Day 182: Working girl at home

One reason I love my job is because of its flexibility. Like today (and tomorrow) when I am allowed to work at home home, in order to extend my vacation by an extra weekend. Hooray! So I worked from home home* today. Aside from getting a certain chatty brother to understand why I couldn't watch a movie or listen to all the cities he's driven through as I was indeed working, it was quite lovely.

*I should clarify that I don't have some typing impediment where I repeat things. I took to calling my Goldsboro home "home home" in college in order to differentiate from whatever my "home" was at the time. Though I'm not sure I ever considered any of my dorm rooms or apartments home. Actually, I do this with other things, like Jeep Jeeps, more for emphasis than anything else.

Day 181: Insert Flipper theme song

What is the one thing a perpetually clumsy person should never do? Engage in any activity or wardrobe choices that will only increase their chances of disfigurement/facial bruises/general public mortification.

Meh, I prefer the rebel life and wore flippers in the pool and on the deck. And stupidly, on the pool ladder while trying to get out of the pool. Awkward doesn't begin to describe the contortions I attempted when trying walk up the steps with them, before remembering they are not permanently attached to my feet, after all.

Day 180: Aloha (from NC!)

I write from the comforts of home home. In my sweet Carolina. With dogs in the next room and family too. Whilst wearing an authentic (made in China) Hawaiian lei, courtesy of my disgustingly-tan travelling brother. My first real lei from Hawaii, as well as some sand and mementos from Pearl Harbor.
It's as close to a tropical beach as I'm likely to get this summer, and that's ok. Home is home and that's all I need this time.

Day 179: Now am I qualified to be an astronaut?

Pretend I wrote a long-winded post about my love of the space program. Or read one of my past entries on the subject. And then witness today's new thing, writing with my own space pen, in as many of the environments described on the package as I could. (Sorry, unable to test it at sub-zero and boiling temperatures.)

Normal conditions:
Upside down:Under water (Should have filled sink with water first, but I was lazy. But this worked too!):
See?

Day 178: Luck be a lady tonite

When it comes to luck, I don't consider myself to have it good or bad. Because I don't have any. At. All. I just have me and the random, sometimes great, sometimes unfortunate, but always have-to-laugh things that happen to me. (This is not to be confused with being blessed. I am very blessed. I just have no luck.)

Thus I've never felt particularly compelled to try my hand, and my hard-earned dollar, at the lottery. Until my friends and I made it our goal for June. So to the news agent in Ballston I went, and purchased this. Makes a far better bookmark than a lottery ticket, clearly, as I am still writing this blog and not travelling the world with my winnings.

Day 177: Celtic pride

Oh Wikihow, where would I be without you? While eating lunch today at work, I read an article on how to husk corn. (Unfortunately, I have done this many times, it would not be new.) Then tonite, in desperate need of something new and easy, I learned how to draw a Celtic plait.
I love that I can now draw stick figures, an A-frame house, and a Celtic plait. I expect these talents to come in handy any day now.

Day 176: My kind of "emergency"

I feel like one of my new things needs to be going a week without talking about books or food. That will not be this week.

In line at Borders today (I had a coupon that was going to expire, don't judge) I eyed a chocolate bar out of the corner of my eye with EMERGENCY on it. Always a sucker for both chocolate, and cheesiness, I leaned in for a closer look. Upon seeing the disclaimer, I was hooked:

For immediate relief of: Chocolate Cravings, Lovesickness, Exam Pressure, and Extreme Hunger.

So I bought an Emergency Chocolate bar. It didn't take long, shockingly, for me to have an "emergency," as I ate a portion of it while waiting for the metro an hour later.


Not too bad. A little more chocolate flavor in the emergency CHOCOLATE bar would have been nice, but it kept me from murdering the couple in front of me who walked so slow I missed the train. (They should add that to the disclaimer, would sell well in cities, I think.)

Day 175: "All grown-ups were once children - although few of them remember it." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

Pat Conroy, in a lecture at UNC my freshman year, said, "A book can change your life, and change it forever."

I didn't actually attend the lecture, but I read the quote the following day in the DTH and it has stuck with me. I read a lot. And not just books, but also magazines, news and web articles, blogs, Wikipedia entries, and quotations. Put something with words in front of me and at the very least I will skim over it.

And though I still maintain that it is utterly impossible for me to choose a favorite book, there are several that I give as stock answers. Books that are honestly old friends, that are there in the happy times for celebration and hard times for support. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Bell Jar. O! Pioneers. The Diary of Anne Frank. The Notebook.

And, The Little Prince, which I already own. I bought another copy today at the used book store, a hardback, with a dedication in the front. My new thing. In all the used books I've bought over the years, I can't think of a single one with a hand-written note in it.

The book was first published in 1943. The note inside is 21 years old. And both still resonate. More and more each day. I hope that whomever Lynda gave it to got some use out of it. Maybe I shouldn't have bought it, maybe I should have left it for someone else. Or maybe I'll just keep it for a little while and pay it forward later.

Day 174: Hometown love

In college, there were three standard reactions I would get when telling people my hometown:

1. Blank stare.
2. "Oh, I drive through there on my way to the beach."
3. "Wow, you have GREAT barbecue!"

It was the latter that brought me my new thing today, at a UNC Alumni picnic in Arlington, featuring none other than straight from Goldsboro, driven up this very morning, Wilber's Barbecue. Thus I had my first ever Wilber's outside of NC. Other than the rather bland hush puppies, it was the same as it always is, which is just how it's supposed to be.

My hometown might be small, but it's home and I love it. And not just because we have the best damn barbecue in the world. (And I'm not prejudiced at all.)

Day 173: The truth is out there

My best friends are my friends for a reason. Maybe because we come from similar backgrounds and went to the same school. Maybe because we would all give our right arm if Roy and his boys ever asked us to. But largely because we all share one thing in common: we are obsessive, passionate, nerds.

Whether it's a TV show or movie or song or event or founding father, we are obsessive and passionate about it/them and are not afraid to show it, to proclaim it from the rooftops! (If a situation ever were to arise where this was necessary.) And even if we don't all share it, we still discuss it and quote it and defend it, knowing full well the other person will listen to us do the same thing. Tonite, partly in honor of it almost being her birthday, and partly because she's my friend, I saw my first X-Files episode, a passionate obsession of my friend, Karey.

And it was good.