Nerdfest 2K10

It's almost unbelievable.

If I didn't take pictures and document them in writing, I swear to god no one would ever believe that things like the following exist.

I mentioned in a blog post last week that one of the reasons I blog is because going home to my parents' house is like entering some weird alternate universe where the 1980s are still cool, made-up "designer" breed dogs run loose and wild, and in any given closet or alcove you might find an enormous hidden stash of bird seeds or a life-size Darth Vader head staring out at you from the back corner.

This weekend was no different.

Friday night rolled around, and my parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew were all here for a nice Friday-night-in with Pizza Hut for dinner.

The pizza got eaten, and conversations were had about the usual things: everyone's work week, my school week, what funny things the kids had done lately, etc.

After dinner, my brother, nephew, and I went to the upstairs den. We put on Men in Black, busted out the K'Nex, and started making kick-ass pieces of K'Nex construction equipment, with my nephew serving as construction manager and pointing out every tiny thing I was doing wrong in my K'Nex handiwork.

And then, right there amidst the Christmas decoration explosion that covered every inch of my parents' house, my sister-in-law came sprinting into the den, shrieking with excitement and teasing us with taunts of "Guess what I found?! Guess what I found?!" as she came scurrying down the hallway that led to the den.

My brother and I exchanged glances. We didn't know what the hell Mandy had found, but we knew it had to be good. We. were. excited.

We were not disappointed.

Mandy had apparently accidentally stumbled upon a treasure-trove of a bookshelf in one of my mom's upstairs guest rooms. This bookshelf might as well have never left 1982. Every book on it was 30 years old. And most of them were Star Wars themed.

Honest to god, sometimes I wonder how I ended up being such a dork, but then I remember....Oh yeah! My mother has entire bookshelves and rooms and storage closets and Christmas wreaths completely devoted to Star Wars or any of the franchise's various spin-off stories.

The thing Mandy had found was this:

This is a children's book entitled "The Ewoks and the Lost Children." Awesome.

After this, it was game over. We were all on missions to explore what other hidden caverns of nerd-dom the Suz had hidden away in closets in her house.

Something like this happens every time I come home to my parents' house in Greenville.

It's like....

Oh hey Mom! The North Pole called, they want all their Christmas shit back. Or....

Oh heyyy Mom, George Lucas called, he wants his massive collection of weird-ass Star Wars memorabilia back. Or...

Oh heyy Suz! The 1980's called, they want all of their creepy-ass shit you only ever see on "I Love the 80s," that you have stored in all the closets of your house like it's totally normal to still own an Atari or a Care-Bear, back......

So, like I said at the start of this post, if I didn't have photographic evidence, people might never believe that some freaks in the year 2010 (my mom) still actually own this stuff and keep it in their house like it's completely acceptable.

Exhibit A:

You see that name scrawled in the upper left of this device? Yes. It says "Michael" in small-child-chicken scratch. This first belonged to my 30-year-old brother when he was about 5. And my mom still. has. it. Why? The world of normal people may never know.

It's the "Fisher Price Big Bird Record Player", by the way, and the record we put in it tonight was this also-30-year-old record of Empire Strikes Back.

I find this especially comical because my mother never really let us watch Sesame Street. She thought that the characters looked decrepit and homeless and didn't think they were good examples to show her young children.

....But by god she bought the Big Bird record player.....and kept it for thirty years......





I just stuck this in here because after the childhood toy artifacts started coming out, I figured I might need it, and I got really excited that Rolling Rock is making "Rock Light" now! Awesome!


Exhibit B:

This poor child doesn't know it yet, but she's doomed for a life of LucasFilm-fueled dorkhood just like the rest of us.

The bookshelf where Mandy had found the initial Ewok book that sparked this foray into the Outer Rim of course had to be revisited, where books like the rest of these seen above were found: "Shiny as a Droid," "Return of the Jedi: The Ewoks Join the Fight," and "Star Wars: The Wookiee Storybook." Classics!



Exhibit C:

I just felt like "Shiny as a Droid" was too epic not to give it its own close-up. I'm thinking about bringing this in to my 9th graders for a read-aloud to help them think about imagery and vivid details. Just kidding.......or am I?




Exhibit D:

I wasn't kidding about the giant life-size Vader head. I found it in a closet, accompanied by this....

A giant shiny life size C-3PO head!

