Me, age 21, after several winters in Chicago: "Wow! 27 degrees outside! It warmed up to the double digits! It must be an early spring thaw! Let’s go outside and throw snowballs at each other while we still can!" Me, currently, after six months in Virginia: "27 degrees? It was 60 last week! 60! Oh […]
These questions have been making the rounds. I’m getting them from Liz Lawley at mamamusings, but I’ve seen them at plenty of other people’s blogs. 1. What did you do in 2004 that you’d never done before? Not completely in order: Started a major career shift. Discovered that I really like fiddling with and thinking […]
1. Bookstore sales are a good thing. Bookstore sales with everything 30% off are especially good. And thus it was that I ended up this evening with Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, which several friends recommended; Cole Swensen’s Goest (the talk about it in the poetry blogosphere got me interested, but it was this poem […]
WTJU’s Sunday Opera Matinee has already prompted enough posts here that I’m instituting a “Sunday opera blogging” category just to talk about whatever’s being broadcast. I missed most of this afternoon’s broadcast, having spent a good part of today in transit back from a Thanksgiving visit to my native city. Getting there was something of […]
This morning I woke up, dragged myself out of bed in the still-dark, switched on the radio, stumbled to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee brewing, took a shower — thinking, all the while, "Gee, I’m tired. I must not have slept very well" — and then put on my bathrobe, my glasses, […]
Dear women’s shoe industry as an aggregate, Perhaps you can explain something to me. When I look for new shoes, I nearly always come away empty-handed. My standard shoe-shopping experience goes something like this once I’ve located a pair of shoes and tried them on: – 85% of the time, they don’t fit my feet. […]
Today I helped someone track down information about a University of Virginia alumnus who came here in the 1850s and who was known by his middle name, which, of course, wasn’t listed in full in the University catalogues. But after much searching I found him nonetheless. By the time I was done answering that question, […]
Overheard on the campus bus: Student talking to friend on cell phone about party the previous night: "You puked?" [slight pause] "You puked on her?" [more conversation, and then:] "So what are your plans for tonight?" I so don’t regret my socially reclusive, non-party-hearty-ing college years anymore…
Definition of blogospheric small-world-after-all weirdness: discovering the blog of an ex with whom one had a traumatic breakup during one’s younger and more drama-prone years. Oy. Definition of blog-facilitated reassurance: looking at said ex’s blog and thinking "Thank god. We really did both grow into different people, and I really did get over her ages […]
Virginia is the furthest south I’ve ever lived — except for Santa Monica, which I don’t count because I think of California as west more than anything else. So far it hasn’t been that much of a culture shock, but every so often I think "Hey, I really am living in the south." What prompts […]