Sour Cream and Roosters

I've been informed that some people miss me when I don't update my blog. I'm glad to hear it. It's always nice to know that I'm loved. I don't really have much to say today, so I guess I'll just have to talk about random stuff that's happened.

Yesterday I had this incredible craving for sour cream. Nothing else, just sour cream. It was a real dilemma because I didn't have anything to eat with the sour cream, and I felt really silly eating sour cream by itself. Ah, pregnancy. Gotta love it.

On Tuesday, Todd was trying to think of ideas for activities for his young men's class. Trying to be helpful and think of a service project idea, I suggested that they put together hygiene kits. His response? "They're not THAT bad...they come pretty clean on Sundays..." I had a good laugh about that. The young men may be a little smelly sometimes, but I think the poor, homeless, and disaster victims probably need it more.

In the work world, Commuter Services is finally recovering from its summer crisis. Enough officers have been hired to replace the ones who left, and we finally have the handheld computers up and running to write tickets with. It's a good thing, too. Fall semester has started and it's a lot busier with all the people who don't know how to park. I've decided to stay in this job until I have the baby. My supervisor has agreed to keep me in the dispatch office and only sends me out when I volunteer. That can be pretty fun because I get to drive a little golf cart around instead of a bike. Me and those carts aren't always a good combination, though. The first time I ever drove one, nobody told me how to use it. I had to ask one of the maintenance guys, who looked at me like I was an idiot. Then I drove it into a banister. I've also crashed into a parking attendant's booth and forgotten that a golf cart doesn't have the same clearance as a bike when going off curbs. But I'm happy to report that I have yet to kill myself or anyone else.

In closing, I just want to pass on another fascinating tidbit from the internet. According to the Mythbuster's website, a farmer in Colorado beheaded one of his roosters in 1945. Mike the rooster then went on to live for 18 more months without a head. He survived because part of it's brain stem remained intact, while a blot clot stopped the bleeding. The farmer fed it food and water with an eyedropper into its gullet. It eventually choked to death in a hotel room. So now you know.

Olympic Sports

I know I promised I would, but I've decided not to bore everyone with a travellogue today. I know you just don't hear enough of them in testimony meetings anymore, but maybe you'll still get to when you're visiting teaching. Instead, I think I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and talk about the Olympics. After all, it only lasts two weeks every four years. I have to seize blog topics while I've got them. I'm also going to mix it up by including more "fascinating things Claire learned online while having nothing better to do at work." Try to contain your excitement.

Todd and I were pondering the other day how women's beach volleyball could be an olympic sport, while cricket is notoriously missing from the list. Well today I stumbled upon the answer. It turns out that cricket, croquet, golf, lacrosse, rugby, polo, and tug of war all used to be in the Olympics prior to 1924.

Now why anyone would want to do away with a fine sport like croquet is a mystery to me, but apparently a sport has to meet certain standards. A sport needs an association or governing body to qualify. It also needs to be popular in 75 countries for men's summer sports, 40 countries for women's summer sports, and 25 countries for winter sports. Unfortunately for all football fans, I don't think anyone plays that except for in the United States. I must admit I'm not too devastated about that. Anyway, I would recommend reading this column. In addition to being educational, it's also pretty entertaining.
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Columns/Default.aspx?article=olympics

Well, I guess I'm done talking for the day. Work decided to be busy for once!

Baby Update

Well, I'm back from vacation and back at work. It wouldn't be so bad, but it's a little depressing to think that I probably won't get another vacation until next summer, and by then I'll be changing diapers and scrambling for stuffed animals. I'm a fan of stuffed animals, of course...I mean, who isn't? I guess I'm just a little nervous about the sudden responsibility of a little one. And I'm pretty sure that's not unusual for a mom-to-be.

I'll give everyone a quick update on the baby and I'll try to cover all the questions I've been getting lately. I do not know yet if it's a boy or a girl, but we do plan to find out. I'm too excited to wait, and finding out makes it easier to plan for. I'll probably find that out next month. I'm kind of hoping for a boy, but both Todd and I have a hunch it's a girl. I'd be happy with a girl...it's just that I worry about what will happen when she gets to be a teenager. I know I was no picnic to deal with. At this month's appointment, they'll be taking my blood and making sure I don't have herpes or anything...although I'm pretty sure that's not going to be an issue. I haven't felt the baby kicking yet. The all-knowledgeable book says I probably won't until the end of this month or even into next month. I'm looking forward to that, but I don't know what to expect. I'll probably just think my tummy's rumbling when I finally do feel it.

That's all for today. I'll post again soon and tell you all about my vacation adventures. Maybe if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll figure out how to post our fun pictures and videos.

Hamsters

I haven't updated for a while, so sorry to the three people who still look at my blog. The topic of today is how uneventful life is at Commuter Services lately. A parking enforcement officer's job depends on people parking badly. Usually, there are more bad parkers when there are more people on campus. It being summer semester, there are few students willing to study between the tortures of spring and fall. So now there are a few responsible students who park correctly as well as us employees who park in the same place every day.

