TGIF!

This past week was my first week back at school.  I am so in love with all of my classes!  Well, at least I think I am.  We'll see how my Acoustics of Speech and Hearing class goes.  That one may be tricky—the word "physics" was mentioned today (never a good sign in my book!)  But other than that maybe, I really do love going to school.  But I have to say, I am exhausted tonight!  My class schedule isn't that heavy (only 14 hours this semester—up to this point I've been taking 17), but my body still thinks it's Winter break and doesn't want to wake up before 10 or go to sleep before midnight or 1.  This makes for a very sleepy Emily.  So TGIF!

Source: photoblip.com via Jess on Pinterest

To celebrate, how about a little....

If you want to participate, answer the questions on your own blog and link up here.

1.  Where do you hide the really good snacks?

I try really hard not to keep snacks around my apartment.  I generally don't snack that much, but if the mood strikes me and I have "snacky stuff" around, I will start snacking and won't be able to stop myself, so I've learned it's just best to not keep stuff around.  But when I do have really good snacks, I keep them (tightly sealed) in my bedside table.  Right now, I think I've got rice cakes, Lance crackers, and dark chocolate chips there, but I don't touch them much.  I'm more likely to grab a bowl of honey nut cheerios or make half a sandwich than reach under the bedside table.

2. Do you keep your vehicle clean?

I try really hard to keep my car clean.  I am really lucky to have the car that I have, so it's important for me that I take care of it and keep it clean.  Plus, I like to think of my car as a "decompression zone" of sorts.  Somedays, my commute to and from work/school is the only time that I can relax (not too much, of course!) without having to focus on school or obligations.  Just me and my XM radio.  But if my car is messy, it stresses me out.  

That being said, there are usually one or two empty/partially empty diet coke cans in my car.  

3. Have you ever been to Vegas?

No.  And normally I would have no desire to go to Las Vegas, but I love The Beatles and would love to see Cirque de Soleil's Love.

4.  Warm room/light blankets or cold room/warm snuggly blankets?

That's a really tough question for me!  But I think I'm going to go with cold room/warm snuggly blankets.  I hate the cold, but I think waking up in the middle of the night burning up is the worst.  At least you can add blankets when you're cold.  

5. What is the worst flying/airplane experience you've ever had?

Oh my goodness...this is a long one.

I was 16 when Hurricane Gustav hit my humble town of Baton Rouge.  My neighborhood was hit pretty bad and we weren't projected to get power back for 21 days.  I stayed home with my parents for the first week.  Once they had to go back to work,  flew up to Charlotte, NC to visit my grandmother for a week because school wasn't supposed to start back up for at least another week and I didn't want to sit at home for a week staring at my toes with no electricity.  Unfortunately, the day I was supposed to fly back from Charlotte, Hurricane Ike made landfall in Louisiana and Texas.  I made it to Memphis for my connecting flight just fine, then boarded the plane to New Orleans, which took off and was expected to arrive on time.  But once we got to New Orleans, we hit really awful turbulence and couldn't land immediately because of wind shears.  We flew around in circles over New Orleans until our fuel got low enough that we either had to land or fly back to Memphis, so we headed back to Memphis.  Mean while, unbeknownst to me, my parents are on the phone with the airline frantically trying to get information about the flight and panicking because the airline is telling them my flight never even took off and that I must have "wandered out of the airport" because I wasn't responding to their pages (Yes, the airline LOST an entire flight of people).  We get back to Memphis and are told that we will have to get in line to try to get on the next and last flight to New Orleans.  Lucky for me, my parents pulled the "Unaccompanied Minor" card and got the airline to bump someone on the flight so I could get home.  So I went to the gate (which was located right across from a karaoke bar—What genius thought that an airport would be a good place for a karaoke bar?) and waited.  After a couple of hours, they page me at the gate desk, where I find a very annoyed looking airport employee asking me why I didn't answer any pages all afternoon.  She didn't quite know what to say when I told her that I couldn't answer pages when I'm 30,000 feet in the air.  But she took me to the room to UMs and told me that the flight to New Orleans most likely wouldn't be leaving and that I should probably fly back to Charlotte and try flying back after the storm passed.  So then she took me to the plane to Charlotte, where I had to get on before everyone else.  Once we landed in Charlotte, they wouldn't let me off the plane because I was a UM.  It took me about 15 minutes to convince the flight attendant that, yes, I was in fact competent enough to find my way out of an airport without any hand holding and would he please let me go before I lost my ever loving mind?  

So, long story short, in the span of a day, I flew from Charlotte to Memphis, then to New Orleans, flew in circles over New Orleans for 45 minutes, then back to Memphis and back to Charlotte.

My gosh, just writing that makes me want to kick an airplane.