They don't even color their sweet & sour shrimp that fake red

Fortunes from our new favorite Chinese take-out place:

You like participating in competitive sports.

Fortune is on your side
play it for all it's worth.

Our new neighborhood

While unloading yet another box from the car, R spotted a black cat and a white cat strolling down the street together. They were surely out on an adventure.

Goo

We made a horrible discovery last night. A bunch of the shelves in the kitchen in our new place are covered in sticky goo. We got some of it off when we went over this evening, but ruined a sponge in the process (the stuff won't come off!). It really makes me wonder what the previous tenants were doing with the place. Well, that and the odd fridge smell and the empty pull-tab Arabic Pepsi abandoned on its side in one of the cabinets.

Stats for idiots

We all know that one of the "new" goals of the education system was to wind up with 80% of kids at or above grade level. What I hadn't realized until my class this evening was that the kids are rated based on their placement within the bell curve of a normalized test. Only 50% can ever be at or above grade level, no matter how well the students know the subject matter. We're chasing our own tails here! The people setting policy are idiots.

Great moments in biking history

Uh oh...


This totally made the trip worthwhile, and I can't believe we got a picture of it. What luck!

*addendum 10:21 pm* This isn't R, but one of our biking posse.

It's confession time!

Following Alynda's lead, it's time to share secrets and trivia about myself.

- I have a special ability to embarrass R. I often wind up telling these totally personal and inappropriate anecdotes about him, much to his humiliation. Over time, I've become able to tell what he will find embarrassing. Unfortunately, this knowledge only seems to kick in after I've spoken. Sorry!

- I'm a nervous talker. If I'm comfortable, I'll usually be quiet (also if I'm totally terrified), but if I'm put in a small group situation with new people I'll totally spill my guts (see previous revelation for greater detail). This is usually about the time I'll tell people that I've got a cousin (okay, second cousin) in Folsom Prison for murdering his mom. Somehow, that always comes up.

-I can eat cake batter and cookie dough (raw eggs and all) until it comes out my ears, but if I'm having eggs for breakfast they have to be solid (somehow over-easy eggs are excepted from this rule). I've been known to microwave scrambled eggs because they were too moist.

-I eat Peeps by the three-pack. I hope to some day impress/disgust my kids with this ability.

- I get really horrible breath if I eat certain foods (or sometimes for no apparent reason) which won't go away, no matter what I do, until I've had a night's sleep. Part of the problem is that R is just very sensitive to smells. Here is a list of foods I can't eat frequently, lest I be banned to the far side of the couch/bed:

*Hard-boiled eggs (even deviled eggs)
*Vinegar
*Beets
*Kimchi
*Bell peppers (not that they have a strong smell, but he can smell it when I eat them)
*Rubio's
*Alcohol (if R isn't having any. Even just having a beer with dinner, I'll smell strongly of alcohol for hours afterwards)

Backyard delicacies

One of the things I'm most excited about with regard to the new place are the fruit trees in the back yard. Home-grown produce has always had a special spot in my heart (and stomach), probably because it always tastes so much better than what you can get in supermarkets. My landlord was kind enough to draw a map of the trees in the yard (some of which are quite unusual) so that I might be able to remember the types of fruit we might be getting. Given that they really didn't give me any information about caring for the trees, I've been doing a little bit of research.

Mango - Apparently this tree has never actually put forth fruit, but given that the trees in the backyard were only watered four times last year, this isn't too surprising. Mango trees need to be watered regularly in order to bloom and produce fruit. I'm hoping that water is the only factor limiting fruit production in our case, because mango is probably my favorite fruit.

Cherimoya - Apparently the landlords didn't really do much research when they picked their trees, instead planting those that reminded them of their origins, because this tree has to be pollinated by hand outside of its natural range. Yeah, that's so not happening.

Philippine Orange (aka Dalandan) - Apparently this fruit has a green rind and orange center when ripe, which seems very neat.

Philippine Lemon (aka Calamondin) - These seem to be used in the place of limes, which is good, as I never have limes when I need them.

Guava - I've never had one of these outside of a smoothie, so I'll be looking forward to trying this.

Persimmon - My grandparents grow these (along with oodles of raspberries, blackberries, kiwis...), and though I've never been very interested in the fruit by itself, they do make the best cookies.

We've also got grapefruit (hope the guys like it, since I can't eat it) as well as the standard apple and orange trees. Man, I can't wait for it to be summer!

