Day Late and a Dollar Short

Try this one.

Congratulations, Lisa!

You were selected as a winner for our Harry Potter book
giveaway!

Your name was announced this morning on "Good Morning
Indiana."

We will mail the book to you later this week.

Thanks for visiting theIndyChannel.com and watching RTV6!!

This brings the grand total of copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in my house up to three. Perfect timing, too. A full week after the book is released. Awesome.

It feels good to be a winner.

It's not even engraved.

This was delivered to our house a few days ago. I give you: the front...


The inside...
And finally, the back...


You're damn right I'm going.

What's new

Wow. So, it's been a while, huh. Well let's do a recap of what's new with me, shall we? If anyone reads this anymore, which I doubt.

And the best family vacation EVER. Check the KFW blog for some good quotes.

I was accepted into Northwestern University's Genetic Counseling program for this fall. Woot! I'll be moving to Chicago, since the program is affiliated with the medical school and therefore right downtown. I've never been a big-city girl before, so that'll hopefully provide copious amounts of blogger fodder. My acceptance marks the first time in my academic career that I will attend a school with colors that don't totally suck. High school: maroon and white. Ugh. Valpo: brown and gold. I think I've already been quite clear on my feelings about that. NU: purple and gold! Loves it! The mascot is also an upgrade. I went from being a looting, pillaging Viking to being a politically incorrect Crusader to being a totally respectable Wildcat. Rowr. Interesting fact: three of the five kids in my family are now wildcats of three separate institutions. We're working on a cheer or something. So if you live in Chicago or know things about Chicago, let me know. So far I've been watching While You Were Sleeping and Return to Me to prepare myself for what my life will no doubt be like.
I executed the most incredible tactical defense of a shower my bathroom has ever seen. I went to take a shower the other day, forgetting that I had trapped a rather large, spindly spider in there the previous evening. I guess I forgot that spiders can, you know, walk up walls, but apparently so did he because that disgusting little bastard was still chilling in my shower the next day. With ninja-like dexterity I turned the shower head on and slammed the door before he could even move. I then retrieved a stool to stand on, allowing me to exact my aerial revenge on his very existence. The spray from the shower head wasn't enough to wash him down the drain, nor were the openings in the drain large enough for him to be washed away without chance of a spread-eagle hang-on. For reasons which I don't feel I need to enumerate, I have a line of empty conditioner bottles perched atop my shower door. I grabbed the first one and lined up my drop: a complete miss. Well, at least now my aim was calibrated. Second drop: direct hit. His scurries became frantic as I dropped my final deep conditioning missile, which resulted in a glancing blow. I had to finish him off or risk his eventual spidery revenge, so I found a face wash bottle and let it fly. Apparently the water had softened his exoskeleton (a phenomenon much like cereal becoming mushy in milk, no doubt) because he exploded in a shower of legs and abdomen and cephalothorax, all of which washed neatly down the drain. Don't even try to cross me, class Arachnida, because I will destroy you and my hair will look fantastic while I do it. BOOM, baby.

Today's my golden birthday! If you don't know what that is, you've clearly never lived in Wisconsin, because that's the only place people have ever heard of that concept. Also, I'm tired of typing this. So I'm out of here. Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes, and if you didn't send any, consider our friendship terminated.

Photographic Dregs of Valpo

Okay let's shuffle the rest of these babies out into the Google-able interwebs. Go!

Here's Berg, home of the Sunday morning waffles. Mmmm. On the mornings I managed to wake up in time, that is. And of course, after freshman year, it was kind of a hike across campus for breakfast. But on the rare occasion I made it over there, they were damn good.

MORE new construction betwixt Alumni and Berg. A quick jaunt to Wikipedia tells me that it will one day be a 386-car parking garage. I'm guessing this is because the new $74 million student union's massage parlors, aromatherapy rooms and virtual reality internet simulators will no doubt cover most of what was once the ocean. Things I will never get to use bore me, so we'll be moving on now.


This is the old main entrance to the school. Notice anything missing? Anything at all? Like, say, a so-called eternally burning torch representing learning or knowledge or whatever that supposedly cost one student's full tuition to fuel each year? Extinguished, dismantled and put into storage. Or sold at auction, for all I know. Tragic.


