I am back.

College is done, its my 22nd birthday today, and it I have a ticket to Europe.  Things are looking up.


I want to refer back to this post:
http://dinowhomper.blogspot.com/2011/08/stay-in-school-as-long-as-you-can.html
It was a lie.  DO NOT stay in school as long as you can.  At the end of that post I said my opinion would change when papers and stuff rolled around.  That was not a lie.


Unlike work, school has the ability to follow you home from class and consume your free time and sleep time and make you a crazy person.  Last week when I was doing all my final papers and lab reports and exams, I noticed I had no clean clothes, no groceries, my room was a disaster area, my nails were grotesquely long, and I had not recently bathed or slept.  I also could not think of when I would next have time to fix any of these problems.  Work will never do this to me and if it does I will quit my job.


Anyways, I did my last school related thing yesterday and am now I am an engineer.  Score!  Also I decided being done yesterday is the University's birthday gift to me.  Thanks Iowa!  Also, a couple of days ago I got a plane ticket to Zurich, Switzerland in July.  Its official, I am going.


Here are some things I found about finals week:

I LOVE VENDIAGRAMS OF STUFF!!!!

Acclimation Station

I run really bad when its hot and since it turns out that global warming is not a myth after all, I am trying to speed up the acclimatization process this year by dressing warm and being really uncomfortable for a while.  Hopefully this will eventually make high temperatures seem cooler.  So far I haven't noticed anything but I guess it takes a while to start noticing the effects.


I have, however, learned not to acclimatize while sleeping.  I went to bed on a hot night wearing a full sweat suit and woke up drenched and disgusting.  


I also learned that steam rooms are like hell.  Today me and Katie tried out a steam room and we almost suffocated to death within the first minute and had to leave for the sauna.  They put oils in the steam for your skin or something but the only thing we noticed was the feeling of breathing in poison and a burning sensation deep in the lungs.  When more steam started pouring out of some vents near the floor it was way too much like being gassed so we escaped.  In the sauna we met a lady who said your immune system gets boosted by being in there.  She said she goes in every day for 20-30 minutes and almost never gets sick.  While, I usually go in for zero minutes and I almost never get sick either!  HA!  Take that lady!  She was super nice.


Here is a makeshift steam room for your home:

Honeymoon

My wife (aka roommate) and I went to Des Moines to drop off our son (aka cat) at his adoptive parents (aka roommates sister and husband's) house.  We realized we were married sometime last year when it turned out our rental agreement was really a marriage license and our landlord was actually a priest who went around tricking people into marriages.  That jerk.  Anywho, we decided to make our trip to Des Moines into a honeymoon since we never had one.


So here is what we did on our honeymoon:


- Dropped off our son, never to be seen again
- Looked at old pictures and videos with the wife's childhood friend Andrew then went to sleep before midnight
- Slept in and the wife made me breakfast
- Ran into a median with my car and destroyed the front tire
- Exchanged the tire for my temporary donut tire using Kathryn's lesbo-knowledge to figure things out, my cross country runner strength to pry off lug nuts (thanks coach Wynn!), and Andrew's moral support and photography skills to document the amazingness.
- Ate at Woody's BBQ
- Visited Kathryn's mom (also my mother-in-law I guess?) at her school nurse job
- Went to get the tire fixed and it took forever so we wandered the aisles of petco, toys R us, and target for hours til it was fixed.  Turned our I broke the tire pressure gauge --- more money.
- Got BeBops to go.
- Drove back to Iowa City.  Honeymoon over.


All in all, super good honeymoon with my wife and Andrew!!!  Yay Des Moines!

Want A 4 Day Weekend?

Invent one.


Last Friday to Monday was a 4 day weekend because class just wasn't going to happen on Friday or Monday and also I had to go to the National Rollerskating Museum in Lincoln, and the University of Nebraska Natural History Museum, and Indoor Track Big Tens, and my house in MN, and then back to Iowa.  All these things clearly require 4 days.


The best thing about this vacation was that it was a solo adventure.  Not that I don't like people, I just like doing what I want, when I want.  Sometimes when other people are around you have to do what they want, when they want and its not as awesome.


According to the sign in book, the rollerskating museum had no other visitors for a week and a there was a rollerskating super nerd working there.  He said he was really into rollerskating and I think he REALLY was.  Apparently there is a whole different subculture in rollerskating that I never even knew about before and they all live in Lincoln, NE and work at the museum.


I learned that the Rollerskating National Championships is held annually and there are categories of Dance, Hockey, Speed, and Derby.  There are also roller club teams and coaches.  I hope to never become a rollerskating coach.  That sounds way too dumb.  I also learned that Tara Lipinski was a highly ranked rollerskating star before she started ice skating.  It was probably a smart move to switch to a publicly recognized sport.


Here is a picture of the museum:

Cinnamon Challenge

The Cinnamon Challenge is commonly tried by idiots.  So my roommates and I tried it...


It goes like this:


1) Get a tablespoon full of cinnamon.
2) Put the cinnamon in your mouth.
3) Swallow the cinnamon.


It doesn't seem like it should be hard but based on thousands of youtube videos I knew it would be terrible.  And it was.  The cinnamon cakes to the inside of your throat and mouth and under your tongue and burns your skin off.  None of us completed the challenge.


Here is a great video of Glozelle trying the cinnamon challenge: Glozelle Fail

Escaping Death

Today Katherin and I fought a dog.

We were on our long run on a dirt road at practice and the beast came sprinting out of its yard and jumped up and put its mouth around my arm.  I bailed into the ditch on the side of the road and it retreated for a little bit.  Then when I tried to get back out it growled and attacked again.  JERK.

It forced me to run in the ditch until we were away from its yard.  Thankfully no blood was drawn.  That would have sucked majorly.


I must also add after reading Katherin's post about this that it attacked her shoulder and there was a lot of screaming that I didn't notice while cowering in the ditch.

We Caught a Deer

Today at practice we caught ourselves a deer.

By caught I might mean we saw some deer on the golf coarse and ran in their general direction until they were out of sight.  We never got closer than about 100 meters away.  These are just minor details.  

We caught one.