hanging in

yo, doods. thanks for keepin' the faith. i haven't been online much lately because we're having to ration power. we've been leeching off the doods next door, but people are starting to run low on propane for the gennies. i'm not sure what will happen to us after it's all gone. we're still stuck under this stoopid dome, and nothing the government has tried so far has worked.

they're letting friends and relatives come to the dome on thursday for thanksgiving, but all we'll be able to do is look at them--and them at us. it's good to see dad, but it sucks that he can't really be here...or that we can't really be there, on the outside with him. if we ever get out from under this dome, i hope my folks decide to move away from here because i'm getting majorly sick of this stoopid town.

don't want to be a buzz kill folks, but i only have a few minutes of juice here and i wanted to say hey to everyone who has been staying in touch and asking questions and sh!t like that. i'll try to get back witcha again after the visit.

how do you spell optimistic?

there seems to be a lot of activity among the head honcho doods in town today. i'm not really sure what's going on. my buddy dale barbie isn't saying much. he's spending a lot of time on his cell phone. he has this number he keeps calling that is in area code 000 and that is just weird. creepy weird.

my other buddy, steve ranconteur, is what you might call an eternal optimist. he's decided that we're going to get out of here one of these days, and he was hired to work on the town's web site, and that's just what he's going to do. he's got a good generator at his place, so he still has enough power for his computer and he can access the web servers. today he updated some new content on the chester's mill web site, so you might want to check those pages out. i admire a guy who takes a job like that seriously even though we have all this other sh!t going on.

i heard that a bunch of famous reporters are holed up in castle rock, hoping to cover the story, but the army is still keeping them away.

sorry i haven't been around much

doods and doodettes, i'm here. still alive, which is more than i can say for some people. but i can't get into that too much. let's just say that things have been getting a little crazy around here...as if they weren't crazy to begin with. there have been some accidents and the doctors here aren't always equipped to handle the injuries. it's not like someone can be airlifted down to one of the big medical centers, ya dig? plus some people just keeled over--stress, i guess, natural causes, sh!t like that. a couple of people even cracked under the pressure and did terrible things. but, like i said, i can't get into that too much. my mom says that we should keep the town's bizness private. it's about the only thing we really have.

some folks are really starting to get worried about provisions. needless to say, we don't have much by way of fresh fruit. a lot of people have gardens and farms, so there are certain vegetables, but is there enough? and for how long? lots of frozen food -- burpee's has this immense storage warehouse and i'm scared to think how long some of that sh!t has been in there. some of it doesn't even have expiration dates on it, and that's not good. but we're all doing what we can.

the days are all starting to run into one another. people are working at important jobs to make sure the town keeps running, but a lot of other people are just doing nothing. i mean, what good's an income if there's really nothing to spend it on? it's crazy, that's for sure. and there's a lot of political wrangling going on, too. they try to keep us kids out of it, but i hear things. the president and the military wanted to appoint one guy the leader in town, but they had no way to force that to happen, and other people in town think they should be running things. kinda ugly. reminds me of the lord of the flies, big time.

the internet isn't working all the time any more, and even when it is, we use it to stay in touch with dad and to find out what's going on in the rest of the world. i'm goofin' around with the web server at the middle school, so if you're reading this and playing along, stay tooned for some new fun things to do there. helps keep my mind off things.

what do we know, really? nothing more than on that day last month when we got locked away from the rest of the world. we can look out, but we can't touch, and people can look in but not touch, too. everything they've tried so far has failed. it's a big frickin' mystery, and i'm still determined to be the person who solves it. it's not that i want to be a hero or anything. i just want things to go back to being normal again. ya know?

failure to launch

doods...and doodettes! i wrote a long blog post about the military experiments and the whole thing got ganked. by THE MAN of course. guess they don't want the world to know the details of what they're working on here. double dratsabs! so, i guess for now i'll have to stay away from subjects like b0mbs and m!ss!les and sh!t like that! ;)

i remembered that i still had the login information for the school web site, so i went in this morning and left you a new message. (attention military types: no, it's not something you need to worry your helmeted little heads over.)

of course, we're all pretty frazzled around here because of the stress and the shortages and the (b0mbs) and sh!t, so i totally spazzed and messed up the first time. so, if you're one of those clever clogs who goes poking around and finding stuff on your own -- phthththt! try again! anyhow, my bad, and i got it right now. do the math, that's all i'm saying.

i still owe you doods a story about the halloween party and ... wait for it ... my first kiss. but i got newspapers to deliver and conspiracies to participate in, so it'll have to wait until later. rock on, doods--and keep us in your thoughts. we are officially out of lettuce.

hail caesar

the internet has been off a lot lately. i guess the military got nervous when they saw us all getting together for our halloween party on saturday. maybe they thought we were going to stage another protest. dratsabs! the whole world seems to be passing us by when we don't even have the 'net. can't talk to dad, can't follow the world series. sux big time.

