Gas Station Friends

 I stop by the gas station semi-regularly to pick up a donut on my way to school or work. You wouldn't think gas station donuts would be particularly good, but this gas station sells donuts from a local donut shop that is glorious. We don't have a Krispy Kreme in Fairbanks. There's one in Anchorage, but of course, that's several hours away, and certainly not worth going for just a donut. I've actually never been to the Krispy Kreme in Anchorage. The few times I've been to Anchorage, the Krispy Kreme had a line out the door and down the street. I imagine the line doesn't get quite as long in the winter time, but I avoid the trip to Anchorage in the winter, if I can. Come to think of it, I think I've only been to Anchorage twice in the last five years.

Anyway. Where was I going with this? Oh, right. So the gas station donuts are great and all, but I'm well aware that donuts have a ton of sugar and saturated fats and really aren't that good for me. But the people at the gas station are super friendly and I just enjoy stopping by a little place often enough to be a "regular." This summer, when I was passing through at 6:30 a.m., I would get there before the donuts had even been put out yet, and they would pull the donut fresh from the box for me. One day they were training a new girl, and when I walked in, the lady training her made sure she knew to pull out a Bismarck when she sees me. Another employee, who I privately call Nerdfriend, looks and takes like a quintessential gaming nerd, and he often recommends new energy drinks or snacks I might like to try.

The first guy who started recognizing me as a "regular" is a guy I just call Gas Station Guy. I think Gas Station Guy is the manager. Assistant manager, maybe? Something like that. I know his real name, but I always privately just call him Gas Station Guy. He's a large, friendly dude who swaps Dad jokes with me whenever I go in there. Most recently, he told me the following joke:

Three dinosaurs were running through the jungle when they saw a bacon tree. The first dinosaur ran straight up to it, and then the bacon tree jumped on him and ate him. The second dinosaur turned to the third and said, "That's no bacon tree! That's a hambush!"

Nyuk nyuk.

Look Who's Back

 Well... I guess it's time to write again.

It's fall in Alaska, and everyone is finishing up their construction projects. The other day, in my normally-ten-minute drive to work, I went through four different construction zones. That's fun. The potholes on the dirt road I live on are not appreciated by my car's suspension. No one's going to bother fixing it, though, since once it snows, it won't matter until spring, and then spring will completely destroy the road anyway. 

There's some kind of blight or bug or something that's been attacking the trees around town, meaning that instead of the leaves turning brilliant yellow or red, a lot of them are just going straight to brown. It's sad, since the pretty fall colors are a big part of what makes this season so great. I enjoy fall more than I used to. Maybe because the season is so short. 

Two young moose were hanging out in my yard chomping on the willows. They were definitely young enough that they should have been with their mama, but she was nowhere in sight. On the one hand, it's cool being able to watch young moose without the fear of their mom getting mad and murdering everyone, but on the other, it's a little sad because it's hunting season, and that seems a likely reason she's not with them.

A few important updates since I last wrote: I divorced Boy several years ago, and he kept the dogs. Since then, I acquired a cat, Monkey, a different and better Boy, and a dog, Tut.

I'm also in my last year of getting a degree in engineering, and have an internship at an awesome company, so that's cool. And I'm working on recovering from an ankle sprain that happened mid-February. They may have to do surgery to stitch a tendon back together. More info on that soon. I think that should be enough to catch up to make sense of things I reference in future posts.

Historically, writing has been kind of therapeutic for me, so I'm going to try to start writing regularly again. We'll see if I can stick with it.

The Adventures of Karl the Potato, Part I: The Magic Shoe

Once upon a time, there was a potato named Karl. Karl was a very smart potato, which is like a smart cookie, only healthier. In fact, if you were to scoop out Karl's insides, they might have resembled brains... if you colored them and sculpted them and squinted and used your imagination.

Karl's earliest memories were of dirt. In fact, most of his memories were of dirt. Having lots of eyes doesn't really do you much good when most of your time is spent totally underground. He might have been able to see earthworms sometimes if it weren't so dang dark under there. If you're wondering how Karl got so smart when his whole life was spent in the cold, dark, and quiet of hanging out in one spot underground all the time, then remember, Karl was only very smart for a potato. Most potatoes aren't very smart. In fact, potatoes are known for laziness and watching TV. Some of the most ambitious potatoes succeed in eventually becoming french fries.

What made Karl so special was that some of Karl's eyes were actually ears, and after he was harvested from the ground, he quickly picked up on the art of language. Of course, with no mouth, Karl had no way of speaking, but being unable to speak often makes one a marvelous listener. He heard all sorts of discussions, and the market where he waited to be bought was frequented by college students and professors who loved to talk about how smart they were and exactly what made them so dang smart. It's difficult to listen quietly to these kinds of discussions without learning something, and Karl had nothing better to do but listen, so as a result, he learned quite a lot. For a potato.

