Freakin’ Fantastically Fun Friday!

Or as I like to call it, “FFFF.” Much to the discontent of anybody within range of my spit.

So, my very dear and amazingly awesome friend Erin (visit her blog here) was sweet enough to include me in a post concerning her favorite blogs that she enjoys visiting, so I figured I should probably cook up a nice little post. Had some fun stuff happen in the past couple weeks, so here’s a rapid fire update for you, starting with something incredibly exciting.

I got a haircut.

Okay, okay, I’m sorry.

I grilled a heart-shaped ribeye for Jenn and me on Valentine’s Day.

I used a new seasoning on it that I hadn’t used before, much to the delight of my easily amused palate. Jenn loved it, too. She cooked a mean pot roast that day for lunch. Our V-Day gift to each other was to stay at home and cook for each other. Best V-Day ever, seriously.

It snowed shortly before V-Day.

Just a little.

Some jerk kids knocked over our snowman. Here’s a dramatic reenactment of the discovery from after our second snowman fell over on its own…

Also, here’s Maddie catching a snowball.

Words With Friends is awesome. Here’s a screencap of the most epic opening word I’ve ever started a game with.

You can see my username on there, so feel free to challenge me. It’s a fun little diversion when I have some downtime at work.

I found this really awesome artist who makes some killer poster art based on favorite comic book characters. Here are two of my favorites, Green Lantern and Iron Man.

I especially love that GL poster. I mean, GL’s my favorite in general, but that’s just cool in its simplicity. Wish I had it framed for my nonexistent man cave. Heck, might as well throw in that Iron Man poster, too, if we’re talking nonexistent things. 🙂

Let’s see, what else? School’s going okay, graduation’s getting closer and closer. Work’s going fine, even though I’m beyond ready to move up into the world of teaching.

Jenn and I doing marvelously. We had our first premarital counseling session with our pastor and his wife last Sunday, and we’ll do our second/last one this Sunday. Planning the wedding and the honeymoon have really brought us together as a team more than ever before, and it makes me all the more excited to tackle life together with her.

Speaking of the honeymoon, I’ve been using Yelp and this excellent book to assemble a “bucket list” of sorts of restaurants and other stuff we have to check out while we’re in Kauai. It’s turning into quite a list, and I’m having a blast compiling all this info. There’s so much to do during the week that we’ll be there, and we’re so freakin’ excited about it. 🙂

Guess that’s about it for now. I hope you have a blessed and FFFF.

Excuse me, I need to get a paper towel.

Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue.

C’mon rain!

Click to embiggen

<– So have you seen this yet? The Empire State Building decided to celebrate the 60 year anniversary of China's commie regime by lighting up all purty ‘n red ‘n yelluh.

Seriously, who’s in charge of this? What on Earth is wrong with you!? 36 million Chinese starve to death (upwards of 72 million dead total), and you feel the need to celebrate this auspicious occasion by using the tallest building in New York City– and an iconic symbol of the world’s most awesome representative of freedom and capitalism– as a shiny happy beacon of commie goodness?

Smooth. Real smooth. So, I’m thinking we march. We get some of our greatest American heroes and have them lead a massive march to the Empire State Building. And when we get there, we drape American flags all over the outside of the building, and throw apple pies at whoever was responsible for this.

Is it possible to be tongue-in-cheek and serious at the same time? 🙂

iPSotD:

Workstation (BONUS: Click for details! Oooo!)

My eyes hurt.

It’s one of those days where my eyes just don’t want to work. It’s also one of those days where I really wish I didn’t have to wear glasses… Which is kinda every day, now that I think about it. Friend of mine just got Lasik surgery the other day, so I’ve been wondering about how much my insurance would cover if I decided to get that done myself. I really wish I could get it done before the wedding, but I’m not sure how likely that is. It’d just be cool to not have to worry about my glasses during the honeymoon, y’know? That, and I really want to get some custom-made Oakleys for me and Jenn to wear during the honeymoon. Check out these bad boys that I made:

Big C style, baby.

That’s not the final design, but it’s pretty close. Slick stuff, huh?

Speaking of the wedding, I’m meeting Jenn at the Sheraton Hotel right after class this afternoon. We’re meeting with the lady there who’s helping us put together our wedding reception, and we’ll be looking at table linens and stuff. Should be fun. If anything, it’s one step closer to us finally getting married, so WOOT. 🙂

The past couple of weeks have been really rough when it comes to dealing with the big-headed dork in my American Political Parties class. The guy is way too outspoken for his own good, and I have a feeling it’s gonna come back and bite him in the butt one of these days. Regardless, it’s certainly been a tremendous opportunity for me to seek new levels of patience that I’ve never achieved before. I’m almost 100% certain that I’m the only guy in here with conservative Christian values, so it’s been quite an ordeal getting through this class every morning. Not really how I like to start my day, of course, but I gotta get it done. And I only have to deal with this for a couple more weeks, so I just keep reminding myself of that. Then I get a couple weeks of free time before I dive head-first into the Fall semester.

Should be getting my Green Lantern: First Flight DVD in the mail today. I was hoping to get it yesterday (seeing as how it came out in stores yesterday), but the post office seems to have epic-fail’d yet again. Oh well, it should be worth the wait. I’ve heard that if the live action Ryan-Reynolds-as-Hal-Jordan movie is half as good as this animated flick, it will be quite the win for DC Comics. Can’t wait. 🙂

BTW, Green Lantern #44 and Tales of the Corps #2 were both brilliant last week. Make sure you go pick them up if you’re interested, it’s worth it.

