Archive | October, 2009

Thing to Do #101: Continue Your Gene Pool

October 30, 2009 by Jessica 10 Comments

I need to say this before anything else:  I’m NOT pregnant.

Ok. 

My brother and I both are working on this list, although I take it a little more seriously than he does (re: OBSESSED).  He has several things checked off of his list that I don’t have and as of last week, he also has this Thing to Do completed before me with the birth of his little girl, Zoe Alexis.  He’s as nonchalant about it as any body could ever be, which is just my little brother’s style. 

birth day3

I don’t usually think new babies are cute, but (being completely biased) she doesn’t look as squished as other babies I’ve seen.

I know 10 (TEN) babies being born between June of this year and January 2010.  Eight of them are girls (in the future, women rule the world).  So needless to say, I’ve been surrounded by baby-mania.  Despite all the baby craziness, I don’t have much baby fever myself.  I don’t usually feel the need to hold babies (they usually just make me nervous and I’m worried that they are going to start crying and I think they sense that I’m worried that they are going to cry and then they…cry) and I definitely don’t coo or make much fuss.  I went to see Zoe two hours after she had been born and then saw her again this past Sunday, but I haven’t held her yet-just kind of stared at her.

Babies seem to be an awful lot of work and I keep going back and forth on the desire to know what its like to be a mother, to go through the experience and to have that kind of relationship and having my independence and being able to do what I want to do when I want to do it.  It seems that babies put a crimp on your social schedule.  Difficult to travel the world and go bungee jumping if you know you have a little one counting on you to come back home.

Supposedly the plan is that Alex and I will have a boy and then we’ll adopt a girl, because I’ve always wanted to adopt.  But like I tell the grandparents-to-be, don’t expect anything for 2 or 3 more years (because at the ancient age of 33, I become an “at-risk” mother).

Lots of people have done this but its still quite an accomplishment.  Anyone have any good advice on how to become a parent and still stay true to yourself/not lose your identity as a person?

Excitement, Life Management, Relationships
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Thing to Do #47: Milk a Cow

October 19, 2009 by Jessica 11 Comments

100_0867100_0868100_0869Although I may have grown up in the country, I didn’t necessarily grow up on a farm.  I do, however, know lots of people that DO live on farms and I’ve been bothering them forever about trying to milk a cow.  All of them told me the same thing: just do it at the State Fair.

I may be biased, but the North Carolina State Fair is one of the best.  I’m impressed that in this day and age, the Fair still stays true to its Agricultural roots.  When I was younger, I couldn’t care less about the exhibits; all I wanted to do was ride the rides.  I still like the rides, don’t get me wrong, but going through to see the prize winning pumpkins (almost 300 pounds!) or learning about beekeeping around the state is interesting to me now.  Of course, with the recent fried-food obsession, eating fried Reese’s Cups, Ho-Ho’s, or, my favorite, fried cheesecake, is a lot of fun too!

But on to milking the cow. 

In the State Fair Ark, amongst all of the livestock, is the opportunity to milk cows with the assistance of student volunteers from the North Carolina State University Animal Science Club.  For just $2.00, you can milk a cow and get a free carton of milk (I opted out of my milk).  Alex had already milked a cow, so he was my photographer.  I sat down with my student volunteer and she explained how to go about milking the cow.  While waiting in line, I had noticed others having difficulty, so I assumed it was a difficult process and didn’t expect to get any milk on my first try.  Now that I think about it, most of the participants milking the cows were children.  Imagine my surprise when warm milk shot out, mostly on my hand.  I got 5-10 more squirts of milk out, but I was beginning to feel badly for the cows.  They were stuck there, having strangers tug on them all day, so I decided I had successfully milked a cow and I should leave poor Bessie alone.

This is probably a pretty easy thing to do, but still kinda neat and the sensation was pretty interesting.  So, who else has milked a cow?  How ’bout a goat?  Camel?  Yak?

