Here and There

I read blogs fairly frequently and the best bloggers have a way of describing a moment in their lives that makes you relate to them in a way that I don’t think we usually relate to other people in our daily lives. Maybe it’s just the mark of a really good story teller that we can enjoy a story about a trip to a
restaurant for breakfast, the time someone backed into the corner of their garage, or the adoption of a new puppy.

I’d like to be able to write more frequently, but I often feel like I only write when I’m really annoyed about something. I don’t want to be the person that always complains. Also, my thoughts recently have been so scattered that I can’t think on one subject long enough to put a few coherent paragraphs together. I have pretty much stopped taking pictures also. All creativity seems to have leeched out of
my brain over the last couple of years.

Since I can’t piece together a story, here are some bullet points:

-In my office every floor has a main elevator lobby. Each lobby has three access points to the floor. Each access point is locked with a badge scanner. Occasionally something goes wrong and the doors won’t unlock. There are still two more access points, so you may walk a little bit further to get to your desk or to your meeting, but so what? Currently the door closest to my desk is broken. My desk is the closest to the door. There is a sign on the door that say that it is broken and has been reported (3 days ago – still broken). ALL day long people try to get in through that door and it never opens. They read the sign, then they try again. They knock. They jiggle the handle. The push really hard once,twice, three times. They mutter. They curse. They eventually walk around. From my point of view this sounds something like - Beep! (badge scanner), thunk, jiggle jiggle, bang, Huh!, bang... Beep! Jiggle
jiggle, pause, jiggle jiggle, Curse! Defeat. Silence.

On Tuesday this annoyed me. By Friday it only makes me laugh. The predictability of people is a
wonderful thing.

-I’ve finally admitted that I just cannot chew gum. My jaw was hurting so much. I stopped chewing gum, got my bite guard fixed. All is better in my mouth.

-The restaurant across the street has a Spinach and Lentil soup that is the highlight of my winter so far. I’m sure it is a super easy soup to make, but I can’t find any recipes that have ingredients that hit on all the high flavor points of that soup, so I just buy it several times a week to feed my obsession with winter
soups. Emailing Liz right now to ask the only Greek person I know if such a soup really exists in the Greek diet.

-Dealing with sickness and death at the same time with different people is hard. The flu swept through my house at the same time as I got a cold and my grandmother died. It was a weird debilitating experience. I wanted to do something nice, so I offered to buy the alter flowers for the funeral. When the recommended florist couldn’t be reach, I couldn’t figure out what to do. After a day of pondering alternatives, I came up with the totally unexpected idea of calling another florist and explaining what I needed. It worked. I’m claiming that sickness clouded my ability to think clearly.