I don't understand this.

We've all seen them.. people that have their mouths wide open like they're in shock, and just walk around all day like that. Why? I tried it a bit yesterday, and it's totally more work to hold your mouth open than it is to keep it shut.

For some reason, Whitewater, WI seems to have the highest percentage of these "open mouthers" that I've ever come across. Anywhere.

I tried to come up with valid reasons to give them some sort of benefit of the doubt. Maybe they can't breathe through their nose (you wouldn't need your mouth wide open to compensate for that). Maybe it's more comfortable and they're willing to risk looking like a complete moron (I tried it, it wasn't, and that's not a very good reason for walking around looking like an idiot either.)

It seems that most of these people only close their mouths when they're talking. I've also noticed that it tends to only be when they're walking around – the mouth shuts once they sit down.

This makes absolutely no sense to me!

Saturday wouldn't have been complete without me doing something somewhat out of the ordinary.. like.. carrying a toaster oven almost a mile and a half through Chicago. A toaster oven isn't that heavy, and 1.3 miles isn't that far, but the shape and size of the box is big enough to be awkward. And awkward enough to become almost unbearable pretty quickly.

To put things into perspective, I'll completely disregard scale and overlay our route on top of another map:

From this, you can easily see that I practically walked across a good chunk of North America. Pictures don't lie.