Happy Birthday to ME!
It's been a while since I updated, so I'll try to keep this short.
I was glad that my parents talked me into going to Gatlinburg. Playing with Michelle was fine: I didn't have to change all that much about how I played, and we only had a few horrendous bidding misunderstandings all weekend. We placed in the Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday half-Swiss games, for a total of 2.8 or so red points. Pretty sweet. Plus it was good to see Larry and Mildred--the last time I saw them was when I was looking at colleges and Mom talked me into taking a tour at Emory (Atlanta is way too hot. I don't want to be any farther south than here in the summer.) Gatlinburg is neat--it's like a version of Mackinaw City up north except that along with small shops there are more putt-putt and go kart places than you would ever believe the economy would support in one place. I talked Mom and Dad into going to Hillbilly Golf, which even they thought was neat--the putt-putt is on the side of a mountain, and you ride a little trolley to get to it.
The saga of the wisdom teeth continues. I had an exceptionally hard time with them, which I didn't really see coming after how easy it was to get the first one out a few years ago--I only took the pain pills for that one for a day. The teeth came out Monday, and yes, I cried over the IV, but only until they got it in. I was much more awake afterwards than Josh was, and I was able to help navigate home, which made him more calm (he hates driving to Nashville and back). But by the time we got my prescription and got home, I was already in a LOT of pain. My pain pill and three advil was not enough to completely stop the pain, though they did make it bearable, but the prescription also made me dizzy and sleepy.
The worst part is that they didn't get better! The oral surgeon said I would feel better by late Wednesday or Thursday, but alas, he lied. I had to cancel my trip to Evansville--I was going to go listen to Denis at the senior reading and crash the party afterward. Denis was very understanding, but I was pretty disappointed. On Friday I went back to the surgeon, and he packed my lower sockets with some medicinal stuff that tastes AWFUL, but let them feel a lot better. Seriously, it tastes BAD, and it didn't quit tasting bad ever. Josh complained that they made my breath smell about as bad as they tasted, and I tried brushing my teeth like 50 times a day and rinsing with Listerine--nothing took. One of the packs got sort of tangled up with my steak on Saturday night and I ended up pulling it out, so that side's been hurting again, but fortunately, not so bad that I've needed the prescription. Just the advil has been enough. Today I have to take the other one out, which might put me back to not eating solid foods, as if it hurts as well, it will leave me without a side to chew on. I hope the sockets close soon.
Last night Max and Mary Otto, the couple who own Hills Point Resort in the Upper Peninsula, randomly called to say they were in Nashville and did we want to meet them for dinner? Mom and Dad had just laid down to take a nap and I had to get them back up, and Josh kept falling asleep at the restaurant so I had to kick him under the table. We're such the partiers.
Today my cousin Kurt arrives from Michigan. We were going to put him in Bobby's room, but last week Bobby announced that he had changed his mind and wanted to come home for the summer, so there's been a shuffle. Josh got booted from guest room A into guest room B (the room where I write, just down the hall from me), and Kurt is going into guest room A. There are going to be a lot of people living here this summer!
Last week was Bobby's birthday. I got him Robot Chicken Season One, which seemed to be a hit. That's awesome--sometimes Bobby is hard to shop for, but he always does such a good job on my gifts.
Finally, today is my birthday! I am 23. I got to pick out my present this weekend--an awesome new TV. Some of you may recall that my old TV had an issue where if you turned it off, you couldn't turn it on again right away. Well, that turned into you couldn't turn it on again for several hours, and then you couldn't turn it on again for the next two days, and finally, it just quit coming back on all together. So I wanted a new one, and thinking of the Greensboro apartment next year and how we all have the same little TV, I asked for a big one. Check this out:
It's a 27" screen, hi-def ready, digital picture, slim tube TV. I named him Cid. I was a little surprised to see that about 70% of the TVs at Best Buy were 16:9 theatre-shaped models, even in the smaller sizes, but I guess that's the trend nowadays. I wanted a square picture, since I'm thinking more videogames than movies. There's a lot I like about him, so it's easier to list the three things I'm not crazy about so far:
1. When you turn the TV, it goes through a mini boot-up process that's a little strange. You hit the button, it clicks, and then you hear like three musical tones before you get a picture. The same thing happens in reverse when you turn it off.
