I am *so* embarrassed right now. And disclaimer: I am usually a very composed person when meeting famous folks I adore. I don't hug them, or give them scary slashy fanfic, or tell them everything I know about them. Cause those things? Are creepy. And I've met people who I just absolutely loved, and been able to make polite conversation just fine.

But you know what I forgot? Meeting people that I love that I also think are brilliant is different strokes, baby. That just raises the bar like whoa, because you can't just be polite. You have to be smart, too. And not just every day smart, cause they're brilliant, and every day smart to them is just like stupid.

I went to go see Tavis Smiley today. My other Tavis-loving-friend couldn't make it, and she was joking with me before hand. "Are you going to be able to keep your hands off him?" But really, she should have joked: "Are you going to be able to form a single sentence around him?"

I met him. I rode the elevator with him and his entourage. He shook my hand. I turned bright red (hard for a black person, btw) and my mind went absolutely blank. Here's our conversation.

TAVIS: Hey, are you coming to see me speak?

ME: (blushing furiously) Uh, yeah.

TAVIS: GREAT! What's your name?

ME: (in the most ridiculously tiny whisper ever because otherwise he might have heard my voice shaking) Liz

TAVIS: Nice to meet you Liz. Hope you enjoy! See ya later -

ME: .....bye ....

*headthuddesk* Please note, I didn't even manage to form a word with two syllables. And I'm a talker. It's what I do!

Called my mother to tell her and she laughed until she cried. I should not be allowed in public.

My 11 year old nephew just sent me an animated text message of a leprechaun (elf maybe?) shaking his nekkid butt. Am completely traumatized. Have no idea how to respond, as I have not been 11 in a very long time and did not have texting back in the middle ages. Am trying very hard not to be the old stodgy stick in the mud I swore I'd never be when I was 11 and yet feel very much like an old, stodgy, stick in the mud.

This is why I cannot have children. There would be some seriously revisiting of sins.

I almost never watch the Oscars anymore - I just don't see enough movies in the theater to be able to root for anything, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it. But after a day of playing with shelter dogs, we went to go see Slumdog Millionaire tonight. And I loved it, and I'm pretty sure everyone else did to. And then it was cool to get home and see it just won a bunch of Oscars. :D

Watched T:SCC this morning, and it was my first wtf episode in a while. Just m'eh, all around. Next week must be better.

TAR is so beautiful, but Linda is just breaking my heart. And I want to sit and drink beer and watch silly Americans throw pies at each other.

So, growing up in San Francisco, you never really understand the true joy of spring. Cause winter in SF is great! It's warm and sunny - way better than summer. So spring is kinda non-existent.

But in Seattle, you learn to love your sudden spring days. And today was so nice people! The perfect day to weed the garden, strip the evil ivy from the kitchen window (my apartment is so nice and bright now!) and get some mulching going on. Which I did. Somehow my rainbow chard made it through the winter of hell. Under 2 feet of snow, and they're still growing. Good stuff.

I have miscellaneous bulbs growing. I do half remember planting some. Maybe tulips? Definitely some daffodils. Maybe crocuses? I don't know, so I'm really excited to see what they are when they bloom.

Thanks to the wonderfulness of alamo_girl80 and xlivvielockex, I have a huge new guilty pleasure = 24. Why am I so late to the party? And why, (why?) did I decide to start just before midterms? Just finished Season 1 and am in total shock. Cannot wait to get started on S2.

Can't watch Top Chef finale until next week. It's safely stored on Bob the Tivo, and I keep wanting to peek. And weirdly, I think spring has jump started my muse again - I've had little stories and scenes flickering through my head this next week. Any day now, inspiration may strike! *crosses fingers*


PS - I won a $100 gift certificate to a fancy restaurant last night at a fundraiser for the Australian fire relief. Yay! (plus got to oogle cute rugby players, which is never a bad thing...)

There's a reason why I think spin-offs suck. And it's because every time there is a spin-off, there has to be a crossover. Always. It's like the great unwritten rule of television. And crossovers pretty much suck.

So I'm pretty surprised at how much I'm actually enjoying the GA/PP crossover (a little less now that I'm in hour two, but the Grey's half was great!). I forgot how much I love Addison on GA. And the song! Oh, the song. Even if the rest sucked, Derek's song made me giggle and snort, especially with them all singing. Something about the five of them really seemed like a group of old friends coming together again.

And the intern game was hysterically awesome - it was like camp and a surgical internship smashed together. With a prize for the winner!

Owen gets more complex every week, and I love watching Kevin McKidd act his freaking heart out. He is so wrong and so broken and even though he knows he's doing wrong he just can't figure out how to be right and it is just so sad. And it's a testament to war and how can anyone ever win when people are just not able to absorb that kind of pain without getting broken in so many ways?

