A wedding, sushi night and a photo shoot in the car

Here are some recent photos from the past month or so.

I attended a wedding of a high school friend in November, had a sushi night with Stacy, Taylor, Karin, John and Eric -- we made our own sushi! -- and I played with my camera while waiting for my brother to be ready when I picked him up on Thanksgiving. Here is a sneak preview:

A face for brochures

I was highly entertained this morning when I checked my email. As you probably know, I spent about three years working in health care communications (two of which were spent at Clarian in Indianapolis -- the better two years for sure due to my awesome co-workers). So this morning, I was excited to see an email from my former co-worker and cube-mate (name changed below to protect him -- you know who you are!). :) However, I was confused upon reading the actual message... He now works for Clarian's cancer center and is apparently coordinating a brochure for the center. Apparently, when he typed "Heidi" into his email "to" box, he didn't check to see if it was going to right Heidi. This is what I received:

Hi, Sam* and Heidi.

I want to give you a heads-up that our development office is working on a brochure, and they would very much like to use the photos that were taken of each of you from the photo sessions earlier this year. I believe the release form that you signed gives us permission to use these in a variety of ways, but, if for some reason, you’d rather not be a part of the brochure, please let me know.

The brochure is about the “In Your Lifetime” campaign – the campaign which is supporting the new inpatient and outpatient facility that is currently under construction, new labs, and cancer research. The brochure will be mailed to prospective donors and be made available in the cancer center.

Let me know if you’re okay with your photo appearing in the brochure.

Thanks.

David*

*Names changed to protect the innocent/not-so-innocent.

The first thoughts running through my head were: "Did I have photos taken at Clarian? The only ones I remember being there are from the holiday parties or of the little magnets I made for my friends there to remember me by (I had closeups of my face put into little circular magnets)."

So here is the email conversation (shortened verstion) that took place afterward:

Heidi: Did you accidentally send this to me? I'm confused. If you do have a photo of me, what is it? Does it look like I have cancer?

David*: LMAO! Yep, wrong Heidi. Who knew there was another Heidi in the world!

Heidi: What is LMAO? That is hysterical. I love that you accidentally sent me this email. If you would like to set up a photo shoot, I would like to make some extra cash. Feel free. I have a good face for brochures.

David*: LMAO is “laughing my ass off.” Let me know your schedule so we can coordinate a photo shoot ASAP.

I learned two new things today:
1. I could easily be a cancer brochure model.
2. LMAO is my new favorite web acronym. It kicks LOL's butt, no contest.

Finals week

Life is busy right now. It's finals week, so that's why I haven't been updating regularly. My schedule lately has (and will) look like this:

Yesterday: 2 tests (Anatomy and Phonetics transcription)

Today: work and study and go to choir practice

Thurs: work and study (and hopefully watch "The Office" -- the Christmas episode!)

Fri: work and study and potentially take a final (Acoustics final is offered on two diff days)

Sat: 2 tests (Language Acquisition and Phonetics) -- yes, on a Saturday -- and no, I don't know what is wrong with the people in charge of scheduling finals -- and Christmas cookie-making party!

Sun: 2 choir concerts (one at 2 and one at 4), then study

Mon: work and potentially study

Tues: work, potentially study, 60 min. massage! (finally cashing in the Christmas present from Mom last year) :) and hopefully hanging out with Eric and playing Settlers of Catan or Stratego (best games ever!)

Wed: potentially take Acoustics final, work, drop Indy off at her grandma's house (Mom's), fly to Albuquerque for 8 days of Christmas/family fun!

So there you have it. And for your viewing pleasure, here is a picture of Karin and me after our choir concert last week at Bethel. Look at the amazing building we sang in -- the organ pipes were huge and lovely -- we were standing right in front of them as we sang lovely Christmas music with the Shoreview Community Band. It was a fun concert despite the fact that there was narrative commentary in between every single song.

Side note: If you like my haircut, it is the work of Karin (nice girl standing next to me/high school friend). I love it. When I actually do my hair (as seen in this photo), the layers look very nice. Thanks Karin!

I hate tow trucks

I got towed.

I am mad.

It's a long story and now that I actually sit down to type it, it makes me tired. Pretty much, my house is technically on Van Buren St. and the house number is 659 (an odd number), but the house faces Summer St. Well, Minneapolis has these crazy snow emergency rules about where you can park on Days 1, 2 and 3 of the snow emergency. I was parked right in front of my house today and figured I had followed the rules of parking on the ODD side of the street on Day 2. My roommate, Kyle, did the same thing, and we even texted each other to confirm that we had it right. Well, after being on campus for class and work from 8-5 today, I took the bus home, walked the block and a half home in the cold temp, and then noticed that there were no longer any cars parked in front of the house. I let out a loud expletive and am certain that if the tow truck guy had been standing there, I would have punched him in the stomach. I could feel the anger growing in my stomach. Oh, I was mad. So then I noticed that my neighbor across the street had just gotten home from work (he parks in the garage -- no worries for him). So I asked him about the snow emergency situation since he's lived here a while, and then I found out that on Summer St. (the street I face and he faces), his address is ODD, so I was supposed to park on his side of the street today. How confusing is that? Really? I mean, sitting here pondering it, I guess it makes sense. But when it is 7:30 in the morning, and you are leaving in the bitter cold to walk to the bus stop, you just comprehend the fact that your address is odd, your car is parked on the same side of the street as your address, and that's that.

