Hit on by the Jimmy John's girl

Today was a pretty good day, if I do say so myself. Work went pretty smoothly and I think I am beginning to get into a bit of a routine with it. The kids I work with are pretty good kids for the most part too. It'll be different when they go back to school and I work with adults all day though, im sure.

Highlight of the day: I was grabbing dinner at Jimmy John's ( a local sub shop just down the corner on 86 & township line) and the girl taking my order had a peculiar exchange with me. I walked in the door and a girl behind the counter a ways made eye contact with me and smiled really big. I walked up and asked if I could have a #1. She said 'I don't know, can you?' with a little smirk on her face. Being my normal self, I realize that she's making one of the most annoying jokes that there can be, and so mentally, I am rolling my eyes and thinking, "oh come on already, just give me my sandwich." So I come back with something very exasperating like, "well, I would like to ORDER a #1 please, if that's alright with you." And then there was a pause and she just stared at me for a moment. It was long enough that I noticed it and started to feel awkward. So, I looked at her and she was staring at me again and started to giggle a bit. Then she said, 'sure! I'd be happy to make one for you.' And made my sandwich. I stood there at the counter waiting and after she put on every piece of my sandwich she would look over at me, as if looking for my approval. It was kinda wierd and I didn't know what was going on really. When she was finished she came over to ring the order up. She asked if I wanted chips and a drink and I said no. She then asked right away if I wanted a pickle. This caught me off guard cause I didn't remember being asked that before. She said there were left over ones from this afternoon. I turned it down politely. As she was ringing me up she looked at my hand (which has the word 'darts' written on it cause I wanted to remind myself to buy darts for work tomorrow.) "DOES YOUR HAND SAY DARTS?!" She says this in a rather shrill tone that kind of startled me because before then we were sort of talking in our 6 inch voices just across the counter. Im not gonna lie, at this point I was a little frightened, cause I couldn't figure out where this could possibly be leading... In a rather timid voice I answered, 'yes. It's just a reminder for me to pick some up tonite.' She then proceeded to tell me that she and her brother play darts periodically and that she loves them and that he made up a rule that if you miss the board all three times you get to go again. In an attempt to be funny and to not display how awkward I was feeling, I came back with ' so does that rule help out you or your brother more?' and she giggled and said she thinks it helps her out more. After she stopped laughing we kind of stood there and looked at each other. So, I started to turn away and said, 'OK, have a good night." As I walked out the door she sort of projected, "OK, I'll talk to you later...". I thought that was a wierd parting word. Then, as I was walking to my car, I sort of put it together that I think she was hitting on me. Or, maybe at least flirting a bit. I smiled, and felt pretty good about the whole situation. So good that I almost turned around and totally just put myself out there by asking her if she would want to do something with me some weekend. Thankfully, I was in the car driving away when I decided that wouldn't have been the worst decision I could have made...

Darts?

On the spur of the moment I decided to run home this weekend. Tracy was coming home from camp for the weekend as well, and my parents are going to be in Europe in the next couple of weeks, so it was gonna be the last chance for a while for the four of us to get together. It was a good weekend, as always. Rained most of the time though.
Work's gonna be busy this week. We're gonna have 150,000 books to put stickers on in a week. I can only imagine how monotonous it's gonna be for these kids to stare at the same book for 8 hours a day for 5 straight days. I gotta think of something entertaining and enjoyable for them. Right now my best idea is darts durring break. If you have any better ideas, let me know.

The Weekend and The All-Star Break

So, I haven't really emailed about this weekend. There's not really a ton to tell cause it was pretty much low key. Saturday night Amy and Darla came down and we went to Mama Carolla's on 54th st. It was sweet action. If I ever have a date again in my life I will go there for dinner cause it was that good. Conversation was interesting. Sunday we finally made it to the 20's class at College Park. It went well. There were about 40 or 50 people in there so it's a good sized crowd. Phil and I talked to the kid who's teaching and he seems to be a really nice guy. The class seems active and we put our emails on the list to let us know what's going on, so hopefully we'll do something social with the group in the not too distant future. Phil found out who 'Abby Moore' from the college class last week is... and believe it or not, I called it, she's going to be a freshman in college next year. HAHAHA! But her real name is Kristen and even though she's pretty young, she still fits in the half plus seven rule, so Phil's still gonna try to meet her sometime (cause she was definately giving him the googly eye for the second week in a row). Sunday Amy helped me pick out some new clothes for work (my first time shopping on my own for that sort of thing i think...). Came out with what seem to be two pretty sharp new polo shirts. So, that was the weekend.

Major League Baseball has reached the All-Star Break. Thus, monday night we watched the Home Run Derby at B-Dub's cause we still don't have cable. Last night Kistler had us over to his house for a feast of fish that he caught on his canada trip. We also watched the All-Star Game on his projector HDTV. Wow.

Im writing at work becuase a couple of things are taking longer to get sent to us than planned, so i've been cleaning the warehouse all morning and listening to some really mellow music which, combined wiht the grey, rainy day, has put me in a pretty solid meloncholy/depressed state (again, I remind everyone that this is not a bad thing, in fact, one of my more worthwhile states of mind, if I do say). So, yeah, it's been low key and that's alright with me.

