You're the only ten I see.

Kaiser gave us ultra cheap plane tickets to fly to Tennessee! I have compiled another vlog so that we can relive this occasion. My apologies to the casual reader who either doesn't know us well enough to enjoy this or doesn't have 15 minutes to spend watching a vlog.

Trogdor? More like VLOGdor

I made a video blog today. I learned from making it that I smile a lot and tend to let my voice trail off.

It's about 3 pastures down...

I had the privilege of visiting Mary Lou's chicken farm for New Years eve. Chicken farms are really country. So is MLT's dad. Fortunately, I am accustomed to the rural Texas prose and learned a bunch about raising chickens. Here's the highlights:

1. The chickens arrive at the farm as babies (the buildings hold 25,000 (yes, each A.C.) and there are 6(ish) of them).
"You see, they start out about the size of a mouthful" -Mr. Thompson

2. The chickens are nurtured by machines and criminals. Additionally, their home smells like Amanda's chemistry lab.
"Those fellas are pretty rough, most of them don't speak English" -Mr. Thompson

3. The wet poop that forms a 3 inch thick crust near the water troughs is called "cake". They scoop this out for sanitation and use it for fertilizer in the pastures. The pastures are very, very green.
"Take care of your animals and they'll take care of you" -Mr. Thompson

4. It costs only 20 cents to raise a chicken per pound because they gain a pound for every one and a third pound they eat.
"Which means they don't poop a lot" Mr. Thompson (he meant by percentage)

5. The chickens live 42 days, which is high rollin for a chicken, and then they...well...
"You never get attached to a chicken" -Mr. Thompson

Trip Shout outz: Stephaniey Lowe for humoring me in conversation, providing wise/intelligent feedback, and dealing with the incessant mispelligns of her name so good. Meredith for her humor too, albeit untintentional (unless you were trying to snore). MLT for hospitality and a fun party to start off the year!

Quick story: I got lost and went down 12th street in Austin trying to find my way. It happens that this street is the location of Mission Possible (where we did 2nd semester Big Project freshman year). I saw the coffee shop we did demolition/cleanup on. It was painted and looked nice. I hope they're giving people what they need. Anyway, the right way back was on 7th street, and that took me by the Church Under the Bridge location. I'm realizing as I type that there's more to say from being reminded of those places than would be appropriate to add to this post, but I'll finish by saying that the reflections that came in the 2 hours I had alone to think afterward were on the same scale of value to me as the friendships this trip allowed me to enjoy.

We be do it

Yesterday was funz on the streets of Victoria. It seems that this Christmas, my siblings are old enough/ cool enough to legitimately do fun things with. Or my mindset toward them has changed.

I've always wanted to be famous on youtube. Not for being an unintentional loser (ie the star wars kid), but to, in full knowledge and with conscious effort, do something ridiculous on camera that tons of people (or even just most of my friends) watch. I suggested to Jessica and Jacob that we make our own version of "Stanky Legg" by the G-Spot Boyz.

Jessica agreed immediately since she loves making her own videos anyway, but Jacob was silent...Because he had already started doing the stanky legg when he first heard the idea.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_yEOP5exY8


Make my dreams come true. Watch. Rate. Refer.

To the windoooow...

To the wall! Ah ski ski ski ski ski ski!

Important update: I learnt to ski! The bejingillion hours of travel time were well worth it.

Thanks:

• Carol Hogan for waiting for me and teaching me and helping me not get discouraged in spite of my ignorant, arrogant, and retarded statements to you about skiing upside down and going off jumps. Even though they were jokes. Regardless, for the record, your actions displayed great carolter.
• Austin Parsons for planning the entire thing. I've seen snow twice before the trip, never skied before, never been on a mountain before.
  

Breakdown:

1st day: Greens and blues. Less than 20 falls
2nd day: Greens and blues w/ Brian Durham = pwnd. 4 falls from ski lift dismounting and line waiting, 3 falls on the actual slopes
3rd day: Myriad of falls doing blue-blacks and blacks.

Mark Zobeck: Why did our bedroom need a lock on the door? I concede you are a better snowboarder than I am a skier, but only because I slacked off on the 2nd day. Score is 1 to 1.

Irony: My wipeouts were a bigger adrenaline rush than going down the mountain succesfully. Yay positive reinforcement.

Deep part: If you aren't falling you aren't learning.

Teaser: Get ready for some sulfurously stanky leggs from the streets of vicky this Christmas.

We're gonna beat the fightin' texas aggie class of 2010 (whoop) HELL outta..bonfire

First off:

I'm not an angry person. I love mock anger. I use the word pissed to describe anger. This post has to do with one of what I am sure will linger in my mind as one of, if not the, worst college experience I have ever had. This is a little disclaimer to guarantee you that this entry will by no means set the precedent tone for the rest of my blog, it's just that pretty much everything that happens in this story SUX, and it happens to be the first thing that struck me to write about.

So I was feeling redass. Redass is great! It's what makes people stand for hours in the sun in dark maroon t-shirts at a football game while seats are readily available, chug a pitcher of beer with a gold ring at the bottom, hiss their disapproval instead of boo(redass ags are too classy to boo, though not quite classy enough to consume alcohol in moderation apparently), and, among other things, build really large fires that sometimes fall down on the builders during construction. I would also conjecture that redass is inversely proportional to the number of real friends a person has.

I agreed to go to bonfire with Mike Simmons because I was feeling redass that night. We planned to stay for no more than 30 minutes, and figured that with travel time and general delays included, our trip would take a maximum of 2 hours, during which we would have time to talk and snap some pix of the historic tradition to put on our fb profiles. I have prepared a timeline of the night (we actually did time this event but I can’t remember the exact numbers), because I think it will put my anger into context.

7:15pm: Left the house for bonfire

7:35pm: Hit line of cars waiting to park in the auxillary lot (we were among the last to be allowed in, people behind us were told to go home)

8:10pm: Paid $5 parking charge

8:20pm: Got into line for the shuttle (yellow school bus) to take us to the bonfire site. There were 6-7 shuttle busses picking up continuously.

9:30pm: Got on the shuttle hesitantly, because the driver had driven into a wall of vines sometime during the evening as evidenced by the foliage hanging from the bus

9:45pm: Arrive at bonfire!!!!

9:46pm: I use the portable toilet (number 1)

9:48pm: Take pictures/get in line to leave bonfire (we cut about 20 minutes ahead because the people around us were saying they were in line since 9:30)

10:45pm: no movement in the line at all for the first hour. Unbelievable.

10:46pm: massive surge forward in the line (I have no idea why, but we moved 100 yards all of a sudden) that Mike and I exploited to cut even further ahead

11:00pm: We notice that only 2 shuttle busses are taking ALL the people who parked in the aux. lot back. A shuttle comes every 7 minutes. The size proportions were this: crowd is to bus as pillow is to highlighter.

1:15am: Board shuttle to return to aux. parking lot

1:30am: Leave parking lot

after 2am (I got Mickey D’s first since I had not had dinner yet): arrive home PISSED. But mission accomplished:

Closing notes:

1. As you can see, I wore a t-shirt. Yes it was 58 degrees, but why would anyone care when there’s a fire? You should. The line was long enough to stretch far from warmth.

2. This experience is the literally closest thing to hell I have gone through. Masses of people (unbelievers too no doubt jk jk, but the Christian bubble was severely underrepresented) all angry with tons of fire around, and everyone wants to be somewhere else but they’re stuck there for an eternity.