Hannah Rae's Blog, page 10

There's a bit of flair on my Frigidaire

This is a photograph of me with my refrigerator... which is possibly a strange thing to document, but I'm just gonna put it out there that my refrigerator is better than yours.

It's a blunt statement, I know, but I am more than willing to support WHY my refrigerator is better than yours. Believe me, it has absolutely nothing to do with my ice maker because my ice maker doesn't even make ice. I buy ice in a bag from the grocery store so that my ice maker can dispense it for me.

Anyway... back to why the refrigerator is great.

One reason my refrigerator is great is because it has pictures on it. There's really no rhyme or reason to the pictures that appear on the refrigerator, and I understand that a lot of refrigerators across America (and probably the world) also have pictures on them, but I have some good pictures. I've got a photograph of Buddy and Nate and me in front of the Class of 2016's Homecoming float (which won, by the way) back in... 2013, I believe?

I've got a selfie with my other mother Amy and her daughter/my dear friend Biz, taken on the evening of Biz's wedding. I mean, no one knew it was a wedding -- we thought it was a birthday celebration -- but whatever. It was a surprise wedding and it was really fun.

There's a photograph of my former work friends Kristen and Jori (they're still my friends, we just don't work together anymore) from when we toured Troegs and another of me with Agatha Wags, my second Airedale. Truly, she's probably my favorite dog ever. I'll write a blog about Wags another night though.

There's a picture of me catching the bouquet at my friend Heather's wedding in Oregon. (Still single, FYI. That "catching the bouquet" thing is a myth...)

My favorite picture is one of my mom and Pip and me. It was taken at one of my Ho! Ho! Ho! X-rated Xmas parties. My mom came over to judge the dance-off. Pip wore pink leggings, the most absurd boots to ever exist, a leopard-print shirt, and a feather boa.

Pip's got some art on the fridge too. (Side note: My mom doesn't like the word "fridge" because it has a D in it and the word "refrigerator" does not have a D in it. I therefore avoid using the word "fridge" as a result. I mean, at least in writing. In speaking, I don't worry too much about it... even though my mom sees the word in her head. But, again: I think that should be its own blog.)

My magnets are funny. The fifties-lookin' ladies are probably my favorite. Here's their conversation on the way to wherever it is they're going: "Who is this 'Moderation' we're supposed to be drinking with?"

I saved the card that came with the flowers my friends sent after my last breakup. There was a poem and it said, "Roses are red / Violets are blue / We hate [insert name here] / But we sure do love you!" My other friend Kristin (Kristin with an I-N, not E-N; Kristin and I have never worked together, but we have a special connection despite this -- and we really would make excellent coworkers) wrote that. Isn't it good? I know. That's why I saved it.

Some other quotes that I've saved are:

"My life got so much easier once my mom told me that you can bake pretty much everything at 375." -Chris (who read The Way Back!), 11.7.2015 "I mean, I can make an egg salad." -Kathy, 10.3.2019 "Your mother has given me words of wisdom, and one of them is 'Why can't people eat birdseed?'" -Aunt Karen, 7.5.2018 "We shared five bottles of wine and all I know is that the second bottle was my favorite." -Amy, date unknown... along with all the good wines "Disney Channel movies got me messed up. I thought by my senior year of high school I'd be tall and hairy... have a cool girlfriend..." -Nate, 7.8.2015 "I have a dog and a cat, so I'm a little worried about the crockpot thing." -Steph, 11.25.2014 In regards to making out: "I'd rather make broccoli-cheddar soup." -Annie

D'you know what else I have on my refrigerator? An old-school calendar because that's how my head works. Wanna make plans with me? I'm down... but let me check the calendar on my refrigerator before I make something official. (This actually reminds me that I need to confer with said calendar and send some possible dates to Pennsylvania Heather -- not Oregon Heather -- because Pennsylvania Heather and I have a REALLY BIG ANNOUNCEMENT that I'll make some other time. It'll definitely be its own blog.)

