Pop vs. Soda Map

I love this map showing where in America people say pop, soda, coke, or something else. I grew up in the Midwest so it was always “pop,” but when I moved to Boston for college, it seemed like everyone else laughed at me for it, particularly the cool kids from California and the sophisticated ones from New York, as if I were some cute backwoods hick. Having not much of a backbone at the time and convinced that the rest of the country called it “soda,” I converted.

Then I moved to Houston. Now it’s “coke,” and I’m calling it the wrong thing again.

(This made no sense to me at first, but I discovered that the ordering process goes like this:
“You want a coke, hon?”
“Sure.”
“OK, what kind?”
“Mmm... I’ll have a Sprite.”)

So who wins? According to the map (by area, at least), the soda kids are in third, the cokes take second, and the cute backwoods hicks claim the majority. Ah-ha!

We’re engaged!

Josh and I are engaged! Josh proposed during our trip to Hawaii and, of course, I said yes. :) We spent most of the trip on the Big Island, and on our second day in Volcanoes National Park, we drove down to the southernmost end of the park where hardened lava flows meet the ocean. The road ends abruptly before it reaches the coast because recent lava flows have buried the asphalt, so we got out of the car at the end and hiked the last half a mile or so on the rocks until we got as close as we could to the water. The area was completely deserted, so Josh set up his tripod to get a picture of us together on the rocks with the active volcano in the background. We took the first one and then Josh says, “How about just one more?” Okay, sure... So while I stood around and admired the volcano and the waves, Josh went back to fiddle with the camera. He set the self-timer and jogged back to where I was standing, but instead of turning around to face the camera, he took my hands, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him!

More about the rest of our Hawaii trip to come...