This is long (5000 words!)… and long overdue. Other than myself, I only know of one other person out there that would really love to have my wedding writings finished. Thanks for the reminder, Anya.

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Friday
August 16, 2002

Another early morning. Luckily for Oksana, she could sleep in just a little bit longer than I could today. I got up at 7 and was out of the house by 7:45. First stop, Joe’s house – to pick up Noah and Rob.

Noah and Rob were ready to go and, because I needed to pick up some family members, we didn’t spend much idle time at Joe’s. Joe was interested in hiking the glacier with us, but he needed to go to work first to see if they could spare him for the morning. The plane was that if he could swing it, he would meet up with us at the trailhead. With Rob and Noah in two, I headed off to the dorms to pick up some rafters.

One of my college roommates, Mike, has been rafting the Mendenhall River as a summer job for the last few years. I had asked him this spring if he thought we could wrangle a free trip down the river for anyone that came up for the wedding. Not a problem – a date, time, and enough able-bodied rowers was all he’d need.

At the dorms we picked up my Mom, Don, and Mariah. Oksana, having roused herself from her slumber, showed up to escort her brother and nephew for the same trip. Everyone was ready to go except my brother, Kegan, who was nowhere to be found. He was supposed to meet us at 8am, but we couldn’t find him at the dorms. Hmmm. Maybe he thought we were to meet at the university, instead. Our train of cars drove down to the campus looking for my grandparent’s rental car – or any other sign of Kegan.

No luck. Eventually I was forced to run home and get my PDA so that we could call Kegan’s cell phone. We rang him up and found out that he was… waiting for us at the dorms! He must have shown up moments after we drove off. We returned to the dorm parking lot, added their car to our train, and made it to the head of the river just a little later than I’d hoped.

Mike was there and all ready to get everyone suited up and in the boat. While they were getting their feet sized for boots, their legs sized for rain pants, and their chests sized for life jackets, those of us not going took plenty of pictures and made plans to pick them up at the pull-out. Soon enough they grabbed their paddles, hopped into the boat, and floated up the lake towards the glacier.

Rob, Noah, and I took a few pictures of their departure and then heading off to Safeway to get some breakfast and some hiking food. While there, Noah gave Joe a call at work – no luck. There were too many important things for him to do at work.

We grabbed a breakfast of donuts (and coffee for Noah) and some food and drinks for our backpack before driving back to the same parking lot where we’d dropped off the rafters earlier. Once there I loaned out a couple pairs of shoes to Noah and Rob, we filled Noah’s pack with our supplies, and dressed in layers because the morning was a bit chilly. That was a mistake – 15 minutes into the hike and we were shedding them fast.
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Dear Mr. Gaiman,

Recently I’ve been enjoying the benefits of a newfound technology – RSS feeds. There’s no way to remember the trail of links that brought me to your online journal, but I’m quite happy to have found it. In the two months that I’ve been reading, you’ve greatly impressed me in the amount of time you spend communicating with your fans.

One day, as I waited for one of your linked pages to load, my mind wandered. I realized that I was rather jealous of the fans that have, for some small slice of time, captured your attention online. I used the time to reflect on what keeps me coming back to your journal. Was it that your interactions with your fans gives me an alluring glimpse into the life of a celebrity? Probably. Too bad I can never tell Neil Gaiman how his work has affected me, I thought. But, boy, wouldn’t that be cool?

How I managed to miss it for so long I’ll never know, but just then I had a tiny epiphany: Waitaminute…I’m actually reading Neil Gaiman’s responses to his fans’ e-mails. And I’m a fan. Thinking back, it’s embarrassing to admit that I needed a revelation for that to sink in, but it simply never occurred to me that with so many fans, you might actually read a “thank you” letter from me.

Once I realized that there was a chance, I decided to write one.

I have two things to thank you for. The first “thank you” is, I suspect, both easy and common: Thank you for American Gods.
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Just about 10 years ago now, I was caught up in a routine where some friends and I would gather at Joe and Karl’s place to hang out. We’d do all sorts of things, but the ones that stand out in my memory were pretty high up on the geek scale: Watching endless hours of the Simpsons, taking turns playing X-wing on Joe’s computer, painting miniatures, and making up new rules and maps for Axis & Allies. In retrospect, the only thing that saved us from debating the merits of the latest in pocket-protector technology was that we also played a fair bit of pool and used chainsaws to cut up the forest behind their house to make trails for four-wheeler races.

We were geeks, but there was still hope.

Just before a few of us packed up and headed off to college, someone managed to get their hands on the shareware version of Doom. I can’t imagine that we downloaded it… in those days, 9600 baud was still a fantasy. No, it probably came on one of the first PC Gamer disks. Not a compact disc – the floppy kind.

Years before, back in middle school, I had played Castle Wolfenstein. In fact, I beat that game on my Apple IIc. I don’t remember much – PC-speaker-garbled German shouts, an overhead view of a white-on-black maze, and a race against the clock to escape the castle after planting a bomb next to Hitler. If I remember that much of it even now, it must have been a good game.

During my first year of college, Wolfenstein 3D came out. I played through the shareware version of that, too, but didn’t find it that remarkable. Yes, it pushed the technological envelope, but it never fully captured my imagination. Perhaps that was because the graphics engine made me motion sick. Still, it couldn’t have been all bad since I played through physical illness just to complete the game. That’s gotta count for something.
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A long time back, years ago, I read somewhere that one of Alaska’s requirements to serve jury duty was that a person had to be a Responsible Citizen. Just like that, too: Capital R, Capital C. The trick to being a Responsible Citizen was that, among other things, you had to be a registered voter.

