lovepeacewolf

i am pretty sure i am the luckiest person in the world right now. my reasons are these:

1. i slept 12.5 hours last night which is a 230% increase from the usual 5.5 hours and it was n-i-c-e.

2. i got a job. a grown-up one. it sufficeth me to say that i am s-t-o-k-e-d.

2.5. in 10 days and 11 hours, i'll board a plane, buckle my seat belt, and fly fly away. to the land of the free. the home i love. the state to which i swore i would never return except for holidays and now it's the only place i want to be. the big u t. that place.



3. i saved this one for last because it alone is enough to convince one of my exceptional fortune. if i had put this one first, you would have stopped reading, certain that the world is sending to me all things good. it will sound made up but i assure you it is not.

yesterday i hit up rue neuve for some shopping, where i was entirely overwhelmed. i found it necessary to create a mantra of sorts. some way to define my style in order to guide my consumption decisions. dr. gary rhoads always said that creativity loves constraints and he was correct.

my mantra had to encompass my lifestyle staples: coral lipstick, wood earrings that almost touch my shoulders, and things that increase my speed without leaving any tracks. the task was challenging. mantra-creating is not for the faint of heart. but i was prepared and finally came up with this: earthy-goes-eighties-with-a-twist-of-athleticism.

this is where it gets good. a mere 7 seconds after i had mantra-cised my style, i stumbled upon this jewel.



is that a navy wide-neck sweatshirt with dolman sleeves and a wolf on it? indeed.

i found my size (which is 34 here. its weird.), stood at the cash register for a couple minutes, stood at the cash register for a couple more minutes (customer service is not key here. in fact it doesn't really exist.) but it was totally worth it. i'll wear it til it has holes in it. i'll sleep in it, spray it with febreeze, and wear it the next day. it will become my friday shirt, my saturday shirt, and my sunday shirt. if monday is a public holiday it will be my monday shirt. my tuesday yoga shirt. my watching-thursday-night-tv shirt. i'll wear it until it grafts to my skin. actually no, that's probably where i'll draw the line.

lovepeacesugargranules

today i took a little break from work to clean out under my fingernails. all was well until under one fingernail i found a sugar granule. it was the size of a hail stone. or the size of a talent. it was the size of a talent-sized hail stone.

interesting, i thought. when was the last time i was eating sugar granules? and this is really shocking but i couldnt remember the last time i was picking up sugar granules with my fingernails.

i forgot to pack nail clippers and im pretty stingy with my euros, so my nails have gotten uncannily long.



i clack when i type and i drum them on my desk when im thinking. its no wonder that things get stuck. but sugar granule talent stones? so the source of the sugar granules remained, and still does remain even now 10 hours later, a mystery.

but where one mystery opens another closes and this is the mystery that i solved today:

the background story is that we used to sleep over at the castletons when my parents went out of town and we would come home smelling like the castleton house. everything from my esmerelda sleeping bag to my stirrup leggings was laden with castleton smell. it wasnt a bad smell though. it just smelled like the castletons. i never knew what it was. i thought it was because they were so righteous that their whole house had a righteous smell. our house didnt have the righteous smell because we went to ponderosa on sundays.

well i recently did my laundry at the neighbor's house. and by the way the people dont believe in dryers here and the weather doesnt believe in not being humid so this is what my room looks like for the three days after laundry day.


so today i put on a shirt that i had just washed and as i sat at work and the sun beat in the window and baked me, i smelled like the castletons again.

so i have narrowed it down to two options:
1 i have become sufficiently righteous and am now deserving of the righteous smell.
2 the castletons and my neighbor use the same laundry detergent.

now there isnt enough evidence to really sway me one way or the other so ill just have to leave it at that until i receive further proof.

lovepeaceamerica

Make your own Countdown Clocks

not that im excited or anything. who even thinks america is the best place ever in the whole world anyway?

lovepeacerehab

this evening, in an act of rebellion, i logged into the online countdown timer to check if my stay in brussels is over or not.

it isnt. but guess what the number of days was. 28. 28 days. like the sandra bullock movie 28 days. i tried to find a funny or interesting clip from the sandra bullock movie 28 days to post here. all were slightly inappropriate or pointless. kind of like the entire movie.

