And...Re-start.

For the past several months, I've felt like I'm in a get up-work-go home-eat-sleep-repeat rut.  I tell myself that I have nothing worthwhile to blog about, and therefore I don't write.  This is bad, and in reality it's just not at all true.  The fact that life if more of a routine than it was during college does not in any way, shape, or form mean that it's less interesting.  And while it is true that much of my time is spent at a desk each day, there's a lot of life that happens outside of work.  For example, here's a list of things that I haven't blogged about and should have over the past several months (in no particular order):

1. At least four business trips to places I've never been to before.

2. The fact that Potomac, Maryland has the most enormous mansions.  And a Tesla store in the mall.

3. The gardening project on my office's windowsill (I'm now a gnat-killing ninja).

4. Downhill skiing after not skiing for over six years.

5. Buying a wedding dress.

[No picture available due to pre-wedding secrecy.]

6. Traveling to Milwaukee to see a Tolkien exhibit in two days.

7. Hiking in the rain in New Hampshire.

[The view from the top.]

8. A trip to the Grand Cayman.

9. Making new friends from work.

[Well, I guess I don't have pictures of said new friends...yet.]

10. The gloriousness of crock pot cooking.

[Yet another thing I didn't take a picture of.]

11. My new-found obsession with NPR.  (I'm the nerd with the NPR app on her phone...)

12. 2013's goal of trying several new restaurants in the area.

13. Not-so-small brother heading to college.

14. Oh, I don't know...planning a wedding.  Obviously not a big deal.

[There is no picture.  We're too busy emailing people.]

15. Getting engaged.  (BOOM.  DONE.)

[This photo is actually two years old.]

So clearly, my imperceptive view that nothing exciting happens anymore is a total and complete lie.  College does lend itself to random, exciting, blog-worthy activities, but college ended more than two years ago - and for crying out loud - my life is just as good (if not better) than it was then.  So in short, I am without excuse.  The no-internet-in-my-apartment thing is just a cover.  If I'm going to "suck the marrow out of life," as Kelle Hampton is fond of saying, then I better start recognizing the fact that everyday life is worth capturing.  I've said it before, but I think there's a good chance of succeeding this time: it's time to bring this blog back from the dead.  I might even give it a fresh coat of paint.  Here's to 2014 - the year of weddings, blogging, adventures, and the beauty of the routine.

A Bird's Eye View

Today was a great day due to a small thing.  As in...literally a small object.  But before I can talk about this small object, I need to provide some background information.

Our office building is luxurious in that everyone has his or her own office.  I am lucky enough to have a window office that looks out over a large field that may or may not be a swamp.  If it is a swamp, it's been enormously beneficial in allowing various animals to inhabit the area surrounding the office building.  My friend Maria and I have often spent a few moments of our otherwise busy time gazing out the window upon the likes of groundhogs, cardinals, Canadian geese (curse the geese...I'll never escape them!), and even a huge red tailed hawk.

(via)

That was a glorious day.  It sat in the tree next to my window for a full 15 minutes!

Enough background.

Maria walked into my office today with a Christmas gift.  Inside said Christmas gift was a bird watching guidebook and a pair of binoculars.

New.  Favorite.  Object.

I've never been a bird watcher, but all of a sudden I felt like I understood the heart of hearts of all bird fanatics out there.  I have a full book of 121 birds to search for and check off the list!  I have 121 glossy pictures to marvel at!  I have binoculars with which to peer into the sky and watch the 121 birds speed across the horizon!  HOW COULD ANYONE DO ANY WORK WITH BIRDS IN THE SKY??

So if you walk past my office for the next, oh, I don't know...year...expect to see me with the binoculars glued to my face.  I will put a check mark next to every single bird in that book if it's the last thing I do.

All else is for the birds.

Musings of Late

It's been a very long time since I've felt like I have had anything worthwhile to blog about.  Not because my life was uninteresting - to be sure, it was great - but mostly because I felt like I had nothing to offer.  For a significant amount of time, I felt like I had entirely lost my identity.  I don't know what happened, except that everything around me shifted as soon as college ended.  It had to - nothing about the way you've existed for the past 16 years is the same, and you're thrust into a world that you've only experienced through thinking about the future.

Transitions are difficult.

There have been a few times in my life that I have truly felt God's hand in my life.  One of the most clear times was at the end of last summer, when I had no idea what I was going to as soon as I was kicked out of summer housing at Gordon for school to start back up.  Within two weeks, I suddenly had a job and a place to live, and I would be in complete denial if I said that I had control over any of that.

