I can has hub status?

Howdy all, I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving Break. I'll get to mine eventually, but first I have some stuff to talk about in my intro (for once). I learned that my blog is not being used as hub status! This is surely a travesty as I would not want people to not think I updated since they are using a less frequently updated (but still interesting) blog. I guess there's not much I can do to get people to change to mine since we agreed not to run ads on our blog (which was my only real option). I guess to appeal to the female audience, I could say something nice about women like....um....that dress does make your butt look big, which is pretty awesome if you ask me. I mean, we all gotta like the butts we have, it's not like we were all born with a detachable ass... Anyway, if you don't use my blog as a hub, that's fine. If you do read my blog though, feel free to comment. It's not that I get tired of seeing the same 3 commenters all the time (I'm just happy to see comments), but I'm sure the girls can come up with witty things to say to my posts.

In other news, No-Shave November ends today. This was my first time fully participating since the days before I shaved. I decided that for some reason, this would be my last one because by this time next year, I would have a girlfriend telling me not to do it or at least maybe I will have had a girlfriend. Another few of reasons why I probably won't do it again are:
1. My facial hair grows too slowly
2. Apparently the only facial hair I can grow fairly quickly is a neckbeard. If you don't know what that is, just don't go google it. If you do know, take comfort in the fact that it shall soon be gone.
3. When you have facial hair year round, spending a month not trimming it and making it look good is just not very fun.

Ok well that was a pretty lengthy intro, so how about I get into the week now? It could get long, but hopefully I'll be able to keep it to a reasonable length for you.

Monday:
Well in band, only 4 people turned in their forms for the trip. After 2 hours of playing, we got to the song that our secondary conductor lead on, so Ken decided to do spontaneous tryouts for his list for that trip. Now this was horrible for me because I had been playing 1st horn parts for 2 straight hours and before that, I had come home that day and played jazz music until I had no chops in an attempt to build them up. All in all, it was not a good idea. As he pulled me out of the class, he had me pick a song. I frantically looked through our folders, but it was no use. The song that I could handle at this point was the one we were playing. He told me to just take Water Music Suite, which involves a lot of high/above staff notes. Of course, I sounded terrible in his office, but we'll see what happens. I'm competing against the girl that stands next to me in jazz band who only shows up for concerts or this turning in her form (she has another band she's in as well), the girl that shows up every day but takes a ton of bathroom breaks and texts in class, and Erik. While there is no guarantee that even the first person on Ken's list would make it into this band, I would still really feel better to be first, so hopefully I'll get to go, but it's currently up in the air until whenever the people have made their decision.

Tuesday:
I skipped psych again because I didn't want to go and then in French, we finally learned more about our projects (that we had previously only heard about once). We learned they were due the next week. Now my group had no idea what to do, so we kind of decided to do a powerpoint, but it was a fail idea because all three of us were not there on the same day that whole week so we'll see what happens. I wish we had gotten more notice on this project, especially since it's a 5 minute presentation done in only French (how in the hell do I know 5 minutes of French after 1 quarter? I can do some descriptions, but if it comes down to it, I'll wind up having to count the passing seconds in French I suppose).

After jazz band, we left for Vancouver. Kathryn really wanted to drive part of the way, so I decided since I drive to Vancouver every other time and since we would be pressed for time on the way back, she could drive to grandma's house. I was carsick the first half because she was so bad, but it got less terrible once she learned that the speed limit is not some magic barrier preventing the car from going faster than what is posted. We met my cousin and his wife (the one that got married in Alaska) and grandma at the Olive Garden. I consumed a lot of breadsticks and the waiter kept calling me "junior" for some reason. I have no idea why, I was taller, bigger, and had more facial hair from him. It was really strange.

Wednesday:
We left around noon and had a rather quick drive to Sunriver. I got to go really fast as it was a two lane road with nobody really slowing me down and no cops on the way. My cousin was driving grandma's new Camaro, so he got to go pretty fast as well, which I'm sure he enjoyed. The continuing joke was that we brought way too much food and my uncle and I had a pretty funny text conversation that I will include tomorrow in my quote post. For some reason, grandma picked up pizzas before we left so they had time to get messed up in the car since we didn't keep them refrigerated. When we got there, the oven was broken (turns out the oven breaks whenever someone self cleans it, but the owners continuously neglect to replace the oven). Remembering that I learned once we could barbecue pizzas from Papa Murphy's, I suggested that. It turned out terrible. The first one actually caught fire. We burnt the crust black on 3 pizzas, including the pepperoni one. One of them had the toppings scraped off and made into a kind of soup. With the pepperoni, we scraped off some toppings and put them on toast. It was actually pretty good. My cousin and I were disappointed though because it turned out grandma did not actually buy 2 pepperoni pizzas as she said she did, so we had ruined the only one. After that, we all just went to bed since it was late.