After Karl was bought, he didn't have as many people to listen to anymore. He tried communicating with his fellow potatoes, but potatoes aren't much in the way of conversationalists. Karl watched as his fellow potatoes were eaten one by one, and he knew one day it would be his turn. But as he waited, he grew more and more bored. Around the time he started thinking he couldn't stand the waiting anymore, he remembered a story he had heard a mother in the supermarket tell her fussing children. The story featured a young woman who called on her fairy godmother, who gave her magic shoes. So Karl wished as hard as he could for the Potato Godmother to come help him. It wasn't long before poof! The Potato Godmother appeared.

As it turns out, Big Bird has a side job as the Potato Godmother. It's not a very difficult job, since most potatoes don't have the presence of mind to summon her. Him. It. Whatever. Karl was as delighted as potato can possibly be! He related to the Potato Godmother the story of the girl with the magic shoes as well as he remembered it (telepathically, of course, since that's the only way potatoes can communicate), and the Potato Godmother asked, "So... all you want is magic shoes? Not a dress and a horse and carriage and so on?"

"Yes yes, just the shoes will be more than enough!" exclaimed Karl eagerly. And telepathically.

"Well golly, shoes are the easiest part of the package! I bet I could make you magic shoes that last well past midnight! In fact, if I did only one shoe, I could make it last even longer!" So the Potato Godmother waved her/his/its magic wand and with another poof! the Potato Godmother was gone and Karl now had a magic shoe!

To be continued...

Doors that open inward

I keep meaning to post something, but I keep putting it off because I haven't decided whether I want to start a new blog now that I've returned to Alaska or just start writing in this one again. Indecision has rendered me inactive, I'm afraid. I hate it when that happens. So for now, I guess I'll take the path of least resistance and write here.

But what to write? Writer's block is the worst. I hate it when I want to write something, and I'm totally ready and motivated, but it's like the words of half-formed ideas are trying to shove their way out of my head so fast that they clog the way and nothing ends up coming to me. It reminds me of one of the rare history lessons I actually remember from grade school. I think it was my sixth-grade social studies teacher who taught us about some big building or other, I think in NYC, that caught fire. Everyone inside was panicking, pushing and shoving to get out of the building, but the doors opened inward, and the people at the exits didn't have room to open the doors so everyone could get out. Consequently, a lot of people died. I think she said after that, a law was passed saying that certain kinds of buildings had to have doors that opened outward for that reason. Obviously the door leading from my thoughts to my hands opens inward. But if that's the case, then obviously my thoughts can't be that bright, if they aren't even smart enough to just take a step backward so the door has room to open. That's one of the problems with quantity over quality, I guess.

Doors are funny things. I know a lot of writers that contemplate the meaning of doors. Some people like to hypothesize that doors are some kind of magical portal because they can magically get you from one place to another. These people are often high, I think. Doors are just empty space with an outline that holds the wall out of the way. Nothing magical about that. Unless the doorway has been enchanted, of course. You know what is magical about doors? If you close the right ones at the right times, you can keep the dogs from stealing your food.

One time I tried to open a door inward, but I was half-asleep at the time. The door swung open faster than I meant it to, rebounded off my big, clumsy foot, then crashed into my head as I tried to move forward through the door. It kind of hurt. Stupid door. If I had been two people, the one watching it happen to the other would have laughed hysterically, though.

Excerpt from an old journal entry

October 10, 2009
The first thing I would like known about me is that I do not pronounce the word "pen" the same way I pronounce "pin." Also, I hate neon orange gel pens. Yellow and green are atrocious too, but the orange ones are the metaphorical leaders of the gang, and so I hate them the most. They're abusive and sadistic. Also, they kick puppies. I've seen it. Therefore, I propose all forms of discrimination and persecution be redirected toward neon orange gel pens as well as their manufacturers and distributors.

Octopuses are really funny-looking. I bet being octopused to death would be really painful. Seriously, how bad would it hurt to have an octopus latched onto your face, gouging your eyes out with its beak? Hey, that's like something from an Alien movie, minus the part where the babies burst out of your chest and kill you. Oh yeah, and kill everyone else, but you wouldn't really care, because you would be dead.

Pet

I had this really weird dream.

My dad took me to a horse farm and bought me a horse. It was a dark horse with darker spots--I think he was part appaloosa. This horse was extremely cranky, and he had scars all over because apparently he had been in a fight with a bull. His previous owner hadn't given him a lot of one-on-one time. I was given to understand that he wasn't really mean, neglectful, or abusive, but he was the kind of guy who saw his horses (and he had a lot of them) as tools instead of living things that need attention. Ironically, he had named this horse Pet.

I got to ride Pet around and groom him and bond with him, and then we left to go do something else for a while. But I was so excited about Pet that I couldn't wait to go back and see him again, so we went back so I could spend more time with him. We went up to his stall in the barn where he was living, and Pet wasn't there. Instead, there was a big, dark, healthy-looking thoroughbred.

