X-Mas Recap

My Christmas was rather boring (at least by my family's standards) though my grandmother still thinks it was crazy. My parents drove in from Indiana on Dec 23rd, but I didn't actually see them till the 24th. I worked on Christmas Eve because I didn't want to use a vacation day and knew I'd get a lot of work done because no one would be in. Plus they let us out at 3, which was nice. That night my parents and I went to a Christmas Eve dinner that we've now been extended an invitation "for life." It was with family friends that we did the 3-day with, and they cook 12 meatless dishes. The dinner has grown and now includes about 35 people. They split families up at dinner so you're at a table with a bunch of people you don't really know...always interesting. We ate and ran because of course the Notre Dame game was on.

FINALLY, no more talk about how Notre Dame can't win a bowl game. We decided that Jimmy Clausen has the same cold weather issue as Brett Favre. So if we just scheduled all away games for the month of November...and possibly October...we should be ok. I'm really disappointed that Kyle Rudolph wasn't more productive because I wanted lots of cheesy Santa Clausen and Rudolph headlines in the paper the next day. It was a great game though wasn't it. I was so bored by the 4th quarter that I hooked up my Wii, played 5 games of Wii tennis and took a shower.

Speaking of my Wii, I get to open one present on Christmas Eve and just told my mom to pick one out and hand it to me. Guess what...the Wii. So then the next morning when I open presents, my last present was mosaic grout. I think I did something backwards. Isn't the big present last? Anyway, I also have a Best Buy gift card burning a hole in my pocket, so if anyone has Wii recommendations I would appreciate it. Also while opening presents, my dad opened a present that he was giving to me, but it took a long time after opening it and staring blankly at it for him to realize what had happened.

Then we went to visit my grandfather at the "retirement community" which is usually painful as he complains about the place stealing all his money and how Donovan McNabb is a bum. But on Christmas, he was actually interesting as he told us how a burst appendix ruined his professional baseball career and malaria saved his life. (His plane got shot down in the war but he wasn't on it because he had malaria.) It did get a little weird when he was talking about how Veteran's Day makes him sad because he thinks about the cannibals eating his dead friends.

We went back to my grandma's house (other side of the family) and then the kids came. We realized that we have at least one kid in every grade from 2nd to 11th. Crazy! I didn't think it was too bad except for the spontaneous outbursts of singing, mostly Sound of Music and mostly from my cousin Heidi.

Friday we went shopping....a LOT of shopping.

Saturday was big Christmas celebration. With all the family members from my mom's side along with my Aunt Jane's mom and sister. There were several awkward moments with people calling someone by the ex-wife's name, talking about how banks are stealing our money (Jane is a banker), talking about how the government is wasting our taxes (cousin Brian is a tax collector), and other various non-Christmasy conversations that no one really backed off once they became awkward. My dad said his tongue started to bleed he was biting it so hard.

Well, that's Christmas with my family. No screaming (except by kids which is ok), no punches thrown, no police, no drugs, so rather calm by our standards.

Sorry, no Christmas Cards

I wanted to thank everyone that have sent me beautiful Christmas cards this year. I love the mail. I also wanted to tell you not to be expecting one from me. I don't know whether I've been watching too much G-word on Planet Green, reading to much Body and Soul, spending too much time on treehugger.com or just generally drinking the Go Green Kool-aid that's been going around, but I decided to save some paper and not mail Christmas cards this year. If you work with me and got one, consider yourself lucky (I gave into peer pressure). So here is my general impersonal blog Merry Christmas to everyone! If I've seen you recently, it was great to see you and if I haven't seen you recently, we really need to get together soon. Stay tuned as Christmas, my birthday and New Year's are always good for some posts (though since two of my cousins are in jail, it might not be as interesting as in previous years.)

Whopper Virgins

Has everyone seen the whopper virgins commercials? Do they bother anyone else? Everytime I see them I think "was this really a good idea?" I mean, come on, have you seen Bizarre Foods on the travel channel? These people drink yak blood and goat urine and think it's good. Am I really going to take their opinion on which burger to eat seriously? In fact, I think it makes the Big Mac look pretty good. McDonald's...we don't taste like goat.