And before you go thinking that these little guys are just for display, and don't actually serve very legitimate purposes.....I opened them up and found this inside....

Star Wars character figurines inside a giant Star Wars character travel case inside a closet filled with nothing but blast-from-the-past Star Wars memorabilia. You're welcome, George Lucas.


AND, just so you don't think this household was COMPLETELY biased towards and obsessed with Lucas-lore, I give you....


Exhibit E:

Donatello, in all his green, teenage, mutant, turtley, bandana-ed glory. You can't tell from the picture, but this thing is about 2 feet tall.

*For those of you in my grad cohort, you now have a visual representation of what I wanted to be for Halloween the year after my mom made me go as Alice in Wonderland. And I had to settle for being the trampy, harlot, green M&M instead.*


Sometimes I fear I talk about Star Wars a little too much. But, this is my blog after all, right?


Let's go GAMECOCKS, and may the force be with you.


And just for good measure, some Admiral Ackbar parodies:





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Why I Blog

Sometimes people ask me why I like to keep a blog, or how I come up with things to write about. I can think of a whole slew of reasons and answers to those questions, but I thought I'd provide you with a few general examples. Here are some reasons why I blog.



Reason #1: I am a nerd.

And nerds do nerdy things like write regularly and keep blogs about nerdy things they find interesting or entertaining.



Reason #2: I am in grad school.

It's like a bottomless pit of blog topics between my classmates, professors, high school students, rants about classes/term papers, etc. Also, my head would most definitely explode if I didn't engage in some writing (read: venting) outside of academic papers. Barf.

For instance, the picture below depicts what my classmates and I did in a graduate course of ours this past Wednesday night. We constructed "masks" out of tissue paper/masking tape/plastic serial killer-looking-face mask combinations as a way to teach high schoolers "characterization." Right...

Coneheads, anyone?



Reason #3: I come from a family full of nutjobs.

Now before all of you crazy family members get offended....don't. I mean this in the best possible of ways. If you guys weren't all complete weirdos, you'd be super boring. So, thanks for being freaks!

This might be the biggest reason of all. I could spend two whole weeks at my apartment in Columbia and not come up with a single thing to blog about, but after an hour home at my parents' house in Greenville, I'm suddenly inundated with topics. Let me explain...

A couple of weeks ago, I came up to Greenville on a particularly slow weekend in Columbia, hauled my laundry basket into the utility room, and made my way to the kitchen to raid my Mom's cabinets. I also did a quick survey of the kitchen counter to see if there was anything left over from dinner.

However, instead of congealing fettucine alfredo or pot roast remains, I found this......on the KITCHEN COUNTER......:


Why yes, that IS a dead snake placed inside a ziploc bag labeled "Warning! Monster Snake!", just in case you were unsure of the bag's contents.

The author of this bag's label, my Dad, spied me snapping a picture of it from the next room and came bounding in. Apparently, if I was going document this, I was going to document it properly. (Can someone plz fill me on on standard snake-corpse-photography procedures? Kthx.)

He proceeded to pick up the snake-bag, maneuver the python corpse inside until it suited his demented preferences, put it back down on the counter, and demand that I do a re-take.


Much.....better? Thanks, Dad. It appears that Steve committed this reptile execution on one of his many obsessive sweeps down our driveway with Weed-B-Gone.

So, that weekend in a nutshell? Snake carcasses on the kitchen counter. Totally normal.

I came home again this weekend to watch the Doodles because Suz would be out of town. One of the first things I did when I got home this time was go to the refrigerator for a Diet Coke fix. I found a Diet Coke alright, but I also found this.....INSIDE the fridge....:



Why yes, that IS the spare set of keys to the house, stashed inside the box of Michelob Ultra...inside the fridge...

It appears that Suz thought this hiding spot would be most conducive to my actually finding the keys. This tells me that my mother is either very hilarious and sneaky, or she thinks I'm such an alcoholic that the FIRST place I'd think to look (or anyone for that matter) for a hide-a-key is INSIDE a case of beer, INSIDE the garage refrigerator.

Sorry for telling the world about your hiding spot, Suz.

And while we are on the subject of my mother, that brings me to my third reason-du-jour why my family is usually a pretty supple source of blog topics.

My mom has the creepiest, most obsessive relationship with Hallmark ornaments and Christmas decorations I've ever seen. And I've been to a national Hallmark convention.

