Spring. It's finally here.

As you may have ascertained from this blog and any personal interactions you've had with me, I'm not a big fan of winter, whether it be the snow/hail/sleet/-40F frozen hell of Northern New York, or the dreary two-thirds of a year of gloom and drizzle in the Pacific Northwest. So it was with much satisfaction that I took the bike out of the shed yesterday morning and rode down to the pub. The crappy weather that was forecasted held off for my little jaunt, but as soon as I made the decision to not return the bike to the garden shed and instead lock it up out front and in the elements, the downpour began, soaking my seat and helmet.

I already blogged about the Timbers season starting, so I won't go into that again, but that is just yet another symptom of the onset of spring. Flowers, sunshine, and soccer were the things that I've been waiting for since approximately September when we entered the wet season and now they're here! Hooray!

However, there are consequences to all this jubilance, as it's really hard to read 10000000000000000 pages on quantifying faunal remains when there are bikes to ride, soccer balls to kick, and beers to drink. Academically, last week was a pretty pitiful showing on my part, and I've now got a lot of catching up to do. Unfortunately for me, my decision to try and graduate next March instead of June requires me to go to summer school this year, which means that while all the rest of the students are daydreaming about their upcoming vacation in less than two months, my next chunk of freedom isn't until roughly September.

But I can hardly complain. Afterall, it's SPRING!!!

Plus, I got a screenshot of the standings. Considering how poorly we did last year, it's nice to look at, even if it doesn't last. Notice where Seattle is? heheheheheh.

Portland Timbers 3-1 Puerto Rico Islanders

Despite this buffoonery, we still pulled it off. (There were TWO blown PKs, btw, not just this one.)

And check this out!
We're gonna win the LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAGUE, we're gonna win the league! Ok, I'm hoarse.

We racked up a whoppin' attendance record of 7,805. Go ahead and snicker Euros, this is the US and that's as good as it gets in a league game. We beat opening night of the local baseball (snore!) team by a few hundred. That oughta serve the naysayers right. The friendlies against Necaxa and AC Milan U21's oughta pull a lot in a lot more.

Sheesh, a little bit of alcohol and I turn into my father. He gets kind of worked up about sports. My mom does too, but Dad is more brutal about it. He yells things that are entirely in character for a guy that grew up playing hockey in Pittsburgh with the steelworkers' kids, but seem a little out of place in other contexts. It turns out that screaming, "SMASH HIS FUCKING FACE IN!!!" at a professional soccer game is acceptable and even humorous, but the same sentiment shouted at a coed rec indoor game is entirely inappropriate. Who knew! And I wonder why I got called for a foul everytime I looked at the ball and/or an opposing player. (Ahem, referree? Shoulder and hip checks are still legal in soccer. This isn't Italy, ya know.)

In other sporting news.... C'MON NEWCASTLE!!! I normally cheer for them anyway, but since they're playing against Chelsea, I'll cheer for 'em double. I now have an excuse to root for Man Utd - five of their defenders are injured and their goalkeeper is still recovering from a broken nose. If they can win games with their reserve midfielders filling in as fullbacks, they deserve to win the league. See, they're *kind of* underdogs in that respect.

Here's an official ad

Be there. Better yet, be at the Yamhill Pub at 4:30-5ish and have some drinks.

The Killer

She spends her days in the window sill, tracking the movements of birds. She hates the dog. Her favorite activity (besides turning the toilet paper roll into a shredded pile of fluff on the floor) is to have someone bounce the ball off the wall so she can do flips and other acrobatics in order to catch it. She initiates this game by bringing the ball to somewhere nearby and then staring at me, then the ball, then back at me and meowing loudly. She's very demanding. Her name is Bridget, and I have no idea why.

The Shy One

She slinks around with a wide-eyed look like, "Oh! Am I being too loud? Please don't mind me." When I say hello to her, she'll pause with that same wide-eyed look, until she thinks I'm done talking to her, then she scoots away again. She lives to eat, and not much else. In fact, while maintaining her facade of shyness, she has been known to hiss The Killer out of her food bowl and steal all of her treats, too. The fact that Bridget puts up with this is proof that The Shy One is really one dangerous, silent kitty. Her name is Tibby.

AAHA! AAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!

ManUtd 7 Roma 1.

Man Utd - Roma | All The Goals
Uploaded by GOAAAAL

I didn't get to watch it, so I had to settle for highlights. I'm disappointed to report that even after much scouring of the intertubes, I can't find any footage of Totti crying. Please tell me he cried. That's all I want to hear.

Because it's the Cool Thing to Do

That's my doggy, Harper, all excited by my surprise St. Patrick's Day visit. He was *squealing* he was so happy. It's nice to know that something out there appreciates my presence so much.

School's Back On

So it's time for me to procrastinate again by blogging!

