March Madness

No, not basketball, but I am calling Kentucky. But Wow! March is almost over and I haven’t posted since I tried out to be Abe! It’s weird because things haven’t really been crazy, but at the same time I feel like this month has just flown by in a blur. So many small things have been happening, so I guess this post is going to be pretty short. To be honest, I think I’m experiencing writers block: Blog edition. In all honesty I have no idea what I feel like writing about. Nothing that exciting happened to be this month. I turned 20, but big deal. Nothing is special about 20. It’s just society’s way of saying, “Oh look, you’re 20. You’re no longer a teenager, but you still haven’t reached the last big (youth) milestone of 21. Sucker! Have fun feeling old!” And that’s exactly how I feel…. Old. I’m twenty years old. Everything about that word just sounds old. My birthday was March 9^th, and the day after, I went with my youngest brother, David and my mom to go to visit my grandma at her nursing home. This is how some of it went….

Mom: Time to go!

Mom: Are you coming?

Me: I can’t.

Mom: What?

Me: I belong here.

Mom: What? Come on. We’re leaving.

Me: Don’t look at me. I’m all old and twenty-ish. I don’t want you to see me like this.

(If you think that I was offending the actual elderly residents, think again. 99% of them couldn’t hear a train 10 feet away…. Speaking of hearing loss and trains, I have a funny story about that. See below*)

Mom: Well, we’re leaving. Bye.

Of course I had to go, even though I felt like I was sneaking out of the nursing home. When the receptionist said “Bye” as we were walking out the door, I knew that “Bye” actually meant, “I see you trying to sneak out of here. You can’t fool anyone. You have twenty written all over you…. Old fart.”

But, before I slip too far back into a midlife, midlife crisis again, I’m going to take my mind off that and wrap this post up since I have writers block. Thanks for listening to my rant about being…. Twenty…. Ehhh.

* Random story about hearing loss and trains. A weird combination, I know, but a few summers ago, my family and my grandma went up to Michigan to visit my great aunt, Marge. Marge and my grandma (Grandma Francis Pickle… if you remember that post) are sisters. My grandma at the time was about 88 and Marge was about 90. To make things interesting, both of them can’t hear. I mean they can hear, but not very well at all. So, we walk into Marge’s house and this is how the conversation went

Dad: Hi Marge. We came to visit you, and we brought your sister.

Marge: What? You kids are always whispering. Speak up!

Dad: We came to visit you! And Francis is with us!

Grandma: Hi Marge! How have you been?

Marge: What? What about my oven?

Grandma: WHAT? I can’t hear you!

Marge: DID SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT MY OVEN? NEVERMIND. OH, HI FRANCIS!

Grandma: (turning to my Mom) Is she talking to me? I can’t hear a thing.

Mom: That’s because you don’t have your hearing aid in.

Grandma: MARGE! SALLIE SAID YOU SHOULD PUT YOUR HEARING AID IN!

(At this point both of them are yelling because both of them forgot to put their hearing aids in)

Mom: No. I didn’t sa-

Marge: HOW DID YOU FOLKS GET HERE?

Dad: You two should probably stop yelli-

Marge: YOU TOOK A TRAIN? WHERE ARE THERE TRAINS AROUND HERE?

Dad: Nevermind then. WE DROVE HERE!

Marge: WHAT? WHICH TRAIN?

My brothers and I were laughing hysterically in the background as the yelling between the practically deaf sisters continued. My Dad tried to explain how we got here, but after 10 minutes, he just settled saying, “Yes Marge. We took a train.” And that’s how deafness and trains relate:) 

A Day Of Being Abe

My experience being a Racing President

Have you ever been to a Washington Nationals baseball game? Is your favorite part watching the bigheaded presidents race around the bases? Mine too. In fact, I decided to tryout to BE one of those racing presidents. Crazy. I know. But it was one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever done! I’ll take you through a day of being Abe.