Almost every single surface in our house already looks like Santa rolled in here and exploded all over everything. So I took a little tour of our house, snapping pictures in any given room of the creepiest decorations I observed on my walk-through....



THIS is the first thing you see when you come through our front door. I left the ladder in the picture for scale. Did I mention that this welcoming fellow is on display BEFORE we even made it to Halloween? Meaning our poor little child neighbors will be subjected to his pedophilic gaze come Saturday night.

Santa really IS always watching you, kids. And Santa is a 7-foot-tall creepy-ass Freud-lookalike.

These next three pictures are in various parts of our house, but all come from the same Christmas decoration "designer." These hideous abominations are called Anna Lee "dolls," but feel free to switch the term "dolls," used very loosely here, for "maniacal demons" or "satanic imps" or something along those lines. What kind of sick person thought that making dolls' faces look like acid trips would create feelings of Christmas joy or holiday nostalgia in any sane person?



(by the way, these 2 are in a random, rarely used upstairs bathroom. Suz leaves no surface un-Christmased.)



And just a few more examples of Suz's decoration-infatuation-blog-topic-inspirations...

Suz has so many ornaments that she can devote entire Christmas trees and entire Christmas wreaths to certain, very specific themes. This one is obviously the Star Wars wreath. In the words of Yoda....Think it's awesome, I do.

Anywhere, literally anywhere you go in our house, you can look around and find some version of the creepy pedophile Santa staring you down. I don't know how any of my siblings or I got through childhood thinking that old Saint Nick was a jolly, good-intentioned soul with these mutant Santas lurking around every other corner.

We certainly wouldn't want anyone to feel devoid of Christmas joy whilst sitting on the porcelain throne!

As if the 7-foot-tall-front-entryhall Santa wasn't disturbing enough on his own, this little sidekick gremlin stands guard at his side. He is apparently "checking Santa's list" for him, a.k.a marking down the names of trick-or-treaters they'd like to molest later.

And finally, a nativity scene. So we can pretend like we are good Catholics when guests come over, and that we don't just go to church on Christmas Eve...... drunk....... (just kidding...)

So thank you, innate dorkiness, grad school shenanigans, and the weirdest (and best) family I could ask for, for providing me ample material to keep this little guy going.

I am, however, always open to suggestions. Happy Halloween!

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Fitting Room Epiphanies

Today, I went bathing suit shopping with Suz.

Today, I realized you can stumble upon a few discoveries when bathing suit shopping for the first time since, ohhh say, a year ago?



1. The dressing room attendants in the bathing suit sections of both Belk's and Dillard's are FRISKY.

Do I need anything else besides the 5000 bathing suits I came into my room with 4 minutes ago? No.

Do I want to come out of the safety and comfort of my dressing room to show you, a stranger, how the suit I have on makes me look like a german sausage? No.

If I do venture out of my room to brave the horrendous 3-panel mirror in the general dressing room lobby area, do I want your superficial opinion of how the suit looks so that I will buy it under your false pretenses and you will get commission of the sale? NO.

I think the sales representative who was "helping" me at Dillard's would have hopped right into the dressing room with me and my nude self if I had let her. When did these practices become normal or acceptable?

I'm not even an uber conservative gal, but my gosh, Ashley-in-the-Dillard's-bathing-suit-department, PUMP. THE. BRAKES. I don't need your over-anxious little fingers getting anywhere near my twins to know whether a bathing suit fits or not.



2. The fluorescent lights in fitting rooms were sent to the department stores of the world straight from the Devil himself.

I think department stores should have caught on by now. If you want me to feel more inclined to buy whatever I am trying on, do not outfit your fitting rooms with lights that make me look like a corpse and highlight every little jelly roll I may or may not have.

It's a wonder I didn't get in my car and drive straight off a cliff after subjecting myself to half a dozen dressing rooms and their fluorescent lights from the gates of Hell.



3. I. am. FAT.

I don't mention this so that I get an influx of comments or messages saying "no you're not!" In fact, I would rather get messages of confirmation rather than opposition to this statement. Maybe that would motivate me to get off my (fat)ass and go run a mile or five.

Maybe it was the fluorescent lights, but....Holy Moly---I'm staging my own intervention. I have a beach vacation at the end of July. I have to be in my brother's wedding in early September. I am turning 23 in two days. Every day that goes by, my metabolism and ability to drop Lbs only gets worse.

