Walkin' In The Tall Trees

Dashing down the road on my two-wheeled open sleigh!

2009-11-18T15:47:00.003-06:00

So, between my hand injury and the fact I had an upper respiratory infection the last two weeks, my exercise quotient has dropped a bit, much to my chagrin. However, through the power of amoxicillin, I'm back to at least being able to bike, if not kettlebell (heeeaaaaal, haaaand!)

Today I went for an exceedingly pleasant 10-mile ride out in the country where I admired such sights as lots of houses, horse farms, and fields full of cattle. The weather was so perfect I pretty much burst into song tooling down the road, and was ready to skip through a sunlit field holding hands.

The last couple months I lived in California, I didn't ride much - between June and the time I left I only put 150 miles on my roadbike, which is pretty shameful. I think my overall malaise at how desperate my situation ALWAYS seemed pretty much took my zest away, and riding seemed more of a chore than a joy. Now that I'm finally getting my financial situation a little more in order and working on getting over this whole breakup thing a little bit, I find myself increasingly back in my happy place.

So, in celebration of that, a picture of my steed, in front of a horsey and I think that's Lake Lavon in the background. Here's to me!

You Don't Want a Smart Dog

2009-10-29T15:37:00.003-05:00

As someone working towards being a dog trainer I sit and ponder the relationships people build with their dogs, and more than that, why people choose the dogs they do. Something that I've noticed is when many people meet Guinness, they say they want a dog just like him because he's so pretty, he has so much energy and life, he's so smart. For the most part, it is my humble opinion that those people need to get their heads out of their respective asses.

Here's the thing, people: you don't want a smart dog. You want a dog that's well-behaved, not more demanding than you're willing to give, and you mistake my awesome dog as the embodiment of those qualities. However, what most of these people aren't considering is the sheer amount of work necessary to make Guinness the dog he is - the training, attention, and sheer amount of exercise necessary to content Guinness vastly outstrips the needs of most of the dogs you meet in a day.

More than anything else, this is a factor of breed. Guinness is an Australian Cattle Dog/German Shorthair Pointer mix. It's hard to come up with a more energetic, intelligent breed combination than that and for the average owner, that is way too much time and responsibility to fit into their schedule.

As a for instance, I recently spent about 6 months living with a small mixed-breed terrier, and Guinness. If you were to leave Solomon to his own devices, he was perfectly content to lay on the couch and snooze for probably 15 hours a day. You could cook a meal, clean the house, and all the while Solomon was content to simply chill out. Meanwhile, if I decide to go into the bathroom, when I open the door, Guinness will be laying just behind it, staring intently at the door waiting for me to come back out. If I don't walk him, he starts climbing the walls. He just runs on an entirely different octane than the average dog. It's like trying to make a Ferrari your running-around car to pick up the kids - that car is just better suited to an owner who will realize the full potential locked up within.

Additionally, in the times where I'm NOT walking, playing with, training, or otherwise actively engaged with Guinness, I have to provide for his entertainment. Not in an effort to spoil him but rather because if left alone too long, Guinness will invent his own amusements. For many dogs this includes digging, barking, becoming escape artists, and a number of pastimes that will make the owner regret they ever thought a dog was a good idea.

However, for the prepared owner, an extremely intelligent dog is a very rewarding, engaging experience. I rarely have as much fun as when Guinness and I are out on the trail alone together hammering out another loop. Or when I'm teaching him a new command (for instance, he finds my keys on command, is aware enough of sled dog commands to run alongside my bicycle, and high fives on his right foot, shakes with his left). So for me a dog of such intelligence is a good idea. But most people need to VERY STRONGLY consider themselves before they get a dog they can't handle and it ends up in the shelter system.

Schnick!

2009-10-15T09:59:00.003-05:00

So Saturday I was cutting up a potato with a mandolin, like you do. And schnick! I schnicked off the very tip of my righthand pinky almost down to the bone. I sat down on the couch clutching my hand in a pile of gauze. Which I bled through. Actually, I bled through 5 wads of gauze in between passing out.

So we wrapped my finger up and I curled up around my hand and tried to sleep. The next day, when we unwrapped the dressing to clean it, as my hand went under the very small dribble of cool water to rinse it, I then saw white. My next memory is sitting down on the toilet with my mom holding my head between my knees. So off to the doctor we went!

We walked into the emergency care clinic, and my mom tells the lady, "Hi, we called you earlier, my daughter cut her hand?"

Receptionist: How bad is it?
Me: You tell me.

As I pull the wad of gauze I'm clutching off and hold my hand up, I then got to watch her face go white.

Receptionist: I gotta say, I would not be nearly so cheerful about this.
Me: I'm pretty much faking it.

They hustled me back to an area so I could lie down and a nurse came back to clean my hand. Even the doctor-approved soaking-wet-with-antiseptic piece of sterile gauze she put onto my finger to ever-so-gently sterilize the wound made me see pretty colors and stars.

So according to the doc, there isn't terribly much they can do - it just needs to heal from the inside out. Apparently, maybe I could see a plastic surgeon later to make my wonky-looking pinky a little more normal looking (riiiight....this scar is gonna get me soo many drinks with Tanner's chef buddies).

The unfortunate side effect of there-not-being-much-they-can-do is I now have a wound that could be best described as "juicy". When I did something similar to part of my thumb, it took 2 weeks for it to stop periodically bleeding (particularly when I'd like, pick something up). If I recall, it also took about 2 weeks for all the nerve endings in my hand to stop screaming at me every two seconds. So here I am, 5 days later, still bleeding through bandages and shrieking any time I have to change the dressing.

On the bright side....they DID give me 30 Vicodin. I now see why.

Being a Bike Chick

2009-10-12T14:40:00.004-05:00

Women are a cycling 'indicator species', according to this article in Scientific American. As BikeSnobNYC notes, much of cycling is shrouded in this "macho" image in which even recreational cyclists feel compelled to do ridiculous shit like try to ride up to Skyline Road in NorCal on fixed gear bikes, mostly (as far as I can tell), because its ridiculously painful.

It became really apparent how unusual it is to be a fairly dedicated Bike Chick the day I walked into Palo Alto Bicyclery holding my front wheel in one hand and holding my Cannondale up on its back wheel by the handlebars. I was instantly surrounded by salesmen. As I spoke to a couple of them, I asked why the sudden attention, and they said "We just don't get many chicks in here towing their roadbike". Huh. I'll be damned. It might also kind of explain why most women's road bikes are either painted pastel or covered in flowers. My bike is about the least flashy women's bike I could find, and it STILL looks like this:

But sincerely, as someone who went from zero to two bikes in a year, I understand. As a chick on a roadbike, if you ride with dudes (and unless you're very lucky, you'll mostly be riding with dudes), you'll almost without fail be the slowest one. You're eternally staring at the back of their heads a block ahead of you, flipping gears, and spinning as hard as you can to catch up. I know, its frustrating.

I also, as a commuter, ride in traffic. My friend Dina was my only chick-friend that rode in California, and I taught her how to deal with traffic. It's scary. Particularly in S.F., where you're dodging traffic, doors, pissed off pedestrians, and oh, have I mentioned it's almost all uphill? Or on the other side, going balls-fast downhill with a stoplight at the bottom?

So I understand why for the most part, women are considered a sign that a city is bike friendly, precisely because it's a dangerous activity. But on the other hand, I wish more women rode if only because while dangerous, it's also incredibly fun and good for you. It's practical, it's easy to be green as a cyclist, your stress level goes down, and so does your waistline. Wear a helmet, hop on your bike, and just TRY riding to the store, and I can almost promise you won't die.

Things I Forgot About

2009-10-08T10:46:00.006-05:00

Weather: Oh, how I have missed you, Real Weather. California's weather patterns are best described as "Perfect, but Seasonal" - i.e. in summer it's 90 degrees and sunny. In fall it's 70 degrees and sunny with occasional days of rain. In "winter" it sometimes even gets cold, but mostly just rains constantly with itermittent days of sunshine. In spring: see fall.

On the other hand, Texas brings an amazing element of unpredictability - you actually have to monitor the weather forecast. In the first three days I've been home, the first day it thunder stormed, the second day was cold and windy with only a minor amount of drizzle, today it's warm as hell and threatening-but-we're-not-sure to storm again. I'm now racing the weather to get my dog walked.

Racial Tension: this barely exists in California, however I'm not convinced it's because of any inherent cultural diversity found in California not to be found here. Let's face it, Dallas is diverse as hell. However, the mentality is totally different and I'm remembering what it's like to be periodically disgusted with the ignorant-ass statements you hear while just getting through the day.

TELEVISION: Oh, holy shit, TV. I haven't had television in about 2 years, and haven't regularly watched TV since I moved out of the house. Mostly because I can never remember when things come on. But either way, here at home they have a bigass HD flatscreen and DirectTV with aaalll the channels. I've watched more History International in 3 days than in the last two years.

Also, how much coke do you have to be on to be this guy?

Home again, home again

2009-10-05T21:42:00.003-05:00

So I've sat down and written half-a-post a few times in the last few days. Due to Life Happening, I've moved back to Texas, and am officially home as of today. It's a tad surreal to say the least.

They say you can't go home - what I've always assumed that really meant is that you can't ever go back in time. There's nothing in life that is static and the world you grew up in moves on without you. Life is change and you can't expect the world to have frozen in your absence, awaiting your return. And holy shit are they right.

I've been out of the house over 5 years now. In that time, I've done a lot of things, met a lot of people, etc - all the things you do when you bust out onto the world. Meanwhile, home has also changed a lot. My friends from high school have (rightfully) moved on with their lives, I don't particularly care to go back to any of the jobs I had last time I was a resident, I don't even live in the same house.

On the other hand, things are eerily familiar. I know all the streets but can't quite remember how a lot of them interact, partially because some things have been rerouted (big surprise, right? see: life is change, above).

Guinness is at the very least content to be out of the car, fed, and sleeping somewhere stable and familiar tonight. Life really really does not suck. We're warm, fed, and have a roof over our heads. It's just weird.

I went through the desert with a dog with a name....

2009-10-04T10:11:00.007-05:00

A couple weeks ago I left California and drove the two days to New Mexico, where we crashed for a day to decompress, and then headed onwards towards home. The drive itself was a long one - a total of 25 hours spent in the car, and only towards the end of the drive did it occur to me I was the only one in the car who had recently done a drive of that magnitude.

Almost a year and a half in California without leaving made me forget what the rest of the country looks like, though the memories of my various homes have stayed visible in my mind.

An odd sensation I got when we rolled into Albuquerque was that of my natural habitat. Guinness and I are BOTH non-natives to California. My family has existed in or around that one city in New Mexico since the 1700s (at least, that we've been able to trace). I got out of the car, smelled the desert, and just felt comfortable.

Outside a truck stop....somewhere in New Mexico. Doesn't he look comfortable?

While I'd only done the Bay Area Southerly Route once, the drive from Albuquerque home to Dallas is one I've done more times than I have fingers and toes on which to count. That being said, however, holy shit is the Panhandle of Texas flat. Like, miles and miles of just.....nothing.

No, really

This was taken 50 miles later. I'm seriously not shitting you, it's just hours of this exact landscape.

I think part of what's so surreal about having moved home is exactly the feeling of being a local. I haven't been a local to where I lived since I was in high school - in Alabama, I was a Texan, in California, I was the chick from Alabama. Here....this is just where I'm from. Me and everyone else that lives here.

The deplorable state of cycling in Dallas

2009-09-29T12:29:00.004-05:00

So I'm moving home this week and among the many things giving me trepidation at the near future is the basic fact I'm moving to DALLAS. They're on the Top 10 Worst Cities for cycling. Seriously.

And there appears to be essentially NO information available on the subject on the internets?! What an idea, right? From what I've gathered, the drivers are not terribly yielding, there are basically no bike lanes (shame on you, city of Plano!), and could often be described as "Terrifying". My theory is, is it MORE or LESS terrifying than biking around San Francisco on new years?

Since it looks like I'll be working in West Plano (and will be residing out in the western part of Wylie, way east), I'm going to be crossing essentially ALL of Plano at least a couple times a week to get to work. I'm not sure if this will be a straight shot up a road like Park, or if I should try to organize a route along the basic network of bicycle trails that are available through the department of Parks and Rec. That's right, in Texas, the bike network is handled through RECREATION, not transportation.

And there's our problem right there - people in Texas think of the bike as a toy, something to be abandoned once you get old enough for a car of your very own. Never mind the personal and community benefits of vehicular cycling.

For one, Dallas is FLAT - on the wonderful roads we have in Dallas, with clearly marked bike lanes I could probably spin the 12 miles to work in about 40 minutes and have absolutely no change in elevation the whole ride. That's probably exactly as long as it takes to warm my car up, drive from Wylie to Preston, get my car in the parking lot, and park at my final destination.

Dallas already has the roads, all they need to do is paint the stripes on them to help protect cyclists from cars and vice versa - we're all just vehicles trying to get where we're going.

So, here is my mission - show people (well, at least, my family and the people I know) that cycling in Texas isn't just an exercise thing, it's not just for fun. It's a whole way of getting around and seeing the world. Let's see if I just have my head up my ass, shall we?

It turns out you can go home again

2009-09-28T13:01:00.003-05:00

So in the time since I stopped being good about updating things, many a happening has...happened. In short - I'm moving back to Texas. Not that I'm terribly, overly pleased by this, but life's rough, and holy shit is Silicon Valley, CA expensive - everything from the cost of gas to the sales tax.

Dave and I have broken up. We dated the whole time I've lived here, 15 months, and I don't regret moving here or having been with him - both were great ideas with terrible timing. There are a lot of what-if's and I-wish's associated with leaving, but overall it's what I need to do. Financial stability is something I need to regain, and I need to re-focus myself on doing something with myself, quite likely in the graduate school direction.

Life's going to be okay, but with this move I'm leaving a whole experiment behind and heading home a completely different person than I was when I left. So once again, it's time to roll some dice and see how they land.

The hair experiment

2009-07-22T17:47:00.002-05:00

So I read an article the other week about 5 women that were asked to stop washing their hair for 6 weeks to determine what would happen. And what happened, apparently, is all the brunettes loved what it did. So my current employment situation (i.e. no longer in corporate America) allows me to look more or less however I want, and I am now 1 1/2 weeks into not washing my hair at all.

As anticipated, the first week has been pretty awful-looking. I look greasy as hell and as a result, have started just yanking my hair back into a ponytail every day. I shower daily, and it doesn't have a smell or anything.

My previous hair care regimen has been pretty salon-approved: wash and condition every day with the high-end stuff (it comes in an orange bottle and costs $20). Then leave-in products to take the frizz/curl factor and make it shiny. So needless to say its sort of been weird, having a greasy head full of hair.

However I have hope! For one, within one week, its stopped tangling altogether. Not only that, but its way, way easier to style - all the grease just sort of molds my hair into place. We'll find out what changes in the next few weeks of me being a grease-head, though.

On blogging

2009-04-06T19:56:00.003-05:00

So I looked at my blogspot account today - holy shit, I've really let this sit since August? As far as I remember, the intention of the exercise journal was to more or less replace this one. In retrospect, I'm not sure why because excepting the intensely focused period from Jan-May 2008, I've never been good at regimented record keeping in my life (thank god for online banking).

So, with the understanding I haven't said shit in awhile, my life has by almost all measures drastically changed. For one and to repeat, still in California, only I've moved a scoche south to right-north-of-San Jose. I've taken up cycling like a house on fire and am now not the proud owner of one, but two bikes. One's a matte grey commuter covered after-market stuff, the other is a black roadbike with white handlebars. It's a pimpmobile that rides like a torpedo. So far my best ride has been 55 miles, and according to the routeguide, 1900 feet of climbing. To all those who know me best, nope. Still look the same :-P. As ever (could be all the beer).

I'm still dating Dave. Actually, we're living together, with our friend Brad, who is an asshole in all the funnest ways. Guinness turned 3 a week and a half ago, and is doing well. We're going for a walk, actually, as soon as I finish this up.

Bam! Dog inna Redwood!
Actually, this picture is a bit old, Guinness has had a teal collar covered in turtles for some time now.

I'm employed! I work right near the Googleplex selling and schmoozing in the whole Silicon Valley thing. It's quite strange. I'm also studying for the GRE so I can hopefully get my learn on. Additional learn, that is.

Anyways, the Crown Prince of Murphy Ave demands a walk. What can I do but comply?