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P.S. Did you pick up on the fact that I was halfway-but-not-totally quoting Shel Silverstein in the title of this blog post? For those who may not know, that's an allusion. Look it up if you don't believe me.

I made an ad for Time Jumps

I made an advertisement for Time Jumps and since I know some of my followers don't have social media (Mom, Amy... that might be it), I decided to write a blog to showcase the advertisement. And here it is:

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Okay. That's today's blog. I hope you liked it!

Trivia Blog: 2/15

Players: Hannah, Mary, Victoria, Ben, Darren

Blogger: Darren

Hint of the Day: A box of Raisins

 

I know, I know, it's been awhile since there has been a trivia blog.  The Educated Friends took last week off and also missed three weeks ago.  And two weeks ago…well, I never got around to writing the blog and since Mary and Hannah have tasked me with doing it every week, it just never got done.  But tonight we were back in full force, at least physically.  Unfortunately we forgot to take a team photo, but if we would have then AI says it would have looked like this:

Mary and I got to trivia early and were talking about all kinds of things when Hannah showed up and excitedly declared “Great news!  I have an ear infection!”  To make things stranger, she then pulled a single pink pill out of her pocket, split it in half and ate half of it and then the other half.  It turns out that she was excited because there has been a ringing in her ear for weeks and she was worried that it was tinnitus but the really cute (from what I’ve heard) doctor at Urgent Care gave her medicine that will hopefully help it.

 

The opening category was The Vampire Diaries, a show that Mary watched in High School but none of the rest of us knew about.  Unfortunately, she was distracted talking to Victoria about Canine Lupus or something like that an didn’t hear the question.  We tried to repeat it to her, and it was about the violent nickname that a certain group of vampires had, and she said “I don’t know, put Rippers or something like that.”  She didn’t sound very confident and it also turned out that she only watched 3 of the 37 seasons of that show so we wagered only a single point.  But Mary was right and we got that point.  The next question was about words with DIS in them, and we easily knew the Tardis was in Dr Who and that Discord was an app, but we didn’t know what ‘someone who believes in natural beauty’ would be.  As a joke, I suggested “nudist” and you know what?  It was right and we got the bonus points!  So it really seemed like luck was with us, right? 

Well not so much, as it turns out.  While I did know that Martin Freeman played Tim on The UK version of The Office, we had no idea that Guggenheim and Astor died during the sinking of the Titanic.  And even with a multiple choice option, we did not know that the Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup in 60 years despite winning 13 over all.  And because we had wagered low on the rippers, these questions cost us.

The audio round was a bit better, and it featured three songs with the word “Little” in their title.  We knew Little Miss Cant Be Wrong , a song that Hannah likes to vacuum to, and Dirty Little Secret  but the third song was a country song.  We all looked expectantly at Mary, as this is supposed to be her area of strength but it did not come through tonight.  Victoria wanted us to put “Little Tractor”, but Hannah thought that the song sounded like it would be about sexual intercourse and so wanted us to put “Sweet Little Piece” (referring to a profane term for what is beneath the cutoffs the singer was singing about).  It turned out that the answer was “Take you for a little ride” and there was then some spirited discussion whether they meant a ride on a tractor, as Victoria suggested, or the kind of ride that Hannah was thinking of.  I guess we will never know.

I then cost the team a point when I thought that Unix was the operating system that Linus Torvald started rather than Linux.  And I might have gotten all geeky and tried to argue about that point but, well, it was just a point and (spoiler alert) the game did not come down to one point.  The next question asked for the two largest cities in Mississippi and we knew Jackson but thought the other one was Biloxi instead of whatever the right answer was.  (Gulfport?)  We ended that round strong by knowing about Matt Groening and The Three Amigos.