Microwave S'mores

So today was the last day for a lot of people that retired/quit/got laid off so when most of them left after lunch I raided their offices/cubicles/working spaces. I now have actually have a matching set of chairs in my office. Can you believe that? But the big find was a case of marshmallows and a case of graham crackers, so of course of first thought was...S'mores!! Do you know what happens to a marshmallow when you put it in the microwave for 20 seconds? This:

Pretty cool, huh? I highly recommend trying it yourself. I kinda want to put a bunch of mini marshmallows all in together and see them all puff up.

Happiness Is...Having a Job

Yes, I've retained my job. Woot! I was about ready to pull my hair out though. At around 11:30, we discovered that calls were being made to people by HR regarding their status. Later we realized that they were going by alphabetical order. Damn! I had to wait for S. I had a dentist appointment at 3:15, but that shouldn't be that big of a deal, right? Well, the call didn't come, so I went to my dentist appointment. URGH!! (which by the way is a whole other post which would have been posted, if this whole thing hadn't been today.) I come out at 3:45 and have a voicemail on my phone. I call them back. No answer, so I leave a message. at 4:45, they call me back FINALLY. The suspense was killing me.

I'm actually a little bummed that I have my job because I was preparing myself for getting laid off so that I wouldn't freak out and thought about all the great things I could do with the extra time.
1) Go to the gym more. Like Camille the gym freak.
2) Clean my apartment (REALLY clean...clean the oven, shampoo the carpet, etc.)
3) Write the great American novel.
4) Complete my grad school applications before the deadline.
5) Finish the book I've been reading for a year
6) Finish embroidering the table cloth that I've been working on for two years
7) Mosaic...A Lot
8) Wrap presents for Christmas
9) Blog more
10) Sleep in...every day

Sigh...that will have to wait.

Eli, you can send me the invoice for my half of the Houlihan's bill.

Long Time, No Blog

Sorry, I haven't blogged in a fairly long time. Things have been CRAZY since getting back from Indiana and then this weekend I was at Duke. I had randomly applied to go to this MBA Women's Weekend thing and shockingly got picked to go. Duke paid for everything, the hotel, meals (alcohol), I just had to get myself to Durham. It was about a 6 hour drive, which wasn't bad since I'm used to driving 9 1/2 between Harrisburg and South Bend. The only thing that was annoying was that since my car CD player is still broken, I had to seek radio stations the whole time. Upon entering North Carolina, I lost the radio station signal that I had been listening to, so I hit seek and the first three stations I came to were Jesus stations. Not that there's anything wrong with Jesus stations, that's just a lot of them.

We stayed at the Washington Duke Inn (or Wa-Duke) which was amazing. We had been alphabetically assigned to roommates and mine turned out to be pretty neurotic. She was stressed out the whole weekend and taking the thing WAY to seriously. She took notes on EVERYTHING that was said. Then the night before our interview studied them for about an hour. We had already been told that the interview was more like a conversation with a current student to make sure you were a good fit for the culture of Duke. That turned out to be true. In mine, we ended up talking about Bob Davie...go figure. But my roommate was SOO nervous she told me she thought about running out of the interview room. She was also really concerned that if she had to leave before the optional apartment tours on Sunday that it would be held against her and asked every alumna/staff member/alumna that we met to make sure it was ok. Despite doing research on all other aspects of Duke life (restaurants, traditions, apartments, etc.), she apparently missed one integral part. I had skipped one of the sessions (I had already gone to the marketing part and didn't care to listen to anything on finance, consulting, or general management) and headed to the hotel early. I was watching the Duke/Michigan basketball game when my roommate returned.

