MS 150

Well, this is the weekend! I've had the thing in my sidebar forever trying to get you guys to give me money (Thanks to everyone who did) and this weekend I'm actually going to do the ride. Dad and I are leaving to go up to Logan in an hour or so then tomorrow and Sunday we're going to be on our bikes.

I'm twittering the whole thing (via cell) on our bike blog so you should totally go over there and check it out.

Cool Clear Water

I live in a desert. With limited water available for use, conservation is really important. This means, durring the summer, if lawns must be watered, it should happen early in the morning or later in the evening. You know, when it's not so hot that the water evaporates almost before it hits the ground. It just makes sense. We've had a really wet spring, so I guess there's enough H2O in the resevoirs that we don't have to be as careful this year as in years past. Still, why wouldn't you want to water as efficiently as possible.

When I see people watering their lawns in the middle of the day, I usually roll my eyes or make a disparaging comment to whoever I might be with at the time.

Yesterday, however, I was kind of grateful for these idiots. It got up to 98 degrees yesterday afternoon and I was either walking from place to place or riding my bike in that heat. The jerks who were wasting water on their lawns in the middle of the afternoon provided a nice little cool down for me. I enjoyed their sprinklers very much, but they're still idiots.

Toy for Wordies

I found a super cool new toy on the internets. Rather than try to explain it, I will just share some of the things I created with it:

This is part of "Not I" - a short play by Samuel Beckett



This is one of my favourite poems: "i carry your heart with me" by e.e. cummings



This is a short story about ducks that I wrote a while ago. It's just a bit of sillyness really.




And this is a sestina I wrote. I think that kind of poem really lends itself to this sort of thing.



Another sestina. I really like how they work with this. This one is "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina" by Miller Williams

Hey Kids

My legs hate me right now. I've been running around all weekend; dancing(I learned Balboa... tres awesome), swimming and riding my bike. I can barely stand my legs are so tired right now. Good thing I'm going to bed soon.

I want to end the weekend on a high note here, so I'm just going to post a video that will make you laugh so hard egg salad will come out your nose (regardless whether you've actually eaten egg salad). Enjoy!

I Guess It's About Time

I meant to blog about stuff earlier this week, just didn't get around to it. So here's a quick catch up.

Last weekend I went camping with my dear ol' dad. We went down to Grand Staircase... somewhere a few miles outside Escalante. I could show you on a map if I really concentrated, but I really don't know where exactly we were. It was really nice to get out of the city and into the desert. I've been wanting to go for a while.

The reason we went where we did was that Dad stumbled upon this spot in March. Just a short way below our campsite is a spot of sandstone kind of simiar to The Wave in Coyote Buttes... near the UT/AZ border. Or at least that's what I've been told. I've never been to The Wave myself. But the stuff we had was pretty neat. Here, look at some pictures:
















Kinda neat, eh?

We hiked about 8 miles on Saturday- went past the pseudo-wave thing down into Phipps Wash to Phipps Arch. It was lovely, but we were hiking in deep sand the whole time. That's not really the most fun thing to do. I figured out why about half way through. When you're hiking in sand like that, it makes you feel like your legs are shorter than they are. Your stride gets super short and with each step you move considerably less far than you're used to. It's frustrating.

Speaking of sand, Dad managed to get the car stuck. We tried just about everything we could to get it out. Eventually we had to call a tow truck (I should thank Verizon for actually having service out in the middle of nowhere... kind of. And AAA for sending a truck out to the middle of nowhere) to get pulled out of the sand. Here's a video of that:



It's not nearly as fun as I hoped it would be. But you can see it was quite the endeavor to get the car out of the sand.

Sunday we packed up camp and drove to Bicknell to do a little bike ride. The plan was to get 35 miles in, but we took a wrong turn and ended up only going 20.

All in all, I'd say it was a pretty good weekend.

Bikes and Dykes

What a weekend!

Friday I worked all day and then shot off to Logan with my parents.

Saturday I spent all morning and a good chunk of the afternoon in Logan riding my bike. It was the first sponsored ride of the season. I already wrote all about it here, on my bike blog.

I got home from Logan around 4, took a shower and passed out until 5:30 when my friend Nick showed up. It was a planned showing up. We went to the Roller Derby that night, Nick and I... and Alessa and another Nick and Jimmy. After the Derby we decided to play mini-golf (why the hell not?).

I got home, completely exhausted, around 11:30 only to discover that Roommie had a few people over. That's not a big deal, they were friends, and it was Saturday night, and I was going to pass out and be dead to the world anyway. I really was going to go to bed right away and sleep a long time. But then I started talking to them. I didn't make it to bed until they left... around 2:30.

Today I woke up at 8. I meant to wake up at 8:30. Was planning on an early morning because of the Pride Parade, which started at 10. I magically woke up half-an-hour early and didn't feel like it was worth it to go back to sleep at that point. Around 9:15, I met up with some friends and we walked down town to see the parade.

