Happy birthday, Crewdroog! Not in, but thanks for the giveaway! :)

Happy birthday, Crewdroog! =)
+1

(Not in)

Tae Kwon Do, four nights a week. I'll regret it if I'm late.

Schoolwork is demanding, and so I'm generally spent.

After my last lecture, I strip off in my dorm room and crash onto my bed. Two hours later, I'm up again with seven minutes to get across campus to the dojang. My work is neat; my life is not; my uniform is on the floor where I left it two nights before. My undies are still in the pants. I pull on both at once. Whatever. I'm out the door with a duffle full of sparring gear.

Of course I'm running. Two students are walking toward me on the same path. They're super attractive. I think I felt that way about most girls at the time. Suddenly, there's a lump. In my pants. Not there. It's on my hip. What the hell is that? With my next stride, it's moved. It's beside my knee. One more step and it's against my ankle and now I know what it is and I can't stop soon enough and as my leg sweeps forward again, my well-worn underwear (which I groggily missed with both damned legs) leaves my trouserleg and is flying through the air towards the two girls.

Time stops and my underwear just sort of hovers there. Certainly long enough for everyone involved to achieve perfect understanding.

I don't slow down. The girls step apart as it lands between them on the pavement, silently. I'm leaning forward in a barely stable fast stumble-- reaching-- and then the undies are safely clenched in my fist as I dash onwards.

---

Not in, thank you. Happy Birthday.

A very Happy Birthday to you Crewdroog, here is a picture of a present for you. Not in for the giveaway but +rep to you for the generosity. :)

Happy birthday to you, Droog! I'll be in for Kingdoms of Amalur, and thanks. I don't have a moment right now, but I'm going to edit this post, and when I do I think I will tell you the story of the one time in my life that I had to climb out of a girl's bedroom window in the morning. It is, perhaps, not quite what you will expect.
Also, a friend of mine was having her annual Cookie Throwdown a couple of years ago, and one of the submissions was a set of cookies with marzipan decorations and such made to look like little hamburgers. They were incredibly intricate, like sliders with mustard and ketchup and buns and all, but they were cookies. Eating them was intensely strange, since the brain kept expecting burgers, even though we all knew they were cookies.

Happy Birthday Crewdroog!!!!!! (I know a little late Im sorry) I will edit this tomorrow to add more talkie and stuff for now night nighty. =P


But for now except this wonderful present picture, I hope your Birthday rocked!!!

Thank you for the awesome and very generous GA!!! +1

Head bump!

Nice bump. It allows me to wish you a belated happy birthday, Crewdroog!

Ouch, my head! That will teach me for standing too close to Crewdroog when she bumps a thread :-).

* Holds head while seeing stars after a might head bump from Crewdroog *

*hands ddickinson ice pack* sorry about that :(

That ice pack worked wonders. But no need to be sorry, it was my own fault. Next time I see someone running around a thread waving her hands in the air and chanting "Head Bump!, Head Bump!, Head Bump!", I'll know to run screaming :-).

Kinda late, but still wanted to wish you a happy birthday, hopefully you had a blast!

Happy birthday!!

Happy birthday

OK, so anyway. As promised, a tale.

I lived for a couple of years in Italy between my sophomore and junior years of college. I lived for a while near Pisa in a lovely town called Pietrasanta - actually, we lived in a tiny hill town called Capriglia, perched up in the mountains above Pietrasanta - along the Ligurian coast; for the last eight months or so I lived in Roma. Between the two I did a little bit of travel, riding cheap rails and occasionally hitching (though hitching is not very fruitful for men traveling alone in Italy, at least in my experience; for couples it's a very different thing).

I spent a week or so in Siena (Forza Onda!) and then found myself in Urbino, an exquisite city near the Adriatic Coast. The town has a long history of canny peace; over centuries of political intrigue, the town leaders followed a rough policy of surrender whenever they were attacked or occupied, and as a result, the Palazzo Ducale, the town walls, and the bulk of the centro are all in great shape. As the town grew in the modern era, forward-looking politicians forced real estate expansion to happen outside the walls and enforced a strict ordinance on building height (also: it's an earthquake zone). It was a magical place, and I hope it still is.

