Category: People

Hey, heads up. In case you syndicate NFD via its RSS feed, you should be aware that the feed address has changed (as linked right there). But then, of course, if you do read this thing only by syndication, you… won’t ever get this message. Um.

A lot of addresses have changed, actually, including the permalink format, but Leonard somehow managed not to break backward compatibility with old links. So they’ll still work, and the original NFD Lite permalinks (which redirect to the original NB permalinks) will still work, but the whole situation is just getting increasingly meta. One of these days the whole thing’s gonna go critical. Metacritical!

This is the second Spring Break Follow-Up Post, and it’s mostly to say that Spring Break Was GREAT! I wasn’t as good about keeping a personal travelogue this time as I was when I went to California, but fortunately I have a roommate and trip companion with a photographic memory. I’ll try to finish that up and patch the holes today or tomorrow.

Notable events that are true:

  • We did get caught in a blizzard, ditch the car, and walk five blocks with only a vague idea of where we were and an increasing chance of hypothermia. We lived, though. As did the car.
  • We did have every intention of seeing Kid Koala and other assorted DJs at a Real Club in New York City.
  • We did learn to appreciate the beauty of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
  • We (this time including Bee and Graham, Maria’s college crew, who are awesome) did stay up until four in the morning for no apparent reason, eventually acting pretty drunk without actually being drunk. This is what grownups do for fun, kids.
  • A cool thing about that night, though, was that Graham and I learned to communicate with gamma rays!
  • We did share our floor of the Days Inn (in Bodily Region) with the entire high-school Asian population of Pennsylvania.

Notable events that are not true:

  • I completely remembered to tell everyone at my job that I was leaving for a week on March 14th–long before, say, March 12th.
  • We did way more in Providence than mostly hanging out on the third floor of the mall.
  • I in no way embarrassed myself on the Dance Dance Revolution machine in the Brown Post Office. (You can take that as “I did play, but did look ridiculous,” or as “I did not play at all,” really. Your pick.)
  • We did actually see Kid Koala, because the show was not sold out.
  • We were extremely nice and careful with your car, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes, and certainly never killed its battery with a cell-phone charger and had to get a recharge from the hotel man. Thank you very kindly for its use. Look! Over there! Behind you! You’re not looking!
  • I came home and, on our self-appointed Monday of Rest, did something more useful than get mad at Prince of Persia all day.

It was a great trip. I can’t say the past month and a half was the most traveling I’ve ever done, but man, it was a lot of traveling. Who knows, I might even grow a beard now!

Oh, right, we’re home and not dead. We got in Sunday night after driving (or, in my case, passengering) like long-distance maniacs all the way from Bodily Region, Pennsylvania. I learned to hate Pennsylvania on this trip, by the way. It’s like Wyoming, but colder and less populous.

It snowed a bunch, so Maria and I punched a yeti in the face and then we went to the North Pole. Also there was breakfast.

Very, very cold. Very slippery. Good food though.

In Providence. Maria is shocked at me for being unhip enough to mention that I don’t like the Strokes in a record store, but dang, man, they’re all 2002.

It was a long drive but not so long as California. I have now visited both ends of the country inside 30 days, so basically I’m the king and I get a special hat.

I’m sending a packet of misdirected mail to my mother, only I don’t have a postal scale nor any way of getting to one. I judged its weight (by holding it in one hand and two sticks of butter in the other, and asking Maria’s friend Jackie to do the same) to be about 9 ozzes, which apparently costs $2.21 and thus consumed my last six stamps (= $2.22). Innovation!

Really hoping that’s enough postage now.

Oh, yeah, it’s Spring Break now, and I am taking my second road trip in two months: Maria and I leave tomorrow for another country, the fabled realm of New England. I hear it is very cold, but then again, it might be damp!

Something pretty gross happened last night.

I semi-regularly make pitchers of Country Time lemonade, which only I drink but which I drink in great quantities. The pitcher is a hassle to wash, so usually I’ll let it get almost empty (at which point the mixture is too strong to drink) and then mix up a new batch in the same pitcher. Kind of like stone soup. I do empty it out and clean it every three batches or so, though.

Yesterday, trying to decide which leftovers to eat, I noticed that we’d almost run out of juice. I pulled the aforementioned pitcher out from the back of the fridge and set it on the counter in anticipation of making more lemonade for dinner. I knew it had been a while since my last batch, but hey, it was in the refrigerator. No worries.

A couple minutes later, Maria started wrinkling her nose up and wondering what smelled bad. I didn’t smell anything, and said as much, but suggested it might be the black bean hummus and pita leftovers we had out from the 3rd Avenue Café. Maria disagreed. Maybe it was the dishes, then? No, nothing we’d been eating would have that kind of sickly-sweet-sour odor.

In the process of emptying the dishwasher, I lifted up the lemonade pitcher and set it down somewhere else. Maria had to leave the kitchen from the smell. I finally took a closer look at the pitcher, which contained green liquid with black stuff floating in it.

I poured it out, followed by gallons of soapy water and a thick coat of baking soda, and Maria made me throw away the pitcher and everything the Undead Lemonade had touched. She wanted to burn them, actually, but we lacked the necessary tools.

If I ever want to kill somebody by burning their flesh off, though, at least now I know what to do.