I got my book club shirts last night, and they turned out great!

Dan Schmahl, the guy who made them, has a blog about his screen printing endeavors and posted an entry about making my shirts, so if you're interested you should check it out.

Here is a recap of my weekend in a cabin in Tennessee with Alren, Dan, Sarah, Caitlyn, and Amie...


Day 1:
We got our rental van around 8am, and got on the road by around 9. The ride there seemed surprisingly quick and went without a problem (thanks, largely in part to Dan's really nice GPS thing). We stopped only once at a Krystal Burger, and otherwise sustained ourselves on muffins and whatnot provided by the girls (who brought many baked goods, including home made apple-walnut bread, and banana bread... mmmm).

 We made it to the cabin around 6, and after we unpacked, Amie cooked some hot dogs and chili on the grill outside. We ate and, immediately afterward, started drinking. There was a game room of sorts on the bottom level so we all went down there and played pool and arcade games for a few hours until someone suggested getting in the hot tub. So... that's what we did.

Once in the hot tub, Arlen suggested that Dan and I kiss, and said once we did, all the girls would kiss each other. We, naively, took her up on her offer.

Now, allow me to digress slightly here. It seems that Arlen, being something of a Devil Woman, had every intention of laughing at us after we kissed, and not going through with the agreement.

But, we lucked out...

Sarah, in respecting the sanctity of our social contract (and also, in being incredibly drunk and not realizing Arlen's plan), proceeded to attack (almost literally) the other girls with a lustful attachment of her mouth. This then served as the catalyst which got the rest of the girls to follow suit in kissing one another. It was great for all, except Amie who busted her lip in the process of kissing Sarah. 

After the tub, Sarah and I went back up to our awesome top floor bedroom, at which point she went insane and hallucinated a lot of stuff, the details of which I'd rather not get into, but that were incredibly funny. And weird.

Day 2:
I woke up, embarrassed Sarah as much as possible for her actions (hallucinations) the previous night, drank some coffee, and read for a while on our third floor balcony. Afterward, Sarah, Dan, Arlen, and I went for a "hike" where we walked a few yards past the end of our driveway and then turned back with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment.

The next five hours we all spent transcending space and time. All of us, that is, except Amie, who got really bored (and I suspect jealous) existing in her measly three-dimensions.

When we came back to earth we were ready for food. Lucky for us, Sarah cooked home made pulled BBQ chicken!

It was around this time that I realized we had drank all the beer. This left only liquor.Which... is alright, I guess. Something about me just wanted beer, specifically beer, so badly. It was odd. I was sad. I settled with apple cider and whiskey, and then an odd contraption I made with juice from a can of fruit, red fruit punch, and some squeezed lemons (we were running low on mixers).

Dan, at this point, had the great idea to play hide and seek. So, we played hide and seek. At night. With all the house lights off. It was intense and lot of fun.

And, other than some more pool and whatnot, that was the bulk of our night.

Day 3:
Our last day was spent eating some croissants and cleaning. We had to be out by 11am, so we got up early, and finished cleaning/packing just in time.

We decided to stop by Atlanta on the way home, and ate at my favorite burrito place of all time, whose name I've never bothered to remember. It, of course, was delicious. We shopped a bit, then got back on the road, putting us back in Tallahassee around 7pm.

After returning the car to the rental place, Dan and I went home and drank some Olde English while watching The Office. We did this until neither of us could stay awake any longer.

All in all I enjoyed the fuck out of the weekend.

The other day I was drinking Olde English and cruisin' around Ebay.

As individual actions, those two things have proven mostly harmless. When done in conjunction, however, their sum apparently manifests itself as this:



Yep. I woke up this morning to an E-mail which told me I'm now the uh... proud? No. Ashamed? Umm.... I am now the ambivalent owner of a 20 volume "Harvard Classic Books" set from the 1930s. Goody?!

Also, I made this cool design for my book club today:

"For here or to go?" is not a question you expect to have thrown at you when ordering a drink at a bar.

That is, unless you're in New Orleans.

