Saturday on the Rainy Island

It was coming down sideways today, so we only ventured out to sort the recycling and grab some Chinese breakfast sandwiches across the street.

Other highlights of my day included making James stand in the utility room for ten minutes with his Chinese-English pinyin dictionary. We had to turn the water heater off because we wanted to shut all the windows to keep the rain out, but not possibly blow up our apartment. That would be an unfortunate conclusion to our grand walkabout.

"Look Leslie, I shut all the valves off."

"But does it say off?"

"I don't know. But they're all shut off."

I'm mechanically illiterate, so even though the valves looked like they were off I wasn't satisfied. I needed to know the thing said "off." James has the Chinese reading skills of a second-grader, so he cracked open his dictionary and set to work.

Awhile later he called me back.

"Alright it's all off."

"What about this green light? Why is that still on?"

"That just means it's working properly."

"Well shouldn't this red light be on instead since we turned it off?"

"No, that red light means something is on fire."

"Ok. Fine."

After tackling the water heater we ate steamed peanuts and watched The Life Aquatic. Then after that was over, I decided to take a gander at the Alaska Sex Offender Registry.

If only my natural curiosity was directed toward things like government wheeling and dealing, or campaign financing, then I would be a rockstar reporter. But instead I'm just a queen gossip hound. I'm primarily concerned with the people I know, the people I used to know and whether or not they've gone to prison and/or procreated.

I keep tabs on the babies my high school classmates produced thanks to MySpace.

I occasionally look up my fifth-grade crush on Alaska Courtview because he's headed to the clink for serial burglary. The 11-year-old me could really pick a man: Police think he stole more than $100,000 worth of stuff from homes on the Anchorage hillside. So I like to check the dockets to see if they've sent him away yet.

And then sometimes I pull up the sex offender registry just to see who's who that's made that exclusive list. Just kidding. I don't surf the Alaska sex offender registry. But there was a guy I had class with who was incarcerated for sexual assault my last year of high school. So sometimes I look him up. Because I can. I mean, why not?

So after seeing that Mr. High School Sex Assault is still working at the Sourdough Express moving company and kicking it in South Anchorage - on a whim I did a zip code search of my old neighborhood. And there I found yet another Dimond High School class of 2004 sex offender, another guy I had several classes with over the years.

I went to junior high out of district, so I didn't even know that many people in high school. We're only four years out of Dimond, and two of the people I did know are now members of Alaska's most infamous boys' club. Ah, how far we've come. In light of my surprise discovery I briefly contemplated name-searching all the moderate- to highly-slimy characters I could remember, but abandoned the idea to watch Star Wars instead.

Hopefully it wont be so foul out tomorrow, in which case we'll go to Taipei. Otherwise, maybe I'll pull out the old yearbook and see who else has been up to no good.