Monday, October 31, 2005

halloween, hooray!

yesterday i spent almost all day at my uncle's house working on stuff for halloween. i'm so excited! it's going to be so, so cool for all the little trick-or-treaters that come out. the yard will be transformed into a graveyard with silly tombstones and a creepy crypt with a flying ghost bobbing about inside. the drivway gets tacken over by the carnival games, which i think are a "rat toss" and something to do with getting a steel hoop over some bones.

this year they have the blacklight puppetshow, with it's huge, nearly life-size puppets and my sister as the live-action gypsy witch. that's going to be a huge hit, because it was good last year but this year will be even more fun. my brother is also going to trade off playing marius, the villian, and doing other, smaller special effects with byron.

this will take him away from the magic mirror, my uncle's brilliant trick-or-treat facade that features a computer moniter face, a kareoke machine, and a fog machine where the candy comes out. this will be the third year for the magic mirror, but it's cool enough that it's still not old news, even compared with the other awesome halloween additions.

and that leads us to the mausoleum, where brave trick-or-treaters will enter the spooky walk-in crypt, the inside filled with dim, flickering light (from one of those fake flame caldrons). the visitor will open up one of the nine tombs and see the gory corpses inside. if his heart does not fail him, he will then reach his hand past the scary remains to get the prize (most likely chocolate coins). then, when the visitor has his arm halfway inside the crypt, i, behind the scenes in the back of the mausoleum, will scare the crap out of him. bwah hah hah!!! yes, i've had my eye on that job for months. and tonight it will be mine, mine!

yes, i'm skipping my monday class and staying in las cruces for halloween. i don't care much about the class i'm skipping, but the homework session that josh and jon will have this afternoon would have helped me out a lot. i tried that homework last night, and i'm stuck. but i think that's an acceptable loss. my uncle's house is probably the best place in the whole state to be tonight, if you have the means, i highly suggest it.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

misery loves company?

tonight was "share your favorite verse night" at iv. at last week's leader's meeting, jesse instructed us to be ready to jump up in front if things slowed down to a lull. tonight was a good meeting, there was lots of participation.

i was a little late. when i walked in, i noticed a boy i know (a fellow iv leader, no less) sitting outside next to the doors by himself. i've never seen him look so sad. he and i have never been great friends or anything, but we say hello to each other, and he didn't look at me when i walked by, just as if he didn't want to be seen.

he came into the meeting a few minutes after i did, and sat by himself with such a look on his face... he looked crushed. he didn't get up and read his verse. in fact, he didn't look up the whole meeting, even when his girlfriend got up to share her verse. and she didn't look at him. it doesn't take a brainiac to draw the conclusion that i'm drawing. after the meeting ended, he left. against my better judgement i followed him outside. he knew i was behind him, but didn't turn around. i asked, "are you alright?" he didn't turn around or stop walking but he said he yes. so i left him alone.

i really hope he's okay. like i said, we've never been close, but it just kills me to see that look... i know that look. i know that feeling. i recognized it as soon as i saw him. what went on inside just backed up my initial gut reaction. i so badly wanted to run up to him and say, "i know, it sucks! i know! i don't know what to do either. but it'll be okay, i promise."

did it take someone who knows the feeling to see what how he was hurting? or am i just being the broken-hearted equivalent of paraniod here? maybe the poor kid was just sick or something. am i imagining emotional pain in the people around me because that's what i'm going through? do i think everyone is heartbroken just because i am?

whether i'm right about him or not, this is a weird experience for me. before all of this, even when one of my friends was sobbing in my lap about a boy that had dumped her or some such story, i could not relate. sure, i felt really bad and wanted to fix everything, but this is different. i don't know how to explain it.

