Music: “I’m Free” performed by Kenny Loggins

I’m emancipated, I’m off, I’m out of it.

In getting my belated birthday day off, I will be catching up on movies, dropping by the local book stores and catching up on sleep.

Guess which one is the lowest priority.

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Music: “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" by Moxy Früvous

Note: This is one of the few, if not the first, time I've knowingly repeated a music cue. I've actually worked hard to avoid repetition. However, I absolutely love this song and it fits the post in its celebration of a borderline psychotic’s obsession with literature. You can see how I can relate.

Getting back to business, if it’s Sunday, and if I’m caught up on sleep, it’s recap day.

Juggling personal goals of rereading all the Potter books prior to the seventh’s book release and taking time to write each day was difficult (the metaphor is even more meaningful if you add the fact I’ve never learned to juggle despite multiple attempts randomly spaced over the years). The books were finished, and a number of things sketched out, but most of the entries didn’t appear till I retroactively posted them Friday… when many of the people who follow this site were otherwise distracted.

Anyway, returning to the recap.

Last Sunday, July 15, we restarted the old weekly summary post, bringing posts in July up to code.

On Monday I warned of the likelihood of delays brought on by having about 2,000 pages left to read in the Harry Potter series by Friday.

The aftereffects of a storm that hit Tuesday prompted me to reconsider my definition of modern progress, which may best resemble an ever-upgrading hamster wheel that continues to get flashier but still leaves its users in the same place.

A brief three-word note scribbled down a week before eventually led to a casual sport’s fan lament about wild world of sports Wednesday.

On Thursday I admitted my strange fascination with letter openers and how I think of them as a sign of adulthood (such as a driver’s license or W-2).

Also, under the guidelines repeated the previous week, the third appearance of the “Random confession of the Week” entry officially makes it a standard feature. Apologies still go out to the “From the Jukebox” series that despite a fair amount of preplanning and writing it still has not tallied a second appearance since initially arriving in March 2006.

As has become the norm, if not a tradition of the years, I don’t slow down much for my birthday, and the associated post reflects that.

Early Saturday, before collapsing into bed, I wrote about the little obstacles I had to overcome – distance, sleep deprivation, accidental trespassing – to finish the Harry Potter series.

To come: Comments about what I do with my days off, the practically compulsive Potter reaction post, and maybe the frequently delay observations about the extremes in weather.

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Extra, Extra! With a few details, coding and editing tweaks added after about five hours of sleep.

Music: “Magic Carpet Ride” performed by Steppenwolf

Got the book, read the book.

The tricky part, as I had feared, was getting to the bookstore.

Some time before the first two I got lost taking a shortcut I usually don't use in the day light and ended up briefly cutting through a scrap yard and trespassing on Union Pacific property.

A note about lugging a a mason jar of soup to midnight sales: If you receive a batch of food from a friend and decide to eat it latter, requiring you to take it with you when you leave work, one must keep in mind its going to make climbing over and squeezing through fences a bit more difficult.

Flashing forward again, I worked hard not to look at clocks while reading through the night, pausing only for snacks and restroom breaks. When I did catch sight of the time around 5:50 something, I decided to stroll down to the park at the end of the street to finish the book.

It's been a while since I read on a bench by the light of a sunrise, listening to the birds sing. It added a bit to the experience, in my opinion, especially the ending.

Now it’s done, and I really need to get some sleep...if I can turn off my whirling brain for a while.

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Music: “Happy” performed by Carolyn Arends

It’s been a good birthday so far.

I finished the last few hundred pages of Harry Potter 6 last night; during which I briefly looked up and realized, “Oh yeah, I guess it’s my birthday now.”

I’m… have to think about it a second… one year older than last year (if you want to know the date, go find one of the half dozen places where I registered such information when I was younger and less worried about identity theft and cyber stalkers).

I’ve had a steady flow of cards this past week, and two packages arrived yesterday. I now have homemade chocolate cookies to enjoy and have been reunited with a pair of socks I apparently left in Houston.

I received my first day-of birthday greetings around 2 a.m., electronically of course.

I spent a bit of time composing today, retroactively posting the entries I had sketched out during the week but never finished.

Now I have to head to work.

As I’ve told others, I don’t think much about working on my birthday. I’ve done it before, though this will be a first time at this paper.

At my workplace people are technically supposed to get their birthday off, but since my supervisor is on vacation this week, we thought it was a good idea to have a least one person around to design pages, especially on a Friday.

It will be hectic, but in theory I should be able to cap the evening by picking up Potter 7 and then disconnecting myself from the world for a while. I figure I’ll reconnect with the world sometime Sunday.

