meaningless blog post

Shameful! It's been a month and a half since I last blogged. The longer I go without posting, the easier it is to say "I have nothing interesting to blog about today,"but today I am just going to get back into it despite the fact I don't have anything important to say. Let's go with my favorite format, the Random Listing of Random Thoughts.

The Power Outage. I think storms are totally awesome. Driving home from Sarah's Friday night, being pummeled by wind and rain across the field by Mayflower, I drove by a tree that was down - I think it had fallen on a power line - it was flashing and sparking. Kind of scary, like, "is something going to blow up when I drive by it?" - but also awesome. Called 911 'cause it kind of looked like it was on fire. So then when I got home I was all like "who forgot to turn on the porch light?" But nobody forgot, it was just that the power was out. Saturday morning I discovered why when I looked out my bedroom window and saw the next door neighbor's huge tree fallen over onto the power line in the alley. Lack of electricity made for a very interesting day! Thinking hard before opening the fridge so that I didn't waste the cool air. Being free from my hair-styling slavery for a day because I just plain couldn't use a hair dryer or straightening iron. Absent-mindedly flipping the light switch all darn day. Carting all my cooking supplies over to Tia's house to use her kitchen. Super-fun. (No, for real, I don't mean that sarcastically. I had a great time chatting with Tia and Jeff and Molly, and letting Mason play with my keys.) The power was back on when I got home last night so now I have lovely hair and the option of cooking in our own kitchen :)

Earthquake! The other super-cool experience of the past few weeks was the earthquake that centered in southeastern Illinois but woke me up in northern Indiana. I also experienced the aftershock via the shaky table in my supervisor's office. I had an interesting conversation with a friend yesterday - being aware of the possibility of earthquakes in the Midwest was rather worrisome to him - I told him, "Why worry when you can't do anything about it? What are you gonna do, stand over the fault line and hold it together with your hands?" I don't worry much about natural disasters. Maybe I should. Well, not worry, but think about them a bit - like when we had the talk at the community meeting about what we would all do if the bird flu hit us. Yeah, I think I'm in favor of thought and preparation, but not worrying. No matter where you live you could get hit with some sort of natural disaster. And we're all going to die someday anyway right? Is that attitude too cavalier?

Running is HARD. That may be the only worthwhile thing I have to say about it.

Biking is fun. I got my old bike fixed up so I could do some cross-training and now I bike to work 2-3 times a week. Just in time for the gas prices to go up! The ride to work is only about 20 minutes, if that, and I also have a really short ride from work to my favorite coffee shops on my lunch break. And I'm being nicer to the environment. And getting healthier. Super fun.

OK, well, that's enough for now. I will blog again another day. Probably.