2. There's a longer blank period between channels--just a second or so. It doesn't matter much for just changing the channel, but it's annoying for channel surfing.
3. There's a way that--were you this deeply obsessive-compulsive--you can go through each channel and give it a name one letter at a time. That's fine. There's also a way to name the video inputs, which makes more sense to me, but you can only pick from the list of names they provide, which means that Video 1 is DVD instead of MAGUS, and in NC Videos 2-4 are all going to be just Game instead of PS2, GameCube, etc. Bah humbug.
The picture on Cid is a scene from the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which is freaking awesome. That's Reno on the left and Cloud on the right (pretty sexy, huh?). I watched it bootleg with Jay in Atlanta, but Josh hadn't seen it and I wanted to own it, so we went to Walmart to buy it last night for Cid's virgin run. I saw Ian Hughes at the electronics department, which was cool because I hadn't seen him in three or four years. He recognized me first, which is impressive and kind of sad since he was the one with the nametag. He gave me his employee discount, which was sweet, and then while we were talking he said, "Oh, I just saw that guy, um... um... what was his name...?" and I was like, "Someone I know?" all surprised because I didn't think we had any common ground other than our parents, and then he said, "Oh yeah, Jeff!"
EEEEEEP! I don't know how many of you have heard the Jeff story, but we used to be really close friends until the summer after our first year at college when he started picking fights with me and Vernie, lying about everything, and sabotaging my dating a guy I really liked, for starters. We had a huge fight and left on bad terms. I saw him like once after that, where we had another, quieter fight, and then he and Vernie fell out as well, and in the three or four years since then Vernie and I have been talking shit at every opportunity about what all we're gonna say to him when we see him again. Well, I had the chance, because Ian said, "Yeah, he was here like 5 minutes ago, oh wait, there he is," and pointed him out at the end of the aisle. Well, it turns out I was full of it, and what I really wanted from the next time I saw Jeff was not to have it happen, because I grabbed Josh and got out of there fast, ducking behind columns and counters when necessary.
Tonight we are bringing a cake to the bridge club for my birthday, and hopefully Kurt will get here sometime before then. It should be a pretty busy day, so I need to get to work writing now if I'm going to get anything done.
I was glad that my parents talked me into going to Gatlinburg. Playing with Michelle was fine: I didn't have to change all that much about how I played, and we only had a few horrendous bidding misunderstandings all weekend. We placed in the Friday evening, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday half-Swiss games, for a total of 2.8 or so red points. Pretty sweet. Plus it was good to see Larry and Mildred--the last time I saw them was when I was looking at colleges and Mom talked me into taking a tour at Emory (Atlanta is way too hot. I don't want to be any farther south than here in the summer.) Gatlinburg is neat--it's like a version of Mackinaw City up north except that along with small shops there are more putt-putt and go kart places than you would ever believe the economy would support in one place. I talked Mom and Dad into going to Hillbilly Golf, which even they thought was neat--the putt-putt is on the side of a mountain, and you ride a little trolley to get to it.
The saga of the wisdom teeth continues. I had an exceptionally hard time with them, which I didn't really see coming after how easy it was to get the first one out a few years ago--I only took the pain pills for that one for a day. The teeth came out Monday, and yes, I cried over the IV, but only until they got it in. I was much more awake afterwards than Josh was, and I was able to help navigate home, which made him more calm (he hates driving to Nashville and back). But by the time we got my prescription and got home, I was already in a LOT of pain. My pain pill and three advil was not enough to completely stop the pain, though they did make it bearable, but the prescription also made me dizzy and sleepy.
The worst part is that they didn't get better! The oral surgeon said I would feel better by late Wednesday or Thursday, but alas, he lied. I had to cancel my trip to Evansville--I was going to go listen to Denis at the senior reading and crash the party afterward. Denis was very understanding, but I was pretty disappointed. On Friday I went back to the surgeon, and he packed my lower sockets with some medicinal stuff that tastes AWFUL, but let them feel a lot better. Seriously, it tastes BAD, and it didn't quit tasting bad ever. Josh complained that they made my breath smell about as bad as they tasted, and I tried brushing my teeth like 50 times a day and rinsing with Listerine--nothing took. One of the packs got sort of tangled up with my steak on Saturday night and I ended up pulling it out, so that side's been hurting again, but fortunately, not so bad that I've needed the prescription. Just the advil has been enough. Today I have to take the other one out, which might put me back to not eating solid foods, as if it hurts as well, it will leave me without a side to chew on. I hope the sockets close soon.