I arrive by bus, book a room for one night (all I can afford, on my budget) at the much-more-expensive-than-I-had-hoped hotel, and stroll through town, admiring this spectacular place. I stop at a cafe to read the guidebook or write some postcards or whatever, and as it happens, there are two American girls sitting at my table. I don't recall just how we meet - I might have ordered for them, since I was eavesdropping and knew what they wanted and my Italian was much better than theirs. And we start to talk.

One I don't remember, and the other is Gabrielle. She's pretty exquisite herself, and we hit it off great. It turns out that there is some college-cum-disciplinary-school-program for misbehaving girls out of New Jersey that places a dozen miscreants at the University in Urbino every semester, and Gabe isn't on their program, but she's rooming with them via some other actual academic program. We walk around town, and she shows me how she lives. I explain that I'm only in town for the one night, since the hotel is so expensive (this story doesn't go where you think it's going, alas).

We make a date for dinner, and part. Dinner is great. We go back to the dorm and I meet her friends, who are pretty awful. They all get stoned and talk about which Italians they are screwing, and in what combinations. Gabe and I talk about art and travel and language. It gets late. We make a date for lunch. I'm locked out of the hotel because it's after 10:00. Italy was like that back then.

The next morning we meet up and by now we're old friends. We go shopping. Gabrielle does the single funniest thing it's possible for an English speaker to do in Italian - she buys figs from a fruit stand. She's okay at Italian and doesn't like me to talk for her, so I'm lingering when I hear her - okay. Gotta explain something first.

A fig, or fico (pl. fichi, FEE-kee), is a masculine noun. If you take that noun and make it feminine, fica (pl. fiche, FEE-kay), you're using a nice filthy rude curse word, a gutter word for describing female genitalia (ours starts with C). So, il fico, a fig, and la fica, which you wouldn't say around relatives. And if I can let slip where this part of the story is going, there's another word that always trips up Americans, and that is preservativi. It looks and sounds like it should mean "preservatives," but it doesn't, it means "condoms." Preservatives are CONservativi.

So here is this lovely dark-haired girl talking to the guy at the counter, and I'm not really listening, but suddenly from a distance I hear her start to ask for a pack of figs, and I know what's about to happen, and I really try to stop it but I'm too late, and Gabe says that she wants una pachetta di fiche - a package of angry vaginas - and she would like them senza preservativi - without condoms. The guy drains white and then stifles a laugh, and turns to the back of the store, and bellows to his partner, "Aoh, Mario - ce l'abbiamo, una pachetta di fiche senza preservativi, per la signorina?" "Have we got a pack of [vulgarity] with no condoms, for the young lady?" Everyone in the store starts to murmur. Gabe, bless her, has no idea what has just happened, and I pounce before this turns messy, get her the pack of figs, hustle her out, and teach her the proper key words in that sentence.

We have a great day, and as it comes time for me to get my stuff and take off, Gabrielle invites me to stay in her room for a couple of days. I do. (This story still isn't going where you think it's going.)

The next day is as good as the first, minus language incidents but plus some shower hilarity - there's a button in there that if you push it shoots a jet of water straight up from a little hole near the drain, and it scares the daylights out of me ("Wonder what this does ... YIKES"). That night we're a little tense with each other, and either we're going to go to bed or I'm going to leave the next day, and the bed thing doesn't happen, so.

In the morning there's a rapping at the door. I'm in a sleeping bag on the floor, Gabrielle is in her bed, and at the door - a day early, apparently - is the maid. In Italy at this point it's a Big Thing to be Caught With A Man In Your Room At University, and they routinely kick girls out of the dorms for this, claiming that they have to evict them because otherwise they could be accused of running a brothel. This apparently was true; Italy's laws have always been weird. In any case, I can't be here. Gabe jumps in the shower, yelling wait wait I'll be out in a minute - Aspetta, aspetta, faccio 'na doccia, vengo subito - and I jump into my clothes, shove my backpack into the corner, and climb out of her window.

Can I say this again? I have not been sleeping with this girl, but here I am at 8-something a.m., climbing out of her window so I don't get caught in her room. Fortunately, because of the earthquakes, the dorms are designed in a stepping-stone manner so each one is on ground and overlooks the unit below, so it's out the window and a quick drop to the roof of the one below, and then a scramble down to earth.

I wait five minutes and then walk around to the front door and knock, declaiming loudly in Italian that I'm here to pick up my bag and thanks for keeping it overnight. The maid opens the door with a face that says I'm not fooling anyone with my uncombed hair and obviously dressed-in-a-hurry air, but in the end we get away with it.