Miscellaneous, Nature
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A New Book List

October 16, 2009 by Jessica 1 Comment

Miranda over at My 101 Things to Do Before I Die posted this list of books.  She found it on Facebook and I like it a lot, mostly because these are books I think I’d be interested in reading!

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien -
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – X
6 The Bible -parts
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy -
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -parts
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – X
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galay – Douglas Adams – X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck -X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – X
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – X
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis -
34 Emma – Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell -  X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – X 
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – X
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood -  X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – X
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel -
52 Dune – Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huley – X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon – X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – X
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Aleandre Dumas – X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac - 
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – X
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses – James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal – Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession – AS Byatt – X
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – X
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – X
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 – X
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Eupery – X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – X
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers – Aleandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – X (Why are both the Complete Works of Shakespere AND Hamlet listed?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo -

So that is 47 for me (as of December 2010).  How many have you read?

Entertainment, Life Management
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Thing to Do #63: Make the Front Page of a National Newspaper

October 11, 2009 by Jessica 5 Comments

I grew up in a county that has several local papers.  I have been in all of these for various reasons: making the Principal’s List, accomplishments on the softball diamond, wedding announcements, and on behalf of the two non-profits I’ve headed up.  Of these local papers, I even made the cover once.  I’ve made it into the statewide paper News & Observer twice – neither time was I on the cover.

I grew up in a county that has a local AM station that is listened to religiously by the 20,000 people that can pick up its signal.  At both the Arts Council and at the Ava Gardner Museum, I have gone into the station to do rather lengthy (45 minutes) interviews several times.  I have done much briefer interviews (ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes) on regional radio stations (WPTF, WQDR and WAVO), all on behalf of my position with the Arts Council and/or Museum.

I have been on television several times in my life.  The first was when I was eight and was filmed being a part of a youth camp.  My name and age flashed across the screen and I was probably on for a good 15 seconds.  At age eight, THAT was exciting.  The second time came 20 years later when I was being interviewed about a film festival the Arts Council was hosting.  But then I started working for a television station, so the novelty quickly wore off.

None of these have been national media outlets, and certainly not the front page of a national newspaper or the lead story on a national news broadcast.  However, I have been in an International news story and I think that’s pretty darn cool.

The Ava Gardner Museum, of which I am the director, enjoys a good number of international visitors and interest.  As she was an international star, we get visitors from literally all around the world – Japan, Turkey, Kenya, UK, Spain, Denmark, Brazil, Costa Rica…and those are the ones I can think that visited in the past three months.  As Ava lived in Spain for 11 years, and did several movies related to Spain/took place in Spain, she has a rather devoted following in the Spanish speaking world.  However, when I was contacted by the Spanish-Speaking bureau of the BBC, BBC Mundo, I was rather excited.  We’ve gotten plenty of international press in newspaper articles, but none that I can think that were meant for television/radio. 

The crew arrived early on a Friday morning and proceeded to spend the entire day at the Museum, shooting much of the interior and collection, as well as visiting the grave site.  They interviewed the town manager about the economic benefit of having a celebrity museum in a small town, interviewed my 88-year old docent Mrs. Eunice who knew Ava and people LOVE to talk to, AND…they interviewed yours truly.  Of course, as this is for the Spanish-speaking BBC, my voice is dubbed in Spanish and you can’t really hear me, but I’m in it.  Plus, (at least as of Sunday, October 11th), this story was on the home page of BBC Mundo!

Here’s the video:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/cultura_sociedad/2009/10/091009_cultura_ava_gardner_nc.shtml

So, I still won’t count this as having completed this Thing to Do as making the front page of a national newspaper is still a bigger deal.  I mean, for 24-hour news broadcasts like the BBC, they need “filler.”  Space is a commodity in newspapers and I would have to do something truly considerable (or heinous) to get front page real estate.

Give me props about the BBC Mundo thing though.

