My Fave Postmodern Jukebox Covers

If you hang out on Social Media as much as I do, you’ve probably come across Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox covers of various popular songs. They feature various musicians and singers who do a “vintage” take on current pop hits, turning them into a totally different songs from the original versions. Some of the covers are quirky and kitschy, others are more serious interpretations. I tend to like their covers best when they are quite different from the original.

Anyway, here are a bunch of my favourite PostModern Jukebox covers. Enjoy!

Get Lucky (Daft Punk) in Irish Tenor Style

Pretty sure this was the first Postmodern Jukebox video I came across and I immeditaely went searching for more of their stuff. This one is hilariously awesome. The can of Guinness totally makes the video.

Thrift Shop (Macklemore) in Vintage “Grandpa Style.”

Okay, I’ll admit I never heard the original until AFTER I saw this version, but I still loved this the first time I saw it. So much fun.

Die Young (Ke$ha) in Wild West Style

Yeehaw!

Really Don’t Care (Demi Lovato) in a Vintage Motown Style

Soooo much better than the original. The tambourine guy cracks me up every single time.

Pompeii (Bastille) in Mad Men Style

This one didn’t bowl me over at first, but really grew on me. Or maybe I just like anything Mad Men-ish.

Blank Space (Taylor Swift) in Cabaret Style

This one is just mesmerizing. Her voice is fabulous.

All About that Base (Meghan Trainor) in Two Different Styles

Finally, there are two Postmodern Jukebox covers of this song, but I can’t make up my mind which one I like best. The first one is a Jazz Cover – with the singer playing an actual upright bass! She is awesome.

But I also like this one…their European Tour version. Amazing voices, and the bass playing’s fantastic here, too.

Do you have a favourite?

Tea Troubles

“I’d like a tea, please.”

Every time I travel to the States, I say those words, and I invariable end up being all confused when a soft drink cup gets handed to me. I have no excuse, really. By now I should bloody well know that in the US “tea” is usually assumed to be iced tea. If you want hot tea, you have to actually say, “hot tea.” In Canada, we assume the opposite, of course. When I say “tea” I mean hot tea, not iced tea. If I want iced tea, then I specify “iced tea.”

I learned quickly, though. After our first fast food stop in the States, I remembered to start asking asking for hot tea. After that, the only thing that confused me was then being asked, “would you like cream with that?”

Sigh.

At least they have unsweetened iced tea down there, rather than the sugar sweet stuff we usually have up here. I much prefer it unsweetened.

Skiing in the Berkshires

Back when I was in my late 20’s, on a bit of a whim, I bought a timeshare while on vacation with my parents. In many ways, it was a silly thing to do, and there have definitely been times I’ve regretted the purchase (especially in the early years), but on the whole I’ve ended up with some really fabulous vacations by trading in my time share week. Thankfully, my husband (who I met just a few months after I bought the timeshare) loves traveling just as much as I do, so we’ve made good use of it.

The place I own is on Hilton Head, in South Carolina, but we’ve only actually gone there once in all the years we’ve owned it. Other years we’ve traded in our week to travel to places like:

• Williamsburg, Virginia
• Whistler, BC
• Beaupre, Quebec
• Albufeira, Portugal
• Oberstaufen, Germany
• Orlando, Florida

And then other years, we’ve just gone on little vacations here in Ontario, to places in Collingwood, Barrie, and Calabogie.

What I especially loved about having a timeshare when the kids were young, is that it forced us to travel somewhere every year. It’s not easy to travel with small children, and I think it would have been pretty tempting to just decide not to even bother. But since we owned the timeshare, there was a feeling that we shouldn’t waste our week…we had to go somewhere, even if it was just a little trip. And since most timeshare units are like apartments—with a full kitchen, living room, and dining room—the kids had the space they needed to feel at home. We also didn’t have to eat out all the time, like you have to when you’re in a hotel.

The downside of timeshares is that you don’t always get your top choice when you try to trade in your week for a specific week in a specific location. The first time we wanted to try traveling to Vancouver Island, we had a search open for about 3 months for a trade, but we never got a place. We ended up going somewhere else, instead. The next time we decided to try traveling there we ended up getting a trade after only a couple of weeks of searching, for a fabulous spot right on Victoria Harbour.

