56.7

I almost ran away today. Never have I been more tempted.

As I sat in front of Manchester's high school, I hit the favorites key on my GPS. On my favorites, I have three locations: Home, Parents, and UWP. And wouldn't you know that Manchester's high school exactly 56.7 miles from UWP and Parents? Exactly.

At first I found it extremely strange, but then I came to a crossroads. Do I go back to work as I am supposed to today? Or do I face west and run away fast?

*Sigh*

Needless to say, to make my boss and the student ambassadors happy, I did the right thing and headed back to work. And here I am, accomplishing not too much, for the next hour or so. Next time, I think I'll choose to run away.

Only a Fool

After ridiculing a man in my apartment building for getting locked out of his apartment and wasting a whole evening of mine, I now feel a bit foolish. After all, Sunday mornings are no fun when one locks themselves out of their apartment, and thus, out of their car, and is, quite frankly, stuck.

I am not sure what's happening to me. I feel like I'm falling apart at the seams a little. Prior to this year, I had never, not even once, locked my keys in my car. This year: three times. And I have never, prior to Sunday, locked myself out of my own house. I am the careful one. I am the one who jingles my keys in my hand before pulling the door shut, just to make sure I've got them. I'm the one who has elaborate systems to keep myself from ever even having the chance of being locked out of anything. For instance, typically, I have my car keys in a ridiculously secret and hard to get to location on the outside of my car. (Really, you'll never find them....) This is so that, in case my car keys would happen to be left inside, I always have a way in to retrieve them. And I have my spare apartment key inside the car, so that if my keys were to be locked anywhere, I have a way to get into the car and thus into the house.

The system broke down.

The only loophole to this nearly perfect system is, if, by some rare chance, one were to be locked out of the car and retrieves the secret outside car keys to redeem themselves, but then does not return the spare to its proper home, and then, by an even rarer chance, locks themselves out of the house, therefore having access to no keys, well then, one then has quite the predicament to solve.

But as it turns out, and you don't need to spread this around to, I don't know, car thieves, it takes more time to bend open a hanger than it does to break into my car from the outside. So, within a few seconds after church, once I had access to a wire hanger, I was back in my house, and my car, with few tears or sweat drips.

Only a fool....only a fool like me....

The Yin and the Yang of Things

Warning: The following post will be nearly impossible to comprehend in the context of my life prior to today. Please read with caution.

Tonight I had a dining experience like none other. I ate sushi. I tried to warn you. I know...it doesn't make any sense when thinking of the amount of risk I'm usually willing to take in my everyday life. And perhaps the more impressive fact of the matter is that I actually liked it. And, if the opportunity presented itself, I think I'd eat it again. Crazy, I know. I'm still reeling.

Don't worry, now. I did not attempt this feat on my lonesome. I met an old peer advisor that is now in the Appleton area who is possibly the riskiest and most random person I know. He, of course, suggested the whole sushi experience. Entering the restaurant was a mystery of itself. The entrance to the parking lot faces the back of the building, which frankly slightly resembled a pole shed. Entering the front doors (finally), the atmosphere was actually very nice, but I felt like I had entered the set of a movie. The booths for each group to sit in were wide rails of sorts that you had to climb over to get to the table. And our waitress was about the most helpful person I had ever encountered in a strange place (scoff). We were left alone to our own devices with a sushi menu and our own imaginations.

I, wisely, chose the Beginner's Platter, a mild array of fairly standard sushi rolls with standard raw fish, shrimp, veggies, sauces, and the wonderfully sticky rice to hold it all together. There was one little piece of sushi that had an entire giant shrimp tail sticking out the top of it. (Fright!) But I dove in head first and tossed a piece in my mouth....which was promptly followed by the rest of the tray (with the exception of that giant shrimpy tail).

After a few rolls, I was pleasantly full. It wasn't that nasty sort of stuffed-myself-with-harmful-fatty-things type of full, but rather a I-think-I-did-something-good-for-myself good. I had no idea that raw fish could make you feel like that.

Overall, I enjoyed my sushi experience at the Nakashima of Japan. Who will join my on my next random food quest? Will it be you?

Ironic

As I sit here tonight in my Appleton hotel room, I am doing what I usually do in the evenings on the road: watching tv. Tuesday nights are always Biggest Loser followed by SVU nights. And although tonight I did make some attempt at working out (me and a treadmill made two slow miles), I managed to watch an entire episode of Biggest Loser while eating half of a medium cheese pizza and a whole order of breadsticks. Yeah, that's right.

And, here's something to impress your friends with: did you know that Americans consume 700 million pounds of peanut butter a year? That's enough to cover the floor of the Grand Canyon. (Says Biggest Loser trivia.) And we Americans also spend 14 billion dollars on dietary supplements each year. Maybe it's because we watch Biggest Loser while crashing our way through a Domino's order.

