The Start of Spring Break

Hello there everyone!

What I failed to mention last time I posted here was that I'm on Spring Break!  It's been a very pleasant three days plus the end of Friday.

So far, I've managed to stay up past midnight or very close to this time every night.  Most of that time is quite useful.  I've been using it for online gym time.  I'm almost done with it!  Everything is due by the 28th at midnight. The sucky thing is, most of the assignments are only worth five points, so I have to do a crap-ton of them... oh well.  Maybe I'll do a paper tonight and I can save a little bit of time.

I've also been using my late night parties (no, there aren't other people.  Night time is my time) to finish the sock monkeys that I intended to finish before Christmas.  You can probably guess how that went down (procrastination is the answer, if you didn't know how that went down).  I'm almost done.  I have two sock monkeys to do and then just the limbs, the ears, and a lion to sew on the other.  Okay, maybe I have a little ways to go.  I'm farther along than I was earlier last week.

Saturday I went with Jack to some of his family's friends house (everyone had younger kids between the ages of six and eleven while Jack's family is made up of two adults, a ten year old, a fourteen year old, and a sixteen year old, so Jack and his oldest little sister were allowed to bring friends if they wanted).  We played Apples to Apples Jr. with all of the kids and it was great fun!  I now realize that I have a very similar sense of humor to that of the eight year old boy.  So basically, everything was hysterical to me.

Anecdote time!

One of the green cards (the card that has a word that everyone is supposed to match one of their red cards with) was 'gross' or 'scary' or something like that.  One of the younger boys across the table from me, after all of the red cards were flipped over and being judged, said, "You should pick girlfriends.  They're so gross!"  To which I responded, even though my own boyfriend was right next to me, "Oh my gosh, I know!  They're just the worst!"  That same boy was also the one that put down 'kisses' when the green card had the adjective 'fearful.'  Sometimes I love kids :)

That same Saturday, I went mountain climbing in my front yard.  To be more specific, I climbed the snow bank located about two or three feet from my front steps.  I made my sister do it too and it was a hoot!

Today was an especially excellent day!  For starters, I got to try wearing contacts today.  Those things are incredibly strange... I'm still not comfortable with sticking anything in my eye, and now that I've tried them, I feel that I'm justified to say that.  I have a five day supply with me, so perhaps my opinion will change in that time.  We'll see...

Today's adventure part two takes us to the city bus!  So, I don't ride the city bus very often.  I don't usually have a reason to.  If I need to get somewhere, I'll use the school bus, my bike, my driver's license, or my parents.  However, after getting lost in down town (the place where we were supposed to go), I didn't want to drive down there, firmly believing that I would get lost again.  So my friend Avery and I took the city bus instead.  When we got there, a few stops after we got on the bus, this other guy gets on the bus and sits a few rows back from us.  Then he starts calling out, "whitey!  Whitey!"  I turn around and he's staring right at me.

Umm... thanks.  I was well aware that I was white, thanks for solidifying this knowledge.

I turned away from him.  If anyone really needed to talk to me, they could use my name or a more polite method of getting my attention.  So I tried ignoring the guy and even while I was talking with Avery, I could tell that he was still looking at me.  Contacts gave me a better peripheral.  He kept making strange faces, staring, and calling me 'whitey' until he finally left the bus, at which point, I could breathe a sigh of relief.  I was really afraid that he wasn't going to get off the bus until we did and then he would follow us.  Luckily, he had better things to do.

So that was a more frightening experience on the bus.  I've only ever had one other not-so-pleasurable experience on the city bus, but it was bearable compared to that.

You may or may not be wondering where we were going that we needed to take the city bus in the first place.  Avery and I were going to go and meet The Oatmeal!  We had both been a fan of his for quite some time and now he was finally coming to Minneapolis!  It seems like hardly anyone decides to visit Minnesota unless of course they lived here at one point.  I think there's this misconception that Minnesota is a frozen tundra-wasteland in the winter and just plain miserable, which isn't true, but it could still scare people away.

Any way!  We had to go to the University book store.  There, we got our books (they're amazing!) and then there was a short... I don't know.  I don't want to call it a lecture, because that just seems to imply dullness... There was a short talk about how Matthew Inman got started with The Oatmeal and how he got inspiration for what he created.  Many of the things he created were created because of things that he hated.  Like dating websites!  He made a website similar to eHarmony called ZombieHarmony.  I guess it surpassed the number of visits to Match.com and eHarmony itself, which I found quite humorous!

Afterwards, he was signing books and answering question at the same time.  When it was my turn, I asked him if anyone had ever asked him to draw them, to which he responded, "Yes actually!  Would you like me to draw you?"  I'm an idiot and didn't even think that this would come up, but I said yes any way and he drew this in the front cover of my book:

It started out as a picture of me the way you would normally view a human, but then he stopped... he said, "Wait a minute.  I'm going to do this differently..." and he proceeded to draw me with the body of a horse.  I can't even explain in words to you how freaking excited I was about this!  I was excited enough to fill the entire book store before, but now I had shot through the roof with excitement because I hadn't anticipated this move and it was just a good day overall!  I had even forgotten about the first bus that we had taken by this point.

After we came back home from the University, we went to Avery's house where we filmed some of the March LONTEM video, but I'll say more about this when I actually finish the video and get it posted.

A word about that last statement there, I'm going to try and get the video done before I go to Chicago, but in all likelihood, it'll be finished, but posted sometime after I get back on April 3rd.  In other words, it'll be here when it gets here.

So you now know what a blog post written after midnight looks like (from me at least.  I'm sure everyone else sounds really coherent).  How was everyone's weekend/Monday?  Hopefully it was as good as mine, minus the creepy bus incident.

Have a lovely evening!

--Jude