I Hijacked a Tree and this is My Story

Something happens to you when you've stared at a computer screen for about 12 hours straight. You go a little wonky, and your daydreams just get weird. Am I addicted to the computer? Yes. Yes I am. In all fairness, I was doing work the first half of the day, but then afternoon was spent looking up hotels for a synaesthesia conference next month.

That's right-- it was something a classmate of mine found advertized on facebook and she asked "Want to go?" I said, "Sure," and that was that. Now we're going on a two-and-a-half day pilgrimage to east London this March, neither of us synaesthetes or synaesthists, but both of us wild for the impossible, extraordinary, perplexing, and altogether STRANGE workings of the human brain.

Synaesthesia, if you don't know, is a spring for creative genius, an unbridled vibrancy of perception, in which the fortunate "sufferer" is able to fuse two or more senses to encode external stimuli that the perceptually-limited (like ourselves) will encode using only one. To put it another way, some synaesthetes can see sounds, others can taste words, still others can categorize numbers by color.

In short, it is bizarre, and it is awesome. And we are going to take a crash course in the most current research about it just because.

The third trimester of my day was spent watching "Charlie bit my finger", Dan Quayle bloopers, and looking up the wikipedia page on the Amish. Wow. Literally going on 12 hours here. At the pub quiz yesterday, one girl remarked that her eyes wigged out after three hours on the compy and that was the longest she could go at once. I have her beat times four, and I'm still going strong.

Oh, and speaking of the hiking club (oh, I didn't mention them, did I? They're the usual group at the pub quiz, anyway)-- I won a new pair of hiking boots! Yippee! A sports-retailer offered to let 2 members of our club review a brand new boot design, and I became one of the lucky draws. So now I will have 2 pairs of hiking boots and a pair of hiking trainers, and at the rate I'm going I'll soon have more shoes than hikes under my belt. It just happened, OK?

I also have 2 toasters, I REALLY don't know how that happened...

Just kidding, I don't really have 2 toasters. I own one toaster, and my roommate decided it was crappy and brought one from home the last time she visited her parents. Oh, so Jana, if you're reading this, I'll let you buy my toaster from me. Good price. Very cheap. No tricks. You buy.

So my goal for this weekend stands the same as last week-- to write one thousand words of my literature review.

I don't feel like going into all the amazing accomplishments I've made this week, mostly because I didn't make any, I was too busy laughing at "piano cat" and eating Frosted Mini Spooners (Malt-o-Meal TM), complements to my mother for shipping my favorite cereal all the way from cozy Streetsboro, over the sharks, and the seaweed, and the Titanic, to here.

Also today, I was very excited to receive a Valentine's Day present from my mom-- YES my MOTHER is my valentine, got something to say about it? ;)
The card is looking at me right now with it's cute gushy pink polka dots and stick-on heart-shaped jewel stuck in the middle of the first "O" of "XOXO". She also sent a Symphony bar, which is probably the most amazing mass-produced candy bar the US makes. Very specific, I know, but I have to be careful about my chocolate-- the Swiss, of course, have us beat.

Oh, moving on to the title of this post, I did not choose it simply as an eye-catcher-- I had a very vivid daydream about driving cross country from Washington to the Midwest with a hacked up pine tree in my backseat and Obi on the passenger side. I think it means I need to take him with me on my subsequent US journeys, and, I need to satisfy my lust for damp, barky, green, chilly, sluggy old western Washington state.

The English do not have monster slugs, by the way. You'd think they would because the climate suits slugs so well. But alas, the slugs are Ohio-sized.

Let me tell you Midwesterners about the Washingtonian slug.

Better yet, let me show you a picture I stole off the internet.



First, this picture WAS to scale but the slug was too big for my blog.

Second, let you all remember that the first picture I ever embedded into my blog was a picture of a banana slug.

Third, look at the size of that thing!

If you're thinking, "Well, that's just an extreme example-- this is a mutant slug"-- then, you're wrong. Here's a factoid stolen now from Wikipedia:

The Pacific banana slug is the second-largest species of terrestrial slug in the world, growing up to 25 centimetres (9.8 in) long, and weights of 115 gram (4 oz).

And here's a real intruiging finding:

Banana slugs can move at 6 ½ inches (16.5 cm) per minute.

Whoa! No way! I pride myself in knowing I'm faster than that. I've one-upped the slug. At least I think so, I don't know how many inches I can go per minute. Most likely more than 6 1/2 but you never know.

By the way, ask me about the banana slug folk songs sometime, not even lying.