The past few days have been interesting. With Karen gone over the weekend, I found myself at times bored out of my mind, and at others occupied in some of the strangest ways…

Take for instance Thursday night. While a lot of my friends were hanging out at D201 (University Village apartment of Rhett, Zach, Dennis and Chris) apparently giving Zach a mullet I was uninformed, sitting in my room playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. (Note that the link is to a Facebook photo; those of you without a Facebook account won’t be able to see it.)

But then on Friday I went to lunch at La Canasta with Joe Caldwell, something we haven’t done since our first summer on campus (I think.) I spent a good part of the afternoon working on a Powersearch It! widget for one of the Weldon Library’s Web pages. It was the most complicated coding I’ve had to do in a while. Nothing at UTM requires that much work.

Friday night I successfully made plans to head to D201 to hang out and play video games with the guys (at which point I saw Zach’s mullet in person…) We got in some good Super Smash Bros. Brawl before watching Battlestar Gallactica (I was completely lost.)

Then things got more interesting on Saturday. Blair and I helped Dad put up a new set of attic stairs to the attic in my parents’ house. We all almost died at one point or another. In case you didn’t know – attic stair units are basically all one piece and very heavy. When we got the old one out (hard enough) we then had to lift the new one through the hole in the ceiling vertically and then angle it around to fit in the hole correctly. While doing this we found out that 1) the hole wasn’t cut perfectly by whomever back when the house was built, so the hole was slightly snug, and 2) Blair’s head and my right hand are really strong.

Because the hole wasn’t exactly perfect, one end of the stairs’ frame wouldn’t fit into the hole. This caused it to fall on Blair’s head at one point (he was standing on some makeshift scaffolding directly underneath the opening.) While Blair was readjusting the scaffolding a few minutes after that, Dad decided to hammer at the snug end and that was all it took to loosen the entire opening. Since it was staying so perfectly, nobody was keeping the stairs in place and I barely caught the falling attic door/stairs with my right hand. Guess my fingers are stronger than I thought. Must be from all the video game playing.

So there’s a public service announcement for all of you: Play video games. It might just save your life.