Do you know what I learned this month? That if someone begins a sentence with "I think I agree with Justice Thomas" I'll probably disagree with 99.99% of everything they will ever say. Especially if they go on to say that prosecuting wife-beaters could be bad, because it might cause women to let themselves be abused. I can't even find the strength in my four fingers (you know, they four that I type with) to go over what I thought when I heard someone say that out loud.
Here's another thing I learned: baseball sized hail will shatter a car windshield in about one minute. I learned this through someone else, but these are the kind of lessons that you don't forget. Oh, and a tornado won't hesitate to steal your porch chairs right from your patio and desposit them who-knows-where. That one I can personally attest to.
I've also learned a lot about the ethical issues in collaborative family law. What? Oh . . . you don't give a rat's ass? Nobody wants to hear about law school? Thank goodness I have Neville. He likes conversation and doesn't mind if I complain about law school. Although he never has very good advice, since all of our talks go something like this:
Me: I still have eight more pages to write! I'll never get this finished!
Neville: Meeeeeooooow.
Me: Is it possible to fail out of law school?
Neville: *blinks*
Me: I need a cookie.
Okay, so maybe that conversation was a bit of a lie. Neville only knows 2 words: "mao" and "yao". He's very into Chinese history and culture. Sometimes we ask him "Neville, who's your favorite player on the Rockets?" and he'll say, "Yaaooo." Othertimes he gets confused and answers "Maaaoooo" but we quickly correct him and explain that he's thinking of the deceased leader of the Communist Party of China.
And although it's not yet Friday, I had to share the following Chuck Norris fact, because I thought it was fantastic (it's way better if you read it out loud):
"Dinosaurs went extinct because of the Chuck Norrisaurus"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Guilds Kick Ass
In the past week, Matt has:
1. killed a wild boar with his fists,
2. gotten sucked into a painting,
3. been bitten by a vampire,
4. been struck by lightning,
AND
5. chased down a dinosaur.
Did I mention this all took place in Oblivion? And by "Oblivion" I mean "the reason that I'm going to fail out of law school". Seriously, I think the most accurate comment I've read about this game so far is that it lacks one thing: an attachment that links directly to your brain so that you can keep playing while showering and sleeping. I call Matt at work to say things like "Have we looked for Nirnroot in Bravil?" and "How do you feel about goblin-made armor?" We're totally obsessed.
Let me tell an anecdote to illustrate the level of obsession that we're talking about here. I was running errands today and was sitting at a stoplight in a really pretty area of Austin that's all hilly and green. I looked out of my car window and noticed that the grass was full of wildflowers, some weird weeds, and a bunch of small shrubs. And do you know what I thought? I thought "I wonder what magical properties those plants have."
1. killed a wild boar with his fists,
2. gotten sucked into a painting,
3. been bitten by a vampire,
4. been struck by lightning,
AND
5. chased down a dinosaur.
Did I mention this all took place in Oblivion? And by "Oblivion" I mean "the reason that I'm going to fail out of law school". Seriously, I think the most accurate comment I've read about this game so far is that it lacks one thing: an attachment that links directly to your brain so that you can keep playing while showering and sleeping. I call Matt at work to say things like "Have we looked for Nirnroot in Bravil?" and "How do you feel about goblin-made armor?" We're totally obsessed.
Let me tell an anecdote to illustrate the level of obsession that we're talking about here. I was running errands today and was sitting at a stoplight in a really pretty area of Austin that's all hilly and green. I looked out of my car window and noticed that the grass was full of wildflowers, some weird weeds, and a bunch of small shrubs. And do you know what I thought? I thought "I wonder what magical properties those plants have."
Monday, April 10, 2006
A Sordid Tale
Sometimes life has a strange serendipity; unlikely choices and the tides of fate collide, with extraordinary and wonderful results. On the other hand, sometimes life gives you the opposite of that, and what should have been nothing turns into something awful. One particular example of the latter phenomenon occured on the eve of my friend Dean's wedding. As the title of this post notes, it's a sordid tale indeed - in fact, the story I'm about to recount is so scandalous that it's ruined any hopes my best friend Mahan had of venturing into politics.
Okay, so maybe she never had any intentions of going into politics. But if she had, they would now be dashed.
