The Eight Hour Meeting

As is the case with most weeks, this week was pretty much completely normal. Pokemon Go was probably the most exciting thing of the week, and that is not saying much. After a long slow climb, we were able to level up in Pokemon Go. Since we do not devote very much energy to this game as of late, our progress has been rather slow.  For over a month now, we have been saving up our coins in the game to buy some magic egg and evolve a whole bunch of our Pokemon all at once. This in turn allowed us to quickly level up and become Jedi Masters/Pokemon Sensei.

Our hope is to out wait everyone else who is still playing Pokemon Go (which has to be like what, 40 people, right?) then take over everything. "Slow and steady wins the race" is what we keep telling ourselves. There is a girl that Engineer R has peripheral and brief association with through school who plays Pokemon, but she more seems like the lone wolf type of player.  Surely her stamina will begin to wane soon..........

In other news, don't sit on wet grass.

It was wet grass. I promise.

---

As a number of you are aware, sitting in meetings can be rather boring. I've never really met a meeting I like. Meetings are for people that wear Desert Beige suits from Mr. Mac.

For some reason, people see the need to schedule meetings in the early hours of the day or at 4:30 pm, right when you are trying to go home. And at times, people will schedule meetings that start in the morning and do not adjourn until 4:30 pm. Engineer R sat through such a meeting this week. If meetings bore you, this post may not be the best thing to read right now.

I would tell you that the meeting Engineer R went to was highly enlightening and engaging. But that would be stretching the truth further than a pair of leather pants being stretched between two fruit wains. (I'll bet you never expected us to use both spellings of wain/wane in a single post, did you?).

Nice shiny leather pants.

This meeting Engineer R attended was supposed to teach graduate students how to obtain funding from national agencies. (The NIH, the NSF, the NBA, the NFL, the NRA, the NAACP, etc.). Obtaining external funding is of course a rather worthwhile goal. Maybe at some point Engineer R will desire to devote three straight months of his life to such worthy goals. Although, knowing how slow some of these national agencies move, Donald Trump could be finishing up his second term in the White House by the time Engineer R gets a reply. (It all depends on who shows up more strongly to the polls, the NRA or the NAACP).

The speaker at this meeting was one of those pant-suited ladies with a brushed aluminum coffee thermos permanently affixed to her hand. Most of her jokes either dealt with various methods of imbibement or were rooted in arcane references to 14th century humanist philosophy.  She also liked to throw around big words like "cognitive dissonance," or "post-masticative hypoglycemia," or "Massachusetts." And of course, Engineer R was the hapless sap whom she chose to sit by at lunchtime. Out of 70 tables in the room, she just had to choose the one where Engineer R was merely trying to eat a roast beef sandwich without drawing attention to himself. 

Engineer J continues to do the school thing. The bulk of her week is taken up by listening to people with large vocabularies, but few spoken English skills. We are considering sending an anonymous email to the professor to request that he send a different graduate student to teach the course for him.

This about sums up the post. Tune in next week to possibly hear a story about a job interview with a tractor salesman.

Wearing Spandex and Riding The Bus

The original title of this post was "Sorcery and Science," but the current title is more catchy I feel. Nevertheless, the original title does give a nice introduction to two of today's prevalent themes. First we talk sorcery. Then we talk science.

Nice leather spandex pants

As some of you are aware, last weekend was not successful for those who fall in the upper echelons of the ovine-caprine scale. Losing to a team whose core fan base considers pro wrestling re-runs to be quality entertainment can be frustrating. Now admittedly, not every Fruit is MUSSing themselves over men wearing spandex and women in leather pants (although some still are). Indeed, these spandex and leather loving fans are more recently being supplemented by persons that would otherwise just fall in the ambivalent middle of the o-c scale.  These persons only like to ride the fruit wagon now that being a Fruit is popular. 

Just remember, the longer a Fruit is on a wagon, the more rotten it becomes. Eventually the sorcery ends.

Do you ride the bus or the bandwagon?

In other news, Engineer R pulled the bus cord for the first time after almost a year of riding the county bus. This is that cord you pull when you want the bus to stop. Since he previously always rode to stops that multiple parties had selected as their destination, it had never prior been necessary for him to pull the stop cord. However, with the change of residence--and in an attempt to avoid riding the bus that slowly ambles about campus shuttling mostly freshman from their dorms--Engineer R rode an obscure bus to an equally obscure location. Hence the pulling of the chord.

Engineer R rides the bus

When he is not pulling cords on buses, Engineer R pretty much does nothing. He has two classes on mathematical statistics and time series, then some credits of research, all of which he dabbles in. This leaves him free to eat dinner at home and to exercise and lose some of the 90 pounds he has gained in the last year. (Good thing spandex stretches, right? Rest assured though that he is not going to become a pro wrestler.)

Engineer J has significantly more responsibilities at school. Because of the structure of her major, she has ended up taking a number of 1-credit courses that meet for long hours each week. Some of these classes take place in the evening. They offered sections that were earlier in the day, but they were all full by the time Engineer J could send something like 29 copies of her transcripts and finally get approval to register. Engineer R has found by sad experience that it often takes a lot of attempts to finally get it right with these state schools. Maybe next year.

