Please stick

So much for blogging during the afternoon nap ... Claire ended up snoozing while I strolled her around Harris Teeter after lunch, and there wasn't much sleep left in her once we got home. Which was OK, since my empty to-do list meant I didn't need that time to myself. And really, is there a better way to spend an afternoon than on the floor with a belly-laughing baby?

Supposedly it's going to snow/ice around here tonight and this weekend. I'll believe it when I see it, but I really hope we get something of substance. So far it's just very, very cold. But Matt grilled burgers for us anyway. I wonder how many other people in Moore County cooked out tonight? I love Matt. And I love burgers.

Nights like tonight are my favorite: good books fresh from the library, an overflow of good food and drinks, and a soundly sleeping baby. Reading for hours at opposite ends of a couch is one of our favorite ways to spend an evening, but for some reason it rarely happens except on vacation.

So Matt's read and loved the first two books of a series by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. I guess there were supposed to be 10 books in the series, but it's turned out to be a trilogy because only three were written before Larsson died a few years ago. The third book, "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest," isn't scheduled for publication in the United States until this summer, but a few days ago Matt was at the library and was surprised to discover it there on the shelf.

He asked the librarian how that was possible. Turns out the head librarian for that branch is also a big fan of the series and couldn't wait for summer, so he special-ordered this book from a British publisher. Matt's probably one of the first people in the state to read this book -- at least without ordering it from Amazon.co.uk or something similar (why do good Christmas gift ideas wait until the end of January to occur to me?). Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool how that worked out, and lucky for Matt.

Slightly related: Anne Tyler has a new book that I can't wait to get my hands on. I'm so glad so many of my favorite authors are so prolific!

I keep walking outside and we're getting the slightest bit of accumulation on the deck. I had planned to have an open house at this condo tomorrow afternoon, but I'm guessing that will have to be postponed. No big deal except I hate to have wasted the advertising. C'est la vie.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Sleepy Jenn

Let's start at the very beginning: Amanda, Mom, Granny, Joy, Gail and Renee are my heroes tonight. That's all I have to say about that.

It snowed enough to cover the yard but not the roads and we had to go to work on time today. Although a snow day is always welcome I wasn't that disappointed since we'd been out of the office since last Tuesday and I had some catching up to do.

I was going to write about Lent today but instead I'm going to write about a couple of funny dream situations I've had recently. Because I know how much fun it is to hear about someone else's dreams.

Funny dream story No. 1: Last night I was dreaming that I was at a high school basketball game and the guy sitting beside me was being so annoying, trying to flirt by making fun of me, which is the main way most high school guys know how to act, which is why I've never been too fond of them. I got more and more irritated until finally I turned to the guy and said to him "Will you LEAVE me ALONE!" and then I punched him twice, which is odd since I've never punched anyone. Well, once, but that's another story.

Anyway, the funny part is that during that dream I really did hit Matt, hard, while asleep. I hit his shoulder but another few inches and it would have been his face and he probably would have reacted out of instinct ... it would have been fun to explain all the bruises. Instead we both woke up and I apologized and he was kind of flabbergasted but then we just fell back asleep.

Funny dream story No. 2: For a few days last week I had the nagging feeling that there was something I'd done that I could check off my 101-things list, but I could not think of what it was. I remembered thinking "Oh good, I can check this off my list" and I felt like it was something spontaneous, not planned, but that was all I could remember. And the times that it crossed my mind I was always driving or in bed or somewhere else besides in front of a computer where I could just read the list and be reminded.

Finally I realized: I'd dreamed of going to an amusement park, which is No. 36 on my list.

That reminds me. Have I ever written about the time in college when I dreamed a final exam was going to be held in a different classroom than where we regularly met? I woke up the morning of the exam (it must have been an 8 a.m. one, because there was no spare time to just get there early and check things out) "remembering" the professor reminding us not to show up at the usual spot, but I couldn't find any record of the new exam location in my notes.

