Three till Seven » Funny

the romantic couple

Sarah — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:57:48 +0000

Yesterday was mine and Todd’s two-year anniversary, which we only just now remembered when he called me to wish me a happy belated anniversary. Did we do anything on our anniversary? Well, he drank bourbon and we both had pizza–does that count as romantic? We did sit side-by-side on my loveseat and play with our respective Mac laptops… Ahh, nerds in love, I can hardly stand it.

there goes the neighborhood

Sarah — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:36:41 +0000

I was startled just now into pausing my music because, out of nowhere, I heard shouting and cursing outside. Some guy was yelling, “Strike me down right now, motherfucker! Fuck you, God! And Jesus, too!” …Wow. I can’t imagine what must’ve happened to the fellow to cause such anger at the Almighty. I’m strongly reminded of that scene in Forrest Gump where Lieutenant Dan is on Forrest’s fishing boat in the middle of a storm, challenging God to do His worst. That kind of parallels the current situation, since everything is coated in ice outside and we’ve been having rain and ice falling all day.

“Gay Love” by Derek and the Dominos

Sarah — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:29:04 +0000

I just heard a story from my brother that had me cracking up. You’ll need to be familiar with the song “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos to really get what’s funny, though. So my brother and his friend were hanging out, listening to some music, when “Layla” came on. My brother’s friend’s reaction was disgust, and the conversation proceeded like this:

“Aww, turn that shit off.” - friend
“Why? I like this song.” - brother
“I don’t want to listen to that gay-ass shit!” - friend
“What do you mean?” - brother
“Listen to what he’s saying!” - friend
“…What do you think he’s saying?” - brother
“‘Gay love, got me on my knees, gay love, begging darling please’!” - friend
*amidst laughter* “No, he’s saying ‘Layla’, that’s the name of his guitar.” - brother
“…Oh.” - friend

Having grown up listening to Eric Clapton, Derek and the Dominos, and especially the song “Layla”, I found this hilarious, especially since I love that song. Wow, talk about misheard lyrics.

ugly boots

Sarah — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:44:57 +0000

Like Sara, I have to comment on some boots I saw today while eating lunch with friends. Jess and I were getting some pasta when I noticed the boots on some girl in line. They were white and gray checkered, fuzzy, and had two pink tassley ball things dangling from the top. I gestured at them in what I thought was a discreet manner, trying to get Jess to look. When we walked by our table on the way to the pasta, Todd and Wes called us over, wanting to know if we were talking about the girl’s boots, too. They had apparently seen me gesturing and had also been marveling at the sheer ugliness of the boots. When we were all seated again, pasta in hand, the lot of us tried to describe those boots. Here’s what we came up with:

It looks like a Yeti is on her feet. - Ashlee
How many cows did you have to kill to get those shoes? - Wes
Did she kill a snow leopard? - Wes

I think the winter season is an excuse for girls to whip out the most bizarre of footwear. I thought Ugg boots were just the end of the line for wacky shoes, but now I’m seeing even uglier stuff: knit boots, anyone? It seems so impractical to have fuzzy knit boots for a season filled with snow, ice, and rain on the ground. At least my garish rain boots are practical in that they keep my feet dry.

calculus test and sleepy quiz-taking

Sarah — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:21:37 +0000

I just had my calculus test, and I really don’t know what to think of it. There were some problems I felt very confident about; others where I thought the right answer could be one of two things, so I wrote out both and finally chose one; and others that I had no idea about. After about an hour, I finally turned it in, deciding that I had mutilated it as much as I could stand to mutilate it. The classroom was still mostly full when I left; everyone seemed to be struggling as much as I had. I hope the professor comes in and says what he did last time: “[The test] wasn’t that bad.” Then when I asked what the average was, he said it was terrible. This of course caused an uproar with the class, along the lines of, “But you said it wasn’t that bad!”, to which our professor responded, “Right, the test wasn’t that bad, but what you guys did to it was terrible.” Ha!

