don't you know by now {you can't turn back}

OMGWTFBBQ THIS IS FOR SERIOUS BIG.

Okay, but only if you like football. My dad and I were talking about this during the game (he gave up about halfway through the 3rd quarter, LOL)--after this year's performance following up on the last couple of years, you begin to wonder if Mike Shanahan's not losing his touch as head coach of the Denver Broncos.

And so it wasn't all that surprising to hear that he got fired today. But still surprising, as this guy's been coach for 21 years (only 14 as head, I think; before that as assistant coach). That's longer than I've been alive, he's been coaching for these guys.

I wonder if this was in the works no matter how they did on Sunday, or if it only got finalized after that bulldozing we got. I'd wager that it was the latter--it's hard to fire a coach when the team got to the playoffs, no matter how shitty their record was that got them there.

In other news, dentist appointment tomorrow. New dentist. I'm making my mother give me some of Tyler's sedative stuff (and if she won't, I'll just steal it), because I'm about to puke from the scared just thinking about it. Fail, me and my dentist phobia.

Terrell Davis had a migraine during the 1998 Super Bowl? And Shanahan kept him in to fake out the Packers for Elway to score the touchdown? That's hardcore. TD said he had such a bad aura he couldn't even see, but they had to keep him in or the Packers wouldn't believe that they were going to run a rushing play. LOL, ESPN has this Super Bowl retrospective on. According to the listings, I thought it was going to just be a rerun of the actual Super Bowl, which would have been wicked, but this behind the scenes thing is pretty cool in itself.

"Leaving Shanahan with the decision whether to try for a 51 yard field goal." What? Elam. No question. Speaking of--Prater? Fix this little "I can make anything over 50, but 40-49 and you're shafted" thing you've got going on, or Shanahan's going to look into somebody else for next season.

Shit. Studying. Must go back to this. It's the night before a drive, so naturally, I'm up with no plans on going to sleep. Stupid claustrophobia-induced habit. No packing has yet been done, but I just did laundry and didn't put my clothes away, so I might do what Rachel did and just throw my whole hamper full of clothes into the van.

"The Broncos' defense continued to punish the Packers." Oh where, oh where have those days gone?

GAH. Study. Now, bitch.

I think I'm going to puke.

Requisite update from last Sunday (28 Sept.): Up all night trying to get tickets to this football game after we got shafted our old ones because the brokerage didn't have their listings updated, and thus let us buy tickets that the vendor didn't actually have anymore. Since Dad already had the hotel down here, I figured I might as well try. Posted on Craigslist finally, asking about tickets by way of bitching about the brokerage, and got tons of responses overnight about people with tickets and people advising me to just show up anyway, because there would be tons of people trying to sell them around the stadium due to there being a concurrent Nascar game and everybody expecting Denver to wipe the floor with Kansas City.

So we went. Dad ended up having to fuss around trying to check out of the hotel for quite a while, so we ended up leaving about an hour later than we wanted to, so we got there halfway through the first quarter. Drove around trying to find a place to park, walked around (as we'd parked on the opposite side of the stadium from the only gate that remained open that long after kickoff), got a pair of decent seat tickets on the way for $20 each. We were in the top level (whereas the original tickets had been in the lower), but low in it (though not as low in the section as the earlier ones either) and at the 30 yard line or so. The higher was good, we decided, as you could get a good picture of the whole field. Brought the binoculars, so we got to watch Shanahan pace around a bit, and get some good close-up looks (though it was more useful to just watch the play as a whole most of the time).

