You can't buy alcohol in Pennsylvania grocery stores.

At work today, someone wrote a story about how one of the big grocery stores in town is opening a 'beer cafe.' I was reading the Facebook comments on this story, not really understanding what a beer cafe is or why it was significant, and someone said something about how they wish they could just go into a convenience store and pick up a case of beer.

My first thought was, what kind of convenience store doesn't sell alcohol?!

Well, apparently Pennsylvania is one of 18 states that is a alcoholic beverage control state. That means the state government owns and sells all alcohol throughout the whole state out of a store called Wine and Spirits. Where I am, the hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. (except Sundays), so there is no waltzing into Walmart at midnight when you need some beer.

According to Wikipedia, this crazy law stems from the repeal of prohibition all the way back in 1933. Some states continued their own prohibition, other states created the government monopolies where the state controls all sales, and the sane states started the private license system where you can buy your groceries and alcohol in the same place.

I went into one of these Wine and Spirit stores, and since alcohol is the only thing it sells, it contained a very wide selection of all sorts of drinks. The prices looked normal to me, too. I just find it very annoying (and weird and backwards) that I can't just buy a bottle of wine while I'm at the grocery store.

And I miss my favorite $6.99 bottle of cheap, delicious Missouri wine.

Lancaster's covered bridges are very scenic.

While searching Pinterest for things to do in my new home of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I found this awesome map of the all the covered bridges in the area! I drove the scenic parks and preserves route, which took to me to eight of the 25 bridges in Dutch Country.

The route took me through some areas heavily traveled by horse and buggies which was an unusual sight (for me) to see! Check out my pictures below:

Willow Hill Covered Bridge

Eshleman's Mill Covered Bridge. Lot's of horse and buggy traffic on this one!

Herr's Mill Covered Bridge

Neff's Mill Covered Bridge

Lime Valley Covered Bridge

Coleman Covered Bridge

Baumgardener's Covered Bridge

Kurtz's Mill Covered Bridge

I'm still living with cockroaches.

They wait until I think I'm safe, and then BAM! Another cockroach shows up. This time it was (dead) in my reusable grocery bag that hangs RIGHT NEXT TO MY BED.

This one is scarier than the last few because now I can't get the image of roaches crawling on me in my sleep out of my head. I'm also faced with a serious dilemma about what to do with the bag. My instinct is to just throw it away with the cockroach in it, but this is my Sainsbury's Olympic sponsor bag from London. It's also huge and can always fit all my groceries. It's mine and the cockroach can't have it!!!

I moved the bag into the kitchen to hang on a closet door that is not right next to my bed. I dumped the dead roach out into the trash, and, it took me a few days but, I finally washed out the bag and it is ready to hold the food I will consume.

LATEST UPDATE: The bug people came back a few days after the sighting to spray and leave their poisonous bug traps, and I haven't seen any roaches since.

I'm living with cockroaches.

I thought that moving into the city and up to the 21st floor of a building would get me away from the bugs. I was wrong.

It was the end of July when I saw the first one. I was getting ready to leave for work, making breakfast in my kitchen when I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I look over and see this HUGE thing twitching on my floor. It took about .5 seconds to register it was a cockroach. The most important thing in this situation was to remain calm. I needed to get out the door as to not be late, the cockroach could not be left alive, and there was no one else around to save me.

Lucky for me, the cockroach was upside down so it couldn't run away. I grabbed my can of Raid (for spiders and scorpions, but it worked just fine) and sprayed it. It twitched and tried to run away, but since it was upside down, it just ended up sliding around the floor. I captured it under a bowl and left.

I told the desk attendant at my complex that there was a cockroach in my apartment, and asked if they could get rid of it. I think he felt really bad for me, and asked some guy who looked like a custodian if he could take care of it. He said yes, and later that day when I got home from work there was no cockroach and my bowl was back on my counter.

Five days later, I almost got into my bathtub with another one. A not-so-gentle reminder to always, always, always check the tub for monsters before stepping in. This one wasn't quite as big as the first one, but still pretty big and disgusting. I washed it down the drain.

I googled it later, which was a huge mistake, because I ran into a bunch of pest control websites that said if you see one cockroach in your home there's probably a million more living in your walls and that one just got pushed out because there were too many. Cue the panic. I also found out that cockroaches have trouble balancing on slick surfaces, like kitchen tile, and can flip over easily on them. I'm assuming that was how the first one ended up on its back.

Then I did what any person living in fear would do. I armed myself with a dangerous weapon.

I also told my apartment complex and they called the bug people to come spray. The bug people came just a few days later and I went for about two weeks without seeing another one.

Then, just as I thought I was safe, they struck again. I was scanning the shower for monsters before stepping in one morning when I noticed a tiny little black thing. Upon closer inspection, I saw it had little legs and giant antennas. It was a little baby cockroach.

That means there was a cockroach nest somewhere in my walls.

They were having babies.

They are creating an army.

The cockroaches are after me.

I quickly washed it down the drain, but when I came home from work that afternoon there were MORE and one of them was in my LOOFA. A cockroach! In my loofa! So I drenched my shower in Raid and now I throughly spray my entire apartment every morning. I also replaced my loofa.

