"There was a huge spider on the side of the car door" I was about seven, and my best friend at the time invited me to go to her grandparent's house, and they lived, like—their house's up against like a woodland area, like, lots of trees and stuff, and they had a hill in their backyard, and us being not the brightest at the age of seven, wanted to ride, like, a car, a kiddy car down the hill. Like one that had like no resistance on the wheels, so we would just like go blazing down the hill, I guess. And so we were about to get in it, my friend was like in the car, and I started screaming, and I couldn't explain to her why, because I was too scared to talk. There was a huge spider on the side of the car door that was about the size of like my palm now. And I couldn't tell her what it was, and so she got out and like was asking me "What's up? Hey?" And I just pointed, and then she starts screaming too, and we ran inside. And then her grandpa came outside and let's just say got rid of the spider. Um, we never finished our plan because we were too scared after that. We just stayed inside for the rest of the day. But we researched it, and we found out that it was a wolf spider. I mean, I don't know how accurate that is now, but that's what we called it at the time. But, yeah, that was one of the scariest, I would say, because spiders are terrifying.

"I always just love drives, honestly sometimes more than the destination." Yeah, so we're just dinking around Metro Detroit. We went to the big mall, with the globe in it, and we went to a Korean barbecue place, and you know, the drive back honestly, was probably one of my favorite moments from that little day trip. And it wasn't even really anything spectacular. Like, you know, my friend was driving, my roommate was in the backseat. She's kind of dozing off. Yeah, I was in the passenger seat and like, the sun was kind of setting. It was kind of getting dark. The sky was like changing colors and stuff. It was very beautiful. You know, like blues and purples and pinks, pinks down like the horizon where the sun's setting down.And, yeah, we're just driving like an hour, hour 30, maybe of highway, and we were listening to music, and this sounds so dumb, at one point, my friend, she just starts putting on this like, frat-house hype music. I don't, I feel like this the genre. And she's like doing, like the frat flick while she's driving, like I can feel the bass like rumbling in the car around me. And I don't really like type of music, like especially during that semester, like I didn't really like a lot of that music, even less so since like, yo, this is so trashy. This is so trashy. But like she plays Hotel Room Service by Pitbull. Yeah, Mr. Worldwide, Pitbull--I think that's Mr. Worldwide. That could be Eminem; I don't know the difference. I know they're like both bald white men. I don't know. But she's playing Hotel Room Service, she's bumping that. I could feel it like reverberate in my body, and like I think it's a disgusting song for me, I think it's incredibly crass, I think it's just really gross the way he talks about women in this hotel. But like, just in that moment, like just being surrounded by like my friends, people who love me, like I don't know, like. It just, I actually like that song now because whenever I hear it, whenever I hear "Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn; we're at the hotel, motel, Holiday Inn," I just think about that road -- that little day trip to Metro Detroit. And, you know what? "Two, plus two, I'm gonna undress you.…

“You could not see my face because I was just covered in boxes” I'm not sure what's the heaviest thing I've ever carried, but probably that's got to be my dog when I was a child. I used to have a Bernese mountain dog, and I'm pretty sure she would weigh the same as me. I was, I don't know how much, but I was probably 12 years old when we got her. She was huge and she was really loving, so I would always carry her. But I love carrying things because it made me feel really strong. Like whenever I go to the grocery store, I always get a lot of food, and then I always get it from the car in one, in one go, like I never come back. One time actually, I got a bunch of Amazon packages when I moved to my apartment, so I had to get a lot of furniture for cheap. So I got it from Amazon and actually all the packages came at the same time and sometimes they bring them right to the second floor where I stay, um, but when I ordered the heaviest stuff, they left it on the ground floor by the mail room. So I had to carry all probably eight boxes by myself to the second floor, which was actually probably the third because the ground floor doesn't count. And I could have came back for the -- half of the packages, but I ended up carrying all of them stacked on top of each other, and I actually felt like a cartoon character because it's a very common scene when somebody's carrying too many things on top of each other and it gets -- like, you could not see my face because I was just covered in boxes, and I was dropping them on the way to the third floor, but I was just so committed to do it in one go. I'm not sure why I'd rather do that than come back, maybe -- yeah, I don't know how it's easier. But that's, that was really heavy, I remember. So maybe yeah, the heaviest thing I've ever carried would be my dog and the eight Amazon packages.

