Thank-You Note

Dear Carolyn,

Thank you for the lovely wedding gift. We're putting the Lazy Susan to good use. :)

Love,
Sam

Still Here

I haven't updated this blog in over a month. It's getting sad. Although with no daytime television, you'd think I'd start updating more. So, let's get you all caught up. (Shouldn't take long...my life isn't that interesting.)

• In February we went to Alabama to visit my family. My Dad has decided he hates my fiance. I kind of already knew this, but it was nice to have my suspicions confirmed by pleas not to marry him. Definitely a feel-good moment.
• While in Alabama, my former roommates C and P threw an engagement party for Tom and I. It was the most fun I'd had in a really long time. There was delicious food, a kickass cake, and Pranathi made us play her version of the Newlywed Game. My favorite question/answer combo? Q: What is the first thing Tom noticed about Sam? A: Her typing speed. (My favorite part was that I would never have thought of that answer, and two of my friends that had never met each other both said it. This is what happens when your relationship starts via blog.)
• While on the topic of weddings, I've been attempting to do a lot of planning. I know a lot of my readers are getting or have recently gotten married. Dudes, what the hell?! It is SO expensive! My parents are paying for it, but if you've met my parents you know that it's like squeezing pennies from a turnip. That doesn't even make sense, and that's why it's applicable. It's almost impossible. And I don't like doing it. Every other day I say, "screw it, we're having sandwiches and iPod music." Because seriously, DJs are making several hundred dollars an hour. And I understand that they have equipment blah blah blah, but they're not buying new equipment for every performance. Actually, Tom is in charge of the DJ and I've been pretty impressed with his bargaining skills. We're down to $800 from a quote of $1500. At this point I'd marry him just for that.
• So far I have ordered my wedding dress (finally), we have a reception site (cheap), but one which will require us to rent pretty much everything including tables and chairs (expensive), and we have the church. I am pretty much appalled by the amount of money the church is charging us...AND apparently we have to deal with some crazy music lady. I'm a step away from City Hall.
  
• The best thing about March has been my living situation. My landlady is out of town. For a MONTH. I have been parking in the driveway, playing music at whatever volume I damn well please, and sleeping in as late as I like because there's no 3 year old in clodhoppers running back and forth down the hallway. It's heaven. I've also been able to have people over. So far it's only been Tom's family, but hopefully we'll extend it out before she gets back. We've been having Trivia Nights on Saturdays. We were playing Trivial Pursuit, but people were frustrated with 1. the difficulty of the questions and 2. the fact that Trivial Pursuit (when played the right way- something we never did in my childhood) NEVER ENDS. Seriously. The game takes hours. So, we purchased the Mental Floss trivia game. It's an easier, shorter, more fun version of Trivial Pursuit created by the same guys who do the Mental Floss Magazine in Birmingham, AL. It's a great magazine, and I'm loving the game. You should buy it. Really.
• Also in March, John came to visit! Yay! It's always nice to have people visit...even nicer when they treat you to dinner. We went out not realizing it was restaurant week. We went to this little place in the North End that Tom and I had taken C and P to when they visited. The food was awesome. Not so awesome was the fact that I hadn't realized we'd be trekking all over the city and therefore wore some high-heeled boots. I think I ended up walking a couple miles that night. My feet were bruised the next day. Thank goodness I was on call the next day and was therefore able to wear comfy sneakers to work. Also, John had a Kindle 2 and it looked awesome. This post is becoming a gift-guide.
  
• It's almost April and it has FINALLY warmed up. I'm pretty excited. Tom spent all weekend sick as a dog, so hopefully that will be his one bout of illness for the year and we can enjoy the Spring and Summer now :)

I'll try to keep this thing updated, but there are no guarantees. There are days when I think, "Should I blog, or lie down on the couch and take a nap?" and those that know me are not surprised by the way that plays out. Every. Time.

Also, why does my blogger now have a tab that says "Monetize"? I just noticed that...going to investigate. Laters :)

Olympic Spirit

While I was in Alabama, my sisters invented a new sport.

It all began with the genocide (mass suicide) of the amphibian population in my parents yard. Every day when we go out to swim, my sisters first clean out the pool filters. There are various reasons for this, not the least of which that we have found on separate occasions both a giant rat and a snake in the filters. No one wants to swim in snake-infested waters. So, we check and clean out the filters before we hop in. The first day that we were going to swim in the completely-filled pool, the girls went out to check the filters. They found frogs. Lots of frogs. 17 to be exact. Actually, 19 total- 2 alive, the rest not so much. We're not really sure if it was the pool chemicals or the inability to get out of the water that killed them, but there they were. So, they pulled the filter out, trying to balance the stack of frogs all the way to the fence. What we usually do when we find creatures in the pool, is throw them out into the yard. Far out into the yard because that way they won't be right near the pool smelling bad and attracting more creatures that could fall into the pool and drown. So, we kind of fling them.

Thus "frog-flinging" was born.