My Roommate

2008-08-18T14:44:00.003-05:00

Sadly for me, the bay area is Fucking Expensive, which means there's no way in god's green earth I can afford to live alone. What this means is that considering this is a brand new city for me, I didn't know anyone and ended up browsing the rooms for rent section of Craigslist. I ended up in a duplex in Belmont with my new roomie, C, and his dog Watson.

C is an interesting fellow. He works with heavy machinery and generally seems to live by the unoffical Louisiana state motto - Laissez les bon temps rouler. I don't know if I've ever met someone who has that certain.....elán vital. A certain je ne sais quoi. He regularly comes home from his plethora of athletic activities drunk as a skunk and the first thing he usually does is fawn all over the dogs and then generally eats the kitchen. For someone who voluntarily lived alone for 2 years straight, it's a bit of an adjustment. Oh, and he refers to his kid's mom as his Baby Mama, which alone gives me more mileage than you'd believe. It's just two little words. Baby Mama. Any yet.....

Oh, and he's pretty OCD about house cleanliness. Compared to my last apartment, this place is like a doctor's office for cleanliness.

So Now That I'm Here

2008-08-14T14:24:00.002-05:00

So to recap, I decided at some point in the last 12 months to move to California after graduation, so here I am. The startup that I interviewed at is apparently waiting for the second coming of christ to hire me (actually I think they're waiting on funding), and I got tired of waiting, so all I do lately is look for a job. And who wouldn't want an articulate, educated polyglot in their office? Apparently, everyone.

Despite my employment trepidations (which believe me, occupy a lot larger place in my mind than I'm going to allow for in inches of text on this blog), California is in fact, the shit. The weather is beautiful, and the amount of stuff to do that's relatively free is amazing (as long as you have the gas to get there). In the last month, I've seen 3 separate beaches, a Giants game, and a Flogging Molly concert, all free of admission.

For those who are wondering, Guinness is doing beautifully. To quote Ted, he is handling the oddity of time travel with the greatest of ease. In another astonishing development (most of all to me), I'm actually dating. Holy shit, there's a nice boy interested in me. What a thought. There's some part of me that's waiting on the ball to drop because someone that cool should seriously not be interested in someone as blatantly uncool as myself, but he seems to dig incredibly clumsy, occasionally awkward girls who constantly trip over things. So one day at a time I guess. Life seems to have taken on an episodic nature. Anyways, I wrote this entire update while jerked up on caffeine, so I'm going to go jitter for awhile and continue to call back potential job leads.

Ch-ch-ch-cha-changes.....

2008-08-13T18:14:00.004-05:00

So the last time I posted to this I was employed, about to graduate college, and still lived in Alabama. Life's a bit different now. I did indeed graduate, to much pomp and circumstance. The only hitch was the restaurant at which I made reservations....doesn't take reservations, it turns out. Kim, however, came through with her special magical powers, and got us a table at Mellow Mushroom in about 5 minutes.

After that, I traveled to Albuquerque for my cousin Ronnie's graduation. Albuquerque, as always, was nothing but a flurry of alcohol and green chile, much to my satisfaction. From Albuquerque, I flew to California for a job interview at Zvents.com, a startup company. I stayed in California for a week, and pretty much did nothing but marvel at how awesome the weather was. Seriously, these people have 70 degree weather in summer. It's like Pleasantville.

I came back to Alabama, and stayed for three marvelous last weeks of doing nothing but move out of my sweltering, un-air conditioned apartment. God, the C was a piece. In the effort of moving, I pretty much got rid of everything I owned. It was a firesale - everything must go. My couch, gone to Kim and Shannon's. My kitchen equipment met similar circumstances. Pretty much the only things I kept were my dog, my clothes, a few books and movies, my gun, and my bong. I broke not one, but two of my glass pieces in the process of moving. I had never previously hurled a desk off a staircase, either. All in all, that process sucks donkey balls.

Either way, in late June, I turned in my keys, cried all over Kim, Shannon, the pack, and the fair city of Tuscaloosa, and drove away for what may be ever (who knows, at this point?). Guinness and I hit the road to Nashville on a rather sour note - it poured the whole way to Nashville, so much so that we stopped and chilled out in a parking lot while we waited on the rain to subside. Several hours later, we made it to Nashville! Into the loving arms of the family we fell, weed-jar carefully tucked away in Guin's bag of dog food, bong wrapped in a blanket, stuffed in my hiking pack. We go incognito, bitches.

We stayed in Nashville a week, and did not much but help dad install various contracting-type things (including but not limited to lighting and flooring), eat, and get my tan on at my sister's girlfriend's apartment complex pool. Pleasant, in a sort of please-god-get-me-the-hell-out-of-here type way. The real hitch was dad had decided to come along for the 2400 mile drive in my Cavalier, which meant that my already-pared down pile of stuff had to make room for my dad. Joy of joys.

Dad and I left the last bit of June, and made the drive from Nashville to San Francisco in three days, which for those who have never done it, is an unreal pace. We drove from about 5 a.m. until about 8 p.m. every day. And we only had one major fight the whole way, which seemed to put a damper on all the other fighting we could have been doing. So we got me here, got me moved in, then Dad went home two days early, because let's face it, he's my dad, and this is California. He wanted to go home.

So I live in California now. It's mid-August, and I'm still not employed, though every day I'm working on it. The economy isn't nearly such a force in your life when you're in college. So that's really what there is to tell (at least at the moment). I live in a house in Belmont, CA, my roommate is a nut, and has an awesome dog named Watson with whom Guinness originally engaged in fisticuffs, but now they're buddies. Life's sort of plodding along a day at a time, so it's basically the same, only its not as hot outside. Hooray.

My last finals week

2008-05-05T10:23:00.002-05:00

As usual, I'm shitting a brick, but this time its bricks of forthcoming nostalgia - I'm graduating college on Saturday, as terrifying as that is. I've completed and presented my senior project, I have one paper, and my Japanese final, and that's it. I'm done. Stick the proverbial fork in me and all that.

If you look back over the blog the last four years, like clockwork, every December and May, I've made a post to the effect of "AAAAAH, IT'S FINALS WEEK *runs around with hair on fire*". While I totally don't blame myself for feeling like that one, I'm definitely making note this finals week, because it's my last one. So here's to you, finals week. Let's do this dance one more time, then after that I'm getting hammered.

También, feliz cinco de mayo, todos!

So here's the thing

2008-04-03T14:47:00.002-05:00

I know I have damn near abandoned this blog the last year or thereabouts. But here's the thing. It's my senior year of college, and I'm busting my ass to get everything done so that May 10 when it comes time to walk across the stage and graduate, I have left everything on the field, so to speak. Basically, I'm busy as fuck, broke as hell, and while I'm getting into a lot of interesting things, taking a lot of beautiful pictures, writing a lot of theories, and reading a lot of books, I have basically zero time to add it to this blog. Unless y'all want to read sentences like, "With a multi-pronged interdisciplinary approach to my research I hope to create a comprehensive picture of applied linguistics within the post-secondary language classroom," I'm sort of on hiatus. May 11 though, I'll probably be so relieved I made it through, I'll be having a day-long celebration of the lifting of pressure off my shoulders, and I can stop being such a constantly busy, cranky bitch.

I'll see you when I see you.

A Short Thought

2008-01-24T17:46:00.001-06:00

Hooray for beer, pad thai, and cartoons!

New Years Recap: Pt III

2008-01-17T22:07:00.001-06:00

Christmas break, as I said, was a non-stop eating, drinking, sleeping relaxation-fest. I came home almost two weeks ago, and began my final semester of undergrad classes last Wednesday. This semester, it's my senior independent project, Japanese, and a Holocaust seminar.

I've given up Chinese for one really big reason - there ain't no fuckin' way. I felt like I wasn't progressing at the rate of the rest of the class, or for that matter at all. Sue me, I'm not perfect.

Other than that, Kim and Justin have moved a whole half mile away, and I see them pretty much just as often as I did when we lived in the same house. I can afford to eat again, and I'm trying to figure out what sort of job I want to get. Life is amazing in its ability to settle back down into a rhythm. So here I am, I spent the day at the arboretum walking the dogs with Kim and Justin, then doing homework, and I just spent an hour updating this blog. So.....same shit, different day.

A Happy New Year's Recap: Pt. II

2008-01-17T21:51:00.000-06:00

Guinness and I got to Dallas on Sunday, with full intentions on doing nothing but sloth around, not be criminally broke or hungry all the time, and not be constantly terrified of eviction. Basically I needed a break. The world kicked my ass for awhile, and once finals ended, the dam sort of broke for me. It was either go home for awhile, or start killing people.

Home was....blissful. It was filled with good times with my family, good times with my Dallas friends (old, new, and otherwise), and a much-needed respite from the continual beating life had been delivering me lately. Almost as soon as Guinness and I hit the ground, we went over to Saraliza's. I saw Sara more in the last month than the last 2 years.

It's amazing how much I've changed in the last few years, at least on the inside (I still look as much like myself as ever). I'm a grownup, or so it seems. I also can't stand driving any farther than 20 minutes to go anywhere, it seems. A few years of the close proximity of a small town has completely warped my sense of distance, and everything in Dallas is a gargantuan distance (it seems). My mom and I hung out, I saw my sister, my cousin, my aunt, my uncles.....all those people I haven't seen regularly in 4 years now. I realized the life path I'm choosing for myself seems to be unique amongst them, or to phrase that another way, I'm the only dirty hippie scholar this family has thus far produced.

Guinness likes the bar as much as anyone else.

Guinness is concerned with his GPA, and had a meeting with the registrar.

The nail I ran over one day, resulting in a flat tire, and then later, a new tire as the hole proved unrepairable.

Saraliza is camera-shy, and wouldn't let me post the picture of her, drinking pomegranate moonshine that she made on her countertop, out of a mason jar. We watched waaaaay too much Squidbillies. But anyways, here's a picture of our dogs together.

A Happy New Year to You All

2008-01-17T21:22:00.000-06:00

It says here on my Blogger homepage that the last time I posted to this blog was Nov 12, 2007. In that period, time sort of seems to have completely melted and escaped me - I never meant to leave this sight to rot whilst I galivanted off to the exotic locales of Nashville and Dallas for the holidays.

Almost immediately after my apartment woes hit their peak, Thanksgiving rolled around the corner, for which Guinness and I adjourned to Nashville for what turned out to be a pleasant 5 days of non-stop eating. I got home that Monday, and began preparing for finals, which were looking to kick my happy ass. In the midst of all this, one Wednesday Anabelle began acting oddly, descending from "Off her feed", so to speak, to full blown sickness in a day. Kim took her to the vet, where a number of tests were run and it was inconclusively theorized that she might have an autoimmune disorder.

We brought her home, with plans to make gingerbread that evening in hopes of cheering up Kim (when Anabelle is sick, Kim does nothing but worry). Around 9 pm I was in my car heading to the grocery store to pick up something I had forgotten in my initial trip when I got a call from Justin telling me Anabelle had started drooling and swaying, then collapsed at her water bowl and that they were going to the e-vet whether I could make it home or not.

I pulled a U-Turn in the middle of 13th Street, raced home, and joined Justin as we went to the emergency vet clinic. They looked her over, and gave her a steroid shot, and sent us home. 2 hours later, Anabelle was laying under the desk on her side, and each breath was more of a gasp, shallow, rapid breaths and easily one of the most terrified expressions I've ever seen on a living creature on her face. Kim called our vet, who plainly admitted that he didn't know what was wrong with her, and didn't have the equipment for a proper diagnosis. Autoimmune disorders don't descend from perfectly-healthy to near-dead in two days. She was going to have to be rushed to the veterinary school at Mississippi State if we wanted her to live, but we needed to go by the emergency vet first to have them make sure she'd survive the hour and a half car trip.

So we (Kim and Guinness took the front seat, I sat with Anabelle in the back, and her parents in their car), drove to another state at 1 am to save the life of the dog. If only they knew how loved they are. We got her to the animal hospital, and then dragged ourselves back to Tuscaloosa at about 5.

Anabelle stayed at MSU for 3 days. It turned out that Anabelle's habit of chasing and killing vermin out in the country by Kim's parents' house resulted in the ingestion of a significant amount of rat poison, which in turn nearly killed her. Many hundreds of dollars later, 2 units of plasma, whopping doses of Vitamin K, a temporary heart murmur, and a completely shaved underside later, we went and got the princess from the hospital, safe and sound. In the process of healing over that few days, she lost ten pounds of muscle mass.

Easily one of the worst nights of my life.

Soon after came finals, which went remarkably smoothly considering the semester we'd had. The Saturday after finals, I loaded my dog and our crap into my car and set off for Dallas. As Guinness and I headed west on I-20 past the Mississippi, the eastbound I-20 freeway in Monroe, Louisiana exploded. The gas line running under the road somehow ignited and exploded, killing two people, and completely shutting down any sort of travel on this road. Meanwhile, I was sitting 20 miles outside Monroe in traffic, not moving. I got on the horn with my mom and found out what had happened, then jumped the grass median in my Cavalier and backtracked 30 miles in the dark to Vicksburg, Mississippi. Guinness and I found a La Quinta, and flopped down for the evening. In the endless ghetto that is rural Mississippi, I've never been so glad to own a large dog in my life. The next day, considerably disgruntled, we got back on the road and made it to Dallas by 3.

My apartment woes continue - I'm pretty sure I can officially say 2007 has blown for the most part

2007-11-12T11:50:00.000-06:00

Saturday night I was relaxing at my apartment, which is an attic apartment (I have the whole second floor), one of four that my house is broken up into. One, the entire front of this old-ass house, is condemned. The other two are rentable, though one is currently vacant. The other is rented by my best friend and her boyfriend. That evening, I finished watching a movie and Kim (said best friend) called to ask if I wanted to come play some Wii and hang out, which is always ALWAYS a yes. As I was walking around the front of the house with my dog, a cop was doing a foot patrol through my neighborhood, though since the football team is away this weekend, it was dead silent and he was probably bored as hell, and he saw a nice girl with a big ol' dog.

Just as I thought he was about to chastise me to put my dog on a leash (Guinness is trained - he doesn't take off on me), he said hi to the dog and we started chatting. As we shot the breeze, he the sniffed air, then said "Is that gas?"

Me: (mentally thinking "SON OF A BITCH) Yeah, it is. It's coming out of the water heater for the whole house in that front vacant apartment.
Him: Um, that's a major hazard. It's flammable and can make you really sick. Can you show me where it is?
Me: Sure officer, it's right over here.

(Note: I'm a 21 year old college student stoner with a healthy resultant fear of The Man)

So I led him around to my side of the house, showed him through the window by my staircase where the water heater is, and the next thing I know, he's called the Tuscaloosa Fire Department, Alagasco (Alabama Gas Company), and my landlord. At midnight. I said "Alrighty, I'm just going to go tell my friends what's up."

So I tore ass around to Kim and Justin's place because we ALL have dogs (I rent from the slumlords of this particular college ghetto - my entire street is owned by them, and every house on my block has a dog they're not llowed to have), and the three dogs weigh a combined 200-odd pounds. Large breed dogs aren't allowed. We recently got caught with the dogs, and hence are quite spooky about having it happen again. Justin, who speaks "Straight-laced upper middle class white male," and is way less sketchy around the police than I am, went out to talk to them, meanwhile I threw all three dogs in Kim's Subaru, went upstairs and grabbed my backpack full of study materials, a bag of dog food for the night, a bowl, a leash, and one tshirt, and got the hell out of my apartment. The total elapsed time since the cop started calling people - about 7 minutes.

I come out of my apartment onto my rickety-ass wooden staircase and see a Tuscaloosa fireman going into the vacant front apartment through the window on my staircase. Apparently, either NOTHING was going on, or gas leaks are not taken lightly. I'm going with the latter.

Now, I've known that thing leaks gas. When they ran new gas lines out months ago, the guys doing it mentioned that they needed to put a vent on that water heater, but it never got done. We've had workmen in and out of this house a dozen times, and mentioned it quite a few, but it never got fixed. That water heater, and the only window in the whole place that allows any sort of circulation, is right below my kitchen window, and in summary, has been leaking gas straight into my apartment for months, giving me a constant headache, and mild Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Not bad enough to like, land me at a doctor, but fairly bad chronic headaches, etc. For months.

From what Kim and Justin told me as they held down the fort here, the fire department and the Alagasco lady were fairly appalled at the state of affairs here at the green house on 11th street, the Alagasco lady going so far as to say she couldn't believe my rental company rents this place out and says it's liveable, because it isn't. There are more things wrong with this house than their are hairs on my head, it seems. Between this and the dog debacle a few weeks ago, I need a fucking hug.

