21 Aug 07

Time:

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Money:

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More interesting things:

Drove (!) past a house in my dad's subdivision with a pear tree in the front yard; the best, most Gainesville-y part of it, though, was the sign in the grass below it, inviting all those who passed to partake of "FREE PEARS," as long as they didn't climb the tree.

Drove (exciting enough to merit the verb repeat) past... Santa. I'd seen him once before, in a Bronco with antlers and Mrs. Claus-looking lady in the passenger seat, but this time it was some other car with a plate that said SANTA and a bumper sticker about his other car involving reindeer. You've got to love that, I think.

Drove (! again) past those lovely blue "Welcome Back" signs on campus that made me smile when I was there and which make me smile maybe even more now that I'm not: clearly they aren't aimed at me any more, but I still appreciate the message.

Thought about my "vestigial trail" idea, in which people leave transparent but otherwise unbroken paths behind them everywhere they go, like a three-dimensional version of a photo featuring a fast-moving object but taken at a slow shutter speed, leaving a print of a blur behind whatever was doing the moving. The trails get covered up when someone occupies the exact same bit of airspace you had, as though they were colored over with paint or a crayon. This is a concept I like to ponder, of course, and on the lawn of the Reitz Union it involved me wondering whether any speck of my cold end-of-finals bicycle trip towards (the old) Hume and, eventually, my mom's van, remained; I like to think it does.

Read one of those fraternity rush banners advertising the "recruitment" events for the week; at least one (and probably more) featured the phrase "PUBLIX SUBS," which does not sound like enough to describe the plan sufficiently, much less look particularly enticing to hungry 18-year-olds, but it's amusing to consider that in Florida, it probably is.

Considered that although I have often thought I could easily remain in the city at great length, there are some real advantages to non-student, non-major-metro-hub life, namely driveways, real supermarkets, and big kitchens. (Probably there are others, but these are the ones that kept hitting me over the head during that visit.)