Week in Review

I did very little this past week besides work, lift and run. 

I learned a few things though: 

1) The foreigners that I work with are not good at playing the game 20 questions. They asked me to pick something for them to guess and I told them, "It's a thing" and immediately they ask, "But like a sports thing or like a cleaning thing or like something else?" "Is this thing like a real thing or a fake thing?" "Can I touch it or is it like imaginary?" I mean, the point of the game is to find those things out, right? "But 'thing' is too big of a category!" "Is it a person?" (No...)  "Is this a thing I go to?" (That would be a place...). And then their idea of narrowing down the category is asking questions like, "Is it blue?" "Does it smell?" "Is it a square?" Because those are definitely the kinds of questions you would ask to narrow down the category of "thing." Yes, it is in fact a blue, smelly square thing, but what blue smelly square thing? But oh, I love the foreigners and they really do know how to make the time fly at work!

2) Running sprints is easier at 5AM than it is at 4PM. Lifting is not better or worse at 4PM because it's inside an airconditioned building. Don't know why it took us so long to figure this out but hey, we did, and that's the important thing.

3) In North Dakota, there are people who actually sell kittens out of the back of their yellow mini-vans. There were like 5 cats in the car.

4) Sundays are the best days for laying in bed and watching TV all day. I woke up this morning, watched music videos, then the movie "Invincible," and now soccer is on. It's like they know that I don't want to move all day so they just schedule all the awesome things back to back to back so I only have to get up to pee and eat. Wonderful.

I got frozen yogurt twice this week, which I don't feel bad about at all since it's almost the first time I've gotten it all summer. 

Played some pickup soccer with the foreigners on Thursday, which was fun. I get to play on the field and run around like a fool with a ball. 

I went to Scheels looking for one specific item and they didn't have it. I looked online and they had it, and asked $13 shipping (it's a shirt). I went to Dick's online and they had it, and offered to ship it for free. Scheels sucks. I love Dick's. (Sorry, couldn't avoid that!).  

I finished reading "50 Shades of Grey" which, despite all the rave reviews I found too weird to be attracted to, at all. And it might have the worst ending of any book, ever. I don't care if you're writing a trashy romance novel, or the Bible, finish the GD story. Disappointed and freaked out, to say the least! And if you're like a mom or older than about 26, please don't read it. Just don't. It'll weird me out if I see you, knowing what you're reading. Thanks.

That's about all I have for this week, it's been a slow week and this soccer game is slowly pulling my attention back to the TV so I will try to update you guys on my life again soon! Have a great week!

Long overdue update

It's been well over a year since my last update and after realizing that there are quite a few people missing my daily ranting I have made the executive decision to restart this little blog. I can make executive decisions about my blog because I own it, K? 

Since my summer schedule looks like this:

5AM- Wake up
5:30AM- Lifting
7-3:30- Work
4PM- Conditioning
5:30-8PM- Coaching
Dinner, Shower, Bed

I don't have a lot to talk about currently, so this will be inconsistent and probably boring until soccer and school start back up again in August, when I will try to do something every other, if not every, day. Bear with me while I try to "make bank" working this summer!

However, if you are "oh so invested" in what I have to say ALL THE TIME (stalker status?), you can follow me on Twitter, @toryhoffman. I tweet a few times daily and I don't believe you have to have a Twitter to read my tweets. But I'll try to give a recap of everything on here when I get the chance, or think it's worth it.

I have something to talk about that is definitely worth it, but I want to wait until I get the pictures from my camera onto the computer, which will be sometime this weekend, promise! And it WILL be worth the wait!

So let's hang tight and be patient until my life becomes more exciting!

"Oh my gosh I think I'm going to have to give you $2 when you go to work on Thursday!"

Sorry for the long wait but like I mentioned before life has been absolutely CRAZY. Let me recap my weekend:

Friday morning I left for Sioux Falls for a track meet. I was instantly depressed upon arriving because it was about 50 degrees there, sunny and their field looked like this:

There is one really important thing missing in this picture. SNOW. The only snow in all of Sioux Falls is those piles in the parking lot. I sat in the grass and laid down in the grass and didn't freeze or soak myself. I want Moorhead to look like that.

