We Won!

So my Baby Doll Brawl team won the bout that was ... like ... three months ago. Whoops! I suck at updating. But there's an awesome clip from the bout of me getting nailed into a railing in this bout intro video! I get hit around 0:29:

FUN FACT: That hit did not hurt. But I did sprain my ankle during warm-ups before the bout even started all by myself! It turns out that if your skates are on really tight and you sprain your ankle, you won't actually feel it until after the bout when you take those skates off. Then this happens:

Worth it!

How I Got Rabies

First of all, I do not actually have rabies. The title is a joke. I feel the need to clear this up so as to avoid a frantic phone call from my mother.

Anyway! Last night I was walking from the laundry room back into my apartment, and came upon two raccoons. I knew they were around, as my upstairs neighbor mentioned them as one of the reasons why I should stop leaving a little dish of cat food out for the neighborhood stray cat I felt sorry for. But I'd never seen them before. One of them took off up a tree, but the other decided to stick around and observe me. It turned out that he loved being the center of attention and was quite photogenic. Look!



Isn't he cute? For allowing me to take pictures of him, I gave him some of the cat food, being sure to do so quietly so the upstairs neighbor wouldn't know of my raccoon-attracting activities. I left a small pile of the stuff just outside my door, and my raccoon friend got brave enough to come eat it. He even brought his shy friend!



By the end of the night, they got greedy and came back to my door and stared in at me in the hopes that I would leave them some more food. I did, although by that point they were brave enough to start walking towards me when I came outside with a bag of food, which was kind of unsettling since I like looking at the raccoons but I don't like getting rabies. Plus, they're surprisingly big and I'm fairly sure the two of them could overpower me and take over my apartment if they really wanted to. So I kind of yelped and threw the food at them and ran back inside. They didn't seem to mind that, since they got food.

Happy New Year From Vince

Look what/who was waiting for me in my mailbox when I got home last night!



I'm totally going to get me some ShamWows now that I see they can be used to clean sheepdogs. It just so happens that my New Year's resolution is to get a sheepdog!

Please don't ask me why I get catalogs from Harriet Carter.

The Cold War Is Over!

Last night, I somehow made friends with the Russian woman next door. It turns out that she wasn't the person I saw a while back putting the cart under my stairs again. There are no less than three old Russian ladies living in apartments off that stairwell who all look the same to me (I can't tell white people apart), and it was a different one I caught with the cart. And then, the other day, I caught the third lady trying to put another cart under my stairs.

I was heading out to Trader Joe's last night when I saw my next door neighbor at the sidewalk coming home with a cart of groceries. She saw me and, amazingly, stopped her cart and took her bags out to bring them to her apartment -- thereby leaving the cart on the sidewalk and not on the walkway where it is in my way. I was touched, so I offered to carry her bags back for her. She, in turn, was similarly touched, and told me (the best she could, not knowing much English and me not knowing any Russian) that she bought headphones so she could listen to her TV without turning the volume up and bothering me! I can't believe it! How considerate of her! She also said she has a bad shoulder, so I told her to come get me anytime she needed help with her groceries and I'd be happy to carry them for her. And then I returned the cart to Trader Joe's, where the sample station was giving out delicious pumpkin bread.

SHOCKING TWISTS!

... that's what it says on the cover of this week's Soap Opera Digest. Inside, you'll find what the table of contents calls a NEW FEATURE -- a two page article written by ME!

It's kind of amazing to know that something I wrote is sitting on grocery store checkout aisles across the country. I have no idea if this will become a regular feature or not, so if you like it and want to see more (which you will because I wrote it and therefore IT IS GREAT), please let the kind folks at Soap Opera Digest know via email or even regular mail. I'm sure my mother is emailing them up a storm from a bunch of email accounts she created specifically for this purpose, but she is just one woman and can only think of so many fake names!

And speaking of me doing stuff related to soap operas, I will be appearing on a special feature on the Dallas Season 8 DVD, which is coming out in February, which is fitting because February is Black History Month and Dallas has no black people on it. So I guess it's not very fitting at all. Buy it anyway!

My Book What I Wrote

First things first: I didn't go to Arizona. Much to my horror and dismay, my weekend was suddenly filled with important things I had to get done and I couldn't spare the day. I didn't let on to Jeff that they invited the wrong person to the party, though, so everyone cross your fingers that they'll accidentally invite me to something else in the near future.

Moving on! So I wrote an essay for a book that came out last week. Coffee at Luke's is a collection of essays about Gilmore Girls, and I was asked to contribute because of those five episodes I recapped for TWoP during Season Five. This is the first time I've ever been published. I have to admit, it's a thrill to hold a real book in my hands and read my name on the back cover. More than I thought it would be.

In all its majesty!!!!

Publisher's Weekly even reviewed it, and my essay was one of the three they mentioned. They said it was "amusing but aimless." I think they really need to up their proofreading standards; even though it was just the Web-Exclusive edition, you'd think they'd have caught such an egregious typo. Clearly, the sentence was supposed to say "amusing literary masterpiece." Don't worry -- I've already written to them about it and I'm sure they'll fix it and issue the necessary correction and apology soon.

A nice woman with incredibly good taste said in her blog that my essay was "one of the most interesting and creative." Suck on THAT, special class for creative students in middle school that wouldn't let me in because I scored four points under the minimum on the creativity test! Even though I won the Connecticut Invention Convention two years in a row!

Speaking of school, I decided to send one of the two copies the publisher sent me to my high school English teacher, Mr. Calise. Since my essay was about the town I grew up in and that we both hated, I thought he'd get a kick out of it. More importantly, he was one of the few teachers who really encouraged me and made me believe that I had ability while many of my other teachers were saying things like "you have talent, but not the right kind of talent," "I want to strangle her," and "we're suing you." It's amazing how many people out there are responsible for shaping and teaching children who clearly hate them and their jobs. I have the utmost admiration, appreciation, and gratitude for the teachers who do care. I really do. I hope both the bad and the good teachers realize the kind of impact they can have on every single one of their students' lives. I'm sure Mr. Calise does already, but I wanted to tell him myself.

Here's Smartpop's website.
Here's the Amazon listing.

Joy And Gratitude

I joined a soccer team and played my first game since my last soccer team disintegrated six months ago yesterday morning. I am currently in great pain from very sore muscles. But! There is one thing that can make me feel better (besides a strong painkiller, of which I have none), and that is the CHECK I WAS SHOCKED TO RECEIVE FROM THE TOWING PLACE TODAY! Covering 100% of the damages! Hooray for Hollywood Tow for coming through! If you're going to park like an asshole, you couldn't be towed by a better company. Boo to my insurance company, who totally dropped the ball on this and will be losing a valued customer very soon. Because I am a valued customer. I've given them so much money and cost them nothing and they pretty much left me to handle this whole thing. If Hollywood Tow hadn't been so honorable, I would've had to waste my time in small claims court. I'm gonna go change my insurance to one of those companies that keeps leaving notices on my windshield that are entirely in Spanish except for the part that says they're only like $20 a month. They'd probably kick in a few painkillers too if I asked right.

VICTORY!

My incredible, if untrained, lawyer skills and your helpful advice have come in very handy! As you can see below, my stupid unfair traffic ticket case has been DISMISSED and I will be getting my money back! Hooray!



I'll be writing about that apartment break-in soon, but I thought it would be nice to share some good news here too.