the results are in...
apparently the shrimp cocktail in my leg was of the benign variety, so thanks all for the positive vibes and thoughts, i am officially on the mend (mentally and physically).
"out! out damned spot(s)!"
i couldn't have said it better than lady macbeth. i've been out since tuesday afternoon (save a show with the thom that i'm not telling my doctor about) after having my "cut-open-my-leg-and-see-what's-inside" surgery.
so not only did i get to have my miniature twin brother removed from my thigh, i was able to serve the greater good of education. unbeknownst to me, the hospital had sold tickets to my surgery (i think it was $25 at the door). my surgeon was accompanied by a young nurse and a med school girl all there "just to watch." i'm glad that i couldn't watch their shocked faces as i was cut up and prodded.
so the good news is that the little me in my leg also had a little me. underneath the first 'palpable' (new vocab word kiddies) was a second growth. after a lot of stretching and pulling, both of my younger siblings were removed and the nurse was cracking jokes about my brain being removed. he thought that they looked like two little brains, but to me they looked more like jumbo prawns. now i just need some cocktail sauce and some
crab cakes...
so now where i had a lump, i have a crater. i guess in the golf game that is surgery, you don't replace your divots. just as well, as my thigh is doubling as the creepiest whole on any put-put golf corse. so other than the fact that each step feels like someone is jamming a packing knife if my upper thigh, i'm on the mend. and on friday i get to find out how much trouble the twins were causing me.
"the sound of the ocean"
Unfortunately, what sloop was hearing was neither the ocean or the river located just below our hotel room. Last night was our last evening playing at the dyc, and rather than go home only to sleep for a few minutes and turn back around for this morning's final session, we shared a hotel room. which is all fine and good because male nudity is always funny.
anyways, with jon jr. a few doors down, we all decided to end the evening with some food and conversation at stanford's. this is where everything went wrong. the olympic ice dancers behind my head and in front of my face should have served as a warning. it seemed that when the male partners weren't throwing their female counterparts onto the ice, they were crashing into each other more than apollo ono and a south korean skater. disregarding the olympic-sized warnings, i ordered crab cakes on jj's recommendation... for the last time in my life.
you can do the math. when you roll into stanford's 1/2 hour before closing, seafood should not be considered. the worst part of it all is that they weren't that good going down... or coming back up. poor sloop j. p., instead of waking to a beautiful vision of ocean waves lapping at his bed, if was just me hugging a red lion toilet giving it all i had (less my spleen and gall bladder).
so needless to say, that raw food diet is sounding better by the hour. somehow i can't imagine a plate of leafy greens doing as much damage to my tummy and the sleeping ears of my friends.
weather post #3
just because i am a petty moron, i would like to start a new kazu-googoo trend that i will call "My Daily Weather Report Designed with the Sole Intention of Annoying Beth Bagel" it will be a charming feature that will be sure to equally astound and stupify.
so here we go, today the weather is......... cold and sunny with a later chance of wind and cold. grab the gloves kiddies!
so there you have it, my third weather-related blog post this week, with several more to come.
seriously, thanks beth, because i had no idea what i was going to post today. by the way, does sarcasm register on the Internet?
dodgeball 101
last week i received two new students, both girls (which is great as it restores some balance to the gender ratio in my class...). in any case, one was from california and had never played dodgeball.
friday we lined up for my students' favorite game only to have her ask in all seriousness, "What's dodgeball?" Clearly the governator has put his power to use replacing all violent P.E. activities with viewings of Terminator 3.
So how do you explain dodgeball to someone who has never played it or seen it played? I do my best to which she asks, "You try and hit each other on
purpose?"
"Yeah, that's the basic idea"
"Okay," she says clearly puzzled by the rationale behind hurling foam balls at her classmates.
She learned all she needed to know 45 seconds later, when an arcing ball crushed the side of her face. She hadn't seen it coming. The last time this happened, we didn't play dodgeball for awhile (and I added a "headshot-and-you're-out-until-the-next-game" rule). I darted over and asked if she was okay and wanted to keep playing.
With a bloodthirsty look she replied, "Yeah, I get it now."
Dodgeball 101!
snow?!
so i left the tripple deuce this morning for what appeared to be another normal work day, a little rain, no problem.
then i keep noticing snow on cars and wonder what gives. as i crest the hill in the o.c. it hits me--it's snowing moron! hiltop o.c. is like a winter wonderland. so we're here at work roasting chestnuts and wondering what santa will bring this year!
by the way Happy Valentine's Day!
who knew?
i didn't realize that portishead played at the Super Bowl.
This must have happened after the Steelers were handed the Lombardi trophy. by that time i had thrown a shoe into the TV box, so my picture wasn't as clear as this one.
vitamin D
the sun decided to show yesterday, which certainly beats the fact that i have been wearing a sweater all morning yet my fingers are still cold.
so i took advantage of the clear sky, donned my overalls (yes, they are my favorite thing to wear in full view of all of my neighbors), and jumped up on my ladder. i became so addicted to suddenly being 10' tall that i pruned one of my trees all the way into the ground by a few inches (at which point i had to get off the ladder). as the on-top-of-the-ladder endorphines kicked in i decided to clean out all of the gutters. atop the house i then decided to scrape off most of the moss on my roof. i think i also scrapped off most of the rocky parts of my shingles but what the hell, i was on top of a ladder.
i even stopped for what felt like 6 hours and was probably actually 45 seconds and watched a bird. i don't know about you, but when i stop to watch a wild animal i suddenly don't feel as self-absorbed. something about that little red-crested finchjay puffin worbler made my problems seem smaller.
