Master of the Mind

It's been a busy week (go figure), but back to the list!

A few weeks before our sophomore year Victoria Romberg (my freshmen roommate) and I discovered our mutual love of the game "Mastermind."  We played for a while on the gimpy facebook app, but it was nothing compared to the real thing.  Time after time we said that we should get together and play, but guess what, it didn't happen until last Tuesday.  It was a great way to do something fun and reminisce (or, to use a word I'm inventing, "nostalge") before parting ways.  We used the board's scoring system and played to 71, the perfect length for a set of games although 71 is the most random number.  On the way out the door, Victoria discovered my pirate gun (you actually shoot pirates out of the gun) which provided a great deal of entertainment.  We haven't seen each other much since we lived together, so I was grateful we could share the awesomeness that is Mastermind and nostalge a bit.

Kaylee.2

She's back!!  After about three weeks of not seeing Kaylee again, Christina and I assumed that she had moved on and wouldn't be coming back even though we fed her.  Last week I heard a few isolated meows that sounded like her, but never saw the cat that made them.  This Tuesday Christina ran into Kaylee in the parking, gave her a bit of loving, then instead of following, Kaylee actually led Christina to the door of our apartment and invited herself into our apartment.  She is adorable and as precious as ever, and has made the conscious decision to stay with us.  She never bolts for the door like she used to, but lazily watches us come in and spends hardly any time in the windows even though they were her favorite haunts last time.  Unfortunately, Christina and I are met with the same predicament that we cannot keep her past this year.  Know anyone who's looking for an extremely loving and easy to care for cat? 

Kaylee

This is an old story, but certainly one worth sharing.  On the first of the month I was dropping off my rent check and right by the door was a gorgeous cat begging for attention.  She had a collar, so I gave her a bit of loving.  She was very unhappy when I had to leave and followed me to the mailbox.  When she followed me back to my apartment what else was I supposed to do, but feed her and love her?

My roommate was home at the time, so we made the mutual desicion to try to find her owner and therefore take her in for a few days so that we would have custody of her if she was claimed.  We bought the stuff she needed to be temporarily adopted, named her Kaylee after the character in Firefly, and made the posters, but when we went to put them up one of the office ladies said that Kaylee had turned up around Easter and had been practically living on her back porch.  The search then turned to a new owner since Christina and I both didn't have a place for her after this year.

Kaylee's a very vocal cat and will let you know when she is unhappy, for example if you come home but don't pay attention to her right away.  Or if you cook and don't share with her.  Or if you leave.  Fortunately, she's a sucker for loving and you can pet her for a while to make her forgive you.  She's odd for a cat in that anytime you want to pet her she will accept it gladly.  Kaylee certainly ruled the household from the moment she came in, although we did not allow her to scratch the furniture.  

Unfortunately, having spent so much time outdoors, she wasn't fond of being cooped up.  We would let her out on the balcony every now and then so that she could be outside and almost a week after she followed me home, she made the jump and we haven't seen her since.  So for five days, Christina and I were the happy owners of spunky and extremely lovable cat named Kaylee.

Stuck

Early last Tuesday morning I was awakened by my roommate after she discovered  that her car battery had died.  I agreed to jump start her car after class and went back to sleep.  Eleven o'clock and done for the day I returned home for a quick jump start and thus the adventure begins.

First of all, my car is designed terribly.  Here's a visual aide:

This is a sideways (don't ask me, ask blogger) picture of my battery with the positive terminal clearly marked.  What is missing?  That's right, the negative terminal.  Against my better hopes, I pulled out the car's instruction manual in hopes of locating the hidden terminal.  I was told that it was "a bolt under the metal part on the driver's side in front of the radiator marked with the letters GND."  Great!  What's a radiator?  After about fifteen minutes of me peering into the depths of the engine compartment, Christina and I switched places and I realized that I had been leaning over the sticker that marked the bolt hidden under a scrap of metal whose only purpose was to hide this bolt the whole time.  Here is a visual of how far away the negative terminal is from the acutal battery:

The positive terminal is the red bit at the top of the picture and the negative is under the discoloration on the bottom edge of the picture.  After we had overcome the poor design of my engine, Christina's car was easily started.

