Just up in India, stealing your cash.

The worst way to wake up on a Sunday morning is undoubtedly by getting a 7:00 a.m. complimentary wake-up call from American Express to ask you if you just spend 1,500 rupees at a cosmetics store in Delhi. 

If we're looking for bright side here, maybe it's that I've never felt so instantly awake that early on a weekend morning.

I went through my mental checklist: card has never left my possession, never written the number down, never said it out loud in a public place, haven't ordered anything from sketchybiz.com. 

And this whole time at the back of my mind I'm remembering those hilarious identity theft commercials from a few years back where they'd show a wizened old man sitting in a Lazy boy, smoking a cigarette, but when he opened his mouth he sounded like a teenage valley girl discussing the merits of a recently purchased bustier. 

Sort of like that time in college when someone in Moscow got a hold of my bank account information and started withdrawing my money in $250.00 increments from various ATMs around the city.  After the initial shock wore off and the I'd survived the crazed visit to the bank to verify that I had not been in Moscow in the last 10 days, I may or may not have spent the day breaking into a Vladimir-inspired accent and mentioning the expensive Vodka I was purchasing with that cold, hard, American cash.

Mid-twenties crisis

So, is this it?  The slow descent into insanity?

Days filled with too much work, too much church, too many metro delays, and gaggles of dust bunnies roaming free throughout the house? 

It's been absolute chaos at work and I'm only now starting to come up for air.  Here's hoping I can catch up with all things life-related sometime soon (maybe during the much-anticipated 3-day weekend coming my way...).

A channel for all ages.

In the weeks since I last posted, we've been busy celebrating the season, vacationing and relaxing.  We had our annual Ugly Christmas Sweater Party (our biggest yet!), celebrated Christmas early with Blake's family, flew to Utah to spend Christmas with my family, enjoyed 18 inches of powdery Utah snow, flew back to DC to cold grey weather, and lazily rang in the new year with friends.

But, before I get to all that...

Last night while we were watching TV, Blake and I saw several commercials for Life Alert and a handful more for the Hurry Cane (the all-terrain cane, of course!).  All of this during the prime-time hours.  It was at this point that we realized that we were watching the travel channel.  I guess we're not quite the demographic that's usually watching the travel channel at 8:30 p.m. on a Wednesday.  What can I say, Baggage Battles is oddly captivating.

Also, as our vacation came to a close, Blake and I decided that playing is more fulfilling than working.  The Travel Channel (and HGTV) have convinced us that to get the most out of life we need to quit our jobs and become real estate moguls.  So, if anyone knows of any real estate that currently needs moguling, please let me know.

Sigh.

Where has December gone?

Oh, right.  It went to crummy things like the stomach flu, a cold, and laryngitis right in a row.  And horrible news on CNN.  And church meetings, long work hours, and keeping house.  And fun things like baking, Friday night dates, Christmas shopping, party planning and family outings.

Now that I have a moment, I can hardly believe Christmas is next week!

I finished the absolute last of my Christmas shopping last night.  Once again, I had the hardest time figuring out what to get for my Dad.  He's a hard one to shop for (he's not very materialistic, and male-oriented gifts are just harder) and I always want to make sure I've found just the right thing.  So, last night found me clutching the steering wheel, peering through the smacking windshield wipers trying to navigate the fog and cursing the heavily trafficked DC streets. 

I hate driving at night.  Have I mentioned it before? If not, I should have.  It's one of Rachel's necessary truths: thou shalt not voluntarily drive at night.  Unless under the influence of an extreme Christmas-shopping high, I suppose.  And night driving in low-visibility fog?  The pitts.  It ages me 50 years and finds me turning off the radio, pushing up the seat and driving in the slow lane.  Oh well.

It's all worth it to have found the right thing. 

And now. Sweet bliss. I can enjoy the stress-free anticipation that come with the holiday. 

T-Bird Pride

I enjoyed high school.  Don't get me wrong...there is no amount of money you could offer me to make me go through it again, but it wasn't all that bad.  I had good friends, I liked my classes (for the most part), I was a member of the Dorchestra, the French Club, the Ski/Snowboard club and the track team.  [I may mention that I was not the star of anything in which I participated...].  I wasn't what you'd call popular, but all was well.

I went to most of the basketball and football games.  Not as a cheerleader, and usually not with a big crowd of friends.  Generally, I went to geekily hang around with the band kids and to pay more attention to cute boys in the crowd than to what was actually going on in the game.

Our high school mascot was the mythical Thunderbird.  A creature painted in orange, white and blue on the sides of our gym and other leering places around the school. 

My friends, who were on the cheer squad, liked to make up goofy cheers imitating the t-bird.  They'd chant "thunder, lightening," then kiss both biceps and growl.  To me now (and probably to you) this seems odd.  To us then it was a thing of beauty and a source of much amusement. 

But, I digress.

What I meant to say before I got distracted by memories of my younger, goofier, freckled and brace-faced self, is that I've never had a ton of high school pride.  Timpview is just not  place I spend a lot of time thinking about.

However, last week I had the occasion to bust out my old yearbook and have a few moments of t-bird pride boasting to some of my other YA lit loving friends.

Camille and I met up at the Bethesda library last Thursday to hear YA author Ally Condie speak.  Camille and I are both fans of her Matched series, so we joined what seemed like half the teenage population of Bethesda for the Q&A session and book signing.  If I had to guess, I'd say that we were the only people above 15 who weren't there as parents with their 15-year-old kids.  In a word: it was awesome.

Ally took questions for an hour.  She explained how she got the inspiration for the opening scene of the first book from a prom that she and her husband chaperoned when she taught high school English.  As she described the school and the prom, it all sounded eerily familiar. 

So, when I had her sign my book, I asked her, just out of curiosity, where she taught.  She then confirmed my suspicions that she'd taught at Timpview.

When I got home I googled around the Internet and found out that not only had she taught at my high school, she actually taught while I was there.  It was a big enough high school that I'd never met her, seen her, or even heard of her, but when I checked my year book there she was.  A younger, early-aughties haircut version of her, but her nonetheless.

Small world, isn't it?