In closing, we are going to include some images from Engineer J's homework. These are images she has created. Comment below if you have further questions or comments. Or if you need a referral of a good leather clothing shop.

The (Nearly) Yearly Fate

Within the past few years, it has come to our attention that some things are just facts of life.

If you do not go to the dentist, your teeth fall out.

If you come to teach a class in a belly shirt, people will make fun of you on Facebook. (Pro tip: don't wear belly shirts if you have stretch marks on your stomach).

If you eat 60 chicken nuggets in a single sitting, you might end up in the ER. (I actually have witnessed such a feat three times: With chicken nuggets, with tater tots, with breaded shrimp. None of them have resulted in hospital visits). These are just the facts of life.

Dame à la mode.

As some of you are aware, this weekend will pit persons of various extremes on the ovine-caprine scale in an athletics competition. Engineer J maintains a pretty even keel throughout these (nearly) yearly proceedings, but Engineer R is (unfortunately?) quite involved in them.

• He wonders why the caprine student section purposefully chose to name themselves after a near-euphemism for cow-pies. 
• He wishes we could hang onto the ball better. We just cannot keep stepping in the cow muss. 
• He wonders why it has become a fact of life that the goats always end up eating our laundry. 
• He wonders if it even matters.
• Thank goodness for regional conference. No hats on the pulpit this week. 

Admittedly, neither of us have lost much sleep over the upcoming weekend. Most of our lost sleep has come at the hands of the 5 a.m. visits from the garbage truck. (Why did we have the unfortune of being assigned the apartment that is right above the communal dumpster?) 

Since most of our waking hours seem to be spent chasing papers around the diaspora of buildings and bureaucracy, this post will have to end here. Next week we promise some photos of what we have been doing, so consider tuning in. 

The Land of Milk and Honey

This past week we [returned/came officially for the first time] to the land of milk and honey (LoMaH). As I explained last time, this piece of titular geography should be taken more literally and less figuratively.  For some reason we use the term "milk and honey" to refer to a place of regal opulence and promise. But, I mean, does anyone actually consider the consumption of milk with honey to be a delicacy? If so, you are probably one of those freaks that also eats honey on your stewed tomatoes. (Yes, I have eaten this. No, it was not appealing in the slightest). Milk and honey is one of those food combos that falls into the category of "all my real food is gone, but tomorrow I go on Christmas break so I better not go shopping, let's just eat cherry pie filling and a handful of uncooked rice" type of foods.

I think this literally is a re-labeled jar of  spoiled mayonnaise.

Every time that I drive into LoMaH, I always drive past a shop that purports to sell "raw honey." Isn't "raw honey" just a euphemism for "still probably has wax and bee's wings in it, but we will pass this off as healthy"? When I Googled "raw honey" most the sites that came back were from the nether-regions of the interwebs. I'm sure we have all seen such sites. They have the ads for "One weird tip to cut your belly fat in half" or have flashing banners proclaiming "This little-known loophole saves (fill in current state) drivers $297 a year on car insurance." Maybe my time in LoMaH will help me better understand the benefits of raw honey.

---

Part of getting all of our possessions to LoMaH was renting a UHaul truck. Although we have only been married for a short while, we have a lot of stuff. I think that this is one of the major reasons why the median marriage age is on the rise around the world. Back when our ancestors got married, they were lucky if they even had a change of pants or a pair of shoes to their name. We've all heard stories about great-great-great Granny Mildred and how she moved an entire city block in a 4' x 4' handcart. Now days getting married necessitates having at least three or four pairs of shoes. And let's not get started on pants and their necessity in marriage. (Okay, in a word, they are necessary; however, you would not know it from the looks of some of these LoMaH denizens. Perhaps this is to cut down on moving costs).

To make a long story short, we ended up renting a UHaul truck from a place that pretty much resembled Watto's Junk Shop. The place was run by a squat balding man that probably was wearing a shirt, but I cannot remember. (Pants are a definite check mark though. He must not be a LoMaH local). The walls of the shop were adorned with all sorts of blasters and gadgets that who-in-the-galaxy knows what did. There may or may not have been a small horse-like creature trotting around the show-floor. We did not go in the basement part of the shop, but I'll bet that Jabba the Hutt had someone in carbonite down there.

Originally we had reserved a 15 foot truck, but I guess that reservations with UHaul are just façades to make you think you will get what you want. We ended up getting a 10 foot truck, which worked out just fine. At one point we were actually offered a 20 foot truck, but when you are expecting to be flying an X-wing, being offered a Death Star instead is not exactly what you want. We had a lot of stuff, but not that much stuff. Plus, we did not have designs on shooting a high power laser cannon at anyone.

Our apartment here in LoMaH is pretty nice, certainly a step up from where we were before. No snoring neighbors, no maggots in the vacuum, and no people playing night games until 3 a.m.

Tune in next week. I do not know what the topic will be, but it probably will have something to do with the U of Fruits.