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.

not quite a world traveller, but getting closer

Holy Geez, I haven't written since October 10? I am certainly falling down on the job.

So, today I was reading this blog where this guy recounts a tale of something that happened to him at an airport. He was being handed back his change at an airport shop and the cashier told him to "Have a nice flight," to which he responded, "You too."

I laughed out loud because a) it's funny, and b) I did the exact thing when I flew to Louisville, only to the driver of the limo that took me to the airport (and no, I did not spring for a limo for myself - too rich for my blood - the company paid for it). Though the way these guys sometimes drive, maybe I wasn't too far off.

So yeah, Louisville. I was there for several days for a conference a couple weeks ago, and it was ... an experience. I was worried that the conference would be boring and that I wouldn't get to go out and see any of the city since my travelling companion didn't seem the "go out and see the city" type. But I was delightfully surprised. The conference was actually quite engaging (what's the deal with my vocab today??), and I met some folks in my training session who were interested in doing the exact same exploring that I was. So we did. And Louisville is a pretty decent city. A nice little entertainment hub, some fun attractions, NO TRAFFIC! It was nice and enjoyable. I'm not saying I want to spend three weeks there over the summer or anything, but if my travels take me there again, I don't think I'll whine quite as much. And maybe next time I'll get to actually GO ON the tour of the Louisville Slugger factory, instead of having to skip it in order to get back to the hotel and airport shuttle in time to make my flight home.

Ahh, flying. I have flown to three new cities in the past three months, which is a new record for me. Actually, that's not saying much because prior to that, I hadn't flown anywhere (or really even GONE anywhere) in 5 years. Yes, I said 5 years. So it was about time. July 31 - August 1 I was in Baltimore for my first ever business trip. First time I'd ever gotten a hotel room all to myself, too. Mid-August I was in New York (the City for a couple days, then a bit North of there for the rest of the week). Next time I go, I'll have to do some SERIOUS SHOPPING. Seriously. And then this most recent trip to Louisville. And that was the first time I'd boarded a plane by actually going out onto the tarmac (that's the word, right?), and up the stairs onto the plane. That thing was pretty darn little, and not something you'd want to spend any amount of time in if you were claustrophobic. The one on the way back was even smaller. Let's just say that my seat was both a window AND an aisle.

So here's to new travelling experiences, and hoping that there are more to come in the near future. Miami in January perhaps?? :)

wrinkles on my forehead and gray hairs on my head

I am getting OLD! I know this because the wrinkles I noticed on my forehead a few years ago are steadily getting more ... wrinkly. And my gray hairs are multiplying like rabbits. Seriously, rabbits. Really horny gray rabbits are growing out of my head. (Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd type.)

Now let me ask you this question. Is it ever in good taste to tell someone they've got gray hairs? I mean, I'd say that maybe to a very close relative or something. MAYBE. But don't you think it would be kind of rude if, oh, I don't know, a coworker said that to you? Like, they were talking to you, and suddenly paused, looking at your head, and said, "Hey, do you have gray hairs?" Yeah, well, that happened to me. That happened to me in a meeting at work with a bunch of customers from abroad. I believe I handled it appropriately by saying quite cheerfully, "Yes, I do. Thanks for noticing." The perpetrater was a bit embarrassed. As he should be.

heart

I love Target!

Just wanted to throw that out there.

I planned on going to Target after work a couple days ago, and all day, I looked forward to that trip. Oh, the things I'd buy!! I needed an over-the-door shoe organizer to free up some much-needed space in my closet. Found it for $12.99! I needed a new shower curtain liner, this time one of the mildew-resistent ones with the metal grommets. Found it for $9.99!! I also bought some more hangers (desperately needed, though they weren't on my list). 13 for $1.99! And I bought a mat for in front of the kitchen sink, which I've been needing forever, but hadn't found one I liked. Found one for $9.99! AND THEN!!! I bought myself a late birthday present. Scene-It!! Yay!! Games!! Anyone wanna come over and play a game?? I'll totally kick your ass! :D

Oh, and a BIG thanks to the girl who rang me up, 1) for opening up a new register so I could get out of the long-ass line I was in, and 2) for making me move to another line, therefore distracting me from the ever-nearing candy counter, from which I undoubtedly would have picked up another few hundred calories as an impulse buy.

Yay!! Target!!

:)

I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City

I made the observation today that my place of work is a lot like the Labyrinth in the movie of the same name. It was kind of like that to begin with, in the sense that all of the hallways look exactly the same, and they're very long and you never seem to be getting anywhere. But lately, it's become even more like David Bowie's little game because everything keeps changing! For example, you used to be able to go into the room where my cube is, and walk through two rooms to get to where my Dad's office is, without going back out into the main hallway. The rooms were all connected. Now, you can only walk into the next room, and you come to a dead end. To get to my Dad's office, I have to go out into the hall, then back through a door into the next room over (which now only has one entrance and MUST be a fire hazard). And somehow they squeezed an entire new room in where there wasn't one before. More recently, an entire program office up and moved into a brand new area (nicknamed Land of the Big Doors). I don't know what was in this area previously - to me it just kind of appeared suddenly out of nowhere. And the people in the offices in their old area keep changing. Makes it kind of hard to find my program managers if I need them. Accounting recently moved out of their area into a new office where all the walls are now in different places. It's like The Powers That Be (Jareth?) move everyone out, shut the doors for a few weeks, then when they open them up again, it's totally different inside. Kinda cool, but very confusing if you already don't know your way around. And then TODAY, I walked past the office where another group I work with sits, and something was ... different. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, and then I realized, "Oh, there used to be a wall there ... and now there isn't." I'm NEVER gonna get my baby brother back if they keep moving the walls!!

And on an unrelated note, do peanut butter Twix still exist?