cookies!

It's girl scout cookie time! Huzzah! I ordered my samoas and tagalongs (or whatever name they're going by this year) yesterday.

In celebration, here's a best cookies in the world post. First off these petit ecolier cookies are incredible. Like most things with chocolate, I like them best refrigerated. The package claims they're made in France and they're "European biscuits", but really they're just a butter cookie with a hunk of chocolate on top. It's a smore without the marshmallow and they're terribly addictive.

I feel sorry for the person nibbling that cookie on the cover of the box. They can't even cookie right.

Walker's shortbread cookies are from overseas too. The box says Scotland. There are four ingredients in this cookie: flour, sugar, butter, and salt and I think that's part of what makes them so good. They're simple; they're extraordinary.

I have no idea what makes a Persian cookie different from any other kind of cookie, but there was a guy at work who would bring in Persian cookies from a nearby bakery whenever we had a celebration and he started bringing me a secret side stash because I became so addicted to them.

I could eat an entire bag of Keebler's iced animal cookies in a sitting, so I think my local grocery stores did me a favor by no longer carrying them. I know I could just buy some off of Amazon, but maybe it's better this way.

places I've loved and left

I've lived in Texas since I was in middle school, but I still feel like I was "raised" in Indiana. My family moved down to Texas from Indiana due my dad's job. It was a pretty big deal considering that neither of my parent's had any friends or family in the south and they were hauling five kids, a dog, and two birds with them.

We lived in a small house in rural Indiana. We always passed a few dairy farms and a lot of corn fields on the bus to school.

Our house had three bedrooms and one bathroom and seven people living in it. It didn't seem cramped, because that's what I was used to. We spent a lot of time outdoors anyway. We had five acres in our backyard that was heavily forested and most days after school, I'd wander in the woods with the family dog, or ride my bike down the dead end road to play with friends.

We moved to Texas during our winter school break. Everything was dead and flat with an occasional scrawny tree, nothing at all like the towering oaks in Indiana. I hated it. I knew there would be no more backyard exploring anymore. How could you explore a giant grass filled field?

My father was making a lot more money with his new Texas job, so our house was considerably larger than the Indiana one. We had a two story house with two separate wings for us kids, each with two bedrooms and a bathroom and a master bedroom and two bathrooms downstairs. We had a pond and a pool with a hot tub, slide, and diving board. My dad was building a barn so we could have horses.

It didn't matter to 10 year old me. I still hated Texas and I was convinced I always would. The first summer we moved to Texas there was a pretty severe drought. Everything died. It was like a second winter. I remember stepping into the tall grass of our west field with the intent of exploring one day, and about ten startled grasshoppers flew into the air, which set off a rippling affect of them startling new grasshoppers a few feet away, and so on and so forth. I decided against exploring that day. My dad shot a eight foot snake one day in the back yard. We let one of our pet rabbits out to eat grass in the back yard and found it dead an hour later, bitten to death by a hill of red ants. To me, Texas was a circle of Hell. Of course, I slowly came around. It was mostly the view from the upstairs porch that did it for me.

Every day I had an unobscured view of the sunset. This was new to me. I don't think I'd ever seen a sunset in Indiana. Too many trees. I became a fan of thunderstorms too. Not that we didn't have any in Indiana; Texas thunderstorms were just a different caliber. Some sunny summer days we'd be swimming in the pool and see a hint of dark blue/grey clouds on the horizon and five minutes later it would feel like the world was ending; wind gusts, a dramatic drop in the temperature and lightening everywhere.Whenever I would go back to visit relatives up North, I would feel claustrophobic and miss the big open skies of my new home.

After about 7 years in this house, it was time to move again for my dad's job. Since it was only four hours away from our current home and I was older, I was a lot less opinionated about that move. That new house was our first experience with living in a subdivision and my father quickly decided after a few months of living there that he'd lived in the country too long to enjoy suburban life. So two years later when my dad got the opportunity to move back to the first Texas town we had lived in, he took it.

We lived in a rental house in a nearby town for a a little under a year while my parents had their new house built. I fell deeply in love with that rental house. It was in a tiny town with a population under 100. The house itself was part of a defunct cattle ranch. There were still cows on the property, but it definitely wasn't what it had been. There was a main house (the one we were renting) and two smaller houses in the back for ranch hands/workers. There were also three barns/outbuildings in the back. On the top of one was a dance-hall/meeting room with a bar. The main barn had a office upstairs with glass windows all around so the manager could look down and see what was happening below. There was also a water silo and an outdoor arena with bleachers like the ones you see at rodeos. The place was like a ghost town and I found something romantic and intriguing about it.