It's currently been about a week and a half since the last cockroach sighting. But they are probably hiding out in my walls, just waiting for me to let my guard down before attacking. If I mysteriously go missing one day, it was probably the roaches.

Alumni refers to a group of graduates.

I subscribe to this fun, daily newsletter called theSkimm (endorsement: it's awesome, you should sign up for it at theSkimm.com). In addition to sending you the top headlines and a brief paragraph outlining the important details, they started adding in a section at the bottom called 'Thing to Know.'

About two weeks after I graduated, theSkimm provided the answer to the question that had been gnawing at my brain for weeks:

I am an alumna, my brother is an alumnus, all of my girlfriends are alumnae, and my graduating class are alumni. I changed my Twitter bio (which previously stated I was an alum... still accurate!) right after I read this.

Too bad I never learned this in college!

I DID learn things in college.

Usually after I take a test in a class, or the semester ends and the class is over, I immediately forget everything that I have learned. That way, my brain can make space for the new things I need to learn for the next test or class. It makes me feel like I haven't really learned anything at all (but I least I walked away with a good grade!).

As my college career starts to wind down, I have started to realize I have learned some things during my four years here at Mizzou. (Please note: this is not an all-inclusive list)

• Reading your emails (and learning which ones you need to read, which to skim) keeps you in the loop. People who don't read their emails suck and waste everyone's time because then you just have to repeat or explain to them what you emailed them.
• Textbooks are SUCH a waste of money. More often than not, at the end of the semester I ended up with a $100 textbook I never even touched. So, wait until class starts and see if you really need it, and then even wait until the first exam to see if you really, really need it.
• Studying abroad was the best experience ever and everyone should do it.
• All difficult classes should be out of the way before your senior year. Senioritis is very real and you don’t want to make things any more difficult for yourself.
• I should have taken my capstone in my second to last semester, instead of my very last semester. I learned a lot of things and worked on a pretty cool project, and it would have been nice to be able to put that on my resume (plus take advantage of some of the professional connections I made). But when I started my job search, the project was only just beginning so I didn't have a lot of things to say about it yet.
• Job searching is the worst thing ever.
• College was way too short and hands down the best four years of my life.

Senioritis is real.

I thought being a senior in high school was tough, but being a senior in college is SO much worse. When high school was over I still had college, but now that college is over there's only real life, and real life doesn't have classes and tests and homework. Plus, I have an internship for after graduation so unless I screw something up terribly I'm okay for the next three months.

As I enter my last full week of school ever (EVER) my level of caring and ability to continue doing any school work is declining drastically. I'm pretty proud of myself because I kept up my work ethic for almost the entire semester. It wasn't until my calendar switched into May and I realized how close I actually am to being done with school forever that senioritis really started kicking in.

My senioritis is so bad right now that I'm blogging about it and I'm just going to hope this post is good enough for a passing grade for my blog post this week.

I can buy whatever I want in the grocery store.

Long ago, when I was young (so maybe not that long ago), I used to go to the grocery store with my mom every week. I'd always ask if we could get some sort of candy, chocolate, or anything else unhealthy and the answer was always no. It was so disappointing and my mom was so mean and obviously not looking out for my best interest.

But what I learned as a kid has now followed me into adulthood. When I go grocery shopping I'll walk past chocolate, candy, cookies and all sorts of delicious things and think to myself, "No, I can't buy that."

Well, now that it's Easter time the Cadbury eggs are out. Cadbury eggs are the best and they put them in a special display in the front of the store so you walk past it every time you are going to check out. Plus they are always on 'sale' so it looks like a great deal every time.

The first day the Cadbury eggs were out, I walked past and thought, "Cadbury eggs!!! I want them! No, I can't..." but then it occurred to me that I'm an adult and I can buy whatever I want and no one can stop me or tell me no.

So I bought a whole bunch and continued to buy them every time I went to the store. They were great and worth every penny!

The stomach flu is not the regular flu.

I got the stomach flu awhile ago. It was a great diet but I do not recommend it. In fact, remnants of it came back to haunt me a couple weeks after I 'recovered,' while I was trying to enjoy my vacation to Las Vegas (where I almost got trapped forever and ever). I seem to manage to catch awful diseases a little bit more frequently that I would like.

When I was in the middle of the worst of the illness (stuck in the bathroom), I was glued to my phone, searching WebMD and Google to make sure I wasn't actually dying, because I sure felt like it. I'm actually surprised I lived through it. In my search, I found out that stomach flu isn't actually the flu, it's gastroenteritis. WebMD said:

"No doubt you've heard people complain they have "stomach flu." You may have complained about it yourself after a bout of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea that seems to come from nowhere. In fact, though, stomach flu is a misnomer. There’s no such thing. The flu, influenza, is a respiratory infection that affects the lungs."

The flu is a virus that mimics a cold, except way worse.

A few of my friends tried to tell me I should have gotten a flu shot, but the flu shot wouldn't have helped. The flu shot protects against the real flu, the respiratory infection, not stomach irritation. Flu shot or not, I would still have been susceptible to the stomach flu (gastroenteritis). The more you know!