After I had applied and sent in my cover letter and resume, I got invited back to audition. I thought “Why not? You don’t get many chances like this in your life time” I went to the Nationals stadium and met in the “visiting tem” clubhouse area. Tom Davis, the Nat’s entertainment manager, came over and explained what we would be doing for the tryouts, and then congratulated the 57 of us for being selected out of the hundreds that had applied. After that, we spent the majority of the time nervously waiting to be called, and interviewing with the media that was there. I was one of three girls who had made the callbacks, so naturally, the media was all over us. I lost count of how many interviews I did, but I think every media group there interviewed us at least once, if not more. They asked us questions like, “Are you nervous?”, Why did you sign up to do this?”, and “How did it feel running while in costume? Was it what you expected?”. All the media made the waiting period fly by, and next thing I knew, the three of us girls were called to be in the next heat.

Only three of the presidents are there at tryouts; Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. (Teddy, everyone’s favorite, is always touring during President’s Day weekend.) I got to be Abe. In the application, they warn you about the weight of the costume…. I mean, you DO have a really big head on. However, once they lowered the head over me, I wasn’t worried. I was expecting it to be much heavier than it was. I guess giving all my cousins piggyback rides really helped haha! It’s hard to explain what it felt like to be inside of Abe. You are basically wearing a backpack that has two metal bars coming up over your head that support the mascots head. As far as the rest of the costume goes, you are wearing semi-normal baseball clothes and a peach “neck” that goes over your head to seal the gap between your costume, and the mascots head. This made it virtually impossible to see. You could see through the “neck” piece just fine. What I couldn’t see past was Abe abnormally long chin/beard. This left you with a view of the ground two feet in front of you. So your view kind of looks like this…

While you are in costume, you have to do four things; sprint 40 meters, run the length of center field twice, dance, and do a victory pose. The dancing and the victory pose were easy…. The running was a little more difficult. Like I said before, the weight wasn’t bad. It was the distribution of the weight that made it hard. Basically all of the weight is on your shoulders and above your head. Its like your wearing a huge globe on your head. As you run and get your momentum going, your huge head starts to rock back and forth. This is where I had trouble. At the start of my 40-meter dash, the harness that was holding the weight of the head in place slipped up, and most of the weight shifted forward. I dove into a face-plant. It didn’t hurt (probably because of the adrenaline) and I got right back up and finished. In the video I posted below, you can actually see me falling and hear the loud “OOOOHHH!” from the spectators. (Thanks for capturing that on footage, espnW)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jOh7K0jZpE

(I fall at around 2:03 and interview at around 2:30)

More footage of me
(The first race they show in this video is my race... and the face-plant after that is also me. The reporters loved to get that on camera)

Sadly, that was not the only time a fell. After the 40-meter dash, we went over to run the length of center field twice. According to the other mascots and spectators, I was winning by a lot. By now, I had gotten used to the oddly distributed weight and figured out how to control it. The problem was, we had to make basically a 100-degree turn in order to get to the finish line. I was going pretty fast, and couldn’t really see much, so when the green wall came up in front of me, I had to make a very abrupt turn. I had also tilted my head backwards to see if I could see where exactly the finish line was. All this combined caused me to lose my balance at the very last part of the race. Only feet from the finish line, I face-planted again. As I got up to step over the finish line, the other two mascots had caught up and finished with me. Lame. I should’ve had that race. In the second race, we all finished together. Once I had gotten out of costume, I re-interviewed with a lot of the reporters. Apparently they like the action of a winning president falling at the last second. They asked me about how it felt to fall and if I was disappointed that I didn’t win. To be honest, I was there for the experience, so I answered most of their questions by saying, “I’m glad I got to experience every aspect of being a Racing President. Running, dancing…. eating dirt. Its all part of the experience!”

Needless to say, I didn’t get the job (not a surprise, since there was about 54 other “football type” guys there that made the running look like they weren’t even wearing a costume.) To be honest, I’m glad. I have NEVER been this sore in my life. Ever. I think I used muscles I didn’t even know I had. No, I KNOW I used muscles I didn’t even know I had. My muscles hurt, my bones hurt, my cells hurt, I have two bruises on my back, my palms are scratched from falling, and I think I pulled a leg muscle. I was only in that costume for like 15 minutes or so. As fun as it would be, I can’t imagine wearing it for a full day, 4 days a week. I think my body would just shatter. They would put the mascot head on me and I would just turn into dust and blown into someone’s eyes.

