11.29.2007

Poire Tilleul

When I was in France I bought a lotion from a company called Fruits et Passion. It's actually not a French company, but a Canadian company. ANYHOW... that's not the point. The point is that the scent of the lotion was Poire Tilleul (Pear Linden) and seriously, I'm willing to bet money that it's what heaven smells like.

Long story short, I bought some other stuff in the same scent and it came today. I've smelled everything and all I can say is it smells so good, I can't even describe it. So yeah, basically I'm in heaven.

This post is sort of pointless, so I'll mention something else pointless and that is that I finished my first ever book about social change and action! Wow. I feel like I've read something worthwhile (it's a bonus that it was entertaining).

High Heels

The other day I was walking to work from the subway like I do every day. It was drizzling a little bit and so the whole world seemed quieter (or maybe softer?) than it normally does.

There is one large street I need to cross which is 6 lanes of traffic. Since it is so wide, the walk light is fairly long. Since the walk light is fairly long, you have to wait a while for it to come up. As a result, people crowd to the edge of the sidewalk waiting for the walk light to turn white.

There was a lull in the traffic, so everything was really quiet (for New York, anyhow). Then the walk light changed, and everyone started walking at once. All I could hear was the rain and the clicking of high-heeled shoes.

I couldn't help but smile, because it's such a pleasant sound.

11.25.2007

8 Hours

I thought living in NYC would mean I'd be closer to home. Turns out, the difference between NYC and France is but a few hours travel time. That's right - it took me 8 hours to get home (and to get back, for that matter).

Holidays are always fun for me. I always have a good time and enjoy seeing my family. However, I find myself unusually exhausted this time around. Sure, part of it is the traveling, but I was also introduced to something I will call the "Oxygen Overload Syndrome."

Apparently when you go from a city (or a place with high pollution) to a small town (a place of lesser pollution) your body gets more oxygen with every breath of fresh air, and therefore becomes very sleepy for the first day or two upon your arrival. This effect on top of the chemicals in turkey (and let us not forget the traveling!) made for a very sleepy weekend. Strangely enough, this sluggish stupor induced by oxygen overload also prompted my grandmother to ask if I was depressed with my life. Oh, family.

This Thanksgiving I had much to be thankful for as far as meals are concerned. My family has an overabundance of food in the house, but it is labor intensive or unappealing. Our cabinets are brimming to overflowing with flour, cherry pie filling and stewed tomatoes, but really what meal can you make with those ingredients? My point is, we always seem to have tons of food but never anything to eat, if you know what I mean.

I was a bit worried about meals all weekend long. I mean, I knew Thanksgiving was covered, but my dietary future after that night was unsure. Well, thank goodness for the Masons! They had not one but TWO meals - a ham dinner and an amazing pancake breakfast. Delicious - and perfect timing!

I am glad to be back in my apartment, though... with my grits. ;-)

11.20.2007

Tumblr

What is Tumblr? Tumblr is this amazing new(ish?) website that makes sharing photos, movies, quotes, conversation, music, etc. very easy in a sort of blog form.

So yeah. Check it out, it's easy and fun.

See the humble beginnings of my tumblr page and my sister's page.

First Snow

Today I received two texts while I was at school. The first was from my dad and it had a picture of our town... covered in snow. The second was from my sister and included a picture of her college... covered in snow.

It is decidedly NOT snowing in NYC. In fact I'd say it's a full 20 degrees too warm for snow. The scary thing is, I feel like it is cold enough to snow. 50 degrees, and I'm feeling chilled like I do in February.

This is not a good sign.

11.18.2007

Crushes

Long story short, I was clicking a bunch of links and one thing led to another. Before I knew it, I was reading this article about first crushes on a kids' health web page.

It's a pretty silly article, and it made me laugh. I'm not going to share any first crush stories (they've been suppressed for a reason!), but I will share my favorite line from the article with you:
When you see your crush, a part of you might feel embarrassed and you might want to run away and hide.
Yup.

To go along with the sappiness, here is a comment I saw someone had posted in response to a blog entry. It's nothing fancy or deep, but I think it's cute:
Girls
are like apples
on trees. The best ones
are at the top of the tree.
The boys don’t want to reach
for the good ones because they
are afraid of falling and getting hurt.
Instead, they just get the rotten apples
from the ground that aren’t as good,
but easy. So the apples at the top think
something is wrong with them, when in
reality, they’re amazing. They just
have to wait for the right boy to
come along, the one who’s
brave enough to
climb all
the way
to the top
of the tree
Now I'm off to do something less cheesy.

