Forgive me?

Occasionally, I forget important things like the fact that my friend Stephanie is Catholic and I should bring her something from the Vatican. So I offer her my heartfelt apologies and acknowledge that I'll have much more apologizing to do.

The trip to Italy, part 1

Deanna and I had so much fun in Italy! We visited Venice, Florence, and Rome. The total trip took 8 days but two of those were en route. Let me tell you, traveling overseas at Christmas was very interesting. Lemme sum up:

Dec. 20: flew out of Houston. Arrived at Bush Intercontinental Airport 3 hours before flight and discover that the flight was delayed by 3 hours due to snow at Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport. There was record snow in the UK and Europe this year. Heathrow Airport in London was shut down for DAYS! Fortunately we didn't have to go through London to get to Italy. CDG had cleared up and got their runways snow-free but still...a delay.

Dec. 21: Delayed at CDG for approximately 2.5 hours due to snow. But eventually we did get on our way. Arrived in Venice almost 6 hours late, which meant we'd missed our prepaid water taxi to the hotel. While we were trying to decide about buying a ticket for the water bus, a very nice man asked about our travel arrangements and turned out he was from the water taxi company. Lots of delays that week, obviously, so he placed a call and arranged for us to get our taxi after all. AWESOME. Trips looking up already.

It was freezing on the taxi (they're open air) but Venice at night, during Christmas...gorgeous. We made it to the hotel, checked in, found some dinner, and then called it a night. We'd missed one of our two days in Venice but, okay, we can live with that.



The next morning we had breakfast, then went out to see..rain! It rained the whole day. But we were determined and bought our bus tickets, then headed over to Il Duomo. The bus boats were neat and a really fun way to see the city. I'd read that during the winter, Venice floods easily and often, and that was certainly the case for us. The Duomo was flooded but we walked around, peeked in the shops and basically enjoyed the fact that we were in Italy!








Now, I'm a bad traveler in one very important way - I get horrible jet lag. And if ya throw in some rain and cold, my jet lag will try to turn into the flu. Full stop. So about halfway through the day, I start to feel like crap. We get some lunch and slowly my system starts to wind down. We headed back to the hotel where I took a looooong nap. Eventually Deanna went out and saw the city on her own. I was out for the count.

Venice was okay but I can't say I felt like I'd seen anything really. Deanna really enjoyed it (which makes sense). I'll have to go back during Spring or Summer. Mostly the city was just drab brownish, rain colored.

Overall: Venice during Christmas - probably not the best idea. (Though I bet it would have been amazing if it had snowed.)

Italian Vacation

For Christmas break this year, I am taking a 10-day vacation to Italy with my friend Deanna. We will be visiting Venice, Florence, and Rome. it is expected to rain the first days that we are there but that's fine since I will be riding a high just from being in Italy. It's been one of my life goals to see the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel (both of these are actually on my life list) and I'm very excited about getting to make that happen.

I will post about the trip, of course.

Saturday morning...ish

I probably shouldn't watch television on Saturdays; there's nothing on and I end up watching random documentaries on the History channel or the Discovery channel. I like to watch cartoons (childhood training) but the pickings are slim. It might help if I got up before 11:30 but that's just crazy talk. I do like knowing random crap and I generally learn random crap that can use later...mostly at the kids.

Saturday mornings are also good for Stumbling around the internet looking at websites I wouldn't find on my own. There are some fantastic websites out there; finding them is kind of like a scavenger hunt.

What else will I do today? Read, nap, maybe go outside if it's not too hot. The picture I'm trying to paint here is that summer is right around the corner and I'm winding down the school year and my activity level. In a few weeks, summer will be starting and I plan to make it one great big Saturday morning.

Mail

I like getting mail; makes me think that someone knows I'm alive, even it they just want money. That being said, for some reason, I hate to check the mailbox...I always feel let down when there's no mail for me. It depresses me to only receive bills, some of which are just stupid.

To alleviate this whole "mail isn't fun" situation, I joined postcrossing.com, an international postcard exchange program. I am so excited. I request an address (can't specify a particular city or country), get the address and a postcrossing code, mail a postcard, and hopefully someone else who's a member will receive my address and send me a postcard. It'll be great since I want to collect postcards from around the world.

I sent my first 3 postcards off on Sunday and can't wait to get cards back.

I made this!

Today I decided to restart my blogging efforts...and to attempt to be more positive. That's probably a bigger challenge than posting every week.