The latest in queries

More words people used to find their way here.

people suck - Yup. I'm afraid it's true.

best part of teaching - My mom (also a teacher) has a magnet that says that June, July, and August are the best part about teaching. This magnet was obviously not made by a teacher, though, since half of June and August are taken up by school (doesn't get out June 1 in my area) and in-service. July, though mostly free, is filled with planning and continuing education classes. This is the best thing about teaching.

having a crush on a teacher - Unless you're a college student, just let it go man.

having a crush on your 6th grade teacher - Let it go!

1. what is missing from my life? - I believe we've decided that the answer is nudity.

secret clinical antiperspirant -free -ebay -coupon - My armpits are famous. Actually, I've been trying this stuff out and it seems to work pretty well. My sister recently told me about a new antiperspirant she's been using (the name escapes me) which is just excellent (this from a gal who picks out clothing based on how well it hides armpit marks). It only needs to be applied every other night, instead of every night, so I might check it out next.

slutty big booms teacher - Don't make me get out my ruler...


*edited 5:54 pm for clarity*

Always in the middle of the night

2:45 am

[CHIRP]

Hunh?

[CHIRP]

"What was that?"

[CHIRP]

"Oh, man. It's the smoke detector, isn't it?"
"Think so."

[CHIRP]

"Ugh, we should go take the battery out."

[CHIRP]

We proceed to go out to the hallway, open up the smoke detector, and remove the battery. The body of the smoke detector hangs from the ceiling by a couple of wires.

[CHIRP]

"Nooooo!"

[chirp]

"Maybe it'll stop soon."

[CHIRP]

"Or not."

[CHIRP]

We then have to decide whether or not unplugging the smoke detector would set of any alarms (this place was once an apartment complex, after all. Maybe they have some sort of alarm system wired to all the smoke detectors in the place).

[CHIRP]

R looks up the manual, which is no help at all. His continued searchings reveal that there is a risk of electrical shock when unplugging the smoke detector.

[CHIRP]

We unplug the stupid smoke detector.

[CHIRP]

It's alive! I bury it in a stack of towels.

Ahh... blessed silence.


3:45 am

We're finally on the verge of getting back to sleep.

[CHIRP]

"You've got to be kidding me."

[CHIRP]

"Is there another smoke detector out there?" "I guess so."

[CHIRP]

"There's one in the computer room!" "There is also another in our bedroom." (Mind you, these detectors are all within 3 feet of each other.) "Which one is it?"

[CHIRP]

"The one in our bedroom."

[CHIRP]

We then proceed to remove the smoke detector in our bedroom, taking out the battery and hiding the carcass in a stack of towels. Just for good measure, we decide to remove the still-functional office smoke detector. Knowing our luck, it was bound to start chirping at 4:45 am.

Funny moments from dinner

R's dad: [serving up the paella] Oh, you didn't get any sausage.
Teacher A: Well, you could just slip me a... uh... yeah.
[everyone chuckles]
R's mom: What's so funny?
Everyone: Never mind!

We're moving!

Not the blog, but rather our physical location. We're moving from a condo to a house not so far away. We are also acquiring a roommate, which will be a new experience for me as, aside from the one year in the dorms, I've only ever lived with R.

Things I'm going to miss:

1. A convenient exercise room. I guess I'm just going to have to suck it up and buy a used treadmill on Craigslist.

2. The Cat Bathroom. We currently have two bathrooms - one for us, one for the cat box (oh, and guests use it, too). Our new place has two bathrooms - one for us, one for our roommate. I'm not quite sure where the cat box will wind up, but the issue has been weighing on my mind lately.

3. Hanging around the house naked/in my underwear. We're going to be gaining a lot of nice things in this new place (having another person paying rent definitely increases the amount of space you can afford), but unfortunately it also means a decrease in privacy. Oh well, I guess I will just have to get some comfy lounging-around-the-house type clothes.

4. Dogs. Living in a condo complex, there are a lot of people with dogs (since, owning their own place, no one can tell them they can't have them). There is even a chihuahua that walks around on its front paws! Unfortunately, all the dog owners are very polite and will stand off to the side of the path when people walk by, meaning I hardly ever get to pet any dogs.

Things I definitely won't miss:

1. Other people using the exercise equipment.

2. Schlepping our bikes up and down the stairs every time we want to ride them. We're going to have a garage now. What joy!

3. The unbearable heat and humidity in the summer. Three cheers for central air!

4. The gardener. He's a nice guy, but most of the time I really don't want to talk to anyone. I've taken to parking far away and checking the mail if I see him by his car (which is near where I would normally pass walking back to my house).

