Friday, February 29, 2008

uh coodle doodle doo

"Honey, could you go out to the store? We need some chicken."
"Sure dear, what would you like?"
"Oh, just whatever, I think they're having a sale on miscellaneous bits down there to Ream's."

This sign is hilarious even totally ignoring the innovative spelling. That just makes it that much more amazing/creepy. Good to know it's only the best, though.

Name that Bluth!


Wednesday, February 27, 2008

good king wenceslas

Have you ever snowshoed? Because guess what I HAVE. I couldn't say that last week, but I can now. This past Saturday my partners-in-adventure and I woke up bright and early and proceeded to drive up past Sundance to the trailhead leading up to Stewart Falls, a trailhead I have acquainted myself with many times previously, but never before under 5+ feet of snow. We strapped on our gear, so generously provided free of charge by Heritage Residential Treatment Center, and set off. The hike to Stewart Falls normally takes maybe an hour and a half round-trip, but such is not the case when you're trudging through snow and the trail is buried to the point of invisibility. We got lost a couple of times but never so badly that we didn't quickly realize it and turn back to find the right way. I found that snowshoeing is one of few physical endeavors where my slight stature becomes an advantage--that snow was not sinking underneath me nearly so deeply as it was for near-300-pound Tom. Still, some parts were very difficult, specifically climbing up steep very slippery slopes, but it was definitely worth it to take in sights such as these:
That picture is stolen! I don't feel guilty about it. We did eventually make it to the frozen waterfall and it was a thing of beauty; I wish I had a stolen picture of it to show as well. The descent was much quicker, as we could follow our own tracks. We passed a few other snowshoers making their way up as we went back, and I felt pretty well pleased with being the first ones out that morning and therefore leading the way for all those to follow--the trailblazers, if you will. Just call us a fairly unexciting NBA team from Portland.

The best part of snowshoeing though was sliding on my butt down a really steep hill on a slide that had been carved out and polished by two butts before me. It was so fast and so exhilarating! It's a fact: snowslides put waterslides to shame.

Look up the words to that carol if you don't know them; pay attention to the 4th and 5th verses. They're relevant.

Coming soon: something interesting happened at my job--what??, pop culture.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

a few of my favorite things

I've just been sitting here trying to decide what to write about, as I'm long past due for a new post, and as I was sitting and deciding I was also munching. On a triple cheese panino, my favorite cheap-but-still-good-and-not-too-far-away-to-walk-to lunch option. I was really drawing a blank and was going to give up and navigate away from this page, until on a whim I looked down at the sandwich in my hands that was almost gone. When what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature cheese star, and a tiny crumb galaxy.
Naturally I took a picture on my soon-to-be-retired phone to share with all of you lovelies. I certainly had no intention of creating this little guy, I was just absent-mindedly biting away at my sandwich, but apparently even my subconscious has a penchant for those five-pointed figures. I like it. And that last star bite was just delicious.

Speaking of celestial orbs, tonight there is a full lunar eclipse! I'm choosing to be excited about it. I love an eclipse that gives me full permission to stare straight at it. I will love it even more if I get to enjoy it by the glow of a fire in a snowy meadow in the midst of mountain peaks. Let's make it happen.

I'm really annoyed that I like this song by Ingrid Michaelson. I am fervently opposed to Old Navy commercials, and all their people slowly sauntering towards each other in strangely empty feeling spaces. And this song was a part of that. It's a huge conflict of interest. But now that I've heard the full version and the part about buying rogaine, well, it's a little harder to dismiss. I just don't know what I'm going to do. Help me decide?



Thursday, February 14, 2008

love, American style

I want to tell this story, but I'm too lazy to form narrative thought today, so here:
y: you would be so so grossed out by me right now
é: why?
é: why moreso than usual i should say
y: I accidentally dropped a significant portion of my gordita on the floor
y: and obviously was not going to throw it away
y: so I gathered it up and scooped it back in the paper and am eating it
é: but but but
y: occasionally pulling out hairs or lint etc. from it
é: you have a substandard janitorial worker
y: I KNOW they NEVER vacuum
y: it should not be that gross from being on the carpet for five seconds
é: you should leave a note
é: to whom it may concern
é: i dropped my cheesey gordita crunch on the floor today and was not pleased with what i found
y: 2-3 hairs per bite
é: hahahaha
y: as an interesting flip-flop, I just got sour cream in my hair
é: are they long red curly hairs at least?
é: haahah
y: so hair in my burrito, burrito in my hair
y: no they haven't been mine, which is reeeally sketchy
é: so someone is sitting at your desk
é: putting their hair everywhere
y: or my carpet hasn't been vacuumed well in two years
é: neither is particularly appealing


Also a very happy valentine's day to all of my loves. I love you. I started to list you but then there were way too many. I guess I can consider myself a very lucky girl. I do want to make a particular shout-out to two, though: Priya and Legend. You were the fastest heart-winners I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

civic duty

Let's talk elections. I'm proud of my current state of residence for awarding its votes to Barack Obama, and particularly pleased with Utah County for giving Obama 66% of the democratic vote, the 3rd highest percentage in the state after Summit and Cache counties (69% and 67%, respectively). On the red side of things, Utah County placed first in highest portion of votes for Romney, with 94% of the county's republicans or unaffiliateds supporting that man. Unfortunately, he did not fare as well in the rest of the country. I have a hard time not thinking a lot of people in the south and east are stupid at times like these. I don't want to feel those things, I love those regions and those people, but come on guys, McCain? Who self-admittedly doesn't understand the economy very well? I mean, I could understand if we were voting for this guy:


If the John McCain of 1974 were running, I'd give him all of my votes based on sheer hotness. But that's not who we're dealing with. We're dealing with an old belligerent not well-enough educated man. Who does sketchy sketchy things in West Virginia. People, stop voting for him.

Back to the democratic side, though, I'm still feeling happily confident about Obama. I've got to ask, though: California, what is your problem? I thought you knew better. Why couldn't you listen to your first lady of state? Maybe it would have been better if one of these women had publicly endorsed Barack Obama.







Personally I wouldn't listen to Joyce Palmieri/Rachel Crisp; she has a bit of a history of choosing bad men to support. But maybe the others would have worked. I mean everyone loves Kelly Preston.

If your primary hasn't happened yet, please make sure you're registered for it and please participate in it. I'm getting nervous that we may end up with a vote between Clinton and McCain, in which case the main decision I'll be worried about making is which country I'll be re-locating to. Maybe though that will allow for Obama and Romney to run together on an independent ticket! That's plausible, isn't it? No?

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

copyright infringement

I'm feeling like it's time to write but I don't have anything I particularly want to write about. So instead I will let others do the writing for me. I may or may not add commentary.

When I set out to start this here documentation of my existence, I knew the first thing I'd have to do was choose something to fill in the space between http:// and .blogspot. I'm sorry to break the news to my current url that he was not in fact my first choice--but don't take it too hard little guy. You were up against some stiff competition. I will now present the audience with excerpts from five of the sites I tried to claim as my own. I will not, however, provide the addresses for said websites. If you were to find them on your own simply through guessing what I might have wanted for my site, well then you know me quite well friend, and I'll contemplate rewarding you in some way.

Blog the first!
the naked chef is the coolest guy on tv. he just cooks out of his own (extremely cool) apartment somewhere in england. and they film him going to all these little groceries and independent farm stands. and then he goes home and just breaks down everything you'd want to know about everything he uses in his recipes.

I can totally get behind somebody who talks about what they watch on TV, and who enjoys the Food Network. Glad to see she and I think alike on website names.


Number two.
Strange how the days moved and flowed, change in temperament coming only with rest and reflection, or lack thereof. The more thought she put into how things were or were not working for her, the more she became depressed and cried. How did the regular people stand it, she wondered? Is disconnection and avoidance how the world survives? These questions had no clear answer, obviously.

This girl's entire blog is written in third person, with the singular exception of the sentence "I don't know why I did this" in an early post. She's also very sad. Somehow I'm feeling some responsibility for her sadness now. I hope she's doing better.


3
hmm, happy new year! it's a perfect day to start a blog. =) new yr always comes with resolutions... i just wanna be happy. sounds rather cliche, i know... but it's what i really want. havent felt sheer happiness in a long time. funny...

She apparently is not given to capital letter usage. She does, however, have an appreciation for the ellipsis. Which is a terrible name for a band. I'm glad her New Year's resolution was not to faithfully update her blog, because this is her only entry.


