Potpourri and Rihanna

I couldn't decide on one thing, so it's potpourri week!

Hot beverages – It’s that time of year again. Actually, it’s always that time of year in Alaska, but it seems so much more appropriate when it’s not summer. If you walk into my kitchen and head towards the microwave you’ll find a cabinet I like to call the “hot beverage cabinet.” Now that I write that, I see how hopelessly unclever it is. Maybe Elation station? Or Lionel Richie (Hello, is it tea you’re looking for)? I’ll work on it. Regardless of the cleverness of the name, the cabinet is great. It smells like coffee and mint, you’ll find a mug featuring rabbits wearing jogging suits in it, and in the wee hours of the morning it’s nice to have all the coffee accoutrements in one place. Excellent kitchen planning, if I do say so myself.

My desk looks like this everyday. Coffee mug, tea mug, water bottle. I have to pee every 3 minutes.

Using my ID badge – Certain areas of the museum require keys to access (like my office,) other areas require waving one’s ID badge in front of a sensor. I LOVE doing that. It makes me feel like I work at the White House or some top secret government building. Mondays are so much less lame if you are pretending to be in a heist and/or spy film, amirite?

This is how I walk around the museum. In my mind.

Season Premiers – Fall season premiers have been happening for the last couple weeks, and I couldn’t be happier. A girl can only watch so many Magnum P.I. episodes on Netflix. I always like watching the new shows, figuring out if they are going to be any good. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Matthew Perry’s new show Go On.  This week he kept getting mistaken for Rachel Maddow. They really do look oddly similar.

Dreamland – It’s been awhile since I’ve done a book review, so I guess I’m due. I just finished Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep by David K. Randall and I highly recommend it. David is not a neurologist or a sleep scientist; he’s a writer who woke up in the middle of the night after he ran into a wall in his apartment. One his quest to understand his sleepwalking, he started investigating sleep science as a whole, and somewhere along the way decided to write a book about what he found. I spent 2 nights staying up too late reading it. Even my sleep deprived state, the irony was not lost on me.

Full disclosure – this week’s hot jam was inspired by TheVoice. Don’t judge.  It’s Only Girl (in the World) by Rihanna. As much as I appreciate classic rock and jazz and weird hipster music, I have a giant soft spot for pop. (No surprise there.) I love that Rhianna unapologetically sings dirty pop songs to fist-pumping beats. She knows her audience. Also, this video is awesomely bad.

Potpourri Week! and J. Geils Band

Potpourri: meaning medley or miscellaneous collection. Like the Jeopardy! category, not the dried flowers.

Occasionally I'll come up with something to write about that doesn't really lend itself to an entire entry: enter potpourri week. These are some (unrelated and in no particular order) miscellaneous favorite things.

Thunderstorms- When I was little my family lived in a house with a great front porch. It had a swing, a brick ledge that went around and was a great place to watch thunderstorms.

I distinctly remember sitting on the porch one night with my family watching the lightning from a particularly exciting thunderstorm thinking this must be what it looks like if you were inside an egg when it was cracked. I’m sure my love of watching storms came from my Dad. One time, while the tornado sirens were going off, my Dad was outside looking for the tornado while I was inside, duck-and-covered in an interior closet, (like you are supposed to be if you don’t have a basement) because he wouldn’t let me go outside too. If I was better at advanced math I might have majored in meteorology. Of course, then my friends and family would have had to deal with me shouting out weather patters rather than rock formations in the car. I’m not sure which is worse.

Avocados- When I was in high school there was a rumor going around that our mascot, the warriors, was going to be changed. To the fighting avocados. Seriously. And it was semi-believable because Fallbrook is the avocado capital of the United States and former avocado capital of the world.

My appetite for avocados is a new one. They are kind of a weird texture (some say it’s the same as butter) and don’t have a ton of flavor on their own. Maybe it’s an acquired taste, because I’ll put them on just about anything.

Newspapers- I’m sort of contrary when it comes to newfangled business. I still would prefer a letter to an email I refuse to use any sort of e-reader contraption, I don’t want my phone to be able to tell me where the nearest Starbucks is, and I like reading the newspaper. Not Wall Street Journal Online, not Anchorage Daily News’ AND.com, the actual printed copy of the newspaper. I like flipping through the sections, I like getting ink on my fingers, I like doing the crossword puzzle, I like feeling like a dad in a 1960s television show. My perfect morning would involve a sunny, warm porch, a cup of coffee, and the newspaper. Pure heaven.

Chocolate Milk- There’s a little restaurant in Metamora, IL, where my grandparents live, called the Family Fountain. It’s a typical small town café. There are unofficial men and women tables, (men generally talk farming, women talk knitting/crocheting/other crafts), they serve biscuits and gravy, pie and other comfort foods, and everyone always orders the same thing. I order 1 pancake (which is the size of a dinner plate) and chocolate milk. No fancy pre-mixed chocolate milk here. It’s regular milk with Hershey’s syrup and you have to stir it in yourself. And it’s my favorite part of breakfast.

This week's hot jam is Centerfold by the J. Geils Band. Centerfold was the band's only big hit, but it was a big one. It hit number 1 on the Hot 100 in 1982 and was a regular video in the early years of MTV. For some reason, the oldies station my alarm is set to often plays this song in the morning, and I catch myself sleepily humming along. (Not that I'm complaining, it's not a bad way to wake up.) Centerfold tells the story of a boy surprised to find his high school crush in a "girly magazine". That has to happen in real life. I mean someone sat next to Pamela Anderson in history, right?