Swanky headbands, unite!

Another week is upon us, my friends. And with this week comes the monthly stack of coupons that mysteriously shows up on the break room's table at work. I don't know who brings them in, but it's usually a pretty giant stack. Another employee benefit, perhaps? Like, 'Thanks for working here. To show you our appreciation, please use this coupon to get $1.00 your next yogurt at Yo Yo Yums." No problemo, mysterious coupon giver. I actually found four coupons I wanted. All food related, of course. Yogurt, pizza, and baked goods, oh my. One thing I wish Columbia had was a decent Chinese food restaurant. They are sorely lacking in that area. Jefferson City might lack in many things, but awesome Chinese food is not one of them. I can think of at least three places off the top of my head that I think are waaaaay better than anything Columbia offers. After pondering this at work today, I had to get some car maintenance done this evening and got myself some good Chinese food. And a fortune cookie whose fortune read something like 'Be cautious of the bees with honey in their mouths because even they have stingers on their butts' or something like that. Maybe it was slightly more eloquent, but you get the gist. I threw it away.

Nerd alert on the topic of employee benefits!: I am SO stoked to be getting actual health care benefits with this new job. Super duper over the moon about it, really. This girl desperately needs to get herself to an eye doctor, stat. I've been wearing the same pair of contact lenses for three months now. Three. months. If you're not someone who wears disposable soft contact lenses, let me tell ya: three months with the same pair ain't so good. The online stores won't let me order more from the same prescription because it's too old, so I've been forced to wait it out until I get eye insurance again. I just can't wait to get the correct prescription for these peepers. I heart my glasses though, so if the lenses have to be changed, I'll be keeping the same frames.

Another nerd alert!: I got my June Birchbox this evening and it had this really awesome retro-esque headband in it from Modcloth. I looooove Modcloth, but with my 30 dollar budget thingy that I'm trying to stick to, there's very little in the way of clothing on that website that I can afford. So, getting this gem as an extra in my regular sample box was a really great surprise! Plus, they gave me a coupon to use for Modcloth this month. I don't know if I'll use it or not, but it's pretty sweet anyway. This headband is enough to make me happy for weeks and weeks! It's super simple. Just a wire encased in a bit of fabric, but it works perfectly and holds really well. I highly recommend one! Because it's Modcloth, it's not exactly value-priced. 14 buckeroos will get you this cute fabric encased wire, but the fabric is pretty awesome. And seriously, there will be no headaches with this headband. It's practically perfect in every way, just like Mary Poppins. It knows it's queen of the headbands, too:

No Explanations.

Website That Makes Me Laugh

Hello Giggles.

5 Things I Love To Do By Myself

Dance Wildly.

Make up songs about whatever delicious food I'm eating.

Do yoga while daydreaming.

Fall into fits of giggles after finding myself and my daydreams hilarious.

Sing Loudly.

2 Things That Frustrate Me

Tall Girl Problems.

Poorly refereed soccer games.

12 Things I Vaguely Fear 

Seafood.

Line dancing.

The word 'smear'.

Nicolas Cage.

The X-Files.

This bizarre high/low hem thing on dresses lately.

Over-planned events (specifically weddings or vacations).

Bugs that I can't identify as a fly, wasp, or ant.

Heights.

Dobermans.

Car maintenance.

Cyclists.

Song I'm Digging Right Now

Nicholas Sparks

This is my 'sporty' post.

I'm keeping tiny tabs on the NBA game between the Heat and the Celtics this evening. I don't really care who wins. I was really happy to have the Oklahoma City Thunder win the Western Division and head to the NBA Finals. That's the team I'm rooting for, (if I happen to catch any of the games) and I don't know enough about the Heat or the Celtics to know which would be the better opponent for the Thunder.

