The Third Presidential debate was held at ASU , in gammage about 500 ft. away from our building. CNN was there, and a couple of other TV stations which was fun. Jordan and Kallie got on TV a couple of times, and Dustin from our hall got to meet Ralph Nader because he bought one of the TV guys a pack of cigarettes.  

This would be one of the guys in the hall... actually he lives right under us and his name is Andrew Paul, colloqually known as "Drewfus" or the Drew. We want Katie and Drew to have a kid so then then there could be a white person with a fro. The coolest thing about Drew is his hair - and he's fairly amusing.  

Kate and I spent a lot of time in the hall our first semester. The bottom floor is all guys, and the top two are girls. Some guys downstairs are pretty cool, so we spend lots of weekend nights sitting on the hall floor talking about doing exciting things. Katie happened to have just finished a long hunt for the pink and white spotted dog, finally retrieving it from Emilio, the RA from Mexico who cant spell but is into photography.  

One day, Katie and Hannah were sitting around their dorm and they decided to not do their homework, since their homework was not fun and due the next day. Logically, it followed that they should begin taking pictures of themselves. Gradually, as time went on, the photographs became more and more fascinating in their subject matter and developed far past the point posted above.

This is our door - or was what it looked like around October '04. It's much more exciting now that Katie's added the "Hot Guy Wall" and there are opposing vote Bush/vote Liberal signs on each side of the door. And caution tape all over the door, and just stuff everywhere basically. The door is usually more open than that too... and the windows are always open. It's nice... except when someone cooks something that then makes the whole hall reek.  

I guess all we did was eat and play on the beach now that I go back and look at all of the pictures - so here we are eating at a Mexican Restaurant in none other than downtown San Diego after a hefty day of shopping. The music spaztically changed from traditional Spanish guitar to blaring hip hop every 3.7 minutes or so, like the owner and his son were having a brawl over the stereo system. 

We went to dinner in downtown San Diego at a semi-nice Italian restaurant that had heat lamps out front. We managed to have an 'incident' with a heat lamp despite being seated inside. Carefully cropped out of the picture is where I sat and the neat red spaghetti sauce splash circle surrounding where my plate was... oops.  

More beach pictures - this one is supposed to be the Baywatch running down the beach shot but we had a little trouble... of interest to note is the expression on Katie's face... 

San Diego - Pacific Beach, 5 pm. (Megan, Me, Halina, Kallie, Katy, Jessica, Katie) One of perhaps 19 or a million "beach pose" pictures Katy's sister took of us. This was after the daring escape from sea kelp and an hour or so of floundering in frigid salty water - and it was a blast! 

Hour Four - Yuma, 10 am, The Cracker Barrel. (from Right to Left - Back -Katie, Kallie, Jessica, Megan, Halina. Front - Katy, Me) We decided to stop for second breakfasts in this place... I was going to say fair city but I try to avoid lying. There were tons of rocking chairs about so we sat in them and took a picture. I sat of course in an itsy bitsy tiny one that really liked me - so much so that I stood up and it came with me...

Third Week of School: Someone, I think it may have been Halina, thought that we should go on a road trip so... we decided to go to San Deigo. There were seven of us who had known each other for a total of three and a half weeks got into two tiny cars (Geo!) and drove the six hours to San Diego for Labor Day weekend. This is me, Katy P, Kallie K, and Jessica at five in the morning outside of our building getting stoked on chocolate covered espresso beans.  

Katie took Beginning Salsa our Fall semester, with this crazy lady who swore us out and danced up a blonde storm. Part of the class recquired attendance at salsa dance clubs (interestingly enough at clubs the teacher owned or taught at) at least eight times a semester... or something like that. Lots anyway, so I went along because I like dancing and Kate couldn't go alone anyway. So this is us dressed up for our first salsa dancing outing where we ended up trecking a mile in high heels through down town Phoenix (not alone, but still) but that's not Christopher's fault entirely (Kate's dance partner) I think he thought we just needed the exercise. 