So, in summary.

Dear Rental Company,

FUUUUUUUUUUUCK. YOU. I hope you burn in hell you miserable, backhanded, slum lord pieces of shit. I'd love nothing so much as to burn your village and hear the lamentation of your women, but as it stands, I'm going to see if I have any sort of grounds for a lawsuit. I went and got a carbon monoxide detector today, hopefully with a vent on the water heater my headaches and constant mild wooziness will clear up, and you'll leave me the FUCK alone to live quietly until I graduate in May. All I need is May. That's not long. I'll be amazed if this fucking place doesn't just fall apart like the car at the end of the Blues Brothers before then, but all I need is to make it til May.

Thanks for nothing you slimy twits,
Annie

I've edited this post to add pictures of the insanity. Sorry for the fuzzy words, but I forgot anything done in paint will be quite lossy when saved as a jpeg. You'll live.

On the Run From The Man

2007-10-22T13:56:00.000-05:00

At the moment, I'm on the run from the man, specifically my landlord. The last couple weeks, there have been a number of maintenance guys around cleaning up the bottom apartment where my now-evicted Sketchy Neighbor used to reside, and in the process of this happening, it came to their attention that Kim's bathroom was in a deplorable state of affairs. During the construction of her new bathroom I was taking care of Anabelle, as it's a poor idea to have workmen and a 95 pound dog in one space.

Unfortunately, they or someone else ratted me out for having a dog to my landlord, and I recently got a lovely letter from the rental company telling me (in summary), "It has come to our attention there is a dog on the premises. It either needs to be under 20 pounds, or it needs to go," (that's a bit of a paraphrase, but that's the summary). Unfortunately, neither Guinness nor Anabelle is under 20 pounds.

So I went up to my rental company and told them that the dog wasn't mine, I was taking care of it for a friend and it was now gone, but that I do have a cat. I gave them a picture of Kitty, gave them a fee, they approved him, and sometime in the next week, I'm going to be coughing up a pet deposit. In the meantime, however, in case they come to inspect, Guinness and I are on the run. We're currently staying out in Tuscaloosa county at Kim's parents house (they're somewhere in the wilds of northern Georgia, camping) with Kim, Justin, Anabelle, Kitty, Kim's parents' old dog April, and myself in some sort of crazy Animal House-like roommate situation while we plan our next move.

So, let's make an addition to The Big List.

The Big List of Things I've Done That Don't Sound Advisable On Paper
(not necessarily in chronological order, nor is it an endorsement of any of these as a good idea)

Moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama from Dallas, Texas
Slept in a parking lot in Wyoming
Hidden a dog from my landlord, gotten caught, and gone on the lam
Mixed Acid and Xanax, woke up the next morning still tripping balls, and drove to Nashville
Jumped 30 feet off a cliff into a lake
Hitchhiked with, and then bought weed from some dude named Felix in the Caribbean
College. That word encompasses more drinking, experimental substance abuse, and premarital fornication than I can possibly express in just one sentence.
Run from the cops
Set off a bunch of fireworks in a neighborhood, then run from the cops
Set off a bunch of fireworks in the sticks, and damn near blown up a boat. Later that night we set the lawn on fire by accident. I later woke up in a recliner with a pitbull laying on me, to the sounds of Sapphic moaning coming out of my bulldyke friend and her girlfriend in the other room. In a doublewide trailer. On New Years morning.
Blacked out, somehow lost my pants and shoes in two separate locations, driven home, woken up in my apartment on the third floor of Riverside.

Aaaaand I'm spent for the moment.

The Shape I'm In

2007-10-17T00:23:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was fall break, which I thoroughly enjoyed, about 3 times more than I expected. The reason for that is I worked a day and a bit all fall break. And the reason for that is I walked out of my job in the middle of a shift on Saturday. It was intensely liberating to stop putting up with the bullshit, and though I find myself unemployed, I'm going to see if I can't live on the parental teat for my last semester of college.

Here's what happened. Saturday I was scheduled to work a 1 o'clock B.D. shift. That means "til business dies down", which unfortunately for us was not looking early. So, admittedly, I was a bit bitter about that and had been grousing. I've been threatening to quit for a couple months now.

Around 2 o'clock, a table went down in Section G, which I was running a part of, and I checked with the hostess to see if it was for me (it shouldn't have been - I was at my three-table limit). She said it was not in fact for me, but for another server, who I passed a couple minutes later, and upon my inquiry of, "Hey, you got that?" he replied with a, "Yeah, I'm straight." I was working on the assumption everyone was on the same page.

We discovered, ten minutes later when this table had still not been greeted, got up and left, that the other server and I had a slight communication breakdown - he didn't realize I was talking about a table in G, he thought I meant a different one. Our service pro jumped on us about it, I replied "Dude, the hostess said it wasn't for me, the other server said they were cool, so I let it go. My bad." Let's all move on with life, quit triple seating me.

An hour and a half later or so, I had 3 tables about to cash out when another table for me went down in my section. Our service pro told me I needed to sweep up around the salad bar for sidework.

Me: Okay, let me get this table greeted and I'll do that.
Her: Oh, NOW you're concerned about greeting tables.
Me & another Guy: Well, that was uncalled for.

I walked out into the dining room and dropped off table 35's check, but somewhere between the kitchen and that table, I snapped. I got back to the kitchen, threw up my hands, and said, "Y'know what? Fuck this. I quit. I'm cashing out my tables, checking out, and leaving."

So that's what I did. Ten minutes after I made my declaration, I walked out of there a free (but unemployed) woman. Go me.

Time Keeps On Rollin'

2007-09-26T09:57:00.000-05:00

Life in these parts has taken some weird turns the last couple months. I've acquired, and then unacquired a roommate, given the cat to him, gotten it back, my neighbors went from quiet and really unassuming to dropping acid and throwing kegs off the roof, Guinness went in for his first-ever adult checkup at the vet yesterday, I've yo-yoed from so broke I could barely eat to okay to broke again to okay again. It's getting to the point where mind is in the same place it was during the road trip: eternally ready for whatever random crap the cosmos throw my way, whether it be sleeping in a parking lot in Wyoming, or watching the cops tackle my drunken next door neighbors.

I've also recently realized I've been working at the Lobsta 9 months. Not only am I not the new kid, I'm about to have an anniversary in that hell hole.

In another note, I've been working out fairly seriously the last couple weeks, and they're right, its addicting as hell. I honestly ENJOY lifting weights, making it hurt, all that retarded crap I've always heard thick-necked jocks spouting. I don't know what it says to my potential to remain in academia that my favorite things to do are all physical. The best parts of my day, be they walking the dog, working out, going running, hiking.....they're all physical. I need to give that one some thought.

As to the roommate thing, it more-or-less appears that Austin has sort of unceremoniously moved back to Selma, thus leaving me and the critters here as we were in July. It's sort of nice to be able to walk around naked again, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to not being constantly kind of allergic to my surroundings.

So, there it is. The general update as to what's going on in life. Rambling, semi-incoherent, but there it is.

Road Trip Part 5: Kansas City

2007-09-06T18:03:00.000-05:00

After the major trek that was California to Missouri, we rolled into Kansas City, brought our stuff inside, and passed out on Parker's couch.

Now Parker and I have known each other a long time. The entire length of our friendship, we have had an ongoing fight about (of all things) barbecue. I, being from Texas, take great regional pride in the locally produced barbecue of the Lone Star State. Parker is from Kansas City, home of (among other things) K.C. Master's. Kansas City produces some of the best barbecue nationwide. With me in K.C. for the first time ever, Parker threw down the meat-consuming gauntlet - it was time to at least settle half the fight. We hopped in the car and headed to Gates Barbecue, a Kansas City restaurant famous in the same way that Dreamland is known around here.

Gates Barbecue

We ordered, sat down, and when someone who's damn near a vegetarian (such as myself) is presented with that much animal protein in one sitting.....it was an intimidating sight. I suspended my rule against eating pork on the basis that this argument predates said pork consumption rule.

Egads, the meats!

To summarize, we ate like kings. Like the Norse gods stroked their big white beards and graced us with much meat and ale. And holy fuck was it good. I don't know if we lost, but....I know those Kansas City boys can cook some damn barbecue.

The Aftermath

We hung out at Parker's apartment the rest of the day while he was at work, watched Big Trouble in Little China, and conked out that night for what we thought was the drive home the next day.

Bearforce1: Warning - watching this is to experience a giant wave of gay

2007-09-03T23:05:00.001-05:00

But I damn near had a seizure laughing.

Welcome to Magic September

2007-09-01T11:37:00.000-05:00

I normally am not particularly political on this blog, despite being quite political in my non-wacky-circumstances life. I read DailyKos as well as CNN, and a number of other blogs and news outlets to try and keep some sort of idea of what's going on in the world.

But, if you'll recall, back in spring, the only thing we were hearing was how September was going to be a key deadline in terms of the timeline of troop withdrawal in Iraq, and.....here we are. Even during the initial media blitz surrounding September as a key moment, there were several dissenting congressmen and Senators (including John McCain) discouraging the public from expecting a large change. General Petraeus' report this month is going to be key in determining surge troop numbers, but riddle me this.

In May, Sentaor Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) was quoted in that Washington Post article as saying,

"Many of my Republican colleagues have been promised they will get a straight story on the surge by September. I won't be the only Republican, or one of two Republicans, demanding a change in our disposition of troops in Iraq at that point. That is very clear to me."

From the other side of the aisle, in the same article,

"September is the key," said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds defense. "If we don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, September is going to be a very bleak month for this administration."

It's now been 6 years of quagmire-like fighting since 9/11/01. Have none of these people ever read a high school history text on Vietnam? Because this whole reduce civilian casualties, make Iraq stable, and get our troops the hell out thing doesn't seem to be going very well.

So I just gave myself a haircut

2007-08-28T10:32:00.000-05:00

When your beauty options are "get a haircut" or "buy food," you are no longer middle class.

Roadtrip Part 4 - San Fransisco to Kansas City

2007-08-26T10:46:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning, I woke up predictably enough feeling like death. When Dave's mother inquired as to my health and well being when I rolled out looking worn out, with insane J.B.F. hair, and hungover, the only thing I could say to her was, "Ma'am, I feel precisely like I walked ten miles then went drinking on an empty stomach yesterday."

Yeah, I felt like shit. Unfortunately, that was also the day we were due to hop in the car and get going, so Austin went to the beer store, I showered, packed, and slept for another 45 minutes, and around noon, we finally got the car re-loaded and left Dave's house. Now I may not have previously articulated how insane driving anywhere in the Bay Area can be. We were going north from Palo Alto (which is right by San Jose), through the city, over the bay and then eastward to Sacramento. Palo Alto to Sacramento is 117 miles, or in normal road-tripping terms, a little less than an hour and a half. It took us 2 1/2 hours to get to Sacramento. Between traffic, construction, and the most insane location of a toll road I've ever seen, by 2:30 I was still hungover, and irritable at all that lost time, so we decided to stop at an In-N-Out burger in Sacramento. My experience was skewed because I was ragingly hungover and it was 100 degrees in the shade, but Austin said it was the most delicious fast food he's ever eaten in his life.

I carried the dog back to the car (the parking lot concrete was so hot it was actually burning his feet), got back in the car and Austin drove the rest of the way out of California. Fact of Interest: we drove right through Donner Pass. I looked around, and what struck me is how little there really is to eat in the Sierra Nevada if you were say, a group of stranded pioneers. The entire area is mountain, scrub grass, rock, and pine trees. I'd have eaten the dead people too.

Donner Pass Road

We switched drivers just before we hit Reno, at the California border. I drove all of Nevada. I really honestly wish I could offer any sort of detail regarding an entire state that's approximately 300 miles apart, but that's how boring it is. In fact, the entire wasteland that is northern Nevada, northern Utah, and southern Wyoming was essentially one long haul through the middle of nowhere. Austin took the wheel through Utah and I took back over just west of Salt Lake City, where we decided to stop for the night.

But....there's the catch. I don't know anyone in Mormonland, so we tried to find a hotel. We searched two exits in Salt Lake, and made it all the way to Evanston, Wyoming at 4:30 in the morning, where we still couldn't find a room at the inn, so to speak. I physically couldn't drive any further, so Austin and I did the logical thing....parked in a Best Western parking lot at 4:30 in the morning, I crawled into the backseat of my Cavalier with the dog, and passed out for four hours before we got up to drive yet more.

The parking lot we slept in. Note that it's a hotel with a bar called "Legal Tender" attached. This would set the pace for Wyoming.

We woke up after about 4 hours of sleep, I crawled back into the front seat, and just started driving again. I drove us all the way across the boring-ass state of Wyoming to Cheyenne, where we stopped at a Sonic. Turns out Sonic in Cheyenne, Wyoming is basically populated with rural, thugged out meth heads, always a dangerous combination. It was like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Joe Dirt spawned offspring. Someone insulted Guinness' presence and I told them they could, "Shut their fucking redneck mouth," so after that we had to bail because the story of "How Annie got into a fight and then thrown in jail in Wyoming," is not one I ever want to tell.

We switched out again and I passed out for a few hours only to wake up in Nebraska, a place that was basically paradise by comparison. There were normal looking people and actual grass. After the last 900 miles or so of non-stop driving through the prairie, Nebraska was a sight for sore eyes.

Nebraska. Some sort of celebration of emigration out west built over the interstate, particularly amusing after driving through Donner Pass.

By the time we hit Nebraska, we were home free. We knocked that state out, went through about 20 miles of Iowa, and entered Missouri, where I had a place for us to stay lined up in Kansas City. We landed at my friend Parker's apartment rather late and passed out on his couch in sheer gratitude at being out of the car.

Yay!

2007-08-22T21:08:00.001-05:00

I figured out how to french braid my hair today. I'm just excited it's long enough to braid. Go me.

Part 3 - San Fransisco, Redux

2007-08-22T11:14:00.000-05:00

The next day, Austin and I planned our trip carefully. We would have no such repeat of the failure that was Tuesday - we'd come too far and seen too much to never get to see San Fransisco. So from the computer and our local resources we pooled information, then just jumped in feet first. Austin and I drove to the local CalTrain station, parked the car there and hopped on the train, a sensation reassuringly familiar to me. If I'm taking public transport, that's one less thing to stress me out.

We rode our train to downtown San Fransisco, and walked around to find a hotel that would have a rack of tourist brochures, and hence, a map for free. We found a Mariott with a Starbucks in it, I got caffeinated and significantly less grouchy, while Austin found a map. From there we coordinated our actions. Closest by, and first on our list of shit to do, was Chinatown.

The Gates of Chinatown, just like in Big Trouble In Little China

We walked in, and holy shit. Chinatown San Fransisco is a mass of cheap trinkets and "Oriental weaponry" as far as the eye can see (which admittedly, in those buildings, is not very far at all). It was unreal. We strolled around for awhile, where I astonished myself by remembering enough of my characters to be able to read a substantial amount of the signs I saw around me. Austin had wanted to go to a restaurant called "Uncle's" he'd read about on WikiTravel for about a week now, and we stumbled upon it. We walked in, sat down, and looked at the menu. Items included "Ox Tail Soup," and when we looked around, we realized we were the only non-Chinese occupants, and the youngest people in the entire restaurant. Guess we got a little off the beaten path. The waiter walked over and gestured, and I realized he doesn't really speak english.

Me: "Nimen you meiyou lua cha?"
Waiter: *Jaw drops, head practically falls off*
Me: "Hong cha?"
Waiter: *gapes a bit more* "Wurong cha!"
Me: "Xie xie!"

Yeah, I tried out my chinese. And they understood me! It was a huge moment for me, and the guy was wonderful to us the whole time. We ate a massive meal (Austin ordered HALF A ROAST DUCK) and had a whole pot of tea for $20. It was unbelievable.

Uncle's Restaurant

From there we started walking. While I am very into cycling, it's a peculiar thing I've run into that many Alabamians don't like bikes. Austin is among them, so renting some bikes and getting around that way was out, and we didn't feel like fucking with the bus system. Turns out it's quite the little jog from train station to China Town, China Town to Haight Ashbury, and through there to Golden Gate Park. According to Google Maps, it's about 8 miles total. Thank God I'm a waitress, I guess, because my walking-fu is strong. I can walk for miles. But my god, they weren't lying when they placed Haight-Ashbury as "On the hill," because my god the steep grades. I'm a smoker from what amounts to a jungle, at sea level. I had to stop and pant every once in awhile. But we made it! All the way to Golden Gate Park, where I haven't been offered drugs that many times in so short a time period.....well, ever. Curiously enough, Austin, with his "middle class white dude" thing going, got nothing, whereas I was wearing beat up jeans, hair loose, and a fair amount of bead-based jewelry.....drugs aplenty.

