SHUT UPPP

I wasn't going to blog about this but a) I'm really bored and kind of out of inspiration this week, seeing as how I've had to deal very little with the ridiculous because I've been off work and school, and b) the more that I think about it the weirder it gets. So here we go.

Last night was trivia (and where the hell were you?) and this gigantic table near us had these two little girls with them, definitely no older than 10. Now, if you've never been to trivia night before (loser...) then you might not know that it runs pretty late, usually until well after 10:30, and what's more it tends to get pretty loud, rowdy, and...well, kind of R-rated. Totally fine if you're a table of 20-somethings achieving various levels of intoxication and who tend to contribute quite a lot to the adult content. But if you're in elementary school...not so much. On a school night. Not a problem for these parents, however. They put their little girls at the end of their table with a babysitter DVD player and, not kidding, EARMUFFS. Earmuffs, pink fuzzy ones, with animal faces on them. All the rage among the third graders.

Anyway. Freakin...you know that the whole "earmuff" thing in Old School was a joke, right? Like, it's not actually a parenting technique. So, what the hell? I mean, sure, they could have been headphones for the DVD player but it's the same thing. I get that it they were enjoying the movie and not being neglected and they were fine but still, it's just a weird thing. I am officially passing judgement: having a DVD player babysit entertain your kids in a restaurant so that you can get drunk and play a game with 12 of your closest friends is weird. Not bad, not wrong, but weird. That is all.

...pretty sweet trivia team name, even if it's a million words long. I am super pleased to announce that said trivia team put forth a SPECTACULAR and VALIANT effort against the evil foes at the finals of Pluckers trivia on Wednesday night. Although we did not win the gigantic beer mug trophy we put up a pretty epic fight, and if not for some unfortunate faltering (Part of which was totally me. Well, me and frickin Michael Collins. Be more famous, Mikey!) the coveted trophy would be resting safely in Katie's living room.

Good thing about trivia is there's always next week. Well, until we're permanently disbanded by either law or the painful separation of grad school. Uhm, anyway.

Team Picture!


Clockwise from bottom left: Claire, Mary, Dale "Ooh La La" Callison, Me, Andrew "Shotgun Willie" Jennings, James, Amanda, Katie, and Word Problem Mark.

Clutch Performer awards for the night go to James for correctly identifying "The Last Starfighter" and Amanda for not having TV but knowing the theme song from "Pee Wee's Playhouse" based on the first, like, 10 seconds.

Open invite for cool people to join us next week, or any week. And next week I have no 8:00 class to screw me up on Thursday morning so I will be downing the Mother Pluckers of Shiner just like everybody else.

If I didn't learn a single thing this semester (which, my classes were pretty hardcore, so I definitely did, this is just a hypothetical "if") I most certainly picked something up today that I am sure to use again.

If you want a new pen or just don't like the one that you have, a surefire way to get a free one is to loudly yell out "CRAP! Are you kidding me?" and violently shake your old one like it's broken, three minutes before your final starts. BAM! Free pen for you, good karma for the donor, everybody's happy. I was just amazed at how easy it was - I mean, I didn't even ask. I just looked confused and shook my pen a whole lot and a girl turned around and handed me a new one. Magic! And the really oddball thing is that I don't even think she was in my class, I'm pretty sure she was in the prof's other class and had a conflict with her final. But I like to think of her as the test fairy. Fluttering around, landing in random classrooms and handing out supplies to students who didn't think to test theirs before they came to their final. Test fairy = awesome.

I'm going to have to remember that and try it in a bar sometime. If I stand in the middle of a room and yell out "Oh crap!" and shake a beer bottle around wildly three minutes before last call, will the beer fairy appear and beer me? Maybe. It's worth a shot, my friends. Maybe a shot and a beer.

On a barely related at all matter, I'm done with school for the semester. I now have exactly ten days until the mini sesh starts and my summer is extra over. Shenanigans!

Oh well. Happy summer!

I have discovered that I can access the pool/clubhouse area WiFi from my bedroom late at night if I’m very still. Suck on that, Time Warner! But I still need internet of my own so please still come out ASAP to help me. And you have my digital cable. My precious, precious digital cable. Also, I’m still paying you.