School! And other aspects of le campus life...

This is Gammage Auditorium, which is about 500 feet away from our building. They held the third Presidential Debate of 2004 there, which was pretty cool barring the triple fences topped in barbed wire, snipers on our rooves and security clearance just to get to our rooms. But it's a cool building and you can see it from someone's window I'm sure.

This is the outside of the Best Hall. Actually, our hall is called best, which is ironic because it's the oldest, cheapest, worst dorm on campus. But that's okay because we have the best people anyway, and that's what counts right? That way when the electricity is out the bathrooms clogged up and the internets not working we have some nice people to talk to. Plus, we have palm trees.  

This is my roommate sitting studiously at her computer, back when you could actually see our desk and the walls. There are also three times as many cords about now, taped strategically to the peeling paint.  

Tempe water is disgusting. It's brown, or if it's not brown it's off-yellow with chunky brown bits in it and it smells like muddy plastic. We thought, no problem, we'll just buy a Brita filter and filter all our drinking water. Ahh.. .the naivety of youth. On our tenth time filtering the same cup of water and still not finding it close to palatable Kate and I decided to take drastic measures - we rented a water cooler. That I can confidently say was the best purchase we ever made. EVER. If you move to Arizona you become a giant sponge, a camel, a fish thrown onto the beach where your skin dries up and shrivels you and shade is your new best friend and water is worth more than diamonds. Okay not really because then we really couldn't afford it but still. The water's nice.  

Closets! This side's actually not that exciting. Thanks Gen though for my Fiji Closet Cloth! What's it called again, a bula? I'll have to ask you again sometime. Well. They're white. That's about all to say about them other than mine is over stuffed and Kate's is really really really organized. Oh no, Kate is so organized it's started to spread like some kind of toxic mold into our drawers. At the beginning of the year, you could tell who's drawers where whos by the way the clothes were folded - or not in my case. Now, I am sad and embarrassed to say, I fold my underwear. I exert free will only in choosing to fold it differently than Katie, which means I'm not allowed to help her fold because I do it wrong but I nonetheless fold now. She will never win over my shoes though, they are still in comfortable chaos. 

This is my bed, and half of the window with some of my stuff on the walls and the tip of our fan, which is essential because 1) Katie lives for air movement and 2) we have no control over our own heating and cooling so it's always wrong, and a different temperature of wrong temperature on each floor. So to combat this lack of environmental temperature control, we use our trusty fan which is plugged in to our elaborate extension cord set up. This extensive system is the result of having TWO, count that only two electrical outlets, a total of four electric sockets, in our room. It makes thing's interesting, if you think fire hazards are interesting.  

... and this is what it looks like normally. It's not "dirty" it has what we like to call "the lived in" look. Notice Katie also has an end table. I am not so good as that. I mean, I have an end table, or that's what I call it anyway. In reality, it is an upturned cardboard box that looks eerily similar to an end table. It works.  

This is what our room looked like initially - bare walls, boring etc. etc. - that would be Katie's bed and the foot of mine. Yes, our beds are foot to foot. It's basically a plywood bench against one wall with foam pads on it, and you call it "beds". This is also what it looks like clean... 

Freshmen Again!

Okay... I realize these are going to be slightly out of order for the first semester and the ski trip is a bit buried, despite being the most recent activity. This is Kate (my brilliant roommate a.k.a. The Beast) and me one of our first weeks in college at ASU. Behind, is our disgusting curtain from the 70's, but the window is nice and big, so that's a good thing.

Names...

In developing a blog, the most important thing to determine initially is a proper title. In consideration of the title of this web log, the greater part of 5 minutes was spent in determining a good title. "Best" Blog was considered, however is unfortunately clever to only a small minority. Due to distractions during the 5 minutes of title development, a properly brilliant title as yet escapes me so I'll stick with this one. I'll explain it later...

In the Beginning...

Spring 2005 -
Have decided to creat a blog to catalog my college experience.