Furthermore, while it seems like an officer is ready with a ticket whenever you stick a toe out of a parking line, we are actually so understaffed that at any given time there are only about 2 or 3 officers patrolling. (Now's a good time to be rebellious). We've also had an equipment crisis. We recently ordered new handheld computers to write tickets with, but we've had trouble programming them. Meanwhile, all of the old machines are dying. Last week, we couldn't even do things the old-fashioned hand-written way because we ran out of ticket books.

You'd think all this wouldn't affect me, since I've spent most of my time inside the dispatch office monitoring the radio and doing paperwork. The problem is that my job is to assist the officers by looking things up for them, so when the officers have nothing to do, I have even less to do. Fortunately, I have the good old world wide web to entertain me. So I'm going to enrich you with fascinating things I've learned while bored.

Let's talk hamsters. You're probably wondering why anyone would want to read about hamsters. This just shows the severity of my boredom. The weird thing about hamsters is that they are an endangered species in the wild. This is weird because hamsters are sexually mature six weeks after birth. Females go into heat every four days. They have a gestation period of only sixteen days and can give birth to up to eighteen young at a time. So how in the world could these breeding machines be endangered? It's a mystery.

A Confession

As an English major, I've read a lot of books, including some classics, which I would have felt ok about skipping. However, it has come to the attention of some of my family and friends that I have not read all the books that perhaps I should have...specifically Grapes of Wrath. First of all, let me just say that there is simply not time in a high school and college education to read all of the classics, especially when they throw in history textbooks and other such books that consume a student's valuable time. Nevertheless, I am going to come clean once and for all. Here is a list of books that I am particularly ashamed to say I've never read:

Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell
Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
Les Miserables Victor Hugo
Little Women Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies William Golding
Moby Dick Herman Melville
Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare (I know, I know...It's pitiful)
The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper
The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson
Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe

These are not the only ones, either. These are just the top twelve books I feel embarrassed about missing. On the master list of 24 books, you'd also find things like Madame Bovary, but I seem to have mustered the courage to press forward in life without that one. So anyway, that's my confession. I'm a bad, bad English major.

Engineering Blues

Today, I want to share with you all a special presentation brought to my attention by my dad. It's called "An Engineer's Guide to Cats." Perhaps it's mostly just funny to me because I'm married to one, but as a non-engineer, it's still pretty awesome if you like cats.



As the wife of an engineer, I can tell you that this is all so true. Engineers really don't eat. If I didn't feed him, I think Todd might starve. I also had the opportunity to have dinner with several of his classmates and their families. After hearing about the myriads of complicated and expensive engineering projects these people plan to do for fun, I felt much better about Todd's solar-powered rotating plant stand project.

Glub Glub

I really have nothing to write about today, so I'm going to tell everyone about our miniature acquatic zoo. I know, exciting.

The Argyle Family Wildlife Center features three fascinating acquatic ecosystems. Billy, George, and Hank, our fire-bellied frogs, dominate the first. George, a bright green spotted creature, is the oldest resident and spends most of his time trying to figure out how to climb to the top of the tank and push open the screen. Billy likes to float on his belly in the "lake." Hank, sorely troubled by the lack of a female presence, constantly chirps in search of a lady love, which can be very annoying when we're trying to sleep. Sometimes, Hank throws conventionality to the wind and flirts with Billy, which usually results in a near drowning.

The resident "lake" is home to a variety of guppies, two large and very plain females, and three males with very frilly orange spotted tail fins. Occasionaly, we'll find a fresh batch of miniscule baby guppies. Unfortunately, these usually end up being sucked up by the filter, cannibalized by their parents, or being accidently flushed when we change the water. Our newest addition is a plecostomus, a gray algae eater, who I christened Slurp. I have to say I feel a little bit bad for Slurp, being the only gray ugly thing surrounded by all those frilly guppies.

The second tank is a tropical paradise, complete with a plastic rock island, REAL plants and moss (I know, we outdid ourselves), and a vine. You can stare at this tank for 15 minutes and not see anything if you aren't accustomed to Tarzan and Cheeta, our Vietnamese mossy frogs. They are fairly large and look just like mossy rocks. They like to hang on the glass with their sticky toes. Tarzan, like George, likes to hang out in the upper corners of the tank, looking for freedom. Cheeta sleeps most of the day, but readily wakes up when the biweekly crickets fall from the sky.

Finally, we must not forget Frank, Samantha, and Ralph. Todd bought Frank, an orange studmuffin, and Samantha, a spotted babe, as feeder fish, expecting them to die within a week. But they turned out to be Koi and have now grown quite large. Their days are pretty nondescript. I guess you don't have much of a life when you only have a three-second memory. They share their tank with Ralph, a small red-eared slider turtle. These are called red-eared sliders because of their red "ears" and their tendency to slide into the water at the slightest sign of danger. Sadly, Ralph's idea of danger includes me and Todd. We may not be intimidating or big to you, but I guess to a 4-inch skiddish turtle, we're horrifying monsters.

That concludes your backstage tour of the Argyle Acquatic Zoo. Tips are greatly appreciated, as our budget prevents expansion efforts.