I have a funny story from yesterday. So I was sitting on my bed, studying for the calculus test, when Todd came over. He was very tired, having had a long day of work and then working out. He laid down on the floor and started watching TV, but before long, I noticed he was asleep. I let him sleep a while and then stopped studying to come sit down with him. I fiddled on my laptop a bit and found The Booze Test, which has a bunch of trivia questions about alcohol. I took it and Todd woke up, so I asked if he’d like to take it. Now, he was awake, though still acting all sluggish and sleepy, but he started to take the quiz.

Initially, I asked him the questions and put in his answers. It was on a per-question basis, so if you got a question wrong, you had a couple more chances to get it right. He got one question wrong several times and the quiz just stopped because he had lost all his points. He got annoyed because he hadn’t finished the quiz but I had, and told me I didn’t have to sound so happy when I told him he got a question wrong. I protested that I wasn’t sounding happy, I was just saying “wrong” in my normal voice. He was getting all upset and wanted to take the quiz himself, so I gave him the laptop. He was going through it but, after answering a question partway through the quiz, the page just stopped refreshing and wouldn’t show the next question. This made him even more upset, so he muttered something about going back to his place… Then promptly fell asleep again.

I stayed on the floor and pouted for a few minutes, because I was annoyed that he’d gotten all upset over a dumb quiz. He woke up about two minutes after he’d fallen asleep, saw me upset, and asked me what was wrong. I ignored him, thinking he was just being a jerk because he obviously knew what was wrong. He asked a couple more times and I finally told him that I didn’t appreciate him getting all annoyed with me over some dumb Internet quiz. There was a pause, then he asked, “When was this?” That was my first clue that something was up. I told him, “About two minutes ago!”, but he didn’t remember it at all. I confirmed that he really didn’t remember taking the quiz, getting upset at me, or getting upset at the quiz at all, then I described what had happened to him. Nope, still didn’t remember. I brought the quiz up on my laptop again, and he went through it, this time easily answering the questions, but it still didn’t seem familiar to him. Well for me, this was deja-vu real bad, except Todd wasn’t all grouchy and he was actually getting the questions right.

I’ve had that happen to me before, where I’ll apparently talk to my parents in the middle of the night if they notice me awake, something like that. Todd and I laughed about his experience later when we were going to Chipotle, and I told him I couldn’t really be upset at him since he didn’t even remember doing anything wrong. He told me that when he woke up and saw me all upset, he wondered if the hermit crab had died. I guess I know not to interact with Todd when he’s partially asleep, because he has a short temper then and won’t remember the conversation later anyway!

crazy lecture

Sarah — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:11:09 +0000

I just came from the best calculus lecture ever. My professor is normally a pretty wacky guy, and his appearance just lends itself to goofiness anyway since he’s about 7 feet tall and skinny as a rail. He’s also Swedish and talks with a neat accent. Well today, being Halloween (happy Halloween, BTW!), I was in mid-conversation with a classmate when I just froze because I saw him running through the hall toward our door. He was wearing a long, white lab coat and those fake glasses with the big nose, fuzzy mustache, and eyebrows attached. He zoomed in the door, flung his hat and briefcase in various directions, then begin hastily going over Laplace transformations. Throughout the lecture, he grabbed chalk and erasers as he needed them, and when he was done with them, he just tossed them any which way. At one point, I was yawning and suddenly a cloud of chalk dusk flew up at my feet because one of the erasers had landed on me. When he got excited about derivatives part way through the class, he climbed on top of a table and cheered about them.

