Birthday Traditions - Vacation!

This is a lot later than I intended to post this, and a lot later than I planned to stay up, but I'm in a typing kind of mood and I'm at my creative best when I should really have been in bed hours ago.

So, if you'll remember, I had a birthday tradition whose conception was fairly recent, but has quickly become my favorite.

Now, if the title didn't give it away, it's GOING TO STAY AT JEFF AND HEIDI'S FOR A FEW DAYS!!! It's easily what I look forward to the most every year when my birthday rolls around. While I'm up there I don't need to worry about work, and now school, or any kind of pressure. I'm there with my sister and her family just relaxing and having fun.

Heidi and I, and sometimes Jeff, will go into the city and just do fun stuff. What's great is that with them, we could all be at Wal-Mart and we'd still be having fun. We have very similar senses of humor and are always finding ways to make each other laugh.

What's also awesome is seeing my two oldest nieces.

"Kelly, look at this!"
"Hey Kelly, check this out! Isn't it awesome?"
"Kelly, look what Bruce does when you do this!"

I'm always happy to look, listen and watch when it comes to Abbey and Lindsay. Yes it helps that to them I'm an awesome uncle who's really cool at everything! But I love them so much that I'm happy to oblige regardless.

I get to talk games, sci-fi, webcomics and all kinds of geek stuff with Jeff. It's always a great outlet to have somebody that likes the same stuff I do and can carry on a conversation that occasionally dips into said geekery.

I practically speak only in quotes from TV shows with Heidi and she gets just about every single one of them. If she ever has to ask, I tell her where it's from and she immediately remembers it. That and it's always just really nice to hang out with my older sister, where I can relax and really be myself.

I went up there in mid January and I had a blast. It went by waaay too quickly. I also missed going to Abbey's school to have lunch with her so that made me sad. I'm going up for spring break though, and hopefully it won't be at the same time as Abbey's so I can finally eat lunch with her. She always asks and I always miss it. Not this time though.

So as you can see, yes, it's very safe to say, and very correct to say, that going to spend time with my sister and her family up in Spokane is my favorite birthday tradition of all.

Birthday Traditions - Free Food

I think going out to have lunch or dinner with my parents (usually my mom) for my birthday started around the same time I started seeing movies.

I remember the first time we went was my sophomore year. We all got dressed up and went to Red Lobster together. I don't think I'd ever been there before so I had no idea what to order. I just wanted regular breaded, deep fried shrimp, but they had all these exotic ways to prepare it. I listened to my parents and got some skewered garlic buttered shrimp. Yeah, uhh... no.

I had a great time with my parents though :)

I'll never forget what I came home to though. Donald and Eric were watching a movie with two of the most popular girls at my school. I'm glad I was dressed up and looking good, because it kinda threw them for a loop. I was a geek that never bothered to put on anymore than cargo pants and a t-shirt for school. Y'know, and that whole social outcast geek thing. I owned that scene!

So, an auspicious start to a long lasting birthday tradition. I always look forward to the lunch or dinner (or both, like this year) I get to have with my mom. I think the only time my dad went along was that first time.

Be sure to come back for what I believe is safe to say is now my favorite birthday tradition. It's a recent one, but that doesn't make it any less special.

Birthday Traditions - Movies

Not quite sure how it happened, but 11 years ago I thought it'd be a great idea to go see a movie for my birthday. What movie should I go see though?

I wanted to see Sphere, The Wedding Singer and Titanic, but I didn't know which one to choose. Then it occurred to me that it was my birthday. So why shouldn't I see two of them? And if I'm seeing two, why not all three?

It was a novel idea in that a lot of people questioned why going to see three movies was a good idea. Because it's not something you do, and it's my birthday.

So from then on it became my own tradition to go see two or three movies by myself for my birthday. I don't think I've missed a year which is kinda cool to think about :) Part of the fun is planning out what times I'll go see what movie. One movie may start earlier, but it might be really short and end way before the second movie starts so I'll have to re-organize. It helps to have a car so I won't have to limit myself to only one theater, so before I could drive my options were limited.

So, I go to the theater to watch movies for my birthday. Just one of my birthday traditions. I'll blog about my other two tomorrow and Sunday.

edit: and yes, I understand that Sunday is technically tomorrow given the time, but I don't consider the day having ended until I go to sleep, and the new day starts until I wake up.

My Sign

This is actually pretty accurate.

Real blog to come soon.

Pandora and the Ark

Being a dishwasher I see a lot of, you guessed it, dishes! They range from the obvious plates, glasses and silverware to pots, plastic containers, pans, frying pans, sheet pans, half pans, full pans, drain pans... there's a lot of pans.

What's great about a lot of those dishes is that every kind generally matches well with their own kind. Y'know what I mean? The plastic containers fit into other plastic containers, frying pans are the same size; they match. That's good. Because there's definitely a certain amount of space to put everything and it can only get more crowded. The last thing anybody needs is to have a bunch of malformed dishes screwing up the necessity of stacking.

Well, unfortunately we've got about a hundred of 'em in the form of plates. How they came into the hotels possession is almost mythical. We're pretty sure they came from Richland by mistake but we haven't been able to give them back. All we know is they're there and we can't get rid of them.

Now, they're not that much different from the plates that are actually ours. They're maybe a couple centimeters smaller and are a bit deeper. The dining room staff as well as banquets are barely able to tell the difference. Put one of them in a tall stack of regular plates and then you've got a problem.

