thank.... you....?

My sister, Jane, is in town for a few days for work, so since she was here, we met up with a few of her friends for dinner.  We met up in Old Town, Alexandria, and, as you know if you've ever been told Old Town, it can be hard to find a parking spot.

We drove around the block a few times and spotted one just a block from our destination.  The trouble was that it was on a one way street and the spot was on the left.  I'm already not the world's best parallel parker (though I did *almost* park in a spot that was exactly the size of my car in Chicago once).  Add to that, that the spot is on the opposite side that I'm used to.  And on a hill.  And the road was paved with cobblestones, and not brick sized ones - fist sized ones sticking out at all angles.  And it was raining and dark.  So, I had a lot of strikes against me.  Then add the last factor that I drive a stick shift.  So it was precarious to say the least.  I had to line up and gun it and then stop suddenly; those cobblestones did not make it easy.  But at last - success! I was parked nearly parallel to the street at an angle that would probably not get my car hit by another car driving down the road.

As Jane and I got out of the car, a man said, "Ah ha! I knew it was a teenage driver!"  It took me a second, but then I realized he was talking about me!  I would like to say that he was an old man with terrible eyesight, but he was probably only a few years older than we were.

So, on the one hand, it's nice to know that in the dark, I can still be mistaken for a teenager.  (I still get college student a lot, but it's been a while for teenager.)  But on the other hand, apparently I drive like a sixteen year old.  I guess you win some and you lose some.

private eyes are watching you

A few days ago, I got a mysterious package in the mail.  It was from Amazon, so I didn't feel nervous opening it.  (I guess that would be a good way to get me to open pretty much any package, provided it looked somewhat official.)  It was the book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot.  Naturally, I was excited because I love books and I had wanted to read this book.  But it didn't come with any kind of note or indication who it was from.  I searched through it and even checked the package a couple of times to makes sure it was actually for me and I hadn't accidentally stolen something for one of my roommates.

First, I checked my Amazon account to make sure I didn't actually order it for myself.  I do that sometimes (as Scarlet can attest) - order something and then forget I did.  It makes for wonderful surprises later.  But, I hadn't ordered anything of the kind in the last six months at least.

I then asked my sister, Lydia, if she had sent it to me.  We had talked about the book in the past and how we'd both wanted to read it.  I didn't think she had my address, but at least two other siblings did, so it wouldn't be too hard for her to get it.  But she said it wasn't from her.

Next, I compiled a list of people who knew my new address.  (Maybe you think I'm a bit crazy, but I wanted to give thanks where thanks was due.) (And I wanted to make sure it wasn't sent by some creeper who now had my address.)  I searched in my gmail account and through my text messages (thanks, iPhone, for making that easy) and made a list of everyone who had my address.

I eliminated the ones who were obviously not responsible.  Leona, the sweet old lady from the assisted living center.  The HR lady from my last job, who needed to send me my last paycheck.  The werewolf, who hasn't talked to me much since he got engaged (and probably wouldn't do something like that anyway).  Uncle Keith, who just wouldn't.  Dulcinea, who still owes me a piece of art from the last service auction (I haven't forgotten!).

Of those left, the most likely culprit was Scout.  She and Mr. Scout had sent me a wonderful Valentine's day package (very thoughtful!) and it seemed like something she would do.  (She's science-y and well read.)  But she denied it.

I went through the rest of the list, starting with who I thought was the most likely working down.  But the Librarian, Scarlet, Big Brother, Jane, Jo March and Legolas all said they hadn't done it.  Well, now I was completely stumped.  I didn't think anyone else had my address, so maybe it really was the creeper!

But then I realized the classic detective mistake.  I'd overlooked someone.  I'd forgotten that I'd left my address for Scarlet on the refrigerator and during my moving out party, Lady MacBeth had copied it down.  I texed her and - score! - she and MacBeth had sent it.  She said they actually had ordered it to be sent with a gift note, but Amazon must have messed that one up.  Once she told me, I remembered that she'd said that she was going to send me something before I left, but I'd forgotten.  (Like I said - I always do.  It does make for some nice surprises later.)  (So, thanks very much, MacBeths!)

So, pretty much I'm going to start my own detective show.  I mean, with these skills of deduction, how could I not?  But it will probably be a British one because they always solve the case.  Just as soon as I finish my new book.

it's a small (mormon) world after all

Since I've started my job, a few people have asked me if there were any other Mormons who work there.  I said I'm sure there were, but I hadn't met any specifically, because it's not like you can always tell.  Well, I went to work today, just like every other week day.  A new (middle aged) gentleman was being shown around and introduced to people.

When he got to my cube, he said, "You know, you're the second Kristin Neeley I've met in my life."