This year, we decided we wanted to do a ski vacation for March Break. This was challenging because March Break is a high demand travel time and we didn’t even start looking for a trade until January. At first, we were searching for 2-bedroom units at Tremblant, Smuggler’s Notch, and Stowe, but no luck. After a couple of weeks, we scaled down our search to 1-bedroom places in those same areas…still no luck. Finally, we decided to branch out and look at other places. I ended up finding a ski resort called Jiminy Peak in The Berkshires area of Western Massachusetts. I was a little worried the snow might not last into mid-March, but I checked reviews of the resort from previous years and saw it normally operated into April. We ended up getting a nice, big, 1-bedroom unit at a resort just across the road from Jiminy.

As March Break approached and we heard about the huge amount of snow Massachusetts was getting, we were so happy with our choice. But then, in few days leading up to March Break, temperatures climbed. We ended up driving down on the first day of our vacation through teeming rain. We figured we’d maybe get in one day of skiing. The weather cooled a little bit the next day, so we booked lessons for the kids for the next morning, plus 4-hour lift tickets for all of us. We were worried the hill would be super icy after all that rain, but the easier runs we were sticking to were not bad at all. But the hills were super-groomed, way more than what I’m used to. The runs were also a lot longer than what we’ve got in southern Ontario, so I had to adjust to that, too. One run we did quite a few times, the Left Bank, was about 3.2 km long. Compare that to the longest run at our regular ski hill: 792 m. Bit of a difference!

We went back again to ski again on the Wednesday. It was a colder day at about -10 C, but we’d skied on much colder days than that at home so we didn’t think it would be a problem. What we failed to account for was the 65 km/hour winds. Holy moly, they were strong! At one point I thought I might actually start skiing backwards up the mountain, but gravity somehow managed to win out. It really was piercing, though, and we kept getting ice cream head aches from the cold. We still skied for several hours, but it wasn’t nearly so much fun as the first outing.

Originally we’d planned to just ski the two days, but when the forecast for the Friday looked much nicer, we decided to hit the slopes again. That day, the weather was beautiful, but the conditions were a bit more challenging. There was both more ice in some areas and more fluffy snow in others, so you really had to be on your guard for your skis speeding up and slowing down on the different surfaces. I almost wiped out a couple of times.

Also, on my first run of the day, I started down the hill and immediately realized things were NOT right. My legs felt like there were going to give out at the knees any moment. They were sooooo tired and stiff. Then it came to me that I had probably never ever before in my life skied three times in five days…not even when I was a kid. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through a morning of skiing without having a major wipe-out, but thankfully by my third run of the day I started to loosen up. Whew! Ended up having a great day after all.

The best thing about the week was just how much the kids’ skills improved. For the first time ever, I had trouble keeping up with my daughter. She kept zooming ahead of us, hardly ever coming to a stop, but still staying in control (she was the only one of us that didn’t fall once all week long). And my son finally learned how to turn better, and to have more control over where he was going. The kids just had two one-hour lessons while we were there, but they learned a lot.

So all in all, it was a great week skiing at Jiminy Peak. It may not have been our fist choice for March Break, but it ended up being a fantastic vacation.

Helloooooo March!

It’s still Winter, I know this. I know from the ice we had to chip off our front steps this morning. I know from my horrendously dry hands and cracked knuckles. I know from the sound of hacking coughs coming from the family room. But February is gone, March has arrived, and there is HOPE in the air. According to Environment Canada, there’s even a distinct possibility we’ll have a couple of days with highs above freezing this week. Okay, just one degree above freezing. But still…I might have to pull out my sandals.

February’s been a bit of a blah month, but we did manage to have a fair bit of fun, despite the cold weather:

• We got out skiing a couple of weeks ago and had a fun time.
• We visited my brother and his family at their new house north of Toronto and got to enjoy the skating rink and toboggan hill they have on their property.
• We booked several camping vacations for the Spring and Summer so we can start enjoying the tent trailer we bought last Fall. I’m getting super excited about creating great family camping experiences for the kids.
• We’ve all been reasonably healthy (until this weekend).
• I managed to actually watch the Academy Awards for the first time in a gazillion years.
• I’ve been kept totally amused by Twitter reactions to strange tunnels near York university, runaway llamas, and that dress that’s black and blue (or white and gold?).
• I’ve started blogging again.

