Joel and Rachel vs The Universe!

I know! I have been long gone. Holidays and such, you understand.

So, for the in-lawses we drew names this year, and put a $5 cap on the gifts. By the 23rd, Joel and I still had no gifts for everyone, and so embarked on the Joel and Rachel vs. The Universe adventure trip.

First stop: home, Craigslisting like bandits. Find styrofoam coolers, screwdriver (with LIGHTS on the end), and thermos for Joel's dad, wicked brass ladle for Joel's mom. All sweet gifts.
J&R: 1
Universe: 0

Second stop: somewhere in Vancouver to pick up styrofoam coolers (for free). No one is home. We phone, woman sends husband home to fetch coolers. Lose 10 minutes of valuable driving time, but acquire exceptionally large gift.
J&R: 2
Universe: 0

Third stop: home, because Joel forgot to bring the UBC hoodie he wants to exchange. Lose more valuable driving time. Point awarded to Universe, but remanded when heat is discovered to have been left on full, and fire to have surely ensued had we not returned home. Exchange considered a draw.
J&R: 2
Universe: 0

Fourth stop subsection A: UBC (Joel) to return hoodie. UBC takes hoodie, promises hoodie in larger size. Joel will have to do some serious angry phoning to actually acquire hoodie. Exchange considered a draw.
J&R: 2
Universe: 0

Fourth stop subsection B: UBC Staples (Raych) to return busted Palm Pilot. Staples manager is female, fails to be seduced by low-cut top. Refuses to exchange Palm Pilot based on long-expired warrenty.
J&R: 2
Universe: 1

(One week later, busted Palm mysteriously begins working again. Universe retains point for having caused week of inconvenience and mental anguish, J&R score point for luck.)

Fifth stop: somewhere in Vancouver to pick up $5 screwdriver with lights. While on the way there, Raych discovers old Scratch-n-Win in glove compartment, wins $3. Point awarded. Screwdriver obtained. Point awarded.
J&R: 5
Universe: 1

Sixth stop: some side street with eleventy feet of snow. Three-point-turn becomes quandry. Tiny Chinese woman offers shovel, and then assistance pushing car. Tiny Chinese woman and Raych fail to dislodge car. Futility and much sock-wetting ensues until passing man helps.
J&R: 5
Universe: 2

Seventh stop: same side street, some ways the other direction, to get free thermos. Beaten to punch, thermos gone.
J&R: 5
Universe: 3

Eighth stop: public library in Surrey to pick up sweet $5 brass ladle. Are pleasantly early, pass happy fifteen minutes watching enthusiastic ping pong players in rec center. Ladle arrives on time.
J&R: 6
Universe: 3

Ninth and final stop: Chilliwack, with all our goods. Everyone is thrilled with cheap, low-expectation gifts. Christmas is a success.

I am a master of the narrowly-averted disaster.

So, I feel like every time I post about cooking/baking/house cleaning, it's about how I set something on fire/broke the sink/seared off my eyebrows. I figured I should post a picture of something delicious I have made to help balance these stories out. Today is a bit of both.

Ok, so I like to make my own pizza dough because it's way easier to always have flour and oil on hand than to wedge frozen pizza crusts into our shoe-box sized freezer. PLUS I make a wikked-good pizza crust, and I like the way dough smells when it's rising.

Which brings me to today. Because for dough to rise, you need a warm environment. Basement suites = sub-arctic temperatures. I have, in the past, considered roosting on my dough to make it rise, but sometimes I got shit to do. ANYways, I figured out that if you turn the oven on for a minute, and then turn it off, it'll warm up enough to do the deed. I like to give the temperature a little flick again about halfway through the rising, because our oven has trouble retaining heat.

The trick is to turn the oven OFF after you've turned it on. Otherwise, instead of rising nicely, your dough will cook into a loaf-ball, and you will have to slice it and make those slices into pizza, because you have been Christmas shopping all day and are too hungry to start over. I was about eight seconds away from this happening to me today. I'm all, why is the oven smoking? Oh right, because I have a bowlful of dough with a dishtowel draped over it in there, AND IT'S ON!!!

Luckily, the dough was just this side of cooked, and I was able to spread it out and bedazzle it. So behold (a foodie photog I am not)! My sausage/red onion/tomato/cheddar and asiago cheese pizza! Covet it!!!

The most inspirational speech EVER!!

While, on the one hand, this is about the funniest thing I’ve seen in days, on the other hand, it totally brings a tear to my eye at the end, proof that I am completely willing to be emotionally manipulated by a handful of clichés and swelling violins.

This is why I run all the time.

Today, after having lunch twice, I ate a cookie that was 420 calories. I was at school and I had the pre-exam need to be chewing something, so I bought a 420-calorie oatmeal raisin bastard from the vending machine.

You know what else has 420 calories? A 5-oz steak! A quarter-pounder! Eighty-four baby carrots! Ok, that last one isn't really that impressive. I'd DEFS rather eat a giant cookie than my weight in baby carrots.

