Excuses, Excuses...

I've been busy...with work, with life, with family. These are lame excuses. Probably the same ones used by the negligent avian mother who laid first one...

then two...

eggs in my potted basil plant before disappearing completely. Actually, family was clearly not one of her excuses...

Sad ending to this story -- both of those eggs were destroyed, presumably by the alarmingly aggressive squirrels that leap from power lines to branches to my balcony with terrifying agility. I'm not sure what that means for my blog in this analogy...

In any event, I have clearly been avoiding this place. I have some guesses as to why, but none of them are particularly interesting, so onward and upward.

In the meantime, so you know work is not just an excuse and I have been writing somewhere, go read this. Really. It will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I'll be back soon.

Procrastination

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.  ~ Mark Twain

All of my grades were due on Monday. On Sunday afternoon I had approximately sixteen pounds of ungraded papers in my bag, so logically, I decided to bake. 

{pumpkin muffins with pecan streusel topping}

 

Eh

 {8.1.10_213/365}

Soooo, it's been a busy, stressful, special kinda crazy couple of weeks. Some of it was good-busy -- my brother came to visit as part of his two weeks leave from Afghanistan, and there are not words to describe how good it felt to hug him and talk to him face-to-face after so many months of electronic communication. There were family dinners galore and a baseball game, and except for the part where he got on a plane to go back to Vermont and then Afghanistan, it was all wonderful.

 {Thanks to Mike's lovely girlfriend Erin for this picture}

There have been less fun things like finding a new apartment keeping me busy too, but the end result is that I don't seem to have much time for things like photography and blogs. The end result is that I have been feeling guilty about neglecting my blog; then I feel stupid for feeling guilty since my loyal readership is comprised almost solely of my immediate family who know very well what is going on in my life and will likely not feel too out of the loop if I don't provide regular written updates.

 {8.5.10_217/365}

Plus, I've now gone so long without posting anything that writing about everything that has happened in the interim seems daunting... You know when you haven't talked to a good friend in a while and you have a lot to catch up on so you feel the need to block off a significant amount of time for the phone call, but then you never seem to have that amount of free time to actually make the call; meanwhile, more time passes and the list of things that you have to catch up on just grows and grows, so really you should have just taken the five minute window and made the damn phone call? It's like that. Anyway, I had that five minute window and thought I'd just check in.

{8.8.10_220/365} 

The radio silence probably also has something to do with the fact that screwing up the picture-a-day thing really took the wind out of my sails. That and...I've just been feeling lackluster as of late. No big thang - I'm looking forward to filling my sails and getting my luster back this weekend when I reunite with my best girls. There is nothing like a champagne-fueled dance party and hours of coffee chat to bring the sparkle back.

{8.11.10_2/365 (Boooo!)}

In the meantime...a preview of another item crossed off the list.

{8.14.19_5/365}

Mi bicicleta es morado. True story.

It has become quite clear to me in recent months that I have a serious problem with follow through. I love brainstorming, organizing, planning, but following through on the execution...eh, not so much. 

I have a chest of drawers full of the supplies necessary for myriad abandoned craft projects from jewelry making to decoupage. At this moment, pushed to the back of my cabinet are things like quinoa and tahini, purchased with the best of intentions for recipes that never came to fruition. My Post-it note bookmark has been stuck to page 34 of Huckleberry Finn for at least a month now. Part of the reason I started this blog was to try to hold myself accountable for following through on my list, and now I've started to slack off even on that... Acknowledgment is the first step, right? I'm working on it.

On a more positive note, I am started working on my Spanish with Rosetta Stone six weeks ago, and I am really enjoying it! The whole concept behind Rosetta Stone is that the best way to learn a language is through immersion rather than the memorization of isolated vocabulary words. You slowly build vocabulary through through reading, writing, listening, and speaking Spanish words and sentences that are paired with pictures that provide the meaning. There is no English at all. I have already learned many useful phrases like, "La gato es en el sombrero" and "El niňo come una manzana amarillo." That's "The cat is in the hat" and "The boy is eating a yellow apple" for those of you who no habla espanol.

  

In any event, I don't think six weeks qualifies as evidence of follow through, but I'm hopeful. Plus, it gives me another, much needed way to bond with my students... They love hearing the latest simple sentence that I have mastered and it's a great chance for them to teach me something. Leo el periódico todos los días, bitches.