In the meantime, happy birthday to me.

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Music: “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” performed by Billy Williams

I hate to be repetitious, but I enjoy using letter openers to open letters. It makes me feel like an adult.

I think it stems back to childhood visits to my grandparents in Kansas City. Their homes have always been full of antiques. Running in the house was expressively prohibited when I was younger, for fear of knocking over and subsequently breaking something that was 10 times my age and worth a lot more than a year’s allowance (not that this rule was always followed. I believe me and my cousins ultimately developed an adjusted gait that simply produced less vibrations on the wood floors when we wanted to race).

Most of the items were off limits to touching or close examination. As I got older I was granted permission to flip through some of the older books, but most things remained off limits. While I have grown up, and am less clumsy than before, I still am reluctant to touch some of the items in my grandparent’s house based on the old lessons that were pounded into me.

So in an environment filled with off-limit wonders, the few items I was allowed to touch became that more interesting. Letter openers fell under that category.

I can still remember many of the designs of the letter openers left on the coffee tables, thus located in easy reach. Some had designs with animals, fantastic faces, or my personal favorite, shaped like an Arabian sword plucked from Arabian Knights.

I was allowed to pick them up, but never had the chance to use them. That was something that adults got to do, I thought at the time, meaning it would be a very long time before I could take a crack at it.

When I started my new job, I was delighted that my desk came with a letter opener. It had a regular dulled metal blade and a wooden handle, which is not as cool as a minerature sword, but it does the trick.

Pathetic? Probably, but I use this perk whenever I can. And with the influx of recent birthday cards (sent by people who have better timing when it comes to mailing such missives), I’ve gotten even more use of them as of late.

So thanks for the cards and the chance to exercise an adult privilege I would put on a scale a few pegs below voting and a bit higher than paying my own taxes: using a letter opener.

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Music: “I Want a New Drug” performed by Huey Lewis and the News

I think it says something about the current state of sports that we had a new subcategory in the briefs section this past week.

Stuck between “Football” and “College sports” we had multiple stories listed under “Steroids.”

I don’t believe we used that header before, but since there were three stories listed under it (two of them being the longest briefs in the whole collection) the wire seemed to think it was appropriate.

While we haven’t reused the header since it first appeared last week, I have a feeling it’s not gone.

I’m not a big sports junkie. At best I’ll catch the big games or pause for my favorite teams when flipping through the channels. Nevertheless, I hate seeing how steroids keeps casting a pall on different sports.

It has often been said we’ll never know for sure how many baseball records set over the past two decades were tainted. And whether you believe Tour de France winner Floyd Landis’ story about the mistakes in the testing lab, the whole debacle took a way a lot of the shine Lance Armstrong had build up for in the preceding seven years.

The debate is most likely going to stick around because I still don’t see a lot of honest exchanges going on. The center question is where to draw the line for those seeking an edge. After all, mere practice is technically a “performance enhancing” activity, as is eating right and taking vitamins.

We’re having a hard time defining what stretches beyond the normal reach. Is sleeping in an oxygen tent bad? Is it too much to try an experimental supplement that isn’t illegal because others don’t know about it?

I wonder if in the days of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson (who I primarily know about because of the movie “Field of Dreams”) they could have imagined the current scandal. It’s not that we have players throwing games by not playing hard enough. Our problem is that we have athletes winning games by playing “too hard.”

“Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

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Music: “Poor Boy Shuffle” performed by the Tractors

“It's a do si do and tip of the hat,
One step forward and two steps back…”

Ah, the irony of progress.

It’s a common complaint to say the more we invest in “timesaving” devices, the more time that is wasted.

I personally don’t always buy that argument.

An example to prove my point: A serious storm cut through the area Tuesday. We heard it was bad before it reached us based on some of the tips we received from people upwind.

My personal favorite warning was, “The Internets down in Green River.”

When asked how the person knew this, the reply was friends were no longer texting back.

The thunder and lightning reached us first, though it wasn’t as serious as the storm from the previous week. Glancing out my window, things still appeared pretty clear overhead. Switching to the opposite side of the office, however, I could see a serious storm sliding along White Mountain, which was mostly obscured.

The pelting rain and hail that was reported in the area did not reach our side of town, but the power blip that was most likely associated with the lightning did.

The power winked off only long enough to reset the computers (it’s been a long time since I’ve been through a prolonged power outage). However, even with the lights still on we spent the next 45 minutes or so, people fluttered around to see what was lost, whose computers were still acting funky and what needed to be done to reconnect to the office’s network.

