He's so romantic :-)

When I came home from work one day last week, this is what I found on the bed:


It's a bunch of origami cranes arranged in a heart. It made me smile. :-)

The cranes themselves are nothing new, Glen's been folding them for me for a little over a year. Part of his gift to me on our anniversary was that he was going to fold 1000 paper cranes for me, about one a day. There's a Japanese legend that says if you fold 1000 paper cranes you'll be granted a wish. He said that he had already been given his wish, but he thought that he should earn it.

So for awhile I'd get one crane on my nightstand each morning. Then they sort of stopped for awhile, but I didn't really question it. When I came home on Christmas Eve our apartment was FILLED with paper cranes. On the coffee table, the TV, the kitchen counters, the bed, the desk, even all over the Christmas tree. He'd been hoarding them in the trunk of his car for months!

So basically the plan is that now, to keep things interesting, every once in awhile I get some sort of romantic surprise with origami cranes. My husband is pretty much the best.

And what are we going to do when there are finally 1000 paper cranes sitting in my closet almost two years from now?

Send them to Sadako Sasaki's monument in Hiroshima, of course.

A Moment of Extreme Nerdiness

Remember the movie "Awakenings"? I remember watching part of it when I was really young, but it didn't make much of an impression on me, except that it involved Robin Williams with a beard.

Then my junior year of college, Oliver Sacks was the speaker at the convocation. I don't know that I'd have bothered to go, except I was in the choir and we sang a few songs at the event. Oliver Sacks is the neurologist who wrote the book Awakenings and the person on whom Robin Williams' character is based. And he was both adorable and fascinating.

I later read Awakenings (which he signed for me!) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I forgot to bring a book with me to the library tonight (which for the most part was not big loss because I was incredibly busy, and with some good reference questions, too!) so I found the library's copy of An Anthropologist on Mars. I haven't even finished the first of the seven stories, but one of the footnotes describes Anton's syndrome, in which individuals lose their sight but are completely unaware of the loss. It's as if they forget what vision even is. So weird.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, other than that Oliver Sacks has taught me that the brain is incredibly complex, confusing, and amazing. And if you're anywhere near as nerdy as I am, you should read his books.

As Promised:

Here are some degu pictures! I can't take credit for them, my husband was the one who actually took the pictures back in April. So Eric, you can stop bugging me now. :-P

Ahh, Nostalgia :-)

Yesterday I came across a music video on YouTube that features some of the stars from Nickelodeon's good ol' days... It made me smile, and it also made me wish they'd released "Salute Your Shorts" on DVD. ;-) Check it out:




P.S. Eric, I promise I will put up pictures of the degus soon!