The top half of the halftime sheet killed us, as we had to recognize the names of various animated fish.  Sure, we knew Nemo  and Flounder  and even Cleo , but we did not know Klaus (although Ben knew he was from American Dad) or Kenny The Shark .  Luckily, the bottom half was better as we had to name words that ended with the letter X, and we got them all, including Matchbox cars (despite the fact that Mary wanted us to put Hot Wheels because she did not read the directions), Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat, and Foreigner’s Jukebox Hero .  The team was impressed that I knew what a parallax was, and we were all impressed that Ben’s totally made up word for Amelia Earhart, Aviatrix, is not in fact a totally made up word.  It was also during this part of the night that I found out that Victoria has a pet fish named after Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine, although I was never clear whether the name of the fish was Edward Jenner or Smallpox, and I am not sure which would be weirder.

After halftime we were not doing so great, although Hannah didn’t mark down where we were – I think it was fifth place out of seven teams, though.  And we were really worried about the third round.  In fact, we really waffled over what to choose as the bonus category in this round as they all seemed awful.  The first question was NFL quarterbacks, and somehow Mary and Ben figured out that Aaron Rodgers and Matthew Stafford have the most yards of any active quarterback.  The second question was philosophers, which concerned us but the question was literally “Who wrote The Republic?”  For some reason that escapes me we did choose European Monarchs as the bonus, and luckily we knew which century each of three monarchs were all from so we got those points.  The next category was “Broadway Plays” and by this time we had realized that the hint of the day was going to lead us to A Raisin in the Sun.  I wanted to turn in the answer before we even heard the question as the ultimate flex, but my teammates were more rational – and wanted to see if there as a bonus question.  But yes, the answer was A Raisin in the Sun. 

Oh, and the final question of that round was about Beyonce’s new country songs and this time Mary did know the country music question.  So we had a perfect round despite our fears that we would crash and burn.  The 6-4-2 question was about the part of the human anatomy that can be affected by tinnitus.  Now you know why I told you the story about Hannah’s ear issues up above, because obviously we had extra reason to know the answer!  Of course, all the other teams also knew this (the answer, not about Hannah’s ringing ears) so we never even heard the easier clues.

The final round started with Canadian geography and asked which province bordered Idaho.  We went back and forth about whether it was Alberta or British Columbia, and in the end put Alberta when it was in fact BC.  There was also a bonus opportunity to name the capital of the province and it turns out that your Educated Friends do not know their Canadian capitals, as we would have said either Calgary or Vancouver when in fact neither are the capital of their respective provinces.  That round we also got wrong a question about a four letter word related to mollusks that also means a piece of metal you can use to trick a vending machine (we said clam instead of slug) but Mary did figure out that scallops were the bivalve food that also lends its name to a potato dish. My geek side also got to show off as, while several of us knew that The Highlander is the scifi movie franchise about a 16th century man named Connor MacLeod, only I knew that the sequel was subtitled The Quickening.  And my team was surprised that I knew what tv show the song Agatha All Along is from, even though I thought it was obvious.

We were technically still in the running at the final question, although unlikely to win, and I felt good about it because the category was TV history.  The question was “Nancy Zerg is a real estate agent who made headlines by winning this game show almost 20 years ago.”  We went through a bunch of options before settling on ‘Deal or no Deal’, but as soon as we turned it in the answer clicked and was obvious, as Zerg is the person who knew about H&R Block and beat Ken Jennings.  Even if we had gotten it right we would have only come in second, as it is we think we came in fourth.  Oh well.  Better luck next time.

 

 

It's (Almost) Time for TIME JUMPS!

Here's the news: Time Jumps will be available on March 5. If ebooks are your thing, you can ,preorder yours now, but if it's a hardcopy that you prefer, you'll just have to wait. Sorry!

Time Jumps tells the story of the Kincaid family and takes place in Callensburg, Maryland. Here's the official synopsis that appears on the back of the book:

The Kincaid family doesn’t have much, but they pride themselves on having each other. Always close, Emory Kincaid’s children have a friendship in addition to their siblingship—especially his twins, Rowan and Jameson. However, the summer that Ro and Jamie turn eighteen creates a rift in their relationship that impacts the entire family.

