Focus.

A little something I'm lacking lately. Luckily, it's summer, so it's not tooooo important. Except when I adventure around the jungle/garden/backyard with my camera.

This was the first time in months, and certainly since I've been back in Maryland, that I've gotten my DSLR out. For shame, self. I do still have some photographic proof of rad adventures I've been on that might get posted sometime. No promises though.

My deepest fear...

...is not that I am inadequate. It is that I will leave for the summer before the mangoes on the tree in the backyard are ripe.

 

I might be referencing this quote, attributed to various people and apparently quite popular among my peers.  

Hello again, and happy mother's day. 

At this moment, the little girl in the picture below is hiding in my closet.

Scratch that, she just jumped out and yelled "Boo!" at me. Ten times.

  

While she was looking out the window right now, she asked if maybe we shouldn't clean the mango picker because someone might have sat on it naked. 

Do you know what a mango picker looks like? 

Check it:

If you've Skyped with me while I've been living in this house, you've probably spent a minute or two with her coming to sit next to me and staring into the camera, not saying anything. I think that might be the only time she isn't talking. She's a pretty great source of entertainment and comes in on a daily basis and says something along the lines of "Hey, my mom knows I'm here. ...wanna watch some bideos?"

Attending college, my interactions with small folk are pretty limited, and I'm glad to have her around. Even if sometimes she knocks on the bathroom door and tells me that I'm brushing my teeth too loud and her baby brother is trying to sleep.

There is no need for paid entertainment with a precocious, outgoing four year old around, that's for sure.

Well lookee here.

It's a crab. A rock crab, maybe? It's certainly more colorful than the (sand?) crabs that frequent the beaches that I frequent.

After popping over to look at my actual blog site, I realized I have new followers! Hello!

As Promised.

Those nerd-tastic photos that were anxiously awaiting posting are here, for your viewing pleasure, now. You will now gain some insight into what went through my head in the hours and hours I spent going through shelves and shelves of books for my current work project. (Also, I send my apologies to the poor library workers who had to reshelf all of those shelves and shelves of books, over the weeks that I was buried in the stacks. Universe, make sure that apology gets to the right person, por favor.)

  

I would look at the cards in the back of the books (For entertainment, naturally. A girl's gotta get her kicks somewhere, right?) and wonder about who checked out the books before. Given the subject matter, it's almost a guarantee that it was for an assignment- this stuff isn't light reading. 

People were reading this book before I was a twinkle in my father's eye, as they say. I wonder where they were from and where they are now. Would they remember checking this particular bit of paper and binding out? I also wonder about the timing- the spurts of interest and the years lapsed between check-outs. Wouldn't it be a bummer to be a book that just sat there, languishing for years in between times that people decided the information on it's pages was worth reading? Sad. (...I might have a habit of over anthropomorphizing objects. Maybe.)

...Now that I have firmly established what a nerd I am, on to the next!

 

I thought that in light of recent world events, this comment left by some unknown reader was appropriate. Also, I think the words that are visible on this page are entertaining. Hope you do too!

Snapshots

I might have declared this week my unofficial spring break, and spent hours in a swimsuit everyday. There is a distinct possibility it might also have been worth it, now that I'm jumping into the last three weeks of the semester and start exams and presentations Monday. 

On Tuesday, I went and did the Laie Falls hike with a couple of friends and took some pictures along the way. 

If I could identify any of these for you, I would, but my Hawaiian flora knowledge is sadly lacking. The third one might be a close up of a Cook Pine tree. Maybe?  

Things to Be Thankful For

Last night, I was sitting in my room contemplating whether or not to do homework (it's all part of the process, you know), and courtesy of facebook updates, found out about the earthquake that had hit Japan, not even an hour after it happened. Along with that news came the news that we were under tsunami advisory with it expected to hit around three in the morning. You might recall last year's Tsunami Tsaturday. I did a little news-searching and received a plethora of texts from friends and eventually decided to pack up and head for the hills, along with everyone else in the house. I contacted family (and won a prize for favorite child in doing so. FINALLY.) and spent the next five hours sleeping in the backseat of the car, trekking up and down the hill a couple of times, demonstrating yoga positions for my roommate, texting, and hoping and praying that nothing would happen. Eventually, around five am, we headed back home and jumped (that might be an exaggeration, we were too tired to jump, but I did have to climb through a window) happily into bed.