Monday, October 24, 2005

this week in hockey news...

i finally got to play hockey again this weekend, after a very long two-week lull thanks to last week's thunderstorms. i missed it. a lot.

first, i took my little brother to his hockey practice on friday. when we got there, dr. dave, who is andy's coach and out for the season in a walking cast, told me to suit up and scrimmage with the boys. that was really fun, because i used to coach a lot of those little boys. the ones i didn't coach thought i would be a pushover, but were they ever wrong! ha! i got on a team with my old friend gordon and another kid, gabe, and we played against andy and lee and about three or four other kids. we totally dominated.

after the kid's practice, the adult league had a scheduled practice, but as usual, no one showed up. i had already worked up a sweat from the kid's practice, but i wasn't ready to go home yet, so i started skating laps and doing sprints and working on my weak slapshot. as i was skating, the sun set and the whole sky turned bright pink and orange and the mountains turned purple. the rink is in the middle of a really large sports complex that takes up several blocks, so there's flat softball fields or desert parking lot on every side. this makes for a very nice view of the sky.

so there i was, the nice, clean, smooth rink and the brand-new boards to myself, surrounded by a huge rose-colored sky, thinking, i could just stay here. i could just not ever go back to school. las cruces is my favorite.

next day i was back at nine for the little kid's games. lee scored to goals for me. phil, my little sparky, scored two goals for me. hugo scored two goals for me also, which was interesting, because he was playing against my team. i'm not sure my teammates saw the humor in that.

he went into that game pretty mad, because my team picked up kevin christeson, who really should not be allowed to play in the over-seventeen league, mostly because he's seventeen. i didn't want him to play, either. hugo put up a big fuss about it, but lost, so he and his team were mad. they picked up a couple of subs also, to make up for ray not being around, and they beat us by three or four points. collin did great, as ever, dinger was alright, i did alright, teague played awesome as goalie, and kevin was, eh... he was kevin. and that brings us to rick.

i told you from the beginning that i don't like rick. mostly this is because he's a playing time hog and a jerk. last season, when he was the new guy, when i didn't even know him, i stuck up for him when some people on his team were talking schmack. later he told me off for taking up his playing time. i got really mad, and a lot of people were mad for me, too. but since then we really haven't bumped heads. i just steer clear of him.

so at saturday's game, rick's being his usual self and not subbing out. that wasn't really a big deal. the big deal was, he was tired, he was playing tired, it was affecting his game, we had two guys on the bench, and he still wasn't subbing out. collin was all alone on defense, and i was rushing back to help, and rick was just standing around, taking a breather. i wasn't trying to be ugly, but i called to him, "rick, if you're tired, take a break."

he didn't say anything until the play stopped. then he blew up at me. just... yelling. "if i'm tired, it's because i'm playing your position!!!!" okay, first of all, he wasn't playing my position or his position, he was standing still watching the play. but i didn't get into that. the point was, he needed to sit, and he was tired. so i said, "well, then take a break! we have subs." and he yelled the same thing, about how he was tired because he was playing my position. and then he just started saying that i don't know how to position. so i thought, okay, enough of this.

i know how to position. i consider it to be the strongest part of my game. i'm not the best puck handler, i don't score a lot, and heaven knows my slapper sucks. but i've been a coach and a player and a statistician for a long, long time. i've been involved in this league longer than most of the board members. i watch almost every game. i have watched more three-on-three hockey than probably anyone in the league. so i said, "no rick, you position weird. you're playing like this is five-on-five, but it's not, this is three-on-three. that affects the positioning." and i was so right.

rick, still yelling, now got sarcastic on me, even though i was pretty calm and not yelling at all. he said, "oooooh, suuuuure, and how long have you been you been playing? half a year?!?" to which i replied, "no. eight." so rick said, "ooooooh, eight! woaaaaaaaaw...." like it was nothing. we ended it then, because collin and teague were just standing there all bewildered, as well as the ref, and rick had already made himself look like a jerk. surprisingly, i wasn't hardly mad at all. i was annoyed, and i don't like him, but i didn't get upset.

people came up to me for the rest of the day and told me in hushed, dramatic tones that i was right and rick was a loser. they thought it was funny that he said i'd only been playing half a year. he really proved that he doesn't know what's going on with that comment. rick played two more games after that, and his teams were all over him about subbing out on time. he got in another argument with chris about it. it's like i set the stage for other people to confront him. it's funny, that league reminds me of middle school sometimes.

i love it. i wouldn't miss it for the world.

