Sunday, March 27

Oh man, it hurts getting up at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning. I guess if Jesus can rise from the dead, then I can…well, whatever. Anyway, we went to my mom and Dan’s new church for the 8:30 Easter service, and while the priest managed to keep it at an hour, it was the longest freakin’ mass I’d ever been to. The husband/wife music crew was like the Will Ferrel/Ana Gastyer couple from SNL—absolutely horrible. And the priest seriously reminded me of the creepy old man with the walker from “Family Guy”. I think mom and Dan need to go back and do some more church shopping. Anyway, we came back to the house right away, and my mom gave Dan and I our Easter baskets. They were stuffed with all sorts of good stuff, like usual. I felt really bad though when a certain SOMEBODY didn’t get an Easter basket for mom. I’m not pointing fingers, but it was definitely pitiful that we had all these goodies when she had none (you know who you are). After the basket hunt we finally sat down for our big Easter feast…of meatloaf. I know that sounds weird, but it’s my favorite, and my mom knows how to take care of me. Well, I pretty much hit the road after our early afternoon dinner, and made even better time on the way home than I did on the way down: 3hr 50min! Mr. Sharp was at home when I got back, so I settled down by myself to watch the big matchup with Kentucky in the living room. What a game! I think my heart stopped beating for a few seconds when that hick drained his 3-pointer at the buzzer, but at least the rag-tag Spartans managed to put them away in the second overtime. Man, I am still in shock that we’re going to the Final Four. I honestly NEVER thought it would happen all season, but I couldn’t be happier about it. All those long marches to Breslin through the cold seem worth it now. Go Green!

Saturday, March 26

Sleeeep. Oh man, it felt good to sleep in. I got up at close to 11, and took my sweet time getting ready this morning. My mom needed some help learning some of the programs on her computer, and how to handle her new/my old iPod. We spent at least a couple hours working on that sort of stuff, and then I finally managed to get dressed at around 2. As I was reading my back-log of EWs on the couch this afternoon, my mom came into the living room in tears after getting an email from Ticketmaster saying that her order for U2 tickets had been cancelled due to an incorrect address on her account. Dan and I tried to calm her down, but I eventually had the brilliant idea to check Ebay for tickets. We actually found a pair for the show that’s going to be in Cleveland in December for a reasonable price, and won the bid. I actually think this is going to work out better for them now, because they won’t have to take off work to go to the Saturday show, and won’t have to pay for a hotel, since they’ll be closer to home. I mean, come on…you can’t pass up a chance to see U2! Well, the rest of the afternoon was pretty low-key, but definitely relaxing. Dan drove us over to German Town near downtown Columbus for dinner, and we ate at the Shit House…errr, Schmidt Haus. Funny names aside, our meal was FANTASTIC, and Dan and I topped it off with a wonderful vanilla cream puff for dessert. MMmmMM. We went for a little drive after dinner through downtown which was nice, and eventually made it home in time for some more basketball. My mom wanted to bust out the Scrabble game tonight, and I think that might’ve been a mistake. I think I forgot to mention that we played a couple games LAST night. My mom went first in the first game, and used all 7 letters on her first word, so she scored 76 points before Dan and I had even drawn our letters. So yeah, we just quit after that and started another game, that Dan ended up winning. Anyway, we played again tonight, and the Schafers managed to destroy me again—it wasn’t even really close. I talked to Stefy online via iSight for a bit after my linguistic ass pounding, but pretty much crashed afterwards, since we had to get up early for Easter mass tomorrow morning.

