But that's my car...

Well, it's been a long week of college fairs, and I'm finally home. Although getting there wasn't all that fun.

After driving three or so hours, I stopped by the office, where I accomplished absolutely nothing in my state of exhaustion. After that little waste of time, I drove the state car down to the fleet garage. I had received an email earlier in the week saying that the garage was having some roof work down and there would be a lot of equipment down there. I was also assured that I would be able to get my car out. In fact the exact words in the email were, "There is plenty of room to get your car out." Plenty of room? Maybe if you're a professional driver.

I found there to be somewhere between six and ten feet between the garage door and the large piece of firmly planted boom-lift truck on stilts. If I drove a Geo Metro or one of those new-fangled tiny electric cars, there would have been a possibility of getting out, but I drive a Lumina, and I'm no professional. As far as I could see, I would have had to turn my car exactly 90 degrees in a ten-foot square area, then drive it over top of a large wooden block where the stilt was planted, if I could fit the car at all between the edge of the building and the actual truck.

So, today, I still have the state car. No big deal. But, when I got home, I did have a slightly big deal. There were seven hornets happily inhabiting my home. Yucky. I recruited a neighbor to help kill what we could see, but today I'm still working on that project. Ugh.

The Luna

Coffee is perhaps the most amazing beverage ever invented. So, this year on the road, I decided that I must visit many more coffee shops that I had last year. And with big chunks of afternoons free on many days and a major corporation paying for it all, why not?

My first stop on the tour de shops is the Luna in De Pere, Wisconsin. De Pere is currently under a slight stage of construction (what's with Wisconsin and roundabouts anyway? I'll save that one for another day...) making it a little difficult to find the place downtown.

The atmosphere here is great. There is a wide variety of art on the well-worn rough brick walls. A bar area to sit at as well as tables, chairs, and lounge furniture. One wall has a vibrant mural sprawled across it, and a lot of their menus are hand-written in bright chalk...very cute. Music was perfectly mellow, too. They sell a variety of coffees, teas, t-shirts, and gifts.

The barista recommended the iced honey latte when I asked and it was pretty good. (I have yet to refine my coffee taste descriptions for the general population.....I'll be sure to work on that. Overall I have nothing to complain about.

So, if you're looking for a good place to stop for coffee in De Pere, Wisconsin, check out the Luna. I'll give it a four out of five for overall coolness.

Ground Potatoes and the Barefoot Mailman

Last week began the first week of many travels for the year. I started off my trails by heading to Iowa, a new concept, for those of you following my travel tails from last year. Iowa, over all was relatively uneventful, but there was one good story to come of it:

Traveling in Iowa can make a girl very hungry. Around lunchtime I found myself in the fun little town of Tripoli, Iowa. Now, if you've eve been to Tripoli, you are fully aware of the dining options available to a hungry person: a Casey's and a local grocery store. Not wanting to seem unusual in my out-of-town-ness, I stopped in at the gas station for quick entry and exit. They had three dried up pieces of pizza and some other fried assortments of things. I grabbed a bag of chips, a bottled soda, and some potato wedges that were about the only thing that didn't look like they would kill me. Actually, they looked pretty darn good. Not only were they potato wedges, but they were wedges covered in cheese and bacon. Mmmm. I get out to the car and unlock the door. As I'm sliding into the vehicle with all the grace of a drunken ostrich, the potatoes began to slip with the paper boat that they were housed in. I saw them going, but what's an uncoordinated girl to do? So I just watched them. Lap....car door....ground....Crap.

For a few seconds, I debated what to do. Do I leave them on the ground? They are, after all, on the ground, cheese side down, no good to anyone anymore as a decent meal. But it is a small town. They'll know the strange girl in the blue car dropped them and went lunchless. So, I quickly picked them all up, making sure to do the look-around-hoping-nobody-noticed-thing as I did it. I drove away sulking, knowing the potatoes now sitting back in their boat on the floor of my car were in an uneatable state. I found a nice little area park with lots of trees and a little stream running through it is a perfect spot to eat my chips-and-soda lunch.

