Have you ever been in a hotel room or jail cell with 30 teenagers?

Not these ones.

I have. And both feelings are ones of sheer panic. Let me start at the beginning (yes I know, a very good place to start). I teach these SAT review classes, right? So I am exposed to teenagers on a daily basis. And like most socio-demographic groups, they are fine when you have them isolated, but put them together and that mob mentality kicks in. One teenager is a piece of cake. Thirty are hell. But worse than that is my largest class, the bane of my existence, the Solana Beach class. This class is infamous. They are home of the "I-live-in-Solana-Beach/Del-Mar/Rancho-Santa-Fe-which-means-I'm-just-going-to-have-my-daddy-pay-the-college-so-they'll-accept-me-and-this-whole-SAT-thing-is-a-waste-of-time" kind of teenager with a five second attention span.

You might think proctoring a test is easy. You pretty much just sit there and catch up on your reading and try every once in awhile to update the countdown to the end of the section up on the board. Most of the time it is just about that easy. Until you try it with the Solana Beach class. In the Solana Beach class (which is held in a conference room at the Holiday Inn), I have kids leaving the room after they "finish" (or sometimes before they start) the sections and using that time to terrorize the hotel guests, push all of the buttons in the elevator, or empty out packets of cream and sugar all over the coffee bar in the lobby while drinking as much coffee as they can (this last one not only makes a mess, it makes them caffinated). Other kids have opted to stay in the room and enjoy pushing themselves through the aisles of other test-takers in the high backed leather board room chairs the Holiday Inn has so generously provided, or playing their I-pods as loud as possible while tapping along to the music.

Making those kids take a test is hard, but what's even harder is trying to teach them. And what is even harder than that, is when the Holiday Inn snatches back it's conference room and instead tries to make you teach them in a "converted" hotel room. One day I walked in and the guy behind the counter told me that my room had been changed and I would be teaching in Room 503 tonight. With that, he handed me a key card and sent me off with a smile. Sounding suspiciously like a hotel room, I wandered off to find Room 503. When I walked in, I either had to laugh or break down in tears. In front of me was a tiny hotel room with no furniture save five tables with a total of fifteen chairs, a lamp, and a mirror and headboard still glued to the wall. Behind me stood the pack of thirty teenagers whining and complaing that this room sucked (possibly the first time I've ever agreed with their judgement). There was no whiteboard to do math problems and not enough light to see anything anyway. I didn't have to wonder for long about where the bed had gone, because I found it as soon as I opened the bathroom door and saw a large king-sized mattress wedged between the bathtub and the toilet. Thanks to the wonderful hospitality of the Holiday Inn, my class and I were only subjected to this room for an hour before they conceeded to move us back to our original conference room. No explanation was offered for the change in location but it hasn't been a problem since.

Teaching the snotty rich kids is hard, but even a class of normal kids can be a challenge if you are teaching them in a prison. Well, a former prison that is. The high school that I teach at in El Cajon is a converted prison. The whole school exists in one behemoth of a building organinzed in a spiral pattern which means it takes forever to walk anywhere and that there are no shortcuts, (or escape routes as they were formerly known). In fact, if you walk for too long in one direction, you just end up back where you started. There are also no outside windows for the aforemention reason. (I'm getting used to the no windows thing, with my bedroom and all. I sure do appreciate windows more now.) You can stand on the bottom floor and look up to see all of the cell blocks which are now classrooms, with the bars having been replaced with panes of glass. Instead of most high schools that have "the 200 building", here they have "the 200 block". There's no gymnasium, they just use the large floor area of the bottom floor and lay out mats. I've just started getting used to this high school and it doesn't seem quite so weird anymore (which just proves that I can get used to anything.) Until last night. Last night, while I was proctoring a test (which was going quite well, sans coffee bar and hotel guests) all of the power went out. The entire building was pitch dark owing to the lack of windows and it being nine o'clock at night. So there I am, with another thirty high schoolers, again complaining that this sucked, and again I agreeing with them. Does anyone remember that old show where people had to run around in a dark haunted old prison at night with cameras strapped to their heads? It was like that without the camera part and the haunted part. So we tried the best we could to pack up our things (I'm pretty sure I lost a pen in there), and headed for the distant light that was an exit across the huge spiral hallway. I told them to complete their test at home in a well-lit room and called it a night. A very dark night.