The house was very old and had quite a few quirks. Sometimes I felt like it didn't provide much more protection from the outdoors than a tent. Over the time we lived there we had a flea infestation, a skunk in the air vents, and 30 wasps mysteriously appeared in the master bedroom one winter morning. We got used to checking our cereal for moths before we poured our milk in. The air conditioning downstairs didn't work and a door that worked just fine 15 minutes ago would become stuck in the door frame and refuse to budge. One day I seriously considered climbing out a window because I couldn't find an exterior door in the house that would open so I could leave for work. Due to all of the livestock, there were a lot of coyotes in the area and we could hear them howling almost every night. One morning I walked up the driveway to move a tree limb, only to find that it was a cow leg. An entire cow leg.

Of course when you live in a ghost town, there are bound to be ghost stories. Almost everyone in my family has a tale of the unexplained from that house. One of my sisters heard someone downstairs moving around boxes, and assumed it was my father when she saw his shadow on the wall. She crept down the stairs to scare him, only to be scared himself when my father walked behind her down the stairs, since he had been upstairs all along. My brother swore he heard "opera type" music playing near the water silo one day. As for me, I never had anything happen that I couldn't explain. The part that creeped me out the most was never feeling like I was alone in the house, even when I was. I became accustomed to hearing what sounded like footsteps and doors opening so much at night before I fell asleep that I just started ignoring them. I regret never taking any pictures of the house. I only have this picture of my sisters giving two stray puppies they found a bath on the driveway.

And a random picture I took of the donkeys in one of the fields. I heard they kept donkeys in with the cows to help keep coyotes away (supposedly they're more prone to make a fuss and kick when threatened) but the donkeys always seemed to segregate themselves from the cows, so I'm not sure how much of a help they really were.

work hangover

It's my first day off after my 70 hour work week and I feel like crap.  But that's okay, because that's how it normally goes.

It bothered me when I would feel tired and depressed for no apparent reason a few days a month. Until I figured out the pattern. My bad day would always be every other Thursday: my first day off of work. I now refer to it as my work hangover. I try to be kinder to myself on these days, tell myself that I don't have to tackle all of the chores I've been ignoring while at work just yet. I give myself permission to wallow on the couch or vegetate in front of the computer. I feel like it's my mind trying to adjust after ten hours a day of goGoGO! to nothing.

I remember watching the last scene of Zero Dark Thirty and trying to figure out some deep philosophical reason that Jessica Chastain was crying on the plane. But maybe it's nothing super deep. Maybe she was just in the beginning stages of a very serious work hangover. After ten years of doing nothing but breathing, eating and sleeping her job, I'm sure she had some very serious adjustments to make. Stay strong, Maya. Stay strong.

books!

As a Christmas gift two years ago my parents surprised me by buying every book and C.D. I had on my Amazon wishlist. I was pretty shocked since my parents almost never shop online, and also because I had forgotten I even had most of those things on a wishlist. They were things I was going to get around to purchasing "eventually" and I just never could find a reason to justify buying them. I loved those gifts from my parents. I was awash in a sea of wonderful books and music for the next year.

Last week I realized that I was almost done with The Brothers Karamazov and I had no unread books in my nightstand, so I went onto Amazon to buy something new. I saw all of the books that had been languishing on my wish list for the past year and decided to treat myself and just buy them all in one swoop. I was very excited when my box of books arrived today.

Since I only read during my breaks at work and before bed, these should keep me busy for a while.

sketch books

I used to draw. Not nearly as much as I used to write in journals though. Drawing was more of a way to kill time. It wasn't terribly therapeutic for me, just fun. And I definitely wouldn't say that I was ever very good at it.

I fully expect to get the urge to draw again...eventually. It's always came and went. I used to have a lot of sketchbooks filled with half done drawings. The only thing that ever really motivated me to complete a drawing was knowing that I was going to give it away as a gift. Most of the ones I completed were done so with a particular person in mind. However, I never got the nerve to give them away nearly half the time.

When I moved into my house I threw away most of my half done drawings and scribblings for the sake of space. Going through what's left of them now, I can tell there were definite "phases" I went through.

In high school, I was all about scribbly smudged silhouette people.

University was rip offs of landscapes from photos and paintings.

The year I graduated from university was birds. For some reason, whenever I stated to draw, about halfway through the lines would end up looking like birds to me, so that's how I'd finish and color them.

The bird time period is my favorite, just because before that I always knew exactly what I wanted to draw or at least had some vague intent, but these birds were just curvy lines my subconsciousness decided upon.

journal - emotional mess = blog?