"I'm sitting here in my dorm, everything's absolutely in shambles" So, I am completing my first year as an undergraduate student, and it's been quite the journey, just getting here and all so, um, like completing the year itself, but specifically I'm packing up my dorm. I'm like pack- -- I'm packing everything up, and I don't consider myself to be quite a collector. If you were to ask me outright, I would say that I'm quite minimal, but after seeing everything that I have accumulated this year, I have to come with the -- I have to grasp the fact that I may be a tad bit of a collector. Um, my friends and I, we tend to frequent the crafting events on campus, and so there's usually extras, so I take like things like collages or like jewelry making supplies and I put this all into like ottomans in my dorm. And now that I'm going through the ottomans, I'm realizing I may have a tad bit of a problem with crafting, and I'm not sure how I'm going to get all home.So I'm sitting here in my dorm, everything's absolutely in shambles, and I'm going through this like, it's um, it's quite a curation of artifacts. But yeah, everything everything's in such a disarray, believe it or not. I'm supposed to be out by tomorrow, my mother is coming to collect me. And yeah, I highly doubt everything's going to fit into our car. And as a side note, I've hung up quite a bit of posters, and some of them have ripped off the paint off the wall, and I'm not trying to catch a charge, so what I've done is, because they've repainted over these walls so many times the paint kind of comes off in these like layered chunks. So they're very pliable. It's like a piece of paper. And so I have taken some of these crafting supplies that I've collected over my over the year, and I have begun gluing them back onto the wall. Um, because I don't know what else to do.So, I started taking off these like little pieces that have come off the wall, and then you know what, I'm going with my Elmer's glue stick, and I'm just sticking them back on and they're actually staying, so I'm going to consider that a win. I'm going to…

"She was in the room with the bird as it flew out of the fireplace" I'm in the process of selling the home that my late wife and I bought when we moved to Lexington, Kentucky. So, the -- one consistent issue that the home has had is certain parts of the roof and siding and gutters have not always been the most impervious to intrusion. So, repeatedly, we have had birds get into two different parts of the home. Most consistently, they've gone into the attic, originally through the eaves and then more recently through some of the side of the gutters. But, what happened more often -- or the problem that arised earlier which I'm actually kind of grateful for, was for a little while, in 2021, 2022, birds were getting in through the chimney of the house which then -- which had a cap, but there was a large space at the top of the chimney between the opening and the cap, large enough that birds could pretty easily fall in. And then the trick was they couldn't really get out. So we first discovered this when we came back from visiting family over Christmas 2021, 2022. We got into the house and found that a bunch of things were knocked down. There was bird poop everywhere, unfortunately, and there was a dead bird. So basically, over the next few months, I dragged my feet and I did not, did not take the necessary steps to getting the chimney properly screened in to prevent birds from getting into it. So sometime in Spring of 2022, I was working on campus in the writing center, which is how I got funding that first year and I -- Jaci, my late wife, tried to call me and of course I couldn't receive the call because I was in the basement. So I only found out about it after the fact. But she called and left a voicemail because another bird had dropped into the chimney. And so the voicemail was actually -- she took it while the bird -- while she was in the room with the bird as it flew out of the fireplace, knocked a lattice off our window, the lattice came crashing down, partially cracked. The panic in her voice was pretty obvious, but also a note of sort of manic humor, and she basically told…

