It's Friday night, and I'm in the library.  Again.  I'm working through my reading for Contracts next week, and I'm relying on the white noise to drown out the roar from the fraternity next door to my building.  The boys have hundreds of the logs used for building things like, oh I don't know, train tressles or something.  They're moving these enormous rectangular logs into a shape to contain, I suppose, the great hills of sand that they've had delivered to their parking lot.  Beach party for the weekend?

So I'm in the library and I stand up from my carrel to look at what they're doing.  I'm on the fourth floor so I'm looking straight down onto the parking lot behind their building.  They're wrestling each other on the mountain of sand.  Two-by-two they wrestle three rounds, with the winner declared at the end by a bull horn.  

As the evening goes on they wrestle over and over, and I step away from my carrel for a few minutes.  When I return, I hear the guy with the bullhorn directing one of the younger frat boys to wrestle himself.  The bull horn is perfectly audible through the building walls, and I climb up onto a chair to watch this kid wrestle himself.  He throws himself down, pretends to have another guy in a head lock, stands up, and throws himself down again.  All 50 kids watching cheer him and shout "OOOOOHHHHHHH" when he throws himself down each time.  They declare him the victor, and I climb down from my chair to go back to work.  The bull horn guy says into his bull horn, "Look! There's someone in the law school!"  

Earlier in the evening I knew they couldn't see me because of the lighting, but now that it's dark, my movement catches their attention.  Assuming it's me up on the fourth floor they can see, I wave.  Bull horn guy shouts "Hi!" into the bull horn, and all 50 frat boys yell "hi" in unison, perfectly audible.

I go back to work.

Another year

My birthday weekend brought the welcome respite of 50- and 60-degree weather, and for the first year in recent memory, March's reputation for nasty beginnings was spared. Despite The Huz's most-repeated phrase this weekend ("I'm not good at planning parties"), he managed to pull together a surprise party for me Saturday night, complete with a surprised look on my face. A friend of mine sort of ruined the surprise by e-mailing me to ask what the order of events was, so The Huz went into recovery mode and convincingly warned me not to get my hopes up too high. He said he had something planned, but that the person he'd counted on to help him execute it had backed out. While that turned out to be true, I was totally convinced that whatever it was had fallen through completely, and I was happy to spend the evening with my guy.

We went to a friend's house "to pick up my present because it was too big to keep at the house," and there was a sweet little crowd waiting to wish me a happy 25th. And the leftover keg beer hit the spot yesterday afternoon as we soaked up the rare warmth sitting outside. Just when it seemed like it would never warm up, a couple of warm days makes all the difference.

One time I dressed up like a man that loved the outdoors, racing, and Miller Lite.

Last year for Halloween, I dressed up like my neighbor, Mike. He dressed up like Karl Childers. My apologies, Mike, but I had to show what you looked like before in order for my costume to make sense. If you ever find this, I'll buy you a Miller Lite. You could even borrow the Dale Jr. beer cozy.