Abbreviated monday musings. Since I am only working a half day today and the weather outside is frightful.

• I'm glad Nebraska won, but bowl games suck. We won't know where we're going until next week, and even so, I'll have to find about $20,000 in sponsorship dollars in three days. No pressure. I also won't know until next week whether or not I have to go, which may or may not pull me from the Des Moines trip. San Diego and San Antonio or Des Moines? Hmmm.
• Caffeine is the devil. I do this every time we eat at Valentino's. See, I had a pretty bad addiction to caffeine during high school and college. I'm quite proud that I have nearly kicked the habit and now only require one soda or glass of tea/coffee per day. But with all that pizza and the like, i get thirsty. The result, I was wired and up until about 3:30 last night. Bummer.
• Gross holiday fact. Between Valentino's, a night out at the Mac Grille with the wife, and thanksgiving stuffing, I gained 7 pounds until last night. After several trips to the bathroom with my Sports Illustrated to kill the time, I lost five of those pounds back. Impressive, huh?
• Got to say that the semiconductors market played right into my hands last month. Instead of buying stock in apple, why not buy stock in the processor company that builds the parts? That little jewel (CNXT) pocketed us a 17% gain in two weeks without worrying about the Apple (AAPL) bubble bursting!
• Only two more classes with the bastard-coated bastard of a professor with a creamy bastard center. This week we have to write an ethics paper, and he said it is OK to break the law if the law is stupid and counterproductive to your business. Grrr. So I guess Enron was completely ethical? What a tool. Can't wait for this class to be over.
• I have to pee now.
• An example of how hollywood can edit anything that you see in a movie trailer to make it seem totally different than what the movie is about. the lesson, never trust a trailer: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/bigtrailer.html

I am recovering from some shocking news one of my coworkers told me about five minutes ago. Hayley and Lindsey, brace yourselves: The Red Barn is becoming a strip joint.

The Red Barn is the tavern in Goehner where, as a child, I ordered many plates of grilled cheese and fries, which I washed down with a Shirley Temple. It's also the place where farmers stop for lunch, order an evening beer, and play cards. Dad has been a regular customer for at least 30 years. It's not an upscale place by any means, but the jukebox, the beer posters, and the red toilet seat in the ladies' room look downright classy compared to a stage filled with exotic dancers.

Happy Holidays, Andersons! I hope your Thanksgiving was a feast 'o plenty.

The cloudy, blustery, rainy weather put me in the holiday decorating mood. Despite declaring that he wanted nothing to do with decking the halls, Andy joined my decorating extravaganza. First, the $2 tree topper I bought during last year's clearance sales wouldn't stay on the tree because the topper was too top-heavy. Andy told me he would take care of it. Fifteen minutes and one power tool later, the star sat precariously on top of the tree.

After showing off his manly engineering skills, Andy went to the office, where he surfed weather.com and checked the progress of the impending snow storm. The real fun began when he returned to the living room to survey my progress. "The tree needs balls," he proclaimed. After finding the glass Christmas balls with other decorating rejects hidden in the guest room closet, Andy asked me whether I preferred the smaller ornaments or the larger ones.
Me: "I don't care. Whatever makes your holiday heart happy."
Him: "I like the big balls."

After a few minutes of helping Andy hang balls, I picked up two University of Nebraska ornaments.
Me: "Do we have to hang these?"
Him: "Hey, if we have to use your tacky shit, we have to use my tacky shit."
Fair enough.

Finally, it was time to hang our stockings. As I climbed onto a chair to reach the ledge, this conversation took place:
Andy: "STOP! You're taking Holiday Andy's job!"
Me: "I am?"
Andy: "Anything involving climbing is Holiday Andy's job!"

I'm making a mental note of that.

Ashley: On Saturday, we lovely ladies, along with Lindsey, headed to the local mall for manicures. Excited by how nice our nails looked, we trotted over to Trade Secret to peruse the nail products. I (Ashley) turned to Hayley and said, "Why didn’t they use any base coat for our manicures?" And Hayley, the wise beauty expert, told me that base coat is a racket. A sham. Unnecessary. I was shocked, because I’ve been using a base coat for years, probably because Seventeen told me to. In fact, according to Schnookums, base coat does not help a manicure because the chemicals emitted by your nails prevent the nail color from adhering to the nail. The polish only sticks to the base coat, meaning your mani won’t last as long. How rude.

We’re using this little lesson in beauty to announce a new, very special blog feature: beauty tips! We all love to be a little glam sometimes, and we’re here to help all of us make wise choices so we can be our naturally glamorous selves!

Hayley: Our second beauty tip deals with application of shimmers and sparkles with your makeup. I feel that this needs to be brought to our attention since many of us will be attending a holiday party in some shape or form. The rule of thumb with shimmer is to only apply it to TWO areas of the face. This means that if you want to make your eyes stand out more (by applying it especially to the brow bone area), then you may want to use a shimmery lip gloss to finish your look. Another area that deserves shimmer attention is the cheekbones. This is because you want the cheekbones to catch the light in an attractive way. Just make sure that you aren’t using shimmer on the eyes, cheeks, and lips or else you will end up looking like the disco ball above the dance floor!

