do what tastes right

There was a Halloween party on Saturday. It was huge and excellent.
There was a snowy soccer game on Sunday. TIL won. Also excellent.
I really want a hamburger from Wendy's right now. And some fries and a frosty malt.

Kareem Abdul-Peterson

In a recent email to my sister I shared the story of the first ever varsity soccer game I played in for my high school team - the Marshall School Hilltoppers. I was an eighth-grader and since wire-rimmed glasses weren't allowed on the soccer field (for obvious "poke somebody's eye out" reasons) I had to buy a pair of plastic glasses for soccer-playing purposes. (Contact lenses just weren't nerdy enough for me, you see.)

The other "glasses rule" from the Varsity Soccer Federation of the Universe was that if you wore them, then you also had to have a strap around your neck to keep them on. This was all good and fine, except for that the only strap I had was the same one I had since I started playing soccer as a seven-year-old.

It was royal blue with green and pink dinosaurs on it.

I would always turn the thing inside out, so that only the plain black side showed - but throughout the course of the game, the dinosaurs would always find their way to the surface. "Look at us! We're dinosaurs!"

This first-ever varsity soccer game was an away-game at Proctor High. I was playing outside midfield which meant that I was always closest to the crowd. A group of four or five Proctor High guys was standing in a cluster pretty close to the side of the field and whenever I ran by, they would shout out: "Hey 15! Nice goggles!" Or "I like your goggles! Where'd you get 'em!" Or just simply "Goggles!" if they couldn't think of anything better. Ultimately, this didn't bother me too much. We won the game, and in my heart I knew they weren't goggles, anyway. They were plastic glasses. With a (dinosaur) strap.

In response to this story, which Marit had undoubtedly heard a number of times before, she sent me the following picture with caption:

Tell him he's wearing goggles, jerks.


Yeah, that's what I thought.

please do not feed fitger, rex, or zombie

I was walking from where I live to the south end of the island yesterday afternoon and it smelled like fall - dead leaves and fires in fireplaces. Whenever I smell the fall like that, I am reminded of the four-and-a-half block walk from 2631 Branch Street to Congdon Park Elementary School. Across Branch Street from my elementary school there was a fenced-off area where a guy kept some deer. Thinking back on the "deer pen" (as we called it) it was kind of strange....having wild deer inside a pen in the middle of a residential neighborhood, I mean. Some days we would go and watch the deer, and if we were lucky, they'd come right up to the fence and we could touch them and, despite the sign, feed them some leaves. Their names were Fitger, Rex, and Zombie, but we couldn't tell them apart.

I don't think there are any deer in the deer pen anymore - at least there weren't the last time I checked. Fitger, Rex, and Zombie are probably running free in deer heaven.

sorry ms. jackson, i am fo real

I was running on the treadmill this morning and I'm pretty sure I started singing out loud along with my rPod. Fortunately for me, it was 7am and there were only a couple of other people working out. I'm not really sure how much Outkast I sang - and when I say "sang," I mean "rapped" - but knowing me, it was the line "fo ever, fo ever ever, fo ever ever" and the part that follows that. I guess I had gotten into the running zone - where I forget that I'm in a public place and sing out loud and play air keyboard/drums. Way to go, Rach.

somebody's gotta catch those naughty pirates

Friday was a blast.
But Saturday was equally blasty.
Scott - or should I say Captain Meyer - and I had tickets to the Oktoberfest party thrown by the medicine students.
This year's theme: Pirate Life.
Going into this, I knew I didn't want to be a pirate. I mean, I love pirates and have loved pirates ever since I was forced to wear an eye patch for a couple years as a child and since Cap'n Billy visited the Morning Show on MPR. But EVERYONE and their mother was gonna dress up as a pirate, so I asked Marit for some alternative ideas. She sent me a list of about ten hilarious ideas and the one Scott and I chose was Navy Officers.

Somebody's gotta catch those naughty pirates, right?!

We found some insane-o Russian navy coats at the army surplus store in town and made "Pirate Patrol" signs to put on our backs in case people didn't get it. We looked fantastic and we got loads of postive feedback.
The party was packed and we ran into some other friends and danced til our feet fell off. (Or at least my toe-nail's about to fall off after approx. sixty pirates stepped on me on the dance floor. Oh well, it hurts to be awesome.)

