One of the most innovative things ever invented is the phone that has different rings for different callers. My work phone has a single ring for all calls coming from onsite and a double ring for all calls coming from the big bad world. This is such a great invention because when my boss is in the office, I never answer any of the single ringers...and when my boss isn't in the office, I never answer the double ringers. Let her leave a message, I say. That way I'm the one in charge - maybe I'll call you back, maybe I won't.

some things that I dislike:

bread pudding, Nordstrom Rack, people who talk in normal voices during a movie, slow drivers, having to wait, coconut, fake people, a well-reviewed book that turns out to be crap ... to be continued

I am telling you now that Horizon Air is the way to fly. "It's the sportscar of airlines" is how a fellow passenger described it. Sure it may have only two seats per side and the tiniest (tiniest!) aisle you have ever seen, but it shaved 15 minutes off the normal flight time from Portland to San Francisco and it served FREE beer and wine...with refills. This was so bizarre to me. The bummer was that I didn't know about this until after the drink service had been by and I didn't want to look like the naive Horizonite by flagging down the flight attendant and begging for a beer. I do have some sort of standards.

My brother Steven keeps bugging me about not writing more and I always respond with the same old, "Nothing has inspired me lately...I go to work, then I eat dinner, and then I'm too tired to write." I'm not sure if this is exactly the truth - I mean, I do those things, but there are usually a dozen or so stories from my work that I end up regaling Adrian with on the way home. I could take one of those stories and write about it - add some funny dialogue, throw in some great adjectives, and poof! I would have a new blog. But I don't know. As it is, I feel like I write about my work (or at least my boss) too much already. I do other things! I go on trips! I'm visiting Katie in Portland this weekend and we're going to paint the town red (or at least the two-block vicinity of her neighborhood)! I got a new haircut! I got a new shelving unit for my pantry and it looks damn nice! I resisted having a Krispy Kreme doughnut this morning for breakfast! I do things...I really, really do. I just may not tell you about them all the time.

We were just bored. And in high school. What basically amounts to the perfect combination for hijinks. It was election time and front lawns everywhere were littered with campaign posters driven into the ground with plywood sticks. The males challenged us to go out and collect as many as we (the females) could in fifteen minutes in a race against them. So we did what we were expected to. We went on people's lawns. We tore out signs that were so bored of their standard "Vote for..." slogans that they were probably excited to be thrown into the back of a trunk and swept on an adventure. We set off alarms. We set off motion detector lights. We set dogs barking into the night. We eventually got to the point where we couldn't close the trunk, but we were determined to beat the boys at their game. We kept on. As our fifteen minute time limit drew near, we headed back to the meeting spot --- with a cop car trailing not so far behind us. We were petrified. We thought we were busted. But the savvy knowledge of our driver saved us as we cruised into the driveway with lights off, all of us tucked safely down on the ground. The cruiser took a quick turn in the cul-de-sac and then disappeared. The males came out of the house to see the damage and we started counting. One, two, three,...twenty-four, twenty-five,...fourty-two, fourty-three...we couldn't believe our eyes. In the course of fifteen minutes, we had managed to steal eighty-two campaign signs. We thought we had this one in the bag, but the males did use a car with a much bigger trunk so we didn't want to get too excited just yet. We walked over to the other car...the trunk was closed (was that a good sign?)...and there we saw what to this day has simply been known as 82-2. They hadn't even tried. They thought we were too chicken to even play. They learned their lesson --- Don't ever, ever underestimate the moxie a bored, female high school senior can gather up when it is needed, let alone three of us put together.

It is this last hour and a half that is the hardest to get through.

Have you ever heard of someone being allergic to a "closed environment"? I have - this is the excuse my boss gave for not being available today until 4:03 pm (okay, she was really explaining how she came to have her sore throat and I am assuming that she was refering to an airplane, but it's a pretty vague statement if you ask me). It does help to explain her aversion to the office and her home office - perhaps she is only able to work outside.

Today as I watched a girl stand in the middle of a sidewalk - in the dark - behind two trees - and try to flag down a taxi, muttering under her breath, "This is so not New York!" I was embarrassed to be a girl.

It was a lesson that I was bound to learn and I'm even a bit surprised that it's taken me this long to learn it - but I will never again go into a hair salon for a cut without having a picture in hand.

Is it just me or is it a little strange that anyone can vote for the California quarter design? Why should the opinion of someone in Kansas count in giving me a butt-ugly design (see #11)? Please vote and vote responsibly - and only if you grew up or have lived for a significant amount of time in this wonderful state. http://134.186.46.107/

Working on a self-review is tough. I spent a good two hours today on the ten question review and I completed two questions. On average, an hour a question - which is why I decided to do this review on my work time. Because it is work - excruciating work. It's not even me trying to sell myself to a possible employer - it's me trying to keep my job? trying to get a promotion? trying to get my boss fired (oh, how nice that would be)? It doesn't help that on practically every other word I was going to the online thesaurus to find an even better word and/or phrase for what I was trying to say to make myself sound coherent and intelligent. "It was a good experience..." No, "It was a great experience..." No, "It was an INVALUABLE experience..." There we go! The next question on the self-review will be my biggest hurdle - "What has your supervisor done this past year that has helped or hindered your performance?" Are they kidding? Do they really expect people to answer this question seriously? No. Instead I'm going to have spend hours figuring out a way to politely say how little my supervisor supervisored me. Eight questions to go - I guess that should cover my work day tomorrow.

Quirky ~ Imaginative ~ Hilarious - ADAPTATION. Go see it.

I hate to say that I'm getting old when I just turned 27, but last night I sunk to a new level. After playing a moderate amount of tennis in the early evening, my hip decided to turn sour and I proceeded to have a pain in my hip for the rest of the night. The sinking to a new level occurred in the middle of the night when I tried to roll over in my sleep and could not do it because of the pain. I tried once. I tried twice. I felt like a bug who had been turned on its backside and was struggling to turn itself over. It was not a pretty sight. On my third try, I finally made it - not without a lot of wincing and cursing. I can only hope that this was a fluke hip moment and not something that I will have to spend the rest of my life nursing.