A thing that happened

Awhile ago I was walking home from the grocery store when I heard someone driving up the street with their music blaring. As I was near a high school, I assumed it was one of the students...and was pleasantly surprised to see a middle-aged, heavily-mustached man bobbing his head and looking smugly at the group of teens gathered around the bus stop. But he didn't stop there...no, he rolled his window down just as a tubular guitar solo erupted from the middle of the retro ballad he was bobbing to. Then he decelerated just enough to make it obvious he was vying for some attention, at which point the teenagers looked around awkwardly and didn't even have the typical adolescent audacity to make any loud comments. I think they were all stunned to silence at this blatant mockery or attempt at being cool. I'm not sure what it was, really. Maybe it was just his attempt at making some random strangers laugh because he knows what it's like to need a good laugh. What a good man! It made my day, anyway.

Haaken

This is my official public announcement of the addition of Haaken to my life. Haaken is dark-skinned, with large eyes and the energy of a five-year-old on espresso. That's right, you guessed it...Haaken's a newt. Not only is he a newt, he's the sweetest newt ever. Pretty much way better than the boys' newt. Underneath his adorable demeanour is the heart of a fighter. The first night here, our furnace quit working. Our house temperature dipped somewhere below ten degrees, and his water was frigid. But he made it through with undampened spirits, enduring all the times I moved his tank to various places in the house to keep him less refrigerated (although refrigeration in its entirety could not be avoided for any living creature in this blasted building last night).
Our furnace was fixed today, by the way.
And Haaken's the sweetest newt ever.

Kaiser

Well, it finally happened. After months of anticipation and days of preparation, the Kaiser tournament took place at the Rokos household this afternoon. It was pretty intense. When we got there, we each had to fill out a questionnaire that would then somehow compute the most effective partner match-ups. Probably the most important question was how big our crush on Ben Olson is. I assume that people with similar responses got paired up, which worries me because I chose the "life-threatening" option...and ended up being Nate's partner. Anyhow, it didn't matter. We were now ready to play.
Nate suggested "Beauty and the Geek" as our team name. Obviously he was feeling very pretty. With that intimidation factor, we managed to barrel through four games before losing out in the round robin. I only had one strike against me, and he got two strikes against him...so we were pretty even. We were also pretty proud about staying above the negative line. So really, we did better than we'd originally hoped. Even I found myself capable of strategizing, which isn't too common in card games.
All in all, it was a super sweet day. We ended with Norwegian pizza for supper (ketchup, ground beef, corn, cheese, and peppers on pizza dough), then poker and a little bit of hot-tubbing. The Kaiser victors were Nick and Alex, although there wasn't a prize to give them. I guess tin foil trophies are so last year.

Lucky

I don't know much about imports and exports, but today while gazing at a bunch of underripe bananas growing on a massive tree in the Mendel Conservatory, I realized how lucky we are to have bananas. I don't even know if we grow them in Canada (and this probably makes me look really ignorant). But I am thankful for bananas.