Hope, Despair, and Cooked Cassettes

Hope - I was reading an article on MLSnet.com where the prognosticator picked the US to lose to the Czechs and then beat Italy and Ghana. That may seem overly optimistic, but I'm hoping that he's right. I'm also ignoring that in his picture for MLSnet.com he's wearing sunglasses and a bandana across his mouth and nose. We're all outlaws in the world of soccer.

Despair - I've got poison ivy again. It's not as bad as some of my previous instances (I don't have to take steroids to combat it), but I thought I was smart enough to avoid it. I try to poison it while scorching the rest of the earth, but this time it was growing next to the carrots planted along the fence. I think buying a $1 bag of carrots at the grocery store would be well worth avoiding this week of discomfort, but I'm trying to be way more self sufficient than I'm capable of. Scratch your knees for me.

Cooked Cassettes - My loaded 89 Cavalier has a state of the art cassette player and a state of the art tape holder. What it doesn't have is a way to keep the car cool w/ the windows rolled up sitting in a hot NC parking lot during the summer. I noticed the Raw Power tape was fucked up about a year ago, but I didn't do anything to save the other tapes in the car. Today I discovered the only thing worth listening to on Daydream Nation was the electronic beep that comes on when you start the tape from the very beginning. There's been a 10 disc stereo from the old car waiting to move in for the past 5 years, but I'm convinced that the engine will blow, the axels will break, and the transmission will drag across the ground as soon as I put in a decent stereo.