Photo Hunter: Sports

I don't like sports.  I am terribly unathletic and don't see much point in all the hype given to athletes.  However, under the influence of friends and family I have come into a recent appreciation for softball/baseball/t-ball.  It certainly helps if you know the players personally and can shout intelligent phrases; plus, it is a good excuse to be outside for a while -- a luxary hardly granted to a theatre student.  That being said, here is my ode to sports:

My nephew's first t-ball game...

My high school friend, Courtney Oberg, playing for Baylor...

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.  

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, Shery! Hope it was beautiful.

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, Miguel!  Hope it was so much fun!

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: Orange

A few days ago, I went to Chili's with some friends of mine and somewhere along the way, Anna decided to carry Carissa there.  They decided to stop and smell the flowers by one of the dorms and Anna had to drop her in the grass.  It was however a great moment for picture taking that led right into an hour of laughter.  The whole event was just fun and conveniently enough for today, Carissa looks striking in her orange shirt.

Photo Hunter

Week 1.5

10 days into rehearsal; 8 days into class.

First run through of the show? check

First English book read? check

First scene written? check

First all nighter? ain't happened yet, baby!

I will fill in the blanks sometime not tonight or I might have to change my last answer :)