Making a List, Checking It Twice

No, it’s not Christmas in April. It’s just me trying to get ready for my trip to London. We leave on Thursday. This is going to be a hectic trip. We arrive at Heathrow at 7 a.m. Friday morning. Then we have to take the train from Heathrow to Paddington, meet up with C and J, and take another train to Plymouth in Cornwall. From Plymouth, we hop in a cab, which takes us to a ferry. After the ferry ride, we hop in another cab to get to our hotel. All this on probably no sleep. I have a lot of trouble sleeping on planes. Maybe I will catch a nap on the train, but I actually want to stay awake to be able to see the countryside. M and M’s wedding is on Saturday. I think I have finally figured out what to wear. It’s been a dilemma—finding something that will be appropriate for a wedding, but will also travel well. CW is cleaning out her closets in anticipation of the big move and gave me a great BCBG jersey dress, very much in the DVF style. It will work perfectly and will come out the suitcase not horribly wrinkled. CW also lent me an adaptor set. This is crucial as my new haircut will be impossible to maintain without various electronic devices (although they are predicting a lot of rain while we’re there, so my hair may be a lost cause—humidity is not my friend).

Tonight is laundry night. Pretty much everything I own is dirty. I’ve been holding off on doing laundry, as I figured it would easier to pack if I had my entire wardrobe to choose from. Then tomorrow night will be ironing and packing night. I am busy making lists of what I need to do before I go (laundry, buy camera batteries, install new memory card in digital camera, etc.), and what I need to pack (about 4000 things, including three cameras—I really like taking pictures). I have a great London guidebook and Brian and I have been poring over it figuring out where we want to go. I am really big on lists. I am always in a panic that I will forget something really important, like my passport.

On the agenda are the following: the British Museum, the V&A (two good exhibits there currently: Queen Maud of Norway’s dresses and Arts and Crafts), the National Gallery (for the Caravaggio exhibit), Sir John Soane’s House, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Great Fire Monument, the Temple Church, and a whole bunch of other things. Yes, this is a lot to pack into less than 5 days in London, but I run a tight ship on vacation, so it should work out ok. (If you think vacations are for relaxing, you probably don’t want to travel with me. Although I will relax if I’m at the beach or somewhere comparable.)

I'm a Yankee?!

Your Linguistic Profile:

45% Yankee

40% General American English

15% Dixie

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

These results are pretty funny when you consider that I have lived much of my life in the South. I guess it didn't rub off.

How much should I tell?

I’ve been very swamped this week and haven’t had a whole lot to say, hence, no new posts. However, I have been spending a lot of time reading random blogs (that “next blog” button is dangerous). I find myself occasionally getting very sucked into certain blogs. They are usually the very personal ones. There’s something compelling, yet voyeuristic, about reading these blogs. Some of them are really fascinating.

My blog has been fairly impersonal so far, and I don’t see that changing. I’m comfortable talking about my interests and what I did over the weekend and celebrities I dislike, but not about my innermost thoughts. I suppose that many of these blogs have taken the place of a written journal or diary (although the word diary sounds like it should have one of those locks with the little tiny keys). But they are in a completely public forum. There is something really brave about this. In a way, I admire that kind of honesty, but I also know that I absolutely could not be that open in a public forum.

I’m curious what others think of this.

Celebrity schadenfreude

This is my new favorite site. Those of you who know me know that I enjoy the misery of celebrities, particulary when it’s fashion-related. I guess I just feel that if you are rich and pretty and have stylists at your beck and call, you should never look too awful. Yet I am proven wrong again and again. This wonderful site provides me with loads of celebrity schadenfreude. And please, please, please, check out their Chloe Sevigny section.

I don't have much to say, but I can still fill up a few paragraphs

I’ve been very lax in updating the blog this week. Either I have no ideas at all, or I think of something really great when I’m nowhere near a computer, and then I can’t remember the idea when I am. In any case, here are a few random thoughts.

I took yesterday off from work to do my taxes. No, my taxes aren’t that complicated, but they are a little complicated, at least for me. Filling out Schedule D or the capital gains tax worksheet usually makes my head spin. It’s all this “if line 6 is larger than line 7, skip to line 12 and add lines 13, 14, and 16, and then multiply by .15” or “if line 6 is smaller than line 7, skip to line 10 and do not pass go.” Did I mention that math is not my strong point? In any case, this year wasn’t too bad, and I was done by 11 a.m., which left me the rest of the day free. It was gorgeous out so I wandered around for a while, figuring it would be a good time to break in a new pair of shoes. Wrong. By the time I hobbled back home, my left foot was actually bleeding. Why must I go through this every year? Are there no shoes out there that won’t cause me intense pain?

Brian and I met some friends of his at a DC United game last night. This was my first United game. It was pretty cool. I haven’t been to a soccer game since college, when the UVA team was it in soccer. They were playing a Mexican team and most of the people there were rooting for Mexico. Loudly rooting, enough to shake the seats. Brian made the mistake of telling me that some seats had collapsed at RFK a few years back, so I spent the rest of the game nervously looking around to make the seats looked secure. When we were on our way home, I got a call from Colin telling me there was a fire in our building, but it didn’t seem to have spread (ther building hadn’t been evacuated). As you may know, my apartment burned down when I was in college, so I am really terrified of fire. When we got to 16th and Florida, there were police cars preventing traffic from going up 16th St, and I was thinking, this is not good. There were maybe five fire trucks outside the building and at least a dozen firemen roaming around. They hadn’t been letting all the people outside back into the building, but about two minutes after we arrived, they let everyone except those who live on the floor where the fire happened back in. The fire had been out for a while, but there was a lot of smoke and they were still trying to clear it out. The fire was four floors below my apartment and on the other side of the building, but my hall really reeked of smoke, so I guess the fire was pretty bad.

Since we were at the game, I taped Lost and Alias and will get to them at some point. Unfortunately, what happened on Lost last night is all over the headlines (well, at least headlines of news sources I visit), so that surprise has been spoiled. Not that I won’t be watching it of course. I’m hoping the remainder of the episodes will have a little more action. The flashbacks were great in the beginning, fleshing out the characters, but now I feel like they are slowing down the action on the island. We still know very little about the island. I really like this show, but the pacing is definitely a problem.

I suppose that’s enough rambling for one post.

Too funny

I just found a parody of the Michelle Malkin article I referenced in the last piece. It's hysterical.

The cutting edge

I try to avoid the prose stylings of conservative columnists in an effort to keep my blood pressure down, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. I have thought for quite a while that conservative columnist Michelle Malkin is an idiot, but this column confirms it for me. It’s all about the new craze that’s sweeping the nation: teenage girls cutting themselves. Yeah, cutting is a new trend. Didn’t I read a big story about it in the New York Times Magazine circa 1995? Michelle is so cutting-edge. She blames the current craze on Hollywood. Ummh, yeah, teenage girls are cutting themselves because they want to be like Christina Ricci. Does anyone want to be like Christina Ricci? Malkin confirms how out of touch she is with this statement: “There is even a new genre of music -- ‘emo’ -- associated with promoting the cutting culture.” I’ll admit that emo is responsible for some bad haircuts and an excess of messenger bags, but cutting?