Lots of sporty things are happening this weekend, apparently. I decided not to watch the Belmont Stakes after I'll Have Another was scratched yesterday. I heard it was a good race, though, with Union Rags winning by a nose. Good job. I didn't think I'll Have Another was exactly a super-horse, but I do admit that I would have watched the Belmont only if that horse had been in the race. Mostly because my sports-watching energy has shifted to soccer, as it usually does in June. I watched the two Euro Cup games that were on today. Denmark beat Netherlands, which was a surprise. Germany beat Portugal, which was not, although it was a tough game. Tomorrow morning my Azzurri take the field against Spain. The Italian national team is yet again in trouble with a betting scandal. It's part of the drama of Italian soccer, I think. Wondering exactly how many laws are being broken each time they play. They are scandalicious, but I love them anyway. It's cool that the Euro Cup is being played in Ukraine and Poland. Today they were playing one game in Lviv, but the commentators were saying the city's name a number of different ways. I finally decided that perhaps the British commentator could be saying it correctly in his own way and forgave him his kind of wonky-way of pronunciation, but the American commentator was so terribly off the mark that you could hardly recognize the name of the the city at all. I wouldn't normally be worked up about the pronunciation of a city I've never been to, except that I've heard all about Lviv for years and years and feel that it deserves respect! My roomie in college (and still my good buddy) was from Lviv. She came to Columbia for graduate school and we were apartment roommates for three years until I graduated. She is from Lviv and she pronounces it "Luh-veev". The commentators today were doing all sorts of things to words, but the worst was the American who kept pronouncing it "El-vivvy". I mean, what the hell? Who failed in their job of making sure the talking heads can pronounce the host cities correctly, ESPN? Get on the ball. I hope tomorrow will be better, but I won't count on it.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've come to be amazed by the number of people I know who don't know how to swim. Adults, that is. I don't know why, but I am completely taken aback when I meet an adult who doesn't know how to swim. It's one thing to simply not like being in the water, but to not know how to swim seems really impractical to me. It's a survival skill and I'm kind of surprised at how many people I know that would probably drown if they fell into a lake. I don't always have the ability to hide my emotions on my face and I am pretty sure I've looked at folks like they suddenly grew another head after learning this about them. They may as well have told me they were born on Saturn. It's unthinkable. I almost feel like parents have somehow failed in their upbringing of a kid if the kid reaches adulthood without being able to tread water if they have to...or if they reach adulthood without ever having tasted macaroni and cheese. It just seems very odd to me. I can't imagine having a kid and not making sure they know how to swim. I don't remember learning to swim. My parents put me in a water babies class that had parents in the pool with their infants, teaching the babies how to hold their breath underwater, etc. I obviously don't remember it, and don't remember learning any of it, but I think that's one of the best things my parents could have ever done. And I don't really believe that if your parents don't like the water, you won't learn to swim. My mom was never all that fond of water, but she didn't let that stop her from getting in the pool and making sure I knew how to swim. I admire her for that. And also for not passing on her fear of the water to me. I never found out why she didn't like the water, but I have very few memories of her + water. A few stand out, like when she fell out of a raft during a white water trip down the Colorado River. If you don't like water, the last place you want to be is out of a raft going through rapids, but she did amazingly well and didn't panic at all unlike another rafter who fell out as well and nearly killed himself and others in his panic-stricken state. My mom was very calm on the outside and I would imagine she was worried while being whisked down the roaring river away from those of us still in the raft. That was the most extreme situation I can ever remember her being involved in where water played a big role. Mostly, when I was really little, she would hop waves with me in the ocean and then go back and read a book in her beach chair. My dad was always the one that would go swimming out in the deeper water, and probably that's another reason the fear didn't get passed on to me. My dad would scuba dive, so I had the example of one parent who preferred to sit on the shore (or boat) and the other who preferred to dive under the water and not surface for an hour or so. I did a middle-of-the-road kind of scenario and tended to snorkle and splash about between the two extremes. As a result, I was never afraid of the water itself. I don't like to go out swimming in the ocean as much anymore, but that's due more to a bad experience I had later in childhood during one of those 'middle of the road' scenarios in the Florida Keys. One bad experience shouldn't put you off something altogether. I'm not afraid of water now, just uneasy about certain animals that live in it. I love pools and water parks and things like that. I can't imagine growing up without going swimming. I imagine I'd look something like this sad little elephant, sitting in the super-shallow end while my playmates swim in the deeper sections of the pool. Sad little elephant.  So, if you happen to not know how to swim, why not learn now? It's never too late to learn something new.

