Char-What?

Charlotte.  Back in my home.  It's funny how much it feels like home, especially since I've lived out of two bags for a month and half.  My old "home" is really just my parents house now, and even though I grew up on the bunk beds they put back in my room after I stole all my other furniture for down here, it didn't feel like my room anymore.

As excited as I am to be back in Charlotte (after a mere 14 hours in the car starting at 5 am), I've encountered a few problems:

1. My phone is dead- maybe this doesn't seem like that huge of an issue except that...
2. My charger is missing- okay, that complicates things a little more, but why don't I use my car charger?
3. My car is about 2500 miles past its oil change.  Whoops.

Oh well.  I need to tame this explosion of things that is in my room right now.  I hate unpacking.

The Stages of Teaching

We were given this graph of the stages of a first year teacher sometime in October for a TFA session on having "balance" in your life.  HAH.  That's how most of us responded to that, if we could manage to untuck our heads from the fetal position.  One of my friends posted this on Facebook and got a pretty funny line of responses, mostly questioning whether rejuvenation would ever ACTUALLY happen.

I re-did the graph to more accurately show the stages of a first year teacher.  Please note the area where the plot line drops off the graph into no man's land (approximately September-November).

Additional Photos

I've been looking at old photos at home, and happened to stumble upon some from the infamous Cousin's Camp that I blogged about last week.

At left is the playhouse in all its glory, and below are two pictures of all the cousins.  To me, the funniest part is the fact that all the kids are doing whatever they want in the third picture, with my mom and dad just looking away not caring anymore. Wonder if Mollie's arm is broken there?

More About That Girl

My boyfriend reads Barstool Sports religiously (as most 20-35 year old men on the East Coast probably do) and I usually give him a pretty hard time about it.  Surprisingly, I don't love watching him pore over the Red Sox, weird-looking criminals with even weirder sounding crimes (i.e. does this look like the face of a man who would lure children into his broken down van with hot dogs and cotton candy flavored condoms?), and hot local girls.  Even so, I caught a post about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo over his shoulder... which made me laugh, mostly because it's true and also because I just blogged about it.  Women ARE reading this book, including my 80+ year old grandmother.  So all three males that read my blog- follow this advice and maybe it'll score you a date (possibly with Nana).

Upgrade

One of the few reasons I'm excited to get back to Charlotte- being able to join the Mac community.  I figure that getting myself a new little MacBook Pro will be ample distraction from leaving my family and friends and boyfriend until school starts.  After all, for the past month I've pretty much been able to bum around with whoever I want for however long I want.  I've extended two-day visits into weeklong stays, driven 400 miles on a day's notice, and used the "Let me check my schedule" sarcasm every time someone has asked me if I can come to a party.  It's a pretty awesome feeling, but knowing that I'll be going back to real life where work and yoga and eating and sleeping leave very little time for extra activities made getting a new little toy a very attractive distraction option.  The only problem is the fact that I now want to throw my old computer out a window... I'll have to suppress that urge until next week.

Camera Insurance

Yesterday I finally pulled the trigger and bought a new camera- my sixth one since I started college.  The quality of the cameras I was receiving (usually on my birthday or for Christmas) slowly began to decrease, and for good reason.  I mean, what kind of person needs a new camera once a year?

People that know me, especially people that know me from college, know that I LOVE taking pictures.  Some nights, I would come home to a memory card with over 100 pictures on it.  It would be closer to a film of the night's event than to random snapshots.  Part of the problem is that I used my camera at all times (and often alcohol is involved), so my little electronic friends would be done faster than most.  Following is a short list of how each of my cameras met its demise.

1. Camera #1: my 17th birthday present, it made it through high school without a scratch.  But at the first tropical party at Trinity, some kind of sticky beverage got underneath the buttons, making it very difficult to work them unless you could put up over 150 pounds on benchpress.
2. Camera #2: bought hastily to capture our family vacation in the Outer Banks in August, it lasted until New Years without incident.  It fell to its death in a toilet (note: a clean toilet) at a party in New York City, and although it still SORT OF worked after that, the pictures had weird lines through them.  Then it fell in a drink concoction and it was DEFINITELY done.
3. Camera #3: my 21st birthday present that was bought with my upcoming semester abroad in Rome.  I loved it.  It got through my 21st birthday celebration, Thanksgiving festivities, and Christmas at the beach in Florida.  Unfortunately, my purse got knocked out of the car at a gas station on our drive back north.  Purse: recovered.  Wallet with credit cards: recovered.  Cash and camera: gone (along with all our pictures from Disney).
4. Camera #4: I couldn't go to Rome without a camera, so I got one before I left that took awesome panoramic shots... probably the best feature on it, especially when I used it to create pictures combining one person's lower body with another person's head.  Somehow, this one stayed firmly on my wrist through a near-arrest by the Spanish police in Barcelona, red wine fueled club nights in Rome, sprints through Prague to avoid homeless men peeing in the street, and all the European gypsies that my mother cautioned me would chop off my arm with a machete to get to my valuables.  First week back at school and it got dropped onto a coffee table.  For some reason, a lens bent up at a 45 degree angle won't take pictures... weird, right?
5. Camera #5: Christmas, four months later.  I was hurting.  I had missed the documentation of MAJOR senior year events.  Then what did I find in my stocking?!  A new Kodak!  It was a Christmas miracle.  So maybe it was the cheapest model they made.  Maybe it was bigger than my first camera with its five-year-old technology.  I didn't care.  Fast forward to about two months ago.  After a night out in uptown Charlotte with way too much ridiculous dancing, one of my friends was missing.  We couldn't leave without her.  Unfortunately, I didn't make the most practical choice of footwear.  Solution?  Take off my four and a half inch stilettos while we waited for her to meet us.  Not wanting to stand on the bare pavement, I decided to stand on my purse (after taking out my electronics, of course).  My camera is probably still sitting on that lamppost, waiting to be picked back up.

The cashier asked if I wanted camera insurance on this new one as I was buying it.  I thought about it...

"Does that cover spilling things on it?"
"Uh, no.  Only internal problems with the camera."
"Oh, so like a lens that gets broken when you drop it."
"No, because that would be your fault."

What's the point of insurance then?  I can only hope that it survives this weekend in Boston...

What a Bummer

One of the most mood deflating things that can happen to me is doing something I hate (i.e. get up at 5:30) for something I love (i.e. 6 am yoga class) and then getting stopped by some impassable obstacle (i.e my dad's truck at the end of the driveway with a dead battery).  And all before I had coffee.  I would have jumped it, but considering I learned how to do that from Michael Scott (see Season 3, Episode 14 intro), I decided it might be better to just go inside and wait for someone else to help me with it.  See post title for my current mood.