after insuring that i will need to replace my roof this spring, i performed the coup de grace... i took down the Christmas lights. forget punxsutawney phil, there is no barometer for the end of winter better than the lights coming down from the front of my house. it's offical, forget the snow broadcast for the weekend, we're in for brighter weather now.
mr. predictable
i must be easy to find on myspace, because first, my students found my myspace page, and they must have spread the word because a steady trickle of people i haven't seen in over a decade have been finding me. generally speaking, myspace is evil and a clear sign for the coming of armaggedeon. most of the time, you get solicited by either cyber-hos or terrible bands.
however, in the last few months, myspace has shown that it has its upsides. it helped me find a
decent new band , okay, so technically i heard about these guys on itunes, but i used myspace to check out a few of their songs before catching them at berbatti's last week. i also caught up with an
old friend.
the last time i talked to most of my high school friends, i was in training to be a firefighter, so they are surprised to hear that i teach 6th grade. so a friend recommended that i check out fever pitch because
jimmy fallon's character is the kind of teacher that they imagine me being. i figured that i would be nothing like the character other than his name is ben, but the similarities were kind of scary.
fallon plays a teacher who is obsessed with the BoSox. he lives two lives based on the baseball season and offseason. the movie ben had a good rapport with his kids, and i'd like to think that i have the same. i finished the movie and didn't think that i was obsessed like movie ben, but as i stopped the movie and turned on my tivo i realized that in some ways i'm just as pathetic as my movie doppleganger.
i have four seahawks games on my tivo as i type this. i combined a birthday party with a super bowl party so that i wouldn't miss the seahawks first SB appearance. i can name not only every seahawk player on the 53-man roster, i can also identify them by their voices. i wore the same shirt for each of this year's playoff games. i have a "lucky" pair of overalls. i have a several-years-running draft day party that i throw at my brother's house each april (the "party" consists of only my brother and i by the way).
so basically, my pathetic obsession with the seahawks is clear not only to my friends, it's clear to people who haven't seen me in a decade, and now it's even becoming clear to me.
tagged!
wow, i just posted my first post in the last 2 months and i already have a tag from sloop. so here i go:
Four Jobs I’ve Had
1. picking radishes and green onions on a farm
2. bucking hay bails until 11pm on another farm
3. guitar store manager (and part-time bass teacher)
4. elementary school teacher
Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
1. the empire strikes back
2. 2001: a space odyssey
3. run lola run
4. the royal tenenbaums
Four Places I Have Lived
1. oregon city - with mom and dad
2. oregon city - by myself
3. se portland
4. milwaukie (the triple deuce)
Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
1. lost (yeah, yeah, i know)
2. law & order (especially the old re-runs with chris noth)
3. arrested development (please come back!)
4. the office (i LOVED the BBC and the US version won me over)
Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation
1. the united kingdom (glasgow, london, cardiff, edinburgh)
2. paris, france (kicks your city's ass)
3. maui, hawaii (i hit my head on the ocean floor!)
4. new orleans, LA (almost a year to the day BEFORE katrina)
Four of my Favorite Dishes
1. burritos
2. french toast
3. bagguette with fromage
4. vegetarian pad thai
Four Websites I Visit Daily
1. seahawks.com (yes, i am pathetic)
2. myspace.com
3. orecity.k12.or.us/
4. seattlepi.nwsource.com
Four Places I Would Rather Be
1. paris
2. new orleans
3. sydney
4. cairo
Four People I’m Tagging
1.
reesarick2.
miss kazu3.
flying teresa4.
bonika stjames
a slight break...
so i've been gone for so long. so many bloggable moments have passed without my cutting wit and sarcastic voice to let you all (or both as is more apt to describe my readership) know the duldrums of my life. so many memories that will fail to be blogged, my surgery-that-was-supposed-to-happen-but-didn't last month, or the bedm-shot-a-video-and-i-got-to-be-an-extra-and-best-boy-and-grip-and-clapper day, or the ben's-return-to-the-dentist-for-the-first-time-in-years, or my elated the-seahawks-really-are-the-best-team-in-the-nfl-this-year-they'll-prove-it-to-everyone week, followed by the how-come-i-keep-letting-the-seahawks-tear-out-my-heart-every-year week, to today. i've been wallowing in the latter for a week or so.
so what has kept me from my blog you might not ask? well let's just say that i got into a superstitious routine that found me obsessing over the seahawks wins from week to week. if i blogged, somehow the seahawks' win streak would snap and they would fail to win the super bowl. well that worked pretty well. so now i'm back to blogging. so screw football (for the next 7 months anyways).
so it's saturday and i woke up and ate breakfast, watched five minutes of usa vs. sweden women's hockey... upon the us' first goal i actually heard myself say, "take that sweden! why don't you go back to making watches and knives!?" at this point i stood up, turned off the TV and left the house. i'm not sure if the swedes are good at hockey, but the olympics sure bring out the best in me.
from there, i drove to peter's to run down to thom rehearsal. two hours of morning rehearsal were enough to tap us both out until two 6-year-old girls recommended that we make blackberry pancakes and coffee. they were right as the spike in sugar intake gave us enough energy for a boy eats drum machine rehearsal. today's rehearsal was odd in that we played music the entire time. we actually ran the set twice and never even turned on the Xbox. so i assume it's a given that our next show will blow since we haven't properly prepared. maybe we'll get back to our normal routine of 2 hours of halo followed by 27 minutes of playing music.
either way, i'll keep you posted.
i didn't realize that portishead played at the Super Bowl. 
