Becky

Weekend update:
My niece is now 1 year old. She can almost walk and had chocolate cake all over her face, but so did Greg so it's not anything too exciting. Wisconsin was full of rain, but it was OK. We ordered pizza and watched Office Space with my parents. My little sister had to leave the room during the lumberg sex scene cause she couldn't watch it with my parents in the room. I don't think they were even paying attention.

Something I've been meaning to blog about for months:
I've been hearing these strange Donald Trump Office Depot commercials on the radio on my drive to work in the mornings.
They start with Trump making some wierd statement, like today it was "everybody seems to be getting married so young these days". Then he goes into about a 1 min commercial for Office Depot.
Then he goes into a 2-3 minute rant about whatever topic he had brought up. Today he talked about marriage and how everybody in Hollywood is getting married too young - they should really wait until they are older. He brought up Drew Barrymore, Britney Spears and a few others. He made little to no sense and it was very unclear why he felt the need to speak about this.
I have also heard him speak about drinking and drugs and money management and love lives and other strange topics. Last week he talked about Oprah and how great she is.
Has anybody else heard these things? What is up with this and why does Office Depot keep funding these things????

okay, so I'm posting to see if Christie's post shows up. hope all is well with everyone. I'm still in lovely cincinnati ohio so let me know if you want any skyline chili.

oh, and my sister informed me that she would not even go out with a republican. sorry guys....

And happy bday yesterday to Jen if she didn't see the post...

Oh I'm Still Alive:

Yep, I just quoted Pearl Jam. It's 1992 in my mind. My belated apologies go out to Jen for missing her going-away shindig at Fizz. I slept right through it.

I've been super busy lately, which explains the falling asleep while it's still light outside and the lack of blogging. Two of my co-workers moved on to bigger and better (?) things over the last few days, so my workload has increased substantially. A bitter east coast/west coast rivalry has also developed in the 3rd floor print room of my office, leading to plenty of tears and printouts carelessly tossed in the garbage. Damn you, Surplus Lines and your disorganized ways! We were here first.

Lessons of the week:
- don't mess with a guy called "The Rhino" when in Milwaukee
- don't sleep in the same room as Matt
- don't ride in a car with me after a night of drinking and greasy food

Becky

So my little sister calls me the other night and she's all upset. She's crying and asks me to help calm her down. I'm a little concerned, but I know she can be dramatic. Here's basically how the conversation went:
-Becky, I'm so upset!!!! I don't know what to do!!
-What's wrong? how can I help?
-You will never believe what I found out today - I'm just so upset I don't know how this could've happened!!
-What is it - are you okay?
-Well, its just that I found out that Laura (our older sister) is voting for Bush!
-What?
-I just don't understand how someone in our family - someone who grew up with us could vote for that monster!!!
-Well, people are allowed to have their own political views, just make sure that you get out and vote....
blah blah blah, so on and so forth for about 15 minutes until I finally managed to change the subject.

Not that I support Bush or anything, but I am certainly not losing sleep over my sister's voting habits, when she will most likely be too distracted on election day to even remember to vote. who knows if she's even registered!

ok I should work now - more later....

ps-wish greg luck on his first day of school orientation. the kids come next week. ahhhhh!!!!

Jen

Here's the deal thus far:

1)We do not have a place yet. Apparently since I am currently jobless, I am supposed to write on the applications for apartments that I have a co-signer if necessary. Hello? I'm 25 - I need a cosigner still? Anyway, we have finally gotten call backs on two places - both in Venice, so hopefully one of those two will pan out.

2)The interview went . . . ok. Here's what happened. I apllied for the position of registrar at this gallery, the position was already filled, so they had me come and interview for a front desk receptionist. I would have galdly taken the job, well, because I need money. The interview basically consisted of the person who currently had the job telling me how she sometimes had to greet people at the front desk AND answer the phone at the same time and that it was very busy and stressful. I replied with "wow, sound really exciting and I'm up for the challenge." Then the director would say, you have a lot of experience and wouldn't you be bored answering phones? Why in gods name did you have me in for? So they said that they have interviews scheduled for the rest of the week so when they have gone over everything, they would get back to me. So frustrating!

3) The weather is so nice, it's hard to be mad. I do really miss everyone so much and I will call everyone and talk everyone's ear off as soon as I can do it in my own home.

Miss you.

Greg

If participating in my lessons is anywhere near as boring as creating them is, my students are in for the most boring class of their lives. Okay, maybe not THE most boring, but certainly tedious.

