I always eat burgers when I travel.*

I am sitting in a restaurant/bar in SFO, waiting for my flight to go home and eating a delicious cheeseburger with fries when I pull out my latest book (thanks for all the suggestions, by the way), In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan. The cover exhorts me to Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants. I take another look at my non-local, non-plant-based meal, and decide to blog instead.

*I used to always eat McDonalds when traveling, but most aeroports don't have them anymore. This makes me sad.

Dilemma

If I move back east next year, I will be on the east coast, near my friends and family, and possibly near all the interesting jobs.
If I stay in California, I get to keep in touch with my San Francisco friends more easily, enjoy better weather, and continue the California adventure.
Right now, I'm feeling pulled to New York. Is that dumb?

That library book sound makes me happy.

Up until I was about thirteen, I was an avid reader. I read all the time, even spending many elementary school recesses sitting at the edge of the play yard, my nose stuck in whatever book I was enthralled with at the time. My parents used to have to come in and check on my in the middle of the night, since I usually stayed up way past my bedtime reading.
When I got to high school, though, I kind of stopped reading. I quickly figured out that my teachers were assigning me many more pages a night than I could ever get done, so I figured out what actually needed to be read and what I could learn by taking notes in class, which was most of it. I was always busy, so I never had any time to seek out fun books, let alone read them.
This continued through college. Every now and then, especially on vacations and a couple of times during my year as a nanny, I would find some book, usually of the Chick Lit persuasion, and read it in two days. I would remember how much I enjoyed getting lost in a story, even one with as badly-developed characters and thin plots as the books I was reading. Then I would quickly forget again, because I didn't have a book right in front of me to pick up as soon as I finished my last one.
When I graduated last June, I realized that I would finally have time to devote to reading again. I read something like six books in as many weeks. When I moved to San Francisco, I brought along Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, because my friend Lisel told me it was good, and it seemed like it would last me until I was able to get a library card. Since then, I've been reading nonstop, and it's wonderful. Last week, I took People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks out of the library, because Emily has been talking about it for upwards of a year, only to return it four days later because I wasn't able to put it down, so I finished it that quickly. Right now I'm reading the Yokota Officer's Club by Sarah Bird because its cover had plenty of pink on it and it looked good. I'm not sure what I'm going to read next, but I'd better decide soon, because given the rate I'm going, I'm going to need a new book tomorrow.
What's your favorite book of all time? What are you reading right now?

I am covered in millions of tiny pink threads.

Now that I've started working on this damn quilt, I have to finish it.
I haven't even finished cutting everything out yet, and I don't have a sewing machine. This is going to take forever.

People are Nice

Five minutes ago, my phone rang. It was my mom, calling to tell me about something she saw.
"I was just at the five and ten in Arlington Heights, and at the barber shop next door, they had a sign that said that they give free Job Interview Haircuts. In this awful economy, people are really trying to take care of each other."
Isn't that wonderful?

Zzzzzzz

Today on the train into work, I sat in the middle of a row of four seats. Two stops before I got off, I looked to my left and right, only to realize that every single other person in my row was asleep. ASLEEP! On MUNI!
That's weird, right? This city is strange. Very strange.

It has been forty eight thousand days.

I just babysat tonight. It was really fun to hang out with one child, actually get to have a conversation with them and not have to manage behavior. It helped that this child was adorable and super easy, but the whole experience helped me to remember why I love kids. Which is really nice.