A glimmer of hope

Earlier today our neighbor from downstairs stopped by. This is the neighbor who is really nice if you run into him outside and whatnot but he and his roommate have been the worst neighbors I have ever had. They are nice until you tell them that they are being too loud and then they yell at you. I didn't know it was too much to ask to not have your apartment vibrate from their music. Moving on...
He came by today to let us know that they have sublet their place starting June 1!! Woo hoo! Of course, we are also in the process of trying to find a subletter and that will most likely be for June 1 at this point, but now I can rest easy knowing that whoever moves in here will not be mad at me later for not mentioning the people downstairs.
It's at least one step in the right direction. Now, if only we could find someone to move into our place too...

Nice to meet you?

Almost 3 months ago I started my new job. I showed up at work, got a tour of the office, sat down at my new desk, got my computer all set up and started meeting and getting to know the people on my team and the people that I sit near. Well, almost all of the people. Somehow I was never introduced or didn't introduce myself to the guy who sits in one of the cubicles next to me. We all sit in little sections of 4 cubes. In my section is one other girl from my team, the handy dandy IT guy for our floor (who introduced himself to me two different times) and the guy that I have never officially met. I know his name because we all have name tags on our cubes (and I'm assuming he's figured out my name by the same means). I have a vague idea of what he might actually do in our office (although my office manager told me he's about as useful as tits on a nun). I know that when there was a really big cockroach in our office a few weeks ago he came to the rescue, thereby making him slightly more useful than my office manager thinks. I know that he was or is a sailor of the military variety because I can overhear his stories of being on the ship. I know he recognizes me when we pass in the hallways. However, we never speak to each other. There's really no work-related reason we would need to speak but we don't even say good morning to each other.
Does this all stem from not having ever been introduced to each other? Should I have just stuck out my hand on my first day and introduced myself and said nice to meet you? Should I just randomly ask him sometime how his weekend was? Or, do I just go on pretending I don't even notice? Does he also sense the strangeness of the situation or is this normal? It's a very large organization so I don't expect to know everyone but I'm used to at least having a cordial conversation every now and then with the people I sit 5 feet away from 5 days a week.

If you could smell my apartment

You might be in a little bit of heaven, just like me. I got the urge to bake something this afternoon (the roommate is gone and I love using a kitchen when I can have it all to myself) so I decided on some cupcakes. I just took the Brown-Sugar Pound Cupcakes out of the oven and once they cool a bit I will be making the brown-butter glaze to go on top of them. A friend made these for a baby shower and they were amazing. We stole the recipe from some lady named Martha who has a magazine and a tv show and I have heard is kind of a household wonder woman of sorts.

Tonight, I am enjoying the smell of brown sugar and butter and tomorrow I will use them to bribe my co-workers into liking me.

I love books!

Random Friday Post:
I'm a fan of books. I'm also in need of a list of new ones to read. So, here's a random little quiz I found. How many of these have you read? What's your favorite book of all time? (Really, I need to know. I'm keep a list.)

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Put an X next to the ones you've read.

X1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
X2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
X3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
X 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
X 6 The Bible
X7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
X10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
X11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
X15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
X16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
X21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
X27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
X28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
X31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
X33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
X34 Emma - Jane Austen
X35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
X36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
X37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
X39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
X42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
X45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
X46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
X49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Game
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
X54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
X57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
X60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
X65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
X70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
X73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
X83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
X87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
X92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
X98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
X99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've never been so excited to go to bed in my life!

My parents delivered my new mattress to me tonight! I am beyond excited about it. My old one was starting to dip in the middle which translated into me not sleeping all that well. So, when the government gave me back some money a few weeks ago I decided that I would save it and spend it on a mattress. I didn't have to wait long. When I was in Wisconsin last weekend I noticed that a store nearby was having an amazing sale on mattresses so my dad and I headed over there to see what the catch was. Well, there was no catch, I picked out my new mattress, handed over my money and they told the warehouse to start stitching! They didn't deliver all the way to Chicago but thankfully my dad can be bribed with ice cream and he agreed to bring it down tonight and even take away my old one for me. (Extra bonus, my mom brought be an Easter basket and my dad bought everyone dinner!)
So, I have now upgraded to a queen size pillow top European something or other mattress that is like my own little piece of heaven. I think that I am going to need to invest in some new sheets soon though. The one set of queen sheets I have aren't quite deep enough. Oh well, I've been contemplating changing that up anyway. Also, I think that I might need to get a step stool in order to get into bed each night. This thing sits up high! And, it's only on the cheap frame that comes with it. I don't even know what it will be like when I actually get a real bed frame!
Anyway, if you can't find me sometime in the next week or so, it's likely that I am hiding away in my room. Good night!

Um, Really?

Seriously, there are some women with very poor bathroom etiquette in my office. I am sure that you all really wanted to hear about this but it's really bothering me today. The bathrooms in my office get cleaned about once a day or so but that still means there is a 24 hour period where we are on our own to keep it neat. I walked into one stall this morning to a toilet that hadn't been flushed completely. Really, is it that hard to hang around for 2 more seconds to make sure everything is taken care of? Later in the day I walked into one stall where it looks like someone had put toilet paper on the seat like a seat cover. Ok, fine, whatever you need to do. However, when you are done can you please be sure that the cover gets flushed so that I don't have to be the one to get rid of it for you? Is this how these people act at their own homes? If so, I wish I knew who it was so that I could be sure to never go to their houses.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

That's really all I got for you today...