Never to be one to stand on my own two feet. Maddog packed up his belongings and moved back to NYC last night. Oh, wait. That's not what happened. I packed up my blog and moved to WordPress following in the shoes of Spider, Kelly, Ur-Spo and many other favorites. My new URL is: http://maddoginthecity.wordpress.com/ don't forget to make the change in your blogroll and links. We wouldn't want you to miss a single minute of Maddog's adventures. Especially now that he's in San Diego and playing with "gay" people. Boys to be specific.

So drop by my new house, tell me what you think. I'm open to suggestions, criticism, and praise. You name it, I can take.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Maddog

I'm still a sick Maddog. I've come to the realization that breathing is highly over rated. Especially through the nose. If God had meant for us to breath through our nose he wouldn't have given us other options. Right? I'm going to try and get to bed early tonight hoping some good rest will hit the spot.

In other news, I'm travelling to San Diego tomorrow. I'll be there until Monday. You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to being around other people. I haven't had a non-school related conversation with someone face-to-face in almost six weeks. It'll be great to talk about politics, and movies, and drink beer with people that I know. If I weren't sick I'd be jumping up and down with joy right now.

In Iowa news. I had another mediocre meal tonight. I'm now o for 10 in the food world. Ten meals out of ten mediocre meals. Tonight the chair of the department treated all of us out for dinner to welcome me to the department and to treat the woman who is here designing scenery for the spring show. My big question is: How is the meat tough? By my best guess, it was alive on a pig farm down the street two minutes ago. It was probably eating breakfast this morning without a care in the world and now it's sitting on my plate covered in yucky barbecue sauce and so tough it would take 3 days to chew through it. And to make matters worse the portions are huge. I wouldn't mind so much, if the food was good. But why make a situation worse by giving me more bad food than I would ever want. I've decided to give up eating out in Iowa. Maybe I'll treat myself to Hardee's, McDonald's, or Dairy Queen. At least then I know what the food will taste like and I won't be expecting more than I get.

On a better note the temperature has been in the 50's for the past few days. Which is good and bad. Good because I was just about done with the extremely cold weather. Bad for two reasons. The first: The warm weather melts the snow during the day. At night the temperature drops back down below freezing and for the past three days I've ice skated home. And if any of you know me, you'd know how non-athletic I am. I've almost hit the ground at least a dozen times. This leads to me bad reason number two. There are no street lights to light my way from school to home. I walk home blindly lit by the passing cars or what little light spills from the living rooms of the houses I pass. Therefore, it's impossible to see the ice on the side walk until you are already skating across it. Or even better, you can't see the puddle in the middle of the walk until you are ankle deep in ice cold water. Both feet were soaked tonight before I got home.

Did I mention that I was going to San Diego where it's always warm and never rains. Somebody slap me the next time I say I miss winter.

I can't breathe. I haven't been able to breathe all day. And to make matters worse, my nose is running. I finally had to excuse myself today in class to go get tissue because I could no longer hide the fact that my nose was running.

I don't think I mentioned it but I had a job interview on Friday. I had the first interview to be hired for the full time tenure track position in Iowa. The interview went amazingly well. I don't think I could have been more on if I had wanted to. I had all the right answers and was able to answer all the questions honestly, with the answers I think they are looking for. Of course now it's just wait and see. I feel like the interview went well because I'm not 100% sure that I want the job. I just don't know if living in small town America is for me. But who knows we'll have to wait and see. But I do think that interviews for jobs you don't want always go better because there's no pressure. If it works out great. If it doesn't great.

I also know that someone from my small town is reading my blog. The hit shows up every couple of days on my site counter. I continue to hope that it's the guy that I met on line who told me he had found my blog. I would hate to think that some student of mine has found me and reading my deep dark secrets. Actually, I haven't told any truly deep dark secrets in a while. The more I get to know all of you the more I edit myself. I don't want you to find out what I am really like because then you won't like me. At least that's my perception.

