I'm Back...

...dunno if I wanna do anything right away, though. The next day after that last entry, my throat was fairly soar again, for some reason. I guess all the activity I did was not highly appreciated by it. So it's soar again.... but it's gotten better. Notably, about the time I actually got HOME, home. Dunno why. It just felt a lot better, then. Maybe it was stress related. Maybe it had to do with the altitude and dryness of Yellowstone (Old Faithfull is somewhere around 7,600 ft. in elevation). I know I'm gonna sleep in tonight, though, probably.

The night before I left, I only got TWO HOURS of sleep. First of all, when I got off work that night, I forgot that I was supposed to do my laundry, until I remembered at 12. It got done at 1:30, at which point I went back to the room, to find my roommates fairly wasted already. Oh man. Rob was so loud... he kept on yelling about stuff, and commited many violent actions throughout the night. For one, I got him to draw in my last comic there (I got like 6 people from the dorm to help me out with it.) First, Rob was knocking stuff off the desk so he could find it. Then he drew this picture of himself, saying "I love Tom and all of my friends." And then he grabbed it roughly and tried to throw it up on my bed, or something, but succeeded in only hitting it against the side of the bed. Travis was out of it. He wasn't obnoxious, but he had this bewildered air about him, and he had some pretty funny expressions on his face throughout the night.

They stayed in the room until like 2:30, and then they went wandering... ...they came back at about 3:45. I had slept for like 45 minutes, maybe. Evidently, they'd been wandering around the kitchen, when a security guard found them. He wrote Rob up for trespassing. He might've said something about Travis, too, but it hardly mattered, since he was leaving the next day, just like me. Rob was talking about challenging it, and accusing the guard of "harrassment" (I can believe it; the security guard that found him is an asshole. Rob knew I thought he was an asshole, too, so he told me it was him. We call him "The Fat Security Guard," or "The Fat One" for short. He never did anything directly to me, but I just didn't like how he treated residents.) They finally went to bed at like 4:15 or so... ...and then got up at 6. I stayed up and watched them leave, and then I slept for like another hour... So that's ALMOST 4 hours of sleep that I got that night/day, though I slept for a little while longer in the car.

Then Mom and Dad found me. Dad walked in to the laundry room as I was finishing drying some stuff, and writing my last journal entry (anyone can read it. I do a lot of bitching in it, though, I confess. The first entry is probably particularly embarrasing.) I did all the stuff I was supposed to do, and checked out. Chuck (my big boss) wrote me a letter of recommendation (Laura had written me one, but I lost it somewhere...) He seemed upset that I had asked someone else to write it, and asked me why I thought he didn't like me, to which I could only reply "...I... just can't read you very well." So he wrote me a letter of recommendation, and wished me the best of luck. He can't be all bad... ...he's alright... ...I don't know what I think of him, really.

This morning, I saw the same episode of the same show that I saw the morning I left the hotel for Yellowstone. Almost exactly 2 months later. Maybe the show had run it's course, and they were showing it again (it was that one kid detective cartoon on Adult Swim.) I didn't see the same videos I saw that morning, though. VH1 wasn't showing videos, or something. Then we drove through the Oregon Desert, and then the mountains. If there is a job that involves doing stuff in the mountains, I want that job. Like inspecting the camp grounds or something. I dunno. Then we developed my pictures. One roll was mostly of my first hike, and there are a lot of pictures in there that seemed like a great idea at the time, but now... eh. They suck. The other roll is pretty cool, though. I think I'll miss my friends there, eventually... rihgt now I don't, though. Right now, I'm very happy happy, and kind of amazed that I'm actually home. It's really weird.

Wuv, Yer Mom