Pete's Log: free shirts and sky surfing, voting and memoirs

Entry #512, (Life in General)
(posted when I was 22 years old.)

woohoo, the free RSA shirt I ordered forever ago finally showed up. I'd given up on it ever showing up. It came with some kinda marketing letter that I think I'll be ignoring, but the shirt's kinda cool.

Watched some x-games on espn2 today. One of the events was skysurfing, which looks like a lot of fun. Main problem I see with it is that it's probably rather expensive... but one thing that I found interesting was that it's a team sport. A team consists of the guy doing the surfing and a guy doing camera work. The judges see only what the camera guy's camera sees, so it's an interesting challenge to coordinate the movements in the air. Pretty cool.

My absentee ballot showed up in the mail today. Which is fun. There's actually a lot I need to vote on. Some of it is fairly straightforward, like president and such. Then there's some amendments and referendums to vote on as well, such as legalizing marijuana for medicinal use. Finally there's all the other offices that need electing, which will take some research. So now I have something to do over break. They also sent me this really tiny pencil. Just looking at the envelope you wouldn't have known it contains a pencil... So the parties with presidential candidates on the colorado ballet are republican, the democratic, libertarian, natural law, green, american constitution, freedom (which is odd -- this is the party pat buchanan is running for, did they change their name? need to look into that), prohibition, socialist workers campaign, and socialist. Other than the presidential election, there's libertarian candidates for four other positions. some of the interesting referendums to be considered are legalization of marijuana for medical use, some abortion issue (i think the pro life vote on this issue is 'yes' but it's some minor issue that's oddly worded, so i'll need to doublecheck). there's also some guncheck issue and something about multistate lotteries, along with quite a few less interesting items...

My grandfather sent me a draft version of his memoirs. I am to read over them, because I am someone interested in them, but someone who won't know all the names mentioned, and am thus in a good position to point out places that need elaboration. So far they've been a fun read. Stories of him growing up on a ranch in Colorado, stories of ancestors, stories of medical school and military service, stories of travel to all sorts of places. Many funny anecdotes. It is a good thing that he is writing these down, they're inspiring. A sample anecdote, talking about an early automobile he owned: "Friends named it 'religion,' because it shook the devil out of you." It's amazing what the man has done in his life. I think I would consider myself lucky to do half as much in my life as he has done in his.

Brian's parents visited the apartment today. I think they were entertained. They brought a penguin cookie jar that makes noises at you when you open it.