Early Morning Runs
I am not a morning person. By any means. I am the opposite of a morning person, the kind of person who would stay up until dawn and then drag herself out of bed at noon to drink an entire pot of coffee if she had the chance. But lately, although my job forces me to get up before 8 anyway, I’ve been taking things a step further and setting my alarm for 6:30 or even 6am. I do this so I have time to go for a run before work. Not only do I beat the heat (temperatures in the 90s all this week—ugh!) but it really wakes me up, and then I don’t have to worry about it in the afternoon when I all I want to do is sit on a beach towel and read trashy fashion magazines.
Welcome to Night Vale
The podcast radio drama about a surreal little town in the desert, has been in production since last year, but I just started listening to it recently and I’m completely hooked. It’s creepy like a campfire ghost story but with an absurdity to it that reminds me of a paranormal Parks and Recreation, is narrated by Cecil, the DJ of Night Vale Community Radio, and listening to each of his reports on suddenly appearing pyramids and time-travelling pteranodons (or is it pterodactyls?) is brilliantly bizarre (or is it bizarrely brilliant?). I’m not caught up yet but I’m dying to know more about the unknowable dog park, the hooded figures, and if Cecil ever gets a date with beautiful Carlos.
Shoes
Footwear isn’t something I’ve ever thought about too much. I don’t remember wearing anything last summer except for cross-trainers, Toms, and those $2 flipflops from Old Navy that come in every colour imaginable. But I’ve had a recently growing obsession that started when I finally gave in and, after coveting them for months, bought a pair of Jeffrey Campbell Lita boots in the fall. Since then I haven’t purchased any shoes quite that expensive—$30 flats from Zara don’t exactly break the bank—but it’s been fun to branch out. And the combination of working in an office and no longer living on the steep hill that is the Ithaca College campus does make wearing heels a lot easier.
8tracks
8tracks.com is a website where users can upload their own playlists and share them with others. It’s been around for several years but I only became aware of it recently when some of my friends (and also all of tumblr) started making “fanmixes” (playlists themed around a television show, movie, book, or other form of media) on it. It’s fun to see what songs people associate with summer or studying or Welcome to Night Vale. And it’s nice to have a playlist to listen to so I don’t have to deal with constantly clicking through iTunes on shuffle until I find the one song I wanted to listen to the whole time when I could have just taken two seconds to maximise the window and search for it.
Summer Television
Summer means that all of my usual television addictions are on hiatus until the fall, but it also brings a whole new set of shows that I love. Of course there are the obligatory reality shows, like The Voice and my guiltiest of guilty pleasures Masterchef. For more refined fare, summer brings excellent programs from places where the September-May schedule is meaningless, like cable and the UK; Luther and Skins are returning favourites, I’m eagerly awaiting (and simultaneously dreading) the return of Breaking Bad, and I enjoyed the pilot episode of The Bridge. There are the summer miniseries, put on by networks to fill in the spaces where their regular shows would normally be—I’m hoping CBS’s Under the Dome has a better ending than the one in the book. And obviously summer is a great time to catch up on the shows I didn’t have time to watch during the year: I’m almost finished watching season 1 of Orphan Black, and I watched the pilot of Hannibal yesterday.
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