Dear Everyone,

I do not have time.

And I refuse to let you make me feel guilty about it.

Love,
Erin

Simple Sundays Return

It's early! And...in my favorite form: bullets. And really, if I can't choose just one simple pleasure, then you know it's been a good week.

• I'm at a conference. It's close to home (Anaheim) but I got a scholarship, so I have a hotel room and don't have to drive in traffic every day. Scholarship!
  

• The conference started out with a talk entitled, "Transformational Megatrends in Healthcare". Doesn't that give you the shivers? LOVE. And it just got better from there. (Yes. Please call me a nerd. It's the truth.)
  

• I have had several hours off in the afternoon both yesterday and today. I spent the time in my hotel room planning for a trip! With my bushtits! Next week! To see warblers! And other birds! (Also napping.)

• Pandora is the COOLEST WEBSITE EVER. I've been enjoying it all weekend. Customizable radio. Pick a song or artist you like. It plays a bunch of similar stuff. Some I know, some I don't. Free! Music! Thanks Curly Sue!
  

• My hotel room overlooks Disneyland. Last night I sat on my balcony and watched the best fireworks display I've seen in a long, long time. Fireworks!

Model Student

I had my first ever modeling gig yesterday, although it was an unpaid job. It's posted on Youtube, so if you want to get an extreme close-up view of my nostril, go to Youtube and search for "nasopharyngeal swab". I don't want to link to it or embed it here, for obvious privacy, separation-of-school-and-blog reasons. I'm not sure they'll offer me another job, though, since I appear quite bored throughout the video.

(Also, according to the doctor, I am one of the rare individuals with no gag reflex, although that hasn't been my experience in other aspects of life. Maybe I just willfully suppressed it for my close-up.)

100 Things, Part 8: DVD Collection

Today I spent an embarrassing number of hours organizing, dusting, alphabetizing and cataloging our DVD collection. (I used Delicious Library, which I highly recommend for multiple reasons, not the least of which is the barcode scanner!) In the process I endured name-calling (including "OCD", "compulsive", and "dork". I also made a number of observations about our collection. Are these observations telling about my personality (or our collective personalities)? Will it make for riveting reading? I DON'T KNOW! But I might be slightly loopy from the hours of organizing.

87. Number of movies in our collection: 350. That includes seasons of 13 different tv series.

88. Number of movies still in shrink wrap: 4.

89. Number of movies in our collection that I have never seen: 41. (Most of these are David's purchases, and include things like Van Damme. So you understand.)

90. Number of duplicate movies: 4.

91. Number of movies in colored cases: 12.

92. Number of Mel Gibson movies: 8.

93. Number of Kevin Smith movies: 9.

94. We have movies that start with every letter of the alphabet except Q. 31 start with "S". Surprisingly, only 2 start with "N", but we have 5 that start with "X".

95. Number of IKEA shelves employed for DVD wrangling: 5. Number needed to accommodate all of our DVDs: At least 1 more. The orphaned movies are lined up on the futon for the time being.

Hmmm. I think that's all I can come up with. Except that, even after wiping down every movie with a damp cloth, my fingers still felt dusty after putting them all back on the shelves.

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Bird Notes:

I haven't had the birding-all-the-time year so far that I resolved to have. But I have gotten out a few times, and I've really been enjoying the bird in the yard. Especially now. April and May are our big yard-bird months.

This week I spotted an ash-throated flycatcher in the brush behind our back lawn one morning. I have seen one of these in our yard before, but not for a couple of years. As I was following it, another bird hopped right into my binocular view and completely distracted me from the flycatcher. This bird was brand new for our yard. In fact, I haven't seen one in awhile, and since it was completely unexpected, I didn't even register what it was until after it had hopped out of sight. A green-tailed towhee.

Links are to talented, well-equipped flickr photographers.

I'm a slacker, you're a slacker, they're all slackers too

Has it really been a week since I posted? I can sum up my time away from the blog in a single breath (a la Miranda): lab, lab, in-laws visit, lab. (Lab, lab, lablablablab). Oh, lordy, how I want to graduate.

I have a couple of more substantial posts rolling around in my head, but, lacking both time and brain power, I'll post a few more pictures from DC. On the first day of the cherry blossom festival, there was a kite festival on the mall around the Washington Monument. It was one of my favorite parts of the trip - there were hundreds of kites flying against the blue sky, flown by kids and adults alike. Happy people were everywhere you looked - both tourists and locals, many with their dogs and kids in tow.






I think this picture shows the sheer volume of kites the best. Click on it for a larger picture - all of those tiny dots are kites. Kites! Everywhere!