risin' up to the challenge of our rival.

the cmu money mellons are taking on Penn Women's College Sectionals this weekend. and i honestly have no idea how i'm feeling.

excited? nervous? stressed? psyched? pumped? anxious?

so many things are reeling through my mind right now. granted, half of those things happen to be stuff going wrong and shit hitting the fan in almost all other aspects of my life, but still. my brain is pretty fried right now. all i want tonight is a good phone call, then a good night's sleep to let my frazzled mind settle and get it's act together for tomorrow's games.

--------------------------edit-----------------------

saturday's games:

9:00am - CMU 6 - 12 Penn State
11:00am - CMU 13 - 4 Gettysburg
1:00pm - CMU 13 - 6 Franklin & Marshall
3:00pm - CMU 6 - 13 UPenn

sunday's games:

9:00am - CMU 13 - 7 Dickinson

11:00am - CMU 15 - 5 Bucknell

1:00pm - CMU 15 - 4 Edinboro

3:00pm - CMU 5 - 15 Swarthmore (backdoor)

the CMU Money Mellons finish 5th, breaking seed but losing in the game to go to Regionals...

all you need is love.

Wikipedia:
Love is any of a number of emotions related to a sense of strong attachment and affection.

Dictionary.com:

Love is a profoundly tender affection for another person.

Love is a feeling of warm, personal attachment and deep affection, as for a parent, child or friend.

Love is a sexual passion or desire.

Love is a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart.

Love is affectionate concern for the well-being of others

Love is a strong predilection, enthusiasm, or liking for anything.

To love is to have love or affection for.

To love is to have a profoundly tender, passionate affection for.

To love is to have a strong liking for; take great pleasure in.

To love is to need or require; benefit greatly from.

To love is to embrace and kiss (someone), as a lover.

Answers.com:
Love is a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
Love is a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.
Love is an intense emotional attachment, as for a pet or treasured object.
Love is a person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved.

To love is to have a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward (a person).
To love is to have a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward (a person).
To love is to have an intense emotional attachment to.

To love is to experience deep affection or intense desire for another.

it's all coming back to me now.

currently, i'm sitting in the basement of hunt library with anna. i'm randomly rotating between checking my email, writing emails, preparing work samples and a cover letter for an internship application, and plain ol' futzing around on the interwebs. she, however, is being the ever so responsible fourth-year and actually working on her studio project.  being that her project actually has the chance of being built, her studio has decided to be extra stringent on construction details and the like. with me being an m&a ta, i have suddenly become her personal m&a-specific wikipedia. in the last hour and a half, i have been bombarded with so many construction questions about things that 1) i didn't think had soaked into my head at all when we first learned it in second year and 2) came flowing back strangely fluidly with barely an extra thought to them at all.

for example, i remember that:
...exception #1: spacing studs 16"o/c means it's 16" from center-to-center of each stud, except when it's not. from the ends, it's 16" from the outside.
...exception #2: 2x4s are always 2x4, except when they're not. 2x4 is nominal, but much easier to label and read than 1 3/4x3 3/4. so in construction, 16"o/c doesn't actually call for a 14" gap between studs as you would think.
...exception #3: vapor barriers are not to be penetrated or compromised in anyway, except when they are/have to be. turns out, you need a way to attach said vapor barrier/wrap to the rest of the structure, correct? what are you going to do; superglue it? don't worry. holes made by staples are small enough that the compromise is negligible.
...construction rule: how do you structure an exterior wall? SPAIGR. not even a good acronym, but turns out, it's pretty memorable.

i'm impressed.

well played, steve lee. well played.

now how about changing the second year syllabus back so that the wee little ones actually learn this stuff?...

...just saying...

you're it. you're the ultimate.

