Sandy in Full Force 
In honor of all my peeps hunkerin’ down up there on the East Coast this week (I love you bro, go NYC??), I thought I’d recount a bit of Nina’s Adventures in Hurricane Un-preparedness. In which I survive a week without power in the sweltering Houston summer on nothing but wine and the kindness of strangers. With a parenthetical side-note on hurricane preparedness in the Big Sleazy. Omg two posts in one week, whatever shall my followers do! Prepare to shit yourselves, please…
I am SO awesome when I sing the BA.
Bad things happen to me when I sing in public. This is no longer a randomized sample, it is a well-correlated, concrete fact. Case in point: my most recent experience of karaoke involved a well-meaning accomplice (I love you, Susan!) and a sadly put-upon Balinese guitarist who unwittingly invited disaster when he suggested that the two drunk Americanos currently funding the entire bar might want to accompany him onstage. By “stage” I mean the small corner area in which he was (badly) attempting to cover (bad) American rock songs. His “songbook” consisted of a collection of painstakingly hand-written transcriptions of his “favorite” songs, with some minimal musical notation, clearly culled from intensive radio-listening time. His vocal ability notwithstanding, these “translations” were a bit, shall we say, loose, and mainly consisted of a number of choruses without verse. After filling the request / tip jar repeatedly and heckling loudly when the only other patrons in this open-air cantina dared to suggest a different song, I think he just figured it’d be easier to get our drunk asses up there with him. We complied. And we sang. We both, in entirely novel and incompatible ways, forgot nearly every lyric to American Pie. Then we sang our favorite Stones song, which was not in fact the Stones song that he was playing. And then the bar emptied…
Just a typical road race in the ATX…
So I’m running a 12k in a couple weeks (yes, a 12k, wtf Oz, get your road race distances right!), which got me thinking about the very first race I ever ran. It was an accident, really, I hadn’t run in years and totally got suckered into it and, yes it’s true, I ran it dead drunk. But I finished! And then there was cake 
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Ooooo, Caaaaaanadaaaaa…
Once upon a time, a lowly graduate student (yes, me) got lucky. Her illustrious dissertation advisor (so ruggedly handsome and casually profane, he is) actually ponied up like, a dollar for her to attend an international paleontological conference (yes, like Ross on Friends, fuck that goddam show)! And so she packed her bags, prepared her presentation, grabbed her passport, and boarded her jetplane. And our fearless heroine flew and flew, crossing borders and time zones, to head once more into the grand unknown. And at what fabulous sunny locale did she alight? That’s right! Fucking Canadia. Ah well, at least it was free…
It’s 5:30 am, I’ve been asleep for about two hours, and I am completely beyond fucked up. This is unfortunate, ’cause I’m supposed to be driving about 30 unpleasant paleontology students to the field for some fossil prospecting in about 30 minutes. I can’t get a ride to school ’cause my ride is in a worse state than I (it’s true, bless his heart), and I’m thinking I may be too incapacitated to figure out the bus. I know, I’ll bike! About 20 minutes and, say, three whole miles later (so I’m a little wobbly and confuddled, so what…), at least I’m there on time. This is when it dawns on me that I totally can’t drive, the professor I’m slaving for is narcoleptic so there’s no way in fuck I’m riding with him, and it’s shaping up to be about 110 degrees out today. Balls.
Best. Souvenir. Ever??
After about three days meandering around Transylvania, trying to avoid more tacky Dracula-themed tourist shit than any self-respecting tourist should be forced to avoid (although yes, I did indeed purchase the above… but it’s adorable!), it occured to us that our hostel offered something much more amazing sounding. You know how you roll into hostels all over the world, and there’s invariably a notice board with stupid signs for “amazing” deals, used / abused camping gear, and package excursions that surely would show you amazing sights un-dreamed-of by any previous traveler while never EVER ripping you off? And it doesn’t matter if you’re in Abu Dhabi or Paris or Idaho, everything up there always sucks? Well, the Rolling Stone Hostel in Brasov, Romania, is the glaring exception. (This hostel is fabulous, btw, fairlyy adorable, fairly fun, and really fucking cheap. Also it’s purple: http://www.rollingstone.ro/). They offer the regular Dracula Tourism crap, yeah, but they also have an add for their famous Transylvanian Bear-Watching Night, which clearly could not be passed up. And that’s basically how I found myself in a stranger’s car with a couple crazy Romanians and my perfect travelling buddy (I love you, Chris!), drunk on crappy Romanian beer, faced with the choice of getting: a) pepper-sprayed in the face or b) mauled by a Carpathian brown bear. Read the rest of this entry
the spicy little buggers in the wild
It’s a hot summer’s night, somewhere outside Monterrey, Mexico, and I’ve somehow misadvisedly entered myself into a chili-eating contest. Specifically, a Chili Pequin eating contest. Not like, a habañero, or a jalapeño, or anything you know, bland, no, that would not do. Instead I’ve managed to stuff like 47 of the hottest little buggers ever down my throat, and am now being egged on by a pit-crew of geologists (yes, yes, I am indeed debauching myself on a work trip. AGAIN), to which I say “Bring it! I will destroy your chili-eating record!” I know I’ve said this before, but this can’t end well… Read the rest of this entry
So I was unemployed for a while a couple years ago (and it was bloody FABULOUS, lemme tell ya…). In the interim, I did some interesting things, like: Nap. Read (I got a library card, promise). Catch up on the Netflix. Travel the world Work for the Census Bureau, countin the homeless by night (turns out they pay $25/hr? who knew!). Anyway, then this job app came up, and it was perfect… Read the rest of this entry
