Kazoo playing superhero elephants with comb-overs?

Caleb told me that I make a lot of lists when I'm talking. I've noticed ever since then that I do make lot of lists. I think that they're really helpful to delineate the different points in an argument. They're also great if you have a bunch of completely unrelated things that you want to talk about, such as:

A. Earlier this week was the anniversary of FDR's first inaugural address where he said "The only thing that we have to fear is fear itself". While the idea makes for a great quote, in the interest of self-preservation, I would add rampaging elephants to the list of things that we should fear.

B. I was talking to some of the other graduate students this week, and somehow we stumbled upon how you say comb-over in Spanish. I found out that in Bolivia they call the person "un prestamista", which basically means a lender, in the sense that one part of the head has to lend the other some of its hair. I thought that was pretty good, but I like the Spanish version even more. In Spain, they call it a "código de barras", meaning a bar-code. I love when a description is so vivid that it conjures an instant image in your mind.

C. If I ever start to go bald, and I need to shift some of the side sod over to cover the playing field on the top of my head, I have a plan. I'm going to grow the hair long on both sides, and then comb them both to the middle. They'll meet in the middle and form a comb-over mohawk. It's astounding to me that nobody has ever tried this before.

D. So everyone knows that Mozart was a musical prodigy, playing and composing at only three years old. But not even he was performing a concert-worthy solo on his instrument at nine months old.

Eat your heart out Wolfgang.

E. I just read on one of the forums on Wordreference.com that in Mexico they call comb-overs Robin Hoods. As in robbing the rich to give to the poor.

F. Marci is at the temple today with the Young Women, so it's just me and Rachmaninoff hanging out. I'm really good at taking care of babies as can be seen in the pictures. Notice that the bib that is supposed to protect the said baby's clothes has on its own accord become a superhero's cape. Holy cute baby batman!

And in this corner...

Weighing in at 17 and a half pounds; reigning champion of the baby bare-knuckle brawler's cuddly monkeyweight division; the dribbling dynamo drubber, the punctilious pugilistic pixie, the bib-wearing basher from the bronx,

Rocky!!!!!!!!

Baby steps

The reason I have never been able to consistently write in a journal for longer than a month is because I inevitably have a lapse in writing, and then the need to "get caught up" looms over me in the back of my head, until my journal gets put away again for another few years. I'm telling you this to let you know that although this looks like a real post, it's really a just a list of a few random things to get me back in the swing of things. A way of getting back into that ol' proverbial saddle you could say.
1. The new classroom that I'm teaching in this semester also has a fireplace in it, except that this one isn't boarded up! It has been quite chilly lately, so I've encouraged my students to bring a log so that we can study Spanish by firelight. So far no one has taken me up on the offer. Maybe we'll roast s'mores on the last day of class.
2. I was just thinking the other day that It'll be sad when Rocky's teeth come in. Without teeth to get in the way, Rocky is able to do this cute grin that's really flat and wide and makes her cheeks appear even chubbier than they are (which are very chubby). The morning after I voiced this thought out loud, Rocky's first nubbin of a tooth emerged. I don' t know if me saying it out loud had anything to do with it, but just in case, I have to say that I'm going to be really sad when Rocky is potty-trained. I said, I'm going to be really sad when Rocky is potty-trained.
3. This video is from one of my studly students from last semester. He wrote this song based off of the things that we learned in the first chapter of 101.

4. This picture is of Rocky and Ginny hanging out during the Christmas break. I just wanted to point out that Rocky, who has a whopping three weeks worth of real world experience more than Ginny, is always trying her best to impart the knowledge and wisdom that she has skimmed from life. For example, it's evident here that Rocky is instructing Ginny in the finer art of flipping someone off.

One down, fourteen more to go

As means of gaining closure to my first semester of grad school and teaching, I thought I would put up a few pictures of the University of Oregon. This is Gerlinger Hall where I taught last semester. Gerlinger has a lot of moss growing on it like anything good and established at the U of O. In fact, some of the best professors here are also covered in moss. My classroom is the room at the top left of the building in the first picture. It's a pretty typical looking classroom, except for the boarded up fireplace.

I'm pretty sure that someone was entombed alive behind the fireplace, and I'm pretty sure that I think that because I had to read the Cask of Amontillado in ninth grade. I was able to use the fireplace to my students advantage though. I told them that multiple studies have shown that students do better on exams when they feel more comfortable. In order to make it a more inviting atmosphere, I hung a Christmas stocking on the fireplace before they started the test.

