Wedageddon

Thursday morning in the throes of a famous Streissand movie, The Week We Wed. Wowsers, it's been crazy. And I just got here!

Here is Rochester and more specifically the Searl kitchen, where looking out the bay windows I can see a slew of centerpiece potted flowers (called heliotropes, I believe) and two shepherd's staffs that Beck and I wove with purple/blue/white flowers. It's all quite lovely. In fact, why describe when I can show...




To catch things up, I nabbed Ben and Ali from the airport on Monday night after a weekend of taking care of the Heidster. Who is that, you ask?



Yep, Heidi rules. We had a very fun weekend together, up to and including her sleeping on top of me in the guest bed and then licking me awake at 5 am a couple of times. Hellsyeah! So on the way home from the airport, Benali and i attempted to have a little farewell dinner in Westborough and were badly shot down at the Canyon Cafe. So we went to (Gee) Willikers and "enjoyed" some subpar margaritas and "fine" dining. And an insane woman tried to bus our table. Odd.

So a solid last night with Gringoat, and I woke up CRAZY kinds of early on Tuesday to head down to school. But FIRST - the Honda dealership. I had this grand plan to get an iPod jack installed in the car for our coming cross country trek, and the price quoted to me at Bernardi was $170. So I dropped the car off there and walked the remaining 2 miles to school (uphill, snow, etc.). And then they called me at 7:45 to tell me it was actually going to be $410. WHAAAAA??? No Dice-K, man. So I had to cancel the order and after class, walk BACK to the Honda dealership. PUNKS!!!! Bernardi Honda, may you burn in a stereo-accessory-less Hell.

So that whole experience was aggravating, but the last day at the Nut was crushingly sweet. My class managed to not be complete jerks, Danielle stopped off and gave me a present, Tory and Grace baked me a cake, and the science / math departments sent me off kindly with gifts. Here are some pictorial accounts of the last day at the Hill; my Nutty friends, I will miss you.

First, the SASI Swans:


And the rest of the class:


And Danielle with mmmmGift, mmmmkay:


And Tory and Grace, and the cake:



ANd the most excellent set of Math/Science types ever to attempt the education of right-brained yahoos:


ANd the Nut as I left it:


So I then BOOKED it home to my empty apartment...


Packed (not pahked) the car and left Massachsetts in the rearview:


And now here I am, that's great it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes and aeroplanes and t-minus 2 days. YIKES! Speaking of, I have to go get some wedding-ness in gear, but I promise I will get more up here soon.

ANd don't worry, I definitely know that I still owe a graduation account and some general recall of the past week and a half or so. But now, on to the details. Be back with more soon.

P.S. I shouldn't fail to add names to the Walnut photos. That's Corin, Jon, Anne, Me, Kathi and Anne B. And the SASI class photos are Jourdan, Nicole (son of a pro baseball player!) and Hope, and the class picture is (standing) Mengting, Celine, Brad, Aaron, Jourdan, Hope, Josh, Vicky, Justine, Vicky, Enzo, Sooji (sitting) Caitlin, Nicole and (prone) Marc.

P.P.S. I also shouldn't fail to mention that my last day was very nice - I got cards from a lot of students, including some of my Taiwanese students who told me that I had helped them a lot with their confidence in math and english and everything. Good times. I will miss a selective number of my students. That SASI class, though - sheesh.

I Prefer the 4.3 Mile Version

Just went on Ali's run this afternoon, and this time made it back sans call to beck or asking for directions 15 times.

I suppose this was a horrendous risk to take - with Beck and Gringoat out of town, I had serious flashes of ending up stranded somewhere in Central Mass, crying at the lack of street signs. But don't worry, I took precautions - I looked at Google Maps right before I left to make sure I knew which road to turn on AND I hooked up "The Lady" (read: GPS device) to my forehead so I would know when to turn right. That was a life saver. As they say, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, Baba O'Reilly.

D-Hall this morning was thoroughly stupid, but it's over... I finished cleaning the apartment yesterday, so all that's left to do this PM is truck over and put the seventeen bags of garbage out for pickup tomorrow. Yikes. That and I've gotta go pick up BenAli from el aeropuerto. Then it's one more day of the Nut, pack up the car and leave the last six years in the rearview. Ho hum.

