fill your horns of plenty, folks.

I know I don't normally put stuff here that isn't my own original content. But this is truly too hilarious to pass up. Thanks to Kendra for finding and posting on her blog!

It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. By Colin Nissan.

If you have been a loyal reader, you know how desperate Lauren and I have been for a chair for our living room. If you don't know what I'm referring to, first read this. Well, lordy be, we finally have a chair! But let me tell you, it was no cake walk.

'Twas a Saturday afternoon, 'round 4pm when we embarked on the F train to Red Hook, Brooklyn. From there, we transferred to a bus, and our excitement grew with every passing block. You see, for us, Ikea is mecca. And we make a yearly pilgrimage to our holy land for special things like kitchen trinkets, and sometimes furniture.

Happily we sat, flopped, and lounged in chair after chair on the display floor before settling on the wonderfully plush chair of our dreams. We also fought for the last cover of a certain style. We were unstoppable. I'm pretty sure I remember us high-fiving at this point.

After paying, we dropped off our furniture pick up form, and went to indulge in soda beverages and giant, salty soft pretzels, and paid a grand total of $4. We sat and gushed of our love for Ikea. 'Isn't it wonderful?' I said to Lauren. 'A chair and cheap, tasty treats while we wait! Glorious!'

Shortly after, the euphoria wore off and the cold, stark reality of Ikea hell set in.

They brought our chair out, but the cover we fought for had been sold. So then we waited again in the exchange line, but they only had a leaf patterned cover in exchange, and that's ugly so we decided to take the chair naked.

Wondering how we got it back to our apartment? This was probably our biggest mistake. First, we thought about renting a U-Haul. But the wait was 45 minutes, and we'd have to return it which would take hours, and at this point, we had already invested two hours of our night into this trip. And delivery was $100 so that was out. A cab, we thought!

Down at ground level, we were approached by a man in a leather jacket and he offered us a ride for $65 dollars. 'Hell no!' we scoffed. Then, another man approached us, who turned out to be what can only be described as the cabbie pimp. He bartered with us and I got him down to $50 +tip. And we were sent with Leather Jacket who was a little annoyed.

It was pretty uncomfortable since we had turned this guy down once already, and as we followed him down a darkened street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Lauren and I started to have doubts; the secret kind where we just looked at one another with confused and worried expressions. We became especially concerned when we realized he was leading us to a Lincoln Town car and not a yellow cab. Having no clear other options (I mean, the dude had our chair!), we got in the car, which smelled horrendous, and began our return trip.

We hit true rock bottom back at our apartment, after literally rolling the box end over end up the stairs with the help of a friendly, (albeit stoned? neighbor, we realized that without the cover, we didn't have directions to put the thing together. The cherry on top of a poop sundae.

sugar and spice and crazy

Good day everyone. I'm home today feeling under the weather, but I can't sleep because a construction crew is jack-hammering outside my building. It makes me want to throw heavy objects out my window, but today I don't have the energy for that kind of psychotic behavior . So I'll write to you about my recent psychotic break. Oh yes, I went full on crazy last week, and I think I'm ready to share with the group.

Let me first explain. My Thursdays are jam packed, and last Thursday was especially busy. I had to meet a class on the east side (which is far!) at 8:30 am, then go to the public school where I observe from 12-3 which is all the way back on the west side, have class at that school until 4:30, and then run to campus for a class from 5-6:30. Somehow I had to find a way to eat something and stay hydrated.

I had about ten minutes to grab a slice of pizza and stop back at my apartment after my morning class. I speed walked, slice in hand, and as I ascended the stairs in my building, I heard a persistent high pitched beeping sound. Because my life is a joke, I assumed it was coming from my apartment, and I was right.

I set my pizza down and decided since I had such limited time, I would ignore the beeping, which I thought was coming from our carbon monoxide detector (I know, not a great idea, but I had to prioritize and pizza won). Soon the beeping intensified to a mind numbing shrill screech that I couldn't stand any longer. I dragged a chair out of the kitchen, grabbed the alarm off the wall and starting removing batteries, throwing them on the floor below me. The beeping persisted. Infuriated, I whipped it into the kitchen. Still it beeped. At this point I was outraged and could not wrap my overly-exhausted brain around the fact that it seemed to have a mind of its own, continuing on with no power source. I started to cry a little, frustration (and crazy) getting the best of me.

Then, I spotted our smoke detector, which had been removed from the kitchen because every time we used the oven it would beep. There was a battery in it that I thought was dead for months. I lunged for it. Ripped the battery out. The beeping ceased. I threw it on the floor just for good measure, laughing like a crazy person.

Then I left. I felt insane as I walked to school, realizing that I just flipped out on an inanimate object, cried a little, and then laughed madly all in the span of five minutes. Worse yet, I hadn't cleaned any of it up. The carbon monoxide detector was definitely still on the kitchen floor. The batteries were all over the floor of the living room, along with the kitchen chair. I thought about what Lauren might think when she came home from work to find things in such disarray. In the end, I have decided to ask for a straight jacket, such as the one pictured below, for Christmas this year. I will make that face whenever I wear it.

I live a neat, tidy lie.

Greetings friends. That's what my cooperating teacher at the Jewish preschool calls our students. I think it's pretty weird.

