Here’s our text history over the past couple weeks:

May 6

Mom: Lakers SUCK!

May 9

Mom: Is M Gasol related to P Gasol?

Me: Yes! Brothers!

Mom: M has his head in gear this game…unlike P yesterday

Me: M is also younger, better looking, and potentially more talented.  Plus he doesn’t play for LA.

Mom: Yup.  All good points.  But he is kinda tubby… I should talk!

Today, May 15

Mom: R u watching BB?

Me: Oh, thanks for reminding me!

Mom: Do you think Bosch is gay?

Me: No, although I never thought about it.  Why do you ask?

Mom: Weak chin.

The Airport Greeters:

I love a capella singing.  I think my favorite part of this video is the “Return of the Mack” guy with the sunglasses (assuming he’s truly caught off-guard and not a plant). He’s so perfect for the song!

The Train Station:

It’s so cool how people go from being “stunned passersby” into performers in a moment.

One of the songs we sang for our performance was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which is one of my favorite Christmas songs. Of all the versions, though, this may be the best:

Official video coming soon!

I have a good rain jacket, as all Portlanders must, and felt fully equipped when it first started raining during my commute.  I park my bike outside at school, though, and quickly realized I had underestimated the discomfort a wet bicycle seat can cause… as well as the sheer amount of water a bicycle seat can hold.

This is what my jeans looked like after my first post-rain ride home:

However!  I wasn’t bothered by the wet bicycle seat because that was also the day I decided to take a new route up North Williams Avenue.  I was in fact pleasantly surprised to see that Williams not only has clearly-marked bike lanes, the bike lanes are complete with banana peels, coins, mushrooms, power boosts, stars and even a few turtle shells.  Apparently some awesome rogue Portlander decided to paint icons from Mario Kart on the bike lanes, making my ride home that day (and every day after) totally awesome.

I later found out it was recently covered on the local news:

Please note how everyone in this video successfully avoids the banana peel.

In the fall of 2007, my brother was an intern for a US Senator from Montana in Washington, D.C.  He was living in a house with two roommates, one of whom was a family friend we’d known for years.  The family friend, who we’ll call Alison, is stunningly beautiful and sweet.  She also has incredible dark brown, curly hair that everyone in their right mind notices and admires. (This information will be important later).

The following are some of my favorite stories from Peter’s time in DC, as I remember them.  I have also included some random photos from Washington to set the mood.

One time Pete saw two elderly women get into a yelling fight across the street from each other, which escalated to the point that one of them reached into her plastic shopping bag and yelled, “Oh yeah?  You know what?  I got something for ya.  I got something for ya right here!” as she pulled out… a table lamp.  As Peter realized it wasn’t a gun and his heart slowed a bit, the woman started waving the lamp over her head and walking toward her opponent.  I believe this is when my brother turned down a side street.

Another time, Pete was walking into the Metro station to go to work one morning and a man on the street asked him for money.  Pete replied honestly that he didn’t have any, but then, feeling bad, mumbled something along the lines of, “But I’ll probably have some change later, when I come back.”  He had no idea that the very same man would be waiting in the very same place that evening, almost 12 hours later, when Pete walked out of the Metro station to go home after a long day of work.  The guy looked at him and said, “Where’s my change, man?”

Pete’s house didn’t have a washer and dryer, so he had to go to a laundromat to wash his clothes.  Once, he watched a man come into the laundromat from the street, open a dryer full of someone else’s clothes and pee into the open dryer.  Then he zipped up, closed the door, and left.  This story haunts me to this day, as I don’t have a washer and dryer in my current apartment and have to use a laundromat.

One of my favorite stories, though, involved Pete and Alison walking on a main street near their house when a woman drove by, rolled down her car window, and yelled out the window to Alison, “OOOH girl you got good hair!”

In November of that year, my dad and I went to visit Peter in DC.  The three of us were walking along the same street where Alison’s hair was so aggressively complimented, when a woman came up next to us at a crosswalk and said, “I like your little jacket, Miss Lady.”  I was wearing my rain jacket at the time (see photo) and I was in the middle of a conversation, so I ignored the woman, assuming she couldn’t possibly be talking to me.

As the light turned green and we started to walk away from her, she yelled after my brother, “Tell her… Tell her I like her little jacket!”  Pete turned around and said “Thank you!” and then hit me on the arm, explaining that I should respond to people on the street who compliment me.

My uncle John even came up with a slogan:

“Dr. Tom’s. Good for what ales you.”

Piece of Mind has never been so affordable!

The only problem is that there aren’t any trees on the deck, so I’d either need to tie the hammock to the railing, which would mean it would have to be in one of the corners… or I’d need a hammock stand.

Okay, so after I find some good cheap hammocks online, I search Craigslist for a hammock stand. No luck. I turn to Google products… Lots of results. When I sort them based on price, the cheapest one is this (click on the image to enlarge it):

Which is exactly what I was looking for, obviously.

Motivational Fitness Video.

I thought the whole email prank was so funny that I lay in wait for the perfect time to pull the same stunt with my friends and/or coworkers.

Much to my delight, within a week or so, our HR person sent out an email to the entire company saying she wanted to decorate the first floor bulletin board with photos of “how the employees of The Foundation spent the 80′s.”  She said there would be a contest for the best photo.  Her email went to the entire company.

I almost immediately responded and chose three of the (very few) men I work with to call out.

I know how Matt, Sean and Dave spent the 80′s, I said, because there’s video of it. Then I included a link to the video and all its spandex and aerobic glory.

It was about 4:30 on a Friday when I sent the email, and Matt and Dave were both already gone for the weekend.  (Sean responded almost immediately, asking if Dave had told me about the Reunion Tour ’09 plans that were in the works.)  After sending it, I got a little nervous that the guys might not think it was as funny as I did… so I sent a separate email to them saying that I chose to pick on them because I knew they could take a joke, and I hoped they weren’t offended.

Which brings me to today’s story.  I felt that since I threw Matt, Sean and Dave under the bus for a good laugh, it was only fair that I embarrass myself in front of our coworkers to make the playing field even.  Being an 80′s baby, I have access to very few of the photos of me from that decade.  However, I do have the electronic copy of this gem:

That’s right.  This is a photo of me wearing panda earmuffs that match my brother’s slippers, with a fake plastic stethescope in my belt loop (funny, considering how many real ones I had available to me), strangling my brother with a look on my face that says, “Nothing to see here…”  I mean, when he was strutting around with cheeks like that baring so much diaper-midriff, how was I supposed to compete for attention?

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you… Anne.

I work for a small engineering company employing around 40 people. Our CEO is a tall, swarthy European man with a thick accent. He is aggressive and short tempered. My co-workers euphemistically refer to him as “direct” and frequently talk about how “refreshing” it is to be dealt with in such a straightforward manner. I suspect these coworkers have daddy complexes, because I do not find it refreshing to witness my colleagues being berated.

Recently, our CEO was giving a presentation at our all staff meeting when someone asked him a question which prompted him to go looking in “my recent documents.” His computer screen was being projected, and so I could not help but notice that his list of recent documents included several unmistakably pornographic document titles. One was a jpeg file called “cum tits.”

The meeting went on for almost two hours after this and I appeared to be the only person who noticed.  I am pretty sure I turned bright red.  I was struggling to hold it together.

After the meeting, I googled “cum tits” and “aerospace” to see if it is some kind of industry lingo and got no hits. Then again, that would not have explained “pussy party.”