ten moving lessons

1. packing tape does not a good meal make. use one of those rolly things with the jagged metal teeth instead of your own.
2. make sure you've had a tetnus shot in the past ten years. dropping a rusty screwdriver on your toe does not feel good. or perhaps the lesson was to wear shoes while being handy.
3. counter-top wine racks do not fit nicely in to any box unless it's the only thing you put in there, in which case, you might as well not.
4. eggs and diet coke also do not a good meal make. there are other ways to use up/get rid of what's in the fridge.
5. charles barklay is a terrible snl host. ok, not a moving lesson, but true, none-the-less and i just finished watching it so the horror is still fresh.
6. commenting on your also-moving-in-neighbors' eeyore doll is only a good idea if those new neighbors are three-year-old girls. in the case of two strapping young lads, keep your mouth shut.
7. moving two miles is, in some ways, worse than moving two-thousand miles. profusely and repeatedly thank the people helping you make six trips, back and forth, especially if moving in and/or out of a multi-level building. and if they have a truck.
8. moving boxes of 'miscellaneous paper' is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.
9. lots of not heavy stuff gets not not heavy when put in a box together.
10. look both ways before crossing the street.

silence of the goats

the men who stare at goats, a must-see movie. funny, cynical, outrageous, and unbelievably, true. i can't even tell you the plot, you'll just have to watch it and fall in love with it like i did. george clooney, jeff bridges, ewan mcgregor, and kevin spacey, so awesome.

road paint

as soon as the first thaw happened, sometime in march (?), the road construction crews came out en masse in madison. roads all over town were torn up, blocked, re-routed, orange-cone covered, drilled, dug. lane closures have ensured that traffic all summer has been nice and congested. as we head in to fall, many of the roads have been re-tarred and opened for business. for the last couple of weeks, many of the roads i take to work and campus have been re-opened, but not yet re-painted. no lines means, to most people, one large lane - very luxurious (seinfeld, anyone?). there are people, however, who are confident they know where the lines would be if they were there and make their own lanes. it's great because not having lines doesn't create enough chaos, we need those falsely confident people on the road too. oh, and have i mentioned the millions of bicyclists in madison? no lines, interpreted by a bicyclist, means the entire road is a bike lane (i'd like to take a moment to disabuse any reading bicyclist of this idea).

this week is paint-the-finished-roads week in madison; instead of orange cones, there are construction workers in the middle of the road. i've been told the workers are worth more points than the orange cones if you hit one. gone are my luxury lanes, back to being told in which ten feet of road i'm allowed to drive. it's kind of a relief and kind of a disappointment, all at the same time. there are still a couple of months left of road construction so the fun isn't over yet, but with the first frost, the construction ends, leaving us with nicely re-paved and re-painted roads to be covered by snow, ice, and slush. gotta love driving in madison!

baltimore - episode two

i am the future of prevention. that's what the head lady of the federal government organization said this morning as she opened the general session of the conference. she didn't say those exact words, but that was her message. i felt very important.

this afternoon, a guy i recognized from the conference walked into the women's restroom. fortunately, i was the only one who saw him and i pretended i didn't. haven't seen him since.

the elevators here at the hotel have a security mechanism that forces you to enter your room key card into a slot before it will allow you to stop on your floor. i'm pretty sure this security measure is to prevent hooligans from accessing guests rooms or kids from running around all wild and crazy-like. last night i wanted to visit a co-worker whose room is on the floor below mine. as the elevator would not cooperate, i had to think outside of the vertical transport box. the stairs! now, you might think that the secluded, windowless, concrete stairwell might be a better place for a security system than a glass elevator where occupants are visible to everyone in the lobby and on the mezzanine, but nope, nada, zip. hooligans, this way if you please.

my co-worker and i went to a lovely restaurant for dinner in downtown baltimore. it's a good thing we make each other laugh because the service was lousy and the food was bland. but the restaurant did provide a complementary shuttle to and from the hotel so we didn't have to walk in the hot, sticky, don't-want-to-touch-yourself, sweat-with-no-exertion, evening weather. speaking of...

it's 6:15 pm and 90 degrees outside. according to the weather channel, it's 90 degrees but 'feels like' 103. how does that work? what kind of guage is used to determine what it 'feels like'? is there a formula involved? if it's a 'feeling', how can there be a standardized objective measurement instrument involved? do they send several people outside, ask them what the temperature 'feels like', and then average their responses? that's neither standardized nor objective. i'm not sure about this touchy-feely weather business, i believe further exploration is required.

i had dinner tonight with the same co-worker as last night. i've made her facebook status two days in a row. i'm pretty sure that makes us besties. move over miley.

baltimore - episode one

i'm being sent to baltimore, maryland by my funder/employer as the evaluator and representative of the south dakota grant-equivalent of what i work on for wisconsin. got that? in real life, i evaluate a federally-funded grant for wisconsin. for the conference, i'm representing the south dakota evaluator on the same grant (minus a few thousand details that are even more boring than this introduction). all that being said, these are the adventures of my trip to baltimore.

first flight, 7am, haven't had a full cup of coffee yet: sat in the wrong seat; apparently, 22e looks very similar to 22a that early and caffeine-deprived in the morning. then, as the plane was taking off, i was looking out the window, watching the flappy things on the wing and i thought, i could die in a fiery plane crash. and then i thought, why does it have to be fiery? it could be just a plain ol' plane crash. or some other kind of plane incident. an explosion perhaps? but then we were back to the fiery. maybe a hit and run? but when would i be walking along a tarmac? i guess i wouldn't have to be the hit-tee, i could be in the plane that does the hit-ting, but then, how would i die in that scenario? i guess, maybe, if we hit something really big and solid. but that would just result in a crash, probably fiery, and the plane wouldn't really be able to 'run' away from it. the plane could lose power mid-air and free fall to the ground...ending in a fiery crash. the plane could lose power mid-air and fall in to a body of water, the impact killing everyone on board. but then, why would our seats serve as flotation devices if that scenario were likely? that just doesn't make sense. the flight attendants could be serving beverages and teeny-tiny bags of peanuts and i could choke on a peanut and suffocate. but i'm cpr-certified, i know how to save myself.

we started our descent into detroit as i came to the conclusion that if i am going to die in a plane-related incident, it's just going to have to be a fiery crash.