Anyway, something really disgusting happened this week and I had to share it. Yes, grosser than eating bugs in a falafel sandwich. Lauren and I made pasta with shrimp for dinner about a week ago. Due to our teensy-tiny kitchen, many times after we wash a pot or pan, it will sit out on the stove top. It's clean, just not put away.

A few nights ago, we made dinner again. That same pot was sitting there, with its lid on. We stood, staring at the pot. The conversation went something like this:

Lauren: It has to be clean right?
Me: I don't remember washing it.
Lauren: Met neither. But it's been a week.
Me: We probably washed it.

Guess what. We didn't wash it. It was full of hairy mold. That I scooped out while wearing a protective plastic bag over my hand while Lauren screamed. And let me tell you, it was oddly warm, as if it had created its very own ecosystem.

Sadly this isn't the first time something like this has happened. When we lived on Avenue B, a ziploc bag of liquified mold was found on our metal storage cart next to the fridge. For almost an hour, we thought it was bread that had molded for so long that it fermented into beer. It was the most exciting day until we figured out that it was actually a bag of rotten veggies.

Funny thing is, Lauren and I really pride ourselves on how neat and clean we like to be. But there's just too much evidence to suggest otherwise. At least once a week we find something completely heinous in the fridge. See the evidence of our latest discovery below:

Grad school: 1, Courtney: 0

It's only been 2 weeks, and grad school is kicking my ass. Here is a listing of things going on in my life, dumb stuff I've done, lessons learned, etc.:

1. It's Saturday night and I'm home in my pjs, doing some of the hundreds of pages of reading for next week. Farewell social life, see you in December.

2. Also, I spent all day in a required drug/alcohol/sexual abuse seminar. Informative, but extremely depressing. Also, it's SATURDAY.

3. The topper: I've been with the rugrats for a grand total of 9 hours, and my body is already breaking down. I'm sniffly, exhausted, and achy. This does not bode well for the rest of my semester.

4. Now, I should tell you the good things. Yes, there are good things! Although my school seems fixated on multiculturalism (apparently they think we're all a bunch of homophobic bigots), my classes are generally great. I'm learning a lot and find the readings engaging, despite the fact that I feel overwhelmed by it. And student teaching is a blast. Kids are awesome.

5. In the interest of full disclosure, on my first day of student teaching I almost killed a child. Well, it wasn't quite that dramatic, but she fell off a chair while sitting right next to me, and I only caught her after she slammed her face into the table.

6. The thing I learned about 2 year olds this week: they're really adventurous, but lack motor coordination. So they think they can do stuff, when really they can just flail about.

7. I fell up the steps the other night. I'm talking full on, sprawling across the steps between the 2nd and 3rd floors of my building. It was so loud that when I opened the door to my apartment, Lauren was sitting on the couch cracking up, because she heard the commotion and just knew it was me. The irony is not lost on me: I am not unlike an uncoordinated 2 year old.

8. Update: mums are thriving, as is Osama. I've lost all interest in killing him.

9. I found a small dead bug in my falafel today, and kept eating it until I found another. I'm beginning to question my judgment.

Well, that about sums up my life. The photo doesn't have to do with anything in this post, but a while ago, our can opener broke and we used one of those pointy-poky kinds to pry open cans. This was the result which I found awesome.

Indoor gardening is messy. So is grad school.

So I've officially started grad school. This means a number of major changes, including the fact that I will probably be too busy for hilarious situations to even occur in my life, let alone have the time to blog about them. But I promise to do my very best!

Check out my mum planting experience below. There aren't too many options for where to do activities that are normally done out of doors, so I used the living room. It was quite the project. But check out the finished product! They've bloomed quite nicely since that photo was taken.

Mousegate 2009: An Update

Another week has passed, and still no bloody dead mouse corpse.

For some reason, the exterminator only calls and schedules appointments before 7am, which is an hour and a half before I'm normally awake. But I've been patient because I've come to the conclusion that Osama is a genius and only a professionally trained mouse-hit man can end him. Last week I woke up at 6:45am along with Lauren and our futon-guest, Anna to anxiously await the exterminator's arrival. Right before he arrived, I got up to turn the air conditioner down and felt tiny terrorist claws run over my feet. Needless to say, I screamed like a child.

The exterminator--let's call him Mr. X--arrived and told us that if we wanted, he's 'spray' in the kitchen. From the respiratory mask he wore, we assume whatever it was, the spray was extremely toxic. Mr. X then told us that he'd put packets with poisonous cakes in them around the place, near the traps, in our bedrooms...everywhere.

So now we have traps rigged to snap with the slightest pressure (covered in Skippy peanut butter, because apparently Osama isn't classy enough for organic almond butter), some kind of biohazardous spray in the kitchen, and poisonous treats in baggies sporadically thrown around.

In essense, our apartment is the opposite of baby-proof. We might as well have live frayed wires next to buckets of water and littered the floor with used hypodermic needles from an AIDS clinic.

Funny thing, at one point, Anna and I saw Osama squeeze out the front door through a tiny hole where our door runner doesn't quite reach. Optimistically I thought maybe he'd indulged in one of the deadly bagged treats and left to die. But then I heard him rustling about and spotted him run under the fridge earlier today.

Lauren and I had a crazy moment last night after we heard Osama, when we were perched on the futon meowing at him. If only we weren't allergic to real cats.