Trashy People

It seems that the weekend is the only time I can find to blog so I am just on a blogging binge...what can I do, I have things to say.  I know I already ranted and I know it was lengthy, but I have another one.  This one, though, will be much shorter.  I promise think.  

Trashy people get on my nerves.  I know that in your mind you're thinking of scantily clad clubbers in pleather mini-skirts.  Definitely trashy, but definitely not what I'm talking about.  I mean people that leave trash around or don't throw trash away.  We're all guilty on occasion of piling the kitchen or bathroom trash a little too high so I would be a hypocrite for going on about that, but I try to generally be clean.  (I should note right now that this post has nothing to do with my roommates).  

On Friday morning at about 7:15 I got on the elevator in my building to head to work.  What greeted me (other than the arm chair that someone put there a couple of weeks ago)?  Two bags of kitchen garbage.  Seriously?  We have an elevator and you're so lazy you can't even take your garbage to the dumpster?  Nasty.

Our HOA is kind enough to to provide us with two garbage cans in the parking garage.  They're really useful when you have a fast food bag filled with gum wrappers from your car or need to toss out your junk mail.  Some people, though, abuse them, piling them high with Costco boxes and regular trash.  Approximate distance from trash can to actual dumpster?  Less than 20 steps.  I checked.  So, trashy folks, walk your big garbage over and threw it in so we can all utilize the little cans.  

Gee whiz, I'm bugged. 

Commuting

Right now I'm using the term commuting fairly loosely.  For real it takes me about twenty minutes to get to work.  I am fully aware that no one in this area has any idea what it's like for people like my dad to get to work.  He goes maybe thirty miles (I'm gonna bet on that being an overestimate) and it sometimes can take him three hours to get there.  Yeah, Provo traffic isn't the best, but you have NO IDEA.  Seriously, go to Stafford then complain about how long it takes you to get across town.  Thing is, in the greater DC area where people are commuting a lot they seem to understand some basic rules of the road.  Here I present some of my thoughts on driving.

1. Slower traffic keep right.  Um, hello Utah, why is this so hard?  If you're going less than 10 over get in the right lane.  I respect the fact that occasionally someone is going ten under in the right lane (let's be real, it's more than occasionally in these parts) and then you have to pass them in the left lane.  Then, GET OVER AND GET OUT OF MY WAY.

2. At least occasionally use the turn signal.  I think drivers in general are abysmal at fully utilizing their turn signal (which I don't understand at all because it's pretty much the easiest gesture in the history of the earth), but Utah drivers seem to have forgotten they have one.

3. You cannot cross a solid line of any color!  Seriously, in those construction zones where you have to stay in your lane, YOU HAVE TO STAY IN YOUR LANE!  Sometimes there are situations where you might have to cross because someone stops all of a sudden or whatever, but these are not times for casual passing.

4. If one more time I get stuck in the Utah road block (when cars in all lanes are going the same speed despite wide open road space in front of them thus preventing anyone from passing) I'm going to lose it.

5. What the heck is with the fact that all of I-15 is currently under construction at the same time and they do the work at prime hours of the day?  You're supposed to do that crap at night.

People in the area of Virginia where I learned to drive are sometimes scary drivers and I'm not going to deny that, but other drivers understand that and so choose their actions carefully.  For example, my dad was riding in a carpool with a stranger.  The driver in front of the vehicle my dad was in slammed on his brakes suddenly.  This pissed off the driver of my dad's car who had apparently had enough that day and so accelerated into the car in front (simply because he was mad).  Mad enough that he then reversed and slammed into the person behind him before putting the car back in drive and hitting the guy in front again.  All on purpose.

Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think this is the best practice and can be quite dangerous, but I can't help but wonder if this type of thing happened in Utah more often would people think before driving like total idiots?

Ok, rant over.

Let Me Introduce You

Let me introduce you to someone.  This is Riley Nelson. 

Oh yes, hello.  Could you please go back to this haircut?  Thanks.  

