I Need You Like A Penny Needs A Wishing Well

In no particular order, here is a list of things that I have recently either found and love, or rediscovered and love:

1. Chocolate pudding cups. Wow. They're fantastic. Nothing cools you off after a long hot day like a couple chocolate pudding cups. Maybe it's a combination of the stroll down memory lane and the fantastic texture, all mixed with chocolotasticity, but it is fantastic. Easily the best purchase I made to start off the semester.

2. ESPN.com's fan passport. It's like a memory vault for every sporting event you've ever been to. You go in, find your MLB, NCAAF, NFL, whatever team, and then select the games you've been to, and it let's you jot a couple notes about it, and then rank the experience. Then it stores it for you so in case you ever need to pull it up (read journal, scrapbook, blackmail), it's there for you. Fantastic. I spent about 25 minutes making sure I had listed every baseball stadium I had been to, and every major sporting event I had attended. Some of the minor ones I left off, like I didn't list that I had gone to spring training games in the summer of 1993. But I definitely did. Many.

3. Skype. Ask me how much I pay to call all over the US as much as I want? $3. That's it. No joke. It's amazing. The hitch is that you have to be hooked up to the internet, but with wifi everywhere and a connection in my room, that's no problem at all. Need to ask the parents about travel arrangements? Done. Cougs just upset the #3 ranked team in the nation? Phone ringing off the hook. Issue with a credit card? Taken care of. From anywhere, to anywhere. $3. Beautiful.

4. Wearing a ball cap. Love it. I had gotten out of the habit of it for several reasons. I wouldn't wear it on days I had to work because I knew it would jack up my hair and I didn't want to re-do it. I didn't wear one on days where I had to act professional (ok, so that might be a stretch. More like on days that I had to interact with people and didn't want them to think I was an immature adolescent, and yes, this included trips to walmart), for much the same reason. And I rarely wore them on days when I was going to see The Girlfriend. I don't think that needs to be explained. However, here on my rock, other than class, there is no one I really need to impress. My classmates don't care anywhere near as much about fashion as people at BYU did (which I didn't really notice until I got here, but wow, Provo and Belmont in particular are ridiculously superficial. I fully believe that moving to Belmont ensured that I would graduate single.) so this Saturday I decided to go with my beloved Cal-State Fullerton cap. It felt like a slice of heaven, deep-fried and wrapped in bacon. Honestly, I think I'm going to make Saturday mandatory cap day and Sunday, after church, mandatory basketball shorts and T-shirt day. Done and done.

5. Boy Meets World. Cory, Topenga, Shawn, Eric, Feeny. I have seasons 4-7 on my laptop. It's like 100 episodes. Set for at least the semester. You want to bring a smile to my face, ask me about my deep and abiding love for Boy Meets World. Better yet, want to bring a bigger smile to my face, ask Mike about my deep and abiding love for Boy Meets World.

6. French Bread. It's what we use for the sacrament here. I know it doesn't change the ordinance, but it certainly is a little more incentive to get there on time.

7. The Oven. For years, (yes years) I had mocked Mike for using an oven for all of his heating demands. He'd put chicken nuggets in there instead of using the far more efficient microwave. It would blow my mind because I would already be half done with my meal by the time the oven had pre-heated. Give me convenience over quality was my motto. Lately, I've come to see his point. The taste comparison...isn't even a comparison. Made some chicken nugget parmigiana (go ahead, act like you couldn't see me doing this. My only question is, has anyone else ever heard of it? If not, I'm so calling it a new creation), and decided to use the oven. I figured if I had to wait for the noodles to boil, why not see how things turn out if use the oven. How, you ask? Fantastically. That's how they turned out. Now I'm hooked. I don't even have a baking sheet. I'm literally just laying aluminum foil on the rack and placing the meat on the foil. Clean up is a breeze and it tastes great. I'm sold.

Word

The Mate Was A Mighty Sailing Man, The Skipper Brave And Sure

For the first time in over a year, I find myself back in a lecture hall. But this is nothing like BYU. For starters, the class is substantially more... diverse than any class I had at the Y, and this school doesn't have an athletics program. But most notably, I'm only in class for 5.5 hours a day at the most. Some days it's only going to be 3.5. That's it. I can't remember ever having a semester where I averaged under 6 hours of class a day, and the only time I had less than four hours of class a day was when I set my schedule around the idea of every weekend being a three day weekend (which, for those of you still in school, I highly recommend. It's worth the time and trouble to look into the possibility of scheduling all your classes Monday through Thursday. It would be even more worth it if you could get a couple people together to do the same. That way you all have the same stellar three day weekend every weekend. Believe me when I tell you, there is no where you can't get to, enjoy, and get back from in three days.)

It does make for light days, but it also has led me to study for more hours than I care to account for. It's not too bad, but I can easily see why some of the 4th or 5th semesters are just counting down the weeks.

Then again, we do live on a tropical island. A tiny, tropical island, but a tropical island nonetheless. How tiny you ask? This tiny:

Just the blob, not the whole square, represents the to scale size of the island. Amazingly tiny compared to anything else. But I'll take it.

Word.