I am waiting on writing up the festivities of the past week (read: it's not happening) until I get a chance to use pictorial evidence - my computer is packed up, and I don't want to toss a bunch of stuff on the Sprecher computer. In exciting news, I got through the entire weekend and managed to snap NO PICS of Emily. Actually, that is a lie; I have a picture of her back and the back of her noggin that was accidentally captured as Ali walked down the graduatin' aisle. I am, like, the worst paparazzi ever.

Alright, Heidi is giving me a look normally reserved for "Cystic pressure" type indications, so I'm going to cut this short. There are pics of her on their way, too, I swear.

T-minus five...

Ground Control to Major Nyet

"Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong."

(Wow, we've been buried in busy-ness here at NyetJones, Inc. Sorry for the dearth. It will happen again).

Posting here from the upstairs study of the Gringoat, post Heidi-walk. A whirlwind week and an account is coming, I swear, but for now you'll get the brief outline form (so I can remember what to put down later). I'm relatively certain (how could one forget this, honestly) that we last left our heroes on the day of "The Song," the shutout of a Dean's Dinner and the lazy Saturday morning of tutoring. And so...

Saturday Night - The Opening Act of Vet Graduation, aka Alipalooza 2007, a party at the Sprechers' down in Newton. Featuring a bona fide celebrity* and red carpet treatment for red-haired grandmamas. Fun times, endearing speech times. Alipalooza.

(* - That was, perhaps, the worst joke ever)

Sunday Morning - Brunch with the iPFam, GrinGoat and Ali's brother, LA Actor and Honorary PBoat for the weekend Jon.

Sunday Afternoon - A threateningly rain-soaked but ultimately beautiful Vet School graduation, aka Alipalooza 2007 Main Show Under the Big Tent (featuring no fewer than 24 PGoat-Devotees, or Pgoatees, if you will. But you won't, I know). This also featured Sarah's Vet Address, which oh yeah is going to get its own post on The Ballad in a second.

Sunday Late Afternoon - Ice Cream in the Drizizzle. S & S. You Know This.

Sunday Evening - Fun dinner with iPFam at The Sole Proprietor (it's a fish restaurant, not a unique entity or a place to buy indulgences). Rumor has it that Alipalooza (now with shuttle buses) conquered a restaurant somewhere in Boston. She had her own menus. Those Wolfs do it up bigtime.

Monday - 'Nother day at school, packing, and Pizza Dinner with an Abandoned Ali. This Post is very Ali-centric, eh?

Tuesday - Test at School, Sweet Letter from a Student, Present from Fellow Teachers, Packing, and farewell dinner at Vinny T's with Gringoat and the Trinity (Christophe, Malcom and Sarha aka Sloe Bube). Let it be known that Sarah is supermom - she is unphased and handles the kid with somethign bordering on maternal instinct. Compelte with sarcasm. Quite impressive.

Wednesday - School blah blah blah, Packing, Burning myself, Ice cream and Heidi style instructions from BenAli. Beck did not leave as planned.

Thursday - Airport ride for BenAli, Politics at School, More Packing, Packing Packing Packing AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH. Beck did not leave as planned - but we did finish stuffing the truck at about 9 o'clock AND we figured out a gigantic pneumatic gate. Let's hear it for two Rice enginee... academs.

A side note - Poor Beck. I had to work all week and she was stuck dealing with our overstuffed apartment. Possessions may be fleeting, but they are not very light. Ugh. Sorry Kwia.

Friday - Beck pushed off early early, I put in a next to last day at school, complete with an Engagement Party thrown by last year's Stat Class, which is just about as sweet as a human being can possibly take without enduring severe kidney damage and retinopathy. Seriously, just a ridiculously cute, make you cry sort of event. Nice. Came home and finished putting trash away in the apartment; the actual cleanup will happen hopefully Sunday. And came over here yesterday afternoon and have played serious amounts of fetch with Heidi. Swank.

So that's a boring account; more exciting stuff to come. In keeping with the Space Oddity theme, we are exactly 7 days away from the death of my bachelorhood. O. M. G.

Check ignition and may God's love be with you...

falling...

tears don't you fall...
eyes don't you cry...
i can't break down...