Her: Who's playing?
Me: Duke and Michigan. Duke's going to lose though. They're down by 7 and there's only 23 seconds left.
::she looks at the TV::
Her: But that's only in the 2nd
Me: Half
Her: Oh
::They show Coach K walking off the court::
Her: Who's that?
Me: Coach K
Her: Oh, that's the guy they were talking about in the part about personal branding. What's he famous for?
Me: Um...basketball

I should've told her that I heard they were going to be asking about basketball later, so she'd freak out. Then she went on the bus and announced to everyone that Duke lost, like she actually knew anything. The rest of the weekend went pretty much like this. Information, eat, information, eat, information, eat, drink, eat. In fact at one point, we walked out of the classroom where we had just finished box lunches and there was a table of snacks outside. Is that really necessary?

In other random news, also attending this event (which included 120 prospective MBA's from all over the world), was a girl from Notre Dame that lived next door to me sophomore. Literally next door. We had rooms 221 and 223 and she was in 225. CRAZY!

Talking to the people there made me feel a lot better about myself since they have even less of a clue what they're doing with their lives than I do. Like the girl I met who was the same age as me. She attended Notre Dame my freshman year. Transferred to Florida State and graduated with a degree in anthropology a year and a half. Didn't know what she was going to do with that. Went to law school. Passed the bar. Practiced law for three years. Didn't like it and is now going to get her MBA because she really doesn't know what else to do. Oh and she has a four month old and a husband that she's trying to drag to grad school with her.

I also spent an abnormal amount of time discussing: where I am from, why Girl Scout Cookies have different names in different areas, where I'm applying to school, when I'm applying to school, what exactly "smart casual" is, if I was wearing jeans the day it says jeans are appropriate and if our student liaisons were reporting back on us even though they said they weren't (we decided no, but that if we did something inappropriate ie got extremely intoxicated and dance on tables, stole ornaments off the christmas tree, or asked why there were so many at the business school that they may have to report that.)

Duke/Fuqua (that's the name of the business school) has moved its way up on my list, but probably the best thing that came out of the weekend is that they waived the application fee, so that saves me $200 or so.

A Note To Various Grad School Administrators

Since I took my GMAT's back in July, I've started getting all sorts of materials from various Grad Schools wanting me to come to their school. I have filed all the e-mails I receive under in a file labeled "MBA" (very clever, I know) and put all the brochures, booklets, letters, etc. in a folder. Well now, its just become to cluttered and I've been forced to clean them out. So if administrators from any of the following schools read my blog, please stop wasting your resources because I'm not interested. I've also posted the reason why.

• Texas A&M: I will not be attending grade school at any place that has A & M, Poly, Tech or other such word in its title.
• Lebanon Valley College: Let's be honest here. We're both grown ups. Did you think you really had a chance of me attending here? Kinda threw up a half court shot mailing out that brochure, didn't ya? I applaud the effort.
• Tulane: I visited your school when I was in high school and your tour guide told me "they have really good locks on all the dorms, so that when Mardi Gras comes around, all the wackos can't get in." Nope...won't be coming.
• Michigan: I'm sure you have a really nice school, but I would rather gouge my eyes out with a needle infected with some horrible painful disease and then be forced to eat my eyes than attend your school. And just between you and me, every time I see one of your e-mails in my inbox, I feel dirty.
• Penn: Great school, so sorry your city sucks! Well, at least you have a World Series now.
• North Carolina Chapel Hill: The powder blue...a little gay
• Stanford: The tree...a little gay
• UCONN: I would have to beat up your basketball teams if I attended. (See Michigan, but with a sterilized needle)
• Pitt: Let's just say I know a Pitt alum and he's an ass.
• Washington University in St. Louis and University of Illinois at Chicago: You only sent me a postcard (a little cocky, aren't we?), so while I know I don't want to attend your schools, I don't really have enough material to make fun of you. Though I can't see myself attending anywhere that has to be specified that its "in" or "at" a city.

Well, I think that's it. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Welcome Back!