On the flip side, clocking in at a cool 90 calories are the lemon-fizzy-beverages Joel and I walked up to the IGA to buy, and then wanted to drink IMMEDIATELY on the way home, and had to pop the lids off of with my nail file, which broke the neck and cut Joel's lip. Should have just got sodas in cans.

I am a walrus

A lack of time desire any sort of cooking mojo, combined with cans of miscellanea lolling about in the pantry, multiplied by our impending move and the need to eat those cans, has led to such nutritious meals as 7-layer bean dip. Because nothing motivates studying like getting fatter. Or having mad gas.

#188 in Things I Fail At

I had $13 left on my Linens & Things gift card so I bought two wikked-sharp knives, and then cut myself getting one of them out of the package.

Twin brains! Also, sexy boots.

Me: *searching in vain for the Pot of Gold Mint Collection and finally giving up because, apparently, they're only available every fourth Christmas. For three days. At Shoppers.* Ah well, guess I'll just buy boo this chocolate orange for her birthday. Except the chocolate mint one, because the orange chocolate is gross.
.

Later on that day...
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Boo: Darren has one of those chocolate oranges.
.

Me: Ick. Those are gross.
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Boo: I know. The mint ones are good, though.
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Me:...I may or may not have bought you one for your birthday.
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Boo: Because you couldn't find the Pot of Gold Mint Collection?
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Me: Yes!
.

In other news, remember last winter when I bought myself some wikked moon boots? And how pleased I was with myself for being so practical? We've come a long way, baby. Check these bitches out.

These babies couldn't hit the broad side of practical from three feet away. But they are sexy, and comfortable, and RED, and cost me a healthy chunk of my Christmas money. In advance.

Hail Dec. 2nd!

What I meant to mention yesterday and forgot, in all the Doohoohoohoohoohoo excitement, was that it's waxy-chocolate time! By which I mean, bust out your dollar-store advent calendars, folks. Christmas is coming.

In which I say nothing, really

Ok, I went to go see a movie today, and while I usually love me some pre-preview trivia, I think the trivia screen got stuck on a loop and we ended up watching the same cringy video twice. If you don't feel like clicking the link and having the inanely catchy chorus stuck in your head for DAYS, or if you haven't got speakers, let me sum up:





The whole video consists of this rather adorable but undeniably middle-aged woman surfing in high-waisted board shorts, gyrating awkwardly in a quasi-muumuu, and generally making something of an ass of herself. The song was irritating enough, with it's 'All I want to do-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!' (seriously, it goes on waaaaaaay longer than you think it's going to), but the video could have been much less painful if they hadn't been trying to paint her as a sexy teen. Sexy 40-year-old is totally do-able.

Basically, what I'm saying here is, that song is still stuck in my head, and I've eaten too much, and now I'm cranky. Stop making crappy videos, people.

Funny every year

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

You can pretend that you ran too!

Because being done classes usually = me getting fatter, I went for a run today. In the rain.

With an absolute dearth of anything else to talk about, let me take you on a guided tour of my running path!

The interminably-long, mostly straight bit: if this bit were at the end, I'd defs die of boredom. It's long, and straight, and goes on forEVER.

The fun, woodsy, many-bridged bit: this bit is all windy and darty and I have to dodge roots and branches, which is more exciting than it sounds. UnFORtunately, in the rain it's all run-run-run-walk-carefully-over-soggy-bridge-run-run-walk.

The shorter, straight, cobbley bit: this bit has cobbles. Cobbles terrify me because of that time I cankled, and the only non-cobbley bits are ankle-deep puddles. Rock and a hard place, etc. This bit is mercifully short, and is the place where my iPod batteries died today, leaving me alone with MY THOUGHTS for the next twenty-five minutes.

The perfectly straight, overrun-with-dogs bit: this bit is connected to roads on other sides, and is perfectly straight. Many people walk their dogs here. I only run on this road for about two seconds.

The long, winding, fool-me-twice second-to-last bit: this is my favorite bit, because in my mind it's the last bit (fool me once), and then about halfway down there's this bit that looks like the bit right before the end, and I'm all Wooooo! Almost done! And then five minutes later I realize that was the false-end bit (fool me twice) and that I still have a great deal of running to do.

The last bit: this is the bit I always forget about. I always make the turn a bit startled, like Oh yeah! I'm not done yet! But then, in my mind it's this uber-short bit, so I run pell-mell to get it done with quicker. By the time I realize that it's not as short as I remember, I've been running for so long that I figure the end must be just around the next bend. For a surprisingly long time, it isn't.

In a lot of ways, being more aware of my surroundings would make this run a lot more painful, because I'd have an accurate perception of how much longer I have to run at all times. Because I have total goldfish brain, I end up thinking I'm almost done half the time.

I write more things!

New Back of the Book column up. Check me out.

