Tarentule

On Friday I came home to my apartment significantly modified. Someone in my ward is going to be moving into this apartment in the fall, and he and my roommate set to work rearranging and redecorating. I think it's mainly the new guy who's up to it.

It kind of bothers me, because I think he's changing things for the sake of changing it and not necessarily to make it better. It would be one thing if he'd lived here for six months and decided he wanted a change--but he hasn't lived here yet. I know he doesn't mean it this way, but I kind of feel like he thinks "You're all a bunch of lazy slobs, so I'm going to make it better."

It doesn't help that I'm already scared of this guy. He's a Renaissance man, and they kind of intimidate me anyway. Plus, he always looks and sounds mad, even when he's smiling. I know he's a very kind person, but he scares me. He's like a tarantula. I know he's not really dangerous, but it's still a bit unnerving to have him running loose around the house.

Isn't tarantula a great word? The word spider is a rather blah word--but tarantula just sounds like it should describe something big, hairy, and creepy. It's named after a place in Italy where they had giant wolf spiders, and then the name was later applied to other kinds of big spiders. Maybe you've read old books that talk about the dance called the Tarantella. People thought that a tarantula bite made you go crazy and dance--so they named a dance after it. It bugs me when people say tri-antula--where'd that three come from?

What else happened this week?

Well, today is my niece's birthday, so yesterday I drove home just for the day for a family gathering. I told Allie she was lucky because I counted six cars visiting for her birthday. I said, "I don't get six cars visiting for my birthday," and she said, "You don't even get one!" It was funny because it's true.

While I was home, I picked apricots and we made an apricot pie. When I set forth my dessert-eating rules, I forgot to mention that I can have desserts made from fresh fruits from one's own yard. If someone made, say, a peach pie using peaches from the grocery store or a farmer's market, I couldn't have it--but from their own trees, I could. Hence the reason I was able to eat apricot pie but not birthday cake.

I also saw my family's new TV and new set-up. We looked at pictures on it and then later we watched YouTube videos. I showed my family some classic videos--like such as "Trololo," "Worst Choir Ever?" and the Miss Teen South Carolina contestant and like such as.Then my dad wanted to watch some boring touristy videos. It was a gross misuse of YouTube.

Today I showed up to church early (to set up chairs), and the room in the Wilk where we have sacrament meeting was not set up. It didn't have microphones, and they didn't have the wall up separating our room from the other room. There had been some dance thing there; there was still the fake hardwood floor. I've had church on the fake floor before, but I don't understand why they didn't put the wall up. They just had flimsy blue curtains. It can't have been too hard to put up the wall. Instead of them putting up the wall, we had to have sacrament meeting in another room and compete to be heard during Sunday School. Why didn't they put up the wall? Someone deserves a wage decrease for that one. 

More than two years ago, I started reading the Peanuts comics online. They have most of them online (you can start at the beginning here), with a few empty spaces. This week I finished. It impresses me that with fifty years of comics, Peanuts never got bland. We have so many dumb comics such as Hi and Lois that were never funny to begin with--most of the comics page is dumb. But Peanuts was great. And even as relatively popular as it is, I think it's still a bit underappreciated. Everyone knows about some of the gags, like Lucy pulling the football away and Charlie Brown not being able to fly a kite. But there are tons of other recurring gags, such as Sally talking to her school building and Linus evangelizing door to door to spread the message of the Great Pumpkin. Also, people know the bigger characters, but there were a lot of recurring characters. Many people don't realize that there were two Pattys, Peppermint Patty (my favorite character) and Patty (one of only four human characters in the early 1950s); they don't know the character Molly Volley, the overweight tennis player; and they are unaware of Eudora, Sally's friend in the 1980s. But I feel bad for the Peanuts kids (well, I would if they existed). Over the course of fifty years, they managed to age only a few years: Charlie Brown from four to eight; Schroeder, Linus, Sally, and Rerun from babies to elementary school; and Lucy from a toddler to almost Charlie Brown's age. I wonder if that's what Hell is like--you are doomed to live as an unfortunate kid forever, getting D-minuses over and over, having your kite eaten by a tree every March, having your Sweet Babboo never give you the time of day.

Since we went to the llama festival last week, some people invited me to watch The Emperor's New Groove with them. I tried to study while watching it, but that didn't work very well. I remember seeing the trailers for that movie when it came out and I thought it looked dumb, but it's a really funny and great movie. Especially if you watch it with other people.

I guess if I'm talking about all this pop culture, I should talk about the song I downloaded this week. For my French class we have to watch things in French. I was watching clips about music on a French news site this week when I was introduced to this song. Apparently Isabelle Boulay sings musique country québecoise--if all country music in Québec is like that, I like it better than our American country music. I figured I'm only in a French class for a few more weeks and I don't know when or if I'll take French again, so I might as well enjoy it. I'm a bit xenophobic, so this song, "Fin Octobre, Début Novembre" became the first non-holiday foreign language song I own.

This has been a really weird post. Sorry about that.