pieces

sleepy this morning. so sleepy. how much is the right amount of sleep? is it 8 hours?

... i get up around 6:00, so that means i need to get to bed at 10:00.

right now, my goal is just to get into bed before 12, which i've been doing. ish.

new goal - in bed before 11. this is good. baby steps.
i like baby steps.

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this morning was the beginning of re-learning italian. my drive to work ranges from 45 minutes to an hour (now that school has started up again) and i feel so unproductive just listening to npr. anthony thinks it's funny; most people would think listening to npr is a lofty enough goal, over that of listening to morning djs or talk radio, but no, not enough for me. i need something more productive than npr.

so some days will be for npr, some for learning italian and some for a book on tape.

my current book on tape is catch-22, which i've never read. it seems to alternate between boredom and hilarity. which is life, i suppose. only on disk 2 of 15, but had to get a new copy from the library since the second disk had pieces of the silver foil stuff scraped clean off. nice.

"'tis just a scratch!" -- the black knight

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this morning i also saw a cute baby garter snake. maybe about 4 inches long and pretty thin. i moved it to the mulch when i saw how much trouble it was having moving on the sidewalk. perhaps it was newly hatched; hopefully it didn't get into anything poisonous.

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labor day saw anthony and i in atlanta (we're seeing about working things out).

rusan's, paolo's gelateria and the flying biscuit. delicious foodstuffs! $12 sushi buffet! crunchy breakfast biscuits with apple butter! gelato!

a 7 hour drive north will remove much humidty and put a chill in the air in the mornings.

regarding the ga aquarium - i think i talked it up too much! far too much expectation. alas. i guess i thought there would be more. but what it really has is just bigger.

don't get me wrong. the beluga whales and the whale sharks were pretty incredible. ok, really incredible. and very soothing, as anthony noted.

the belugas were very graceful and so powerful. you could see their skin and rippling muscles. and when they talked, their fatty melons changed shape! adorable.

most of any negative feeling i have towards the aquarium came from 1) the immense crush of people who were there and 2) the horrific mascot, deepo. deepo is an blatant "friend/rip-off" of neemo's, not to mention his shark friend looks completely stoned, with huge bags under his eyes. unfortunately, i was unable to find an image online. i compare it to the animation style of dreamworks (as opposed to pixar). and i don't like dreamworks' animation style.

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my new roomie, emily, has also arrived! in a word, she's awesome. her cat molly is adorable. and we both enjoy arrested development, jon stewart, kids in the hall and douglas adams. w00t! i easily got her addicted to lolcats (it's a sickness, truly).