Quiet

It’s deathly quiet around here at work. We’ve lost several people to other programs and new buildings over the past few weeks, particularly people whose offices were along the same hallway as mine. eerie.

I guess I’ll get out my mp3 player. I wonder when iPod will become like Kleenex? At some point, will I give in and start referring to it as my iPod, even when it’s actually a Sansa?

I Voted

Josh and I woke up just after 5:30 this morning to get to our polling location a few minutes before it opened at 6 am. We stood in line for nearly an hour and a half before actually getting into the school cafeteria to vote. It was neat to feel like we were participating in a historic election, but I think Josh and I voted for different candidates for president, so in reality, our votes just cancelled each other out. Oh well. At least we have “I Voted” stickers to take to Starbucks for free coffee today!

My computer is struggling to transfer many GB of files from my harddrive to the server. To reduce its workload, I’ve done everything else I can think of that doesn’t involve my computer—straightening up my desk, filing papers, talking to a few coworkers to get some questions answered... and my computer is STILL transferring files. Bleh.

Today is my 1 year anniversary at work. Sadly, this is the longest I have held a single job in my entire 26 years of life, not counting the two years I was in grad school and working for the company that paid my tuition. It’s been... different than I expected. Recently I’ve gotten an opportunity to work on a new program, and it’s been nice to stretch my brain a bit and do something different. I have a feeling this won’t be a long-term job for me, but then again, I have trouble seeing anything as a long-term job for me...

I got a haircut yesterday, and I think it’s the first time that my wonderful stylist here has goofed. I spent forever messing with it this morning and eventually ended up going to work with my hair in a ponytail. Ugh. I can’t decide if I want to go back to have her trim it, or if I want to wait a few days to see if I get used to it (or at least figure out how to not gag when I look in the mirror).

My paper for this conference is due on Monday, and in typical fashion, I’ve put it off the final edits until the very last minute. I’ve had a hard time getting motivated for this thing, especially now that our travel arrangements for Hawaii are all set. :) I’m not getting graded on the paper or the presentation, although it would suck to look like an idiot in front of people I’ve never met, just like it would suck to look back at this paper in several years and wish I had spent more time polishing it.

Meh.

Notes on domestic life

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had chapped lips. It was probably a combination of my stupid habit of rubbing my lips together when I’m nervous, which happened all the time at gymnastics practice (not to mention continuously drinking from my water bottle), and playing wind instruments growing up. It seemed that I could never get enough Chapstick on my lips, so I started carrying a tube around in my jeans pocket all the time. The days that I forgot it or lost it to the dryer meant dry, peeling, cracked ugliness, and those were the times that I would say to myself that when I finally grew up and had my own place, I would stock every room with Chapstick so that I was never more than an arm’s reach away from one. I had forgotten that until recently, and the day after I recounted my dream to Josh, he showed up at my place with a three-pack of Chapstick whose contents we have since divided and stashed around my apartment. It’s glorious.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about food. I’ve been thinking to myself that I should really make more of an effort to eat more healthfully and eat a wider variety of foods. Enter my bread machine. It was a gift from my dad several birthdays ago, and I used it a couple times in Houston and once in Boston, but mostly it sat in its cardboard/styrofoam home on top of the cupboards. But several weeks ago, I was inspired to make stuff from scratch, so I pulled it out again and baked a loaf of whole wheat bread. I did this several times, and the loaves always came out fine, but the recipe constantly wavered somewhere between slightly off (fresh) and downright gross (week-old). Over the weekend I finally discovered that it’s because the whole wheat recipe uses molasses instead of sugar. Blech. Molasses doesn’t belong in bread. So I tried the basic white loaf (which uses sugar) and substituted one cup of whole wheat flour for one cup of the white flour. Yum! The only thing I’m going to do differently next time is reduce the salt. The bread machine is officially in business.

Still on my kick, I went to the library today and checked out a Cooking Light cookbook titled 5-Ingredient 15-Minute Cookbook. Perfect for people like me for whom anything more than boiling pasta water is “a lot of work” for dinner. It’s quick (duh), healthy (duh), there’s a picture of every recipe, they suggest side dishes to go with each meal, and they even write out a grocery list for you. Yeah, I know… how lazy can you get… but trust me, I need all the help I can get.

I’ve also discovered a hidden benefit to quasi-living with someone else – there’s more inspiration to cook because you won’t have mountains of leftovers, and – AND – there’s someone else to split the work! I usually “cook” dinner for the two of us, and Josh is awesome on dish duty.