So here is what I found out reading online:
1. I could have searched this nifty little website for my address and gotten a little pop-up map that shows you where you can and can't park on certain days. Would have been nice to know yesterday.
2. My roommate Kyle can't get his car until his mom (she owns the car) sends a signed, notarized paper giving him permission to do so.
3. To claim your car, you need to provide: proof of insurance, a title/lease info, your license plate number, VIN number, the promise of handing over your first born child to the tow company of my choice....These are all true except the last one. Oh yeah, and you also need $138 for the towing and $34 for the parking ticket. Tis the season to ... not buy any gifts because I had to pay the city of Mpls.
4. If you don't claim your car before midnight, they charge another $18.

So I'm sure you're now wondering why I'm sitting here typing instead of getting my car. Well, first of all, there is no one to drive me there right now. The other two roommates are at work with their beloved cars. Eric offered to drive me, but he's in class til 9. The guy across the street offered to drive Kyle and me, but now I want to wait to check out one more thing. See, Beth just called and said that a family friend of ours who works for Hennepin County might be able to help me with the situation since this seems to be a weird street setup -- it's not just your run-o-the-mill "here's the odd side, here's the even side." So when he gets home at 9:30 tonight, I will be calling him to see what he suggests. After that, I will head to the impound lot and see if I am able to resolve this.

Wish me luck.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful...

...and there is no fire to make me delightful...and since I'm sitting here at work under a fan that refuses to blow anything but cold air...(this is where the usual "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow" comes in to this song, but right now, it's so cold that it wouldn't even be able to snow outside). It is freezing, people! That's all I have for you right now. I'll think about writing later when I'm more thawed out.

Random ramblings during a slow week

It's the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and things have slowed down a lot -- so much so that I almost fell asleep in anatomy class today. Wait...I come close to that quite a bit unless I have my trusty cherry coke zero to give me my much needed caffeine. Anyway, I have welcomed this slow week by spending time reading for pleasure instead of studying. I'm reading "Three Cups of Tea," which is about an American mountain climber who almost died attempting to summit K2 (large mountain in Pakistan) and ended up being nursed back to health in a tiny little village in Pakistan. The book is about all of this, and also details his mission to build a school for this village (and then many more). I'm a little over half way done, and it is an amazing story so far. I would definitely recommend it.

Today, my boss took me out to lunch at the Loring Pasta Bar in dinkytown -- it's this great brick building that has high vaulted ceilings and lots of trees and funky lighting. It used to be an old corner store or something like that back in the day. I love old places like that. I'll have to go there sometime at night....and have some wine instead of water....maybe with a cute boy instead of my boss. :) I thought it was really nice of her to do that. We were celebrating the fact that I just finished some pretty big projects, so she also paid the bill with the company card. Love it.

Well, I'm getting ready to head home on the bus and then take Indy down to Lake Nokomis to go for a run with Aunt Katie. I haven't run in a few weeks, and I'm supposed to do the Turkey Day 5K Thursday morning, so a jog in the chilly weather should be good practice. Oh how I miss being so close to that lake to run. I now live in NE Mpls instead of South Mpls, so I'm not close to the lakes anymore. But I do have the river and other cool places to run, etc. I just actually need to get my butt out there more often to do it.

Well, happy Thanksgiving to all and to all a goodnight! I'll be running the 5K in the morning, eating brunch at a friend's house afterward, then eating dinner at Mom's house around 1, then popping over to Aunt Jan's and Uncle Jim's for more snacks, drinks, visiting and potentially some games. Sounds good to me!

The sweetest words

Today, the sweetest words to my ears were: take-home exam.

I have had at least one test each week for the past five weeks, and I was pretty much over studying. But last night instead of doing something fun -- my usual Tuesday night consists of hanging out with Eric going to a movie or something like that -- I spent from 4:30 to 10:30 studying for a test I have coming up on Friday. This morning in class, the prof tells us that it's now a take-home exam. At first I thought, man, I could have just played last night instead of studied. But then I thought, awesome, now I'm pretty much caught up so I don't have to study as much for the final. So yeah, we get our tests emailed to us on Friday, we have all weekend to do them, and they're due on Monday morning.

Awesome.

Fall photos

I thought I should add some photos from the past month or so. Here are a few. Click on the links to see the full slideshows for each category.

Fall hiking: In September, Eric, Indy and I went to Wild River State Park (which I wrote about already). Then a couple weeks later, he, Stacy, Taylor and I went to Taylors Falls (on the Wisconsin side of the river). It was a gorgeous 80 degrees out during that first weekend of October. Absolutely amazing weather!