Responsibility

Wah, kalo liat tanggal postingan terakhir saya yang 4 mei 2007 kemarin rasanya udah lama banget gak ngurus blog ini, banyak tetangga yang jarang dikunjungi, malahan rumah saya yang kesatron orang yang gak jelas. Whatever! Rasanya merasa bersalah juga, apa lagi waktu kemarin sempat ke tempatnya k’ aan waktu peluncuran bukunya (itupun hanya datang untuk memberi selamat) saya ketemu dengan rara, ndy, dan beberapa blogger lainnya. Rasanya sudah lama sekali. Menjadi masalah kah? Tentu saja, karena banyak cerita yang tersia, banyak cerita yang tidak sempat terkeluarkan, dan hanya membusuk di ujung pikiran.
Kali ini saya hanya ingin berbagi dengan kalian mengenai responsibility alias tanggung jawab. Yah karena inilah yang mengisi dan menyita semua waktuku selama 3 minggu terakhir ini. Kenapa tanggung jawab? Pertama, ketika mata kuliah Produksi Siaran, ternyata semua tim saya tidak ada yang kerja full, otomatis saya yang mengambil alih mulai dari pengambilan gambar, proses editing dan menyiapkan semuanya sampai sang produser datang dan bergabung kembali. Dan minggu lalu baru aja kelar workshop penyiaran yang sudah selama sebulan lebih dipersiapkan. Jadi kalau ada yang bertanya, bagaimana long weekend saya kemarin. Percayalah kalian tidak akan mau berada di posisi saya.
Kamis … rehearsal terakhir untuk live Pelangi Makassar di kampus, walaupun jadwal latihannya paling sore saya udah datang dari pagi buat latihan dan menyamakan persepsi dengan teman yang lain. Ini sampe malam, trus lanjut briefing dengan panitia workshop, karena listrik di FIS IV disabotase, sehingga mati. Sedangkan kami ingin produksi, gimana? Ini juga sampe malam
Jumat … ke kampus lagi, soalnya memfix kan semua urusan untuk workshop di hari sabtu. Workshop yang rencananya dua hari, jumat sama sabtu menjadi dipadatkan di hari sabtu saja, soalnya bingung dan ribet harus mencari listrik dari FIS 3 (dengan menggunakan 5 kabel rol) dan mencari laptop buat peserta, soalnya lab computer gak bisa dipake produksi. Jadi panitia menyarankan (soalnya kasian juga kalo mesti dibatalkan) memakai laptop saja buat produksinya. Pulang ke rumah sehabis sholat jumat, setelah itu bisa tidur sejenak dan malamnya ke Bazar anak 2005 (secara sebagian besar panitia anak 2005, entar workshopnya di boikot)
Sabtu … ke kampus untuk workshop penyiaran. Materinya bagus banget. Cuma karena ternyata masalah listrik, damn!!! Saya terjaga sampe sore, trus ke rumahnya alfie, were buat ngembaliin laptop mereka. Ke tempatnya k’ aan dan terjebak kemacetan dan berpetualang di gang-gang bersama mookz
Minggu … tidur udah jam 12 malam, bangun jam 5 subuh, trus nonton LOST plat satu sampe plat 6 dengan mengingat besok adalah final semester 6 dengan mata kuliah Komunikasi Antar Budaya dan membawa rasa bersalah mengingat lagi bahwa ternyata bahan kuliahnya besok itu dibawakan dalam bahasa inggris. Jadinya teteup nonton saja.
Jadi kembali dengan tanggung jawab. Kenapa? Karena memang saya tipe demikian. Tipe orang yang akan menyelesaikan semuanya ketika memang saya sudah dipercaya untuk mengerjakannya. Dan hari ini saya diuji lagi. Diuji oleh teman saya dan dosen saya. Untuk mata kuliah Media Format Kecil. Saya sudah mengkonformasi bahwa di semua tempat yang Bapak Dosen TERHORMAT rekomendasikan sudah tidak membuat lagi slide postif. Tapi beliau tetap keukeuh. Dan teman-teman saya bersikap, yah… whatever! Saya sebagai ketua kelas harus mencari penyelesaiannya, setelah memberi kabar, ternyata beliau menyebut satu tempat lagi di jalan yos sudarso. Dan tadi (senin, 21 mei 2007, final hari pertama) semua yang ambil mata kuliah menanyakan lagi mengenai bagaimana tugasnya dan nilai finalnya. Yah, saya langsung menceritakan saja berdasarkan kenyataannya. Dan saya mencari teman buat menemani (dalam kata lain mengantar) ke tempat yang dimaksud. Eh, tiba-tiba saja ada seseorang yang nyolot. Katanya sia-sia saja. Dan bla bla bla… buset! Sakit telingaku mendengarkan perkataannya. Saya kan tidak akan merepotkan kamu. Kalo emang gak mau, ya udah. Nanti saya yang berusaha sendiri. Jangan nyolot ke saya. Saya suruh ngomong ke dosennya langsung, gak berani juga. Sekali lagi jangan NYOLOT sama saya. Kau kira saya juga suka diginiin. Ini bukan masalah bilang sama tu dosen bahwa sudah tidak ada tempat yang bisa nyetak slide itu, tapi saya lebih kepada masalah tanggung jawab dulu. Bagaimana supaya kalian enak, tu dosen juga enak. Karena walopun udah semena-mena, tetap nilai jatuh ada pada dia. Walopun capek, tetap saya akan jalan. Karena bagaimana pun juga ini menjadi tanggung jawab saya. Toh kalian nanti hanya perlu tahu apa yang jadi tugas penggantinya kan?
*tarik napas dalam-dalam dulu
Maaf saya jadi emosi. Tapi memang ini dari dalam diri saya. Kalian bilang bodoh, silahkan. Kalian bilang sia-sia, silahkan. Tapi inilah taktik saya. Untuk mengcounter perkataan dosen nanti ketika dia menanyakan hal ini lagi. Jadi tolong saya juga capek. Tapi ketika tanggung jawab sudah ada didepan mata. Bagaimana pun juga itu harus diambil dan dihadapi.