What should be a stable ceramic tower is now liable to topple should anyone glance askance at it.
So naturally these plates are a problem when we run out of regular plates and need to use them. What's funny (in a cosmic sort of way, which means not funny at all) is the cart they're in is broken and has a big hand written note saying they shouldn't be used at all. It never works, and few weeks ago enough was enough.

I went to Brandon and told him that sorting them back into their own stacks was getting out of hand. Dining room and banquets either refused to, or didn't know they had to, stack them separately so as to avoid plate smashing catastrophe. I offered to put them in their broken cart and roll them down the hill and hope for the best. Y'know, natural selection and all that.

He agreed that they were a problem (he didn't agree on my proposal), and suggested we box them up and hide them somewhere.

Fine by me.

Brandon picked out a couple boxes to put them and gave them to me for reinforcement and placement. Using some really high quality duct tape I secured the bottom of the boxes so nothing could fall out. For the first box I shoved more than half of the plates into it. I guess I thought I could fit all of them in there but once it was full I still had about 25 or 30 plates left. I taped up the top and asked Brandon if I could borrow his sharpie.

Now I couldn't just write 'DON'T USE' on the box because look at how effective that was for the cart. As I am wont to be, I got a little creative.

Ark of the Covenant
Do not open ever!
You have been warned!

I showed it to Brandon and it got a pretty big laugh so I knew I'd done my job. I took the Ark back into banquets and stuffed it away in a nice little hidey spot. As I walked back the line, "It's being examined by top men." kept replaying in my head.

I still had the other box though. I put the rest of the plates in it and taped up the top like I did with the other box. I just didn't know what to put on the top of it. The answer came to me pretty quick and I scrawled away.

Pandora's Box
Don't open this one either!

I put it back with the Ark and was quite happy with myself. The idiot plates were out of the way and would only be seen if there was a really big event. And it'd surely be a long time until that happened.

Well it didn't take long. The other day Brandon came up to me and told me they had to open one of the boxes.

"Crap. Well wait, which one did they open?" I asked.
"Oh, don't worry, they only opened Pandora's. The Ark is still sealed." Brandon answered.
"Good, if the Ark had been opened that would have sucked."
"You don't have to tell me."

As Brandon walked away I thought for a second about what had just happened. I wasn't expecting that when I named the boxes that it would stick. It felt kinda cool to have created a kind of in-joke at work. A code if you will.

I'm pretty sure that not many people know they're back there because Brandon told me he went and got them himself when he was told more plates were needed for the banquet that night. So hopefully the secret is still safe.

I'd hate to get fired if somebody's face gets melted off because they needed a few more plates.

Freakin' Awesome!

Blink 182 is back together!

I really don't know what else to say.

Check It!

Question

Is there anything more painful than listening to teenagers philosophize with each other? Well yes I'm quite sure there are any number of tortures that easily outmatch it, but how often are we actually tortured like that?

As I'm writing this there's a group of three kids sitting in front of me and they're all having a conversation. Well, the kid in the red shirt is talking and the other two are nodding and confirming everything he's saying. So really, he's preaching and the choir is eating it all up.

Does he really think that's conducive? Where's the counterpoint in all of this? Who's playing devil's advocate while all this self aggrandizing is going on?

I would very much like to say something right now and burst his bubble, but I'm pretty sure that when he's older (and hopefully knows better) he'll realize how unwarranted his massive ego is.

Damn well better be, he's so annoying.



Nevermind that this is posted 12 hours after the fact. I had a class to go to and then papers to write :)

Wait, say what?

Last quarter I told all of you about the critical reviews I had to do for my Psychology class and how I always scored pretty high on them. I even got my grade boosted to 25 out of 25 for two of them, and 23 on the other two. I also said how I never got started on them until a couple days before they were due but as you can see, that was never a problem.

So this quarter I have Biological Anthropology with the same teacher I had in Psychology. If you're following the pattern, I've got more critical reviews to procrastinate on. We got our first article to review on the 15th and it was due on the 22nd. If I put off doing them until late last quarter, then I did this one pretty much at the very last second. I finished it around 1:20 AM or so and spent about 10 minutes proofreading and editing the thing.

I didn't even do the special cover sheet where we sum up the main point/s and things we learned from the article. Not including that is an automatic 10 points off the paper. I had to do that when I woke up and the first few minutes of class. Last quarter Psychology was my last class and I had two hours between it and my second class as a kind of buffer. Not so now, since this is my first class.

So I was positive that what I was going to turn in seven hours later would be lucky to see a score above 15. So, fast forward to this morning when we get our reviews back. Instead of being passed out, papers, quizzes and tests are set up front to be picked up. I didn't really want to get mine because I'd hate to go from a great round of reviews last quarter to a disappointing start this quarter. Needing to know everything though, I got it.

But I wasn't going to look!

But that needing to know thing...

You only see outrageously physical double takes in cartoons and most sitcoms. I am here to tell you different.

I nearly snapped my neck when I saw that I had gotten a 23 out of 25 on my last minute, under the gun, rush job of a paper getting an 'A'. I was sorely tempted to speak with Dr. Taff (that's the professor, duh :P) and tell him that I don't think I got the right grade for my paper.

I didn't, but only because this year the critical reviews will be different. Instead of four of them this quarter, only three will be needed. There will still be four articles, and all four can be reviewed, but only three will be scored and count towards the final grade. The lowest getting dropped of course.

So I'll be doing all four of them to make up for what I consider to be an overly generous score. Unless of course the paper really was that good, haha.