After the parade we had to go to the festival, of course. For those who don't already know, the Pride Parade and especially the Pride Festival is pretty much a big gay party. It's a celebration of all the homos, trannies, and miscellaneous queers. I'm as straight as they come, but I have wonderful friends who speak fluent fag, so I go in support of them.

I was at the festival pretty much all day. It was a lot of walking around, checking out booths and checking out people. Pride really brings out the more interesting side of Salt Lake. It was a lot of fun, but I'm pretty sure that after my bike ride and then walking around all day today, my legs are about to fall off.

This evening I went to my parent's for dinner. Now I'm home and have a daunting amount of homework I have to get done. Remember the days when I used to have free time? *sigh* those were the days.

Danke Schoen

I should really be sleeping. But I thought I'd throw a few random thoughts into the blogosphere first. And rather than doing a bulleted list, I think I will mark each separate thought with a Suessical fish.

I went to the dentist today for the first time in 2 years. It's not that I hate the dentist or anything, I just haven't gotten around to going. Anyway, I have two cavities. Boooo!



The Tyger by William Blake is much better in the context of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I found that poem mostly annoying before reading the rest. It's still not my favourite, but I like it much better now.



Speaking of Blake, I have to come up with a topic and thesis for a paper for my Lit History class. The paper (it's short, only 5-6 pages) is due a week from Tuesday. I really need to figure out what to write it on. I have a few ideas floating around my head, but nothing really solid.



Remember River? She's gone. Roommie took her back to the pet adoption place today. She was a very defective cat. She peed where she shouldn't have, and she was destroying my couch. Roommie's pretty bummed about the lack of cat we now have. That makes me feel bad about celebrating, but I'm really happy that stupid cat is gone.



Tonight at swing club, I requested Danke Schoen I was excited about the Ferris Bueller-ness of it all (P.S. The link is to a trailer video. The song is at 1:47 and lasts about 3 seconds. It's the best I could do without making much effort). No one else got it. That made me sad. I guess I'm just weird like that; it's astonishing how often I make references that no one gets.



I'm riding Little Red Riding Hood this weekend. The weather looks like suck. Hopefully the forecast is wrong and Saturday will turn out to be really lovely.




Must sleep now. Bye!

Sleep With One Eye Open

I have an irrational terror of Yellow Jacket Wasps. They terrify me. If I find myself in the same room as one, I tend to run screaming toward the exit. I know I am prone to exaggeration, but I am not joking about that. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you and I and a yellow jacket are in the same room, you will hear that scream. If I found myself in Room 101, it would be full of yellow jackets. You have to understand how incredibly horrified I am of this simple insect. That said....

I had this dream last night (I suppose it was really early morning). I am lying in bed and I hear this horrible droning buzzing (What the buzzing? Yes... all the time the buzzing... so called... in the ears). I look up and see what appears to be a large fly zipping around my ceiling. Thanks to amazing dream magic, I suddenly discover in my right hand a rather large flyswatter. I start swatting at this fly and then it dawns on me... That is no fly, it is (ominous revelatory music) a Yellow Jacket! So I wield my flyswatter more ferociously, because I am now fighting for my very life. After an epic battle, the fiend is defeated. As I stand triumphantly over his lifeless, and rather smushed, corpse I realize the buzzing is still there. Fade to black.

Then I felt something crawling on my face. I shot upright in bed (I may have yelped) and there, buzzing around my ceiling, was a big old yellow and black wasp-of-death! I may have screamed. I definitely pulled the cover over my head and cowered. The buzzing grew louder. I peaked out from my quilt and saw the winged evil futilely running into my closed blinds over and over again. I occurred to me that if I can just open the blinds, it's probably not so dumb that it can't make its way through the wider gaps and out the window (which is open, but does not have a screen yet because my landlords are... I don't know why they haven't put a screen in yet. I've asked them to). The buzzing insect seemed to be rather distracted, so I decided to risk bodily harm and tentatively reached my arm out to grab the stick thing that adjusts the blinds. The demon bounced closer to me. I panicked and ducked back under the covers.

After a moment the buzzing seemed to get farther away. I poked my head out of the covers again to see the bug running into the blinds on my other window. Thinking very quickly, I jumped out of bed, opened the blinds (to the first window, not the one he was buzzing at) and ran out of my room, shutting the door behind me. I stayed safely in the kitchen and living room for at least an hour. The evil seems to have made its way back outside in that time. I half expect it to come buzzing out from some cranny or nook, or attack me when I open a drawer or something. Seriously, I am very wary about touching things... anything... that might be harboring a wasp.

I thought I would share the story of how I woke up today because, as terrifying as terror is, I can absolutely see the humor in the way I behaved. Even as I was taking refuge under my covers like some kid hiding from the boogie man, I realized that my behavior was absolutely ridiculous. There was no fucking way I was going to come out and face the beast though.

By the way, when you wake up with that much fear, there's no way you can go back to sleep. So I've been kind of sleepy today.

Twenty Four

It's my Birthday again! Yay Me! Let's dance:



(Peanut Butter Jelly Time anyone?)


(Yay Chickens!)