I heart Weekends

It's been a pretty intense weekend of garage saling and dress shopping. I kicked it off Thursday by shopping at Maurice's, where they have given in to the temptation to make all their dresses in patterns mimicking an acid trip and wound it up Saturday evening at Windsor, where the sale girls take you captive and trap you in the fitting room, bringing back dress after dress until you buy something (it's true, I never would have made it out alive otherwise!).

In between dress shopping, Robin and went garage saling. She found a couch, now all we have to do is figure out how to get it to her house!
We also stopped by the farmer's market. I've always meant to go, but I've never actually been.
There was someone selling beautiful flowers. Robin bought some...they're gracing her largest sauce pan.


After finding a dress Katie and went over to the Flat Top grill...I'm not a big stir fry fan, but it was fun to be able to make my own.

Walk About

Every month my boss assigns me the job of figuring out what we'll put on the cover of our magazine. If there's some kind of event and we have pictures from the year before (big if) we use those, but a lot of times it involves me making some kind of field trip to find a good cover photo.

I love that.

I was supposed to get pictures of wheatfields...but there weren't any. And interestingly enough, there aren't alot of places to park one's car in the scenic spots of Amish Land. So I parked my car at the alternative lifestyle center (I don't want to know) and took an hour long hike.

wedding bells and vacation days

Debbie, the girl who was my best friend between the ages of 5 and 12, is getting married. She met the guy on e-harmony or some other such site and apparently they are blissfully happy. All is well.

I never got an actual invite. That's ok...most of my friends that have gotten married...I haven't been invited to their weddings and really she means for me to come...I'm invited to dinner with the rest of my family after the wedding...so I can only assume that I'm invited to the wedding itself (especially as my mother, who keeps in better touch with Debbie than I do, keeps insisting that I am). That's fine. Although, frankly, sitting down to dinner with friends after you've just gotten married sounds a little lame - even if I am one of those friends. Don't expect me to be hanging around if I get married.

In anycase, this is all periferal to the fact that she has placed this lovely event early on a Friday afternoon! I'm sorry, what? The happiest day of your life to be shared by all you love and you place it when most people are still only dreaming about clocking out?

Gee, I'd've done something more than a card but I don't have any money because I skipped out on work!

Not that it upsets me or anything.

A Salute to Fiction

No sleep. Far too much coffee. One book. Amazing.

Rowling is brilliant. That's really all there is to say.

A good story leaves me longing for more.
A great story leaves me satisfied for a long time.

This, was a great story.

"Wild nights are my glory" - Mrs. Whatsit, A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeline L'Engle

I've always loved storms. I don't know why. As a child I traumatized my mother, who worries a lot, by rolling down the car window during thunderstorms and sticking out my hand so I could feel the rain.

In high school Holly and I road Son of Beast over and over when it rained. The ride went so fast it felt like the raindrops felt like they would leave bruises.

But I haven't seen a good storm in a long time. Last night was a good storm. I did wish it would be a little bit of a quieter storm so I could go to sleep, but I'm really psyched that its still raining today. It looks like it's going to keep up raining for my lunch break and I love being in the car when it rains.

My Love Affair with Monday

This morning I had about four shots of espresso. Normally that just keeps me from nodding off at my desk, but I must have been better rested than I thought because today I cannot sit still, which is probably why I have so many random thoughts running through my head this morning.

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First of all, I love Mondays. On Monday the week is new. I have’t screwed anything up yet. I haven’t snapped at my coworkers, yet. I have yet to forget my lunch every single day and I have not been led astray by the candy dish. Yet. I still believe that this week I will give work my best shot. Because it’s Monday it is so much harder to be apathetic, even when I felt that way all last week, except for Monday. On Monday, too, all my work goes quickly. I don’t care much for Tuesday, the novelty of my job has definitely worn off, but Monday is great. I just think you should know.

Also, I think I'm developing a phobia of going to the hair dresser. See, growing up I didn't cut my hair much and when I did my mom cut it straight across, no layers. This is fine when you wear your hair in pigtails or braids every single day, but you can see how that to change when I got older. That was fine too, my hairstylist loved me and I could walk in and say, "I don't know what I want, it should be this length, make it pretty."
In college I cut my hair very short, much to the approval of almost everyone I'd ever met and a few people I didn't even know (it's true) and the dismay of my boyfriend-at-the-time who really likes long hair (but seriously it didn't look good). That was easy because of Lucky Magazine's hair guide...but since then styles have changed and Lucky has yet to put out anything of equal or greater value.
The first stylist I tried here in Indiana cut my hair very nicely...oh a couple of times, but I've since discovered that though I bring the same picture with me each time, the original cut is never recreated.
I got tired of ineffectually attempting to straighten my hair, which hovers indistinctly between being straight and wavy, so I told my latest hairstylist I just wanted to wash the style and go. She completely misread that as, "Please scrunch my hair and try to sell me expensive hair care products, punctuate with uncomfortable small talk."