The second time is now.  The line "I once was lost, but now am found" keeps repeating itself over and over, and joy - once elusive, yet earnestly longed for - has woven its way back into my soul.  My life is so richly blessed, and for that I am eternally grateful.




(Note: please ignore the grammar mistakes and strange images in this video.  The music was the goal...)

Surprises

Ok, so after all of my previous complaining, I completely neglected the absolute sweetest part of today.

I had to go to the doctor this afternoon, which was something I had dreaded with fear and trembling (sort of) all afternoon. Once that was all over, I met up with the Official Blog Boyfriend (he will be referred to as such henceforth) for a quick dinner before I headed home and he went off to a rehearsal.

And he had bought me flowers.

Just-because flowers.

Saying he's the greatest is an understatement.

Snapshot

Today in a nutshell:

Work (ate a lovely lunch, called England, survived a tiny earthquake)

Home (made an omelette with a good pan, texted a lot o' people, read blogs)

3.6 mile walk (strolled past a swearing, angry, possibly drunk man on a bike, saw a concert and the beach, stabbed finger by accident on a plant (presumably) and drew blood, came back in the dark)

Home (changed into very comfortable clothes and got ready for bed)


Minus the fact that this sounds really boring when written as such, it was an eventful day and I feel healthier than I did when I left the house this morning. Except for the bleeding finger, of course.

In it to win it...

I am making a goals list for this year. And LUCKY YOU! You get to read them. Don't you feel privileged? Ok, maybe not. But at least I have witnesses now, right?

1. I will practice at least 4 out of 7 days of the week. I will, I will, I will. I will.

[source]

2. I will read the entirety of Gray's Anatomy in 356 days. So far I've made it to page two, but I started today. Give me a break, ok?

3. I want to be more...muscle-y. I have to wear a nicer dress next month, and I want it to look better than it does at present. Grr.

[source]

4. I will take part in at least one world-wide fad, just because I can. I mean, come on. Though we are not of the world, we are in it. This will probably happen sooner rather than later, while I still have motivation.

[source]

(Not this one; fear not.)

5. I will consider learning yoga. I may not actually do it, but I will consider it.

6. In two years, I will be on my way to doing something fantastic as a result of hard work.

[source]

(Ha.)

7. I will throw a dinner party, cooked entirely from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Consider yourself invited, because chances are...if you're reading this, I probably know you.

[source]

8. I will travel somewhere out of the country. That will require funding, but perhaps that will happen soon. Perhaps. I dunno...if all else fails, I could always join a convent in Italy. That's been my back-up plan to my back-up plan for several years now. Don't YOU want to become a nun?

[source]

That's all. I may add more to the list later in time. I could add impossible things, like becoming a Highly Successful Blogger, but then my list wouldn't be realistic anymore. So...bye.

Catching Up

I have to admit...I'm not feeling inspired in the writing department these days. Probably because most days are exactly the same: babysit, beach, practice, ice cream, sleep. Sometimes we throw a movie in the mix too. So...sorry. MLIA. Whatev.

That's not to say, however, that summer is being wasted away. No sir. (Or ma'am.) It's been a long time since I've had a more lazy summer, and I'm really enjoying it. I guess I can't be completely footloose and fancy free just because - ya know - I'm looking for a job and all that. (Have I ever mentioned that before? Yes? Mmm. How redundant. Again, sorry. Chalk it up to networking?)

I've discovered a new-found love for lying on the beach with friends, even though it requires wearing sunscreen (which I hate almost as much as I hate folding laundry).

I've rediscovered the glory of ultimate frisbee, and I've eaten way too much ice cream for my own good (to the point where I finally ordered sorbet instead. Uncharacteristic).

My family is currently is Switzerland, and I miss them a lot. (As in more-than-expected-a-lot.)

I've cried too much. Also uncharacteristic. (Uncharted territory stresses me out, apparently.)

And I've seen so much more to be grateful for. Transitions really make me want to hold tightly to the things that I've treasured in the past, but I really can't do that forever. Thus being grateful for new things is imperative.

In the meantime (while I figure everything out - ha!) I will try to eat more Pinkberry than ice cream, I will try to gain more freckles than sunburn, I will try to branch out from frisbee to whiffle ball, and I will try to practice more than two hours per day.

