Hold the Carrot

In the middle of our adventures this morning, Jamba Juice called.  They asked us to please never ever ever (like ever) apply for a job there.  In fact, I think we could get them to pay us to NOT work there!  Why you ask?  Great question.

Last night, we had an Avatar: The Last Airbender marathon with some friends who had never seen it.  It's a wonderful show and if you haven't seen it, you'll love it.  Anyways, as most marathons go, this was a call for major amounts of junk food.  We did not skimp.  Double stuffed Oreos, donuts, two bags of chips, jelly beans, 3 bags of popcorn, and a tube of cookie dough.  Unfortunately, a better part of the food was eaten that night.  Katie and I stayed up even later after this watching a chick flick.  We woke up this morning wondering what to have for breakfast.

After so much junk food, we were so sick to our stomachs and overloaded on sugar that even Pinterest's deliciously sugary recipes had no appeal.  That's when you know it's bad! We have recently acquired a blender and thought it would be a fantastic idea to make a smoothie!  We thought we would throw in all sorts of healthy things such as an apple, strawberries, yogurt, and juice.  Having seen my parents my make an extremely healthy smoothie everyday for years, I thought, "hey! why not throw in some of their ingredients!  You can't even taste the carrots they put in!"  I just received some free carrots from our cooking class so we pulled them out.  I grabbed the biggest one thinking the bigger, the healthier!  Can't go wrong with that right....wrong. very wrong.

We threw the massive carrot in and cranked that puppy up!  Excited to taste our masterpiece, we grabbed a spoon and tried it out.  Note to the audience: carrots have a very dominant flavor.  It tasted heavily of carrots!  This is not how we imagined our delicious fruit smoothie turning out.  What else could we do but add in more ingredients to make up for the taste!  Lots and lots of strawberries were added and a splash of juice. Repeat.  No matter how many more ingredients were added, it still had a slight taste of carrot we could not shake.  We finally cut our losses and gave up at the point when our blender was full.  We could not repeat anymore.  That smoothie was about as smerfed up as it would get.  All in all, it was still pretty decent!  Although we might have just been saying that to make ourselves feel better...please just let us believe the former.

Self Discoveries.

This summer, I've taken up employment at a local call center.  During my long days of training, I came to several conclusions while I was supposed to be learning how to engage, be empathetic, and listen.  Yes, I recognize the irony in not listening to a lesson about listening.  But if I'm being honest, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on customer management- pretend to be interested and above all else, don't ever tell the customer he/she is an idiot.  Even if he/she is potentially the dumbest person I've ever smerfed with in my life.

But I digress.

The following are very important life lessons I will remember always.

1. Long nails give me the heeby jeebies.  Maybe it's because I played piano for a very long time, and the importance of having consistently short nails was ingrained to me in third grade when my piano teacher would not allow me to continue playing until I cut my nails, washed my hands, and was thoroughly lectured on the negative effects long nails have on performance.  One of my coworkers has freakishly long nails, and every time I see them, I shudder and all I can think of is the disturbing picture I saw in a Guinness world records book once of the longest nails in the world.  Am I alone here?  Long nails are the worst.  
2. I have very little patience.  We played twenty questions as a bonding experience one of my first days, and I was interested for the first three questions or so.  Then I lost all hope and spent the rest of the game calculating how much money I was being paid per minute to listen to my coworkers try to identify a taco in twenty questions or less, completely tuned out.  Which brings me to my next point.
3. I have a breaking point when it comes to learning new material, after which I am decidedly done.  I am unable to continue paying attention, and I zone out.  I quickly realized if I sat at the back of the room and leaned in to my cubicle, it looked like I was just following the lecture on my computer, and my instructor was not able to see anything I was doing.  That is how I read upwards of a dozen books in three weeks of training.
4. According to my instructor, adding "mundo" to the end of any word basically makes it Spanish.  True storymundo.

As a bonus, I found this on my second day.  What a great indicator of my time as an inbound phone technical specialist.  Smurf this, indeed.

Awwww, Yeah!

I'm back.  It's been a long month of non-posting, but I have about seven inspirational stories that might make for very rambly, very confusing blog posts.  One of them might make some actual sense.  Don't quote me on that.

Since it's bothering me that the text I've written doesn't extend to the bottom of the picture, I'm going to include my latest favorite joke to fill up room.

What do you call a fake noodle?
Impasta!

Cheers, y'all.  See you later this week!

our new friend.

i was talking to sara about the nice opthamologist i met last friday. she reminded me that he was actually a phlebotomist. then asked me if i knew what an opthamologist was, anyway. yes, i do- it's an eye doctor. then marina had to show us up. we're both wrong- eye doctors are called optometrists. then we started talking about optomologists, and got all turned around trying to figure out what an optomologist and opthamologist is. we still aren't sure.

but i digress.

last friday, i met a nice phlebotomist (guys, that word is spelled right- i googled it!). i went in to give blood after physical science and was settled with a phlebotomology (that one is probably definitely misspelled) expert named landen. remember that one time i explained how i'm crazy, but i try to dole it out? well that went out the window in his presence. i'm a rambler. that much is painfully clear if you actually read the whole first paragraph. when i'm nervous (i get realll scared when i give blood), things get much stranger.

