Even the most boring classes are useful.

I had History of American Journalism today. It's basically like death in the form of an hour and 15 minute lecture. I usually use this time constructively to check twitter, facebook and my email. Constantly. I circulate through them pretty much all class. It's kind of a battery drainer. I do tune in occasionally, though, so I heard the professor say 'gold rush.'

One of my favorite songs ever by one of the best bands ever, is Good To Go by Eye Alaska. I love it so much I usually play it on repeat in my car until I get to my destination and it has 341 plays in iTunes. Part of the lyrics are, "and if this was the gold rush, I would be caught up in the moment."

Naturally the very first thing that popped into my mind when my professor said gold rush was this song. Also, that's all I really retained. I have no idea what he was actually talking about. Since it was the most exciting thing that happened all day, I tweeted about it.

My friend Megan retweeted:

Roy English is the singer in Eye Alaska. His real name is actually Brandon Wronski. Eye Alaska broke up and he started a solo project where he changed his name to Roy English and basically changed his whole image. Megan has a great blog about it! Anyway, this is where it gets awesome...

He tweeted back at us!

I've never had a celebrity tweet at me before! Good thing I went to class today and tuned in to the second best thing my professor has ever said. First best is when he announced today he would give us the test essay question in advance.

Props to Megan on her blog about him as well, she tweeted the link at him and he answered!

Breakfast tacos are a Texas thing.

I stumbled upon this fact while chatting with a friend from Missouri one day. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I'm so hungry. I want a honey butter chicken biscuit. (From Whataburger, which is definitely a Texas thing, and arguably the most delicious meal ever.)
Me (being more realistic now): No, actually I want a breakfast taco.
Friend: What's that?
Me (this is actually what my face looked like):

Then the next day I was chatting with a different friend, also from Missouri. That conversation went something like this:
Me: Did you know our friend doesn't know what a breakfast taco is?!
Friend: What's a breakfast taco?

Me (again):

This is about when I started to realize that either breakfast tacos are a Texas thing or just not a Missouri thing. So I went into journalist mode and verified my facts with a friend from Illinois. This conversation went something like this:

Me: So... do you know what a breakfast taco is?

Friend: Um, no?

Unless my very detailed and extensive research is incorrect, breakfast tacos are in fact a Texas thing. This is very unfortunate, because next to honey butter chicken biscuits, they are the best breakfast ever! They're also one of the few things I can actually make, and I will share the recipe so everyone can have the opportunity to enjoy the second best breakfast ever.

What you need:

• 1 Egg
• A little bit of milk (for scrambling the egg)
• Flour tortilla
• Shredded cheese
• Bacon (healthy option=turkey bacon), or ham, or sausage, or potato, or all four.

Step 1: Cook the bacon. (Or ham, or sausage, or potato.)

I cook four slices and put two in the breakfast taco and just eat the other two.

Step 2: While the bacon is cooking, scramble the egg. If you want more than one egg, you need to make another breakfast taco because only one egg will fit in the tortilla. Also, to make this step take one minute and 35 seconds, use the microwave (it works and the eggs are delicious).

Step 3: Put the scrambled egg and bacon (or ham, or sausage, or potato, or whatever) on the tortilla. Add some cheese.

Sorry about the missing piece of tortilla. I got hungry.

Step 4: Roll the tortilla!

Step 5: Eat and enjoy!

Camping is much more enjoyable with a tent.

The MU vs. kU basketball game is always a huge deal, but this year it was even bigger. Since we're moving the SEC, we'll no longer be in the same conference as kU and they won't play us anymore. So, this year was the last year in a long time that we'll play kU at home. On top of that, ESPN's College Gameday came out to cover our game.

People started lining up at Mizzou arena Wednesday night. The show didn't start until Saturday morning.

Disclaimer: This picture was actually taken Friday night, though most of these tents were up by Thursday morning

My friend and I arrived around 10 p.m. Friday night. We were nine hours early but still significantly far back in line. Our plan, which was decided way back in December, was to just wait around on the sidewalk until the show started. But then mother nature decided this would be a great time for a rainy weekend. Our new plan was now to just wait around on the sidewalk with umbrellas and ponchos. This worked out well for the first 15 minutes, but then we got tired and wanted to sit down. The ground was pretty wet, so we used our problem solving skills and set out a poncho to sit on.

This worked out great for the next 15 minutes until it started to rain again and the poncho got wet and the realization that we still had to wait around for eight hours sunk in. We put our problem solving skills to work again and decided the only way to survive was to go get a tent.

We got the people in line next to us to watch our spots and we loaded up into the car and drove to Walmart. It felt so great to be in a warm, dry environment. Once at Walmart, we headed back to the camping section and found the tents. Luckily for us, the cheapest one was an affordable $35. Except there were none on the shelf. The next cheapest tent was $70, which was way too expensive, so this $35 tent was really our only option. 

We asked the sales associate and she went into the back to look for the cheap tent. The two minutes she was in the back were excruciatingly suspenseful. If they didn't have one, we'd have to suffer in the rainy cold all night. Or drive to all the other Walmart's in town to find the tent.

It must have been our lucky day, because they had one! Several actually. She came back with quite a few boxes. We drove back to Mizzou Arena and pitched our tent in about 10 minutes.

