So, I was at work hosting probably what will be my last birthday party that I host there, unless I come back for a break. And the first birthday party that I hosted that night, it wasn't going that well because the fire alarm got pulled. And there was just some air of sadness to the party. Like, I couldn't figure out what it was, but I was trying to smile and make everything be perfect. But clearly because of the whole fire alarm thing, it wasn't going to be. And at the end of the party, I offered to help the birthday boy's father carry some bags out to his car 'cause that's just something that I do for all the parties that I host. So, this time the dad said, “Yes,” when normally the parents say no. So I was carrying all the gifts out to the car, and the birthday boy's dad said, "Thank you for making this the most special birthday party ever." And I said, "I'm just trying to do my job. I'm sorry about the whole fire alarm thing." And he says, "I don't really think you get it. My son was a twin, and his brother unexpectedly died. And this is his first birthday by himself." And the thing that made it really special is, apparently, the boy's twin brother had the same name that I do. And the dad said that me being there made it feel like his son who had passed on was with them. And even though I really didn't do anything at all to make this party as special as it was for them, it was just like my existence and my presence and trying to bring light into it without knowing the good that I was doing that made it extra special. And, I mean, that party did not give me a tip, but I feel like the impact that I was able to have on that family was just as important, if not more important, than any extra five dollars could've gotten me. So, yeah, sometimes you impact people in ways that you can never expect.

My son really likes airplanes and trains and history, and we had hoped to go to the Milwaukee Public Museum -- the Public Museum -- because it's closing for relocation. And then we had also hoped to go to the Illinois Railway Museum. We ended up not being able to do any of that. And it's a really good thing that we didn't go, because as you know, the historic floods happened in Milwaukee and Chicago. So if we had gone -- if things had not hindered us from going -- like, my, my son got injured, so he couldn't hold the camera. So we, we ended up not going 'cause he would wanna film these places that we were gonna go, so we ended up not going ‘cause he can't hold the camera. His, his hand got injured. But it's a good thing we didn't go, because the historic floods hit Milwaukee and Chicago, and we saw on the news where they were. And that's -- those are the roads, the 41 and 43 in Illinois and over there in Milwaukee, we would have been driving right through the floods and the rain. And it's really dangerous driving through a storm and driving through floods. So -- and my car might have gotten stalled and that would be very bad if I'm so far away from home and I need auto repair because we don't live there. There's nobody we can really call for help, and how would we get to hotels and everything? So it, it ended up -- it was bad for my son. He had nine stitches. Um, so it -- and he's kind of worried about it 'cause, you know, stitches make you look like Frankenstein. But at least it wasn't his writing hand, so he can still write with his writing hand. But that's what prevented us from going, and that's what prevented us from being caught in a storm.

Eventually, one of the girls that lived on our floor -- the, the floors were divided at that time. We had girl floors and boy floors, and there were sister floors and brother floors. So one of the girls on my floor, she was real nice, but she didn't do too well at school so she had to drop out for a while. So, her roommate had a room to herself, and I desperately wanted to get rid of my secretive, moody roommate. I went down and talked to this girl and asked if I could move in with her, and she said, "Sure!" So I did. I moved out and moved in with [Name], so, ha! And [Name] and I hit it off. We had so much in common. We became good friends very fast. We spent a lot of time talking instead of studying. We would lay in bed at night and just talk and talk. She -- we both had loft beds. So we had boosted both of our beds up and we had room underneath for a couch and then our desks. We had our -- and our room was very cute. So, we just -- we had so much in common. Our dads had similar jobs. We both had older sisters that were the same age. We had lots of memories that were, were similar. And we liked the same, same kinds of things. We were both business majors, and we both loved movies, and we liked certain bands. We liked Journey and Boston, Van Halen, all those old bands from the eighties. And, um, we both loved to just do silly stuff. Like, we liked having fun. We, we would go just do, like, goofy things in the cafeteria.And one night we decided we were gonna go steal all the light bulbs from a room in our brother floor. Some boys -- we knew that they never locked their door, so we went down there and we stole all their light bulbs and we brought ‘em back to our room. And we were just laughing hysterically. We thought it was so funny. So then we locked our door and we went out for the evening and somehow, those boys figured out that it was us! And they, they somehow got into our room. We never did find out how they did it. But they…