Travelouge: Prep work

We're going to London in 26 days.

This trip was first thought of in May of 2009, due to a wedding gift from an at the time to-be-sister-in-law.

Enter September 2010--we hear about offer expiring.  We decide to go during my spring break of that academic year, come rain or shine or coersion to get time off for Dale at whatever new job he got!

December 2010--AIRLINE TICKETS ARE PURCHASED!  Dale and I barter for the window seat on the coolest parts of the trip.

February 2011--Travel Itinerary is finalized.  My now-is-currently-sister-in-law, Lana, has been living in the English countryside for going on 3 years now.  I didn't really know what one does on a trip to England, and she has had plenty of practice taking people around on visits.  She and Dale were pretty amazing travel agents on this whole thing.  I'll save the intense detailing for later, but let me just say, I'm pretty stoked for a trip to Cambridge, Westminster Abbey (which--believe it or not--is an actual functioning Abbey... with Nuns and stuff!), the Brittish Museum (Ooh! Mummies!), Windsor Castle, Chatsworth (that sweet house that Mr. Darcy lives in for the A&E Pride and Prejudice movie), Dover and the White Cliffs (where Sabine jumped off for her execution in the Disney 3 Musketeers Movie), and OH SO MUCH MORE!!!

I'm SO stoked.  Pictures to come in 41 days when I actually get back.  WOOHOO!

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London really does deserve it's own entry and justice, but I couldn't figure out how to separately post this idea.  I mean really, the decision over how to post under what title, which one first, and is "first" the one that appears on top, or the one that was actually given the earliest time stamp? ... it was all just becoming too much!

Story:

Dale and I did our taxes this year and it was the first year we'd processed where either one of us had earned over $10,000.  2010 was good for us!  When we saw what our tax return would be, I stepped back a little.  We don't have any immediate needs.  Savings is important, but we're contributing to it already... "Honey, if we were just going to blow this money, what would we spend it on?"  About two hours later, Dale came back with ideas for a -- wait for it --

TRIP TO EASTERN EUROPE!!

(Including Prague, Vienna, and Budapest)

Coming to blog spaces near you in September of 2012...

Can you believe these people made it into graduate school?

Things I have witnessed today from graduate school educated people

1. Pronunciation of the word "measure" as "may-shur"

2. One mouth breather in the computer lab

3. One woman in computer lab who took 3 minutes to figure out that rather than just shaking the mouse on its pad, she had to actually turn on the computer

4. Inability to understand what a "normal curve" is and how it relates to graduate level research

5. Inability to create a flow chart

6. Inability to create a legible genogram

Standing for Something

Just a follow up:  once I had been able to process the beginning of school for about 10 days, it has seemed a lot less insurmountable.

Maybe that's just me pretending that the work doesn't exist.

Just thought I'd share with the blogging world that my alarm went off an hour and fourty minutes ago.  I would ideally be at work right now.  But instead I am still in my pajamas absorbing some needed mental health on the computer.

I'm taking a stand for sanity this morning.

I have a tendancy to get overwhelmed.  I kindof just live my life recreationally, and plan to manage responsibility as it comes.  Occasionally, enough responsibility piles up that I realize I couldn't get it all done the day before and have fun doing it, and I begin to hyperventilate.

This morning was one of those days.

I'd say there were two reasons for the feeling of dread that overtook me:

1. The first day of a semester of graduate school
I hate the first week of school.  It's all teachers telling you EVERYTHING that must be done in the next 4 months, and I have a tendancy to feel like I need to get that all done in the following 24 hours.  I usually don't want to do much of it either.  Or at least not in the timeline that they give me.

Oh well, I go to grad school to get a degree, not to have fun doing it, neccessarily.

2. Yesterday
Yesterday was a singular piling of intensity in my life.  These 5 large things happened within 6 hours of eachother:
--After having quit his job 1 week ago, Dale got his first call back!
--Dale got hired as a small business consultant working roughly 10 hours per week for the forseeable future.
--Dale got a second call back from a second company who may interview him this week!
--Dale is now a partner in the HR consulting firm LaineDale Associates.


All good things, some, very exceptional things.  All very big, or relate to something very big.  And somewhat unfathomable when bundled all together.

These two situations happening within 4 days of eachother... I'll tell you when I no longer have to focus on keeping my breathing even and steady.

BBC believes people are stupid. I've read 32% of your snooty book list: Take THAT BBC!