Achievement, Entertainment
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Thing to Do #36: Visit Every Country-Mexico

October 8, 2009 by Jessica 2 Comments

cozumel 2008In my previous post about our cruise, I mentioned Alex’s visit to Margaritaville in Cozumel.  That little bit is at the end, but this post is mostly about my first visit to Mexico and my visit to Tulum.

The second port of call on our 7 day cruise was Cozumel.  I booked an excursion to go to the Mayan ruins of Tulum, but Alex was not interested in going, so we decided to split up for the day. 

Tulum is not on the little island of Cozumel, but rather on the mainland Yucatan Peninsula.  To get to Tulum, this required me boarding a ferry immediately upon arriving in Cozumel to travel 45 minutes to Playa del Carmen, where I boarded a bus to take an hour long bus drive south to Tulum.  Once we arrived to the site, we still had to walk a good distance to the entrance. 

I should say at this point that while I was very much excited about seeing these ruins, I had developed a full blown summer cold our third day at sea and although it was hotter and more humid than even the summers we have here in North Carolina, I was feeling rather miserable, sneezing, coughing, and blowing my nose constantly. 

Tulum 2008Tulum 2008 2Tulum2008Our guide gave us a throrough overview of the site, the importance of the different buildings, and the history on the Mayan people.  Then we were allowed to go explore the site and were instructed to meet back at the bus in two hours.  Unfortunately, by October 2007, the Mexican government no longer allowed visitors to go into some of the buildings or climb the steps of the main pyramid.  I guess its my Ancient Art History background, but there is just something magical about being near something that is thousands of years old, especially seeing the pyramid and some of the other buildings still standing.  The Mayan people were exceptionally advanced and I’m intrigued by many of their ancient sites.  

After exploring the site, I returned to the area where our buses were parked, which was surrounded by a few small shops and a couple of restaurants.  I chanced eating a couple of items from the restaurant, praying I wouldn’t get sick (I didn’t) and was quite proud of myself in negotiating a cheaper price on a woven dress (I usually don’t bother and just pay what I’m asked).  We boarded our bus, and returned to Playa del Carmen to board the ferry back to Cozumel. 

The ship was set to depart at 5:00pm and I had only gotten back at 4:45 myself.  Alex wasn’t in the room when I returned but I didn’t think much of it, assuming he had gotten back on the boat and was wandering around or getting a drink at one of the bars.  I had not quite gotten into the shower yet when the phone rang.  It was someone asking whether Alex had boarded the ship.  I told him that we had spent the day apart, and I didn’t know where he was. 

I began to worry as I didn’t know what to do.  They wouldn’t let me off the ship to look for him, and even if they did, I wouldn’t know where to go to find him.  We didn’t have our cell phones with us, so I couldn’t call him.  All I could think about was that earlier that morning, he had asked whether or not he should bring his passport.  I exclaimed, “YES! You are in a foreign country!” So I was glad at least he had that with him.

It was now well after time for us to leave port and they called back two more times asking if he had yet arrived.  The cruise officials had assured us time and time again throughout our trip that if we were late arriving back to the ship from a port of call, they would leave a person behind. 

Finally, at about 5:20pm, Alex opened the door, with a sheepish grin, informing me that he almost got left.  I quickly let him know that I was well aware, as they had called several times looking for him.  As it turned out, Alex had not accounted for the time difference (although he had been reminded time and time again to stay on “ship time”) and had spent the day drinking at Margaritaville.  As it turned out, he wasn’t the only person that was almost left behind, as when he boarded, he was followed by another couple and a family.

I enjoyed my short time at Tulum and because of my interest in the Yucatan Pennisula (or the “Mayan Riviera”), we returned for a week’s stay in August 2008.  I’ve already talked a little bit about that trip with swimming with whale sharks, but I’ll save the rest of that story for later.

Anyone spent time in the Mayan Riviera?  Its grown to be quite the destination for “jet-setters” and is only more attractive to visit due to its relatively inexpensive price tag.

