Hi, I'm the Pink Panther.
I just forgot to paint my nose pink or put whiskers on my face, so I'm actually just a person with a bunch of pink clothes and a tail and ears.
Anyway, happy Halloween!
At work we had a costume contest, but I didn't start my shift until an hour later than that. Then we had pizza and caramel apples, which I didn't miss. I picked up a couple extra hours today, so I think I'll be here for the morning pizza and then again for the evening pizza. I love getting free stuff at work!
And this morning I spent about 20 minutes throwing my costume together, making the tail and ears that I'd procrastinated about. They turned out well, if I do say so myself.
But what I actually spent all morning doing was leveling out our front walkway so no one would twist their ankles and sue us while they came for Halloween candy. See, we used to have a sidewalk that, after 70 years of tree roots growing beneath it, was impassable. So we ripped that out and still haven't decided what to put on our front walk. All we had for our guests (few and far between) was a hole with chunks of old cement in it. But now it's all smoothed and leveled and watered into place. They shouldn't be able to sue us for that. :)
And I really hope we have trick-or-treaters come this year! We actually bought candy. Kevin's been eating it as if I bought it for him, but we should still have enough.
Happy Halloween everybody!

I like being smart.
I don't always feel smart, but I do like when I'm able to answer people's questions and give enough information that people are satisfied with my answers. I'm specifically talking about my job here. I take phone calls and help people place orders, and I love the feeling of helping people. I love when the customers have a problem that they think will be a huge deal, but then I'm able to do something simple (or even not so simple) to help them through it.
This is in contrast to the calls I get when people insist on asking me questions about areas that I'm not trained in. I've gotten good at just transferring people to the right department, but then you always get those calls where someone insists on keeping you on the phone and asks you the same questions over and over-- in different ways-- just so you have to keep telling them over and over that you don't know.
And then I feel stupid.
But I'm actually a smart person. I know lots of random facts and details, and I'm really good at remembering names. I'm also really good at a lot of other things, which is why I notice such a drastic contrast when I'm really bad at things.
I can't skateboard.
I can't play the guitar.
I can't remember numbers.
I can't remember Utah addresses (refer to above).
I can't do chemistry.
I can't keep my room clean.
Otherwise I'm pretty competent.

September and October are my favorite months of the year, weather wise. And since they are almost over, it's really hitting home to me how much I enjoy them.
I love that it's nice and warm in the sun but pretty cold in the shade. I love that the trees (especially the cottonwoods in New Mexico) turn yellow. I love that there are still really pretty flowers everywhere except on BYU campus where they've already ripped everything out and planted fields of pansies.
I spend most of my Septembers and Octobers in high school outside doing marching band, and I guess I had so much fun then that just the weather reminds me of that happy time in life. I didn't like summer band. You had to stand in the sun learning your spot in the marching drill. And while the flutes or someone had a really hard drill, we were usually standing in one place for 48 counts marking time, getting socklines that ruined our hard-earned summer tans.
But then by the time September started, we knew enough of the drill and enough of our colorguard routines that it was actually fun to practice the drill. Plus there were football games and Monday Night Rehearsals and sectionals, which we would always pause for a few minutes to go talk to the cute trumpet or French horn players who were doubtlessly running amok through our rehearsals, complaining if we accidentally hit them with our flags.
After a couple months of this, by the end of October, I usually had a few complete changes of clothes that I'd keep in my band locker, all of which I would wear on Monday Night Rehearsals. And then we had the State Fair Parade, Pageant, and Zia down in Albuquerque. Those were certainly a kick in the pants. Seriously, you get that many teenagers with that much sleep deprivation, who are all nervous and excited for the same event.... it's a gas.
So I still love the fall, and apparently I always will. In the future I want to talk to a high school and be able to volunteer to help their Colorguard. I had such a blast with it when we were successful, and I'd love to help other people love it that much!

I make the world's best chili, if I do say so myself.
And I eat waaaay to much of it, and I also say so myself. Wow, does my stomach hurt! I'm sitting here at work trying to sound much more cheerful than I feel, but what I really want to talk to all these customers about is how much my stomach hurts.
But it was worth it!
I've learned that if you cut up fresh vegetables (tomatoes, onions, bell peppers) and add them to the beans and ground beef, it is very very scrumptious.

Wild sunflowers. I think they're my new favorite flower. I can't say for sure, but they're really high up there at least.
I love that they're so pretty and flashy, and they grow without any help or too much water. I know that can be a bad thing if you're a farmer in the Midwest or something, but I'm not. I'm from the desert. I love pretty flowers that grow with hardly any water.
We drove through the Salt Flats in Utah a couple weeks ago. This place defines the word desert. It is so flat and ugly and brown, especially when it's raining. But then when we drove by some sunflowers along the side of the road, the storm and the dry field behind them just framed the already-beautiful picture. It made my day.
So today during my break at work, I went out to the little field behind the parking lot and got some seeds from the old wild sunflowers so I can plant them at home. We have quite a wasteland behind our house, and I think wild sunflowers would be a perfect addition-- or barrier. :)
So yay for sunflowers.