This last Friday through Sunday was spent exploring, via horribly paved roads, said city with Daniel and attempting to make all those who couldn't come as jealous as possible (i.e. Sarah, mostly... and Dan a little too).

I'm not super awake right now, so rather than a play-by-play I'll keep this all brief.

I stayed at Mike and Drew's place, who not only graciously provided us with a bed/couch to sleep on, but also with liquids to help us get to sleep... liquor.

So the first night was spent at the house drinking.

The second day was spent exploring the city, eating fried pickles/chicken, checking out a book fair, and stopping at a few bars in between.

When night came we went out to Bourbon St... which is a street that thinks "a normal weekend evening" is synonymous with "Mardi Gras". The crowds were insane, beads were thrown, breasts exposed, etc... We just stumbled from bar to bar mostly. I made everyone take a detour so I could pose with a statue of Ignatius Reilly, and then Daniel had us make another at a strip club (where he spent well over $100 and a stripper danced to a Crystal Castles song [which, alone, made the detour worth while]).

The next morning we were supposed to get up and go to a brunch thing that's in an old bank and sounded really cool, but Daniel's a bitch and refused wake up until he'd slept for 12 hours... so we missed it. Instead, we went back to the French Quarter, ate some po' boy sandwiches, bought some bad gifts, and got on the road by 3ish.

And that was the trip in a nut shell!

As I'm sitting here in my living room, with the front door open, the cool outside air filling my house, and my near naked body exposing itself to my poor neighbors across the street, I've decided that today is a very nice day. In fact the entire week has been, and seems like it will continue to be, a very nice week.

The cherry on top of it all is that Daniel has invited me to New Orleans this weekend, and offered to pay for my gas/alcohol! Now I can finally see the statue of Ignatius Reilly that exists somewhere in the city!


And then next week I have Wednesday off for Veteran's Day, and am skipping Friday for... wait for it... The Mansion Cabin!

Not to jinx it, but that sounds like a recipe for another nice week to me.

Apparently there's some new scholarship at the Veteran's Affairs office called the something 9/11 something GI Bill for people who something something blah blah blah 9/11 Amercuh.

What this means for me is that I'm broke.

See, thing is, my scholarship is through the VA office too. I'm supposed to get somewhere around $1000 a month because my dad was in 'Nam. But, when I turned in my paperwork at the beginning of the semester, the lady at the desk was like "We're extremely backed up right now because of this new GI scholarship we're offering, so it may take a while to get your first check. But don't worry! Whenever the first check does come in, it'll back-pay for the months that you didn't get."

Well, I'm 2/3 the way through the semester and I've yet to receive any checks. This puts me in an odd place. As it stands I, in theory, have thousands of dollars to my name. It's just not... here yet. And in not-theory, I have uh... let's see, carry the one, bring down the zero... umm... $60. And that's not including the two months cable and utilities I owe. Woo!

Last week I realized that my coffee drinking had gotten a bit out of control (at least for my standards). I used to drink maybe 5 cups a week, max. As of last week I was up to about 10. This isn't a shocking amount by any means, but I hate feeling like I need things to function.

Luckily!(?) I ran out of coffee a couple days ago and decided, as an experiment, to abstain from it. How hard could breaking a caffeine addiction be, right?

It was a couple hours past my normal coffee ingestion when the Headache started. Then a couple hours after that I was so unbearably tired that I HAD to take a nap.... that lasted for 4 hours. When I woke up I felt a bit different... I was grumpy, and slightly depressed. Seriously caffeine?! Seriously??

Those exact same symptoms continued the following day (including the 4 hour nap).

I woke up today, my third day being caffeine free, and was at first steadfast in my commitment. Then, by the end of my first class, I, tired, grumpy, and sad, found myself weighing the pros and cons of my addiction (pro: happiness, con: breaking some abstract principle I've, for unknown reasons, created for myself. Etc...).

So now, after the (not so) intense internal debate, I've decided to be content with my addiction, and will now pronounce myself, officially and proudly, a caffeine addict.

Here's to being alert, productive, and happy!