nom nom ALL THE SMOOTHIES nom nom.

While there is not a Jamba Juice coming to town (boo), there is a hometown smoothie shop opening up a couple of blocks from my work! They are opening for staff training in a few weeks and for the first several days while smoothie training is happening, they'll be giving away the 'mistakes' for free! Yay! I might just stand there and be like, 'ALL THE SMOOTHIES. Nom. Nom. Nom.' I also have been looking on pinterest for different smoothie recipes, since I've actually had a smoothie maker for a couple of years now. My Aunt and Uncle got me a smoothie maker several Christmases ago, probably foretelling the fact that I would become a fan of smoothies some day. And that day has arrived, my friends. Plus, there are oodles of places on the web that offer knock-off Jamba Juice recipes such as this doozie:

CARIBBEAN PASSION
12 oz. Mango-passion juice
2 scoops strawberries
1 scoop peaches
2 scoops orange sherbet
1 scoop ice

Another thing coming nearby is Fazoli's, which makes my world brighter. I loooove Fazoli's. And the one in town is too far away for me to ever go to. So, I expect lots of pizza and really yummy breadsticks in my future this fall after it opens.

I decided to become a bird rescuer on Monday. I was recycling newspapers in a back room at work and walked out of the room and heard a bird hit the window and looked over and it was trapped in an underground area. It was a little chickadee and it would flap and flap against the windows and then fall to the bottom of the area and chirp chirp chirp in frustration. It breaks my heart to see that sort of thing. One of the archivists has told stories of her father's work as a conservation ranger in Michigan for much of his career, so I went to find her and ask for her if she'd inherited any of that ranger-y stuff. She thought she had, so I asked her to be a co-rescuer in my plan. It took a little wrangling of wire mesh and some temporary shifting of the security system the landscapers on campus implemented, but eventually the bird flew out and hopefully won't do that again. It made us feel like awesome humanitarians for an afternoon, at least.

I also just learned that Kentucky marriage records are online. FamilySearch.org is sort of a savior to those of us in the genealogy world. Ancestry is fine, but it's nice to have a free alternative to offer genealogists who don't necessarily have the funds to pay the Ancestry subscription fees at home. And FamilySearch just helped me possibly narrow down a search for a name of a groom in an 1820s marriage somewhere in Kentucky. Maybe I've only confused the poor genealogists even more, but at least there are a couple of new roads that they can go down in their searching. I hate to send people away empty-handed, although it can't be helped sometimes.

I watched a bit of the MLB All star game last night, but around 9:30 (I know 'cuz I checked the clock), there was a gun shot near my apartment building. It sounded like someone shot it off in the adjoining apartment or the one above the adjoining apartment. However, it could have been in the parking lot or, maybe even out on the street. Sounds play such funny tricks on you. It was just definitely just one shot, which I thought was odd, but plenty enough for my imagination to go running wild. I never heard fighting or shouting or screaming or sirens or anything, and it was just a single shot. It's amazing how quickly your imagination can run away with you, like, I quickly had decided on several possible scenarios of a single gun shot:
1) the gun accidentally went off.
2) the person hit their target with just one shot.
3) really sniper-like drive-by?

When it's dark outside and you're just chilling out in your little apartment deciding whether or not to head to sleep, the sound of a pistol does tend to jolt you into awake-ness. And then, because I was in my jammies, I was hit with the conundrum of whether to change into real clothes in case I had to talk to police. And then, I started wondering about the thickness of the walls and whether the walls would stop a bullet (doubtful). At any rate, I spent a lot of time last night in my head running through the various scenarios and whether it was okay to go to sleep or whether it would be better to stay up longer and wait to see if anything else happened and if someone was going to knock on my door. But, I decided to go read my book (more on that later) and eventually went to sleep, never awakened by police or more gunfire.

My challenge for the summer is to finally read a book that has been on my shelf for a couple of years now. The most glaringly obvious trait of the book is its length. At nearly 1400 pages long and is certainly an epic novel. But, if you're going to choose a book to spend all Summer reading, you need a big book, right? First published in the 1980s, it's called "...And Ladies of the Club". I'm around page 750, and it's mid-Summer so I figure I'm on track to finish it by Summer's end. It's a really great read. If you have some time and aren't the sort who feel like a failure if they don't finish a book really quickly, try this one on for size. Don't let the page count intimidate you...it's a wonderful story. It follows a little Ohio town from the end of the Civil War through the Great Depression. It focuses on the women of the town and a literary club that they start in the 1860s. I'm only in the late 1880s right now, but the author does a fantastic job of keeping the various families' story lines going and not mixing things up. I haven't noticed glaring mix-ups or anything. That's my continuing Summer Reading Challenge. I'm not reading anything else right now. The only downside to reading a book so big is it's not really that portable. It doesn't fit in my purse, so you really do have to carry it around. I carried it with me to a doctor's appointment to read in the waiting room and it certainly did get a lot of comments from other 'waiters'. I'm not sure if people are already losing the familiarity of seeing people with real paper books or if it's just the ginormous size of this novel that causes the commotion, but I recommend it, for realz.