I looked in all the other stalls, but Pet wasn't there either. We went back to the desk (because apparently this barn had one) and said, "Hey, where's Pet?"

The lady said, "Right there in his stall." She showed us how the horse in Pet's stall had a fine bronze tag on his harness that said "PET" in big engraved block letters.

"But that's not Pet," I said. "You put the name on the wrong horse."

"Oh," said the lady. "How embarrassing. Well, let me go get Pet for you, then." So she left and brought out another horse. It was a fine, beautiful horse with a spirited step, possibly an Andalusian. But that wasn't Pet either. So she went back out to the fields where there were dozens of horses milling about, and she brought back horse after horse. None of them were Pet.

Finally, I asked if I could go look. We wandered through field after field and saw tons of horses. We returned to the barn and checked every single stall, then checked the fields again. I was told I might as well just pick a different horse--I could have any one I wanted. Besides, they were all stronger, healthier, better-adjusted, and probably better-trained horses than Pet was.

I don't remember whether I did eventually pick a different horse. If I did, I certainly don't remember anything about what kind of horse I picked. All I remember is that we never did find Pet.

Gladiator

For Christmas, Jack got me the 2012 release of Les Miserables, which is a musical I saw in London and thoroughly enjoyed. I was worried that turning it into a movie would make it seem forced, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well it had been done. When Inspector Javert was introduced, I felt absolutely sure I had seen the actor before.

Jack informed me that, duh, the guy was Russell Crowe, to which I responded, "Who?" I don't recall having heard the name Russell Crowe before. Jack rattled off the names of a bunch of movies that I had never heard of that Crowe was famous for, and of course, I had never heard of them either. After the movie, I checked imdb.com (internet movie database), which listed every movie, TV show, etc. that the guy had appeared in. I had never seen a single thing on the list, and had only ever even heard of one or two of them.

To remedy my ignorance, Jack decided to show me the movie Gladiator, in which Russell Crowe starred as Maximus Decimus Meridius. I have now seen a whole two movies that Russell Crowe was in. Hooray!

I find that Russell Crowe has very distinctive eyes. They droop a little, which makes him look permanently worried or sad. I suspect that this may have been partly why he was cast as Maximus Decimus Meridius. Allow me to sum up the gist of the movie using Russell Crowe's facial expressions.

"I'm worried because we're about to fight a battle."

 "Now I'm sad because even though we won the battle, a lot of my buddies are dead. Also, I think this guy might be Dumbledore, but I'm not sure."

"Now my family's been murdered and I've been enslaved and forced to fight as a gladiator. That makes me sad."

"My buddy and I are going to win this fight. But look at all this carnage. How sad."

"The new emperor just made jokes about when he murdered my wife and child. What a jerk."

"This is my angry face."

"This definitely feels like a legit time to be worried, since that's the emperor who wants me dead."

"Oh no, I'm dying. What if I get reincarnated as a French guy?"

"What if Jean Valjean steals another loaf of bread? That might be the end of the world! What revolution? Oh yeah. That too. Allow me to sing you the song of my people."

So that's that. I do have to admit, Russell Crowe is a hottie. They played that up in Gladiator. Notice that in the pictures above, even after having been a slave and a gladiator for months, his hair and beard are still perfectly trimmed and styled.

I like Russell Crowe better as Maximus Decimus Meridius than as Javert. But then, I never really understood Javert. "Oh no, I don't understand why this guy made the decision he did. Welp, time to kill myself."

I want to see a movie with him in a role where he smiles more. That's a really nice smile.

The end.

Baseball

For Christmas over a year ago, I bought my husband the 2K10 major league baseball game for the Wii because he played baseball in Wii sports for hours every day and complained that it didn't have enough innings, that it applied the mercy rule (aborting the game if a team was more than five runs ahead), and that it didn't offer the ability to build a team and follow their stats for an entire season. All of these were remedied in the game I got for him.

Unfortunately, he played it briefly once and then set it aside, claiming it was too complicated to play. I finally decided maybe if I figured out how to play it, it may pique his interest in the game and encourage him to play. So today, I sat down in front of the Wii for a crash course in baseball.

The first team the game put me up against was the Yankees. The game offered me a pitching tutorial before the game started, and I practiced for a while before beginning the game. I threw the first pitch, and the computer slammed a home run. Hooray. I threw a second pitch, which was promptly hit to right field. My fielder ran toward the ball, tripped, and fell on his face. The ball bounced a few times, and my fielder stood there and stared at it as the runner took the opportunity to run home. The third batter hit another home run. I actually got a strike on the fourth batter before he hit one out to center field. My center fielder was camped right in the glowing area that told me where the ball was going to land. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he threw himself flat on the ground. The ball bounced behind him. He clambered back to his feet, turned in a circle, then threw himself to the ground again. I imagined what must have been going through his mind: "Oh boy! The ball's coming right at me! Watch this! Hey, what if my arm isn't strong enough to throw it back to the pitcher all the way? I better tone my muscles a bit. Pushups! Ready, go! Woohoo! I did a pushup! Hey, I know, I'll do another one! Aw yeah! I can totally do pushups! Did everybody see me do pushups? Want to watch me do it again? Yay, I love sports!"