So that was Friday. Saturday I actually had the meet which was fun. I didn't do exceptionally well, but for throwing outside for the first time in disc (and throwing shot put for the first time since the conference meet) I guess I wasn't disappointed. Saturday night a friend and I sober-cabbed for a few friends and experienced a really, really epic projectile vomit. I'm talking like 10 feet. Across a room. And all over a laptop. Nasty. Needless to say, we didn't stick around for much longer after that.

Sunday was full of sleeping, editing a video, ellipticalling for a long, long time, some AbRibberX and doing last minute touch ups on my drawing project.

Monday was long, but relieving. I got A LOT done. I turned in my bird sculpture and critiqued it. It got mostly positive reviews and I decided to sit it on it's side (I called it "Tippy Sideways Bird," but it looks better that way) for my portfolio review tomorrow. Then I turned in my drawing project and critiqued it. It also got mostly positive reviews and I was relieved because I thought it would not. But here's how cool it looks hanging on the wall in the critique room:

Much cooler on the white wall than on the grey floor!

Econ was Econ, done. I had a hard lift then went to the design studio to finish up matting some projects for my review. Got it done. Awesome day. Big stress relief!

And finally, today. Today was pretty good. I turned in my "Pants Off Dance Off" video which was not good. It was a good concept but the sound is bad and my lighting is mostly bad too. But it's still fun to watch and it's only a minute long so it might be worth your time!

History was also just History. Track was interesting because we threw outside. There's not a lot of snow left outside. There is a lot of water. I mean A LOT of water. Like, the whole field is basically under at least an inch of water and in some places there is up to six. The English Channel runs along the right side of our throwing area, and I swam it twice today to retrieve discs. I would say that I was just happy to be throwing outside, but I was not happy to be throwing outside. I was wet and unhappy.

But after track some friends and I had a little adventure in Fargo. We went to Spicy Pie (a really really good pizza place in Fargo) because they had 2-for-1 slices of pizza. So basically, for $4 you got two slice of pizza (which in Spicy Pie language is close to half a pizza) and a pop. AWESOME. Then we went to Wal-Mart which was also... Fun.

I wanted to have picture of my portfolio review room all set up for you, but there were lots of people still there when I was setting up so I didn't get it all done and couldn't get pictures. But tomorrow, I promise.

I have to go to bed now, I have a 7AM wake-up call and a very, very important morning! I'll leave you with a little tweet I found amusing, from the Hulk himself, Clay Matthews (and don't ask for a context for this because I know as much about it as you do):

"Traffic traffic... Looking 4 my chapstick... Gettin kinda carsick... There's a Ford Maverick."

"These socks are for midgets."

Ahh, glorious Thursday. It was only glorious because I did not have my 10:30 class and I decided to forgo my 1:30 class in favor of soccer practice. I was set to simply not be there, but I happened to run into Prof and told him. He said, "OK." And it was great. And soccer was great. And dinner was... fine. Then I went grocery shopping for the first time this semester and brought some food that doesn't have a 100% sugar composition into our dorm. It looks out of place next to the jelly beans, candy corn and cookies. But it's delicious.

Then I did art. Lots of art. Some for fun, some not for fun. Here it is;

This was for fun. This is also a dark picture. I'll work harder to get a nicer picture, one day. (Ha ha, get it?).

The long awaited completion of my surrealism project. This is not completely complete because I put some double sided tape where the pages connect to make it lay flatter. But it's close.

Here's an actual complete picture. It's reaching out of the top of the picture, can you imagine what the rest of the robot looks like? Me either.

And a nearly completed bird flying over some rocks. I need to sand some more, and you can still totally tell where the tail broke off, but hey, it's better than last time you saw it.

Besides that, my day was "chill." I found these pictures that also made me happy. I took one and didn't take the other, can you tell which is which?

Ok, I'll just tell you. I took this one. It's my campus, in case you can't recognize it. The really bright light in the upper right corner is where I live. If I thought you could find me based on this picture, I wouldn't have told you that.

