Barb’s Burblings

This is how I try and attract men:

(From Raising Hope)

Sexy, right?

My last ice skating boyfriend was Tim Goebel, who skated in the 2002 Olympics and won the bronze and was the first person to land three quads in competition. He was adorable. Curly hair. Love!

Anyway, I naturally have watched the Olympics since and swooned over skaters. But now…I have a new boyfriend. And credit goes to the Fug Girls, for this entry. He has a sarcastic long program! That is AWESOME! Seriously, you should watch it, and ignore the first couple of jumps, which he whiffs.

Also, cute World War II theme for the short? Win. Picture of himself as a kid on his Twitter feed? Win.

I mean, he’s not cracking the Top 5 Boyfriends, but he’s on the list.

I’m reading The Stranger Beside Me, a true crime book about Ted Bundy written by a woman who had worked with him at a crisis center. It’s a good book, but because it deals with a serial killer, there’s a lot of description of victims. And their last days. Which means that I wind up narrating my life that way:

Barb had gone to a movie with a friend the night before. That morning, she got up and posted on Twitter about snuggling with her cat and expressed her hopes for the Orioles’ future on Facebook. Her downstairs neighbor saw her leave the building at 11:30 in the morning. She was supposed to be ushering for Sunset Blvd at the Signature Theater. It was her first time ushering there, though, and so nobody was particularly concerned when she didn’t show up for the afternoon performance–just a new volunteer flaking out. It wasn’t until she didn’t arrive at the office on Monday that anyone noticed her disappearance.

Let me tell you–good times. Maybe I should re-read Bridget Jones’s Diary so I start narrating my life in that voice instead.

Snow was predicted for last Wednesday. I got home before it started, and when I pulled into the lot (shortly after leaving work; I left before it started snowing, so did not have an 8-hour commute, thankfully, unlike others in the region), I decided to park in the second spot from the end. My theory was that because the last spot was oddly shaped, nobody would park there. Then I’d only have to shovel out one side of my car, and the maintenance guys would dig out the end spot when they shovel the sidewalk and plow the lot.

Snow it did. At 7:30, the power went out. I did the dishes. And then I figured, what the heck, and went outside to dig out my car. The snow was quickly winding down by that point, and I didn’t have much else to do. So I cleaned off my car and shoveled out one side of it.

And then, 4 in the morning rolled around, and I heard the maintenance guys outside. Hours later, when I looked outside, I saw that my plan had worked. The one side of my car WAS dug out! Triumph! Of course, those guys are just too awesome, but actually, they had dug out everyone’s car. So my 20 minutes of digging was for nought. Well, exercise, I guess.

And then I didn’t get power back until 10:30 Friday night and had to throw out everything in my refrigerator and freezer. But that’s a boring, chilly story.

You know how when you’re first getting to know someone, you sort of throw out ideas and are all, “Yeah, we should totally do that!”? And how that doesn’t happen?

Except when it does.

One of the first times I hung out with my friend T, we talked about traveling. I mentioned my desire to go to Russia, and she said she wanted to go, too. Awesome! Traveling buddy! Except that, really, we didn’t know each other. But over the past couple of years, we continued hanging out. And the Russia trip kept coming up. We had hoped for 2010, but my family was going to the beach and that didn’t leave enough time to save money. “Russia 2011!” became the rallying cry.

And so it was that on Friday, we booked our trip to Russia. We’re taking a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. I absolutely cannot wait. I’ve wanted to go to Russia since taking a Russian history course senior year of college. Plus, I’ll be away from the office for over 2 weeks. Epic win!

So if anyone has suggestions for must-sees in Moscow or St. Petersburg, let me know!