Right so if you know me, you know how very much I detest moving (Bonus points if you’ve ever actually moved with me before, double bonus points if you were there that time I broke my nose while moving.). You also probably know how unlikely I am to have survived an 8:00 am class or to actually have any intention to SHOW UP to my eight o’clock on the last class day. And because my life is a series of Perfect Storms, last week moving and my very last 8:00 am class period fell not only on the same week but the same damn day. And when I say damn I mean like, damn. But I’m nothing if not resilient, so there I was, desperately scrubbing carpet and vacuuming at like 1:30 Thursday morning (Sorry, old neighbors!), getting our old apt in good shape for handing over our keys the next morning, knowing that I would have to get up and make that long drive to San Marcos in a few short hours. Dale, bless his sweet heart, told me to go to bed at 2:00 while he stayed behind (keep in mind, we’ve only just moved across the apartment complex) and finished the last bits of things that were left to do. So when the alarm went off at 5:15 I was annoyed. I then stumbled around our cluttered, disheveled mess of an apartment (…moving…) for the next half hour getting everything together for school and work, which was difficult considering half of it was still in boxes. I finally got to the car but then had to return to the apartment because I’d forgotten a book I needed for my last in-class assignment for geography. Then I stopped at the gas station but couldn’t fill up because I didn’t have my purse. Yep, I’d carried it back inside the apartment when I went to get the book. LAME! So, back to the apt, back to the gas station, finally on the road. Finally on 183 annnnd…WRECK. Crap! I hate it when I’m, like, already late, and then something happens to make me LATER. Like if I’d remembered the stupid geo book then all that other stuff would have gone fine and I wouldn’t have gotten stuck. But no, WRECK. Whatever, I figure I’ll just get there whenever I stupid get there. Also, at some point during this trek Kate called me to relay some of the most entertaining information you’ve ever heard in your LIFE (which you haven’t heard unless you work with me (sorry Kate!) or have talked to Kate so…sucks for you) and somehow that just made my whole morning not suck, not even a little bit. I mean it – I was stuck in traffic and late and felt dumb and it didn’t matter. One day you will read Kate’s best-selling novel and you too will learn how AWESOME that stupid story is.

Oh, and the crowning glory of my morning was after I paid to park in the garage because I was late and then booked it across campus (Re-open the Quad bus stop already!) I walked in to my 8:00 class (now the new-and-improved 8:20 condensed version) and was very confused to find the professor standing there alone. Yep. CANCELLED! WTF. It’s cool though because I still got to sign the roll with the other two habitually late latesters, and got my paper back, on which I would have made an A but I lost three points for my three margins that apparently didn’t measure exactly 1 inch all around so it got knocked down to a B. Geeky.

But yes. The Perfect Storm strikes again, this time in moving/last class day fashion. They’re getting tricky. And whatever.

One of the best things about being sick at home is that you get to lay on the couch and watch daytime TV all day. When I visit my grandparents during the week I am treated to endless hours of sitting with my Papa watching "his judges" which is the parade of Judges Judy, Joe Brown, and Alex along with Divorce Court and whatever else. My grandma is in charge of the remote, she knows exactly when each "judge show" is on each channel, and she adjusts them accordingly. It's an awesome system that a couple can only achieve after sixty years of marriage.

I, however, get to watch the judges during my lunch break (or...you, know, my one o'clock break or my sitting down break or whatever) in the break room at work, so on my sick day I'm not interested. Instead, I have discovered that the Spike channel is gracious enough to show, like, five hourlong episodes of "World's Most Amazing Videos" today. It's 12:39 and since at least 10:00 am today I've been parked on the couch, the dog distracted by a giant chewy bone somewhere near my feet, and at this particular moment I am being treated to a video of a theater fire in Russia. There's dancing, an audience stampede, someone who can't work the fire extinguisher, a performer ripping down a flaming curtain, it is all very exciting. I love "World's Most Amazing Videos." And today there's no end in sight! Best sick-day TV ever.

Ok, gotta go, skydiver hanging from a plane and the plane's running out of gas. Amazing!

Blar

As I am writing this my body has become the host to some horrid, creepy little microcreature that has taken up residence somewhere in my bloodstream. I have no idea where I picked it up (either from those crazy people at my one job or those nutty kids at my other) or how long it's planning to stick around, but I feel cruddy, I've been through my quota of Kleenex for the next year, I've coughed up more stuff than the cat, and the back of my throat is currently decorated with these interesting red and white blotches. It might be the plague.

Ok, so it's not the plague. And it's not strep - I went to the doctor (That's THREE TIMES this year. Three! And last year I only went once and it was just a check up! It's only April, jeez.) it's some virus that I don't know how to pronounce and basically it makes you feel crappy for like five days and then life goes on. And there's nothing the doctor could really give me to make it go away, she said she can just prescribe something for the pain. But on the upside: Vicodin!

But on the other downside (yes, this is, like, a pyramid or something) this has been going on since Sunday and my term paper for Modern Korea is due tomorrow (Thursday). Guess how much of the actual writing I had done on Sunday when I started feeling gross? If you said more than 20% you're off by at least 20%! So yeah, pretty much the past three days of my life have been spent alternating between frantically writing my paper while in pretty bad shape and very interesting time spent under the influence of codeine. Fabulous.

So the paper's done, although I didn't really read the whole thing over so I don't know how coherent it is, and all I want to do is sleep but I kind of can't and I have to get up tomorrow morning to drive to San Marcos and hand it in at 8:00. Shenanigans.

Germy, Virusy Kisses.