Mmmm, rainy.

This weather is so nice. I wish it would last all day. I also wish I was still in bed listening to it, as opposed to being in the basement of University Hall, listening to my incredibly Japanese professor teach us about American political parties. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but he’s actually pretty awesome. Except for the 15 page paper he assigned us yesterday that’s due on August 5th. That part isn’t so cool. But it’ll be an easy paper to write, so that’s nice.

There’s a dude in here who’s a Political Science major, and he just cracks me up. The guy is trying to look like a total B.A.. His hair is slicked back, he’s very physically fit, he wears a Jaegermeister t-shirt that’s a size too small, and he flirts like crazy with this one girl in here. The funny part? He’s got the goofietht lithp I’ve ever heard. It’s freakin’ hilarious! He triyth to go on theeth ranth about whath wrong with the Republican Party and how Chrithtianity ith dead, and all I can do is laugh at the lisp. I know it’s wrong, I’m sorry. But I just can’t help it. 🙂

This half of the summer has been crazy. I’ve got this class, which has been pretty decent, plus my Images of the American West class in the mornings. My American West class has been pretty sweet. We watched “Stagecoach” last week, and we finished “Dodge City” yesterday. Both are excellent movies, and showed John Wayne and Errol Flynn at their awesomest.

Anyway, I’ve also got my Architecture class at TCC in the evenings. My teacher is this really scatterbrained Jordanian lady. She’s really nice on a personal level, but she’s all over the place as a teacher. It’s really hard to get her to focus when you have a question that needs to be answered. She kinda irritated me last night. We had to have a roughdraft ready for a model we have to build for our midterm project. I kept mine pretty simple, a mildly stylized cross with a couple of pyramids on it. It would have satisfied the criteria she outlined in the assignment sheet, and I was happy. But of course, she comes around to take a look at it last night, and she scribbled like crazy ALL OVER IT. You can’t even see the original design anymore, because she drew what SHE wanted me to make right on top of it. Granted, the design she came up with is really nice, but it was really irritating how she approached changing up my original creation. Not to mention that she made it a whole lot more complex, so I’m not looking forward to figuring out how I’m going to build the stupid thing.

Back on my diet today. I’m STARVING. Gotta stay focused.

Oh, and Blackest Night #1 is freakin’ awesome. This is gonna be one wild story!

An update just for you, Kilo.

Man, what a summer this is shaping up to be. Classes have been kicking my butt, and I am beyond ready to be done with school. Summer I at UTA was pretty rough, but I think I emerged unscathed. Summer II is shaping up to be pretty cool, with my Political Parties and Images of the American West classes. TCC is kinda the exact opposite, though. Summer I was a lot of fun thanks to the people and the teacher in my Spanish III class. But now Summer II kinda sucks, because Spanish IV and Intro to Architecture just aren’t tickling my fancy so much. BUT, I’ll get through it. Have to.

Jenn and I (with Misty) took our annual trip down to Galveston this past weekend. Despite what some people said about the devastation caused by Hurricane Ike, it actually looked really great down there. True, there was a field full of destroyed boats right as you crossed the bridge onto the island. And true, there’s a huge gaping hole in the side of the Flagship Hotel on the Seawall, along with the entry ramp being completely washed away. But aside from all that and some minor cosmetic damage to various stores, it really wasn’t that bad at all. Stewart Beach was in better shape than it’s ever been. This is the first year we’ve been able to go there and not have to deal with massive amounts of washed-up seaweed. It was clean and beautiful. We were able to get out there on the beach two days in a row this year, and I’m paying for it right now. I look like the Leper of UTA or something here.

Oh, there was one MAJOR downer about the trip. A good chunk of the Strand is still closed due to damages, namely LaKing’s Confectionary, which is (or was) one of the greatest ice cream and candy shops to ever exist in the history of the universe. It was completely shut down, and that made Jenn and I really sad. 😦 But we made up for it by having a blast on the beach, and checking out some amazing restaurants that we’ve never been to before, so it was okay.

Speaking of the restaurants, O.M.G.. Fish Tales, Miller’s Landing, and Salsa’s. DO NOT go to Galveston without eating at these three places. Wonderful stuff, friend. Life-changing.

Oh, and then there was Buc-ee’s, the greatest travel stop EVAR. If you ever run across one in your Texas travels, you absolutely must stop there. You’ll love it, I guarantee. I can’t even put into words the awesomeness of Buc-ee’s. Lemme put it this way… do you like jerky? Ever wished you could order just about any kind/flavor of jerky imaginable, fresh from the deli? Yeah, go to Buc-ee’s. And don’t forget to get some Frostie’s Root Beer. It’s on tap there. OH YEAH.

So yeah, all in all and excellent weekend.

In other news, I’m geeking out like a… geek… about Green Lantern right now. Variety is reporting that Ryan Reynolds has been cast as Hal Jordan for the new Green Lantern movie coming out in a year or two. To me, Ryan Reynolds is one of those awesome actors who tends to get stuck in crappy movies, ie. Wolverine and Blade: Trinity. But the man can act, and I think he can totally pull off Hal Jordan. Can’t wait. On top of that, I just preordered “Green Lantern: First Flight” on DVD, and I get to go pick up my copy of Blackest Night #1 tomorrow from Lone Star Comics. Freakin’ awesome! 🙂

Guess I’ll wrap this up by telling you something that most of y’all already know, and has been a long time coming: I finally got an iPhone! Yay!