I'll warn you that this entry is a bit whiny, but still outlines the absurdity of my life and so you may chance to enjoy it. 

So my life lately has been a bit challenging.  My new bedroom has no window in it.

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT HAVING NO WINDOW
1. Do it yourself Circadian rhythms
2. Significantly reduced risk of skin cancer
3. Indoor baseball games are much less destructive
4. Um, that's about all I can think of

I also learned that my cell phone cannot swim.  I dropped it in a cooler full of melted ice (some people would refer to it as water) and it broke.  I actually heard it sizzling in my hand and then I got electrocuted.  I'm ok, don't worry.  And I have a new phone, yay.

Next, my car was towed because I parked it blocking MY OWN garage.  So yesterday I went to retrieve it from the tow yard.  I realize that tow yards do not need to be the nicest places on earth--if you have a parking lot and a fence, you have a tow yard. But this place was crazy.  I went up to the gate and there was a handwritten sign that read "Please ring bell."  So I look around for a button or buzzer or something to ring.  Turns out what I find to ring is an actual bell. Think Liberty Bell or cow bell.  It looked just like that.  There was a string tied to the inside ringy thing and that is how I rung the bell.  So a woman comes out and leads me to a Silver Stream trailer (circa 1970) that serves as  the office.  Notice I didn't say modified Silver Stream trailer.  There was a bed with sheets and a bedspread on it.  And on top of that, a computer, kinda bouncing around.  So we sat down at the kitchen table to conduct our business.  I noticed that behind her was a spice rack.  In the spice rack there were not spices but small liquor bottles half-full.  Next to that was a small sign that read, "Psychiatric Help $45/hour".  I took this to mean that this trailer also doubles as a psychiatric clinic.  Nice touch.  So I finally won my car back and I noticed that I was boxed in by other cars.  "Just a sec, let me get the forklift!"  Best words I heard all day.  As she precariously lifted the Ford Focus in front of my car, I felt bad for it until I realized that there was a very good chance that my car had met that forklift sometime during it's stay here....

So I now have in my possession a phone and a car, and a room sans window.  Not bad for a day's work. 

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Alright alright alright already. The terrible, horrible drought of blogging here has finally come to an end. Up until this point, I have been busy doing a number of things lately, not the least of which has been GRADUATING, so cut me some slack here people. Luckily, that means that together with the act of graduating and also the recent vacation to the east coast, I have spent a vast amount of time with my family. That in turn means I now have ample material for blogging. So here goes.

As I mentioned, my family and I just got back from a delightful family vacation to the east coast. Well, at least, we flew into Kennedy Airport on Long Island, NY which most people would consider the east coast. But that is not where we stayed. No no no no no. Then we drove due west. Why? For some reason, in my family, just because you want to see specific sights does not mean you need to get a hotel anywhere near them, nor in the same state or even one of the states bordering them. No, we wanted to see Manhattan yet we stayed in Pennsylvania (cheaper, you know). In case you need to brush up on your geography, let me remind you of the situation. Going west from Manhattan there's New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Switzerland, Thailand, and then Pennsylvania. It's a three and a half hour drive each way (if there's no traffic...yeah I laughed too) between NY and PA. Now I can't accuse my family of being completely illogical about this since they decided that if we were staying in Pennsylvania we should make time to see some things in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the only things to see in Pennsylvania are in the southern part of the state and we, of course, were staying in the north. Turns out Pennsylvania is a much bigger state that anybody thought and driving north to south is also a three hour drive. Each way. And that is how we found ourselves in Hershey, Lancaster County, and Philadelphia, PA. These places are all clustered together about an hour away from each other at most, but as was previously mentioned, THREE HOURS EACH WAY away from us. So our day trips were more like allllllll day trips. We typically got up at 6 am (3 am if you're on west coast time), left at 7 am, drove till 9 am, and since we had gotten up at the buttcrack of dawn that morning, usually wanted to go home at 6 pm to be in bed by 9 or 10 pm to get up and do it again the next day. My favorite was parking our car at the Hertz rental place at Kennedy airport on Thursday (my dad talked Hertz into letting us park the car there for free while we visited Manhattan since that's where we rented it from), getting back to it at 9 pm, driving back to our hotel by midnight, then waking up at 6 am the next morning to drive right back to the airport where we were exactly 12 hours before. I'll just sum this up with two numbers: when we got the rental car, it had 200 miles on it. When we gave it back a week later, it had 2,500 miles on it. (Yes, we had an unlimited mileage rental package, effectively screwing over Hertz. Mwahahaha.) That means that we could have driven from Long Beach to New York and it would have been about the same thing. Grrrr.