Riley is backup quarterback for BYU.  Tonight he rocked out a trick play that was BEAUTIFUL.  Not the point of this post.  Moving on. 

Looky, even though baby Jakey took his job they are nicey nice to each other (I have nothing against baby Jakey, by the way).  

Right now he's grown his hair out long.  I prefer it short, but it's growing at me.  He seems to keep it clean.  Still, not the point of the post.  

Want to hear a little known fact about good old Riley Nelson?  Let's talk about what Riley wears under his football pants.  Is it A) Underarmor shorts B) briefs C) athletic shorts D) nothing.

Did you choose an answer?  

If you chose D you are right!  Our seats being on the third row and all we see the team up close and personal and let me tell you, you can see RIGHT through those white pants and you can tell that Riley is all skin color under there. 

Also, you can see the whatever the leg strap parts are called on his jock strap.  That part's not my favorite. 

Is it bad that I don't mind my view much?  In fact, I really like it.  At the Utah game the most interesting thing on the field was Riley Nelson's backside.  

Men look good in football pants.  Riley looks especially good in football pants.  Riley apparently has something against underclothing.  

I'll stop there.  I promised Sarah I would try to keep this post relatively tame because her mom reads my blog.  

P.S. New football love?  Daniel Sorensen.  Yum.  

Another Freaky Dream: Voldemort Edition

I've told you before that I have strange dreams and they come in cycles and are super bizarre.  This is another one.  It's kind of disgusting so if you're feeling exceedingly sensitive or nauseous, don't read.

Ok, so it was decided that I had to fight Voldemort.  My own pals in real life were there supporting me as were Harry, Ron, and Hermione.  I was getting all prepped, but was not magical.  At my disposal I had a few magical items.  It was almost a ring fight type of situation with everyone watching and keeping their hands off.  I started by just attacking him physically.  It wasn't really working so I moved on to something else.  Then my dream kind of fast forwarded like I wasn't paying attention to a movie and all of a sudden I was winning (how the heck I was beating Voldemort without being magical is beyond me).

I had him down and injured (injured bad), but he was regenerating quickly.  His wounds would just heal themselves if given any amount of time.  I was getting tired and I knew I couldn't go much longer.  Then I found something awesome in my bag: some aerosol hairspray with some sort of essence of phoenix in it.  I started spraying old Voldy and he started rotting away like that guy in The Last Crusade.  He was basically a skeleton with sticky brown and yellow and black goo attached to his bones at this time (and he was still talking to me and taunting).  The magic phoenix hairspray prevented him from regenerating as quickly as he was, but given time without being killed he would still continue to rebuild and take over again.  I wasn't sure what to do.

Suddenly I realized the solution: I had to destroy his heart (it was somehow still stuck in his rib cage chest, though it was a little shrunken).  The problem was, I ran out of phoenix hairspray.  With no better options in sight I grabbed a knife and started to cut the heart apart.  The pieces just rejoined or continued beating separately.  Voldemort was still taunting me.  How the heck to destroy the heart and Voldemort?  I was out out of ideas and time was running out as the rest of his body continued its slow regrowth.

If you're thinking of the solution already, then you're gross and I want to know how you got there.  In my dream it just came to me.  The only way to destroy the heart once and for all was... to eat it.  So, I quickly cut the heart into the smallest pieces possible and mashed it together into a form similar to a hot dog.  Then, I ate it.  One: it was disgusting.  Two: even if it wasn't, knowing you have Voldemort's heart in your stomach will make you nauseous.  I finished off the Voldy-heart hot dog and that was the end.  At the end of my dream just before I woke up I remember being uneasy and wondering if when it passed through my digestive track if it would begin to join together again or if it would happen while still inside.  My friends (and my character friends) assured me it was ok and before the outcome could be ascertained positively, I woke up.  Did I want to eat breakfast when I woke up?

Not at all.

The end.

A Great Video

Listen, just go watch this now because it's so funny at the end in my opinion.  I giggled out loud to myself.

DI: Always an Adventure?