Supertramp & the Retarded Song, Pt. 2

So we eventually left the Sav/Mal/Joy triumvirate to their peace and headed back along the rain-slicked streets toward Grafton. And this is when things got truly hilarious. First, ben launched into an unprecedented monologue about the restaurant Dino's in Worcester. This was excellent and contained a rather thorough and disgusting description section. Sweet. And then Ali and Ben began worrying about what they would do with Heidi that weekend, as their planned (and to be paid) dogsitter had fallen through.

"What ever shall we do?" the PGoat cried.

"I know not!" the Grin declared.

The entire car was in an uproarious state of distress over the care of Heidi over the coming weekend. It seems Ben-Ali will be traveling to Mexico this coming week, not just to counteract current Amnesty-laden congressional bills, but to attend a wedding of friends of theirs. Ben is going to be acquiring a prescription snorkel mask for the occasion, having calculated that purchasing the correct mask once would be cheaper over the long haul than renting one every time he goes to a wedding. A shrewd businessman, that one. I tried to ask what kind of wedding requires a snorkeling mask. Dead silence. Damn. Apparently the time of concern for Heidi is not a funny time at all. After roughly ten minutes of debating what to do, it occurs to them that, as planned, I am staying at their house next weekend! So they were about to hire someone to watch over Heidi and I would have been there. This is, quite plainly, highly insulting. Nevertheless, their short cancellation notice problem is solved, as now I will take care of the Heidster, free of charge. Much laughing occurred, and someone (I'm guessing Ali) asked what they could do to make me feel better about the gigantic dis. I wryly declared that it was okay, so long as they sang the "I'm retarded" song. (Please note the comedy value of offensiveness for the sake of being offensive - it's debatable how relatively heartless and cruel this is, but given that the phrase "wicked retarded" gets ballied about Bostonian parts without a second thought, it's pretty much a fair statement that we've all been brutally desensitized. If you feel the need, you can blame the Farrelly brothers circa "There's Something About Mary").

It was meant to be a passing comment. But I had inadvertently tossed a softball in the Gringoat wheelhouse.

"How does it go?" Ben asked.

I sang a rather tuneless melody to the lyrics "I'm retarded," complete with indecipherable accent portraying a vicious speech impediment. This is vicious and mean, I know, but again, it's in the spirit of a comedy game of "where's the line?" Well, Ben and Ali joined in and left the line well behind them. They belted, quite joyously, an impossibly loud, offensive, tuneless, enthusiastic and absurd version of the I'm retarded song. So they won the offensive game, hands down, maybe even moreso since Ali capped off the performance with "Oh, I didn't realize that was offensive." Brilliant. I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. I am a terrible, terrible human being.

