College Memories #5: Whirlpools and Wheelchairs

The saying in the training room was that if you were never hurt as a high school athlete you'd spend all your time in the training room in college, and vice versa. I was one of the lucky ones who got to spend hours in the training room each week for therapy and treatment.

My catcher and I used to joke that we'd be in wheelchairs by the time we were 40. I have 12 years to go, and I'm not so sure we were wrong! We used to get in the whirlpools after games to help with the muscle pain. Sounds lovely, doesn't? Two close friends hanging out in the whirlpool after a game...

Yeah, well, it's not. In training room terms a whirlpool is an ice bath. Yes, an ice bath. You know which body parts I had to whirlpool? My hip flexer, hamstrings and lower back. Guess what that means? You guessed it - sitting in the stupid whirlpool with who knows how many pounds of ice swirling around. I'm surprised I still have all my toes.

College Memories #6: White Bouquet

Our sophomore year, Amy and I decided it would be good to have an air freshener for our room. I can't remember if she picked it up or if her mom did, but neither of them knew of my sensitivity to floral smells (as in, I can't stand them and they give me a headache). I thought it would be ok, but the Glade plug in was just too powerful for our little room, even on the lowest setting. So, being the smart college sophomores we were, we unplugged it and set it on the dresser.

Set it on the dresser, next to the stereo remote, not thinking about the fact that oil is viscous and permeates just about anything meant to hold it in...especially something meant to let the vapors out. Yeah, that's right, it leaked all over the place.

Our room reeked of White Bouquet, the offending odor, for weeks. Finally we got rid of it. Until one day....

Amy and I both snapped our heads up from our books. What was that smell. Could it be? No, it'd been months. But it was! Where was it coming from? Not our room...let's go, we'll figure it out.

And like Toucan Sam we followed our noses and found that people at the end of the floor had a plug in air freshener in - you guessed it - White Bouquet.

College Memories #7: Local Restaurants -or- The Only Place Open Past 9pm is Shari's

For a small town, Newberg had some decent restaurants. We had Lucky Fortune, the good and cheap Chinese place where a HUGE plate of whatever was somewhere around $6. Cancun, one of the best Mexican places around, was always a huge hit. Checkers, an awesome sandwich shop, opened during my junior or senior year. Underground was one of 3 awesome coffee shops off campus, and my favorite of the 3. Mocha Milkshakes rule! And of course we had Jem 100, the local ice cream shop and burger joint.

But when you start getting into "fine dining," the options are slim. Yamhill Grill was where everyone went when their parents went to town, and Shari's was the one place in town open past 9. We spent a lot of time at Shari's...a lot of time. Because all on campus housing had floor hours, and because Shari's was the only place open real late (that is, until Underground opened our junior year), it was not uncommon to head there around 11 or 12 pm and find several booths or tables filled with "mixed company" GFU groups. Man I drank a lot of coffee at Shari's!

College Memories #8: The Plagues

Freshman year we somehow managed to start a prank war with another floor. To be honest, I can't remember how it started. The part I remember the most is The Locusts.

Around 2 oclock in the morning, my roommate woke me up saying there were crickets in our room. I told her there weren't and to go back to sleep. She insisted they were in our room...and then I heard them. We turned on the light and found that there were many, many crickets or grasshoppers or whatever they were, in our room. Opening the door to the hallway revealed that several people had woken up to the same realization. We had been infested.

We found out that the boys with whom we'd been having a prank war managed to get into our dorm floor (they took the door to our hallway off the hinges!) and released 200 live crickets onto our floor. We were fighting those things for months.

Sadly, the boys weren't very smart. They forgot that their dorm and ours were connected by an underground hallway. The crickets traveled a lot throughout the year and had babies who traveled, who had babies who traveled. Not only were we fighting them, but all 3 floors of the 3 dorms connected by the underground hallways were fighting them - including the floor that introduced them to our dorm!

College Memories #9: What Really Went on in the Theatre

The theatre was a bizarre place, to be sure. A lot of very strange things went on there. Some of the highlights...

• During a camping trip for Quilters so that the cast could get an idea of what the pioneer women went through, one female member awoke to find the arms of a male crew member wrapped around her. In his sleep, he mistook K for his wife!
• Many of us had blankets and slippers stored in a room in the theatre.
• For a theatre major, there was no better place to sleep than in Wood-Mar. Nice and dark, quiet, and only other theatre majors could get in!
• As other techies know, rehearsals get real old real fast for tech crew. Singing "YMCA" during tender moments or mocking the lines of a show was standard fare.
• I spent many an evening reading by aisle light during rehearsal. Ah, the joys of trying to stay on top of academics during hell week!
• Somewhere around here I have a picture of me in a hawaiian shirt dancing with a glow stick. 'Nuff said.
• Initiation. After a show, all the newbies get to be Retarded Earthworms. During strike, we'd head out for pizza and a shrimp pizza was ordered. All newbies had to eat a piece. Some cried, some cringed, I dug right in! No on liked initiating me since shrimp is my favorite pizza topping!

College Memories #10: American Day in Paris

During Juniors Abroad (3 weeks in Europe, led by 2 professors, for which we got credit), we spent a few days in Paris. Sadly, none on our trip were much in love with Paris. It was hot, it was humid, and the Parisians hated us. One day, fed up with it all, we deemed it "American Day in Paris." We went to a movie, partly because we knew it would be air conditioned, partly because it was an American movie (Murder by Numbers with Sandra Bullock). It was a cheesy movie, but it was in English, so we were happy. Apparently it didn't translate well - there was a point when we all laughed but no one else in the movie did. I guess the joke didn't make much sense in French!

Later that night we had dinner at Hard Rock cafe. I don't remember who all was there, but I know it was close to our entire group, nearly all 22 of us. We were all so tired of Paris, so ready to move on. It was our last night there and we had a great ol' time. How sad is it that my fondest memory of Paris is the night before we left when we spend every waking minute being as American as possible?

College Memories #11: A Tale of Two Bunk Beds

I will never forget this event because it scared the crap out of me.

Freshman year, we had these crappy metal army-surplus-clearance-sale bunkbeds. They sucked, hardcore. Most people bunked them because it made for more space in the room, and many people would then put the whole thing on top of cement blocks. Probably not the safest thing in the world, but college students know no fear.

I was sitting in my room one day, early in the school year, when suddenly I heard a crash. I rushed out to the hallway to see my across the hall neighbors with petrified looks on their faces. Their bunked beds had fallen. More accurately, the top bed fell off the bottom one.

Thankfully no one was hurt, but what a scare we had! Unfortunately, the school showed no sympathy and the official party line was that the students must have bunked them wrong. Ha! I only wish I had a picture of the type of feet used on these beds to show you how unsturdy these bunk beds were.