One for my sis!

Yo, Karen. I did it!
Readers, if you miss the Rocky reference, too bad for you.

Based on the queue this morning, I wonder how many people will be left to vote on the actual "election day."

Things you don't expect to hear from a flight attendant

As I was taking my seat on my crack-of-dawn flight this morning, I overheard the flight attendant say, "I'm expecting a shipment of guinea pigs. Please let me know when they are loaded."
Maybe because it was the crack of dawn, but I found this funny.

Random oddness

I’ve been working in Eugene, Oregon for the last two weeks, and I really enjoy it up here. Today I went to lunch with my friend Ian (who works at the local newspaper). As we were driving to Café Yumm! (one of my favorite places), a street sign caught my eye. On our way back from lunch I just HAD to stop for a photo. How much would I LOVE my address if I lived on this street?

Just one of my pet peeves

As I mentioned earlier, I spent this last week working in Salt Lake City, which was quite fun. I think I also mentioned the fact that I carpooled with my friend Matt. While providing interesting conversation, Matt also provided me with a passenger, which meant we were allowed in the carpool lane. Excellent, right? Sadly, no. We soon discovered (and re-discovered each and every day) that there are many drivers (at least many Utah drivers) who don’t understand the purpose of a carpool lane. Just because you have the required number of people in your car does not mean you MUST drive in the carpool lane – especially if you insist on driving slower than the rest of traffic. The purpose of an HOV lane is to encourage people to carpool so that they can travel at faster speeds than the rest of the traffic-jammed, single-rider vehicles. I’m not talking about exceeding the speed limit here. There were times when I would have loved to have reached the speed limit. What I’m talking about is the fact that if the vehicles in the far left lane (a.k.a. “the slow lane”) are moving faster than you are, you should get the heck out of the HOV lane. I'm just saying.

It’s a headrest, for crying out loud

This week I’m lucky enough to be on-site for work… in Salt Lake City. Well, lucky in that I get to sleep in my own bed at night, unlucky in that I get to drive an hour each way to work. Anyway, that’s not the point of this story.

My friend/co-worker, Matt, is carpooling with me, which is important to know because when Matt’s up there alone, he usually rents a car and he gets nominated to drive to lunch. Since I had the car today, I drove to lunch (we went to a YUMMY little Greek place off 3rd South and 4th East, I think – but I digress). Anywho, one of the guys who came to lunch with us is 6’5” – on the way to lunch he sat in the back seat of my really small Nissan Sentra. Since that seemed uncomfortable for him, one of the smaller guys sat in the back on the return trip. It was then that Brady noticed that the headrest was folded horizontally instead of vertically – poking him right in the head.

All four of us knew that the headrest should “bend” back to the vertical position, but none of us could get it to do it. I was a little annoyed that my new car – that gets awesome gas mileage, I might add – had such a defect.

So, at the end of the day, after I dropped Matt off at his house, I decided to drive to the Nissan dealership and ask them why I had a defective headrest. With headrest in hand, I asked the first sales guy I saw why it was like that. He said he knew it could be put back in its vertical position, but he couldn’t remember how to do it (see, we’re not so dumb). So he asked another sales guy for help. This sales guy couldn’t remember either, so he suggested we go see if another Sentra had instructions in it (excuse me? Instructions on how to return a headrest to the vertical position?). On the way to find these awesome instructions, he figured it out. There’s no button or lever or anything that resets the headrest – you have to push down even further on the headrest in order to get it vertical. Of course. My car has some techie things, but I didn’t think one of them would be the headrest.

Be your own kind of super hero

It seems like you can't turn on the T.V. or radio without hearing about the state of the economy. Well, it totally stresses me out, and I try to avoid it at all costs. But, at the same time, I have to deal with it. So, that said, I'm turning into Budgeting-girl. Nananananananananananananananana Budgeting-girl. (a la Batman theme song).

The other day I Google-ed "cooking on a budget" and came across several awesome resources, but my favorite was on allrecipes.com (yes, Miss L, it's true, allrecipes really does ROCK). I especially liked the information on The Perfect Pantry. And the fact that they provide actual recipes that use the suggested items? Icing on the cake. Oh, cake sounds good right now...