Belated birthday

My 26th birthday was just over a week ago, and it feels very strange to say that I am 26 years old. My actual birthday was very low-key, since work has been so busy lately and Josh and I had just gotten back from our whirlwind wedding weekend extravaganza. It was crazy—a friend’s wedding in Richmond on Friday night, driving back to DC early in the morning to catch a plane to Detroit for my dad’s wedding on Saturday night. And that still feels weird to write too! Anyway, I had to stay late at work on Monday, so Josh and I just went out to dinner at TGIFriday’s that night. I told Josh several weeks ago that I wanted to go to the Melting Pot for my birthday dinner, but I knew we wouldn’t get a chance to go before we left for the weddings, so maybe when he gets back this weekend we’ll be able to do it. We made plans to go there nearly three years ago when we both worked in Houston, but it never worked out, so I’m hoping that the second time’s the charm. :)

A few months ago, wanting to test-drive getting a dog, I volunteered to help with H.A.R.T., a local animal shelter. Volunteers come to one of several nearby Petco’s and hold a dog on a leash for a few hours outside the store to show it off to potential adopters. I got a beagle, and it was mostly a dull afternoon—my beagle just wanted to yank me around to find stuff to sniff (I know... beagles are like that). Anyway, due to the mostly unrewarding-ness of it and the fact that it quickly got colder and I didn’t want to spend three hours standing around outside in freezing temperatures, I haven't volunteered there since. (Ugh, I feel awful about this just typing it.) However, the other day while running some sims at work, I went onto the H.A.R.T. website to browse through the animals that are currently up for adoption. I started looking at cats, wondering if maybe I might have grown out of my cat super-allergy, because amazingly, my little sister has done it. I was bowled over by how cute the kittens were, so I stopped by the Petco store by my work on the way home to see them in real life. As expected, they were adorable. This Petco has a little room that has six or eight crates of cats, but it’s separated from the rest of the store by a glass door, presumably so that they don’t get eaten by dogs or covered with flying snot from people who are allergic. Care to guess how long I lasted in the little glass room? About 20 minutes. I felt perfectly fine for those 20 minutes, but then I felt a sneeze coming on, so I left the little room to spare the cats and family who had come in to look. I then proceeded to sneeze/sniffle my entire way out of the store, across the parking lot to Target, and halfway through my Target errands. I felt fine by the time I left Target, but my eyes were still a little pink the next morning. But considering the general state of my eyes, I probably shouldn’t place too much blame on the kittens.

So, most likely, getting a cat is not in my future. But it’s too bad, because they’re so cuddly and adorable. And they’re much less work than dogs, even though they generally don’t play fetch or go running with you.

Iceball

This winter storm that has blown through the Northeast and Midwest hasn't quite lived up to the hype, at least here in Boston. It snowed about 4 inches overnight, and now we're down to freezing rain. I decided that I'd rather not risk my neck in the campus shuttle with the crazy drivers and icy roads, so I walked to work this morning. The majority of my walk is across the Harvard Bridge, and it's always pretty windy. This morning I had to hold my hand up on the right side of my face to keep the freezing rain from stinging the part of my cheek that wasn't covered up by my hat or hood.

When I finally made it to work, I took off my gloves and started to put them in my pocket when I felt a lump at the bottom of my right pocket. Evidently I left my jacket pocket open while I was walking, because when I pulled out the lump, it turned out to be a perfectly round iceball, just the size of a cherry tomato.

Early to bed, first in the shower

I have not been doing well on my New Year's resolution to go to bed earlier. This means that I still snooze for way too long in the morning and then get into the shower only about 20 minutes before I used to. For about the first five minutes, all is well in the shower. Then the water starts to get cold. So I turn the handle further toward the hot water. But the water just gets colder. And then the pressure drops until it's barely just a trickle, dribbling out of the shower head. This is fine for activities like shaving, but for anything else you'd want to do, it sucks. Huddling in the back of your tub to avoid getting sprayed with icewater for 10 minutes per shower is not my idea of a fun way to start the day.

I can only guess that I'm taking a shower at the same time as 90% of the rest of our apartment building. The first time it happened was in the evening, so I assumed someone was doing laundry, but I highly doubt that anyone's doing laundry every morning at 8am. The building is pretty old, and apparently the hot water heater can't handle the load when all of us decide to shower at once.