After I stopped peeing in my pants, we managed to take the GG home and headed back ourselves to get ready for the Dean's Awards Dinner. We snappy-casualed up ourselves well enough and then headed over to the Worcester Marriott to pick up the iRents. And then we hit up the country club for the first in what I'm sure will be an insurmountable mountain of graduation events. Ali quickly noted that drinks would be in order as there were approximately 37 awards being given out in the evening. iPJ gladly obliged, grabbing a Cosmo for the PG and scotches for iPMM and me. Good times! We had a fine cheese and fruit pre-dinner , ate a nice standard fare buffet meal, and spun our chairs around to the front, eager to listen to award winner's names being announced through the most fuzzed out amplification system this side of the Sex Pistols.

Well, it's a good thing Beck and Ali are friends with Almond Joy, because otherwise our little corner of Vetverse would have been totally shut out on Awards Night. Ali was near tears when I reminded her that they don't give out a Prettiest Girl of All Time award because that would be akin to giving an award to the sky for being blue; we don't need to acknowledge the blatantly obvious. This seems to cheer her Goatness up. beck, on the other hand, was not near tears at all - degree (nearly) and job in hand, she has accomplished more than enough the last four years and any award would have just been the cherry on top of the icing on the cake. Plus, as Beck pointed out, these were the types of awards that were likely swayed by isolated incidents and anecdotal evidence, and as we all know, anecdotal evidence makes an anec out of dot and al. There also seemed to be a disproportionate number of awards handed out to the ten or so male students in the class, leaving the analytic likes of ben and me to conclude that voters were allowing themselves to be swayed by stand out factors - essentially the same reason you remember the last commercial featuring Jennifer Love Hewiit you saw but probably don't remember the last general commercial you saw. Stand. Out. Factors.

So we left the shindig empty handed, but everyone knows there are no winners and losers, only people who got $500 stipends and people who didn't impress their professors enough. So it goes. We bid the GG and the iRents goodnight and headed for the homestead, where I briefly contemplated staying up to watch the Spurs scores scroll by on the monitor but opted for sleep instead. (The Spurs won, by the way, and the only asterisk that requires is the one that reads "comma, beeotch!").

Saturday has been a slow one so far - one tutoring job and a quick stopby at a Vet function at Canyon Cafe - saw Emmy and Dave and Steve and Jason and Cindy and a bunch of other Vet-peeps. Everyone looks so dolled up, and everyone in Cindy's family looks incredibly like her. Otherwise, I am apartment packing for the PM and headed down to Newton for a shindig and perhaps one of the most spectacular evenings... ever. Oh, you shall see...

Supertramp and the Retarded Song, Pt. 1

Mainly to irk Karen, I'm going to include another picture of the Beck smooching with one of our ever-so-cute dogs...


And in other news, I may now have an inkling that Darren = Wrigley. Hmmmm....

Friday was an altogether bang-up day, fraught with controversy and intrigue on the Nut Front (elections, allegations, oh my) and an afternoon of this-is-your-age-now, bildungsroman type uberevents. After surviving the Nuttiness (no really, I'll be here all week), I traveled home through blustery storms to meet up with the Beck. She got her new MacBook, so in lieu of having a conversation I just looked at a white plastic cover with an Apple logo and told it how my morning went. Oh, the detachment of modernity. Sighs and ones and zeros.

It turns out that we were waiting for the PGoat to get home from a train ride into Boston, but once she got home things kicked into high gear. We picked up Ali and Grin and headed to the Worcester Hospital to visit Mal and his rents. Let's take a moment to get a few things out of the way...

Hey Sarah, is Mal content? (giggle giggle).

Hey Christophe, when the whole family is together, is Malcolm in the Middle? (Guffaw).

Phew. So Ali and Beck chatted away in the front seat while Ben and I discussed NPR shows and socialist tendencies in Venezuela and the goodness that is Reece's Pieces. (Thankfully, we did not run into Reece; I hear he's a bully). We pulled up to the hospital, got some valet service and headed up to see the happy Fam. Thirty six hors of induced labor produced not just a lot of sarcastic comments but a pretty awesome little guy. It is now time for a slew of pictures...


I gotta go tutor so this is a big fat to be continued... but seriously, check out those pics. Thanks again to greg and meghan; those are undoctored shots straight from the camera. Beautiful!