A few days before Dean & Crystal's wedding, which would take place in Dallas, Mahan drove up to Austin from Houston so that she, Matt and I could take one car to Dallas for the wedding. At some point we stopped at Erin's - I think because she was cat-sitting Neville - but maybe we were just hanging out. Mahan and I couldn't help but notice that Erin had a Playboy on her coffee table. (See? I told you this was a sordid tale.) Erin, who at the time was working at Starbuck's, explained that she and a friend had bought Playboy because the theme of the issue was "the Girls of Starbuck's" and supposedly featured real Starbuck's employees, and they wanted to see whether the pictures were actually Starbuck's employees. Erin then told us that the girls didn't look like baristas at all. Here's where the bad choices begin: somehow it was decided that Mahan and I should take the Playboy with us so that we could look at the pictures.
Mahan was the driver on the trip to Dallas, and Matt spent most of the trip sleeping. Have I mentioned that the drive to Dallas is the Worst Drive Ever? Well, it is. Other than the possibility of picking up a Dr.Pepper made with real sugar, the trip has almost no redeeming qualities. About halfway through the trip Mahan and I started to get bored. We started daring each other to do things, which was boring until we remembered the Playboy. Then we spent about half an hour playing a game where Mahan would match the speed of an unsuspecting car next to us, and I would hold up a picture of a naked lady to the passengers in that car.
(I wanted to point out that this happened BEFORE I started law school, because if someone suggested this now, I would promptly explain about negligence law and how creating a distraction on the road is a bad idea. But back when this story took place I was young, innocent, and ignorant about tort law.)
When we got tired of holding up dirty pictures for other cars and trying to shock them, we came up with a better plan - let's take crazy pictures!! In yet another twist of fate, neither Mahan nor the Giani-Sherrill's had brought along a digital camera, but for some reason we had a disposable camera. (I really have no idea why.) We had to stop for gas anyway, and while Matt went inside to get snacks I took some Very Interesting pictures of Mahan, some of which involved the Playboy. Then we decided to stop wasting film, and the rest of the car trip proceeded normally.
Dean & Crystal's wedding was wonderful, and, since we'd left plenty of film on the disposable camera, Matt took a lot of wedding-related shots. After we'd all seen Dean and Crystal off with the ceremonial flinging of rose petals, a group of people decided to go the Cheesecake Factory. Matt had more items than usual so I checked to make sure he had everything. Keys? Check. Wallet? Check. Rachel's lip gloss? Check. Then I asked about the camera. Matt got a little flustered, and then realized he'd left it in the room where the wedding took place.
This might not have been a huge problem, were it not for the fact that each table at the wedding had a disposable camera on it. You know, the kind that you put on the table so that guests can take pictures of each other? Mahan and I ran back into the main room when we realized Matt had forgotten the camera, and were horrified to see that ALL of the disposable cameras- including, presumably, the Camera in Question (CiQ) - were grouped together in the corner while the roomed was cleaned up. And they were all the same brand. And the same color.
Okay, so maybe I was a little entertained, in addition to being horrified. But Mahan was seriously horrified.
We pored over the cameras until we noticed a slight difference in the packaging of just one camera, as if it had been purchased at a different time. We snatched it up, praying that it was the CiQ.
I got the pictures back about a week after the wedding, and called Mahan to let her know that everything was in the clear and we had the CiQ. I thought that was the end up the issue until a few months later, when some North Austin locations of a certain drugstore chain got in trouble with the law because their teenage employees were making personal copies for themselves when customers brought in photos. The reports implied that these were male employees copying dirty an semi-dirty pics. Guess where I'd had the film from the CiQ developed . . .
On another side note, who takes serious dirty pictures and then has them developed at a store? Get a digital camera, or take Polaroids or something. Invest in a color printer like a normal person.
I never heard what happened with the litigation about the photos and the news sort of stopped caring, but I'm fully convinced that in some evidence file in the Travis County DA's office, there's a picture of Mahan pretending to lick a picture of a humungous boob. That should be the moral of this story: if you pretend to lick a picture of a humungous boob, don't allow the incident to be documented.
Okay, so maybe she never had any intentions of going into politics. But if she had, they would now be dashed.
A few days before Dean & Crystal's wedding, which would take place in Dallas, Mahan drove up to Austin from Houston so that she, Matt and I could take one car to Dallas for the wedding. At some point we stopped at Erin's - I think because she was cat-sitting Neville - but maybe we were just hanging out. Mahan and I couldn't help but notice that Erin had a Playboy on her coffee table. (See? I told you this was a sordid tale.) Erin, who at the time was working at Starbuck's, explained that she and a friend had bought Playboy because the theme of the issue was "the Girls of Starbuck's" and supposedly featured real Starbuck's employees, and they wanted to see whether the pictures were actually Starbuck's employees. Erin then told us that the girls didn't look like baristas at all. Here's where the bad choices begin: somehow it was decided that Mahan and I should take the Playboy with us so that we could look at the pictures.
