lights will guide you home / and ignite your bones

Last night I walked outside at 6:50 to get in my car and go to my 7:00 class. UHCL is only 5 minutes away, and my professor is always 10 minutes late, so I had plenty of time. Plenty of time, that is, until my garage door opener wouldn’t work!!

This has to rank up there with “the dog ate my homework” as one of the more far-fetched excuses for being late to class, but it was actually true. The damn garage door opener would not open my garage door and I had no way of getting to my car! I have two openers, but the other one is in my car…in the garage. What to do, what to do…

I first called the apartment complex. The office was closed, but they have an after-hours emergency service that answers. I explained the problem and the man told me he’d page maintenance. We hung up. I decided to call Becca, who was still at work but was nice enough to come get me. While she was on her way, my neighbor came out to walk her dogs and I had the thought (don’t know why I didn’t have it earlier) to borrow the battery from her door opener. Well, it still didn’t work. Not a dead battery problem, but the opener itself.

After she memorized the bit flips for her door, we changed the switches in her opener to match mine and voila! The door opened! Hooray, my car was freed! By this time it was 7:05 and on my way out I stopped to talk to Becca, who had reached the gate to my complex. Sorry for making you drive over Becca, but thanks! Then the apartment complex people called back and said maintenance could come but that it’d cost $45 or something. What a load of crap.

Off I sped to class, arriving around 7:20 and walking into the middle of the first critique. Our latest assignment was to make a set of bottle labels, and last night was the night to present them and hear comments and suggestions. I did a wine bottle, which was very unoriginal but I had a good reason for it: I know basically nothing about wine, and so when I buy it, I tend to buy bottles with pretty labels. For this project I went to Kroger and found a bottle of wine (a 2001 Shiraz from southeastern Australia) with a completely hideous label, and redesigned it. The name of the wine is Didgeridoo, so I had a lot of fun. Here’s my label (the circle goes on top of the cork):

And here are a couple photos of it on the bottle (taken with my new Razr phone, woo!):

The coolest part was the end of class when our professor gave everyone a purple post-it and a yellow post-it and we got to “vote” on which bottles we liked best, purple for most professional and yellow for overall favorite. It was a way of giving semi-anonymous pats on the back. I got 10 stickies total — six purple stickies for most professional-looking and four stickies for overall favorite. Since there are only 18 people in class, that’s 36 post-its to be divided among 18 bottles — and I got 10 of them! That’s almost a third! (And no, I didn’t vote for myself.)

I was pretty happy about that. There were some other very creative designs, more creative than mine in terms of content. I find that I tend towards creating things that look more polished and professional and less fun and fanciful. I think that’s why I got more purple stickies than yellow. Either way, I left class feeling really good. It’s always nice to know that what you create is appreciated by others.

I came home from class and baked 5 dozen owl cookies, much to the delight and satisfaction of all my coworkers at today’s LSO hot dog day. (The LSO’s make hot dogs. We all eat them for lunch. That’s really about all there is to it.)

In 3.5 hours I report for duty as a photo runner at the WORLD SERIES! WOOOOOOOOOOO!