After all the waiting, the interviewing, the running, the falling, and the soreness the morning after, I look back and I’m glad I did it. I may even do it next year just for the fun of it. It was 114.7% worth it and now I can say, I was a ‘Washington Nationals Racing President’ for a day!

I may be posting more videos, or articles as they are created. Here’s the only one that’s up now. 

Article About Auditions
Photos

Don't Hit My Car. I Mean It.

I was sitting in the passenger seat, and my dad was driving my little blue car. Behind us, was a nice person who will remain nameless (I’ll call him Chris). Chris was driving a huge silver SUV, with my mom and brothers also in the car. I don’t remember what we were driving around for, but we came to a parking lot with two open spaces. My dad started to pull into one of the spaces, but he was taking a long time. For some reason, my dad wanted to line the car up perfectly before pulling into the spot. This angered Chris, so he decided to slam into our car and push us around the parking lot. Our car started spinning. I rolled down my window and started yelling at Chris for wrecking my car, but he was driving away laughing. I was furious. (Here I should apologize to my roommate. Caryn, I’m sorry if I woke you up screaming obscenities in the middle of the night. I don’t know what came over me.) My dad and I got out of the car and stormed out of the parking lot, trying to follow Chris. For some reason, I knew exactly where he was headed. He was driving home to hide from us because he knew he had pissed us off. By the time we got out of the parking lot, Chris was out of sight, but we knew he wasn’t far. We knew that his house was just up the hill from the parking lot, so we began to climb the hill. We had to cross the road at one point to get to the right side of the grass where Chris had dropped off my mom and brothers, so we played what seemed like a “Frogger” game in traffic. Let me tell you…. It’s easier to cross the road than frogger makes it seem. Once we crossed the road, we stormed angrily over to Chris’s house. This is where it gets interesting.

Chris had a house that was run down, old, and dark. It reminded me of one of those haunted houses you walk through at theme parks. The curtains were sheets that were ripped and dirty, the furniture was old and broken, and there were many small rooms throughout the house. When we got up to the house, we saw that there were three police officers standing outside. They told us that Chris was hiding somewhere inside and that he was going to scare us when we found him. My dad and I tried to walk in, but the officers stopped us and told us that we had to go in one at a time so Chris could scare us. If you know me, I HATE haunted houses. Hate. Them. I was thinking to myself, “I’m really pissed at Chris for wreaking my car, I hate haunted houses, these cops are annoying me, and I’m in no mood to play hide-and-seek…. THAT’S. IT.” Infuriated, I grabbed a taser gun and tasered the three cops. My family looked on in shock. I didn’t care. I stormed into the house by myself and shouted, “CHRIS! I’VE GOT A TASER GUN AND IF YOU DON’T COME OUT OF HIDING, YOU’RE NEXT!!!!!” There was no response. I started to check every room, taser gun at the ready. I was in no mood to be messed with. After I searched the whole first floor, I knew Chris was hiding upstairs, because there was only one room upstairs. I walked up the stairs and saw Chris’s feet behind the door. He was giggling kind of loudly. I opened the door, saw him, and tasered him. He fell down on the ground and I looked at him and said, very dramatically, “That’s for hitting my car.” Then I walked out of the house, feeling very proud of myself.

This morning, I woke up mind-blown. Sometimes I don’t understand where my dreams come from. The only thing I can get out of that dream is that if you hit my car, I will taser you. Don’t hit my car.

My Little Grandpa Phone

I have a question. How many phone years are equivalent to 3 human years? Because the years are definitely not the same. If I had to take a guess, I would say 3 human years equal 70 phone years. Why? Because I’ve had my phone for almost 3 years now and it acts like a 70 year old Little Grandpa. I think that’s what “LG” stands for. Little Grandpa. Not Life’s Good. Well, actually, let me back up. My phone used to be a Life’s Good phone. When I first got my phone it was like a little shiny maroon steroid man screaming “LIFE’S GOOD!”.

Now my phone has seemed to age as fast as lettuce wilts. It looks more like a little grandpa with a white beard and a walker, who smells of old people and screams, “WHAT? I can’t hear you! Speak up, son!”

I’m half expecting my phone to start telling me it’s old stories that all start with the words, “When I was your age….”

