Somewhere, in a dark cobblestone alley...

Neuros leaned leisurely against the wall beside the back entrance of a worn down bowling alley, the fog from his freezing breath and the puffs of cigarette smoke mingling together in the brisk winter air. He was dressed for the cold, but not so much that he couldn't pass for a worker out on a smoking break. Which, by the way if you were to ask him, he was.

Not that the topic would come up. After all, this alley, at this hour, was not exactly a hub of society. At least, not most society. Neuros only planned on talking to one man that night. That man had just turned a corner and was walking up the alley, as slowly and casually as any stranger would walk towards another. His gate betrayed no knowledge of the man taking a smoking break until they were within feet of each other. By then, the stranger had spotted the smoker's face out of the corner of his eye. He greeted him.

"Hello, Neuros. I didn't take you for the type that smoked."

"You haven't talked to me in so long, I don't expect you to be able to take me for anything." Neuros said, dropping the butt to the ground. It landed in a dusting of snow and went out with a sizzle before he could grind it with his heel. "I don't, really. Its mostly for cover." he said, smirking as he looked up at his old accomplis.

"I appreciate you meeting with me. I heard you had retired."

"Oh, you know my type...we rarely really retire. " His voice became a bit softer- "At least... not with people like you, Wanderer. "

Wanderer looked away and coughed for a second, then seemed to pause before talking again. "Thanks."

"I haven't seen you since, what... 20? You look a bit different now, you know. Your wearing black." he added, half jokingly.

Wanderer looked at his coat briefly as he produced a small vile from it. "I'm wearing something." he said distantly as he popped the cap off, letting steam rise from the top. He noticed Neuros's inquisitive look. "Nothing from a paper bag, Neuros. Just coffee."

"I must say-" he said in a pleasantly surprised tone, "You've done better then I thought you would have. Your discharge, was it...?"

"It was a discharge, okay?" Wanderer snapped back, "but...I don't think its permanent. "

"Sorry....So, whats the occasion?"

Wanderer put the lid on the vile and slipped it back into his coat as he cleared his throat. "I have a...gardening dilemma, so to speak."

Neuros expression barely changed, but his eyes betrayed a smiling understanding. "Botany; of course. Do tell."

"There is a garden I've been watching back in the country- a very special garden. Its fruits will be prized, its promise is unmatched. I've spent a lot of time walking through its rows, smelling its air. It is a beautiful garden. I've thought about it, and I've decided I want to cultivate it myself so that it can better meet its potential and so I can have the opportunity to enjoy toiling with such fortuned soil.

Neuros laughed softly. "Thats quite a speech... I've always thought you were a green thumb at heart. Whats the problem?"

"Someone else is tending it already."

Neuros furrowed his brow. "Does he own it?"

"No one owns it!" Wanderer shot back, slightly surprised at the seething tone in his own voice. "Its a wild garden."

"But- he got to it first. "

"Yeah."

The man out on his smoking break raised his head up in thought, and let out a slow deliberate breath that filled the air above them with a fleeting fog. "Is this man dying?"

"No."

"Is this gardener a very wicked man?"

"No... I wish he was. He's a very nice man, actually. I almost like him. But I know I could do better- and there is no other soil like this. The fortuned soil suffers from my inaction, in a way. "

"Do you plan on taking it?" Neuros asked calmly.

"Perhaps. " Wanderer turned his head to meet the gaze he could feel being directed towards him. "Look, I know its not...ideal. But it might be an opportunity that I just can't give up. He...he doesn't appreciate the soil, anyway."

"Do you know that?"

"It doesn't matter if I know it! All I can do right now, is LOOK at it. I want to be a part of it, Neuros! I want the dirt between my fingers, I want to be invested in this land. I want to nurse it through the droughts, fend of its pests and celebrate its bounties when they come. I know I can. I know I'm right for the job..."

Neuros was silent, his expression, unreadable. After a moment, Wanderer continued.

"Some fruit- they rolled out of the plot. Several of them, actually. I tasted them. Its out of this world. I need this fruit- and Neuros, I think it needs me, too. "

"So you are going to take it?"

Wanderer relaxed a bit and took out his vile again. "I don't know... not just yet. " He took a sip. "I'll continue to watch it. I'll hold off my decision until another year or so passes by. A lot of things can happen in a year, you know? Maybe, the gardener will take sick. Perhaps he will be distracted with business afar and abandon the land. Perhaps there will be an accident. There is always the chance that he will be out of the equation. Then.... " Wanderer tapped his vile of coffee, nervously distracted in thought. "Then I wouldn't have to deal with it. "

"Your not suggesting...taking him out of the picture yourself, are you?" Neuros asked, his normally blank expression betraying a hint of anxiety.

Wanderer put the vile back and dusted off his coat. He looked at the ground and appeared as if he were about to say something, but instead he just shook his head. Finally, he looked up.