Nothing says welcome to South Bend like 21 degree weather, 10 inches of snow, the smell of ethanol in the air and losing a football game that we should've won big. AHHH...the memories. Friday evening I went to the women's NCAA tournament soccer game and force my mom to leave because I honestly couldn't feel the big toe on my right foot. She told me to just wiggle it around a little, and I told her that I was trying, but couldn't tell if it was wiggling or not. So we left. I honestly expected my toe to be white or purple or some other unnatural color when I took my shoe off, but it wasn't, and so my mom just thought I was a fair weather fan...oh well.


Despite having snow in both Cleveland (my connecting city) and South Bend, I managed to have no delays and arrive with both myself and my luggage in tact...well there's always a first for everything. I'm sure there will be more posts before I return to Pennsylvania, I've just been too busy.

At Least I Have Something to Fall Back On

I guess it really started Tuesday night when the theme for the volunteer meeting was dessert social. Everyone was invited to bring a dessert to share. TT brought a pineapple lattice pie (definitely not homemade) that may or may not have been in a freezer/on the shelf of a discount grocery store for the past several months/years. It was the only dessert that no one took a single piece of.

So the next day, there the entire pie sat on our lunch room table free for anyone who cared to be daring enough. I remarked that I felt bad and wanted to take a slice and throw it away, just so it looked like someone had eaten some. My coworkers dared me to taste it. I told them that if they ponied up some dough that I just might. $1.60 later. I had a sliver of pie in my hands and was told to eat two bites (approx. half) of the piece. It tasted mostly like cheap apple pie (cinnamon and goop and what not) but with chunks with the textural characteristics of pineapple. The crust was NOT good.

Then today, I was playing with a cat hand puppet that came in our "Safe Kids" kit (jealous, I know). I took the puppet and peaked it over the top of Stefanie's cubicle. Charlene then said she would give me 20 cents to take it outside Carmen's window. Of course I did it...don't tell Charlene, but I probably would've done it for nothing. She actually ended up giving me a whole quarter then!!

It's strange, but somehow the morale in our office has seemed to have gone up since we all found out that we might be losing our jobs. Bizarre.

Name That Stencil

Today at work I was getting supplies out of the "stencil and sticker" box (aren't you jealous that your job doesn't have a stencil and sticker box?) and I came across this.

Our idea was that is was either a) a lamb with an exposed brain or b) a dog wearing a bike helmet. It looked even weirder once we actually traced it because the face comes out looking kinda like a turtle. Upon discovering that the other stencils with it were a shepherd, Joseph and Mary and Baby Jesus, we concluded that it was meant to be some sort of lamb/sheep type creature.

The Concert

I know that this happened last week, but still I feel I need to finish blogging on it. After making our way back to the car, and driving in rain and Philadelphia rush hour traffic, we made it to the Wachovia Center. We got there early (unless we had purchased the $300 VIP All Access passes, which we didn't), so we decided to walk over to the pub that was located in Citizens Bank Park. (Is there a bank that doesn't have a Philadelphia sports complex named after it?) It was still freezing out. We ordered appetizers and desserts. As soon as the waitress walked back with our order, she turned around and came back out with our nachos. It was almost too quick. I'd at least like to think they took some time in making my food rather than throwing some pre-cooked meat and vat of cheese on it. Danielle and I also had plenty of time to people watch. We felt out of place when we realized that people had dressed one of two ways for the concert: 1) slut 2) flash back NKOTB fan with large buttons and homemade shirts. We also discovered that there were a few men who were totally whipped and their girlfriends were making them attend the concert with them.

We went back to the Wachovia Center and were still too early, so we sat in the car (because it was too cold to stand outside) and watched the people tailgate in the parking lot in the rain. We finally decided that the doors should be opening soon, so we should go get in line. And that is when we first saw it...a very well-proportioned girl wearing ::drumroll please:: a custom made corset which appeard to be made out of NKOTB sheets....HORRIFYING (you can also make your old sheets into a dress if the corset is not for you...I saw that at the concert too). We finally got in and discovered that horrifying corset girl was two rows in front of us. YEAH! I had an older woman beside me that smelled like Bengay and we had an annoying group of girls behind us that sounded like a group of drunken dolphins.