[editor (me!) note: I watched a soccer match earlier today and now the narrator in my head is one of those damn English announcers. Odd sounding phrases shall be blamed on that. Oh, and this may be a long post, and not very interesting to boot.]

Spring break brought mixed results. Instead of being energized by the end of yet another exhausting finals week, I was bored out of my mind. I've had a mental list of things to do around the room/house during a break since last summer. These are things like fixing my mandolin case so it doesn't jiggle the instrument around inside, putting a crate of some sort on the back of my bike, getting some posters/frames up on the wall, cleaning, getting straps for my mandolin and camera, possibly getting a couch, etc etc. Things! Instead I laid on my bed and stared at the ceiling until I decided to call home and see if they'd take me. They sure did. I left on Friday night and didn't return until the next Sunday. Ten days of doing little to nothing.

We tried at one point to go to the coast. We'd booked a room in Florence, known for its sand dunes. This is something that we're not known for, this splurging on a hotel for the coast. All were loaded into the ol' station wagon and off we went down the scenic Hwy 34 route. That morning I'd had some strange insomnia and had been up since about 6 am, inexplicably. I'd hoped the car ride would give me a chance to nap. However, 34 is extremely windy in this portion, so sleep was out of the question. Also, I couldn't believe the number of massacred hillsides there were! One after another, massive clear cuts topped the hills; huge swathes of forest were now huge swathes of mud and rubble, just waiting to slide down into the streams and rivers below. So by the time we'd gotten to Waldport, the first stop on the coast before we were to head south to Florence, I was already pretty grumpy.

At the first street light, the lower speeds suddenly allowed us to hear a horrible noise coming from the engine. We pulled over immediately and Dad and I stared under the hood, clueless as to what was causing this grinding sound. Dad's knowledge of cars is only slightly more than mine, and what I know about cars could be scribbled onto the back of a gum wrapper with plenty of room left in the margins for doodling. Since we couldn't afford a mechanic out of town, we decided to drive back. Despite my warnings and protests that we should at least eat our last meal before the car broke down in Deliverance, OR, we drove on anyway. Sure enough, the car quit in Eddyville. Doesn't Eddyville sound like a great place? It sure is. A very nice woman at the post office (the one nonresidential building in 'town') gave us a jump and the car managed another three miles. Totally out of cellphone range and out of sight from anything resembling human settlement (other than the clearcuts, of course) we were stuck. Dad thumbed a ride ten miles down the road until he got cell reception and called a tow truck. An hour or so later that tow truck finally arrived, just as the torrential downpour began. And so went our only adventure of the week.

The rest of the week was just me sitting around, watching rerun soccer games on television, playing video games, plucking at my mandolin and attempting to show my sis some notes on the guitar, and taking the dog for many walks.

***
My new schedule kicks some serious ass. No class on Mondays and Wednesdays until 2pm! No class at all on Fridays!

Unfortunately, all of my classes are extremely into attendance. Not that I'm a big class skipper, but I like the relaxed atmosphere of college and I kind of resent the militarism of some of this term's professors. One class requires attendance because, well, it's friggin' hard, but the others seem to require it because they think it's fun. All kinds of no-brainer assignments that just require your presence and nothing more. One of them has an overcrowded classroom, too! That's the kind of situation where idiots ought to be encouraged to stay home, if anything to free up space for the rest of us. I hope it gets moved to a proper lecture hall, rather than into the highschool-like room it's already in. People were standing yesterday!

***
Today, given my relaxed schedule, I skipped the gym and went to a pub to watch the ManUtd v Roma match. I've taken to liking United partly because they're fun to watch, but mainly because I've been playing too many soccer video games and since I suck, I need a really really good team like them to make up for my lack of ability. But stronger than my love of United is my hatred of all things Italian football. I hate hate hate their national team. While gorgeous (even I have to give them credit there), they were the biggest cheaters and whiners on the planet last summer. If ever one failed to make a successful play on the ball, he'd just flop to the ground, arms pinwheeling around, and then shriek in agony hoping to get a call from the ref. More often than not, he would get that call and magically said injured player would hop right up without even a limp. They cried their way to the final, and nothing made me happier than the look on that dude's face when Zidane headbutted him. *I* would like to have headbutted him. [on review, that sounds a little dirty.] A few of their national team players are on Rome, so therefore I had to cheer against them.

Oddly, the bar was nearly packed (in the middle of the day, no less!), and with plenty of vocal Irishmen. I couldn't tell if they were huge Manchester fans or really just hated the Italian team, but in any case, as Rome won, the bar was mostly filled with shouts of, "fucksake!! ahhh FUCK!!! and FUCKING...FUCK!" While my team didn't win, that part at least made me giggle a little.

***
I have homework and shitton of reading to do, so I best get to it. Afterall, Thursday is my early day with a map lab at 10:00 - pity me, please!