Nicole

I wasn’t sure if this was going to work, but today my free custom luggage tags from KLM arrived!

You can upload your own photo, or choose one of theirs. I used a pic of me outside the wall of Visby, one of my new favorite destinations. The tags are pretty good quality, and have your info printed on the reverse.

In other news, it pays to be nice. I took myself out to linner at Macaroni Grill (an end of semester tradition since my halcyon, impecunious undergrad days), and my rather inept but nice waitress forgot about me. It was no big deal, and I tried to calm her down about it, and when I left she gave me not only a free dessert (which I was half expecting) but a loaf of bread to go with the leftovers of my entree! I’ve previously attempted to take home the bread from the table, only to have them take it out of my doggie bag, so this was an especially sweet surprise. Not as sweet as a big’ol’ piece of free tiramisu though, amirite?

So, I’m not immune to all this New Year’s introspection and aspiration. I know it’s just a (relatively) arbitrary point in the earth’s annual journey around the sun to which undue significance, debauchery, and exercise routines are ascribed. The fact that I recently had to renew domain names and hosting suggests that I get the webmonkeying bug around the turn of the calendar year (and always have: my first website, hosted by an Aussie I haven’t heard from in years, went live January 1/2, 2002, thanks to the time difference).

And this year’s train of introspection keeps returning to a thought sometimes expressed by others, that I should share all my finds. I have a nose for deals, and a passion for information. Of all the Gladwellian personality types, I’m closest to a Maven. And perhaps sharing these finds will help me savor them a bit more (read: shop less often). In the past, I’ve done this sporadically, but I want to make a real effort now.

This new category will appear under the moniker “The Good Life” as an homage to my favorite Kanye song. And because The Beautiful Life: TBL was already taken, however briefly. 2009 was a tough year for a lot of us, evidently.

Here are today’s finds:

Request 3 free books from Crown Publishing/ Random House: http://read-it-forward.crownpublishing.com/

Sale items at Dillards: I won’t show you exactly what I got, but three words–paisley, push-up, and $3.99!

Hey kids, I’m writing again. Really writing. Funny how a little anxiety and sadness send me scurrying back to hide under notebooks. Well, not really funny. Or surprising.

Anyway, most of what I’m working on you can’t read just yet (still in research stages of… a screenplay!) or will never want to (thesis). Aside: Why am I writing a screenplay? Because I don’t have time for it and I don’t know how to do it. But here are some fun haiku I’ve done for my supercool friends lately….

12/14/2009
purchasing firewood
promises nice winter nights
i’m totally stoked
-Nic

12/21/2009
‘to my father’
We become our craft?
Doctor can’t understand what
The mechanic can
-nicole

28 December 2009
Little black dresses
And all the right subscriptions
Thought I was ready

I love you Stamos. WWUJD.