Weekend Laziness

This weekend has been delightfully lazy for me. Sure, I got out a bit (last night I went to see a movie with some friends - August Rush is a bad movie, btw. I would skip it), but for the most part I've been sitting around my apartment.

Normally when I sit around my apartment I feel like a slug and have this general sense of incredible amounts of time being wasted. This weekend, however, I've made my sluggish weekend productive (if you can imagine a scenario when that is even possible). I did some cooking, I cleaned the apartment, I took not one but TWO baths and read for a few hours (I had forgotten how nice that could be), watched some quality TV shows (Freaks and Geeks), and sent a ton of emails. All in all I'd say it was a pretty rocking weekend.

Oh, I also found out that the book I am currently reading was written by a guy my friend knows quite well (rather, her mother knows quite well - they worked together) and her mom's work is mentioned about 5,000 times in the book, so that's sort of random and cool. Small world.

11.16.2007

Computer Tragedy, Bouncing Back

Imagine you were an English teacher and you had been working on lesson plans all year. You spent hours writing the lesson plans out, painstakingly gathering page numbers of interest and passages for analyzing. Now imagine all your lesson plans were burned.

Luckily, you keep photocopies. Unfortunately, a few days prior you lost all your photocopies in a freak gust of wind, so your backup is gone.

As if life weren't bad enough, now imagine all your teaching materials were burned as well - all your books with all your notes, gone.

And to finish it off, let's say you had been an amazing teacher and had not only created assignments, but completed several samples of what an acceptable finished product might be. But unfortunately all those samples were lost in the fire, too.

Oh yeah, plus you lit the match.

That's what happened to me this week - I deleted all my lesson plans (plus examples, demos, not to mention programs I had been working on for future reference) accidentally, and of course my backup was screwed up. Go me.

However, I'm actually not too upset (I was for about three hours after the fact, but not so much anymore). I've gotten pretty good at using this programming language and it is not taking me too much time to recreate programs that initially took me weeks. Plus I have learned a lot about the learning styles of my students, which is an unexpected positive.

Apart from my minor meltdown, this week has been good. Two of my classes were canceled today and twice this week my class with one student in it did not meet because the student has been out. This afforded me a ton of time to get work done. I also had some wonderful evenings with my roommate... hanging around on my new couch... I got honked at the other day while I was walking down the street (hey, at least *someone* thinks I'm hot, and I'll take what I can get)... I saw Borat (so funny)... I got some awesome emails from awesome people (I'm going to respond I promise!!!)... and I've got plans for the weekend.

Plus it's almost Thanksgiving. And I love mashed food!

11.11.2007

Christmas Cards

Last year I worked really hard on making amazing Christmas cards. I bought this tack board and some amazing French construction paper (seriously, the French rule the world when it comes to office supplies) and made cards for maybe two weeks straight. They had little snowmen on them, fir trees, snowflakes, tree lights, presents (you get the idea) all cut out of paper, decorated with glitter pens, and finished off with long personal messages on the back. They looked amazing!

But then, I never sent them. Sure, a few made it around the country and into the hands of my friends and family. I sent a handful of them from France (after the fact, no doubt). For the most part, though, my stack remained largely unsent. I meant to send them, and even packed them back in my suitcase and brought them home with me in May. They stayed in my room all summer until August when I decided it was time to ditch them (seriously, they needn't have followed me to NYC).

This morning I woke up with a jolt at 6:45. The reason for my sudden alertness was my subconscious realization that it was indeed time to start making those Christmas cards again. I can't say that they will be sent this year, but I can't suppress my irrational desire to make Christmas cards for all my friends and family.

Anyhow... if you read this but don't get a card, it's not that I left you out - I just suck at using the US postal system (and the French system, for that matter).

11.10.2007

I Feel Fantastic

We have heat in our apartment - yay! It's really nice, and I took care of it all on my own. I feel like a bona-fide adult.

On an unrelated note:

The song can be found here.

11.07.2007

Gmail Is Changing

Has anybody else noticed that the title when you log in is different? Or that the word "Loading" as you log in is bolder and moved in from the edge of the page more? Or that the storage space counter on the main page is going up like crazy? Curious.

