Mommy Mommy Look at the Caged Animals!

I went to the zoo today! The Lincoln Park Zoo is free, which is very accommodating when you are a broke student trying not to spend too much of your student loan. For the most part it was everything I had hoped to see. Interesting and exotic animals in cages. Their ape exhibit was far superior to the Potter Park Zoo from my home town. They actually had silver back gorillas.

The most interesting part of the trip was the battling tigers. They got up in eachother's faces and were roaring fit to bust. It's funny going to a zoo when you're older. Watching the tigers was like watching larger versions of house cats.I'm looking at submitting to another contest soon. Just starting to brainstorm some ideas. It's a Mary Shelley short story contest over at Rosebud Magazine. Lucky for me, Mort Castle is the finalist judge. That should give me a bit of an edge (though everything is done blind) because he'll know my writing style and he'll know what they're looking for.

Last night I helped my roommate perform a rescue operation on a can of Ragu sauce. Having come from an Italian oriented family, I grew up with homemade sauce. I've even learned how to make my own. Having it from a can was blasphemy, but with the help of spices, and some hot Italian sausage, we managed to save the majority of it.

And to bed I go...

PS: I noticed that I've been spelling extraordinaire wrong in the title, so I rectified it.

I finished the majority of my moving in today. It was a whole lot of pushing piles in circles. I'd move a couple things where they should be, tuck a few other things away, and the pile would rotate in another circle. It is mostly frustrating. Packing is far easier than unpacking. Especially when you have more space.

I sent Mort Castle the first chapter of the Center. I finished it a couple days ago. It was one of the easiest chapters yet. I'm writing it with the mentality that I am going to just toss a page break when it gets boring, and keep it moving nonstop. Growing constantly to action and to intensity. Maybe I'll send it out to the F Magazine Novel and Short Story Contest. I need to get more things out anyways.

It takes me nearly an hour to commute from my apartment to Columbia. This gives me a lot of time to read. I also have a feeling that I am going to be putting a lot of miles on my iPod over the next year. I'm nearly a third of the way through the second book of The Dark Tower (The Drawing of the Three). I'm hoping to finish that book this week. I'm also hammering my way through the 22 disk epic of the Historian. It is very good. Everything the Da Vinci code should've been, and more. And it's about Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, or more importantly, Dracula.

Class starts tomorrow. I'm taking "The Fundamentals of Communication," and "Prose Forms." There are only 5 people in my prose forms class. This is both a blessing and a curse. I've got 2 days that I am going to want to miss. One is next tuesday because I turn 21. The other is the thursday afterwards because it is a few days before Ben Logan's wedding. If I've got the skips I'm going to use them. Life is just more important than the 12th floor.