Mahan was the driver on the trip to Dallas, and Matt spent most of the trip sleeping. Have I mentioned that the drive to Dallas is the Worst Drive Ever? Well, it is. Other than the possibility of picking up a Dr.Pepper made with real sugar, the trip has almost no redeeming qualities. About halfway through the trip Mahan and I started to get bored. We started daring each other to do things, which was boring until we remembered the Playboy. Then we spent about half an hour playing a game where Mahan would match the speed of an unsuspecting car next to us, and I would hold up a picture of a naked lady to the passengers in that car.
(I wanted to point out that this happened BEFORE I started law school, because if someone suggested this now, I would promptly explain about negligence law and how creating a distraction on the road is a bad idea. But back when this story took place I was young, innocent, and ignorant about tort law.)
When we got tired of holding up dirty pictures for other cars and trying to shock them, we came up with a better plan - let's take crazy pictures!! In yet another twist of fate, neither Mahan nor the Giani-Sherrill's had brought along a digital camera, but for some reason we had a disposable camera. (I really have no idea why.) We had to stop for gas anyway, and while Matt went inside to get snacks I took some Very Interesting pictures of Mahan, some of which involved the Playboy. Then we decided to stop wasting film, and the rest of the car trip proceeded normally.
Dean & Crystal's wedding was wonderful, and, since we'd left plenty of film on the disposable camera, Matt took a lot of wedding-related shots. After we'd all seen Dean and Crystal off with the ceremonial flinging of rose petals, a group of people decided to go the Cheesecake Factory. Matt had more items than usual so I checked to make sure he had everything. Keys? Check. Wallet? Check. Rachel's lip gloss? Check. Then I asked about the camera. Matt got a little flustered, and then realized he'd left it in the room where the wedding took place.
This might not have been a huge problem, were it not for the fact that each table at the wedding had a disposable camera on it. You know, the kind that you put on the table so that guests can take pictures of each other? Mahan and I ran back into the main room when we realized Matt had forgotten the camera, and were horrified to see that ALL of the disposable cameras- including, presumably, the Camera in Question (CiQ) - were grouped together in the corner while the roomed was cleaned up. And they were all the same brand. And the same color.
Okay, so maybe I was a little entertained, in addition to being horrified. But Mahan was seriously horrified.
We pored over the cameras until we noticed a slight difference in the packaging of just one camera, as if it had been purchased at a different time. We snatched it up, praying that it was the CiQ.
I got the pictures back about a week after the wedding, and called Mahan to let her know that everything was in the clear and we had the CiQ. I thought that was the end up the issue until a few months later, when some North Austin locations of a certain drugstore chain got in trouble with the law because their teenage employees were making personal copies for themselves when customers brought in photos. The reports implied that these were male employees copying dirty an semi-dirty pics. Guess where I'd had the film from the CiQ developed . . .
On another side note, who takes serious dirty pictures and then has them developed at a store? Get a digital camera, or take Polaroids or something. Invest in a color printer like a normal person.
I never heard what happened with the litigation about the photos and the news sort of stopped caring, but I'm fully convinced that in some evidence file in the Travis County DA's office, there's a picture of Mahan pretending to lick a picture of a humungous boob. That should be the moral of this story: if you pretend to lick a picture of a humungous boob, don't allow the incident to be documented.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Happy Friday!
A Chuck Norris fact to start your weekend:
They were going to release a Chuck Norris edition of Clue, but the answer always turns out to be "Chuck Norris. In The Library. With a Roundhouse Kick."
They were going to release a Chuck Norris edition of Clue, but the answer always turns out to be "Chuck Norris. In The Library. With a Roundhouse Kick."
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
the Post you knew was coming
Saturday night as we finally got into bed Matt asked me if I would set my alarm. Sure, I responded, how abotu for 10:30? I figured that would give him plenty of time. "Um, could you set it for a little earlier", he asked, "like, maybe 9:15?" I groaned, but complied. It was 3:30 in the morning - actually, it was 4:30 because of the time change - and I was going to have to get up in four hours in order to go stand in line outside Best Buy.
Are you beginning to suspect what this is about?
This past Friday evening, Matt had made his usual round of calls to Best Buy, Circuit City and the like, asking if they had any Xbox 360's. And Best Buy had informed him that they would be getting a shipment of a least 30 units in on Sunday morning and that it would be advertised in the Sunday morning paper. So you can understand the glee Matt felt as we went to bed Saturday night. If you can't, pretend you're about to get that fabulous dress/pair of concert tickets you've been jonesing for.
