It's the truth, grandfather!

The snow fell.
The days passed.
We decided to get Saadia's car out of the snowbank, once and for all. A group effort seemed best.

Amanda showed up at the apartment: the first strange occurrence of the day, since she has replaced us with cooler, more interesting people. She brought one of them, K-Bo, with her.

many minutes
digging digging
pushing pushing
changing tack-tics then
changing back

Finally after one of many long, ponderous moments, the car wrenched itself away from the curb, and out into the plowed street.

"Where should I put this?" asked Ken.

"Academy Hall would be best," instructed clever Meg.

Amanda and Ken left us as quickly as they had arrived, and Meg and I stood idly by, scraping the ice off the pavement with our cheap plastic shovel as we waited for Saads to retrieve her car from Academy Hall.

Soon we saw her meandering back down the hill towards us. We could not help but notice that she did not have a car with her! However, before we could ask about it, we were distracted by an SUV with the nerve to pull up to our newly shovelled space and blink at us.

"I don't want to talk to them." I said

"Pretend you're shoveling!" said Meg. We did an excellent job of ignoring the problem.

Then the door to the car opened, and a tiny little dog jumped out, trailing its leash behind it. A tiny old lady followed. She looked suspiciously like her dog, which was strange. At that moment, the dog was sick of being in the car, and the old lady was very sick of being in her life. She wanted to know two things:

1. If there was a dead body under her car, and
2. If someone could grab her dog.

She had managed, on the drive up the hill, to first knock off her front bumper, and then proceed to drive over it, lodging it tightly under her car. No amount of prying with a shovel could convince it to move.

She decided, of course, that the best way to dislodge the bumper would be to run her car up onto the curb outside our apartment.

"You girls aren't going to leave me, are you?" she inquired as she got back into the car.

Meg got to hold the dog, who was very ugly, and who was running around smelling things with its adorable little sweater on.

It worked! There were many scraping noises and roommates placing themselves as far as possible from danger zones. When she emerged again, I used my engineering prowess to yank that bitch right out from under there (there are many courses in yanking a bitch here at RPI). Saads and I then shoved-a-bitch right into the back of her huge car.

"Do you love Troy? I love Troy," she said idly.

And she drove away.



At this point, Saadia admitted that she had misplaced her car.

We found it.
We retrieved it.
We waited too long in the parking lot for a bus to move; each step of the boarding passengers took seconds.
We waited long enough for Saadia to become bitingly sarcastic.
We parked.
We got stuck.
We got out.
We are the worst-parked car on the road.

It is snowing again. :D


.

sometimes I go to school and
sometimes I play by the rules and
no, I don't want to talk about it
(not to you, anyway)

sometimes I hear what you say and
sometimes I think you're gay and
maybe you should listen back
(maybe not, 'cause I don't know much anyway)

CHORUS:
but people
people say I'm smart, boy
maybe that's why I act coy
(because I like to lie)
and you say that's not the way
and that no one knows me anyway
and that may be okay
but I. just. don't. care.

there are times when I try to have fun and
there are times when I love no one and
no, I don't want to talk about it
(la de da de da de da de da)

I make a pot of coffee when I go to bed
and it keeps me up all night instead
and you should know what I need by now

(chorus)

maybe I'll stay in bed or
maybe I'll get up instead, but
no, I don't want to talk to you and
no, I don't wish to sleep with you
and I think I'd pretend to like you
if you'd never open your mouth

bridge:
the other day you said you'd walk me home
but you didn't come to get me
(who's that ly-ly-lying there?)

you mentioned we could watch the time go slow
on the road that goes nowhere
(so tell me; who's that ly-ly-lying there?)

(chorus)

end.

My stress-relievers this semester have been:

1. Cat
2. Meg's boob pillow
3. Piano!

I have been playing away, and it is very relaxing and fun and all my troubles just fall right away . The other day I went to learn some piano at the home of dear My Saint Slowtus, only to discover that it was HORRIBLY OUT OF TUNE and made my body shake in anger from head to foot (yes, Ryan, the anger was shaking in my fist).

<3
<3

Now back to mau (mau mau).

Yesterday my friend said to me,

"I don't know what's wrong with you...but I...kind of wish I had it."


ps: this had nothing to do with boobs.