Just because I have seen other people do this, and I keep wondering how I would do if I REALLY counted:

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Have you read more than 6 of these books? Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen


2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien


3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte


4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling


5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible


7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis


34 Emma -Jane Austen


35 Persuasion - Jane Austen


36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell


42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding


50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
 
It'd be even more than that if they included the ones I've seen the movie for!  There are some good ones on here that I haven't considered recently... May be a good guide for my late winter book reading!

"The Bane of a Fake Date"

Found this written by one Jessica Hoopes and posted on Facebook.  I find it hilarious, and share it in hopes that this posting will expand her fame and future as a blogger extraordinaire. 

I AM happily married right now, but this brings back memories.  Just for the record: Dale asked me on our first date via text message, but on Wednesday, not Friday night.

"Ok fellas, you know the drill. There you are, fresh off the mish, looking for your eternal companion. Lo and behold, an angel appears....

WHOA WHOA WHOA REWIND! (sound effect of record disc being stopped abruptly)

Who we trying to kid here? no way! you are home and you are FREEEEEEE! so thus pose the next dilemma: Commandment: multiply and replenish the earth.
Desire: Playtime! -perhaps potential arm candy on the side.

Ok ladies, you know the drill. You're focused on school and your career right now, and you love being single. However, you are young and energetic and open for something new.

So there you are, it's 9:30 on a Friday night. -Note: just late enough that you're about to not make plans because you need to be in the library early on Saturday morning anyway to study for that big test that's gonna land you that sweet job you want.

You start getting ready for bed, maybe a quick hour of Grey's Anatomy and Ben&Jerry's; we have all done it.

10:30 p.m. -commence annoying cell phone beep of an inbox about to be completely bombarded

Here it comes. You KNEW it was going to happen.*
*Names have been changed to maintain confidentiality
Bill: "hey"  (how original and inspired, yet expected every Friday night for weeks on end)
Charlie: "What's goin on?" (it's Friday night, what do you think? Also an anticipated text.)
Fred: "Hey pretty girl, whatcha doin tonight?" (You're thinking, I have looked the same since 11th grade and you STILL have never asked me out)

But lady, after several years of experience, you know how to make this go down. Though all of these boys are potentially attractive, successful, charismatic partners, you know that it would be completely socially unacceptable to 1.) admit to not having plans on a Friday night, and 2.) accept shoddy effort and set yourself up for a lifetime of Fake Dates. That's right. Fake.

As every BYU student has undoubtedly heard from one religion professor or another, dates are as mentioned: Planned, Paired off, and Paid for.

Simple, right? Wrong. Apparently many of our fellow students on campus have failed to acknowledge this brilliant piece of advice. Favorite lines include the following:

• "hey, wanna come over and watch a movie?" -it's now 11:30 p.m. Common knowledge prime movie time.
• "I don't have any food, but if you wanna bring some cookies and come over that would be great!"
• "Oh, and bring your roommate if she wants to come"
• "I'm bored" 
• "What of the color of your toothbrush?"
• "Hey, it's been a while!" (since when? your last text like this? yeah. approximately seven days.)
• "Hey, when are we ever gonna chill?"
• "I miss you" interchangeable with "i miss your face"
• "Hey, do you wanna come sleep in my bed?" (WTF? HELL-O! NO!)
• "Hey let's be spontaneous and get Betos at midnight!"
• "wanna go hike the Y?" (code for: prep yourself, I am about to DTR you.)
• "The stars are really bright tonight" (there is snow on the ground. no WAY am I hanging out outside.)
• "Hey you" (handy, easy mass text)
• "I just heard something interesting about you that I think you should know about"
• "So i met your friend _____ tonight" (boy you once hooked up with. awkward.)
• "Hey, do you wanna do somethin?"
• "Hey, I know we had plans, but I don't really feel like doing anything. Wanna just come over?"

So in case any of you ladies are still wondering what to do in this situation, the answer is this:
9:30 p.m .  question:  "hey, what are you doing?"
12:00 a.m. response: "getting ready for bed. good night."

Wow

Chuck Norris to become honorary Texas Ranger

Thursday, December 02, 2010

TEXAS -- Actor Chuck Norris for years played a Texas Ranger on television. Now he's going to become one in real life.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is scheduled to present the actor and executive director of "Walker, Texas Ranger" with a designation as an honorary member of the famed law enforcement group Thursday.

Ceremonies to honor the 70-year-old martial arts star and entertainment action hero, who is known for doing good and going after bad guys and gals in the long-running TV series, will take place at a Texas Rangers office in suburban Dallas.

Perry also will honor the actor's younger brother, 59-year-old stunt coordinator and producer Aaron Norris, as an honorary Texas Ranger. http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news%2Fentertainment&id=7820630&rss=rss-wabc-article-7820630