Most of the time, I like my apartment. In fact, I love it every time I write my rent check and marvel at the fact that I'm paying almost $250 less per month than I did last year. The location is fantastic, the building is quiet, and I love the views and sunlight (and no weird upstairs-neighbor noises) that come with living on the top floor. But the building is old, there are old cigarette burns on our carpet from previous tenants, and the bathroom grows mildew like nobody's business because there's no airflow through there. There are things that I'd put more pressure on the management company to fix if we were staying longer, but I've lost interest in fixing most of them because I'm moving in 5 months. I'd like to say that makes me easy going, but it probably just makes me a lazy bum.

Adiós, Laura

Tonight I tried to do some blog housekeeping. It didn't really work, except that I updated my reading list and deleted Laura's travel blog from the sidebar. "Deleted" seems like such a cruel word, so I thought I'd at least say something about it here rather that just wiping it.

Laura returned home from Spain about a month ago. From what I know, she had a fantastic time and achieved her ever-changing goal of fluency, although I think she was pretty happy to home. For one thing, she missed the peanut butter.

Blogging is a pretty cool thing. My older sister spent a year of college in Germany several years ago, and although it was wonderful to read her descriptions of places, people, and traditions, it was hard to imagine what it was really like until we actually got there to visit her. I never got a chance to visit Laura in Seville, but I liked getting to see a very teeny slice of her life there along with the words. So maybe it's the digital cameras that are pretty cool things.

Are you from Wisconsin?

Apparently my 18 years in the Midwest have only a marginal lead in my speech over my 6 years in the Northeast, at least according to this quiz.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

One of the many reasons I should stop watching "Extra" while waiting for my dinner to cook

My dad occasionally has celebrity dreams. He meets all kinds of famous people in these dreams, both living and dead (I think), and the next morning he'll regale us with adventures and conversations he had with these people the night before.

I don't know many other people who experience this sort of thing - I definitely haven't - so I chalked it up to one of those things that just happens to you or it doesn't, sort of like dreaming in color.

So imagine my surprise when I met not one, not two, but THREE celebrities in my dream last night. First I met Angelina Jolie. I went over to her house to borrow a textbook, and I ended up babysitting her three kids. Except that her youngest was that African boy that Madonna just adopted, not the baby that Angelina just gave birth to. I don't remember meeting Brad Pitt (too bad), but I do remember her house being surrounded in the front and back by paparazzi. Eventually Angelina gave me the textbooks that I needed and told me that I didn't have to return them if I didn't want to because she had hundreds, so I left her and the kids and got into a taxi.

At that point, it was somehow decided that I was going to attend Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's wedding. ?!? No one was supposed to be there, but I ended up getting there some boat with three women from People magazine. Once we got to the wedding site, they wrapped themselves in sod to blend in with the grass so that Tom and Katie wouldn't notice them on the way to the wedding. Once we got to the ceremony, however, Tom and Katie didn't seem to mind that the women were there, along with some random Asian family and a couple other people I didn't know. If this wasn't weird already, here's where it becomes completely random: After the ceremony, I gave both Tom and Katie hugs, but when I hugged Tom, he somehow morphed into my 7th grade band teacher. On the way to the reception, I sat with Katie in the back of an enormous van while Tom and the driver sat up front. At that point, Katie confided to me that Tom could be "a little harsh" sometimes, and so I asked, "so why are you marrying him?"

So either I have a hidden desire to attend celebrity weddings and play marriage counselor, or my brain was just so scrambled from the day before that it needed an opportunity to wrap people in sod to let off steam. It reminded me of one of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons:

Googleable

My site is result #11 on Google! Haha, probably because I keep Googling it to see if it shows up, rather than anyone else actually looking for it. Oh well.

1992

Remember the group Positive K? Of course not. Nobody does, I think, except for me. Back in 1992, they had a one hit wonder with "I Got a Man." I remember taping that song off the radio, B96 in Chicago, when I was, jeez, 10 years old, because I liked it so much. Anyway, we never had MTV growing up, so I never saw the video for this song. That is, until just now. It's on YouTube, and it's hilarious. It looks like it was filmed in someone's backyard, it showcases nearly every awful clothing style from the early 90's, and the lyrics are just ridiculous.

As a side note, I can't believe some of those fashions are actually coming back. I am officially old. But for the record, 14+ years does NOT make the clothing look any better.

