Dude...Monday.

Okay, so I got in to work this morning and I thought to myself, "It's Monday! I should update the blog!" And then of course, I stared at the screen thinking that I have absolutely nothing that is thought-provoking or original to say. So. It's Monday! And I am updating the blog by pilfering from A Quiet Room. I generally don't play nicely with the meme stuff, but it's so much of a Monday that I've got no where else to go!

Here goes:

Four Jobs I have had in my life:
-Music Store Clerk
-Office Temp. (I know. The glamor. Try to restrain yourselves.)
-Comparative Literature Instructor. (Undergrads do not scare me. That's not entirely true. Sometimes they do scare me. A lot.)
-Office Assistant. again.

Four Movies I can watch over and over and over again:
-Pride and Prejudice
-Our Mutual Friend
-The Matrix (I prefer 2 but I can watch any of the 3 over and over and over)
-Bleak House

Four Places I have lived:
-Seattle
-Athens, GA
-Oak Ridge, TN
-Durham, NC

Four Places I have been:
-New York, NY
-Galway, Ireland
-Frankfurt, Germany
-Halifax, Nova Scotia

Four of my favorite foods:
-nachos with black beans and white corn and Boca chicken
-malai kofta with basmati rice
-pad see yew with tofu and extra chilies
-falafel with feta cheese

Four sites I visit daily:
-Gmail
-BBC
-Fark
-Sundry

Four places I would rather be right now:
-at home in pajamas
-Paris, France
-in bed with a good book
-Seattle

10 Literary figures I would most like to snog:

-Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice: I know. It's so cliche...everyone loves Mr. Darcy, but with good reason.
-Mortimer Lightwood from Our Mutual Friend: smart, sarcastic, noble at heart.
-Sydney Carton from Tale of Two Cities: smart, sarcastic, self-destructive--what? I said snog, not marry!
-Roger Hamley from Wives and Daughters: smart, compassionate, and a naturalist...he's bound to be a good kisser.
-Thomas Bertram from Mansfield Park: smart, social conscience, Regency bad boy...lovely.
-Benedict from Much Ado about Nothing: I have to side with A Quiet Room, there's just something about witty banter and good conversation that's attractive.
-Count Almasy from the English Patient: incredibly smart, passionate, fierce. Wow.
-Patrick Lewis from In the Skin of the Lion: smart, a bit naive, gentle, but violent when wronged.
-Will Ladislaw from Middlemarch: smart, artistic, passionate...good for a smooch but I wouldn't want to live with him.
-Rawdon Crawley from Vanity Fair: a gambler and a soldier...need I say anything more?

Well, now you can all say that you know more about me than you ever wanted. For those of you who aren't up to snuff on your British slang, a snog is a smooch not the full montey! And if you're interested in sharing your list then by all means meme away, if not. Then go in peace and we will chat again another day.

Over-medicated Mondays

I don't sleep. Much. As in, I average about four hours a night. A lot of people I know find this fact deplorable and wonder how I survive without coffee. I do. And maybe it is something to whine about, but from where I sit, it's not such a bad thing.



Which makes it all the strangers that I slept yesterday afternoon. For 3 hours. ME! 3 Hours! Asleep! Continuously! I must be coming down with something.



I got my groove back last night, though. I slept off and on for about 4 hours.



Why, The Wife? What are you thinking about while you are awake and the world around you slumbers? Thank you, Internet for asking, I am happy to oblige you.



Last night I was thinking about the show Heroes, since the Husband and I had watched (I think)3 episodes back to back to back before bed. I thought about what life would be like if I was like them and had some sort of genetic mutation that gave me super-powers and what I would do with it. I found myself more than a little jealous of that one girl with the power of persuasion...how cool would that be? Or the invisible man? All my life I've wanted to be invisible...alas.



And then I thought about The Husband and his midterms and how hard he works but he's not entirely sure why he works so hard.



And then I thought about Boston. It's 2 weeks from this Thursday that the Husband and I will be embarking on a real vac-a-tion! I am so excited. I've never been to Boston and it's Autumn and it will be beautiful and fun and I get to go with my most favorite person in all the world!

And then I kicked Agnes off of me 323 times in a row.

And then I gave up and got up and came in to work.

White Bread and other Glories

Alas. There are no mating slugs in NC and so you will have to endure yet another dry post from a very dryyyyy part of the country.



In other news, the Husband and I are contemplating running away from home. Far away. As in another continent. The Husband has a 12-week internship next summer (Coming Soon! Whining Wife Whinges about Where the Husband Went Without Her!) and the internship tends to sway where you land your first job so while we still can, we are dreaming. And we're dreaming in the vicinity of Geneva, Switzerland. The Husband has always wanted to live overseas for a while and The Wife has wanted to leave her country far far behind for quite some time and live a glamorous life in Europe, so this could work out well. Or it could be The Husband working a lot and the Wife whining that she has the same old life she had in the states, but in a more beautiful place. Go figure.



We had dinner with the family yesterday. And blessings rained down from heaven in the form of homemade bread (made by the Mom of the Wife). I love white bread, especially homemade white bread, with a love that cannot be named and even if it could be named it would be beyond the reckoning of mere mortals. Salman Rushdie wrote a truly brilliant essay on white bread, you can read it here. It comes closest to communicating my own love of white bread.


I wonder sometimes what it says about me that I'm listening to Matisyahu's Youth continuously and day-dreaming about white bread toast and the hills being alive in Switzerland.

Hmmm. Maybe it would be better not to over-analyze that too much.

The Gig of Gig

So. We were on our way home last night from work etc. and we were discussing approximately how much information will 1 Terabyte of electronic storage space hold. And Then lovely Husband piped up with "A gig of gig!" and the phrase just made me laugh! And so I give you the gig of gig that's going on with us:



a gig of gig worth of yuck currently evacuating from our faces. yep. We have the simultaneous-married cold.



a gig of gig worth of money it's going to cost to buy textbooks for The lovely Husband.



a gig of gig worth of homework for The lovely Husband starting his first week of graduate school.



a gig of gig worth of work done for the lovely DB for whom I work and who is leading a study abroad in South Africa for the fall.



a gig of gig worth of Dostoevsky to catch up with my own reading schedule (count them, I'm 30 pages behind! I blame the aforementioned gig of gig worth of work!)



a gig of gig worth of small projects that have piled up while I've been getting DB ready to go to South Africa.



a gig of gig of neglected and pitiful cats currently living in our apartment. Don't feel too sorry for them, they have a great apartment all to themselves during the day and they get to maul us at night!



a gig of gig of sleep which will be essential to me feeling like a human being again.



On a totally unrelated topic. One of the women I work with came by my desk today as I was trying to assist in the aforementioned evacuation (I was blowing my nose) and asked if I was sick, I said yes, and that I was blaming my nieces who have been visiting from Utah (they're adorable but I'm convinced that children are a breeding ground for germs and that it is nothing short of a modern miracle that mothers are not permanently ill). She said, "Oh your sisters have kids?" I responded with yes and specified ages etc. And she replied with, "Well, you're behind! You'd better talk to your husband before it's too late for you to have kids!"



The Mama-in-Law would be proud. I am now being lectured about fertility by my coworkers. The beauty of the moment was that The Husband was standing right there. Which I gleefully pointed out. At which point she blushed. Apologized. And went back to work. HAH! A gig of gig of embarrassment for the coworker!



Your turn: what are you having a gig of gig of right now?