Golden Gate Park. Hippies EVERYWHERE

We called Dave, who was late getting to his train station and hence wouldn't be in the City for another hour or so, so we stopped by Amoeba, an amazing record store on Haight Street, where we found something we had been missing the last few weeks of the trip. Austin and I had been looking for two CDs for about 2500 miles - "The Best of Journey," and Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet." It took going to one of the best record stores nationwide to find those two albums. It'd be sad if it weren't kind of funny.

While Austin shopped, I hung out with a dude outside who invited me to a rave, and I made the mistake of giggling at a George Clinton look alike, who then responded, "Hey, pretty girl." I didn't have the heart to tell him the only reason I looked at him and smiled was I was praying he'd bust out with a little Parliament Funkadelic.

Dave called and let us know he was in the city and we headed down to Toronado, a bar in the lower Haight. Toronado is where I'd end up if I were lucky enough to die and go to heaven. It's a beer bar, with 24 taps that rotate out of hundreds they have available. They don't serve the same two beers on any given day. It was amazing. I don't even know if that adjective covers how cool this bar was.

A dreadfully fuzzy picture of some of the inside of Toronado. This is what happens when drunks attempt photography

We drank for a couple hours then left to get walking to the 10:00 train back to Palo Alto. Sad times, but we underestimated the distance and missed our train, and the next one was leaving at midnight. But, as luck would have it, we were passing a bar just as we realized we were late. Why not just drink more?

Only problem is, remember the last time I had eaten? Uncle's, in Chinatown, about 9 miles and 6 pints ago.

I was shitfaced. My memories of getting on the train, getting back to Palo Alto, and getting back to the house (no, I didn't drive) are fuzzy at best. It was the best day of the whole trip and the highlight of our whole week in the Bay Area.

Even in a sweet, normal picture, I look like I'm about to deck someone.

2007-08-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

Specifically Courtney. Seriously, I was just moving my hand to my lap when the flash went off.

Part 3 Continued - Santa Cruz

2007-08-17T11:01:00.000-05:00

After two very relaxed days of basically doing nothing, Austin and I finally lit a fire under our asses Thursday, hopped in the Cavalier and hit the road south to Santa Cruz, CA. Santa Cruz is about 45 miles south of Palo Alto, on the ocean and one of the many beautiful towns that rests on the Pacific coast along highway 1. The drive south was ridiculous - beautiful hills covered in Redwood trees, curving roads, which finally pops you out in a town that had more VW Buses per capita than anywhere else I've ever been in my life. Though being from Texas, I was working on the assumption that when an individual gets to a certain age, there's a law requiring you to purchase a Silverado.

We made our way to a visitor's center to pick up some maps, then onward to the U.C. Santa Cruz arboretum. Yes, I'm a hippie, I went to an arboretum while I was on vacation. But nerdiness aside, it was really cool. It has multiple gardens, an Australia garden, a New Zealand garden, a garden of California native plants, and so on. I in particular was fascinated by the succulents, the family to which cacti belong. We stumbled across their greenhouses as well.

The Hoophouse full of baby Succulents

From the arboretum, we wandered around campus, and then made our way downtown, where we parked the car and went shopping. We walked around their downtown area, which while somewhat small, is really cool and contains some very cool head shops and bars. I bought a new piece of paraphernalia, Austin bought a tshirt. We both bought a beer. After we spent our souvenir money, it was time to complete the task that brought us all the way south to Santa Cruz. It was time to walk to the ocean and stick our feet in the Pacific.

We made our way down to the famed Santa Cruz boardwalk, down onto the beach, where we took a minute to go "HOLY FUCK is that water cold!" before we took a picture.

I made it, baby! Me in the Pacific

We walked around the boardwalk for awhile, but it was a touch brightly colored for my tastes, so we moseyed back to the car and headed back through the redwoods to Palo Alto.

Part 3 Continued - The Bay Area

2007-08-14T17:24:00.000-05:00

We got to the Bay Area, where we stayed with the family of a friend of mine, Dave. We threw Guinness in their backyard, and passed out. The next day (Tuesday), we got up, showered, had some coffee and did a little internet research on San Fransisco and decided to try and drive into the City, park, and walk around downtown for a few hours. Unfortunately, Dallas and San Fransisco are two totally different animals.

The thing about San Fransisco is that it's a fairly old city by Western-Half-of-the-United-States standards. It's the second most densely populated city in America. Driving and parking are a fucking biiiiitch. We drove around in frustration, found a meter, paid for a couple hours, but unfortunately, meters come with time limits. Our eventual decision was to just drive home, declare the day a bust, regroup, and try it again another day. We went back to Dave's house in Palo Alto, took a nap, and got up in time for dinner at Miyake.

Being from a city as I am, I'm quite familiar with good dining. The restaurants in Dallas are fantastic, but the problem with that is I am currently a resident of Tuscaloosa. The dining out here is dismal. Almost entirely chains and mediocre cheap bullshit, so my dining has been limited to say the least the past few years. Miyake is this little Japanese place in Palo Alto with phenomenal food. The entire trip to the Bay Area could be basically titled "The story of how I went to this amazing restaurant for [culinary genre] then went to this nifty bar." Miyake distinguishes itself with fantastic sushi, and the Sake Bomb. If it's your birthday at Miyake, they turn down the lights, turn on the disco ball and techno, and feed you a shitload of sake. This is a somewhat nice restaurant. To see it go from "pleasant Japanese restaurant" to "Nightclub" and back again in about 2 minutes was pretty kickass.

Day Two: Palo Alto

The next day, Austin and I elected to snoop around Palo Alto, where we were staying. Palo Alto has a beautiful downtown that reminded me of Boulder and Fairhope, AL all at once, and also happens to be home to Stanford. There's actually some stuff to see. We stumbled our way around the Stanford campus for awhile then parked and walked around downtown, where we found Bell's Books. I found the perfect present for Kim there. I found Kim a picture of Further, the Merry Pranksters' bus. It was taken by a guy who owns the store next door, whom the woman I spoke with knows. She's going to put it in a shadowbox.

That night we went to the Rose and Crown, a place that serves good beer, and whose stamp now rests in my passport because I didn't have a driver's license. We had a couple beers and bailed, went home, and chilled out. The next few days would be a flurry of activity, and rest was needed.

Holy Fucking God Buy Some Curtains

2007-08-12T08:55:00.000-05:00

This isn't the remainder of my trip logs, those will be coming in the next couple days (which I have off work - w00t). However, here it is.

Dear New Neighbors,

So far I like you. I haven't really gotten to talk, but you're waay quieter than the frat boys, there isn't any shattered glass everywhere, and you seem to enjoy much better music. However, kind sirs, please buy some curtains. I get up at 7:30 in this weather so I can walk my dog while the weather is still remotely tolerable, and the last thing my bleary eyes needed to clap on as I walked out the door this morning was your bare, thrusting ass.

So please. Curtains, or blinds. Or aluminum foil or a Budweiser flag or a towel. Something to protect my fragile little mind from going "Eh?" and then "OH FUCK". Because I can't bring myself to stroll by while you're getting your groove thing on, thus probably making the girl self-conscious and the guy lose his hard on. So, curtains. That's all I'm asking.

Delay

2007-08-11T11:38:00.000-05:00

I'm working a ton this weekend to attempt to begin to dig myself out of the slight financial hole into which going off gallivanting into the wilds and having adventures has dug me. This leaves me with not-so-much energy for writing, though I will be putting up something in the next couple days at the latest.

----------------
Now playing: Cypress Hill - Clash Of Titans
via FoxyTunes

Part 3 - California....Knows How To Party

2007-08-09T15:09:00.000-05:00

On the Road Again - The Drive Out

Seein' things that I may never see again.....well, that's a lie. I'm sure I'll see Arizona again. Monday morning in Albuquerque we packed up our shit and once again, the Annie, Austin and Guinness brigade rolled on down the road. Now for those friends of mine from Alabama and the general eastern half of the country, you must understand that in the western half, the states are a lot bigger than they look on the map. Arizona alone is about 400 miles across on I-40. In summary, it's a long fucking drive.

We left Albuquerque at 8 am, and our first stop was to purchase the good luck totem for the trip, a Kachina doll, at the Laguna Indian Reservation in western New Mexico. Guinness and I explored the scrub grass surrounding this little Indian arts shop while Austin picked out his trinket, and from there we made it to a truck stop. There, I bought a necklace for $20 off a panhandling Indian and his peyote smoking wife, then chatted with a Hell's Angel who was chilling out with all his Hell's Angel buddies, fed my dog and ate a sandwich. Seriously, Hell's Angel's. There were like 30 of them, and I couldn't have been more hypnotized if the Grateful Dead had popped up at a truck stop in the middle of the desert.

Seriously, fucking Hell's Angels!

We left the truck stop thoroughly perked up, and hit the road again. It's amazing how far the desert spans. It's thoroughly beautiful, but when you're driving across it, it eventually seems interminable. Guinness, who was basically wonderful the entire time, got so bored he started laying on the cooler and refusing to even look at his bed. The damn dog spent about 200 miles laying on the cooler, sulking because we turned it so he couldn't wedge his head in there to lick the packets containing turkey and eat all the ice.

Road Dog

We made it to Needles, California, the tiny little shitbox of a town on the border of Arizona, successfully made it through their little freeway stop where they asked if we were carrying any fruit, and then began the Mojave Desert. The Mojave Desert was something we had been dreading the whole trip. We were prepared to not enter it, depending on what the weather looked like, because here's a few statistics about the Mojave.

The Mojave National Preserve is only a part, but the desert itself stretches for miles. From Needles, Arizona to Barstow, California is 144 miles of nothing but desert wasteland as far as the eye can see. The Mojave desert averages less than 10 inches of rain annually, and the elevation varies between 3000 and 6000 feet. Summer high temperatures in the valleys, where most of the interstate lies, soar to 120 and even 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Mojave Desert. It's this, at 100 degrees, for a couple hundred miles

Basically, it's an oven surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. And yet, as we passed through it, something miraculous happened. It started to rain. It rained for 50 miles, and we had cloud cover the entire rest of the way across. Our Kachina doll kicked ass for us. We made it to Bakersfield by about 9 pm, and being the young, totally insane road trippers we have become, we decided that rather than crash in Bakersfield and drive in the morning, to drive straight through. We rolled into the Bay Area at about 2 o'clock, exausted, but happy.

Part Two: Albuquerque and the Camping Trip

2007-08-09T10:52:00.000-05:00

We Can't Stop Here, This is God's Country

That Wednesday, we left Dallas and hit the long road to Albuquerque, a trip that takes you through all the finer parts of the Texas Panhandle, a landscape so featureless it's prompted the Texan joke that it ought to be a national park - there's no trees or mountains cluttering up the landscape.

Basically what the entire Panhandle looks like:

This is interrupted by the occasional store selling cutesy cowboy or ranch-themed crap and a Dairy Queen every ten miles. I've done this drive dozens of times since childhood, and it's no surprise for me, but this was the furthest west Austin had ever been. He had no idea of the wasteland that is a lot of the middle of the country.

After the interminable 366 miles that it takes to get from my doorstep in Dallas to Amarillo going about 60 miles an hour because country cops are insane, we crossed the border to New Mexico. Happy times. We rolled in at about 7 pm, ate a couple Taco Burgers, and passed out to get up bright and early to go camping.

Hurricane Pedro and the Crown Royal Society

The camping trip, if I haven't previously articulated, is something I've been planning on attending since February. It's a notoriously alcohol and marijuana fueled crazy train of fishing and other sundry outdoorsy-ness that takes place every late July. We left at 7 a.m. to follow my mom and her man-friend Sam in the truck (all the gear, and us, and the dog, and the boat they were towing wouldn't all fit in one vehicle) to Chama and the lake where we were going to be spending the next few days. Northern New Mexico as always, was a spectacular drive full of sandstone cliffs, startlingly blue skies, and a total lack of cell phone service. My mom told me later that it had been years since she'd had to roll a joint in a car, but it came right back like riding a bike. The pace had already been set, so it seemed.

160 miles later, we got to the lake, where I was presented with an entirely new sight. Across the moonscape that was the rocks, was a tent city surrounded by 4x4 F-250 roofing trucks, people getting high, drinking, and fishing, and I was offered a beer within 30 seconds of appearing. Looks like the crazy train is off and running.

We got our tents set up, sparked a bowl, and started drinking. Then we ate some brats (the sausages, not children) for dinner with whatever chips they had laying around, and more beer and weed. This continued non-stop for about 2 1/2 days. I felt like I was slacking every time I took a minute to have a beverage that wasn't somehow getting me fucked up.

Tent City:

The Moonscape:

Lake Heron After A Storm:

If I had to make a quantifying comparison that will allow the average person to get an idea of the trip, imagine this. Take a Grateful Dead and a Willie Nelson concert and have them crash together in the mountains in northern New Mexico. Add insurmountable quantities of alcohol. The Crown Royal Society, as they call themselves, went through 3 gallons in the 3 days I was there, and we all did our best to slaughter 12 cases of beer and a case of wine. All hippies, aged anywhere from their mid-sixties to tiny little hippie children. I had never previously baby-sat and hit a joint. Everyone got their party on, even Guinness. He was entirely off a leash the entire time, being official Camp Dog.

Camp Dog

After 3 days of drinking and getting sunburned, sad to say, but all fun things must come to their end. Sunday morning we woke up bright and early for a day of catching a buzz, breaking down camp, and heading back into Albuquerque. On the way back, the scenery was about twice as spectacular because the sun was out, and we stopped to take some pictures and spark a bowl at an enormous natural amphitheater nature and the gods have carved out of an enormous sandstone cliff.

The long drive back (Chama is 160 miles north, near the Colorado border) was peaceful, with the exception of Peyote Man - there was some dude in an indian headdress and a loincloth, running down the road barefoot, carrying little hand weights. My mom's comment was, "Well, someone's had a little too much peyote today." I wish I hadn't been stoned, and driving, or I'd have gotten a picture.

We got back to Albuquerque around 3, ate dinner, and passed out to begin the next leg of our trip the next day.

The Chronicle of Austin and Annie's Roadtrip, Part 1 - The Trip to Dallas

2007-08-06T19:14:00.000-05:00

Several months ago, when I went to Las Vegas for my 21st birthday, I was invited by my mom's friend Dale to their annual campout in the mountains, which takes place every year at the end of July. My mom, upon hearing I planned to do the trek from Tuscaloosa to Albuquerque alone, promptly flipped out a touch and threatened to cash in her flight and drive out with me so I wouldn't have to go it alone. Apparently Guinness doesn't count as ample company (who knew?). She suggested my newly acquired roommate, Austin, accompany me because she didn't want to make the drive. When I suggested it to Austin, he agreed, and somehow in the process of planning, he suggested we continue on to California, if only because....we're already going 1000 miles. What's an additional 1500?

We left the 23rd of July, a Monday, to make the 8-hour drive to Dallas, a drive so familiar to me, I could probably do it from the back seat of the car steering with my feet. We got to Dallas, ate dinner with my family, and went to the Fox and the Hound with some friends of mine to play pool and drink beer. Which is pretty much my favorite hobby, despite being completely terrible at pool. A pleasant evening later, we went home.

Beers consumed: 2 23 oz Sam Adam's Summer Ale

The next day I went to the DMV to get my driver's license changed from the Under-21 verticle to the Over-21 horizontal, when the guy running the computer, a 3 foot tall mexican midget informs me that "Joo license has been revoked, mane." I very politely asked, "Um, what?"

It turned out that due to a clerical error on the part of the state of Texas, a speeding ticket I acquired in New Mexico was never listed as paid, and thusly, my license was revoked. About 3 hours on hold later with the state governments of both Texas and New Mexico later, I managed to gather the information I needed, and set off for the lower circle of hell on Wednesday, the north Texas headquarters of the Texas DPS on I-35 in Dallas. On the same day that this happened. Traffic in Dallas was not hospitable.

Austin accompanied me to the DMV, and after the usual quagmire of paperwork and waiting, the young guy I got helping me with my license took a look at my documentation, then promptly waived all my fees. Victory dance on my part. They then cut my current driver's license in half, took a picture of me that probably looks like hell, and gave me my little paper temporary that not only doesn't have a picture on it, but looks like something I could whip up in Adobe with about 20 minutes. Looks like I'm using my passport at the bars.