Gellerson School of Engineering. I only had one class here all four years: Calculus. I took it the same semester that uber-nerd Catie was taking chemistry. It was an odd reversal of roles that put both of us out of our elements and threatened our GPAs. One day while I was walking to class, I heard an odd beeping noise. My heart leapt - Gellerson was obviously on fire, and the beeping was the fire alarms! Class would be cancelled! I charitably decided to show up anyways and express my fabricated condolences for the loss of such an important center of mathematical nerdery, and then head home for a well deserved nap. I closed in on the building, craning my neck to look for smoke billowing from the windows or flames licking the walls. Just as I passed the VUCA, I realized that the beeping was not the death throes of my own personal hell. It was the warning sounds of a bus driving in reverse out of the parking lot. I almost cried. Then I went to class and felt stupid. And let me tell you - there's no stupid like calculus stupid.

Also, once I lied and pretended to be a new engineering student to get free food at an engineering picnic with Catie, way back in the days before she decided she liked Jesus more than she liked numbers. Free hamburgers are the best hamburgers!

A quick shot of the logical, minimalistic sidewalk layout of Valpo.


Another time I wished I had night vision goggles: One night freshman year we walked to some field back here and played Capture the Flag for holy crap, way longer than I have tolerance for that game. Rachel and I began wandering out in the open in enemy territory we were cornered and talked to but never actually caught. I don't really remember how the game ended, but I think there was singing involved.



Some Chapel.

This used to be a Schlotzsky's Deli, the proximity of which delighted Rachel to no end. One time, during Catie's vegetarian period, the three of us went there for lunch. At the end of the meal Rachel and I had finished eating and Catie was almost done with her veggie sandwich. Rachel was impatient to leave for some reason or another, so I (in my infinite and often hilarious wisdom) said, "Well we can head out of here as soon as Peter Rabbit here's done with her meal." She got pretty mad at me. Sorry, Catie. I don't really think you're a rabbit. :) Now it's some Greek restaurant, which would also probably make Rachel happy. Greek food is harder to make than it is to eat, as we learned during the Harre-insulting, butter-soaked phyllo Space Camp Night. Space Hug!


And then it was back to the exciting and perfectly level landscape of northern Indiana.
My self-tour was over, and I had a camera full of pictures and a fuzzy new sweatshirt to prove where I'd been. Feel free to insert your own meaningful aphorisms regarding the past and/or future here. It's late and I'm tired.

Crusade to Valpo: Part Deux

Okay, here I am again with another batch of Valpo pics to document so no one can comment on them and they can drift out in cyberspace, unacknowledged, until the interweb eats all our brains and digests them with its system of mechanical organs. Let's go, shall we?

Here's St. Teresa of CVS and the good ol' Green House where I lived senior year. I hear the life-size Mike Singletary poster no longer guards the top of the stairs; he was a victim of the fall cleaning we missed out on before we moved in. But I believe I discussed him in the last post. How about... ooh, when we got Lucas Paducas neutered in October, we held a Halloween Ball to celebrate the end of his potential for propagating his species as well as his impending desire to spray the walls of our house with his feline juices. (No, but really, get a cat. They're great animals. Amie knows what I'm talking about.)

But anyway, to expand on the theme, we served cheese balls, meatballs, mixed nuts and other vaguely testicularly named foodstuffs. Even though it was thrown in his honor, I think we had a better time at the party then Lucas. But even he had a better time than some anonymous cat from the anatomy lab whose one, two kitty testicles were left on our porch in a jar of some sort of fluid. Hooray for theme parties!


And boo to Kohl's. Yes, I realize that all Kohl's look alike and that this could be any of the no-doubt hundreds of extant Kohl's stores. You'll just have to trust me when I tell you that this is the Kohl's where I worked at P.O.S. and didn't really enjoy it and only two people came to visit me ever, so friend points go to you, Tara and Christine. I remember during orientation (a series of horrible, horrible videos from the 80s) we learned about the name tag incentive program. When customers filled out comment cards and mentioned you positively, you earned points. Everyone started out with a maroon name tag, but as you earned points you progressed to a silver and then a gold tag, and then you started earning stars to add beneath your name. I decided my goal was to be nice until I earned the silver tag. After that the name tags just got ugly, so I'd end the nice routine to maintain what was clearly the most aesthetically desirable tag. Did I achieve my goal? The maroon tag on my bulletin board mocking me to this day will be more than happy to answer your question.

It is also the very same Kohl's where a woman was piling clothes out of her cart while talking to her friend when I scanned a pair of baby pants. They rang up for twenty-two American dollars. They then began a debate on whether the pants were cute, and once they decided that they were they began wondering if the pants were twenty-two dollars worth of cute. "Well," said the woman who was planning on buying them, "If I don't like the price that comes up, you can offer me a lower one, right?" "Uh, no, sorry. This isn't a Venezuelan flea market. You pay what the tag says." I only said the first part out loud, but I think there was a tone that implied the second part. Maybe there's a reason I wore a maroon tag for the entirety of my employment.

