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!