So yeah, we went to Pennsylvania. First was HersheyPark, a.k.a. Chocolate World U.S.A. They attract a pretty impressive clientele might I add. No one at the park weighed less than 200 hundred pounds, children included. But I suppose if you love chocolate enough to make a pilgrimage to the Mecca known as Hersheyville, you would have to be willing to let that sweet chocolately-ness distort your figure a bit.

Next was Pennsylvania Dutch country where people commonly referred to as the Amish live. Amish. Pronounced AHHHHH-mish. Not I-mish nor Eigh-mish. My dad still has not learned this. It's not too big of a problem unless you are talking to one.

"So you Eigh-mish don't use any electricity?"

"It's pronounced Ahhh-mish, sir."

"If the Eigh-mish don't use electricity, what's that stove doing over there in the corner?"

"It's Ahhh-mish, sir. Not 'Eigh-mish'. And that stove is propane."

"So you I-mish don't pay Social Security? What do you do with the old people?"

"We AHHH-MISH believe in taking care of our elders ourselves at home."

That was almost as embarrassing as practically hitting a deer in the road when my dad saw an Amish boy on rollerblades and took his hands off of the wheel to take a picture. He drove slowly through the streets muttering, "I just want to smoke them all out so I can see all of them. Look at that one! Look there's another one!"

Now I'm going to tell you a little known fact about Amish country and once I tell you, you'll know why it isn't too heavily advertised. Everybody thinks the center of the Amish community is Lancaster, PA. Not true. There's a smaller town outside of Lancaster called...get ready for this...Intercourse. Yes Intercourse, Pennsylvania is the center of everything. Don't ask me why. But as if that isn't enough, the near-by towns of Virginville, Bareville, Bird in Hand, and Blue Ball round out the neighborhood. So we had a pleasant drive through Amish country, holding our tongues all the way and feeling incredibly uncomfortable, and when we got tired of that we stopped in the outlet mall also conveniently located in Amish country (kind of unexpected, right?) where I got really cheap Banana Republic jeans and a couple things from J. Crew. Nice.

It's not like I could afford anything in Manhattan, that's for sure. The toll just to drive in and out is $10. But to me, it was well worth it. I wanted to go to the Guggenheim museum but I knew it would bore the rest of my family. Case in point:

"So Kellie, what's this Google thing you want to see?"

"It's called the Guggenheim, Dad, and it's an art museum."

"This Guggenheim guy was an artist?"

"No, he had a big art collection."

"Why would he have a big art collection if he wasn't an artist?"

At this point Katie took the opportunity yet again to inform us she was tired/cranky/sweaty/annoyed/unhappy/mad at the world and that she would like someone to buy her a drink from a street vendor. My dad only heard the word "drink":

"Guggenheim was a drunk artist? That could be worth seeing after all."

We ended up not at a museum, but at a restaurant. (Not surprising.) The Carnegie Deli serves cows on bread. My sandwich had about 5 pounds of meat in it. And because that wasn't nearly enough food, we also ordered cheesecake. (Hey, when in New York, eat like a New Yorker, right?) That may have been the highlight of the entire trip. I highly recommend Carnegie Deli cheesecake.

Next we went from cheesecake in New York to cheese steak in Philadelphia. See what I did there? First of all, I don't mean to offend anyone (not that I'm worried that too many Philadelphians are going to be reading this), Philadelphia has the meanest people I've ever met. Give me a New Yorker any day. A New Yorker demands clarity and brevity, yes, and if you ask them a dumb question they will tell you that you asked a dumb question in no uncertain terms, but Philadelphians never even give you a chance and they are very protective of their cheese steak. We asked a park ranger at Independence Hall where to find the best cheese steak in Philly and he told us to go to New York. Very funny.

So I pretty much ate my way through the vacation--chocolate in Hershey, cheesecake in New York and cheese steak in Philadelphia. Not bad for a week's work.