That night we hung out with some more friends of mine, drank more beer, and then the next day set out on the road again to go to New Mexico, my driver's license successfully reinstated.

Total beers consumed: 5 12 oz Shiner beers (3 Hefeweizens, 2 Blondes)
12 12 oz Coors Lights
2 23 oz Sam Adam's Summer Ales

Recipe Time

2007-06-20T09:15:00.000-05:00

Beyond hiking (and videogames), one of my favorite things to do with my spare time is to cook. The last couple days were my days off, and the weather decided now was the best time to pour, so our options for entertainment were limited at best. Last night we decided to make full-on dinner, and to try some new recipes. So, here's what we made for dinner last night.

Mediterranean marinated Cream Cheese:

1 8 oz package Philadelphia Cream Cheese
Sun-dried tomato vinaigrette
About 3 small sprigs Rosemary (we used fresh, but I'm considering trying the dried kind for texture reasons)
A bit of thyme
Zest of 1 lemon
A fair amount of garlic/garlic powder.

Mix everything that's not the cream cheese together in a bowl, then cube the cream cheese and GENTLY toss/mix it in the marinade. Refrigerate for a period of time (1 hour to overnight is fine).

The Roasted Chicken I Pulled Off A Cooking Show On The BBC

1/2 a stick of butter (4 tablespoons)
A fair amount of garlic (I chopped up a whole clove).
A number of strips of bacon (I used bacon because it's easy, but what you're shooting for here is something with a smoky taste)
The zest of a lemon (as well as the rest of it)
Rosemary (I used a couple sprigs)
Thyme (A good little bit, just enough so the flavor is there)
1 whole chicken

Slice up the bacon into small-ish bits, and throw that, the butter, and everything else that's not the chicken into a bowl. Smoosh it all together so it forms a chunky, gooey butter-paste substance. Then, slide your fingers between the skin of the chicken and the meat, but be careful not to tear the skin. Take your butter/bacon/seasonings paste and shove a fair amount into the skin between the meat, then smoosh it down so it's fairly even. Take what's left, rub some of it on the legs and shove the rest inside. Take your zested lemon, and slice it up into slices about 3/4 an inch thick, and shove them inside with the butter stuff on the inside. Feel free to parboil some potatoes and toss them into the roasting pan with a little olive oil. Heat the oven up to around 325 and put your chicken in. Because the buttery mix is under the skin on top, and the lemons are on the inside, you won't have to baste.

After an hour, take it out, and make a little aluminum foil "tent" over it, then throw it back in the oven for another hour. For the final 30 minutes, turn the heat up a scoche (we did 350).

Summer is officially here

2007-05-27T15:14:00.001-05:00

I have done nothing but drink, swim, work, smoke, hike, and sleep since school got out. After finals made a pressure cooker out of my internal organs at the end of the semester, I needed a break. My break came in the form of a visitor, a long-time friend of mine named Dave. He came down, hung out, and as time progresses, I can feel my shoulders unclenching.

Yesterday, Kim and I took the dogs out to Lake Harris to go swimming at the pier (in another story entirely, How Anabelle Cut The Shit Out Of Her Foot On Glass At The Lake Harris Creekbed So We Aren't Going Down There For A While), and we were playing ball with A.B. while Guinness stood and did his usual routine of whining and looking nervous while A.B. swam. Then, we had a breakthrough. I watched from the pier as you could see him decide "Fuck it" then leapt into the water after Anabelle. Puppy love is so cute.

We left, I went to work still kind of fucked up, made $75 in 5 1/2 hours of work, went home, got fucked up all over again, got up this morning, went to work. I'm on break right now, and high. I'm sensing a pattern.

God bless summer.

SexyDrownWatch

2007-05-16T08:37:00.000-05:00

Well, this made my Sunday....

So, Jerry Falwell is Dead.

2007-05-16T00:26:00.001-05:00

My reaction has been something in between "RIGHT ON!" and "YAAAAAAAY!"

Between this and Paris Hilton going to jail, it appears May of 2007 is "Karmic Retribution" month.

Well, Yesterday was Fucking Weird

2007-05-15T10:10:00.000-05:00

I know I haven't rolled around to posting about my trip to the Caribbean, or even pictures. But I will eventually roll around to it. But, yesterday was interesting too, and I haven't been regularly posting in awhile, so here goes.

I had a friend in town over the weekend, Dave, a guy who is singularly awesome. Yesterday was his last day in town, and the only day of his visit I didn't have to work, so we were going to go hiking at Lake Harris and go down to the creekbed, mostly because it's awesome. Me, Justin, Kim, and Dave get down there, strap up the stuff we need, and start the scramble over the rocks to get over the spillway and into the easy part, make it ALL THE WAY TO THE CREEKBED, get there and.....no water. I had heard that we were low on rain, but I hadn't realized exactly how long it had been since we'd gotten any rain. I'd have taken a picture of this depressing-ass sight, but my camera batteries were dead.

Either way, not to be undaunted, we walked down the rocks to go to the swimming-hole like place at the bottom, get there, and find a shitload of broken glass everywhere. Some asshole, or many assholes, had broken a number of varieties of glass items all over the rocks and left these razor sharp shards everywhere for us all to enjoy. And guess what happens when you've got dogs running through broken glass.

For once in his life, it wasn't Guinness causing us all to have to fly out of the woods because of something we never would have anticipated. Nope, Anabelle cut the pad on her front foot open like a thanksgiving turkey, and was bleeding EVERYWHERE. Kim (naturally and rightfully), flipped out, and then we did the mile and a half back in about 18 minutes, which sounds slow until you realize there are parts you have to scramble up a rock that is chest height on me, thorns everywhere, absolutely no visibility, etc. We followed a trail of bloody footprints for a mile and a half.

We got back to the car, threw all our shit in it, and took off down a logging road to the vet as fast as the Subaru can drive on a dirt/gravel road (which it turns out is really goddamn fast). We get to the vet, drop poor A.B. off, and head home, thinking "Okay....plan B anyone?"

Plan B becomes "Well, let's go to the city pool and go swimming there." We checked their website, found the pool, and drove over there within normal operating hours, and it's closed....for cleaning. When we got back to the car, Kim said something along the lines of "I could have shot that girl."

This is why I am the firearms owner out of the two of us.

So, we started out at about 10:30, and it's almost 1 now. Plan F anyone?

We went to Target, bought a garden hose and a kiddie pool, though not before realizing none of us had our IDs, and hence couldn't buy beer. God just smote our day all over. However, the kiddie pool (henceforth referred to as "The Spa") worked out beautifully - it currently sits in my front yard, full, and I have an appointment to go lay out and drink some wine with Kim, poolside, in about an hour.

Dead Week, Finals Week, And The Shitting of Bricks That They Bring

2007-05-04T08:33:00.000-05:00

I'm in the middle of studying for finals and getting ready for the end of school, but after that I will post pictures and the story of my trip to the Virgin Islands. Meantime, I'm gonna do some more homework and maybe throw up.

I'm So Lame

2007-03-31T22:18:00.000-05:00

From my dog's birthday party. That's right, the dog's.

Kitty Gets Neutered.

2007-03-22T16:18:00.000-05:00

Yep, I took the feline to get his nuts snipped off today. Of course, this morning had to be the morning with I woke up with him cuddled up to me, head on my arm, purring and looking at my adoringly. He couldn't have been poking me in the eye or something. Either way, I dropped him off at 7:30 this morning, and picked him up at 3, now ball-less. He's sitting in the crate, all fucked up on Kitty Morphine or whatever they gave him.

Guinness Turns 1 Year Old

2007-03-15T20:21:00.000-05:00

Guinness is turning 1 year old on March 27 (very exciting). My little puppy is my big grownup dog now, who runs with me, backpacks with me, and weighs in at 53 pounds.

Remember this?

Yeah, not so much anymore. He now looks like this (both taken Tuesday, March 13th):

Yeah. He's grown.

Either way, to celebrate, the 30th of March I'm throwing Guinness his very own keg party (though the beer will more likely be Bud Lite than Guinness......unless someone makes a donation. Hinthint). It'll be in my backyard here at the little green house on 11th. Get ahold of me for details.

The Office On Shakedown St.

2007-03-10T01:30:00.000-06:00

Ever since I moved into this apartment, I have had a random nook off the the far side that really has only served as a Dog Room up to this point. Guinness' wire cage and food bowls lived in that space and basically it sat and did nothing (there are abundant other places to put such things). My neighbor, however, had a different thought - she thought to create a Smoking room......a den, if you will. We're calling it The Office.

Tonight, we began in that pursuit. We picked out "entrance curtains," and she started the sketches to what will one day become the slightly hippie-ish, slightly psychedelic art that will be the Office's main focus. It's going to be, in not so many words, bad-fucking-ass.

A few pictures:

The original space, as of a few months ago:

The cleared space with the new curtains up and some of the pencil sketches:

The address is 420 Shakedown St.

The Office

Viva Vegas, Man

2007-02-27T18:31:00.000-06:00

February 5, 2007, I turned 21, and February 8, I got on a plane to begin a 4 day odyssey into the land of bright shiny lights and my naturally addictive personality. My mom and her boyfriend flew us all out to Vegas for a couple days for some serious drinking and gambling.

My journey began at 9 a.m. Thursday when I said my tearful goodbyes to the farm and left them in the care of Downstairs Neighbor, then got in the car and drove to Birmingham. I flew through Houston, made a stop in Dallas where I picked up my mom, then started drinking at the airport around 4. We flew from Dallas into Albuquerque and stayed the night.

Basically, I got baked, watched some bullriding, then went to sleep, got breakfast the next day, and caught the plane to Vegas.

My first ever legal beer with my mom.

On the plane from Albuquerque to Vegas, I drank free because the woman next to me had had her baggage fucked up and they were comping all her (and hence, all my) drinks. I arrived half in the bag and chipper as a goddamn bird because not only was this lady from Reno and really nice, but was a dealer at Boomtown and taught me how to play Blackjack. Landing in Vegas is different from any other airport I've ever been to in my life. They have slot machines. At the gates. The entire city is the largest ode to capitalism I've ever seen in my life.

We got downstairs, I snagged a cup of coffee, walked through a labrynth of flashing advertising and slot machines, picked up our bags, then stood in a long, Six-Flags-esque line to get a cab. We got the most insane cab driver I've ever met in my life. This guy was middle eastern and drove from the airport all the way to the Flamingo hotel entirely by weaving around in traffic, at one point driving ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD, using backways and weaving through a back parking lot. I'd have felt safer walking down LBJ Freeway back in Dallas with a target painted on my ass.

An exchange:

Insane Taxi Driver: THIS IS A BACK WAY.
Annie: YOU FUCKING CRAZY BASTARD, SLOW DOWN. I AM A YOUNG WOMAN AND HAVE NO DESIRE TO DIE TODAY. I WANT TO LIVE!!
Insane Taxi Driver: WE'LL BE FINE! *weaves through some cars at breakneck speed* FUCK I AIN'T GONNA HURT NOBODY!

After 15 minutes of this hell, homeskillet whips that bitch into the parking lot, dumps us off and away he goes to scare the piss out of some other people. Godspeed, dude. Take a valium. Seriously. Seek help.

Either way, we walked into the hotel, get checked in, and I'm basically like a rodent staring into a snake's eyes. I am mesmerized by all the slot machines, blinking lights, and fake tits. We found the second half of our group, my aunt, uncle, and cousin and.....got started.

We went up to Margaritaville, ate dinner, and started drinking. I drank 11 hours that day, in between losing at blackjack. I ended up all the way at the Bellagio, then Coyote Ugly in New York, New York. I drank....a lot. This was a theme that would continue.

The view of Caesar's from across the way at Margaritaville (located in the Flamingo).

My cousin (who is 13 months older than me) and I staggered back to our hotel at 3 (5 a.m. Alabama time), hammered. I awoke Saturday at about 9 hungover, but determined to press on. Mom, Mom's boyfriend, and I stagered down to a diner in the Flamingo where I had eaten the previous evening, also while drunk, with the family. I ate a huge omelette, then headed to Margaritaville (visit #2) for an early morning Bahama Mama.

Then from there to a flair bar, where I had as much to drink before noon as on the average Friday night my sophomore year. Which is to say, quite a bit. A couple shots, beers, and a 3 foot daquiri later, I was out doing the electric slide to a band called Wonderboogie, bought my sister a skirt, and then wandered into a casino to learn to play Craps.

Now, I first learned about gambling around age 3/4-ish. My mother taught my sister and I how to count playing poker. My earliest memory is being in a stroller going into a mall, but one of my second oldest is playing Deuces Wild with mom. I mean, I'm basically an alcoholic, and have imbibed more substances in the last 3 years than most people do in their whole lives. I've calmed down quite a bit, but to say I have a personality that likes that kind of rush is an understatement. I started drinking. And gambling. About $150 later, I was cleaned out. I spent the rest of the half hour my mom was playing craps drinking and talking to some dude from Nagasaki, Japan in drunken, pidgin Japanenglese. Which is to say, half Japanese, half English, all hammered.

We walked down the strip to Bally's, met up with Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin, and went to lunch in downtown Vegas. Old Vegas. Vegas, back when it was blatantly run by the mob, and Frankie, Dean, and Sammy came to play. I ate a hotdog, a shrimp cocktail, and had a beer, then started gambling and drinking again. I lasted for 45 minutes, waxing and waning, on $20. Then I went to the bar to play videopoker and drink for the low-low cost of $.25 a hand (for those who don't know, in Vegas, if you're gambling, all your drinks are "free").

I hung out at the bar as everyone drifted out, flirting with this hottie who drag races from California, then stumbled back to the bus, drink in hand, back to the strip. All told, I was drinking and gambling at the Horseshoe Casino for about......5 hours.

We got back to the Strip, where TheCousin and I sprinted to find (apparently) the only bathroom in Caesar's Palace, then started drinking again. At this point I was at about hour 36 of solid intoxication and losing money, and ended up lasting through the night until about 2. Among the places I visited in my (admittedly fuzzy-as-hell memory) were Hooter's Hotel and Casino, Bally's, New York, New York, back to the Flamingo, and eventually, the realm of the comatose.

I woke up, dragged my ass onto the plane, slept until we got back to Albuquerque, then went to the ghetto for Chicharrones and then went to TheHippie's. TheHippie is a friend of Mom'sBoyfriend from way back. These two dudes have been getting fucked up together since Nixon was in office. TheHippie's place was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen. You drive in through a chain link gate and park about 20 yards from his front door, and walk down past a bunch of rusted out trucks and the like. The house is two-story, all built by TheHippie himself.

In the back, he has a porch, a 200-lb Rottweiler named Kitty, a water garden, a building where they have barbecues, and three or four HUGE aviaries for the peacocks, chickens, and exotic pheasants this guy keeps. He grows grapes out past that, and tug an irrigation trench around his whole property.

If that's not incredible enough, his house has a massive lofy over the living room (beautifully constructed in one week of TheHippie's free time when he was bored), and then on the second story is his Wine Room.

You heard that right.

I met an aging hippie from New Mexico.....who makes his own wine. Damn good wine. He's also a member of a wine club and has a fantastic eye for an amazing bottle of wine. We talked, he taught me how to roll a J, and then sent me back to Tuscaloosa with 2 bottles of wine, a Strawberry White Merlot, and a White Zinfandel he'd made himself.

All told I spent probably $300 drinking and gambling, but it was so worth it. I drank or smoked for about 72 hours straight. I enjoyed the shit out of myself, and highly recommend the experience to anyone who really wants to be sensory overloaded and advertised at in the extreme. Vegas was incredibly, Albuquerque was awesome, and thus ended the full saga of my 21st birthday.

Cease Fire

2007-02-07T09:29:00.000-06:00

The cat and the dog have finally declared a cease-fire. Once more, peace reigns in the Angello Kingdom.

Guinness chews his bone, the cat hangs out on his scratching post.

Another angle of the same.

My area! Mine!

So I'm Legal Now. Like, All the Way.

2007-02-06T22:42:00.001-06:00

Yesterday, February 5, I turned 21. I can now take my alcoholism to the streets. Unfortunately, the needs of the world don't always stop and go at my whim, so as well as celebrating my birthday, I also had to work (a couple weeks ago I acquired a waitressing gig at Red Lobster). I got out of work by 8:30, came home, changed clothes, then went and met Austin at Mallet to get a couple people together to go to the bars. Dammit, it was my 21st, I don't care if it was a Monday. We acquired a couple of the shadyer (shadier?) people I know, got a couple pitchers of Long Islands and settled down to drink. We caught a decent buzz and played some Galaga, then barhopped down to Egan's.