On the other hand:

• I’m tired of the cold.
• I’m tired of snow.
• I’m tired of my Winter wardrobe.
• A whole bunch of family and friends have had bad news this past month, in terms of deaths in the family, health issues, and lay-offs.
• Leonard Nimoy died, which made me very sad.

So I’m happy to turn the page on my calendar (an actually paper one you hang on the wall…very retro, I know). Let’s see what March has in store…

10 Books That Have Stuck With Me

I’m following in the footsteps of Nicole and Lynn by writing a post on the top 10 books (or series of books) I read as a child under 12 that have stuck with me through my life. Here’s my list:

• Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss — I’m starting with a book for younger kids. I read lots of Dr. Seuss when I was growing up, of course, but my favourite was Fox in Socks. It’s a book full of challenging tongue twisters. I mostly associate it with my older brother John, as he was the one who most often read it to me. John loves a challenge, so he would try to zip through the book as quickly as possible without making any mistakes. As an adult, I had my chance to twist my tongue in knots, reading to my kids about tweetle beetle puddle battles and who sews Slow Joe Crow’s clothes. I got pretty good at it (though not as good as John).
• Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee — I loved the poems of Dennis Lee! They’re so odd and quirky, with vibrant imagery and a wonderful lyric quality that keeps them bouncing about in your head long after you finish reading them. I can never hear the words “mumbo jumbo” without thinking “Christopher Columbo.” I especially loved how the poems dealt with scary subjects like monsters kidnapping parents, rattlesnakes, the measles, fear of the dark, and other assorted dangers in such a silly way that they became safe to laugh about. Even cannibalism could be funny (and oddly Canadian):
  

  In the Gatineaus
  I’ll eat your toes
  In Napanee
  I’ll eat your knee…

  It was both shocking and hilarious. I suspect my love of Dennis Lee has somewhat influenced my musical tastes. I’ve always loved bands that mix sweet melodies with somewhat shocking or upsetting lyrics…bands like The Beautiful South, The Cure, The Smiths, and Death Cab for Cutie.

• Famous Five by Enid Blyton — For a couple of years I was absolutely obsessed with these books. I borrowed as many of them as I could get my hands on at the library, and read them all multiple times. I got so much into the books that I started speaking with a British accent (not likely a very good one, mind you) and using all sort of British terms. I would say thing to my brothers, like, “Do you know if there’s a torch in the boot of the car?” which I’m sure annoyed them immensely. Going to England became a strong focus of my life after reading the books, and eventually I ended up doing a study term there in my third year of university. I haven’t picked up a Famous Five book in many years. My suspicion is that they haven’t aged well.
• Asterix & Obelix by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo — Comic books featuring fiesty French villagers downing magical potions and defending themselves against the invading Roman army…what could be better than that? I loved the word play and the terrible puns. And Dogmatix was cute as a button! On an early date with my eventual husband, I made reference to Asterix and Cleopatra, and he immediately responded, “such a pretty nose!” and I positively swooned. Could this be a rare man who will actually get my wacky sense of humour? (Answer: Not always, but yes, most of the time he does.)
• Deenie by Judy Bloom — Nicole and Lynn both wrote about Deenie, too, so clearly this is a book that resonated with a lot of us. I have a bit of a back curvature…not scoliosis like Deenie had, but lordosis, which is a front-to-back curvature, rather than side-to-side. I used to see a back specialist every year. He would assess whether the condition had gotten any worse, and there was always the looming threat of an operation or a back brace if it did. That made the book especially interesting/scary to me. Thankfully I never did end up needing a brace or an operation. For more reflection of the book Deenie, hop over to Throwing It Back, where Nicole is posting a running play-by-play of the novel.
• The Cat Ate My Gym Suit by Paula Danziger — I read a bunch of Paula Danziger books, but this one especially resonated with me because the protagonist was a chubby girl who hated gym. Hello! That was totally me. She was also smart, a bit cynical, wise-cracking, and not quite in control of her own life…I could relate to her.
• Rilla of Ingleside by Lucy Maud Montgomery — I read all the Anne books, but my favourite books in the series were the ones about her children. I absolutely adored Rilla, who grows from being a silly young girl into a strong, capable woman through the painful years of WWI. So many tears, but such a wonderful read.
• Little Town on the Prairie / These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder — Likewise, my favourite Laura Ingalls Wilder books were the later ones where Laura was moving more into an adult world…teaching school, being courted by Almanzo, and moving away from home. I think I found Laura and Almanzo soooo romantic (though now I think, “whoa…that was quite an age gap.”)
• My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel —This was one of the first YA books I read that had more grown-up themes in it: dating, teen pregnancy, abortion. I was a pretty advanced reader, so I had no trouble reading it, but I’d say I was an emotionally immature kid, so it was definitely leading me into territory that was a bit scary and confusing. I was one of those kids who wondered why all of my friends suddenly wanted to stand around and talk about boys they had crushes on at recess when I still wanted to play tag and skip rope. (The next book to exceed this one in terms of shock value was Go Ask Alice, but I’m pretty sure I was 13 by the time I read that one.)
• Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — I first became acquainted with HHGTTG by listening to the radio series with my older brothers and loving it. Shortly after, I read the first book in the series, and eventually the rest of them, too. I reread them every few years till well up into my 20’s. By the time I was in my mid-teens, I could quote entire passages of the book (though I didn’t often, except with other similarly obsessed, geeky friends). Even just thinking about parts of the book make me smile: Arthur lying in front of the bulldozer in his housecoat and Ford asking him “Are you busy?”, the wacky consequences of the Infinite Improbability Drive, Vogon poetry, the mice, the whale and the petunias, passages like:
  

