Have you ever made a backup plan for something just in case your original plan didn't work? Yeah, doing parties, there's always a backup plan in case it rains. When my son graduated high school -- oh, it was so funny because he was a very popular boy, very popular. He belonged to two churches. He was -- belonged to two youth groups. He was a football player. He was a star football player. He was homecoming king he was, um, you name it, he was it. And I had made out a hundred and one invitations for him to send out in the mail. And he came back to me and said, "Mama, do you mind if I make up a flyer for my -- and I'll just pass out flyers for my party." I said no, "I don't mind. How many do you need? I'll make them for you." He said, "Probably about 350," and I laughed at him. So, fast forward to his -- his party day, the most torrential down fall there ever was. I was outside with an umbrella, between me and my husband, cooking hot dogs and hamburgers, and all the graduation fare that you you may -- you can imagine, and there in my poor mother's house because we were having it at my mother's house. Inside her house, it was wall to wall people, all day long. There had to have been 700 people come to my mother's house to visit with my son that day. It was absolutely incredible. I'd never seen anything like it.

Something about somebody recommending a new song TV show or movie to you and you really liked it. Well, it's a good thing you didn't ask books because we'd be here all night. But yes, so I -- I was watching a lot of British TV during the shutdown, and I mentioned this is kind of like an icebreaker thing in a staff meeting and somebody who works in my office, but I don't know very well or didn't at the time, said she liked to watch a lot of that too, and she recommended a show called Hinterland to me, and oh my gosh, it is so good. It's really dark but it takes place in Wales. And when they film the show -- when they film the show, they film the every scene is filmed twice, once in Welsh and once in English, I never knew this until I was watching the extra features because of course, I don't speak Welsh I only speak English. And so that's the only one that, I mean, that's the only part of the show that I watch. So of course every actor is bilingual, which I think is really cool. I guess that's not so uncommon in Wales, but, you know would probably not too hard to scrape those people up. But anyway, I still find that is a really fascinating aspect to the show. But yes, it's a very good and of course it has like the lead detective has you know, problems in his past. The stories are -- I'm trying to think if I'm mixing it up with Shetland, Shetland will take an entire season to solve a mystery. I think, I think Hinterlands I don't think it takes a whole season but you know, I'm sure I'm down a season. I should really I should watch it. I tend to watch this stuff on DVD and when you do that, you can only watch seasons that have been out long enough to come out on DVD. Because I get them from the library and so I know they have there's another one out there that maybe by now I can watch it or maybe on my -- maybe on a streaming service, but I highly recommend it. It's not upbeat, but it is very well done. And hey, I suppose if you look hard enough you could…

Do you and your family like to play a certain game when you all get together? There's pretty much a few that we stick to, 'cause everyone has different game preferences. I like either strategy games or trivia games. My sister would like more sort of interactive I feel like, like when we were kids she liked to play Charades and I thought that was the worst game ever, but she also thought my trivia games were like the worst games ever. So we pretty much stick to ones that everyone can agree on, which is only about four. There's like Rummikub, Yahtzee, Apples to Apples. And that's about it, 'cause someone usually has some objection to the other ones. And it's always an interesting dynamic, because my sister's not competitive at all, my dad and I are extremely competitive with each other and that can get funny. We have a game that's based on the show Jeopardy because that's my favorite show, and he and I loved to play it. And but we would compete so much with it, that we would worry about little details. You ought to ring a bell like when you want to buzz in and give the answer. And we would get into arguments about who was sitting closer to the bell, or like whose hand was closer. My arm was shorter than his so was that fair? and eventually it got to the point, my sister would usually read the cards 'cause she didn't want to play and so she measured a distance from the bell. And we each had to put our hands like on that spot and she had to finish reading the card before we could move them. Because that's the only way it was going to work. We were giving each other bruises from like slapping hands trying to get to the bell first. So that's always kind of funny, but I usually actually beat him at that game. So maybe that's why he was so competitive because I was beating him at the Jeopardy game at like age 16.