It was briefly noted by some older coworkers that this would not have been a problem in the days of typewriters and wax-cobbled proofs. Spellchecking a printed page takes longer than tapping Spelchek on the computer monitor, and the trouble involving the repositioning of all the elements on a literal board is not laughing matter either, but they don’t require a constant source of electricity.

I was a bit frenzied Tuesday afternoon for having “lost” about an hour, but then I began to rethink the situation.

I would counter the originally stated argument that we are reinvesting time rather than wasting it. There’s still the same number of hours in a day and we dedicate about the same proportion to working.

The major difference is we travel longer distances, coordinate with people that are farther away and can access more information in that same amount of time.

Of course one set of pros usually comes with its own set of cons. Stuff needs to be charged up, have programs updated and checked for bugs or else you’ll just be working with an expensive paperweight. And lightning strikes, of course, will have a greater impact than before we started wiring everything.

Maybe progress doesn’t involve taking extra steps forward or backward as much as coming up with cooler things we can do in the hamster wheel. We really aren’t going anywhere any faster than before (but check out the GPS/mp3 player that shows me standing still, and plays appropriate music).

Such is modern progress.

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Music: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Eva Cassidy

Yeah, I know. I post regularly for a week after a prolonged break, following a series of even more prolonged breaks, and I’m already warning that things are going to get bumpy.

The good and bad news is that this is a onetime event: The last Harry Potter book is coming out this weekend, and I’m simply clearing my schedule.

My long-stated goal was to reread all the previous Harry Potter books before starting the new one, which will be released Friday night/Saturday morning (depending on how strict they are at the book buying venue of your choice).

I’ve done this before, albeit the last time I was still in college (taking summer classes) and had a lot more free time.

There’s a trick in the timing, and the last time I messed it up. I started too early and ended up finishing the tomes with about a week and a half to go, which partially killed the rising anticipation I’d been cultivating. I also was not able to pick up the book at midnight, as I had the previous title (I had jumped on board the Potter train around the time the first movie and book four came out, meaning I missed out on some of the fretting over release dates).

After that, I pledged to be smarter with my pacing… and thus found a different way to mess up than previously experienced. Over the past month or two, whenever I’d finish a book, I’d find myself glancing over at the row of Potter books (sandwiched on the shelf between the copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy I’ve never read and a better worn copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series). Thinking it was still too soon, I’d go looking for something else.

After getting back from the Houston trip, where I’d packed the British edition of the first Potter book my sister bought me while in London, I found I still hadn’t taken the time to start reading (having poured most of my reading time into a book on cultural collapses and the Dublin entry in the “Horrible History” series).

Then there was work, and chores to do, and getting stuff in line for the weekend.

Needlessly long story short, I didn’t start rereading the series until Friday morning at the laundromat.

Yep, you read that right. I’m trying to get all the books reread less than seven days, because there’s work and I’m acting night editor (which additionally requires me to come in early and stay a bit late if I want things to go smooth).

The line that divides being driven to being crazy is a fine one indeed. Of course, such a distinction is not really needed when you’ve blatantly gone over the line.

The plan still works on paper. I got a little bit ahead over the weekend even though I still stopped for church and a wedding and the community’s International Day celebration (in reverse order, actually).

I’m a fourth of the way through book five already, though we’ll see what the rest of the week has to bring.

So when it comes to posting… you see I’m already busy.

However, I’m still not writing it off yet (and time will tell if these words are extremely foolish).

I wrote dozens of pages of notes while on vacation. Most were on the trip, though I did get some creative writing done in addition to other projects. Also, I have some outlines of ideas I fleshed out before glancing at the countdown and going, “Yeah, I’d better get started…”

And after all, I have a finicky attention span. It’s not as short as I often say that it is (insert look-at-the-shiny-shiny-object-joke here), but I do welcome distractions.

So what I’m saying is that I’m aiming to make a tricky goal a touch more difficult than it always is. Why just cut through a minefield when you can dart through a minefield while juggling? Think of how much cooler that story would be to tell on the other side… or how much more spectacular the failure would be.

Hey, I just took a break that will put me about 100 pages behind when all is said and spellchecked. Apparently I’m already on track.

Hope to see you at the end of the Hogwarts Express line, where there may or may not be a train wreck.

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Music: “Double Back in Time" (instrumental) by ZZ Top

If it’s Sunday, and I feel like resurrecting an old standard, it’s recap day.

To help the number of people who are slowly returning to the site after learning I’m posting again (I think we may be up to 3 by now), I’m dusting off an old feature.