SPRING ULTIMATE SCHEDULE:

jan. 16 - CWRUL Indoor Women's Tournament @ Case Western, Cleveland, OH

mar. 8-11 - High Tide @ Brunswick, GA

mar. 13-14 - Philly Classic @ UPenn, Philadelphia, PA [rain site: Messiah College, Manheim, PA]

mar. 27-28 - Roll Call @ Poolesville, MD [Cultimate FAIL.]

mar. 27-28 - Battlefield Brawl @ Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA

apr. 10-11 - Sectionals @ Manheim, PA

may. 1-2 - Regionals @ Princeton, NJ

happy birthday to...me...?

i'm 22. damn. when did that happen?

i guess it hadn't really it me that i was turning 22 until we were getting ready to head off to some tournament in the fall and at least one of the rookies came and found me at practice to let me know her waiver will be coming in very last minute because she needed to mail it home and have her mom sign the chaperone form [note: only for under 18s]. damn. i'm old.

anyhoo, as per usual, my birthday came and went with pretty much no event. pretty eventless. had a terrible start to the day even before i managed to get some sleep. woke up early to head out to 8:30am practice only to find none but one [and the coaches] had bothered to do the same. thank you for wasting our time. :P sat around a little. waited until my partner for studio came in so we could finalize our board and plot it in time for mid-review in studio at 1:30pm. boring. more stressful than necessary. mid-reviews came and went. i presented and bailed into some other studio/up to the clusters to futz around some more. already exhausted beyond belief, i headed up to geagle to restock up on the greens for Puppy dearest. stopped by a couple of stores to search for that ever-evasive winter aviator hat that i've been looking for. no such luck. headed home to drop stuff off and grab my computer gear to head out to anna and john's for some good ol' take out thai food. delicious. guess it serves as some semblance of a birthday meal. no cake. but that's okay. got to get my new laptop, a birthday present from the parents, with rhino. meant to get other stuff too, but that shit fell through. now i'm back here. in my apartment. remember that i still need to pack, clean up the apartment, feed the bunny and study for a quiz for which i have no idea what to study all tonight since i then take the quiz tomorrow and then hope on a bus to the airport, which would then take me to hop on a plane out of town until the end of spring break.

so all in all, not a great birthday. could've been better. thought for once, there might be more to it. but oh well.

but man! spring break!


so here's the plan:
mar. 4-8 - boston, ma. with my B having the best date and birthday weekend ever.
mar. 8-11 - brunswick, ga. for high tide. i'm excited. three full days of sun, sand, ultimate and partying. baller.
mar. 13-14 - philly, pa. for philly classic. again, excited. this should be fun. and new. and challenging. all good things.

consensus = awesome. i plan on coming back to pittsburgh tanned, sunburned, sore, grassburned, bruised...and grinning like an idiot. fingers crossed this actually happens.

wish me luck! :)

my new pooter! :) all new and shiny...and now covered in stickers.

rockin' high tops and sayin' no to stilettos.

after much persuasion and convincing by the city council and much bitterness by administration in response, cmu had a four day weekend. ridiculous. it snowed about 2-3ft friday night. and pittsburgh, being pittsburgh, had no idea what to do with that. like, literally no idea. we're talking about a city who hasn't even quite gotten dealing with 2-3inches of snow right yet. nothing was plowed, nothing was shoveled. it was a snowpocalypse.

this has also most definitely been the hardest, or longest, i've ever partied. thanks to the casbah.
friday = "warming up"
saturday = "no winter league? still rockin'"
sunday = "the superbowl" followed by "snow day!"
monday = "connect 4" aka. "second snow day!!"
tuesday = "one for the thumb" aka. "snowpocalypse, day 5"

almost 100% sure i haven't made it back to my place and into bed before 3am all weekend, with the record of only getting to bed at around 5am last night/this morning. realizing this upon waking up at 1:30pm today...damn...

this has also, on record, been the least stressful weekend of my life. seriously. i couldn't have been happier. i couldn't have been more full of energy. and while i am positive that pittsburgh is already well on its way to becoming yet another massively dreary and slushy mess, i absolutely have the ass load of snow that got dumped on us to thank for that. so thank you. :) [p.s. its snowing again. we're expecting another 6-inches. damn.]

::photos of snowpocalypse to come::

we're where the freeway stretches out like pop songs.

today was the field trip to Evergreen Hamlet in Millvale, PA. it's about 20mins north of CMU. here are just a few shots i liked :)

the funky, triskelion-esque oculus window from the attic.

they had two giant schnauzers. it was awesome. :)

ceiling detail in the foyer.

lights in the dining room.

 

bendy staircase up from the kitchen. over one of the many doors to the outside. | flowers and pane of rose glass on the foyer table.

an old spinner-turned-desk. cool, no? | one of the awkward hallways up in the attic. seriously. it led to that window.

there's more...but blogspot's being slow. :P maybe later.