We play this other game called "Revenge", and this is our family game. So if you didn't know, Dish Network has Sirius Radio available on it. And we've always had it on it. If you go to those stations and push like the button over right, yeah, the right button over, it kind of brings up a little like menu where it's still playing the music and still showing you the station that's on and the channel, but you can't see the screen to see who who's singing what the song is etc., and so ever since I was like little, like 10, we figured this out and we've made a game of it, to guess who is singing and we call it "Revenge", because this is like -- we want revenge on each other for the last person who's won it's just trivia, you know, who's singing basically, whoever gets the first get the point. And you'll be go through all different kinds of music. And the way you start playing it is we'll just be sitting there like doing nothing, and one of us will say "Revenge" and if at least, you know the majority says "Revenge" so three out of four of us. My older brother did not play this he was -- he was not into it, moved out. He's -- he's like nine years older than me, so, he moved out well before we started playing, but three out of four people at least say "Revenge", we gotta play Revenge. And it's just music trivia, and I win almost every time now. You know, before, I didn't always, and it's all kinds of music, right? It's not just music nowadays. It's like there's country on there for my dad. There's modern hip-hop. There's old hip hop. There's 70s 80s 90s lots of rock and roll stations for sure. You know, especially for older music. But I mean, that's our go-to game. That's our family game. And it is just one of those things that we have always played, makes it sound a little nerdy but -- we have fun and we even have a belt for it. We have this old wrestling WWE belt, you know, the spinner kind that John Cena started. I don't remember if it says Cena on it, or CM Punk or if it just doesn't say anything. But yeah, it's…

This person wasn't really that interested in teaching and actually seemed resentful that they had to do it. And that became clear in the first class when they were using all this terminology that nobody, save for the PhD students, I think there was like three PhD students and then all the rest of us - save for those three students understood. And I raised my hand and I said, "I think there might be some confusion. This is our entry level class to this, this topic, you know, we're very unfamiliar with what you're saying." And he paused and he said, "Well, I thought you all had this other class before." And we said, "Nope." And I thought that would have cleared it up, but he kind of just kept going. And the purpose of the class was to learn how to design different like research implementation strategies. So like if you're trying to propose a solution to a problem, how do you design that well? This person, again, really only had interest in kind of their own research ideas and projects and getting those drafted into grants. And so very quickly the class became a grant writing course. It was almost like the original purpose, he just didn't even try to teach. Or he did, but it was via a grant application with very little support. So it was an incredibly frustrating experience. We couldn't just drop the class because it was one of those required core classes, and there was a lot of complaints from myself and many others going to the administration for our program. And it just, you know another layer of stress in what is already stressful for grad school. I just, I was over it. And so one day had been a particularly bad day. He had been extremely unhelpful. He'd given us a really unrealistic deadline for this grant application seeing as how none of us had actually ever written one. And we were supposed to be writing this grant application utilizing skills, like designing an intervention, which we had none because he didn't teach them to us. And I was pissed and so I drafted this whole long thing. And I don't even - I think what happened was there was a string of emails previous, in which I was communicating directly with him trying to understand the deadline, communicating more about I don't think that we…

If it's a smell specifically, new tire smell. Love the smell of like that rubber plasticy smell. Oh love it. You know you're going to Walmart and you walk through the the automotive tire section. Oh frick, I love that smell. I don't know why, I think it smells like the shop, like growing up my um, you know, my abuelo had a shop on the property because he was a harvesting and hauling company for oranges. So you had - we had to fix you know the rigs. We call them goats, but they're actually loaders. They just go slow, that's what we call them goats. They'll you know, they'll load - they're like tubs and you fill the tubs full of oranges from the fields. So that's what you do from the groves. Other machinery tractors etc. They didn't always do oranges, but that was a big thing. And the shop always had big stacks of tires in them and that's what it smelt like. So maybe that's why I like that smell.

Have I, or anyone I know ever bought a lemon? When my siblings and I started driving we all got really old used cars, but they were in pretty good shape, I would say overall. Our dad is a mechanic, and so he you know looked them over made sure the basics were working. And you know for the most part all of the cars that we had ran as long as we needed them to, I'll put it that way. But I remember my oldest brother had some Honda, little Honda thing, that was blue and I think I had a name as a lot of high school cars probably do. And shortly after he graduated it died. So my little brother was looking around for a car and he ended up finding one almost exactly like the original blue car. It was a red Honda. And he saw it driving to school, it was sitting in someone's corn field. And had probably been sitting there for a little while. So he had my dad come take a look at it, everything, you know looked good enough and he ended up buying it. So he drove that car, you know all summer or all spring and he would drive me to school most days, as well. So we were driving to school one day and it was getting colder out. So we had started the car and turned on the heat, and it just it smelled horrible, horrible and we realized you know, pretty immediately that it was coming from the vents. So we turned the heat off and just shivered, you know, the entire drive to school. It was kind of far. It was like 20 minutes probably. And same thing happened, you know, we didn't know what was going on. So the same thing happened at night or after school. We were driving home and we turned the heat on and it smelled horrible. And so we came home and we're like, "Dad, like what is going on?" And he checked it over and I think at the time I want to say he didn't see anything and so this cycle repeated and sometimes we would just have to like grit our teeth and bear the smell because it was so cold out. And I don't know how we eventually figured out what was going on. But…