A few things

- more as side notes to myself, in hopes of turning them into full blogs between now and the move, that is, if I don’t collapse of exhaustion, dehydration or pass out from excitement first.

• If I had a nickel every time I trained someone, or my take on summing up residential real estate in a few paragraphs, as my way of marking an end to a phase. I hope that after the next two weeks I'll never ever have to deal with it again… Even when I decide to buy my own house one day.

• Between Persian princess and street urchin, I will forever go down the history of R&C as the girl who not only politely corrected the boss that “No, Mr. R., it’s diphthong, not dipthong” but was also able to explain what it actually meant and illustrate it on examples. Big deal – even the dumbest student at Brusov knows this, and yet, the Boss-Who’s-Always-Right was not only impressed but somewhat hurt, as I shoved the dictionary right at his face and ended the argument with Subjunctive “I wish I were wrong…”, thus scarring the poor thing for the rest of his lifetime… The incident itself took place a couple of years ago, and yet up to this date the guy won’t stop bringing it up. Food for further though - you’d think that with such grammar background, I’d make a lot less errors on this blog but my short attention span has been a long established and documented fact.

• A baffled attempt to respond to an image conscious comment thrown at me some weeks ago, as in “You look great! Different.” “Different how?” “You look like you’ve lost a lot of weight. You look skinny now. ” Apparently the comment affected me more than I'd expect it to, hence the necessity to write a coherent piece on an extremely tangled and convoluted mess that weight related issues once used to be.

• Can someone tell me what’s the difference between a regular physical checkup and a school checkup? Apparently there is, since they’re billed differently and chances are that my current health insurance won’t over the latter. Which sucks – such a waste of year long insurance money thrown away for nothing. Does anyone actually need another long and drawn out rant of hostility and rage on how much health care sucks in this country?

• Is it just me or Starbucks has been brewing some seriously mediocre coffee lately? An observation of the last few months or so based on visits to several stores, including one in Boston and another one in D.C… On a slightly different note – as my coffee consumption dramatically decreases, my soft drink consumption increases accordingly. Between the two, I’m not sure what to consider a lesser evil…

• I have finally reached the point where I am mentally and emotionally done with Richmond. And yet, I find it hard to list every little thing that I will miss. However, I can firmly assert that anything south of the river or north of Broad will not be remembered fondly…

• As much as I hate winter, I am having a really hard time dealing with dog days of August, when Richmond seems to be the hottest spot in the whole entire East Coast, if not the continent intself (seriously, check weather.com, if you don’t believe me). At this point, frost bite and snow seem a much more pleasant alternative to this blood boiling, brain melting, suffocating hell. I do realize that I might want to reconsider this last statement in a few months. I think I need to move to a place like Oakland, or San Diego, or whatever happens to have temperatures of perpetual upper 70s, if for nothing else, at least for the sake of having one less thing to bitch about.

• And lastly, I still owe a comment to Tamara, and the promised reward, so hopefully, that will be coming shortly. Just to let you know that I haven't forgotten.