  “It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
  “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
  “You ask a glass of water.”

  My kids have never read the books, but they know still know what I’m talking about when I suggest they put a fish in their ear. I loved the book then, and I still love it now.

The great thing about a good book is that it really does stay with you forever, doesn’t it?

Names and Faces

One of the things that makes me particularly anxious about social situations is that I have a terrible time connecting names and faces. I’ve tried to work on my ability to remember names, but still when I get introduced to people I find I quickly forget who they are if I don’t jot down their names. I actually keep a list on my phone with the names of my kids’ friends’ parents, so that I don’t embarrass myself at school functions.

I have similar problems with the names of people at work. A little over a year ago when I started at the company I’m working for now, I did a week-long training course to learn all about the software products we develop. The course took place at our company’s Toronto office, and people from all over North America attended. We all introduced ourselves on the first day of class, but with so many people there I never really did learn anyone’s name.

A couple of months later, I started occasionally going down to the Toronto office for meetings. While there, I would often see this one guy I did the training course with. We’d smile and say hello, maybe chit-chat a little bit, and afterwards I would always chide myself a bit for not being able to remember his name. I kept thinking I should walk by his desk sometime to see if there was a name plaque there, but I never did get around to it. By the end of March last year, I stopped needing to go down to the Toronto office so his name remained a mystery.

I still worked with people in Toronto, but only via email, messaging, and the occasional phone call. The woman who acts as the main technical reviewer for all of my documentation, Nina, works out of the Toronto office. Last November, when she went on vacation for a few weeks, she had a co-worker named Ryan fill in for her while she was away. I worked with him quite a bit, trading emails, chat messages, and attending the same meetings. As with all the other people I work with remotely, I kept thinking it would be nice to actually meet him in person.

So now we get to last night. Our company had our annual Holiday party (in February, because December and January are among the busiest months at my workplace). The party brought together employees at all three Toronto-area offices for one big celebration. I was excited to meet up with my main technical reviewer, Nina, because I’d never had a chance to meet her before. The fact that I didn’t know what she looked like was a small stumbling block, but I was pretty sure I knew people who knew her. Thankfully, that was the case. Someone I’d worked with last year was able to point Nina out to me, so I scurried over to say hello and exchange hugs. It was lovely to talk to her face-to-face.

Then, at one point, I saw Nina gesture to someone to come over. I turned and there was the guy I’d done my training course with. “Ryan!” Nina called to him, “Come meet Mary Lynn!”

“We’ve met!” he said. And I burst laughing. I’d worked with him extensively for several weeks, all the while not realizing that I already knew him from training. Apparently he knew who I was. I just didn’t realize who he was. Thankfully he thought the whole thing was pretty funny. I felt like a bit of a goof, though.

Not the first time something like this has happened to me, either. At my last company, I had an extensive email-only working relationship with someone, thinking she worked at a location somewhere in the States. In fact, her cubicle was in the next aisle over from mine. I passed her in the hall regularly without realizing. I felt very silly when I finally worked that one out, too.

I really have to get better at this.

Rambling

It’s cold and dark way too early these days, and the time change has seriously thrown me off. I don’t have the presence of mind to come up with any sort of organized blog post, so get ready for some stream-of-consciousness rambling here.