Blog blog blog, here I go!
Ok, the purpose of this blog is to write about some of the boring and mundane things in life, because sometimes the boring and mundane are actually kind of exciting if you choose to see them this way.
That is my excuse for not writing about Kevin as my first item on my list. He's the best thing in my life, by far. But he is not one of the boring and mundane things, so he probably won't get an entire entry devoted to him.
For example, today's blog is about water. Specifically, it is about the water in my washing machine. I just moved into a house where our landlord had bought a new washer/dryer. I don't know if it was on purpose or just cheap, but it seems to be a low water usage washer. It always seems a little wasteful when you have like 3 items to wash and you have to fill up the whole washer! But this is a front-loading washer, and it doesn't even fill very much at all. It just sloshes the clothes around in enough water to make them clean and sweet smelling.
And speaking of clean and sweet smelling, is there anything to compare to the smell of fresh laundry (fresh as in just finished drying). Whether I put it in the dryer with a scented dryer sheet or hang them out to dry on the line, they smell so good when they're done! That's how I know the washer isn't broken. My laundry gets clean. It just doesn't waste water.
And speaking of drying on the line, I'm super happy about my clothesline. My mom bought it for me a couple years ago when I asked her to get me some clothespins (which she also bought, btw). Even though I didn't need it at the time, I'm glad I have it now that I strung it up between two trees in my yard.
Seriously, stepping in to my yard is like stepping back in time. I have a laundry line. I have no dishwasher. Our house is over 70 years old. We have a cellar. I make applesauce like a mad fiend. Life is great.

Welcome to the new and improved blog... this time with paragraphs!
I hope that worked.
Anyway... At work again. Still like it. We're all good.
And as far as wonderful things go, today's shout out goes to Harvest Fresh Market in Orem, Utah. I love that store. I always have a favorite store, and they're usually grocery stores. Where else do I shop on such a regular basis? Well, there is a wonderful new grocery store about 15 minutes away from my house. Usually spending 15 minutes in the car, in traffic, burning gasoline and pouring all that crud into the air would encourage me to go to grocery stores closer to home.
However.
The closest grocery store to me is Allen's. I have a cousin named Allen. He's a great guy. It is not his grocery store. It is awful! It is just averaged price, nothing terribly expensive, and nothing ever on sale. But the worst thing about it is that they never have anything fresh. I bought some carrots. Half of them were rotten. I wanted to buy lemons. All they had was canned lemon juice. Their produce department is tiny with nothing but old produce. Boo! If I ate nothing but canned stuff or potato chips, this would be a fine grocery store. But I don't.
Then there's Smith's. Smith's is nice. It has a huge variety, but it gets kind of expensive. And then Macey's is fun. They have sales and specials, free popcorn, and weird contests at midnight sometimes. It's a fun college student grocery store. But it's a bit farther away from where I live, and as long as I'm going to a store that's out of the way, I'm going to go to Harvest Fresh.
It is cheap and fresh and inspires me to eat healthy, fresh food. Most of the store is an organic health food store, the kind of store like Wild Oats Market that I would generally go to and laugh at all the hippies buying soy ice cream and overpriced vegetables.
And the first time I went there, that's what I expected to find. I was in the area, and I was only going to buy one item, so I didn't really care about the price as much. But I went in and found that the produce items were about 1/3 of the prices of Macey's and Smith's. I got a huge bag of groceries for only like 5 bucks!
So now I go back and buy all sorts of cheap food. Not only is it a health food, but it's a local farmer's market. So all their fruits and vegetables are super cheap and super good. Plus their meat and cheese are on sale sometimes, and those are nice.
Let's hear it for Market Fresh! Yay!

Hee hee. It looks like I posted that entry a few years ago, but it was actually a few minutes. Yup, that's right. I've invented time travel. MWoooha ha ha!!
And then there's also the fact that I may have started this blog a few years ago, not posted anything for a few years, and then changed the subject of the blog. But time travel is much more exciting.
So time travel, huh? Good stuff.
This blog is going to be mostly a bunch of random stuff, but partially a bunch of positive, beautiful things like I mentioned in the previous post a few years ago. :)
Positive stuff: I like my job. That's where I am right now, so that's what I'm thinking about. I work at a call center, so I talk to people on the phones all day. And when I'm not on the phone, I can talk to my co-workers (when they're not on the phones). Compared to my last job, which was eight hours of solitary confinement translating boring manuals from Chinese to English, this job is just the best! And as far as normal, cubicle jobs go, this is quite nice.
In my last job, I would complain that my job was boring, and people would tell me that, well, that's just how jobs go. I was horrified. I mean, I have 5 years' experience working at a day camp, and I knew nothing would be as fun as that. But I didn't know I'd have to cry myself to sleep every night before going to work in the morning.
But now I don't.
And I like my job.