When Life Gives You Oranges…Make Orange-Pineapple-Banana Juice
This weekend I learned that everything you do will teach you something. Even when things don’t play out exactly how you planned. This past weekend was a great example of just that, making the best out of a not so great situation. I guess I have to clarify. The weekend really wasn’t as bad as I am making it seem. Actually if I hadn’t had such high expectations going into the weekend it probably would have been a blast.
I guess it all started with an idea about going to a concert in the cities with my girlfriend Marisa and my buddy Leif. When getting tickets for the concert we realized they where assigning seat numbers with every ticket so Marisa called and asked if it was a seated concert or a standing concert. The lady on the other end of the phone, Rachel, said that it was a standing room only concert and now we were pumped!!! The plan was to drive down Friday to the University of Minnesota (where the concert was) and then crash at my parent’s house (if you haven’t read my bio I grew up in a suburb of the cities). We arrive at the U of M and I quickly realize one of the reasons I love Concordia so much, size. The U of M has approximately a billion students (give or take) and because of that their campus is the size of Rhode Island (give or take again). Now if Concordia had a concert there are only so many places it could be, and us, being the naïve Cobbers that we are thought we could park and walk to the auditorium. Well I’m not sure if Rhode Island is cold, but for the sake of this blog lets imagine that it is, now picture walking across the State of Rhode Island in 20-degree temperature, wearing only a tee shirt and jeans. Yeah. Not my smartest moment. So we get to the concert, we were human icicles but we made it, and low and behold there are chairs. Well after a few minutes of grumbling about how we hate Rachel we decided to make the best of it. We pushed our way through the crowd of middle schoolers and their parents and found our seats. The concert itself was pretty good. All Time Low and Boys like Girls were amazing. I just felt like I couldn’t get totally into it on account of the chairs. After the concert we made our way back to my place and after showing Leif and Marisa the sleeping arrangement I crashed on the couch.
The next day is when the interesting part of the weekend starts. So not only were Marisa, Leif and I staying at my house but so was my sister and her Boyfriend. So our little 4-bedroom house was stuffed pretty full, but the reason I bring this up is any time we have guests of any kind my mom flips a brick. I wake up and walk up to the main floor and go straight to the fridge to grab a cup of juice where I was meet with an interesting predicament. My mom, bless her heart, decided it would be nice to have a variety of juice, but to her apparently a variety is orange juice, orange-pineapple juice, and orange-pineapple-banana juice. To a normal human being maybe a variety would have been apple orange and grape, or not all of them having the same main ingredient. Now I have no problem with this but I wanted to shed some light on why it may be nerve racking to introduce a new girlfriend to a crazy mother (crazy in a good way, but crazy none the less). That actually went rather well though and from there we headed up to Park Rapids for what was supposed to be a semi-formal thanksgiving extravaganza with some fellow Cobbers at one of their lake homes. While driving up to the cabin the activity of choice was sleeping, lots and lots of sleeping. Oh! We also got pulled over which was interesting. State troopers don’t like it when you go ten miles an hour over the speed limit, but he let me off with a warning, which is nice. We got to the cabin, dressed up a little bit, and ate what one might call a thanksgiving feast; I on the other hand would call it a sliver of uncooked turkey and a spoonful of straight from the can stuffing. Now I want you to imagine the most awkward family thanksgiving you’ve ever been to, take out uncle Larry’s post dinner no pants nap on the couch and insert a bunch of kids who have nothing to do. That’s my weekend in a nutshell. 
What is the point of this blog one might ask? Well, while the weekend was in progress all I could think about was what wasn’t going as planned. Well since I’ve been in college I’ve realized many things don’t go exactly as planned, but if you make the best of what you have and realize life is about the people and not the activity’s then great times will be had. Since coming to Concordia I have had the best few months of my life, and this past weekend was just icing on the most delicious cake!