But then, you know, Denver didn't bring its defensive team with them to Kansas City, so that was sort of disappointing. But I had a lot of fun with Dad. Staying up all night the night before wasn't the best idea, though, because I wanted to be able to help him drive the bits when I was there so he didn't have to drive the whole six hours by himself (back here to drop me off and then back home). But in retrospect, I'd forgotten that he doesn't like me driving--he had crazy dreams about it last time we went somewhere (I think here to school for some reason, but I might be wrong) and thus won't let me drive long distances with him, though he never enunciated it this time around. Worse, though, we didn't really get to hang out on Saturday when he came down that afternoon, just a couple of shopping runs and then dinner--he ended up going back to the hotel around 8 or so and giving Rachel and I the car to run around wherever we needed (though nothing's open to do down here on a Saturday, it appears; even the mall closes at 9)--so in the car was the only time not occupied by something else that I really got to spend with him (football games = loud), and I was struggling to stay awake (and failing quite often) for most of it.

Downloaded this SopCast software today to let me watch the Denver game today, and ended up blowing my entire week's bandwidth. So I'm running at dial-up speeds for at least the rest of the week, which sucks. Further suckage comes from the fact that the entire bandwidth usage came from the P2P reuploading--3.75 gigs of it, when the whole 2 or so hours of football watching only took 635mb. Planning to look for a way to limit that like you can with normal P2P software, but I haven't found it yet for this program. Which means I might have to find another one that works, because that's not going to be doable if it busts me every week.

But above mentioned defeat to Kansas City, though humiliating (it seems like we only can get beaten by teams with horrible reputations--first Houston, then Kansas City?), really appears to have paid off, because it humiliated them early and enough to pick it back up for this game against Tampa Bay. Today's was a defense game, and we brought it.

Just got off the phone after about 40 minutes of conversation with the parents. Talked to Mom about the VP debate and politics and such--she's pretty disenfranchised with politics in general; she's voted in every election at least since I've been alive, and I'm pretty sure that's been since she turned 18, but she definitely doesn't get into it like I do. She's of the opinion that all politicians are crooks (often true, I'll concede), but as a result, isn't locked in to one party as much as I used to think she was (as much as she used to be?) And I'm pretty sure I've got her voting for Obama as well. So that's both parents turned from almost exclusively voting Republican. Job = success. She was asking me about the whole Obama/Ayers thing, which still hasn't really been explained well, but I read to her the couple of pertenent lines from the AP article I linked to in the last post (that was mostly about Palin calling Obama a terrorist) and she was reassured a bit ("That makes me feel better about--" I assumed 'voting for him' was the next line, which made me quite happy). She likes that Biden votes for the partial birth abortion ban, as she was always pretty much a one-issue Republican (stems from the Catholic upbringing plus probably more from the shitty luck she had having kids, I would guess). Not a fan of taxes either, but who is?

So win there. Same note, on Friday got to see Kristen Bell (from Veronica Mars and Heroes) and Rashida Jones (of The Office) come talk about Obama. Got some pictures of that on bleakone's camera that I'll have to have her email to me/nick with camera cord and put up for kicks. Mostly just went because Kaci and Mom watch Heroes and I wanted to snap a couple for them, as they didn't really say anything interesting. ("Register to vote! And then make your friends! And then vote for Obama!")

Cleaned out my email inbox on Friday night too, which took a long time. Brought it down from near 700 just in the inbox to 170 or so; my goal was enough less than 200 in the inbox that everything showed up on one page of messages even when I had some unread emails in there, which has been achieved. I'd say about half filed into my folders (that need renamed/reworked, as I combined some things and filed emails into folders that were originally for other topics, as they didn't have their own folder and I didn't feel like there were enough emails to deserve it, such as all Star Trek topic'd ones into the Voyager folder, etc.), and half deleted.

Missed breakfast and lunch (it's really just one brunch on weekends, but still) out shopping with bleakone and her mom (LOL at how I'm officially out of cash--as in, I have something like *counts* 37 cents to my name, and I didn't even buy more than a couple of 67 cent bottles of soda, a $1 package each of vanilla wafers and Wal-Mart brand cookies, and a thing of my Wal-Mart sugar free fruit punch that I down in two-liter quantities like water), so I microwaved one of my bison patties when I got back. Fairly successful--I could have gone down and cooked it on the stove in the basement, but I was watching the Denver game, so that wasn't happening until at least after that was done, and by the time it was over it'd be time for dinner and thus pointless, so I went for it. I did the math according to some website's suggestion of 7 minutes per pound (thus about 1:30 for my 3.5 oz), but stuck it in there for only a minute at first, which was good, because it was definitely done after that. A tad too far done, actually, but still quite eatable. So yum.

