It is abso-frickin-gorgeous out tonight. Not a cloud in the sky, and warm enough that you don’t really need a jacket. I took the opportunity to wander around campus for a while and enjoy the pleasantness.

Many years ago, before Suzanne was married and Jeremy hated my guts, the three of us would go on many night-hikes through various parks and the outskirts of town. We wound up doing these in the spring (when the nights were still almost wintery… probably not the brightest things we’ve ever done) and continued sporadically until the end of fall; I saw (and missed) more shooting stars during that time than in the rest of my life combined. I also came home at odd hours of the morning (we would start, say, at 11:00 pm and get back at 2:00 am-ish), which gave my folks some grief.

They’re used to me holding odd hours, now.

I miss those walks; not only were they good exercise—I remember one walk that was uphill for hours on end—but they gave me a chance to step back from everything and relax for a while. From certain vantage points the city lights seemed almost like a miniature galaxy, an extension of the starlit sky.

And then there was the time we tried to take a shortcut down Chip Ross Park after a recent rain, and all ended up coated in mud. I was both the one who got the furthest down the hill before falling and the one who suffered the most spectacular fall…. The first distinction was simply the result of watching Jeremy and Suzanne slip before me; the second is because I somehow managed to go from a vertical to a spinning airborne-horizontal position in the course of my fall. Of course, we then all piled into my car to go home. ::sob:: (Haha! I never bothered cleaning out the mud, and it eventually disappeared on its own.)

I should find someone who trusts me enough to head out in the middle of nowhere with me, ’cause it’s been too long. This night really is tempting.

Other news: the new iTunes feature is actually called party shuffle, not party mix. While personally disappointing, I still find the name humorous; turns out that its a fairly well thought out extension of the traditional shuffle (random) option. Now you get a preview of the next however-many songs that will be played, and can rearrange or delete upcoming songs as you wish.

I’m still waiting for the feature that examines your music collection and assembles a kick-ass party mix. Yes, I would call that feature Party Mix. (Of course, given my music, I’d stress Party Mix to come up with something decent. Actually, it’d probably just take my Night at the Roxbury soundtrack in whole. Bad, bad movie, but good soundtrack. In my opinion. I admittedly have no musical taste, though.)

[One of the defining moments of my first Honors College trip to Sunriver was the first evening, when Eric popped in the Night at the Roxbury soundtrack near the house’s TV and managed to gather a good number of people who were intrigued by how the music oddly matched whatever was happening on the screen.]

[Another defining moment, albeit in a later Sunriver trip, was Matt and me doing a duet of If I Had $1,000,000, by the Barenaked Ladies. We got Katie to laugh, which was more than I expected from of it.]

The reason I was wandering around campus this evening was because I had just left the weekly ballroom dance practice. I had taken a brief nap beforehand, but I was still pretty tired throughout the dance. I wound up chatting with Mandy a good deal, dancing a cha-cha with Robin, and giving Kristy a quick introduction to the hustle. I was impressed that I remembered as much hustle as I did (which isn’t to say I remembered much); it’s been quite a while, and I tend to lose things pretty fast without practice.

Mandy, FWIW, was suffering from dry contacts. Robin was having a bad day for reasons I never quite caught. Kristy was just glad to be out of Milam, which apparently has no air circulation these days.

And now: sleep! My odd hours are probably half the reason I continue to be tired.