the strangest feeling....

I actually read and answered all of my email today. Messages that have been waiting for attention for days are gone....on all of my email accounts. This feels strange, like I am forgetting something, or the world is about to implode.

The gov'nar's dogs

We live a few blocks away from the governor of our state, and Mr. 3 and I walk down my the house almost daily. The governor has 2 dogs: a retriever and a bulldog. We don't reach through the fence to pet them or anything, but we say hello to them and them walk along with us along the fence line. Today they did something different. The retreiver figured out a way of setting his ball so that it would come out of the fence and land by your feet. So today we played catch for a little bit. It was sooo cute! I wish that we could just arrange visitation rights to the dogs, then we could actually go inside the fence and play and pet them. They seem so starved for affection.

Apparently I have cajones

Yesterday it was 91 degrees, today 49....so my body is a little confused and I spent most of today napping and drugged up. We ventured outwards about 8 pm today and we discovered that the weather was a little difficult on the electricity. So we are at 7th east and 21st and the lights are out....which means, if you remember driver's ed, that it needs to be treated as a four way stop. So I politely wait my turn, begin to drive across the intersection when not one, but two cars figure that there is no stop. I held my hand on my horn the entire way through the intersection much to the amusement of Mr.3 and the car next to me trying to cross the intersection without being hit. It was by far the bitchiest thing that I have ever done by driving, but it was quite liberating.

Painted Harlot in a Helmet

My natural skin color is white, white to the point of translucence. Now with summer coming I would like to have a bit of a tan, but I refuse to waste time trying to tan, let alone the skin cancer risks....this leaves with the only option of fake tanners.
I had gotten a sample of the Jergens Skin Glow lotion, supposedly it will not streak and is fool-proof...it isn't, as I managed to give myself streaks. So then I switched to the Neutragena air-brush thingy. The bottle said to apply an even coat, but you don't see the tan for a couple hours. Wednesday evening before going to the CFR dinner I decided to apply it to my legs. We still couldn't see the tan when we came back and went to bed. The next morning my legs looked like a kindergartener had taken marker to them....apparently it isn't fool-proof and that whatever I seem to think is an even application really is something that resembles swirling modern art.

Then today Mr.3 and I went to the Army Navy Surplus Store. Everytime I had been in there before I was a) with clients and b) completely broke. My goal was to get something cool from the store....I got 3 cool things: one, a soft comfy t-shirt for $3, two, a canvas tote bag that could withstand anything that I could throw at it, and three (and definitely the coolest) I got a helmet that looks like this:
Now all I need is a machete and a little native man to be a pack-mule for all of my stuff as we go through the jungle. Mr.3 has a picture on his phone of me wearing it...he thinks that it is funny and really, it is. This is only a glimpse into the silliness that will be me as a mother....I'll make sure to get matching helmets for all of my future children.

4 logical steps for parallel parking

Not once, but twice today we had an encounter with bad parallel parkers.
Bad parallel parker number one:
Mr.3 and I are sitting on the patio outside of Barnes and Nobles in the Gateway, enjoying a tasty beverage after a day of wandering aimlessly from mall to mall so that I can collect furniture catalogs to get ideas to redo our house. Looking down on the plaza, we notice this guy attempting to parallel park in front of the Apple store. Only he didn't know how to parallel park...he tried to pull into directly into the spot and then straighten out. Anyone who has paralleled parked before knows that he has done this in the opposite way it is supposed to be done. We proceeded to watch him jocky his car back and forth a couple inches at a time. He got out of his car a total of three times to see if he was even close to getting into the spot. A foreign tourist tried to help him, but the closest he could get was the nose of his car mostly in the spot and the back of it still blocking traffic. I am not sure what annoyed me more....watching him try to park for five minutes, or the way that he finally left his car. This is the note that I wanted to leave on his windshield (but didn't get a chance to).

Parallel parking is quite easy when you approach it in a logical manner. Here are four easy steps.
Step 1: When you have found a spot that you wish to parallel park in pull your car one carlength past the spot that you wish to park in.
Step 2: Reverse into the spot by sharply turning the back of your car to the curb.
Step 3: Now putting your gear into drive, straighten out our car by driving forward turning your front tires into the curb.
Step 4: Adjust as needed.
By following these steps, and perhaps remembering your driver's ed class, you will be able to park like a pro...rather than make yourself out to be a complete fool for the rest of the mall to see.

