Monday, July 19, 2010

Peruano

Hi There,

I just got back from a 1.5 week long trip to Peru and have got to say, wow! The country is historically chock full of interesting historical sites, is considered to arguably be the culinary capital of South America (though, as a vegetarian this point may have been lost on me), and is filled with incredible natural vistas. I won't go into too much detail on my trip, but wanted to point out an interesting observation:

Peruvians Run:
Some people run for exercise. Horses run for money. Chris Kantos runs for fun (and for St. Patrick). But Peruvians run for another reason altogether: regular transportation. It is apparently totally normal for Cusquenos to run from place to place as a mode of transport. Suits, dresses, whatever. People just run to their next location--and none of them seemed particularly late for anything. It's just what they do. Why walk when you can get their a bit quicker with a nice jog I suppose? The only other time I can think of someone doing this was that kid that lived on the 3rd floor of Hill Hall Freshman year.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Journaling

I've always thought it would be fun to do journaling. There's only one problem: that's a broad category. What would I do? Write fiction? Write down ideas? My mother and sister practice journaling by writing down good bands names they think of, like Untainted Bubbles (admittedly, they're not all that good). The also write down ideas for inventions, like the Life-Sized Chocolate Man, a must have for any single woman.

I've decided to start simple. I rather superficially write down my days' activities on our house calendar. It's not terribly philosophic or deep, but I find it useful surprisingly frequently. Last Friday, Steve and I were trying to figure out when the last day we had seen each other was. We couldn't. I looked it up on the calendar, and--voila!--there is was.

Here's a little breakdown of my month of June:

  • 17 days at work at Lime Brokerage
  • 1 day working from home/the iPhone line
  • 1 day in Connecticut
  • 4 days in Rochester/Syracuse
  • 2 days in Vermont
  • 146 miles of biking


With the calendar in mind, I thought of other stats I could easily gather:

  • Number of items "read" on Google Reader: 4,489
  • Number of items shared on Google Reader: 75
  • Number of personal e-mails sent: 29
  • Number of work e-mails sent: 183


I think journaling in any form is a valuable activity, because one can forget to remember what they do in the blur of life. It'll be nice to have these calendars to look back on some day. Hopefully it'll provide some modicum of reassurance that my twenties weren't entirely wasted!

We have to go back...

It's been a year!
A lot of people decide to come back to the game after a year away (multiple times if your last name is Jordan). Why not us? Y'all have smart phones now, you could blog on the run?

What's that? Tweeting has replaced blogging you say? Nonsense. 140 characters is not nearly enough for our wordiness.