And I keep finding scarier and scarier picture of Clay Matthews from this photo shoot. But still, just a little sexy, right?

My quote today is from a tweet I read when I woke up this morning afternoon. From Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on The Office. He's funny. Read the whole thing if you wanna LOL. [The part like this were other peoples' who he re-posted on his Twitter. Gotta give credit where credit is due!]:

"Dancing With the Stars 2012 wishlist: Mickey Rourke, Qaddafi, Snooki, Jet Li, a robot, Sting, Knut's corpse, An Olsen twin, Anderson Cooper, Satan, Howard Stern, a turd, Macchio, Berlisconi, Marilyn & Charlie Manson, an albino, Korn, the cast of Ave Q (w/ puppets), @JoyBehar, Osama Bin Laden, another turd of some kind, Frosty the Snowman, Suri Cruise, a gay veterinarian, Tori Spelling's vagina, discharge of some kind, Bob's Big Boy, a severed finger, Cher, Fred Durst impersonator, Hello Kitty, Half of Santa, a pebble, Cher, a box of napalm, Vin Diesel, Cher's fa..., Charo, Gary Glitter's hard drive, Pete Rose, the dead half of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, White Snake, Michelle Bachman, the University of Kansas, Loki the Trickster God, Chief Seattle's rattle, a rare fungus, Cher, [fish parts, Optimus Orime, Rebecca Black's home ec. teacher, the Aflac duck, Bizarro, Paul Reubens(not Pee-Wee), Moby, Hobo with golden voice, Octomom (& brood), slice of deli meat, Mel Gibson's beard, Stephen Hawking's wheelchair, Cthulhu, Paris Hilton's dog, and zombie Abe Lincoln]."

"Because I think you could do a lot of good for us here. Or at least not be in dead last."

Just a couple quick things about today, because it's really, really late and I'm tired!

The JJ Watt Foundation (if you don't remember who JJ Watt is, look here) had kind of a mini-launch today. The "Official Twitter" was opened and the logo was released. Super exciting! I think you should all follow both @JJWatt and @JJWFoundation on Twitter and buy the wristbands when they go up for sale next week! I know I will!

I ate an apple today. In case you don't know me that well, I'm allergic to apples. They make my mouth itch and sometimes I get these little hive things inside my mouth when I eat them. But I bought a green apple for drawing today and I just couldn't bear to throw it away so I ate it instead. It was yummy. I had my "emergency water" to flush my mouth out when it started itching. But that time never came. I ate an apple and nothing happened. I think I'll try again tomorrow.

I worked on both my drawing and design projects until about 1:15AM and I nearly completed both. Which is super exciting and relieving because now I can put most of my focus into my portfolio review and getting ready for that. But that's not why I told you I was working until 1:15AM. I told you that because when I finally walked into the outdoors at around 1:30AM, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. I almost cried. Snow. On the ground. It's like pants on the ground but much less... Awesome. It sucks. I was sad. It ruined my good night.

I got my quote today from Twitter. It's a post by someone I don't actually know, but it was retweeted by someone I follow. The original author is Rob Delaney who I guess is Canadian and a writer, so that makes him cool, I guess. Here's what he has to say (it's an LOL, just so you know!):

"Atheism is so hot right now I'd say we're a few months away from hipsters joining the priesthood en masse."

"Freshman don't have to pay quarters!"

 Ok, so I think I might have overreacted yesterday. It was probably a combination of sleep deprivation and being extremely busy but even though I have a million things happening, I'm not as stressed anymore, promise.

So today was nice because my 10:30 class was canceled and I didn't have class until 1:30. So I slept in, which was Ok because I stayed up super late to work on my sculpture (which I actually took a huge chunk out of, and then broke. But I'm going to glue it back together tomorrow and everything's gonna be OK!). So I slept until about 10, got out of bed around 10:30 and then started my day.


I had a nice talk with my soccer coach today, whenever I go in there we always end up talking for a really long time about a lot of stuff I didn't intend to talk about and then I forget to tell him what I went there to tell him. But basically we decided a few things: we had a good weekend, we're going to Trampoline World as a team next year and even though sometimes I regret not going to college somewhere warmer, I am very happy here. I can say that now because the snow is going away. If we had had that same conversation a few weeks ago, I would probably have left and hopped on the next flight to California. But it's better now!

