Turkey Eve

See

This is my office. I've been spending 7-8 hours per day, 5 days a week (minus holidays and vacations) for the past 2 years and 2 months. It's a really nice office.



I'm really lucky in that I get it all to myself. That other desk you see is used for excess paperwork, boxes and an old copy machine I never use.

I often stop to gaze out my window:



Not a bad view. I feel really fortunate to be surrounded by so much beauty in my workplace. It makes all the emailing, number crunching and paper-pushing less monotonous.

Eat

Tomorrow morning we will be hosting a Thanksgiving brunch for the Garlingtons. Dan put together a menu that incorporates the tastes of the big feast:

sweet potato biscuits with turkey gravy
turkey bacon and gruyere quiche (made last night - and it looks wonderful)
turkey sausage
yam home fries
orange & cranberry scones
pumpkin bread
cranberry juice



My mouth is watering!

Drink

Each day at lunch (usually) I go work out at the gym on campus. When finished showering and back in my work clothes, I often stop at the little juice bar/cafe to grab some food to bring back to my desk. I'm often very, very thirsty. My love of all things sparkling led me to this new item:



What better way to refresh after a tough (or medium) work-out than with an all-natural, no-calorie soda that comes in a variety of interesting flavors. So far I've tried the tangerine-lime, black-cherry-apple and my favorite thus far, the mango-peach.

Each one also has different ingredients that give it that extra something to qualify for the name (ie, ginseng is in "Focus"). Similar to Izze, but a smaller portion/zero calories and, according to their website they "do good, too, with a commitment to social and environmental causes."

Read

I am now on Chapter 4 of Francine Prose's book, which I first mentioned in Monday's blog. Chapter 2 was all about words, chapter 3 was all about sentences and chapter 4 -- anyone? -- that is correct, is all about paragraphs.

Chapter 3 ended with a wonderful quote from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a great little memoir I read in my late twenties (or, uh, last night).

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going...I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

Pretty great words, huh? The author then brings up the interesting concept that Hemingway and others have consistently confused truth with beauty. In art, are they one and the same?

Remember

This year for Halloween I recycled a Daniel Boone costume, made by the talented and resourceful Daniel P. Garlington for one of his costume parties. I had just returned to the Mainland the night before my friends Jason and Jayson were throwing a combination Halloween/housewarming party at their swanky new pad in the up-and-coming South of Madison neighborhood (maybe it deserves to be called SoM?).

Here I am with my good friend Spencer, who went as an Ewok. After some champagne I told him he looked more like be belonged in a nativity scene. Without the mask, it would make more sense.



Worry

Sooner or later my luck with technology is going to run out. Yesterday my iPod nano froze up (this has happened before), but my beloved was able to fix it after I went to bed so I awoke to the familiar joys of a symphony at my fingertips. I wonder, though, if I'm hard on these things. I ruined one while running in the rain and this freezing thing has happened at least three times.



What next? Digital camera?

I must remind myself, especially now at Thanksgiving time, that these are simply ridiculous things to worry about. So I wouldn't have music to listen to while I run? Big deal. We have yet ANOTHER iPod in the house. So I wouldn't be able to take picture for a while. I could go take polaroids and scan them.

Sometimes I drift toward the increasingly popular idea that technology is only making our lives more stressful. But then, without it, I wouldn't be here.