I woke up yesterday with the beginnings of a cold. I attributed most of it to allergies, so I took some Claritin and after a couple of hours felt okay and I thought the worst of it was behind me. That was not the case. I woke up this morning and it was back with a vengeance. I'm congested, tired, sneezing and just feel overall like crap. I found the local pharmacy and bought some Sudafed Sinus medicine. It's helped a little but I still feel like crap. I got home around 4:00 and by 4:15 I was taking a nap. I had thought I would sleep for about 30 minutes. I woke up to the phone ringing at 7:00. I had been SOUNDLY asleep, dreaming about school. Who knows how long I would have slept if the phone hadn't woke me up. I will probably never get to sleep tonight after sleeping so late in the afternoon.

The worst part about the cold is that I'm a terrible sick person. I have the hardest time functioning when I am sick and like to do pretty much nothing but sleep. Unfortunately, I have a very busy week. Classes are going to take a lot of planning. In fact, one class I'm winging tomorrow, because I just didn't have the energy to do what I had planned. I'm also in the process of doing a design for the local high school. They have a brand new theatre space and this will be their first fully produced production. It's not a very complicated show, but it still takes work. I was surprised last Friday with the information that the design had to be completed before I left to go to San Diego on Thursday. I spent the weekend figuring out the rough designs. Tomorrow after class, I have to solidify my ideas and start drafting them. I don't like drafting on a good day, but I especially don't like it when I am sick. Perhaps Donnie or Digital would like to do some drafting for me? Luckily the design isn't very complicated and shouldn't take long to do, it's just the reality that I have to do it.

I'm going to try and get some sleep now.

What I learned today in small town America.

Audiences in a full theatre here behave just like they do in theatres in NYC. I went to see Bridge to Terabithia and the theatre was packed with screaming kids. There were at least two people who answered their cell phones and then there were the two teenagers who were eventually escorted from the theatre for throwing popcorn, farting, and disturbing everyone in the back of the theatre. For two plus hours I really felt like I was back in the big city. Just for the record the movie is not for small children. It's really for kids 9 or 10 year olds. Unfortunately, the average age today was about 4 and they were BORED.

I also learned that unlike NYC people here don't assume what your buying should go in a bag. I went to the Kum and Go (Insert joke here) last night and the girl looked at me like I had three heads when I asked for a bag for my things. The same thing happened today at the grocery store. Is it too much to ask that when you buy something that it can be put into something you can carry.

After almost six weeks in Iowa I've yet to find a restaurant in town that has decent food. Tonight I tried Chinese. I've heard since I got here which Chinese place is best and was told in fact that the one next to the coffee shop was excellent. I guess excellent is relative. I had the worst broccoli chicken I've ever had. It's was completely lacking in flavor and I almost didn't know I was eating. It was more than a little disappointing.

That's it today for Life Lessons in Iowa.

I keep learning a lot about small town life. For example today I learned that just because it's the best diner in town, doesn't mean it's the best diner ever. I ventured out in the fresh snow today to get breakfast out for the first time since moving here. I had been directed to the A & M Diner about 10 or so blocks from my house, so around 10:30 or so I headed over.

I wanted to take pictures but I wasn't sure that the locals would like it much. Let's just say it's a DIVE! In fact, there was an entry door that led into the restaurant, except it opened up on to what looks like a large storage closet. In that room there were about 5 or so solid doors an old refrigerator some boxes and other odds and ends. One of the doors had a hand written sign that said "pull to enter." I wasn't sure what to expect or even if I was in the right place, but I went to the door and pulled. Inside was the seating area for the restaurant. It was a huge open space with a concrete floor, plastic chairs and old signs on the wall. At one end of the room was a Christmas tree on a stage that had been decorated for Valentine's Day. The room was so thick with smoke that you could cut it with a knife.

The restaurant was about half full and I wandered in looking for a place to sit. I was also looking for a place I could breathe. The seating area is quite large and I kept moving all the way to the back corner. There was a booth open. I sat down and waited. Scattered around the room was thirty or so people and my guess would be that 75% of them over the age of 10 were smoking. Luckily my corner seemed to be out of the air flow. After about 10 minutes or so "Flo" showed up with a menu and water. The menu looked like it had seen better days. "Flo" went off to get me a Diet Pepsi and I began to look for breakfast. I decided on a ham and cheese omelet and a cinnamon roll. "Flo came back, took my order and was off again. I might add at this point that the most expensive thing on the menu was 6.50 I think. It was for some sort of lunch meal.