turns out my phlebotomologist friend is good at rolling with the punches. when i accused him of not doing his job right, he didn't jab the needle in harder. when i panicked because i almost fell out of my tilty chair, he showed me how it goes back and forth just a weensy woony bit and told me to cool it- it's not an exercise chair. when jessie mentioned that she drinks blood sometimes, he was only mildly alarmed. most importantly, he only gave me the "wow this girl is insane" side glances a few times. guys, he's a pro.

finally, before i left, he asked me which color gauze i wanted him to wrap my arm with. i told him i wanted both. he asked what color i wanted first, to which i replied "surprise me." surprise me he did.

that's a bow, you guys! a bow, on top of the regular wrap!

anyway, sorry if you were hoping for a real story, and you read all this just to find out i'm done, and there wasn't even a point to this post. jeez, cut me some slack, it's two in the morning and i've been working on accounting homework for at least five of the last eight hours (ok, ok, at least 90 minutes of that five hours was spent smerfing the internet). on that note, night night, don't let the bed bugs bite!

-katie

There might be vampires in this post. Possibly.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are now several weeks into the semester, and you know what that means. Cookies, you ask? No. Don't be ridiculous. (Okay, fine. I'm willing to share my cookies. Actually I'll pay you to eat some of my cookies. That's a lie; I won't. Just come eat some.) No, getting this far into the semester means that it's time to plan out the rest of our lives, or else we will die alone living under a bridge with no college education and only really crappy snacks. At least that's what I presume will happen. These past couple of weeks, we have been tackling what is probably the easiest of the upcoming life decisions: housing.

Our journey began at the campus housing fair. Actually I didn't go to this, I had pesky commitments like "work" and "class" to attend to, but Jessie, Katie, and Sara did. Apparently at least one apartment complex guaranteed marriage. They brought back many fliers. An intimidatingly large mountain of fliers, in fact. We decided that naturally, the only logical time to look through these fliers was three in the morning on Friday night. Luckily Katie was there to rethink my decisions, as my attention span capped out at about twenty seconds, and I placed at least three options in the "no" pile because they were too complicated to read. Eventually, we narrowed down our options.

And then it was time for apartment hunting! We didn't tour any sketchy, we-might-be-murdered looking places at all! Nope! Not a single one! It also wasn't hailing, and we didn't knock on any doors and ask random strangers to show us their apartments! And none of the places smelled weird at all! And we didn't base our decision at all on how the apartments smelled! That would be ridiculous!

Anyways, we finally decided to live at Glenwood, land of the many dead animals and antler light fixtures. We're irrationally excited about this. Anyway, when contract signing time came, I learned just how efficiently my friends can stalk me. They found my home address, emergency contact information, and social security number all without any input from me. I'm not totally sure how concerned I should be about this. But it's official now; we have a home! Or, you know, we will in like seven months. And it's a beautiful, wonderful place and there's only like one vampire lurking in the path to campus. We'll almost definitely survive. Sara beat him off with my purse the first time, and only minor injuries were sustained.

I hope you all are having a fabulous week! Smerf! (I'm bad at this.)

if he could've, i think he would've run away. screaming.

i had an encounter with one of the new boys in our ward yesterday. his name is britton (i think... he didn't stick around long enough for me to double check) and he is in the same physical science class as jessie and i. jessie, social butterfly that she is, invited him to sit with us, and then walk back to the dorm with us afterward.

it just so happens that i get a little tongue tied around new people sometimes, and i say all the wrong things. it also just so happens that i have been a bundle of nerves lately as i consider my various potential classes/futures. i've been really stressed the last few days about making sure i'm in good classes this semester that i'm more socially inept than usual.

with that in mind, consider what this poor new kid must be thinking as he walks down freshman hill with jessie and myself as i start rambling about my mid-year crisis and how conflicted i've been feeling. then jessie, trying to comfort me, mentions my mini-breakdown/cry fest the night before, and that's it. we've completely lost him.

i wish i could've told him i'm not normally so smerfing chaotic, but if i'm being honest... i'm a big basket of crazy. i saw him later that night and apologized while explaining that i usually dole out the crazy in little bits until people are used to me. but i don't think he understood.

tragic, really.

howdy, pardners!

life is tough. we all need a break sometimes, to vent or think things through or (in my case) to ramble. hence, the blog. being the first to post is a daunting challenge, but i never back down from a challenge!*

mostly, i just want to have the bragging rights of being the first one to post a blog. so why am i here? well it seemed like a good idea at the time. i'm not the type who is good with words or has an innate humor that makes for a lifetime of blog-able stories, but i am the type to start projects right and left with every intention of developing life long talents and abilities (so far, i have three unfinished scarves, two other blogs i never post on and one dog back home who is selectively trained). probably, this will lead to another dead end buuuut... we'll see!

with that in mind, welcome to our blog and smerf out!

-katie

*ok that's a big ole lie. i back down from stuff all the time, but it's generally for relatively acceptable reasons (i.e. when spiders or hard work or any kind of physical exercise enters the picture)