I haven’t been keeping up with my journal very well, so few people know I’ve been “sick” for the past two weeks. Sick? About two weeks ago, I woke up with a really bad sore throat, strong enough that swallowing, yawning, and even hard breathing were painful. This continued for three days, until eventually I also started coughing. Oddly enough, I was coughing for no reason. Nothing was coming up, and no cough medicine seemed to work. I figured I just had a cold; unfortunately I was very wrong.This kept up for days. Eventually my throat hurt so bad, I also started losing my voice. Late one night, Jen took me to the hospital to see about my sudden turn for the worse, afraid I had strep. After about two hours at the hospital, we found that I did not have strep, and my painful throat was marked as pharyngitis. Fast forward one week through a rather miserable Christmas and New Year, and oddly enough, I don’t feel any better. What to do?Take a day off work and go to a doctor, that’s what. The doctor didn’t examine me very long, and seemed to have an immediate idea after I merely listed my symptoms and he took a quick look at my throat. To confirm his hypothesis, he gave me a breath-volume test; I barely registered 80% after three attempts.“Looks like allergies!““God damn it!“According to him, since Chicago has such bad air pollution, people who move to the area sometimes react adversely to the climate. Suddenly the weeks of post-nasal drip and constant coughing made sense. The air was invoking a histamine response, causing my sinuses to constantly produce mucus, and my lungs to constrict. My constricted lungs had bronchospasms, since the constriction imitated clogged lungs. That of course is why I kept coughing without production, and why no cough medicines reduced the urge.So yeah… I’m allergic to Chicago. Now the city is actually trying to kill me. Thanks Chicago! I really needed another reason to liken you to a puss infested boil on the ass of a rotting camel.Eat it, shit hole.

After messing around a little with Google Video for a while, just searching around, I found this.Now, what else can I really say? This is just pure awesome.

So what do you do if you can’t easily escape a snowed-in parking spot, and you drive a truck? Well, drive right into the car behind you, of course! Just back waaaaay up, about three feet farther than necessary, and just let the bed of your truck scrape right along the hood of whoever is behind you. Then when you’re done, just drive away! All the cool kids are doing it. Leave a note apologizing or giving your insurance information? What are you, drunk?And here I was, starting to forget that Chicago was a putrid stain on the face of civilization, unworthy of the effort necessary of reducing it to a pile of smoking rubble. Should the day come when ICBMs are fired at the US, I somehow doubt any would dirty themselves by entering Chicago airspace. This city is safe, merely because it is a horrible wasteland which emanates banality and destruction. I’m surprised pigeons don’t immediately drop out of the sky twitching in throes of death within five miles of this filthy, pulsating bastion of bubbling chlamydia puss.It is impossible to have a nice car in Chicago without a garage. Parking on the street is a crapshoot, and I guess I was just lucky nothing happened before now. I need to get my car somewhere safe so it sustains no more damage, and get it fixed so someone will fucking buy it, but I’m kinda screwed here. If I get it fixed, I have to put it somewhere, or it’ll just get hit by something else again. But I can’t sell it until I get it fixed… Nice!I have a friend who’s all into rebuilding and selling cars. I’m going to see if he’ll take on this challenge, because I don’t have the resources here, and this vehicle is becoming more and more of a liability.

Thanks to Verizon’s “New Every Two” plan and a $100 promotion, I just scored $200 off on my new RAZR bitches! Now maybe I’ll have a phone that doesn’t forget about daylight saving time whenever it’s off the network for 5 seconds. Don’t get me wrong, the LG-VX4400 is a pretty good phone, but it’s twice as thick as a RAZR, and weighs less.Other than that, I don’t have much to report. I’m boring, and I admit it. I’m getting faster at solving the cube, and I’ve learned about five new algorithms for doing the last layer, but I’ve still got about 50 to go. Boy, it seems like a long way away before I can get under a minute. Oh well. :)

Well, I am now able to solve a Rubik’s cube in less than five minutes. I think with a little more practice, I can get faster; I just need to get more accustomed to how a cube moves, and the methods I use to solve it. About when this becomes second nature, I may learn the really fast ways of solving it, and see if I can get under a minute. Now wouldn’t that be amusing?