I know a spot that i love full well

Even though my beloved Wildcats lost to Bulter in the Elite Eight, I gotta say I'm still proud of our dance and how we represented ourselves on the national scene. And I'm apparently not the only one.

Check out this video of the team's arrival in the Manhattan airport Saturday night. Well done boys. Thanks for going farther than KU :)

"I know a spot that I love full well

'Tis not in forest nor yet in dell;

Ever it holds me with magic spell,

I think of thee, Alma Mater.

K-S-U, we'll carry thy banner high.

K-S-U, long, long may thy colors fly.

Loyal to thee, thy children will swell the cry.

Hail, hail, hail, Alma Mater."

Who at Buffalo Wild Wings kept sending this thing into overtime!?!?

It's like walking on hot coals, except you eat them

I have several interests including, but not limited to:

• confidently making up answers to questions I don't know the real answer to to see if anyone believes me,
• storytelling,
• making people laugh and
• putting people up to challenges. Seemingly the majority of these challenges involve food or eating things, like pet fish.

My latest food challenge involved my boss and Buffalo Wild Wings' "Blazin' Wing Challenge." My boss, Cindy, is from Texas and loves hot, spicy food. If we go to a mexican restaurant she asks them to bring the hottest salsa out and I'm pretty sure she eats jalapenos like most people eat carrots. It's awesome.

So sometime this past summer it came up that she always ordered the wing sauce one notch lower than the hottest at BWW. We will now switch to a dialog format to really make you feel like you were there.

Erin: "Well, if you can do that one, you should totally do the Blazin' Wing Challenge."

Cindy: "What's that?"

Erin: "You have to eat something like 12 wings with the Blazin' wing sauce in 6 minutes"

Cindy: "Oh, easy I could do that."

Erin: "Ok, that's what I want to do for my birthday lunch next year. Please!?!?! You can spend your maternity leave training for it if you need to."

Cindy: "Alright, I'll do it."

Erin: "SERIOUSLY!?! I can't for my birthday now!"

Skip ahead 6 or so odd months later and it's time for my birthday lunch at work.

The task: Eat 12 traditional wings with the Blazin' wing sauce in 6 minutes. You have to get all the meat off the bone, but not the "gristle or cartilage" (I really am quoting there, the word cartilage make me gag so I wouldn't voluntarily use it). You cannot use any dressing, eat anything else, like fries, you cannot drink and you cannot wipe your face or hands.

Here Cindy is with her 12 wings. She made all of us smell the wings so we could sort of know what she was going to be enduring.

Here is Dave, the Regional Training Manager, announcing over the sound system that she was doing the challenge.

The first wing.

We negotiated the photos that would be taken. We could capture the first wing and at the end, but nothing in between. I also feel it's important to mention I offered her my hair band to pull her hair back, but she scoffed saying, "I'm not going to have this all over my face, amateur. I'm going to be very dainty."

And she was! Look at that, no sauce on her face. I get sauce on my ear just when I'm eating wings at a normal pace, let a lone 12 in 6 minutes!

But I digress...did she conquer the challenge or not?!!?

She nailed it in a time of 5 minutes 58 seconds.

Bravo, Boss Lady!

And if any of you readers out there are inspired now to do this challenge please do and report back. There was one guy who apparently did the challenge in 56 seconds and I'm not entirely sure how that is humanly possible.

You don't get to the Big Dance...

...without moves like these.

Let's go Cats!!!

Even Hitler is upset

Back before all this March Madness hit, K-State had a second meeting with KU in regular season play. Even though KU was on the heels of a nasty loss to Oklahoma State, and the game was in Lawrence and it was senior night, I went ahead and made a bet with my niece Kendahl, (who some how ended up a KU fan) that the loser had to get their picture taken wearing the winning teams clothing and make that their profile photo on facebook for a week.

As many of you know, we did in fact lose that game. So I would like to share some of the outtakes from that photo shoot. I was doing a really good job pouting for the camera, but the photographers kept laughing at me and it was hard to stay in character.

I felt like today was a good day to share this story because I can end by gloating that K-State is in the Sweet Sixteen and well, thanks to my new best friends Ali Farokhmanesh and "Guy with crazy chops and a really, really, really lame green shamrock tattoo on his shoulder", KU is not.

Here is a video of Hitler reacting the same way many others, presumably not KSU or Mizzou fans, did after this weekend.

Birthdays = Awesome

Ok, it's been something like two weeks since my birthday and I've yet to blog about all the ways people made me feel super special. That all changes now. Hold on tight, this might be lengthly.

I went back home to spend my birthday with Mom and let me tell you, that, was a good idea. She woke me up on Saturday morning with an actual piece of crispy bacon. (I realize I haven't been woke up a lot of different ways in my lifetime, but I'm going on the record saying being woke up with a piece of bacon to eat is easily #1 or #2).

After making my way upstairs we sat down to a Garrett Family Tradition, Birthday Breakfast! In my 28 years of life I would probably venture a guess that 22+ of my Birthday Breakfasts have consisted of french toast and crispy bacon.

We then went to Hays to do some shopping. I was in the market for pretty pots for my nearly dead indoor plants, but due to too many choices I left empty handed because I couldn't make a decision.

However, I found these awesome frog things.

I also found some possible plants that I could keep alive, Just Add Ice Orchids (just like it sounds, you give the plant 3 ice cubes a week and you have a living orchid plant) and cacti.