The opening act was Lady GaGA. Bizarre. Luckily she is on youtube, so you can enjoy for yourself. Just click here. Please make sure you watch at least to the point where she is being posed in mid air by her backup dancers. Love the outfit by the way.

Lady GaGa was followed by Natasha Bedingfield who was actually pretty good except that the dolphin girls behind us kept screeching "Sing The Hills...Sing the Hills." OMG, SHUT UP! And Natasha Bedingfield is a big liar. When she went off stage, she said "NKOTB will be on in 15 mins" Um...try 35. Luckily, they had these big screens up that people could text things to and try to win front row seats for the concert. There were a couple of different categories.

1) Just looking for the front row tickets : "It's my friend's birthday" "I just found out I have cancer today, but I still came" "My brother is in Iraq"
2) The flashbacks: "I saw you in 88 and still love you today." "I saw you when I was 9 and now I have my 9 year old daughter here"
3) The dirty: "Jon, I want to S your D" Um...we all know what S and D stand for and you should be ashamed.
4) The play on words: "I'm your cover girl." "You said, please don't go girl and I didn't"
5) The funny: "Donnie, my husband said you can be my freebie"

Somebody texted "Go Steelers" and got booed.

So the concert started, and it WAS AWESOME. Though I'm still not totally convinced that Jon wasn't a body double since he was the only one that didn't talk or have a solo the entire time. There was a nice mix of old and new stuff and even some old songs that I had forgotten about (Like "Games"). Jordan and Joe even did songs from their solo albums. By the time it was over, I had lost both my hearing and my voice. It really lived up to 20 years of waiting (Danielle is still a little bitter that her mom didn't let her go when she was younger. Just ask her. My mom claims that I never asked to go to the concert when I was little.)

We got out relatively easy except for almost crashing into another car (but that happens every time you leave a concert) and seeming like we drove through the entire city of Philadelphia to get on the Turnpike. We stopped at the first exit for Starbucks which was a nightmare in itself. I almost had to jump behind the counter and start making drinks myself because I knew more that the people working there. In planning this trip, I somehow neglected to think about how late I'd be getting home (2:20 AM), but I still made it to work the next day. I was disturbed to find out the Terry says she goes out to the bars all the time till 2am and still makes it to work.

The Amazing Philly Trip, Part 1

I'm really kinda too tired to type this right now, but I'm doing it to keep my mind off of the general crappyness that happened at work today (if you have no idea what I'm talking about e-mail/text/call me and I'll fill you in with all the shitty details). That is why I'm not fooling myself by pretending I'm going to type this whole day's events in one post. I also apologize if this post is lackluster/completely nonsensical.

Danielle and I have been planning this trip for months. It turned out to be a very weird/fun day. We arrived around noon and so decided to find something to eat before visiting our first stop. We walked in about a three block square until finally finding an Irish pub about a half block from where we had parked. We entered and had lunch with some locals who all appeared to be "regulars." I had a cheese steak (because I was in Philly after all), but it left me rather underwhelmed.

After lunch, we headed to the Mutter museum, which Danielle has wanted to visit for a long time. I'm not sure why. For those of you that haven't seen the Mutter museum on the travel channel, it is a place that displays medical oddities. After Danielle got in for the student rate (because she still carries her Penn State id in her wallet...loser), the ticket guy let me in for the student rate as well after I flashed my driver's license "in case, the security cameras were watching."

The museum didn't nearly gross me out as much as I expected it to. It houses a large collection of skulls, items removed from people's throats, a growth from John Wilkes Booth, a malignant tumor from President Garfield, a petrified "soap lady" and various other hands, feet, tongues and babies preserved in glass jars. I think the thing that amazed me the most was the 9 foot long human colon that during autopsy had been discovered to house 40 pounds of poop.