The next time one was hit to a fielder, he tripped, another guy tripped, the first guy tripped again, and then they apparently started some kind of slap fight while the batter laughed his way back to home plate. Then one of my fielders ran for the ball and suddenly decided to become Muslim and realized it was time to praise Allah as he knelt on the ground facing Mecca. The next time, a fielder ran toward the ball to catch it, then suddenly stopped and thought, "Wait a minute... what's the point of catching the ball? What's the point of this game? What's the point of existence? Hey look, there's a birdy flying over there. I wonder if it sees a bug it's about to eat. Mmm, I'm hungry. I wonder if there will be hot dogs after this game. I like hot dogs. I hope there's relish."

Eventually, it was my team's turn to bat. The batting tutorial taught how to swing, how to hit grounders, how to swing hard and fast in hopes of a home run, and how to bunt. I turned out to be as bad at swinging a bat in the game as I am in real life, and I practiced a lot before I told the game I was ready to begin the second half of the inning. Jack was surprised that I actually practiced. He said that he had skipped the tutorial because he wanted to just get to playing. I was feeling pretty confident that at least the batting controls would be pretty easy for me, assuming I could connect with the ball.

As it turns out, the batting wasn't as hard as the base running, which I wasn't given a tutorial for. I hit a pitch way out to center field, it bounced off the wall, got past the fielder, and came to rest before it was recovered, and the runner made it to first base and decided to have a tea party there instead of trying for at least a double. The next guy hit a single, but decided he wanted to try for an inside the park home run. At one point, I had runners on second and third, the batter hit the ball, and the runner at second decided to stay where he was, while the batter decided to go hang out with the second base runner. "Hi! Look at me! I hit the ball! Let's high five! Hey, look, the guy who recovered the ball is coming for a high five too! What a good sport he is! High five, dude on the other team!" Another time, my batter hit what should have been a good solid double. He rounded first, kept going past second, got halfway to third, then realized he had gone too far and decided to go back. He turned around and sprinted back to second base... then tried to run all the way back to first and got tagged out by the first baseman.

 We lost the game, but by golly, my team sure had fun.

Keeping Pace

I suspect that part of the reason it seems like everyone else my age has no trouble at all putting on weight while I remain almost unhealthily skinny is that I spend too much time pacing. I pace when I have nothing to do, when I have something to do but I don't want to do it, when I'm waiting for something, and when I'm doing something that I have to do that doesn't require sitting down. I don't really know why I do it. Half the time, I don't even realize I'm doing it until well after I've begun. Or until someone says something, such as when I arrive at a meeting early and it hasn't started yet, and a couple minutes later, someone goes, "Hey, why are you pacing?" and I realize that I've circled the room like fifteen times. Then they inevitably ask what's bothering me, and I wonder why something needs to be bothering a person before they're allowed to pace.

I even pace when I'm reading. It's because I have trouble sitting still. I can sit and play video games for hours, but if I sit down to read a book or watch television, there's not enough interaction, and within an hour, my butt is yelling, "This is boring! Get off me! I want something to do!" Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to give my full attention to whatever it is that I'm reading, which is severely handicapping my ability to do one of my favorite hobbies.

My dogs used to follow me when I paced, especially my husky, Akela. Now they're so used to it that they don't care anymore. I'll stand up from something and start to walk towards them, and they perk up and think, "Oh boy! She's coming this way! Is she going to give us treats? Are we going for a walk? Am I going to get my tummy rubbed? Is she--oh. Oh, she's just walking around in circles again. Okay." And then their heads plop back down onto their paws and they go back to basking in the sunlight.

Changing a tire

Apparently, Hyundai has its own idea of what "changing a tire" means.

 This evening, a friend of mine called and asked if we knew how to change a tire. Since I do and my husband does not, he deployed me to go meet the friend in a parking lot to help her change her tire. I smiled and whistled the whole way there, pleased that I could share my worldly expertise with someone and look like a hero, swooping in to save the day! I imagined explaining all the steps as I performed them and thoroughly impressing the friend and anyone else who may have happened to see what was happening.

When I got there, I dramatically swept out of my pickup truck, announced my arrival, and proudly went to the trunk of the friend's car to haul out the spare tire. I lifted up the little rug in the trunk, and all my pride melted away. There was no spare tire. There was a well for the tire, but it was filled in with some kind of styrofoam, vaguely-tire-shaped container with some weird-looking tools that were unquestionably not a car jack or a lug nut wrench.

