Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Prenuptial Soup

Greetings from Louisville, which I still can't pronounce correctly - it sounds like someone mumbling Louaville. Here are some highlights (and lowlights) of the trip so far:

1. I got to use my laptop bag for the first time. It's pink and shiny and I bought it for $15 at the mall. Yes, slightly ridiculous, but I love it. My roommate Ern HATES it. It offends her with its lack of blackness. But guess who else loves it? EVERYONE! You'd think it was a puppy by the amount of attention it attracted. Security guards and airport personnel were complimenting it all day, and a man chased me down to ask me where I bought it because his wife liked it.
2. The hotel is really nice.
3. The food is lousy.
4. After a morning training session, they divided the readers into table groups, where we will be spending the next 6 full days grading exam questions. I am the youngest person by about 20 years in my group. When we introduced ourselves, we all said where we were from, what we taught, and what was our biggest accomplishment in the past year. Everyone else had touching stories about their children graduating from college, birth of a first grandchild, blah blah blah, and then I wowed them with "I bounced a check and gave myself a black eye in the same month!" (Just kidding. I mean, I did actually do that, but I didn't tell my table.)
5. My "reading buddy" has a terrible cold and is constantly coughing and blowing her nose, and in the process accumulating a pile of used tissues that resides way too close to my elbow for comfort.
5. As for the work itself, there are a lot of bad answers to the question that I'm correcting. However, bad can sometimes be funny. Like this statement, about the evolutionary significance of cephalization: "the first cells evolved from prenuptial soup."
Um...I believe the student meant "primordial soup" and was not referring to the first course of a rehearsal dinner. Ba-dum-bum. I'll be here all week. No really, I will.
6. Off to see a minor league baseball game tonight- the Louisville Bats! (named for the Louisville Slugger, the official bat of the MLB.)
7. Trivia question for you guys: what legendary athlete is from Louisville?

8 comments:

J.R. said...

I do believe that would be not just a legendary athlete, but in fact the Greatest of All Time, a.k.a Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay if you from Loo-a-ville, and still insist on his original name.

eileen said...

Nice work, JR!

GOAT indeed.

Anonymous said...

Don't you mean his slave name?

Anonymous said...

OH MY GOD PUT THAT HIDEOUS BAG AWAY!! bring it back to the mall and let some pre-teen girl give it a good home. it has no place with an adult. you forgot to mention that the wife who liked it was a child bride. oh, the horror, the horror!

ps - eileen, i never told you, but i feel almost the same way about your sweat-skirt. but i love you very much as a person.

Anonymous said...

dammit jr. i was just about to win my first sports trivia event EVER.

secondly, louisville is pronounced correctly with two syllables: lou-vull. so, remember liz mckillop my freshman year roommate? one day i get back to p-dub and there is a note on the phone that reads, "heather from wool-wool called". and i was like liz, "what's wool-wool?" and she was like, " i don't know but i asked her, "did you say wool-wool?" and heather replied, "yeah, wool-wool". well, after some sharp thinking on my part, i realized it was heather from high school who went to the university of louisville (rhymes with wool- wool). it was one of the better moments in 340 PW that year.

eileen said...

I am wearing my sweat skirt right at this very moment. I love it almost as much as my shiny pink bag. Maybe I will carry the bag around this afternoon, as I saunter through Wool-Wool in my sweat skirt.

/ern's head explodes

Anonymous said...

Dash the hopes of those overachieving nerds. Enjoy your safety school!

Kevin said...

If you can´t pronounce the one in KY you can always head to Louisville, Nebraska (population 100 or something) where they pronounce the "s".