As time passes, the distance between Jameson and his family intensifies. Physically, the young man is right there in front of them… but his troubled thoughts keep him distant. Jamie yearns for the ability to travel backwards through time. He yearns to once again be that boy he was before turning eighteen.

But what if there’s a way to venture back through the hours?

What if there’s a way to revisit the past?

If you've read my stuff before, you may recognize Callensburg since it's where Jack and Amelia Porter made their relationship official (Kick It One More Time, The One You're With), but it's also where Ansel Ferguson (The Way Back) grew up.

If you've read The Way Back, you might remember that Ansel received a compass tattoo before leaving the east coast and venturing west. Well, Emory Kincaid is the tattoo artist who gave him that tattoo... and Emory Kincaid is one of the main characters in this book. He's a very cool man; I think you'll like him a lot.

For those whose attention to detail is as minute as mine, you may recognize some other familiar names/faces as well, and if you're thinking it would be beneficial to revisit The Way Back before jumping into Time Jumps, you're in luck! Thanks to Chris Kerrigan, you can zoom through the ,audio version in under six hours! My mom finished it yesterday and said:

"Hannah, I listened to ninety-six books last year and cannot remember the last time I had so much fun with an audio!"

So if that isn't a glowing endorsement, I don't know what is.

All that being said, I hope you're as excited as I am about the upcoming release of Time Jumps.

Writing and Whatnot

I don't usually work on more than one book at a time.

Perhaps I should amend that to read "I don't usually write more than one book at a time" because I do often edit multiple books while writing another book entirely. For example, I am currently editing three novels: I just finished Time Jumps (stay tuned for an announcement regarding its release), am working on Come and Go So Quickly (another in the Sebastian saga) with Mary, and have just begun to revisit Uptempo, Down in order to make final edits before its release later this spring. There's going to be a contest with that book, fyi. You might win a prize if you participate! A really good prize!

Anyway, while I don't usually write more than one book at a time, I am actually sort of writing two books at the moment. Interestingly, both of them have mostly-new characters. (There are some minor characters from other texts who make appearances in these new manuscripts, but I won't tell you who they are because that would ruin the fun.)

What I think is intriguing about writing two books at one time are the vast differences between the two. The nameless book (it does have a working title, but I've changed it so many times that it seems silly to include it here since it may change another few times) takes place in Flickerwood, New York, and was inspired by a hypothetical situation posed by my penpal James and by a challenge issued by my student Percy. The plot of the titleless book is very clear, as is the setting, but the characters are still introducing themselves to me as we explore each chapter. I know exactly how it will end, though, and I'm really excited about the ending.

The other book, which is called A Heavy Sky, has incredibly real characters and the vaguest of plots. I'm not sure where it's going or where we'll end up, but the setting is fun because we're back in Radio Park, Oregon, and I just love Cup o' Mud Buzz so much! And The Library! And On the Side! Radio Park seriously has the best eateries.

My mom said to me yesterday, "Do you ever think about making art again?" I found it to be a peculiar question since I just made a TON of art that is currently hanging at the Garryowen, but I think she likes it when I make art because it's easier for her to view it and give comments than read an entire novel and give comments. But the writing of the novels is so fun, you know?

To thank you for reading this blog, I'll give you a sampling of A Heavy Sky. These are the first two pages. It's not been edited at all (because I'm editing other things, obviously), and I have no idea when it will be finished and ready for reading, but here's a new character for your literary enjoyment:

It's here for the hearing!

Last night, a wonderfully exciting thing happened while I was hanging out at my parents' house and drinking chardonnay with my mom. I checked my email on my phone, saw that ACX had sent me a message, and opened it to learn that my novel, The Way Back, was available for purchase!

Cheering ensued!

I called Chris Kerrigan, who narrated The Way Back, and we talked briefly of things. He also talked to my mom because he requested that I pass the phone to her. I did as he asked. My mother promptly fell in love with both his voice and his personality. I mean, how could she not? There's nothing not to love about Chris.