We have quizzes once a week, always on Friday. Today, however, he pulled out a quiz for us, explaining that we had to have something scary on Halloween. The note at the top said, “No calculators, books, cell phones or brains allowed.” For the date, he had “Fall 3² * 223″. Each question had the number of points it was worth marked; most were worth 2 or 3 points and dealt with the Taylor series. However, one was worth 0 points and asked, “What is the capital of Zimbabwe?” Gosh, he’s zany. My other professors today are going to be normal acting, though they may give us candy.

possum on campus

Sarah — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:41:38 +0000

While walking to lunch with Todd and Eric today, we saw a couple of girls in front of us on the sidewalk, coming our way. All of a sudden, they kind of flew away from a particular spot on the sidewalk, yelling. Todd, Eric, and I were confused and alarmed; I was able to discern a word of the girls’ yells: “possum.” I didn’t know what they were hollering about still until I looked next to a trash can they had just passed, and there between the can and a brick wall was a possum. A soggy, angry possum that was hissing because the two girls got too close to it. I got excited and wanted to take a photo of it with my phone, but Eric and Todd were all worried it would bite me. Eric kind of shuffled the possum backward, using his umbrella, so that he was less out of the sidewalk. We went on to lunch where I called my old biology professor, who was a big fan of possums, to let him know what was up. When we finished lunch, we walked back that same way and the possum was still there, so Eric called the campus police. Someone else had called Animal Control, so I assume it’s getting taken care of.

I usually only see squirrels and occasionally rabbits around campus; this was my first possum. Kind of exciting, really. I always like possums because I think they’re very cute; they’re kind of like big prehistoric rats, appearance-wise.

a drippy nose and a drowned roach

Sarah — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:39:29 +0000

So I went to get a Benedryl just now because today’s rain is wreaking havoc with my sinuses, and when I pulled out the package, I saw a medium-sized roach perched on the pill packs. I think I may have done something bad to my leg, as in pulled something, because I flew backward like I’d been shot. Damn, do I hate roaches. However, in my panic, I of course threw the pill box and it landed in the sink. Mr. Roach went further in his flight and fell down the drain; score: Sarah - 1, roaches - 0.

pricey plastic lids

Sarah — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:21:39 +0000

Todd and I ate at Penn Station yesterday for dinner, and I got a sweet tea to drink. I filled up my cup and then noticed they were out of lids, so I went to tell an employee. When I did, he responded in a serious voice, “They’re a dollar-50 apiece.” My jaw just dropped as I exclaimed, “For the lids??“. I knew it sounded crazy, but he just seemed so serious… I was all set to just go lidless when he started laughing, apologized, and said he was just messing with me. He and Todd got a good laugh out of my reaction; I guess I’m just too gullible.

power outage

Sarah — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:14:26 +0000

Yesterday, I was just packing up my laptop at work, getting ready to go home, when the power went out. A coworker and I just kind of sat there for a few seconds, confused as to what had happened, then we slowly turned to look at each other. Dr. Jaromczyk came from next door to see what was up; his wife called from a building across campus, and apparently power was out there, too. We ended up scrambling around trying to turn off our servers before the UPS’s gave out. However, the servers were locked up in a metal cabinet and we didn’t know where the key was. We thought an old admin guy who had since moved on from our lab still had the key, but fortunately Dr. Jaromczyk found a copy. Then we had the problem of being able to log into a server so that we could shut it down. None of us remembered the password, so we were going to ssh to my coworker’s home machine to read his password file, but because of the power outage, we didn’t have Internet access. We were just about to go downstairs with my laptop to see if the wifi was up when the power came back on. Nothing got hurt except for an old machine whose hard drive had been slowly eating itself, and after powering it back up this time, it wouldn’t even boot, it just gave us the Grub menu. Rest in peace, CSURS7.

I read today in the newspaper that a squirrel chewed through some wires and was responsible for the power outage. It affected central and north campus, apparently, so it was a pretty good area. This is the third time this has happened, which just seems hilarious to me. When I left the building yesterday, I passed a server room and people were scrambling around in there, I assume on damage control from the power outage. I can just imagine folks all around campus being interrupted at work, in classes, in their dorms, and trying to minimize data loss… all because of a squirrel. Then today when I was walking to class, one of their group had the nerve to bark at me from a tree. Cocky squirrels.