We then did lunch at Al's Chickenette, seriously the best fried chicken ever! If you ever find yourself in Hays America, eat there and thank me later.

Oh, and then Mom and I stopped at a place that had puppies for sale and she fell in love with this doxie puppy. I wanted her to get her and name her Clara Belle, but the dog was $250 and Mom informed me that Clara Belle was a cow's name, not a dogs name. THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT FUNNY, RIGHT!?!

I miss Clara Belle.

When I got back home to KC on Sunday I had a package, from one of my greatest friends since preschool, Alison. Inside, 48 fruit rollups!!!!

She read on one of those facebook surveys that I love fruit rollups and when she saw this box, she couldn't resist getting it for me. So let this be a lesson to all of you, that not only are survey's fun to fill out, but rewarding too.

Thank you for making me feel so special, y'alls!

There are a couple of other birthday centered activities involving a bet gone awry and the Blazin' Wing Challenge, but look for those later in the week.

It's here...and done!

Just as fast as it arrived, it's finished. The 2010 Census.

After an evening of food and drinks with Becca & Josh in from College Station, Texas (much more to blog about there). I found the 2010 Census in my mailbox! Thanks for the heads up Gleason!

Apparently, your response is required by law so I'm not sure why the government wasted so much money of tv advertisements and mail teasers, which totally worked on me.

I started my census survey at 10:43 pm and was finished by 10:47 pm. I sure do wish they would have picked me for the 4 hour census, but there is always 2020.

And remember, postage is paid for, so you have no excuse for not sending yours back right away!

Go 2010!

It's coming

The 2010 Census is almost here! Today in the mail I received this teaser telling me that the census should arrive in my mailbox sometime next week.

I can barely contain my excitement. Census Fever. Do you have it?

Happy Birthday Abby!!

Many of you fine "unfiltered nonsense" blog readers out there might know that today is my birthday. Well, believe it or not, I have the honor of sharing this special day with my awesome niece, Abby.

While eating a "birthday lunch" together we discovered that I am double her age and she is the same age I was when she was born. There was also about 3 minutes where we tried to figure out if that would ever happen again mathematically and then we talked about cow farts.

She's was the cutest chubby cheeked little girl,

and she is growing up to be a beautiful young lady and quite the artist. I couldn't be more proud of her!

Can't you totally tell which self portrait is hers? And to top it all off that is all drawn by her writing her name over and over, no straight lines, just the word abby over and over and over. Amazing, right? Also amazing is that a girl in her class looks like Marilyn Monroe, or a least that's what I thought until she told me that was actually a drawing of Marilyn, not a classmate.

A K-State fan and all around ham ;)

But watch out, she's taking her drivers test on Tuesday and I have no doubts that she'll do this when driving for reals too :)

Happy Birthday Abner! I love you!

Who ya gonna call? GEESE POLICE!

In the corporate world of suburbia we have lots of ponds and geese. I don't know why, but these stupid birds never leave and during the spring/summer months they become a real nuisance.

Most of my beef with these birds lies in the fact that they stand in the middle of the road and won't move for minutes at a time, even when you honk the horn and yell at them. It's illegal to hit them with your car and they are big enough they can scare you into submission. My secondary beef with them is that they poop in the parking lot and right in front of the door entrances to my building. There have been many mornings when I'm late for work and they or their green poop is in my way.

However, I have a co-worker that had a run in with one last year and apparently they are also a very aggressive fowl so she has this comical (but probably legitimate) fear of them. It's running joke in the office.

Guess what someone saw in the parking garage today. A truck with a canoe strapped to the top of it and the words Geese Police painted on the side of the truck. That's right. I think these birds have pissed off the wrong people and now they are going to pay.

I will now spend the rest of the day looking out my window trying to see what the Kansas City Deputy Dogs do.

If any of you out there are looking for a new career, I suggest looking into a franchise, many corporate office parks could use the services I'm sure. And as an added bonus you can have this slogan painted on your vehicle, "Call us to get the FLOCK OUT!!"

**UPDATE** It's like a geese ghost town outside now. I didn't see any of the action go down, but there are no geese to be found anywhere outside. The Geese Police don't mess around. Stay on the straight and narrow, birds.

A lesson in traditions

As many of you know, there is a very exciting game coming up in the next 20 hours or so. My beloved Kansas State Wildcats, lead by mafioso Frank Martin, will take on the KU Jayhawks.

There is already a lot of "chatter" on facebook about the upcoming game and one post featured a youtube video of the KSU student section at Bramlage (you will never hear me refer to it as the Octagon of Doom) doing the Wabash Cannonball. The quality of sound wasn't that great on that video and I was left really wanting to hear the band blast that ditty out so I went to youtube to find a better version.

Imagine my surprise when I found this:

I'm not really sure where I thought this song came from or what it was about or how it became a K-State tradition, but I did not see this coming. It was much like the feeling I had when Becca and I realized that the band's name was not Haulin' Oats, but rather two dudes names, Haul and Oats.

If anybody of importance at K-State reads this blog I would like to encourage you to make this part of orientation or at the very least offer a 1 hour credit course that covers university traditions. You should probably also closely monitor the Wabash Cannonball Wikipedia page.

To any college friends who tried at some point to impart this wisdom on me, I apologize for acting like I was listening (doesn't this seem like something Steve Kirk would have known?). Clearly you were trying to teach me something important and I should have put down the beer.