'Cats are 4-0!

I had a short and late post this week over at LTP. Check it out here.

Feeling really good about my 'Cats this year. (I mean, I always feel good about my 'Cats, but it's an extra special good feeling right now.) I've been saving up already in anticipation of a post-season bowl game; last year's trip to the Outback was absolutely phenomenal, save the last 3 seconds of the game. Still, what a game, and you could almost see the college football scene start to take notice of the program at that moment. At this point we're just hoping Fitz is here for the long haul.

Next week is Minnesota, and I want to win as much as ever, especially because I want to bring back the "5 and 0" high-five from my senior year. So awesome. Go 'Cats!

Grad school, quarter 2, week 3. Desire to shoot myself in the face: waning.

This humorous piece in the Sunday Post is speaking to me this week, as I continue to be embroiled in the finer points of the English grammar system. Special shout-out to Chrissie, a goddess of lexicon. On the slate today: schemes and tropes. It baffles me that I never learned this stuff in high school, at least not to this depth. I learned the basics, of course - metaphor, parallelism, alliteration - but it seems as though my teachers avoided anything for which the term has only a Latin name. Epistrophe. Anadiplosis. Antimetabole. Paranomasia. At this moment, it's all Latin to me.

The goal is for it to make sense by 5pm today, which means I should probably stop here.

Future study break.

These guys can do no wrong

Seriously, it's absolute genius. OK Go is completely rewriting the rules on music videos.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming: staring helplessly at a detailed guide to English grammar and wondering why your seventh grade teacher didn't warn you that someday you'd need to recall the differences between prepositional, participial, gerund, infinitive, absolute, and appositive phrases. Or really why she didn't teach you any of that in the first place.

Business as Usual

Goofs.

As usual, I rounded off my week -- which included donating blood and NOT fainting, finding out my car is broken and I have to pay for it DESPITE having a warranty (curse you, Sierra Auto), boring things like eye exams and grocery runs, and completely and utterly freaking out re: grad school before realizing it wasn't as bad as I thought -- by talking about NUMB over at Lake the Posts.* Check it out, and have a great weekend!

* How's that for a complex sentence, Professor Mulderig?

The Novel

This is the kind of stuff that makes Family Guy hurt so good. Writers everywhere cringe with every uptick in Stewie's voice. Way close to home.

Monday morning...

...is for 'Cats recaps. I love fall.

A Cappella PSA

In college I sang a cappella with the women of Ladies in Red, the a cappella group of the Beta Chapter of Sigma Alpha Iota. We graduated, and immediately were sick over how much we missed singing together. We got the band back together, so to speak, and are working on filling out our repertoire before beginning our grand tour of Chicago-area nursing homes, which was a favorite philanthropic pastime while at Northwestern. Bringing a cappella to the elderly masses, you might say. In the meantime we're performing for our friends in my dining room.

What I'm saying is, please like us. I posted recordings of all the songs we've done so far, which are (click on the artists' name to hear their original version):

Happy Ending by Mika (arranged and soloist Brittany Petersen)
Hide & Seek by Imogen Heap (arr. Renee Altergott)
Put Your Head on My Shoulder (arr. Megan Mitterer, soloist Elizabeth Bourgart)
Walking on Broken Glass by Annie Lennox (arr. and soloist Megan Mitterer)
Samson by Regina Spektor (arr. Laura Sloman, soloist Brittany Petersen)
Wake Up by Sliimy (arr. Renee Altergott, soloist Megan Mitterer)
When Sunset Burns and Dies, written and arranged by Renee Altergott

Music has played a big role in my life -- to the point that I got a tattoo celebrating it -- and I'm so grateful to have an outlet to continue to perform, and the wonderful friends and lifelong sisters to share it with.

Old Ladies in Red (photo by Xixi Cheng)

----

UPDATE: Check out a recording of Old Ladies in Red singing "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap.

God Bless Google

I lose things. Often. It's not that I don't value my possessions, it's that I just can't seem to keep track of anything, which is surprising because I'm an incredibly organized person. One look at my planner will scare any errant agenda into submission.

So I wasn't that surprised when I lost my license last weekend in Nashville. I've come to expect such things. We drove down for a football game, and I took my ID into the stadium with me but left my purse in the car. Somewhere between the stadium and my car, I dropped the ID, meaning I couldn't go out in Nashville to celebrate the win with my friends. Worse, I was the driver, so I trampled all over my friends' fun for an hour while they tried to figure out how they'd get home without me. I felt bad, but again, it felt typical. On Tuesday morning I got a new license ($5 for a duplicate, a small price to pay for negligent stupidity) and went along my merry way. No use getting upset.

This morning I received an email from someone who had found my license. They had apparently Googled my name along with the word "Vanderbilt," come across Lake the Posts and therefore my email address, and figured it was the same person.

Moral of the story: If you do something stupid, make sure your web presence is up to date. From now on I'll be sure to blog incessantly about whatever city I lose my stuff in. Maybe lightening will strike twice.

Or maybe it's time for the government to start putting email addresses on IDs.* Just a thought.

* I checked, and "mclovin (at) gmail (dot) com" is taken. Damn.

It's BAND CAMP

My weekly NUMB post over at Lake the Posts, the venerated Northwestern football blog, was posted today. How many times can I say "post" in a sentence and still have it be legitimate?

Link it up.