You say goodbye and I say hello...
Not exactly. Goodbye, McAllen. Hello and goodbye, Austin. Victor and I got back from a lovely four-day visit to his hometown this afternoon. Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for Twin Falls.

I feel so stuffed from all of the food I consumed this weekend. Most days, it was Mexican food for every meal. My first night there, we headed across the border to Reynosa, Mexico, and had my first taste of cabrito, which is one of V's favorite dishes. It was very tender and tasty. Sorry, vegetarians, I eat meat. The other new thing I tried was barbacoa, which I had for breakfast this morning. It wasn't too bad either. In addition to putting on some serious Mexican food weight, I also did some bargain shopping! My best find was some Moschino shoes that were 75% off.

So anyway, I've mostly finished packing for Twin Falls. I'm exhausted, so I'm going to hit the sack. My stupid flight is at 9:30 tomorrow morning. Uggh.

It's a madhouse!
In the last few days, I've dropped $700 on my stupid malfunctioning (well, no longer malfunctioning) car, gotten sunburned while swimming, gone to a couple of parties, skipped a day of work because of the car... and much more! Today was my last day at the office for a couple of weeks. Victor and I are going to his parents' house for a long weekend. Then I fly out on Monday to go to Twin Falls, Idaho, for two weeks to train a call center there. Oh yes. After that, I only have two more weeks of work before I'm done for good and move to Dallas.

A word to the wise: the new Streets and Morrissey are good. Get them. Also, I'm very angry that Fantasia won American Idol. I can't stand her, and it has nothing to do with race. I'm pretty sick of the media pulling the race card too.

Sorry no top ten last Thursday. We were a little late getting them made (except for Mark), and Victor never turned his in (busy with graduation), and then I took my sweet time compiling them. But never fear, I see that it is 1:11AM, so technically it's Thursday, so here they are!. This week's topic is "Bands/Artists You Loved in High School."

I'm probably going to be out for a while, since there's no internet access at Victor's parents' house. In the meantime, check out the top ten and picture it looking less ghetto. I promise it will get snazzier.

Congratulations!!!

Victor graduated from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business MBA program today.

I'm so proud of him. He's my favorite MBA ever!

When Johnny comes marching home again...
As in, "Hurrah! Hurrah!" Victor got me Office 2003 Pro today, and boy howdy is it nice! I had used it a little at work, but just on computers in training rooms (my system hasn't been migrated yet). So this is the first time I have been able to really play around with it. Outlook is so nice. Also, the junk mail filter is great, so maybe I won't accidentally delete emails that I think are spam anymore.

I wore the new contacts to work today. I've been wearing glasses for 11 years now, so this is a pretty big change for me. Most people noticed (my glasses are pretty chunky anyway, so it's not like they were invisible), but my former boss mentioned that I had a new haircut. I said that it was the lack of glasses that made me look different. Best of all was my friend Kat saying, "You do have beautiful eyes!" That made me feel nice. I think my eyes are one of my best features, even if they're a little small.

Wow, that paragraph above has made me realize that it's been 11 years since I was 16. That doesn't seem possible.

I've seen this list several times now, most recently on Kris's blog. It's the College Board List of 101 Books that apparently you should read before applying to college. Some of these books are a little challenging for high school, I think, but I did read many of them while in AP Lit and AP Comp, so I guess they're not that challenging. Anyway, what you're supposed to do is list the books and note the ones you've read. I am pretty well-read, but not by this board's standards, I guess. The list is a little unfair, because I've read books by several of these authors (like Flannery O'Conner, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc.), but not the ones that are listed here. Maybe I've read the harder books, though! I think it's a much bigger accomplishment to get through Les Miserables (which I have) than The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Anyway, here's the list. Sorry it's so long. I made the font smaller to compensate.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss (I have this, just need to read)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury (I have this, just need to read)
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair (I have this, just need to read)
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

It's about damn time!
Congratulations to little Victor, who finished his last exam today. No more MBA program for him! He graduates officially next Friday. And then he will have three degrees. Yes, three.

A small congratulations to me too, as I was able to put my contacts in all by my lonesome tonight.

New Weekly Feature, Version 1.0
There is a new reason to visit this site on Thursdays.. oh yes, it's the Thursday Top Ten! My friends and I love doing lists, and lately we have been inspired by the Staff Top Tens over at Stylus Magazine.

Our new section is pretty crusty right now, but I'm planning on boning it up with bells and whistles (and photographs!). Until then, mosey on over and check out the current version today.

Sitting on the prettiest eyes...
There have been a bunch of changes at Blogger. In addition to the site itself looking smoother (and being more user-friendly), they have also added some new templates. I've been thinking it may be time for a bit of a change around here, so you may see some experimentation in the next few weeks.

Another exciting development is the addition of a new weekly feature here. I hope it will be weekly, anyway. It should drop tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled.

Speaking of eyes peeled, I finally got my contacts in and out today. Apparently I was right in thinking that my eyes are pretty small. The opthamalagy tech and I had a great time laughing at my ineptitude, as I tried for about an hour to get them in. Yes, it took that long. But I prevailed. I'm not giving up glasses completely, because I think they can be very sexy and/or cute, and they're a great accessory. I would just like the option to not wear them. So it's a new era for Mandy as well.

Ten years on...
Today Ryan and I received invitations to our high school ten-year reunion. It's actually next summer, as we graduated in 1995, but they are starting to plan it and gather everyone's information. Yes, I feel old.

I went to Victor's reunion about a year and a half ago. It was pretty cheesy, but it was also fun. It was nice to see that so many people remembered him, because he is pretty shy. Of course, he was also the valedictorian, so I'm sure that helped.

I've kept in touch with some people from high school, but not many. I'm interested to see how people have changed. I wonder how people will think I have changed...

New love.
Have you guys been to Gawker's west coast sibling, Defamer? It's super snarky.

Also, happy Cinco de Mayo! Kiss a Mexican... I know I will.

May in Texas should not be so cold!
I had a great weekend.

Friday I had the day off, so I ran some errands. Specifically, I went to the optometrist and had my eyes examined. I got a new perscription, so I got cute new Burberry glasses. I also got contacts, but I still can't get them in my damn eye. After all of my running around, it was time to collect Debbie and Aaron for our trip to Dallas.

It stormed much of the way from Austin to Dallas. It didn't actually start raining until we were almost in Dallas, but there was a spectacular lightning show that started in Waco and didn't stop until we reached the hotel. We were a little worried that the rain would ruin our weekend plans, especially since the Friday Rangers-Red Sox game had been rained out already.

Saturday morning it was overcast but not rainy. Unfortunately, it was also about 58 degrees Farenheit. Wait, come again? This is Texas, right? We had looked at the weather forecast before the trip, but I guess we only looked at the chance of rain. So we all wore t-shirts and jeans to Six Flags and froze our asses off. We also mistakenly thought it would be a good idea to go on a water ride. Soaked jeans do not dry very quickly, especially when it's cold and misty. I almost chickened out on a couple of rides, but good sense prevailed.

The Red Sox lost both games on Saturday. Victor and I were not good luck omens for them. Aaron and Debbie were so cold that they bought Texas Rangers sweatshirts at the ballpark. I bought Victor a Red Sox t-shirt, and I wore a sweater that we found in Victor's trunk. I wish we had looked in the trunk before going to Six Flags... ah well. Hindsight is 20/20, just like my eyes are with these new glasses.