I waited a few minutes and my cinnamon roll appeared. It was huge, smothered in icing and looked great. Ah, but disappointment was soon to present itself. The roll had the consistency and taste of white bread. It was soft and mushy and had no flavor. In fact if it weren't covered in icing it would have had no flavor at all. I ate about half of it, because I was starving and still waiting for my breakfast. Eventually my omelet was dropped off. I might start by saying that most of the ingredients were on the outside. The cheese was melted on top of the eggs and the ham was sprinkled on top of that. And it tasted awful. I wouldn't even know how to describe it other than awful. I ate about a half of it. Luckily, it's hard to screw up hash browns and toast so those were enough to fill me up.

"Flo" had dropped off the check with the omelet in true diner fashion. The bill was totalled but it was easy to see that the entire thing was less than ten dollars. My favorite part of the morning was that omelet was spelled omlet on the check. I took a deep breath and headed for the cashier. I paid and was out the door.

As I said I have been told that this is the best diner in town. I'm not even sure where the other one is and I have been assured it's too far to walk. What I do know is this one is not worth the walk. If I go back it will only be to take pictures for you guys so you can see the proof of what I'm talking about.

It's been a great day. I actually saw another gay man in town tonight. Before you get excited it's not like we had sex or anything. In fact we didn't even speak. We just kind of glanced at each other across the coffee shop secretly knowing the truth.

I discovered that one of the coffee shops in town also functions as a bar. So on Monday and then again today, I went there to prep for my classes and to have a beer. It's been kind of nice being out where other people are and since I don't/can't drink coffee after lunch or it keeps me up all night, beer is the perfect alternative. So today I got to the coffee shop around 4:00 and ordered my beer and a bowl of tomato soup and got to work. It took about an hour an half to get my notes together for tomorrow. I then ordered another beer, and scanned my notes. While I had been there the place had kind of cleared out and since I knew talking on my cell phone wouldn't bother anyone I decided to catch up on some calls. While I was on the phone... in walked Mr. Gay Man. As he walked in and to the back of the shop, he glanced at me three or four times. He settled in and I continued my phone call, but every once in a while I noticed him watching me. Unfortunately, he was with a number of other people and so there wasn't a time for us to talk. It was nice though at least seeing someone else gay. And he was kind of cute. He was probably in his late 40's with just a touch of grey at the temples. And he was short, and you know how I like my short boys. I may just have to go hang out there some more and see if he shows up. I'll keep you posted.

Hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day.

Maddog's Monday check-in on Tuesday:

I haven't posted in the last couple of days because I haven't had much to say. There's not much going on here and if I have one more conversation just about the weather I'm going to scream. I've been talking to my mother almost once a day and she can talk about the weather for 40 minutes without talking about anything else.

So what has been going on with me? I went to the movies twice over the weekend. As I reported Happily N'ever After sucked. However, I did see Dreamgirls again. It was just as engaging the second time as it was the first. The audience was more reserved and no one applauded but I felt like they were enjoying it as much as I was. Overall, it's a great movie and it's easy to see why Jennifer Hudson is getting the attention that she is.

I applied for two jobs last week. One was the full time position here in Iowa. The other was in Oklahoma. The job application process for Oklahoma sucked. It all had to be done on line and the catch is there is no way to go back and add documents once you process the application. Unfortunately, I didn't' have electronic copies of my transcripts so I don't know if I'll be considered for the position or not. At this point, I'm not too worried about it. I do have a phone interview scheduled for the job here in Iowa. I have no idea what to expect and I'm not even sure I want the job, but at the very least it will be practice interviewing which I haven't done in a while.

As for my weight this week. I gained 1.5 pounds last week. This isn't as bad as I thought it would be but it's still not losing. I have been eating everything in sight...well not really but too much to lose weight. It's all out of boredom and I'm aware of this. Unfortunately, I am bored.

The one saving grace is that I leave for San Diego in a week and a half. I'm going out for four days to go my friend's memorial service. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone as well as having some warm weather.

Have a great rest of the week.