The Justin Bieber Fad

Using Justin Bieber in a short story for an English class was a slight miscalculation on my part. I don't know if I've been immune to the "Bieber-fever" all this time, or if I've become hyper-sensitive to anything that has to do with  him, but every time I turn around, he's there.

 I walk out to the cafeteria and girls talk about Justin Bieber. 

I click onto my Youtube home page, and oh, look - J. Biebs released a new, slightly creepy, CGI Christmas music video.

I go down to the local drug store and there's an ad for his new perfume next to his smiling face in the makeup section.

I can't escape him; he's like Santa Claus; when the Christmas season come around, you have to work really hard to avoid the "Ho-ho-ho's" and large men wearing red suits. Only Bieber is all year long.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not one of those haters who believes that he eats babies and should throw himself off a skyscraper. But I'm not exactly a fan either. Let's face it; he sounds like a 10 year old and sings about making a girl wearing extremely tiny shorts feel good. There's something wrong with this picture. 

You know who reminds me of him? Aaron Carter, that kid who sang "I Want Candy" in the late 90's, early 2000's. I remember when my friends swooned at the thought of Aaron. Now I have to explain Aaron to puzzled people when I make the comparison. 

I'm sure the Justin Bieber fad will eventually fade. He's starting to go through puberty finally, and his voice is dropping, kind of like Aaron Carter at the end of his career.

My only question is, "Who's next?"

Strange Encounters of the Odd Kind

Today I learned a very important lesson: Always  put the cover on your saxophone mouthpiece when you're not using it.

Now, most people say that the cover helps protect the reed. I agree, but I would also add that it keeps people from putting your reed into their mouths.

Here's an explanation: 

My school's jazz band played at a local high school as a promotional stint for the music program, and during one of the breaks, I was outside with my saxophone, trying to stay out of the way while everyone moved chairs and music stands.

A boy in a red shirt ran over to me, and I thought, "Okay, cool, maybe he has questions about the school, my saxophone, or why the sky is blue."

He actually did have an interest in my sax - he grabbed it, put the mouthpiece in his mouth, then handed the sax back to me before doing a weird shuffle dance and fleeing.

This picture summed up my reaction: 

To put it in layman's terms, imagine that you're carrying your toothbrush around. Then a stranger walks up and uses it to brush his or her teeth before handing it back and running away.

Disgusting, right? It makes you want to throw away the toothbrush. Or at least scald it thoroughly with boiling hot water.

I managed to run the reed and mouthpiece through hot soap and water before playing again.

Ironically, he'll probably regret using my mouthpiece. 

I have the stomach flu.

*Edit* After I finished writing this blog, I checked my soaking mouthpiece and realized that I just submerged it in anti-cavity fluoride rinse, not mouthwash. So apparently now my saxophone is in no danger of needing fillings or having bad breath.

Mighty Moth Hunters

Moths are evil. Their frantic flapping and ugly brown wings make me cringe.

In the last four days, Roomie and I encountered two trespassing moths in our dorm room, which I had to dispose of. Since I'm becoming quite the moth expert, I decided to create a list of Mighty Moth Hunter Techniques.

Several options and a necessary item:

Fly swatter - preferably a pretty colored one. Teal is the 1990's favorite at home. Squish the moth with the big wide end. A heavy dictionary also works. 

Paper cup and cardboard/ paper- for the humane hunters who only want to release it into the wild. Some sort of exit, either a door or a window, is helpful to let it go outside. 

Closed window with a screen - Trap the moth between the screen and the window area until you can deal with it or let it die. A plastic spoon or some other slender object may be needed to slide the moth's body out.

Courage Method- All of the methods require this ability not to freak. You know the moths are out to get you; you can feel it in the way they wiggle their little antennae and stare at you with their beady little eyes. However, a scream at the wrong moment can ruin the hunt, scare the crap out of you, and let the moth find a new place to hide. 

In the end, Roomie and I ended up using the "Closed window with Screen" method as well as the "Fly Swatter" method, but substituting the fly swatter with a piece of notebook paper. Hopefully more moths won't come in, but if they do, we'll be ready.

Moth picture from: http://www.ent.iastate.edu/images/lepidoptera/wbcutworm/western_bean_cutworm_moth.jpg

The End of Steve

"Steve" in Over the Hedge

Have you ever seen Dreamworks' Over the Hedge? If you haven't, the storyline is simple: Simple forest animals meet suburbia.Throw in a smooth-talking raccoon, a psychotic animal control keeper, and an uptight development owner, and you've got the basic ingredients.

 In the movie, there's a particularly memorable scene when the animals meet their first sign of human civilization: a tall, green hedge that surrounds the housing that surrounded their home. Of course, the animals have never seen a big green leafy fence before, and thinking that it's alive, decide to call it "Steve" as in "Oh great and powerful Steve! What do you want from us?"

 

I am proud to say that I killed Steve this afternoon. Or actually, my parents did, with some help from me. 

When my family recently moved into our new house, a giant juniper hedge, which we named Steve, greeted us in the front garden. He looked similar to the picture on the left: big, kind of furry looking. We quickly found out that Steve was anything but furry. 

Steve didn't take kindly to our attempts to uproot him and attacked us fiercely with his many branches and ninja-like needles that slipped beneath our gloves and jeans to embed themselves in our skin. His many trunks' diameters were golf-ball sized, if not bigger; we figured that Steve happily sat in our front yard for 25 years.He resisted so strongly that Dad had to wrap rope around Steve and yank him out one bush at a time with the pickup truck, a process which required both street lanes in front of our house. Mom and I cut up branches and tossed them into the pick up truck. We also shook the dirt from the bush's roots and shoveled the dirt back into the garden.

Of course today was the day that everybody decided to drive down our street. Maybe a huge yard sale was going on around the corner. It must have been a good one for people to come by every five minutes. We saw more people  trying to get around us today than we have in the last six weeks we've lived here. One person asked if we were the owners.

Dad replied, "No, we're stealing someone else's bush. They go for real cheap on the black market."

When we finally conquered Steve, it felt really good to toss the last discarded branch on top of the pickup bed. Dad, Mom, and I immediately collapsed on the front lawn, stared at the empty hole where Steve used to be and looked at the treasures we found beneath his branches: a wallet, a street lamp shell, and a crushed water bottle. Then we decided to have root-beer floats.

So what interesting gardening or landscaping stories do you have?

Been a long time . . .

I apologize to my three faithful followers that I haven't written a lot of blogs lately; I've been on a long writer's block and my life has been full of papers, tests, and other school-related things. But I thought that I would share this still that I snipped from Monsters Inc. illustrating how most college students feel when Dead Week comes around: 

 Hope you enjoyed that. I know that I did. 

 Monsters Inc. belongs to Disney and Pixar; not to me.