Things that distract me…

I have a few things I’ve been saving up to blog about, but none of them are very long, so it made the most sense to combine them into one larger post. When I sat down to consider how to unite them, it was almost too obvious: things that distract me. There’s even an additional meta element here, because writing the blog also distracts me…

1. Walter: This should be obvious to anyone who has spent more than 15 seconds looking at the blog. I got a new tiny, tiny video camera from the Point Foundation and, of course, tested it out with Waltini.

2. Crafting: Though last week wasn’t exactly the Valentine’s Day I’d always dreamed of, I had a really good time crafting cards for friends. Design*Sponge (also high on the list of distracting things – this one is thus a two-for-one) had previously posted some really, really cute fruit sticker templates (stay with me here folks), and so I dutifully printed them out, obtained a punch, and stuck them to some delicious-looking oranges to share around. I gave all of the oranges away (they said “Orange You Glad You’re My Valentine”), but here is a shot of the apple sticker:

I would encourage you to print some of these yourselves and put them on fruit in your own lunches, or those of people you care about, because they are funny and cute, and only the orange one is really specific to Valentine’s Day.

3. Reading: Motivated not only by the large number of good book available, but also by the calming effects of reading something unrelated to my dissertation before I go to bed, I’ve been slowly working my way through a variety of fiction and non-fiction books this past year. The most recent was Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw, which Ruti recommended after Alicia and I decided to go to Colombia for a vacation after I defend. It was quite a disturbing read, both in terms of the drug violence and the shady US involvement in Latin American politics, but gave me a much better sense of the history of the drug trade in Colombia.

4. Random stuff: These kinds of distractions are impossible to avoid, and occur all to frequently in the world. The latest:

That’s right, the translation of “Peppermint to the max” is transliterated back into English as “An explosion of peppermint”! This seems less funny now that I’m actually writing it down, but I’ll leave it here as an indicator of how punchy things are getting at my place as the dissertation defense draws near.

Oh distraction...