Things that are awesome about the new place:

1. A backyard! We've got a patio and two (2) gazebos. This place is going to be BBQ central this summer.

2. Fruit trees. Apple... Guava... Philippine Lemon? I think I have some research to do.

3. Having enough space to have both a dining room table and a crafting table. Our dining room table is currently covered in a partially assembled photo album (me) and paper waiting to be converted into a sweet-ass model (R), among other things. Plus our new dining room table (kindly left by our landlords) looks to be in a line of sight with the place we plan on putting our TV, so we might actually eat there. Heavens!

Top five

On the way in to work this morning, the DJs on the morning show were doing top five lists of inventions that have happened in their lifetimes that improve their lives. We only caught the last one, but we did hear a caller comment on the fact that none of them picked the credit card for their lists. Apparently, the whole crew there is money stupid and can't really handle credit cards. One guy uses an American Express card so that he is forced to pay it off every month, and the other guy, his wife gives him cash if he needs money! Talk about lacking common sense (and yes, I do include basic money sense in that category). In any case, here is my top five list of inventions that have make my life better.

1. The credit card. I hardly ever carry cash around, and now that almost everyone takes credit cards I don't have to. The smallest amount I've ever charged: 31 cents for postage.

2. Wikipedia. This makes up for my deficient historical education (as well as being the first place I go to if I want to know more about anything). It's been really helpful lately, as we've been watching the British "Whose Line is it Anyway?," and they keep dropping all of these British cultural references that we then have to look up.

3. Silica gel cat litter. Without it, I don't think I'd be able to keep cats, as the dust from every other sort of litter I tried just made my nose go crazy. Of course, I have yet to try a mechanical litter box, so maybe some day that might take this spot on the list.

4. Laser eye surgery. This might be cheating, as I haven't actually had it yet, but my mom and all my uncles have been thrilled with theirs. I will be getting it as soon as I can, but they want you to be 25 so that your eyes are done changing (mine did in fact change last year and the year before, after having been stable for several years). I can't wait to wake up in the morning with clear vision.

5. Digital music. As nifty as records are, I'd hardly ever listen to music if I had to carry around individual albums. The portable mp3 player is where it's at.

There are so many other things in my life that also make life better and easier (the rice cooker, the microwave, cell phones, the Internet, the printing press), but I can't include them, because they were invented before I was born.

Snakes!

I watched "Snakes on a Plane" this Saturday, for the first time ever. It was awesome! So very over the top and ridiculous. Some of the inaccuracies were funny to point out ("Hey! That snake has red and black touching. It's not even poisonous!).

Sunday, after Easter dinner with my family, I got to go see B's snake for the first time. His name is Tyrone, and he's a red-tailed boa constrictor. I got to hold him for a while (he had a very strong grip on my arm for such a little snake) and even got to hang out on the couch with him draped around my neck. As we sat there watching TV, waiting for the arrival of the feisty mouse that Tyrone would eventually strangle and swallow whole, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye and getting flashes of "Snakes on a Plane." B telling me that she hopes he won't bite her, as she didn't realize that she wasn't supposed to hold him during his first week home (but instead held him all the time) as they sometimes have issues adjusting didn't help any. I finally relaxed once I realized he just wanted to hang out and slither around a bit. He's a cool snake.

My goodness, a post!

The kids have been on spring break this week, so as enjoyable as it has been for me (Thursday and Friday off! Woo!), it definitely decreases the number of interesting incidents I have to share with the blogonet. The highlights of yesterday: strawberry pancakes and getting plastic drawers to go under the bathroom sink, so that every time the cats go under there chaos will no longer ensue.

I do have one ray of excitement in my life: I got a bike! I actually got it three weeks ago and we've been going mountain biking every weekend since then (I spent the whole week after my first ride searching for padded shorts. My ass, it was killing me!). San Diego is riddled with little canyons (really screwed us over during the wildfire), which means that there are oodles of trails. This is what we did last weekend:



The weekend before we went to a canyon that, even though it was in between houses, made it seem like you were all of the sudden in the middle of nowhere. It was incredible.

Two incongruent systems

Let's talk about sharing, shall we? Now, when you're married to someone (or otherwise attached), you have to share things: living quarters, toothpaste, and, in particular, food. Obviously, you can have separate things, but there is a point at which is becomes silly not to share. My step-mom's second husband had separate food with his name on it, which no one else was allowed to touch. Now, ice cream is something that I can understand (R and I get our own pints of Ben & Jerry's, as there really is no other way), but there is a point at which one has to draw the line.

