Two Questions for Tuesday

Why does this Coach Robot Necklace exist?

And why do I kind of love it in a ridiculous way?

Choo Choo Chooseday

Gentlemen, this is the Coast Starlight, one of the great American trains operating on one of the classic American routes. On this side, you’ll see panoramic ocean vistas inaccessible to any other form of transportation, while on your side, you’ll be treated to 350 miles of CostCos, Jiffy Lubes, and cinderblock homes with above-ground pools.

Over the past few years the Northeast Regional and I have become okay friends. Despite the fact that I think Amtrak is a huge rip off half the time I'd rather spend 5 hours on a train and that's it, than 7+ possible hours in the car stuck in traffic. For about the cost of two tanks of gas I am forgoing the traffic and sitting here in the very last seat in the very last car spending my time dicking around the internet, listening to music, applying to jobs, and writing parts of the books I'm working on.

Baltimore or bust!

Manjoyment Monday: Tea Time

This movie. What can I say about this 7 minute clip other than Alan Rickman is incredible?

And now I'm going to go have some tea.

Dance Like You Don't Have A Nation!

Had to share this. Because these people were awesome.

Closing Time...

...every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

So. It's been awhile. Lots of big things have happened. Namely it's been a bit over three weeks since I lost my job. I'm actually relieved. I really hated spending two hours a day in the car commuting - despite listening to some awesome audiobooks - and I hadn't really been given any opportunities at the company to show them my worth. Add on that an announcement back in December that we were being acquired by an ENORMOUS company in California and basically I knew my days were numbered.

I was proud that I lasted to almost August I mean I've known since December that they were going to get rid of me but it took them a lot longer to realize that. I've been applying to everything in the area that has popped up since last year and was hoping I could leave them before they let me go, but that didn't quite pan out.

I'm not upset, I'm trying to look at this as a good thing. A reason to finally get my personal life back on track, finally get my physical life back on track, and actually enjoy life doing things I like to do. I'm eating better, I'm getting into an exercise routine that will have me ready to restart the c25k in September, and I've spent some quality time with my family. It's been good to decompress.

I'm hoping that by October I'll have found a new job at a company that actually finds me valuable and understands my creativity.

In the meantime I'll work on me and I'll work on my writing. I'm two chapters shy of finishing my first novel and I've got a few other stories in various different stages of completion. I've even got a young adult series planned out and hope to really pursue my dream of being published. I even have a great pen-name picked out and I just am ready to do this!

Paper Anniversary

A year ago today was pretty much the most epic day ever!

I heart my Silly.
Happy Anniversary sweetie!

Avid Reader, or Maybe Just Pretending...

Another one of those fun little memes from the Interwebs. A lot of these I've read parts of, but I won't bold them out until I've finished them...

1. The Bible (King James Version recommended)
2. Gilgamesh, Anonymous
3. Analects, by Confucius
4. The Iliad, by Homer
5. The Odyssey, by Homer
6. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
7. Aesop’s Fables
8. Oedipus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles
9. The Orestia, by Aeschylus
10. The Republic, by Plato
11. The Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle
12. Histories of Herodotus
13. Hortensius, by Cicero
14. The Aeneid, by Virgil
15. The Metamorphoses, by Ovid
16. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
17. The Confessions of St. Augustine
18. The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius
19. On Loving God, by Bernard of Clairvaux
20. The Mind’s Road to God, by Bonaventure
21. Didascalicon, by Hugh of St. Victor
22. The Summa Theologica (selections are okay), by Aquinas
23. Beowulf, Anonymous
24. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
25. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by the Pearl Poet
26. The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
27. The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
28. The Fairie Queen, by Edmund Spencer
29. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
30. Utopia, by Thomas More
31. Four Great Tragedies (Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, & Lear), by Shakespeare
32. Henriad Tetrology (Richard II, 1-2 Henry IV, & Henry V), by Shakespeare
33. Four Great Comedies (Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, & The Tempest), by Shakespeare
34. Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin
35. The Temple, by George Herbert
36. Paradise Lost, by John Milton
37. Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan
38. Tartuffe, by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
39. Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, by Immanuel Kant
40. Pensees, by Blaise Pascal
41. Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
42. Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope
43. Candide, by Voltaire
44. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
45. The Federalist Papers, by various authors
46. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution Independence Day is coming, cue up 1776 and Gettysburg!
47. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
48. Lyrical Ballads (2nd ed.), by Wordsworth and Coleridge
49. Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft
50. A Practical View of Christianity, by William Wilberforce
51. Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
52. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
53. Grimm’s Fairy Tales
54. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
55. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
56. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
57. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
58. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
59. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
60. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
61. Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope
62. Narrative of the Life of Fred D., an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass
63. In Memoriam, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
64. The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
65. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, by Edgar Allan Poe
66. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
67. Unspoken Sermons, by George MacDonald
68. The Idea of a University, by John Henry Newman
69. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fydor Dostoyevsky
70. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
71. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
72. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
73. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
74. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
75. Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche
76. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles
77. The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov
78. Rerum Novarum, by Pope Leo XIII
79. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
80. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
81. Howards End, by E.M. Forster
82. Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud
83. Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
84. Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard
85. Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot
86. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
87. The Plague, by Albert Camus
88. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
89. Deus Caritas Est, by Pope John Paul II
90. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
91. Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
92. The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
93. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis
94. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
95. 1984, by George Orwell
96. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
97. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
98. Silence, by Endo Shusaku
99. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
100. Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
101. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Waterson

Only read 7 completely? I feel like a horrible person...though now that I have this I'll have a nice long list of things to look for audio books of at the library.