Phil's Boss

So, the last two days at work we brought in 7 people. Phil was one of them, so yeah, I was his boss. He's an ok worker, i guess... Got a little unruly with throwing pieces of cardboard all over the place, but other than that, I guess I decided I didn't have the heart to fire him before the job was finished. On a more serious note, HE GOT A JOB. The bank, after dragging it's feet for 4 weeks finally figured out that he was good enough to create a position for. So, it was a good day yesterday when we found that out.

Ben & April

It was an enchanting weekend. Probably the best one since we've been to the apartment. Phil's friends Ben & April were down for most of it. What a beautiful couple. I know, I'm a sucker for rigorous conversation, but this weekend was good and that was a big part of it. I think it was so good because I've been so paranoid that I'm never going to get to have those kinds of conversations again now that I'm not in the college setting. Oh, how paranoid I am that my mind will succumb to time and lack of use only to relegate itself to that thing I use only when it's convenient or self serving and basically pointless.

So, we made a wonderful pasta dish, a mexican taco dinner, and a breakfast. Group cooking seemed to be sort of the theme of the meals this weekend. I like the idea cause everyone kind of contributes their little thing or their little nitche. We went to a Hookah bar, which was pretty sweet. The waitress was young, and I think she probably would have wanted to be our friend if we'd asked her. Maybe we'll go back and see what she thinks sometime. Church was interesting. The integration of nationalist sentiment and Christian practice was a topic discussed the night before in a rather harsh light ( I wont jump on the soapbox for this one because of time) and rightfully so. This made church interesting, I said, because this weekend was the 4th of July and there was, of course, the obligatory 'God bless America' sung by everyone in the service. I think all of us rolled our eyes. The sermon was pretty good. We went to the college class on the advice of another friend only to be sadly disappointed. It was pretty much highschool youthgroup continued for all the Heritage kids who attended the church.

Monday was spent going to the Indians baseball game which was great except that I didn't bring my cell phone and missed Amy's call (she was going to the game as well and we planned to meet up to say hey). Well, when we got back I got like 5 messages from her informing me that she was with a group of like 6 women at the game from the 20something's class that we're gonna attend next week and they wanted to meet phil and I. CRAP! That was a perfect opportunity to meet friends wasted because of a stupid cell phone. The game was much fun though, and the fireworks were quite a spectacle. Highlights of the night did not include some old dude sitting behind us yelling for Rowdie, the team mascot, nonstop through the whole game to get his little grandkids to get something signed. Highlights did include some old guy sitting two rows in front of us randomly shouting indiscernible words to the ball players when noone else was talking.

All in all, a very good weekend. Thanks to Ben and April for coming down to hang out. I am pretty sure Phil and I are good hosts, so any of the rest of you yahoos who wanna come chill with us, give us a call.

Friday night

I got up at 4am yesterday to be in a work @ 5. Let me tell you how much fun that was... Oh wait! The good part about that though was that we got up early so we could leave early. My 4th of July weekend started at about 11:15am. Bonus.

I finished Animal Farm and was very satisfied with the book on the whole. Again, I'll probably be referring many who get into Marxism/Socialism/Communism discussions with me to it because it really does highlight the differences subtly. Here's the keeper line:
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

Spencer came to visit us yesterday night. We went to TGI Friday's to eat and were served by, quite possibly the pushiest waitress I've ever had. We all ordered pop to drink and she proceeded to push us to get something from the bar for like 3 minutes. Attempted to belittle us and mock us and the whole nine yards. Throughout the meal, whenever she came to our table to ask what we needed or whatever, she would put her hand on my back. Ok, here's where we all remember how funny it is that Travis has a bit of a personal space problem... especially with people who are annoying him at the time. Yeah, so that didn't help things at all. Funny story though... There was some kid's birthday at a table near us so all the servers come out and one announces that this girl is turning 16 today. They all sing and the people in the restaurant all clap at the end and cheer and stuff... what does Phil (in all of his impeccable eloquence) yell? 'Two more years till she's legal!'. I think I may have been the only one to hear, and that's a good thing cause I'm sure some girl's dad would have loved to hear that shouted across the room... What a dork. I can't take him anywhere.

Afterwards we drove down to Broadripple and walked around a bit in search of a coffee shop I found on the internet. We found it. It's called the Monon Coffee C0. because it's right off the Monon Trail that runs through there. The coffee was pretty good and the atmosphere pleasant. It may have been a little on the small end, but no matter. Unfortunately this, too, closed at 8pm on weeknights. The harder I try the more I realize that I am going to be relegated to reading my books at the Starbucks down the road because it's taken over everything and is the only thing open late.

Went to see War of the Worlds. It was alright, but kind of weird. I don't really get into the aliens thing to much, and it didn't help that I knew the ending and all from reading the book in middle school I suppose. Phil makes a good point and convinced me that I don't really care for Dakota Fanning (the actress who plays the little girl in the movie) because her lines and dialogue always are so much more intelligent than what she's supposed to be acting like. 10 year olds don't really do sarcasm or dry humor at all. Neither are they really about to out reason their fathers frequently. So there are my not so rave reviews.

I found a hookah bar on the BroadRipple strip and Phil got pretty stoked about that. So much so that I think he wants us to take Ben and April there tonite. We'll see how it goes.