The Beginnings of a Journal

In response to a few requests that I post my journal from my Brisbane days (Haydn, I'm talking to you), I've decided it would be well worth the time to transfer this stuff to an electronic form. Some of these entries are huge, some are small, but all are personal. Therefore, I plan to only let a trusted few people read it. If you'd like to become part of this privileged group, shoot me an email, and I'll add you.

It will take the form of a new blog, creatively titled "Nate-Dawg's Brizzy Journal". Fascinating, I know. Anyway, the URL for this blog is http://ndbrizjournal.blogspot.com.

A few notes on layout -- It will be completely unabridged and unedited. Any typo's that occur in my journals will occur in the blog entry. If I feel the need to clarify anything, I'll either subscript it or put it in parentheses and italics.

With that, on with the show! I'll start one day before and end one day after this particular transfer, and hopefully continue from that point later. The first entry is November 13, 2006.

Busyness...

So I've discovered that it's not a good idea to start a webcomic revival in the midst of finishing up a semester at college. Or, at least, not if you want any degree of consistency. So here it is, ready for production, the second webcomic in a series of two.

Actually, to be fair, I watched a Strong Bad Email that reminded me how amazingly awesome webcomics are, and it motivated me to pump out another one when I probably had other stuff I should have been working on. Like I should be doing now...

The Revival

Good times

I was reading through one of my old journals from my mission last night, and it brought back some good/funny/crazy memories. Pretty much every day I spent in Australia, there was something memorable that happened. I think one day in particular does a good job of representing at least a part of mission life. I was in Cairns (pronounced "Cans"), a beautiful, tropical city in the northern part of Queensland, and my companion was Elder Reiser, from Salt Lake. I was a seasoned missionary at this point, like 22 months out, and I was training Reiser, who had only been serving for a couple of weeks. I'm just going to quote straight from this particular day in my journal, with some minor editing and comments for clarity.


"5/15/07 -- This morning, after study, Elder Reiser and I went to go see Jeff, that half-paralyzed guy who we played chess with. (The week prior to this, we were following up on an old contact and met Jeff, who had been meeting with missionaries for a long time. He had each missionary that came to visit him draw a picture, and he had all of these pictures on his wall... maybe 50 or so drawings. He wasn't able to speak very well, but clearly enough to be understood. Like I said, we played chess with him, and he gave us each nicknames. I was "Cowboy," because I was from Wyoming, and Reiser was something like "Ruby." He was a cool old guy... anyway back to the narration.) We got there and the first thing he did was yell at us, saying that we came "straight from hell" and he didn't ever want to see us again. Total change of attitude. I thought he was kidding at first, but apparently not. Weird. (By the way, we went back the next week, not something we normally did if someone told us to go away, and he was right back to normal again.)

We then went to go see Stephany, a former investigator who sounded really interested from the teaching record, and whom it described as "an intelligent and attractive young lady." That is, of course, obviously not the reason we wanted to go see her, but she was right around the corner from Jeff, so we might as well. (We had never met her prior to this.) We knocked on the door and waited for a minute. The screen door and lighting was such that we couldn't see anything on the other side, but they could see everything outside. Someone came to the door and answered in a deep, gravelly, harsh voice, 'Yes?'
'G'day, is Stephany here?' I said.
'I am Stephany,' the baritone voice said.
We had a hard time believing that the body that belonged to the voice on the other side of the screen door could possibly be attractive, much less female, and the one described on the teaching record. So we talked with the disembodied voice for a second, just trying to get some clarification on stuff (name, previous contact with missionaries, etc.) . She... or he... or 'it' dismissed us by reacting violently against the door, and we came away quite confused. We thought that 'Stephany' might have gotten eaten by that voice. We never actually got to see who was talking to us.

...

We tracted into this one house that was in a state of disrepair. A man answered from the background and brought us into the front room to meet the owner. He was sitting in a chair in the corner of this dimly lit room. There was a couch next to it and a TV across the room. He was old and frail, and sitting in the middle of heaps of random rubbish -- newspapers, plates, banana peels, etc. Above everything else that was noticable was the smell. Like urine mixed with poo, rotten fruit, moldy bread, beer, BO, everything sick you can think of (most of which, by the way, you could see in piles all around this guy). I almost lost my lunch right there, and Elder Reiser was the same. And this guy was sitting in the middle of all of that. It would have almost been a relief if he would have rejected us and sent us away, but he wanted to talk with us, so we obliged and tenderly sat down on the couch. We tried our hardest not to be affected by the stench, but it was awfully painful. We taught him as best we could, given the circumstances, but it was rough, tell you what. He was a pretty nice guy, though. Maybe he just didn't notice the filth he was living in, but I find that hard to believe. We were there for over an hour, anyway. When we finally got outside, it was pure relief. Incidentally, it turns out that he wasn't really interested, anyway.


We took the bus back home in time to pick up the other elders and take them to PEC, and for us to go to youth night. When we got there, though, everyone had apparently already gone golfing, so we just went to Hungry Jack's to get some dinner. When we finished, we went back to the chapel to pick up the other elders. That was the day!"

Yeah, I'd say this day was a pretty typical one. We got yelled at, got a slammed door in our faces, met "interesting" people, and loved every minute of it.

Comics

Wow, these bring back some memories. These are a bunch of comics that I did in 2004-2005, on the old "Nate-Dawg's Castle" site. Looking through them again, I recognize that some (if not all) of them are pretty ridiculous. I don't know if I'll go back to comics again. I might give it a shot. It was pretty fun, after all, even if they are pretty dry and nobody sees them.

Real Life Love

This past week, as I was perusing through the internet, as I am wont to do, I found a few things that made me chuckle. I guess I was looking for something that wasn't as romanticized as the rest of Valentine's Day seemed to be. These are what I found.



This is from an Aussie group called Tripod. I've heard that they're pretty great, but this was the first time that I've actually seen/listened to them.





These guys, Flight of the Conchords, are a bit more well known. They're from New Zealand. I swear this blog isn't a plug for that part of the world, it just kinda happened this time.

This seems more true to life than all of that other lovey-dovey crap. Of course, I guess I wouldn't really know, and I might just still be disillusioned with V-day (no, not May 7 or August 15). Whatever...

Valentine's! Day!

My homemade valentine. Who says geeks can't be romantic? (Props to ThinkGeek for the idea.)

In case you're wondering, this particular valentine isn't going to anyone specific (or anyone at all). Just another opportunity to warn any girl who's interested in me what she's getting herself into. If she actually understands this, then either 1) she's the one for me! or 2) she's kinda weird.