Cowboys and cottontails.

I'm just going to stick to the bolded title format.

Bookstores and Computers. Well, Thursday was a productive day. I woke up early to be at the university for 8:30 so that I could get my lockey key for our grad room. After that was done, I decided to go pick up my textbooks. Walking ALL THE WAY ACROSS CAMPUS (which really isn't far at all), I get into the Union where the bookstore is. The Union is great. There's a foodcourt and everything. The woman at the door says that the cash registers are down, but I could look around until they came back up. I start to walk toward the back of the store and another woman comes tearing up to the front yelling to shut the doors and not let anyone else in. I laughed and looked right at her and said, "DON'T WORRY. I'll leave." I sat down in one of the chairs right outside of the bookstore and waited until the doors opened--it was about an hour. The doors were opened back up and I went in; problem being, the computers were still down. They told me I could get my books together and leave them to pay and pick up later, so that's what I did. I walked back to the Health Sciences (HS) building and grabbed my clients' files to go over for a while. A few hours later I returned to the bookstore to pick up my books and to meet the professor I will be a graduate assistant for. He is from Alaska originally, a fisherman, and is doing research in one of my favorite areas: narratives. WOO WOO. After this meeting I rushed back to my apartment because my dishwasher was being replaced. So that it's for the boring productive stuff.

Walking adventures. So I was bored Thursday evening and decide I would see how long it took to walk from my apartment to my building on campus. (For the record, it is about 25 minutes). Parking on campus (or even near it) is ridiculously impossible, unless you're there super early. I have been trying out alternate forms of transportation to get there, so it looks like I'll be walking until it's cold, and then taking the shuttle that's like, a block from my apartment. Anywho, I decided to go for this walk. I'm walking along, and it's beautiful. I love it here. Everything was great until I got outside of my building. Well, I shouldn't say anything went BAD, but I do believe I have a knack for putting myself in odd sitauations. So my mum calls me on the phone. I talk to her while walking for a bit. Easy right? Then I was texting my friend Colleen because I miss her like crazy. I wasn't thinking much of anything, which is the problem. When I text, I zone, and zoning and walking at the same time are not good things.

     As a side note, a few months ago I was visiting my friends Cushman and Ashley down in Ann Arbor. We were at Blockbuster looking at movies, and I was texting. When walking back out to the car, I quite literally ran SMACK into a sign. Like, bonked my head on it and everything. All because I was texting and walking. That is the prelude to the story I am about to tell you.

So I'm zoning and walking and texting and moseying and all those sorts of good things. I come to a stoplight and I've got the "not a good time to cross" signal, so I wait. It's finally my turn to walk, but wait, what is this? I'm texting. So I see there are no cars coming and decide to continue my thumb frenzy while crossing the street. DISCLAIMER: the curbs here, well there's really no down slope into the roads because there are bike lanes on every street. SO there was quite a large gap between the curb and the street. Not looking down at my feet, but rather my phone, I did not see this cliff I was about to jump off of. I step, stagger, trip on my other foot and almost go face-down into the street. Thankfully, I was able to do that awkward catch-yourself jog people do to make it look like they didn't just trip. True to form, I laughed at myself. This was no ordinary laugh, though. I was listening to music REALLY loudly (which automatically amplified my voice from what it normally would have been) and it was like this, hysterical gun-shot one chuckle that was high pitched and startled even me. That was a really long run-on sentence. Oh, well. I must have sounded like I was barking or something, I don't know. Anyone who has been around me and heard this laugh knows what I'm talking about. So I played it cool and took the neighboorhood roads instead of the main roads back to my apartment. If you're wondering, the answer is yes. I did continue texting and almost tripped a couple more times, but there were far less (meaning no) people around to witness those ones.

The demon bunny. Any of you that have seen my Facebook recently may have seen a picture of a bunny that I posted. Here is his story. I was walking back to my apartment and texting Colleen. In the middle of a neighboorhood I was just strolling and minding my own when this hellion of a rabbit darts out and nearly buries himself under my foot! It's a good thing I saw him out of the corner of my eye and stopped walking because despite the velocity he was travelling at, the timing was just right for my shoe and his head to meet. This obviously startled me. I'm not used to seeing rampant rabbits, but I got over it. I continued walking and about a block later the menace darted at me AGAIN from another direction. It was a full on attack: Peter Crazytail vs. me. This time, however, he had the audacity to turn around and look at my from the street like I was in his way (which is where/when I snapped that picture). He had this "come at me" smug expression on his scrunched little face (that's an overexaggeration maybe). I expected him to come flying out of a tree next. Needless to say, after that encounter I went on high alert and stopped texting until I arrived safely back at my apartment.

Murphy's Law. So I decided to try out the shuttle (again for timing) that runs from right by my apartment to the Wyoming Union on campus. I had to be at an orientation around 8:15, so I wanted to give myself plenty of time; I arrived at the bus stop around 7:45. Immediately, a bus pulls up. I get in and we sit and wait for a bit. A couple minutes into this sitting, the bus driver contacts his garage and says that his bus is overheating. He is told to wait for further instruction. I get a little bit nervous, but am happy that I came early because we have been sitting for a few minutes now. The garage comes back on the intercom and says to park the bus and have all of the passengers exit and wait for the next one. JUST MY LUCK. We exit the bus and I am most likely visibly distressed. I ask a nearby (foreign) man when the next bus comes and he said, "I sink a couple minutes?" Sure enough, another bus pulls up about five minutes later. I was on-time to the orienation that I didn't need to be at until 9 am anyways. So, that's good. Also, I didn't realize a bus left from that station every 5-7 minutes depending on construction. I was a bit worked up over nothing. C'est la vie.

Graduate Assistant Orientation. Was boring. We talked about sex more than the last orientation. You don't need to know anything more than that.

The Cowboy Bar. A group of people from my department decided to go out because a) it is our last week before grad school starts and b) it was somebody in our program's birthday. So we went to a restaurant/bar to begin the night and moved around from there. The first place was like an Applebees kind of. Compare it to Stuckos maybe. The next place was a hippie-ish thing attached to a vegetarian restaurant--think Blackrocks, I guess. After that we went to a place that was, well, I don't know. I guess I would say it's like Flannigan's without the karaoke. Then we went to a place that was their dance club--think any dance club in the UP. Finally, we went to The Cowboy Bar (that is both what it's called and what it is). I HAVE NEVER SEEN DANCING LIKE THIS. It's a mix of swing/line dancing/square dancing/club dancing all rolled into one and it is SO MUCH FUN. Oh, my goodness. There were some real cowboys in there, and boy can those boys move. Half of my time was spent in mesmorization of the people that knew how to do the dances. The other half was spent subjecting the people I was with that knew how to do it to teaching me. We liked it so much (meaning me and two other girls from the Midwest) that we are going back tonight. In flats. Heels were a bad decision.

In the words of our favorite little orphan Annie, "I THINK I'M GONNA LIKE IT HERE!"

:)