Bring on the Silent Nights

Now that American Thanksgiving is here, we can officially start thinking about Christmas, and you can all wish you had some of these bad boys. They would look much more awesome against a not-white background, but I'm not the photographer of the family. I'm the cookie-maker.


Candy canes do not go quietly.

UBC's finest

So...the engineering department, or whoever, is having a banana pancake fundraiser in the lounge. Which, awesome, do whatever you want to raise money for your program. But they're taking up the entire kitchen-area, AND using all the power outlets. I understand that at 10:30 in the morning, not a lot of people are going to be wanting to nuke their lunches, but I DO! And I don't have money for your damned pancakes either.

So I made my case, and they unplugged one of their griddles so I could plug in a microwave and faux-boil my oatmeal, except that a fuse blew halfway through and my oatmeal was barely softened and still swimming in oaty water, more of a tepid oat-soup than a hearty meal. But a blown fuse = a blown fuse, and also = me eating my starchy broth in silence while the engineering students scrambled around trying to figure out how to fix a blown fuse.

I think the irony is lost on them.

Plague-yoga

Sometimes when I'm sick, I am weak like the kitten, and sometimes I have superhuman strength. Either way, my balance is down the tubes.

In which I finally give my plague its due.

Friends, I am sick. The world is spinning, and I'M NOT EVEN ON ANYTHING!! I have 2 Buckley's (the pills, not the ass-syrup) waiting for me, but I don't want to take them until I have to go somewhere so for now I'm just staring loopily at the ceiling.

After last week's hellish run-around to get all my assignments done, and a rather satisfying Friday dropping shit off and handing shit in, I have had the awesome weekend of death (the good kind of death, except where that creeping cold caught up with me and sternum-punched me).

Friday night I went to Leah's to watch the America's Next Top Model finale and drink copious amounts of wine and eat a block of expensive cheese and try to reproduce some of the modelly gals' most famous poses (there will be pictures up on Facebook later) and then stumble to the bus and transit my way home feeling like a bag of sand. Being sick always dehydrates me so much, and wine is not what you call 'water.'

Saturday Joel and I ran all around town in the moderate sunshine, by which I mean to the aquarium and then to Joel's friend's wife's dad's place in Vancouver for appies and more wine and then down to Granville Island for dinner and theater sports and then back to Joel's friend's wife's dad's place and then home.

I am le drained. I would like to sleep for a month, and maybe I will. I think I'll go take that Buckley's now.

In which November is a bitch

So, yesterday I took all the files sent to me by the members of my group, spent an hour and a bit ship-shaping them up (read: almost entirely re-doing them) so that they'd match in format, and not overlap in content, and make some sort of sense. Then I Ctrl-S'ed them all into the ether, because where do files go when you save them off an email? I searched my whole computer, even the 'hidden documents' (what are those?) and no dice. So now I do again.

Also, as brilliantly cloudless as it was this morning when I took the time to blow out my hair and admire my sexy bangs, it is now pouring rain. I saw the forecast, and I ignored it.

I am entirely umotivated to succeed today.

My life is tedious.

Even though I have already biffed at NaBloPoMo, and even though school is eating my soul and I have three major assignments due in the next 2 days, I am here.

What do you want to hear about? About how we kept our nicest TA for an hour and a half past his regular office hours because NONE of us (TA included) could figure out what was going on with the assignment?

Or how I have a poster due tomorrow that's worth 25% of our final grade (meeps) and she keeps giving us time in class to work on it when, unless someone brings posterboard and markers to class, there's not much we can do?

Or how I have the sorest of throats?

Or how this weekend I'm going to have the longest of sleeps?

In which I fail at several things.

Ah me, I have lost at NaBloPoMo. Alas.

Regardless, let's talk about taking the bus and how hard it is. So today I catch the 480 which is, like, eight miles long (the bus, not the route), and I worm my way all the way to the back because that's where the single functioning light is, and I have a quiz to study for.

The new talking buses are awesome, and they mean that you can happily immerse yourself in a linguistics text and know exactly where you are without looking up. EXCEPT! So I'm in the back plowing through vowel acoustics when the bus stops, says 'Thunderbird Boulevard,' and EVERYONE gets off.

I sit there for a minute because vowel acoustics is hard, y'all! But then I realize that everyone has gotten off AND that we're not moving, and I'm all, Awwwwww, does this bus not go all the way to the loop? ALL buses go all the way to the loop.

So I look up and hey presto! We're at the loop, Talking Bus was wrong. BUT! Now both back doors (see? Long bus) are shut because the bus is off, and I have to walk the eight miles up to the front of the bus where the bus driver is laughing at me so I can get off.

How did they know?

Rachel krueger's Dewey Decimal Section:

429 Old English (Anglo-Saxon)

Rachel krueger = 8138521815758 = 813+852+181+575+8 = 2429


Class:
400 Language


Contains:
Linguistics and language books.



What it says about you:
You value communication, even with people who are different from you. You like trying new things don't mind being exposed to unfamiliar territory. You get bored with routines that never change.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com