I slipped on the ice on my way to my busstop, and then when I got out to Russel Road, I was still waiting for all the cars to go by when my bus drove away without me. I then had to stand there and wait another 20 minutes for the next bus. In the cold. My legs got very cold. Apparently the fabric in the pants was not as thick as I thought it was.
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(4)
09:28:34 AM,Thursday 6 December 2007
I made coffee! This may sound unimpressive, but my mom had a French press coffee maker, and mine is idiot proof. And I can never remember the ratio of coffee to water. (One of the advantages to the giant tubs of nasty Folger's coffee is that it actually tells you.) When Mandi and I would try to make coffee we would either wind up with stuff that was mud or stuff that was lighter than tea. Anyway, the person who always makes the coffee in my office hates driving when there is ice, but we needed coffee.
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(2)
09:24:47 AM,Thursday 6 December 2007
Because I can't, actually, be sane and normal when I have an interest/hobby, I went out last night to the Paper Source and bought a book of pictures of the patterns of tiles from Barcelona, because I want to try to design my own stranded knitting mittens, and they looked cool. I then sat there and cursed at my computer for not having Photoshop or Illustrator (the book came with a CD) and cursed Word for being lousy at helping me. (I curse Word a lot. I used to write essays in Quark instead of Word.) They will be awesome mittens. They will be begun when I have a pattern, and have stopped trying to make Christmas presents.
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10:12:28 AM,Wednesday 5 December 2007
Good lord, I feel like Lorelai, all stupidly happy about snow. (Everyone on that show who snorted about her ability to "smell snow coming" was nuts. You can totally smell when it's going to snow.)
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(1)
10:06:14 AM,Wednesday 5 December 2007
Because I am mildly bored, and feel mildly homesick for Philly, here is Absynnia, the Ethiopian place around the corner from my old apartment, which had truly awesome food, and was the first place I ever ate Ethiopian food.
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09:42:44 AM,Wednesday 5 December 2007
I just clapped my hands and said "Yay snow!" I feel like a child.
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09:35:51 AM,Wednesday 5 December 2007
This is my apartment building when I lived in Philly. Google is awesome. And also a little frightening.
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09:06:50 AM,Wednesday 5 December 2007
Every winter when we were little, my dad would sit down with us one evening and we'd make Magic Snowflakes to hang on the windows. It always snowed after we made the magic snowflakes. It still does, when I make snowflakes, if I make the right sort, and I make an odd number of snowflakes. My mom thinks I'm absurd, and has tried to take away the magic by telling me that they would always make sure there was like 99.99% chance of snow before we made the snowflakes. My dad sort of laughed when I asked him about it, and said "no, really, it's magic." Maybe it is like slight of hand magic, but...It doesn't really explain why I can make it snow when I make snowflakes. (It also always rains when I water my mother's vegetable garden, and I have been known to sit around and tell the weather that, goddamnit, it will not rain for graduation/croquet/whatever, and tends not to.)
I am a huge skeptic, and I don't believe in magic or fairies or ghosts. But I do believe that I can control the weather.
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05:02:46 PM,Tuesday 4 December 2007
Did I read different books than everyone else? I seriously did not come away from them going "Man, that guy really was trying to tell us both that religion is bad and that there is no god." Particularly not in The Northern Lights. By the time I was slugging through The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman should not be allowed to write trilogies until he has learned how to keep the second book as good as the first and the third from sucking terribly) I felt like he was playing with Christian Mythologies, but not in a "I'm trying to make all kids Atheists!" sort of way.
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(8)
10:08:16 AM,Tuesday 4 December 2007
On Black Friday, around 10 am (when everything was sold out already), Connor, Jamie and I wandered off to the stores to try to find Christmas my dad's Christmas present. (We had found what we wanted on Amazon at $5 more than Best Buy would be selling it on Black Friday on Wednesday, but didn't get it because we were stupid. Then the sale was over, and the price was bad, which is why we headed out to Strip-Mall heaven in Central PA on Black Friday.) Eventually, we found what we were looking for, and went out to get take out Thai from our favorite Thai restaurant (seriously. Connor and I have both gotten vaguely accustomed to the Thai food we can get in Boston or Alexandria, but this place in a strip mall in Mechanicsburg blows them away). We had to wait like half an hour (this was going to be dinner for like 10 people), so we wandered into TJ Maxx, because it was there. (This is the point of the story.) I fell madly in love with this black cashmere hoodie. I stood there and tried to convince myself that I didn't need a cashmere hoodie, but I failed. It is an awesome sweater. It is warm and soft and lovely. Cashmere is awesome.
