Ah, the Conveniences

So some of you may know I value convenience, that I appreciate things that have ease of use in mind. Well, I suppose that might be a bit disingenuous, to call a spade, a spade, let's just be forthright and say I'm lazy. This of course, comes to no surprise to those that have spent more than 15 minutes with me. My latest accomplishment in effort efficiency (or is that deficiency?) dispenses soap.

A long time ago I bought this stylish liquid soap dispenser from Bed, Bath and Beyond but after just a year of use the bottom became unglued from the body of the dispenser and leaked soap everywhere. It was quite a mess, well, it was as much of a mess as soap could be anyway. Moral of the story, no matter how svelte a soap dispenser looks, buy only those whose body comes in one piece construction, not glued together like your popsicle bridge from high school.

For a long time I put off buying a new soap dispenser, mostly because of my aforementioned mastery of the human 1s orbital. Did I go around with unwashed hands you ask? No, certainly not! Luckily my super-sized soap refill tub (it would be an injustice to call it a mere bottle) came with a free disposable soap dispenser. For the time being I used that, but I was annoyed by both its unsightly-ness and its lack of weight, making it prone to slip away when applying pressure.

While I was unsatisfied with the solution, I really couldn't be bothered to purchase a better one at the time so I just made do. Until that is, I saw an advertisement for the (cue angelic chorus...) automatic soap dispenser! That's right, using infrared technology it will dispense a user-specified, perfect dollop of soap each and every time you put your hand under the nozzle, automatically! No pumps, no effort, just pure easy, soapy bliss! I was in the store so fast when I went to pay for it I had to call my bank to verify my identity. Yeah, that's right, I'll expend uncharacteristic amounts of energy from time to time, especially when it's to enable myself to be that much lazier because of it. It's an investment in lazy. :)

RIP Vanilla

Vanilla died today. I noticed that she seemed unwell this morning. She waited until I got home from work today and then gasped a few last words to me in my hands as I tried to make her as comfortable as possible before she finally passed. She put a lot of effort into weakly opening her eyes and moving her mouth. I know she loved me. And I her. She was my friend. I knew this day would eventually come, she has been getting older and suffered from more and more ailments and frailties. But I find that I am still unprepared for this event.

I have no words to convey at this moment. She was a beautiful hamster. And though she was tempermental with me, always biting my finger when we first met, she and I quickly warmed to each other. I didn't play with her as much as I should have but she was my friend and kept me company at home. She listened to me and shared in my joys and sorrows. She was always curious, always active, and had a great personality. She always loved to sleep in and sleep often, in that respect, we were kindred. She also loved her Yoshinoya. Each time I brought home a beef bowl I would make sure to give her a helping of the rice. She would wake up for Yoshinoya. She was unique.

I can only hope her time with me was happy. I am hardly qualified to take care of myself but I did the best I could. I hope she looked back on her life during her last moments with us and didn't find too many regrets.

You left your imprint on my heart and soul Vanilla and brought happiness into my life. Thank you. Thank you so very much. Rest in peace.

Emma on Fire

This will only get one sentence in spite of being the title of today's entry: Emma Watson as Hermoine, in her ball gown was beautiful.

Not too much over the weekend, UCLA football didn't play (3 bye weeks in a row,) and UCLA basketball is now 3-0 on the season so that's good. USC almost lost to Fresno State and the Lakers dropped another game, this time to the Bulls. It's getting to be more frustrating that it was last year. Kobe is playing well and from what I can see doing everything he can. He just needs a legitimate second option. Back to the world of Bruins football, I hope they are practicing hard and come out of the 3 week bye well prepared as opposed to rusty. Here's to December 3rd.

I'm going to try and get a Xbox 360 tomorrow. I wasn't going to before but after seeing a demo unit and knowing that I'm definately going to want a few games on the system anyway I figure I might as well try to get it on launch day. I thought about waiting until the price drops but consider that the Xbox is still $150, I'm not sure how much the price of the 360 will drop when the PS3 comes out. Plus, this is why I work right? So I can reap the fruits of my labor. Reap the High Definition fruits of my labor. :)

The dead of Fall

It seems as I get older the faster the holiday season zooms by. I'm not really ready to move past Halloween yet and Thanksgiving is nearly upon us. I'm definately not ready for Christmas yet (shopping procrastination,) and while technically I don't need to do anything to be 'ready' for New Year's I'd like to have some plans one of these years to go with the time off I take each year. What to do though? Like it or not, here comes Santa Claus.

In the everyday-department, my UCLA Bruins are back on the winning track after last week's disaster. The offense showed up this weekend, and as it turns out, last week's defense showed up too - that is to say, nobody showed up to play defense. However our offense is better than our defense is terrible so we won the game 45-35. So all in all, it was an exciting football game. Drew Olson went 22-27 510 yards and 5 touchdowns. How crazy is that? They finally started using Marcedes Lewis like they should have been for the past 4 years. When you have a tight end that's as fast as a wide-reciever, as tall as a basketball player and as strong as a lineman how do you not throw to him every down? He had an amazing catch of an underthrown ball where he literally reached over the top of his defender and took the ball out of his hands while still staying inbounds. It would have otherwise been an interception. So Yay, 9-1 and we've got the next 3 weeks off to prepare for USC.

In the particularly-sappy deparment, I may never know why but I've always been a bit of a sucker for romantic comedies. Perhaps it's just I like comedies in general, but for whatever reason I will find myself watching 'Sleepless in Seattle' as often as I am watching 'Die Hard'. Sometimes I wish I could hate them, but I really can't. Wish I knew why. I am mentioning this because I found myself watching two romantic comedies simultaneously this weekend, both of which I had already seen before. In more exciting news, Harry Potter 4 is coming out Friday. Can't wait to see Emma, I mean, the movie.

And just like that...

It's all over. Arizona defeated my UCLA Bruins soundly today. No amount of miracles would be able to save us today as we never found our defense or offense. So now I just hope we can bounce back from this and not let it take us into a spiral. This is where coaching is extremely crucial. I hope coach Dorrell can find some motivation for the players. Hopefully the team can soon figure out what it is they need to do to get some early sucesses. This team has still exceeded all of my preseason expecatations and I expect them to have the character to dig deep bounce back from this.

Let's go out there and play hard next week boys.