It was a lecture course in which I didn't know anyone well, and I had to call one of the few people I at least knew how to get in touch with and basically say "Am I crazy?" and she basically said, "Uh, yes." That was embarrassing.

On that note, I'm off to bed.

Believe it or not

This is old news, but I never wrote about it and I want to document it because I think it's an absolutely crazy coincidence. As you know, Amanda turned me on to FutureMe.org and several weeks ago I was on the site writing a letter to her future self. After I finished I was bored and clicked on "View Public Entries."

The third public entry that popped up was written by a girl who'd scheduled it to arrive on her and her boyfriend's fourth dating anniversary, in 2003. The first sentence referred to the boyfriend -- Stephen. The fifth sentence referred to a friend -- Keely. Amanda's husband (a mere boyfriend in 2003) is Stephen, and her best friend from college is Keely, so I thought, that's interesting ...

And then I got to the end, which simply read "143" -- which is "their" number, if you will. I did the math on the dates and sure enough, it added up. I couldn't believe it! I called Amanda, read it to her and she confirmed.

Out of hundreds of thousands of public letters on that site, the third one I clicked on was written by my sister five years ago. What are the odds?
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Riley picture of the day

Small world

I feel like I've spent more nights away from home than at home in the past month! Right now Amanda and I are in Fredericksburg, Va., for Keely's graduation from the University of Mary Washington. It's just a quick trip, but traveling with Amanda is always fun. As soon as we got in the car today she pulled out about 15 of her famous mix CDs she's made over the years and it was like listening to the best radio station ever but being able to skip the bad songs.

While we were driving this afternoon I realized this trip completes my No. 33 (visit three out-of-state cities I've never been to). When I put that one on the list I was definitely thinking more along the lines of San Diego, Chicago and Juneau, but Fredericksburg, St. Simon's Island, Ga., and Greenville, S.C., count, too.

We had dinner and drinks with Keely and some of her friends tonight and I mentioned that Kaitlin, who also went to Mary Washington, is on the school's website. (Check it out: She's the pole vaulter at the top of the athletics page.) It turns out that one of the girls we were eating with graduated from Mary Washington about the same time as Kaitlin and knows her (remind me to tell you about that, Kate!).

I love being reminded what a small world this is. One classic example is the time Grandma and Grandpa were visiting us from Atlanta when I was about 10 or 12 years old. We were all standing in line at Hardee's for breakfast, and Grandpa, who could and probably would talk to a brick wall, had struck up a conversation with the kid in front of him. Grandpa told him he was from Atlanta, to which the kid replied, "I know someone who lives in Atlanta! His name is Ellis Loyd" -- to which Grandpa replied, "That's my son!" Now what are the odds of that happening?

Randomness

One day last week Matt and I were driving somewhere and somehow we started talking about the word "detente," lowercase -- we can't remember what brought it up, but we talked about it for a few minutes. Later on the same car ride I was telling him how much Amanda liked "Rent" and he said it was right up her "wheelhouse," which was a term I'd never heard before. He told me it was common in sports.

Later that night we were kind of watching "Boston Legal" when they said something about declaring detente. Right after that we watched "House" and they referred to a wheelhouse in some context. It was pretty weird to have just talked about two fairly uncommon terms and then for both of them to come up two hours later.

You know how sometimes, at least in a smallish town like ours, if there's a car that really stands out, you start to see it everywhere? When we were in high school there was this red convertible with the license place Sunny T, driven by an old man, that we used to see EVERYwhere. But you know you probably pass by all the other cars equally often; Sunny T just stands out because he's easily recognizable. Well, we figured that was probably what was going on with "detente" and "wheelhouse."

To test the theory we decided to pick an equally arbitrary word ("innocuous") and see if we noticed it being used the next day. We didn't, and in fact I still haven't heard anyone use it since then. So maybe the detente/wheelhouse thing was just a funny coincidence, I don't know.

Thank you for sticking with me on my boring days.

P.S. If you like to read blogs and you don't use Google Reader to do so, you should check it out immediatement. It's so much more efficient than the one-by-one method.