Don't know if anyone but me is a Top Chef lover, but they had auditions today in Seattle for their next season (auditions were at this yummy restaurant in Queen Anne, and I so wanted to go and volunteer to taste the various dishes and help them decide - just out of the goodness of my heart and not because I'm obsessed with yummy food. Of course, I was stuck chemicalizing in lab instead and missed it completely).

I love this show. I'm sure it's why I ended over 15 years of happy vegetarian living (and gained however many meat-pounds). I'm also sure they need to have a season in Seattle so I can somehow wiggle my way into Restaurant Wars.

And I love Carla - and not just because her hair is as crazy as mine. And I love Stefan too and he absolutely deserves to win, but a not-so-secret part of my heart wants Carla to sweep in and Hootie-Hoo him right out the door.

That is all.

(except I haven't seen tonight's episode yet and I hope Fabio still has all his fingers). :D

My father is really my favorite person in the entire world. From this morning on the phone:

Me: Hey, Dad. I have a question for you.
Dad: Do you have your question card?

(This is what he always said to us when we were little annoying kids who asked way too many questions, and it still makes me giggle.)

Me: I do - should I put it in the mail?
Him: No, I'll take your word for it. Should I sit down?
Me: I don't know. How lazy do you feel?
Him: I want to go outside and sit in the warm sun.
Me (shrieking): Sun? You have sun? It's snowing here - again!
Him (laughing): Told you not to leave California
Me: You don't even sound sympathetic!
Him: That's cause I'm not.

In other wonderful news, I just tried to pay the parking ticket I got on inauguration morning - when I parked on the opposite side of the street and idiotically stuck my sticker on the right window as always, not realizing that it was no longer the curb-side window. Meanie cop wrote me a $20 ticket for putting it on the wrong window! I got heated. There may have been some tearing up of said ticket and using it for confetti after Obama's speech.

Anyway, I just called to try to pay it and the lady could not find it anywhere. Apparently there was either a typo or the officer didn't file it, but they can't find it so I ain't payin it! Yipppeee! My empty wallet smiles with quiet job and a little relief.

Did anyone else have a hard time watching Supernatural last night? I've been so digging Castiel and Bunny Colvin (I'm sorry, he'll always be Bunny to me!) and Anna that the more isolated epps have all been a little disappointing. ( But last night, I had to turn off after the first 10 minutes. ) I've read a lot of threads talking about misogyny and endemic racial bias in the show, and read them academically (with interest but not 100% belief). But last night was just too much.

So, I tried to flip over to GA, only to find that my ABC station (which lost its picture during Ugly Betty), then dropped sound for the first 20 minutes of GA. I thought this was part of my war with Comcast; turns out it was for the entire Seattle area. *iz sad*

Considering that I'm online, hopefully my Comcast war is over. But it's been going on since end of December (when their system suddenly dropped my automatic payment information) and each time I think it's fixed, something else goes wrong.

I just feel bad that their CSRs are so damn nice, even though one of them watches Lincoln Heights, which I just cannot support. And I'm the mean, grumpy person being irritable with nice people. I hated me when I worked customer service.

Am going to gym to hopefully run off my very bad temper.

You know how when you're a teenager, your mother nags you on and on about the simplest, most pointless things? And you inevitably end up rolling your eyes, and thinking, I know, already, and wondering why she thinks she needs to repeat the most basic instruction over and over? Like you could ever forget! Like you don't have two brain cells to figure it out even if she never told you? But inevitably, one day, you will forget.

While I was cooking today I decided I should clean the oven. It's due. And I've got one of those automatic oven cleaners, so all you have to do is lock the door and turn it on for three hours. But, wait! It's not that simple! First you have to look inside the damn thing and make sure you've taken out everything. Otherwise, your oven sets itself on fire. D'oh!

*rolls eyes* I know, Mom. It's right there on the inside of the oven door (which btw, you can only see if you remember to open it to check the contents. Which I didn't.

It was a disaster. There was so much smoke billowing out of the apartment through all the doors and windows, I'm surprised no one called the fire department on me. (Surprised and a bit worried - so much for my neighbors not letting me burn to a crisp!). And now, the apartment smells like melted plastic, and the oven is still full of thick, black, putrescent smoke.

Sigh.

Dear 49ers,

The Super Bowl party was a lot of fun. We watched the Cardinals and the Steelers play some great (and some not so great) football. Wish you'd been there! Maybe next year.

Love,

Liz

P.S. Seattle Times headline says: Santonio Holmes made a brilliant catch ... to give the Pittsburgh Steelers a record sixth Super Bowl title, 27-23 over the gutty Arizona Cardinals

gutty? Is that a good thing?