If your flight gets canceled, just stay in the airport.

I recently took a trip to Las Vegas, and I almost didn't make it back.

The flight was originally supposed to leave around 6:00 in the evening, but some time in the afternoon we checked the status and found it had been delayed about one hour. More fun time in Vegas, yay!

When we did get to the airport, rumors of cancelled flights started flying around while we were waiting in the bag check line. This was at the same time there was some crazy winter storm in the Northeast, so there were a lot of cancelled and delayed flights. I figured we were probably safe because we were Southwest going Midwest, nowhere near the Northeast. Surely our flight wouldn't be cancelled.

We made it through security and to the gate only to find our flight had been delayed a few more hours. Not a good sign, but we sat patiently awaiting the plane's arrival. Several hours passed and a flight attendant made an announcement that our flight was missing a pilot and we might not take off until midnight. For a minute I honestly thought they were joking. How could a flight be 'missing a pilot??' But they looked pretty distressed and never came back to say, 'Just kidding!'

Well, midnight rolls around and we're all very antsy from sitting around for six hours. The flight attendant moves to make an announcement, and moment of truth: our flight was cancelled. Panic ensued.

After waiting in line forever to talk to the attendants at the gate, we found two flights for the next day and the remaining three for the day after that. Our group would have to split up AND we had to go stay in a hotel we couldn't afford for two more nights.

Another girl and I were supposed to have work the next day so we got the first flights out. We went to the airport the next morning and split up to our respective gates. My flight had a connection and, a few minutes before boarding, I double checked the status. GOOD THING I did, because the connection I needed had been canceled. I waited forever (again) to talk to the gate attendant and she tells me flights are booked until three days from now. I'm in tears now because I'm certain I'm going to be stuck in Vegas forever.

The attendant suggests I get on a wait-list for a flight, so I went all the way across the airport to another gate. The lady working at this one was very nice and she wait-listed me for a flight to Kansas City (where I was trying to get to) and booked me on an evening flight to St. Louis (in the same state, so close enough). I started to feel more optimistic as things were beginning to go my way, and I sat down to wait. And wait and wait and wait.

Finally, the flight arrived and started boarding. Could the stressful journey be coming to an end?! I was on the edge of my seat with all my fingers and toes crossed, hoping that I'd be able to get on the flight and go home. The universe was finally on my side and I got a seat on the flight.

When it took off, there were still about 10 open seats on the flight. Three of my friends were still stuck in Vegas trying to find a flight, and we could have all gotten on this one. What we should have done was just spend the night in the airport the day before and started trying to book a new flight or get on wait-lists first thing in the morning. I bet tons of flights took off with empty seats to where we wanted to go.

It ended up okay in the end, though, as the rest of the group ended up getting a late flight back and we all made it to the correct airport only one day later than expected.

I don't have an addiction to gambling.

I typically find basketball to be pretty boring, so I was usually bored out of my mind at my old job where I had to work at basketball games. I was the director of the video display screen in the gymnasium, which I LOVED, just the games were usually dull. But one day, all of the game day workers (myself included) took bets on the score of the game. No prizes or money involved, just bragging rights.

That game was a a hundred million times more exciting than all the other games because my bragging rights were riding on the outcome. Based on my extremely high level of excitement because of that one small bet, I was slightly worried I would discover a gambling addiction later on in life. I took a trip to Las Vegas for New Years Eve and my potential addiction was put to the test.

It turns out gambling sucks. As soon as my friends and I arrived we hit the casino (obviously)! I was really excited about the slot machines because they have cool sounds and bright lights and look like so much fun. 

No. They are money eaters. You put money in, press a button and lose it all! It takes zero skill, zero thought and 100% luck. Needless to say I didn't win anything.

I did find a unicorn slot machine, though!

We also played a few games of Black Jack and I lost at that too. Black Jack was much more fun, though, because there is a little bit of skill involved. You actually use your brain and think about your next move. We only got to play once because whenever we went back to the casino the minimum bet was $10 (we played at $5 the first time) and that was too high for us. We walked past some tables where the minimum bet was like $500. Who has $500 to just throw away like that?!

Anyway, I was responsible and only spent the money I allotted for gambling and walked out that much poorer. It's not fun if you don't win!

Keep food from drying out by reheating with a wet paper towel.

Not being responsible for feeding other people is awesome because I can make dinner at the beginning of the week and then it lasts me for that whole entire week. 45 minutes spent cooking on Monday means for the rest of the week I can eat my dinner after I microwave it for just two minutes!

This week, I made some delicious BBQ biscuits. They're so good (biscuit+beef+secret sauce+cheese), but after they are refrigerated for a day the biscuit part loses all moisture.

These BBQ biscuits used to be one of about four things that I ever cooked, but I have since broadened my horizons and started cooking all the things on my Pinterest recipes board. Since I used to make them all the time, it turned into a pretty huge problem that I was frequently eating super dry biscuits for days in a row. It was also pretty gross and sad, because these biscuits are normally so good. I put my thinking cap on and came up with a solution!

Just soak a paper towel in water, cover the food and voilà! It comes out of the microwave like it's fresh out of the oven.

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.