MacGyver Moments

***Dear Readers,

Who’d have thunk that blogging would be such hard work? Needless to say, an update has been overdue. This is a belated update that I meant to post last week (ie the last week in June) instead of this week (ie the first entire week in July). Yikes. I’ll try to do a better job keeping you up to date in the next few weeks. With that, enjoy this older, yet still entirely enjoyable, blog post.***

Here’s the experiences from the past week, as outlined in an easy to understand format.

Bad Things:

-This heatwave! Minnesota is having hot flashes.

 

Good things:

-New AC unit

-Bike Lights!

-The world’s largest pepper mill

-Good times with new roomie B.Ryba

 

I will admit, it was a bit of a trick to get that new AC unit working. Apparently, there’s a small rubber stopper that you need to prevent the air conditioner from dripping water all over the place.

I first realized something was wrong once I stepped into the big puddle of water that had collected on my bedroom floor. I took the AC unit in the bathroom and cursed my rotten luck.

My mom called shortly after to inform me that I had managed to leave the plug behind. She dropped in the mail for me that day, but in the mean time I needed to cool my bedroom. I took a quick inventory of makeshift plug materials I had in the house. No putty, no sealants, no corks, no nothin’. With no help in sight and a sweltering, restless bedtime fast approaching, I had nothing left to do but improvise.

I grabbed a potato out of the pantry, took a few Qtips from the bathroom, and in a jiffy I MacGyvered myself a makeshift plug.

Fix an air conditioner. Just one of the many things you can do with a potato and a Qtip. You can’t make this stuff up.

My first day of work

For those of you who didn’t know, I started my new job today.

Despite all of my nervousness and pre-job jitters the night before, the first day passed fairly uneventfully. It was mostly introductions and housekeeping kinds of things today, with the majority of the training kickin’ into gear later in the week.

I had been meaning to blog about my four day trip to Boulder that I got back from last week, but I got lazy and before I knew it, today happened.

I went out to Colorado to go visit my good friend Brennan. We had some good times, a couple of beers, and a few good hands of gin rummy. He and his roommate Casey were kind enough to let me stay at their place the whole time – so here’s my shoutout to the good folks in Boulder.

Much “adieu” about college

Last Sunday was my graduation ceremony. Despite my best efforts to sit next to my good friend Tommy T, fate was a fickle lady that morning. We ended up getting split up, he in the row in front of me, sitting on the exact opposite aisle. Such is life.

 

The following day we decided to finalize my graduation by completing another tradition, the throwing of the shoes. Monday morning, Scotty and I headed over to West Bank to hurl an old pair of my shoes into a tree. Not just any tree, but a very specific, very special, shoe tree.

Nobody really knows why the shoe tree got started, but I felt like graduation was cause enough for me to join in on the fun. Scott, with camera at the ready, snapped photos as I chucked my old Sketchers into the shoe tree.

He was still snapping photos as my shoes bounced off of the limb I was aiming for and plummeted to the landscaped underpass below. I figured that I couldn’t give up that easily, so we went down beneath the bridge to collect the shoes and rethink our strategy. Note my terribly pouty expression. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once we were back at bridge level, it hit me that I just had to throw smarter, not harder. On the second try, I lobbed my shoes up to the very tippy-top of the tree.

 

They landed on the top-most branch, wrapping themselves securely around it.

I felt pretty good about that second toss. Even if I hadn’t caught them on that branch, there would have been every other branch below it for them to land upon.

I think the message of this story pretty much sums up what I’ve learned in my time at the U of M. 

If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Rethink your strategy, and aim higher than you did the first time. As long as you have the heart to keep trying, you can’t lose.