if people can go to rehab for 28 days i can stay in brussels for 28 days. but i think the food is better in rehab. dont ask me how i know that i just do.

jello and waffle just had a showdown in my head and jello kicked waffle's trash. you know why? jello is resilient. every time waffle threw a punch jello just bounced back. so go jello.

i sound homesick. because i am. but not as bad as i sound. brussels is... whoa i almost said brussels is cool but thats false. cool is not the right word. brussels is... umm... so weird. i thought i was weird until i came here.

you know what is cool is london. they speak english there. the signs are even in english. food labels are in english. its absolutely revolutionary, as in radically new or different.

one thing london does not have going for it is the pound. 1 pound cost me 1 dollar and 76 cents. and then my shirt was 30 pounds, which is 52 dollars and 80 cents, which is kind of an expensive shirt. and i bought it anyway because it says love on it three times. and it is charcoal. which is probably my favorite color right now next to neptune green. which is why i also spent 18 pounds on the neptune green version. whoopsie daisy. they say that in london, you know. hugh told me.

lovepeaceaerosol

despite the fact that my european evenings are typically too full of european adventures to find the time to write, TWO blog-worthy things happened today so i had no choice.

1 i waterproofed my hair. not exactly a high point for me. i recently made two purchases, aerosol waterproofing spray and aerosol hairspray. in a moment of high intelligence, i placed them next to each other on my vanity. behind my ikea mirror, where i couldn't see them. in another moment of high intelligence, i reached my hand back to grab the hairspray. and then, in moment number three, i sprayed my whole head with waterproofing spray.

its so painful you might want the story to end there. but it doesnt. because in moment numero quattro, when the supposed hairspray didn't do anything for my coiffure, i went at it again. the front, the sides, the back. and thats when i saw it. the can came up around the back of my poor waterproofed head and in my ikea mirror i saw that it wasnt gold with a beautiful woman on it. no, it was black with a nineties-style graphic of enlarged water drops.

i thought about jumping in the shower to see what would happen but i had to be to work in 2.3 minutes. we will save that experiment for another day.

2 i found sprite zero. no need to ask where, as it could only be the carrefour that cares for me. the carrefour express up the street from my house likes to pretend it isn't the bomb (or da bomb, if you are reading this out loud) by overcharging me for just about everything except for baguettes. but then it gives me things like sprite zero and i know that it really is da bomb. perhaps it is even dabomb.com.

sorry carrefour express, but you blew your cover. you keep pulling stunts like this sprite zero one and ill pay double price for my corn flakes any day of the week.

lovepeacelent

and stephanie said unto her blog, 40 days remain. and the blog saw this amount of days, that it was good. and the blog said, if jesus can go 40 days and 40 nights without food, you can live 40 days and 40 nights in brussels.

the going without food thing is kind of relevant too, seeing as how im down to two eggs and 1/4 of a tomato for the rest of the day. and its only 5:28 PM. or 17:28 if you are in europe, which i am. i tried to clear out all the food i had so i could go on an overhaul of a grocery shopping trip and get everything fresh and begin anew. i would say i was pretty successful.

so yesterday i braved the dam of amster.



and not only did we experience amsterdam on a saturday aftrnoon. no, we took on the saturday of a certain pride parade down the canal. you know the protesters on the first episode of the first season of arrested development? times that by 20 and add spectators in pink boas. legit.







post-parade all of the "floats" gathered in the canal where loud girl bands, excessive alcohol consumption, and wearing a bra as a shirt were all deemed appropriate.



and look who came back from the dead to support his people... DUMBLEDORE!



we hit up some lunch action at my new favorite place ever, the eclectic and organic gartine. being uncharacteristically courageous, i ordered the potted dutch shrimp with cognac and lemon rolls. could be the cognac speaking but im pretty sure the meal was flawless.





we proceeded to the van gogh museum, the catchy albeit touristy I AMSTERDAM letters, and then homeward bound. was it charming, lovely, and full of character? it was. would i spend the night in a hotel there? i wouldnt. no, not ever.