All The Kids Are Doing It

Since Kate has become my blog mentor, did you know that Kate? You're my blog mentor! (We should plan a reception or something to celebrate.) Since she is my blog mentor, that pretty much means everything she does blog-wise, I am liable to copy. So there's this new thing going around that I discovered in Kate's blog where you're supposed to post the fifth sentence from the 23rd page of the nearest book. Can do. My nearest book at the moment is one I'm using for my research paper on the history of medicine so here goes:

"With almost everybody slain or immune, the pestilences would withdraw, victims of their own success, moving on to storm other virgin populations, like raiders seeking fresh spoils." -- The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

Why thank you medical history for that optimistic tidbit on the human predicament.

It's Possible That I've Taken This Too Far

So today Kate, who is sitting-in on a J.R.R Tolkien class, came into my room and told me that she and her fellow "Tolkieners" had come up with the idea that at her party tomorrow night everyone should come dressed as a different Tolkien character. This makes her a geek. We have all been relatively understanding that she is in this class in the first place ("intelligent curiosity" says she) but the dress-up idea crosses some sort of line. Yes, she was kidding, which only makes her a facetious geek, but a geek nonetheless. So I made the joke that if she had a Tolkien-themed party that it would be just as geeky as if I suggested that we tell everyone to dress up like a chemical element. She just stared at me disapprovingly (I'm sure you all know exactly the look I'm referring to). And while both ideas are geeky, the more I thought about it (and maybe this is just my newly-approved Chemistry minor talking here), I kept thinking of ideas for costumes which I have decided (against Kate's better judgment...hey we're all friends here right?) to share with you. I've also taken the liberty of listing the atomic number for those of you that care and/or don't believe these are actual names of elements. I must say, there are some I'm more proud of than others and I'm apologizing in advance for most of them. I seem to have gained momentum towards the end there, maybe because those have more creative names in the first place. So here goes nothing:

Hydrogen (1) - best for the smallest person
Lithium/Arsenic (3/33) - look sick/poisoned
Oxygen (8) - walk around with an oxygen tank
Fluorine (9) - dress up as a tube of toothpaste
Neon (10) - think "day-glo"
Aluminum (13) - all you need is a big roll of foil
Silicon (14) - stuff your bra (yeah I know its not quite the same thing, but everybody thinks it is anyway)
Sulfur (16) - wear yellow and eat as many cans of beans as possible
Calcium (20) - dress up as a bone, or a tooth
Scandium (21) - a con-artist maybe?
Nickel (28) - glue as many nickels as possible to your body
Copper (29) - see above, substituting pennies for nickels
Selenium (34) - dress up as the late songstress Selena
Krypton (36) - Superman costume
Zirconium (40) - dress cheap and say you wanted to be a diamond
Ruthenium (44) - really easy if your name happens to be Ruth
Silver/Gold (47/79) - easy enough
Antimony (51) - dress as a rich ex-wife and say you thought it was "Alimony"
Hafnium (72) - only wear half a costume...
Tantalum (73) - a great reason to be slutty and "tantalizing"
Mercury (80) - wear wings on your hat and sandals
Radon (86) - periodically throw things at people and say you're "particle emitting"
Neptunium (93) - all you need are hula hoops, and lots of 'em
Plutonium (94) - be small and distant
Berkelium (97) - wear a Berkeley sweatshirt and decide you're smarter than everybody else
Californium (98) - bikini
Einsteinium (99) - easiest one of all, just concentrate on getting the hair right
Unununium (111) - I can't really think of anything for this one, but its fun to say...maybe you could go around mumbling unintelligibly, think Milford from "Office Space"

Group Costume Ideas
Europium & Americium (63 & 95) - be patriotic and secretly hate each other
The Noble Gases - go in a group of six and only talk to each other
The Big 7 - take 14 people and tie them together in groups of two (not everybody will get that)
Transition Metals - great for anyone who's "between jobs"
Alkali Metals - every time you touch anything water-based, just explode (ok I'm stopping now)

If anybody out there actually HOLDS a chemical element themed get-together, you must must must take pictures and send them to me. If it goes well, you must also give me full credit. Thanks for humoring me. :)