Thursday:
The oven guy came at 7:30am to fix the oven which was really cool. After that, I took a walk with mom and dad and later met up with my uncle and aunt who had gotten lost. I was glad to get some exercise in because I knew the rest of my day would be spent watching football then eating. We watched the first 2 games, but then in the lack of the nfl network, we had to resort to college football instead of the Giants vs. Broncos. The dinner was really good and we only used one of the turkeys that was brought (I don't know who thought 11 people could eat 2 turkeys and a ham (but as I said, the running joke was that we had way too much food)). After dinner, we decided to play Apples to Apples for some reason. My cousin's wife and I did terrible because as we decided "We're too cerebral for these people." After all of that, I went to bed after playing some Episode 1 Podracer on the N64 downstairs against dad. One of the controllers had a bad analog stick (mine) and dad's screen was missing the bottom portion due to a fucked up aspect ratio or something, so we both did pretty poorly and it evened the playing field some which was cool.

Friday:
It was the turkey trot day, a 3 mile run or walk. Considering the St. Patrick's day dash is about 3.5 miles, this one felt really short. I hope that this means I'm getting better at running even though I still took about half an hour on this one. Maybe it was also because due to the big openness of the area, I could see the entire course at all points on the race. After that, those 5 of us that did it (my cousin and his wife, my uncle, my dad, and I) came back and were going to go on a brewery tour later, but my uncle decided to stay. While the girls were out black friday shopping, we left for the tour. It was cool and much more informative about the beer making process than any other brewery tour I have been on (I've been on a lot in case you were wondering).

On our way back, the GPS in the car led us slightly off track and we got to talking about how we really wished we hadn't ruined the only pepperoni pizza we had. My cousin said "Ok that's it, if we see a Papa Murphy's we're stopping." No sooner did he finish that sentence than a Papa Murphy's appeared on the left side of the road. We stopped and went in and three angels made our pizza for us. They were actually pretty cute, but since they lived in Oregon and 8 hours from my house, I didn't get too flirty with them, but we all did stick around for a few extra minutes talking about nothing since it was obviously a slow day for them (everyone else must have been having leftovers, but not us because WE HAD PEPPERONI PIZZA SUCKAS!!!1). On the way back to the house, we debated whether to come in triumphantly carrying the pizza which would anger the people complaining that we were not eating all the food or whether to hide it. We decided since my grandma felt bad about forgetting the 2nd pepperoni pizza, we would sneak it in and put it at the bottom of the fridge. Soon enough, the girls came back from shopping and had bought us darts (there was a dartboard in the garage) so we started playing.

We played Cricket which is a cool darts game that we spent a lot of time doing. I learned I'm actually not bad at darts, which surprised me because I always thought it looked so hard. After about an hour of playing, my cousin came down and she told us they found a second pepperoni pizza. We all looked at each other pretending to be surprised, secretly happy the plan had worked. It was great pizza since we had gotten the oven fixed.

Saturday:
We decided it was time to get some sledding in, so we headed up to Mount Bachelor where we sledded last year. This year, there had been a lot of snow, so they weren't allowing sledding there and the kicked us off to some state park that's specialized for sledding. Dad got mad because he figured it would be some bunny hill, but he was wrong. It was actually a very crowded hill on the shady side of a mountain which meant it was still coated with ice, so the sledding was fast and dangerous. There was a good run on the side where you could get some good air. I sustained some good injuries from my wipeouts there which resulted in the crowd watching going "Ooh!" Falling off that sled and rolling on the snow/ice was like rolling along on pavement. It hurt. I cut up both my knees, scraped my right forearm bad and then did it on the next run, making it actually hurt. I also bruised my ass, left chest, neck and burned off some skin on my side. All in all, a fun day! After getting hurt like I did, for some reason I had the urge to go play some football. The more I thought about it, that actually seems like it would be really cool so who knows, maybe I'll make up for not joining the football team at shorewood my senior year (which I still kind of regret) and I'll go out for the football team at the UW if I get more in shape.

We left the sledding hill and I put some rubbing alcohol on my cuts, then drove home while letting the alcohol sink in for no reason other than to be manly I guess. I put on some neosporin when we got back though because that stuff is amazing. That night, we had Thanksgiving 2: Room for Dessert (our action thriller coming to a theater near you). It consisted of the other turkey and my uncle's special roast that Kathryn and I prepared. Basically, you take a roast, coat it in black pepper and garlic salt and then slow cook it on the barbecue. I know Orion doesn't like beef, but someday maybe I'll get the chance to cook it for you guys, it's pretty good. After dinner, more darts ensued.

Sunday:
We spent all but half an hour of the time between 10:00am and 6:00pm in the car, a very busy driving day. After I got home, I was freaking out about the project due the next day in French, but then I learned class was cancelled and I had an extra day. Now I have had time to email the guys in the group and figure out what we're doing (which I guess they had some time to figure out in my absence on Wednesday).

Today:
In jazz band, I got to try the section leader's black trumpet. It was pretty cool and tricky to play, but it was a really nice horn. I can't wait until winter break when I go trumpet hunting.

Ok well I'll make a quote post tomorrow. This post was really long and it's now taken me about 2 hours to write because I was doing some other things as well such as emailing my group back and forth about what was going on. Until later, peace out.