However, the most highly hilarious part of the night was when we got on the bus from the pre-party going to the University. The ENTIRE back half of the bus was FILLED with pirates and when Captain Meyer and I got on everyone screamed and went nuts. ARRRRGGHHH! Then we charged through the crowd and started pretending like we were gonna arrest 'em all. They loved it. (Exhibit A)



Exhibit A (left)

Don't worry Mom and Dad, I only had two beers the whole night. I promise :-)

lemme hear ya say "aiiiiight!"

Friday night was the big night - well, so was Saturday for that matter, but we'll get back to that in the next post. My favorite Swedish indie-hoppers performed at Insomnia Festival here in town. In case you didn't know, an indie-hopper is the name I made up for really good-looking white hip-hoppers who looks like indie rockers. Snook - in a word. The other rad thing about Snook - besides the music - is that they wore hooded smocks.



After Snook came the featured act of the festival: Public Enemy. Yes, all the way from the U.S. to tiny little Tromsø, Flavor Flav and Chuck D. brought the house down. And me and my U.S. homeboys Scott, Colin, and Jeremiah rocked ourselves unconscious during the two-hour long concert. Being in Norway and all, I was a little disappointed that Flav wasn't wearing his viking helmet. But when you've got a crowd of crazy, drunk Norwegians shouting out "Hell Yeah!" and "Aiiiight," nothing else really matters.
It was probably the raddest and most hilarious experience I've had in a long time.

bad luck

I know it's bad luck to walk under a ladder, but is it bad luck to almost knock a guy off a ladder? I opened up the door of our study-room cause I needed out, but little did I know there was a man perched on a ladder fixing some wires in the ceiling right on the other side. He said "Oi!" I said "Yowzahs!" Nobody was harmed.

My friend and co-worker from Skogfjorden, Grambo, came to visit for a few days last week. By the end of his first day in town he said: "I could see myself living here, for sure." That's what Tromsø does to you.













And then my lovely Bulgarian friend and peace classmate Tsvetan left Tromsø because his girlfriend is expecting a baby - which was sad because we want him to stay here, but happy because he's gonna be a dad. And he'll be a great dad.

singing on the pier

The sextet I sing in - which, unbeknownst to my fellow singers, I have dubbed sexytet - preformed at a 40th birthday on Saturday night. Considering that we had only practiced twice since June, we did fine. My favortie part of the evening, however, was not singing at the actual party, but warming up in the rain on the cement pier under the yellow glow of the shipyard lights. The bridge to the mainland towered above us as the smell of salty sea fish filled the air. Imagine if you were walking over the bridge and suddenly heard the faint refrain of Blackbird coming from somewhere below...coming from the water. How creepily wonderful!

snip snip goes the hair

Vibeke The Great cut my hair last night.
This is what I look like now:

oh geez...please don't fall

I had my first day of work at a daycare/pre-school last week and when I wasn't wiping runny noses or peeling clay off the floor, I was stabalizing furniture and covering all remotely sharp corners with my hands. One to three-year-olds get hurt a lot. The funny thing is that when you think they've hurt themselves real bad, they just get up and shake it off. It's when they graze their head on the book shelf or accidently get hit in the face with a pillow that they freak out. But man, they're cute.
I was pushing five kids on tire swings - each swing was attached to its own side of a pentagon-shaped swing set so I just had to walk around in a circle - and when I made it back to the girl I had started with, she was on the ground. She had simply slipped right through the hole in the middle of the tire and landed on the ground. I tried real hard not to laugh, but I couldn't help myself.
Working at the barnehage reminded me of an exhibit my mom and dad took me and Marit to see at the Field Museum in Chicago when I was maybe 8 years old. It was a reminder of what it was like to be three years old again. They had built a huge table and chairs so that when you sat down your head was barely above the table surface...and your feet were dangling in the air. For an eight year old, I probably didn't quite get the point. Three was still failry fresh in my past. But I'd like to see that exhibit again. Except this time I'd want a huge bowl of applesauce and some gigantic animal crackers, too.