LoL#42: Just About Write!

Hmmm....

This is odd. It's November, not that there's anything specifically odd about November...besides Turkeys...turkey's are just kinda freaky...and Tofurkey is really odd but I ranted enough about that last year (see The Archive)...what I mean is that is it's pretty odd that it's almost through November already (THANKSGIVING'S TOMORROW!!!) and the last LoL I sent was sometime in early October. I could make excuses that I haven't had time to write anything but really it's more a lack of meeting between inspiration and time on the keyboard.

But as always, nothing to say has never stopped me from talking. Especially since I'm long overdue on a ton of shoutouts. First off November birthdays: Jenny , Sara M & Kristin P!!!! Woohoo!! And since Jenny's turning 20 (is that right??? Are you really gonna be 20??!!?? Dang, I feel old...) there are officially no more teenagers on this list! I have such a mature audience!! Uhh.....riiiiiiight.... And speaking of my "audience" a very special shoutout to Kris and Jason C for being added to the list!! And if you don't know what the heck this is about, don't worry, cause I really have no clue either.

But I will recap a little. There's been talk lately about what "LoL" actually stands for. Obviously it's a play on the fact that LOL is AOL-speak for "laugh out loud" (did anyone NOT know that???) but originally I declared it to mean "Life of Lisa" meaning that these messages would be all about whatever was going on in my life at present. Eventually though I realized how lame my life really was (j/k) and decided that instead of boring y'all with the details of cancer research (no we didn't cure it yet!) I would instead expand off into my crazy thoughts about life in general so I decided that it should stand for "Lisa on Life" but supposedly seeing as how infrequently I'm on the computer these days it might more accurately stand for "Lisa Online". And once again if you want to check out the back-log LOL Archive you can find it at *****edited: http://bloggerarrow.blogspot.com******

So time for random insanity which for simplicity's sake I'm just going to call randsanity. That's my new word. It means random insanity. Randsanity. Use it in a sentence at least three times today and you will help to incorporate it into everyday use. Even jiggabuns had to start somewhere! Actually a better idea would be to use it in three different sentences today. If you went around and told everyone about Lisa's randsanity of inventing the word randsanity then there would be a little too much randsanity going around.

OOH! New topic to rant about: FREE STUFF!!! I love free stuff!!! I mean I know you could argue that nothing is truly free and that even handouts come with an opportunity cost, but we're gonna throw those debates out the window and just say that free stuff is really really cool!!! The reason that I mention it is because last year during our insanely early day after Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza (I don't know if it really counts as an extravaganza, I just really like the word extravaganza) we got free radios at Target. I wonder if there will be any more cool free stuff this year, but actually I've had a string of good luck in getting some cool free stuff lately. First off last month I got to go to a free Sting concert in Grant Park. It was sponsored by American Express and they were giving out tickets at Union Station. It was really cool because they had these little "game pieces" that they handed out and they had bar codes on them that they scanned and told you if you won or not. (I'm not sure why they're called game pieces, handing me something and then scanning it is hardly a "game".) But anyway the conversation went like this:

Me: (appraoching large crowd of people in American Express T-Shirts) What's this all about?
AmEx Dude: It's a free Sting concert in Grant Park, take a game piece and I'll tell you if you won.
Me: (resisting urge to debate if scanning a paper was really a "game") Uhh...okay.
AmEx Dude: (scans card) Sorry, not a winner.
Me: So that's it?
AmEx Dude: Are you a Sting fan?
Me: Yeah he's pretty cool. I mean I'm not die hard, but hey, free concert woulda been cool.
AE D: (takes out large stack of "game" pieces) I gotta winner in here somewhere.... (scans several cards) Here's one! (hands me winning game piece) Just take that over to the guy over there and he'll get you your tickets.

Needless to say I proceeded to ask the game piece dude and the ticket guy "What's the catch???" But aside from having to give them my name and address - which will most likely ensure my receipt of AmEx junk mail for the rest of my life that I'm already inundated with anyway - there really were no strings attached and I walked out with Sting tickets and my dad and I got to go to a really cool show! And for those of you Non-Sting fans out there I have another really cool Free story. I went to see the movie Elf the other night with Tony and his family and while we were in line buying tickets a woman approached me with an invitation to a free movie screening. It was for the new Ben Affleck movie Jersey Girl and they were recruiting a test audience to view it with the editors before its release. Now I'm not really a B. Fleck fan but again it was one of those hey, it's free! moments and I figured even if it sucked big time, I wasn't paying to see it. So Tony and I showed up to watch it Monday night but I guess they overbooked the number of invitations and as we were waiting in line the managers gave us coupons for a free admission to any other show playing at the theater that night! We went to see Master and Commander instead (and although it wasn't the greatest movie, based on what I heard of Gigli, I think it's safe to assume that it was better than Jersey Girl). So yeah, free stuff is cool.

Hopefully that's enough randsanity for you all. Sorry that I've been slacking on the e-mails and even more so sorry for slacking on the shoutouts. I lost my address book so if everyone could send me a quick reply with your name, address, phone number and birthday that would be super spiffy.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Ransanityfully Yours,

lisa :)