2 wheels

I just bought a bike. Like 1 hour ago. It is a used bike of a good brand that fit what I was looking for. You know that feeling you get when you've just bought something and you're not sure you made the right decision? Well, I don't have buyer's remorse; I have non-buyer's remorse. My mistake was that I went to three bike shops before I went to the used bike shop where I ended up buying. At one of those three, I fell in LOVE with a bike. Love. It was such a sweet bike and such a great deal for the bike. The problem was that it was more than I originally budgeted. I could have afforded it, but I really should save that extra money for other things. Plus, one of the reasons for buying a bike is that I wanted something cheap that I could commute with and feel ok about locking up and leaving and not incredibly disappointed if it were to be stolen. My new used bike fits this need. The other one, not so much. But it was so hard to be a responsible adult and let the dream of owning that sweet, sweet bike go. Good-bye, Trek 7.3 FX; I'll never forget our test ride together. :)

A work of beauty...beautiful components...rides like a road bike
with more of a mountain-bike-like geometry

goldfish debate

I'm working on materials for my lesson in the preschools tomorrow. I'm using the Goldfish Colors crackers for part of the lesson (genius that these were created...go so well with Rainbow Fish!). Due to being lazy and not wanting to go downstairs and dig through our materials box in the clinicians' work room for our crackers but needing to know the colors, I google image searched them and came across this gem to share.

two stories i love (ripped straight from the headlines of my facebook status)

1. Last week Brian was in Florida for meetings related to a project he is working on in collaboration with about seven other people at universities across the country. One of those people (a professor at Vanderbilt, I believe?) was talking about doing service work in Paraguay. Brian asked him about it, and it turned out it was through MCC, that the guy and his wife are Mennonite, and that he and/or his wife grew up in and/or went to Bluffton!

2. Last night we went to a Mardi Gras celebration on campus and were eating at a table with two other graduate students, one of which Brian had met before. The other was the neighbor of that guy. We were all talking about being glad we went to smaller schools for our undergraduate degrees. The neighbor guy said he was from Indiana. Brian asked him where and he said close to Notre Dame. Brian and I looked at each other, and I said, "Goshen is close to..." The guy piped up with, "Goshen -- that's where I'm from." I had to ask, "You're not Mennonite, are you?" Yep, he sure is (but he didn't go to Goshen or to Bethany).

heart cookies.

So I didn't win any romance awards on Valentine's Day. I didn't even stay home. I got together with some friends to paint Valentine's cookies. It was really very therapeutic, and I was super impressed with how brilliant the colors were! Big shout out to Joce and Cammie for making the cookie dough, rolling and cutting all the cookies, and setting up our painting supplies. The cookies were really yummy. Next we want to try painting bread. Oh, and we also shared a special heart pizza together, aw. (In my defense, B was prepping for his crazy comprehensive oral exam coming up later that week, so I wasn't the worst wife ever, right?)

a sample of the cookies we created

dinner out

Tonight we went out for dinner to celebrate Valentine's Day. We went to our favorite Thai restaurant here, which (usually) has a very nice atmosphere. It was still nice tonight, but a few things were odd. Like when no one seated us and finally someone randomly gestured to the tables along the wall...

Our waiter brought us place settings and water and left us with our menus. A while later, he came back and said (first words he spoke to us all night), "Wuuuuz up?!"

We both just looked at him. For a long time. Personally, I was waiting for him to give a more proper greeting and to ask if we were ready to order. I was not going to dignify "Wuuuuz up?!" with my order. When I finally decided we had created an sufficiently awkward silence, I asked, "Does that mean you're ready to take our order?"

the julie project.

Fascinating. Heartbreaking. At times incredibly difficult to read and to look at (especially at the end, for me). But I really believe in the importance of people's stories being told.

The Julie Project




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needed a drug-sniffing dog.

During Christmas break I bought some necessities at Victoria's Secret. All day driving around with that bag in the car was incredibly pleasant because of whatever scent they had sprayed on the tissue paper. Mmm. The next day (after having sniffed the paper a lot) I decided I needed to know what it was. I called to the store and said I had kind of an odd question, but did they have any idea what scent they might have been using to spray the tissue paper the day before? Unfortunately, they use many different ones throughout a day, so they could not tell me.

Fast forward to last month when I decided to try to track down this scent in the store here. I took a good sniff of my scent-waning tissue paper right before I entered the store so it would be fresh in my nose. Obviously I have not shopped for scents at Victoria's Secret in many, many years. I remember them having like six flowery/fruity scents and five or so Dream Angels scents. They now have a whole room full of different scent collections, all with like six to eight scents within each collection. That room was a complete olfactory overload. I was overwhelmed. And yet I spent probably an hour smelling lotion after lotion, body mist after body mist trying to find it. I might have even tried to take my tissue paper out of my pocket as a scent refresher, but there was no smelling that over everything else. I thought I might have narrowed it down to two or three possibilities but ended up leaving the store empty-handed because I couldn't be sure.

Fast forward again (I hope you are using a DVD where you can skip by chapters and not a VHS where you have to pay attention to the fuzzy image on the screen and probably rewind and fast forward lots to get to the right place) to today when on a whim I went back to the store -- with only a vague memory of the scent -- to try again.

I can't believe I found it. Beauty Rush Wild Pear.