They're Not Cool Yet

I saw the guy at school who rides around on a Segway today. I think he is officially known as "The Guy At School Who Rides Around On A Segway." What's worse, that is probably exactly how he wants to be known. Those things, cloaked in secrecy during development and currently costing $5,000 are, at the moment, only owned by rich people and very few at that. I realize that in order for Segways to enter the mainstream, somebody has to buy them. Ok, a lot of people actually, but I still think that the people that do are, for now, just showing off. It's the ultimate status symbol because as it turns out, humans can walk. It's not that hard, it is a skill possessed by most 1 year-olds worldwide. But people would rather pay exorbitant amounts of money to show that they are no longer constrained by inferior human capability. People complain constantly about the growing obesity of the American population and somebody then decided that standing still on a "human transporter" would greatly improve our lives. I could be wrong, but wouldn't exercise even more greatly improve our lives? We already go from home to a car to work to car to home, seated most of the way. Are they going to take the act of walking away from us too? At least for now, it will only be the rich people faced with this problem, and the show-off ones at that.

Speaking of show-offs and Segways, I saw a car dealership commercial the other day with both owners of the dealership filming the commercial on Segways. Were they trying to be cool? I don't understand how that would help increase car sales (I'm assuming that was the motivation behind making the commercial, it seems to be that motivation which lies behind ALL OTHER commercials) The only message that was getting across to me is that these guys must charge WAAAAY too much for their cars to have enough money to buy TWO (count 'em two) Segways (yes kids, that's $10,000) to zip around on. Either that or their life of car selling has led them to drive so many cars that they have lost the ability to put one leg in front of the other. Oh, and that they are lame show-offs. Especially because I SUPPOSE there is a slight advantage to using a Segway every once in awhile since they are faster than walking but there is no excuse for being on one in a car commercial. There is no walking required in those. Have they lost the ability to stand up without their hands on handlebars as well? Not to mention, if you have a Segway, doesn't that slightly reduce your need for a car? It only goes as fast as 12.5 miles/hour but if you live close to work you could commute on one of those.... ok maybe not in California, but still. So my conclusion is that it was purely a way of saying, "Hey we're cool cause not only are we on TV, but we're on Segways on TV." Grrr to them.

Kids Have It So Easy These Days

I admit it, the only reason I bought the box of cereal that I did was because there was a free toy in it. What the free toy was isn't really pertinent to this discussion nor was it to me at the time of my purchase. These days it's almost impossible to find an actual toy in a cereal box, now you have to mail away for them all. But the way I figure, if it's got a free toy IN it, I'm sold. (That would be how I ended up with a large collection of really ugly temporary biker tattoos.) If you must know, this was a pretty respectable toy, as far as cereal box toys go--it was a bendable Pumbaa figurine. And what's even better than knowing there is a small rubber Lion King-inspired toy living in your cereal box is that day when you finally find it buried down in the depths amongst pulverized powdered reminants of cereal. No, I take that back, shoving your hand down in the box, digging around for an eternity with cereal spontaneously leaping out and finally grabbing onto the toy is just as good (that was easier when my hands were smaller). So you can imagine my surprise and disgust when I opened up my brand-new box of cereal and there, right in front of me was the Pumbaa toy in its own wrapper sitting on top of the separate sealed bag of cereal! It wasn't even IN the cereal bag! Where is the challenge in that?! I've always had a problem with the cereal bags that had the toy towards the top of the bag but I've passed that off as "contents settling after packaging"--I mean, fair warning I guess. But they didn't even TRY! It wasn't in the bag! It wasn't in the bag! Oh how I wished I had accidentally opened the wrong side of the box. They should have a disclaimer that warns about the toy being on top of the bag inside. Imagine the effects this could have on children, just look what it did to me! And people wonder why kids are so lazy these days. Everything is just handed to them, no work required. That is the real tragedy here. The children and their destroyed work ethic.

Places I've Been

create your own personalized map of the USA

Hmm, it's a bit lopsided. I guess I have my work cut out for me with those eastern states.

Organic Chemistry Midterms Are The Devil

Just in case you were wondering how my o-chem midterm went, this is what happened BEFORE it this morning. I am taking the easy way out and pasting in my IM conversation with Jolene because I have already described it once and I don't want to write it all out again. Also because she complained that I don't update enough (even though I have a DISCLAIMER about that sort of thing in my very first entry) and this is the only remotely humorous thing that has happened to me lately.

jojokat35: how did your o-chem midterm go?
kon2chiwa: do you want my whole dissertation on how it went?
jojokat35: no homeless man sat next to you with a paper bag and took the test, did he?

