An Epiphany

Here's one summer project of mine. I'm done with fast food drive thrus, and hopefully fast food in its entirety. If you can get it from a drive-thru, it's off my list of acceptable places to eat. The reason for this, other than the obvious "It's healthier not to eat that crap?" I was at a drive thru today, picking up some lunch after stopping at a gas station to fill the tank and drive through the car wash. I've had my 2009 RAV 4 for about 5 months now, and I'm still loving it quite a bit. I noticed today that I've made it a habit of taking any drive-thru pick ups and setting their bags on the floor because I don't want to take the chance of something spilling out and staining my beautiful passenger seat. I've done this reflexively probably ever since I bought the new vehicle, and today I thought for a moment about why I was doing it. And it occurred to me: If I don't trust this stuff enough to set it on a car seat, why the @#$! am I EATING it?

What SHOULD I do on my summer vacation?

The following post is written under the assumption that at least some of my current 64 Facebook friends and perhaps a few other people beyond that group will be checking this blog periodically to see if I have anything amusing or profound to say. I really hope some people are, because this whole thing feels like a waste of time if nobody is reading it.

Anyway. One of the things I'm considering doing this summer is trying new things. Mostly because I've spent enough time in my shell for these first 4 decades, and because it's summer and I have loads of time on my hands and trying something new or unusual might give me something to write about. Nothing crazy like bungee-jumping from helicopters, but low-key stuff that might be kind of odd but not extremely so. A couple ideas I'm toying with so far: Make a trip to the grocery store where I can only buy things I have never bought before; read an entire novel in one day; time out an afternoon in a theater where I can see three or four movies start to finish; paint the wall in my kitchen something other than blood-red; spend a day wearing only one sock... so, I guess I'm going for the stupid and the ridiculous more than anything. So if anyone IS ACTUALLY READING THIS, tell all your friends how darn enjoyable it is so they read it too, and then come up with some mildly pointless things for me to do to occupy my time.

I'm Really Kind of a Happy Idiot

Or maybe a hopeless music nerd would be a better description... It's about this time each year that you hear people who work in a school talk about what their plans are for the summer. Some travel, some spend time with family, some take on projects. A couple years ago I remember hearing about someone in my school planning to spend the summer perfecting a recipe for the ideal strawberry margarita. These are the types of indulgences you can allow yourself when you have some 70-odd days off from work. I won't deny it; it's pretty sweet.

I've got my own set of goals every year, including this one. And one of the more ambitious ones is also one of the most ridiculous. I have a new 120 GB iPod, new enough that I still have kind of a crush on it. It's big enough that there will be more than enough storage space for me to hold my entire music library, including the songs and CDs I've never put into iTunes before. So I'm going to do just that, but with this set of steps:

(1) Import all CDs I currently don't have on the iPod,
(2) Re-import any partial CDs I have, so the songs will be in the proper order while stored in the music library,
(3) Add the cover art for the album that every single song came from so it will show up on both the iPod display screen and on my iTunes screen saver,
(4) Maybe, maybe update the genre and star-rating for each song in the library.

I don't know exactly which obsessive disorder this would file me under, but I'm sure it's gotta be one of them...

Now, did I mention that when this little project is done I estimate I'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 13,000 songs on the iPod? And yes, one of them, appropriately, is Styx's "Too Much Time on My Hands."