The friend called the company from whom she had bought the car, and they too-politely informed her that new cars apparently don't come with spare tires anymore. You have to specifically request one when you purchase your car, and it costs extra. Instead of the tools to replace her tire, they informed her, she had been graced with the tools to repair the tire! How exciting for us! Unfortunately, she had to call a different number for roadside service and spend at least an hour on hold before anyone would be available to even listen to her tale of woe, much less begin taking steps to remedy her problem.

So we cracked open the user's manual and pulled out the tire-repair kit and set to work trying to patch a hole that both of us could have simultaneously stuck our thumbs through if we had felt the urge. For some reason, part of the directions involved her driving around on the flat tire for two miles before we tried pumping it up. Naturally, our efforts were in vain, since the hole was too big to patch.

In the end, I tailed her as we drove carefully to the nearest tire repair shop, which was, ironically, another two miles away. The gentleman behind the counter informed us that not only was it unfortunate, but unsurprising, that the car had come without a spare tire, but the remaining three tires were of poor quality and weren't holding their tread very well at all.

The moral of the story is: when you buy a new car, make sure that it comes with an actual spare tire so that when you get a flat tire, you can fix it and be on your way in about ten minutes, rather than spending two hours fiddling around only to conclude that you have to drive on the rim anyway.

Puppy Nightmare

Last night, I woke up to the sound of Blitzkrieg whimpering in his sleep. I guess he had a nightmare. I was sleeping with my back to him, and after a few whimpers, he crawled over my back, burrowed under the covers and buried himself against my chest, then let out a huge sigh and fell back asleep.

I love my doggies.

Jerk towhee

There's a towhee outside picking on a much smaller junco because the junco is eating birdseed off the ground too close to the towhee. And the towhee is almost twice the size of the junco. Jerk bird.

I spent hours and days outside working in the garden, making it look nice so the HOA and my landlord don't complain this year. For some reason, my landlord had planted only boring green stuff in the garden, including two gigantic patches of what he called "ornamental grass." Unfortunately, this grass wasn't hardy at all and it bit the dust. Apparently it was terribly expensive grass. After checking the garden areas of Wal-Mart and Home Depot, I can agree. Seven dollars for a patch of grass is terribly expensive. So I uprooted the grass, which was by far the hardest part of anything I did out there (and also broke my gardening trowel, so I had to go buy a new one before I could finish my work), and planted daffodils and violas and creeping myrtles and three different color primroses and two different colors of some kind of bulb I forgot the name of, and I uprooted and relocated some of the less attractive green leafy things that were already out there. And now, by golly, our house has the prettiest and most colorful garden on the block. Unfortunately, my work outside still isn't done, since there are still weeds in the grass that need to be uprooted, followed by reseeding bare patches in the grass, and of course an entire back garden to do. But I think I earned the right to brag a little bit about the front garden.



I'm on the Women's Volleyball Team at church. Yesterday was our first game. We'd never had a practice. I don't even know the names of most of the women on the team. I just showed up and suddenly "Bam! Here's your team. Game starts in two minutes." Given the circumstances, I started out the game hoping to play for fun, not play to win. But unfortunately, two or three of the other women on the team decided not to make that possible. Any time the ball started to come in my direction, one of the two women on either side of me would practically shove me out of the way to get it. And most of the time, because they had rushed to get there, they didn't have even marginally decent aim. We played to 25 points, and in the first game, except when I served, I didn't even touch the ball until the next-to-last point scored for either side in the game (which we lost 25 to 20). The second game wasn't better, but at least that game didn't last as long because we lost 25 to 3. For me, the highlight of the evening was as we were leaving, when I heard the lady who had been standing almost in the very center of the court no matter which position she was playing tell our coach that our problem was that "certain people on the team don't know where their zones are."

Hero-worship?

Jack was awarded the Distinguished Commissioner Award at the Pacific Harbors Council Awards Dinner tonight. He's done a lot of great work as a commissioner, here and in Alaska, and I'm really proud of him! I know he's worked hard to learn the Scouting program inside and out, and he's helped a lot of people. I'm looking forward to helping someone write a nomination for him a few years down the road for the District Award of Merit and Silver Beaver (although the Silver Beaver may take many more years, I guess).

The speaker for the evening was none other than Robert Birkby, who wrote, among other things, the last three editions of the Boy Scout Handbook! He gave a fantastic speech along with a great slideshow--and he indicated to the computer operator when to change slides by waving a semaphore flag.

After the ceremony, I approached Robert Birkby for an autograph and to ask if I could have my picture taken with him, because I thought my dad might be interested. Since I had nothing else with me for him to sign, I had him sign my program for the evening, then we got a passerby to take my pictures. The following picture shows us with his Troop 77 flag, which is in the Scouting Handbook (check p. 449 of the current version). Troop 77 no longer exists, so Robert was given the flag, which he has taken with him to such places as Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Everest.



