{"id":89,"date":"2010-08-19T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2010-08-19T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2011-02-11T18:51:07","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T23:51:07","slug":"things-i-love-thursday-august-19th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/2010\/08\/19\/things-i-love-thursday-august-19th","title":{"rendered":"Things I Love Thursday, August 19th"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week has been absolutely great. I’ve been keeping busy, writing a lot, hanging out with good people, and just been having a good time. This week also went by super fast. It definitely does NOT feel like a week since I wrote my last TILT post. But it sure has been, so here I am. Without further adieu:<\/p>\n

\"\"External Hard Drives:<\/strong> I’m totally going to geek out here (as if my last post wasn’t enough techno-babble). I was able to find a 2TB external hard drive for $119 this week. It’s awesome, because I’ve needed another external hard drive for a while, and I was finally able to find one with the right amount of space, at the right price, at a time when I actually had a little bit of extra money (which is rare since I’ve got my budget down so perfectly that there’s rarely any wiggle room). Since I don’t have a TV, I use my laptop (hooked up to a huge external monitor) to watch movies and TV shows. Having this 2TB external hard drive means I can go through my DVD collection and convert them all to digital format and sort them on my hard drive for easy access any time. I can download and store full seasons of my favorite shows (after I purchase physical copies, of course). I haven’t had enough hard drive space to get anything new to watch in a while, and now I do! I’m totally going to turn all two terabytes into entertainment central. It’s going to be AWESOME.<\/p>\n

Sit Down Restaurants:<\/strong> These days, it’s rare that I go to any sort of sit down restaurant. I don’t really cook either, so most of my meals consist of cereal, sandwiches from the Deli that I eat while working, and other quick bites that are more convenient than satisfying. I always have some excuse to rush through meals, be it schedule, money, or simply having no one to eat out with. So when I do actually go to a restaurant, it is such a stand out experience. This week, I ended up at not just one restaurant (Uno’s) but two (Artie’s Delicatessen). It’s so great to just be able to sit down and enjoy a good meal without have to worry about getting all the ingredients before hand, following any sort of recipe, or cleaning up afterward. Restaurants always huge so many different options, so I can always find something that I’m in the mood for at that moment. And what’s even better<\/em> is when you go to a restaurant with a large party of people and at the end everyone tosses their money in for the check and you’re over instead of short. That’s when you know you have good friends.<\/p>\n

Long Sleeve Dress Shirt: <\/strong>This week was host to the day (Friday!) where I comfortably wore my first long sleeve shirt of the season! I absolutely love the cold weather, and the fact that it was cool enough to toss on a long sleeve button up shirt, even if it was for only one day, just made me all happy inside. That morning, after checking the weather for the day, I was able to open my closet and choose from a large number of shirts I haven’t worn in half a year. It took me a really long time to choose (I finally went with a short length long sleeve striped shirt from Hugo<\/a>). It’s the same feeling I get after I go clothing shopping, and I’m so excited to wear each individual item that I just can’t choose. At some point soon, I’ll also be able to toss on one of my sport coats, which also brings me irrational joy.<\/p>\n

\"\"Middle Eastern Culture:<\/strong> I’ve had two (completely unrelated) brushes with Middle Eastern culture this week, and it always makes me extremely happy. The first was a conversation that was sparked with my friend Cameron after helping a customer who happened to be from Saudi Arabia, close to where Cameron’s sister and brother-in-law live. I took a few Islam classes in college, and it’s always interesting to me to hear what it’s actually like in a Muslim country from the perspective of someone very similar to me. Also, in events completely unrelated, I ended up catching the movie Cairo Time<\/a> with my friend Diana<\/a>, which was all about an American visiting and getting used to the culture in Egypt. Both of these events really make me want to travel to that part of the world. Cultural differences have always fascinated me: the way in which human brains can be wired so differently yet still be intrinsically the same. And I’ve always been drawn to Middle Eastern culture for some reason. Now I want Hummus.<\/p>\n

\"\"Maimy: <\/strong>My male cat is named Maimonides, or Maimy for short. He was a birthday gift, and I share the same birthday at the scholar Maimonides<\/a>, so choosing his name came pretty naturally. Maimy is an absolutely amazing cat, probably the best that I have ever owned. He’s extremely an affectionate cat; a complete lap cat who loves to be cuddled and loved. He is also an absolute monster who will follow me around at night and wait until I turn around to jump on me and attack. His favorite game to play is being pushed off things and roughly knocked around. I’ll push him off my coffee table and onto my bed, jump on top of him, hold him down, upside down, and shake him, and he’ll love it. As soon as I get up, he’ll jump back on the table and stare at me until I do it again. If I don’t, he’ll just go around my room knocking things off shelves until I attack him once more. The best part about playing with Maimonides is that no matter how worked up he gets he’ll never actually scratch or bite me. Sure, he’ll grab my arms with his arms and legs and put his mouth on my arm when I attack, but he won’t actually put out his claws or bite down hard. He’s totally the type of cat that I could see becoming best friends with a toddler. That kid could totally pick him up and carry him around anywhere, torture the cat, and Maimy would love every minute of it. He’s just that fucking awesome.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Rest:<\/strong> David Sedaris, getting positive feed back from people you respect, having amazing friends, political discussions with my mom, the iPad (being a geek is awesome), Simplenote<\/a> and Notational Velocity, snakes as big as world domination, reading about all the amazing things WordPress can do, downloading PDFs, “I’m a Mac, and I jailbreak my iPhone<\/a>,” Futurama yet again, $7,000 cufflinks, 1Password Pro, Firefox magically working perfectly again, making personal deadlines and sticking to them<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s Things I Love Thursday again, August 19th, 2010 edition! This week includes being a geek, eating out, clothing options, THE MIDDLE EAST, Kittens and more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":93,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[45],"tags":[72,66,68,74,62,69,73,67,7,64,65,71,63,70],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/maimy3.jpg?fit=1280%2C960&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p123kB-1r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":683,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iamdann.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}