Idiosycratic Life

Happy April Fools' Day. I am thrilled to say that I did not have to substitue teach on April Fools' Day. That would be like going scuba diving in shark-infested waters while bleeding profusely. :) I can't help but think about my old friend Jon who used to love April Fools' Day. He and his brother Zach always got such a kick out of planning hijinks for weeks. I need to get in touch with him. I haven't talked to him or Heather since mid-January. It occured to me right after their wedding that Brad Steinbacher wasn't at there. I really though he would have been at the wedding, as he and Jon were best friends for years. Huh.

Speaking of wedings, I just bought something online for my friend Andrea, who is getting married in the end of April. Online bridal registry shopping is very easy, surpisingly. Much better than running around the store with a print-out trying to figure out if the list is referring to *these* salt-and-pepper shakers, or *those* salt and pepper shakers. I am really excited for her. She and Don are great together, but this will be an interesting wedding, if only because she has a very strange relationship with one of her guy friends from college who is a wonderful person (He helped me buy my first real camera) but he may just jump up and protest during the "Forever Hold Your Peace" part. We shall see....

Over the weekend, my sister introduced me to the incredible procrastination game of "Googlewhacking." Googlewhacking is this thing where you enter only two words into a google search and try and get one and only hit. The words have to be more than four letters long, spelled correctly, not appear on online "word lists" for games like Boggle, etc. and be verfied by dictionary.com. This is not as easy as it sounds. Once you find a "googlewhack" you go to Googlewhacking.com and register your googlewhack to the Whack Stack (trust me, this is addictive and fun). However, once a googlewhack is registered, it is no longer a googlewhack, as that same search will call up two hits- the original site and Googlewhacking.com where you registered it. There is also a point system associated with this: one point for getting a googlewhack on the first try, one point if you actually get one on any number of tries, one if you learn something, even if you didn't get a googlewhack. Alissa and I spent an hour (a precious hour that she should have been working on her dissertation proposal and I should have been "Mach Schnell"- ing her) entering things like "cerulean endometriosis"and other obscure combinations of words. Alissa finally got one with "drongo sharpener." I have to say, "drongo"- a bird, Australian slang for "idiot," and a sandwich at Isaac's- was my suggestion, if only because Amanda and I were having some close calls with that word earlier in the day. :) So yeah. Googlewhacking is fun. I just got 89 hits for pterodactyl clarinet. Go figure.

By the way, Bella is no longer a Blast-Ended Skrewt, for those Harry Potter fans out there who are aware of her "issues" last week. Still a little touch and go, but she is much, much better. We are sending out Healthy Pet vibes to Alissa's friend Becca's cat Cage, who is not doing so well. Get well, Cage!