Jo would first load the frog up into the catapult:
And then Bear would fling it into the yard:
By the end, she had a whole method. According to Bear, when it comes to frog-flinging, it's all in the legs. She's pretty sure she's going to medal in this event.In the end, all the frogs were dispatched to their final resting place and then we all went swimming.
Tom celebrated by diving headfirst into the part of the pool that's only 5 feet deep. :-p

Trivial Pursuit

Those of us that were left played Trivial Pursuit on the last day of MilONYE.

Q: What star of "There's Something About Mary" was taught to swim by the Pips?

Are things really that bad for the Pips? They did have that Velveeta shells 'n cheese commercial- surely they haven't burned through their preservative-laden cheese-product funds yet. Do they have a flier on the bulletin board at the Hollywood Y? And why would the director hire the Pips to teach someone to swim? Who swam in that movie? Couldn't they get a stuntman? How many Pips does it take to teach someone to swim? Aren't there superfluous Pips in this equation? Where the hell is Gladys?!?

A: Ben Stiller.

This still doesn't make any sense.

Time to Google.

Ooooh. It was when he was a kid. That makes a lot more sense.

The Oregon Trail

When I was in elementary school we went to the computer lab once a week. I'm not sure how long computer lab was- I had very little grasp of space and time when I was 8 years old- but I remember how awesome it was. You would go to the computer lab with some stupid assignment- type a letter to someone, or type a story, or choose the right answers on some stupid multiple choice quiz- and when you were done, you could choose a game to play while everyone else finished. The only problem was that the computer lab only had a limited number of floppy disks containing "The Oregon Trail."

4 in fact. 4 children of the roughly 25 in the class would have the opportunity to play "The Oregon Trail." Everyone else would be relegated to MathBlaster or something similarly lame and educational. I'm pretty sure the only things Oregon Trail ever taught me were:

1. It pays to do things quickly.
and
2. Cholera totally blows.

These facts have actually proven themselves through the course of my existence and education. You don't get to take naps at school unless you're an unusually fast test-taker (in which case your teachers encourage you to nap or go get a soda or something- this may only be in Alabama) and everything that I learned in public health points to the fact that yes- cholera really isn't pleasant.

So, when someone invited me to join their wagontrail on Facebook I thought- sweet! Oregon Trail! And I immediately signed on for the journey. But this isn't your 1989 floppy disk black and white version. It's all in color, and the oxen have faces....it's so not cool. I didn't even get to buy my own supplies for the trip.

When I was a kid, I *sucked* at Oregon Trail. It never failed that I would initially purchase nothing of any consequence for survival, the majority of my caravan would succumb to cholera, and the rest would die of starvation because when I was at the store I was saying things like "Seeds? What am I, a farmer? Hells no. I'm a pioneer." I didn't really understand that a pioneer *was* a farmer and not just some dude trying to make it to LA.

So, now I'm playing the modern version and I'm starting to realize the futility of the game. Up until now my wagon had been healthy and I'd just kept pressing on, occasionally hunting (which is monumentally easier with a mouse than it was with arrows and the space bar), and resting up. It's been kind of boring. All of a sudden I get the message that someone "Desperately Needs Water." I have 300 pounds of food, 28 rounds of ammunition and 800 bucks...but nary a drop to drink. In fact, there's no record of the water. So, I figure I can't do anything and continue on. We come to a river crossing and I assume that he'll stick his face in the water and we'll be set. I have no option to toss him in myself, so I just move through the river and continue on. Guess what? He's still dying of thirst. I've decided that if he crosses the Rio Grande and is too stupid to take a sip, it's not going to be a huge loss on my part. Mysteriously he recovers on his own 30 miles down the road.

So, I have full health and the weather changes every 15 miles from "snow" to "sweltering" to "hail" and I wonder how we haven't died in a tornado by now. All of a sudden, someone has cholera. I start having flashbacks.


















I'm going to be proactive. Have to avoid wagon epidemic. The question rapidly becomes, what do I do with her? Chances are she's going to pass it to someone else. So, I'd like to off her, or dump her in the woods. The only option the stupid modern-day game gives me is to eat her. First of all- eew. Second of all- really eew. Chick has cholera- why the heck would I want to eat her? Third- eating someone really opens the door for a whole host of new health problems. Like Kuru. Which basically turns your brain into a sponge.

















This new Oregon Trail game really sucks.

Raving Rabbids

I'm not much of a videogamer. I lack the patience to master the various gaming systems and lack the will to try more than once after failing to win a game. I really enjoy MarioKart because it's short and really difficult to lose. That's the extent of my gaming expertise: not losing at MarioKart. However, there is now a Wii at my house and it's kind of fun. Kind of a lot of fun.

The other day Tom purchased Rayman's Raving Rabbids. A game I've wanted since watching the commercials and realizing that it centered around cartoony rabbits that dance. The game arrived yesterday and it does not disappoint.


It's hilarious. The rabbits randomly run, scream, dance, and shoot at you with plungers. It's basically a bunch of mini-games, which is nice for my short attention span. So far I've shot multiple bunnies with plungers, pulled worms from a bunny's teeth (eew), thrown a bunny dressed in a superhero costume as far as was humanly possible, and danced to hiphop, disco, and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." If you have a Wii, you should get this game. For this, if nothing else: