Monday I stayed home sick with a really bad sinus or pressure headache. It took almost all day for the headache to subside. Pills did nothing. Sadly, the headache ruined what turned out to be an almost perfect day weather wise. The temperature stayed in the mid seventies and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
On Thursday my recent string of being near important people continued. This time I helped run a meeting attended by Timothy Killeen (or as I now know he goes by Tim) the current president of the University of Illinois. I will not here discuss the rather sad state of my Alma Mater. I hope he can get things going in the right direction.
Friday came and the bizarre times at the University of Illinois continued. With one week until the start of the Football season, the campus was shocked.. and overjoyed by the news that Football Coach Tim Beckman had been fired for cause. I have written previously about Coach Beckman. The TLDR version is that he is a terrible coach and needed to go away if Illini football would ever be successful. Sometimes you have to strip a car down to its frame to rebuild it and that seems to be where we are with many things about the University of Illinois. Heck that pretty much applies to the entire state. The big question being asked now is if the athletic director Mike Thomas will be the one to hire the new coach or if his butt will be out the door soon as well.
The highlight from Saturday was watching an amazing movie. I had heard some talk about and seen a few commercials for Ex Machina. Even though people told me it was good I think the commercials turned me off. Watch below:
The commercial makes it looks much more horror themed than it is. I turned it on expecting to watch it form maybe twenty minutes and then to head off to do something else. From almost the very start I sat mesmerized. It captured my interest immediately with the beauty of the film making. The framing of the shots is compelling, the sound is prefect, and the dialogue intriguing. The movie challenges your mind. It is very cerebral. You will be thinking about big ideas from the very beginning to hours after the film has finished. There came a specific point in the movie, I won't spoil it, in which one of the characters thought they exact same thing I did. At that moment I realized how brilliant the movie was.
Later that day I watched the Chicago Bears look really bad in a preseason game. It's going to be a long year for Bears fans.
Great Squirrel war 2015 Update:
It would usually be a happy thing for me to report that the squirrels have left my tomatoes alone. I have realized this week why the squirrels have been so compliant. No they aren't dead. My tomato plants are dying. A few days after the squirrels destroyed my two nice tomatoes, I forgot to water the plants for a couple of days. I was out of town. When I came back they were all wilted. I watered them and they perked back up. Over the next week or so I noticed that leaves started to die off. I didn't think much of it. I assumed it was just a reaction to not getting water for a couple of days. More and more leaves died. Then the flowers started drying up without producing fruit. Finally after a couple of weeks of this I took a long look at the plants. I noticed yellow spots all over the dying leaves. My plants have some sort of blight or mildew killing them. I pulled off as many of the infected leaves and stems that I could. It left one of the plants almost stripped bare. The tomatoes that were already growing stopped at whatever size they had been. I am waiting for the last few tiny things to ripen then I will probably just pull out the worst plant. Today I did notice one blooming flower on the lessor blighted plant. Maybe there is some hope.
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