But something was overwhelming my senses, making my mouth water and my mind wander. Man those potatoes smelled sooooo good. It was uncontrollable. I kept looking at them out of the corner of my eye....desiring to enjoy them. I reasoned with myself, "You cannot possibly eat those. They were on the ground...at a gas station. They could kill you. They are gross." "Yes, but they could not all have possibly hit the ground...and wouldn't all the dirt and deadly chemicals have stayed on the ground with the sticky cheese?" My split personalities decided that it would be ok to try just one...one that for sure did not actually hit the ground. Mistake. They tasted better than they smelled. Absolutely divine.

Needless to say, for those of you who know me well, they were gone in about five minutes. The mental battle of whether or not to eat them raged on with every bite, but they sure did end up gone.

Oh, and the barefoot mailman, you ask? Well, shortly after lunch, I went to the high school in Tripoli, and a huge panel van pulls up behind my car...you know the type, more rust than paint, scary shaggy-haired man behind the wheel...Well, he got out, grabbed piles of newspapers and a mail bag an proceeded to the school entrance. It wasn't until he was almost there that I noticed he was wearing no shoes, cut-off acid-wash jean-shorts, and his USPS uniform shirt mostly unbuttoned. The whole scene screamed, "WELCOME TO IOWA!"

Genesis 1:3

Have you ever pondered Genesis? I mean really meditated on it? At the rate I'm going, I think I'll be at it for a while (I have a goal of maybe a decade or so.)

Tonight I started over at the beginning, what some may say is a good place to start. I got through exactly three verses before I felt like I should stop. Verse three, for some reason caught my attention. Strange. The statement, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" didn't stop me in my tracks...although I did end up going back and realizing the absolute gravity of that statement later.

But verse three says, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." Hmm. Try as I may, I can't say, "Let there be [anything]." No matter what, nothing happens. No matter what I want, something has to happen for me to get it. If I want socks, I have to get them from the drawer. If I want pizza, I have to bake it or order it. I'll never be able to just make these things appear. Now imagine creating light. This is not the turning on the light switch kind of creating. This is the conceptualizing and then making from nothing light. What power is possessed! It's not even really comprehensible. Before God there was no light. No idea of light. God wanted it, and it was there.

I'm sure as I battle through the biggness of Genesis there will be many more baffled entries on the amazing depths of God.

Dimmer...No Switch Required

There's a strange phenomenon going on in my apartment lately. It's been getting dimmer, at a rapid rate. Light bulbs have been burning out with unheard of vigor. What constitutes as unheard of vigor, you may ask. How about five in the last three or so weeks. Well, six if you count the stolen one.

Today, I finally get the landlord over to change some burned out bulbs (fifteen foot ceilings make light bulb changing difficult), and he manages to replace two out of three main room bulbs. But he tragically runs out of bulbs, saving the other one for a later date. (If you're doing the math here, we haven't made five yet.) But somehow, today, ironically, one in the kitchen goes down after he left. Stranger than fiction, yes, but here's the reality. I had replaced one of four bulbs that I can actually reach in my entire apartment. That's right. There are four that I can reach: the four on the bathroom mirror. So, I managed to actually go out, buy bulbs, and replace one myself. This would be the fifth bulb. I decided to be energy friendly and spend the extra few bucks for an Energy Star bulb. (Fast facts of Energy Stars: they last ten years, they run at significantly less wattage, they save you money on monthly electric bills...they're not cheap.) Well, today, after the landlord was here, I go into my bathroom, and my Energy Star bulb is gone, replaced with your average wattage wasting, power hogging, short lasting bulb. So there goes a couple of eco-friendly bucks down the drain.

But my question to you is what possesses a person to steal a perfectly well working state of the art light bulb out of someone's bathroom? It is worrisome at best.