New intersection in front of the aforementioned Kohl's, leading to countless venues of commercialized splendor. A twenty minute drive to Merrilville is no longer a necessity, which saddens me until I think of that time my stupid car started choking on its own radiator (or something... I don't know cars) and the 'check engine' light came on halfway home. Later that day on my dad's advice Catie and I bought some radiator fluid see if that would solve the problem. We successfully located the radiator cap and even opened it, only to find that it was mostly full. We opened up the new radiator fluid and poured some in - and holy crap, have you ever seen radiator fluid? I honestly believe it's the prettiest liquid that exists on earth. Like molten emeralds! It glittered in the late afternoon sun and Catie and I exclaimed over its beauty for an almost embarrassing amount of time, and then we wondered why there aren't more female mechanics. We bounced my car around by jumping on the bumper to, I don't know, settle the fluid in or something. Then I took it to a real mechanic and had to pay about four hundred bucks to really fix it. Memories.

More stores, including a dress barn for all your dress needs. Somehow I managed to survive four years at Valpo without this store. I had to bring a dress from home for the Sophomore Year Christ College Christmastime Gathering of Pretentiousness (or CCCGoP to those in the know) when I played first chair kazoo. I think that was the high of my Christ College career, too. Wait- no it wasn't. End of freshman year, a certain CC dropout and me filled out our evals in fluorescent gel pen. My favorite part was where we ranked the books we had read using a crudely drawn bar graph. I think our input really helped the program.



Okay last one before bedtime. I'm not sure if you can read that sign if you don't know already know what it says, but Mayfield Apartments hosted much stupidity over the first half of senior year. Like when we went to go see Tara's brand new apartment and during the ensuing celebratory drink, Laura spilled her red beverage across the beige carpeting. Whoops. The first time I ever saw the original Star Wars movies, and then watched them again for some reason, because even though there's apparently no black aliens the phrase "We got stheparated!" just gets funnier and funnier the more you say it.

And then that night after the Travis the Horse party we walked back to the Green House. There was frost on the cars and I spent way too much time using the side of my hand to make what looked like tiny footprints all over the car. I spent the whole time giggling over the fact that when the owner found it the next morning they'd undoubtedly wonder what baby had clomped barefoot all over their car, defying gravity by walking straight up the side of it.

There was another night where I came home from Mayfield to be alone in my house save for a bat fluttering around the ceiling of my bedroom and how the VUPD sort of saved me. But that's a story for another time, even though I'm sure you've all heard it before. It was a tale of valor and tiredness and utter embarrassment, and I milked it for all it was worth at the time. All right, I'm out. You behave yourselves til I get back.

Return to Valpo

After an interview in Chicago this past weekend, I went a bit out of my way to stop by Valpo on the way home. I'd been there since graduation and had already seen the new library, including the Matrix-esque journal retrieval robot. Travel tip: DO ask to see this if you go back, DO NOT look at the rest of the library or the discrepancy between it and the library we knew will make your head explode. I present you now with a photo journal in however many parts it takes chronicling both my self-tour of campus and some precious memories of the time I spent there. Enjoy.

Adblock

Marvel at my cinematographic skillZ, my taste in music and my apparent aversion to using my windshield wipers.



The new road leading past "that Chapel" and the new library, a fine showcase of the wonderful opportunities Valpo has to offer. Strangely, Alumni Hall was not included on this greatest hits tour, but I'm sure the ongoing construction will eventually correct this oversight.


Memorial Hall, home sweet home of Sophomore "Everyone's Crying But Me" Year as well as half of Junior "Live in a Triple? Sure, I Can't Foresee Any Problems There: Love You Catie And Rachel BFF" Year. Now, apparently, there's a (gasp) road leading right to the front door, which seriously blows my mind. It almost makes the fact that the main doors of the dorm face in the complete opposite direction of the rest of campus logical. No, that's a lie. But I'm sure the campus feng shui went up a few points, or whatever units in which one measures feng shui.


Is it blasphemous to refer to the 'ass end' of a Chapel? I don't see why it would be, and since I'm too lazy to look up the real term for this portion of it, the ass it shall be. Also, the large stick of bells near the Chapel and the front of the CLI...R. It sure is shiny.


