I just finished reading a book by A.J. Jacobs called “The Know-It-All”. Essentially, the senior editor of Esquire decides that his brain has been overrun by useless pop culture ‘knowledge’, and it’s time to return to his roots as an intelligent human being. To accomplish this, Jacobs decided he’d read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-to-Z. When I first read about this book I was intrigued because, I’ll admit, when I was seven years old, I wanted to do the same thing. I never got around to it, instead attempting to read Gray’s Anatomy all the way through (which never happened…)

    Even though I was eager to read the book, I was a little nervous. It was rather difficult to imagine how the book would avoid the tedium of reading the actual encyclopedia. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Jacobs’ talent for weaving random information with personal stories from his life as he struggled through this feat of education. He was very open, discussing everything from work to family to his and his wife’s struggle to become pregnant with their first child. It was insightful, intelligent, and most of all, hilarious. I learned a lot of both useless and useful information from such a wide variety of subjects, and yet Jacobs still found a way to connect all of this supposed randomness to events from his life. It was a cliff notes version of the encyclopedia, mixed with the heart-on-your-sleeve qualities of a blog.

    Halfway through the book, I was inspired to work on a little encyclopedia project of my own. Sure, I toyed with the idea of reading it from A-to-Z myself, but I certainly don’t have the time for that right now. Instead, I’m going to write one. Don’t worry, I haven’t entirely lost my mind. It won’t be a tome to challenge the Britannica, rather it will be my own personal encyclopedia. So often on my blog I use terms and phrases that aren’t familiar to everyone because, quite frankly, I made them up. For instance, ‘The Tiffany’s Game’ or ‘The Infamous Kick Butt Red Dress’. I’m repeatedly asked what these and other uniquely Me things are, and being the nice person that I am, I repeatedly explain them in detail. Instead of continuing this pattern, I’m going to write ‘The Encyclopedia of Me’ and post it in the About Me section of this blog. That way, I can just direct curious readers there and it will answer all of those silly little questions about me. Plus, it gives me an excuse to write about myself as if I were a snotty scientific expert. Not only that, I’ll get to use ridiculously huge and ludicrous words that I’d never use in regular conversation. And really, any excuse to use words like “paterfamilias” or “auslanders” is a good one. Hehe.

    Another nice inspiration I received from the book led to several new products in the Heather Show cafepress store. There are postcards, a sassy license plate holder, a new ladies t-shirt, a charming tote bag, and a seriously cute mug. Go check it out, you know you want to!

    Now for the day’s events! This afternoon my friend Stephen came over so that we could put Christmas lights up in the yard. Last year we spontaneously decided to decorate the yard three days before Christmas and ended up buying just under 2000 lights for just seventy-five cents a box. Unfortunately, being so close to Christmas, all they had left were purple lights. Worse still, when we got home and plugged them in, they weren’t so much purple as they were pink. Not to be dismayed, we simply dubbed our work the Breast Cancer Awareness Yard.

    We kept all our pink lights and will most certainly use them this year, but we wanted more. Really, 2000 lights just aren’t enough. 🙂 We went back to Target and purchased 1000 blue lights to compliment the pink. However, that wasn’t enough. Oooh no. We also bought a giant 8″ tall inflatable penguin. I was all excited until we got it home and I read that we couldn’t keep it inflated for more than 8 hours at a time. The thought of seeing a melted penguin in the front yard every morning was just too depressing, so we returned the darn thing and bought about 800 more lights.

    After all of this, we decided it was too dark and too wet from a whole day of rain to put the lights up tonight. If the weather clears up, we’ll be decorating fiends come Monday. Now if only we could decide on a theme… I really want to do a Spongebob yard because my brother Tim came up with a way to make the tree out front look like a jellyfish. But alas, Mom’s not too keen on that idea. I’ve got two days to convince her – think I can do it? Honestly, nothin’ says “Happy Holidays” like a giant lit-up plastic Spongebob Squarepants in the front yard, surrounded by psychedelic jellyfish and an ocean of bright blue lights. I can’t imagine how anybody wouldn’t love that. 🙂