roundup time

Tuesday, March 30, 2004, at 06:12AM

By Eric Richardson

It feels like forever since I last managed to scribble a few words here, but really it was just Thursday. Let's see if I can put together what's happened since then...

Thursday and Friday we got to hang out with my sister Amy, which was cool. Being halfway across the country I don't get to see her very often, and I don't know when else I would have gotten to see her play softball. I saw her hit her first college homerun and have a game where she went 3 for 3 with 5 RBIs.

Friday night my dad and I went with Taylor to see U of A play the USA Olympic Team.

Saturday morning I flew back to LAX. Kathy picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at my apartment. I went upstairs, grabbed dirty clothes out of my bag, threw a couple new things in, grabbed a pair of waterski gloves and headed down to my car. Waiting to meet me in our basement parking area was the fact that sometime between Wednesday and Saturday my car got broken into, and my cd player got stolen. I had far more important stuff (wakeboards, etc) in my trunk, but those got left untouched. All that got taken was the cd player (6 years old with a tendency to skip), my garage door opener, and a pair of sunglasses (prescription no less, so they'll be fun to wear). More annoying was that they broke the front passenger side lock to get in, and getting a new handle and lock cylinder is about $300 with installation.

But I didn't really worry about any of that on Saturday. Saturday I wanted to waterski. So I cleaned things up a bit, stopped by campus to pick someone up, and headed out to Mecca, CA -- the absolute middle of nowhere. Private ski lakes are always out in the boonies, and this was no exception. This was a pre-season warmup/fundraiser for the USD Waterski Team. We skiied Saturday, stayed up late, and then the sun woke everyone up for a bit more skiing on Sunday.

Got back to LA mid-afternoon Sunday, laid down for a bit to recover from four straight days of sun, and then headed to Chili's and then to church. There were two new Simpsons on Sunday night, but I only watched one. I'll download the other and add it to my collection, which currently stands at around 275 episodes (there have been 320 or so total, I think).

Monday -- yesterday -- was Kathy's birthday. Before I could do anything about that, though, I had to take care of actually filing a police report and such for my break-in. So a nice little chunk of my morning was spent sitting at Southwest Division. Generally you'd just do something like that over the phone, but I got a couple busy signals and figured I'd just head down and take care of things in person. It wasn't an unpleasant process at all. Next I took my car to Toyota Central, conveniently located under the 10 on Fig. As I knew they would, they found a bunch of other things that really needed to be done to my car. Leaving the lake on Sunday the USD coach asked me, "You got a supercharger in that Camry?" Turns out, no, it's just a head pipe falling apart. That the kind of thing that's fun to hear on a Tuesday morning.

So now I'm working on catching up on all the things that got left a little behind -- like school, for instance. I think life will be a little more normal for the next while, though, which is good.