Here's the latest in the From the Man Himself series. This entry, which took place on May 3rd, describes a very nerdy computer science trip to UAB. 'Twas supposed to contain the next weekend, May 10th, and describe the car wash, but the first weekend was so long and the second weekend so much more boring that I said forget about it. Should be interesting, but not nearly as interesting as The Spanish Convention/Prom Extravaganza. Still, if I manage to remember most of the stuff that happened over that weekend, then it should be pretty good. Anyway, without further ado...

Dear Fans,

I'm writing to you today after a weekend jam-packed with very nerdy computer science stuff. This only goes to show what a complete nerd and computer science weirdo that I am. Enough about that, though. Now I will begin with the whacko weekend of May 3rd.

Ah yes...that morning I arrived at school with all my goods (books and materials for my first two periods, my suit jacket and pants, and my suitcase full of goodies for the trip [including my newly acquired "Handbook for Today's Catholic" from the library]...and oh yeah, my camera). First, I dropped off all the unnecessary goods in Mrs. Rountree's room and headed off to that wonderful class that we all know as Mrs. Weyler's class...the joy of pre-calculus in the morning. Then, on to Spanish III! OK, enough of that...I finally returned to Mrs. Rountree's room after saying adios to Mr. Thornton in the band hall.

After interrupting Mrs. Peirce's class to give Lauren (a girl from the infamous Lazarillo group, which will likely never be explained in detail on this site) the camera so she and the other girl in our group could film some scenes, I got to Mrs. Rountree's room and loaded onto the bus with all the rest of kids who didn't remember what their supercomputing projects were about and were only going on the trip in order to capitalize on the $40 that they had paid for it and because it got them out of third and fourth period for the day.

Well, after a very long school bus ride, we finally arrived at the good 'ol Birmingham mall, home to...well, there was a movie theatre, where we saw a showing of X2 (X-Men 2...sheesh...). It was pretty good, but I can't say that I'm really into the gamma-radiation, alien-attack, psychic-powers sort-of-science-fiction-movie-style-type-genre that it promotes. I mean, c'mon. Bambi has more realism than this movie, and that's saying a lot: Bambi was an anti-wildlife hunting propoganda movie, for goodness sakes. But anyway, the movie was pretty good. Then we went to Johnny Rockets nearby and had a really good meal, but not before walking a long way in the rain to find out that the Mexican restaraunt had a thirty minute wait.

After X2, we hitched a ride with a mall golf cart driver who gave some of us a ride, and informed us that the mall was mall employee turf, not, as we wondered, local police jurisdiction. Finally, we arrived at La Quinta Inn, who, as could be expected, had somehow forgotten to reserve rooms for us. Though Mrs. Rountree had called to make sure of the rooms multiple times, and when she checked her records later, she had already reserved the rooms. Oy, it was very frustrating. We ended up having to sit on the bus for about an extra thirty minutes, waiting for her to get rooms checked out for us. Well, finally we were aloud to get off.

The carpet of this certain La Quinta Inn smelled like orange-scented cleaner, and our rooms were pretty trashy. We spent a good deal of the time walking around the hotel, hanging out with the other kids in on our trip and checking out their rooms, which were for the most part exactly the same as ours. Luckily, though, we had a suite, which meant one less bed (I had to sleep on the pulled out couch with a very thin sheet and one pillow) and one more television. Except we didn't have any good channels, and the ones we did have didn't have anything good on them.

Well, after walking around for a little while we got the fourth member of our group to come over to our room so that we could practice the presentation (the other three of us were rooming together). It turns out that our project, not surprisingly, was still a bunch of bogus scientifical, astronomical mumbo-jumbo about converting polar coordinates to Cartesian and entering data and pre-defined spacecraft and complete nonsense. I'm honestly not sure what we did in that class, besides play on www.trackwars.com and watch LEGOmation movies online.

So, finally, we went to sleep. My roommates later told me that I was mumbling some really weird stuff in my sleep when they came in to check on me; I zonked out pretty early, but it turns out that they had stayed up to 2 AM or so talking about who knows what (probably girls...what the heck...). The time was fast approaching when my group would have to fake like we put any work into our project, and fake like it actually meant something to the real world.