So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Well, guess it's time for another sporadic update of events in my life. I'm taking two spring courses (one of which carries on until mid-July, but by correspondence), which keeps me pretty busy: it's not all that long until I'm done though. Last Thursday was International Towel Day, to commemorate the brilliant achievements of the late, great, Douglas Adams, from whose work I have lifted the title of this post (it was the dolphins' final message to humanity, before they escaped the oncoming destruction of the planet Earth by the Vogon Constructor Fleet to make way for a new hyperspace bypass). Towel Day is where Adams' fans from around the world carry a towel around all day, and take photos to prove that they have done so (some of mine from on campus, at the lake, and on my way home from baseball are posted at the end of this post: if you want to see the full album, it's posted on my Facebook account (and if you don't yet have Facebook, you should get it!). As the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says,

A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

In other news, I have been playing sports three times a week at least: I play on a soccer team on Tuesdays, and in a softball league on Mondays and Thursdays, both of which are a lot of fun. Yesterday's soccer game was most interesting... we play 6 on 6 usually, on a small field, but this time, our team only had 4 players show up. I also managed to step in a pothole while warming up and give my ankle quite the twist. The other team decided to only play 5 players against us, but subbed others in quickly, and tried to run us into the ground... however, we defended pretty well and scored on some counter-attacks. Despite messing up my other knee in the process, and then rolling the first ankle again, I got a hat trick, and our team was leading 4-2 shortly after half. However, victory was not to be ours: one of our guys tripped over another hole in the field and landed really awkwardly on his ankle, which then proceeded to rapidly swell to epic (baseball-size) proportions. He had to go to the hospital right away, so we wound up having to forfeit the game after all that hard work. Fortunately, my injuries weren't as bad, but I'm still limping around a bit today.

Tomorrow, I have another action-filled day... Math class from 1-4 PM , then softball in the evening, and then I'm leaving for Washington, D.C. at 1:40 AM: catching the bus to the Toronto airport, and then an early morning flight to Washington. I'm going down there for the weekend to visit my uncle, who is in town for a stamp convention. We're going to try and see a fair bit of the sights, so I'll attempt to take some pictures and post them here.

Further upcoming events: my final exam for my Math class will be June 14th or 15th. I'm then leaving Kingston on June 20th, and flying to Manchester, England, where I plan to spend ten days visiting a friend. I'm returning to Vancouver on June 30th.

Towel Day Photos: