I also had to wait about 9 minutes in the Burger King drive-thru today

It's been a rough week.

First off, I decided for about four days that hey, maybe I should have been an athlete all those years.

Bad idea.

I went running, as I have every Thursday for the past... 5-ish Thursdays. Then, I met up with a friend, who wanted to go to the gym. We were supposed to go to a dancy-cardio class. It was full. She talked me into a weight class. Horrible, horrible idea.

The following day, we went to an actual cardio-dance class and then decided we'd try out the gliding class. Well, I had agreed to it in advance but by the time it began I was kinda like "you know, if your muscles are getting sore, why don't we just go home?" but God knows my friend would continue working out in the middle of an earthquake and I wasn't going to be the one to stop her. 15 minutes in, I couldn't do a whole lot. My endurance just isn't made for that kind of shit. 5 minutes later, she informed me her injury was really starting to bother her and that was the end of that. We went home.

I should add, that before going home, we sat in these awesomely fantastic massage chairs to make our muscles feel better. In my opinion, these chairs could soon replace men. Except for, you know, that whole fertilization thing. But we're working on that one.

Anyway, we got home, put muscle relaxant on and relaxed for the evening. I was fairly sure I was going to be sore the next day but my friend even had the nerve to say she didn't think I would be sore the next day - she certainly worked harder than I did. Ridiculous logic, when you think about it, but you get the idea.

The following day, I was actually alright. Sore, but it was bearable. In my opinion, the second day is always the worst, but since it was my first day on the second workout and second day on the first workout, I was expecting to be pretty sore, and figured I was in the clear.

The day after that, I woke up, and was not physically able to move my neck. In some ways, for the entire day. I was able to get up out of bed after a little while, but even at the end of the day, I could not look up or to the left without turning my entire torso. It was some of the worst pain I've ever experienced. Tylenol, muscle relaxants, nothing could do anything. I was dizzy and had migraines throughout the day, resolved only by darkness and cold compresses. It was bad.

So basically, in three days, I have gotten all the use out of my gym membership.

I gots 3 G's of love

My 16 year old brother is going through a phase where he thinks he has become extremely cool, and consequently uses words such as "ain't" and "sup" and such. Today, he told me he was "going out with some bros" later. I responded, "you have bros?" to which he responded, "i got peeps too" like I should obviously know the difference. Finally, I somewhat conceded, and asked him what I was. And you know what he said? "Cool." That's right, he has peeps, and bros, and his big sis', who could probably go by any number of cool names, got labeled just plain cool. I love my brother.

A watched pot never boils

Alright, I'm sitting here, and I just tried a last-ditch solution to get the oil out of the interlock on the driveway, and I have so much invested in the outcome of this scenario, that I am actually sitting here, watching the ground dry, and I realize how sad this is, so I thought I should probably tell you. So this way, I can say I was doing something productive. But we both know the truth.

Lisa the track star

So you may or may not know that I have decided to take up running - more likely the latter, since I have told basically no one, but there is always the chance you have seen me running spastically around Ottawa telling myself that I look sexy (I'm pretty sure I don't).

Anyway, since I've been known to jump head first into ideas and then abandon them I try not to invest too much in them and considering the reason I took up running was because a friend of mine is going to run a marathon and I was running with her "to help her self esteem," I decided I didn't want to buy any "real running clothes".

Now, that being said, you have to consider the fact that since I am not athletic at all, I don't own anything that could even remotely pass as running clothes. So, I resorted to the next best thing. Pajamas.

At first, it wasn't too bad. It was cold, I wore a track sweater I like to wear over my shirt and I was wearing brown stretch pants, so I looked moderately socially acceptable. Yesterday, being 22 degrees, was a different story.

Initially, I had decided I would wear the same thing as the first time, but we quickly realized that would not be an option - it was freaking hot. I only had one pair of shorts. They were red, with either kittens or presents on them - it was hard to tell. But, I concluded, if I wear my pink American Eagle shirt, it looks almost like I have a track outfit like my running partner, who was wearing basically the same thing but in black and blue with the name of her running store on them. This was good enough for me.

Her brother came out to say goodbye to us, and commented, "I've never seen a running outfit like that before!" "They are my pajamas!" I responded. He took this to mean that I intended to change before leaving. I did not.

"Oh, you're actually wearing that to run?" He said, as we walked out the door. Whatever. Too late to change my mind now!

Incidentally, I didn't really get any reactions over it. Or comments, at least. Sure, we got honked at a couple of times, and a fireman fully turned around to check us out as his truck drove by, but I'm pretty sure that would have happened even if I had been wearing regular shorts. Girls showing skin, come on!

You can't always get what you want

So I saw 21 tonight, and I won't get into too many details, but basically, it was a huge flop. Huge. Flop. I don't know how it got good reviews. I thought it had a good soundtrack. Primarily because they had the song "Young folks" which my roommate forbids me from playing and he was there so I took an immense amount of joy out of hearing it while in the same room as him. Secondly, because they had that song which basically just repeats the line "You can't always get what you want" and since there was only 5 other people in the theatre other than the three of us I felt that I was at liberty to sing along at the top of my lungs. Oh, and there were lots of pretty colours and expensive things, and the main actor was kinda hot. And it had Kevin Spacey. And Laurence Fishburne. And the Fire Captain from Rescue Me. But while I love all of them, not even a plethora or great actors can make a mediocre movie great, and this movie was barely mediocre. It was predictable, and the "twist" got totally ruined by a second, lamer twist. It's unfortunate, too, because the concept is really cool, but apparently no one wants to explore anything new these days and the directors just didn't have the guts to take this as far as they could have without packaging it in a perfect blockbuster package.

Text message conversation of the day

"I just accidentally flashed a customer."

"Was she hot?"

"She was someone's wife, yes."

"A wilf!"

Speaking of which, I had to explain to someone what a milf was the other day. How is it that in a room full of men, the only one who knows what it is, is the 22 year old girl? Yeah, I don't know either.

The indestructible phone

A friend of mine lost his phone about a month ago. No big deal, I mean, it was an expensive mistake, but he tends to lose them pretty frequently so it wasn't particularly shocking. We went back and looked for it, but we knew there was about a 95% chance he had dropped it on the side of the road during a snow storm so we figured we would probably never see it again with all the plows out pushing stuff around and such.

Anyway, the other night I got a text message from someone saying she thought she had found a phone belonging to someone by his name. As I had called it countless times after we lost it and she had my number, I figured it had to be the right phone, but I was totally blown away.

Last night I went to pick it up and man, you would not believe the state of this phone. It looked like it had been in my pocket for the last month, not sitting in a snow bank - it was in mint condition. It was in better condition than it would have been had we kept it!

I thought, it had to have been indoors all this time - but sure enough, her son found it at the bus stop right where we lost it. It must have been in the snow bank. For a month. She said he had to peel it out of its case, which was completely destroyed, but the frigging phone was in mint condition! She was even able to turn it on to get his name and my number. I know my phone, when it gets really cold, will turn off even though it has battery power left and presumably that is what happened, but still. Not even water damage. Half the time his phones get water damage when they haven't been in the water!

We thanked her profusely and were once again reminded that there are, in fact, good people in this world. But a month under probably a hundred centimetres of snow. Someone at Motorola is doing something right.

Accident-prone as always

Well, I'm obviously still not doing my paper and I figured it only right that I share with you what just happened 20 minutes ago and now I am in pain and I have no one to whine to and I have a better excuse to continue procrastinating so I am going to tell you.

I've been crashing at a friends the last few days - a break from the roommate troubles and all that, and he has someone else staying with him for a couple weeks with whom I do not get along at all. In my defense, I was staying here when she showed up needing somewhere to stay, and she was supposed to be gone a week ago but shows no intention of leaving ever so I hope you don't think I am terrible for staying here in spite of her. Him and I are a lot closer, so it would be weird if I stopped coming by because of her.

So my friend is working today, leaving her and I alone together. She doesn't have a job, or go to school, so she typically sleeps until around 4pm (or at least stays in bed), which really, is fine by me, but I really wasn't in the mood to see her today so I set myself up in "my room" for the day.

Anyway, it's 1:30, and I'm hungry, so I decide to go heat up leftovers to eat. After they are heated, I decide to stealthily go back to my room to grab my drink and magazine without making enough noise to coax her into coming out to talk to me - she won't typically talk to me unless she wants information or something anyway, so it's not a difficult feat, but I didn't really want her to know I was awake, either.

So I grab my drink and my magazine and quietly make my way down the stairs, and then, in true Lisa style, trip, fall down the entire set of stairs, followed by the huge delayed crash as my drink got thrown into the air and then landed - hard - on the hardwood floor. So there I am, lying on the floor in immense pain, surrounded by glass and covered in pepsi and having made an immense racket, and, of course, the very person I am avoiding comes running out to find out what has taken place.

Great. I explain to her that I am fine but that it's going to be about 5 minutes before I move. She doesn't offer to help clean up. That's fine. I thank her for coming out and making sure I am okay. She goes back to bed. I spend the next 15 minutes cleaning up my mess. Sometimes I don't know how I function on a regular basis.

I'm still alive!

So I apologize for the infrequency of posts this week - I'm 3 weeks from graduating from school and I have a major (ly ridiculous) paper due tomorrow that I need to complete. After tomorrow I will be back for good! Somewhat. Well, you know. I'm writing this while reading "67 New Blow-His-Mind Moves in Cosmopolitan" (none of which are particularly new or exciting - I'm pretty sure they just change the order in each issue) and calculating what my marks are notwithstanding the exams. Like a true student - I never did break those early habits from first year.

Back in the day, I was in the same program as one of my cousins and his girlfriend. Him and I used to stay up as late as possible the night before our papers were due (at 8:30am) without actually starting them. We would call each other for bragging rights, and eventually one of us would give in and start the damn thing around 10pm. His girlfriend would have been working on it for weeks before - taking it in to writer's help and to discuss with the prof, and yet my cousin and I would always get higher marks. It drove her insane.

Now, I'm a little better. I submitted my topic a few weeks ago, and I wrote almost a thousand words yesterday. Two thousand more to go, and I will be back here for your entertainment pleasure. In the meantime, check out the video about candy mountain to keep yourself busy, if you haven't already. It never ceases to make me laugh.

said by my only true online friend

"OMG, never trust people on the internet".

Sometimes I just don't know what to do with the whole online thing. But it can be so enlightening.

Hellooo Mommy!

The other day my mom called and, I kid you not, it showed up on my call display as "Mommy". This was not on a cell phone, nor any phone where you can pre-program numbers, just my landline, which displays whatever the registered name is.

Initially, I thought I had to have imagined it, but sure enough, I just checked, and it did indeed say "Mommy" in the display.

Meaning that any time my mom calls anyone, it shows up as mommy. What a way to confuse people. And I thought I was crazy.

Corn, corn... abort, ABORT!

I watched Charlotte's Web last night. I know, I'm such a kid at heart.

I also absolutely love Dakota Fanning. How she can be so fantastic and handle so many movies just blows my mind. I would love to meet her someday, she has this face that just radiates intelligence, and she is just so damn cute, I feel obliged to watch her movies.

So of course, when I got my hands on a copy of Charlotte's Web, I was all over it. I sat in my room, alone, and watched it. Lame, maybe. My roommate likes to watch girls/children's movies in smaller doses and since I subjected him to Enchanted last week, I figured I had better keep this one to myself.

But it was good, in spite of my immense fear of even seeing spiders. And at the end, I totally cried. It would have been pretty sad if you had seen me right then - sitting in my room, watching a movie I already know the end to on my laptop alone, crying my eyes out over a spider. I know.

And then, I had nightmares about spiders all night. Huge ones, having thousands of babies, and me jumping in a river to get away from them. Sometimes even children's movies are a bit much for me, it seems.

Belated April Fool's

I used to work in the office of this place that gave horseback riding lessons. Every year on April Fool's Day, the "guys", as we called them, would come running in with some crazy scheme trying to convince us of something. This year, we were having none of it, we were ready.

That afternoon, we got a frantic call from them out in the field, where they were bringing the horses back in from grazing. "Get the supervisor, one of the horses just started going crazy jumping all over the place and I think it's dead. We need to call the vet immediately!"

I put him on hold, kinda roll my eyes and grab my supervisor. "It's Jamie*. He says one of the horses is dead, and he wants to talk to you."

