Little Laura Goes to War

A short while ago my good friend and former roommate Laura got a letter instructing her to get her gear, she's going to war. Deployment time. Brass knuckles time. Whether it would be Afghanistan or Iraq was still to be determined, but a few things were clear: she would be the first of us to deploy and she'd need to find a way to strap more grenades to her chest. As it would turn out her deployment was not per the usual, however. When her deployment letter finally came instead of being tasked to a forward operating base or major theatre hospital in country hers read: you're going on vacation! Her six months of service to the nation would be an all-expense paid trip to Germany where she'd visit the Swiss Alps, lounge in Bavarian beer gardens, and take in culture and class at many a Baroque Austrian palace or concert hall. Sure she'd be caring for patients and war wounded at the medical center in Landstuhl, but as judged by the constant stream of Facebook photos since, she's mostly there to party.
 
Despite the fact that she had likely ruined deployments for all the rest of us for all the future I decided to pay Laura a pre-deployment this-may-be-the-last-time-I-see-you-alive visit. It was also secretly a visit to the Historic Triangle of Revolutionary America and an excuse to get a tricorne hat. The trip was successful on all accounts.

The trip was not without hardship; however, especially if you like to use the word "hardship" as a stand in for "never ending rain." The rain didn't start till after we set out on our twenty something mile bike ride, but once it started it never stopped coming. Quickly we were soaked, but still we rode on.

Whenever I insisted we stop and admire a local landmark Laura often insisted she wait under a tree. We then had a very wet lunch, and proceeded to have a very wet ride back after leaving behind very wet chairs and table clothes behind us.

We didn't stay in Yorktown or Old Williamsburg all too long, but there's always time for victory poses. Just like back in 1776.

Once all that was said and done we settled down to what really mattered. College football and puzzles.

Laura made this while slowly losing her mind -- smashing together decorated styrofoam is apparently more difficult than it looks. Coincidentally I was also losing my mind for an entirely different reason -- thank you Fighting Texas Aggies. We also saw a movie, had some food and drink, and then Laura went off to war. Went off to war a few weeks later after visiting other family and friends to be entirely accurate, but I'm pretty sure what prepared her most was my inspiring visit. My hat spurred her into a patriotic furor.

The Amazing Race for the Amazing Race

This week the Amazing Race started, one of the few television programs I've ever cared to remember to watch. Although never truly as good as the one, single season of Amazing Race: Family Edition, the Amazing Race: Vanilla is still a pretty good time. Especially if you enjoy strangers yelling at each other in taxi cabs. This series' first episode was relatively unremarkable, but I imagine it achieved what it meant to -- that being to identify the snowboarding dudes as dudes, the cocktail waitresses as bimbos, the grandparents as slightly senile grandparents, the Survivor couple as scheming soon to be scoundrels, the male flight attendants as the token gay couple, and the twins, apparently, as not having memories that can last longer than thirty seconds. I imagine the climax of the season will be when either of the brother-sister duo runs the other over in their brand new, special edition 2012 Ford Focus.

The episode reminded me, however, of a friend and I's amazing race last spring in an attempt to have the most amazing movie marathon ever: an Amazing Race amazing movie marathon. What could be better than spending a whole day watching a whole season of Amazing Race? The answer is a whole lot of things, but in San Antonio not much. Being the master planner of this party I was assigned the task of obtaining the videos, and so I devised a plan.

Plan A: Go to Blockbuster and rent it.

Genius in its simplicity. Unfortunately no Blockbuster admitted on their website to owning any Amazing Race DVDs in the entire San Antonio area, and sure enough none of them actually owned them when I visited their stores and demand they show me where they kept them. Blockbuster does own a surprisingly large number of Firefly copies, however, which is why I imagine they went into bankruptcy.

Plan B: Go to another movie rental chain and rent it.

Very similar to Plan A, Plan B was different in that it involved going to other movie rental chains. Not surprisingly it too failed. People do not want to watch Amazing Race in South Texas. Not when there's sweet Tejano music weekly at El Mercado at least! Seriously, what can compete with an accordion?

Plan C: Go to any other store I can think of and buy it.

This plan was admittedly devised on the fly while driving about in my fruitless pursuits of Plans A and B. I visited two separate Best Buys, a Walmart, a Target, and even a used booked store which for whatever reason also sold movies. The end result was no Amazing Race, but a decent book on the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan and, somehow, a 2000 piece puzzle of a castle in Germany.

Plan D: Use NetFlix to rent the series.