The rain today was a huge relief. The sun has been like that person that's always a little too friendly, that you just wish would leave you a little more alone.

I can't wait until the Mamas and the Papas are singing to me about how all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey, and how they've been for a walk on such a winter's (or at least autumn's) day.

What's funny is the less often I write in here, the less I have to say. You'd think it would be the opposite. I used to keep a journal next to my bed, and sometimes I would get weeks behind in my updates, so then I would make lists of what I had to write about, and then eventually I would make lists of the lists. Finally I just stuffed it into a drawer.

This is a quiz:

1. What is this?
2. Should it be edible?

Here are the words to a song I wrote last night, boring boring boring, and blah blah blah, and stuff:

I awake from a long night of dreams that weren't so good for me
They hurt my head, and they hurt my heart
And they gave nothing for free

They sell some things to me around the block
I wait for you to say some things
And while I sell my things
I miss more every day

I come home, but I don't think i was gone
Nothing's moved, and the birds are out on the lawn
They only sing when I sing
And they've been pretty silent lately

Hey before you do
Don't wake me, but give me a kiss, would you?

and another email from my gramps that I received, which cracks me up:

My grandpa (Pup) has spent his entire retired life writing a math book for youngish kids who want to learn more than they do in school. When I was small and impressionable, he paid me small wages to work through it and see if it was understandable. It was inexplicably fun. Anyway, he recently got someone to make him a website, and has been making the final changes to his book (in PDF form). Here is an e-mail he sent me, apparently in an attempt to keep me updated of the goings-on. Verdict: has he lost his mind, or is he being what we call "funny"?

He does have a pretty hilarious (yet terrible) sense of humor. Perhaps that's where I got it? :P

While most of  you may view Beginning C Programming for Engineers as very deserving of the description "joke course", I find that I lack the will to think about it. Is it because I am afraid to discover my shortcomings? That I don't wish to discover that I will fail at this new way of thinking, and forever be plagued with hideous self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy? Or is it simply because I don't care? The latter question may give us some insight as to why I am writing about the subject (in all its glorious boredom), when I could be sitting in front of my laptop, moaning and groaning at the screen and thinking of the many better methods with which my eyesight could deteriorate.

It's Chicken Thursday tonight at the home base with my lovely roommate Meggums, so I'm going to lug my books back to Stac and (hopefully) get crackin'. Maybe ponder the C project that's due Monday? Maybe put it off? Maybe just whine about it some more?

Peacock and Spesh are arriving tomorrow! Hopefully Dan'll get here in time for the Sheer Idiocy show, and Amy's arriving after her "party" (loser). I miss them, a lot (and shut up, I am not getting sappy)!

If the weather would warm up a little, we could have a snowman making session, and I could throw someone in the snow and have a good ol' tussle. I want to be a little kid again.



and i'm gonna maaaake you cry
and i'm gonna saaaay goodbye

Here's a fun project we did in Intro to Visual Communication -- we had to make faces (symmetrical and asymmetrical) out of letters/numbers/punctuation.

( LOOK HERE )
( Oh, and irony? )

I think I will manage to have nothing but fun for the remaining time home before I go to back to RPI. Even the nagging of the parents has ceased to bother me, and their qualms about the damages of having more than 36 hours of fun all at once. There are less than 36 hours before I get in the car with Dansie and chatter at him for 2.5 hours, and here's what I plan to do with them:

1 hour: make brownies
4 hours: teach ol' karen to skate, and blab for a while with her
1 hour: pick up beck and brie from track practice, while blasting my "road to dalhousie" celtic tape (it's kickass)
2 hours: use up marshall's gift card
forever after: amy (we'll call her blame-y) time!
8 hours: sleeping
4 hours: packing with ben folds (he agreed to come help! he's a real nice guy)
2 hours: daydreaming

I really hope no one counted to see if it added up to the correct number of hours (which was unspecified anyway, so HA!), because it doesn't. In fact there are only 24 hours left now, but who's counting?!*

Love, Bets


*certainly NOT me.

except if I hadn't come to visit I never would've been forced to listen to stupid Charlie the friggin' Unicorn three more times.

I don't know if I have ever loathed anything more.

I'm glad my shitty little car got fixed in time for me to visit RPI for 3 days!

Really glad.

But I love that shitty, shitty little car.

