July 1st, 2001

In Libertyville...

Another relaxed day in Libertyville. I find that in addition to a place to sleep I get a complimentary alarm clock as well... every morning around 7:30 or so one of my aunt and uncle's dogs come in and give me an investigatory sniffing... after that she becomes sort of a snooze alarm, coming in every half hour or so to see if I'm awake and available to pet her.

I think my alarm clock is the dog named Dorie. There's two of them, a mother and daughter. The mother is named Bonnie. They are flat coat retrivers, I believe. If it isn't, drop me an e-mail letting me know if I got that right or not... I prolly botched it as it's rather late at night and I'm writing this on a train... not that writing on a train should have any bearing on my thought process but the tired bit does, the train bit is incidental.

Anyways...

The dogs are very sweet and very affectionate. Also very intelligent, one of them(I can't recall which) knows how to open doors and whatnot.

After waking up I have coffee with Pam and Jock. I don't think I'm worth much for conversation since it takes me a couplea hours to become functional after waking up, but I manage. They don't seem to mind.

Molly arrives around 10am. She looks kind of tired from her trip, but she's up for going out and doing stuff. So Jami, Molly, Pam, Alie and I all pile into a car and head out... cruising down to the mall.

Apparently Alie hasn't been to a mall in over a year. So, like traffic, streetlights and Wal-Marts, she's rather blown away by it.

As we wander through we run into this one store I've never seen before... called Build-A-Bear. It's this large, brightly lit childish looking store that lets a child(or a big kid) select from an assortment of stuffed animals, mainly bears but they have some other critters there too, and do all these really cool things to customize them... like put voice chips in them so they'll say stuff, or pick out outfits for them and a number of other things. So of course I have to do it.

Yah, I made myself a stuffed bear. You gotta problem with that? Didn't think so. ;)

Afterwards I decided I needed a haircut... so we went to a local hair place that was cutting hair for dirt cheap. I'd stashed the camera but Molly and Alie found it and decided to take pictures of me. So, for those of you wondering about my hair... there ya go. And no, it wasn't a mistake. I just decided I wanted something different.

Afterwards we head back to their house and hang out for a while. Then Molly and a friend of hers, Tuyen(I hope I spelled that right) offered to take us over to this new park that had been built in Libertyville called Independence Grove.

It's a completely man made area... lots of paved paths, a man made lakes, buildings, fountains scattered here and there. It's really nice... it would be a good place for me to go rollerblading.

We wander around for a while checking out everything, then head back home. Tentative plans are made for tommorrow. We'll be heading into Chicago for the first time...