P.P.S. Watching in Seattle meant rooting for Arizona - every person at the party was still heated over losing to the Steelers 3 years ago. It made for a lot of screaming, jumping up and down and ref-smack-talking. Good times for me, even if the Cardinals lost. Did anyone see the 3-D commercials? The kids got all the glasses, so I saw 'em in 2-D and they didn't look too special.

I feel like I'm in Empire Records. Happy Rex Manning Day! Except there's no Manning in my Super Bowl. Hee!

The football helmet cookies turned out tasty, although our decorating skills were a bit... creative. I managed to do the Cardinals and the Colts, but gave up on the Steelers (cause black food coloring? Not in my box). So the rest were just bright colors, until the wine kicked in and we started spattering and dribbling and now they look like Jackson Pollack discovered the NFL.

I think Super Bowl Sunday is just like Thanksgiving, without all the family drama and with carte blanche to watch all the football I want.

I think I'm rooting for the Cardinals, because I love me an underdog story. But ... if the Steelers win, they beat out the Cowboys for most Super Bowl titles. So either way, I'm happy!

Off to the gym to run off all my beer, chips, burgers and cookies in advance. (Does that actually work?)

Two new things I just learned:

Kelli McCarty, who played Beth on the former soap Passions, was Miss American in 1991. Cool, huh?

Now that Passions has been canceled, she's apparently following her other career aspiration: porn. Yup. Her new hard-core porn movie is coming out this month. Hand to God

Not to be all skeeved out, but girl acted in shows on the Disney channel! How can you do porn after being on Disney? Doesn't that like, break the law of the universe?

Damn. That's all I can say. *shakes head*

I think it's exceptionally unfair that the television gods chose THIS WEEK to be reruns, when they should all realize I have exams this week and am therefore in need of quality television to procrastinate with.

I mean, seriously!

P.S. I have these little muscle tics - one in my knee and one in my eyelid. They are driving me batty.

You know, Bush has ruined the phrase 'heckofa job' for me. Really. I'm watching footage of the plane crash in the Hudson, which is crazy and miraculous and an amazing story. Everyone survived! And the entire Special Report is about how beautifully everyone handled their roles, especially the pilot. And I'm loving it, despite the fact that the newscaster keeps saying that everyone is 'gotten out of the plane safely' and that makes my English major's soul cringe.

Then he says: "Gosh, that pilot did a heckofa job" and now, I'm giggling. Made me think of that joke on NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" last week, which I can't type out cause it won't be funny but involved brown people and heckofa job and was all sorts of funny.

This disjointed entry replaces the whiny entry I was preparing to type about how Organic Chemistry has apparently stolen ALL of my creativity and I cannot think of anything to even dream about writing, much less try to plot out. I think maybe the more science and math I study, the more my little writerly self shrivels up and dies a little. *inserts appropriately tragic sigh*

Have not posted in ages. I point in the direction of finals and too many work shifts, of holidays and too much family time, of shoes and ships and sealing wax.

So. Quickly.

It is 9:16. The snow was supposed to turn to rain at 9:00 sharp. It is still snowing. Is it bad that I am constantly refreshing SchoolReport.org to see if classes tomorrow (first day, no less) are canceled? Am altogether too lazy to dig the car out of its spot (on a sidewalk - I'm sure I'll get ticketed) tonight.

In college, we never had snow days. We had a 'walking campus', so come snow, come ice, come hell itself freezing over, classes were held. My roommates and I created our own snow days (rules = over 6 inches on the ground, maximum of three per semester) to use at our convenience, when the thought of hiking a mile to class in deep snow was too overwhelming (or we were too hungover to successfully accomplish it).

I would do that tomorrow, if it weren't the first day of class, when I'm liable to get dropped if I don't make it.

Went for a looooong walk today and managed to miss much of wildcard football this weekend. Buddy le dog and I are now mutually exhausted, and instead of digging out my car, I am reading yuletide fic and batting away jealousy. I know some of you wrote and were written for - what am I missing? Rec some good stuff my way!

It's been a terrible day.

A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

My exam this morning went poorly, and I'm tired of the kids in class obsessed with comparing grades and answers.

My work meeting (yes, another one) went even worse and ended with me in tears. All my ideas were received negatively (we can't do that! we don't want to do that!) and then I got a lovely barrage of attacking questions. After the meeting, people came up to me individually to thank me for offering ideas and offer support, but by then it didn't matter. I can't believe it's still bothering me, but I just really feel awful - frustrated and emotional and marginalized all in a big smoothie of yuck.

