Four score and seven years ago

I have a race this afternoon. It's in Burlington. My parents will be there. I'm hanging out with them for Fall Break (Jason so mad it funny). We have Monday and Tuesday off. I'm tired. I have a race later today, and I think I'm going to skip my class at 11:15 because I'd rather sleep. It'll be the first class I've skipped this semester. Actually, I'd rather sleep that write this blog post. I'll just make it quick.

Last Friday: Got on a bus, drove down to Westfield, Mass. Slept in a Holiday Inn.

Saturday: Woke up, raced. Didn't do too well. Got on the bus and went back to Midd. Saturday night shenanigans.

Sunday - Today: Ugh.

Well, that about does it.

Oh, never read Dead Souls by Gogol. It sucks. It's exactly the kind of book I was dreading when I signed up for Russian lit. Pushkin and Lermontov got my hoped up for this class, and Gogol crushed them. Hopefully Turgenev or whoever the hell we read next is better.

We used this cool thing for a geography lab called social explorer that allows you to use census data to make a map of just about anything ever forever, and, unlike every other computery thing we do in geography, it's very intuitive. Here, I'll make a couple of maps right now to show you, and they'll only take a couple of minutes.

[EDIT: Wow. All my maps disappeared. I kinda need to go race right now. I'll fix it later. In the meantime, I'm boycotting the internet. This is just one of those things that is really, really annoying. Why would they (meaning the gremlins inside my computer) take away my maps? I'm in a bad mood now. Maybe that'll make me race better. Or worse.]

Percent Slave Population in the South, 1830 Census

Percent Illiterate Age 10+ in the Southwest, 1900 Census

Median Household Income (darker = richer) in New York City, 2010 Census

Percent Mormon Population in the Lower 48, 2010 Census

Population Density in the Northeast, 2010 Census

Carbon Emissions in Lower 48, 2002 Study

Percent Asian Population in South Country, 2010 Census

Well, I made more than a couple. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise.

Yesterday in my other geography class, the one about the history of cartography, the professor brought in her giant map of Gettysburg and had us lay it out on the floor and look at it for a long time. Why lay it on the floor? Because when I said it was giant I was understating it. The thing took up half of the classroom floor, and was at a ridiculously large scale. Awesome.

The NHL season was supposed to start this week. It didn't. You don't have to pretend to be angry; I'm angry enough for all of us.

EDIT: I can't believe I almost forgot to put this in. As you either know or don't know (really narrows it down, eh?), this past Tuesday, October 9th, was Leif Erikson Day. Therefore I present you with this: