Day #24 - SNOW DAY!

Snow days. They affect every one in a different way. 

Snow days make school children crazy with anticipation of a day off so they can go sledding, have snowball fights... or more likely, sit in all day playing video games.

Snow days make motivated teenagers get an early start offering to shovel sidewalks and driveways for some extra pocket cash while others take the extra morning hours to sleep.

Snow days make municipal/transit workers hope that people will be smart and stay off the roads and inside their homes, even though they are forced to be outside clearing the roads and helping those who venture out and get into trouble.

Me?

Snow days convince me to sit contented by the window watching the snow fall. 

Snow days inspire me to play with my camera even though I will ultimately be frustrated because I can't get the shot to properly frame or capture what I have in my eye.

Snow days create strange concept ideas in my head... which leads to snowman violence. Rest in Peace Frosty.

Day #23 - Travel Itch

Everyone loves the comfort of their home, but I really enjoy traveling away from home too. There was a period of time where I was traveling frequently, but it's been a while since that was the norm. In early November I traveled by plane for the first time in two and a half years. It was great. I love airports. And on that trip, I got to add two new airports to my list: San Francisco and Chicago's O'Hare. 

What the trip served to do was make me itchy. I need to travel more. I miss the process of traveling all over the place. When other people get irritated by delays and changes to their plans, I just sit back and laugh. 

Once I build up the vacation time, you can bet I'll be using it to galavant around. Having a full-time job and not being overloaded with financial responsibilities is awesome. I'll enjoy the two coinciding factors as long as I can. 

I've got a list of places I want to visit both international and across my own country that gets longer and longer the more I read and look at things. Hopefully I get to visit plenty of places throughout my life without the list ever actually getting shorter.

Day #22 - Spreadsheet Mania

Spreadsheets. Fridays. Every week.

Every week on Friday, I spend the entire day up to my eyeballs in spreadsheets. Reports I have to generate and send out to the bosses and a couple other people to keep them abreast of what is going on in our department.

They're tedious and can be time consuming but I don't mind them usually. I'm very detail oriented and so I like when these things are precise. It's when they are not precise that I get annoyed by them. This week while going through some of the numbers from the beginning of this year to prepare the documents for next year's data input, I noticed some numbers on the sheet didn't match the real data. It's part of my inherited documentation... I took over half way through the year. But now I have to fix it. I can't leave it that way. The numbers are wrong and I can't cope. So here's to being up to my eyeballs in spreadsheets on Monday too. 

Oh goodie. Next week I'll open AND close my week with spreadsheet overload.

At least they'll be correct after that though. Thinking positive.

Day #21 - Liquid Nitrogen

One of my favorite things to "play" with at my job is Liquid Nitrogen. Ever since I was a little kid, I have loved seeing the N2 show performed by so many different presenters. They all have their own style and some use different demos, so it's never exactly the same. 

Commonly we use the N2 to make ice cream in under 5 minutes... the amount of sugar makes it terrifying for parents. At -320°F, we form gigantic clouds by combining the super cold Liquid Nitrogen with hot water. And of course we get into unmentioned mischief with it.

My favorite demonstrations involving N2 would have to be a toss up between the ball explosion, the soap bubble monster and dragon's breath. All are incredibly awesome and can be experienced at a variety of events that happen at or in cooperation with The Franklin Institute. 

Day #20 - Help Your Local School Community

I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers as a little kid, collecting the Campbell's soup labels labels and turning them in at school. It was an easy way for the school to raise funds through corporate sponsors. Now there are even more companies that do that sort of thing. "Labels for Education" and "Box Tops for Education" are things you can find on many of the products that (at least in the U.S.) we all use everyday. 

Not everyone has a kid in their local school and that could make it seem creepy to volunteer actual time to help out, but collecting these labels is an easy way to do something for your community. If you use products that happen to have any of these labels, cut them out and pass them on to local schools.

Honest. Little by little, it'll make a huge difference for the kids at the school. Every bit helps.

Day #19 - Dead Things

I've always had a strange fascination with dead things. Maybe it's because I was apparently conceived the night my parents went away to a funeral. Maybe it's because I grew up with a cemetery on the other side of the back fence. I don't know.

Although, I guess I should clarify what I mean by "strange fascination with dead things." I not talking about necrophilia. I didn't get involved in a career that deals with corpses. And I don't sleep in a coffin... nor do I ever plan to.

But every time I take some time to look back through my pictures, whether on my phone or the computer, I notice just how many times I have taken pictures of a dead animal that I've come across. No seriously. It's definitely not normal. I mean there are probably some people who would be concerned with the pictures. Over the years, I have taken a lot of pictures of dead animals. Hell. I have a ridiculous amount of those pictures on just from the last year alone. (Of course, a bit of normalcy, they still don't even make it to 1% of the pictures I take over all... so it's not the only thing I photograph.)

If it's so commonplace of an occurrence for me though, why did it come up in my head to be the entry for today?

Today, I was quite disturbed as I was leaving for work. I turned towards the backyard where the dog was to say bye and I noticed she had something hanging out of her mouth and she was chewing on it. At first I was simply befuddled. What was she eating? Then I thought she had a mouse that one of the neighborhood cats (or her cat) had killed during the night time hunts. Then as I got closer and asked her what she had, she dropped it to the ground and started to move away. That's when I noticed the larger object on the ground in front of where my dog had just been. It was a dead squirrel. What had she been chewing on? The arm that she had ripped off of the squirrel's body.

So I grabbed a shovel from beside the gate and went into the backyard to scoop the squirrel up and deposit it into the trashcan so that the dog didn't try to keep eating it. Gah. I'm more grossed out than when dog #4 would roll in every dead animal it could find... leaving a matted mess in his fur and setting himself up for the torture of being bathed.

Of course I followed through with my obsession and there are pictures of the squirrel, sans an arm, laying on the shovel before it was disposed of. The squirrel, not the shovel. And despite the fact that I regularly decide to share the pictures of dead things that I find and photograph on a variety of social media avenues, I'll refrain this time and not make you want to loose the contents of your stomach. Even I think the dead squirrel was a little to gross to publish. 

Day #18 - Re-re-re-reading Books

It's getting close to the end of the year... well, close enough to know that I'm not going to make the goal I had set at the beginning. I had plotted to try to read a book a week, well, an average of a book a week.

At the beginning of the year I was doing pretty well. First three months actually, I had read about 13 books. Then I got busy with work and so the pacing slowed down. Then I was still busy at work and I needed more sleep, so it slowed even further. I was still consuming pages of books, but just not as fast. See, I was zoning out or falling asleep on my commute in and out of the city every day rather than absorbing chapter after chapter. Not the worst thing in the world to happen. But still a little disappointing.

I had also wanted the books to be new books. Titles I hadn't read yet. So that also put a crick in the goal of a book a week. 52 new titles.

I should have known it would be a doubly daunting task. I mean, there are certain books that I just love to read again. And again. And again. If I like a book, I will re-re-re-read it so many times that the binding goes weak. And since I also love to read books that are a part of a series, that means I re-re-read the entire series whenever I want to read just a part of the series. Each time I catch something I don't remember noticing or understanding the last time I read it. Or I simply remember a detail of the plot that I had forgotten. Some of those re-re-reads also got in the way of my goal of a (new) book a week.

So with only about four weeks left in the year, my new book count currently stands at 28. Maybe it'll get to 29 or 30 before the end of the year, but it won't get much closer to the goal of 52 this time.

There's always next year, right... then again, I am already itching to re-re-read a couple of series that I have particularly enjoyed reading before.