Bad Parallel Parker Number Two: Driving home from the Gateway, a car two cars in front of us parallel parks. They did know how to do it correctly, which was refreshing. However they forgot that signalling is strongly recommended so that other drivers know what you intend to do. When you just stop the car and throw it in reverse in heavy traffic, communication with the other cars that almost smash into you should be a high on your list of goals.

goals for this week finished

1. After ages of not doing my duty on Global Voices, I finally wrote both of my articles for this week. They aren't the best, but at least I am trying to get back into the game again.
2. I managed to make a drinkable smoothie!

Items for next week: study Arabic and keep up on the dishes....

You Are Miss Piggy

A total princess and diva, you're totally in charge - even if people don't know it. You want to be loved, adored, and worshiped. And you won't settle for anything less. You're going to be a total star, and you won't let any of the "little people" get in your way. Just remember, piggy, never eat more than you can lift!

The Muppet Personality Test

Your Lucky Underwear is Yellow

You're an extremely happy, laid back, fun soul. And your lucky yellow underwear can help you get even more out of life. In life, you rather play than work. You're apt to quit any task that doesn't nourish your creativity and inner child. Sometimes your drive for freedom hinders your quality of life. You find it impossible to do anything unpleasant. If you want to have responsibilities and still have fun, put on your yellow underpants. They'll help you make a party out of the most mundane tasks.

What Color Is Your Lucky Underwear?

Your Linguistic Profile::

70% General American English

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

5% Yankee

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I've got the blahs

Infrequent to non-existant posting is due to my depression ravaged body. Nothing new but more of the same old stuff that is too private to put into my blog.

Anyway....last week an annoucement was put out for some last minute FLAS scholarships for this summer. Since this summer I will not be working (alas, the Outreach job is only 10 months out the year) I thought that I would apply for the scholarship. The FLAS is only for language study and really for something so short notice my only program choice is the intensive Arabic program at BYU. Arabic you may ask? (Well for a lot of you, I am sure the question is also BYU?) Yes Arabic. I took a year in 2000 and I have an opportunity to get paid to take and intensive second and third year of it....and well....I am going to take a leap and take the class with Mr.3--who was planning on taking it anyway. The past two days have been fun as we have spent 2 hours a day reviewing. (with varying levels of bum pinchings and the slight molestation ;)) It is slowly coming back, but now I at least have some more linguistic background under my belt to understand what I didn't before. Now on to the subject of BYU....applying isn't too bad, signing off on the honor code isn't too bad, but where in the hell am I going to get an Ecclesiastical Endorsement!? I tried to go the "talk to your local LDS bishop" route....but no one answers their dang phone....the missionaries have no problem knocking on your door at any random time, but try to talk to someone by choice? No chance. And I am throughly annoyed with the hoops that the administration here is making me go through....they have already told me that one of my letters of recommendation is invalid and that they weren't even sure if they could fund the program....which they have decided now that they can. Basically they are treating me like I have already been awarded the money and trying to find some reason to take the money away from me. I am not sure if they are worried about some conflict of interest.....but they didn't care when they screwed me over originally for my Graduate program. And we all know how messed up that was.

More for my benefit than yours

The very last vestiages of this school semester is sitting in a tattered document on my desktop only waiting to be repaired with all of the random bits of information in my head.

I was supposed to work on a take-home test and a paper while I was gone in California. It didn't happen- - no surprise really. I had the best of intentions of working on it yesterday but I crashed because of the drive; recovering from the dehydration and stress of the past week. I think that Mr.3 is getting sick....which means that the Genghis and Aziz uprising of my GI tract might have been in fact a bit more contagious than it should have been....stupid re-occuring ameboic dysintery (ouch the spell checker gods but be angry with that one).

I managed to finish the take-home test and am now working on the paper....it isn't going well. I started to work on my Kurdistance article....which will probably be along the same lines of my paper but I have hit a road block so I spent the past hour listening to songs on my Ipod Nano that Mr.3 gave me and reading old entries of poetry and diary-type items that I have written. At 26 my head is a lot clearer than it was at 23. I am more rational now but I am afraid that my writing lacks the lyrical quality that it once had.

There is alot to say about the passing of my Uncle and I am not sure that I know where to start with everything. I have discovered (well I suspected) that my Uncle was a very different man than I had imagined....not that that is bad, it is only that I found out that he was even more secretive about his life than what we thought. Part of me wants to write about him, all that we learned, that we are learning now....I want to piece my Uncle together from the artifacts that he left behind. But is that a fitting tribute? He lived to keep everything to himself, should he be lead to rest in the same fashion?

Either way, all of this still leads to the same conclusion....that I have a paper waiting to be finished. I think that I am going to change locations of my computer (from the dining room table to the TV tray by the couch)...something has gotta give. I have so much to finish and I want to have it all done at a time that still enables me to sleep tonight.