Paintball Freaks

So I played paintball today for the first time in my life. It was an outing arranged and paid for by my company - not surprisingly, only four of us from the office showed up. My coworkers are notorious for avoiding any office events. Since I've never played paintball before I didn't really know what to expect, but I was given fair warning that some of the people that show up to play are kind of extreme. No kidding. There were a couple of nerds there that showed up in full blown gear - CO2 tanks on their backs, wearing these black and red neoprene looking vests and whatnot...just really really weird. And before each round they'd try and give us a briefing of some sort.."Okay, most of you go up the middle, we're going to go to the left and pick people off from there, some of you go to the right...we've got to WORK AS A TEAM here or else they're infiltrate..." Okay so, yeah right, like I'm going to go running up the middle. Stupid. I kind of hang back (I was NOT hiding) and watch the first round. One of these freaks is staking out a spot in front of me about 15 yards off, so I get to watch him work. About ten minutes into it, almost everyone is out, and he's having some standoff with some guy from the other team that I can't see. Well, I am not kidding you, as I watch this kid, he ducks behind this wall and sits with his back against it, takes the remaining few swallows out of his water bottle, adjusts his mask to wipe the sweat off his forehead...moves into a crouching position, gun ready, and TOSSES the bottle away from his position. And he waits, thinking some guy is going to come running out after his water bottle shooting, possibly thinking it's a human being?!?! My mouth just kind of hung open. If he had turned and seen me, he would have seen me shaking my head in disbelief. What! It was the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Anyway, paintball, quite an experience. I only got hit a couple of times, one was a direct hit to my head. My hair was covered in boogery green paint. And I also took one to the mask, it obscured about 80 percent of my vision. But all in all, not as painful and intense as I expected. Oh, I did see a guy get shot directly in the balls though...Ew.

Snapes and Large Birds...

So, I suck because this is the first post I've done in forever. For some reason this blog thing just doesn't seem to stick. I definitely have lots of time to work on it, so I really don't have an excuse other than that I spend way too much time on Facebook and watching reality TV when I could be blogging. Okay so an update - We're now living in Tucson, Arizona; we've actually been here for over a year. Jon randomly got an awesome job as a surgical sales representative. Don't let the word "sales" fool you though, his job basically consists of gynecologists spending ridiculous amounts of money on plastic surgery equipment (mostly lipo, boobs, and "cosmetic gynecology" which is exactly what you might imagine it to be and much, much more) and paying for him to fly out and set it up. Then he walks them through their first "procedure" (that's what we're supposed to call it, I guess it's insensitive to say that someone "got the fat sucked out of them". We say they "got their procedure done"). Ew. And I got a really great job as a receptionist/admin support at a civil engineering firm that I really enjoy. We got a cute little dog (to keep me company during the many days each month Jon is traveling) and we spend way too much money eating out, but it's one of my favorite things to do. We also got some baby cornsnakes - they're really pretty but I got the biggest shock of my life the other day when we were at the petstore buying their food and there was this HUGE cage with an ENORMOUS snake inside of it..I'm not kidding this thing was five feet long. Anyway it was a cornsnake. Ew! And one of ours (the male, Severus) is at severe risk of getting that big, he eats more than any animal on earth should be able to eat. The other one, the female (Bellatrix) should die any day now, she's an idiot and doesn't know food when it crawls on top of her, literally. We call them the "snapes" for obvious reasons, and it still makes me snicker. And, ew, we have to feed them these nasty little baby mice...apparently in the snake world they're called "pinkies" because they're one day old and you have to put them in the freezer to kill them and all the bacteria on them (I've been told they just "go to sleep" when they get cold, which I'm still having trouble buying.). Anyway, like I was saying before, we went to the pet store to get some "pinkies" for Severus to eat and Bellatrix to hide from, and there was this big old cage with a HUGE macaw inside, the biggest parrot I've ever seen in my life (and my sister loves birds, so I've seen my share, particularly in Bird Fancy magazine, as well as on numerous T-shirts she enjoyed wearing as a kid). Anyway this thing was HUGE. So it's clamboring around inside and I'm looking at it because it's so pretty, and Jon is staring at it with his mouth open because he thinks birds are reptiles and that if you look in their eyes, you can "just tell" that they don't have souls. Okay so we're both watching this HUGE bird clambor around inside it's cage, when it gets to a point where all the bars are vertical, it loses its grip and he's hanging on to the top bar with his beak and his feet are just sliding around on the bars, trying to get a foot hold. Well he gives up after a few moments and just hangs there, this thing must have weighed 30 pounds, and he was just swinging back and forth from his beak. And I'm watching his feet, and as he swings they every so often come even with the cage bars. So I get all brave, right, and I'm thinking "I wonder what his feet feel like?". So I get my pointer finger all ready to touch his toe the next time it comes close to the outside of the cage. So I've got my finger up, kind of holding it close to my body...and then Jon starts to say something so I get distracted and look over at him. AND THE VERY NEXT SECOND, something has GRABBED onto my hand and I scream and wrench my poor hand from the grip of this desperate macaw. You wouldn't believe it if I told you that I laughed the whole way home, but I did. And I called my sister Annie (the bird lover) over and over and over again, but she wasn't answering, so I resorted to telling her the story over her voicemail because I just couldn't wait to tell her. Turns out she was on the phone with our other sister, Corinne, and I was really bugging the heck out of her by calling her constantly over those several minutes. Anyway, typing Corinne's name just now reminded me of some GREAT stories that will just have to wait until another day to tell, because this post has already gotten out of hand.