What makes me think my phone is so old? Well I’ll tell you. I'll do a comparison of my phone to the younger version of itself. Once upon a time my phone was awesome and young and fast and sleek. Now it's almost three human years old, slow, and scratched. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my Little Grandpa, but I think it’s just funny how I can find easy ways to compare it to a Grandpa. Now where did it all begin…. Oh yes. I remember. About a year ago my Little Grandpa lost his memory. It was a slow and painful process. He would keep turning off out of the middle of nowhere. It got so bad that I had to take him to the doctor (The Verizon store) to get him checked out. It turns out that his memory card had been corrupted so they had to remove it before it would delete all the information in his brain. Sad, I know. Well they had to do surgery on him to remove his memory card. The surgery lasted for a loooong time. I think 10 minutes to be exact, but they finally brought him out with the gut wrenching news that he was no longer a young phone, and that I should think about getting a new one. But I protested. I loved my little grandpa and he was too young to die, so I decided to keep him even though he no longer had any memory of any pictures (one of the side effects of the surgery). Well, that’s where it all began. That’s when my phone turned into a little grandpa.

When my phone was younger, I felt like I could punch it in the face (drop it on the ground) with no harm done. Now, I feel like if I drop little grandpa, he’ll break his hip and have to use a walker, and I don’t want that. I mean, I think he already kinda uses a walker. When my phone was younger, he was really fast. I could type words so fast that I felt like the phone already knew what I wanted to say.

Now, little grandpa is so slow at typing, that I’ll usually finish typing the text before all of the words show up on the screen.

10 minutes later

Little grandpa also doesn’t vibrate much when I have a message…. Or it will just wait like 30 minutes before it tells me I have a message. It’s like this….

…. When I wish it was still like this….

Not only has my phone gotten weaker with the vibrating and alerting me of my messages, but little grandpa is also going blind. With my young phone I could see pictures like this….

But that would be way too hard for little grandpa now. If he wants to view a picture, he has to get out his coke bottle cap reading glasses and squint and even then the picture looks like this….

Not really. My phone just can't zoom anymore. That was the point I was trying to get across.

And if the picture doesn’t look like that, then it’s so dark that there’s really no point trying to look at it anyway. I really don’t understand why it gets so dark. Like the picture will be fine when you take it, but as soon as you save it, it gets like 4 shades blacker.

Little grandpa has hallucinations too. (Another side effect of the surgery). My young phone used to sleep soundly through the night.

Little grandpa has troubles. Every night for about the past year, little grandpa will light up at exactly 10:43 pm claiming that I have “A new multimedia message!” only when I open my phone, there’s nothing there. It’s like my poor little grandpa is waking up in the middle of his peaceful slumber claiming that aliens are about to attack the planet.

Most people would just get a new smartphone, but I’ve decided to stick with little grandpa until he really does die, cause even after all that stuff, I still love my little grandpa:)

Brownie Thief

I come home from college. I eat dinner with my family. I decide that we should have some dessert, so I make brownies. When they come out of the oven they are hot, so I set them on the counter to let them cool. I go into the living room to watch some of abc's 25 days of Christmas. My Mom calls from the kitchen asking if she can have a brownie. I say yes. She seems to be in the kitchen for a while so I walk in and witness something like this....

I think to myself, "Why is my Mom acting all suspicious getting a brownie?"

She rushes away without saying anything so I walk over to find this.

Cool Mom. Real cool.

It's nice to be home.

Donkeys After Midnight

I think my college dorm might be haunted. Not in a bad way, but in a weird way. You see, on most nights when I go to bed at around 11 or 12, I am like this....

But for some reason if my roommate, Caryn, or I go to bed after 12 we end up like this....

Weird things happen after midnight. Well, not really things, more like weird conversations. I don’t know what it is, but if we go to bed after 12, we are bound to have some weird stuff happen. Let me take you through a typical after 12 night for Caryn and I.