"Well, thanks. Thanks for listening, friend. "

"Thats it?"

"Thats all... we haven't talked in a while, and I'm not sure when the next time will be so.... I figured I should let you know what I might do. "

As Neuros looked at Wanderer, one could not tell if he was more angry, surprised, or proud. It didn't really matter. Wanderer went on.

"Because I know- if anything goes wrong? Any plan you could start working on right now for just that occasion will prove itself very useful. "

And with that, Wanderer turned and walked away.



TO BE CONTINUED...

I broke the internet.

Hello everybody.

Heres a small update of whats gone down since the last post. Sorry its taken so long, things have been crazy busy and fun over here.

So, on the 31st I left on the plane (on time- early, even!) and successfully landed and was picked up by 10:22 local time. Much better.

Mrs. F narrated the drive through Kansas as we went. We ended up picking up Nate, which was a blast. He still was wearing one of his awesome hats.

We got to their house and I ate some monkey bread. I go ape over that stuff. *ducks*

I spent alot of time chilling out with Nate in his room. He decided he wanted to show me a game he got called Prey, because of some crazy multi-dimensional mind bending physics engine stuff. He had recently rebuilt his computer, so he had to reinstall it. At this point, he found out he had misplaced his key. And his manual. "I just cleaned up my room..." his voice trailed off for a second. "Oh man, I hope I didn't throw it away."

Long story short, since he couldn't find it I decided to see if I could find it first online, and when that didn't work, I decided to port scan to see if I could find any hidden FTP servers that might have a key.

That, put simply, was a horrible idea. You see, port scanning is basically where, instead of using a search engine or typing in a website URL, you simply start at one part of the internet and start looking door to door till you find something. Its fun. You can find websites at random, or other things like file sites that aren't availible normally. You can find all sorts of weird network devices. You can find print servers from Itally (my friend did once). A friend of mine got me hooked on it for awhile, and we would share our findings every now and then.

Well, we told Mr. F what we were doing thinking he'd get a kick out of it and he got really upset. "DON'T PORT SCAN ON MY NETWORK! I don't want the liability..." and about that time, the scanner stopped working. And so did all of our connections outside to the internet. The whole house had lost the network. And he used IP Telephony, so... the phone died too. Yeah, smooth move Zeke. Way to make an entrance. Either we had got ourselves shut down for port scanning, (I guess it was against their Terms of service?) or we triggered hit something that freaked out the cable modem. I felt so bad.

Eventually Mr. F had to go to the Road Runner (Their ISP's) office and have them reset it. Talk about a comedy of errors...

So that was a bad start, BUT! It honestly got better... That night Mr. F himself even bought me a "George's Carmel Blast" at the coffee house half his family works at, Harbor Lights. It was really really good. Legend has it, that a guy named George would always come asking for a Carmel Macchiato with extra extra carmel. The guy REALLY liked carmel. Finally Tim started experimenting with his drink, finally stumbling upon glazing the inside of the cop with carmel, then doing the rest and putting whipped-creme and carmel drizzle on top. Word got around, and when they redid the signs, they put it up as "George's Carmel blast". Man, I want a drink named after me! So cool...

I am a day or two behind at this point in posting, but instead of sit on this post for another day, I'm going to let it go. I'm off to the wedding rehearsal now...

Day 4- Best coffee EVER

Greetings all- this is an early post for me, as the day isn't really over yet and I'm still in Hudson. But I don't know exactly when I will get to a computer next, so I figured it would be good to post the happenings of the day here.

Last night we slept in an awesome camper- very very comfortable. The family was going to a party from 11 to 1ish, but they said if we wanted to come back after that we could go Kayaking (sp?) with them in a local pond. We of course, agreed to the arrangment.

Before we went down to the water though, we had some time to kill. So we decided to head over to Nashua to check out some trails that our hosts told us about. After making a short stop at Showtime computers, we ended up at Mines Falls. It was pretty neat- a few nice wide easy going trails and alot of water. After that we decided to just sort of chill and talk by the river for a while.

Then came one of the coolest discoveries to come out of this trip: Riverwalk Cakery & Coffee House. They are in Nashua- 35 Railroad Square, to be exact. dX saw the words coffee shop and he suggested we check it out. I was game, so we locked up our bikes and went in.

The second we got through the doors, everything screamed CLASS at us. The colors, the chairs and tables- imported, the lot of it as we later learned, from all across Europe. dX got a chia latte and I got a Irish cream iced latte. The coffee was unbelivable. It was strong, but not acidic. It was bloody perfect- the only words I can think of to describe it. I also got a expresso brownie and we sat down and talked for a bit in the shop. I noticed that it had its own blends, and that there was a large obscure and expensive looking machine in the far end of the room. I asked him about it-

"Oh, that is the roasting machine."