Fun at Work

Ok, so I know I'm supposed to be getting a real job and all, but honestly, babysitting is kinda fun. I mean, how often do YOU get to have someone do your hair, dress you up in a fancy evening gown made out of a large green blanket, and pretend that you're a movie star for 45 minutes at a time? I even had a photographer.

He was 4.

But still.



I felt so pampered.

Even if my hair was held in place by marker-covered popsicle sticks.

Fotobooth Fun

Hello world!

I am writing today in order to explain a photo collage which apparently grows larger upon the commencement of one clicking somewhere on the surface of it. This collage came to be in existence because my sister, the notorious and infamous Jillian Griffin, who i'm sure is known for her blog posts throughout the interwebs, opened photobooth on her computer... Apparently the fun does not end after this outrageous photo taking program is running. We spent nearly an hour creating funny and inexplainable facial expressions as well as body gestures to entertain ourselves in the evening.

One would think that you would use effects to have the most fun, but that is not the case. Simply have an excellent time on good old normal mode and off to the races one goes. You see, I have found that there is not so much ingenuity or perplexity involved in the making and observing of photos that rely simply on the effect to make them funny, like having two faces and four arms. All you really need is to have the soft susurration of your imagination prompt you, within three seconds, to plaster onto your features an indelible moment of creativity that is now saved to less than one kilobyte of space on your hard drive. Congrats you've made a photo!

Well over the course of that one hour, I had a most excellent and bodacious adventure. *Bill and Ted fans insert laugh here* I hope that everyone who reads this blog tries out their own version of photobooth or crystaleye or whatever type of program you have so that they all can have as much fun as my sister and I did. I dare you to try it :)

K, Later all

(Jillian's brother, not v v v)

Last week

So I may or may not have left the power cord to my computer at the school over the entirety of April vacation, which meant that I struggled to save my battery for the past nine days and thus avoided blogging. That's really very sad, because a LOT has happened in the past week-and-a-couple-days that is entirely blog-worthy.

1. Church. I have never, ever spent so much time at church in my entire life. We had church last Sunday (2.5 hours). Then again on Thursday (2.5 hours), Friday (2.5 hours), Saturday (4.5 hours), and Sunday (2.5 hours). That means I spent a total of 15.5 hours in church just this week. Crazy, huh? It was entirely enjoyable. I could write a whole post on each church service, but I'll save that for another time.

2. Clothes. First, I sewed a dress. I stayed up waaaaaaay too late (we're talking till around 3:30 am...) to finish it, and it has some potential. I need to make some alterations before I could even consider wearing it - I guess I'm not quite standard sized - but one day, I think it might be acceptable.


Then Diana and I went shopping, and I found a dress that I LOVE that was originally $42.00, and I got it for $18.00. Three cheers for discounts and sales! Finally, I found a pair of green shorts. I'm sort of in love with them...and that might be an understatement.


3. Exercise. I've gone running for the past four days in a row, and I'm planning on keeping that up. Win! I feel much more energetic in the morning, and, weirdly enough, I ended up having more time to get ready for school even though I'm doing more. Maybe it has something to do with actually forcing myself to get up on time.

4. Duct tape. I made a duct tape wallet, and I'm pretty proud of it. I guess that's what happens when you have a week off and no computer... A friend labeled me "one of those duct tape wallet girls," which I guess is true. Not sure if there are any connotations associated with that. What else was I supposed to do on a rainy afternoon after being poked by a kabob-sized needle in the morning? I maintain that it was creative and fun, even if it makes me five years old.


5. Books. I read John Steinbeck's The Pearl on Saturday (in 74 minutes, no less! I timed myself. Before you think I'm superhuman, let me inform you that it's only 90 pages.), and found it to be a very sad story. If I wanted to be really hardcore, I'd think about all the symbolism, imagery, hyperbole, etc. that was used because I know without a doubt that the book was chock full of it, but I'll probably save that for another time. After I finished that, I started reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. You might be familiar with his other book, Kite Runner. I've read that and I loved it, sad as it was, so I figured this one would be splendid as well. Right now I'm 60 pages in, and I have yet to be disappointed.

6. Cleaning. Our apartment, as well as my side of our room, is sparkling clean! I plan to keep it this way as long as humanly possible because it's just so nice to have so much floor and table space.

7. Food. This week I made pizza with pesto, freshly sliced tomatoes, and grated cheese. It was heavenly - so much so that I made it twice. Next time, I'll make the crust too.