It's so hard to prepare for something you know nothing about. I've never taught at this school, i've never even substituted there, so i don't have much of a conception of what the place is all about. Add to that a very confusing department chair who talks and talks and tends to say little that i can understand and a delivery snafu which keeps the textbooks out oif my kids hands for the first two weeks, and i'm struggling to figure out what's expected of me. All this gets figured out a week from Monday, hopefully i'm prepared.

As a huge Cubs fan from birth (I had a homemade Ryan Sandberg banner in my window as a kid. All blue pinstripes and the number 23), I'm very excited that they're doing so well both on the field and attendencewise. However, my very last avenue for attending Cubs games has been taken away. I tried to get standing room tickets (available only on the day of the game) for Tuesday's game 2 hours before start and they were all sold out. A quick glance inside revealed few people in the standing room section. This leads me to the conclusion that scalpers are snapping up standing room tickets in the morning to make their tickets more valuable. With absolutely no way to enter the ballpark, except through them, i've just about given up on attending another game this year.

Hey jen, i know you have an interview today, so Good Luck!! Let me know how it went!

Greg

Still trying to recover from what was essentially 15 or 16 hours of drinking for the Berko wedding. Needless to say, i was a bit drunk, but i managed to avoid doing anything stupid. Fun was had by all.

I start my teaching job next week. Next Tuesday-Friday I have staff development and orientation stuff and two weeks from today I have a full day with Freshman only. Since four of my five classes are freshman, i've gotta be ready to go. I'm a little nervous. Starting a career is something i've never really been presented with before. I've had a bunch of jobs, even good jobs, but nothing that i saw myself doing in the long term. It's gonna be hard, but i think i'm gonna do okay.

Jen, hope everything is going okay! Blog when you get a chance.

Becky

OK Jen I'm workin on it!!
Glad to hear that you made it safe to LA - sounds like quite the adventure that you guys had! It's too bad that you guys aren't paris hilton and/or nicole ritchie cause those adventures might've been televised..

We miss you here. I can't seem to walk past Henderson - its too soon.

anywho, I just returned from cincinnati which was lovely - NOT! (ja, right!). but the weather was good so all of my flights were on time which was a rarity.

tonight starts the Berko festivities which last from tonight all the way through sunday - ayyy!!!

ps- got the proofs back from the wedding - we are looking hot!!!

Jen

"I'll be here awhile. Ain't going nowhere."
-311

I've been listening to them a lot on this trip. It's nice to drive to.

Well, after 4 days of traveling, Matt and I are now staying the day at my parents house in Las Vegas. It's been a crazy trip thus far. In Iowa, we hit a bunch of storms (that I guess hit Chicago sometime after that) that made us stop a bunch of times to fis the matresses strapped to the top of our trailer. At one point, the top matress was almost at a 90 degree angle to the trailer.
We then stopped at a Target parking lot for about two hours as we retied the whole thing back down. There must not be a whole hell of a lot of things to do in Omaha, because a good majority of people that drove past us had to roll down their window and yell something at us. Most things weren't even insulting, just totally obvious facts: "Have fun tying down your matress!" or "you have a lot of work ahead of you with that!" Then they would drive away laughing. Yee haw!

Sometime later on the second day of our trip, I was following behing Matt who was driving the Jeep/trailer combo and noticed something wrong with the tire. The something wrong was the flat that we got, about 60 miles west of Kearney, Nebraska. It was late and we didn't have a spare, so we unhitched the jeep, drove to the nearest town and spent the night. The next day we found the nicest people in Cozad to help us change the flat. Apparently the guy who changed our tire used to be a sniper! cool!

Colorado was fine, a little drizzly. Utah sucked. It rained and hailed almost al day. We had to pull over a bunch of times because we couldn't see the road. If you know anything about I-70, then you know that there are very few, if any towns in Utah until you reach I-15. I was scared that we would get stuck in the mountains and would be a feast for coyotes by midnight.

Josie was a handful on her own. My cat meows a lot. Really. She was a nonstop talker the first day. At least (at first) she would just hop right into her carrier with no problems. She would sleep most of the time, but by day four, she was sick of her carrier and basically tore the inside of her carrier up. Finally, we just let her out in the car with her little leach tied to the roll bar, and then she was fine.

That's pretty much it. I'm tired even though I got a ton of sleep last night. Tomorrow morning we leave for LA. I'll write again when I can which may not be for a few weeks. Becky - I expect you to take over!