I’m wearing my cat ears from last year’s costume to work today. There’s a bunch of cats roaming our office wearing black scrubs. I’m also working on a big chocolate covered banana lollipop in celebration of Halloween. Yum.
I like Halloween. It’s a very youthful holiday. Everyone dresses up and giggles at everyone else. I’m going as a Hula girl this year. Pictures will be taken tonight.
I leave you with a picture of Alan and me last year when we were just roomies.
I had a great weekend, spent mostly with Alan. Friday, we had chill night at Dave and Busters. Saturday, we went to the UT/Missouri game (UT won 56-31!) and then met up with some of Alan’s friends for birthday celebrations. Today, I had lunch with my brother and dinner with Bing, Nisreen, and Nino. Good weekend.
At Dave and Busters on Friday, I noticed a guy putting on a gas mask before doing a dance on one of those dance games. He started to get really into, having the piece memorized, dancing with his back turned away from the prompts and doing handstands. After the song we were going to go when Alan noticed he had a whole bag of costumes. We watched him do one more masked dance. I told Bing and company about him tonight over dinner when Bing and Nino informed me that this guy does it at other arcades as well. Neat hobby.
I took a cell phone video of the performer.
The first picture, Alan wasn’t smiling because he was experimenting with my cellphone. Second picture, I look weird. This is right before we left with maybe 4 minutes left of the 4th quarter. I think I fell in love with UT football. In college, I went to many games without really loving the game. I enjoyed going and cheering but it was more a socializing event for me. Now that I understand the game a little bit more, I don’t get distracted watching. Mostly due to Alan’s patience in answering questions, I’ve learned a lot more about football ever since Cindy and I talked about learning more about football. I find UT football especially addicting since I have an automatic sense of loyalty to my Alma Mater. Dare I say, I’m hooked? Who would have thunk it? Alan got us some amazing seats. Never sat that close before. 30 yard line, 6 rows back from the field. We could see Derek Jeter and Roger Clemens from our seats.
The stadium was packed. 98,383 people. Alan said this is the first home game we’ve had where we were ranked no. 1 since 1977. Pride!
Seriously, though. I like football? How crazy is that?
I leave you with a football joke.
Why are football stadiums always hot after games?
Because all the fans leave.
This is about a week late. Nisreen and I had lunch last week and she introduced me to an Austiny treasure I’ve been meaning to try for a couple of years now. Serves vegetarian and vegan. A darling place. I had no idea I’d fall for it at first sight. Friends have suggested this place to me for several years now and I’ve always thought it’d be a little seedy in the dinerish kind of way. I was mistaken! Very quaint and darling. Has it’s own garden/patio. They also make their own everything from ketchup to mustard. I loved their mustard. The menu is eclectic. Everything from stir fry to pastas to enchiladas to burgers. All vegetarian. I ordered one of their burgers that was voted no 1. garden burger in Austin. It was good but I can’t wait to go back and get either omelets or the mushroom stroganoff (another suggestion from a long time patron). Love it. Will come back.
This is kind of rushed. I’m sweaty and about to run and shower and try out a Mediterranean buffet tonight also with Nisreen but with other great company :).
Wrote an article. Here it is as published on yahoo.com. (P.S. I’ve shaken his hand and have his autograph. Wee!)
How to Ruin the U.S. Economy
by Ben Stein1) Have a fiscal policy that creates immense deficits in good times and bad, burdening America’s posterity with staggering burdens of repaying the debt.
2) Eliminate regulation of Wall Street and/or fail to enforce the regulations that already exist, instead trusting Wall Street and other money managers and speculators to manage other people’s money with few or no regulations and little oversight.3) Have an energy policy that disallows producing our own energy and instead requires that we buy energy from abroad, thus making our oil prices highly volatile and creating large balance of payments deficits, lowering the value of the dollar and thus making the problem get progressively worse.
4) Have Congress mandate that banks and other financial entities lend money to persons they know in advance to have poor credit ratings or none at all.
5) Allow investment banks, insurers, and banks to bet their entire net worth and then some on the premise that borrowers known to be improvident will in fact repay those loans.
6) Allow the creation of large betting pools called “hedge funds” that can move markets and control the outcome of trading, thus taking a forum for savings and retirement for families and making it into a rigged casino game that exists primarily to fleece suckers like ordinary working men and women.
7) Have laws that protect corporate officers from being sued for misconduct but at the same time punish lawyers in the private sector who ferret out such misconduct and try to make accountable the people responsible for shareholder and investor losses. If one of those lawyers gets particularly aggressive in protecting stockholders, put him in prison.
8) Appoint as head of the United States Treasury Department a man whose whole life was spent on Wall Street, who became fantastically rich through his peddling of junk bonds at his firm while the firm later sold short those same sorts of bonds.
9) Scare Americans into putting up $750 billion of their hard earned money to bail out the billionaires and their friends who created the market for loans to poor credit risks (The “subprime” market) and the unbelievably large side bets on those loans, promising that such a bailout would save the retirement savings of Americans, then allow the immense hedge funds to make the market crater immediately afterwards.
10) Propose to save the situation by surtaxing the oil industry, which is owned by our fellow Americans, mostly in their retirement plans, thus penalizing Americans for investing in companies that efficiently and legally produce an indispensable product.
11) Insist that the free market requires that banks and insurers with friends of the Secretary of the Treasury be saved but allow other entities not so fortunate to fail, thus creating total uncertainty and terror among financial institutions, and demolishing all of the confidence built up in financial circles since the days of FDR.
12) Then have the Republican candidate say he would keep on the job the Treasury Secretary who facilitated the crisis, failed to protect the nation from the crisis, got the taxpayers to pony up to save his Wall Street buddies, and have the Democratic candidate, as noted, say he would save the day by taxing the stockholders of energy companies.
There, that should do it.
link: http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/yourlife/112984
My man had a birthday yesterday. I took him to Golf Smith and I’ve never seen him so alert. His ears all perked and he just looked hyper aware not unlike a puppy when a new animal is on his turf. It’s his candy shop. I learned that golf clubs can go all the way up to over $1K. Also learned that a lot goes into a club and there’s all sorts of detailing for what kind of ground you play on to how you swing. I found it very intriguing.
Anyway. Happy Birthday, Alan! He’s special to me.
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