Just the facts.

Here is some shit about me:

• I don't particularly like apples. I'll eat one now and then, but I never really enjoy 'em. I do enjoy apple pies and apple crisp, because those are full of butter and sugar, which have saved worse fruits than apples.
• I am an awesome baker, but I think those "...and it's good for you, too, because we subbed in millet for flour and carob for chocolate and applesauce and agave for the butter and sugar!" recipes can suck balls. Full-fat (salted) butter and brown sugar win every time.
• I don't like cream cheese in my baked goods. No cream-cheese frosting, even. The exception, of course, is plain cheesecake. Not with fruit or anything.
• Despite owning two dogs, I am not a dog person. I like mine okay, usually, and a few other dogs have won me over, but I pretty much have no interest in your dog, or anyone else's. 
• I absolutely love the show Cops. I wish they had it on Netflix. I'd watch it all the time.
• I am becoming significantly more organized as I get older. My desk at work is organized logically and files I need are in file folders and labelled in order in my drawer. This is a total departure from my previous systems, which included "just put that shit anywhere" and "four of us share our lockers, so there's always a math book to grab, even if it's not for the right class".
• Being an editor for my job makes it really hard to enjoy a book that hasn't been proofread well. This is irritating, because I really can't enjoy a story, no matter how interesting, if I'm spending the whole time with my mental-red-pen poised.
• I am not overly "girly," I guess. I wear skirts and dresses a lot, but that's mostly because some days I cannot stand the thought of wearing pants. I wear at least a little makeup most days, but I paint my nails maybe five times a year, and I have had one pedicure in my entire life. On the other hand, I have no interest in sports or wearing athletic sneakers, ever, or baseball caps, so maybe I am a little girly after all. Or maybe I'm not really comfortable with labeling myself! Resist!
• I have a magical ability to ignore messes if they stay there long enough, for weeks at a time, until suddenly they drive me insane. For example, I folded a load of laundry three days ago, and it has stayed on the couch since then. It's fine for at least two more days, at which point a switch will flip in my brain and I will be so irritated I have to put it away immediately, even if it makes us late for something.
• I do not like 90% of romantic comedies. I enjoy 40% of shitty action movies.

Phew. Glad I got that off my chest.

Let's make this an official trend.

Here are several more unrelated things, so we can call this "the week where Rachael wrote all disjointed nonsense entries, as opposed to her carefully planned, powerful writing the rest of the time."

Today's post, in a special tribute to "cleaning out my email inbox, which is where I send stuff to myself so I don't forget about it," will be a series of snippets of stuff I have emailed to myself or others.

First: a single-line email to my work best friend, regarding a coworker who is very smug about the way she lives her life. Said coworker does not seem to realize that several of the main tenets in her life scheme outright contradict each other. She also is the kind of human who would get very, very unpleasant if anyone were to suggest this to her. The single line was quite poetic, though: "MY CHOICES DEFINE WHAT I AM AND BY EXCLUSION WHAT YOU ARE NOT. LET ME SHARE THEM WITH YOU AT LENGTH."

Second: a seriously old entry by Mimi Smartypants, whose archives I have been slowly perusing for weeks because I am a creep (I am back in 2004 right now, no joke), in which she describes her aversion to showering. Reproduced here because it captures pretty neatly the inconvenient mess that is actually taking a shower: "I bathe every day, barring an episode of suicidal despair or the occasional housebound Sunday (provided my head does not stink like an ashtray from the night before). But I do not enjoy bathing. Or showering. Many times I have expressed the wish that there was a magical way to be shiny soap-smelling clean without all the nudity, water, and washing. I find it tedious and I would rather not. But I don't like being dirty or smelling bad, so until that magical non-shower is invented it looks like I am screwed. I guess I could develop a heroin problem, since heroin addicts also find showering unpleasant but they are too messed up (on the heroin!) to care what they smell like. I am an expert at finding big, messy, dangerous solutions to tiny problems, as anyone who has ever watched me try to kill a spider or unclog a drain can attest. Maybe I should get a government job."