Bar Olympics: This is a pic of Ashlee, me and Karin at Bar Olympics. We were representatives of Team England -- notice our soccer (football) jerseys. Bar Olympics consisted of teams of 5 who had to compete in various bar events: foosball, bean bag toss, darts, karaoke and pool. It was a really fun time -- hope to do it again sometime! PS Picking countries and having team uniforms was optional -- I'm pretty sure we were the only team to do that. :)

Halloween/Bday: To your left is a photo of me in my "roller derby chick" costume. I did not win the contest, but I did at least get chosen to participate, along with Karin and John, who were figure skating champions. They even made it to the finals!

Rockin' Young People

As I was checking cnn.com this morning, I noticed a new section called "Rockin' Young People," and it contains profiles of young people who have done some pretty amazing, extraordinary or just different things so far in their lives. One of them was about a 25 year old guy who traveled around the middle east interviewing terrorists, their children and the under-30 crowd and then he wrote a book about it. I would definitely add that to my list of "must read soon" -- it's called "Children of Jihad."

But that's not the only reason I wanted to share my little find this morning. There was another person profiled who may not have done quite that, but she seems to be really inspiring in another funny way -- she is approaching her 30th birthday and has set out to do one new thing every day between her 29th and 30th birthdays, and she has a blog about it: http://www.jen365.blogspot.com/. I scanned some of the stories but decided I shouldn't just sit here at work and read her site, although it would be really easy to do that. Some of the things are funny, some are nice gestures, and she's had tons of visitors from all over the world reading her posts and posting comments or suggestions for other new things. So check it out! I think it's such an interesting thing -- funny, entertaining and inspiring.

The funny thing is a couple years ago when I was approaching 25, my co-workers at Clarian were asking me "So, do you have your list of things to do before your 30 figured out?" And I hadn't at the time. The only thing I could think of was skydiving (PS: now I'm not so sure I want to do that since people die sometimes). I think I had a couple more, like riding in a hot air balloon, and I recently got the idea from Eric that it'd be cool to travel to all the countries of my ancestors -- England (done), Denmark, France (done), Canada, Germany....I know there are others, but I can't remember. I'm kind of a mutt. I think I just like the idea of changing things up every now and then, getting out of your comfort zone, trying new things -- whether it's food, travel, hanging out with different people, trying a new sport, etc. So if you have other ideas of new things to try out, I think it'd be fun to hear what's on other people's lists. Feel free to share!

Here are some of the things on my to-do list (not necessarily to do before 30, just during my lifetime in general):
- travel to the countries of my ancestors
- skydive?
- snowboard
- make sushi
- ride in a hot air balloon
- travel to all the continents (except Antarctica -- I really don't think my fingers and toes would like the cold that much)
- go to the boundary waters for a long canoeing/camping trip
- buy a house
- sing on the mountain tops in Switzerland and pretend I'm in the Sound of Music
- go to Greece and eat real Greek food
- live in another country for an extended period of time (even if it's just 6 months)
- gain a better understanding of different world religions
- earn my master's degree
- learn another language (or at least enough to get by -- maybe improve my Spanish or ASL)
- own a cabin (anyone want to go in on cabin in like 5-10 years?)
- go flyfishing
- ride in a gondola

That's all I can think of for now. I might continue adding to this list...

Here are some cool things I've already done:
- rode a camel in Tunisia
- visited Carthage
- accompanied a friend to a doctor in Tunisia, where she got stitches without having any pain meds or anything to numb the pain (except a suppository, which is supposed to do the trick -- she refused to use it)
- lived in France for 5 months
- traveled to Normandy, France by myself and rented a van with 7 guys to tour the beaches, memorials and cemetaries
- wakeboarded
- skiied in Colorado and in the French Alps
- traveled to England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Italy, the Caribbean, and many US states
- lived in the high desert in southern California for 6 months (on $700 a month)
- learned about the tough system the US has for welfare when I applied/fought for food stamps and used them during my AmeriCorps experience in Cali
- set foot in the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Mediterranean Sea
- rode on a catamaran in Atlantic Ocean and got scared of sharks so only swam for about 3 minutes
- wrote a thesis
- sang in a wedding
- read in a wedding
- ate octopus and other unknown sea creatures in a "seafood salad" in Italy
- spent two weeks traveling in Europe with my mom
- ran a marathon and 2 half-marathons
- completed 2 sprint triathlons
- rowed on a crew team for 4 years
- let someone cut my hair by snipping off my braid (Sam and Emily!)
- lived in a house with 6 girls (oh the fun and the drama!)
- bought a puppy and trained her to be well-behaved (most of the time)

This is too fun! It's kind of fun to look back at all the things I've done and all the things I have yet to do. You should try it. It kind of reminds me that I really have done a lot -- especially when day-to-day, you kind of forget these things and sometimes get stuck just doing the same ol' stuff (like for me, studying, making dinner, etc.).

Haiku #2

Stupid online quiz
How could I forget you, quiz?
Hope prof still counts you