halloween plans

hey, i know you may be sick of hearing this, but did i mention that las cruces rocks and socorro sucks? i did? hmm.

this weekend was our second-to-last chance to really get some work done on the mausoleum and get everything ready for the big day. friday was tech's "homecoming", which i guess is fun for the school athletes and the party animals, but i am neither, so i left town after my last class on thursday. on friday morning i went over to my uncle's house and helped him and byron paint halloween facades all day. we painted and talked about politics, painted and talked about movies, painted and talked about iv (surprize there), the list goes on and on. we finally packed up about four in the afternoon because my uncle had to go pick up alex and byron had a date night with his wife. i, however, drove my little brother to hockey practice.

yesterday andy, scott and i went back for the formal "work day". we drove around with my aunt distributing fliers for her good-will pumpkin carving contest, which she says will keep the neighbors from calling the police halloween night because of the crowds of people. and the crowds are going to be huge. then scott and i tested all the fog machines and timers and manual buttons to make sure that they suck up the fog juice properly and everything. fog smells really weird, we discovered, but the equipment mostly worked, much to the delight of alex, who screamed and pointed and ran around everytime the back porch filled with the weird-smelling clouds. he is the cutest kid ever. i love him.

then i helped byron put together the LEDs for the inside of the crypts. it was a lot of wire stripping and soldering and shrink tubing, but we finally established a system of sorts. we tested how two red ones and two yellow ones looked inside a crypt against one of my uncle's fake skulls. when we shut off the garage lights, everyone looked inside and saw the skull lit red from one side and yellow from the other, and it was very, very spooky. this is going to be SO much fun.

on friday i bought a mask from one of the halloween stores in town. it's purple and has feathers on it. i plan on dying my hair purple, which i think will look pretty cool, and just wearing dark clothes so i won't be able to be seen inside the mausoleum. i'm going to be a behind-the-scenes scarer. i'm so excited! hooray for halloween!

if you'd like to check out my uncle's blog, where he's posted several pictures and keeps better tabs on the progress than i do (and the final week should be an exciting one), he's nephilim dot blogspot dot com.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

weekend, uh huh

here i am, eleven hours until my first class, sitting on the couch in las cruces with my brothers and sister, watching dallas play vancouver. right now the stars are down by one with about five minutes left. hockey is back. i love mike modano. we've got the popcorn, the pretzels, the milk, and we're going to watch evita after the game.

there were no hockey games this weekend, because it was pouring saturday morning, so i hung out with andy and lee at the mall for about four hours. that was fun. then we went and helped paint sets at my unlce's house, then we went to see wallace and gromit (which rocked) and then alicia and i went dancing. today after church i bought myself some new clothes. my grandparents showed up at our house tonight and my sister and i sang them "feed the birds" from marry poppins, mariachi style. we are awesomly good at that. then my dad made us kung-pow chicken for dinner (d'angelo stayed) and then nick, tracy and i headed over to my uncle's house to help tear down the halloween stuff. and now here we are, watching the game.

i love being at home. sure, it means i have to wake up a little before six to get into town in time for my nine o'clock class, but i'm so glad i'm not in socorro. my family is so much fun.

so my sister and i are considering releasing a cd of mariachi-style cover songs. keep your eyes open.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

midsemester today

i hate school, i hate school, i hate school....

never, in all my time at tech, have i been this miserable. even at the very beggining, when i had no friends at all and couldn't do my chemistry homework and almost failed calc one, even then was not as bad as now. not by a long shot.

i have no confidence in the meche classes i'm taking this semester. if i don't have jon or adam looking over my shoulder, i'm sure i'm doing it wrong. i don't understand the material. it's not just that it's hard, most of the classes here are hard, but i don't understand it and i'm really not interested in it. conrols, mechatronics? i don't care. i just feel dumb all the time.

then there's the whole drama. i've had a chance to talk to both kc and mike. kc took it like a man. mike walked away. i'm so mad at both of them, and i'm so hurt. they say god told them to do it. what am i supposed to say to that? "well, god was wrong!" it sucks that i can't get away from this. i can't just have a big fight and be done with it. they are still dating each other at the end of the day. i don't want to come back to my own house. today josh and jon and i were studying in the ce lab, and kat called to tell josh that she and mike and shuter were coming. josh warned me, and i left because i didn't want to see mike. but after i left i didn't know what to do... i didn't want to go home either.

