Sprizee :: A simple girl replete with complications

What drives you in this adventure?*

Buy Shopgirl and then memorize this sentence.  "He doesn't yet understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart." Also, that part about being her watch wouldn't hurt either.

Listen to the soundtrack to Amelie while bumbling through another day at the office.  But make plans to go to the park after work and swing on the swings.

Read Scientific American, The New Yorker, and anything else that keeps you curious about the world.

Fall in love with the violin especially when Joshua Bell is involved.  Do you know about that time he set up shop in the Metro as a busker?  Do you know he's probably coming to your town soon?  Vancouver, BC on April 17th and Seattle on April 19th.

Make plans to take in Holst’s The Planets June 25–27, 2009 at the Seattle Symphony! Jupiter I adore you.

*Just got out of an interview where one of my coworkers actually asked this to the prospective employee.  Hello random, confusing and bizarre!  So yeah, I totally wrote it down and then mocked my coworker mercilessly.  Next time please be more obscure with the questions, yes?

I wonder what the stuff you forget says about you.

Can we step back for a moment here so I can recount just how smart I am?  Okay good.  So last night I showed up at the University Bookstore to hear Sam Goslings talk about What Your Stuff Says About You.   I wasn't planning on buying the book but I found what he had to say so compelling I grabbed a copy and stepped in line to have him sign it.  Also, it didn't hurt that he had a charming British accent.

The two ladies in front of me were super obnoxious.  When he asked them if he should include their name one replied with, "Write something pithy!" and the other one replied with, "Write something witty!".  Ah, how charming of them, right?  Be funny...1, 2, 3, go!  I leaned forward to see what he was actually writing and it was just that, "Something witty, Sam Goslings".  Ha, suckers.

Anyways, I was up next.  I didn't even have him sign my name.  I was good with just a signature.  This will be important later in the story.  I think this is what folks call foreshadowing.  (No, actually this is what folks call bad storytelling.)   So I walked downstairs to checkout, buy my book, getting my parking validated and get the hell out of dodge because it was past 8 PM and my stomach was starting to rumble. 

I get up to the front counter, and that's when I realize this huge purse I'm carrying which holds my umbrella, my hat, 2 scarfs, 27 gift cards to places I never go, 3 tubes of lip gloss, my mileage log for business trips, my bus pass and 3 iPods is missing on key item.  My wallet. 

So then I had to put the book down (good thing it didn't have my name in it!), walk out to my car and explain to the parking attendant smarty pants forgot her wallet at home.  His response was, "you owe $3".  So I had to review the whole not having a wallet thing with him one more time. Apparently I'm not the only one whose elevator doesn't always make it to the top floor.  So that made me feel slightly better.  But not good enough.  I still want that book!  Fascinating.

You people can not be serious.

Oh, hell no.  Wow, I hate to say it but I thought the first one was bad.  And then I saw this gem. Run. Away.

Speaking of running, the book I'm currently reading has this really interesting chapter on the Marathon des Sables, a 6 day / 151 mile endurance race across the Sahara Desert in Morocco.  But because that wouldn't make the race difficult enough, the participants also have to pack all their supplies with them ON THEIR BACK. So, as you can see Sables means The Crazies in French.

Part prose, part posed, part precious.

Nancy Pearl Nerds Unite.  Book Lust lovers addicted to the InternetS will love this new site.

Lost! The Action Figures! I'm totally bummed there is no Sawyer.  Not because I think he's hot but because I love to make fun of how he only has one face when he's "acting" on the series, his angry face.  Grr!

Sweet.  Looks like the onesie I made for Alissa finally fits!  Yaay!

Center of the Universe back to me.

So, I'm still reading that Bill Bryson book.  I'm about 300 pages in which is slightly more than half way through.  I almost gave up after I got stuck in the section about rocks and the age of the earth.  Seriously, I could care less about the age of the earth.  Rocks just don't do it for me. 

I thought about skipping that chapter after the first 3 pages or just not reading the book any further but that would have broken my streak of always finishing a book once I start, with the exception of Plath's In The Bell Jar.  But c'mon, Silva is such a downer.  I don't need some book to explain to me the world of a misfit girl who has suicidal thoughts every time she gets a hangnail. 

Anyways, I had this misconception that Bryson's Short HIstory was going to be, well, a history book about the history of the earth, in the historical sense of the word, meaning he would talk about this civilization and that civilization and how they interacted with each other, or more likely destroyed each other over some turf war, or because one civilization caused the other civilization to get a hangnail.  But, as it turns out, not so much. 

It's more about the science of the earth and the universe, and a bunch of other science mumbo jumbo that I've already forgotten, or more likely never absorbed.  I should probably read it again after I finish it.  My point is the part of the book I'm at now, the ocean stuff, is seriously fascinating.  I don't want to ruin it for you, but suffice to say there's all kinds of crazy creatures in the ocean we've most likely never seen before.  And even the ones we know about are little understood. 

Take for example the blue whale, the biggest mammal known to man, with a heart the size of a car and blood vessels so large we could swim down them.  We have no idea about so many things that this creature, which outweighs any dinosaur known to man by 3 to 1, does.   Okay, I just made that 3 to 1 thing up.  I'm just saying, the blue whale is huge.  And this is an animal that has to surface the water to breath. 

What about all the creatures that never have to surface the water to breath?  There could be a whole community of snorks living down in the ocean and we'd never be the wiser.  It's seriously odd how we know so much more about the moon than we do about all the vast oceans around us.  I guess I'd just never thought about that before which is why I love reading non-fiction.

Review: A Walk Across America

I finished up A Walk Across America last night.

I laughed. I cried. It was good. You should read it too.

Hey, I don't want to spoil it for you.