My alarm went off at 9:15 and I hit snooze, thinking that I had a few minutes. Did I mention that Best Buy opens at 11am? Anyway, in the fifteen minutes between snoozes Matt got completely dressed, so that when my alarm went off again at 9:30 he decided to go without me. He called a few minutes later.
"Hey!"
"Hey hon. Are you there? What's going on?"
"Well, there's no line yet. There are about four people waiting in their cars, but no one's in line. Do you want me to come pick you up? Are you ready?"
"Will you buy me a smoothie?"
"Suuure."
"Okay, you can come pick me up."
So I threw on some clothes and waited for Matt to come pick me up. Then we got a smoothie, and then we returned to Best Buy. By then it was probably 10:20, and the nerds of the world had indeed started lining up outside the still-closed store. Some Best Buy employees started going down the line and asking, "You here for the 360?" and then noting whether the person wanted the core system or the platinum system with a harddrive. Each person was given a voucher as the employees moved down the line.
"What are you here for?", they had gotten to the dude in front of us, who wanted a platinum system. Then it was our turn, and Matt explained what he wanted and gleefully accepted his voucher. The employees moved to the guy behind us in line, and had the following conversation:
"Sir, what are you here for?"
"Hmm?"
"What are you waiting in line for?"
"Oh - Turbotax!"
" . . . .Turbotax?"
"Well, yes. Do you not have Turbotax??"
*Trying not to laugh* "No, no , we do, it's just - this line is for people waiting for an Xbox 360. You don't have to wait in line for Turbotax. You can go ahead inside."
Seriously, I know that getting your taxes done on time is important, but who gets to Best Buy a half hour before it opens on a Sunday and thinks they need to wait in line? Who thinks that lining up outside Best Buy is normal?
Promptly at 11am they let the line inside and Matt finally obtained the object of his affection. So far he's been playing it fairly cool, except that every now and then he shouts out something like "I can watch a slideshow of all our pictures!!" or "I can play any music on the computer while playing video games!" He also gets really excited when Alan sends us messages.
Are you beginning to suspect what this is about?
This past Friday evening, Matt had made his usual round of calls to Best Buy, Circuit City and the like, asking if they had any Xbox 360's. And Best Buy had informed him that they would be getting a shipment of a least 30 units in on Sunday morning and that it would be advertised in the Sunday morning paper. So you can understand the glee Matt felt as we went to bed Saturday night. If you can't, pretend you're about to get that fabulous dress/pair of concert tickets you've been jonesing for.
My alarm went off at 9:15 and I hit snooze, thinking that I had a few minutes. Did I mention that Best Buy opens at 11am? Anyway, in the fifteen minutes between snoozes Matt got completely dressed, so that when my alarm went off again at 9:30 he decided to go without me. He called a few minutes later.
"Hey!"
"Hey hon. Are you there? What's going on?"
"Well, there's no line yet. There are about four people waiting in their cars, but no one's in line. Do you want me to come pick you up? Are you ready?"
"Will you buy me a smoothie?"
"Suuure."
"Okay, you can come pick me up."
So I threw on some clothes and waited for Matt to come pick me up. Then we got a smoothie, and then we returned to Best Buy. By then it was probably 10:20, and the nerds of the world had indeed started lining up outside the still-closed store. Some Best Buy employees started going down the line and asking, "You here for the 360?" and then noting whether the person wanted the core system or the platinum system with a harddrive. Each person was given a voucher as the employees moved down the line.
"What are you here for?", they had gotten to the dude in front of us, who wanted a platinum system. Then it was our turn, and Matt explained what he wanted and gleefully accepted his voucher. The employees moved to the guy behind us in line, and had the following conversation:
"Sir, what are you here for?"
"Hmm?"
"What are you waiting in line for?"
"Oh - Turbotax!"
" . . . .Turbotax?"
"Well, yes. Do you not have Turbotax??"
*Trying not to laugh* "No, no , we do, it's just - this line is for people waiting for an Xbox 360. You don't have to wait in line for Turbotax. You can go ahead inside."
Seriously, I know that getting your taxes done on time is important, but who gets to Best Buy a half hour before it opens on a Sunday and thinks they need to wait in line? Who thinks that lining up outside Best Buy is normal?
Promptly at 11am they let the line inside and Matt finally obtained the object of his affection. So far he's been playing it fairly cool, except that every now and then he shouts out something like "I can watch a slideshow of all our pictures!!" or "I can play any music on the computer while playing video games!" He also gets really excited when Alan sends us messages.
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