Now I really want to go to sleep and just wake up early enough to finish up my lab book for genetics (I've kept it mostly caught up, I just need to locate all the random papers I'm supposed to paste in and make sure they're up to date, as they're all the spare copies of ones we turned in, and I tend to fill in one copy and forget about it until right before I've got to hand it in and then not have enough time to duplicate it for my book), but I've had something like 3.5 liters of fake!Diet Dr. Pepper and two or three glasses of Diet Mtn. Dew since 2pm (I'm a whore for the soda--it's a problem, but I'll drink whatever you give me in whatever quantities you give it to me in, thus making the two liter bottle last not even a day in most cases) so I don't think it'll happen. Even though my body is tired (and my brain sort of too), I'm hopped up.

OMG beautiful weather today. Downright chilly most of the morning--add the windchill from bike riding and I was goosebumpy through all of my polisci class. Which is interesting. The class, not the goosebumps. It's one of those ones where all the material is interesting, but you come out of it looking over your notes and wondering what exactly there is in there to be tested on. Plus, the teacher's still trying to pretend she's from Oklahoma. Seriously. I recorded part of her lecture today, so I'm going to go though that and pick out some of the strikingly not-Oklahomian bits to share.

I'm in the top floor lobby atm, and not only did (in the few minutes it took for me to run back to my room, pop a bag of popcorn, and come back) somebody take my spot in the cushy chair alcove, now two other people (boyfriend and girlfriend, I'm assuming) have come into the same alcove to powow. Idk what they're doing--the girl padded in in her pajamas, bringing two bottles of water (vodka?) and the guy came off the elevator, and now they're just talking. Nothing wrong with that, I mean, but don't you have rooms? And at 11pm?

I am quite annoyed currently with the network stuff here. They're all "don't go over your weekly bandwidth or you'll drop down to dial up speeds!1!one!!" Umm, that's what I'm getting anyway. (And still managed to get within 400mb of the limit a few days ago, LOL). It's horrible. The inconsistency is the worst part--I'll be going 80 bytes per second for a while, and then it'll jump up to over 1mb/sec for a while, then back down to where it usually hangs out at 20-30kb/s. No idea how I got the killer speed, no idea what made it go the snail speed--all on Megaupload at pretty much the same time of day, so that's not it. And it's not even the wireless--this is on the wired connection. The wireless is more consistently fast (300kb/s ish in the basement lobby) if you're actually in the wireless zone--I can pick up the wireless from my room since this lobby has it, but the connection is spotty so it's not as quick.

[Edit: later, 1:20 am ish? I'm getting between 750k/s and 1mb/s back in the room on the wired. *sigh*]

Food here still doesn't make me happy. Omlette bar days do, because they've got whole eggs that I can separate myself (LOL at how I have to do it) in the hall that's practically in my building and a bucket o' egg white in the one that's on the way to most of my classes. But due to my scheduling, I rarely get down there for breakfast, which is sad. Most other days, the only thing I can count on is the salad bar (which tends to suck at the one near my classes--wilted lettuce, still-frozen vegetables, etc.; I only hit that one on T/Th for lunch, though, as other times I'm either in class during the meal times or near the closer one) and I have to bring my own fat free italian down because they only have one fat free dressing (raspberry--it's good, but you get tired of it quickly because it's a pretty flat flavor). There's a grill with burgers and stuff every day, and then some random fried meat substance most of the time for the main course (pork fritters today, etc.), and then one random thing that's usually not something I'll eat.