• I’m finally getting settled into the sort-of new, sort-of not new job. All the weird password and email access issues I had because I was a contractor-turned-permanent employee have finally been sorted out, so I now I get to complain about my regular work instead of all that stuff. Progress!
• One thing I’m realizing is what a creature of habit I am. Back when I was contracting at the company, I didn’t get to use the indoor parking at the building. So all through last Winter I had the joy of walking out to my car at the end of the day and having to scrape off whatever snow had accumulated on top of it. This really wasn’t a big deal to me…I’d been 12 years at my previous job and there was no underground parking there, either. Now that I’m a permanent employee, though, I finally get to park underground. Woohoo! But do you think I can get used to pressing the P1 button in the elevator at the end of the day? Nooooo. Every frickin’ day, I walk into the lift, turn around, hit the G button and then go, “Doh!” Every day. Maybe next week I’ll finally learn…
• Segueing now into completely unrelated news…I just finished reading a book in just two days, which is something of a miracle for me. I generally don’t zip through books that quickly except maybe when I’m on vacation. The book in question was Longbourn by Jo Baker, which tells the story of Pride and Prejudice, except through the experiences of the servants of the household. It sounds like it would be a bit of a silly novelty book, but it’s really quite well done. The characters are wonderful, the story rich, and you really get a feel for how the servants’ lives are really at the mercy of the whims of their employers.
• Hmmm…what else? Let’s talk commutes! On my way into work there’s this one area where the traffic always gets bunched up. The lanes go from two lanes to three, and when the third lane starts pretty much everyone wants to move one lane to the left of where they are. Well, almost everyone. What throws things off are the people who actually do want to be in the lane that they’re in, and then it gets all confusing as people try to move over, while others try to maintain their position. So this morning I was trying to move one lane to the left when an SUV that was slightly behind and to the left of me decided to ZOOM forward quickly to keep me from merging in front of him. I could have sped up more to try to get ahead of him, but I decided–eh, I’ll let him have his way. So I slowed down and merged in behind him I saw he had two decals on the back of his SUV. One said COWBOY UP! and the other said REDNECK. And I thought, “Well of course. If I’d known you had those on the back of your vehicle, I wouldn’t have even tried to merge in front of you.”
• In other news, tomorrow I’m heading off to Whitby to hand in the final payment on the tent trailer we’ve bought. It’s a Jayco Jay Series 1207 model tent trailer that’s a few years old, but in really good condition. After several years of hemming and hawing about maybe buying a cottage, we finally decided it would stretch our finances way too much. But a used tent trailer? That we can do. I have all sort of awesome memories about camping all over Ontario and the rest of Canada with my Mom, Dad, and brothers when I was a kid. Looking forward to giving the kids similar memories. Just have to wait till next Spring…

Yup, It’s Definitely Monday

This morning dawned with three out of the four members of our household feeling exhausted. The poor ten-year-old, had been up several times during the night, troubled by a bad cough, sore throat, and congestion. Both my husband and I were up with her, so this morning all three of us were very groggy. The eight-year-old slept like a log.

Anyway, we determined that our daughter was not well enough to go to school. Thankfully, I’d finally been able to arrange remote access to work at the very end of last week, which is good because my husband really can’t work from home. Whew! Got that just in the nick of time.

So, my husband and son head out the door to go to work and school. A few minutes later, I’m surprised to hear the door opening again.

“Uh, what’s up?”

“The van won’t start.”

Oh no! Frustrating way to start the day, but not the end of the world. If I’m staying home to work, then I don’t actually need my car. We exchange keys and the boys head off.

I spend the next little while puttering in the kitchen, giving my daughter some medicine, and slowly waking up enough that I can get into my day. Finally I get around to lifting out my computer to log into work, only to find that I’ve forgotten my power cord at work and I only have a couple of hours left on my battery. Gah! I go running around the house looking for any laptop power cords we might have hiding about. I manage to find two, but neither of them are the right kind for my work laptop. I tell my daughter that I might have to nip to work and back just to get my power cord and she tells me that’s okay.

And then I remember I don’t actually have a car that will start. Crap, crap, crap…whatamIgonnado?!?

I get a hold of my husband and we determine that the power cord for his work laptop will probably work on my computer, too. An hour later, after his early meetings are over, he nips home with his spare power cord. And ta-da! It fit my laptop just fine. Mini-crisis over.