Speaking of melting snow, we had track practice outside today. It was good because we got to throw for real hammer (not that it was good for me, it's impossible, I swear) and it was fun to watch some of my teammates throw really, really far into banks of snow. It was funnier to watch them try to shag because it was snowy and icy and people fell a lot. I think I'm going to call it "Arctic Hammer" and try and get it in the Olympics.

After that, I ate really quick then went cycling. It felt good to cycle again, because I hadn't done it since last semester and it reminded me how much I love it. I cranked the resistance up and went a total of 15 miles! It's gonna hurt tomorrow but be totally worth it. Then I did AbRibberX, which was good and bad because I also did it yesterday so it hurt a lot more today. But I'm going to have RippedX Abs for the summer so... Yeah.

I took about an hour for myself then, to relax and get my head cleared before starting the little amount of homework I planned for myself tonight. I have to get up early-ish tomorrow so I'll save the lots of work for tomorrow because I can sleep in on Thursday again. I made this to help me cope with my busy life, I recommend you do the same. It feels good to write everything down and then give yourself the opportunity to demolish it when you complete it. Like burning all your homework and paper from a year of school during the summer:

Do it. I promise, you won't regret it.

Then I did my homework, which was pretty easy. I discovered an artist named Nathan Sawaya who makes sculptures out of Legos. Like real Legos. The little kids toy, Legos. And they're not replicas of buildings or spaceships, they're real sculptures. This was my favorite one and the one I did my assignment on:

Called "Yellow" it's make completely out of the same yellow brick over and over again. He has a lot of other cool stuff, I encourage you to take some time to look at it!

So that's all I have for you today! I tried to be positive and give you a suggestion for making your busy life more enjoyable and I'll try to do the same again tomorrow! I have to shower now and then I get to go to bed. I'll finish with a quote I heard from my track coach (he always writes the best quotes on the board during our meetings) by Zig Ziglar:

"The harder you are on yourself, the easier life will be on you."

"You couldn't make this sh*t up!"

My weekend started with a late night Sketch Comedy rehearsal and ended with a late night return to campus, followed by a really, really long stressful day. Here's the deets.

Thursday, as much as I can remember, was pretty boring. The only real excitement came Thursday night when we finally had our first (and only) rehearsal for the Sketch Comedy show on Friday. It lasted from about 10:30PM to shortly after 1AM and was really, really funny.

Friday was awesome. I got to sleep in (gasp!), picked up some video equipment, went to soccer practice (at that same awesome "turf" field) then went straight to the Sketch Comedy show. The show went really, really well and for being my first time ever performing, I was surprisingly not nervous. And I liked it. People actually laughed at me. Which normally I would be offended by, but since they were supposed to, I was pleasantly surprised. So hopefully we get to do another show before the end of the year.  And my friends were awesome and came with signs and stuff, so the other people in the Troupe were like, "Your friends are such jocks, they brought you signs." But I appreciated them, so that's all that counts.

We walked to Tastee Freeze after that, which was nice. It hasn't been really cold here lately (is it finally spring???) so it was nice to walk at night. We saw these two things on the way there:

This is a very, very deep puddle located at the crosswalk that is necessary for all students to walk across multiple times a day. So it kind of sucks that it's there. And my friend got really excited because she was wearing rain boots so she jumped in. Then she got water in the top of her boots and decided she thinks there's a hole in her boots. Excellent choice.

Just made us all laugh!

After ice cream, we made some crafts and ate some (more) food at Dragons After Dark, then hung out some more, then went to bed. It was a good Friday.

Saturday was also very good. I shot footage for my next video production project, which is an action sequence. I chose to do a pants-off dance-off. It's not as racy as it sounds and I think I actually got some good footage, but we'll see once I start editing. And to top it off we went to Spicy Pie and used some COUPONS and saved a whole bunch of money and ate a whole bunch of pizza.

