sunday, the twenty-eighth of january, two thousand one

Watching: The Superbowl... commercials. (My favorite so far: Bob Dole shilling his "little blue friend," a can of Pepsi. I did also notice the anti-tobacco ads and once again realized how weird it is to do defense work for a company that so many people hate so much.) Although the introduction to the halftime show with Ben Stiller was kind of funny, but I'm basically just waiting for Survivor. Speaking of which...

Seeing: B.B. in the bookstore last weekend. (He's from here, don't you know.)

Eating: Pieces of French bread with Laughing Cow cheese. I was jonesing for Laughing Cow a couple of weeks ago, but to my distress could not find it in our giant Midwestern grocery stores. It was only during a chance stroll through Dean & DeLuca (where I had never been before, and my checkbook was the better for it) that I saw it and snatched up two packages. That stuff is sooo tasty.

Also watching: An hour-long retrospective about the Challenger. Cried the whole way through it. I'm such a sap sometimes, but I remember that day clear as a bell. Ninth grade, on my way from 3rd-hour French to 4th-hour Social Studies, when the guy with the locker next to me told me about it. My SS classroom was one of few with a television, so a couple of other classes came in and we just watched it for an hour. Nobody said anything the whole time.

Also seeing: Shadow of the Vampire. Maybe it's because we had to sit on the end of the third row, but I'm not sure I understood this movie. I mean, I understood the idea, but just not the execution, if that makes any sense. (At the end of the third row, you can't see the whole screen at once, and I swear that makes it harder to get a good sense of the movie.)

Also also watching: Andre Agassi wipe the court with Clemente's sassy shades for the Australian Open and his 7th Grand Slam. Oh yes, indeed, I stayed home on Saturday night to watch tennis. What can I say. I've loved Andre forever.

Possibly anticipating: Hannibal. I liked the book up except for the very end, which I hated. But I think Julianne Moore will do fine as Clarice, and Anthony Hopkins will certianly, er, sink his teeth in, and it should be scary enough. So we'll see.

Link of the Day:

Am I Hot or Not?

Wouldn't it be funny if you saw someone you knew?

There are some days when I have all entry and no sidebar, and some days when I have all sidebar and no entry.

Um, this is one of those days, but I'll try to muddle through with something of interest. Don't go sending this one to diarist.net, is all I'm saying.

I think I've overextended myself with the New York invites. See, if I do end up going to trial in a couple of months, it will only be for a couple of months, like maybe eight weekends max. If I come home every other weekend, that leaves four weekends for me to bring someone out, and I've issued at least fourteen invitations. I'll have to hold a raffle or something.

My officemate (have I named my officemate before? I can't remember now. We'll call her... Carol, because her hair looks a little bit like Carol's from ER). Anyway, Carol and I have a habit of going across the street to Starbucks a couple three times a week to break up the afternoon doldrums. She asked if I wanted to go Friday, but I had no cash on me and had already gone out to lunch with Gillian, so for the first time, I passed.

Now, I have a theory that the guy who is almost always working the counter when we go is baked. I'm serious. He just always seems to be moving a bit slow-motionish, and gets really easily confused about which buttons to push on the cash register, but he's always very very happy. Carol at first thought that he was... slow, like mildly retarded, but that's clearly not it. He's just high, I'm sure of it.

So she came back with her Caramel Macchiato (I'm so happy to have an officemate who is as much a caramel junkie as I am) and said that when she went up to the counter, instead of just asking her what she wanted, he said, "What kind of Starbucks beverage would make you really happy today?"

I think that proves my case, n'est-ce pas?

I went to the public library yesterday for the first time in I don't know how long. I didn't go to the public library of my childhood, where my friends and I spent many an afternoon pretending to work on research papers but really only making nuisances of ourselves. (Elise and I have a favorite story about how we were there for four hours one day and succeeded only in removing a piece of paper from our notebooks in preparation for, I don't know, writing down names of books, I suppose. The rest of the time we just stole each other's stuff and hid it in the periodicals.)

Anyway I went to a different one, a newer one, closer to where I live now. I got myself a library card and headed to the travel aisle. Fifteen minutes later, I had checked out five books about going to France. The Let's Go guide, a couple of Rick Steves guides, and one called "The Grown-Up's Guide to Living in France," because even though I'm not planning on actually living there, I thought it would be interesting. Also Peter Mayle's famous memoir, A Year in Provence. I read this years ago but I haven't read any of the sequels, so I thought I'd revisit the original before moving on.

Yes, I know my own excursion isn't for another fifteen months, but what can I say. Once I get excited about something, I can't think of anything else until the novelty wears off. (Which it will, eventually. Look at me being all paradoxical by pointing out how I've not mentioned Eddie Izzard in this entry at all.)

There's probably medication for that. Anyway, even though I won't have to do anything really proactive for, oh, a year or so, I'm having fun trying to figure out where I want to spend my time. One of the Rick Steves guides has a suggested 21-day trip, but it basically covers the entire country, which is not my style. I'm one of those tourists who is much happier settling in and soaking up the local flavor rather than seeing how many different buildings I can see in one day. So I'm probably going to break it up into three major stops: Paris, the Loire Valley, and the Cote d'Azur.

I can't wait, really, but as Heinz taught us, anticipation is good. Fortunately, I have another travel excursion planned a bit sooner, for which I am equally excited. The girls and I are going to descend upon my brother in Hilton Head for a St. Patrick's Day weekend that will include such things as Savannah's famous parade, a tour of Charleston by a former native, and, quite possibly, a tattoo.

Oh, hijinks will ensue, for certain. God help my poor brother. He has no idea what he's in for.