she only reveals what she wants you to see--she hides like a child, but she's always a woman to me

Note: for those of you who work with me, what I'm revealing below hasn't been formally announced or completely finalized, but feel free to ask me about it. For the rest of you, you probably already know most of it anyway--and if you didn't, I'm sorry you didn't hear it from me in person :(

So I found out today that I'm definitely going to Ireland, and that I'm going for at least a year! Yay! A year sounds much scarier than six months; but then again, a year in Ireland sounds less scary than six months in India, so I think it's a wash. Also, judging by the number of people who have expressed interest in visiting, I don't think I'll be lacking in friends. I'm really excited, and this will mark a lot of firsts for me. It will be my first living experience in a real city (Dublin is much bigger than Menlo Park), it will be my first grown-up living experience in Europe, and it will probably be the first time that I have an apartment of my own, if you don't count the month or so that I lived in the two-bedroom apartment that Walter had vacated. Anyway, I'm super excited, but things are still a little up in the air, since I haven't been given a departure date or timeframe yet. This is a bit troubling only because it's been in the works for so long that I thought I'd be leaving nowish, and so gave up the lease on my apartment. Now I find myself homeless, which is a really weird position to be in given my age and employment status, as well as the lack of any drug or gambling addiction. I hired professional movers to take my stuff to storage this morning, which may have been the best money that I spent in quite awhile--they were really fast, v. careful, and they did a much better job of protecting my stuff than I would have, since I wouldn't have saran-wrapped my couches, for example. I'm sad that my bed is gone, though, so I'm sleeping in a nest of blankets on the floor of my bedroom. Bad news bears!

In other news...yesterday was my oldest niece's birthday. Sammi's fourteen now, which is really hard to believe, and I loved talking to her even though she's a brat and demanded a birthday shoutout on my blog :) I guess she feels that she's entitled to one, especially since everyone knows that Vidya forces me into them all the time. Speaking of, Vidya was one of the many people who came over last night for dinner. Claudius made meatloaf and a tasty banana-cream pie, and I went waaaay overboard and made scalloped potatoes, corn casserole, greek salad, chocolate chip chewies, deviled eggs, and spinach artichoke dip. Gone are the days when it took me four hours to make potato salad, since I was able to turn out six dishes in less than three hours. This was especially impressive given that the only thing I prepped in advance was boiling the eggs, and given that I mistakenly bought the wrong kind of corn for the casserole and so had to run to the grocery store in the middle of my endeavors. Some of Claudia's coworkers came, as did Vidya, Sri, Zach, Oniel, Adit, and a brief visit by Shedletsky and Joanna. I managed to give away a lot of random crap that I no longer wanted to haul around with me; Oniel looked v. funny as he was leaving, since he had my former laundry bag slung over his shoulder, filled with my bathroom scale, a Twister game, a couple of notebooks, bandaids, and some other stuff. Speaking of bandaids, I was v. glad that I didn't give away all of them. In the middle of making dinner, I began to wonder why there was red stuff all over the outside of the cream cheese wrapper--then I realized that I was bleeding, and then my thumb started to hurt. It turns out that I cut myself pretty badly, and I have no idea what I cut myself on--but I triple-wrapped the wound and still managed to bleed through it. It's in an awkward place on my thumb, so the wound keeps separating a bit when I try to do things, but I've thoroughly covered it in bandages to avoid creating a complete biohazard. Of course, I'm paranoid about it due to my recent experience with glass embedded in my foot, but I'm pretty sure there are no foreign objects embedded in it, so I'll just have to hope for the best.

Okay, it's time for me to retire to my cozy nest. Start saving up your money for a trip to Dublin! I hear that it's awesome.