FOR SOME BACKGROUND, you know that I’ve always loved pets, which means I’ve owned anything I could get my hands on. Currently I have two parakeets, a dwarf hamster, a talking dog, and two rabbits. Everything lives in my apartment except the rabbits, some punk kids came around and started letting them out of my yard so I had to move them to my parents house.

Ashley recently caught a rabbit and tried to give it to me, and I immediately started listing the things she shouldn’t feed it. What can I say, I am a walking index of pet advice. It’s kind of pathetic really. I aspired to be a vet, and when that wasn’t possible I looked into being a vet tech. I found a local program, but they wanted $41,500 in TUITION (meaning, not including books) for two years of school which would certify me to spend the rest of my life cleaning cages and taking “temperatures” for roughly $12.75 an hour!

Uh, no thanks.

So here I sit, telling her what not to feed Chester the Rabbit (or Sweetie as Aspen calls him) and I…well…read it for yourself. Let’s just say I’m a PET expert, not a food or spelling expert.

Ashley:
i tried to give the rabbit we found to mom, she wouldn’t take him and says shes giving you your rabbits back someday

Aub:
the rabbits i can’t have at grams because kids let them out, and mom/dad shouldn’t have to care for them.
haha yep those are going.
i dont care about the black one, i’ll miss my brown one tho

Ashley:
is this the same aubrey that wanted to be a vet tech and save baby birds along the freeway?

Aub:
bite it

Ashley:
Glade (her cat) LOOOOOVED The rabbit. he was totally rubbing up against him

Aub:
what a fag (Sorry. You’d have to meet Glade to understand that. He’s antisocial, his best friends are a pair of raccoons and he hates the daylight. You can’t help but make fun of him.)
dude don’t feed the rabbit alvacados or tomatoes, it’ll kill.

Ashley:
altho the rabbit was last seen at the neighbors house–the neighbor called me last night and says “do you have a rabbit”? um…we brought one home yesterday
alvacado???
alvacado??
answer me
dont google it.
alvacado

Aub:
avacado?
heck I dunno.

Ashley:
avacado.
much better
you should try ALvacado’s theyre delicous.

Aub:
bite it

Ashley:
well they are

My favorite part? How she has to tell me “don’t Google it”.

She knows me well.

I WAS FOOLISH TO THINK THE WORST PART WAS OVER. Testing was the easy part, the “sit back and do what you’re told for the next three hours” routine that I was well accustomed to, if not a little rusty.

Finding my way around campus was the true challenge. Here I am, in capris and flip flops turning a map this way and that, hoping against hope that if I tilt it a certain way I’ll recognize something, anything and know my way around.

I was lost. I had to get from this building:

To this building:

I found out later that you can walk from one to the other without going outside. Being me, I wound up here:

And here:

And somehow I found myself clear up here:

I even wound up next to another building! But it wasn’t the right one.

Thankfully the college took mercy on me and I found where I was going. Phase two is now complete, I am registered for college and start classes on August 26th.

Also known as the day the word “sleep” disappears from my vocabulary.

As a reward, Ashley and Niel took me out to dinner to celebrate. We all spent about twenty minutes marveling at the turn table in the middle of our plush little corner. What a marvelous invention! How ingenuitive! How creative!

Then we wondered over to see the crabs. Jake and Abby took a moment to ponder why the crabs don’t pinch each other. I had no answer for this. All Aspen was concerned with was how to look into the tank from a safe distance.

We feasted for a while before I demanded one last photo with the kids. Jake obliged somewhat willingly.

To end the night on a great note, Aspen kept asking for “my mato! My Mato!”. I don’t speak munchkin, so I asked Ashley to translate.

“she wants that tomato out of the car,” she mumbled as she passed the fist-sized, plump red vegetable into Aspens open hands. “Open it,” Aspen puzzled as she turned it over and around. “Just bite into it.”

Internet, this child had just finished eating a full serving of Chinese food, and she still devoured that WHOLE tomato. May I sink my teeth into education as willingly as that infant bit into that juicy fruit.

My question for you: Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Either way it is foreign to me, and grows in my garden. Don’t worry, I won’t throw them at you.