My friend Rachel asked me a mind boggling question tonight on the phone - assuming that when you think to yourself (in your head) you think in the language you were taught, how do you think deaf people think? If they've been deaf all their lives then their language has no sound, so what is "thinking to themselves" like? We both agreed that it's probably visual somehow, but still, I thought it was an interesting question. So yeah, Rachel gets the awesome card today.

I'm making a brick game in my programming class. The concept is easy, but the syntax is killing me. Three days and all I can get the ball to do is move 5 pixels every time you click it. Stupid Revolution. (On the plus side, my graphics ROCK! I'm a Photoshop genius.)

11.06.2007

Creative Organization

I was looking for something long and string-ish tonight because I needed to guestimate the length of something. My standard technique for measuring when a ruler or measuring tape of any kind escapes me is to take said string-ish thing and count how many times it extends the length of a piece of paper.

Anyhow, I have a ton of cords and things (being a bit of a gadget addict, I have wires a-plenty) in this one drawer. I pulled open the drawer and right on top of all the wires I saw one of my favorite bras which had, up until this point, gone missing. To this, I say WOOHOO!

There are two points I'd like to make, the first being that you find things in the most unexpected of places. Second, I think a safe conclusion to draw from this experience is that I am a totally random individual and could benefit from a little organization in my life.

11.04.2007

Krakatoa and an Explosion of Subsequent Educational Readings

I found my Krakatoa book and have been reading it some more - it's AMAZING! I'm just now getting to the part about the beginnings of the eruption, and how the telegraph played an important role in the passing of information worldwide about the event. ANYHOW...

I never expected to enjoy reading a book about something so historical and, well, educational. It has inspired me to take on other educational reading endeavors. So, this weekend I bought a book called "Calling All Radicals". I'm not a radical, but no matter - I started reading the book today and it's phenomenal! It's shockingly captivating and the stories really draw you in. I'm impressed, I'm not going to lie, and Gabriel Thompson (the author) wrote another book that looks equally as interesting which I will probably read if this one continues to be good.

I was also equally intrigued with a book about coal mining, which I might have to get from the library or something. Who knew educational reading, when self-initiated, could be so much fun? I'm trying to make up for lost time.

(Don't worry - I'm still keeping to my traditional roots and love of all things fluffy/stupid/mindless, and have been watching Eurotrip every single night for the past week and a half.)

(Red)

I just went to the official Product (Red) page to see what all the hullabaloo was about.

Initially, it seems like a good idea. Buy some products, help with the aids effort, feel good about yourself. I was intrigued and almost "bought" into the idea. Luckily, I decided to take a look at just how much my purchases could really help.

They have a calculator on their site so you can enter what products you've purchased and see what sort of impact you've made. I entered that I bought three Motorola phones, two Vanity Fair CDs and one Hallmark tote bag (lies, all lies). After all my "purchases", I saw that only one month of ARV medication would be supplied.

Here's the thing - if you are in need of a new cell phone, by all means purchase a (Red) product. If you're in the market for a new jacket, why not consider the one from Gap's (Red) line? Since you're going to buy a product, you might as well choose the one that's going to give a SMALL amount towards a good cause.

However, don't think that your purchases are going to make a significant impact and thus be persuaded to make a purchasing choice you wouldn't have otherwise made. If you really want to make an impact, don't buy that red t-shirt that you don't really need for $25. Why not just give the $25 to charity in the first place?

It's a good idea in theory, and while I'm glad to see that there is some good to come out of consumerism I think/fear that many people will make pointless purchases in order to achieve the warm fuzzy "I'm a good person" feeling, rather than sending their money directly to a truly good cause.

11.02.2007

Martian Child

Did this come out a long while ago? No matter, I want to see it.

11.01.2007

The Subway

I was riding back on the Subway from having looked at a sofa (which I totally bought! YAY!) and the conductor was having a hard time getting people to step all the way in so she could shut the doors. Now, what conductors usually say is:

"Please stand clear of the closing doors."

or

"Move all the way in to the center of the car, please."

This conductor was saying those phrases exactly, except her intonation and tone of voice said so much more! She would say,

"Stand clear of the closing doors, please."

but I could tell what she meant was,

"Stupid people, get your butts on the train and stop blocking the doors! All night long at every stop you pull these shannanies, it's time to get to business and step on the train like your life depends on it... please."

I laughed at every stop.