I also figured out how to modify the microwave cake to make it vanilla!


And I introduced my mom to Pinkberry. SO. GOOD.


(Fear not; the dessert-y elements listed here were consumed on Sunday. Lent was thus upheld.)

8. Final Things. I played my last formal Wind Ensemble concert at Gordon last week. It was a little sad, but mostly exciting. We do have one more performance with some community bands, but Wind Ensemble is pretty much over. I also picked up my cap and gown last week. I guess college really is ending, which feels weird. I don't feel old enough for this. I mean, heck, I still make duct tape wallets. I'm going to miss Gordon and all its quirks. There are things I won't miss, i.e. chapel requirements, the registrar, homework assignments, practice cards, and goose poop scattered everywhere, but I'm really going to miss all the wonderful people that I've met here that I won't see every single day anymore, as well as the music department culture (mostly...), the academic environment ( I know, I know, liking school is dorky), and my apartment. Oh dear, my apartment. I will miss them the most. That requires a separate post also.

Makeshift Food

It's somewhat amazing what sorts of things you can come up with when your food supply is severely limited by budget constraints. (Yes. Severely. At least for the rest of this week.) As it turns out, butter, milk, flour, and eggs can make an astonishingly wide array of food, as can cinnamon and pizza dough.

My first success was cinnamon pizza. That sounds nasty, I know, but it wasn't. Probably because there were no normal pizza toppings involved. I remembered late last night that I had a roll of pre-made pizza crust in the fridge that I needed to use very soon. However, I didn't have any pizza sauce or tomatoes, so it seemed like it was doomed to a miserably, rotten death until I remembered that everyone loves apple crisp. Problem number one: Lent. Problem number two: no apples. Now, dessert isn't dessert if not all the pieces are there, and you can't have pizza for dessert. Therefore, problem number one was solved. On to problem number two. I think we can all agree that the best part of apple crisp is the topping, so that's what I made. No recipe involved, just experimentation. It worked, too. It came out of the oven looking like this...


...the apartment reaction was something like this:


...and 10 minutes and six people later, it looked like this:


I will be making that again next time I have pizza crust.

After school today I ate some eggs, but then I decided I wasn't full yet. After perusing the Williams and Sonoma website for things I could make with the above-listed ingredients, I came across a recipe for rosemary popovers. Now, I didn't really want to make them with the parsley and rosemary that was called for, because I wanted to put butter and jam on them. Parsley and jam, in my opinion, don't make the best combination. So I just left them out.

If you've never made popovers before, they might seem kinda weird. The batter is lumpy and quasi-viscous, and you put them in a cold oven to start. But if you make them right, they are the most delicious little biscuitlike things you can imagine. They're not sweet at all, even though they look a little like muffins.


(Yes, they are supposed to be that crispy-looking. They're crispy on the top and squishy in the middle.)

One of mine came out looking a little lopsided, but it tasted the same.


Then you put on your butter and jam - I am particularly partial to jam of the raspberry-minus-the-seeds variety - and you have an excellent after-school snack.


Lauren and Diana ate some too...and I ate four...

I'm slowly exhausting my supply of not-so-renewable-by-me resources, so I'm going to have to become even more creative for the rest of the week. But given my success so far, the outcome should be pretty good.

Catching up

I just went through my camera and I found a whole bunch of pictures that I should have posted long ago!

One time, Meghanne, Jon, Diana, Luke, Taylor, Chris, and I went to Boston to hear the BSO. Once there, we quickly discovered that the BSO was out of cheap(er) tickets, and none of us wanted to spend over $25 dollars, let alone $98. Ha. So it was time for plan B: Fire and Ice! This adventure was partially in celebration of Taylor's birthday, so we we told the chefs, and they made him stand in the middle of the cooking area while we all sang. ("Sang" is a very, very relative term...) After we had gotten our first round of food, we took some scenario pictures. I don't know what was supposed to be happening in this one, but it's my favorite.


This is another scenario picture that is definitely not ringing a bell...


But regardless of what the scenarios were supposed to be, we had a good time acting them out.

Later that week, I baked a cake for our organist/music director's last week of church. I took a picture of both the copious amount of butter necessary to make it taste good, and the even more copious amount of powdered sugar that went into the frosting. At some point or another, I'm going to have to dedicate an entire post to the merits of butter - as in, if you want anything to taste good, throw in as much butter as you think your arteries can handle. Take a look at the sugar-to-cake ratio...



