I just realized that for the past two days I've written my updates, but completely forgot to upload them to my webpage.

Oops. So here comes three days of Dougie goodness, all in one fell swoop.

In other news, Argh!!! I'm a pirate!!!

Today was our celebration of the Fourth of July, since all things considered, it was just so much more practical to have it on Friday instead of Thursday (interesting fact: we don't have a fourth class on Fridays; I'd never noticed this before, because offhand I don't think until now we've had a normal Friday class wise - previously we've always had exams, or field trips, or something that kept us from having a normal day of classes. So today, once we got done with our morning classes, we started barbecuing. And oh, how much food we ate. I had hamburgers, and hotdogs, and onigiri and yakatori… I stuffed myself like a turkey the day before thanksgiving. Then we played Frisbee football for almost the entire evening, only stopping when people almost literally began dropping in their tracks (a couple actually did get sick, playing too hard after eating to much). I, fortunately, was not one of them, but by the time we stopped, I'd been playing so hard that I managed to completely soak my shirt through. And I mean completely. It's like I'm wearing a giant wet towel. Since then I've also downed about a gallon of cold barely tea. I never really liked it before, but since there is a serious lack of diet soda in the vending machines, I bought a couple of bottles. _Best_ beverage _ever_. Nothing has ever tasted so good, or felt so cool and invigorating on the way down as that tea did. Then because I still felt like I was about to pass out from over heating, I soaked the bandanna I carry around for hand wiping in the sink, and tied it around my head. Argh!!!!! I became a pirate.

Perhaps I need to explain this a bit further. You see, early on in the semester one of the students was supposed to write an essay about what his home was like. Coming up utterly lacking in anything even remotely exciting about Farmington Hills, he wrote, "You can be anything there, even a pirate!" In response, the teacher jocularly wrote, "Really? There are pirates in Michigan?" And thus it all began. The whole class got pirate fever, and several subsequent essays involved the difficulties of being a pirate in modern America (especially when the Vikings tried to move onto their turf), and ever since then pirates have been the running gag at the Center. One girl's door, for whatever reason (draft or defective spring or something) when unlatched continuously bounces open and shut. That's the work of our pirate ghost. Another girl won some gold fish at a local festival. They're out pirate gold(fish) and guard carps respectively. Our slippers our pirate booty(ies). We've really had way too much fun with this. So while I'm wearing my bandana that makes me an honorary Farmington Hills Pirate.

And I think that I've figured out which CD(s) to give to Elena, the only problem being that in listening to the second one, I absolutely fell in love with it, and now I really don't want to part with it. But I'm pretty sure that Elena would like it too… So my solution (crass and selfish as it may be)? I'm sending her a _copy_ of the CD, along with the translated lyrics. If she does like it, then I shall (oh so sadly) send the original (part of the fact I'm so fond of it is that it was part of a kind of 'best of' set, and also has DVD full of goodies; Elena doesn't have a DVD player so…). I really should have recognized the sub conscious justification I was making when I decided, 'gee, I'll just give them a listen to make sure Elena might like them…