I said something non-committal like, "Huh, that's interesting."  I mean, it doesn't seem like a stretch that someone else in this wide world could have my same name.  It's not that unusual.

He went on. "Only she spells her name without an "i" in the beginning - Krsten."

Now he had my attention!  I'm fairly sure in this wide world there really is only one Krsten (pronounced "Kristin") Neeley and she is my aunt.  I said as much.

Now I had his attention.  "Oh yes?" he went on. "Are you... Steve's daughter?"

I said I was Steve's niece, but that I was Bruce's daughter.

He said that he used to work with my uncle - Keith (Krsten's husband) - and that they had figured out that he was second cousins to Bruce, June, Steve and Keith, their grandparents being siblings.  (Note to my mother, Eleanor and Justin, being the siblings.)  This would make me his second cousin, once removed.  And of course, we got to chatting a bit more after that.  He gave me his phone number, in case I need anything, in true Mormon relative fashion (me being new to the area and all) and told me about his kids at BYU.

So there you have it - the first Mormon I meet at work and it turns out we're related.  Of course.  Welcome to Mormonville.

it's been one week (or so) since you looked at me

Ever since I've moved to the DC area, the question I get the most is "How's DC?"  So, here's a pretty boring update. (I think that everyone knows I moved here, but if not - hey, I moved to Washington DC!)

First - living arrangements.  I live with three other girls in a pretty spacious townhouse.  I have my own room and bathroom, which is lovely.  (Not that I minded sharing with previous roommates Scarlet and Scout before her, but it's nice to pick up a pair of glasses and know that they are mine.)  Two of the new roommates are delightful and kind girls and I've enjoyed talking to them.  The other one is probably delightful and kind, but I've only seen her once and I'm not totally convinced she even sleeps (or comes) here.

I started work two days after I moved here, and between work and school (still in school) It has been slow going trying to get my house in order.  I spent most of the time I had in the first week and a half getting the front room organized, so my delightful and kind roommates wouldn't hate me.  As those of you know who helped me move, I have a lot of stuff.  At last I've got all the books on the shelves (luckily my roommates didn't have anything in the front room, so I could take over, as is my wont in the places I live).  (Also luckily, there wasn't a tv in the front room, and I provided mine, so they have more reason to not hate me for taking over.)  So for the last few days I've at last been able to focus on trying to get my room organized.  One of my roommates commented on the progress I was able to make in just one day yesterday as she walked by my bedroom.  What she doesn't know is that since I have a bathtub separate from the shower, I've just been putting stuff in the bathtub until I know what to do with it, so it looks like I'm much further along than I really am.

Next - church.  Three singles wards meet in the building that I meet in, and there is even less parking (and no double parking options available) than the building in Columbus, so this year my ward meets at 3.  Yes, I will tell you, it's a little bit awful.  But I do have loads of time for reading in the morning, not to mention blog updating and box unloading.  So, while I don't love it, I can live with it.  Next year we move to 8, which I will like much better.  The ward is much bigger than I'm used to as well; about 250 people.  So it's a bit overwhelming, but I've already ran into three people that I knew at BYU, plus a friend of Mrs. Weasely, so I feel like at least there are some friendly faces about.

And finally - work.  Work is going well.  Really there's not much to report on there, except I work right on the Army base, which is a bit exciting.  It takes about a half an hour to get there, so I've been enjoying some good old BYU devotionals on the drive in and some good books on the drive home.  As my older sister pointed out, this is the first time in my life since college that I haven't work for a three letter acronym.  (In college I worked for BYU at the MTC, then I worked for MWH, then ACS, the CGI and finally the Ohio Department of Legislative Information Systems, or LIS, as it was called.  So I'm like a fish out of water here.)

And that's about it.  I'm enjoying the adventure so far.  I miss my friends, of course.  It just takes a while to meet new people, and I miss talking to people beyond the cursory getting to know your story questions.  (I especially miss Lauren, Tawna, the Carpers and Joseph for those more meaningful conversations, though I know it's dangerous to name names, and I miss everyone else too, trust me.)  But I know those things have to be waded through, and really I don't mind too much.  It's been fun and exciting.  But, you know, if you wanted to drop me a line or something to let me know that you still have fond thoughts of me, that's okay too.

shiver shiver

Ohio, like many places, has weather that can be pretty up and down during this part of the year.  One day it will be warm enough to run outside without a jacket and the next you can't go out without twelve layers.  So, the other day, I was in my house and I was freezing.  I'm often colder than most people.  (My mom says I am another Sam McGee and I will only be warm when I'm cremated.)  So, I turned up the heat.  But it was still quite cold.  So I turned it up some more.  I didn't hear the tell-tale sign of the heater turning on, so I feared the pilot light was out.  We've had pilot light problems in the past.