LOLZ DREAM POST
YAYYYYYYYY I'M STEVE!

            This was a very detailed dream, and not ridiculously crazy; it would've made for a good story had I not forgotten nearly all the details and plot while waiting for my computer to turn on.

            The setting was like the Old West, except we had cars, etc. -- a lot of crazy looking old Chevys and others, with the curvy bumpers and prominent noses, all in garish coats of paint and carrying the impression of having extra parts, although they (upon inspection) didn't. I was with someone I liked a lot (I don’t remember, somehow who it was) -- and somehow I got scooted off to a place entirely across the country. I desperately needed to get back to wherever/whatever I was before, but for some reason this had to be done in the utmost secrecy. No one in the new town with the stupid-looking cars could know about it. I pretended that I was a man who had recently died in the village, with the name of George Lucas. I don't know why (or how) it worked, because one man who had seen me as a newcomer before exclaimed, "oh, hey, it's you again!" while driving by in his wooden-slatted pick-up.

            "What's your name?" he asked.

            "George Lucas," I replied.

            He got all sad. "But...he died…" (it was at this point that his IQ plummeted noticeably – I have no idea why).

            "A different one," I said, and moved on.

 

            Apparently, the way to get home was to drive enough miles in other people's cars to get me there; but I didn't have to physically move from the town at all. So I hung around the gas station waiting, just like the movies (I don’t actually remember this happening in any movies, but I know that’s why I was doing it), for the arrival of trucks with large backs, perfect for stowaways. In that town most people had friendliness coming out of their ears, and I could have hitched a ride with nearly anyone, but I waited for large trucks because that's how it's done in the movies.

            I kept track of the miles I had gone on a caulking gun which for unknown purport was equipped with a counter that would tick numbers off one by one -- like a pedometer. I stashed the caulker in a pantry, in a fruit bowl set by the window, because no one would look there. It was important that no one find it.

 

            There was a man who worked pumping gas who was very, very stupid, but very sweet. There were some conversations with him that I forgot, but in one I offered (or was otherwise convinced) to teach him things. Me and another man (I was a man, in faded blue overalls and a greasy painter's cap) went about teaching this Idiot to garden and kill wasps, but at the same time. To do this, you held the wasp sprayer in one hand, in between an implement not unlike salad-serving tongs. That was to get the weeds. I was running around pulling them out, and he didn't seem to get the point of it (we were, in fact, just pulling out all the things in the gardens). The other man helping me teach sprayed a particularly large bunch of wasps (there were also no wasps in these gardens. We were, really, the worst teachers ever), and yelled triumphantly, "did you see that?!"

            "Nice angle." I commented.

            The man nodded and peered into the window in front of us, to see the extent of the wasp-killer damage inside the house. He spied the extinguisher and questioned it with his eyes, but didn't say anything. I got stone cold and as nervous as I've ever been in my life. But why would he be suspicious about that? People leave things lying around everywhere.

My Dad finally bonded with a Cat, but then it went and got run over, so the family decided to get another one. Spigot was great, but this one is oh-so-adorable. Its name might be Socks, or Toast, or Boots; it was undecided last time I asked.

Meel: what is with the red coloring?
Meel: does my aim come up as being typed in red to you?
bets: yes
bets: it's because you just c+ped something
bets: dur hurr
Meel: what
Meel: what does that even mean?
bets: dur hurrrrr
bets: it is the perfect thing to describe when something is retarded
bets: (or someone)
bets: (like you)
Meel: oh sped
Meel: i get it
bets: what is it w/zack and his ghetto slangs?
Meel: he just does it to be a c+ped

bets: mel
bets: are you retarded
Meel: what
Meel: what
Meel: what in the dickens is the deal?
bets: he just c+ped?
bets: can you tell me just what you meant by that?
Meel: he just does it to be a sped
Meel: c+ped
Meel: why? what does that mean?
Meel: that is the meaning that i gleaned from your use of it
bets: OH MY GOD
bets: I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING
bets: i thought, up there, that you were asking about the meaning of "dur hurrr"
bets: "c+ped" means "copied and pasted"
bets: oh.
bets: god.
Meel: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Meel: i can't believe this is happening either
Meel: (pronounced eye-thur)
bets: well, that gives me some idea

The Four Sisters Quartet needs a name.

Suggestions please?