Digression:
During my very first midterm in 140A, the resident homeless guy of La Jolla decided he too wanted to participate in the o-chem festivites of the evening. He walked into our midterm, carrying nothing more than a bottle of liquor in a paper bag and a pencil (no really, I wish I was kidding) and chose a seat in the crowded lecture hall right next to me. By this point, the professor had given up with the "every-other-seat" idea so he sat right next to me. It was a bit distracting I'll admit because the smell of alcohol and body odor was kind of overpowering. More so when he took off his jacket, but having no other empty seat in sight except the one on the other side of him, I stayed put. During the midterm, I barely contained my desire to glance over just to see what he was so vehemently writing but the last thing I needed was to be accused of cheating off of the homeless man. I finished my exam first and left before he was done so I don't know whether he turned in the test or not.

kon2chiwa: no, i just spilled coffee all over my white sweatshirt and left my wallet in a planter box
jojokat35: youre kidding

Ok, this dialogue thing is getting annoying. Here's what happened: I was stirring the coffee that I had just bought at the Grove when I took out the stirrer (popsicle stick) and a drop dripped off and narrowly missed me. I thought, "That's a first, it always falls on me." I have come to find out that if coffee is sitting in a cup anywhere near me, it will spontaneously jump out of the cup and onto me. So I put the lid on and walked off. Turns out there was something wrong with the lid because even though it clicked onto the cup, it did not form a liquid proof seal. When I tilted it to drink out of the hole, about half the cup of coffee ran between the cup and lid...all onto me. This was hilarious really because I had JUST thought about two seconds ago, "Yay no coffee on me." So i walked over to the nearest planter box, put my coffee down and forgot I was also still holding my wallet which I must have put down next to the cup. I took off my sweatshirt, mopped up the cup, took the lid off and chugged it, giving it no opportunity to spill again. Meanwhile, walking away, sans wallet. This is especially bad because in o-chem midterms they check IDs before you can turn in your test. Which, I was surprised to discover a few minutes before my test was due, I did not happen to have. I left my test with the TA and retraced ("re-ran" actually, since I could only make the TA wait a few more minutes after class) my steps waaaaay back by the Grove cafe where I discovered my wallet still chilling with the potted tree. So I guess it all worked out ok in the end...at least until I get my grade back....

Please Pull Through To The Next Window

Ok, once and for all, let's get this drive-in church thing settled. Yes, when I was little my parents and I went to drive-in church. No, it was not drive-THROUGH church, we did not go to the In-n-Out of churches. Drive-IN church, is kind of like a drive-in movie, except instead of staring a movie for an hour and a half, you stare at a church. Pretty simple concept. There was a huge lawn behind the church with old men in orange construction vests bedecked with reflective tape guiding you to a parking spot, except in this instance, you weren't just parking, you were there to stay. All you had to do was tune the radio to the right channel and you instantly had a direct line into the audio system inside the church in front of you. The only mandatory contact with people was during the offering when a velvet (only the best for drive-in church attendees) bag on a stick was thrust into the driver side window by one of the aforementioned elderly, neon-orange-clad "ushers". Yes, some people dressed up, even though many did not leave their vehicle. It's a matter of respect you know..... Especially if you wanted to go to coffee hour after church (yes, I see the irony), it was a requirement that in order to interact with the Christian public on Sunday morning, you had to be in your Sunday best. This is probably what started the whole drive-in thing in the first place. I, personally, was not allowed to attend drive-in church. I was required by my parents to exit the car and trek to Sunday school every week to attend class with real-live other students. Children aren't supposed to be reclusive until they're older, I suppose. If you don't believe me about any of this, you are more than welcome to call Tanya's parents as she did when she first heard me recount my drive-in church memories. They also attended the same church, but be forewarned, it will be made quite clear that they "always went inside the church." I'll finish that thought for them: "like normal people."