Round two began when she did not have enough time to drive around and let the battery rejuvinate itself and got stuck at Office Depot.  On an errand of my own, I wasn't far away and met her there.  We started her car up again without a fuss and since I had a slightly more fluid schedule I offered to switch vehicles so that it could run like it needed to.  Christina gratefully agreed and we went our seperate ways.

Far from the reaches of campus, I was stopped at a traffic light, about four cars back.  The engine began to sputter and I just knew that Christina's car was going to give out again.  I tried to save it, but there was no hope.  The next step was to locate the hazard lights and turn them on, then put it in park.  Not long after I realized that I couldn't push the gear shift past neutral, I realized that the hazards weren't working.  The battery was that dead.  

Christina was far away, but immediately turned in my direction when I called, then I called my sister to see if there was anything else I could do.  Meanwhile, I was stuck at a traffic light with my foot stuck to the brake, no efficient way to alert people of my troubles, and a gas station so close that I could almost touch it but could not hope to reach it.  A godsend in the form of two guys appeared saying, "We want to push your car into the gas station, is this okay?"  I told them that, yes, indeed, I would allow them to take me out of the middle of the road.  They stopped traffic and pushed me in and were back on the road before I had a chance to say thank you.  Christina fortunately had AAA and was able to sit out the last bit of the day getting the battery replaced.  Now I rejoice when I see that her car has changed spaces since it means that it has left one location and has successfully returned to the apartment.  

Three Visually Adept Mice

Not long before making my way back to my Waco apartment, I recieved a text message from my roommate reading, "Can I get a hamster?"  This was of course puzzling because we already have a mouse.  Our Jasper is endearing, but it didn't seem important to have another rodent.

Still, mice are social creatures and thrive when they have company.  As it turns out, we had mistakenly decided the gender and Jasper is a girl, therefore Jasper can have mouse companions without the fear of mice babies.  Therefore, Christina bought two more mice rather than a hamster.  The initial integration did not work well and one of the mice escaped on the first day.  So when I got home there was black-and-white Jasper in one cage and brown-and-white Emma in the other and the rumor of Dodger.

I was beginning to believe that Dodger had made it to a world beyond our apartment when Christina found some chewed up bits of foil that we have wrapped around our burners.  We proceeded to find an increasing trail of evidence around the kitchen.  I began to mark the trail with crime scene numbers and fortunately, only one bag of chocolate chips were compromised.  For about a week, this is all I knew of Dodger:

Then, the trail went cold for two whole days.  When I finally believed that the poor creature had crawled into the trash and I had thrown her in the dumpster, I recieved a text message from Christina saying, "I'm going to be as artful as possible when I say I've managed to dodge any future theft of my chocolate."  She had found the prodgical mouse under the vaccum cleaner (which I had just put away only a few hours before) which is stored in the bathroom, a good distance from the kitchen in mouse terms.  There was much rejoicing in the retrieval of our pet and the loss of an unattended rodent.

About a week later, we decided to try to integrate Jasper with the rest of the mice again.  Christina had read that we needed to put some vanilla on them so that they would all smell the same -- a neutral smell.  We put it on a little thicker than we meant to, so they seemed to be more preoccupied with getting the vanilla off than fighting each other, but it worked.  The three are now the best of friends and safely contained.  The end.

Photos: Top, Emma - our spastic blonde bombshell.  Bottom, Dodger - our independent brown-coat.

Photo Hunter: Book(s)

I wish I was at home for this one so that I could take a picture of our bookshelf, which is double stacked in many places and creatively squeezed to fit everything in, except for my top shelf which has a lot of blank spaces from me shoving books into the hands of my friends with (and some without) free time. And I certainly don't have enough books.

