Bah Humbug

Good morning everyone.  I hope that all of the "it's FINALLY going to be cold" people in San Marcos, America are happy now...  It's almost 9:00 a.m. as I begin typing this and the temperature is THIRTY-FOUR degrees - BRRRRR...  And yes, I AM armed with hot chocolate for the second day in a row at the keyboard...

There are many of you who are not friends of mine of facebook, so you're probably unaware of the fact that at the end of last week, on the last class day of the fall semester at Texas State, I had made a comment about the student population being preoccupied.  This came as a result of a walk that I was taking around campus, and seeing some "unusual" driving, which is saying something for the college town of San Marcos, America...  Well, fast forward to last night, when I'm driving down the hill to go watch the "confrontation" between the Houston Texans and the New England Patriots (I'm looking like a GENIUS right now if the Seahawks hadn't destroyed the Cardinals on Sunday, or even if Mojo hadn't picked the Seahawks)...  :)  Anyway, I reach the convenience store at the bottom of the hill, which already has a police cruiser in it accompanying the heavy traffic for this small parking lot.  SUDDENLY I'm SLAMMING MY BRAKES as a BIG pickup truck decides to make the left turn across my nose, coupled with the BRILLIANT DECISION to then STOP right in my path, which probably resulted from a combination of hearing my brakes AND realizing that there was really nowhere for him to land in that parking lot.  Thankfully my vehicle stopped after slightly fishtailing and skidding closer to his truck.  At that point I had nothing left to do but hit my horn as his truck creeped its way into the crowded parking lot, just hoping that the police officer had either seen or heard the near miss.

So back to football, I went 7-3 on my predictions for this week, and am now 4 games above the .500 mark for the season.  I had an interesting comment on yesterday's blog entry that the Dallas game may have been the Cowboys (+3) when I picked them to beat the Bengals, but I went back and saw that I had typed in (-3) when I selected them.  I would have taken Dallas (-3) in that game, so I'll stick with taking the loss (especially considering that there was no money riding on it).  My mistake in giving away the six extra points if the line did not actually change that much.  As I sit here typing this, I'm thinking that maybe the line could have changed almost a touchdown due to the fatality accident involving the Cowboys nose tackle and one of the practice squad players this past weekend.  I enter my picks with the Friday morning lines, and I stick with those numbers regardless of any subsequent movement in the lines.  Thank you M. Prosk for trying to make me look better though, which is definitely a monumental task...  :)

A couple of short stories from my station in the hallway at work this week for ya...  At the "checkpoint" that I monitor, where no beer bottles or glasses are allowed to pass, the customers are required to transfer their beverages into plastic cups.  Well a few nights ago (although I should honestly NEVER be baffled by anything that I see at this point), as a guy holds the plastic cup while the girl that he's with pours her beer into it, he holds the cup parallel to the ground so that the beer won't foam up (which I really appreciate).  The problem is, he NEVER tilts the cup upward, and the beer inevitably spills from the STILL parallel cup onto the floor...  :o  Merp...

Someone actually made me smile later in the week without me having to clean up anything...  :)  A couple of the university's football players were ascending the stairs on their way to The Veranda (which I have been told on more than one occasion are quite numerous, and thank you very much for pointing that out to me), when the second of the two grabs his hamstring in jest as they pass by...  I'm now surprised that it took almost three months for someone to think of that...

Oh, one more from work, and this made me laugh out loud when it happened...  There is a corner that you have to round before you approach the doorway cutout (there is no door there) that I am stationed behind, and I was using the top of the doorway to stretch (basically imagine me signaling a 'touchdown' while propped up on my tippy toes - I'm six foot tall to begin with also)...  As the first girl in a group rounds the corner, she looks to her left, then looks back to her right, up at me, and GASPS...  I start laughing as she backtracks into our 'shot bar' EXCLAIMING, "that was terrifying..."  :)  By the time her group made their way past me a few minutes later, I was immersed in a conversation with... somebody??, and was unable to let her know that I get that reaction all the time...  ;)

I hope that this little ramble is enough to get you through this cold and bitter day, and I'll see you again tomorrow with some Las Vegas vacation chatter...  Have a great day!