For those who are interested, you can easily review my week’s posting by scanning through quick summaries.

Also, before anyone gets picky, I know the title says weekly, but I’m starting off by recounting all of the July stuff.

Anyway, now we return to recap.

Early Independence Day, July 4, duh, I took an early morning pause to outline some feeling about flying on a national holiday where security restrictions automatically get tighter. Also I needed to maintain my tradition of not really sleeping before riding on an airplane (for fear of missing a flight, not for concerns about cruising at hundreds of miles an hour, several thousand feet aboard the landscape).

On Monday, July 9, I share some of the starker differences between Texas and Wyoming… and try to collect my thoughts together before starting a full day of work even though I’ve already been up roughly eight hours).

Tuesday, having had a little more time to decompress, I detail a couple more encounters I had on my first day back, and personal pleasure about the lack of humidity.

Early Wednesday I was spent time I should have use to sleep to catch up on headlines I had missed the previous week. My lack of judgment derived through sleep deprivation was further underlined by a questionable post that positions: While we shouldn’t do this, can we also admit there would be some benefits to attaching the death penalty to white-collar crimes?

On Thursday staring at my hands produces a personal revelation, and further introduces what I hope to become a standard feature. Appearing for the second time only, “Random confession of the Week,” comes closer to being canonized. After all, following the old saying: “The first time it’s new, the second time it’s a repeat, the third time is a tradition.”

Domestic chores, and the heat, start to cut into my schedule Friday, though I end up taking refuge in repetitive, childlike lyrics. Thanks T-Rex.

To come: Notes from vacations, a bit on the boy wizard and frank talk about flash floods and wildfires, or as I’ve called it lately, the weather.

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Music: “Hot Love” by T. Rex

Note: You could also subtitle this post “Or, a quick little update that indirectly tells why I didn’t get around to writing something more substantial this morning, lengthwise, at least.

While in the cooler months, I love wearing clothes fresh from the dryer, today I don’t welcome the extra injection of warm… because it’s summer… in July… in Wyoming…

And furthermore, now that the weather forecast projects precipitation, I doubt we’re going to get a drop after yesterday’s “dry thunderstorms” caused brief flash flooding around town.

Oh well. It’s not like I wasn’t going to get warm walking to work anyway. Might as well be upbeat about it.

“La, la, la, la, la, la la… La la la la la la la…...”

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Music: “Willie and the Hand Jive” by Johnny Otis

Today I realized the fingernails on my left hand are all twice as long, if not more, than their respective digits on the right hand.

The lone exceptions are the pinkies. While very similar in length, the right hand pinky has a slight advantage.

Bonus confession: Only in the last few minutes did I learn that Johnny Otis sang the “hand jive” song I’ve had bouncing my head all these years. I’m fairly sure I didn’t even know who sang the tune when I first downloaded the wav. file version in August 1999 (if the file date is accurate).

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Music: “Feed Me” from Little Shop of Horrors

“I'm your genie, I'm your friend, I'm your willing slave.
Take a chance, just feed me and...
You know the kind of eats, the kind of red hot treats, the kind of sticky, licky sweets I crave...”

Note: This post could also be subtitled, “Why I should not stay up late reading headlines and be left to my own, sleep-deprived thoughts.”

While I don’t approve of the execution of a food and drug safety monitor for messing up his job, I’d wager the effect might be pretty noteworthy, at least in the short run.

Imagine how many elected officials in the United States would be less likely to take bribes if they knew they could be killed for it.

Of course some people would still go for the deal, even with the death threat looming; they would simply ask for more money to do so.

Between those scared off by the thought of death, and groups economically pushed out by the rising price of the bribe, there would be less corruption to worry about.

Just a thought.

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Music: “Neutron Dance” by the Pointer Sisters

“ I'm so happy doin' the neutron dance.
And I'm just burning doin' the neutron dance.”

Jumping back into work almost immediately after getting back in the state is always intense.

There are two main drivers behind this action. The first is necessity. I can’t afford to take a day off, and with one of our key workers out this week (he’s tackling the final details before his wedding this weekend), we’re already understaffed.

The second is the same crazy logic that I employ when jumping into frigid water: If I just throw myself in, I really won’t have the chance to change my mind mid-flight.

I survived, and it doesn’t seem like my final product suffered to much for it. I started to brag about my survival Monday night, but in the middle of crowing I thought it best to wait a day to see if I arrived the next day to a red ink-stained newspaper with an accompany list of readers who wanted to talk to the editor.

