Concert Tickets
A Chilean rock band from the 80's is playing tonight in SLC. They're called los Prisioneros. The only problem is that the show costs $25. Don't you think that's kind of a lot for an old band that you barely know and only because you served a mission in their country? Don't they know that their whole fan base here is RM's and that missionaries just come home and turn into college students which just turn into young married people which just turn into young parents. We only keep getting poorer and poorer as we get older, so how do they expect me to pay $25 for a concert? By my estimates, I won't have money for that until I'm 60 and my kids have moved out, and by then the Prisioneros will be dead.
A Hope for Normal Conditions
We went to lunch early today, and its a good thing that we did, because it started melteding pretty hard as soon as we got back. I think its worked its way into frozening. I hope it at leasts normals in the mountains, but it would be fun if we got some normal here, too.
Brighton opens tomorrow. Are they the first? Well, I'm excited. I'm torn about what to do with my money this season, though. I really liked the Brighton night pass that I had last year; that worked out pretty well. It costs $250. I think the rumor about Sundance puts a mid-week pass at $130 or something like that, which is much more in my price range, but then there's no night skiing and probably no Ben, which for sure would slow down my improvement rate. A real pass (even for students) to Brighton is about $500. I need to sell a Web site or something.
Oktoberfest
Well, Sam tried to tell this story before I got a chance, but I used my executive override so that I can do it myself.
Last night I went to Oktoberfest over at Sam's apartment complex. When we first got there it seemed like a lame party, but they had free hot dogs and root beer, and I certainly never turn down free things. Then things got better.
Have you ever seen those shopping carts that have the little cars on the front? Well they had two of those and they had an "autobaun race" around the pool in them. Yes, around the pool. In the rain. A race. I was in the cart and Fat Tim was pushing, and he almost pushed me into the pool; it was scary. Then when I was pushing him the people we were racing against crashed and I totally ran into them. But we still lost.
Then they had the Miss Deutchland competition, and they had some crazy obstacle course set up for the girls to run through. The highlight was when these two girls started rolling on the ground wrestling to try and get to milk the "cow" first. But they didn't win. It was an injustice.
Finally, they had a 8 foot by 4 foot German chocolate cake made, and in the cake they had hidden a fake plastic ring. The deal was the whoever found the ring in the cake got $1500 store credit at some jewelry store that was sponsoring the party. When the brought it in all of the guys just dove in it. There we like 40 guys, and we were piled on 4-people deep. I was in it up to my elbows, and by the end I was just covered in cake, and then we hosed each other down to try and get the cake off, so I was freezing and dirty, and I didn't even win $1500. But it was fun.
Skiism
Tyler and I went up to Brighton to go skiing today. Now, I know that you're thinking, "It's only October; the ski resorts aren't open yet." Well, that's true: they're not, but we did go up there and there was a lot of snow (driving back it was almost white-out on top of the mountain). The lifts weren't open, but there were some rails set up at the base that we could just hike up to. Here's a picture of
Tyler hitting a rail, so that you can be jealous of how great the snow was (I don't put pictures of myself because I suck at it).
At first we were hitting this big, tall, wide rail that had a pretty nice kicker built up to it, which was nice (especially for a beginner like me). We assumed that the rails were set up by Brighton, but when I said this to someone a guy came up and told me that it was his rail, and that he'd set it up. We didn't know, so we then asked if it was cool that we rode it, and he told us no, and went off on this big rant about how people shouldn't come up to the mountain and just expect to be able to ski without bringing anything up to contribute. I think it was lame that he wouldn't let us ride it, but it was his rail, so that's his business. The part that was particularly annoying was that there were about 20 random snowboarders around that didn't even know the guy or that he had set the rail up, and the guy was totally cool with them hitting it. I think he was just discriminating against us because we're skiers.
I've hardly been to any of my classes this week, and I haven't worked that much, and I can't think of anything important that I've gotten done. Maybe I was on a break. I wish I'd known ahead of time that I was going to be on vacation, though, because then I could have taken a trip or something.
Moore stuff
I went to see Michael Moore yesterday. I went with the Democrat club--not because I'm a Democrat (or a Republican) but because I thought it would be fun to out protest the protesters. It turns out there weren't that many protesters anyway, so I just made a sign that said, "John 3:16". That'll teach 'em.