My friend Steve tonight asked what his title was when we worked on our college newspaper. I couldn’t remember, but did remember that our school library has electronic copies of the paper, so I randomly chose an issue from January of 2000, my senior year. I flipped to the masthead and naturally my eye was drawn to the “Consider This,” which was our weekly editorial. That week there had been a snowstorm, to the point that classes were canceled. And this is what we wrote:

A helpful word of advice from the association of inebriated pedestrians: In hazardous conditions, the consumption of alcoholic beverages while walking anywhere on the College campus is not recommended. Out of the 500,000 snow shovels made by Wal-Mart annually, none of them, we repeat none of them, have ever made it to Gettysburg College. Also under that heading are snowblowers, icepicks, plows, and all other variations of snow removal equipment.

Drinking and debauchery aside, the cost of each class meeting for a Tuesday/Thursday session is approximately 95 dollars. The way that was, the staff, figure it, the College owes us a total of approximately 600 dollars. Checks can be made out to The Gettysburgian and mailed to campus box 434.

(The Gettysburgian, January 27, 2000, p. 9)

Dang, we swore! We were Hard Core. Also, completely insane by 2 a.m. And apparently desperate to pad the word count. But still, this, right here, is why I have such fond memories of the Burgian. It was awesome.

“Did you go home for the holidays?”

This afternoon, I tried to figure out when people stop asking you that. My office opened today for the first time since December 23, and there was a lot of “Did you go home for the holidays?”

There are some problems with this. First of all, I’m assuming most people mean “your parents’ house” when they say “home,” and my parents live in a house they moved into a year after I graduated from college. Over the past 9 years, I’ve maybe spent a month there, if you put all my visits together. (More, probably.) Before that, they lived in Richmond. Because I was still in college when they lived there, it was technically my home and I was a resident of Virginia. But it never really felt like home, though I did spend an entire summer there, as well as school breaks. And before that was Montana, where we lived for the last two years of high school. It was my permanent home for a while, but it wasn’t where I grew up.

At this point, it really should be, “Did you stay home for the holidays?” Because my apartment is my home. I’ve lived in this general area (within, say, 10 miles) for the past 10 years. But, I guess because I’m not married, “home” is still presumably my parents’ house. I can’t imagine asking my coworkers if they went home for the holidays. Once you’re married, you have your own family–so you have a home. It’s assumed that I’m traveling for Christmas. I did host my parents and grandmother once, but that was it. And it’s not practical to host, I know; honestly, my apartment isn’t huge.

But you know what? It’s home.

There was this Italian restaurant in Connecticut that we went to a LOT when I was growing up. In the back room, they had an arcade. In between ordering and the food arriving, I would scamper back and play Super Mario Bros. We didn’t have a Nintendo, so except for when I was visiting friends (”What do you want to do, Barb?” “Play Nintendo!” “But we did that last time.” “…Please?”), this was my chance to play.

I recently downloaded Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 on my Wii. This is the Best. Thing. Ever. This illustrates why it was probably a good thing that we didn’t have a Nintendo. Because ALL I DO is play videogames when I’m home. If I’m not playing one of those (or Sonic), I’m playing Wobbly Bobbly on my computer. (I finally beat it! YEAH!) This is probably not the healthiest situation. Particularly since I’m all, “Ooh, I should compare it to Super Mario Bros. Wii” (which, good idea–it’s so impressive seeing how they updated it) (though I do get annoyed by the new one defaulting more to Mario shooting ice; I like the fireballs).

So obviously I have more pressing things to do than to update this blog.

There’s an awesome 60 Minutes clip–12 minutes of footage of a cable car ride in San Francisco, taken mere days before the 1906 earthquake. At first I watched it, just appreciating the clothes (the hats!), the old cars weaving around, the horse-and-carts sharing the road with the cable cars and the cars. Such an interesting period, the turn of last century. I particularly enjoyed the bicycles passing the cable car.

But as I watched, I got more involved with the fact that the earthquake was going to happen. It particularly hit me late in the clip, as people started darting into the picture more, hamming it up a bit for the camera. And I couldn’t help but contrast that with the images of the post-earthquake city. And so sad. So, so sad.