The Color Run! (Pt. 2)

Remember this post? Well, they've added many races and spots for this year including a St. Louis race for August 18th! And they've re-opened some of the spots for the KC runs. Thanks to Mrs. T's tip-off at lunch today, I got signed up for the St. Louis one! They don't have the map up yet, but registration opened last week and, lo and behold, it's still open! So, yours truly is going to be doing her first 5K in a couple of months. I'm stoked to take part in a Color Run! Remember, you don't have to be competitive, you just have to enjoy the idea of getting color dust thrown on you and having a blast! Plus, it starts at 7 in the morning, so here's hoping that it won't be 100 degrees that morning in (possibly) downtown St. Louis...or maybe Forest Park? That'd be nice...

Yay!!

G'night.

Tomorrow is a going-away snack day at work for a co-worker of mine. She told me her favorite kind of cookie were snickerdoodles, so I decided I would make her a giant snickerdoodle. I've never made a giant cookie before, but I figured it was pretty easy peasy. It was. The difficult thing is trying not to eat it once you've made it. Because, unlike when you bake regular cookies, folks are gonna notice if you eat any part of a giant cookie. It smells really good in my house right now, just so you know. Next time I'm going to bake a giant cookie and keep a little bit to the side to make a couple of regular sized cookies for me to eat when I'm done. Oh, the torture.

What else? I have barely two weeks until my vacation. It's worked out perfectly in that I will be able to take my vacation and then come back and begin my new position at work afterward. This is great. There was only a little bit of doubt/apprehension about whether I would be paid for my vacation time or not. Never fear, though. It has all worked out. I've got a lot to do between now and then to fully closeout the Civil War grant, but I think it can be done. I've been working pretty hard at it this week so far and it's going to be okay. It's exciting to see this project to the end. I feel like I was a real part of something. And I learned a lot, too. Yay for that. There is a lot of stuff happening or beginning to happen. This has the potential to be a good summer!

I haven't worked out in a gym in a while. I got my notice from the health plex that my membership is about to end. I'm going to try out the rec center like I mentioned in my last post, but until I do that, I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do. But, today during lunch I went and walked 3/4 of a mile around a track on campus and that felt nice. As long as it doesn't get miserably hot, I might try to do that a few times a week. It's not crowded on the track. In fact, it's pretty slow still on campus everywhere, although summer school has begun. It's a nice slow, calm version of campus life. Students are on campus, but it's pretty laid back. Summer school always has that kind of laid back vibe. I like it.

I went and saw Venus crossing the sun yesterday evening. I waited in line for about half an hour to climb up on a ladder and look through the viewfinder of the giant telescope. I couldn't see anything at first, but I finally got my head moved to where I could actually see it. I think the observatory would be really fun to go to at night. I'm sure the staff point out the constellations and things that are visible when you go. I'm going to put that on my list of things to do on campus.