However, since my shelves live about two hours away, I have an older picture to present. Last year we were about to recieve a new, large screen, incredibly heavy TV. Christina was not certain that our TV cabinet would support the weight, so we started piling on objects until she was satisfied. One of our other roommates, Rachel, was actually asleep on the couch when this all happened. With two science majors, we found that the easiest thing we could use to add weight was the collection of all our textbook(s).

Photo Hunter

Bella

I never thought I would be a rodent person, but Bella has won my heart. In fact, my emotions on Friday started with confusion, moved to infatuation, then anxiety. The addition of a pet does not upset me, but I was having difficulty understanding the reasoning. On Friday, all I could fabricate are as follows.

Plausible reason #1: Christina had an impluse buy.

Plausible reason #2: Christina's bio-pre-med major required her to take care of a mouse before some lab experiment.

Finally, late in the evening I was able to ask Christina and was happy to learn that Bella was a semi-impromtu present and very definately NOT a lab experiment. I never had much admiration for rodents, including the sterotypical hamster or gerbil, but I am absolutely smitten. It's love at the first sight of her goofy looking spotted clumsiness.

Errands

I was just thinking that my life was pretty boring because I didn't have anything to blog about lately. Then today happened.

This morning I was able to spend a half hour with my roommate. We had a pretty monotous conversation about weekend plans and she said she was going to run some errands and go to a sorority retreat. Nothing out of the ordinary, but when I came home this afternoon, this is what I saw:

Let me walk you through what you see. 1) There was no sign of a package when I checked the mail today. 2) The box in the back is for a hamster cage, the yellowish bag is for wood shavings like those you put at the bottom of a hamster cage, and the green bag is rodent food.

Naturally, I searched deeper and when I went into Christina's room this is what I found:

I don't think this is what other people's roommates typically classify as "errands." Then again, maybe it's just me.

Photo Hunter: Squeaky

I have never met a swing, particularly of the porch variety, that was not squeaky. Our swing was no exception, yet we still enjoyed employing it for phone calls and the occasional homework binge if the weather was good. In this picture, Rachel is installing a hammock for a couple of days just because she had a hammock for a couple of days. Under the right circumstances, she can be squeaky too.

Sorry for the delay, the time change and diversions got the best of me.

Photo Hunter

MY ROOMMATE'S BACK!!

To quote my favorite line in Cyrano:

"You're not sad anymore!"

So true. Christina's back!! My apartment is no longer empty!!

[Enter Brillance Here]

Boy, oh boy am I tired. This has been a long, crazy semester. I have been running like never before just trying to keep up, and hoping that I can help my friends stay afloat as well. I feel like I haven't had any adventures lately -- either that or I've had too many, I can't remember. There have been several laughs and jokes and ironies, but none of which make sense to anyone outside those involved. I guess I really just wanted to check in and say I'm not dead (at this point). And since this is a random, uninteresting, and unintelligent blog post, I'm going to add a picture simply because I like it and I like having pictures on my blog. Done and done.

Last year's roommates on the playground at Cameron Park Zoo. Good times.

Photo Hunter: Together

Last year I lived with three girls in a two-bedroom apartment. We had many adventures, but we also had difficulty doing anything that involved all four of us. The only outing that the four of us went on together was bowling at our Student Union Building right around Halloween (although one roomie had to bring homework while the rest of us bowled). We had just recieved Halloween goody bags from my past and current roommate's mom, so we all wore our festive socks for the outing. This is the only picture of the four of us together.

Photo Hunter

Photo Hunter: Scary

I noticed that all of my other photo hunter posts talk about how difficult the word is. So this week, I want to say that finding a scary picture was easy. The first one is some dorm fun from freshman year. Scary how time flies!

For the next one, airplane food is always scary but there's something about reconstituted soy beans that is even more frightening than usual.

PhotoHunt