The problem was the furnace is located in the unfinished part of the basement and currently that part of the basement is full of furniture and other stuff that was in the way of checking the pilot light.  Being the pansy that I am, I couldn't move the stuff by myself to check.  So I waited for Scarlet to come home and together (i.e. her, by herself) the furniture was moved out of the way.  I removed the cover, but the pilot light was going strong.  Great - now what's the problem?

I headed back upstairs and settled in on the couch with a hat and gloves and cuddled under a comforter to read.  Scarlet walked by and laughed good-naturedly at me.  "It really is a bit cold," she conceded.  "Oh," she went on, after having checked the thermostat, "the temperature is set to 80, but it's actually not on heat - it's off.  That's probably why."  Probably why indeed.

wait.... what?

It's been a while since I updated by blog, and who knows when I'll update again, so I've got a few unrelated thoughts.

1.  I was at a concert at the Newport recently and while I was waiting for my party to return from the restroom, a girl came up to me with a large beer in her hands and, holding it out to me said, "You've got to help me drink this!"  Luckily, I had my standard, "Sorry, I don't drink!" response, so I didn't have to try to explain that drinking from a strange girl's cup, with the possibility that she was trying to drug me so she could steal my organs (I was all alone after all), was not my usual modus operandi.

It reminded me of a time I was at Columbus State walking to class when a guy walking toward me was lighting a cigarette and talking to himself.  "What am I doing, this is bad for me, I need to quit this," he said.  When we were about to cross paths, he held the cigarette out to me and asked, "Do you want this?"   Luckily, I had my standard, "Sorry, I don't smoke!" response.

Even so, it got me wondering, does this happen frequently to other people?  I can't imagine there are many things that I would take straight from a stranger's mouth no questions asked, except perhaps dark chocolate or pineapple.  Do people usually go around wishing to share overpriced carcinogens with people they don't know at all?  And why aren't more people walking around with dark chocolate covered pineapple?

2.  An addendum to my previous bicycle post.  I went running at Antrum Lake a week or two ago and as I was about to start, a guy on a bike was coming toward me.  He was talking on his cell phone and I had just enough time to hear him say, "I will call you back!" before he threw the cell phone down and crashed into the bushes.  He was unhurt, which was good because it was pretty much the funniest thing I'd seen all day.  Apparently he has the same bicycle skills as me.  (Or else I'm just a magnet for bike crashes.) I can only imagine what kind of conversation was so important that he had to take that call right then.  And I can only imagine what the person on the other line thought - if the call was ended or if they were just listening to the bystanders asking if he was okay.

In other news, my physical therapist told me that she doesn't want me to ride my bike for a while until things settle down with my shoulder a bit more, which is good because I'm still a little bit afraid of my bike.

In other news, I dislocated my shoulder last month white water rafting.  I guess I don't have anything else to say about that, except that if you ever dislocate your shoulder while white water rafting, Lady MacBeth is a good person to have with you.  She came to the hospital with me, so I didn't have to be alone.

3.  A week from today I start my first class at Johns Hopkins University.  I'll be working on a master's degree in bioinformatics.  The program is designed for people who are working full time, so it has both on site and online options and I'm going to start with the online option to see how I like it.  My first class is biostatistics, so wish me luck.

And if you happen to be walking by me sometime, can you please have some pineapple in your mouth?

i can ride my bike with no handle bars, no handle bars, no handle bars....

My whole life I've had an interesting relationship with bicycles.  My earliest memory of a bike is when my bike literally tried to kill me.  I was probably about 6 or 7, riding my bike with training wheels (the one two previous sisters had learned to ride on) and somehow I managed to fall off.  (Apparently I was so uncoordinated back then I was able to fall off a bike with training wheels.)  Being the same melodramatic girl back then that I am now, I laid on the ground in despair, thinking I would never learn to ride a bike, when the bike itself, having had enough momentum to keep going, and having training wheels so it didn't tip over, headed up the slight incline that was our driveway, turned, came down the drive way and ran over me.

Somehow, I still managed to learn to ride a bike and had a fairly normal childhood riding around the neighborhood, graduating up to the purple banana seat bike and then to a bright, new, shiny, my very own pink ten speed later.  (Nothing is better as the third girl in the family to get something of your very own.)

But my brushes with bicycles were not over.  My freshman year in college, I was hit from behind by a biker.  I was just walking to class when I felt something hit my calf causing me to stumble.  I can't remember if the girl fell off her bike or not.  She was probably going slow enough that she was fine.  She apologized and said she hadn't seen me.  "Really?" I thought. "I am the only person on the sidewalk.  Were your eyes closed?"  As neither of us were hurt, we went our separate ways.

