College Colors Day at Mizzou

Today was College Colors Day all across the US. Mizzou participated by having departments dress up in black and gold and take pictures of the staff. We did it. I was surprised at how many participated in our office! Our business manager is really into the event and was sharing pictures from her last few years in another department. She got everyone kind of excited about it and then made the picture all decorated and submitted it to the NCAA for some reason. Here are many of the staff, (plus, Charlie, our wooden ultimate frisbee dog) showing our black and gold pride:

Jeneva decided to title the photo "Historical Spirit".
She's very into this event and we were all happy to support her enthusiasm.

Maggie and Erika chilling out with Charlie, the ultimate frisbee dog. 

Mizzou spirit back at home.

(As an aside: I love that shirt I'm wearing! I found it on clearance and wasn't sure why it wasn't being bought? It was at the student center and maybe people on campus aren't that into the vintage vibe of the shirt or something. I think it's great and I got several compliments on it today! I'm still doing my $30.00 clothing challenge that I began last May. Most all of my 'new' clothes are just new-to-me, as I buy a lot of my clothing secondhand. But, this shirt is actually New! As in, no previous owner! Even on clearance, I think I paid too much for it, but I'm happy with it! And the $30.00 challenge is going swimmingly. Four months in and I've had zero problems and really no desire to even buy anything over $30.00. Shoes are the most difficult things to find under $30, but I've managed to find a pair of Fall boots and a pair of Summer sandals. I had to throw out my running shoes, and those are kind of an issue now that I don't have running shoes...but maybe some giant sale will happen and I'll find some fantastically cheap and well-made running shoes? Eh? A girl can dream.)

Up in here, up in here.

This morning when everyone was heading to work on campus, there was a bit of excitement when a steer got loose and began running through campus and downtown. It had jumped the fence from a slaughterhouse and was trying to be free, I guess. It did get to run free for about an hour and see campus and some of downtown. Police, Vet School staff, and the owner were all running around trying to catch it, but when it ran over one of the people trying to catch it outside of a parking garage, I think they probably decided they had to kill it before it hurt anybody else. The animal actually got away for a while but it came back and they killed it in a backyard near campus. I decided to go into work early today and so I missed out on the entire thing. It would have been going on when I would have been normally trying to walk through campus to work. I was glad to miss it. As a general rule of life, I prefer to steer (ahaha, see what I did there?) clear of animals that weigh over a ton when they're scared and wandering around in unfamiliar places.

I'm trying my hand at making my own artwork. I found some canvases on sale at Joann's Fabrics and bought some cheapo acrylic paint. It's not worked out quite as I had hoped, but it's going to be okay. I've got only one canvas mostly done right now. It's got the final line from an e. e. cummings poem on it. It just reads "I carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)" and it should add some nice color to whichever room it ends up in. It's not too large. I have one larger canvas and one that's the same size as this first one. I'm debating the next verses or lines to put on the other canvases. A proverb? Another line from a poem? A song lyric? A quote? Not too sure yet. When I get all three finished, I might share them on here. It's not been as easy as I had hoped it would be because I thought that scrapbook stickers of the alphabet would stick to the canvas rather easily. Then I'd just paint it, let it dry, and peel the stickers off and voila! The words would be perfectly visible and beautiful and what not. Oh, silly Jill. It didn't work like that at all. The stickers didn't stick very well and kept moving when I'd paint over them. Then when I would get the paint on them, they wouldn't peel off after the paint dried. So, the first one is actually okay-looking, but not exactly crisp and perfect. It's sort of crooked and stuff. It really wouldn't be a craft by me if it had come out all perfect, though. Everything looks so easy on Pinterest, you know? All those super crafty people making super duper crafts all the time.

I only have a couple of days left of my job. I've been slowly moving things around and cleaning up this and that. I'm only moving across the building, but I hadn't realized how much stuff I had put all over my cubicle in just the 18 months that I've been working at this position. This morning, when cleaning out a drawer, I found 4 mix cds that I brought in the first month that I worked there. I had completely forgotten about them. After listening to a couple of them, I was reminded of some of the songs I was digging 18 months ago. Lots of cheery, upbeat songs that were great for cubicle cleaning and chair dancing this morning. So, thanks to my past self of a year or so ago when I dumped those cds in that drawer and promptly forgot about them until my present day self re-discovered them!