Anyway, now that The Way Back is available as an audiobook, you should purchase it and download it and start listening. My marketing manager Mary already did and she texted me this morning to say, "I just started The Way Back. I'm in love with Chris's narration already!" See what I mean? Mary knows things. She's my marketing manager for a reason, after all.

That's enough news for now. I don't want to overwhelm you with all the other wonderful things that are in the works, so I'll write another blog in a day or two to touch on those things. Until then... you should be listening to The Way Back.

On the brink of excitement...

It's taken a while... but The Way Back audiobook has been submitted for final review to Amazon. This means that in the very near future, you will be able to have my friend Chris Kerrigan read (and sing!) The Way Back to you! Yay!

Chris has an amazing voice -- both an amazing reading voice and an amazing singing voice -- so you will probably be ecstatic to learn that he has actually taken my song lyrics to Flannel Lobster's tune "Uptempo, Down" and put the words to music. This is included in the audiobook, but I've also made it available on my website.

As Chris continues to bring my novels to life (Just Whistle is up next!), he'll be doing the same for Flannel Lobster's songs, and since the band is really gaining in popularity, I felt them deserving of a website of their own. You can link to it ,HERE , where "Uptempo, Down" is available for your listening enjoyment, as is an excerpt from an interview with the band and (coming soon) their discography in its entirety.

Another fun thing that is happening is this: Rob Connolly is nearly finished reading Kick It One More Time so that novel will soon be available as an audiobook as well! Like Chris, Rob has a phenomenal voice and he did a lot of research in order to voice Sebastian the way I imagined him.

Speaking of Bas... I love him. And even though it literally hurts my heart when people criticize him, I understand that not everyone enjoys him. In my mind, he is the equivalent of Jamie Fraser. I want to know what he looks like, sounds like, smells like, etc. all of the time. I don't get tired of him.

My mom gets tired of him.

Mary, my magnificent marketing manager, does not get tired of him. She prefers Bert, but she has an appreciation for Bas and enjoys his humor and artistic moodiness.

My mom has a theory that "old ladies" get tired of Bas because it is an age thing. I would be curious to learn if this is an accurate theory. If you are a self-proclaimed "old lady" and have read one or more of my novels starring Sebastian (Kick It One More Time and Running Through the Words are the two that are currently available to the public), I am hoping to hear from you. There's no need to be overly harsh in your criticism of Sebastian as this generally just makes me question my worth and ability to write and causes me to wonder if I ought to completely abandon all of my unpublished manuscripts and leave them to be published posthumously decades from now... but if you don't like him and just want to write and say, "He doesn't do it for me. I prefer [insert other character here] because [insert reason here]," that is fine.

It's not as if I'm expecting Sebastian to be everyone's favorite. That's not it at all. I just never expected him to be viewed so harshly by people because he's such a good and kind person. Flawed, yes, but good and kind! Then again, he is the lead singer of Flannel Lobster and deals with this sort of criticism all the time. Essentially, real life is emulating fiction, I guess.

Here's another fun thing for you to have on your radar: I'm going to be releasing Time Jumps this winter/spring. Possibly really soon, possibly a little bit farther down the road. Only time will tell! You'll have to pay attention to social media and blog posts and wait for an announcement because it may end up being a spur-of-the-moment type thing.

I think those are all of my announcements for the moment. If you've read Just Whistle, you probably realize that the next Flannel Lobster song to be released will be "Kick It One More Time," so that should be thrilling for absolutely everyone. Me, most of all! I wrote additional stanzas for Chris! It's going to be so fun to hear what he comes up with!

Okay. For real, I am done now. Sorry this one's long. I haven't written for a while, though, and I had things to say.

Now it's lonely in my head...

Inevitably, shortly after the high of finishing a novel comes the low that follows... and now it's lonely in my head. Do you know what I did yesterday? Worked out. Cleaned. Read. Watched a movie. Watched another movie. Took a nap. Went to the grocery store.

I did not write.