I agree fully, except the suggestion that nudity is a pain. I would so much rather hang out in my undies - as in, just briefs - than be fully clothed, any day. And the whole not-fully-naked is mostly due to a combination of hygiene (who'd want to sit on the couch after a naked person?) and stubble-itching.

Third, two recipes via V-Neck and a Cardigan, both of which look amazing, and which I emailed myself so I wouldn't forget about them:
Cocoa brownies with browned butter
Funfetti sandwich cookies

Fourth, I am running the new version of Firefox at home and the old one at work, and what the fuck, Firefox? Why did you move the home button way the fuck over there, away from the back-and-forth buttons? And because the little right-click menu is slightly different, I keep opening neat stuff in new windows instead of new tabs, the way God intended. It is mildly irritating! By golly, I intend to do absolutely nothing about it!

So there, internet! I'll be better next week, or something.

Titles are hard when nothing's connected.

1. I went running again. I realize that there are people who do this, every day, on purpose, without making a big deal out of it. I am not yet one of those people. I seriously was such a wimp about it, too. I was out for about twenty minutes, and I'm sure more than half was walking. But! You have to start somewhere, and other positive things!
1a. I am pretty sure the whole "runner's high" thing happens because if it didn't you would straight-up either murder someone or collapse in a sobbing heap. Running is the fucking worst, and it really really sucks right up until that split second where you go, "Oh wait. I could keep going, I guess. Maybe I won't firebomb this whole block after all."

2. Whenever anyone, including me, says "[such-and-such] is the worst," I immediately think, "Worse than genocide?" The answer is always "No, not worse than genocide" Really puts things in perspective: Running is awful, but I don't fear for my life because of the condition of my birth. Sweet potatoes suck, but having to eat them is better than watching all of my loved ones be ethnically cleansed! Coworkers with compromised digestive systems are still preferable to the systematic murder of a people! Be warned, though: If you point this out to someone who is complaining, it will pretty much kill a conversation dead.

3. Something new for me to feel self-conscious about: I cannot draw a reasonable arrow. I always end up blocking them out to make them look more even so you can tell it's actually an arrow and not just a stray mark or evidence of the palsy or something. Isn't this a bizarre thing for me to worry about?

4. My sister-in-law (Andy's younger sister) is recovering from some crappy health issues, so today I mailed her a sudoku book, a crossword book, and the trashiest, most ridiculous (and cheapest) housewife porn I could find at Wal-Mart. I just google-searched to find out if "housewife porn" is the phrase everyone uses to describe romance novels of a certain caliber, and it turns out that no, people in general do not. Turns out also that you maybe shouldn't google that phrase from work. Anyway, I'm hoping the stuff I sent helps her recovery process which is mostly just boring at this point. Also, the novel I got involved a police chief of some sort, but if I had had my wits about me, I would have tried to find one with a male nurse, so as to relate more to her situation.


5. This book looks really awesome. Via A Cup of Jo.

That's all I got! Whatchu got today?

What I've been googling

Things in my recent searches on Google:

• Revetments
• Adoption forum (we're considering maybe starting to look into finding out about adoption) (you come across a lot of crazy pretty quickly when you search for this, by the way)
• $65000 canadian to usd
• how to buy an island
• what are oat groats
• sushi tomago
• "pete doherty"
• "this property is within wyoming county"
• adverbial phrase
• oregon trail diseases
• "all traps must be examined and checked"
• Chicago-style preferred spellings
• how much is a peck
• Edward Lear's siblings
• vectomega
• "Life is very short and there's no time"

I will leave it to you to guess which of those are work-related and which are not. Also, I don't have $65,000 in either US or Canadian money, but if I did, I could buy an island with it. And oat groats sound kind of good, but also like a lot of work.