in competition for cutest little boy in the world

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my friend Kristentatious at her home. As a result of this visit, I got to spend some time with her adorable little 2 1/2 year old boy Eric. He played shy at first around "Auntie Heidi" but after a while, he was back to his usual flirty self. He literally threw himself at me while we were doing puzzles on the living room floor, and I gave him the first horsey ride that I'd given anyone in a VERY long time. By the end of the night, he was as sad to see me go as I was to leave. At least, I'd like to think so. :) I came back telling people that he was officially the "cutest little boy in the world."

HOWEVER ... last Thursday was Thanksgiving, and I went to my Aunt and Uncle's for our annual feast. My cousin's little boy Gaian was there and I gotta tell ya, Eric's got some competition! Gaian is almost 3 years old, and he delighted the crowd with his moving rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle" several times throughout the night (I got to hear it twice). And did I mention that he was totally on-key? And that he's got floppy blond hair, blue eyes, and a missing front tooth? To be fair, Eric also has the prettiest blue eyes, which he inherited from his mother. But I did come home after Thanksgiving claiming Gaian as yet another "cutest little boy in the world."

And now I am torn. If only I had pictures of the two of them that I could post here and have the "public" vote (like anyone other than my own friends read this). But I guess for now I'll just have to say they are both the "cutest little boys in the world" because I JUST CAN'T DECIDE!!!

They have fudge

A coworker just popped his head into my cube and said "We have fudge."

There was a pause.

I looked at him blankly.

Then he added, "Vickie made homemade fudge and it's in our area if you want some."

Oh, now I get it.

from the memory bank

For one reason or another, something I was reading today triggered a memory from a few years back that I'd like to share.

Most of you reading this probably know that I have a younger brother. We have the kind of relationship that I consider to be typical of an older sister/younger brother combo. We didn't particularly get along when we were kids, and fought about stupid crap a LOT. We are VERY DIFFERENT. I cannot stress this enough. But as we've grown older (and wiser??), we've found more and more things to appreciate about each other. At the present, we get along pretty well, as long as we don't have to spend exorbitant amounts of time together.

Anyway, one summer when I was home from college (or possibly shortly after college, but before my brother moved away), I was driving home to my parents' house late at night, and I saw something that took my breath away. The main street near their home is called Silver Glen, and that night I discovered how it got its name. The road goes through a small, low-lying marshy area, and on damp nights such as that one, it tends to gather a little bit of fog. Add to that the full moon overhead and you've got one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in nature. The moonlight shone down on the thick layer of fog over the wetlands and gave it a mystical silver glow. It was magical - like nothing I'd ever seen before. I could see it as I approached in my car, and then drove right through it, emerging from the other side. My first thought was that I wanted to park my car and walk through the fog on the platforms built over the wetlands. But no, I wanted to share this with someone.

My brother is such a night owl that I was sure he'd still be up. And sure enough, I found him watching TV in the living room when I came home. I immediately told him to put his shoes on because there was something I wanted to take him to see. At this point in time, our relationship was in one of its in-between stages. He admired me mostly because I could drink alcohol legally, and I admired him because because he still had so much living to do. As he was getting ready to go, I could see he was getting excited about our adventure, even though he didn't know where we were going. I just hoped he wouldn't be disappointed.

So we drove back to the wetlands and I showed him the thing I found so beautiful that I just had to share with someone. I approached slowly and pointed out the fog and how amazing the moonlight looked reflected off the top. Then we parked the car in the gravel lot off a side road, and walked into the mist.

I am pretty sure that when I pulled my brother out of the house that night and told him there was something I wanted to show him, that he was expecting some kind of underground, thumping, rollicking, drunken party or something like that. I know that what I actually showed him must have been a bit of a disappointment. I'm not really sure that he appreciates the same things as I do, like finding beauty in nature. But my hope is that he could find the beauty in that moment we spent together, or at least that one day he can look back on that night and see it as a precious moment spent with his big sister, when all she wanted was to share with him something that she thought was special.

because blue is bouncy, and things stick to ugly people

I submit for your enjoyment ...

How does this woman still have a job?
Occasionally in the mornings, I listen to Nine FM on the way to work. I don't particularly care for the music, or the morning "personalities," but considering the mass of crap that passes as morning shows, it's one hundred times better than most of what's out there. Plus, they only have one-minute-long commercial breaks. :) Yeah, who am I kidding? That's really the only reason I listen. But I digress. The morning "personalities" I am confronted with on this station are Steve and Joey. Steve has been an integral part (well, a part anyway) of Chicago radio for quite a long time now, and if you think about it for a minute, you probably know his last name. But Joey. Aaaahh, Joey. She is ... well ... maybe I should cut her a little slack here and say she SOUNDS ... well ... in a word ... dumb. Not counting her I-have-no-idea-what's-going-on laugh, and her lack of intelligent responses to the things her cohost says, here is a list of the best (meaning worst) Joey-isms I have heard in the past two weeks or so:
1) "You're ugly, I'm blue, everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you." Actually, Joey, it goes, "I'm rubber, you're ..." Oh, nevermind.
2) In a news story about Oprah, referring to her not once, but twice, as Madonna.
3) In the news story about John Kerry's botched Bush "joke," referring to him not once, but twice as John McCain.
4) In a story about a corrupt clergyman (which was just this morning, actually), quoting him as saying he was "sexually immortal." Steve made a joke about this one, but I'm not sure that Joey ever caught on to what exactly she had said.
I have come to the conclusion that even I, the word-stumbler-over, no-quick-response-haver that I am, would make a better morning cohost than our Miss Joey. Not that I'm complaining or anything. At the very least, she gives me a laugh (intended or not) every morning. Sexually immortal indeed.

Whatnot
There are two people who I see nearly every day who have the unexplained habit of adding "and whatnot" after almost everything they say. I'm not sure who picked up the habit from who (or is it whom?), but it's one of those little verbal tics, like saying "like" too much, thatreally tends to get on one's nerves! Here's an exaggerated fictional conversation to illustrate.
Person A: What did you do this weekend?
Person B: I went grocery shopping on Saturday because I needed some eggs and bread and whatnot. Then I stopped at the Post Office because I had to mail my bills and whatnot. I came home and ate dinner and whatnot while I watched the news and whatnot on TV.
Person A: Yeah? What about Sunday?
Person B: Sunday I went to visit my Mom and whatnot at her house and whatnot, and we took her dog and whatnot for a walk and whatnot ...
Seriously. Driving me up the wall ... and whatnot.

Why don't you try it too?
I used the word "circuitous" in a sentence today. Go me!

rebellion

List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline (blogger won't do underline, so I'm using **s) the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain **
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne **
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe **
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank **
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert **
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens **
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo **
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker **
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire **
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil/Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey **
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller **
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker **
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck **
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser **
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath **
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl ** (how sad is it that I've never read this??)
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov **
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess **
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes


Hm. Pretty disappointing. I need to read more.