Brandon Notices

I was cooking myself a hot dog and was pulling out a bun for the hot dog when I noticed something odd. You know the tag thing that keeps the hot dog bag closed? It has the expiration date printed on it, but it says FEB29. Now wait a minute! There is no February 29 this year! Does this mean that the hot dog buns do not expire until the leap day next year?

We took a family trip to Chevy's tonight and before we ordered, Mom showed the waiter a coupon she was planning to use, but he interruped her to say, "Actually, ma'am, we're not accepting coupons tonight because of..." something unintelligible. When we asked him to repeat himself, he said that it's President's Day and it's a holiday so they aren't taking any coupons.

After he left, I was cracking up because it was a rather sorry excuse not to take a coupon. I mean, the place seemed to have just as many customers as normal. Dad said that it isn't really a holiday if you have to wait tables all night.

I stopped at a snack machine in the basement of Mary Gates Hall just a few minutes ago; I saw some of the Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles in the machine, but was very frustrated to see that they were positioned behind two bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. I am of the opinion that snack machine fillers should NOT do this to me! I don't like spicy Cheetos. I left without buying anything.

When we went to New York for the Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 launch last week, we got gift bags containing lots of excellent items, including awesome mousepads! The mousepads have an image of the new Windows Vista logo.

Since each of us got a gift bag and since not everyone in the family needs a mousepad, I have a second mousepad hanging on the wall in my room! Why? Because it looks cool. It is serving as a souvenir.

Just ten minutes ago, I was just sitting on a bench near Frosh Pond, minding my own business, eating the last of my Doritos when a mallard jumped out of the pond and walked across the pathway and stood within a yard of the bench. "Sorry, duck," I said. I didn't have any more Doritos—I had just finished them off. And even if I did have any, I wouldn't give him any because I can't imagine Doritos being very good for ducks.

But he just sat there, looking at me. I tucked my empty bag of Doritos into my backpack and the duck just kept standing there. Eventually, he turned 90 degrees to his left, but I could still see him eyeing me. Then shortly after that, he turned 90 more degrees so that his back was toward me. But his head was still turned so he could eye me. Then he made a brown watery duck poo and continued to stand there. This is the point during which I got up and walked away from the duck.

My cat's been glaring at me. What can I do to get him to stop it?

We decorated the living room for Christmas yesterday and today. We moved the sofas into more an an "enclosing" arrangement to allow access to the fireplace.



I was totally in charge of assembling the artificial tree and hanging ornaments, but the tree is very much the same as it's looked in previous years, except there are more lights (there's 300 bulbs). I love my new Jelly Belly tree ornament. I found it at Cost Plus--they happen to have a lot of Jelly Belly stuff there.

I also created the construction paper chain that lines most of the room. It took me several hours to complete. I made most of it watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I found the secret to making the chains look good is to use only two colors and to make thick, tight chain links.

It's very windy outside. I was just walking to the HUB from my chem lecture and a big gust of wind caught the blue canopy tent of a group set up outside (to hand out study bibles). The canopy blew completely upside-down. It looked like it was going to strike a couple people, but it didn't. They fixed the canopy and it looks like no harm was done.