She rolls her eyes too. I had worked there for three years, and never had a horse died while I was there, period, let alone while I was working on April Fool's Day. We try to look out the window, but can't see as far as he would be. She gets on the phone.

"Alright Jamie, we'll be RIGHT THERE. To see the dead horse. Jamie, I'm not calling the vet. If I call the vet he will charge us. It isn't funny to joke about this kind of thing"

He pleads with her to take him seriously, and she finally hangs up. He calls back immediately. "You really, seriously, need to call the vet right now." We decide he's been persistent enough, and the supervisor goes out to see what's going on. Sure enough, the freaking horse was dead. I think it had some sort of aneurysm - I can't remember, exactly. Either way, there was nothing we could have done. It's pretty rare that something like that would happen - old age, maybe, but this was completely unexpected.

As horrible as it was, I don't think anyone could believe that of all the days of the year for this to happen, it was the one where no one would possibly believe it. And I think it taught the guys not to play wolf next time.

Holidays with Lisa

I did something kindof bad this week. As I may or may not have already mentioned, I am supposed to go on a trip to Cancun in a couple of weeks with two girls. But, we haven't bought the tickets yet (one of the others is sick with mono and we want to wait before we do it, figuring at this point we might be able to swing a last-minute deal anyhow), and I am pretty short on money right now - I'm on a month-long break from work (paid work, anyway), and I'm stretching to last me another 3 weeks until my trip.

So I thought, instead of borrowing money from someone (which I wouldn't normally do but, as I am graduating and all that, several people have insisted I go and offered to lend money, and I know I could pay it back by the end of May), I should apply for another credit card and just, see if I get it.

I know, I know. Do not follow me as an example. In my defense, I have never carried any debt ever except for this year, and this year, I figured, it's the last year of my life I will ever be able to take serious time off and focus on my studies (and I have no more tuition bills to pay), so why not?

I know, still bad. Anyway, they sent me a card today. $1000 limit. That's a ticket and spending money. Awesome. Feel free to hate me.

Calling to activate was another story. I'm used to my bank, where it's all automatic. On this one, they make you talk to a person - who tries to sell you peace of mind, at a monthly insurance rate. Yeah, lame.

I know I don't want it already. No way. I tell him I have lots of people that will pay my credit card off if I become severely debilitated. He offers me a trial month. I tell him no, I did that once on a card and I still have it and I'm totally hating on that company. He says it will be easy to cancel. I tell him I don't really like talking on the phone and I especially don't like customer service lines, so I won't want to call back. I can hear the smile in his voice, too. But he keeps trying to sell me shit. Finally, he asks if he can tell me about another "opportunity". We banter, I finally tell him there is no way he is going to sell me anything, and he sends me on my way, "a thousand dollars richer". Or so I like to think.

It was "you're"!

How wrong is it to reject someone based on reasonable grounds, but then secretly feel glad about it just because you can't stand the fact that they misused the word, "your"? Really wrong?

It just feels so right.

Sweet rejection

So I met a couple of my girlfriends for drinks after our last day of class yesterday, and what a spectacle that turned out to be.

First of all, it was partially because one of the girls totally likes this guy that I despise more than I despise anyone, and we wanted to hash it out. But it got worse.

He ended up being at the bar we were at, avoiding all eye contact. I can't imagine he would know what to do but he was definitely with another girl so I didn't want to say much. The friend I was with had her eye on him the whole night though.

Then, to make things worse, she ran into a guy who is friends with - get this - her boyfriend. (Let me add, this isn't a close friend, not close enough for me to know she had a boyfriend, so don't judge ME on this one). The guy and his friends ask to join us, and I quickly realize it is to hit on me and the third girl with us, who also has a boyfriend.

Third girl quickly averts the advances of the guy next to me, and I didn't actually catch that he tried to hit on her or I would have called him on it right there. Then, he starts to work on me. He had some great lines:

"I'm normally very shy, so if I see you around school I might not come talk to you" (translation: I am drunk and have faux confiance, and I may or may not remember you after this but if I do you can be certain I will try to contact you".

"If you had to choose between someone very fit or a master chef, which would you choose?"