Now, before yesterday I was under 21, and actually have been a pretty good girl - I've never tried to drink underaged in a bar with a fake ID or anything like that. All public underaged drinking has been acquired by trickery, my winning charm, or plain old parental consent. I'd never actually been in a bar with the intent of drinking, only to pick up drunk friends of mine. It was new. It was really REALLY smoky. I started drinking beer at Egan's, which is what I usually drink - in the last year I have moved from hating beer altogether to loving it and rarely drinking anything else.

But, the Gods weren't content with my meager offering of Monday alcoholism and dictated that not only would I run into people I know at the bar, but that the bouncer would be a guy I know from Chinese class. We all know what this is boiling down to. They found out it was my birthday. Can you see whats coming? Show of hands, please.

Jagerbombs. Oh dear god, do I hate Jagermeister. It is licorice flavored alcohol, and I don't like licorice to begin with. It's Satan's piss, filtered through wood ash and the overcoat of a homeless man. Then to combine this most unholy of liquers with Redbull? Egods.

But drinking pride dictates a few things: one, that you never turn down free alcohol, two, ESPECIALLY while in public, and three, to say no to shots on your 21st would have been a bitch move. So I got them down in a smooth show, saved face, then went back to drinking my beer. But, remember earlier, when I said I had to work? I forgot a crucial thing: having worked through dinner, I hadn't eaten since about noon. And remember the Long Islands?

Yeah, I was shithoused. My friends walked me home, and I passed out facedown on my bed. But my story doesn't end here.

During all of this, my faithful hound Guinness was downstairs at AwesomeNeighbor's apartment. When I woke up (albeit feeling like death), he was upstairs with me. According to AwesomeNeighbor, when she came upstairs, I was wearing a tshirt, asleep on top of the covers of my bed with the front door ajar. I'm lucky my TV is still in my living room. AwesomeNeighbor put a blanket over me, closed the door, and didn't make fun of me, for which I'm grateful. A little look through my camera's files was enlightening, so here before you, I post a couple of pictures.

Me and STD. He's the guy from the Virginia College At Birmingham commercials.

Don't I look happy? That's because I hadn't had any Jager.

We look like intellectuals, but were probably talking about masturbation or bowling or something.

\
Egan's Pub

Food Experiment: Tofu Caesar Salad

2007-01-11T17:40:00.000-06:00

Today, as I was scrounging in my kitchen for food, I discovered tofu and a bag-oh-caesar salad, and thought to myself, "Surely this can be made into some sort of meal." I swiftly set myself to chopping the tofu into blocks, and let it sit in soy sauce for a few minutes (approximately one beer). I stir fried it in soy sauce, a little oil, and some garlic and then well....dumped it on a caesar salad. It is suprisingly not bad.

Spring In Winter

2007-01-06T15:55:00.001-06:00

It's 70 F outside, on January 6. That's right, I didn't typo. Seventy degrees. It feels like May outside.

While admittedly, it's pleasant, it's not as though it's a respite from anything. Today there was a fly in my house - it's been warm enough, long enough that the insects killed off by that cold snap in late November/early December are already back at it. There is a massive flock of little brown birds flying around outside my house, harvesting freshly hatched insects. That cat is BASKING IN THE SUN ON MY PORCH.

And people don't believe in global warming.

A view taken from my porch. I was outside in flip flops.

Another view, same time of day (around 4 p.m. ish)

See the two little furry things at the bottom of the steps? The brown one is Tiger and the white one is Patches, his girlfriend cat who I also take care of, though she is not tame enough to be allowed in the house.

Guinness, basking in the sun. Or at least he was basking before I came to take pictures of the cats. The he was grumpy for about 30 seconds, leading to this picture.

Music Makes the People....Come Together

2007-01-06T00:01:00.001-06:00

I'm currently trying to learn both the Godfather Waltz and the Godfather Love Theme on my guitar. My father makes this look so easy, but I havent picked up an instrument in probably 6 months. I am so rusty its ridiculous.

The Great Cat Saga Continues

2006-12-31T11:02:00.000-06:00

Remember the Cat? Becase it is my lot in life that very little is ever smooth or straightforward, the saga hasn't come to it's conclusion. I got back from Family Christmas in Illinois, got Guinness and I out of the car, and whose kitteny little face is there to greet me? You guessed it. This one:

However, being the optimistic soul that I am, I figured my downstairs neighbor had simply put the cat outside for awhile. I went to bed. Got up the next morning to walk the Hound, and who pops up meowing at me? You guessed correctly, Tiger. So I brought him inside, gave him some water, and went downstairs to ask my neighbor what the hell was going on. I didn't give him the cat so he could essentially go back to being an alley cat. He gave me some beef about the cat liking to stay outside and it being friends with another cat (remember, Tiger is unneutered as of right now). I told him that doesn't matter, the cat needs to come inside, and if nothing changes, I'm taking the cat back. I left the cat with him, went back upstairs, and went on with my day. It's now two days later and every time I go outside, Tiger's still outside. Last night I brought him in and gave him some cat food I had from when he was with me and he ate it like he hadn't been fed in a couple days. I went downstairs last night and my neighbor was not only completely hammered, but is apparently a depressed drunk. According to Kim (my other neighbor in this house, owner of Anabelle), he came by at 2 a.m. asking her to jump his car so he could buy cat food, essentially confirming to both of us his drunk ass had only just remembered the cat needs to eat. Yeah, this dude is fuckin' WEIRD.

Either way, nothing has changed, so a large male friend of mine and I are going to go down there in the next couple days to get all the Cat Stuff (which is basically his litter box and cat nip) and I'm just going to get the dog and cat adjusted to each other. Either way, this shit is ridiculous. I can't believe I'm having to fight with my creepy neighbor about the goddamn cat he said he'd take care of. *Sigh*

Stuff I Put Together Today

2006-12-29T23:02:00.000-06:00

Here's what I did with my day. I put together the vacuum cleaner, the shotgun, and the bookcase. The book case is easily 6 feet tall and is completely full.

Home Needed for a Cat

2006-12-10T20:38:00.000-06:00

Unfortunately, it has worked out that Guinness is not a cat kind of dog, so in the interest of preserving El Tigre's life, I'm looking for a new, cat friendly, permanent home for the little guy. This cat is a total sweetheart - he basically lives out of my lap. I have bought him a litterbox, collar, and some food, so he comes basically completely equipped (though I havent had the money to get him to the vet). He's a loving little guy, less than a year old, and in my amature assesment, seems totally healthy. Even help finding him a new home would be appreiciated. Help me, and help my little guy! Adopt him!

Guinness and I Have Been Adopted

2006-11-29T12:54:00.000-06:00

....by an alley cat. Who me? Captain Nazi of the S.S. Feline Hater?

Yep.

This is one of the band of cats that lives under my house, and one of them, who I have dubbed El Tigre (Tigrito to his face) has buttered up to me and is weaseling his furry little butt into the pack. He's even buttering up to Guinness. Cats and dogs, living together, mass hysteria. Guinness is doing his best to not bounce all over the cat and I'm doing my best to resign myself to the fact I now own a cat because I don't have the heart to let an animal suffer.

Announcement

2006-11-27T22:32:00.000-06:00

Changed my screen name. It's now Amega001. Contact at will.

Drunk Math

2006-11-03T18:13:00.000-06:00

Drunk math is one of the more common phenomena in my life, right up there with skipping class and thinking "Showering....how dirty can I have gotten, REALLY?" Drunk math is the part of mathematics regarding how drunk you are now, how much drunker you would like to become (as though that's really a question), and how long you have until sobriety is necessary. Some examples of drunk math:

If I have to be at work at 2 p.m. and it is currently 3 a.m. and I am currently half in the bag, how soon must I pass out in order to be semi-functional?

If I have had a 12-pack and nothing to eat, how long is it until I can expect to see all that beer for the second time?

All this brings us around to the current form of scotch-drunk math I'm trying to compute: If I have but a wee tuppance of scotch left in the bottle, almost no soda, and it is only 6 pm, how long do I have to wait until the semi-retarded guy who will let me buy booze comes on staff at the convenience store?

The answer? Way too long.

Annie Nearly Projectile Vomits While Sober: Way to go Ferg

2006-10-23T19:06:00.000-05:00

Today I was at the student union eating lunch and working on my Chinese homework with the held of my friend Zi Han, when I took a bite of my burger and swallow, and feel something sharp get lodged in my esophagus.

My Thought: Did I just get a FAKE NAIL in my food? FUCK YEAH I AM GONNA BE A THOUSANDAIRE!

My Action: Proceed to nearly choke to death/projectile vomit all over the Ferg food court seating area.

When I'm sober, I have a bit of an aversion to publicly vomiting, but I also have an aversion to a premature, stupid, public death, so I coughed and teared and basically managed to get down whatever it was - it wasn't coming up and only one direction was left to me. I put it behind me in the interest of the test I had in 15 minutes, plodded on through my homework, and went to class. Cut to two hours later, my stomach is mildly achy and my throat still hurts. Not to mention there's the sensation of "OHMYGOD WHAT WAS THAT WTF" pervading my mind. I am nowhere close to OCD (I grew up eating at the State Fair of Texas and public school lunchrooms), but there's a certain amount of basic hygiene one shouldn't ignore, so after my classes I swung by the Dining Services office. If I had food poisoning or cut up insides or something, I want a paper trail started NOW.

I walk in fifteen minutes prior to their closing for the day, tell the lady my problem and their new general manager walks out, offers me some free lunch at the same establishment that just tried to kill me, an explanation of a possible bone in a beef patty from processing, and a job.

That's right people. The man offered me employment. What gave, I wondered. So, I asked, "What gives?"

The guy said I had "The right attitude," to work for the exclusive dining services at my school, but if it pays $12 an hour and I get better hours than where I'm currently working....let's face it. I'm too broke to turn that down. GOD I am a sellout.

Can I sue for this? My throat STILL hurts. Does this count as distress? I mean, I don't know that I can bring myself to order food, it seems like tempting fate. I don't want to poke the Probability Gods in the side with a stick, but let's face it, I couldn't bring myself to finish that BurgerKing either and I was only halfway through it back around 1 o'clock, so I'm fucking HUNGRY.

Guinness Grows Up

2006-10-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

So Guinness, lately, is almost full grown. He's about 7 1/2 months old, weighs about 45 pounds, and his head comes up to about my thigh. He has full adult teeth, his coat has come in as a labrador-type (double coated, hard, kind of oily, and water resistant). His collar that I bought him as a wee ickle puppy used to slide straight over his head at the tightest setting, and now is extended out to about half-length. Here's the pictures of him I promised a month ago.

Vote Kinky!

2006-10-15T22:35:00.000-05:00

So for once in my life, I'm giving a shit about state politics. I'm personally in favor of Kinky Freidman for state governor of Texas in 2006.

Here's his website which I am not going to reprint here. Either way, check it out, and even if you don't vote for Kinky, at least pick someone.

Self-Assigned Photo Projects

2006-10-08T19:25:00.000-05:00

In between getting stoned and getting fired this summer, I did a self assigned photo essay of Breckinridge Park, where I often walked Guinness when he weighed less than 50 pounds. Unfortunately....right before I got back to Alabama my hard drive promptly died, taking everything I had on there with it, including ALL Guinness' pictures from when he was a Baby Puppy, all my Colorado trip pictures, everything I've ever taken out at the Cliffs, and all my Breckinridge pictures. I'm now finally getting back to where I have a good collection of pictures, most recently taken during G-Dog and my's walks on the hiking trails of Munny Sokol Park. Some of them are actually kinda pretty, so I thought I'd post some. You can click on these - they are thumbnails - and a much larger, clearer picture will come up.

A full photo-album can be viewed here. The pictures might be smaller because it's Photobucket.

There's a couple random places where you pop out of the woods and you're suddenly in these fields.

This is what most of the park looks like. Note Guinness leading the way.

Fuckin' fairies should frolic through here.

See that drapey shit? For those of you playing the home game, where "home" is also "not in the southeast," that shit is Kudzu. It was brought here to slow erosion, and then basically strangled the south. It's a Japanese plant, and one vine can be miles long.

Guinness is all grown up, ain't he?

Great.....Now I Need A Gun

2006-10-02T13:22:00.000-05:00

I have a new neighbor that gives me the ever-living heebie jeebies. My previous neighbor was a quiet cat owning girl who kept to herself. This guy is overfriendly and keeps giving me That Look. Awesome. Now I'm creeped out.

Writing a Paper

2006-10-02T06:18:00.000-05:00

I wonder if Shakespeare, when writing out Hamlet or Macbeth ever sat around going "I have nothing more to say, but the people expect this play to last as LEAST 3 hours, how am I going to stretch this out.......I KNOW! OUT OUT DAMNED SPOT THE PEOPLE LOVE LAUNDRY!"

That's about how I feel right now.

Long Night

2006-09-30T15:23:00.000-05:00

Ever had a night that began with the best of intentions and ended so far outside the realm of what you thought that you're just sitting and going "Huh?"

Yeah?

Me too. Last night.

The events of the evening, in absolutely no order whatsoever. We (my accomplice and I) drank a 12 pack, went to the bookstore, went to wal-mart, made soup, watched Grandma's Boy, drank with some asian friends of ours, showed off the dog's tricks, then had drunken hook-up time. I won't detail that until you ask, but it was fun.

My Family Reunion: A Weekend Voyage to Chicago

2006-09-27T23:41:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago (the 14th through the 18th of September) I made a 4 day exodus in the car that took me from my poverty here in Tuscaloosa to the bosom of my dad's family up north for a family reunion. The occasion? My great grandmother turned 98. Bitch is fucking old, but damn if that ain't some awesome genetics, and she's still mentally and physically on top of her shit. Either way this meant the gathering of her 50 descendents, some inbred, some not.

Thursday afternoon I left Guinness with my neighbor and boogeyed up to Nashville to rendezvous with my padre at his house. I got there at about 7 p.m. and by 5:30 am the following day was back up and in the car for the drive north with both dogs. Man, driving a big ass truck is a powerful feeling. Having to add an extra 15 feet to my "bubble" (we were towing a trailer) than in the Cavy was less fun, but still, the thing goes vroom. I love a good vroom.

We got to Chicago, I had to put up with several small, noisy, spastic children related to my stepmother (I'm not big on children, particularly ones with parents who bargain with them), and watched them chase StepMother's West Highland White Terrier around.

Then came meltdown. My mom, in her wisdom, got hammered and drunk dialed my sister from Dallas, yammering on about trying to drive home. My sister, in typical fashion, flips out. Then has a total meltdown, spends an hour and a half crying, and chain smokes half a pack. Wheeeee! Isn't family fun?

The next day, we pile into the car and drive out to my grandfather's house (for purposes here, I'll call him The Don, because what I actually call him is so sicilian it might as well be), and from there to the family reunion. We got there (this is in a farm town in Illinois smaller than Tuscaloosa), and holy shit. There are a fucking ton of people at this place. God, I wish I were stoned. Toni and I just look at each other with the sensation of "Let's grub, then let's get hammered." There was a handle of Skyy Vodka on ice just sitting out for all and sundry.

Toni and I get our grub on, some choice comments are made about the possible inbreeding of my cousins from Indiana and the closeness of their eyes, and general merrimaking is made. Then it happens. The most memorable event of the day, maybe the most memorable event of the whole weekend. My stepgrandmother C.D. (yes, my grandparents are divorced) goes and fetches Grandpa TheDon a plate of food, and he turns to my sister and says "See that, if you want a good husband, learn that there. You wanna be independent and that's just what you'll be. Alone, and independent. Also, learn how to run good head."

.......

Toni and I share a sisterly sort of mind-meld a lot of the time, and our mind-meld at that moment said one thing: "It is now time to become very, very drunk. Either that or stab myself in the eardrums with a broochpin, for that was something that I probably should never have heard."

....Yeah. 9 beers (I didn't actually count, but that's probably an accurate guess of my alcohol intake) later, I'm drunkenly singing the spanish happy birthday song with my Cuban, married-in aunt from Miami. Normally, I try not to have more than a sixer by myself, but this was an all-day event, and I had trauma to erase, dammit. I'm hugging my cousins who it turns out are from right down the road a piece in Dallas. I'm in harmony with the universe, and later, asleep, face down on a picnic table. Yee haw. I wake up to drag my ass back to the car, back to Grandpa TheDon's place, and back in my dad's truck to drive our asses the two hours north back to Chicago. Because this shit is EFFICIENT.