A little while later, as I was talking with some other people there about my Wood Badge tickets, he tapped me on the shoulder and said he would like to talk with me for a minute before I left. So I wrapped up the conversation I was in, and he pulled out a big, beautiful, brightly colored Scouting Centennial book called Boy Scouts of America Scout Stuff, by (you guessed it!) Robert Birkby. He said, "You know, signing your program was cute and all, but I thought you ought to have something a little better than that. So tell me your name again." And he signed the book and gave it to me right there! Inside the cover was also a printed list of items in the book that were from his own collection.

After I thanked him again and hugged him and said good-bye, I was talking with Jack and our friend Merrill, and I said, half-jokingly, "Ha ha, I wonder if he could get me a job editing his stuff. On second thought, he'll probably say, 'How dare you! My work needs no editing! Gimme that book back!'"

Jack and Merrill pushed me to ask him anyway, thought, so I bothered Robert Birkby one more time to ask who I would talk to if I were interested in editing. He said, "Me, actually. Give me your contact information and I'll send your name to my editor and see if we can hook you up!"

Job or no, though, I met the guy who wrote the Boy Scout Handbook! And I got his autograph, and my picture with him, and he gave me a book, and yay! Coolest evening ever!

Stuff

Jack has been bugging me to update my blog, so here goes. Now shush, dear. :P

First on the list of things I'm required to write about, we spent so much time playing Wii Bowling that we decided to go normal bowling. Turns out I'm less terrible at it than I was last time I went bowling, which was about three years ago. In the first game, I beat Jack 95 to 88. YAY a win! After that, we were both warmed up, and I broke 100 on the second game with a score of 106 (this is the first time in my life I've broken 100 in a bowling game, so it's very exciting for me). Jack beat me with a score of 125. After that, my wrist was starting to get tired, but we did one more game, which I lost again 86 to 103. I didn't feel bad, though, because I kind of consider bowling to be a game where I mostly just play against myself, and other people happen to be playing too. The reason I view bowling this way is, of course, because I'm so bad at it normally. Apparently playing Wii Bowling has actually slightly improved my irl bowling. (Note for Mom and Dad: "irl" stands for "in real life.")

We also did Pinewood Derby, which was a blast. I got to be the one who set up and released the cars this year! YAY! Because of the way our brackets were set up, there were a couple kids who had to race an equalizer car, which was basically the block of wood with the wheels put on, painted like a school bus. The school bus was supposed to be horrendously slow and lose every race, but it actually beat two or three kids' cars, which made me feel a little bad. The school bus was the only one that I actually tried to turn a little crooked on the track to slow it down. It didn't work, though. Oops!

The kids all had fun anyway, though. Thirty scouts showed up, and after the scouts finished their races, five or six little brothers and sisters ran up with cars that they had made that they wanted to run down the track too.

Also, since springtime is apparently here now, Jack and I have been doing a lot more bicycle riding. In addition, I've started filling the bird feeder, for which I now have about 15 pounds of seed thanks to a Cub Scout project we did a few weeks ago. We saw a bird out there just now that I've seen a couple times before and forgot what it is. We looked it up and it's called a Spotted Towhee. Weird-looking thing with red eyes.

Anyway, other than that, not too much to tell. I still jog periodically. I've ridden my bicycle over 250 miles since September (I have a bike odometer now because I have to go 500 for my Wood Badge ticket). I beat Final Fantasies 7 and 8 and am playing 12 now, which is by far the best FF game I've ever played. Also, I'm studying for my ham radio license and am reading a book called Schwa Was Here, by Neal Shusterman. I'm only about forty pages into it, but I'm really enjoying it!


Okay, the end.

Update!

Last Christmas, we were in the process of moving from Alabama to Washington (state), and I was very sick on Christmas Eve. Consequently, I'm counting this Christmas as my first official Christmas married to Jack.

We got a real tree! A seven-foot Douglas fir. Jack has a buddy from work named Sean, and the day after we bought the tree, Jack and Sean went out to do Christmas shopping, and Sean's wife Samantha and I bought ornaments and lights and stuff and decorated the tree.



On Christmas, after going to church and singing/playing piano for the Christmas presentation thingummybobdoohickeywhatsit, we got down to opening presents. Akela immediately homed in on which one was hers.



We let the dogs open their gift from Grandma Dubby first. Blitzkrieg didn't seem nearly as excited about opening the gifts as Akela, so we let her do it.



We probably shouldn't have, though, because after she opened hers, she started wanting to help us open every other present too.



Especially the chocolate Jack got me.



I got him a Boy Scouts campaign hat, which I know he's been wanting. I don't think I got the size quite right, but they said he could take it in and exchange it if it didn't fit, so it's all good.



After that, Sean and Samantha came over. We ate salmon and shrimp scampi and happle pie and brownies, and then we played Farkle and Funglish and MarioKart Wii and Poker and then more Farkle. It was really fun.

Thanks, everyone who sent gifts! I don't want to list them all on here because I don't want to forget anything and then feel like a jerk, but thankyou thankyou thankyou!

