Today marks 3 years of Leafing Through. Groundhog Day. My new job at the time blocked Yahoo’s 360, my first attempted blog, so as a gift from the sister, I got my little piece of the Internet. It started as a distraction and it mostly still is but now whenever I find something odd or learn something new, I think about its blogworthiness. For example, learning how to scrub a toilet would be blogworthy if I were willing to admit I’ve never learned how to do it before! But it’s not blogworthy. Because it isn’t! I do love how it sparkles though.

Sleepy. Lethargic. Hungry for carbs. Next thing you know, I’m going to be sprouting hairs. Rawr, I need a cave to curl up until March.

This morning I made an 8-cup pot of coffee and drank a good 7 cups of it. I am so jittery right now, but it felt so nice sipping it in this cold weather! Hence this random post, which no doubt will cover topics that have no relation to each other.

I was cleaning out my closets and donated a lot of clothes this weekend but I just couldn’t bear to part with my suits. One still had tags on it, one I’d taken the tags off but never wore, others I’d worn once or twice. So I am making myself wear suits to work so I don’t have to throw them out. Kind of a backwards way of not cleaning out the closets but I love this new suit I donned this morning. I feel sharp.

Lent starts February 15th this year. Possible things I might give up for 40 days:

I have eleventy thousand other things sloshing around in my caffeine-addled brain right now. Pretzal.

We’re down to the last days of the “O” decade. O-nine. I started my career during this decade. 5 jobs and an internship. The economy soared, the economy tanked, the economy tanked, the economy tanked.

I finished my formal education during this decade too. Yes, I’m still in debt for it but the connections with the people there are priceless.

This decade, I grew 1 more vertical inch. My most formative 10 years indeed.

We went from VHS to DVD/VCD to Blu-Ray to streaming. I think I still have a functioning VHR machine. All my Disney movies are on VHS. Bippity boppity boo!

In 2009 I:

No work today.  No jury duty either – courts closed due to inclement weather.  It’s 10:30 AM and I’ve had chili and cornbread for breakfast and now I’m working on a pear.  Boredom-eating for sure.

I’ve played with the chinchillas for a while now too and finally got some pictures of Gina that aren’t behind bars.  Aside from her curly tail, she (the one one the right) looks remarkably like her brother (the one on the left).

“Let me outta here!” – Gina

You’re tellin’ me!

Happy Winter Solstice!

These past couple of weeks, I’ve been engrossed in reading! Yeah, not really. Unless you count 10 pages of Freakonomics. It’s a great book; very easy to read because it’s written in a conversational tone. But no, I’ve been distracted lately – by the farm in FarmVille. It consumes more time than I’d like and yet I’m drawn to it night after night. Must hurry home to harvest the artichokes before they wither!! In my loserish manner, I even created a spreadsheet to track which plants yield the most ROI, experience points, considering the amount of time they take to mature. I’ve scheduled my life around the harvest.

October 11

October 23

October 28

October 31

November 3

Last night was the first night of coming home from work and not having to think about any school work. Now that I have all this free time, let’s see how I fill it. I get the feeling it’ll be 95% putzing around the house (which I executed beautifully last night) and 5% reading. I ended up reading 5 pages of Freakonomics (very entertaining and amusing) and then falling asleep by 10. I now have three unfinished books by my bed.

Today was prime autumn foliage viewing up in the mountains. My mom prepared a picnic and we drove to Skyline Drive to see the colorful treetops. Because the best viewing happens only for a few weekends, traffic was packed. Normally they charge an entrance fee to the national park but in order to keep the cars moving, they just kept directing traffic through. We drove up and stopped at a few of the look out points. Whenever I tried to use the timer to get a shot of the three of us, folks would volunteer to take a picture for us. One guy held the camera at a high angle to make it appear like you were looking down the mountain. Very clever technique, I’ll remember that for next time!

You would not believe how many fancy cameras and humongous lenses were out there today. Everywhere you turned was a dSLR. Maybe part of it is because I have been hunting for a dSLR camera this past week so today I was taking note of the Canons and Nikons all around. We didn’t stay too long, maybe an hour or so because we just didn’t feel like negotiating the roads with so much congestion.