I was pretty disappointed with Moore's speech. I'm rather undecided still on the whole election thing, so I was hoping for him to give me a unique point of view and try to persuade me, but really all he did was make fun of Republicans the whole time, and didn't really address the issues. I guess I should have expected that from him: "Bowling for Columbine" was just a long string of contradicting rhetoric that didn't go anywhere. Maybe that's just his style.
The highlight, by far, was that Rosanne Barr showed up. I think that woman is about the funniest thing ever. In UVSC. Yesterday. Um, well, she's funny, ok? Someone should find a transcript of what she said yesterday and put it on the internet so I can enjoy it over and over.
Don't you think that it's amazing that, despite the ridiculous and dangerous depth of the gutters in Provo, it still manages to overflow them when it rains? I do.
I went over to some friends' house for dinner last night, and as I was getting ready to leave after dinner, they made us circle around the table and take turns telling uplifting stories that had happened to us during the last week. They wouldn't let us leave until we did it. They claimed it was a tradition, but they've never done it when I was over before.
Tyranny and Apathy
Utah's electoral votes are pretty much set already, right? I mean, no matter what I do, it seems, they're going to vote for Bush. What, then, is my motivation for voting? Everyone I talk to seems to either not care who wins or they think that their vote is impotent to make a difference. I hate the idea of not caring who wins, because it seems like that takes away from my right to self-governance, but if my vote doesn't matter, then maybe that right has already been taken away.
In other news, Duran Duran is supposedly on the Tonight Show, tonight (does that sound redundant? I guess it could be the Tonight Show tomorrow--but its not). That's the Leno one.
I stabbed myself
I have this English class (which I hate) at 9am today. That's early for me. It's in the law building, too, so it's about the farthest place on campus from where I live. So I'm late everyday. Well we have this stupid project where we write instruction manuals for products in our fields, and so we were testing each others manuals today (as in reading someone else's manual and trying to perform the tasks the manuals describe). One of the manuals told how to test your blood sugar levels with this little device (that I can't remember the name of), and you have to stab yourself in the finger with this little thing (kind of like what they use at the plasma place). Well no one wanted to test this manual because they'd have to stab themselves, so the teacher said if I tested it she'd forgive all of my tardies. Good deal, huh?
Wayne's a member
I met Wayne yesterday. He's super nice, he remembered by name for like an hour and everything. I told him that I had a shirt with his face on it, and he seemed pretty happy about that: he said it made his day. I was so excited that I went home and put on my BBQC shirt, and I'm wearing the new one today (I guess I'm still excited). Besides, the new one matches my shoes.
Tonight (Monday) through Wednesday you should stay up and watch Carson Daly on NBC, even though he's lame, because Steriogram is going to be the house band. Three days only! But wait, if you act now....
The main page for the project that I do for BYU is finished, and today we were trying to figure out how to get the domain name pointed to it correctly, but we got it and the page is official as of today. I've been working on a module that sorts the images into galleries, and I finished the part that allowed a random image from the gallery to be displayed. I was uploading this
just as my boss was sending out the announcement that the web site was done. You, there are several files and changes to the database that happen while I'm uploading a modification, so the web site looks screwed up for probably 2 minutes while I'm uploading things. These, of course, were the exact two minutes in which the dean of the college received the email and looked at the web page. Drama ensued.
Ok, I'm not all of the way fixed yet. This may not actually show up, because I need to switch servers now. We'll see what happens.
We have a soccer game tonight, and I'm kind of worried about it. I know you're thinking, "What difference does it make? You always lose anyway." Well, that's true. I'm worried because we barely had enough people last game and that was two weeks ago (we didn't have a game last week) and we haven't had a successful practice in probably 3 weeks; I'm afraid that everyone will have forgotten that they're on a soccer team and that they have to show up.
My web page was dead for a few days because I didn't pay the bill for my hosting. The same thing happened to my cell phone on Saturday. And it might happen to my apartment and my gas tank, too.
You may notice that the links on the side changed. I had to take off all of the porn links, due to the whole conference thing. Sorry to disappoint you.
