It's Hard to Rely on My Good Intentions...

Well, believe it or not, those words are words from a song. The song? Good Intentions by Toad the Wet Sprocket. I know that you are rolling your eyes at the name of the band Aunt Hila. What can I say? This is the kind of stuff my generation found pleasing to the ears in the late 1990s. My mom would be rolling her eyes too, if she would ever read my blog ;).

Anyway, so yeah... Good intentions. I had big plans and good intentions for today's post. I brought in all my picture CDs so that I could get all the pictures of family and such that I wanted to get. Also, this was going to make it very easy for me to upload pictures to Wal-Mart or Walgreens and pick them up tomorrow. So, I load my first picture CD, which is one that has all this installer junk on it from Wal-Mart. Well, I can't install anything on this computer, so I Xed out of that and went to open the disk through "My Computer." Which I was successful. At least for getting that same screen to pop up about installing something. Only this time, I actually read through my choices, and one of the choices was to view and email the pictures, etc., without having to install anything. So yay. I click on that. And my computer does nothing. It completely freezes up. So, I do the whole "Task Manager" and "End Program" thing. I end up having to shut down my computer. So I figure I'll try it again when my computer comes back up. Now the CD-ROM drive doesn't actually read anything I put into it. I tried to open another CD with tons of pictures, but it was burned at home, so it doesn't have any installation stuff on it. And the CD-ROM drive doesn't even recognize anything being in there. Hmmm... I have to admit, I'm highly annoyed. However, I'm also a tad concerned that I broke it (although I really don't know what I did to break it...). What to do?

So, despite my best good intentions of having a post about my brother Ben, or a post about my in-laws... I'm afraid you are stuck with my rambling yet again. Although, I guess this gives me a reason to find something about which to reminisce. I'm thinking this blog has been a great way to document a lot of my memories. So, this is not at all tragic for me. Now the challenge is to think up some hilarious story. Because I really don't want to bore you all to tears and chase you away from my blog ;). See, I'm considerate ;).

Oh, before I do that... So last night I cooked dinner for Stefanie and myself. Nothing fancy. We ate Bisquick's Ultimate Chicken Fingers (this is a really good recipe and it's easy, so I linked it for any of you fellow food and recipe lovers), salad (leftover from Sunday's dinner) and mashed potatoes. Which, I'm not really great at seasoning mashed pototoes. I never add enough salt. Then later on, Stefanie left with Pace to go to a birthday party. I didn't hear her come back or leave again this morning for her nanny-ing job. I guess I am a pretty sound sleeper. But when I got up this morning and opened my bedroom door to head outside to warm up my car, there was a sticky-note on my door with three pictures: a sheep + what looks like a rock star maybe? (a stick figure holding a guitar) - a star. So I spent the morning trying to decipher that code. I have no idea... Any thoughts? I won't get to solve that little mystery until after I get home from school tonight. But it gave me something about which to laugh (and over which to scrunch up my forehead in consternation) this morning.

Good grief... I have the unbelievable ability to say, "Well, I can't think of anything to say, so I'll do a remember when story" and then I write a novel before I even get to the remember when story! I think I shouldn't ever be a professor, because I'd probably be one who would say, "Well, I don't anticipate us being in her the whole time... We'll probably get out early." And then I'd end up running my mouth so much (probably because I got side-tracked on like 20 tangents) that I'd keep them 10 minutes over my allotted class time. Haha...

Well, since 7th grade seems to be on my mind this week, let's take a return trip there. This isn't really a hilarious story, but it's something I've got floating around in my head. And, it's something I'm going to want to remember. So, I took Spanish I in 7th grade. Sadly, I was not fluent in Spanish (and I still don't call myself fluent, but I do call myself proficient), even though I had grown up in a Spanish-speaking country and my dad is (and was) fluent. Anyway, the teacher (Mrs. Carde, to link you to my teacher list :)) wanted us to get real world experience. So, we had to go around to different locations with a tape recorder and put ourselves in real life scenarios. Believe it or not, I used to be incredibly shy. Especially when I had to do something of this nature. I felt SILLY! And embarassed. And any other word that would add up to awkward and uncomfortable. So, two of the places I chose to use were a shoe store (had to pretend to buy shoes) and a restaurant. Lucky me, when we went to the shoe store in Panama City, the salesman who was helping us was also very shy and awkward. Ick. I can still feel the awkwardness of the whole event. My mom had to explain to him what I was doing. And then I had to ask for certain things (like different sizes and colors). All on tape! Hmmm... I wonder if I kept that tape... The restaurant was easier. We went to Sorento's (and this time we didn't pretend, we actually ate there). It's this wonderful pizza place in Panama City. I hope it's still there, because one day I'm going to go back and I'm going to find my way to that restaurant. Anyway, we went there every so often as a family and so there was one waiter who always served our family. He knew my dad by name and so it wasn't so awkward, since he'd known us for years and he was not shy.

Okay, so not the greatest or most hilarious of stories. But something to remember anyway. Although it did bring up a slightly more embarassing memory. Okay, so in 9th grade, I somehow heard Mrs. Seitz (maybe I had to be in her class for the CTBS testing or something, because she wasn't one of my teachers that year) say that studies have shown that music is an effective way to remember things. And that makes sense. Think about it: I mean, I don't know about you, but I can remember just about every lyric to a song I once learned 10 years ago and haven't heard since then. What a powerful tool. So, I came up with this genius idea for studying for exams. I decided I would listen to the cool hip music of the day on my walkman (haha, what's a walkman?) (songs included Sophie B. Hawkins' "As I Lay Me Down" and others I can't remember). While listening to them on my headphones, I would sing along with the songs, but I would sing the stuff I was supposed to be learning for the exam to the tune of the song. And I would record this. YIKES. I taped over most of all of that, because it was rather embarassing sounding. I sounded AWFUL! It's hard to sing different words than that to which you are listening and stay on key (or even close) or even in tune! And the only reason I remember that one song is because I didn't record over all of it, and so I have my horrible-sounding voice at the end of a tape singing the end of the song (only I'm singing the right words at that point, because I didn't want to keep saying 'Andorra' over and over again.). Did this work? I honestly can't say for sure. I know I got an A on my Geography final that year, but that's only because I filled in EVERY blank. And that teacher (Martinez) didn't really check your answers, as long as you had an answer. I answered Andorra about 10 times on the same map. Yeah. Probably I didn't deserve an A. But then, that's also the teacher that called me Hilda the entire year (and I quit correcting him after the first semester), so maybe I deserved the A for the mental anguish it caused me to be called by the wrong name... :).

Of course, this was also the teacher who was baffled when some kid had a watch with remote control abilities. Like for a VCR. So one day, Mr. Martinez put on something for us to watch and this kid Lewis started fast forwarding the video using his watch. And that freaked out the teacher. He picked up the remote control on his desk and was like, "What's going on here?" It was rather humorous. Oh, this was also the class in which I was sitting when the OJ verdict came back: NOT GUILTY. Yep, we watched it.