I did not write because the characters are all just, like, asleep in my head. It's so bizarre because Sebastian is almost always doing something, but yesterday he was essentially doing the same things I was doing: mundane life happenings. I could visualize him in his kitchen, making dinner with random ingredients found in his refrigerator and cupboards, but it was just a stand-alone story that will probably never make it into a novel.

I've also got these three ladies who have started to materialize in my head, and two of them have names but one of them still doesn't, and even though I know where they live and that they're (probably) sisters, I don't know enough about them yet to start writing their story. So in the days to come, I will probably return to a Halloween novel that I started writing for NaNoWriMo but put aside once December 1st rolled around.

That's essentially all I have to share with you today. That and I'm pulling a Sebastian and making up a recipe with things I have in my own refrigerator. We'll see how this turns out. So far I've got some chicken thighs, onion, and garlic simmering on the stove in half a container of Greek yogurt, a splash of half-and-half, and a tiny amount of leftover yellow spaghetti sauce. There's also a lot of garlic salt and parsley in the mix. I measured nothing and have no idea what it'll taste like, so fingers crossed.

(This is me with a sad, and therefore lonely, head.)

I have finished writing another book.

An exciting thing happened this evening at approximately 10:12PM. I finished writing another book. This one is called Torn Asunder and it is really clever, if I do say so myself. Let me tell you why:

The formatting is genius because I took things from The Way Back and Time Jumps and all five of the band books and meshed everything together to make a brilliant layout. The plot is genius because it mirrors stuff from all the previous books and also expands on stuff from the previous books and yet can be read as a stand-alone and will still make sense. The plot is also genius because I set some things up for future books that I may someday want to write.

There are other things that make this book clever and genius as well, but I'd rather just tease you with the knowledge of this title's existence and drink some wine to celebrate its completion.

(And that's all you're gonna get for right now.)

Trivia Recap: 1/18

The Players: Hannah, Mary, Siri, Marc, Brock, and Ben

Opening Category: Dr. Seuss Titles

Hint of the Day: Teacher

I would like to begin by saying a few wonderful things happened today.

I had really a blast and a half with my period seven students. We analyzed data and laughed a lot and I was drunk on coffee so that made the experience especially wonderful. I found out that there is no need to set an alarm for tomorrow morning because school is already cancelled. I have all day tomorrow to write my book, which is on beyond phenomenal because I am almost finished with it. Five more chapters to go! Siri and Marc and Brock were all able to join us for trivia and I hadn't seen any of them for quite some time! I did a really fun thing when I got home from school and I was super tickled and excited about it. Allow me to explain said thing...

Ben and I have this pickle thing. He doesn't fully understand that we have it because he doesn't want to have it, but it's had and Ben is in denial. I even bought him a pickle sticker when I was in Jim Thorpe last year. He didn't seem to care.

As you may remember, Darren gave me some pickles for Christmas this year. The pickles are REALLY good. I actually ate one with my dinner last night and I'm legitimately running low on the good pickles because they are so good that I eat them often. But last week Darren didn't eat his pickle at Fourscore and he offered it to Ben and Ben didn't offer to share it, which is fine because I was full from my wings. But Darren's reason for offering it to Ben and not me was because I didn't share my Christmas pickles with him. But now let me explain to you how the Christmas pickles came to be in my posession...

I hosted an after-trivia party the Thursday before Christmas. Both Kristin and Ben came to my house after trivia. They drove and I walked. They got to my house before I did. Neither one of them thought to offer me a ride. [Insert eyeroll here.] Kristin, Ben, and I had a drink. Ben left. Darren arrived. Darren brought pickles. Phil and Brock arrived. Everyone talked. Everyone left.

Last week, this is essentially how the conversation went when Darren gave Ben his pickle:

Darren: Here, Ben. You can have my pickle because Hannah didn't share her Christmas pickles with you.

Ben: Why didn't you share your Christmas pickles?

Hannah: Because I didn't have them when you were at my house.

Ben: But why?

Hannah: Because Darren gave them to me after you left.