I don't know what this video is from, but I showed it to my students at the beginning of the semester.

What I'm thankful for

I'm well aware that these Thanksgiving pictures are late, but I'm swimming in my finals papers. As if that's not enough, my students had final projects and two tests this week, so I have to get all those graded and uploaded as well. I know: wah, wah, wah.

The absolute best part of Thanksgiving for me is to be able to play football with my brothers. All of my brothers are great athletes, and it makes me very proud in a big-brother sort of way to watch them knock the socks off of somebody. I obviously didn't have brothers to play with, and I drove all over town (in vain) looking for a football game to join. I ended up playing a pretty hardcore game of Ultimate with a bunch of hippies. Ultimate is also called Frisbee football, and the hipsters do frequently refer to each other as bros, so I guess it was logically the next best thing.

Despite the lack of brotherly bonding time, we still had a great Thanksgiving because we had what any good Thanksgiving needs, namely:



twelve layer jello,


the type of listlessness that only tryptophan can provide,



and really big, tasty, turkey legs.

Ummmmm Boy!!!!!

Just doing my little bit to save the world, three lives at a time

As I was going through the questions to make sure I was safe to donate blood today, the nurse looked at my driver's license, and said "You don't look like the Mormons I've known before". I figured she was probably referring to my face-fro. Like most mammals in northern climates, my fur gets thicker and wider distributed in the colder months. Obviously, she has never seen a picture of Brigham Young or Lorenzo Snow before. I felt it was my duty to free her of any other misconceptions of Utah that she might have. So I told her that in this past election, Utah had the highest percentage of people voting for a Democrat since the 1920s, to which she responded by giving me a high-five and bumping up the waiting list to get my blood taken.

When the phlebotomist was getting me unhooked and ran through the list of Coban bandage choices, I promptly told him to make it purple, because Weber will always hold a special place in my heart. I must have said purple a little too quickly and possibly too enthusiastically, because he gave me a look that said "Ohh, purple, eh? You sure you don't want to read over some of those donation questions a little more carefully?" My first thought was to tell him that I bleed purple. But then I realized that he had physical evidence to the contrary in his hands. I couldn't risk making him think I was lightheaded, because then he would have made me lay down for even longer.

I was a little nervous at first about riding my bike home after donating, which is why I caved in and ate one of the free chocolate chip cookies to replenish my waning blood-sugar levels. Actually, I had two of them. And a Capri Sun apple juice. And a packet of trail mix.

The city of Eugene is prepared though in the event of any fainting/narcoleptic college students on bikes. I think that it is precisely because an emergency of this nature could arise that the city has not picked up any of the fall leaves. Every street in the city is lined by corridors of dead leaves at least four feet high. Before when it rained and the rim brakes on my bike basically became a "just for show" feature, my commute was a little scary. Now I ride with a lot more confidence knowing that the leaves are there if I ever need to launch myself off my bike for any reason.




On a completely separate note, this picture was staged - I needed it for my PowerPoint for my class today- but it's still pretty cute.

Eugene's sparkling glitterati

Hey, how's it going? [insert lame excuses about how busy I've been here]. [insert profuse apologies and unfulfillable promises here]. Wheww!!! I'm glad we got that over with. So, Marci and I have been called to go to the Spanish branch and we went for the first time last Sunday. We had already made a lot of friends in our other ward, so we were a little bummed but also excited to go to our new branch. Plus, our other ward had somebody that mysteriously looked exactly like Cillian Murphy (the scarecrow from Batman Begins) and a guy that was a foot-and-half taller version of Vincini from the Princess Bride. So, I was especially excited to see what near-brushes with fame awaited us in our new branch. Possibly an Antonio Banderas lookalike or a Ricardo Montalban doppelganger. Well, I'm sorry to report that there were no Rickys or Tony Flags impersonators, but the guy that I sat next to in Elder's quorum did sound exactly like Machete from the Spy Kid movies (also known as the bartender from Anchorman if you don't watch those kiddy shows).
As if these almost celebrity sightings weren't enough, I just got an e-mail from the UO president, Dave Frohnmayer. Now most of you probably don't have an entire hemisphere of your brain dedicated to the minutiae of 80s movies, but Dave Frohmayer is the name of the sausage king of Chigago from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's reassuring to know that if the president of the university gig ever seems like it's not going anywhere, Dave can totally go back and reign over the land of stuffed meats. As a footnote, the sausage king of Chicago is really named Abe Frohman, but lets not get nitpicky.