Saturday Night

Hey everyone,
I hope everyone is having a good Saturday night. My day has been excelent. I'll tell you all about it so here we go. After staying up till midnight last night, I thought that I would try to wake up early this morning so I could get some work done. I figured seven and a half hours would be a nice sleep time, so I set my alarm for 7:40ish. I once heard that you sleep in intervals of an hour thirty minutes. I heard it takes you about an hour thirty minutes to go through a cycle of REM sleep. That's the time in your sleep when your eyes move up and down. The time when you get your best rest. I also heard that its better to wake up after or befor you next cycle. I think the place that I heard this also said that the reason you can sleep really long and still feel tired is that you woke up mid-REM, and that you don't feel awake because you were in the middle of your REM. It could also explain why you might feel better after getting six hours of sleep sometimes (if you plan your REM cycle right). So I dunno if this is true, but it is how I try to organize my sleep time. If anyone has any info on if this is true, let me know! Send me an email and let me know.

Okay, so I get a bit off subject. So I ened up waking up before my alarm clock went off, but I layed in bed half asleep till 7:50. From then I got up and tried to get ready for the day. I had planned on working some of my jobs (I'm a janitor working for my dad btw) this morning before going to be with Monique. I didn't end up getting out of my house till 9:10 though cause I was lazy. I started downloaded the newest episode of The OC for Monique before I left as well. I ended up going to work and doing all that. This morning was my big job. This week, my dad assigned me to do things a bit different this week. Instead of doing the rag cleaning on all 7 of our jobs, I was told to do the "rag" part on 2 of them, and do the vaccumming on all of them. So this morning I had to do the rag part and vaccumming on the biggest job we had. I took me over 2 hours to do it all. It goes be faster than you would think, cause your working every second of it. It also went fast cause I was listening to last week's TwiT. I finally finished up, very proud of my work. I believe this was the first time I did a full job by myself. I'm glad to see that my dad trusts me to do it all by myself. Okay, the only thing I didn't do was the bathrooms, but I'm sure I'll learn that in time as well.

So I went up to Monique's house around noon. I was invited to go see Must Love Dogs with Monique and her Mom. We took the drive up to Santa Rosa to the Roxy. It was fun to listen to Monique and her Mom, Melinda, talk about girl things. I just sit in the back and listen, I try not to say much. Its kind of like going to the zoo and you can watch the animals in their "natural" habitat. Hehe, okay, kind of a joke, but I thought it was funny. They aren't animals, but I also like to know how people interact with one another. When Monique tells me how conversations work with her parents, I also like to know the other point of view. So, I really like to see how people talk to one another, and see how they interact. I keep track of the mood of the conversation, the language, and physical expression when people talk. So I kept track of how they were talking.

The movie was much better than I thought it would be. I thought for a romantic comedy, it was not so bad. Of course, some parts were very predictable, but other things kept you guessing. I also really like John Cossack (sp?). He reminds me of my dad, along with myself. So, that's how the movie went.

The afternoon was filled with going to the mall, taking along her brother Davide. My mission was to find a new pair of shoes. After walking though the whole mall, I was once again looking at Vans again. I just like the way the shoes look. Skater shoes or not, I like them, so there. Maybe the reason I don't care about shoes, is that I don't associate shoes to certain lifestyles. I guess some people think that if you wear Vans, your a certain style of kid or person. I don't ever see that. I really think your attitude and personality really determine what kind of person you are.

I got my first Portuguese soccer experience last night. The males of Monique's recorded a soccer game on TiVo, and they watched it after it was done. It was damn cool to see how Tivo worked. I've heard lots about it, and know about it, but this was really cool to see in person. Just like a VHS recorder, you just record tv comming in and watch it later. Man, sounds just like podcasting. Time shifted video though, not audio. I'd sure like to record the Daily Show every night. Anyway, the soccer game was fun. We all sat down to watch it. Monique's dad and I talked about soccer, as he explained how it works. I have to say, I really don't know much more than the basics when it comes to soccer. I know how many players there are, you use your feet, I know the positions, and stuff like that, but I got lots of information last night. What was cooler was that I got to learn how soccer works in Europe. More specifally, Portugal. I'll do my best to explain how this works, and if I get something wrong, leave me a comment to get it right. So, they have a nation league, with 6 times. Under that, there is another league with about 6 teams as well. The first, or top league plays all year, and the top three teams of that year stay up on the top league, while the three lower teams move into the lower bracket. So, the top 3 teams from the lower league move up into the upper league. Wow, complicated, but how cool is that? Davide (Monique's Dad) was saying that each city in Portugal has a team, and there are "county" teams as well. It's just like in every part of life. And it's all year long. So soccer is a very big part of the culture where everyone, I'm guessing mostly males, play and play each year. The better they are, the higher they get. Then we also talked about the world cup, and how the teams are picked there. If you think of the USA like each state in a country, it works like that. So for me, it would be like California versus the rest of the nation. Talk about national pride for your country. It just sounds like this really cool thing, and I'll defently check it out next year. I'll of course root for good ole' USA, but I do have a portuguese soccer shirt...

I think that's long enough for all of you to get though. Hope everyone has/had an awesome weekend and I'll be checking back later. Till then, smile!