The next day I spent asleep on the trip from Chicago back to Nashville in preparation for the drive from Nashville to Tuscaloosa (it was a one-day, two leg trip). One big thing which should be noted is Graham, my dad's dog of 12 years, passed away Sunday. Quietly, painlessly, in his sleep. His tag (we couldn't find his nametag, so I took his rabies tag off his collar) has joined Blue's on my keys in memorial to my faithful old buddy. Rest in peace.

I drove home fairly tearfully, and then got home to Guinness, who acted like he hadn't seen me for a year, and lo and behold....life has moved on.

Either way, here's a few pictures from the family reunion.

My Sister and I - Note the beers

My sister and I are giggling retards when drunk and put cake frosting on our noses. Here I am with cake frosting on my nose.

My sister with my grandfather, two beers after his recommendations for a good marriage

What might be the cutest picture I have ever taken.

And Now For Something Positive: Photos and Updates on Guinness

2006-09-26T12:58:00.000-05:00

Lately, Guinness and I have been moving right along in his training. The list of commands he has learned and is going to learn (a * indicates he has it down, a ** we're working on it):

Sit*
Down*
Settle*
Stand**
Stay*
Come**
Heel**
Heel Up (he comes to my left side and sits)**
Let's Go (the less formal heel where he just has to not drag me off my feet)**
Automatic Sit at Curb*
Hold It**
Drop It**
Leave It**
Go Kennel*
Shake/High Five*
Go Lie Down
Fetch
The Send Out (command: "Back!")

Most of the two-star commands mean he knows it and does it in my living room perfectly, but the second we walk out to even the front yard he gets amnesia. He is now 6 1/2 months old and weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 pounds. Every day we take 2 or 3 walks of varying lengths, and they're getting longer as he gets older (and for all the dog people who tell me not to walk a puppy that much....I challenge you to live with a dog this high-energy and not walk him - he'd make you insane). I will post pictures later today, but for now I have class.

Annie Gets a New Phone, Is Jerked Around By Her Service Provider: Hilarity Does Not Ensue

2006-09-25T21:24:00.000-05:00

Saturday, the day had finally arrived. Upgrade day! New phone! That does....STUFF! Superior, sleek stuff! My mom had seen the new phone, an mp3 player/phone combo dealy at the store and with our omniprescent gadget love, we decided that was the phone we were getting with our upgrade. So I bounced to the mall (the only store I ABSOLUTELY knew the location of) and bought my phone. Which cost me $200 over what it should have. Brow furrowed, I thought "Hmmm, something isn't right, however it is late and I have a great deal to do - I will fix this Monday," and left. Then the new phone starts acting goofy - it randomly shut off whenever I moved the slide into "up" position. This probably happens every 2 or 3 times.

So today, I thought "Well, the customer service at that mall store was total shit...I am going to another location." I walk into the large electronics/dvd/general stuff store and speak to the lady who informs me of a fact which will be very important in the coming 4 hours: the original store at the mall where I had bought my phone is an independent contracter that sells cellphones and isn't directly affiliated with my cell service provider. This is one of two corporately run locations, the other of which was across a busy intersection. What might work is if I take my phone across the street to the other store where the technicians are located and have them take a looksy loo at my phone. I get back in my car and go caddy corner to my current location, where the technician tells me because I have not owned the phone for 30 days, he can't work on it. What NOW needs to happen is that I need to go to the original store in the mall a half mile away and have THEM look at my phone. Are we sensing a theme?

I get back in the car and drive down the road a piece to the mall, go in the store, tell my story to the moron in a skirt they have working their main desk. I also inquire as to my $200. She tells me (after 20 minutes on the phone with some of her coworkers, including the woman who sold me the phone to begin with) that A) they aren't fixing it, and B) They aren't giving me my money.

Pretty please?

....No. Not even if you throw sugar on top. The only real option is if you want to return it for a refund, then go buy a phone at corporate.

......

*Headdesk*

I then drove home. I collected the original packaging, the charger, all the extra little receipts and the bag I had carried all these things home in. I also grabbed my old Brick phone, just in case. I drive back to the mall, and get caught on the train in the meantime. I can feel the vein in my head starting to pulse. I get back to the store, it is by this time 12 ish. Remember, we started at 11? I then sit in this store while the girl dicks around on the computer for 45 minutes trying to figure out how to make a return. I was getting close to screaming at her, but I kept it together. I just wanted to rip the keyboard out of her hands, and while beating her over the head with it, scream, "YOU WORK RETAIL! YOU DO THREE THINGS: SELL, RETURN, AND EXCHANGE!" This degree of incompetence is a rare thing, friends.

I make it out of there by 12:45, and go back across the street to Corporate to buy a new phone. I get there, walk back, tell my story for the third (I think) time, and the guy looks my account up on the computer. Unfortunately, the money doing a math problem back at the mall failed to annotate the return within the big database, so I'd be paying full price for the phone. Ah, no. Not only no, hell no.

They give me a phone number to call, the main hotline for my service provider, and I get on the phone, tell my story (repetition 4), and the dude on the phone tells me I have to call back the store in the mall to tell them to annotate the account with the return so that THEY (the main hotline) in turn can roll back the update on my account, thus allowing me to get a functioning phone from the correct people at the correct price. I call homeskillet back at the mall. She says "I have to annotate?"

"WHAT? DO YOU HAVE TO ANNOTATE? YOU TOLD ME EARLIER YOU ARE NOT NEW AT THIS BITCH!" (I thought).

"Also, do you have the hotline number? I don't have it here."

....My head nearly exploded. I give the cellphone sales lady the phone number to the hotline of the company she (kind of) works for. She says "Alright, I'll call them. Call me back in 15 minutes." That's right. She couldn't call me back at the corporate store because she didn't have that number either. It's like they never removed their heads from their asses long enough to even try to THINK about customer service. I call the hotline back, and of course, get a new operator. I repeat the abridged version of this saga (5th repetition), ask her to check if it's been annotated. She says yes and inside I do a little "WHEEEE!" dance, thinking my troubles might be over for the day. Celebrated too soon, as they say. She tells me that her supervisor has to do the actual rolling back, and that she is with another call right now, but that she will get to me as soon as she can and will be calling us back at the store within 15 minutes. Can you guess what didn't happen?

I bet you can. You're smart people.

And you're right. She didn't call back. 30 minutes pass. It is by now 1:45 and I am edging into the "I am going to miss class" territory. Waiting on something that should have been resolved in an hour. I call the hotline back and get yet another operator, but this time something is different. Praise be, she's hispanic. I have the movida with this lady. I repeat my story, this time in a second language (repetition 6 for the day). She tells me she'll get right on it, goes to talk to her supervisor. Puts me on hold. The call promptly drops (I was on a landline - God hates me sometimes). I call the hotline back. It is by now 2:15. I am officially missing Chinese. Tell my story a 7th time. Thank you lord, I have gotten two competent, hispanic people right in a row. The lady fixes my account in five minutes, then requests I put the technician who has been "helping" me (and by helping I mean basically hanging out with his thumb up his ass) on the phone so she can make sure it has cleared. He is busy doing something else, blows her and me off. She calls the store that is housed within the mega-electronics store I started at 3 and a half hours previously. She gets back on the phone with me and tells me the guy at Mega-Electronics store can see my updated account, despite what The Technician With The Flowing Locks And His Altogether Equally Useless Co-Technician are telling me. I walk out of the corporate store, go BACK across the intersection to the place I began my day, where it takes another 30 minutes to sell me a phone, activate it, and transfer my numbers.

For my troubles they gave me an additional $50 off, bringing the cost of my new phone down to $100, a massive headache, 4 hours of my time, and I missed 2 classes (2 and 3 o'clocks). I don't know if that's a bargain, but it really doesn't feel like it and I have that distinct raw sensation that only people who have been jerked around 6 feet from Sunday without lube can feel. I traveled to no less than 4 distinct location, and visited every store twice. I spoke to 4 people via the phone, 2 technicians, 3 salespeople, and one manager over the course of my day. But I got my fucking phone, dammit. I didn't swear (which for me is a Herculean feat when I'm happy, let alone head-spinning mad). I didn't scream, I was persistent, and I didn't even assault anyone. I didn't threaten anyone, and I didn't try to set the place on fire.

Anyone who hasn't contemplated terrorism has never owned a cellphone.

Groovin'

2006-09-22T20:52:00.001-05:00

I'm wearing no pants, just ordered a sandwich, am listening to some groovy tunes, and in a little bit I'm gonna go get drunk and see a movie. Life, all in all, ain't bad.

Water Consumption

2006-09-21T08:47:00.000-05:00

One thing that has struck me over and over since I've been back in Alabama is the completely different attitude towards water held in this state versus back home in Dallas. In Dallas, water is a precious resource to be coddled, encouraged and told it's special so it doesn't go away and the whole state dies of thirst. Watering of lawns and washing of cars is limited, and people actually use their lack of water consumption as a selling point at times (I can think of a few commercial car washes and certain hose sales at the hardware store just off the top of my head).

Whereas here in Alabama there's an attitude of "FUCKING WATER, EVERYWHERE IT IS." I've been walking to class in a rainstorm and seen sprinklers on. Are you fucking kidding me? It's astonishing. I suppose when you live in a place where you can't leave your car windows down, it becomes more of a nuisance and less of a prized resource. This entire state is covered in trees and kudzu and other leafy things, all of which do an admirable job of not only holding in the water, but absorbing it quickly when it rains (also kudos to whoever designed the drainage around here because it is FANTASTIC).

But it practically alarms me, the difference. Is there a place where they're just BEGGING for an 18 month drought, something we in Texas take for granted? Where 50% humidity, 106 degrees is desirable? Where is that place? Siberia? I would love to know how many resources we in Texas take for granted that they would kill for in other regions.*

(No, I don't mean money or medical care or anything like that, I mean NATURAL resources).

5 Years Since 9/11/2001

2006-09-11T07:48:00.000-05:00

Well, holy shit. It's been five years since I walked out of marching practice all the way back at Williams High School, and then watched the Twin Towers come down live on TV during chemistry class. I personally had no connection to anyone who died - I'm not a New Yorker, and none of my family are New Yorkers, but we felt for them and hoped for the best.

I don't know if the highjackers, had they the perception of 5 years later, would have done what they did. If they had realized their actions were the catalyst of war, strife, and political conflict resulting in the death of millions, the wounding of more millions than that, and the changing of the worldview of the West, would they have done it? As to that last bit, probably. But if they had known the Taliban would come down, Saddam Hussein would come down, and that our crazy ass President would consider it reasonable to then continue steaming through the middle east into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, would they have done it?

I don't know. You don't know. None of us do, because they're dead, and they're in a special place in hell reserved for people who murder en masse.

*Snaps a salute*

For all that this country is a bit fucked up, I wouldn't be from anywhere else, so I raise my morning orange juice in salute on September 11 for all that have died.

Renting From the Slumlord Has It's Downsides

2006-09-10T16:08:00.000-05:00

I live in the Undergraduate Ghetto just off campus, solely populated by broke college students and one or two prison halfway houses. I love chatting with ol' Ankle Bracelet on my daily dog walks. I rent from the company unilaterally known in this area to sincerely not give a shit what you do so long as the rent is paid on time - a bonus if you're an illicit dog owner, but not great if you want to move in somewhere and not have to scour the place first.

It's now football season and with that comes the weekly descent of a group of people known as "Big Al's Army." Big Al is the name of our elephant mascot, and his army are the 80,000 rednecks or so that attend every UA game. My slumlord property owner has rented my front yard out to some friends of his from a small town south of here, where they are now keeping their RV. Once a week, my front lawn becomes the playground of 6 country folk who basically stay drunk and eat chips and hot dogs for four days, then leave the place a bit of a mess. Last weekend, when this monstrosity initially appeared, I kept waiting on them to pack it in and leave, but no, it turns out they are leaving it there for the next 7 weeks.

Now let's get something straight. I am not a snob. I love the people that live in this state and how very different they act and react than the people from Dallas. People here talk slower, act friendlier, and generally are far more pleasant to be around because they don't spend all day sitting in traffic.

But that doesn't mean I want their Winnebago parked on the grass.

However, I can say for the most part they are nice people. Their daughter, however, owns a Chihuahua, enjoys fistfighting, is engaged to be married, and refers to me as "that chick." This family increased my sense of "Only in Alabama" the night before last. I was sitting and visiting with the patriarch of the clan (whose name I still don't know), drinking a beer and mulling over life when come to find out, their family is friends of the family with my freshman year roommate. Who was quiet, a bit strange, and watched Law & Order 27 hours a week with headphones. She spent a whole month not speaking to me and when I finally asked why she had not said one word to me in a month, she shrugged and went "I never thought about it."

She is friends with the people who have taken over the yard. Only in Alabama.

Let Your Soul Glow

2006-09-09T03:27:00.000-05:00

I got off work tonight at the ass-crack of 11:25 p.m. and on the ride home received a call from my Friday Buddy "Cornbread". Every Friday we team up for dumb, often stoned, adventures. Last week we saw Crank. This week, as we were walking my dog, we decided it had been far too long since the last time either of us had cornbread (hence the nickname).

"By golly," one of us declared, "we should journey to Wal-mart and procure some cornbread mix and a castiron skillet to cook it in!"

"Shit yeah!" went the other one.

A half an hour later we strolled back home, kissed the puppy a good night in his crate, hopped in the car and headed to Wal-mart. We got there, found some decent parking, and got out of the car. There, our first argument occurred.

Cornbread, "Dude! We should get some chocolate cake frosting. It's so good on cornbread!"

Myself, "Dude, stay focused. Goal number one! Skillet! Goal number two! Mix! Goal number three! Buttermilk!"

Cornbread, "It's amazing though, you have to try it."

Myself, "Y'know, it's really tempting to get a cart and just go grocery shopping."

Cornbread, "What was that about staying focused?"

We found the cast iron and after a good ten minutes of debate ("this size or that? Ribbed bottom or flat?"), I settled on a skillet. We went and found the cornbread mix my family has always used and the buttermilk her family has always used, bought honey, and checked out at a self-service line that apparently doesn't like five dollar bills. This is what I get for shopping at 2:30 in the morning.

We came back to The Pad and here I had to defer to Cornbread's superior knowledge of soul food preparation. We prepped the skillet, made the batter, poured it into the skillet, and waited about 45 minutes. Out of my oven came a beautiful warm, golden brown slab of cornbread in a beautiful cast iron skillet. My apartment looks and smells like something out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a major feat considering I have black and white posters of dead guys everywhere. The cornbread was as fantastic as I could ever have dreamed it be. Viva my cast iron skillet. May it live long and prosper!

Some photos:

Cornbread! In a skillet!

Cornbread the person and Guinness (channelling a demon of cornbread-thievery)

More cornbread in a skillet!

Oh God, Why Is This So Funny?

2006-09-08T11:45:00.000-05:00

They Hatin'

Holy shit why is that image so funny?

Guinness' Favorite Toy

2006-08-29T16:45:00.000-05:00

My dog, Guinness, is an odd one (while still being extremely cute). He only steals two things of mine - panties and shoes. When I lived at home with him, his specialty was my sister's stilettos. His favorite chew toy right now is a dildo I was given some time ago but have never used because it is absolutely massive. Either way, it's adorable in a way only I could find, so here's a picture.

Thoughts Of A Bad Person

2006-08-29T15:44:00.000-05:00

I'm a bad person and really make no bones about that fact. While my partying has slowed down lately (it'll pick up steam again, I'm sure), that doesn't mean that my thoughts or words have gotten any kinder. Here's a few of them:

Yesterday, as part of my punishment for the Minor in Possession I received back in May, I was required to turn in $20 worth of various goods to a battered women's shelter. I really, really wanted to show up with $20 worth of concealer and call it a day.

I really, really want to ask my Japanese teacher if she's any sort of relation to Takeru Kobayashi, the world eating champion.

Earlier today I saw a rather retarded looking individual riding a grown up-sized tricycle. I literally burst out laughing.

This is all I can remember for TODAY. Do you have any idea how long this list could get?

It's 7:50 in the Morning....

2006-08-28T07:48:00.000-05:00

I'm wearing a tank top, flip flops, and soccer shorts. This is as dressed as I'm getting for class.