"Outside of intelligence and personality, what do you like most in a man?" " Um, looks? Is there anything left outside of looks?" (I continuously "guessed" things and then was like, oh wait, no that qualifies as personality)

The highlight of the night was when he asked me, "If you had to choose between someone cocky who admits it, someone cocky who pretends to be humble, or someone humble but less confident, which would you choose?"

I, of course, said humble, with genuinely cocky as my second choice because I just can't stand people who are fake. Third girl agreed, my friend was still staring at the guy across the room, whose hand is now on the ass of the girl sitting next to him.

The guy then asks, which one do you think I am?

The first thing I think is, "I think you're insecure," but I decide I probably shouldn't say this. He wants me to say humble. I don't think he is humble. I don't really think he has enough going for him to be cocky, either, though. He's kindof a douche, doesn't know how to talk to girls, is pretending he is normally shy but that the alcohol has saved him, which is also totally not attractive. I go with, "you look nervous".

And for a second, I see his true personality shine through, and he is a cocky freaking bastard who thinks he's better than everyone in the room. "Oh my God, you are the cocky one pretending to me humble! That's horrible!" "I know," he says, "but don't tell anyone". "Why would you admit that? That is the worst of all of them! Not only have you been being fake the entire time we've been here, but you have been lying about it." I'm shocked, not only because I didn't quite read him, but he is so full of himself it's disgusting, and he has no reason to be. He's not attractive, he's not interesting, he doesn't have much of a personality going for him, and he says, "well, I was only lying for the first hour!"

Like I'm actually forgiving about lying. I despise people who are fake. I have way more respect for people who are who they are and make no mistake about it than people who change and you never really know who they are. He also pulled out this gem: "I'm just being socially acceptable".

At this point, douchebag across the room still has his hand on this girl's ass, so I clink glasses with the girls and go, "drink up, girls, because it's time for us to go!"

We grab our jackets, and get the freak out of there.

As an afternote, he had already looked me up on Facebook before I got home. It was hilarious because he kept claiming to forget names, and yet I could hear him memorizing my name, so I knew he would add me. He actually said my name slowly out loud, it was pretty obvious. And then he pretended like, "if we ever catch up on Facebook...."

First date with my family

Around Christmas every year, my family on my dad's side has a bowling-and-dinner party. Everyone has a blast, and it usually serves as an initiation for all new "significant others" in the family. It's typically pretty brutal, but once the said boyfriend or girlfriend survives it, they never want to break up because they feel the need to stick around at least to take part in the whipping of the next poor soul to date someone in my crazy family. This year, of course, was no exception.

I really don't know what would qualify as the highlight of the evening, and for this I apologize, because this post may meander a little bit.

There we were, about 25 of us seated in a (secluded, thank God), part of the restaurant. The "cousins" showed up late, so my poor cousin and her boyfriend were seated with the parents - a horrible scenario to be in, because they are particularly bad. There's not just good cop and bad cop; there is crazy cop, drunk cop, what are your intentions cop and I will embarrass you if it's the last thing I do cop.

The cousins are a bit better, we will harrass the poor guy but we know whatever we do is coming to us someday, so we have to behave a little. So the night starts out at dinner fairly tamely, the parents are somewhat behaving (asking immense amounts of questions, confusing him by trying to make him contradict his answers, asking his intentions and then likely accusing him of other intentions, none of which is actually serious but still moderately hilarious), and the cousins are doing things such as shouting his name loudly from across the room and then pretending it didn't happen, so that each time he looks around he thinks he is going crazy. Also, they re-named him after my other cousin's boyfriend (I think her boyfriend may have come up with that himself, actually), so he was mostly getting addressed by a name that wasn't even his. You get the idea.

The climax of dinner was when he made the mistake of revealing that he is capable of singing (he plays the keyboards in a band), and they started asking him to sing. In front of everyone. He looked completely bewildered but, not wanting to back down, reluctantly agreed. I kid you not, his first day with my family, and he sang "Piano Man" by Elton John, in a restaurant, in front of about 25 members of my family in addition to the rest of the customers. After about a verse, my entire family joined in, and it is still by far one of the most hilarious moments in my life. Picture this: you like a girl, she finally introduces you to her family and they insist you sing a song in front of all of them? Yeah, I know. Don't ever ask why I'm screwed up. And it wasn't the only time they made him sing that night, either.

