What We're Watching

1) The complete seven season series of Gilmore Girls. I "borrowed" the DVDs from my sister (she knows and I know that she will never get them back) back last summer and have been slowly watching them. Right about the third season when Jess enters the scene, the boy started watching the series with me. The series is just as wonderful as I remember it (if you conveniently forget that the character of Rory even exists for the first half of the sixth season when she is the brattiest of the bratty). I still want Lauren Graham to have my babies and I still want Scott Patterson to be my diner owner.


2) The complete series of Firefly. During my husband's recent illness, he broke out these gems and we watched them all and for the next two weeks we went around screaming the lyrics to The Man They Call Jayne out just when we thought the other person had moved on to another song. We're a loving couple that way.

3) The entire, altogether too short, two seasons of Reaper, a show that lived on the CW in 2008-2009. The main character is a slacker guy who finds out on his 21st birthday that his parents sold his soul to the Devil and now our slacker hero must become a bounty hunter for souls who have escaped hell. He has two slacker friends who help him and an on-again, off-again girlfriend who all add to the hilariousness of this show. Really, I just thought the entire show was riotous, right up until about five episodes from the end.

4) The first two episodes of Dexter. I know this is going to be controversial, but we stopped watching Dexter because it was killing us with boredom. I convinced the boy to watch it because everybody was writing about what a great show it was on the internet, David Bianculli was salivating about it on Fresh Air, and I am a sucker. Maybe it was because the boy and I already knew the premise of the show, but it just was kind of yawn inducing for us.

5) The 2007 BBC miniseries Jekyll. We've only watched one episode of this, but I'm totally hooked. It's written as a sequel to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with our main character a modern version of the same character. I think we'll eventually find out that he's the descendant of the original character, but I haven't gotten there yet. The acting is good and I'm intrigued.

Quest for the Perfect Travel Mug

Many years ago, my mother-in-law handed us a free travel mug that she had received. She didn't want it since she had a full cupboard of thermos type containers. Apparently it is one of the favored freebies that pharmaceutical companies give to physicians and my father-in-law was forever bringing them home.

I loved that thing. I used it every morning for years. It kept my tea warm for hours. It held approximately a billion ounces of liquid. It survived being dropped over and over again with hardly a scratch. It had a lid that screwed on super tight that never leaked. To drink from it, you simply twisted the lid, a little opening opened, and you drank. It was, as far as I am concerned, the perfect travel mug. And then one day I left it on the bus. I freaked out, tried desperately to find it, and then had to resign myself to the idea that I need to get a new travel mug for my tea in the morning (and afternoon and evening).

The quest for a new thermal mug began with another freebie mug from the in-laws. Unfortunately, the lid leaked and it wasn't well insulated so it didn't keep my tea warm for long at all.

I spent more than I like to admit to buy an actual Thermos Brand Vacuum-Insulated Leak-Proof Travel Mug from a local sporting goods store (see below). It has some really good points. It keeps tea warm for hours. It has also survived its fair share of falls from high distances. It is highly leakproof. However, it holds a mere fourteen ounces. Probably more problematic is that it is really hard to open to take a sip. You need to twist the lid and sometimes the seal is so good that it takes a person with super human strength (or a pair of pliers) to open it. There can be too much of a good thing and in this case, that is the leakproof nature of the mug.


So fine. The Thermos would work, but only in limited situations in which the lid could remain open for the duration of its need. That might work when I am in the car, but it's not going to work for me on my day to day commutes on the bus. Enter the Contigo.


I have been using the Contigo Travel Mug for several months. The boy got it on super special discount at the bike shop where he works part-time. There are some definite pluses to this travel mug. It holds 16 ounces, so slightly more than the Thermos. The folks at Contigo claim that it is leakproof (I'll get back to this in a second). Basically, you screw on the lid after putting in your delicious hot beverage and press the button located on the side to sip and release the button to create the leakproof lock. It doesn't keep the tea as warm for as long as the Thermos, but it will keep it warm for quite some time.

Mostly I like it. It's easy to clean. It's not impossible to unscrew the lid like the Thermos. But. It's not at all leakproof. When I throw that bad boy in my bag, if something hits the button, it leaks. All over everything (papers! books!) in my bag. Okay, fine. Don't put it in your bag then. Fine. If I carry it, along with my purse, my school bag, and the bag I have to carry around for my part-time job, I then must juggle it, and occasionally (or every other day) I will accidentally hit the button while I am attempting to get my bus pass out of my purse and then I will have hot tea all down my skirt for the rest of the day.

So I am still stuck on an odyssey for the perfect travel mug. Please help me.

Fashion Crisis

It's not that I don't care what I look like when I leave the house. Most days I have on makeup, I have blow dried my hair, I have put on jewelry, including earrings, necklaces, and rings. Most days I have even seriously considered whether or not it is appropriate for a woman of my age to wear tights with random swirls of color all over them and have decided it's completely fine. Most days I have showered, eaten breakfast, and weighed the pros and cons of my footwear choices.

But then there are the other days.

I collapsed on to the couch the other day when I got home in the early evening only to discover that in my haste to put on a cardigan right before I walked out the door, I had failed to notice that the cardigan was inside out. Furthermore, not a single soul mentioned it to me all day long.

I was standing in front of my evening class earlier this week, waxing poetic about process of elimination, when I reached up to scratch at my neck to realize that the tag from the dress I was wearing was right there. Yes, my friends, I had worn my dress backwards. During the break in my class, I ran into the bathroom and fixed it and just hoped that the class didn't notice the change in my neckline. Dr. BB assured me that since I was giving them riveting information in my lecture, it was unlikely that anyone noticed anything strange about my sartorial change up.

Please tell me I'm not the only one to leave the house with strange fashion mistakes.