I'm waiting for the fourth game of the NBA Finals to come on tv tonight. I'm not a fan of the tv scheduling that they're doing. I don't like that the weekday games begin at 8. I can't stay up til 10 to see the end of the games. I'm an early-to-bed person now. I usually just make it to halftime and then find out the result the next morning. I'd really like the Thunder to win. It's kind of frustrating to go to bed at halftime with them ahead and then wake up in the morning and hear that they lost it. Boo.

C'mon Durant and fellow Thundery people! I need to keep my mind for a wee bit longer.

Live, you don't have to look back, but if you ever do, you know where I'm at.

So, Albert Pujols is moving to LA to play for the Angels. I'm glad it's an American League team and we won't have to play him all that often. I like the Angels. I like all the California teams. Well, I like them all plus I feel really sorry for the Dodgers. I'm not sure what will happen to that team. But, back to Albert: I think this is a pretty cushy job. He can be a DH on that team and in that way, they might get 10 years out of him. Maybe. If he doesn't have to play first base and bat in the same game? I think it works out well for him. The Cardinals couldn't have afforded to keep him for that long because he would have to play defense and it would have been a sad sight to see him get traded or something. I think I prefer to see him leave like this. He and LaRussa together. After Pujols is done with baseball, I hope he returns to St. Louis. I like to think he would come back to us.

I got an e-mail request to complete a survey from MU regarding my post-graduation plans. It was multiple choice. Under the question of post-graduation plans, the given choices were:

Do volunteer work.

Start a family.

That was it. Two possible answers. What the hell? What about 'Work Full-time', 'Travel', 'Take Up New Hobbies'? Or 'None of the above', at the very least? I had to scroll to the top and make sure this was actually MU's survey and not Baylor's.

I finally saw Mizzou play basketball on Tuesday night. I was in class at a pizza place and they had the game on TV. MU vs. Villanova in NYC. It was good. I hadn't had a chance to catch any of MU's bball games this season. I plan to go to at least one in the coming weeks, and I knew they were doing really well, but it was fun to get to see them in action. They look fantastic. So far, so good, boys! Basketball is definitely my favorite collegiate sport.

I'm on the lookout for a graduation outfit. I'm not sure if I really want to buy a dress for it. I have several dresses that I could probably make some sort of funky winterish celebratory outfit out of. I might have one of those fashion show evenings tonight. You know what I mean? Where you basically pull everything out of your closet and try as many things on to come up with different combos and see what looks hideous and what turns out to look totally awesome? I'm hoping to lean toward more of the 'totes awesome' side.

So long to a good Tiger coach.

So, it was announced yesterday evening that Mizzou's basketball coach, Mike Anderson, was leaving to take the head coaching job at Arkansas. He's from there and there had been tons of speculation that he was going to take the job. I wish him well. It sounds like Arkansas is in need of help and Anderson is a good guy for that kind of job. I always liked the Razorbacks, as well. So, good luck, Coach!

I really admire the man because he stepped in after Quin Snyder attempted to crush the program and left it in rubble. Anderson came in and built a decent program out of that rubble and I'll always admire anyone who does that. For me, I'll cheer on Coach Anderson wherever he's coaching. I'm not sure what's going to happen to our team now, though. Many of the guys on the team were the kids of personal friends of Anderson and the entire team seemed like a big family. Losing the head of a family is obviously not something easily overcome. Also, the way the team plays is different than your typical college basketball team. The guys play a style in which everyone plays no more than maybe 15 minutes total per game and they rely on pushing the other teams to the breaking point by being really fast and forcing turnovers. I'm not sure how a new coach coming in with a typical style of play where they only want to play 5 or 6 guys tops the whole game is going to work with this group. It's back to the drawing board, I guess? I just hope the tiger fans who are mad, stop being mad and start realizing what an honor it was to have the man come and coach at Mizzou. If they can't remember what it was like with Quin Snyder at the helm, they probably can't appreciate the awesome job that Mike Anderson did here. Tiger fans want a coach that comes and stays for decades like Norm Stewart did, but how realistic is that? Not very. Let's stop with the anger and just focus on finding a new coach using Mike Anderson as the example of who we want. Please please please, don't let us end up with someone like Quin Snyder again, though. Good lord. I don't think we could really handle that. I would turn from the happy tiger cubs at the beginning of this post into something more like this tiger at the end of this post.