Signed,
Your beauty gurus

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Oh my do I love the snow that's falling outside my window right now. They are the big fluffy sticky kind. I'll admit that I didn't believe the weather reports of snow forcasted for last night/early AM. I mean since when do those silly kids get this kind of thing right? Oops, that's kind of mean. What I mean is good effort! Anyway so in spite of the snow I can't help but be pushed to a new level of Christmas anticipation. I mean I LOVE the holidays! I'm one of those people that will start breaking out the decorations the day after Thanksgiving. But my biggest weekness is Christmas music. I understand that maybe I'm more prone to this since my life revolves around music and whatnot, but I can't get enough of the groovin' Christmas toons. So I'll be the first to admit that I am a Thanksgiving cheater. This means that even though I'm hardcore about my holidays, I must not skip over one to begin another. Well right now I'm cheating because I'm listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. (My excuse is that even though it is Christmas, it has more of the mellow, slow jazz that I love!) Lame excuses I know. So please fellow relatives, forgive me for passing up Thanksgiving for 40 minutes and 24 seconds!

Monday musings:

• Graduate term papers. Why. Why would any professor assign this garbage. Do they really want to read 50 students' 20-page papers? That's 1,000 pages of the same repetitive garbage page after page after page. Part of me wonders if they even get read as much as they just get glanced at.
• The Canadian oil market is really starting to get its legs back, and the timing couldn't be better for the market as a whole.
• You are giving your neighbors permission to egg your house if you have Christmas lights turned on before Thanksgiving. It is perfectly acceptable to have them hung and ready to go at this time of year, but for pete's sake....just leave them off until turkey day.
• I've never really liked yams.
• Enjoy Penn State's mascot doing his Napolean impression: http://college.break.com/articles/mascotdyno.html

Ok, so I got busy on Monday and couldn't do my regular rant. So here is Tuesday's random thoughts.

• I have a theory. I am seeing way too many frat guys and even a guy or two in my circle of friends taking this "metrosexual" thing too far. Plucking eyebrows, using product, etc. Anyway, as winter nears, the air and my skin will get dry (shut up Paul and Cole -- getting older sucks). To make up for using moisturizer and other things I call "girly," men need to over-react in the masculine sense to balance the scales. So it is my theory that for using said product to keep my skin baby-ass soft, I need to spend more time with power tools, watching football, breaking wind or grilling meat. Discuss.
• The Asian markets are rallying nicely right now.
• This semester is quite possibly the worst class I've ever taken. Not only is the professor a bastard-coated bastard with creamy bastard filling, now he is deviating from the syllabus and description of the class into his speciality area of economics. And what a coincidence, he wrote the textbook for the class. I always thought it would be cool to have a teacher that wrote a textbook, thinking they would be way smart. Au contraire -- turns out the professor doesn't really know anything except what is in the book and the sad part is the book is only supposed to cover about 1/4 of what the class is about. I'm still pulling and A in there so far, but I cannot wait for this one to be over. Bastard.
• Talked to a former roommate now living in banjo-country Tennessee. Good talk. Short story is he moved down there with his wife and baby, but they just got a divorce. (He is better off.) The sad part is he is 1,000 times the parent that the mother is, but the mom gets custody only because she has ovaries and is nearly engaged to a guy near 40 who has already had three marriages and a handful of his own kids. Hope it works out for the guy -- but crap like that really makes me cherish the lady I have. (Girls, collective "awwwww.")
• I don't know what is sadder. The fact that our football team sucks so bad, or the fact that we haven't received a single alumni compaliant about football yet this season.
• I love bagels.
• I also love Chipotle. Hmm, maybe I'll go there for lunch, and then sit in the front row of class tonight and reclaim my masculinity by farting all class long right in the professor's lecturing space. Maybe we'd get out early.

Are we getting together for Christmas?

I know this is kind of short, but it's the memory I want to write about. I remember when Grandma and Grandpa would come up to our house to watch fireworks on the 4th of July. Grandma loved to watch the boys fire them off, and when there was a really neat one, she would exclaim, "That was a doozy!" That was always the best part about the 4th.

What I learned while at FFA National Convention in Louisville, Kentucky

1. Even when you think your in the "nice" area of St. Louis (we stopped there on the way) you still will see gangs; homeless people begging, sleeping on park benches, and singing to you; and numerous cars that aren't going to stop for you even if you're still crossing the street.

2. The St. Louis Arch is not brown like you once thought when you saw it in nighttime photos; it is welded together with shiny silver metal.

3. Six Flags theme park has found many ways of strapping you into roller coasters, including standing up and hanging from the roller coaster track. Both of them are awesome unless you're a guy and you get racked from all the twists and turns while standing up.

4. People from Arkansas have the thickest southern accent ever. They don't say "you guys", instead they say "yearns." Example: Instead of saying, "Where are you guys from?", they say, "Where yearns from?" Imagine that with a southern accent. Also, roads are not numbered there; they have names like "Opossum Trout Road." That is NOT an exaggeration, it is for real.

5. When you go to a racetrack, say Keeneland for example, expect to see A LOT of rich people. Little skinny blondes dressed in the latest fashions, 40+ women in fur, and 3-year-old little boys in khakis, a little sports jacket, and a little old-fashioned looking hat. They will also come with $40,000 in their pockets and make it sound like they're going cheap that day.

6. Don't let anyone tell you differently. No matter how many times you tell yourself, "It's not real. It's all fake," you will still be scared shitless and scream thousands of times in a made-up Halloween Haunted House.

7. No matter how new or nice a charter bus is, you still aren't going to be able to get comfortable, let alone sleep, on the 12 hour bus trip home.