So I guess I should sit down and tell you all what transpired on our super awesome amazing better-than-yours weekend. As you may have known, Megan and I were house sitting again this week. It's kinda fun to kick it in someone else's house for a little while and enjoy the perks of a super huge TV and all that sorta jazz. Plus there's the obvious benefit of getting paid to do it. The only down side to the whole deal is the commute. The house we sit (well, technically it's more dog sitting than house sitting. We stay at the house and feed two dogs: one that is all hyper all the time, and one that is nigh unto death and apparently can't control its bowels like it used to in the good ol' days.) is in far boonieville Chandler. So we end up spending a little more on gas to get out there, but we're saving on our electric bill because we're not at home running the AC. So that's good.
This time the house sitting gig started on Thursday and overlapped our weekend. On Friday I had a ridiculous day. I won't go into any details because I am writing this entry on a computer that may or may not be more closely monitored than the computers our boys in Iraq are using. Let's just say I got busted for something that really shouldn't be a big deal, and the person who ratted me out was either one of our more ridiculous patrons or a person I work for. Either way I'm not too happy about it. This summer the major things I normally do as summer-long projects have been cancelled due to lack of funds (which is an all-too-common problem at ASU these days) so it's not like I have a lot to do around here. Everything I write on this computer is being screened and sent to the head of the library for review. It feels a little like 1984(the book, not the actual year. 1984 the year was great. The Larry Bird era Celtics won the NBA Championship over the Magic Johnson era Lakers. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the first Karate Kid movie and Footloose were all released that year. The board game Axis and Allies was introduced. Alex Trebek started his long stint on Jeopardy!. Apple computers released the first of their Macintosh computers. Bon Jovi, Yngwie Malmsteen and Spinal Tap all released their debut albums in '84. Wayne Gretzky's Oilers won their first Stanley Cup. There were new TV shows like Airwolf, Night Court, Punky Brewster, and The Cosby Show. And just look at this murderer's row of hits from 1984: Karma Chameleon by Culture Club, Jump by Van Halen, Footloose by Kenny Loggins, Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper, When Doves Cry by Prince, Missing You by John Waite, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham!, Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen, Drive by The Cars, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper, Here Comes the Rain Again by the Eurythmics, I Want to Know What Love Is by Foreigner, Lucky Star by Madonna, People are People by Depeche Mode, Pride by U2, I Want to Break Free by Queen, Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Shout by Tears For Fears, Sunglasses at Night by Corey Hart, The Longest Time by Billy Joel, The Power of Love by Frankie goes to Hollywood, Purple Rain by Prince, We Belong by Pat Benetar, You Might Think by The Cars. Seriously, I'm going to make the new tape player at the top of this blog from those songs. So if you're not convinced that 1984 the year was a good year, you're crazy. Did I have way too much fun looking all that stuff up? Of course I did.)
So the workday on Friday was boring, long, and tedious. I had nothing to do and had been banned from the ways I normally pass the time. So I was literally twiddling my thumbs for three hours at a time. Your minds cannot fathom the depths of my boredom. Watching paint dry would have been a refreshing relief. I was as happy as a man could possibly be when Megan picked me up at the end of the workday.
After work Megan and I headed over to Last Chance to see if we could find me some new pants. Megan is beginning to see that it's totally a woman's world when it comes to clothes shopping. In all her favorite stores, the men's section takes up a small back corner and none of the clothes they have are in my size. So I didn't get anything, but I was much happier to be shopping than at work. We couldn't shop for too long because we had to go back to the boonies to feed the dogs. We spent the rest of Friday night watching Monk and thanking the heavens for the weekend.
We slept in a little on Saturday, which turned out to be a bad idea for me. Megan slept like a baby, and I slept like a guy in a full nelson for 8 hours. I didn't know it, but when I woke up, the rediculous down pillow I was sleeping on was fat on both ends and wafer thin in the middle where I was sleeping. This did two things for me 1) It made me self conscious about whether or not my noggin is overweight and 2) It crinked (that's a medical term, by the way) my neck and gave me a headache for the whole day. So that was fun. I feel like I'm complaining a lot in this post. Let me interrupt myself and apologize to all of you in reader land.
So on Saturday we had errands to run. We went into Tempe to return one of Megan's tires to discout tires because it had developed a comically (and I only say comically because it didn't explode and cause a crash) large bulge. We dropped the tire off and then headed over to get Megan a hair cut. During this time I started calling my old roomy Travis because they were holding some mail and a package for me at the apartment. I probably called Travis about 9 times that day. I called him every time we were in the neighborhood of the apartment, which amounted to about once every half hour. Little did we know that he was in Mexico.
So we got Megan's hair cut and the tire fixed and we headed over to wally world to pick up some important supplies. We got a garden hose so we can give our cars the wash we've been talking about for months. We got bug bombs so we can head off this inchworm problem. Anyway, I'm sure you're very interested in the contents of our shopping cart, but I think I'll cut it short right there.
