The land of the free and the home of the SOONERS

I've never been much of a football fan, but I have been full of pride the past few days for my Sooners. It could be simply because I'm not surrounded by it anymore, and I miss the excitement behind it. It could be because I miss Oklahoma and want to feel close to something familiar. Or it could just be that I don't want to be an Aggie fan so I have to place my allegiance elsewhere or get automatically lumped in with everyone else in this town.

I don't have anything against the Aggies either, except that I am not one. So tonight, I will probably be doing laundry at my boyfriend's house, because he has a washer and dryer and I do not, and I will make him put the OU/BYU game on, because even if I don't watch it the whole time, I want to keep up.

I've managed to carve out a little bit of a social life here. As I've posted before, I joined a book club, and over the course of the past few weeks, we've slowly started hanging out more in between meetings, for game nights and the like. I really enjoy hanging out with these people.

I should sort my laundry and try to get a few things checked off my to-do list. It is ever-expanding and I never seem to do anything done.

You're just jealous that OU wins football games.

I've been lounging around tonight, just reading and chillaxing, when I decided to go to the post office. I wrote a letter to my roommate, who is in China doing mission work until December, several days ago and had yet to post it. It's really hot outside, even though it's dark, so I rolled my windows down so I could wiggle my fingers in the wind. I didn't have my music on loud, and I was minding my own business, but as I pull away from the post office, a black windows-down-music-blaring SUV honks at me and yells "HATER!" I assume this was in reference to my OU decal, which I REFUSE to remove, because OU is awesome and I am PROUD to have gone there even though I'm stuck living in Aggieland now.

Other goings on: I'm officially getting sick of watching Friends, mainly because Matt has been watching episodes back to back for basically the entire summer. So the other night, I BEGGED to go out somewhere and DO something fun, so Matt took me to this family entertainment center that had glow-in-the-dark mini golf ... and it was cowboy-themed! It was arranged in themed rooms, so there were the cowboys on the range, cowboys in a saloon, sheriffs holding cowboys in jail ... it was very cute, and I actually held my own pretty well. They also had a semi-decent arcade, and I challenge all of you to ski-ball if you ever come into town.

The next night I guess Matt was still tired of Friends so we went to go see The Ugly Truth. It was really good! Lots of man candy and a funny storyline, and both of us really liked it. It definitely had awkward stupid-guy moments, but overall made up for it with Heigl hilarity. She really is quite awesome in this movie.

My family is coming into town tomorrow, so I'm cleaning during the commercial breaks of Chelsea Lately. So I will try to focus my attention elsewhere. Hope all of ya'll have a wonderful weekend!

Most people either live to eat or eat to live. I live to write about what I'm eating.

In my intro to sociology class in college, we spent a great deal of time talking about what some book called "McDonaldization." Basically, it's that chain restaurants create some magic formula for their food so that no matter where in the world you visit, their restaurant/fast food chain's meals will always taste the same. A big part of this class was spent discussing the "Iron Cagers," "Rubber Cagers" and "Velvet Cagers." The velvet cagers were the ones who loved this about restaurants, and stick to major chains because they like what is familiar. The iron cagers are the ones who always try to break free of the chains, primarily visiting local restaurants only. The rubber cagers were kind of in between, liking a little bit of both. This class bored me to tears, so I'm sorry I had to explain it.

My family has always been iron cagers. They like trying out every local place when we travel somewhere new, and my dad gets restless with eating the same foods all the time. One of my biggest goals since moving here (far aside from finding a job) has been finding local restaurants. I would consider myself more of a rubber cager. But along with being sick of fast food and enjoyment of cooking for myself came a desire to try a lot of local food places.

Today I wanted to try Firehouse Subs, a place that I thought was local, but my mother informed me a little while ago that there's one off the highway up by her house, so that's kind of a bummer. BUT, it was AWESOME. They have amazing subs, and Matt and I decided that it was way better than Jimmy John's, and we couldn't decide if it was better than Quizno's. The only problem was that the sandwiches were HUGE, and I couldn't finish mine even though I ordered the smallest size. The interior was really cute too, with Dalmation-spotted tabletops and fireman-themed everything.

My current adventure has been looking for a church down here. What makes this interesting is that I'm pretty flexible about church-going; I went to a Presbyterian kindergarten, but soon after that we stopped attending church altogether. In high school my now-former-roommate Julie started dragging me to her Methodist church, and I continued going to a Methodist church through college because that's what I was used to. I don't really consider myself to be of any particular denomination though; I prefer to label myself a Christian and leave it at that, because sometimes the labels cause too many problems among different groups. So we've been trying out a lot of different places. So far we've found the Church that Feels Like School and the Rock Concert Church, both of which we've nixed. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I haven't found it yet. But the search has been fun. I think I'll just know when the place is right.

By the way, now because of this town, I keep trying to capitalize the word "college," even when used to informally describe the university which I attended. Thanks for that.

Lessons Learned

You get what you pay for.
Today I bought a vacuum cleaner. Matt and I had dinner party tonight (went well, by the way), and the apartment kind of badly needed a good cleaning, even though it wasn't really obvious (hooray beige carpet!). I went to Target to look, figuring a decently cheap (but not crappy) vacuum would be around $50. I found one for $39.99 and got really excited, so I bought it and used the extra money I WOULD have spent on the vacuum to buy a cute pair of green flats. ^_^
So I get the vacuum home, and it is CRAP. I should have spent the extra $10-$30 for a less crappy one. I don't like it at all, and it definitely requires quite a bit of assembly. I assumed vacuums were meant to be idiot-proof, but Matt told me that when they price them that cheap, they remove the idiot-proof features.
Spend the extra money. You get what you pay for.

Sometimes it's a good thing to own two bottle openers that sing "Boomer Sooner."
Somehow in college Julie and I acquired one of these singing contraptions. It was funny at first, then was annoying to no end. Then, soon after graduating, I acquired a second one. Since I had just moved to College Station, I wanted to cling to anything OU I could, so I kept both. I hadn't really used either of them since moving (I'm not really a big beer drinker), but since we had people over tonight, they got put to use. It was good to hear "Boomer Sooner," believe it or not. I really miss OU.
Also, there is nothing better than irritating die-hard Aggies. :) Luckily I retrieved my bottle opener from the garbage before anything happened to it.