I’m in this horrible rut right now. With all the studying and lack of going to work consistantly for the past week or so, I can’t seem to get in bed before 3am these days. If I do lay down before then, I just can’t get to sleep. Tonight of all nights I should be ready for the shuteye, after last night finally falling asleep about 5:40am (and being awakened quickly thereafter by Farris’s alarm clock going off), I awoke bright and early at noon. I felt just fine after only 6 hours of sleep. Now, I am going to crash now and hopefully make it out of bed by 8am so I can get to work at some sort of respectable time. Who knows.

On other fronts, Reinier (yes his name is a palindrome) and I are diligently preparing for our Friday departure to Alaska – so diligently, in fact, that we haven’t even bought our plane tickets. I did call some rental car places tonight. Turns out that for someone that is just a year too young, 24 in this case, it costs about $500 to rent a car for 5 days. If he was 25 it would be less than $400. That blows. I was hoping to make it out of this trip for about $350, but it looks like that figure might climb a bit over the next few days. Heck, its still worth it, this just means that I’ll be eating PBJs well after the trip is over, probably through about December. I just hope we don’t get TOO close to any bears. They’re majestic and beatuiful and all – from a distance. Once you’ve gotten just a bit too close to one (or one and her cub while hiking in the middle of the Colorado backcountry where you just know that no one would find you for days if not weeks and even if they did it would take way too long to get to a hospital to do you any good after you get ripped to shreds by the nice, cute, ‘little’ bear) you’ll understand my reservations. It’s not that much fun to just know that something that has no regard for any life other than its own can decide to toss you about like a playtoy just because the you happened to be upwind. No, I really don’t have a problem with bears. As long as they’re on the other side of a very large fence, or where I can only see them through a telephoto zoom.