M A xx W Cimetière de Bracieux L L

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Growing Older

There's a number of things that I didn't like growing up, but now that I'm a semi-adult, I find that it doesn't kill me or may even now like it.

Brown Flexible Fabric Band-Aids: As a young girl, I wanted something that wasn't so drab. Muppets or Disney or even Clear would have been better than brown. But now, because I have the flex, I can type with my index finger just fine! And they seem to last longer than the plastic bandages anyway.

Singing when prompted by a phrase: My mother used to do this constantly, joined by my father at times, and it always drove me nuts, not sure why, exactly. But yes, I do this now that I'm older. Something someone says will remind me of a song and I will break out into a verse until my mother says "You used to hate when I did that!" I think it's just genetic.

NPR: Seriously, what kid wants to listen to talk radio? I wanted to enjoy music in the car, not have the news rehashed, and thankfully, most of the, time my parents obliged and actually liked a lot of the same music as me. But for some reason, I seem to be tuning into NPR pretty frequently now. Fresh Air with Terry Gross has been my daily entertainment while running to the bank for work and I'm actually enjoying the following of the campaign trail.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Sick

Patrick and I finally watched Michael Moore's documentary Sicko this weekend. Now I want to move to England or France or Norway or Canada, pretty much anywhere but stay here in the US. Patrick said, "I keep telling you, Toronto is the place to be!" I just don't know if I could handle the cold. I do have some reservations on Universal Health Care, mainly the tax burden of it. But when the United States is being listed as number 37 on the World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems, I have to give my reservations a second thought.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Christmas 2007

I have finally uploaded all my pictures from Christmas. I didn't take many this year, and those that I did are mostly of our baby niece.

Patrick and I talked about what a great Christmas we had this year. I was determined to have all our Christmas shopping done early, which was both easier and harder this time around. Harder, since we didn't start till after Thanksgiving. Easier, since we finally set a pretty strict budget instead of like years past where one of us would say "oh, I want to get this other thing for so-and-so...." and the so-called budget kept ballooning. We really wanted this year to be about spending time with our families and that's exactly what it turned out to be instead of the usual running around, crazy, trying to get things done . We wanted to spend time with our New Yorker sisters (et al.) since we only get to see them once or twice a year. And I wanted to squeeze Sophie as much as possible because the next time we see her, she'll have doubled in size.