Please say honestly, you won't give up on me......and I shall believe...

I have this weird thing when I'm traveling that none of my dirty clothes can touch any of the clean stuff in my luggage. It doesn't sound weird except I usually end up washing everything when I get home anyway.....clean or dirty. I feel like the clean stuff still smells like 'luggage.' And most of the dirty stuff isn't really 'dirty' either. Aside from the stuff like underwear, 'dirty' might include a shirt I wore in El Paso from the time I got out of the shower around noon, until I changed to go to dinner at like 6. Or a clean shirt I put on to lay down in bed and sleep for 7 hours and then take off upon waking up and showering. Those things would constitute 'dirty' shirts that I'd want to not touch anything else in my bag. Yeah, I'm neurotic. So what I do is just put dirty stuff in plastic bags and pack them that way when I come home. Being in El Paso for over a week, and then immediately going on a business trip upon returning from vacation, caused me to accumulate a lot of dirty clothes. I thought I'd caught up on everything, until tonight when I opened up my hamper to do one last load of darks and found beneath them a large plastic bag that said HILTON on the outside. I opened it and found myself wondering how I had managed to wear four outfits on one overnight business trip. Actually, that's normal I guess. One to drive to SC in, putz around Rock Hill and go shopping.....then change for dinner....then change to lounge in/sleep at hotel....and one to wear the next day for my meetings.

Moving on......
Does it annoy the F out of anybody else to be put on speaker phone? I despise it....and it happened to me TWICE tonight. Ugh. I just don't get it. The first time was my friend from NY who is down at LSU for grad school. I noticed it sounded kind of distant and echo-ish so I asked why it sounded like I was on speaker phone to which she replied, 'Because you are.' She's a resident director and was putting up some bulletin board. I mean I appreciate her answering my call but if you're busy just be like, hey, I'll call you back. A couple hours later one of my other friends that lives here in Greensboro called me. I noticed the strange distant echo and thought to myself, no way it happens twice in one night. Wrong. She said she just got a new cell and it was the first one she'd ever had with the speaker phone option and she loved it. She said she never wanted to hold the phone again when she could just set it down and do other stuff while talking. It's not just annoying, it's hard to have a conversation on speaker phone. Because the person talking sounds so far away, you compensate by talking louder and it's stupid. I told her to quit being lazy and pick it up or I wasn't going to talk. Yes, I'm a bastion of maturity.

Speaking of maturity....or the lack thereof....Chris and I got into a debate tonight. We were discussing the pronunciation of the word 'Pecan.' I apparently pronounce it 'PEE-KON.' She says the accepted pronunciations are either 'PEE-CAN' or 'PUH-KON', with 'PUH-KON' being said very rapidly. We called several other non-southern people to assist us in settling this dispute. Naturally, I called my parents first. They weren't home and neither was Greg. Grrrr. I got ahold of my friend Aimee, who is from California. I asked her how she would pronounce the word spelled 'P-E-C-A-N.' There was a few seconds of silence and she replied, 'PECKIN?'
Me: *completely dumbfounded* 'Um, no. It's a nut. You eat it.'
Aimee: 'Ohhhhhh. PEE-KON.'
Me: 'HAHAHA I KNEW IT I'M RIGHT I WIN!'
Granted, both my parents and Greg called back and sided with my sister.....BUT....the fact remains that the first vote sided with me!! Sure, she originally said, 'PECKIN', but still.......
So Cusi, that's what I wanted when I called you. When you called back and left voicemail I was on the phone with my parents and your message said you were going out tonight, so I didn't call you back.

Alright, time to sleep. It only took me about 2 hours to write this entry. The ONLY good thing about John being in El Paso for this course is when I start chatting with him at 11 here, it's only 9 for him and we both end up ready to go to bed at the same time, 1:30 for me and 11:30 for him. Even so, I wish he'd go to bed earlier. The alarm clocks start going off in that house between 04:30 and 05:00. I don't care how used to it they get....they need more than 4-5 hours of sleep per night. That's one thing I really noticed when I was in El Paso with them, how tired they are. And it's not even really physically tired, but they're just tired emotionally, tired by life, and it shows. I don't know if it's because they get such little amounts of sleep, or because they put in 13-14 hour work days EVERY day M-F (15-16 when John has Masters class after work), or if it's that they've seen more awful things in the past 2 years than anyone their age should have to. Collectively they have 26 months in Iraq between them, and they may have come home with their bodies intact, but they are most definitely not unscathed. I think back to our carefree days at Elon and wonder when exactly it was that we all grew up.