In February, we hosted a 'Creepy Valentine's Party'. It has been a longstanding (3 year) tradition to watch scary movies on Valentine's Day, so we decided to take it to the next level by making creepy valentine's... yes, that does say "Your liver is beautiful." This party was inspired in particular by the 2011 horror flick, The Roommate, in which a psychopathic Leighton Meester pierces her own ears, puts a kitten in the dryer, and becomes obsessed with, you guessed it, her roommate. Classic tale. Saw it happen time and again as an RA.
The Christmas caroling kitties made an appearance as a center piece for the event... not sure what to say about the pack of gum leaning up against the middle one.
For Explore UT, our department mixed up about 500 pounds of cornstarch with a enough water to fill an 8 x 4 wooden box with Non-Newtonian fluid, a substance that acts like both a liquid and solid such that you can run across it, but if you stand for more than few seconds, you sink. Translation: hours and hours and hours of fun. I wish I had gotten a better picture of this-- this was the little girl who wound up in the Statesman, and she was so dang cute.
In April, Deborah and I spent four days traipsing around New York, seeing the sights, spotting the celebrities, and just generally painting the town red.
I met my longtime love (and namesake of the beta fish I had all through college), yes, YES, that is Norbert Leo Butz. Oh, you haven't heard of him? He was Fiyero in Wicked? Jamie in the Last Five Years? The brother in Dan in Real Life???
Anyway, Deborah and I saw him in the new musical 'Catch Me If you Can', which was fantastic, and then he obligingly let me snap a picture with him at the stage door after. And when I say obligingly, I mean he all but rolled his eyes and then made that lovely half smile/grimace.
Debs and I also waited for three hours in line to get front row tickets to see tiny little Daniel Radcliffe in 'How to Succeed in Business Without Trying'. This is me, about two hours in, sitting next to a banana peel. Worth.it. The show was so much fun, and we were close enough to see Daniel spit into the audience each time he said his t's! Other highlights of the trip included attending a taping of the Wendy Williams Show (also in the front row!), shopping on 5th Avenue, and lots of yummy food.
On our last day in New York, he pried ourselves out of the tiny, dirty, quite possibly unstable bunk beds in the hostel where we stayed and walked up to Central Park to drink our coffee and soak up our final few hours in the city.
Showing our respect at the Met.
I think that every trip has some kind of hiccup-- there are just too many variables when you travel that the universe feels obliged to mess with you. This is where our hiccup began-- the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had allotted three and a half hours after leaving the museum to run back to the hostel, grab our luggage, get to the subway, and be on our way. When we left the Met, it was pouring-- and I do mean pouring. There were people everywhere, and we got turned around trying to find our way to the subway, which had not happened once in the four days we had been there. Deborah suggested that we hail a cab... which was unfortunately also everyone else's plan. We finally got someone to stop, and low and behold, it was the one cab driver in New York City who didn't know his way around. After getting stuck in traffic for a good fifteen minutes heading in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go, we asked the driver to just let us out. We made a run for it-- all the way to hostel, up four flights of stairs, down four flights of stairs (luggage now in tow), and then on to the subway. Still in a dead sprint, Deborah sailed through the turnstile at the subway station, rolley suitcase in hand, and got stuck. Like, really stuck. I threw all my luggage on the floor (I still have this very clear image in my head of the apples my mom gave us before the trip rolling across the ground towards a large map of the subway system), and we both tried to pry the suitcase out of the metal clutches of the electronic contraption. Some kind New Yorker eventually walked by and easily popped the suitcase out, without a word to Deborah or I.
Approaching full panic mode, we asked a man waiting on the platform the best way to get to the airport, since we weren't sure if the way we had come from the airport would be the fastest for our return. The man explained to us we needed go to Queens. Huh? We headed downstairs, just as a train was departing the station. A woman spotted our baggage (and our distressed faces) and asked us if we needed to know how to get to the airport. We told her yes, we needed to get to JFK. She said, "oh, your train just left". Well, of course it did. We waited in agony another ten or fifteen minutes for the train to come again, and once on, another kind New Yorker asked us if we knew how to get to the airport. In all honesty, I can't remember if these people offered to help or if we just asked loudly, in the direction of anyone of who would listen. She told us that we would need to switch trains, and she would tell us when to get off. And then fell asleep. That is, until I frantically shook her awake three stops before we needed to get off. Not my finest moment. However, at this point, we still had hope that we would make our flight-- it would be a stretch, but we would make it. Forty five minutes later, standing on the platform and waiting for our connecting train to come, we weren't so sure. Twenty five minutes after that, when we finally arrived at JFK, exhausted and starving (we hadn't eaten since breakfast in Central Park, our lunch plans dangling somewhere between that wayward cab ride and the subway station), a cranky clerk at the ticketing counter confirmed our fears: no, we were not going to make our flight. She had one flight, leaving out of La Guardia in a few hours. We paid her the $150 change fee and went to go get (another) taxi to the airport across town. I almost got us sold into prostitution by taking up some man on his shady offer to skip the taxi line and go in his cab company's private car (not kidding)-- thankfully Deborah told him no after I told him yes, and we got a safe ride to the airport. As we were eating our dinner, Deborah nudged me in the ribs and said "Heather, look it's Hanson! Hanson, Heather!" I looked up and saw them. MMMbop, men of my ten year old dreams, long blonde hair, HANSON, who just happened to be on our flight, sitting one row ahead of us.
Oh, you know, just eavesdropping on Hanson.
Passengers on this flight also included my Creative Writing professor from college and his wife. Universe, you definitely have a sense of humor.
Obligatory Nigel pic.