And opposite the Chapel... a disgusting muddy mess. The old library is gone, having no doubt collapsed in upon itself once the thirty books that once resided there were removed. Hmm library memories... Rachel used to work in the back room sniffing glue or something in exchange for minimum wage (hee-yah!). One time Catie and I decided to ninja ourselves along the walls and through the bushes to peek in at her through the windows and mock her with our freedom. I don't really remember the outcome of the story, so maybe it wasn't the best one to share here. Another time we were walking past the library back to Alumni and kicking white puffy dandelions. Most of them had been kicked, so we were fighting over the few that remained. I spotted one in the distance and thought the best course of action was to tear ass over to it and claim it as my own. When I reached the weed, however, I was cruelly betrayed by both my foam flip flops and the laws of friction as both my feet went out from under me and I landed square on my ass. And then my friends caught up to me, laughing their fool heads off, and kicked the flower I had suffered for. Ah, memories.

Skeleton of the new union, I'm guessing. See that banner on the lamppost? One time during the summer before senior year, I was walking around campus and saw one on the ground. I wanted one very badly, so after taking an inventory of my visibility, I scooped that baby up and brought it home, hiding it along my outside leg to hide it from any authorities. Hey, it always works in the movies. It lived on the wall of our fantastically decorated living room for the rest of the year, and has probably been thrown out along with the inflatable glitter guitar, the plastic glow-in-the-dark skeleton and the life-size poster of Mike Singletary. Sigh. Cleaning is not always a good thing.


That's all for tonight, kids. Tomorrow we'll explore the areas surrounding campus and some favorite buildings from the other side of the construction zone. G'night!

Marsh Bakery Report: Theirs No Spellcheck On There Cakes

The cashier thought it was hilarious and told me to take it to customer service to see if I could get it for free for spotting the mistake. The manager at customer service, however, had no sense of humor about the grammatical inadequacies of his bakery staff. He took the cookie from me, saying he would take it back and have them correct it. Presumably after he beat them senseless with dictionaries.

Cars and Skanks and Naked Demi Moore - Oh My!

Sorry for the delay... some stuff came up. On to the party!

One more thing... all credit for the photos goes Laura, whose photographic talents are matched only by her ability to remember the memory card in her digital camera, a skill I hope to one day master. You rule, girl.

As we had expected, our invitations were a last minute payoff for grinning and bearing our parking lot servitude. No pictures of the cars lining our street, because it was rainy and dark when Laura and I drove down the street to the party. Yep, we drove. I don't even think the tenth-of-a-mile place clicked on my odometer, but I drove to the valet station. I pulled up and a snappy gent led us under an umbrella to a Lincoln Navigator - or other overpriced facsimile - to be driven five hundred yards to the house.

Immediately upon our arrival it was obvious why he was not reprimanded for his parking transgressions: several police cars were parked right in front of the house. This guy clearly knows how to grease a wheel. One more short umbrella-led walk later we were inside. Yeah, it was a pretty big house, crammed to the rafters with seriously ugly art and skanks in varying degrees of undress and sloppy drunkenness. But we’ll talk more about the skanks later. We began a cell phone aided search for my mom and our neighbor, who had arrived before us. Eventually, we found them beyond the weirdest bedroom ever, containing the biggest entertainment technology gap I've ever seen.

I love the NES as much as the the next gal, but come on! Upgrade.

Mom, having already been exploring, proceeded to lead us on a greatest hits tour. First step was the car room. Correction: the FIRST car room. If I knew about cars, I'm sure the makes, models and years would have absolutely blown my mind; however I was more captivated by the sheer number of cars one person could own. Oh, and the shininess. And the fact that this man had at least two subterranean garages that he could have easily parked his guests cars in.

Some old red car

The insides of that red car

Laura had them valet park this one in our driveway

Looks like they had ugly banana yellow cars back then, too!

Sorry for the blur, we were in stealth mode... no flash.

In the words of Laura, "I'm sure this is nice… if you like old cars… which I don't."

Anyway, there was also food and a makeshift bar. We grabbed some food for the trek to the NEXT car room, which was infinitely more exciting because of THIS!

One point twenty-one gigawatts!

What the hell is a gigawatt?!

That's right, he owns a damn time machine. De Lorean. Whatever. I got to sit in it and crack wise about flux capacitors. Like it was even a question I'd do that! Please. Oh, and Frank Sinatra's last car... meh.

He did it his way... and his way was green and kinda ugly.