Last night Max and Mary Otto, the couple who own Hills Point Resort in the Upper Peninsula, randomly called to say they were in Nashville and did we want to meet them for dinner? Mom and Dad had just laid down to take a nap and I had to get them back up, and Josh kept falling asleep at the restaurant so I had to kick him under the table. We're such the partiers.
Today my cousin Kurt arrives from Michigan. We were going to put him in Bobby's room, but last week Bobby announced that he had changed his mind and wanted to come home for the summer, so there's been a shuffle. Josh got booted from guest room A into guest room B (the room where I write, just down the hall from me), and Kurt is going into guest room A. There are going to be a lot of people living here this summer!
Last week was Bobby's birthday. I got him Robot Chicken Season One, which seemed to be a hit. That's awesome--sometimes Bobby is hard to shop for, but he always does such a good job on my gifts.
Finally, today is my birthday! I am 23. I got to pick out my present this weekend--an awesome new TV. Some of you may recall that my old TV had an issue where if you turned it off, you couldn't turn it on again right away. Well, that turned into you couldn't turn it on again for several hours, and then you couldn't turn it on again for the next two days, and finally, it just quit coming back on all together. So I wanted a new one, and thinking of the Greensboro apartment next year and how we all have the same little TV, I asked for a big one. Check this out:
It's a 27" screen, hi-def ready, digital picture, slim tube TV. I named him Cid. I was a little surprised to see that about 70% of the TVs at Best Buy were 16:9 theatre-shaped models, even in the smaller sizes, but I guess that's the trend nowadays. I wanted a square picture, since I'm thinking more videogames than movies. There's a lot I like about him, so it's easier to list the three things I'm not crazy about so far:
1. When you turn the TV, it goes through a mini boot-up process that's a little strange. You hit the button, it clicks, and then you hear like three musical tones before you get a picture. The same thing happens in reverse when you turn it off.
2. There's a longer blank period between channels--just a second or so. It doesn't matter much for just changing the channel, but it's annoying for channel surfing.
3. There's a way that--were you this deeply obsessive-compulsive--you can go through each channel and give it a name one letter at a time. That's fine. There's also a way to name the video inputs, which makes more sense to me, but you can only pick from the list of names they provide, which means that Video 1 is DVD instead of MAGUS, and in NC Videos 2-4 are all going to be just Game instead of PS2, GameCube, etc. Bah humbug.
The picture on Cid is a scene from the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which is freaking awesome. That's Reno on the left and Cloud on the right (pretty sexy, huh?). I watched it bootleg with Jay in Atlanta, but Josh hadn't seen it and I wanted to own it, so we went to Walmart to buy it last night for Cid's virgin run. I saw Ian Hughes at the electronics department, which was cool because I hadn't seen him in three or four years. He recognized me first, which is impressive and kind of sad since he was the one with the nametag. He gave me his employee discount, which was sweet, and then while we were talking he said, "Oh, I just saw that guy, um... um... what was his name...?" and I was like, "Someone I know?" all surprised because I didn't think we had any common ground other than our parents, and then he said, "Oh yeah, Jeff!"
EEEEEEP! I don't know how many of you have heard the Jeff story, but we used to be really close friends until the summer after our first year at college when he started picking fights with me and Vernie, lying about everything, and sabotaging my dating a guy I really liked, for starters. We had a huge fight and left on bad terms. I saw him like once after that, where we had another, quieter fight, and then he and Vernie fell out as well, and in the three or four years since then Vernie and I have been talking shit at every opportunity about what all we're gonna say to him when we see him again. Well, I had the chance, because Ian said, "Yeah, he was here like 5 minutes ago, oh wait, there he is," and pointed him out at the end of the aisle. Well, it turns out I was full of it, and what I really wanted from the next time I saw Jeff was not to have it happen, because I grabbed Josh and got out of there fast, ducking behind columns and counters when necessary.
Tonight we are bringing a cake to the bridge club for my birthday, and hopefully Kurt will get here sometime before then. It should be a pretty busy day, so I need to get to work writing now if I'm going to get anything done.