After Mutter, we decided to walk the 6-10 blocks to Eastern State Penitentiary (picture above). Again, a place that Danielle wanted to visit for some unknown reason. The walk did not take us through the ghetto as I had feared, but it was rainy and cold out and stupid me had forgotten to bring my coat to Philly (thank goodness, I don't have kids), so I froze my ass off the whole way...which sure as hell seemed like more than 6-10 blocks. It's weird because it looks like a castle in the middle of the city. We got the guided audio tour and it was actually more interesting than I thought it would be, but also significantly colder. We listened to every possibly interesting entry in order to waste extra time, but eventually were too cold to continue further.

Well, I think that's all for now...stayed tuned for the best part of the day! NKOTB!!

I Hate My Pants

I'm not really sure what the major problem was today, but my pants really bothered me. It was a little weird because I had worn them before, but they didn't piss me off as much as they did today. I think the biggest problem was that Victoria's Secret and I have different concepts of "low rise" and "short".

In my foolishness, I thought that "low rise" were meant to sit low and snug on the hips. Apparently, Victoria thinks low rise means that the crack must make an appearance. And "short," at 5'4", I thought I would qualify as short, but apparently, I'm midget. "Short" is around 5'7". My pants ticked me off so much that I was in a bitter, angry mood the whole day (just ask the people I work with). Even though Terry is still on vacation, we went to the candy store, and I got a free latte at McDonald's (all good things), I was still miserable. Now I'm torn as to whether I give the pants a second chance.

The Pink Lunch

This past week we had lunch bunch at work which is like a potluck with a theme. The theme was pink food in honor of breast cancer awareness month. This seems like a really great idea at first until you try to come up with pink foods. But all turned out good. We had ham and cheese stromboli (I didn't dye the dough pink though and this was apparently very disappointing for some people), mini salmon cakes, seafood salad, shrimp, salad with raspberry vinaigrette dressing, strawberry banana smoothies, pink cookies and this awesome strawberry ice cream pie.
It came with red raspberry drizzle which I kinda glopped on rather than drizzled. But my favorite was Stefanie's pink pasta salad.

That is normal pasta in there. She just dyed the water she boiled it in and tinted the mayonnaise. How cool is that!!

Phillies Win!!

I was all set to blog about the pink lunch that we had today at work, but since the Phillies won the World Series that will have to wait. My family is longtime Philly fans. My grandfather loved the Phillies and my mom used to get in trouble when she was little for listening to their baseball games on the radio in her room after bedtime. I remember when my parents took me to a game when I was around 7. We had gloves to catch foul balls and everything. One foul ball hit the ralling two rows in front of us and skipped off to the right or we would've had it! Anyways, this is a big deal and I have some random thoughts from last night's game. (Which was the result of a conspiracy by MLB to make the World Series go longer, but I won't rant on that because I've already done it enough to random people in the grocery store and such.)

1). I like that Philly fans booed Bud Selig. That's just typical Philly, and Bud probably deserves it.
2). Ryan Howard running to the pitchers mound after the game...that I think, was the fastest he'd run the entire World Series.

3). Brad Lidge. I'm not just saying this because he's a Notre Dame guy, but I still can't wrap my head around what he's done. 48 for 48. I just hope to make a week at my job without screwing something up. There's no way I could go to work 48 times and not make a debacle of something.

4) Did it bother anyone else that the announcer's kept referring to things that happened "tonight" even though it was two days ago? Like (I'm just making this up), Upton is 0 for 2 so far tonight...no, he's not. He was 0 for 2 a couple days ago. They could've said "in the game", but they didn't. The first time I thought they just made a mistake and I was ok with that because it was a weird circumstance, but then they did it OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

It's been a really great sports week for me: Notre Dame won, Penn State beat Ohio State, the Eagles won, Philly won the World Series, Washington fired Ty Willingham (which sucks for him, but makes Notre Dame not look racist anymore), and Notre Dame basketball is ranked #9 in the preseason rankings. Wow! That only sets up for complete misery this weekend.

Thank you, Blackberry!

Since my dad has now discovered how to take pictures and e-mail them with his blackberry. I'm hopefully going to get a lot more of random pictures from him. Like this:

Yes, that's a statue of Bruce Lee. And this:

I'm not sure why he felt the need to send these to me, but he did. He e-mailed these pictures to his secretary as well...isn't she lucky! He's in Hong Kong...I think.