Apparently everyone else had the same idea as us (except they didn't wait until they were already in line to go get one), because we were just one of about 13 identical $35 Walmart tents. The night got significantly better as we enjoyed camping inside of our nice, dry, semi-warm tent. We got delicious cheese pizza and even managed to get about an hour of sleep.

The morning (aka 5 a.m.) rolled around and it was finally almost time for Gameday! Someone, I'm assuming the coordinators of the event, came to knock on our tent and tell us to pack it up so we could actually stand in a real line, rather than a conglomeration of tents. 

My friend and I weren't going to the actual basketball game, so we got to line up in the line for people just wanting to attend Gameday. The other line was for students who wanted priority seating for the actual game as well as Gameday. My line was much, much, much shorter than the other line, since most students were going to actual game. Despite coming to wait in line 2 days later than most students, we got great seats! We were only about five seats from the center section, and only about four rows from the front.

Gameday was super fun, my sign made it on national television and we beat kU! All around great experience, and now I have a tent for the next time I camp out for something.

Shopping carts are incredibly efficient for moving.

I moved out of my apartment and just across the complex to a new building. It's about a 15 second drive, so it seemed kind of excessive to take all my stuff from my apartment, walk to my car, put it in my car, drive my car to the new building, take all my stuff from my car and carry it into my new apartment.

My parents suggested using a shopping cart, so that way I could take my stuff directly from my apartment and bring it straight to my new one (almost, since it was on the second floor). At first I thought it was completely ridiculous.

But it was totally genius. By using a shopping cart, I wouldn't have to put all my stuff in boxes to carry to my car and then carry right back inside again. I could just pile a bunch of stuff into this shopping cart. Easy! Plus I save gas, the environment AND get exercise! Efficient! 

So I walked over to the grocery store that's right across the street and borrowed a shopping cart. (Thanks, HyVee!) It was super awkward taking it home with me. Probably one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. I had to cross over a busy street just pushing a shopping cart by myself and I think everyone was judging and/or laughing at me. But it was totally worth it.

Once moving day arrived, I loaded up my shopping cart and pushed it over. Other people were moving in too, and I got a few funny looks until people realized that this was actually pure genius. While they had to keep going back and forth from their car to their apartment, and when you're carrying a bunch of stuff the walk from the parking lot to the door is kind of long, I wheeled my cart right up to the stairs. I even got some compliments!

I successfully got everything from point A to point B in just three easy trips (plus two trips in my car for the really big boxes that wouldn't fit in the cart). Which is awesome because I seem to have somehow accumulated an excess of things.

I avoided the awkward walk back to the grocery store to return the cart because two of my friends that helped me move agreed to go with me. Things are always less weird when you're not alone. The shopping cart idea even made unpacking easier since most things were not taken apart or thrown into a box and mixed with a bunch of other random things.

I guess my parents do have good ideas sometimes.

Always, always, always verify information.

Twitter is very powerful. So powerful that it has the ability to kill people.

Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno died on Saturday according to Twitter, and on Sunday in reality. AP reports that the source of this misinformation was Penn State's student newspaper. The publication tweeted Paterno died, and then everyone picked up on it: CBS, People.com, The Huffington Post.

But then someone put their thinking cap on and went out to verify this information. I think they only set out to double check because Paterno's sons took to Twitter to announce that no, he was still alive. The first tweet I saw about it was CNN:

"CNN's @susancandiotti just spoke to Paterno spokesman and says Paterno is NOT dead. 'Not true. Not true. Not True.'"

All the news organizations came out and apologized and accurately reported when Paterno died for real on Sunday morning. The common theme for everyone tweeting the misinformation seems to be the pressure to break the story first. So I guess congratulations to them, they broke the story before it even happened!

In all my journalism classes the professor always drills into our heads to verify everything. Even a reliable source like CBS can report false information, only driving the point home even more: everything always needs to be verified.

You can't use liquid dish soap in the dishwasher.

Oops.

I had just moved out of the dorms and into my very first apartment, so I was lacking a lot of things normal people have in their homes. Like dishes and dishwasher soap. In fact, I went through the whole summer and majority of fall semester with only one plate (that one orange one in the dishwasher). Luckily the apartments I moved into had inhabitants already so I was able to use their dishes until I inherited my own.

Anyway, the dishwasher was getting full and I was almost out of dishes to use so I had to run it. While living in the dorms I had a meal plan so I usually ate in the dinning hall. When I did have dishes to wash, I just did them by hand in the bathroom sink. In fact, I believe this experience was the first time I had ever used a dishwasher without parental supervision. I had dawn liquid dish soap from my dishwashing days in the dorms, but nothing else, and so I was like, 'Okay, dish soap! I hope this works!'

It didn't. The mess got even worse and I ended up having to mop the whole floor with it. Which wasn't working out very well for me because I didn't have a real mop so I was using a Swifter. So after this I went out to the dollar store and picked up some real dishwasher detergent.

Lesson learned.

I'm really fortunate to have a house.

Seriously. Earlier this week I reported on a story about a family whose house burned down. It was completely burned to the ground and the family lost everything. They didn't have insurance, either. Three of the family members were also firefighters, so the fire department started a fund to help raise money for them.