i want so badly just to drive home to las cruces and forget about tech. i could get a job (even if it's back at the nursery), and hang out with my family and the few friends i've kept in touch with and play hockey. my little cousin is so much better than school. my uncle's halloween plans are so much more interesting than controls. hockey is way better than iv. way better.

and now i have a senoir design meeting in five minutes. i don't want to see those boys.

Monday, October 10, 2005

about the game...

another loss for team canada, but this one we really should have won. first of all, it should have been a forfeit for the other team, since they only had one guy show up, and we had four. but they picked a guy up, and we picked a guy up, and they picked up the hugos (totally not fair). then about twenty minutes into the game, two more of their players showed up. we were leading alomost the whole game, but we ended up loosing by one. we would have lost by two, but collin gave me the sweetest pass in the last minute and i scored. yay! i gave it to ian, who was keeping score. hugo scored four goals. we really should have won. but it was fun.

there's a new guy on that team. his name is roger. new guys amuse me. they nearly always fall into one of three categories:
a.) the gentlemanly type, that go really easy on me and apologize for everything, like they hurt me or something. i take advantage of this. they catch on eventually.
b.) the very snobby type, that totally ignore me on the court because they think they are above playing with a girl. it's weird, because they play like i'm not even there. i take advantage of this also, and get lots of steals that way. this usually doesn't last long, less than a game in most cases.
c.) the macho type, who have something to prove, that play really hard against me. this i can't really use to my advantage, but i typically play pretty well against them because, well, i have something to prove, too.
young roger falls into that last category. he played rough the whole game, and it was frustrating for me because he's actually very good. somehow i ended up guarding him most of the time, and it was hard work! he had a lot of goals. he's fast.

on the other hand, he ended up guarding me a lot of the time, and i'm happy with how i played. i always got the long shot off before he charged me (and they were good shots!), my passing around him was good, and he was guarding me when i scored. ha! take that, mr. chip-on-my-shoulder.

hockey is so, soooo much better than school.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

hey, hey, rainy day

today i slept through my alarm and woke up eight minutes before class. i got dressed and ran out the door and realized on my way to class that winter had suddenly fallen overnight and i should have worn a sweatshirt. it was freezing. later that freezing turned into raining and freezing. it was really cold, but i still jumped in puddles on my way home for lunch, because i'm mad and i could.

kc has not so much as looked at me since this bomb got dropped. she's a coward. i saw mike driving his truck, and he just stared at me. he's a coward too. the more i think about it, the more i think mike told kat because he knew it would get back to me eventually and he didn't want to tell me himself. he is so careful with what he says, he thinks about everything that comes out of his mouth. that's one of the things i really liked about him. this was no accident. now both of them are james deaning it, playing it cool, like they think i'll get better or forget or something. riiiiiiiiight... what a lousy plan.

i'm feeling very confrontational about this. i know exactly what i want to say to both of them. in fact, i can't stop rehearsing it in my head. the problem is, both of them are avoiding me like pros. in all honesty i've only seen kc twice since tuesday afternoon, and both times were for about four seconds. i have things i need to say to her, that i need to say face to face. i have even more things i need to say to mike, face-to-face. i don't know how to go about this.

i don't want to be bitter. but right now it sure seems like boys are liars and girls are backstabbers and all people just suck in general. the worst of it is, i thought mike was the best boy in the world for about three years. i loved him so much. if i could fall for him, and he can do something like this.... boy, and i thought i had good taste. i know this is short-sighted, but right now it really feels like i won't ever trust someone like that again. feels like i don't want to.

i know, i know, i know. things will get better. i know they will. i know there are good people too, actually my friends are doing a great job of taking care of me. i know that things happen for a purpose and that i will learn things from this and that GOD has a plan. but right now i don't even want to think about the other fish in the proverbial sea.

