Man in comfortable shoes

I got the thumbs up for my drag design and results from my advisor. There's still some things that need to be investigated, but overall we can consider the design a success. And that feels good. Really good. So good that my blood sugars have ceased to be mind-numbingly erratic for the past couple of days. The path to the end is still a considerable journey, and I won't be able to submit my thesis while I'm here in Urbana (I just don't have the time to get data and write it), but the path is clear and well defined. And that feels good.

Seeing as Katie will only be working at Heel to Toe for a couple of weeks, I ordered a pair of nice Footprints (one of the Birkenstock spinoff companies) a couple of weeks ago to take advantage of the family discount while we still have it. They came in yesterday, and they are [begin French accent] very nice [end French accent]. This, combined with getting approval from my advisor the day before, put me in a pretty good mood.

So on my way home from the shoe store, I stopped by a used music store. Perusing through the various sections, I found a couple cds that I just had to get. The first is Medicine Music by Bobby McFerrin, an album that we used to listen to all the time. The second is Down the Road by Andy Narell, a steel drum virtuoso whose love of the music and people of Trinidad, the Caribbean, and the West Indies is always first and foremost in his music. I've been looking for music to play with Elsa, and these two will do nicely. I've also been jones-ing for a couple of stories called How the Camel Got its Hump and How the Rhinoceros Got its Skin, narrated by Jack Nicholson with music and sound effects by Bobby McFerrin. We had them on LP, and while they made a VHS of the stories, they haven't been released on cd at all. We'll have to dub our old LPs if Elsa wants to get a taste of these delicacies. I love these kind of stories more than anything else, stories of origins, explanations of natural processes, because it provides such a sense of cultural identity, brings the subject to life and gives it character, describes complex processes with such elegance, and encourages an inquisitive view of the world where "What is that? Why is it that way?" are the two questions always on your mind.

I just thought of a The Onion headline: "Omniscient God Faces Charges of Insider Trading."