Stupid butterfly, like, slamming into the glass for no reason. I was there on Saturday, and, you know, doing my restaurant stuff, and the front half of this restaurant has just a ton of, of windows, and it has these garage doors that open completely to the outside. So, all of the garage doors were open, so the front half of the restaurant, it's basically like a covered patio. Like, there's holes everywhere. I was in this front half of the restaurant, and I looked over, and there's this gorgeous butterfly. It's like big and yellow. And it looked fake, it was so gorgeous. But it was slamming itself into the glass when the opening to the outside was right there. So, I walked up to it. I had other things to do, but I was like, "I gotta help this butterfly, stupid butterfly, this -- the window's not an exit." And I grabbed a menu off a table and I tried to scoop the butterfly up, and I got him to like perch on the side of the menu, and I was almost successful, but I was like, carrying him over to the open door, but we have these stupid dangling lights in front of the door. And I guess the little butterfly saw the lights and freaked out or something, 'cause he flew off of my menu up to a even higher window and was banging against the glass up there. I was like, "Well, I, I can't reach you now. I can't help you, dude." And eventually he perched on a windowsill, and I was like, "Well, okay, I need to go wait on my tables. The butterfly might live, he might not. There's nothing I can do." So then on Sunday night, I was working again, and I was in the front half of the restaurant again, and I see I think the same butterfly from across the room. He was even closer to like the garage door opening this time, but he was doing the same thing, stupid butterfly, like slamming into the glass for no reason. So, I was like, "Okay, this is my chance. He's lower down. Maybe I can actually get him out this time. The lights aren't in the way of this particular opening." So I grabbed a piece of paper. It was someone's, like, pre-shift quiz. Side note. What kind…

"But one thing I am grateful for is the connections that we do make." This week, I moved across the country and I'm away from all of my family and friends that I had built up. Um, and it's an exciting change. I'm excited for everything that I am going to do. But it has been difficult adjusting to a different culture and a different place. But one thing I am grateful for is the connections that we do make, and those chance encounters that we sometimes have. I was at a gathering of young adults, uh, for part of my church and, while I was there, I walked in not expecting to know anybody. I looked around the room and I wasn't very excited, uh, to talk to anyone, to get to meet new people, but I looked around and, uh, as I was scanning, I saw someone from the area that I had just moved from and I was super excited, so I called out to her. I said, "Hey!" and she turned, looked at me, kind of not really expecting it to be me. When she finally recognized who I was, her eyes just lit up. And seeing her eyes light up just really made me grateful that we had made that connection earlier. It made that evening go so much smoother than I had planned, and it made moving here and adjusting a lot easier.

“… it was basically a modified hide and seek.” Do you have any scars from doing an outdoor activity, like hiking or mountain biking? What happened?” Um, well I have one from, like – from my childhood. Um, I wasn’t doing anything cool like hiking or mountain biking, I was in middle school. And at my school, we would take these trips every fall, we would go to this camp out in, like, rural North Carolina and stay there for, like, half a week. They were always really fun, but we would play this game, usually every night, where we would – it was basically like a modified hide-and-go-seek, where the kids would hide, and we would try to reach a base, and the teachers would, uh, try to catch us, basically. And I remember, I was trying to get to the base, and I could see the base, but it was about, like, hundred, two hundred feet away or something. And I thought to myself, “The best way to get there would be to cut through this, like, concrete soccer field type of thing. It was, like, a small soccer field that was concrete, not grass. So I thought I was gonna do that. So, I started running just as fast as I could, trying to get through this, um – trying to get through this soccer field. And, it was really dark that night, they had, like, minimal lighting and I couldn’t really see where I was going. And I didn’t realize that there was, like, this wooden goalpost that was right at the level where my head was going to be as I ran through the soccer field. I didn’t see it until, like, probably one fourth of a second before I slammed into it and just, like, busted my head on this wooden board. And I flew into the soccer field. And, uh, yeah. It wasn’t great. It was not a pretty picture. So I feel really bad for the teacher who I eventually ran up to, screaming, and clutching my head, my forehead. Because I’m sure that – I’m sure that was somewhat scarring for that teacher, but, yeah. I, uh – they had to call an ambulance and take me to the hospital. My parents were really worried, they had to drive the hour-and-a-half over there to the hospital to see me. And they…