Fourth
i wake up and begin to turn to look at the bright red numbers on my alarm clock, but before i can move close enough to see the time i hear the click and the radio begins to play a familiar song. it is six am. i hate when this type of thing happens(waking up just before the alarm goes off). i listened to the rest of the song and when it was over i felt around for my glasses, (they are never where i leave them).

Very detail-oriented. And that hatred of waking up right before the alarm clock, well that's something we all can relate to isn't it.


And, finally, five
I was talking to a friend about past relationships, specifically mine, and she provided a really interesting perspective on happiness...If you're banging your head against the wall, once it stops, you deceive yourself into thinking that you are happy. It's not happiness - it's an absence of pain. What we sometimes fail to recognize is that there is a whole other level of happiness on the other side of that wall.

Hmm, all of the blogs-that-could-have-been were written by females. There's got to be something interesting about gender roles to be discovered in that. I guess I am decidedly girly, if all the urls I wanted are owned by girls. I appreciate that this one wrote "a whole other" rather than "a whole nother," even though it is awesome that English does have that one infix that doesn't get nearly enough attention as a linguistic phenomenon.


Rock the vote, please.

Friday, February 1, 2008

cronchaloncha, base!

^^ That one's going out to my big brother Brad. He gets it.

I realized that the custodian in question yesterday is in need of a serious attitude adjustment. With one simple change in lifestyle, he would quickly find that his woes can become his joys. In my days of early morning custodial work, I would find a little morsel here or there of spilled/unwanted/discarded food. That is NO cause for complaint. That was breakfast! If our IAA custodian had been truly diligent he would have seen that there was even a half-full bottle of Sprite in the trash can that he could have used to wash down the daily popcorn fix. I really think he could benefit from this new diet plan. Maybe I'll leave him a note.

Segue.

I've been tagged! I've read those three words on many a blog in recent months, usually followed by some type of questionnaire the author was requested to fill out by one of their blog friends. I feel like in my being tagged, I've now officially been inducted into the blog world. I'm a card-carrying blog member. This paragraph also goes out to my big brother Brad, who loves nothing more than he loves the word blog. Blog blog blog. Hi buddy!

On with the hopefully self-revealing survey. This one came in the form of eights.

Passionate about:

1. language
2. killer whales
3. music
4. cheese
5. F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing
6. race relations
7. autumn
8. comfort

Want to:
1. go back to Korea
2. make music of my own
3. jump out of an airplane with my dad
4. regularly use my KitchenAid and Magic Bullet
5. learn how to parallel park
6. get a graduate degree
7. see a killer whale in the wild
8. Color Me Mine

Have recently read
1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
2. I Am America and So Can You - Stephen Colbert
3. various short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
5. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

6. Details magazine
7. The Little Black Book of Style - Nina Garcia
8. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

Say:
1. oh, really?
2. heeeey
3. Institutional Assessment, this is Tracy
4. I don't care
5. see if Scrubs is on
6. sweet
7. I'm going home now
8. but I mean,

Attracted to friends by:
1. making me laugh
2. not taking themselves seriously
3. intelligence
4. an appreciation of good food
5. interest in various forms of media
6. downloose (this is the opposite of uptight that I just made up)
7. the right balance of logical and emotional
8. tolerance of me

Could listen to over and over:
1. Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope
2. M.I.A. - Paper Planes
3. Once soundtrack

4. Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
5. Most any Bright Eyes
6. Bloc Party - This Modern Love
7. Something Corporate - Konstantine

8. Queen/David Bowie - Under Pressure

Learned last year:
1. America's health care system is broken
2. one room can be better than four
3. bodies can handle more than you might think
4. hamburgers aren't so bad
5. fresh flowers and live plants do wonders for a home
6. moms always take care of their babies no matter how old
7. Oreos can in fact get any better, through a brilliant change in packaging
8. people are the same in a lot of important ways and different in a lot of important ways

And I:
1. like that I'm not fashionable
2. could say the alphabet backwards when I was 2
3. have a really comfortable bed
4. don't much care for drivings cars
5. love my nephew
6. take more baths than showers
7. feel like something big is going to happen
8. will be really disappointed if it doesn't


Oh, I forgot the part where you tag eight more people. Oops.



 
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