When Lydia was on her mission, I borrowed her bike.  I would ride it to work, which was only a five mile ride.  I only fell off once when I was trying to avoid a pedestrian and my handlebars hit a fence, causing me to go down.  I still have a tiny scar on my wrist from that incident.

This is just a funny bike related story:
Jane was visiting me and she saw my newest bike and she said, "Hey, that's cool - I used to have a bike just like that."  To which I replied, "Huh.  Did you leave it in mom and dad's garage?"
(In my defense, mom and dad were on their mission at the time and they said I could take any bike out of the garage that I wanted and by this time in my life I wasn't as interested in the pink one.)

Recently, I decided I want to start doing triathlons.  I did one with Sleakbean back in the day and we had a lot of fun.  Plus, it's always nice to have something to train for.  So, naturally, I bought a road bike.  (My stolen from Jane bike is a mountain bike.)  Being the want-to-be-savvy biker that I am, I got a fancier model, i.e. one that has pedals that you have to clip your shoes into.  It is what those who are serious about biking do, so that's what I did, because I want to be serious about biking.

I was a little nervous to take it out the first time because, to be honest, I never was really good at turning.  But I figured I could only learn by doing, so I got geared up and headed out.  I headed to Antrum Park and started north on the Olentangy River trail.  To my surprise, turning wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  Road bikes are much lighter than mountain bikes, so I felt like I had much more control than with my old bike.

The first trial came not long into a ride.  There is a point on the trail where you must go over a bridge, make a nearly 180 degree turn and then go under the bridge.  I know myself and I knew I couldn't make this turn, so I came up with a plan.  Where the turn occurs, the trail actually goes straight for a bit into a parking lot.  I decided I would go straight, turn around on my feet and then go on.  I thought I could unclip one foot, stop, unclip the other foot and then go from there.  As I was approaching my stopping place, I unclipped my right foot and prepared to stop.  It was here that I learned something very interesting about myself.  It turns out that without even realizing it, I always get off my bike on the left.  So, I stopped the bike, and my reflexes told my brain to move my left leg down, but unfortunately my left leg was still clipped into the pedal, so before I knew it, I was on the ground.  It really takes talent to fall off a bike when you are prepared to stop, but that is me.  I fell in front of a group of forty something soccer dads on roller blades, who asked if I was okay, which of course I was.  One of them told me that I was going to wrong way to the bike trail and told me the way to go.  Of course I knew the way to go, and I had to pretend like that was my intention all along and that I hadn't just been thinking that the smart thing to do would be to go right back the way I came and completely give up my designs on biking that day.

I clipped back in and headed back down the trail, now with a bruised knee and a bleeding shin.  And now with the added stress of realizing I was probably going to die.  I tried to calm myself down by thinking, what's the worst that could happen?  But then I thought that the worst that could happen was that I could break my leg in a horrible manner and that I would never be able to use it again.  I just concentrated on pedaling.  I was about half way to the Worthington library (the end of the trail going north) when I realized: I have no idea how I am going to be able to turn around and get back on the trail.  I probably got a better aerobic workout than I maybe would have because my brain was telling my hear to panic.  Luckily, I did not remember what the Worthington area was like and when I got there, there was a big loop for bikers to just ride around and get back on the trail.  Whew! Crisis averted!

But no! New crisis!  I still didn't know how to stop.  Sweet Lady Jane! - I am literally strapped into this death machine!  I might just have to ride this until I die from exhaustion!  And then I realized that I still had the hairpin turn to deal with.  I practiced unclipping and clipping a few times to where I felt like I could at least get both feet unclipped at the same time.  I approached the turn and slowed down, with both feet carefully unclipped.  I managed to stop and get both legs on the ground.  I didn't dare actually swinging one leg over the bike, so I just kind of walked my way forward up the bridge.  There were a few people around me, so I "rested" a bit to let them by so I wouldn't embarrass myself getting back on my bike and going down the road.  To my chagrin, two young men walked by and, perhaps noticing the distress that was emanating from my body, asked if I needed help.  I told them that I was fine, but thanks.  One eyed me uncertainly, taking in my bloody knee and asked if I was sure.  Now I had no choice but to continue on.  I assured them that all was well and slowly got my bike going again.  

I approached the end of my ride with some trepidation, realizing that my usual method of stopping when I don't know how was to either fall over or run into something.  Realizing that with a padded room not available at the end of the ride I would have to try another method, I practiced unclipping and clipping a few more times.  I reached the park, and happily was able to unclip and stop, with only a few minor bruises to my thighs from stopping juuuuuust a bit too quickly.  

Hopefully my relationship with my bike with improve.  I'd like to think that I just need to work at it more, but that precludes the idea that I actually have a bit of balance in my body.  But, as it's the only plan I've got so far, I guess it's the one I'm going to have to take.  Plan B being a broken leg, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.