My idiot day

Yesterday I brought my gym clothes to work, like I usually do, because I often go to the gym after work. But yesterday I had to run an errand at the mall before going to the gym, so I gathered up my stuff when I left work so that I could go straight to the gym afterward. Except when I got all the way downstairs and outside, I realized that I left my shoes in my office. *sigh*

Not a big deal, I'd just stop by my office on the way back - it's mostly on the way anyway. So I went to the mall, didn't find what I was looking for, of course, so then I biked back to work. Picked up my shoes, got back on my bike, headed over to the gym. After locking up my bike, I failed miserably at trying to cross the street - some other girl and I managed to hold up four lanes of traffic as we crossed. So then I got all the way into the locker room and realized that I had left my rear bike light on. UGH. So I trudge all the way back to the bike rack (no traffic hold up this time), and discover that I had, in fact, turned the light off. Yay! But boo for wasting all this time and energy walking back and forth.

So I get back to the locker room, get changed, go to the mirror to put my hair in a ponytail, and realize that I didn't bring a hair tie. ARGH! I shuffled through my backpack to find my extra in-case-of-emergency hair tie, but alas, it had served its purpose during the last one of these moments and had promptly made its way out of my bag, onto my head, and then safely home. Out of my backpack. I looked around the locker room to see if there was another girl who might have an extra one that I could borrow, but today of all days, the locker room is completely empty except for one girl who's in the shower. And I'm not interrupting anyone's shower.

So I shoved all my stuff back in my backpack and headed home. By the time I got home, I realized that the reason I hadn't left my rear light "on" was because the batteries died, and I had just biked all the way home, in the middle of traffic, with no rear light. Lovely.

Resume writing

Tonight I spent way longer than necessary updating my resume for the career fair next week. It's amazing how long you can debate between "action" words to describe things you've done at work... developed, produced, constructed, determined, analyzed, performed... bleh. And I also can't decide if I want to keep the objective on my resume - on one hand, it gives the reader an immediate idea of what field I'm in, but I always feel like my objective sounds stupid and completely obvious, since I can't come up with anything more creative than, "To obtain a challenging full-time position in aerospace engineering." Double bleh.

Tomorrow is my last day of work/class this week because I'm leaving on Friday to go to Indianapolis for my cousin's wedding. Yes, to be a hot pink blob. The wedding is going to be a lot of fun since I haven't seen much of my extended family in a while, and Josh is able to come too, so I'll have a date. :) Of course, the downside is that he'll have to put up with my crazy family for the weekend. And I may have to wear my glasses during the wedding since my eyes are still messed up. Still. STILL! But that's a story for another time...

Anyway, going home to the midwest for the weekend. I'm excited. :)

Goodbye Marlborough St.

It is officially September 1st, which means I am officially squatting in my own apartment. Technically my lease ended at midnight, but I can't get my keys for the new apartment until 9am tomorrow at the earliest. And since I have no plans to sleep on the street tonight, my junk and I are staying here illegally. I've had these unsettling dreams the past couple nights that the current tenants in our new place don't return their keys on time and I can't get my stuff out of here... hopefully reality will be a nice change tomorrow.

Anyway, this past year on Marlborough Street with Glenn and Phil has been a good one, except for moving in last September. That was awful. And just for kicks, the internet has decided not to work since I (gasp!) unplugged the modem from the power strip and plugged it into the wall, so I'm stealing wireless from some other sap in the building. And now it's time for bed, since I need to be up in five and a half hours.

Cleaning

It's been a mostly boring evening - cleaning the microwave, cleaning the toaster, cleaning the bathroom... I also threw out a bunch of old stuff and left a couple things in the entryway of the apartment building, which has become part garage sale and part dumping ground. A few days ago I left some books and a coffeemaker; today I left a broken chair and table but picked up a fan. Very handy.

Tomorrow NASA will announce the prime contractor for the newly-named Orion crew exploration vehicle. The company I work for is on one of the teams that submitted a proposal, and everyone in the lab is excited about the announcement. The company has done some very important work in space exploration over the years, but lately the work has been on much smaller projects, so this contract would be almost like a revival of the 1960's. I'm really pulling for the company because my thesis is based on the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and although I'll still have funding even if the lab doesn't win this contract, it'll be much more educational and a lot more fun if I'm working as part of a team instead of on my own.

