Awesomeness confirmed!
Would you like to translate this page from Russian?
I’m trying to decide who is ultimately responsible for this, Google Translate or the Russian media, but I got a laugh out of it either way. I was looking at the statistics page here on the blog and saw that someone got referred to the website via a link from vk.com. Apparently, back in July of 2010, someone in Russia made a folder with a bunch of pictures from our season of Beauty and the Geek—mostly the promo pics showing the couples, each participant, a few production shots… I’m sure you could find all of them in various places throughout the Interwebs.
In this case, the link was in the comments below the picture of Scarlet and me. Several people were lamenting the fact that she had been murdered, something that which I addressed with a “Live In Peace” post around that time. It apparently relieved a lot of people and still does to this day—in the last two months, that post has averaged about three hits a day. That may not seem like much to you, but given how little traffic this blog sees on a regular basis, it’s significant.
But the important part isn’t the fact that so many people have been concerned about my partner’s death (or lack thereof) since the show aired in Russia—it’s the name of the folder where that picture was posted. If Google was right when I clicked on the Translate button, the television producers there decided to turn the title “Beauty and the Geek” into “Cheeky and the Freaks.” That’s awesome.
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“Dude, trivia tonight was nuts!”
Trivia at Green Mill in Lakeville runs from 9:00-11:00pm on Thursday nights. I have class on Thursday nights which can potentially run from 6:00-10:00pm. Given that my classmates and I tend to burn out before reaching the four hour mark, professors are generally gracious enough to cut things a little short, so with a 30-minute drive down to the restaurant (about two miles from home), I can usually be there by 10:00 or so. Plenty of time for food, drink and trivia.
Today was no exception: buffalo wings, root beer and trivia. There are four rounds of five questions and I got there in the middle of Round 3, which was all about nuts. I don’t remember what #1 was, #2 asked for another name for peanuts (legumes), and I sat down at the table in time to hear #3, which was the nut that’s used to make pesto (pine nuts).
Normally, the host uses a microphone to ask questions through the speaker system—I don’t know why it wasn’t working, but tonight, he had to walk around the restaurant supplying each table with the questions. Thus, before we heard #4, the guy sitting across from me said it’d be funny if one of us went to another table, listened to the question and came up with the answer before the host got to us.
So I did. Not the “listening to the question” part. I came up with the answer.
For no particular reason, when he said it’d be funny, I blurted out, “Macadamia!” Then the host got to our table and he posed a question along the lines of “the nut that was named after John Macadam, an Australian chemist, in 1957.” And I raised my hands in victory.
We did pretty well and came in second place, earning ourselves a $10 gift card to Green Mill, which I graciously accepted on behalf of our team. Getting “macadamia” right, getting the gift card and hearing a tie-breaker question made tonight awesome.
The tie-breaker question? “How many self-titled albums has Seal produced?”
The answer? Three.
The answer one team gave? Twenty three.
Like I said, that helped make tonight awesome, too.
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Today. Was. Awesome.
Admittedly, I could do without the sunburn, but once I learn to put on suntan lotion (and not assume that I’ll be fine without it), I’ll be golden. Which is better than bright red.
Things got started yesterday when I told Matthew Feeney that I could join him and three others for a boat ride in Prior Lake the next morning. He said that was cool, gave me the address to meet everyone and said to be there around 9:15. Matthew showed up closer to 9:30, but he had stopped to get ice for the cooler so we’d have cold Coke to drink out on the lake.
We got some good news when he got there. We needed to bring the boat back around noon so it could get cleaned up and prepped for the next group of people who had it reserved for the afternoon (thus, the boat needed to be ready by 1:00). Turns out they called in and said they’d get to the docks around 4:00, so we had a couple extra hours to use the boat.
When we headed out onto the water, it was awesome. The temperature was warm, but not hot, the sun was shining, there were no clouds in the sky, a slight breeze… gorgeous conditions to spend hours on a pontoon boat in the middle of a lake. We spent the first part of it cruising around for a bit, then decided to drop anchor and fish for a while.
Technically, I guess the others fished while I was hanging out in the boat, but it was all good. They tried using lures, bobbers with… well, I’m not sure what they had on the hooks initially, but they got the most nibbles with the bait that Matthew brought along: raw bacon. Unfortunately, no one caught any fish, but they enjoyed fishing nonetheless.
Of course, we did more than fishing in the lake. Matthew and one of the kids had been on the lake earlier and knew about a couple of abandoned houses and a trail that led to another small lake, so we ended up on the shore to do a little exploring. The houses were pretty busted up with glass all over the place, one had shit in the attic (and when I say “shit”, I’m talking about human poop), and there was an easy chair up in a tree. Why it got put up there, I haven’t the slightest idea, but it was wedged between some branches at an awkward angle, so the lightest kid in the group (about 115 pounds) climbed up and got his picture taken while sitting in the chair.
The “small lake” was pretty much just a pond covered with algae, but Matthew wanted to try fishing in it anyway. He got off to a rough start when his first cast went up and over a power line, but after that… no fish. However, there were geese there. They were afraid of us.