Delayed feedback is an interesting component of my profession. The realization that one has screwed up comes in varied speeds. Sometimes I find my eyes snapping open in the middle of the night paired with the awareness that I messed up a jump. Other times I don’t realize I’ve stepped into it until the next door or even after the weekend.

Fortunately, no notice of blatant idiocy greeted me Tuesday, so I feel better prepared to brag about functioning under stress and the stress the importance of uppers in my diet (sugar, caffeine, whatever they make Pez out of – probably more sugar and amphetamines).

In addition to the belated confirmation I can do my job well under such circumstances, the brightest points of my day was seeing familiar sights and places.

Walking to work along my favorite route was nice, especially soaking in the lack of humidity. I realized I hadn’t mentioned it in my initial arrival post because it was nonexistent, and thus more difficult to notice through its absence.

Reaching downtown, I exchanged multiple greetings in the parking lot. However, the big smile I wore walking into the building was prompted by the sight of a dog relieving itself on the city hall sign across the street.

This is actually a regular occurrence, and there have been office discussions about whether this is trained behavior or if the dog developed it on its own. The answer remains unsettled with the parties divided, though I find myself regularly switching camps.

The other noteworthy, I-guess-I’m-back-in-Rock Springs occurrence I saw when getting back from dinner. No, it wasn’t seeing the sun disappear behind the mountains, though I did get to see that Tuesday night.

After watching the participants set up the linoleum square, do some quick stretches and tweak the boom box, I voiced an observation that, though obvious, I thought needed to be said.

“It looks like Break Dance Boy is back.”

I don’t know who he is. I don’t know his motivations (though in the past, I believe his performance was intended for a nearby female). I do know he regularly sets up catty corner from our parking lot (on the corner not covered by city hall) and tries to break it down to the rumblings of an poorly-amped stereo.

He emptied the press room the first time he performed, drawing people out to see his antics. With more regular performances, the shock value has lessened, but it remains interesting. And if nothing else, I can say he appears to be getting better with practice.

He’s not as classy as the bagpiper who used to perform in the park across from the Missourian building back in Columbia. While Celtic strains at the end of a work day helped ease some of my stress over the summers, I can’t say the same of the

Still, such craziness does provide some comfort in the fact that it is familiar and the status quo can give us a foundation.

Besides, most of us are insane – we just show it in different ways and to different degrees. He may make a fool of himself in public, but I’m the one taking personal time to write about it. Of the two, which one of us is crazier?

I’m leaving others to decide and heading off to bed … once I finish spell checking and finalizing the HTML code on this thing…

Yeah, I’m voting for me, too.

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Music: “Get Back” by the Beatles

Relaxing outside the airport, waiting for my ride to come, I knew I was back in Wyoming.

As I’ve mentioned before, the airport is located up on a plateau. It’s about a mile removed from the interstate. The road isn’t a winding, twisting path, but it rather cuts a long slow curve up a steadily increasing slope.

From that vintage point, I could once again look around and see mountains in every direction. I could see only one tree, however, located in what I believe to the property caregiver’s yard.

I was also soon greeted by the infamous Wyoming wind. For a brief time, the only sounds I could hear were the whistling wind and the flapping of flag.

Then the piece de resistance showed up. The two of us who were waiting outside soon picked up on the sound of an approaching vehicle. Seeing it wasn’t my ride, I leaned back to watch the other guy’s reaction.

He put out his cigarette and walked into the middle of the road. He pulled up his jeans to show some leg. He made a mock suggestive pose and stuck out his thumb. As the truck pulled alongside, the man quipped, “Picking up strangers today?” Tossing his bag in the bed of the truck, he climbed in and rode off, leaving me shaking my head at the scene.

Granted, this is not necessarily something that is exclusive to Wyoming, but the humor is similar to the fringe people I identify with the area.

I’m back in the West.

Giddy up.

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Music: “Shining Star” by Earth, Wind and Fire

I wish everyone who celebrates it a Happy Fourth of July.

May the skies be clear and the fireworks planned.

I'm hoping for a clear day – weather-wise, geopolitically-wise – because I'm flying on a high alert. Sure, for those of you playing the home game the regular Homeland Security warning is set at Elevated or yellow, but it's usually one step higher in the “airline sector.” It's just one of those things.

Personally I'm not anticipating any trouble, but all it takes is one idiot to pull some stunt (and it need not be zealous jihad-related; ordinary idiots can foul up the system to). I'm just a mite worried about having to spend part of my holiday in the airport.

Anyway, here's hoping for a few days of uninterrupted relaxation and good times.

And as I said, planned fireworks.

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