Once two people are sharing their food, however, the way in which they eat their food suddenly becomes an issue. Now, I'm the sort of person who eats what she likes best first. R, on the other hand, is the sort of person who saves his favorite things for last. This is a guy who, as a child, loved Cadbury creme eggs so much that when he got them in his Easter basket would save them all year, only to eat them the next Easter once he had received his new creme eggs. You can see the problem here. He'll be eating a sandwich, consuming all the edges in order to save a perfect middle bite full of goodies, at which point in time I will ask for a bite of his sandwich and (unintentionally) bite off the good bit that he's been saving. I try not to do that any more, but really, if I ask for a bite and there is this sandwich peninsula hanging out there, you know that is what I'm going to bite off.

The main issue now is when we get one of those big variety packs of mini candy bars from Costco. I don't dig though the bag for my favorites anymore, but I still am the one getting the better candies out of the collection. Even though we try to just work our way down the bag, I will pick the ones on top that I like the best, while R picks the ones he likes the least. Unfortunately, we tend to like the same candies, so we wind up slowly working our way through the bag, me eating the ones I like the most and him eating the ones he likes the least. It's pretty hilarious.

Since we're already on the subject

Apparently they've found a way to convert A and B blood into O blood.

And just because I'm anal retentive...

The probability of an AOxOO couple producing three AO children is 1 in 8 (.5 times .5 times .5), the same as the probability of them producing three OO children. The odds of them having at least one OO child and at least one AO child are therefore 6 in 8.

But biology is MY specialty

Ugh! R's dad got to show me up last night at dinner. He was saying that ABO incompatibility was an issue between mother and child, and when I disagreed he just steamrolled me with problems that came up in his experiences with having kids. It turns out he was talking about ABO hemolytic disease of the newborn, rather than ABO incompatibility. I had just never heard of this issue and it had been a while since I studied blood types, so I couldn't correct him. Nevertheless, I have a degree in biology! I should have known about this! Of course, I haven't actually had a sex ed. class since 6th grade, nor did any of my college classes deal with human reproduction, so I suppose the gap in my knowledge isn't unforgivable. This also isn't something that would come up in the family lore, as we are all type O and therefore have never experienced this problem. R's dad only learned about it after he had kids. I swear, it seems lot people don't advertise about reproduction. Don't want to scare off prospective parents, I suppose.

Of course, I'm never going to be able to say my response to him, as bringing it up later with the express purpose of demonstrating his factual errors would make me seem petty and insecure (and perhaps I am, in some areas). Nevertheless, I need to say this somewhere because it is eating me alive, so here is my rebuke:

"Tripping my sorry ass up by using the wrong name for a physiological problems doesn't make me wrong. I may not have known about ABO hemolytic disease of the newborn, but I was correct when I denied that ABO incompatibility was the issue. The placenta is there to keep ABO incompatibility from being an issue. In any case, R and I are not the same as you and your wife, if we look at it purely based on genetics, even though phenotypically we are the same. Given that all your children wound up with A-type blood, I'm going to guess that you are of the AA genotype (Yes, I know that getting all of one type or all of another is equally probable if you were AO, seeing as each child would individually has a 50-50 chance of being type A or O. Nevertheless, on average half of your children would be type O). In any case, being a product of you and your O-type wife, R is definitely AO genotype. R and my children therefore only have a 50-50 shot of having A-type blood, nor is that a guarantee of ABO HDN, so don't tell me that all my children after my first will have to go under the light. It could happen with my first child or (more likely) not even happen at all."

So there.

Phoning it in

I'm working up to a post with substance, but until then you'll have to subsist on funny pictures and some more odd keywords that have been used to get to my site. I've been having my own private Slayers marathon, so until I can unglue myself from the TV stuff just really isn't happening.


Can you believe this? [snicker] Apparently they have these all over the Midwest. This picture happens to be taken in my favorite little town, Missoula, Montana, which is also home to several cunningly named chain-store knock-offs: Kreate-a-Kritter and Junga Juice. Apparently they're so far off the map that no one ever sues for patent infringement.


I spotted this box while visiting a friend's garage. What stuck me as hilarious was not just the frugality of it (I'm a bit of a pack rat myself), but also how impeccably it was labeled. It takes a special kind of mind to do this sort of thing.


This picture is only funny because Obi just so extraordinarily fat. He's going to outweigh my nephew for a few months yet.

Now on to the recent searches!

tell i have a crush teacher - You have a crush on your teacher? Perhaps you should wait to tell him or her until your grammar has improved.

the evil side of the teacher - Mwahaha! You've found me out. I really hate you and that's why you're failing.

are you moist - Okay... I know what I was talking about, but I don't think that's what you were looking for.

power ballad wedding - There is someone else out there who is totally awesome!