Brilliant idea in that NetFlix has multiple seasons of Amazing Race for rental. Terrible idea in that you can only rent one of 3 or 4 DVDs in a season at a time. Not ideal for a one day marathon. Aborted.

Plan E: Use NetFlix streaming video via Laura's giant television.

Laura has a gigantic television. Its size is measured in yards and the weight of it has ruined the foundation on that side of her house. Assuredly inside of all that plastic and hardware there would be a means of connecting directly to the Internet. There was not.

Plan F: Use NetFlix streaming video via Paul and Rachel's Nintendo Wii.

Easy to obtain. Easy to hook up. Already wasted a whole heck of a lot of time previously setting up a NetFlix account for Plans D and E. It seemed pretty flawless to me. It was at this time that we noticed NetFlix does not stream any of the Amazing Race series over its streaming video.

Plan G: Screw it. Let's watch The Pacific instead.

Around back up plans five or six is generally when I consider giving up, and so way gave up after Plan F. Clearly someone, divine or otherwise, did not want us to have an Amazing Race marathon. It likely would have been too amazing. There probably wouldn't have been anywhere to go after that and the rest of our lives would have been lived in listless boredom and indifference knowing our best day was already in our past. In either case we watched The Pacific instead and it was confusing. Too many guys with dark brown hair and average height. Thankfully most of the difficult to tell apart characters got killed off early in the series so by the end I had some idea what was going on. It turns out the war with Japan was rather wet. Or at least that's what I believe the take home message was.

Our amazing race ended in failure, but in the process I learned a lot about Laura and together we learned a lot about ourselves. We didn't win the grand prize, but what we lost we more than made up for in friendship. I wouldn't have run the race with anyone else. Mostly because no one else has a love for the show and a gigantic TV. But also because of the friendship. It is its own reward, especially when you don't have a real reward. Or a television movie marathon to watch.

Little Pig, Little Pig, Let Me In

I may shortly be kicking down the door of my own apartment. That is if there's an apartment left for me to kick into. Despite almost half a year of waiting my fancy, shiny new apartment downtown is still not fit for living in. The latest problem? A huge water pipe apparently exploded flooding floors 6 through 9. Or something like that, it involved lots of waters and freak inexplicable accidents keeping me out of my rightful home. Perhaps it's for the best, though, God seems to have a thing against this place. I may be saving myself some heart ache, and perhaps a case of boils, if this whole thing falls apart.

Since I haven't mentioned my own current housing crisis much before let me start at the relative beginning.

A long, long time ago, feels like three years but I guess it was about 9 months, I was in the market for buying a house. I looked around, found some places, my family duly let me know they were terrible places, and so I looked around some more. Finally, I found the greatest place. Unfortunately it was around this time, shortly before starting my work as an intern, that I decided that no, in fact, I did not wish to buy a house. The appeal of free artistic license, spacious guest bedrooms to have family over in, and a backyard to build a garden upon were dshed by the reality that as an intern everything but basic hygiene gets neglected. And so I moved into the base housing. Unfortunately base housing is only free for a month (and apparently my base housing was also home to a family of fearless cockroaches), and so I moved into some friends' place. Josh and Sarah were newly weds, however, and their house was way the hell away from everything so I duly sought out alternative residence number three. That's when I found my good friend, then complete stranger, Laura Gallo. After some brief negotiations she set me up in her second guest bedroom and I was set for the next two to three months.

Or so it was to be. I had found, what I thought at least, would be the apartment equivalent of my previous dream house. The Vistana. "Lofty Living Downtown" their ridiculous and somewhat pretentious advertisement claimed. It was conveniently placed between both hospitals, in a different setting than the suburban wasteland I had been living in for 8 years, and 9 stories up giving me the wonderful sunset view I had long sought after. And all for a fairly reasonable price. Unfortunately my official move in date, mid-October came around and because of the previous spring's epic rains construction was behind schedule. I would be moving in in November. November came and again it was pushed back. Now it was December. December came and that too was wrong. We're going to play it safe and say first week of February. And what happened when the first week of February came around? "Mr. Crabtree, we're sorry but we're going to have to push back the moving date one more time. How does March 6th sound?" "March 6th? My favoritest day, sounds great."

And now we come to February 26th. I had thought maybe March 6th really would be the day. Even started planning renting a moving truck and reboxing my stuff. But now comes a pipe flood and once more I must wait. Current move in date is unknown pending further catastrophe. I am expecting either a zeppelin to broadside the place or a pterodactyl attack. I eagerly await the call.