Which leads me to rant number three. I hate telling people I graduated from Grace. Invariably it leads them to believe that then is an appropriate time to tell me that they think 1) Grace is the devil, 2) All Gracies are pricks, 3) They would have never survived there because they are much too cool for that. Thank-you. I am glad to know of your disdain. I'll cherish it always.

For the record, I liked being at Grace. I liked a great majority of the people (and I don't even like people). I liked my classes. I liked chapel. I barely noticed the rules, much less felt compelled to break any of them.

If that makes me a prick, so be it, but at least I didn't go just because it was easy. At least I didn't go because mummy and daddikins threatened to revoke my car and pocket money if I didn't do it. At least I didn't spend the entire time whining that I was expected to meet a standard I agreed to meet. I'm sorry I'm not bloody cool enough, just cut my hair so I can pay the exorbitant bill.

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Moving on to actual events, this morning I was driving to work and I noticed something odd on the side of the road. It turned out to be a lady learning inside some sort of small covered cart (about knee high). The lady turned out to be Rosie Swale of Pope Wales. She’s walking around the world for cancer. She has this great accent and she never stops talking. It’s times like that I wish I had a pocket recorder. We met her because she met Delilah who thought that we might know of a harness shop where she could get a new harness made. None of the harness shops around here make people harnesses, but she’s out buying the parts right now and then some guy is going to sew them together for her. Meanwhile, her cart, Charlie, is parked outside our offices and people have been coming buy to take pictures (a local paper did a story on her).
Rosie’s been through Eastern Europe, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and the upper plain states of the U,S.
You can check out her site at http://www.rosiesaroundtheworld.co.uk/.

Edit: She came back and I got some more pictures of her taking off. It was a lot of fun. I got to run up the highway and take pictures of her coming down the road. My job is really odd sometimes, but quirkiness can be a good thing.

Sometimes...

I think my boss has been working with the Amish too long. He just ruined a beautiful design...so he could add superfluous text. Ok...maybe it wasn't beautiful...but it was just right. Frustrating.
But since I have zero ability to speak up about things like this...it will totally go to print that way.

We're also making the school calender and the kid's artwork and poetry from last year decorates it. The teachers picked out the artwork they wanted on the calender, but sent over every scrap of poetry the kids have done all year for us to sort through. The poetry is kinda filler. We have to have a picture from each school on every month, but we can mix it up with the poetry.

Unfortunatley my boss thinks that there is no objective way to decide which poetry is better than others...so we picked these poems out at random. Some of it's rather good, others I believed were written by second graders until I realized that "7" indicates the grade...not the age.

So comforting...

Mon Jul 2, 6:48 PM ETPORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - A fire ravaged a marketplace in Haiti's capital,prompting a protest march Monday by hundreds of street vendors who accusedthe city government of setting the blaze to remove them from the area.The fire began Sunday night near Port-Au-Prince's cathedral, destroyingmerchandise including fruit, radios and televisions."We knew the mayor wanted to clean up this area and move the marketplace,but they never told us what day we should move," vendor Julio Alexis said.City officials did not immediately return calls for comment or make a publicstatement. Haitian police firing shots in the air broke up the demonstrationSome vendors said their sales at the market were their only source of income "Nothing remains," said TV repairman Philippe Audosit.People scrounged through the market's ruins Monday for aluminum and zincroofs, under the watch of police and U.N. soldiers.More than 80 percent of the 8.7 million residents live in poverty in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere

Yup. That's where my little brother is. Very good.

"Hey There Delilah" always gets stuck in my head and I always endup walking around the house singing some sad emo guy's song, hating his girlfriend for inspiring the song and wondering what would posess someone's mother to name their daughter Delilah.

My sisters, hearing of my dislike for this song, put me on to this video.

So now, whenever that song pops in my head I think, "Oooh, you live up in a treeeee, oh you live up in a tree, you live up in a tree" and that just makes me laugh.

So today's lesson is that as long as a serious love song can be turned into a song about Cicadas we'll always know that there is a bit of good in all of us, even the fool who wrote that emo song and his silly girlfriend in New York.