So yeah- he roasts his own coffee. This got me interested, and I started talking with the owner who was the only person on staff at that hour. The shop has been here only 5 months and he says he allready has regulars. Its not hard to see why- he knows coffee. He buys his own beans still 'green'-and he buys them straight from importers he knows in New York and Boston. He makes his own blends by knowing the crop they came from and using different beans to counteract eachothers weaknesses and compliment their strength. He's from Germany and hes awesome. I now know an awesome place to go for coffee- and if I ever have to impress some girl by buying a 5 dollar 59 cent peice of cake I know where to do that to.

After that we went Kayaking- wow, sooo much fun. It was dX, Lyndsi and I in occean Kayak vessels across the lake. When dX heard that they we could go Kayaking he said "dude, you'll love it. Kayaks are like the moter cycles of cannoes." Boy, we he right. We went so much faster then in our big cannoe and we had a ton of fun- though apparently biking endurance does nothing for the upper body strength it takes to Kayak. Lyndsi pWnd! us- and she said she only went once, bah! All in all it was a great day.

Right now I am waiting for dX to see if he has enough money to cover us going to a show. If he does, were going to the show then going home. If not, we'll just be going home.

I'd post some pictures of the mobile homes and of the Kayaks but sadly I seemed to have misplace my USB cable.

Well, thank you all for reading. Have a great one!

Day 3- Just chillaxin

Greetings from Hudson everybody!

We woke up today around 9:00. When I got out of the couch I was sleeping on I went over to the room dX had crashed at.

"Dude-" he said, "we have a problem."

The problem was his ankle. He had hurt it last night while flipping off of his bike, but it didn't look like it was going to be that big of a deal. When he woke up on it though, he could barely limp with it.

This, to say the least, complicated our plans- eventually we decided to get some ice on it, and he wanted to rap it in a bandage- but oh wait! The bandages we bought were in his backpack. Where was his backpack? In Jakes car. Well thats fine, but- wheres Jakes car? Not at his home. You see, dX had left his pack in the trunk of the car, which should have been fine- but as it turned out, the van one of the family members was using broke down, so they had to use his car. And that put us with out bandages.

So, after a little bit of griping and a lot of good strong coffee (they make the best coffee over there, seriously) I biked off to shaws, which was really just a stones throw away from the house I was at. I got an Ace bandage there for a ridiculous 5 dollars and 59 cents. Talk about a rip off...

Anyway, we got back and he applied it to his poor aching foot. By this time it was probably 11 or so. He could barely walk on it still, but I was trying to convice him that biking would be different. Renee said that she thought it wouldn't be good to work much on it. There was a slight back and forth, but we did in the end relent to chilling out there for a bit. dX could still work on computers, and thats what he did:

This picture very much sums up the tone of the day. We chilled, we watched some videos, we talked. And thanks be to Renee and their family for letting us- we don't know what we would have done otherwise. Thanks again guys for your generosity and everything, your flipping amazing!

About 3ish or so, dX was walking around on his foot LIGHTLY. I had convinced him to try riding his bike earlier to see what it was like, and he concluded that it was possible and as I suspected, it was actually better then walking. So at 3 or so in the afternoon, we decide to try and visit some of his friends in the area. We found out Renee had a bike, so she got to come too since it was so close. We headed up the road about a mile or 2 really fast since dX and I were not wearing those huge backpacks we were used to. Renee was actually keeping up pretty well. We got to the place where we suprised a few of dX's old friends and then we decided to move on for a good trip down memory lane. After catching her breath and downing some water, Renee went all hardcore and said she was down with it too. We biked over to dX's old house, all the way to amherst where we stopped at a cafe for food. It was really nice, and I played a pretty evenly matched game of checkers with Renee (but I won in the end). Then we biked back- About 20 miles in all.

When we got back, it was allready 5ish. We were trying to figure out what our next move was... we wanted to camp, but we didn't know what place we could camp at that was near enough. In the end, we decided to stay over at our lovely stop at Hudson- as it turned out, we were just 10 miles out anyway. We biked down through Nashua, only stopping once- there was a concert going on in some park for free. The musicans playing were all in their middle to late ages, but they were playing some funky music and they were good. dX and I stayed there for just as much as we could afford, then we got back riding. We arrived at our new destination at about 7.

This host home is awesome- They gave us cold cuts to go along with our ramen, they gave us icecream, and we've got to just talk with them and have a ball. They are into everything cool here... I don't know how specific I can get with names and things since it is 1:26 and they are all in bed. I got to watch The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe with two people who haven't seen it yet. It was an interesting experience- they watched movies with captions on, and I actually got little bits of dialouge and background chatter that I never quite got before.

Well, thats about it for me- I am devilish sleepy and I must be off to bed. Today was pretty much just a chill, relaxing day. We, once again, don't really have tomarrow very much planned out but I'm sure it will be great.

Till next post- farewell.