I Need A Halloween Costume

We just received an e-mail from our HR department giving us permission to dress up on Friday. But I don't have a costume and really don't want to go buy one. I want to dress up because they area allowing us to. FREEDOM YEAH!! The costume cannot be anything that is risque or deals with political or religious statement (or may otherwise offend people)...so basically dominatrix, Sarah Palin and the Pope are out for costumes. Anyone have any good/cheap/creative ideas for a costume that I would mostly already have around my house.

Pumpkin Carving

I got invited to join in lunch and pumpkin carving at my uncle's house Saturday. Since I'm somehow still in the "kid" category (I guess since I don't have kids myself yet) I got to carve a pumpkin too. Pumpkin carving had to be moved indoors because of the much publicized rain here in Pennsylvania, which other than being a mess for my uncle was not that big of a deal. I didn't realize how long it had been since I had carved a pumpkin.

I free handed an old school Jack-O-Lantern face (with Spongebob-esque teeth). I also have to say that the new pumpkin carving little saw tools work much better than a carving knife that I was forced to use when I was young. Oh, how pumpkin carving technology has improved! My cousins were a lot more creative than I was. We did have a few faces (though admittedly less traditional than mine), there was also a Nittany Lion logo, a house, and a cat which needed dowel rod support so as not to fall in. I'm now trying to decide whether I dare to put it out by my front door and risk that it be smashed by some riff raff...I just like saying riff raff.

This is an actual picture of my pumpkin (on my purple sofa), so you'll be happy to realize that I now have access to a digital camera again, so that should mean more pictures. When my dad gave me his camera and I finally got it charged, I discovered about 70 pictures from our family's trip to Hawaii a year and a half ago. When I asked if they wanted me to print them out or save them to a disk or anything, I was told to just go ahead and delete them. And why did they have a digital camera?

15 Thoughts from the 3-day

Well, the walk is finally over, so here's some deep (and not so deep thoughts) from the Philadelphia 3-day. (Side note: That fountain was in downtown Philly...can you believe how ridiculously pink it is? and how cool! It looks like a giant pond of Pepto.)

1). Blue, Red, and Purple Gatorade pretty much all taste the same. At all the pit stops, they had either Gatorade or water that you could fill your water bottle with. By the end I was just taking whatever the person closest to me had even if my bottle was already partially full of a different color.

2). Just because something is sponsored by Pepperidge Farms does not necessarily mean that there will be Goldfish available...though it should.

3). The smell of Bengay permeates EVERYTHING. My dad used pretty much an entire tube of Bengay after the first day. It was like living in a senior citizens' aromatherapy room. We were downstairs in the lobby and some lady was like "it smells like Bengay down here." I lost it. We came back to the hotel room 12 hours later and it still smelled.

4). The 3-day people are big LIARS. Every morning we would get a card that would have the mileage for all the stops on it. So you'd get to a pit sto,p be like "oh, there's only 1.3 miles till the next pit stop." Then we'd walk for like 20 minutes and hit the "1 mile till pit stop" sign. That's BULL SHIT! Just because they put "all mileage is approximate" on the card, should not give them the right to dick around with us. Also, someone had an extremely accurate pedometer that measured 25 miles on the day we only were supposed to walk 20.

5). Boobs are funny. There were funny boob related signs, shirts, team names and cheers all over. So here are my favorites: Team Hakuna Ma Ta-tas, the old guys that wore the "boobs make me smile" and "I'm here for the boobies" shirts, the little 4 year old and 6 year old chanting "breasts yes, cancer no," the girl dressed as a pirate with the "treasure your chest" sign, and finally the "save a life, grope your wife" sign.

6). I am a big sap. There was a woman walking that had a sign on her back that said "I walk...because I miss my mom" and it had a picture of her with her mom and the date her mom died in 2005...cried like a baby...little kids with a homemade sign that said "walk, mommy, walk"...cried...no reason at all when I was walking in some random park...cried.