Post-church, there was a party at a new restaurant in Boston called Lolita. NOTA BENE: IF YOU HAVE NOT HEARD OF OR BEEN TO THIS RESTAURANT, HEAR ABOUT IT OR GO TO IT RIGHT NOW. RIGHT NOW! I can't recommend it highly enough, and to top it off, it was started by people from church. So cool! And they gave us fake tattoos!


(This is my left arm, if you couldn't tell.)

The next week, my lovely apartment played Bananagrams. I won the last round that I played before heading off to a concert by a phenomenal string quartet, and I took a picture of my crossword masterpiece.


Good times.

This weekend, we went to Lauren's house to celebrate her birthday, but I think that requires a post of its own....

"Bless me, Blogosphere, for I may have sinned..."

Ok, ok, so I have a somewhat embarrassing confession to make. I have tried extraordinarily hard to avoid admitting this for a long time, but both the truth and the guilt are weighing so heavily on my conscience that I can no longer put it off. Please don't judge me, even though I realize that this is perhaps juvenile and unacceptable for someone aspiring to be a quasi-respectable, grown up sort of person.


(I secretly enjoy listening to Taylor Swift.)

Grr

This marks the last time I will complain about this, but....

I am very, very tired of being sick. I think I have caught every single cold that went around campus over the past two semesters, so I guess I'm making up for the lack of colds I had during my first 2.5 years of college. Maybe if I get all of this sickness out of the way now, I won't have any while student teaching.



Yeah right.

And they told me to eat my fruits and vegetables...ha...

Sometimes I think that I should just quit school and become some sort of houseperson. (I can't be a housewife as I'm not married. Thus houseperson.) I think this because any time that I've had free time in the last few days, I've been cooking or baking, and I've felt very accomplished. Then I remember that I like playing oboe just as much as I like to cook. On Wednesday, I made tomato sauce. It turned out pretty well, although now it's sitting in the fridge until I make pasta to go with it. On Thursday, I ate leftover chicken. Uh...not so exciting. Moving on. On Friday, I baked oatmeal honey bread and ate it with butter and jam, and subsequently tried to feed it to anyone who came to visit. Today, I made bruschetta, and it was one of the best and easiest meals that I've made yet. And it was healthy!!






And - the best part - it made me eat chunks of raw tomato for the first time in my life! There are a lot of very normal fruits and vegetables that I've never tried. Let me come up with a list:

-peaches
-plums
-mangos
-cherries (I half-tasted one once, but I don't count that)
-apricots
-grapefruit
-lemon
-lime
-pineapple
-beets
-rhubarb (not even in pie)
-sweet potatoes (except for sweet potato fries)

Up until this summer, I had never eaten kiwis, oranges, avocados, artichokes, tomatoes, or grapes, so I feel that I'm slowly making some progress. As it turns out, I like tomatoes, artichokes, and avocados, so clearly I'm missing out on all the rest. Maybe trying everything will cure me of my dislike of fruit.

Late Night/Early Morning Thoughts

It's 3:40 in the morning, and I can't sleep. I would very much like to sleep, as I know that I will be exhausted if I ever do fall asleep and wake up later, but that seems to be an impossibility right now. I don't know what's keeping me awake. In any case, I will take this opportunity to record one of the best quotes from The Count of Monte Cristo, which I finished this past evening. After classes started, unfortunately.

"Women have infallible instincts, and, by means of an algebra unknown to man, they can explain the most marvelous things."

I think that this quote is highly amusing. I also think I should stop typing now, or I risk waking up my roommate with the sound of tapping keys.

Cooking Mishaps, Apartment Life, and Organization

This evening I made myself dinner. I'd made breaded-fried-mixed-with-Italian-seasoning chicken before and it turned out just fine, but tonight I didn't put enough oil in the pan and had the heat up a little too high. This combination of events led to rather dark undersides of the chicken, and me bemoaning my oh-so-skillfully prepared poorly cooked food. How unfortunate. In order to make up for this sad event, I am determined to redeem myself tomorrow night with bruschetta. There is no possible way for me to mess up frying slices of bread. If I do....I will eat frozen food for the rest of the year. Well, maybe not frozen food. Cereal. I could survive off that for a very long time.

