some other things + cold enough

to wear a scarf, so I have broken out the gorgeous pashmina that Barb gave me last Christmas. Of my dozen scarves (and the five or so I brought with me -- ha, the joke's on me :P) it's tied with the orange-gold-cream-pink scarf I bought at Maya on Newbury Street for the position of my favorite, though its weight makes it a slightly more functional garment. (Somewhere in the folds of this scarf is my Fenway House button, but I can't find it, which should tell you how voluminous it is.) (Though not quite this voluminous.)

The other things?

1. I have decided that I am a competent traveler.

For some of you, to read this may seem silly, but it feels very odd to me to declare myself competent in almost anything. Except, I don't know, baking cookies or something else equally non-threatening. Who's going to argue with me about that? Especially if they might get some cookies.

But really -- I think I'm competent. It involves some advance preparation; I'm not a spur-of-the-moment person. But I don't feel particularly bad about that. I do what I need to in order to feel comfortable. I am a "calculated risk" person. I feel like that's no bad thing.

I decided this after contemplating upon this summer, but also last summer. I think I have finally "gotten over" the stress that is flying. (Admittedly, I say this with some caution, since a 16-hour+ lots-o-checked-luggage intercontinental flight marathon is in my near future.) It doesn't freak me out to pack a bag one night, take the taxi/subway to the airport the next morning, spend the following day navigating a new (sometimes large) city, sleep in an unknown bed (usually in a room with other people, also sleeping in their own unknown beds), spend another day navigating, take a different subway back to the airport, and fly back. I am good with directions (somehow this is odd to type; I think that the general knowledge is so inundated with the idea that women must be spatially helpless and directionally challenged than it seems bizarre for me, a woman, to claim competence in this area), in that I can read and remember a map, and once I have walked a route, I generally remember it forever after. Sure, I spent 20 minutes being lost here and there, but never so much that I can't right myself (or at the very least backtrack.) I can also usually get a sense of relative directions fairly quickly (maybe in a weekend, maybe longer than that) -- a general sort of, "Well, if I walk in this direction I will run into this landmark; if I walk in this direction I will run into this landmark; the thing I want is sort of in this direction." I don't think the fact that I can't reliably say anything like, "We need to go NORTH" rather than "We need to go THIS WAY" makes me less competent.

2. Just so I don't forget -- an industrial design blog and design boom competitions.

3. This is interesting. Sort of. Primarily I like it for giving me this quote, ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’

4. At some point in the near future I want to put my favorite moments from Coraline, as it was a very pretty movie, and possibly from the Hellboy movies as well.