Last weekend my little sister left for Spain to start her semester abroad in Seville. She seemed a little apprehensive at first about getting there on her own, meeting the other kids in her program, and finding out who she'd be staying with (she chose to do a homestay, but they don't find out anything about their local hosts until they arrive), but I think she's settling in well. She's started a travel blog about her semester, which is here if you're interested in reading.

Speaking of traveling, Josh has been gone for almost three weeks now, and he won't be back until early next week. We've been able to talk on the phone a couple times during the brief times he's popped up in civilization, but mostly I've been sans boyfriend for the past three weeks. It's been sad. I never realized how often I called him for no particular reason at all, or how I unconsciously store away funny things that happen to me during the day so that I can tell Josh about them that night. But I've also realized that I've let him become my social crutch, so it's been great to hang out with some old friends again.

Packing

I don't think anyone should pack alone. Even if the other person who's packing is in another room in your apartment, on another floor in your house, or down the hall in your dorm, they should be there. This is for those "Ohhhhh!" moments when you discover your high school track shorts crammed in the back of your closet and realize that since the elastic is now so brittle that the shorts would fit a 200 pound man, you have to throw away this piece of your childhood. Since my roommates have all left, you, dear reader, are my audience. Your line is, "Awwwwww."

Thanks. :)

Also, it turns out that my most recent roommate used up all our packing tape when she moved out last week. She bought another roll to replace it, but it turns out that she bought the cheap, flimsy stuff that twists around and sticks to itself better than the box. And the cheap tape doesn't come with a dispenser. Argh!

I buy a lot of generic, cheap stuff instead of the name-brand stuff, but I happily fork over the extra dollar to get the thick tape that comes with a dispenser. I think everyone has those few things that they won't compromise on, and in addition to the tape, my list includes running shoes, ziploc bags, and toilet paper. I may have used furniture in my bedroom and no-name spaghetti sauce in my kitchen, but darn it, I buy Charmin toilet paper!

They just keep on leaving

I met Greddy at 7 this morning to bike down to Carson beach and the JFK Library. I grumbled a bit getting out of bed at 6:30, but the ride was totally worth it. I've decided that August is officially the best month of the year in Boston - June was too rainy, July was too hot, and I don't have a car so I can't drive through the Berkshires to admire the fall colors. That sort of thing is pretty boring anyway unless you're hiking, camping, canoeing, or doing some other actual outdoor activity instead of just ooh-ing and ahh-ing from your car. But I digress. This August has been absolutely beautiful. Very sunny and warm without being hot.

So we biked for about two hours and then when I got back to my apartment, June was getting ready to leave for the airport. First Phil, then Glenn, now June is moving out. My little apartment is lonely again. It was nice to have some female company this summer after all the burping, football, and conversations composed entirely of movie quotes with the guys. I love them, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it would have been nice to have another girl around to balance things out.

~~~

I got a package slip in my mailbox last Wednesday, so on Thursday afternoon I trekked down to the post office to pick up the pillows I bought in Houston that Josh had sent to me. But when I got there, I was told that the package hadn't gotten back in yet, so I should come back the next day. I came back on Saturday and was told, again, that the package wasn't there, but if I could leave my phone number with the post office, they'd check their other nearby offices to see if my pillows popped up. This morning I called again to see if my long-lost pillows had shown up, and the guy I spoke with said that they had. Yay! So I can go pick them up this afternoon and toss out my old crummy ones. (Side fact: According to this website, up to 10% of the weight of a 2-year-old pillow is dust mites and their poop.) The dude told me that there was some confusion with my box because there was another name on it besides mine so someone might have assumed that was the recipient. "The name?" I ask. "Uhh... N-A-S-A," he says. "Anyone you know?"

Important?

Over the past week and a half, I've been asked to be the in-case-of-emergency person for Josh while he's tromping around in Peru, an executor for my parents' will (although low on the list), and a bridesmaid at my cousin's wedding. The first one makes my chest tighten, the second one makes me feel a little unprepared (the extent of my tax knowledge ends with the 1040EZ), but the third one should be a lot of fun! My cousin Debbie only recently decided that she wanted to have a couple extra bridesmaids, so it was a little last-minute (the wedding's in a month), but I think I'll still have time to get everything sorted out.

And although the first two things are a little morbid, I'm flattered to have been asked to do them. And I do think that I would be able to handle that sort of responsibility rationally if I ever needed to. I'm not sure if I like what that says about me though.