Once upon a time I was desperately searching all places with used junk for Candy Land (perhaps a rant on how the new one is crap later).  On one particular day I hit up the Provo DI and was almost run over by a guy in a motorized wheel chair.  Later I was at the DI in American Fork and saw the same old guy sitting on a couch.  I said hello and acknowledged the fact that we'd both been at two DIs that day.  He asked what I was hunting so furiously for and why.  I told him I was a teacher and needed some stuff for my classroom.  We wished each other luck and I headed on my way.  When I finished my hunt (and didn't find anything I wanted) I passed him as I headed on my way.  The man asked me to sit as he told me about some old movie star that had a show on tv when he was a kid and how beautiful she was.

Before too long the man asked me if I believed in God and the Gospel and the priesthood.  I figured he was trying to be very much like my grandfather and just making sure I was doing what I should.  Old people sometimes get a little nosy with strangers (not all old people, just some).  I answered in the affirmative and he said I was a "dangerous woman."  He went on to talk to me a little bit about religion.  Nothing struck me as particularly odd until another man came up to him and asked him about Warren Jeffs.  The stranger talking to me said Warren Jeffs was way out of line and quoted some people on the matter.  Then the second guy said, "Ok, I just wanted to ask because I knew your group would have something to say about that."  Wait, what?  This guy has a group?  Oh dear....

Long story shortened a little bit this guy threw a whole lot of backwards doctrine at me and told me how polygamy (or celestial plural marriage, as he insisted on calling it) was the only way to live.  Little did he know that polygamy is one of my major questioning points of the church and something that I'm insanely uncomfortable with.  When he quoted Journal of Discourses to me I was quick to point out that Brigham Young sometimes erred on the side of insane which led to him going on a racist diatribe about another error with the mainstream church.

He eventually invited me to his sacrament meeting to get some real answers and gave me his cell phone number.  I was told to call him any time day or night.  Last week I went to check DI for Candy Land again and he was lowering the wheel chair lift to one of those old people shuttle bus things to leave.  I was pretty sure he saw me and I hurried inside and got on the phone with my mom so I could pretend to be busy if he approached me.  The man didn't follow me, but I did get the willies and was on super freaked out.  One thing I have decided: if I run into this guy again I'll have to stand my ground and be a little more honest and a little less polite.  I may not be sure of many things, but I definitely don't want to be a polygamist.

Oh, and one note.  The guy told me not to tell anyone what he told me because then my friends would start to reject me.  You're not going to reject me, are you?

Definitely a Shame Spiral

About a week and a half ago I was in the midst of a shame spiral, as my friend Brittany terms it.  I'd had a bad day at work.  I was still struggling to adapt to my apartment.  I was flat broke, but luckily I'd found 40 bucks in a bank account I rarely used.  I went to the grocery store in a shirt that looked two sizes too big (it was actually only once size too big) and gym shorts.  My hair was a hot mess and I was in quite a bad mood.  I had necessities to buy and wasn't really in the mood to be there.  I got my necessities and a couple of groceries and also placed some raw chocolate chip cookie dough into my basket with no intentions of baking it.  You know what eating raw cookie dough makes you feel like?  Simultaneously you feel like it was the best idea ever and you hate yourself.  It was one of those days, you know?  I was walking through the parking lot back to my car with my phone tucked into my bra and it started ringing.  Seriously?  The one time my hands are full my phone is going to ring?  I was pissed, saw it wasn't a number I recognized, but decided to answer it anyway.  It was a principal from an interview I'd gone to earlier that day.  "Great," I thought.  I just interviewed today and they're already telling me they picked someone else.

Not so.  I GOT THE JOB!  Hello, this is only my lifelong dream to be a teacher.  Now I've got one week under my belt teaching fifth grade and it's awesome.  After the first day I almost cried because it was a disaster, but it's gotten much better.  I really think I'm good at this job.  I'm still adapting to the learning curve, but it's not as bad as I expected it to be.  The kids are great (even though I have a few difficult ones) and I really enjoy this job.  That's what picking a career is all about, yeah?