Hot Pocket!

You have to sing the title in a Jim Gaffigan kind of way to really appreciate this.

This is most likely the best contest ever!

Mmmm, what could I do with a year's supply of Hot Pockets? Well I certainly wouldn't eat them , if that is what you are thinking...I'm not that crazy!

Fall Activities

BTW, I'm back

So for any of you folks out there who haven't deleted me from your reader after not getting any new posts for 3 months....I'm planning to get back to updating my blog a little more frequently. I don't want to make any firm commitments, but it shouldn't be 3 more months until my next post. ;-)

Enjoying the Journey

So, lately I have been thinking a lot about how I live my life and how I tend to always look forward to the fun stuff and begrudge the not-so-fun stuff. The typical, "I wish it were the weekend", or "I can't wait for vacation", or "If I can just get through work today, then tonight will be awesome!" That kind of thinking. However, when I stop and think about it, I really don't want to live my life waiting for the next fun thing. I want to be able to enjoy everything, the good and the bad, the easy and hard, the boring and exciting. So lately I have really been trying to enjoy the journey of my life. To think instead, "I am excited for this one thing but look at all the things I get to experience between now and then. How cool is that?"

Today happened to be one of those "I'm looking forward to the day" days but it didn't come without it's fair share of varied life experiences to keep me on my toes. Here's what today's journey involved:

• Running back to my apartment after being at work for a mere 45 minutes to do a very quick clean so a potential renter could see my apartment. Then returning to work all sweaty and smelling like Glass Plus.
• Finding out that my closing costs were $1000 more than I was expecting exactly 30 minutes before I was to sign the papers and hand over the check.
• A lovely lunch and a chance to decompress with one of my favorite people.
• Working until 9:30pm (since I only had 3 hours combined as of 4 pm)
• Slicing my thumb on the top of a soup can as I attempted to prepare dinner at 10pm.
  

After today's experiences, I wonder what tomorrow will be like? However it turns out, I intend to enjoy the journey!

A Life That Resembles Me

I don't want to be married anymore.

In daylight hours, I refused that thought, but at night it would consume me. What a catastrophe. How could I be such a criminal jerk as to proceed this deep into a marriage, only to leave it? We'd only just bought this house a year ago. Hadn't I wanted this nice house? Hadn't I loved it? ....Wasn't I proud of all we'd accumulated?... I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life - so why did I feel like none of it resembled me?

The above is a quote from the book "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. The first few chapters read like a biography of my life for the last couple years. I could relate 100% to the last line. It's weird how we can take one step after another in life only to find that after all those steps, our life doesn't even resemble who we really are.

All the crazy changes I have gone through over the last couple years have really helped me create a life that, now, does resemble me. I love where I am at now. I love that I can walk to work. I love that I have an exposed brick wall, on purpose! (name the musical!) I love that my apartment is now decorated. This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but we lived in our house for 6 years and never hung a single item on the wall. So yeah, its a huge deal. I even found some great city pictures for the bathroom. I went all out. Anyway, here are a couple pictures of what I have ended up with.

My aunt gave me the picture in the center during my run of "Guys and Dolls" where I was playing Sarah. It is one side of what was a reel cover. (Like a record cover but it actually encased the movie reel). The street sign photo on the left was bought on a recent trip to New York and the rest of the frames are filled in with various other New York city photos.

And my kitchen. Equally awesome with the Eiffel Tower in the background! (Sorry you can't really see it, I promise it is really there.)

Pride

Salt Lake City hosted the annual Pride festival today...And even though the rain managed to give us all a good drenching as the parade went by, it was still fun and good to support the cause. Of course there were plenty of the "out there" type of entries....


but there were also a lot of entries that were quite moving. It was awesome to see Cleve Jones as the grand marshal for the parade (he was portrayed in the movie "Milk" and has continued to champion the cause since Harvey Milk's death). It was also moving to see many members of PFLAG expressing their support as parents, families and friends of lesbians and gays. Seeing them made me think that the media should be focusing more on groups like these and less on the shocking type of entries. It seems to me that is what pride is really about anyway...loving, understanding and supporting each other.

The parade ended with this huge flag which was just cool!

It was fun to see a few friends along the route as well. Yay for Utah Pride!

Leaving

I finally finished Reading Lolita in Tehran. It really was a very interesting read, although not for the faint of heart. I think I read three other books over the course of reading just this one. Anyway, I want to share just one small quote from near the end of the book during the time the author is getting ready to leave Tehran. I just liked the way she summed up, so succinctly, these kind of experiences in life.

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.