Go Team Action Sweatshirts! Plus....pumpkins!

Alright, so I'm super tired, so I gotta make this quick.  I have to be up in 6 1/2 hours to go zip lining, which will be sweeeeet!  In addition to being really fun, hopefully it'll give me something to write about (3 hours in a group of strangers could be....inspirational...).  But anyway, I wanted to post some pics beforehand and write about my pre-zip planning. 

I don't have a large selection of active-wear because I'm not that active of a person (although I'd like to be?).  Generally, I feel that jeans work for me in most situations.  Besides, active-wear never seems to be that important to the process. Yet, all the time I see special hiking shorts and "performance fleece" (not to be confused with the extremely sedentary "failure fleece?").  So when thinking about what I should wear while zip lining, I started looking at the stereotypical active-wear-type sweatshirts.  They're crazy expensive!  I decided that, for the price, the sportsy sweatshirt I was looking at needed to retain certain qualities:  could I successfully karate chop my way through the thick jungle canopy of Georgia in said sweatshirt?  Could I do jumping jacks and round-house kicks in it?  Could it repel rain like some sort of force-field around my body?  Surprise!  It couldn't!  The "performance fleece" performed as well as a regular sweatshirt for the difference of about $100 (and good news, it's not supposed to rain anyway, so no rain force-field needed).

Nonetheless, the idea of "action sweatshirts" didn't leave my mind.  This is going to be an "extreme-to-the-max" type outdoorsy adventure for Keith and I, so we needed something to symbolize our excitement and designate one another as zip lining teammates (vs the other people in our group, of course).  So yay for iron-on transfer graphics!

Yeah, I stole it from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  And yeah, it doesn't really make sense as we're not in Philadelphia.  But "zip" sounds like "flip," the jingle is catchy, and spirit of Flipadelphia relates to the our excitement for zipadelphia.  Plus zipeorgia and ziplanta sound dumb.  You need the extra syllables of the "delphia" to make it work, I guess. 

That's Keith in his (and my cute cat being cute as usual).  Here's mine:



Jealous?  You should be.  I'm going to be able to do all sorts of karate in this action sweatshirt.  And while you're busy being jealous, here's a picture of my pumpkin I just carved a few hours ago:

You should probably just listen to this song in the background while admiring my pumpkin because it's good enough to be in the trailer for that 3D owl movie (which I liked, by the way).  Side-note:  I totally cheated and used a template for this pumpkin.  Oops!  Still awesome, though.

Keith's pumpkin turned out pretty sweet, too.  It could be in that Nightmare before Christmas movie. 

In summary, sweatshirts are best when accessorized for action and pumpkins are made for Hollywood.  Crap, 5 1/2 hours until zip line.  Gotta sleep so I don't fall to my death (just kidding, it's a moderately safe activity as long as the zip guides get more sleep than me).

Later!

Why Airshows Are Kinda Neat But Not Really

Living next to an airbase is pretty much awful.  You never know when things are going to get loud, and when they do, you'll see my cat swiftly army-crawl to and from all her tiny hiding spots. I've been startled out of sleep in a half-conscious panic by some of the things that fly over our apartment.  And after that, you get to listen to everyone's car alarms go off.  Fun.

(By the way, if you google or flickr images of "army-crawl," you just get hundreds of images of people's babies, all of which are not very good at demonstrating an army crawl.  I was going to paste a picture of my cat's face on someone army-crawling, but pasting her onto a picture of a baby wasn't an accurate illustration of my point.  This is where I would have put that picture, so use your imagination and laugh because a cat crawling around with an army helmet on is probably pretty cute.)

Anyway, if you know me, you know I don't care for airplanes much (I blame this cartoon.).  I definitely don't like being in them, and seeing/hearing one fly overhead is enough to get my heart rate up.  Even so, I'm planning on seeing parts of the airshow this weekend because A) it's free, B) it's probably entertaining, and C) I just have to go outside and tilt my head up.

So free entertainment is one benefit of living next to an airbase.  But after that, it's mostly all cons.  If a plane nosedives into our apartment (and, unlike the slightly improbable Bugs Bunny cartoon, doesn't run out of gas the moment before crashing), that's going to cause some problems.  Also, the volume of the show is going to be annoying, but I'm used to that a bit.  One inconvenience I wasn't expecting, though, is the pre-show spectators.  The airbase is right between where I work and where I live (see map below:  A = work, B = airbase, C = Subway, D = live). 


View Larger Map

I figured the weekend traffic would be obnoxious, but I can avoid that area when I don't work.  Apparently, though, two days of actual airshow are not enough for most people.  On the Friday before the show,  it appears that some people like to randomly pull over to the side of the road, get out of their cars, and squint towards the sky to watch the planes practice.  They also apparently have to go to the same Subway I go to for lunch and clog up the line!  Blurg!

I'm probably just being a local, crabby jerk-head, but it does seem kinda dumb to watch and photograph the sporadic, unscheduled, and less impressive practice-runs.  It'll be way more entertaining to squint up at the sky with your mouth open tomorrow and Sunday.  Until then, keep your eyes on the road and move out of my way...I gotta get back to work and do important things (one of which is definitely NOT writing this post...seriously, it's not...shut up!).

That's a pretty accurate picture of my lunch-hour experience (Georgia folk sure do love their moonshine).  I hope you enjoyed the good-ol'-fashioned copyright infringement.  Also, I made the barrel roll joke before any of you jabronies could.  Sorry!

This is my weekend airshow futurecast...barf or no barf, should be entertaining.

Later!

Back for Birbiglia Day!

After almost a 3 month computer hiatus (sorry, I'm apparently horrible at keep blog promises), I'm back-in-typing-action!  I attempted to get back to it a few times now, and it just wasn't meant to be.  I'd type something out, hate it, erase it, start over again, and repeat.  A few days ago, I got a couple paragraphs of a post started and saved it to work on again later.  I'm serious when I say it wasn't meant to be:  when I re-opened the post, it was blank (and for anyone familiar with blogger, that's kinda strange since the composing app saves whatever you've typed every few seconds).

But it all makes sense now because I realized that it's Mike Birbiglia Day (or so I'm claiming it to be)!  This is the post that is meant to end my hiatus, since it starts where I left off last.

"So what is Mike Birbiglia Day?" you might be wondering.  Well, he's calling it Book-tober because him and his savy promotional team organized a signing and called for fans to host make-out parties (seriously) in celebration of his book release.  But even though I can't be in New York for any book signing and since it's not technically a party even if Keith and I make-out, I'm still celebrating because I get my copy of Birbig's book in the mail today.  Plus, they just recently uploaded my video chat with him to YouTube! Yay!

And so a new post is born.  And it has a video clip for a twin (non-identical, of course).

This clip is a bit awkward for me to watch:  it's pretty obvious that I have a bit of a crush, which apparently makes me giggle...constantly...and sit still...never.  My web cam's mediocrity (or perhaps my inability to set it up properly) makes for poor video of myself, but at least his team was able to fix up the volume problems (I could barely hear him during our chat) while adding some humorous edits.

Anyway, I hope my embarrassment is your entertainment. Enjoy!
 

          

P.S....Pumpkin had her surgery and is all better now.  Yay!  But for a while, she was pretty mad at me, and I kinda deserved it.  After all, she's the one who broke the ice between Mike Birbiglia and I.  Who do I think I am putting her in a cone after that, right?

Pumpkin thinking she could climb with the cone on...