Friday, March 25

Good Friday—can’t complain about getting out of work early. The office was pretty dead this morning, and there was a general consensus that everyone was going to bug out at around noon for the day, since pretty much everyone else in the building had the day off. I got a decent amount of work done on the website, but I still ducked out at 12:30 like I planned. The trip down to Ohio was uneventful, but I managed to break my previous speed record of 4 hours and 20 minutes by about 10 minutes on the way down. It was really great to finally see my mom, and catch up on everything from the past couple months. It’s amazing what you miss when you’re away from home. I guess my mom had some heart episode a couple of weeks ago, that turned out to be nothing, but was still enough of a scare to warrant a stress test—man I’m out of the loop. Anyway, Dan got home just in time for a quick bite to eat before the MSU game against Duke. And what a game it was. I was saying all week that this was the biggest game for the program since the title game in 2000, and the team certainly played like it. We pretty much dominated Duke for 40 solid minutes of basketball, and it was certainly the most impressive performance I’ve ever seen out of this team. MSU = ELITE.

Thursday, March 24

Film theory wasn’t too bad today. We got back the midterm papers from before spring break finally, and I was glad that all my hard work paid off with a nice 3.5. That was one of the biggest headaches of the semester (although, it was still a cool assignment), and it definitely feels good to have it out of the way. My dad and I went to the Pizza House for lunch today, and hashed over some things for my London trip. I have to send in the check for my airfare tomorrow, so we needed to get that squared away. Film Theory was pretty interesting this afternoon, because we pretty much spent the entire class session talking about “Rear Window”. Gotta love the Hitchcock, baby. I had to run some errands after class, starting with a trek out to the west side of town to pick up some papers from my mom’s tax lady. That didn’t take as long as I thought, so I had a little extra time to do some shopping before my haircut at 6, which was back downtown at Panopolous. I eventually made it back to the pad though, and spent a good chunk of the evening packing up clothes and getting things ready for my trip to Ohio tomorrow. At 9:30 I took a break to watch American version of “The Office” on NBC. I really liked the show, but it definitely pales in comparison to the British version. Still, it was better than 90% of the crap I’ve seen on TV lately. We’ll see if anyone watches it though. Well, that was pretty much it for tonight.

Wednesday, March 23

Sociology was pretty ho-hum today. We just did the usual for that class—lots of notes, and lots of Tetris. Work was pretty busy again because I was still dealing with the invoices (blah), but I managed to get pretty much everything done that I wanted to do. English Lit wasn’t too bad because the professor did a pretty good job of lecturing for this week’s reading. We have a short paper due on this one next week, so it was good to get a head start with it, and actually have some idea what’s going on for once. Stef and I pretty much just watched some TV tonight, and had a nice, quiet evening together at the apartment, since we’re both going home for the weekend.

Tuesday, March 22

Today was my film day. I’m writing this a week later, so I can’t remember for sure what we watched in Film History this morning, but I’m pretty sure I dozed off for a good chunk of it. Work went by REALLY fast this afternoon though, because there was a ton of stuff to do to get the invoices in the mail by the time I needed to leave for Film Theory in the afternoon. We watched “Rear Window” today, which is one of my favorite Hitchcock films, and certainly one of the best movies we’ve watched all semester. The great part too is how well it ties in with our reading right now, which is all about cinematic spectatorship. In fact, our last paper of the year is going to be on “Rear Window”, so I’m feeling pretty good about that one, because I’ve seen it so many times now. Anyway, the rest of the night was spent poking around on my computer, and then over at Holmes with Stef to get our weekly dose of Sex and the City

Monday, March 21

Well, I got most of my paper on Sergei Eisenstein done last night, but there was enough of it left to wrap up to warrant skipping Sociology. After feeling pretty bad about the slow start I got yesterday, I actually think it turned out pretty well. Still, I’m just glad to be done with the thing—what a pain. Work was pretty busy today because Wanda was gone, and I had to rush around to get this month’s invoices ready for the mail tomorrow. English Lit wasn’t too bad this afternoon, because the prof actually gave a pretty decent lecture on today’s reading, and I got a lot of good notes down from it. Anyway, I took it pretty easy around the pad with Stefy tonight since I was still feeling kinda frazzled from writing that paper over the last couple of days. The rest of the week should be pretty much downhill from here.