Victory Shopping....Not So Victorious

Once upon a time, I really did like shopping.

Tonight I thought that shopping as a victory lap of sorts to celebrate my new promotion of sorts was a great idea. I started at my favorite store, The Gap. While talking to my mom on the phone I managed to accumulate a huge armful of items to try on. After a few minutes in the dressing room, I walked away from the store empty-handed. And that was just the start.

After two hours of meandering around a giant mall, I had only purchased a pair of sale rack shoes from Payless. Lovely. I was fully expecting to blow a lot of money today, and, frankly, that mood doesn't strike very often. Let's fact it: I'm pretty much a cheapskate. New job, new year, why not spend a crapload for a change? But alas, no such luck tonight. Just shoes.

But I did manage to purchase the largest possible latte from a Gloria Jean's to make me feel better. And better I felt indeed. However, in order to feel truly and fully better, I feel that a rather large and lengthy internet shopping binge is on the verge. Now my only predicament, where to start...Victoria's Secret? Gap? Zappos?

MUD Creek Coffee

So, this one threw me for a loop. Today I started my morning in a small town called Stockbridge, with a population of 600 or so. As usual, I was just a few minutes early, so I decided to explore the town a bit to see what there was to offer. About two blocks from the school I saw a peculiar sign on the ground that said, “MUD Creek Coffee Drive-Up Open.” Now, the concept of drive-up coffee shops is not a new one to me, but for a small town, it is nearly unheard of.

After I visited with one very nice student at Stockbridge, I decided to check out the MUD Creek first-hand. To my surprise, this was no ordinary old-timer’s-small-town-hole-in-the-ground. It was an actual coffee shop…with personality, atmosphere, acoustic and alternative music, WiFi, and frankly delicious coffee. It had the feel of a downtown, big city shop. The walls were dark and warm, the lights were dim, and there was a variety of seating options: booths, tables, cozy loungers by a fireplace. Weird. I ordered their seasonal special, a 20 oz. pumpkin pie latte and a pastry.

I took it to go, and as I drove, I nearly stopped on the side of the road at the first taste. What a latte! It was strong but not the least bit bitter, sweet, but not too sweet, thick, creamy, and that perfect hot-but-not-too-hot temperature. I would highly recommend that anyone in the Stockbridge area to check this place out. In fact, I’m marking it on the map as a serious spot to return to (just of the coffee shop).

This shop inspired me, once again, to start thinking about starting a coffee shop of my own someday. MUD Creek was a perfect example of what I would do with a small-town shop.

On a completely unrelated note, you know what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately? Broadband. That’s right, broadband internet. You know, that kind of internet you can access from a hole, a pond, etc. (for those of you who have seen the TV commercials). How nice it would be to be able to check my email, update calendars, and look up things like phone numbers from the front seat of my car. Until then, its evening work and a lot of copy and paste action.

Baby Its Cold Outside

There is a distinct chill in the air. The wind blows with the whispers of winter on its way. Or maybe the wind is shouting. Today the gusts were over forty miles per hour. And for a short time, oh how I dread even bringing myself to say it, it snowed.

The chill in the air is not the bitter below-zero temperatures one experiences in the dead of a Wisconsin December. In fact, I don’t believe the temperatures even dared to fall below freezing. But there was just something about that wind that chilled a person to the core. Perhaps it is the mere thought of the horrors awaiting us in the ominous clouds of the future, the dreaded snow that will soon torture us all. Somehow just the thought of it makes me cooler, even now, in the warmth of my hotel room and sweat pants. Or perhaps it is just because it is the first of the cold winds for the season that makes us shiver. There seems to be a getting-used-to time that we all require to adjust to winter, and for me, that must have started today.

My gas tank of the bright blue Ford Taurus that I spend much of my life in these days ran tragically low this morning as I trekked from town to town. The idea of forty mile per hour winds did not entice me to step even one foot out of the car today either, but I knew I’d never make it all day without filling up. Have you ever filled up a gas tank with forty mile per hour winds blowing in your face? It was a challenge from start to finish. I staggered and stammered around the pump for a few minutes until finally the tank was full. Then I immediately sprinted inside to grab the warmest thing I could think of, a cup of gas-station-quality coffee. As soon as I had it paid for, I forged back into the tundra-like atmospheric conditions and directly to the driver’s seat.

A large gulp of hot coffee quickly warmed my entire body, but, as it turned out, I was a little over-eager to drink. And after the warmth quickly faded away, all I was left with was a scorching fire on every surface of all of my digestive organs. My mouth, my throat, even perhaps my stomach were burnt to a crisp. I guess there is a perfectly logical reason to the “Caution-Hot” warning on all Styrofoam coffee cups after all.

So, here’s to the start of that evil, uncomfortable, dangerous season we like to call winter….and to many more scorching hot coffee gulps to come.