And the rest of the day was relatively uneventful and quiet…except for all the coughing.

This and That

Well, this blog is off to a roaring start, init?

It’s been a busy few weeks around here, with very few chances to nap and even fewer chances to blog. A few weeks ago I started a new, permanent part-time job at a company I’d contractor for earlier this year. It’s been nice starting out  a new job in a place where I already know the people I’ll be working with and the products I’ll be writing about. There’ve been a few hiccups, mainly related to weird password and email issues that came up because I’d left the company, but now I’m back, but in a slightly different role. Thankfully, those things seem to finally be ironed out so I spend my time writing documentation instead of pulling my hair out and phoning support.

And just as things were starting to fall into place at work, the inevitable fall sickness descended upon the household, so I’ve spent the last week all stuffed up and coughing. The whole household has had it. Just like every freaking year. It’s my own fault that I caught it, really. Last Monday my son came up to me with a deflated balloon in his hand.

“Mom, I can’t blow this up. Can you do it for me?”

“Sure!” I said, putting the balloon to my lips and exhaling a big, deep breath before thinking, “waitaminit…isn’t the kid who handed this to me the same kid who’s been coughing up a lung for the last two days?”

Doh!

Sure enough, a day later I came down with a sore throat. Was probably going to happen even without the whole balloon incident, right?

So, my health has taken a wee bit of a hit there, but to make up for it, I’ve become a FitBit owner. I promise to not be too weirdly obsessive about it and talk about it all the time. (Wanna know how many steps I’ve taken today? 8,397! Woohoo!) The deal is that I’ve had a very hard time motivating myself to exercise in the last couple of years. And I have zero interest in going on a diet, but I do want to get myself into better physical shape. I find I huff and puff more than I used to when I climb stairs. My joints get all creaky when I sit in the same position for too long. And generally speaking, I just don’t have the energy I used to have. I feel like I need to put a stop to this before it gets any worse. I’m not ready to be old! So far, I find the FitBit helps. I’m a goal-oriented sort of person, so when it tells me that I’m 5 active minutes of exercise away from my daily goal, that’s enough to get me off my duff and get moving. Whether this continues in the long-term is yet to be seen. Wish me luck!

So This is Why People Burn Books…

That may seem like an odd subject line for a post on what, according to multiple sources on the Internet, is International Literacy Day. But stick with me here, people…I have my reasons. And my reasons do not have to do with the dangerous words that can be contained within books. And they don’t have to do with that time I got a paper cut while reading a novel (though that really did hurt a LOT).

No, this has to do with how very distracting books can be at just the wrong moment.

It also has to do with me embarrassing myself in public. Again. If you were a regular reader of my old blog, this should be striking you as a familiar theme. In fact, I’m just going to go ahead an create a category called “embarrassing myself” since I’m pretty sure I’ll have an occasion to tag a bunch more posts with it.

So here’s the story. Today I dropped by the library to return a couple of books my daughter finished reading. While there, I decided to pick up another of the books on her Battle of the Books reading list for this year. It took a while to find the book because it wasn’t on the shelves where it should be, even though the computer system said there was a copy on the shelves. Finally one of the library staff found it on a display shelf.

As soon as the book was handed to me, I walked over to the checkout machine, checked it out, then headed toward the exit. As I walked, I realized I hadn’t even really looked at the book to see what it was about. I turned it over to read the back cover. “Lucas has dinosaurs on the brain, but he’s…“

BANG!

And I walked right into a glass panel adjacent to the library door. The glass rattled loudly, and several library workers rushed over to me. “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

Oh fine, fine…except for the fact that I might actually be dying of embarrassment.

I quickly reassured the staff that I hadn’t hit my head, just my arm and chest. I think I’d noticed something wasn’t right just a second before I hit, so I was able to turn my head enough to avoid whacking it into the glass. But I had too much momentum to totally keep myself from hitting it. It wasn’t too bad, though. Just my ego was bruised.

I gave a sigh of relief that no one I knew had seen me walk into the glass. Then I logged onto Twitter to tell everyone what I’d done. I’m funny like that.

But to go back to my main point. See how evil books are! They are dangerous things that distract you from the world around you. They clog up your head with with their pernicious words and distract your attention. I probably should have been forewarned, though. The name of the book that distracted me? Feather Brain.