Then we went bowling. Now, bowling is also an adventure. No one in my family actually cares about the rules, winning, or even completing the game. Most of our scores are fairly low, breaking a hundred, maybe, for the best players. The poor boyfriend, of course, plays like any normal person, and scores 223 - around a hundred points better than everyone. From the beginning of dinner he was saying he wasn't good (and really, was he?), so they end up taunting him endlessly about how he destroyed everyone.

To make it worse, my dad got this dancing and singing Christmas tree, which they decided would be the prize for the best bowler. So, they presented it to the new boyfriend, and then made him dance and sing along with it. I know. I'm going to hell. But it was freaking hilarious.

Finally, the insanity was over, and we were all hugging goodbye. My dad hugged me, and then went, fists first, to hug someone else, and ended up punching me in the face really hard. I swore - loudly - and then didn't know what to do because it was obvious I had sworn and I had just been punched in the face, so there I was, doubled over, half laughing, half ready to cry, because it hurt like a bitch, but it was really funny, too.

And that, my friends, is what a typically first date with my family is like. We always try to prepare the poor suckers but really, even if I told you, would you actually believe me?

My door is currently open

Something I'm starting to find really frustrating is the fact that my cat knows how to open my door from either way. The handle mechanism doesn't lock in all the way so you can always push it open, even when it looks fully closed, and as my cat has discovered, you can open it from the inside too, if you put your paw under it and pull it open.

This wouldn't be so frustrating except I often close my door for privacy and, although my roommate would always knock (or at least shut the door behind him!), the cat does not, and my door is constantly open because, well, she is a cat after all - anything a door is shut she wants to get through it. If only I could train her to close the door behind her, then everything would be great. I don't see that happening anytime soon though.

Phone-sitting

I've been "phone sitting" for a friend on holidays for the past week, and it has led to some interesting calls. The most recent one was particularly interest-inducing, it was the gas company, and they left a message on his voice mail while I was in class.

You have one new message. First message, sent today at 6:27pm from phone number 000-000-0000:

I almost hung up before she finished reading out all the zeros one by one. But I thought, maybe he was calling collect or something and I should probably listen. No such luck.

Hello, this is the gas company. We have not received your payment for this month's invoice. This must be resolved today. Thank you.

I kid you not. No name, no phone number, no outstanding balance, nothing. I have no way of responding to this. For past calls (and yes, it's happened), I explain that he is away on holidays and that I will be taking care of it. Usually no problem. But how do I respond to this? I drove to his house, looked for a bill, found nothing (for the record, we're close enough that that would be acceptable and that I would have a reasonable idea of where the bill is kept - I'm not some sort of snoopy stalker). I can't call. They didn't technically say they were going to disconnect the service. It was somewhat of an idle threat. If I didn't resolve it yesterday, they could do anything today. I'm sure I'll be getting a call from his friends staying there if they suddenly have no heat, though.

Zero. zero. zero. zero. zero. zero. zero. zero. zero. zero.

April Fools!

Every year on April Fool's day when I was a kid, my dad would run to the window and shout, excitedly, "hey, look, a rabbit!" or something equally inconsequential. And every year, we'd run to the window like maniacs only to be taunted for falling for April Fool's!

Not that I'm not a fan, but I think I'll keep it on the L-D this year. I probably won't really even see anyone major enough to want to play a prank on anyway. I thought of my roommate, but I don't think either of us could ever be bothered.

However, one of the funniest pranks I've ever seen play out has been when I was 13, we had this wonderful French teacher that drank water at her desk, all day every day.

When she was out of the room, one of my close friends dumped out her water and replaced it with vinegar. We were all sure she was going to smell it long before she drank it, and I'm sure she was eyeing us suspiciously as we all were listening a lot closer than usual.

Thankfully there was a sink in the room, because I will never forget the look on her face as she realized what had happened and ran for it. The entire class (her included) laughed until we cried; in retrospect, it was kinda fortunate she had a sense of humour.

So enjoy your pranks, however elaborate they may be, and if you have any cool stories, feel free to share. I'd love some ideas, maybe get my dad back someday.