So, I set a goal. I need to shed at least 10-15 pounds by the time my brother gets married. Which is in September. Five months. Plenty of time! Like, something is wrong with me if I can't manage to do this. And I'm posting it on here because I feel like the more people that know about it, the more people I will have to face if I fail miserably. Hooray for motivation!

Upon leaving the mall, Suz and I went to Play it Again Sports. I bought ankle weights, 10-pound dumbbells, and a jump rope. And so it begins, and we shall see how it goes.

All I have to say is, residents of Columbia, if you see a wide load with ankle weights strapped to her feet, hyperventilating and about to keel over dead while attempting to "jog" in the Shandon area, please don't make fun of me. Or I'll send my new BFF Ashley from Dillard's to politely badger you to death.

Hey Stella, let's cut the crap (pun absolutely intended)

Conversation that just transpired between me, Stella, and my mom:


(Stella comes trotting very happily into the kitchen. She has been missing from the room for all of five minutes. Stella obviously has a trinket of some sort in her mouth.)

Me: Hi Stellz. What do you have in your mouth?

Suz: What does she have?

Me: Stella, spit it out..... Drop it Stella!

(Stella lowers her head in an attempt to guard/hide whatever is in her mouth. I reach down to extract said object with my hand because Stella is guarding it with her life and won't give it up. I feel the object. It's not that large, but it is very hard. I assume it's part of a dog bone or a lingering rogue baby toy from when Niece was here for Easter. [Boy was I wrong].)

Suz: What is it?

Me: OH MY WOW. IT'S HER POOP.

Suz (very calmly, not stirring from her chair): Are you joking?

Me: Why would I joke about something like that? It's her POOP!!!

Suz (gets up from her chair and starts meandering around the rooms of our downstairs): I wonder where she got it? And where the rest of it is?


It seems that Stella has continued to eat her own shit after all.

And this poop-log was HARD. Like Stella is hoarding little steaming piles all over the house until said time that the piles have hardened and turned into perfectly tote-able collections of poop-logs.

Looks like Suz and I got a little feces-themed scavenger hunt of our own as a day-after-Easter surprise from good ol' Stellz. As of post-time, we still have not found the missing excrement.

I think that calls for another beer in the name of the guano-loving furry ball of crazy that is Stella.

Making FedEx Friends

Some of you may know that I recently went to England for a week. Suz, being the crazy fretter that she is, ordered me a temporary global phone to take over there with me so that she could still get a hold of me at all times. Gotta love moms.

So, a week before my departure for England, I was waiting around one day for FedEx to deliver the phone package. Shockingly, FedEx was NOT right on schedule with their "by noon" delivery promise.

No big deal, I thought. I don't have class until 3:30, I can continue my waiting game.

One o'clock came and went. As the clock creeped closer to 2, I still wasn't really that worried/bothered, but Suz was, of course.

Then it approached the 2:30 mark. I really needed to get ready for my class, which included getting in the shower, where I would surely not hear the FedEx delivery guy knock on the door, and the temporary-global-phone-delivery-fail-Apocalypse would obviously ensue.

Not taking a shower wasn't really a possibility, seeing as how I'm a disgusting college student and probably hadn't showered since at least a day and a half prior to that (and I dont want to become one of those PYMIGS that I so vehemently rant about in other posts).

In my opinion, the next course of action for my little dilemma was an obvious one. I would charm the package right out of the FedEx guy's hands and onto my porch, where he would leave it and be on his way even though it required a signature from me.

How would I accomplish this, you ask?

I left this note taped on my front door for the delivery guy to find:





"FedEx man (woman?),

Could you please leave the package even if I don't answer the door? I had to shower/go to class :( -- Possibly try to hide it under our mats maybe? If I could tip you, I would! :) Thanks!

-Shannon Townes"



I hoped for the best, and got in the shower. When I got out, I went downstairs to check on the status of the note/possibly package.

The note was gone, and I will be darned if that FedEx delivery person didn't go to the greatest lengths he could to make sure that package was hidden.








Yes, it's a teeny bit on the conspicuous side, but he definitely tried. And I'd like to think it was because of my jolly note.

I'm not sure what became of the note, or why he felt the need to take it with him, but hopefully some FedEx workers got a little tiny bit of amusement that day because of one customer who was particularly determined that their package be left, signature or not.

At the very least, I definitely amused myself.