These Machines Are Made For Walking

My washing machine tried to escape today. We keep it in the dank confines of the garage, so I guess I can see it's point, but I had no idea washing machines could just decide to get up and walk away. Normally the washer and dryer are facing the same direction (as is quite normal) toward the far end of the garage with their backs against the wall. This is the standard configuration I found them in as I put in a load of laundry. However, when I went back down 30 minutes later to put the laundry into the dryer, the washing machine had moved foward between my car and the door and turned 90 degrees away from the dryer, meaning it was now facing the door which it was also partially blocking. My first thought was that someone had been trying to steal the washer but couldn't move it any farther than pulling it out and turning it but I would have heard either the front door or the garage door open. When I finally pushed it away from the door and opened the lid, I noticed all of the clothes were huddled on one side and the other side was completely empty. I realized that with the help of the centripedal force of the unequally weighted machine on the spin cycle, my washing machine had been happily bouncing toward the door but had luckily been restrained by the fact that it was still hooked up by now-contorted hoses to the back wall. It was a good thing the washing machine's delinquent activities only called for escape and not auto theft because it was dangerously close to my parked car and had it decided to turn the other way, would have really messed up the paint job. Try explaining an attack by a renegade washing machine to the insurance company:

"What happened to your car?"
"It was hit by a washing machine."
"Are you sure it wasn't the car that hit the washing machine?"
"No. It was the washing machine's fault. My car was parked."

The washing machine has now been safely returned to its rightful place beside the dryer and barring any further attempts to escape, should remain there for awhile.

Hey, Those Aren't Vegetables!

As if the Atkins people have not capitalized enough in the name of their deceased founder, I would like to propose they are also secretly behind this new product I saw at the grocery store frozen food aisle the other day. There were vegetables on the box but there were no vegetables IN the box. Veggie Tales as it seems, those adorable singing vegetable cartoon characters, have sold out to the Tyson chicken coorporation. What would a company that specializes in frozen chicken want with vegetable cartoon characters, you ask? As models for their new line of chicken nuggets! They now make chicken shaped like vegetables! Now if you tell your kid to eat more vegetables, they have a valid reason to reach for deep-fried fattening morsels of chicken by-product. Don't get me wrong, I love chicken nuggets as much as the next girl, but vegetables they ain't. And people wonder why Americans are unhealthy as a population. Could a mentality capable of passing off chicken as vegetables have something to do with it? I tell you it's all because of the Atkins fad of meat, fat, fat, meat and a bit more fat. Now you can pretend you're biting into a cucumber or tomato without fear of those pesky carbohydrates. Whew, good thing we've all been saved from those fattening vegetables.

Would You Like To Make A.......Comment???

I have a comment section finally!!!! Thank you thank you thank you Kate! Your powers of html deciphering are fabulous! Ok everybody, this is your chance to make yourself known (to me, at least). Now we'll see how many readers I actually have, as opposed to the number I just wish I had. So don't be shy, line right up and comment, comment, comment. (Don't say anything mean though, I might not be able to handle it.) I know you've been just itching to comment on that post I made two months ago, so go ahead, give me some input. I realize that I may sound like I'm pushing for comments, and I will admit that maybe I am, but I love getting them and I've decided that this is my one and only opportunity to unabashadly beg, I swear I'll never do it again. For awhile anyway....

The Ants Go Marching

Yesterday morning as I stumbled downstairs before my 8am Organic Chemistry lecture (yes, a moment of silence for my horrible schedule this quarter would be in order here), I grabbed my huge Price Club sized box of Cheerios from the cupboard and poured myself a big bowl of nourishment with milk partially thanks to Tanya who had bought the milk (thanks Tanya!). I sat at the table, minding my own business and reading "InTouch" magazine (which, coincidentally Tanya also bought, thanks again Tanya!) about the extravagant wedding had by Ryan and Trista ("The Bachelorette" for those of you out of the pop culture loop). After I finished just about the whole bowl, I casually glanced down and was immediately stricken with horror by what I saw. There were ANTS floating in my Cheerios. Lots of them. Some dead and some gasping for life on their tiny makeshift Cheerios life preservers. There was one in particular who seemed to be pleading to be rescued from the milky depths as it flailed its legs wildly. I had eaten ants for breakfast. Lots of ants. Yes, I know, most of you are out there thinking "Well that's one way to get your protein. " Whatever people. YOU are not the one who just ingested an entire colony of DIRTY DIRTY ants. This was even worse than the Chocolate Chip Cookie Incident of '03. (Sorry Dan.) So in the end, all I can say is that unfortunately, through no fault of their own, Cheerios has lost one very loyal customer.