Usually Caryn is in bed first so I am the one to turn off the lights. You know how as soon as you turn off the lights its pitch black because your eyes haven’t adjusted? Well, that usually happens to me…. Unless it’s after midnight. Tonight, as I turn off the lights, I see what looks like a light above me and I tell Caryn I see God’s light. We giggle, and then I climb into bed. And then we both see a flashing green light. It freaks us out, so I frantically shine my phone light at it only to discover that it’s just the smoke detector flashing. Neither of us have noticed it until now. We giggle some more. I roll over in my bed and yell because something hits my face. It’s just my silly little teddy bear. I throw him at Caryn even though I can’t see her. We giggle more and she throws him back.

After we calm down from all the giggling (sorry suitemates), the weird conversations start. We talk about random stuff like class systems within IV, maybodys and nobodys, alcohol consumption, cranberry juice, and how bad words originate. I never really know how the conversations start, but they are always pretty intense. It usually goes something like this....

And then we proceed to have an in depth conversation about the history of a "donkey".

When we are done, we laugh about the conversation, and then we go to bed. Like I said earlier: weird things happen after midnight.

Nontraditional Carrot Cake

(I know it’s a little late for a thanksgiving post, but I’ve finally had enough time to sit down and write one so you’re just going to have to deal with it.)

Thanksgiving break this year was pretty good. Thanksgiving day? Not so much. Let me start at the beginning. For the past two years, my aunt has been able to get all of us cousins to go to this 5K Turkey Trot. It’s a lot of fun, but it requires us to get up at 6am on thanksgiving morning and run 3 miles. Most of us are in college now. We value sleep. So when my aunt brought up the turkey trot this year, we all looked away. The thing is, my aunt doesn’t give up easily. That can be a good thing…. Just not in this case. She kept trying to make the turkey trot sound like it was this awesome once in a lifetime thing that we were going to miss and regret our whole lives. But, trying to get us to come to the turkey trot was like trying to sell us carrot cake. No matter how you dress it up, its still carrot cake. Plain. Old. Carrot cake. No one wanted it. And no one ate it. This was the first year that no one went to the turkey trot on thanksgiving morning…. except for my aunt and my uncle. Snaps to them!

I would really like to skip my rant about my thanksgiving meal that day. My most of my aunts thought it would be funny to have a nontraditional thanksgiving dinner this year. Nontraditional as in NO mashed potatoes, NO cranberry sauce, NO green beans, and NO stuffing. I was not happy about that. NOT happy. Another downer about that day was that my Dad burned his hand really bad. He was holding those little sparklers you can run around with and draw your name in the air and stuff, and when he went to light them, they all caught fire and basically burst into flame instead of becoming all sparklerey. He got second-degree burns and had to go to the emergency room. He’s better now, don’t worry:)

Aside from the turkey trot, and the nontraditional thanksgiving dinner, the rest of my break was pretty good. I got to go to D.C with my cousins and see EVERY. SINGLE. MONUMENT. EVER. BUILT. No joke. That’s what you have to expect when you go to any sort of museum or historical place with my cousin Tim. I honestly only learned 3 new things. 1) There’s a misspelled word in the Lincoln Memorial (Freedom is spelled Ereedom), 2) If you stand in front of the Einstein statue and look him in the eyes and talk, your voice will be amplified, and 3) That the Boy Scout monument looks really weird with the half naked adults standing behind a little boy scout. Again. Really. Weird.

On black Friday we did what everyone else does, we went ice-skating:) It was a lot of fun, and I’m pretty sure if my cousin’s Tim and Melissa were given lessons, I’d be watching them in the Olympics. They are that good. Funny thing though, if you remember my post from last thanksgiving (This is our Family) you should remember when I wrote about how my cousin, Cecylia, got a number from a staff member. Well, hehehehe, guess who was working at the rink on black Friday this year? Yup! The staff member. Nick, to be exact. And the funny thing was, he remembered her from a year ago! Crazy. It’s probably because my cousins and I are a huge group that always gets into trouble because we start train lines, and speed skate, and knock over little kids. Yeeeeaaaah, now that I think about it, that’s probably why he remembered her.

To sum it up, this year I got to spend time with 40 family members packed into houses that were meant for families of 5. We went to D.C, played trivia games, ice-skated, hung out with my grandma, played a made up game called “The Block Game”, ate pizza, had sleepovers, and giggled about things like farts;) Aside from real cake and a real thanksgiving dinner, what more could I ask for?