Even with the good weather today, the gym has not become any more tolerable. If there's more than one other person on the tiny row of treadmills, it's too loud to hear whatever episode of something I've put on my MP3 player (I wrap the velcro arm band around the handlebar thing to sort of prop up the screen so I can see it, though I've got to keep adjusting it the entire time because it tends to flop around because I can't quite get it to velcro on tightly enough), and you can never hear/see the TV. The latter mostly because my glasses are too wide for my face, idk how, and I can't get the ear pieces to sort of go back inwards, so if my face gets at all sweaty, they start sliding down.

Speaking of TV. O HELLZ YES, DENVER BRONCOS. Thank you for Monday night, sirs. But OMG, I didn't realize that we let Elam go. The new kicker's not bad (by that I mean he didn't miss last night), but IL Jason Elam. He's 38 and still the best kicker in the league. Plus, he's been playing pretty much my entire Denver-watching career, so he's one of the names that I still know from the Elway days. I read an article talking about how that's the exact reason that all the Denver fans are up in arms about his leaving, which is prolly true. Doesn't hurt that he kicks ass, though.

Re: mock trial. So, turns out that the pre-law fraternity is trying to start up a group. Which is good--takes the pressure off of me having to try to do so (as that almost definitely wouldn't have gotten done this year, now that I've looked at how many hoops you have to jump through). Nobody on the team's got MT experience at this level, though--two of us did it in HS (I think I actually beat her in State two years ago--definitely in rankings, if not also in a physical match) and we were talking after the intro meeting about co-captaining it. Which would be cool. I've pretty much got to join the pre-law frat to captain it, though, it's seeming, as the team's being done through them rather than as a separate club. Which is pricey. And I still don't have my bank card that they were supposed to send me (the form got turned in the 2nd of September, and I already had the account, all they had to do was print me up a card). Nor do I have my Public Speaking book that I ordered more than two weeks ago (totally could have done without it, too, as I know people in that class that I could have borrowed the book from to write my "Teach a chapter of the book to the class" speech, but it was only $6 or so including shipping, so whatever). That one's ticking me off. It's getting negative shipping feedback, LOL (as though most of the delay was probably the post office, the shipping confirmation they sent me says that they didn't ship it for some 5 days after I paid, which is not speedy).

Battery is low on the computer. Must go back now. Final note? Need to find out why I'm so sick pretty much since I moved in here. Dining hall food, methinks, but it's gotten to the point where I'm actually throwing up more days than not because I'm so nauseous.

Dear Weather,

Please to be NOT making Cutler slip on the GAME WINNING PLAY.
FU.

Sincerely,
Alexandria

Oh curses.

Ebenezer Ekuban is out for the season with an Achilles' tendon injury. He's totally my favorite Bronco; I mean, just look at his name--tis awesome. Plus sometimes he has really long hair, which is fun. I barely saw him at the end of last year (but that's prolly because Denver started letting people just walk by them with the ball, so broadcast TV stopped carrying some of the games), and now not at all this year.

Ahh, Denver. Tis a love-hate relationship we have. I love you guys, but sometimes you really screw up. I lol, though, at how last year I got totally into football. I yell at the screen. (But then again, I do that with most TV shows and movies also. Still.)

There's an ad for House above my email box! You know with Yahoo how you've got "Yahoo Mail" and then a little banner ad and then the main email thing with "Mail, Addresses, Calendar, Notepad" and so forth on down the page? That's where it is. Yay for adverts for tonight's ep. Which I won't get to see for several days due to the fact that I'm going to make somebody take me up to mini medical school this week. But the lecture's going to be about ethics in medicine, which is cool.

Ahh. Studying. Yeah. Going now. Both of these are really important as the bio teacher told us that this is the biggest whore of a test this semester and my grade in math, as previously reported, sucks arse.

Ooh, next week Denver is playing San Diego in football. Nice. I think we might lose, though. As they seem to be sort of better. Though we've been tied in standings most of the season. So maybe.