Hallelujah!

Last night we went to a "Handel's 'Messiah' sing-a-long," which is something I had never heard of before. A buddy of ours who went to Wood Badge with us and goes to our church also (Got all that? That's the subject of the rest of this sentence) told me about it. At first I was a little noncommittal--"well, maybe I'll go, maybe I won't, I dunno, I'll talk to Jack..."--but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. After all, I do like classical music, and I like concerts. A sing-a-long, though?

Turns out that while the choir was professional, or at least semi-professional (at least I assume so because they were adults and they were excellent), the orchestra was a youth orchestra. The concert, which they put on every year, apparently, is free, but to buy a score (which is optional), it's ten bucks. So we bought one, and it was the actual full and complete score. All 252 pages of it.

Once we got there, we started looking for our friend, Merrill. We didn't find him, so we went up to one of the four balconies to look there. While we were looking, the usher lady saw the awe-struck look on my face and explained to me that the lowest balcony was called the "loge," then there was the lower mezzanine, the upper mezzanine, and... oh nuts, I forgot what the other one was called. It was at the top, and there were actually two, one on the left and one on the right. Then the people sitting on the ground-floor level were divided into sections: sopranos on the right, altos on the left, tenors mid-right, basses mid-left. They said wherever you sit, though, you can sing along, but the higher up you go, the fewer other people are likely to sing. The people who come just to watch tend to sit on the higher balconies. We wanted to sing, but we also wanted to sit together--plus we only had the one score--so we sat on the loge. Even though we were half an hour early, there were still only two seats left on the loge level. They happened to be together, halfway down a row right in the very front, so that I could stick my feet through the bars and let them dangle over the heads of the people walking below.

They only did an hour and a half of the four and a half hours the whole thing would take. Apparently tonight they're doing all four and a half, but I don't think I could actually sit still that long!

They swapped out conductors every few movements, and the conductors were really funny. My favorite was the guy who was balding on top and let his remaining white hair grow down to his shoulders to make up for it.

Every time the choir stood up to sing, the audience was asked to stand and sing as well. I'm not terribly ashamed to admit that while I did passably well, in several parts of the music, I haven't been so lost in any music since I was a freshman in high school. But it was super fun anyway! Definitely worth the ten bucks we paid. Plus the five it cost us to park in downtown Olympia. The only thing that could have been improved was the French Horn section. Only because there wasn't one. But the trumpet solos were outstanding.

Traffic light

On the way to my horse-feeding job, there's a traffic light that I'm convinced is controlled by a gremlin. If there's only one person stopped at the traffic light, it will turn green and stay green for a more or less standard amount of time. If, on the other hand, there's a line of four or five cars stopped at the light, it turns green just barely long enough for the first person to start moving, and then it turns red again. I'm not joking about this. The light is yellow for longer than it is green sometimes. I once pulled up behind two cars that were stopped at the light, and I watched the light go red-green-yellow-red so fast that the guy second in line had to rush through the yellow, and I had to stop and wait for the light to change again.

I bet the gremlin that works the light thinks that's just the funniest thing in the whole world. I sure do.

I made a song!

To the tune of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee":

I have a puppy dog.
Her picture's on my blog.
She's really neat.

She knows to sit and stay
When food is on its way.
She does this twice a day;
She loves to eat.

Lord of the Rings

Jack and I have been watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the course of the last several days. I figured this would be a good place to post my opinions regarding the cast of the movie. We'll start with what I like the least and work our way up from there.

I can't decide which I like less, Arwen or Frodo. The actor who played Frodo seems to have been chosen primarily for his ability to make that grimace of extreme pain.


Seriously, he makes this face or one very similar to it for practically the entire movie. When he's not making that face, he's making this one:


This is the one I call the I-love-you-Sam face. In addition, the actor can't seem to figure out whether he wants his character to be timid or authoritative, and I don't think that has to do with the ring. I can't blame the actor too terribly much, though, since the character himself is pretty lame. I think just about the only useful thing he does in any of the movies is solve the "Speak, friend, and enter" riddle to open the door into Moria. Other than that, the character is pretty wimpy. I mean, in the first few movies, he offers the magic ring of power and utmost evil to pretty much anyone taller than he is. Sam is constantly saving his sorry butt, and all Frodo really does is make one bad decision after another. The character doesn't seem to have any particularly redeeming qualities. But he's got a pretty face and brilliant blue eyes, so I guess he's always got that going for him.

The other character/actor I really don't like is Arwen. Seriously, I don't know what Aragorn sees in that chick. The character is completely useless in the movies. The only thing she does that is remotely cool is that little bit of fancy riding to get to Rivendell with Frodo, when she outrides the ringwraiths and then summons the water to wash them down the river. Okay, that was awesome. But in the books, that wasn't even Arwen; it was Glorfindel. After that, all she does is cry a lot and be seductive when she has the chance.