We got to go to Bookman's, which is my new old favorite place. It had been a favorite place for a while, but now that I live closer to it, the favoriteness has been renewed, revived, refreshed, rejuvenated, replenished, and other words that start with "re." I love the fact that I can roll in on any given day and pick up Atari 2600 games for less than a dollar each. That's just a good time. Megan picked me up some birthday presents, which was kind of comical. She has gotten me a couple presents that I don't know about, but the ones she got at Bookmans are things that I know all about. It's going to be hard to get surprises on each other's birthdays. I'm ok with not having any surprises, but it's kind of funny to try to keep that going. At one point Megan said, "Here, hold these games, but don't look at them." Yup, that's married life. Did I mention that 9 out of 10 doctors prefer marriage to single life. And these aren't the same doctors that were telling us about how Camel cigarettes were easy on the "T-Zone" back in the '50s. These doctors are legit.
On Saturday night we went to a housewarming party for Janae, Megan's old roommate. It was nice to see some of our single homies again. I hassled Eric and told him to hurry up and propose. That was fun. I've never had the ability to be the married person who tells single people, "Just get married. It's not like it's hard or anything." I'm hoping I never forget how rediculous and hard it was to be single, but at the same time, it's still fun to hassle single people as long as they know you're mostly joking. Oh, it was also the first time that Megan and I were not the newest newlyweds in the room. A couple who got married two weeks after we did found their way to the party. So Megan and I are old-timers. We know everything about marriage. Call us up if you need advice or anything. We've got it all figured out.
After the party I dropped by the old apartment to pick up some stuff. Luckily they hadn't thrown out my old skateboard or hockey sticks. My favorite brand of hockey sticks has been bought and sold again. Koho was once owned by CCM which was bought out by Reebok, which is apparantly owned by Adidas (pronounced Aw-Dee-Daws by most everybody except Americans, as I learned on my mission). So I don't know if I'll be able to get Koho sticks anymore, especially not Mario Lemeux signature models. So it was good to get the remainder of my stuff out. We talked with Joel for a second then headed back to the boonies to feed the dogs and whatnot.
On Sunday Megan got asked to fill in and tech Relief Society. So she spent the morning getting her lesson together, and I spent it writing the meme you may or may not have read. When we got to church, the member of the high council who was supposed to announce my new calling wasn't there. So I didn't actually get sustained, and nobody in the ward talked to me about the calling. So I feel like I may have jumped the gun a little by telling y'all what the calling was. I didn't actually think about that until they didn't announce it and I realized I maybe should've held off until I was actually sustained (who knows, the ward might vote against it). Megan's lesson didn't go nearly as well as she had hoped. People didn't make that many comments, and she zipped through most of her material well before the hour was up. She made it through, though and I think she probably did pretty well. There is a huge difference between singles wards and family wards though in terms of people commenting during lessons. It can be silent as a crypt in Elder's quorum when the teacher asks a question, and apparantly Relief Society is a little bit the same. We'll get used to the ways of the family ward before too long, but we're still pretty new at it I guess.
Oh, and I guess I can tell you this crazy anecdote before I close this thing up: so I went to get a hot dog from Circle K at lunch today. They're cheap, they're delicious, and they make a great meal on days when I forget to pack a lunch. So I buy my hot dogs and take them outside. I set them down on this crate of propane tanks where I proceed to slather them in ketchup as I am wont to do. Out of the corner of my eye I see this guy ride up toward me on this rediculous low rider bicycle (I have never understood the low-rider bicycle thing, especially if it's a white guy riding one). The guy riding this abomination of a bicycle was a g-funked white guy with chrome-plated teeth. He asked me if I had 50 cents so he could ride the bus. I told him I didn't. It's the truth. I never carry cash, and I hardly ever have change. I feel bad when I see homeless people because I genuinely never have change to give them, but what can ya do? Anyway, this guy rode off and as he rounded the corner, he yelled at the top of his lungs, "Liar!" So he's calling me a liar when he doesn't actually know that I really don't have any change. Maybe if he wasn't spending all his money on tricked-out bicycles and chrome-plated teeth he might have some spare change of his own.
The beggars in Tempe are getting way out of hand. A few months back I had a similar scenario where I guy asked me if I had any spare change as I was eating my lunch. I told him that I didn't. He asked me, "How'd you pay for that food then?" I should have told him it was none of his business, but I told him, "I payed for it with plastic." He then cursed us rich people and our plastic and how it deprives people like him of what they need to survive. Now I'm sorry that we have homeless people in this country, but they are not entitled to my pocket change. As a Christian, I am supposed to give when I am able, and I do. But it's a little rediculous to be called out by a guy who feels like he has a right to a cut of my money. I've never seen rediculous beggars (Is it P.C. to use the term "beggar?" He was technically begging for my change, but it's not a super dignified term. But what's a less offensive term: hobo? transient? pauper? panhandler? vagabond? domestically challenged person? You tell me what a better term would be and I'll use it) the way we get them in Tempe.
I guess that's a bit of a downer to end on, but it's almost time to close up shop here in the liberry, so I'll leave it like that. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of, "James Complains About Everything." Tune in next week when I complain about 1960s and 1970s U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia. It'll be riveting.