Excitement, Nature, Recklessness, Travel
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Thing to Do #58: Live in the Place You Love

October 5, 2009 by Jessica 8 Comments

I have struggled with how this one should be completed because I actually already live in a place I love-North Carolina.  Sure, I’m biased as its where I grew up and have lived all my life, but I think its pretty swell.  And so do others:

Unfortunately, others are seeing these lists too and moving here, making us also one of the fastest growing areas in the country

After all, what’s not to love? 

  • Affordability (I bought my house at age 25-could you do that where you live?)
  • Location (I’m 2 hours from the beach and 3.5 hours from the mountains.  We’re actually the exact halfway point between New York City and Miami, just fyi)
  • Great climate (maybe a little hot in the summer, but you betcha I ain’t shoveling snow, and hey, if it snows, no work!)
  • Plenty of things to do (I’ve got minor league baseball, NHL Hockey, and the BEST college basketball rivalry in my backyard, and that’s just sports.  We’ve got major performance halls that bring in the hottest shows, great restaurants, and plenty of parks and trails for hiking and all that outdoorsy stuff).
  • And best of all, we weren’t hit as hard by the economy.  People are still buying houses and there are still jobs to be had.  I’m not saying we’ve completely escaped the downturn; after all, I got laid off in March, but I found a job three weeks later, didn’t I?

So I don’t know what to do about this one.  I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to live in a place outside of my birthplace.  And for awhile I thought I’d like to live in Manhattan; I feel like the best version of myself when I’m there.  However, the last time I went and stayed for a week, I found myself getting irritated with the general lack of SPACE.  I felt like I couldn’t get alone, away from people, and I need my space.  So I’m thinking if I started to feel that way after a week, living there may be too much.  Alex and I have both discussed that we fear we may fall in love with New Zealand and want to live there, but we haven’t even gotten there yet, so I can’t say.

Where would YOU want to live, if you could live anywhere?

Life Management, Travel
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Third Quarterly Report

October 1, 2009 by Jessica 2 Comments

I posted my Things to Do for 2009 in the beginning of January and did a follow up in my Second Quarterly report in June.  Here is where I am on these goals:

#12 Get a piece of art into an exhibition – Completed!

#14 Ride the World’s Biggest Rollercoasters – Rode the Top Thrill Dragster but Son of Beast was closed.

#22 Go Up in a Hot Air Balloon – So far no plans on this one and I may have to move this one off the list for this year.

#28 Sky Dive – Again, no plans for this one, although when I went to New Hampshire in April, I went Indoor Skydiving.  I’m working my way up…

#37 Make fire without matches – Not yet…

#52 Read the All-Time Greatest Books – Completed my goal of reading 8 (Asterix and the Golden Sickle, The Day of the Triffids, Atomised, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Lost Estate, An Artist of the Floating World, The New York Trilogy, and Stupid White Men)  Even went above an beyond and succeeded on my third try of The Grapes of Wrath.  Currently reading Winter’s Tale.

#88 Get Married Unusually – Completed June 6, 2009.  Vegas, Baby!

#99 Confess – I put this one off all summer because Saturdays are too busy with nice outdoor activities.  Maybe I’ll wait until its cold.  

So this is where I am on the original goals for 2009.  However, I also manged to be a part of a flash mob during the No-Pants Subway Ride, went snow sledding for the first time in my life, saw a Bald Eagle, and started toward trying to get my name in the ring of honor at Flying Saucer.  As of right now, I have drank 45 of my 200 beers and plan to get at least 5 more by the end of the year.  I may also be able to complete another Thing to Do at the NC State Fair but I’ll unveil that one if it happens…

How are you doing on your New Year’s Resolutions/goals for 2009?

Achievement, Entertainment, Excitement, Life Management, Miscellaneous, Nature, Recklessness, Relationships, Sport and Activity, Travel
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