Despite my minor food disaster (ok, saying that blows everything out of proportion), our apartment is absolutely wonderful. I foresee this being an excellent school year, regardless of how daunting student teaching second semester sounds. There will be many awesome things to make up for it. I do have a lot of things to do before tomorrow though: I NEED to finish The Count of Monte Cristo tonight, because I am determined to finish it before classes start. That shouldn't be too hard, because I have less than 60 pages left. Half hour boost. I also need to figure out if I can get all of the 20+ English books from the library, because there is NO WAY I am buying that many books for a 100 level class that does not pertain to my major in the least. Granted, they are literary classics, but I don't think I need every classic ever written in my personal library. I don't have enough room for that on my shelf. I may need to do laundry, but I think I have enough clothes to last me for a while without doing it. I would mostly consider doing laundry just because it's now FREE!!!! This novelty gives me an incentive to do the laundry much more frequently than is necessary. The downside of doing laundry more often is that then I have to fold it all and put it away, and that's my least favorite chore in all the world. I'd rather clean the bathroom. I guess that pretty much covers all the things I need to do tonight, so now on to the list of things I want to do. I want to go to bed awfully early. I want to make some pasta sauce. I want to go to Target to get the ingredients for said pasta sauce, among other things. Side note: never in my life did I foresee myself voluntarily buying whole tomatoes. The world is a surprising place. And I want to watch last night's episode of Lie to Me. That could potentially wait though.

And finally, I feel that I need to note my new-found love of coupons. I had no idea that I could save as much money as I can using coupons, and so I'm trying to figure out how to organize them so that I can easily find them when I need them. Organizing and subsequently shopping using them automatically requires that I make grocery lists, which will probably be better than my usual method of going to the store and figuring out what I want for the upcoming week while there. Therefore, it seems that this year will be The Year in which I Become Organized, Both in Terms of Academia and Domesticity.

Stress? What?

I never thought that I got stressed. But after waking up around 7 with no alarm with a very slightly upset stomach the past few mornings regardless of how late I went to bed the previous night, I'm thinking that maybe I'm subconsciously more stressed than I think I am. I don't really have any reason to be stressed, except for the paper that I have to finish before 9:45 this morning, the audition(s) I have during the first week of the semester, the reality of the fact that I am graduating this year and I need to figure out what the heck I'm doing after college, and normal everyday things that everyone deals with. Really, these things don't even come close to the amount of seemingly stress-inducing things that occur at other times of the year, like the end of a semester. So stress should not be an issue right now. How bizarre.

Song of the Day (Week?)

Aside: about a million high school hockey players have taken over the campus. That's right. Hockey. In the middle of July. And they make more mess than the to-remain-unnamed-denomination-alists. This makes cleaning dorm bathrooms a rather nasty business.

Main point: this past week marked the beginning of a summer English class that lasts until the 20th of August, meeting every Monday and Wednesday. The class entails a drive of about half an hour, which therefore means that I have the full drive to sing along with any and all of the cds I have in the car. Thus, over the course of the past three days, I have listened to "Thank You for the Music" about five times per trip. Thank you, Mama Mia, for providing me with a new sing-a-long song.

Observations

Things upon which to think for today:

-Surprisingly, I have the day off, at least until 3. This was unexpected.

-I keep getting sick. Still. It's summer. After taking allergy medicine, diagnosis ≠ allergies. WHY? Bring on the apple juice and vinegar...

-Lie to Me is on tonight! I was introduced to it at the beginning of the summer, and it's my new favorite show.

-I just ran out of milk! No!

-I need to be practicing more, because I have to do a recital in November. As currently planned, the repertoire could possibly include Bach (definitely), Molique (definitely), Mozart (maybe), Hindemith (maybe), some random modern piece whose composer I've forgotten (hopefully not), and the Herzogenberg oboe, horn, and piano trio (definitely). I also need to become sweet at making reeds, which means that I need to buy more cane, which requires spending money. Dislike. I'll go practice once I finish writing.

-Up until yesterday, it had been awhile since I did any landscaping-type work. I forgot that working with dirt means that it gets ground into the skin on my hands for days, and it won't come off just by washing. But I am washing my hands, so I guess that brings some new meaning to the expression "good clean dirt." And I also feel very productive, having gotten some good work done.

-I recently discovered a whole bunch of PhotoBooth pictures of my brother and me that are absolutely ridiculous. Example A:

To avoid the risk of exposing both of us to public ridicule for being quite un-photogenic and certifiably crazy, I will refrain from posting the rest of these pictures, despite the fact that I find them amusing. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks so.

-And finally, "Dude, DC on the 4th?" "Dude."