Tuesday

My last 2 posts have been written on Tuesdays, (quite unintentionally) so I figured I should write one today to keep up the trend, even though I missed last Tuesday.

I was here...

....doing this...

I also did lots of other things like ride a tandem bike around Mackinac Island, look for petoskey stones in Petoskey, MI, and hike a million miles up and down zillion foot tall dunes to Lake Michigan, which was a billion degrees below zero when I stuck my foot in. It was a lot of fun, but I was happy to get back home to the land where it's 90+ with a relative humidity of 3000% in June (not the lucky-to-get-up-to-75 weather I experienced for a week), where people say y'all instead of yous guys, and where sweet tea is a staple. Honestly, other than the accent and the weather (and of course the lack of good drinks) Michigan is a lot like Mississippi. Lots of farms, lots of cows, lots of country stations on the radio.

Making the transition back to work from being on vacation wasn't so bad either. I went into work yesterday, was asked to work the weekend shift at the Walmart branch of the bank, and told I could take Tuesday and Wednesday off. Off for a week, work a day, off for 2 more days. I can dig it.

I had all kinds of plans for today. I was going to get up and walk with my dad as usual, do some cleaning, go to Hobby Lobby because I have a crafty thing in mind and need supplies, and spend the rest of the day working on my still splotchy leg tan from the beach. However, my alarm didn't go off (or perhaps I turned it off without realizing it) so I wasn't up at 5 to go walking, and as a result, I am still in my p.j.s at 10:00. Oh well, there's always tomorrow, which I probably won't blog about because it's not Tuesday.

Noise

As my dad and I were out walking yesterday morning, he said something about how wrong people are to assume that living out in the country would be quiet. I hadn't really been paying attention to the noise around me before that, but I perked up and started listening. It is loud! There might not be the sounds of steady streams of cars rushing past, horns blowing, and people yelling, but there are roosters crowing, dogs barking at the crowing roosters, birds chirping, frogs croaking, crickets...cricketing.

This morning as we set out, I started listening again. You can hear roosters coming from every direction. I would like to see a map pointing out every house with chickens within a 5 mile radius. I bet there would be a big circle right around our house. Imagine the Ring of Fire, only the Pacific plate is my yard, and the volcanoes are chickens. (Now there's an interesting mental image...)

In addition to the usual critters this morning, we also heard our friendly, neighborhood lion. The Mobile Zoo is right down the road, and every so often, I suppose when it's feeding time, you can hear, or rather feel, the lion roar. It's kind of like the bass at a concert, only in my front yard at 5 am.

Anyway, I suppose if you truly want quiet, even living in the middle of nowhere won't always do the trick. Life just has a way of being noisy. My advice to those in pursuit of silence: find a library.

What I've Been Doing Lately, Picture Book Style

I graduated, which makes me very happy and very sad at the same time.

I started working at the bank again. (This is not really where I work. Century Bank is a much nicer looking bank than this. Even the Walmart branch.)

I hung out with this guy a lot, but not as much as I would if we didn't now live an hour and a half apart instead of the former 2ish minutes. (P.S. Isn't he a handsome?) Yesterday I went car shopping with him which made me decide to start saving my money...

...for one of these.

I started getting up at 5:00 every morning to run with my dad. I like the exercise. I love the conversation and the time spent outside watching the world wake up.

I was asked to help teach 2nd grade Sunday School, which I am very excited about and will start next Sunday.

I also went to the beach and got a funny, splotchy sunburn on my legs, which I will spare you pictures of because I couldn't find any non gross sunburn pictures.

Basically, I started my transition from college student to whatever comes next. So far, not so bad.

