Certain people convinced me that I needed to see The Ring. "It's very well done," they said, "go see it. So David and I took their advice. From what I gathered during the times when my eyes were not closed, The Ring was a scary scary movie. Not as much scary in a "look who just got hacked to pieces" way, but rather in a "building sense of foreboding and dread escalates into nightmarish sequence that is not as much gory as creepily disturbing". And of course there were the obligatory spooky little kids. From watching horror movies, I have come to realize that the scariest things in the world are indeed small children. The worst part is that children can never say anything in a normal voice. I won't spoil the movie, but for those of you who've seen it, why couldn't the little boy just say "the girl never sleeps, mom". Instead he has to whisper "she never sleeeepssss..." in this bone-chilling voice. And he was supposedly one of the "good guys".

If I keep talking about that movie, I won't be able to sleep tonight, so let's move on to another topic: manhole covers. For some reason, besides having an unhealthy obsession with stop signs, the city planners must have had some sort of manhole (or "personhole" for you "womyns rights" folks) obsession, because there are many places where there are at least 3 or 4 manhole covers all clustered together in a small group, as if they were huddling together for warmth or because they were scared of being alone in the Crime-iest City in the World. It seems that every time they repave the roads here they dump asphalt over one of the covers, remove just the piece of concrete covering the manhole leaving a large suspension-rending pothole, then decide that we actually need a different entrance to the sewers and dig another hole just to the left or right of the original. This ensures that there is no possible way to swerve around the numerous potholes to avoid destroying the alignment on my car. Unless the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are running our city (which I sometimes wonder about considering the way traffic lights work around here), I see no reason for so many manhole covers.

And for those of you who are interviewing with Microsoft: manhole covers are round because it's the simplest shape that won't drop through if oriented in a different way (tilt a square cover upright and diagonally and it would fall right through).