So I spent a pretty big chunk of today screwing around with the html code of the blog. I'm in no way skilled at coding but I'm a fairly decent mimic so I found instructions online and then poked and prodded at it until it's almost what I want. The things I can't change are just gonna have to stay the way they are until someone more knowledgeable than me can fix it. Know anyone?

The background comes from a packet of scrapbook papers I received for my birthday. I scanned it and several other sheets (see previous post) for multiple uses both now and later. Of course, in the process of preparing to scan, I dropped my scanner and may or may not have broken it; there's a random little piece of plastic skating around in there now. It still works so I'm not gonna sweat it right now. Anyway, the scrapbook papers are really beautiful and I hope to get more. It was a very nice and deeply appreciated gift. I like scrapbook paper.

Anyway, the blog is partly my creation and I feel justifiably proud of it.

This is what I do on Sundays...excitement abounds.

I love Scrapbooking Paper

For my birthday back in March, Melanie gave me some beautiful scrapbooking paper. I love it so much I've decided to use one of them as the background on my blog.

Here's some samples of what I got:

Life List

So this weekend, in between bouts of sleeping and randomly searching the Interwebs for useless shit, I got the idea to create a "bucket" list...then decided that sounded too depressing so I changed it to my Life List...or Things to Try before I Die.

Now some of the things on my list are awesome/awe-inspiring (at least to me) and others are rather mundane, however they are all things that I have not done before. My goal is, I think, to complete everything on the list before I turn 60. Math: that's 20 years from March.

Here's the first 20 items on my list:

1. Camping.
2. Hiking.
3. White water rafting.
4. See Yellowstone National Park.
5. Walk on a glacier.
6. Ride a gondola in Venice.
7. Learn to ride a horse.
8. Visit the Rodin museum in Paris.
9. Learn to play golf.
   
10. Learn to ski.
11. Go rollerskating again.
12. Learn to sail.
13. Learn to play tennis.
14. See the Great Barrier Reef.
15. Walk on a volcano.
16. Tour the Taj Mahal in India.
17. Go on safari in Africa.
18. See the pyramids at Giza.
19. Visit a rainforest. (preferably one that still has trees.)
20. Become fluent in French.
    

In the immediate future I'm trying to knock out: #1-3, maybe around Spring Break of this year.

2010...What to do with it?

A new decade has begun. Most people are reviewing the past year/decade and analyzing what it all meant. I can't be bother with that, so instead I'll take a look at what I did this decade, no analysis involved.

What did I do?

• Moved 5 times: San Diego (2000-01); back to Austin (2001-02); Houston (2003-05); Austin (2005-now);
• Law school for a brief year and a half;
  
• Grad school: earned a Master's degree in Literature;
• Began teaching 8th grade English.

Where did I go? The list is somewhat chronological (to the best of my memory):

• Denver, CO
• Utah - remind me to tell you about trying to outrun a blizzard and driving only 20 mph across most of the freaking state
  
• Las Vegas, NV
  
• San Diego, CA
• Tijuana, Mexico
• San Francisco, CA
• Los Angeles, CA
• New Orleans, LA
  
• Lexington, KY
  
• Baltimore, MD
• New York City, NY - 3 times!!
• New Haven, CT
• Virginia Beach, VA
  
• Seattle, WA
• Memphis, TN
• random parts of Kentucky
  
• all over the Texas Hill Country
• London, England
• Paris, France
  

My mother died in 2004 so no matter what else may have happened to make the decade great and interesting for me, it still sucked more than I can ever say.

Plans for 2010?

There are several ideas on the table for what to do with this year; as much as I like to plan, I'm not crazy enough to plan the whole decade. This past decade did teach me that randomness is a major part of my life and there's no getting around it.

So here's what I've set in motion for 2010, much depends on the outcome of #1

1. Doctoral program in Literature at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, or
   
2. teach in UK, or
   
3. move to NYC, or
4. move to Philadelphia anyway.
   

UPenn sends out the decisions in late February/early March, so no plans can be formulated until I know what's happening with them. On the one hand, I would dearly love to be admitted; on the other, I want to move to the UK. Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, it would just take me a little longer to do both.

And NYC, well, that's a huge, huge move to make considering the cost of living and how crowded it is. But it's fantastic there, okay, so it's a little uriny during the summer and it snows and is very cold during winter, but it's NEW YORK CITY! And I can get a job there.

Honestly, I need to live somewhere that is exciting and interesting and dynamic in a way that I like and crave. Austin's okay but it's not me and I really can't figure out why I'm here. I think that's the best indicator that it's time for me to leave.