Since discovering that lovely little loophole, I’ve used it as an excuse not to vote. Not that it always works – invariably someone always tells me that the Alaska courts obtain the eligible jury list from the Permanent Fund. Yes, I always say, that’s the “among other things” part. Then I’d go on to state what little proof I had: I’ve never been called for jury duty.

The most recent time I’ve had this conversation was with my mom just this summer. She was so convinced that the Permanent Fund is the only source that she was ready to fire up the internet to prove it. I was ready to do the same. We both got online and tried to prove our respective cases… and turned up a whole lot of nothing.

At any rate, it’s time to eat some crow. I was wrong. In mid-August I got my first jury summons. Oh, well. It’s time to admit that even us Irresponsible Citizens have to do their civic duty.

But wait! The night before my first day of service (servitude?), I jumped on the internet to make sure I knew exactly where to go. Lo and behold, what do I find, but the exact regulation I was looking for before! What’s the deal? According to this FAQ, I shouldn’t have been called!

Unfortunately, I don’t think I could site that web site as grounds for why I should be able to skip jury duty. Especially since all the local media is abuzz about how one of the judges is exasperated with the low jury turnout and has issued Trooper-delivered subpoenas to 83 people. Those irresponsible Responsible Citizens now have court dates where they must give damn good reasons why they shouldn’t be held in contempt. If they don’t show, arrest warrants follow.

Great. Now if I forget my nightly call to the duty hotline, I could actually go to jail. Wonderful way to start off my first month ever of jury duty!
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I’ve been meaning to update my blog lately but I’ve been struggling mightily just to stay awake during my lunch hour, so trying to write anything coherent has been out of the question. But for the first time in over a week I got a full 8 hours of sleep last night. I’m a new man!

What’s been going on? Well, unless you’re an avid computer gamer, you won’t understand. Really, I’m having a hard time explaining to myself why I should stay up past 2am on a work night… how can I convince you?

World of Warcraft is responsible for my lack of sleep and it’s a game that hasn’t even been released yet. Blizzard allowed me (and 100,000 of my closest friends) to download the 2.3 Gigabyte(!) installer and participate in their server “stress test.” You see, the company has already let 6000 or so players participate in their beta test, but they wanted to know what kind of server load they’ll be looking at when the game is finally released.

World of Warcraft is my first foray into the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Games and I realize now why they are so addictive. World of Warcraft in particular has a frightful allure – the artwork is extremely varied and downright gorgeous and the gameplay is remarkable non-tedious. Multiplayer games of this sort wouldn’t be much fun at all to play by yourself, but fortunately for me, my friend, Karl, was also selected to play in the stress test. We’ve been playing an embarrassing number of hours together each night.

The stress test was supposed to end yesterday, but Blizzard decided to add even more players and keep it running until Sunday. I’m conflicted about that. I’m having a blast playing the game and don’t want it to end, but yet I can’t help but miss the full nights of sleep (not to mention seeing my wife!) When this stress test ends, I won’t be able to play World of Warcraft again until it’s in stores – and that can be anywhere from 3 months to a year from now. It’s a long time to wait, but I look forward to a time when I can play with even more of my friend and there isn’t a game-ending deadline right around the corner. At least then I won’t feel like sleeping is wasted time!

Anyway, for those few interesting in online entertainment, I’ll probably post a more detailed account of my impressions of World of Warcraft sometime after the stress test ends. Oh, yeah… and I should really finish up those half-written blog entries on Doom III and my stint of Jury Duty, too.

I’ve been working at UAS (in my present role as Digital Media Specialist) for almost four years now. For the last three, I’ve managed to schedule my annual leave in mid-August… just in time to miss Convocation. I wasn’t actively trying to skip out on the returning faculty members and the ensuing ITS meetings that surround them. It was just a coincidence. Swear.

So here it is, my fourth year, and it looks like I’m finally going to be in town for Convocation. I figure my boss is going to be happy – he’s been ribbing me all this time because I (and my position) still haven’t been formally introduced to the faculty at large.

Oh, but of course there was a snag! Two years ago, the big reason to take some vacation time was for my wedding and subsequent honeymoon. It never occurred to me that getting married in August would be a problem down the road. I now realize that if I want to take a day off to celebrate with my wife, I would more than likely have to find a way out of three days of meetings.

Fortunately, that didn’t turn out to be much of a problem. I approached my boss last week and asked him if he had a Convocation schedule. He did, and the whole department was allotted just 45 minutes to talk about the new technologies and procedures that we’d be bringing to campus this fall. Obviously he didn’t need me to hop up there on the podium with him, so I quickly followed up with, “Great! Can I have half of Tuesday off?”

Oksana was going to be pretty busy at work, too, since a coworker was going to be on vacation. She didn’t think she could justify taking a whole day off, so we talked about a half-day instead. Besides, who were we kidding? If we took the whole day off, we’d just end up sleeping ‘til noon, anyway!

With our bosses’ approval gained, we were ready to make the best of our second anniversary on August 17th.
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Last night, as Oksana and I were finishing up dinner, we received a call from her niece. She was staying the night with her friend and was just calling to spread some gossip. “Did you hear? The downtown Subway has been burning since 2:30pm!”

When Oksana relayed this news to me, my first thought was, “Wait a minute… Juneau doesn’t have a subway system!” Oh, but yeah… They do have a sandwich shop franchise down there. Well, at least that explained the hazy smoke we’d been seeing all day.

When Oksana hung up the phone, it was still only about 8:30pm and she wanted to go check it out. I thought it might be interesting to see the damage before the results of the inevitable cleanup. I know firsthand how tragic a fire can be, but there’s no denying that there’s a certain allure to observing the scene of an accident.

We grabbed her camera and headed in to town.
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