We could tell because when we first got there, they all swam to the far side of the pond. Later on, one of the guys snuck around to the other side and scared them all away. Well, all but one. I’m not sure if it was injured or what, but instead of flying away, this goose ducked its head down to almost water (algae) level and started swimming away from him. And then we steered it in the other direction by throwing rocks into the water towards it. Bizarre.
Eventually, we decided to head back to the boat and went cruising around for a while. But we needed to do more than just cruise and fish. We were on a boat in the middle of a lake on a beautiful day: we needed to go swimming. One person didn’t want to and was resisting all efforts at peer pressure, so what did I do? A cannonball. Right next to the boat. And the water splashed up, over the seat of the pontoon boat and got him wet. Word.
Another was willing to go swimming, but didn’t have a suit. The best alternative to jumping in fully clothed? Jumping in au natural, of course. I don’t think there were any other boats around to see him, but even if there had been, I don’t think he would have cared. There was just one problem: he got on top of the seats to do a backflip into the water. He landed feet first, which was good, but it also meant there was nothing to protect his nuts from slapping directly onto the water. Ow.
But that last kid finally caved, so we were all in the water and some more of them were doing flips off the boat. One kid had never tried a backflip off the top of the seats before, so we explained that you didn’t need to worry about tucking too much, just jump and throw your arms back to help you rotate. Well, he didn’t throw his arms back. His arms made it about halfway up, then he grabbed his nose to plug it when he jumped. Consequently, he smacked his face onto the surface of the water. Ow again.
Later on, we were moving along at a decent pace and saw another pontoon boat coming toward us. It turned out to be a group of girls (vs. our boat of all guys). As we passed, one of them said, “Hi, boys.” On cue, one of the guys who was sitting on top of his seat turned to wave and turned himself right over the edge of the boat and into the lake. It was really funny (except for the bong on the side of the metal pontoon—thankfully, it was his elbow instead of his head). Then to top it off, as we stopped, one of the guys yelled, “HE CAN’T SWIM!” and dove off the back of the boat toward him. (They both swam up to the boat, but I can only imagine what the girls were thinking after all that happened.)
But even with all the minor mishaps and injuries, it was still an awesome day. But not golden. Nope, it’ll take a bunch of cold showers and a few days with my body covered in aloe before all the redness goes away.
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This weather is no laughing matter!
As it turned out, the voice on the CSC weather line was very calm and collected when I called at 10:00 this morning to let me know that all morning soccer games had been cancelled, but the afternoon games were still on. Then I called around 1:00 and everything was cancelled and all of the games will be played on Dec. 19th instead.
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here, but I’m aiming to start getting back on the field at the beginning of 2011. Mom asked if I wanted to play in the game today—I answered simply: “Noooooooo.” I’m being realistic, especially since I’ve found out between using the Wii and shoveling snow this morning/afternoon that my right leg is still significantly weaker than my left. I didn’t think about it before, but when my right quad got sore or tired, I’d shift my weight to the left without thinking about it, something I’ve been doing for the past nine months.
And speaking of shoveling, we have an awesome neighbor named Rich Carron who is awesome. And when I write “awesome”, I mean AWESOME. Dad and I let Mother Nature do its dirty work yesterday because we live across the street from a lake. The wind blows across the lake, picking up velocity and throwing snow around wherever the hell it wants. If we shovel some away, the wind will replace it, quite possibly with the snow you just shoveled away. Mother Nature sucks.
It was still windy walking outside today, but we weren’t getting any more snow, so it was time to go to work. Mind you, not all of the house and driveway looked that bad because of the drifting. I looked at the upwind side of the Ford Explorer and thought it looked worse when we got hit with 14″ of snow earlier this winter. (Or is it technically still fall?) It didn’t look that bad until I got to the other side and saw snow snuggled all the way up to the level of the hood. On an SUV.
As I was clearing off the front steps, that’s when awesome Rich Carron showed up. In a Bobcat. He cleared off the front part of the driveway, along the sides, made some extra space in front of the mailbox and moved everything away from the fire hydrant. He got rid of hundreds of pounds of snow. Hundreds and hundreds. There are now five-foot piles of snow stretching at least ten yards down the block on both sides of the road. (Sure, some was already there, but it hadn’t been packed down by dumping more snow on top of it with a Bobcat.)
I have no idea how much time and effort he saved us in those ten minutes of work… heck, maybe it was just five… but however much it was, he is still AWESOME. So thanks, Rich. You’re a back saver.
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Soup for dessert?
I was eating dinner with my dad at Erbert & Gerbert’s yesterday—I had a sandwich and Cheetos while he ate a bowl of chili—and it was kinda late, so there weren’t any other customers in the restaurant. Out of the blue, one of the guys working there (the night manager, perhaps?) asked if we wanted some chicken noodle soup. They can’t keep stuff like that overnight, so he was about to throw it out and he “didn’t want to let all that good food go to waste.”
Thus, to supplement our already tasty dinner, we got some small bowls of chicken noodle soup. (I imagine Dad felt pretty good about ordering chili instead of ending up with a second batch of the same stuff.) So to the dude who didn’t want to dump out all of the soup last night: Thanks for your generosity. It was yummy.
