I'm probably going to catch some slack for what I'm about to say, but, what the heck. Yesterday, Elian Gonzalez finally was allowed to leave the United States and return home to Cuba with his father. I say, it's about damned time. I agree that he may have a life with greater freedom here in the U.S. But, how can you, in good conscience, separate a little boy from the father he so obviously loves? Look at the pictures when they're together... the kid's ecstatic to see his dad again. If Juan Miguel wants to defect and keep his boy here with him, then so be it. However, he wants to return to Cuba. Let him. To the Florida relatives... Elian is not your kid. You have no say whatsoever in his life. Let him be with his father in a Communist country if that's what he wants. Deal with it. Your fifteen minutes are up.

I got a job... I got a job!! Woo Hoo!!! Be happy for me, 'tay? I'm gonna be working for a company called Intertec Publishing as a web editor for their magazine Telecom Business. I'm going to be in charge of the website for this magazine and posting all the articles that are published within its pages. I may also be writing some articles here and there for it. Coolness. The company is located on the 23rd floor of the IBM building downtown. In case you're not familiar, it's the first building just north of the Chicago River on N. Wabash. Killer location. Intertec is putting all kinds of resources into making this magazine all it can possibly be. I'm gonna enjoy working here.

This is both cool and a scam at the same time. See what you think. Recently, Disney announced that they will finally be releasing Toy Story and Toy Story 2 on DVD. About time. Lots of special features and the like. However, they are being sold in a two-disc set known as "The Ultimate Toy Box." It's not all that bad, except that Disney DVDs already cost an arm and a leg without being bundled in a two-disc set. I'm not sure what I wanna do.

I had a very cool weekend. Katie came out and we went to my friend Frank's wedding (congrats, man). On Sunday, though, we got toasted by the sun at the White Sox - Yankees game. We had a blast. We originally had seats in the outfield, however, Katie's boss at the pharmacy upgraded us to front row seats on the third base line just past the tarp. Very sweet, indeed (Thanks Jeff!). I will admit that we did get fried a bit, but it was worth it.

Here's one for ya... There's a man who waits at home wearing a mask and another man heading towards home. Who is the man waiting at home? Any guesses? Answer will be posted next week. Tune in.

Okay, I know everyone here is probably sick to death of the skyrocketing gas prices. I know I sure am. The worst thing is, I live in the state with, supposedly, the highest prices in the nation. They range anywhere from $2.00-2.49 a gallon. What is this!?!? Why do we have to pay such high prices for gas. As recently as six months ago, I could buy gas for $1.19 per gallon depending on where I went. What is going on now that is causing these prices to go up? Apparently, OPEC is meeting this week to discuss upping production by 100 million barrels a day. If they were capable of doing this anyway, why didn't they start sooner? The difficult thing to believe in all this is that predictions say that no matter what the crude output is, the prices in North America will stay the same. WHY????? I don't need to be paying this much for gas. Nobody needs to be. The rest of the world is going broke as a result. Many people can no longer afford the little things that they used to like to buy because they now have to budget for gas. Complete load of s$%t. Will the politicians stop blaming the oil producers, and vice versa, and just solve the problem at hand. Bickering doesn't help anything! Okay, then... (raving lunatic has left cyberspace)... 

I found the funniest thing in the world yesterday. It was an instant win game piece for a 007 (James Bond) contest that was packaged with my copy of For Your Eyes Only on DVD. Well, my particular game piece awarded me $1 off the purchase price of my next 007 DVD/VHS but it expired back on March 31. No biggie. However, in fine print along the bottom of the game piece is an hilarious little caveat. It reads "CANADIAN RESIDENTS, to win and redeem prize, must also correctly answer, unaided, this skill-testing question: (100 x 2) + 28 - 3 = _____." Okay, what is this? Do Canadians have that tough a time with math? The best part is the "unaided" stipulation. Heh. I can see it now... "Hey Hoser! Here's your motivation to master remedial math, eh. You can win $1 off a 007 DVD/VHS, eh." If you're wondering about the "hoser" comment and all the "eh"s, check out Strange Brewand you'll understand. Eh!

This should be kinda cool... I was contacted yesterday by an author named Michael Marcotte (mass e-mail, I know) who recently wrote a book entitled "Gold in the Shadow." Kind of an Indiana Jones style adventure novel starring a woman (guys... don't think Tomb Raider here, okay?). Well, I e-mailed him back and he's sending me an advance galley copy of the book. He wants people to review the novel for him in advance. This is cool. I've never done this before and it's kinda exciting to know that I'm gonna be reading a book before almost everyone else.

I spent this past weekend with Katie. I know, I know... you're all wondering "what else is new?" Well, you wanna know? Do you really wanna know? We may have found a place to hold our reception for our wedding, and, maybe even our ceremony depending on our final guest list. It's this cool place out near Woodstock that Katie's maid of honor Alyson found called Concorde Center. It's a converted barn on a huge piece of land (Monty Python fans... "huge tracts of land"... heh heh). Got a lake, walking path, lots of trees. And if all works out well, the weather and scenery at this place will be even more beautiful when Katie and I get married in October 2001. They're gonna have a wedding for someone else on October 12th of this year and we may use that to gauge how our's would be if we held it there outside in October. Hopefully things will go nicely.

I finally found a steady source of income. Instead of just working day-by-day as a freelance instructional media designer (doesn't that sound wonderfully official? I made it up myself.), I now have a part-time night job as a waiter at Applebee's Aurora. Yep, me as a waiter. This should be kinda interesting, don't you think? I've never really waited tables before (I don't count Unisys with their three-item menu), but I have worked in restaurants and every other job I've had has been customer service in scope. So, how tough can it be? Wait and we shall see together.

You wanna talk about something that hasn't been updated in quite a long time? You should check out my Fun With Dead Trees page. For those of you out of the know, FWDT is my book review page. Yeah, it's been one heckuva long time since I've read anything and reviewed it. However, I finally did get to read something late last semester (American Psycho) and I finally got around to reviewing it. About time, eh? Now I'm reading Thomas Harris' Hannibal and that should be up sometime soon if I ever get a chance to really sit down and just read. God knows when that'll happen. Ideally, I'll go in and redesign the page as well. Got a pretty good idea what I wanna do. Now it's just a matter of implementing it.