Streamers can be made in After Effects.

It's a big year for the University of Missouri! It's MU's 175th birthday and it's the Trulaske College of Business's 100th birthday! Since I work at the Business School, I got to make a fun birthday themed animation.

Step one for any good birthday themed anything is streamers. 3D-looking spirals are actually much harder to make in After Effects than you might think. Lucky for me my boss sent me a link to this tutorial about how to begin, starting with a single skinny line.

I animated this one line, added a cylinder effect for the spiral, and duplicated it to create several different spirals. The only problem is the effect I used doesn't create more than one twist, which can make for some pretty lame streamers.

Those doesn't look like a super exciting centennial AT ALL. So, I duplicated all of them and shifted the time over to make the duplicates into an extension.

Much curlier, longer and overall more fun-and-exciting-birthday-party-looking! Next step was the confetti. That was the easy part, as the confetti is just a rather simple particle effect. I had to adjust all the settings about a million times to get the amount and speed of my confetti just right, but I did it!

The final step was to add a grand entrance for the main happy birthday message! Here's the final product:

Water does not always put out fire.

My household has a mess problem, especially when it comes to the kitchen. Our drip pans always have weird stuff in them, whether it's crumbs or spillage or anything else. They had gotten bad enough that we were sort of talking about replacing them, but no one really wanted to (including me).

Well, one morning (afternoon, technically) I stood in the kitchen and began to prepare myself a breakfast taco. I put my delicious turkey bacon in the pan and turned on the stove. It normally smokes a little bit as the pan gets hot, but this time it started smoking way more than normal. I was a few steps away preparing the egg when I noticed there might be a slight problem.

And then, BOOM. FIRE.

Everything that happened next is sort of a blur, but I remember the fire alarm went off, I started screaming and freaking out and then my roommates began freaking out with me. The poor dog was very scared. I needed to stop the fire before the whole apartment burned down, so I grabbed a nearby cup, filled it with water and dumped it on the fire.

No. Everything I have ever learned about water being the opposite of fire was wrong. Apparently, water actually makes fire worse (or grease fires, anyway). Why did it take 21 years for me to learn this?

My roommate saved the day after she got a washcloth wet and then tossed it over the fire, causing it to go out. I did know that fire can't exist without oxygen, so I'm glad that piece of information is still true. The whole incident lasted approximately 20 seconds and nothing was damaged. Not even my bacon!

We have since replaced the drip pans.

I am Buzzfeed worthy.

I was trying to schedule a meeting for a class project, listening to everyone list off their availability and what meetings or jobs they had during times when someone else was free, while also trying to fit in a time in my own busy schedule, when I thought to myself, "Hmm. This would make a great Buzzfeed list."

And so I wrote 13 Signs You Are Chronically Over-Scheduled.

I wrote the article one night (while I was supposed to be working) and woke up to a lovely email the next morning notifying me that the community team noticed my post and it was getting some extra promotion around the site. It was a dream come true! My list was a featured post on the community page and not long after I won the 1,000 views award.

Things only went up from there as I saw my list get shared all over Facebook and Twitter. In the afternoon I got an email that my post made it to the front page of buzzfeed.com. Front page! Of the MAIN site!

That's me, that's me!!!

That was probably the coolest thing to happen to me in awhile. My friend texted me later that evening to inform me she saw my post shared from one of her friends who goes to another school via her friend. My post went viral!

Now, a few days later, traffic is starting to die down a little bit (and by die down, I mean it's currently getting around 500 views every hour), and the post has more than 100,000 views and nearly 70,000 views just from Facebook alone. 

Time to brainstorm some more genius ideas!

Buying lightbulbs is difficult.

One of my worst fears is that one day all the lights in my house will just stop working and I'll be forced to do everything in the dark. I frequently have nightmares where all the lights stop working in my room or bathroom and I get trapped in the dark.

I turned on the lights in my room one day and noticed it was darker than normal. I looked up at the fan that had three lights on it to see what was up and all but one of the lightbulbs was burnt out. I don't like to take immediate action on minor issues like this like a normal person would, so my thoughts were basically, "Wow, that's gonna suck when the last light goes out."

Well, lucky for me the last light burnt out the day I left to go home for Christmas break for about two weeks. This also didn't require immediate action, so I left and completely forgot about it. It was a shock when I finally came back and tried to turn on my lights only to be left in the dark. I have a bunch of Christmas lights hung around the walls in my room, so I just used those lights until I finally decided to complete the simple task of going to buy lightbulbs.

It turned into a much more complex task than I thought. The joke 'how many X does it take to change a light bulb?' should actually be changed to 'how many X does it take to BUY a lightbulb.' First, I couldn't find the lightbulb aisle anywhere in the store. I had to ask someone, they pointed me in the right direction, and I still wandered around in circles for several minutes until I found it.