Dear Dickhead

2006-08-27T00:04:00.000-05:00

To whatever anonymous person gave me a whole 15 minutes of worry about my trip to Old Bryce, I've done some fact checking, and I'm aware I am totally in the clear. I have a message for you, you low, petty individual with apparently nothing to do but make my life hell.

Fuck you.

If I did something to you, say something, but don't hide behind anonymous bullshit comments on my weblog. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not an extraordinarily bad person (except maybe when I'm drunk) and I really don't think I deserve this shit. You have a problem with me, say something, but don't be a coward and hide behind anonymous threats that not only hold absolutely no logical or legal water, but are right in the realm of asshole. This level of dickheadedness falls squarely under the heading of douchebag. Eat shit and get run over by a bus, fucker.

Kisses,
Annie.

Hmmm......

2006-08-23T08:03:00.000-05:00

Someone named "SYEKOTIC" wants to be my friend on MySpace. Approve or decline, approve or decline, chicken or beef, beef or chicken?

The New Neighbors

2006-08-18T18:59:00.000-05:00

Last night at about 9 p.m. or so I was finishing up Guinness' walk and about to go upstairs when I see two of the frat-daddy types that I live next door to out and about. In my neighborhood we have a lot of feral/alley cats, and they are a bit of a nuisance. This is the conversation I had with my neighbor regarding them.

Him: You don't like cats, do you?

Me: Well, I don't have anything against them, but I wouldn't have one and I certainly am not a cat person. Oh, and I'm allergic to them.

Him: "Oh, good, because sometimes we tend to get drunk and shoot at them and I didn't want it to hurt your feelings. We hardly ever hit 'em, but, yknow."

Me: (Internally):-O omgwtfonlyinAlabama.
(Aloud) Where I come from I'm pretty sure you'd get arrested for that. Kthxbye.

Does anyone else have these conversations? Ever?

The Return to Alabama

2006-08-14T19:43:00.000-05:00

I realize I didn't exactly burn up this blog all summer, mostly because I was more or less internetless, but also because I pretty much stayed stoned for three months. However, Saturday I returned to Alabama, and my family moved Guinness and myself into our new apartment. My only current roommate is my dog - no duck, no Law & Order, no bullshit. Matt was right when he said I would adore living alone. It's liberating. Tomorrow, in theory, the Dell guy will be by, fix my computer, and then I'll go by Comcast and see about TV and internet, and BAM! - back in business, baby. This has been Annie, keepin' it real.

Youth Hostelin' Again: Day 2

2006-07-22T23:18:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure whether or not I described my accomodations for the trip this morning. I'm staying at Boulder International Hostel, about 2 blocks off campus of CU. Today I saw a great deal of fair city Boulder, including a rather high end pet shop, three indie book stores, and a shitload of street musicians. One rather pathetic example was an 8 year old girl in a cheap Snow White costume playing the violin, her mother urging her on.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my mother for never dressing me up in a dumb costume and forcing me to publicly perform for our rent money. Mom, I love you.

As to Boulder itself, I explored today via both car and foot, though mostly foot. This is the happiest goddamn place I've ever been in, and while I may have never been to London or France, and I certainly ain't never seen no Queen in 'er danged undies (as the fella says), I have seen a number of spectacles as mindboggling as any on this earth. I was nearly eaten in a barbecue joint in the Texas Panhandle for God's sake. I listened to an angered Gino, of Chicago's Gino's Pizzeria call some kitchen dude a culero when I was eight. I found an incestuous porn rag in the parking lot of an Albertson's once because it was stuck to my shoe. I've seen a lot, but I have never seen to many fucking happy people in one place. What kind of Valium is in the water. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and someone to scream "WATCH IT MOTHERFUCKER" at one of the seven thousand cyclists (as I forcibly restrained myself from doing once or twice today).

I understand, the place is staggeringly beautiful and the home of some of the most foward thinking legislation in America. I understand that alternative energy and transportation are not only acknowledged but embraced here. I have seen more "WE USE WIND POWER" signs since I got here than I have in my whole life - not inaccurate, considering I had never seen once before I got here. All in all, I feel like the angry, stressed, rageaholic city dweller dropped into Mayberry.

On the other hand, the school is gorgeous, it's 80 degrees ouside, I'm near a state park, and Guinness the Menace would love it. This place has possibilities.

Purple Mountain's Majesty: Colorado Travel Log

2006-07-22T08:50:00.000-05:00

In my never ending wanderlust, I have managed to wander my way from the comfort of the bosom of Plano, TX to Boulder, CO. This time, it's me and Steph who got in the car and moseyed 13 hours west. The night before I took the time to record my thoughts, but because I forgot to bring along my little Captain's Log, I have totally forgotten what I had to say. What I do know is that yesterday I saw a shirtless man who had so much body hair I wasn't immediately aware he was shirtless. I saw some people in the panhandle of Texas who have a miniature of the Statue of Liberty in their front yard. I saw volcanoes, many of which I took pictures of. In an effort to record most of this, I did photograph a great deal when I wasn't driving, though I missed the overpass in Pueblo with DANNY GLOVER graffitied on the side. I can say without reservation that there is a severe lack of pollution here - I didn't realize skies were that blue or clear. Ever.

All in all though, yesterday passed relatively uneventfully (or as uneventfully as 13 hours in a Toyota Corolla can pass, which is to say, really uneventfully). We didn't get pulled over, and there weren't any dead bodies to gawk at once we left Dallas. I managed to pass through Clarendon without murderous rednecks trying to eat me (for once in my life).

So I'm almost a thousand miles from home, and I'm about to go rustle up some Starbucks. I'll report more later once I've seen the place in daylight.

Updating for the Sake of It

2006-07-17T14:08:00.000-05:00

Here's the update: I was working at a seafood place, and today I got fired for chronic lateness. So, yeah, today's been real. In other news, I'm taking a five-day trip to Boulder, Colorado on Friday, though Guinness the Menace is staying behind. Wicked awesome pictures of me stoned in various locales throughout the western U.S. will be forthcoming. Um, I bought Pirates (the greatest porn in the universe).

Oh, and the other day I was standing outside my drug dealer's apartment complex watching as a five year old unlocked the van containing my pot. I glanced down at this whole absurd scenario, and the front license plate said "You've got a friend in Jesus - MICHIGAN". This shit basically sums up my summer. Either way, I'm out, peace, I'll be back in Alabama August 9.

Overwhelming Monotony

2006-06-22T18:31:00.000-05:00

Since I've gotten home, I've lived an exceedingly monotonous existence. I pretty much raise the puppy, get high, masturbate, go to work, and hang out with the Stephanie. Not necessarily in that order, but occasionally at the same time. Pretty much the only one of those things I haven't tried to combine with any of the others is going to work. I'm fairly sure the customers don't want a stoned waitress.

In other news, I have sent off the deposit and lease on my brand-old one bedroom apartment. For all you Alabamians, I'm moving about a half a block from Jew Laura's apartment on 11th St into the green house with the overgrown bushes on the left hand side. I'm directly behind those fancy-schmancy brick condos on Paul Bryant. My apartment is the only one that is actually "upstairs". I've been hitting Ikea looking for appropriate furnishings. I'll be moving back August 9, possibly with Stephanie in tow to help me move.

Either way, that's really about it. I would welcome a distraction from this pattern, so all suggestions are welcome. I am considering plotting a trip down to the Guadalupe for a couple days, so all who are interested should totally get aholds of me. Camping ahoy.

I'm off to dinner. Peace out.

Meet Guinness

2006-06-15T17:06:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday I was at the SPCA of Texas in McKinney, TX, and came home with a new member of the family, a Labrador-ACD mix I have named Guinness.

Everyones, everyones, say hello to the cutest stuffed-horse murderer in North Texas.

Site Meter Re-Added

2006-05-08T04:07:00.000-05:00

I actually used to have one of these for this site, but I updated the template and changed email addresses, so unfortunately, it is no more. However, in the interest of knowing how large my readership in Singapore is, I have added the little button you see at the bottom of the page, quietly monitoring away every page hit I get. A click on said button will jetison you off to StatisticLandia, a great and noble place that tells you just how many hits I get off the AOL IP addresses.

Big Brother Annie is watching.

Life is....a little overwhelming right now

2006-05-08T03:47:00.000-05:00

What the title said.

It's 3:45 a.m., Sunday night/Monday morning. I've been trying to fall asleep for 4 hours. I NEVER have this problem. I have a final at 8 a.m. - about another 4 hours. Then another one at 11. Then I have to call Judicial affairs to see about arranging a meeting to see how I'm going to be punished for nearly being arrested Friday. This week I also have another two finals, I have to get moved out of Riverside, get the lease on my apartment for next year, get packed and ready to go, sell what books I need to sell. Also, my car insurance is coming due in June for $700. I have to drive to Nashville on Saturday (I'll be there until Monday so I can deal with the insurance people). Then either Monday or Tuesday (hopefully the former) I get to make the oh-so-much-fun 700 mile, ten hour drive from Nashville to Dallas. Alone. I hate driving that long by myself. There's only so much companionship a cellphone provides.

So, if I suddenly fall mute, don't be suprised. I'll be back, though. You just wait.

Breakin' the Law

2006-05-06T12:28:00.000-05:00

An explanation of the previous post - I was drunk and had just had an encounter with the fuzz. The chronicle of last evening:

Last night, as you are all aware, was Cinco de Mayo, and as the only one of my friends with any remotely hispanic heritage, I felt it was my responsibility to get everyone drunk. The party went extremely well until about 2 a.m. There was an altercation between two very drunk people in which one person was asked to leave and not come back. Amazingly, they left. However, 15 minutes later, the cops are on the third floor, standing over my keg saying "Miss [My Last Name], we received a call notifying us of a party with alcohol. I found this when I looked around. (*Points to the massive keg*)" I yes and no officered for about 20 minutes while they decide whether or not to send me to the slammer for Minor in Possession and General Source of Alcohol (in distribution to minors, no less). I was extremely intoxicated at the time, and the only thing making me sober was the fact I had more adrenaline going through me than I've felt in awhile. I was wired/in shock for a good half hour afterwords.

They decided not to arrest me and wrote me a ticket for Student in Misconduct which is basically a slap on the wrist (thank you Jesus I got a nice cop). Then they confiscated the whole rig and poured the remaining half a keg out on the lawn. In regards to the assembly, I don't think anything will happen to it as a unit, mostly because I took on the personal responsibility for the proceedings.

So, I'll probably have to go to alcohol awareness class (again) and hopefully the repercussions will be relatively minor for me personally, and hopefully totally nil for the assembly as a whole.

Almost innocent: a tale of an evening.

2006-05-06T02:55:00.000-05:00

Earlier, I threw a party. Slighly later, I came within an inch of getting arrested.

Pardon me while I try to recover from both.

Midget Swallowed by Hippo in Bangkok

2006-05-03T16:22:00.000-05:00

I shouldn't laugh, but my god, the headlines write themselves.

Like Wild Animals

2006-05-02T00:53:00.000-05:00

It's occurred to me lately that college students and twenty-somethings are the wild animals of the human animal kingdom. If you think about it, it makes a curious amount of sense.

For example, name me another demographic that upon being handed food, doesn't even try to find a place to sit and eat civilly, but rather just eats standing up, hunched over, plate in one hand shovelling food with whatever utensil is handy (fingers if one isn't). Name me another demographic of people who really often don't care where they sleep as long as they are warm and not assaulted while it happens (and often, one or the other is optional). College students make dens in the wild, much like wolves, only ours aren't usually in the hollows of trees but rather in a thrift store Barkalounger. I slept in no less than three different thrift store chairs this weekend. I know I wasn't the only one.

I'd like someone to name me another demographic of people so opportunistic as college students and twenty somethings, so willing to comfortably live in spaces so cramped they make a hamster's colon look like a palace.

In addition, regard our opinions towards one another: a land where only the strong survive. I live in a universe where getting attached is considered a bad idea, a lack of willingness to do something isn't a personal preference, it's being a pussy, and where attaching any emotional ties to sex is not only looked down upon, but considered a bad fucking idea.

Seriously, though, it's a jungle out there.

A Question that for the life of me I cannot figure out the answer to.

2006-04-30T15:35:00.000-05:00

How is it possible that I woke up at my apartment this morning, in my bed, alone, but my pants were in the passenger seat of my car, my shoes were at mallet, and my cellphone was in my car trunk.

A corollary to that question is this: how did all that transpire, and I survived?

Implements of my Doom

2006-04-28T11:41:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking of taking that last, final step to my inevitable doom. For a year and a half have I resisted the path, thinking myself above it, but my will to resist is crumbling.

I'm thinking of getting World of Warcraft.

All my friends play it. Each new soul introduced to it seems to slowly, and then not-so-slowly gain a crack-like addiction to it that I as a person who enjoys her addictions, can only admire. There has to be something here, and yet the one time I created a character on my friend's account, I got bored with killing spiders in like an hour. Is there more?

Let's face it, I love video games. I play Prince of Persia with a relentless hatred of zombies paralleled only by my hatred of Oklahomans. Halo sends me into murderous frenzies so powerful I nearly hurt myself leaping off a couch once. Super Monkey Ball makes for a frenzied session of childlike glee, and don't even get me started on the pure competetive agression let loose by Soul Calibur. I got my first video game system before I entered kindergarten.

Should I follow in that path? Should I try and enter the World of Warcraft?

It's that time again.....

2006-04-23T19:43:00.000-05:00

It's time I threw another party, and what party could I possibly be throwing?

Cinco de Mayo, baby. Friday, May 5, 2006, the third floor. $3 to drink, and all other donations welcome. They keep me throwing these parties.

Also, if there's interest, and everyone ponies up a bit to help, I will throw a pre-party barbecue and maybe do tshirts.

I'm gonna whinge a bit.

2006-04-21T14:47:00.000-05:00

Dear Roommate,

I like you as a person. You're easygoing, amusing, and all around easy to deal with on a person to person basis. However, you live like a pig and it makes me want to tear my hair out. I'm aware I'm a tiny bit Obsessive Compulsive about the common area, but I grew up in a household that valued cleanliness, and there are things out there I'm afraid to touch. Like the bread you left sitting out which then grew the cure for cancer. Or the gross dishes. I didn't protest when you brought a pet duck into what is technically a DORM even though its shaped like an apartment and I didn't want to live with a duck. I didn't even whine when your boyfriend and your best friend basically moved in with us (the living room is called Kim's Room. I cannot use me own sofa). For god's sake, they have a place to live. I signed up for one roommate, not three. Hell, Andrew isn't even that bad, he hasn't totally taken over anything. The refrigerator is full of leftovers you'll never eat and then when I buy things I like, often nutritious things full of flavor and vitamins, they vanish faster than a pair of rims at a Puff Daddy concert.

The worst thing though, is the mess, and the duck. DUCKS CANNOT BE HOUSETRAINED FOR GOD'S SAKE. The entire place smells like a duck. I don't want to go to the R.A. with two or three weeks left to go, but this is making me crazy. I've been known to stay the night elsewhere so I didn't have to wake up to quacking. I don't want to do anything to get you kicked out, but this is completely and totally irresponsible.

Before you say anything, I'm aware my room is messy and that I have more clutter than I should, but when you moved into this apartment, the place practically sparkled. Maybe not my room, but the common area. I promoted a place of living I could be at ease with when I had guests. I cannot bring anyone over here anymore, it is so filthy. Seriously. Confine your mess to your ROOM, which I'm aware is already unwalkable. I think I needed a pen the other day and couldn't figure out how to get into this room.

I'm not taking out my rage at you on the poor duck - I'm sure he'd like to live outdoors where ducks SHOULD live. This place smells like a barn. Also, whenever you clean the floors, you use the sponges I buy for the kitchen sink. You have run through a whole package of sponges. Those ain't free, and you never replaced them, so I have. I expect this cycle will begin all over again. Then AFTER you clean the floor the water will often either sit on the counter and block my access to like, my hairbrush, or the SINK WHERE I BRUSH MY TEETH THAT'S FUN TO INHALE, or on the floor. I refuse to clean up after you on principle. It's not my mess, and you aren't a child. I JUST DON'T LIKE LIVING IN YOUR MESS.

Signed,
Your Patient but slowly being driven insane roomie.

Happy 4/20!

2006-04-20T17:55:00.000-05:00

So it's international pothead day, better known (a rarity among holidays) for it's number, 4-20. The reason I'm making this post, however, isn't to dress in tie-dye and promote peace and love, man.

I'm making this post to tell everyone that today is Hitler's Birthday. That's right kids. Let's celebrate a day of peace and love to the tune of Deustschland Über Älles.