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I can’t help but love octopuses. Octopi. Whichever you prefer. It’s hard not to be fascinated by such a strange, smart, tough creature, and it seems a lot of people are fans (check out some of Miss Monster’s popular tentacle stuff!). Here are a few little octopus baubles that have caught my eye:
Finally, one I’ve admired for four or five years: Yep, I’m a sucker for octopuses. Before:
After:
I’ve taken the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator three times: the beginning of high school (INTJ), the end of high school (ISTJ), and the end of college (ISTP). When I took it the last time at my college’s career center, the counselor took one look at my scores and said, “Yep. Engineer.” It’s funny to see the little evolution there from intuition to sensing and from judgment to perception, but obviously some things haven’t changed. My introversion score is huge. A couple years ago my family got a laugh out of the Introvert’s Lexicon — the extrovert column may as well be labeled with my sister’s name, and the other with mine. My own grandmother once told me I ought to take a class to learn small talk (oh yeah?). I like myself just fine, but let’s face it, it’s an extrovert’s world. I’ve read that approximately 75% of people are extroverts. I used to work in a government R&D lab, where people are generally happy to leave you alone with your work because they would like to be left alone with theirs, too. When I moved to Houston, I switched over to a business environment. Now I work for one of the top ten companies in the Fortune 500. Plenty of high-achieving, hard-chargers. This year my boss is really into personal development. He decided I should take a company-offered class about the MBTI. I suspect he may be trying to ‘fix’ me, because that is what many extroverts do. I’m used to it. So I cleared my schedule for today and made sure I got to the classroom half an hour early so I could eat breakfast and check my email. Eight o’clock came and went. Nobody arrived. I suppose an extrovert would have started walking around the floor to see if anybody knew anything, or would have made a bunch of phone calls to see what they could find out. That is not what I did. I waited all alone until 8:30, double- and triple-checking the course confirmation email and today’s date, and then quietly packed up and walked back to my office, where I emailed my HR person. I’m pretty sure I’m not getting out of this class forever, but it should be no surprise that I was relieved to spend the day in my familiar office with my familiar coworkers, and then to go to my familiar spinning class. Where we had cake. My weekend starts now. It’s good to be me.
Last weekend I had to resurrect a thermal and a hoodie as Mother Nature took one last unexpected parting shot, but I think we are in the clear now. However, we’ll soon be traveling to DC to see my parents and enjoy the National Cherry Blossom Festival. I was looking back at my Cherry Blossom Festival pictures from 2007 and 2008 and noticed that I had a coat with me (and that was before I moved to Texas and got really soft about temperature), so I guess I’m not completely done with those winter clothes for the season, but it will be worth it.
Around this time of year we would also start visiting our favorite park in New Jersey to look for signs of spring.
The arboretum was spectacular in the spring:
Sunday is smoothie night, and here’s what we’re drinking:
I go straight to the gym in the mornings and get ready for work there, so I’ve been freezing a bottle full of smoothie and leaving it in my trunk during my workout. By the time I get to the office a couple hours later, it is about 2/3 slushy and 1/3 frozen (I expect that it will all melt once we get into Houston summer weather!). I consume it with a handful of nuts for protein and healthy fat. Here’s one ready to go from the smoothie I made for breakfast Saturday:
When my sister and I get a really good deal on something, we like to tease our husbands about how much money we saved them. Sort of like when you get such a good coupon that you’d be losing money if you didn’t buy something with it. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Mark and I recently planned our big vacation for the year — we are going to Hawaii for a week and a half! I am so excited that I quickly commenced with the fantasy-shopping of swimsuits and such, and came across something at Bluefly that I actually needed — a pretty new cover-up, at an irresistible price:
Next up, I need the perfect beach playlist for my ipod. Any suggestions? I love nail polish, but I can’t be trusted not to mess up painted fingernails immediately, which is why I usually just do my toes — I don’t write or cook with them (aren’t you glad to know you can safely accept a dinner invitation from me?) and nobody gets close enough to notice a dent or a smudge. Or sheet imprints. How do I always get sheet imprints on my nails, hours after I’ve painted them? For the last year I’ve used a quick-dry oil on the occasions that I wanted to paint my fingernails, and it worked pretty well, but I still had to sit around with my hands in the air for a while afterward to keep from denting the polish. Plus my topcoat kept getting destroyed by my daily sunblock, which really makes all the effort seem pointless. When I ran out of the quick-dry oil, I decided to try a quick-dry topcoat that I found at the grocery store:
I thought I could never love another kitchen appliance as much as I love my KitchenAid mixer. Until we got a blender. I don’t like fruit, but I like fruit-flavored things, and I like shakes, so we figured this was a good way to add healthy things to our diet. Especially Sunday nights, after we spend the entire afternoon moaning that we’ll never be hungry again and force ourselves to unenthusiastically eat something before bed just so we don’t wake up ravenous. You should see the recipe book that came with this sucker. Apparently you can make ANYTHING. Like bread dough. Or peanut butter. Or soup — blend long enough and it heats up! You can throw anything in there. It’s like a home version of Will It Blend? Today we went a little crazy at the farmer’s market and brought home a ton of produce for the blender’s maiden voyage. We didn’t use a recipe, just put a little of this and that in and blended away: grapes, a tangelo, a carrot, kiwis, spinach, strawberries, a banana, Greek yogurt, raw honey, agave nectar. The result tasted pretty good, looked a little worse, and smelled awful. I’m not writing this recipe down for posterity, but I’m pretty excited to see what else we can make.
I judge holidays by their food. Specifically, their candy. Halloween: awesome. Valentine’s Day: love it. Christmas: the candy situation is so-so, but it gets a pass because of eggnog and all the baked goods. Thanksgiving: not really a fan. There is no Thanksgiving candy that I am aware of. I don’t even like pumpkin pie all that much. But the one thing I will say for it is that it heralds the beginning of eggnog season. The king of candy holidays, however, is Easter. Some of it is nostalgic — my mother has not only mastered road trips, but she made a mean Easter basket when my sister and I were younger. However, the biggest reason is that I simply cannot get enough Cadbury Creme Eggs and Mini Eggs. Ever. I have been known to hit every drugstore between work and home after Easter in search of them at 50% off. Here’s a crappy cell phone picture of our seasonal candy shelf last Easter:
Some holiday candy is just all-year candy dressed up in colored wrappers (I’m looking at you, Hershey’s Kisses), so it saddens me that there is no non-Easter version of my Cadbury favorites (unless you live in Canada), even if it is probably for the best. I would even forgive Cadbury for the sin of shrinking the Creme Eggs if I could get them all year. I wonder how many Creme Eggs and bags of Mini Eggs I would have to buy to get me through until next Easter. Probably too many to fathom, since we have eaten four bags of Mini Eggs this week.
This photo is brought to you by my near-inability to take a photo of my own right arm:
I really like Leila’s stuff — it’s a little bit girly and a little bit rock ‘n’ roll. You can check it out here, but I’d strongly advise searching for a deal or waiting until it comes back to BDB, because that is way more than I paid. |
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