Lately, a lot of my friends have signed up for a blog from LiveJournal. I’ve looked into their services quite a bit and really like some of their features, such as the friends and interests lists. LJ also makes contacting others easy and integrates right into Mozilla Firefox, both of which seem quite appealing. But, at the same time, I like the integration of my news manager into my web site. So, I have signed up for a LiveJournal; my username is: erichmusick, but have decided to post all entries on both my web site and my LiveJournal so I get the best of both worlds.

On a completely different note, I was hanging out with my friend Hans this evening, riding around. We were driving North on Rt 59, coming from the Fox Valley Mall area. There were some baracades of some sort in the middle of the road…seemingly normal for a Chicago suburb. I accelerated once my light turned green. After reaching a speed of about 40 mph, I saw an animal which turned out to be a racoon waddling toward my car. Not wanting to cause an accident and becasue things happened so fast, I did nothing except maybe let off the gas a little bit. Hans and I heard a thud and I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the cars behind me change lanes to avoid the roadkill. At the next street, we pulled off 59, stopped under a street light, and hopped out and examined the car to ensure it was okay. I looked at it more closely later on and found some guts near the wheel well and on the bottom of my door. Otherwise, the car was fine. We road back around to check on the coon, only to find out it didn’t survive the ordeal.

While I feel bad hitting the poor animal, there wasn’t much I could have done. It hit me more than I hit it. It scurried into the side of my car. I would have felt worse if it had been a pet, as opposed to a wild animal because it would have meant something to someone. … In this situation, as long as my car is okay, I’m not so upset.

Well I’ve gotta get up at 8:30 tomorrow so I can go and work another who knows…10 hours if it’s anything like today. At least the work is enjoyable!

Well I had my surgery today. My right hand is now in an enormous cast-like bandage. It’s not an actual cast, but it has a hard material in it. Therefore, I have very little typing ability. It is helpful that I am accustomed to typing properly (cause I know where all the keys are), but I am forced to peck when using letters on the right side of the keyboard. I’d tell more about my surgery but I’m getting kinda tired again, so I’m going to get to bed.

I really ought to get on here more frequently and post updates on my life, but I’m never really in the mood for writing.

Anyway…

I took my last final (Probability and Statistics) from 2-3 pm on May 19. About 5pm, my dad and brother got up to MSOE with the old van so we could bring home my deck, the two lofts, my futon, and all the other junk I still had at school. And when I say junk, I partially mean it…now that all my stuff is home and all over the place, I look at it and wonder why I have it and what to do with it. Really, there’s not much more stuff than I began with, but it doesn’t want to re-situate. I got home later that evening and spent much of Thursday relaxing and attempting to put all that stuff away. Friday I worked most of the day and then left around 9 or 10 to head back to Milwaukee.

I spent Friday night in Milwaukee with Gabe and we left with several other Intervarsity members for Chapter Focus Week at Intervarsity’s Cedar Campus retreat center in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In addition to being somewhat sick the entire week, I broke my finger Monday evening after dinner. A bunch of us were on the beach throwing rocks at a larger rock sitting on top of a log standing upright. We moved the log to a different location and placed the large rock on top of it once again. Like any good engineer, I saw that the log was unstable and wanted to reinforce it. As I moved a rock to the log’s base to stabilize it, the rock fell off the top of the log onto my hand. I felt pain shoot through my hand but assumed it was nothing more than a good bruise…until I looked down at my hand. My right ring finger was pointing sideways and had some blood near the joint where the finger meets the palm of the hand. I felt Steve Strombeck grab me to keep me from falling forward. He put my arm around his shoulder and helped me walk back to the cabin. The pain kept increasing and along with it, my nauseous stomach. I passed out for a few seconds and as I woke back up, Steve laid me down in the grass. Everyone from my chapter gathered around and assured me that I would be okay. They were also asking me a bunch of obvious questions, such as “What is your name?” and “Where are you?” I answered in a somewhat frustrated tone, as if I deserved to be asked more intelligent questions. As I realized later, this was to keep me from going into shock. I remember babbling on and on and cracking a lot of jokes, or at least making comments I thought were funny. When you’re kinda woozy like I was, that has a tendency to happen.

After a 45 minute drive to the hospital with a hand numb from the ice placed on it, I got in the ER and they fixed me up. The rest of the week went all right … I had to learn to swallow pills and never really recovered from my cold and sore throat, but we had some decent Bible studies and some hopefully helpful training on how to lead a Small Group. Everyone was understanding of my injury and helped me accomplish those tasks which were no longer simple because of the temporary loss of the use of my dominant hand.

As per the instruction of the doctor in Saute St. Marie, where I was treated for the injury, I saw a doctor here today. His first comment was something to the effect that my injury had not been treated properly … without a doubt, it needed surgery. So it looks like I’ll be going in Saturday to get some pins stuck in my finger.

Well, I’m going to have to cut this short; Stan and I are going to make one of our late night Wendy’s runs.