This time around, I have no feelings of "Well, that was a waste!" like I did last year. I am just glad to be home safe and am thinking of all those who aren't. One of my good friends lives in Tokyo and can't get back to her family because the transportation isn't working. Other friends have lived in Sendai and are waiting to hear back about people they knew.

There are so many things to be thankful for with this situation- that the tsunami didn't come, that we have the technology to tell us about these things, that communication enables us almost instant contact with the world, that there are so many people who care about me and want to check in and make sure everything is okay.

Also, that it calmed down enough that I could still get some beach time in this afternoon. ;) It's hard to not be selfish in a situation like this and think about all the things that could have happened but didn't. I hope I'll appreciate all of those, but still keep in mind everything that did happen in Japan and elsewhere. The clean-up isn't going to be fun, and I know people's lives will be different for a very long time.

When will my reflection show...

I hope you realize that by whatever path you used to get to this blog, you were signing yourself up for some fantastic nineties pop-culture references. If you didn't catch the one from the title, you are missing out and need to grab a bean-bag chair, a bowl of stove top cooked popcorn (which is obviously far superior to the kind that comes in a bag, covered in radioactive orange grease) and a copy of Mulan and study up, because clearly a vital part of your education is severely lacking.

This is probably the last of the old-school projects, but there may be a couple more to excavate, we'll just have to wait and see.

There are some nerd-tastic pictures anxiously awaiting being shared that I've taken in during my many hours spent in the library as part of my latest project for work. If that statement right there doesn't move you to the edge of your seat, you should probably check your pulse, because you might be dead, or at least mostly dead. (See, there I go, another pop-culture reference, even if this one is late eighties. I am full of them tonight.)

Annnnyways. Have a beautiful week. I would tell you to spend it on the beach, enjoying sunshine, but that isn't feasible for everyone.

Also, just for fun, read this. It apparently also a night for wikipedia links.

Blue Like Jazz

Alternative title: Super Saxy

Another old school art assignment, albeit more interesting than the last one. I repeat the "Don't judge me." sentiment, even though it's inevitable.

The title of this post came from a book a friend recommended to me a couple of years ago, surprisingly enough entitled Blue Like Jazz- Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller. I like it. You might too. I tried to flip through and find a quote that might entice someone, somewhere to read it, but hadn't underlined any of the stories I remembered. Bummer.

And that is that.
 

Chocolate, Vanilla, Choose.

Pretty early on as a nanny, I learned that posing open-ended questions such as "What do you want to do after school?" or "What do you want to eat?" to the oldest boy would result in ten minutes of us staring at the menu or going through possible options before he would make up his mind, an inevitably he would change it two more times before it was for sure.

The only real way to prevent mulling over decisions for longer than the activity would take was to offer a few suggestions and make him pick one of those, and provide a general time limit and go from there. 

One of the things I hate most is sitting around going "Whaddaya wanna do?" "I dunno, whudduyuwanna do?" I'm guilty of it, for sure, but isn't doing anything better than that? 

Right now, I'm kind of at that "I dunno, whudduyuwanna do?" stage. In a big way. 

My summer plans are up in the air. Am I doing research on an even more tropical island paradise than the one on which I currently reside? Should I spend some big bucks and fly home and take a rad course through the university out there (why yes, I would be helping to excavate one of the places where Frederick Douglass was once a slave, thanks for asking!), do I want to bum around here and enjoy my last undergrad summer? 

I don't have a dang clue. 

Have I mentioned that I graduate this year? It's happening. Do you know what the single most common question I get when that comes up in conversation is? I bet you can figure it out. It goes something along the lines of "What are you going to do now?" 

Besides scaring the living bejeebers (that's the anatomically correct term, btw), it reminds me that there are no concrete, or wood, or cotton, or rubber plans. There are a million options floating around that I think would be fun, or interesting or actually help me on some sort of career path (Wait... am I supposed to have one of those? Right now? Are you sure about that?), but narrowing those down is simply not working currently.

What I've been leading up to with all of this is:

If someone could make my life, or at the very least, my summer, a chocolate-vanilla-choose situation, I'd be much obliged. Please and thank you.