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09:50:07 AM,Tuesday 4 December 2007
Do you have childhood memories that your parents swear never happened? I have spent an incredibly long time convinced that I went to the wedding of two of my parents' friends, although they swear I was babysat by my dad's uncle, and that the wedding I'm remembering was someone else's (mostly I remember that this sweet bread as passed around at communion, so so long as they don't tell me that didn't happen, I'm mostly okay). My stepbrother Zeb and I both have incredibly clear memories of rides on helicopters as like toddlers (not together, we didn't know each other as toddlers), that our parents scoff at.
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09:09:15 AM,Tuesday 4 December 2007
I loved the narrative style, the way it flipped so easily between Leo and Alma. I loved how real and natural they're narrations felt -- that it felt like you were in their heads as they narrated their lives for themselves.
I have always been fond of the sort of so fast you can almost feel the narrator stumbling over their words as they come out to fast sorts of writing, all tied up with in the real world but it feels like magic anyway sort of writing. I love the sorts of books with excessive description of a feeling, but not as much about what is going on around (there was a passage in something by Francesca Lia Block about eating an ice cream sundae to fast and getting a cold headache and a sugar rush at the same time that has stuck in my head for years. I think it was a sentence, it was definitely a Weetzie Bat book, and I'm fairly sure it was Missing Angel Juan). It's what I liked in Nicole Krauss, and Jonathan Safran Foer, and An Extraordinary Work of Staggering Genius.
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02:08:55 PM,Monday 3 December 2007
I read The History of Love because we were discussing books at William's birthday party, and I asked Peg if she'd read Everything is Illuminated, and she said "No, but I read his wife's book, and it was great" so I got Brianne to bring me her book. I finished it while I waited for the vet this weekend. Given that I got the book on Tuesday, this means I read it significantly faster than I read Everything is Illuminated, and it doesn't even really compare to how slowly I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (who knew that good reading for the train while you're going to visit your dying grandfather doesn't involve a whole bunch of heart broken characters? I would read about two pages, put myself on the verge of tears, and watch Dr. Who on my laptop. Eventually I just stopped trying to read it, and I reread Pratchett's Guards book. I finished it much later.) It was stunning and amazing. Leo Gursky is stuck in my head now, and his book where all the girls are named Alma.
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(1)
01:51:36 PM,Monday 3 December 2007
Our vet is at Petsmart, and when Sam is good at the vet, I buy him toys afterwards. today we then walked over to Barnes and Nobles, where were going to meet Brianne and get Cassie a Christmas present (they were sold out of what I was going to get her). At some point while we were walking around the store (Barnes and Nobles doesn't mind at all when you bring your dog in, just so long as the dog goes into neither the cafe nor the children's section), Sam remembered that there was a toy in the plastic bag I was carrying around. He jumped up, ripped the bag a bit, and got his toy. It was really rather adorable. He was so very proud of himself.
Also, we met a cute kid in a stroller who was also named Sam who kept trying to pet him. But little kids sometimes grab instead of petting, and Sam gets wary of small children.
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12:28:13 PM,Saturday 1 December 2007
Sam has a lump on his right hip. I made a vet appointment, and then I looked it up on the internet. I went into a rather serious panic because if you google things like "lump on dog's hip" you find information about dog lymphoma. The vet appointment was this morning, and the vet is pretty much entirely sure that it's a fatty cyst that somehow decided to form between layers of muscle. (Also, the vet and vet's assistant were both like "wait where is this? How the hell did you find this?")I am so greatly relieved.
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12:20:27 PM,Saturday 1 December 2007
What had become my favorite shampoo/conditioner/products line (it's availability in the United States was the only thing that let it top the Trevor Sorbie line that I adore madly) seems to no longer be sold anywhere other than Boots. Damn damn double damn.
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(20)
05:11:49 PM,Wednesday 28 November 2007
Stunningly amazing customer service:
"I'm looking for Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams."
"Okay, let me check, I'll be right back."
"I have to go check the back, let me put you back on hold."
"No, ma'am, we don't have it, but we can order it for you."
"Thanks, but I'm trying to give it to someone this weekend, so..."
"Well, Clarendon has it, and Downtown, and (rattles off a list of other stores). Any one of them could put it on hold."
"Um...Thank you for trying, but I'm going to Pennsylvania tonight, so I'll try the Barnes and Nobles. up there."
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05:09:50 PM,Tuesday 20 November 2007
I had all these plans, like going to Whole Foods after work, but I feel like I'm about to melt in to a puddle of exhausted Tori, and so I might just go home. If I'm feeling particularly inspired when I walk out the door, maybe I will go to Trader Joe's.
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05:27:31 PM,Thursday 15 November 2007
Except for Jamie, no one that I ever set up a custom ring for ever calls me. So I stared at my phone in shock when it started playing the Dr. Who theme this afternoon when Nate called. (Jamie has a custom ring, and Nate, and my uncle Walter, who I mostly set up because I had figured out how to make ringtones of MP3s and had his CD on my computer.)
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(4)
09:45:17 PM,Wednesday 14 November 2007