"My baby's fun had gone and left my baby blue, nobody knew what kind of magic spell to use."

You know what one of my favorite things in the whole world is? Wet feet. It's right up there along with toothaches, food poisoning, and a pencil in the eye.

And wet feet seems to be the theme of the week.

Give me a spring or summer rain any day. The warmth, the rolling clouds, the mighty thunder and spectacular lightening. And then the lingering smell of clean.

Fall rains are the complete opposite. They are cold, you get nothing but stony gray skies, no thunder or lightening, and all you have in the end is a ground that never seems to become properly dry before the next rain comes.

I would gladly take a pencil in my left eye to have this rain stop. Well, maybe not a pencil. Maybe I would rather have one of those annoying eyelashes that never seem to come out no matter how much you flush and rub.

Now, I WOULD take a pencil in the eye, a month of wet feet, a week of food poisoning, and three toothaches to have my notebook back.

Last week I was going about my normal business. On Tuesday I thought that I would start working on one of my projects (the birds in the cemeteries one) by entering the raw data into Excel. I go to my backpack, where I had put the notebook containing the data and....

...it's not there.

At the time I was CERTAIN that I had put it in my backpack right after my Human Dimensions class and hadn't taken it out since. Apparently I was wrong in thinking this because it was nowhere to be found in that backpack.

I searched my room.

Nothing.

I searched my car.

Nothing.

I have gone to every office in Arts and Science, Natural Resources, and CAFNR to see if ANYONE, a janitor, a student, a bum off the street, had turned in my notebook. No one had seen it.

I checked and re-checked my backpack and my messenger bag three times each.

I even called in a favor with NASA and had them check the far reaches of space.

Apparently no one has jettisoned my notebook to the stars. But who knows? There is no air resistance stopping it out there. If they shot it fast enough it could have traveled back in time or something. If it has, I really hope that the people in ancient Mesopotamia enjoy my bird data and story ideas.

So the conclusion that I have come to is that the notorious campus notebook thief has made yet another ingenues heist. There is no record of this master thief existing. In fact there have been no other documented accounts of his thievery. But I KNOW that he is out there somewhere, reading my aimless writings and laughing his face off.

To come to the real and serious point of it, I think a janitor must have found it and thrown it away. Or a student found it and gave it to a lost and found and someone else collected it thinking it was theirs or said lost and found have tossed it since it was lost a week ago. So I have no bird data and I spent a good amount of time and (in the case is Indiana) money collecting. I also have no information on the cemetery mapping project we are also doing for this class. The mapping assignment is due Tomorrow.

I have e-mailed my professor, and my team members. I have spent a good amount of the last 1/2 hour feeling foolish and even a small part of it feeling thoroughly depressed.

What am I going to do without that data?

What about the stories that I had started in there?

So much is now lost in that notebook and it EXISTS somewhere. There is no way that it vanished into oblivion. So it has to be somewhere. Whether it be in some strangers backpack, in a recycling bin or dumpster, or in the far reaches of space (perhaps being read by Shakespeare right now) it is out there. And I have a feeling that I will never see it again.

This fact has put a real damper on my day. Along with that, I still have a million things to do before I graduate.

On a happier note, Happy second birthday to my one and only nephew Noah. I'm sure that his day will be much better than mine has been.

In other news I am kind of freaking out about the whole going to New Hampshire thing in 6 weeks. That's right folks. My last day of work is December 26th and the days before I leave on the 31st will be filled with packing and preparing.

Also, I am finally going to try this fish experiment ONE MORE TIME. Over Thanksgiving break.

Of course that's the one thing I want to do over my Thanksgiving break. In fact, observing fish eggs is another one of my favorite things to do, though I think I would put it in the category of of being forced to watch the CW for 24 hours straight while getting my appendix cut out (I'm fully conscious, mind you) and being forced to listen to Hannah Montana and Hillary Duff during commercial breaks.

I think I've found a new for of torture for Jack Bauer.

Thank you and good day.