The actress made the wimpy character so much worse. Firstly, I never thought she was quite pretty/graceful enough to be an elf. I always imagined elves with more delicate, slightly pointy facial features, and her face is much too round. That aside, it's really annoying how she never raises her voice above a whisper. And unlike Frodo, who could at least make two different facial expressions, she only has the one. I mean, this is the most intense her face gets:


That's supposed to be the face of someone who is riding a horse at full gallop with nine ringwraiths in hot pursuit, almost on top of her. She's trying to balance a wounded, delirious hobbit (Frodo, of course) on the saddle, and she has to outrun the ringwraiths and get Frodo to Rivendell because if she doesn't keep the ring away from the ringwraiths, the entire world will be destroyed. Pretty intense, right? Maybe I'm crazy, but I just really don't see that reflected in her face.

Also, this is her angry face:


That's also her sad face, her neutral face, and her seductive face. And PS, that dress is horrendously ugly.

One more thing: Galadriel was super creepy.


Okay, now on to the characters and actors I really liked.

They picked a perfect actor for Gimli. He was phenomenal. Also, I can't, in good conscience, finish this post without mentioning how much I liked Faramir. Even though you felt bad for the guy because of the way his father treated him, he was still incredibly lovable. His eyes, like Frodo's, were a brilliant blue, but unlike Frodo's, Faramir's eyes were very expressive. They had a twinkle in them that could turn to sorrow so intense it made viewers sad too. Or maybe the sorrow came from seeing the twinkle leave those eyes, which was almost symbolic of watching darkness cover the land, as it would if the quest to destroy the ring failed.


I'm glad he ended up with Eowyn, who, by the way, was also totally awesome. The actress looked perfect for the role, if slightly older than she was in the books. According to the book, she was supposed to be like 18 or 20. So her crush on Aragorn was perfectly understandable. The hopeful look on her face as she fed him soup, hoping he would like it, although she was apparently an atrocious cook, was great. (About as great as the look on his face when he tasted it.) As she prepared Meri for war, she seemed just like a mother dressing up her young son for his first day of school.

There are several stories about women her age (-ish) dressing as men to go to battle and then doing something totally awesome to basically make their side win. This story was one of the best. She fought as well as any man, well enough to stay alive, which, in that kind of war, was feat enough. Then, to finish it up, she stabbed the Witch King, Sauron's most powerful pawn, right in the face. Frankly, I think she's easily the coolest chick in Middle Earth.


Finally, the guy who played Sam was fantastic. In the books, I didn't really like Sam much. Loyal as he was, he struck me as kind of clingy and a little annoying. In the movies, though, the actor breathed new life into Sam. You saw him playful, you saw him angry, you saw him crying, destitute because he had followed Frodo all the way to Mordor only to have Frodo tell Sam to go home as Frodo journeyed on with Gollum, who Sam knew wanted Frodo dead. (Did you follow that sentence?) If I were to pick one actor in the Lord of the Rings for the Best Acting Award, it would be the actor who played Sam.


Sam's character kicks butt. Without him, Frodo would never have gotten anywhere near Mordor. Sam saved Frodo's life so many times, and in the end, he carried Frodo up to Mount Doom, even though he had been journeying just as long and far as Frodo. He put up with more crap than anyone else in the trilogy, and struggled longer and harder, was more patient and focused, more loyal and devoted. Who wouldn't want a friend like Sam? In my opinion, Sam, not Frodo, should have been the celebrated hero at the end. I know he is in my head.

Electrocution

The horses I feed have this enormous watering trough. Lately, the water has been getting filthy as the horses drop grass and crud in it, and algae grows in the water. So for the last several days, I've been letting the water get low so that I can empty it out and scrub the trough. Today, I just used a bucket to bail out enough of the rest of the water that I could dump it and scrub it. Naturally, during the process, I got, if not soaked, then at least pretty wet.

Being the genius that I am, I thought I wouldn't have to turn off the electric fence for this process, nor would I have to duck under the fence to get into the right paddock to turn the water back off. Instead, I leaned across the fence to turn off the water pump, which ended up being slightly stuck in the "on" position. My knee got a little too close to the bottom part of the fence, and the next thing I knew, there was a flash of light and this big flash of pain in my chest and face as my heart and eyeballs tried to pop out of their respective places, and I was flat on my back about four feet away from where I was before. Lesson learned: Turn off the stupid fence next time. (It doesn't really hurt when it zaps me and I'm dry and not touching any metal, so I figured it wasn't a big deal. Silly me.)

Anyway, when I managed to stop twitching and get my heart rate under control, I went home and decided to look up whether there's anything you should do after you get zapped like that. I don't know why I bothered. I've been electrocuted before, worse than this, and I'm well aware that it's one of those things where if it doesn't kill you, then you're fine. But I tried anyway. Here's what came up:


If you have to, click on the image so you can see it full size, because it's worth reading.