I used to journal. I started in middle school. When I was that age I would have numerous and vivid dreams and I used my journal to document them. Over time, I treated it more as a diary and through high school and university my journals were logs of my heartbreaks, torments, and perceived inadequacies, with some bad poetry and free writing mixed in. After university, my journals took on a more "what is my place in the universe" kind of tone.

I still have a journal in my nightstand, but over the last three years only about fifteen pages have been filled. I absolutely blame Perry for this. I used to have such a craving to write my thoughts down. It was comforting to see my confusions with the world on paper. I would go back to my writing later and try to make sense of them and separate the muddled emotional mess from the true problem. It helped me a lot throughout my life.

Only my life hasn't been confusing since Perry came along. I distinctly remember writing in my journal years ago, lamenting how love, romantic love had never brought me peace. Love was always dizzying highs and lows. But now I think I have it. To me Perry is peace.

And it does disappoint me, frustrate me to know that I am fundamentally no different than where I was three years ago, and yet my view of myself and my life have changed so much...just because of a boy. The idea that I needed a romantic partner to "complete" my life has always been abhorrent to me.  And maybe it's not true. I've had other partners, and none have them brought me this peace and calm.

2012

For this new year's eve Perry and I went out to eat and saw a movie. As I was driving to the restaurant, I thought of how we spent the previous new year's eve (at a party at a friends house) and it seemed so long ago. I didn't think 2012 was that eventful of a year but it really was. My niece was born. Perry moved in with me and graduated from university. I started working at a new hospital closer to home. I visited Washington D.C. and Cozumel for vacation, and Chicago for work.

There were several new artists/bands that I started listening to this year so I decided to do a 2012 recap of all of them. I'd like to make a disclaimer and say that these artists/bands aren't all exactly "new" but they are very much in the new to me category.

I've been a fan of the band Spoon for a while now, so when I heard that the lead singer of the band was going to be working on some new stuff as The Divine Fits, I already knew I'd be purchasing their album. It didn't disappoint me.

I first heard of Kimbra due to her part in the song Somebody That I Used to Know. It was a good song, it just got overplayed. I'm not a huge fan of pop music in general, but I feel that she does it well.

I heard about Rumspringa on someone's "best of" list...from 2010. This is great idie rock. Whoever is on lead guitar does an amazing job.

I was introduced to The Shakedown Project when I saw this video on a comedy website I visit frequently. It's a great example of one of my favorite things: stripped down garage rock.

This is slick indie rock, which I'm not always a fan of, but Delta Spirit's vocals and buildups get me.

After hearing this song, I wanted to like Rilo Kiley, but alas, this is the only song I could find that I really enjoy. However, I enjoy it so much I had to put it on this list.

vacation

Well, it's been so long since I've posted that I'm a bit worried about the length of this entry. Things have happened, but I don't really feel like writing a long post. I've been quiet for the past week or so because I was working and then went on a cruise with my parents, brother, and sister. I'll talk about that later. Actually I guess I can just do it now, since there's not much to tell. We went on a short trip to Cozumel, Mexico. The part where we actually visited Mexico was nice, but the rest of it was just napping and eating on the boat. I went on a cruise about five years ago and swore I'd never go on one again. It wasn't a bad time, but it wasn't exactly a good time. I don't think I'll do it a third time. Really. I extra promised myself this time.

Anyway, back to the work week before I left on vacation. Christmas day was kind of interesting. When I drove to work that morning, there were some severe thunderstorms in the area, but by the time I left it was a winter wonderland outside. I had to clear off a few inches of snow off of my car before I could drive home. By the time I made it home, it looked like this in my backyard.

This is a pretty significant snow fall for north Texas. We normally don't get snow until early February.

I was a bit worried about my driving to work the next day since I knew all of the slush I had driven through was going to freeze overnight. So, I did the thing I always judged other women for doing: I had my significant other drive me to work in bad weather. Perry's been done with school for a few weeks now and won't start as a substitute teacher until school starts up again in January, so he's just been hanging around the house for the duration. Actually, I called him up a few days prior to to this and had him jump my car battery in the parking lot at work. I could have called the on duty security officer to do it, but it was nice have Perry available and only 15 minutes away. I told him that I was really enjoying having a stay at home boyfriend.

I was planning on driving to my parent's house to see them on Christmas, but the weather made a nice excuse to stay home with Perry, drink tea, and watch Christmas in Connecticut on amazon prime.

Old romantic comedies are my mental comfort food. I don't really know why. I have no childhood memories associated with them and I'm sure if you put modern actors in the same roles, I'd hate it. There's so much blatant sexism in them, but for some reason, maybe since it's so blatant, I don't mind. I'm a complicated person.