We found some stairs and wandered upstairs into a large... something room. I'd call it a TV room, but that really wouldn't distinguish it from any other room in the house. This guy must buy forty-something inch plasma TVs in bulk. At least one in every room, and in the kitchen I saw two mounted on either side of a 2-foot wide decorative dividing wall. The room we were in now had a television the size of a twin bed in a wall unit, and a smaller (though not much) television on a wall not 30 feet away. This room had several couches and a dedicated bar. And that brings me to the discussion of the skanks. The only reason I know there was a bar in the first place was because the bartender was tall and I could see him distributing the booze over people's heads. The bar itself was surrounded by an annulus of skanks, three deep in places. The layers was even thicker around a man with the most prominent brow ridge I've seen this side of a museum's wax exhibit of Paleolithic hominids. He had a voice several octaves lower than bass, which apparently functions as a skank magnet. The low frequency resonates with their lady regions and they cannot help but flock. Really - I read about it in a science journal. American Journal of You’re a Skank.

These were not just any skanks, either. Oh, sure, they looked like your typical, garden-variety skank from a distance. But upon closer inspection it became clear that the artfully spackled makeup was concealing their true age: approximately 139 in alcoholic years. Truly horrifying. Needless to say, we didn't hang out there very long.

The next door we came across that was open (or had an easily picked lock, whatever) was apparently DB's office. It contained all the typical office accoutrements: desk, computer, couches, oil portrait of Demi Moore, naked but for a painted on "suit." Yeah. What? The hell. I have no explanations for you; I can only present the facts in a derisive manner. What you do with the information is entirely up to you.

Essentials for productivity.

Next up, the exercise/antiquated video racing game/knock off (I hope!!) Venus de Milo room. I defy you to find a more natural combination – I’m sure it was a Feng Shui thing.

Get in a little workout...

...then drive the hell out of a 32-bit racing simulator while naked headless lady stands guard!

We hit the kitchen, where my sister drained the ice sculpture/scrimp dispenser (I haven't made anything up yet, why would I start with that?) and having thusly eaten the food and seen the house, we made our way towards the door where the wait began. We had to wait for the shuttle, so we stood by the door to feel the breeze and marvel at the skank parade. I have never seen - and hope never to see again - that much side-boob and lower-ass. Dresses too big and too small in dangerous places left them straddling the line between legality and whoredom. Ladies (and I use that term loosely) we don't need to see your baby factory to know you're female. Your preternaturally outsized boobs make it abundantly clear what sort of equipment you're packing, and your lack of clothing clearly advertises what you're willing to do with that equipment. Geez. Subtlety is DEAD, people.

During the wait, we received bags of gourmet popcorn (read: overpriced Cracker Jack without any prizes inside). My mom solicited help on an epic search for an umbrella that turned out to be right next to the door and probably made the help think we were involved in some sort of poorly planned umbrella heist. The knowledge that our house was in walking distance plus a woman smoking a cig and generously sharing her stench with all of us multiplied by two adorably precocious brats made the wait interminable. Eventually we tired of the standing around and of Laura's bitchiness (sorry, girl, the shoes are cute but they put you in a hell of a mood when they start cutting your toes off) and just walked down the damn driveway. Of course once there, we had to wait for my car. Great. Not five minutes later, the golf cart shuttle brought the very people we had walked away to avoid to wait with us. Fantastic. But wait for the silver lining, folks! As she was leaving the shuttle, the Marlboro Lady dropped her black purse on the driveway, where the darkness rendered it nearly invisible. Laura and I began a nearly silent campaign willing someone, anyone to run over the clutch, crushing what we imagined to be its contents: half a pack of cigs and a cell phone with a contact list brimming with numbers of local VD clinics. After near misses with both the golf cart and a real car, one of the brats ruined our fun, as brats are wont to do.

“You dropped your purse!” Little Lord Fauntleroy piped up. He retrieved the bag and handed it to her.

“He deserves a reward!” shouted some drunken moron from not two feet behind me. He had been monitoring the situation and decided to craze it up for his own amusement. “Give the boy a reward!” He was clearly hoping for either a kiss or a monetary reward to be bestowed upon the boy – the slurring made it hard to tell which. Either way, the woman was too drunk and/or dumb to coordinate such a complicated response. She mumbled a thanks and the boring wait resumed. Eventually, I saw lights coming down our street. Thank god. They began lining up in front of us, and the trained professional driving a pickup truck nearly hit another car (and I mean inches from a squealing, metallic mess) made me seriously doubt my decision to valet park. The Precious was clearly not in talented or even competent hands. Thankfully, it arrived with nary a squeal and Laura and I got in. It was go time. I turned around in the driveway, right in front of the valet bitches, and then drove right back to our parking lot home.

The verdict? Not even close to worth it. It would’ve been more fun to park every car we could lay hands on in our street and then saran-wrap all encroachers. Oh, well, there’s always the next party… because it’s only a matter of time before DB feels the need to flaunt his extensive popularity again. Whoopee!