Then got a call from the trainers asking me why I'd missed my scheduled appointment - reminder of why I don't schedule things out three weeks in advance - because I forget about them. I feel deflated and defeated and miserable.

And no, the rain doesn't help.

I should go to kickboxing and work off some of this bad feeling - I feel like Linus with his storm cloud o' angst. It was Linus ... right? But I also have some B&J New York Super Fudge Chunk in the freezer. Is it bad form to eat it before going to kickboxing? Cause right now, I think chocolate may be the only fix.

P.S. My computer is being slow and grumpy too - I think it's contagious.

An acquaintance (former friend) has a blog on blogspot. She writes about politics, dating, friends, life. She refers to people by initial or acronym, and yet includes enough information where their identity is no secret. She used to be part of a large group of friends, but consciously isolated herself and burned the bridges. Every person is aware of her blog. Many of them read it frequently. It's been a harmless source of amusement. She is judgmental; by posting her opinions on her blog, this group of people often reads and mocks her entries, although only with each other.

She has posted entries that are a small dose of truth with a hefty dose of fantasy. I have popped up in her blog, in a not very complimentary reference. A friend was the main subject of that post, and it was a burner. And now, my friend has popped up in the blog again. She sent a polite email requesting that the blogger please stop posting negative comments about her online, and also not make those same comments to the friends they have in common and has received no response. My mom always warns me the being online is not nearly as anonymous as we may think, and she is right. I'm sure this blogger has no idea that we knew of or read her blog. Does that make it okay to write negative comments about thinly disguised real people? I hear about real world ramifications to bloggers. Luckily, all I do is ramble on about television and football. Although, some teams may not like the comments below.

Speaking of football, I did terribly on my NFL picks last week, missing 6 out of the 14! Damn. I was stuck in a meeting all day Sunday, so I missed all of the Sunday games, and all the beautiful fall weather Seattle was rocking yesterday. Can't believe the Bills collapsed, and the Browns win was another stunner. Oh well, a new week looms.

( Week 9 Picks )

Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother were shot and killed today. Just heartbreakingly awful.

A routine foreign body removal turned into a three hour surgery nightmare at work today. We'd barely recovered when an HBC kitty came in, in rough, rough shape.

Ugly Betty made my heart sad last night.

My sister decided to get married this week. In San Francisco. In Forest Hill. My mother was so excited, because she thought they meant the Forest Hill Clubhouse - a beautiful place and wonderful for a wedding. But then called me, giggling, horrified and traumatized. Because they're not getting married in the clubhouse. They're getting married in Forest Hill bus station. In the underground.

There are rats in the underground. And it smells like pee. So ... really?

To each their own, I guess. It's unique, I guess. Interesting. And free. (But ... really?). Am suddenly very glad to be living 1,000 miles away and unable to hop a plane to stand in dark, dingy underground and have to plug my nose.

So ... am I a terrible sister?

This morning: 8am, ORAL physics midterm - 2 questions, 5 points. Gah! Was absolutely terrified, my hands were shaking, and of course I pulled out the one theory I couldn't remember exactly how to derive. But ... somehow I managed to blab out enough about isothermic processes and thermal expansion to score a 5/5! Yahoo!

I'm a hoarder by nature. I have little cash stores around the apartment, and I'm pretty creative. Inside my ski boots, under the wine crated in the hall closet, you name it, I've hidden something there. Works great - when I got robbed none of my "stash cash" was taken. Only problem is ... sometimes I can't find it. When I move, it'll be a freaky thing. They'll be cash popping up everywhere! But finding a surprise is 100 times the fun ... like today when I'm frantically looking for chapstick and instead find ... a $100 bill! Way better!

Am supposed to work overnight tonight, which I'm ticked about. I have a friend in town, plus I wanted to go to this presentation with the possibility of hot black men going as well. Instead, I got suckered into working from 6pm to 7am? Not. Fun. The hospital just called and for a moment, hope swelled. Maybe they didn't need me! But no luck. They'd FORGOTTEN I was working and had planned to send everyone home, but! Now there's an emergency case that needs to stay, so not only am I stuck working, but I'll only have one patient to tend. Booooring. Lame.

They just called back, and I'm off the hook! Yay! yiippeee! Yayayayayayayayay!

(I'm not thrilled or anything...)

Guess I'd better try to nap.

FNL is lurking on my computer, but I think it'll be my reward for making it through the night.

Happy First Day at Work! mkwhite

Holy crap, that's big. :) I'm just wishing I could come along bearing cookies and hot chocolate and to remind all of your new coworkers just how lucky they are to have you on their team. But ... since that might be embarrassing, as well as making your first day your last, I'll just have to send you good wishes via LJ. And text messages. And maybe an email also. *kisses of good luck*

Kick butt sugar pie!