Just Call Me Domestic Darla

It is Saturday. More importantly, it is the Saturday of Super Bulldog Weekend. What does this mean to you? Maybe nothing. To me it means that I was up late last night and I'll be up late again tonight, therefore, in the interest of my mind and body, I should be asleep right now. Instead, I was awake at 7:30 am. Wide awake. I could have stayed in bed hoping I would fall back asleep, but it was hot, so I decided to go downstairs and have breakfast. Once I reached the kitchen and saw the state it was in, I decided I'd straighten it up a little first. This turned into completely cleaning the kitchen (wiping counters, scraping up little bits of cookie dough that seemed to have gotten plastered all over everything, sweeping, and mopping) and the living room (scraping up even more cookie dough that somehow got under the rug, sweeping some more, mopping some more, straightening the pillows, and vacuuming). Then and only then could I make the coffee and biscuits that I came down for, but before I'll be able to enjoy eating them, I'm going to tackle the dishwasher, and possibly even the dirty dishes in the sink.

P.S. I wasn't even here last night to make this mess.

P.P.S. I think I have a problem.

I just spent a while reading a few other blogs, so I feel the need to write something in mine since I've neglected it for a while. The only problem is that while I have the inspiration, I lack the subject matter. The only thing I can think of is that I never wear my spoon ring anymore and I never play my ukulele either, rendering my last post completely obsolete.

Also, I am hot. The living room in my house is big and open and has tile floors and my roommate and I are cheap. These things combine to make it cold in there all the time. However, even though we don't set it very high, we do keep the heat on since it's been downright Arctic here for the past week. The heater runs and runs, unsuccessfully warming the living room but way too successfully warming my bedroom which is much smaller, a lot less open, and carpeted. I don't know how thermostats work, but I'm assuming that whatever instrument measures the temperature of the room is in the living room where it is currently 67, not my bedroom where it has to be at least 90. The only exception is my closet where it is always 30 below. Maybe the architect designed my room the way he did, knowing that the closet would always be cold, because he knows that boogie monsters prefer a warmer climate. Unless my personal boogie monster is the Abominable Snowman. Or was he not actually one of the monsters that worked to scare kids on Monsters, Inc? I don't really remember, but I don't think he was. Guess that means I'm safe.

It looks like I had more to talk about than I originally thought.

Spoons 'n Ukes

I didn't get in bed until after 1:00, yet here I am at 7:17, already finished with my regular internet pass times so you know I've been up for a while. I moved back to Starkville yesterday. My bed was apparently not as happy with this as I would've thought and welcomed me back with zero sleep. Since I'm up anyway, I'll bore you with a little of the happenings in my world recently.

I have lost my spoon ring...again. I know I had it Saturday, and I know I didn't have it Sunday. I'm at a loss as to where it might have gotten to between those days. Maybe it was tired of living life being called a spoon but never being used for food consumption, so it ran away. Or maybe I just dropped it and it rolled under my bed and it's living it up with the dust bunnies. In either case, I feel truly bereft without it.

My mother got a ukulele for her birthday back in May, so all summer I've been messing around with it. Since I'm back in Starkville now and figured she probably wouldn't appreciate it if I took it with me, so I bought my own. I am very excited and fully expect to be the next Israel Kamakawiwo'ole except for the fact that I am not a very large Polynesian man.

I will now combine the subjects of the last two paragraphs into one snazzy picture.

I miss you dearly, spoon ring. Hopefully our paths will cross again one day soon. My finger feels naked without you.

I

I never post anymore.

Is it sad that most of my posts say something to that effect?

I guess that really depends on your point of view. If you like hearing from me, it is sad. If you don't like hearing from me, you probably aren't reading this now and so it makes no difference.

It is currently 1:17 a.m. I'm in that weird stage of being tired, but not sleepy enough to go to bed. When I reach this point I get contemplative or silly. Right now it's kind of both.

I've started every little section so far with the letter I.

It was unintentional, but now I feel like I have to continue with it.

Icecream is yummy.

Ice cream is also apparently two words.

Igloos probably aren't very fun to live in. Or at least they wouldn't be for me. I'm always cold.

I can't think of any other words that start with I and it seems self-centered and taking the easy way out to just use the word "I" as my i word, so I believe I'll stop.

It's bed time anyway.