the halloween party was a blast, but i don't have time to write more about that now. i will soon -- promise. the military has been doing some pretty freaky stuff outside the dome. bombs and missiles and all kinds of sh!t. so far, no joy. i've been hanging around a lot with this cool dood named dale barbara (barbie to his friends). he was in iraq, would you believe it, only to end up here in chester's mill, trapped like the rest of us. worst thing for him, he was on his way out of town the day the dome appeared. almost made it, too.

anyhow, gotta run because we're setting up a computer camera to monitor a military test and i'm helping out with the live feed to the rest of the town.

some doods from a place over in england called hodder and stoughton asked me if i would deliver a secret message for them. i figured, why not, though i can't make any sense out of it. if you've been playing along at home, you know the drill:

'Patm'l matm lfhdx?' Ptgwt tldxw lnwwxger, ihbgmbgz ghkmaxtlm, mhptkw 119. 'B whg'm dghp,' ax ltbw. 'Wbw fr fhmaxk-bg-etp ytkm?' Mabl vktvdxw abf ni tgw ax lmtkmxw etnzabgz. Ptgwt Wxuxv kxtebsxw lax atw ybgteer atw xghnza. Mabl vetkbybxw max phkew tgw axk ynmnkx bg t ptr matm ptl tefhlm ftzbvte. Lax ptl mnkgbgz mh abf, max phkwl B ptgm t wbohkvx hg max mbi

boo!

hey there, doods and doodettes! happy hollow weenie! it's cold and raining--outside the dome. in here, it's nice enough, though seeing all that rain dripping off the sky around us is mondo weirdo. the force field is getting a little bit grotty. i guess there's some pollution getting it dirty like the windows my dad made me wash a few weeks ago. man, that seems like forever ago. anyhow, you can see where the rain hits and runs off. it leaves streaks in the sky. seriously, majorly weird sh!t.

the upside -- the halloween party in the commons can't get rained out. we're lucky that romeo burpee ordered his halloween supplies early this year. either that or he's dragging stuff out of the warehouse from last year. e-yew if that's right. stuff'll probably end up being stale.

anyhow, that's only part of the fun. people are cooking up stuff and bringing it like a big pot luck dinner and everyone's supposed to get in costume, even my mom. she said that big jim rennie should come dressed up like the devil, except that wouldn't really be a costume. i don't know the whole story there, but she doesn't like our famous used car salesman all that much.

pete freeman from the democrat will probably be taking pictures for the next special edition. guess they're all special these days.

it's been ten whole days since we got trapped and we're no closer to getting out of here than we were on day one. i don't think everyone's heart is in having a party tonight, especially not one with ghosts and witches and other scary things. lots of people are starting to wonder what will happen to us if we don't get out of here in a week, or two, or three. what happens when we start running out of important things? it could get bad. it's a little bit like that book we read in school, lord of the flies. will we start dividing up into groups of us vs them?

scary thoughts for a halloween afternoon. time to forget about all that and go have a good time. i can't wait to see what norrie dresses up like. lately i've been having different thoughts about her. she's not just one of the boys any more, if you know what i mean. i get nervous when i talk to her. i think what it might be like to kiss her, and that's never happened before. everything's turning upside down. i don't think the world will ever be the same again, even if we get out of here.

it seemed like a good idea at the time

first off, let me say that it wasn't my idea. seriously. it did sound like a good idea at the time. boy, was i wrong!

my homies and i got together last night to deliver the democrat. we all have baskets on our bikes, except norrie just has a carrier, but it works. after we picked up the papers from miz shumway we went off to the town common to plan our strategy.

that was when norrie pulled out the cigarettes. they belonged to her dad. apparently he quit a year or two ago, and she found them in the closet. they were all bent and croggled and stale, and there was even dust on the package, but we thought they'd be okay.

it was benny who said that we'd be like indians doing a ceremony to ask the gods for support before we went to work. see. not my idea at all. norrie said she didn't pray to god, but she'd pray to her favorite goddess: wonder woman. benny teased her about that, saying he would pray to gi joe. what a maroon!

norrie was the one who lit the cigarettes, too. i stopped her when she tried to light benny's, because three on a match is bad luck. not that i'm superstitious, but with the weird sh!t that's been happening around here, you can't be too careful.

who ever thought smoking was a good idea? i just don't get it. the stuff tasted like stale panther sh!t. it made me woozy and queasy and i almost passed out. passing out in norrie's lap, that might have been okay, but still def not cool. norrie looked totally awesome with a cigarette in her mouth, almost grown up. but we all decided afterwards that it had been a bad idea.

chalk it up to a failed experiment, like a science fair idea gone bad. good thing no one caught us. my mom would have grounded me until new years if she found out. of course, it's sorta like the whole town is grounded right now.

the only good thing that happened yesterday was the baseball game, and i couldn't even see that. it was just so awesome to hear that the yankees went down in flames. i was even thinking about using that as my halloween costume. a new york yankee with fake flames stuck all over him. ha!