Then, I had to pick out which lightbulbs to buy. At first I was like, 'I want the nice, energy efficient light bulbs!' Then I saw those are like a million dollars so I quickly forgot everything I know about helping the environment and moved over to the super cheap $4-pack-of-four bulbs. My plan was to bring one of the burnt out bulbs with me so I would know what size to get, because the ones I needed were not standard lightbulb size. Of course I forgot, so I basically just had to guess and hope it would work out.

I picked correctly and I'm no longer in the dark! The package of the bulbs I picked said the bulbs last twice as long as normal bulbs, but they are half as bright. What a great marketing technique!

Windex kills worms.

My apartment has a serious bug problem and this is not the same place where I was attacked and nearly killed by a spider, which is just proof that the creepy crawlies are after me. The bugs like to come in through the basement door, which happens to be extremely close to my bedroom, as shown in the picture below.

The door with the stuff on it is my bedroom.

The bugs are the worst in the summer and even more terrible after it rains because they all either get washed inside or come inside to hide from the rain. Unfortunately I don't have a picture, but that whole hallway by the back door gets filled with nasty bugs. It's pretty gross.

One terrible summer evening, after an especially bad rainstorm, I was on my way downstairs to my room when I saw two large squiggly lines on the floor amongst all the other nasty dead bugs. Worms. TWO worms. TWO WORMS, INSIDE. 

I was out of Raid, we didn't have a very good vacuum at this time so I couldn't just suck them up, and I wasn't about to get close enough to sweep them up. My roommate was home at the time but she stayed upstairs and refused to even get close to the steps. After several minutes of us freaking out, we put on our thinking caps. It was getting late and I wasn't sleeping in my room next to live worms.

My roommate suggested spraying Windex on them. I was skeptical at first, but her boyfriend is Greek and apparently Windex is what they use to fix everything. I venture down the stairs, armed with Windex and I spray it all over the worms so they are left sitting in a puddle of Windex on the floor. And it worked! They died!!

After several days they dried up and remained shriveled up on the floor for quite some time, until I inherited a powerful vacuum from my parents on a trip home, brought it back to my apartment and sucked up the worms and all the other dead bugs in the hallway.

Peppermint aids in digestion.

The best thing about going to my parents house is that they always have chocolate, candy and cookies. I don't have the time, money or self control to keep these luxury goods stocked in my own apartment, so it's a super bonus for the few times a year when I visit my parents.

My brother recently graduated from college and got a real person job, and his job gave him some peppermint bark for the holidays. The extra delicious, homemade peppermint bark, not just the generic kind you buy in the grocery store. He brought this wonderful gift home with him to share with his whole family, so this visit home had an extra, extra bonus!

The routine is usually eat dinner and then sit on the couch and watch TV until it's time for bed. Around 8 p.m. my dad will usually get up and grab some candy in the kitchen for everyone else. That's exactly what happened on this particular evening. My dad got up around 8 and asked if anyone wanted some peppermint bark, and my mom responded (something along the lines of), sure, we can all boost our digestion. I didn't know this was a thing, so I was like, what? And she responds back to me, "Yeah, that's why restaurants give out mints."

My whole entire life I thought restaurants gave out mints just to freshen your breath.

Nope, it's because it helps your digestive system! Perfect for right after you eat a big meal. It also has all these other health benefits that I didn't know about either, like treating headaches, skin irritations and anxiety.

Black pepper is not found in the produce aisle.

It was my turn to make family dinner for my roommates, so I decided I would go all out and make my mom's super secret, award-winning Cincinnati chili recipe.

A quick side note about Cincinnati chili for those who have never had it before: It's unlike any chili you've ever eaten. There are no beans in it and you eat it on noodles. When I announced to my roommates I would be making chili, the response was along the lines of, 'I don't like chili.' Except everyone loved it.

Anyway, this was the first time I'd ever made this chili and I'd never watched my mom make it so all I really had was the recipe to follow. And my phone to call my mom. I'm at the grocery store buying all the ingredients, which include ground beef, red pepper, black pepper and a bunch of spices. Using my superior grocery store knowledge, I walk into the produce section and find myself a red pepper. Then I start looking everywhere for a black pepper.

I have this fear of asking stupid questions in the grocery store (completely justifiable, too), so after getting all the other ingredients and still missing this black pepper, I call up my mom. I tell her I found a red pepper, but WHERE are the black peppers?? She just laughs at me and explains that black pepper is a spice (like, the pepper that's in a pepper shaker) and that the red pepper is also a spice, so put that bell pepper back.

Whooooooops! So I put the bell pepper back, grab the right peppers and go home and make the chili. Which turned out delicious. Then, months later, as I'm visiting home for the holidays, my mom brings up this whole situation again. I try to defend myself with a, "how was I supposed to know?!" My mom's argument is that she has failed as a mother because I never watched her cook or went to the store with her to know that black pepper is a spice.

Then she started saying something about a Home Ec class or something... sorry mom, too busy taking math and science classes for that!