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Congratulations to posicat, who has been promoted from hell no, maybe purgatory? Hmm. Well, whatever you want to call phone-based tech support. He'll be doing development work now, writing code! It's true; some few of our tech support brethren, the wisest and most skilled, can eventually become enlightened and move on to the next plane of existence.

Congratulations Posi!

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I kind of want some more sushi. I have to try some more different kinds though. If I don't branch out, I might be stuck with things like Philadelphia roll whenever I eat it. It might take a while to work up to more kinds though, given how long it took me to try the stuff in the first place. I'm still pretty pleased with myself just for eating raw fish. I wonder if it helps that vandringar got me to try steak tartar at an Ethiopian restaurant in Orlando and I realized that it was at least palatable.

You know what I really liked at the place I went for sushi with Posi too? The tobiko. It has a really nice texture. I wonder if that means I'd like caviar?

I did a little cost calculation about my Michigan trip. I added up all the driving on the main part of my route, and I love my car even more. From Kenosha (where I'll probably stay the night on Friday and start from early in the morning on Saturday) to Manitowoc, then from Ludington to Lansing to Allen Park and back to Chicago will cost me, all together, about $50 in gas. And that's based on $3 a gallon gas (might be cheaper in real life) and 45mpg (might be better in real life). Just the trip across the lake by boat will cost more than double that! Percy is a no-frills affair, to be sure, but what it does, it does very well!

Speaking of the trip across the lake, I'll be taking the SS Badger. The SS Badger was built in 1953 and is a coal-fired steam ship! She is the last of her kind on the great lakes. Now, one of the reasons I've been excited about taking a ship across a great lake is to get a sense of what it's like for people in the merchant marine who work the lakes for their living. Moira bought me a book about steamships that have foundered in the great lakes (from Walk-in-the-Water back in 1818 all the way through the Edmund Fitzgerald [Did you know that Mighty Fitz was a steamship? I certainly hadn't!]). Reading all those stories fanned embers that have been around since my childhood when I wasted time in class doodling sailing ships in my notebooks. I've never been out of sight of land in my life, and I want the experience.

I was thrilled when I read about the ferry service and realized that, not only will I be riding a vintage merchant ship in a four hour trip across the lake where I can feel the wind and the sun and motion of the deck, but that ship will be a genuine relic from the end of a prior age of mechanical propulsion! When I call to reserve my tickets, I'm going to ask really nicely if I can photograph the engines. If they say no, I'm going to try really hard to find a crew member to make friends with on the boat who'll take me down there anyway. Oh, to see the boilers and feel the thrum of the pistons! I wonder how the coal is fed; it can't be a bunch of guys down there shoveling the stuff through fire-doors, can it? It must be an auger, like late model steam locomotives had. Still, even Union Pacific's Big Boys needed a stoker who could even out the coal for efficient burning.

So I'm kind of excited by all that, as you may have noticed.

I'm probably going to move my living-stuff down to the Rogers Park room on Sunday the 1st. I"m on call that day, but I should be able to snag the team's cellular card so I can do stuff on the road if I need to. I don't think I'll have a whole lot to move either, but I should start making a list. Most of my stuff is staying at my parents' house, including a lot of stuff that's still in Racine. I'm slowly working on that.

And last, but not least, Moira and I have our wedding anniversary coming up in just a few days this Sunday. She's really busy getting stuff ready for the state fair that day, and I'm going to be at a friend's party on Saturday, so our anniversary date will be going to Par-King, "The World's Most Unusual Miniature Golf". I'll almost certainly end up with a bunch of pictures from there to share too. It looks fantastic.

I'm thinking about getting some lunch. I'm getting hungry. Alas, we have no sushi.