Darren: I did give her Christmas pickles, though.

Ben: It stands to reason that if you had pickles, you should have offered one to me.

Hannah: But I didn't have them when you were at my house. They arrived after you left.

Ben: But you could have gotten them out of your refrigerator.

Hannah: I could have... but they weren't in my refrigerator because they arrived AFTER YOU LEFT.

Ben: But if they were in the refrigerator---

Hannah: They weren't.

Ben: Oh. I misunderstood.

So last week, after the above conversation, I told Ben I'd bring him a pickle. He told me not to. I did it anyway. I was really pleased with myself, too. Allow me to now document the gifting of Ben's Christmas pickle via pictures:

Do you know Ben's reaction to the above efforts? "Thanks, Hannah. I'm not gonna eat this."

So that put a definite damper on the night because now I'm down a really good pickle.

Round One:

A decent round. I know Mary and I kind of messed up with Panic at the Disco last week but we were on fire this week. Unfortunately, our fires got put out a time or two. Fortunately, we advocated for the fact that Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World was a teacher before he was a principal because teacher was the clue of the day. We also had to talk our team into believing that Bullseye is the name of the Target dog because some members believed that his name was not Bullseye. But Mary and I know our dog breeds and were like, "Hello? He's a bull terrier... His name is Bullseye." Because it was.

Round Two:

This round was awful because the audio clue, which was our bonus category, was movie music. One may expect this to be fun, right? Wrong. Because the songs were songs that were buried deep inside Pixar films and they didn't have anything to do with the actual movies and after Adam played the songs, he then started playing screamo music that was AWFUL. I am talking awful as in I would have rather listened to Christmas music. Hell, I would have rather listened to stupid "Dominick the Donkey" a good three times. I would have rather listened to Nickelback. And Adam kept playing his stupid screamo music for the rest of the night and it was just atrocious. I hated every second of it. I wasn't in an especially bad mood until I started listening to screamo... and then I just got irritated. Fortunately, Marc was sitting across from me and he is very jolly and fun and he kept me upbeat.

Halftime:

Had the team listened to Mary, Marc, and me, we would have scored 20/20 on the halftime sheet, but half of the Educated Friends were reluctant to contemplate the fact that just maybe perhaps Russell Crowe was born in New Zealand and then moved to Australia. Oh, well. 19/20 is still decent.

(I was asking Marc about that Russian hockey player, Alexander Ovechkin, because I thought his picture was cute and then Ben and Brock tried to convince me that he's super intimidating and scary because I guess they don't want me to think he's cute. But he is cute, isn't he? At least in that picture. Marc says he probably only has about three teeth, though.)

Round Three:

This was actually a pretty good round. A lot of the time, the third round is very difficult and we don't do well, but Siri killed it with her knowledge of Disney World, Brock and Ben knew some stuff about Google, Ben pulled Jack Harlow out of thin air, Siri loves Hamilton and therefore knew In the Heights, and pretty much everyone knew Amy Schumer. We lost a bonus or two, but did alright overall.

6-4-2:

Fortunately, we waited for the four-point clue because that was the ticket we needed to figure out San Antonio is really good at basketball.

Round Four:

For the most part, this was a terrible horrible no good very bad round because planets? No thank you. But Marc did know that Kent State's mascot is the Golden Flash and he said it (the first time) with this smug assuredness that was absolutely priceless. And then that confidence wore off and he started second guessing himself but we still went with his first statement and it was right so we got the bonus.

Final:

Going into the final question, we were in third place. And then the final question was stupid and we had to have Adam legitimately spell part of the question because a lot of teams couldn't understand what he was saying and I still don't really understand what the question was other than that the name of a drink owned by CocaCola can be translated to "Little Mole." And we got it wrong and didn't place.

Congratulations to el Duderino who came in first and chose The Legend of Zelda as next week's opening category.

PS Sorry if there are mistakes in this, Mom. I didn't proofread it because I didn't feel like writing it in the first place. I've got a novel to finish!