I think the giant cookie might have cooled enough for me to move it from the pan to the awaiting plate now. Beatrix has settled herself on my lap, and I think she's telling me it's time for bed. Her nails need clipping, but I hate to do that. I feel like they should be able to take care of that sort of thing on their own. So far, she's done a pretty good job of it. Bea had the chance to run away last weekend. She got out on the back deck and actually jumped off of it (from one story above the ground). It was only a little scary for me to realize how easily she could have run away. I was out on the deck, but not prepared to have to herd a cat back inside after it jumped off the deck. Bea was kind of freaked out and sat in a corner under the deck crying for me to come and get her. She pretty confident in her outdoorsy-skills because from the comfort of her windows, she's queen of the wild. She's sort of like me with the giant cookie. I'm queen of the giant cookie at the moment, feeling pretty certain that I could eat that much awesomeness just fine. If I started to eat it I'd soon get to feeling kind of sick and not so sure of  myself and I'd be overwhelmed by the fact that I'd have to bake yet another cookie for the co-worker after clearly eating most of hers, and here it is going on 10 pm and I'm tired and blah blah blah, I'm actually a giant cookie wimp. In Bea's case, she's got the idea that she would be an awesome outdoor cat (at least in the backyard), but once she's actually out in it, she's no longer so certain that she's made for stomping through grass and chasing birds. She'd rather flop on a carpet and be fed at regular intervals.

So we go on in our own little ways. I hope your own little way is going well, too. I'll leave you now to whatever it is you're doing tonight.

Got a case of the Tuesdays.

Some people just should not be in jobs where they have to work with other people. Especially greeting people at a front desk. If you have no clearly apparent amiable qualities to your character, being a receptionist is not a good fit. I had a run-in with one such person earlier on a trip to City Hall. First of all, she kept calling me Jennifer despite my telling her what my name was three times. Secondly, she needed an attitude adjustment along with a face that didn't frown so much. And thirdly, I had to wonder how in the hell she got this job? I don't remember her being there the last time I was there, but she might have been. I vaguely remember feeling like the person I talked to was in no way competent when I turned in my tax receipt earlier this year. I have a feeling it's the same person I dealt with this morning. She definitely wasn't there last year, so I think perhaps she came in with the new mayor. I have to assume she's a friend of his somehow, because she certainly doesn't have the personality for this position. Boo to that. Bring back the old mayor's receptionist! The old receptionist always knew how to take a message, how to write down a person's name when they showed up, knew when someone would be in, knew the processes for things, etc. The one they have now seems to know how to do nothing except look at you and speak like you're wasting her precious time. I had to bite my tongue and go sit where I couldn't see her to keep from letting this fool know exactly what I thought of her. I didn't even bother to notice her name. I hope she's on the way out.

This morning Beatrix took my ring off the bathroom counter and threw it down the furnace grate. I managed to find the screwdriver and get the ring back before I had to go deal with the rude receptionist. I've also managed to mess up something at work today. Boo. It will get better, I'm sure. All good things must return at some point.

Like, maybe a Triple Crown winner this year? I saw the movie Secretariat last night and it was pretty good. I love horse racing movies, usually. It generally makes me wish I was involved in horse training. I like horses. Secretariat won the Triple Crown on June 9th, the same day that this year's Belmont Stakes will be run. I don't know if this horse will actually be able to do anything. Secretariat had the benefit of a) being a phenomenally awesome horse and b) having a lot of his competitors drop out of the race. Secretariat had to run against only 4 other horses in the Belmont Stakes. I'll Have Another will probably be facing 10 other horses, so far, in his run on Saturday. I think usually Belmont is a smaller field than the other two races, which is good. And, hopefully, I'll Have Another's race doesn't go the way of Big Brown's race several years ago. That was kind of sad having the Triple Crown contender come in last because of a shoe problem.

Are you going to see Venus this evening/afternoon? The observatory on campus is having a free deal this evening so I'm going to go after work and look through the high-falutin' telescope to see it. I haven't been to the observatory since I was little, so I'm kind of excited about it. I always forget the observatory is here on campus because I'm rarely here at night, but it's cool that there's one nearby. I need to take better advantage of things like that. I'm thinking of possibly taking better advantage of things on campus now that I'll be a full-time employee soon. They have some interesting classes at the rec center, like hula and stuff. I might try it out next semester. Actually, I'm excited to try out the rec center again because I'm interested in having access to a pool again. Especially during the summer while it's quieter around here. Yay, pool.

David Foster Wallace