We left for our soccer tournament around 3PM. We rode in vans (our van won by like 30 minutes) and had time to watch the first half of the USA-Argentina men's soccer game before we left. Talk about some good soccer! It was exciting to see Messi completely shred the US defense. But it ended in a tie, so I guess USA picked it up a little in the second half.

We ate dinner at Macaroni Grille and the highlight of the dinner was probably the tables. They were covered in paper so we got to color all over them. Unfortunately our table only had two brown crayons so the creativity was limited but we got some interesting things on there:

"It's [coach] on an island, with a mean crab clamping his leg standing next to a coconut tree with a whale mermaid swimming in the water saying 'swim to me, I can help you." Courtesy JW.

Not exactly sure what all this is, but obviously there's some sort of conflict going on here. Courtesy AG and LC.

It started out as a horse, then a horse with a tree, then our coach said, add a noose. And I didn't get a picture but the artist also added in a skeleton hanging from a noose. It was a little cynical for a tablecloth but hey, it's pretty impressive for a brown crayon.

And the same girl drew a caricature of another girl on our team.

And it turned out very good! Courtest SL

And that night in the hotel was pretty much nothing like you could expect. I could tell you everything that happened (I'll tell you some of it) but you probably wouldn't believe it. We started a contest where you have to time how long you pee for. Like, you bring your phone into the bathroom and time your pee with the stopwatch. I drank five glasses of water at dinner and I peed for about 14.8 seconds and I think that was the longest from the trip. So I'm really good at... Peeing... We tried to fit our whole team in the elevator. Which subsequently broke. We were stuck for a few minutes while it tried to lift us, but after we kept hitting the alarm I think it gave up and opened the door on the first floor for us. It was weird that we tried to do that because the first thing I noticed when I walked in was this sign:

It's almost like... We don't pay attention...

So after that scare a lot more stuff happened but it ended up with us not being able to sleep and me staying up until about 1:30AM rolling around in the bed because I couldn't sleep.

Sunday = Game day. It was very exciting to get to play soccer again. We played three short games against Viterbo, MTA and St. Croix and went 1-2. But we scored a whole bunch of goals and worked on a few defensive tactics we'd been practicing. It was nice, tiring and now my legs are so raw it hurt to shower. But that's a good thing.

We were supposed to be back around 10:00PM, but we got held up a little by a tiny medical emergency (everyone is OK now, promise!) and didn't get back until around midnight (and I was in the fast van. Roommate didn't get back until like, 12:30).

So of course it would happen that the night before Monday I don't get enough sleep. Today was such a long day. And it only made it worse to go through both art classes and listen to Prof and Prof talk about all the projects due next week. Basically my next two weeks are total hell. I have huge drawing and design projects both due on Monday. I have a Video Production project due Tuesday. And then I have my freshman portfolio review on Wednesday. So I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm going to die. So if I don't update this, sorry, I'm only trying to maintain my sanity.

I sat restlessly through Econ just looking at my schedule (then he gave us homework, too... guess what I'll probably forget to do), and I wanted to cry a few times, but I didn't because I'm not that stressed out (Yet. Just wait though I'll probably be that girl who just starts crying in the middle of class for no apearent reason and then ends up not doing anything because I'm crying. Just kidding. Gotta keep my head up!) and I later told my roommate, "Don't cry because your life is a total sh*tstorm, be happy because you are alive!" So I'll have to live by that mantra for a while until this is all over!

This picture made me pretty happy:

Ok, just kidding, it really scares me a little, actually. Usually I wouldn't diss on Clay Matthews like that (I mean, he could kill me) but that is a scary picture. Both because of his face/arms and because it looks like he's bald. But at the same time, it's kind of hot, right? :\

So that was my super long weekend. Sorry it all got backed up. But like I mentioned, it's that time of year when I probably won't get on here everyday, but I'll still try to share things with you. At least a little everyday. I'll try. Really hard. So hang in there, like me and let's make it through these next few weeks together and with smiles on our faces!!!

I'll end with this little story thing I found on Facebook that made me smile:

"When I was little, I was always told that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote "happy." They told me I didn't understand the assignment. I told them they didn't understand life."