Lachat.com

They gather in darkened hallways, cloaked in hoods. A secret handshake, a flick of the wrist, and the message is transferred with no one the wiser. However, they must be careful as the everwatching nemesis is lurking, ready to pounce. Okay, perhaps study groups don't have the cloak and dagger glamour we've come to expect from a 007 movie. If you're asked to picture a study group you might imagine a bunch of honor band geeks sitting around some wooden table in a suburban home, or perhaps a bunch of passed out frats who really intended to get to that studying but didn't quite make it. And yet, despite these unassuming guises, study groups have been a point of student rebellion against the system. That is, if they're done right.

January 21, 2008. Another orbit round the sun, and I find myself turning 27 years old. Somehow I'd survived another year on this turbulent planet despite near misses by cars, buying and sailing a boat, and walking two miles home through questionable neighborhoods at midnight. Usually I did a decent job of mitigating risk, and I guess that paid off. To celebrate, I planned to treat Eric and myself to a nice relaxing evening at my favorite Thai restaurant, Keo's. However, the evening held a few surprises lurking around the corner.

Bulkheads--they're big, they're brown, and in my case they're rotten. Water had long since wormed its way through the sealant at the chain plates and one window and down into the interior of the bulkhead. A bulkhead is what they call the interior walls in a boat. These babies don't experience stresses like walls do in buildings. A load bearing wall in your hom must endure compressive loads without buckling. On a sailboat you don't have a roof above you, you have a mast and the standing rigging that supports it. The basic process is that the wind pushes the sails, the sails stress the mast, and the mast transfers the stress to the bulkheads which transfer the force to the rest of the boat. Under normal sailing conditions there might be 5000 lbs of force on the chainplates. However, if you accidentally gybe you could put 20,000 lbs of force on them. If the rigging, mast, chainplates, or bulkheads fail the ship can violently dismast whipping metal wires around like band saws. On this episode of 'This Old Boat', Robert replaces the main bulkheads.

Have I gone off my rocker? No! This doesn't contain fish, but garbanzo beans as the base. Its reminiscent of a tuna-fish salad spread I remember growing up but without killing fish. My dad always hated the smell of tuna fish anyway. I have a heaping bowl of this recipe in front of me and a stack of a nice toasted multi-grain bread next to it.

I used to love eating the Ethnic Gourmet "Pad Thai with Tofu" frozen entrees. It was a bit spicy, but very satisfying. This recipe is my take on their product. I tried it recently and love it! Its a bit more preparation than my regular recipe, but its well worth the effort.

TheBus has many signs inside directing people's actions. There is the happy smiley face listening to music with headphones, signs telling you to get your ass to the back of the bus. There's even a sign that says its not okay to eat hotdogs on the bus (or I think that's what it meant). One such sign tells not to urinate or defecate on the bus. For some reason they did not give any smiley faces mimicking the actions here. Perhaps they need some outside artist to provide such things. Unfortunately, I've witnessed every single one of those rules broken on the bus, as well as several more which don't have signs... yet.