7). Gay guys dancing with pink boas make everyone smile. We had three "support team members" that didn't walk, but just drove us around and cheered us on and brought us changes of shoes and stuff. The one guy every time we saw him cheering, he was dancing with a pink feather boa to Abba songs. It brought a smile to everyone's face.

8) Anyone who says home field advantage does not exist is a LIAR. We had these cheering sections where people would clap and high five and give you candy and cookies and whatever and no matter how tired I was after hitting one of them, I could go on forever even if it was straight up hill. My dad was also wearing a Notre Dame sweatshirt, so we got a lot of "Go Irish"'s too.

9) And speaking of hills. HILLS SUCK! Even downhills suck and when the hill is at mile 19.8 of a 20 mile walk. They suck more. If I were to do this again, I'd pick a nice flat city...like Chicago.

10) Sometimes straight guys look good in pink. It was amazing how many guys that participated actually wore pink. And along this same note, there are about 20 billion shades of pink.

11) No matter what is sore if you ignore it, it will eventually go numb. Things hurt that I didn't know existed, but if I ignored it, it would eventually go numb. Along these same lines, just because you look like you are going to die, feel like you are going to die, and think you are going to die, does not necessarily mean you will die.

12) It is possible to gain weight after walking 60 miles...I did it. Gained 5 pounds this weekend. How does this happen? Possibly because I ate pretty much anything I wanted because I was walking 60 miles.

13) It is possible to have a blister bigger than the toe it is on. My friend Becky took off her shoe and her pinkie toe was bigger than her big toe, which was weird until we realized that the entire top portion of it was a blister. She held it up to the sun and you could see through the top 2/3 of her toe. Gross! It is also possible to have a blister with a blister on it.

14). Even when it's not a race, it's a race. They had a counter at each pit stop and finish line, so every chance people would ask what number they were. At the end of the day 1 we were like 1320, which isn't bad out of 3900 people. At the end of day three, my dad and I were 508 and 509. Which was great, except it could've been better had we not waited 45 minutes at lunch for the rest of our team to catch up...GRRR...they also count all the people that were bussed back, so that's not really fair.

15) It is absolutely impossible for my dad and I to have a sentimental moment. Because he's a jerk. So we're walking down the finish line aisle thing. People cheering, his arm around my shoulders, having just walked 60 miles together and you know what he does? Hip checks me so that I fall over sideways. Ass.

The Top 10 Anti-Smoking Lyrics

Today Kate was forced to go to some anti-tobacco conference or whatever, which sucked for her, but rocked for me when she brought back the goldmine "The Prevention" which is an anti-smoking hip hop album put out by the Dauphin County Executive Commission on Drugs and Alcohol, Inc. (DCECDA). Actually in their album notes it says Alchohol, but I'm assuming they meant alcohol. We listened to it in my office and it features 6 songs: "I Cut That Smoking Out," "Blow It Up Yaw," "Think About It," "Unaddicted," "Ashes to Ashes Puff to Puff," and the ever popular "Nicotine Fit/Butt Ugly." I can't make this stuff up folks. So here are my top ten lyrics from the album.

10) "So stay away from nicotine; Before it stunts your growth"
9) "Plus your breath smellin funny; and your teeth turning brown"
8) "And what you'll have to show fo ryour life; Are tar filled lung sacs."
7) "But you got more folks coughing; than an outbreak of SARS"
6) "No help wit the candles; better scramble like Randle"
5) "The advanced aging wrinkles; and how they came to be."
4) "You got more air in your lungs; Than these rafts out there floating."
3) "Lungs collapse; Cancer attacks your body; Rigor mortis sets in hospital lobbies"
2) "Breathing kind of hard, kicking; Teeth looking sickening; No way you getting a chicken; Unless you mean finger licking."
1) "Couldn't stay on top of the log; You fell off like them frogs; Trying to kick the habit; Cause Trix are for the rabbit."

Thanks Kate!