fish lie. fish suck. i hate fish.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

very long angry post

we had a test in construction management today. i did alright, i probably should have studied more, but it will be okay. yesterday i studied with josh, and when we weren't getting anywhere, i gave him a ride home. on the way, he asked me, "so i heard mike is going out with that other girl now?" i knew who he meant.

so i heard this from josh, who heard from kat, who has several classes with mike, and since it was somewhat shady third-hand information, i didn't fully believe him right away. when i got home, i called carmen. she told me they've been dating for weeks now, and that kc made her promise not to tell me. she said that mike and kc went to the pastor of their church and talked it over with him, and they prayed about it and talked it over with joel (kc's ex-boyfriend) and talked about it to a whole group of people and everyone seemed okay with it. so it sounds like they handled everything right.

except me! you know, i don't swear, because it's not a habit that i want my eleven-year-old brother to pick up and i'm all about being a good role model. but it really seems appropriate in this situation. so if you'd like to mentally add four-letter-words where you feel the need, be my guest.

i feel totally betrayed by both of them. they've been dating for weeks and lying to me about it. i can't believe they would do this. i can't believe they would let me find out from josh! what was kc thinking? how was this going to be okay? what was pastor randall thinking? he knows me too! why did joel get to be part of this whole decision making process and i didn't? you know, even if they had been upfront about this it would have been terrible but this... unbelievable. redundant, i know, but that's all i can use to describe this.

a few weeks ago i had a Big Talk with mike, just to get some of my questions answered. he said he broke up with me because GOD doesn't want him to have a girlfriend right now. then he said that he still cares about me and hopes we can be friends. when i'm thinking about that now, i wonder if he was already dating kc at that point. the time frame seems about right... he must have at least been thinking about it. he doesn't care about me. if he did, he wouldn't have let this happen. and the whole girlfriend and religion thing... he's a liar. he's a liar.

so after i called carmen i was very upset. i got out of the house and started walking. i went all over town in a zig-zag, because i was avoiding places where i knew people. apparently i didn't do this very well, because i already ran into someone today who said i walked right by his house. he didn't say, "i saw you wandering around town crying like a little two-year-old", but i'm sure i've made a fool of myself. i ended up on the road to magdelena and i sat there for about three hours. i called my dad and cryed. i really wanted to break my phone, but i restrained myself. just when the sun was going down, nicki's mom was driving by and she saw me sitting there and pulled over. and wouldn't you know it, she already knew why i was upset, because i really was the last person to find out about this. anyway, she gave me a ride home.

if there were a list of slimey, horrible, low things you could do, breaking up with your girlfriend of thirteen months by giving her the GOD card and then dating her roommate has got to be like top five. secretly dating your roommate's ex-boyfriend behind her back is up there too. they are bad, bad people.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

first test of the semester

i took the hardest test i've ever taken on thursday. it was mechatronics, and it was supposed to be hard, but not that hard. it was impossible. jon, the smartest person in class, the smartest person i know, only finished half of it. so it's not that bad that i failed, because i guess everyone failed, but what gets me is that i spent several long hours studying, and i might as well have been reading harry potter for how much good it did me. i told travis that, and he said, "that's why i'm glad i didn't study. i wouldn't have studied any of that."

that test was from dr. miller. on tuesday, we have another miller test, this one in controls. i'm so discouraged by it, because even if i study my butt off it won't matter. maybe i will actually make a dent in harry potter and the order of the pheonix.

school sucks. i've never hated school as much as i do this semester. i was talking about this with josh, and he mentioned that if this had happened to us our first semester, we would have dropped out. the only thing that's keeping us going now is the fact that we're almost done. we've come so far that we can't give up now, and they know it, and they're taking advantage of that. dirty cowards.

in other news, my team lost again, so we're now 1-3. i didn't score yesterday, but my passing was on. bean didn't show up, and dr. dave isn't playing anymore, and there was no sign of gabe. but i got goals from phil (who's new nickname is sparky, and he's trying to call me spunky), lee (that's my boy. he's awesome), danny (he's the most fun), hugo (i was reffing that game) and finally, after weeks and weeks of asking, ray. woo hoo!