On the 12th day of each month bloggers all over the world take 12 photos throughout the day and post them on their blogs. It’s Chad Darnell’s idea, and you can see his website and a list of links here.

To see my photos from past months, click here.

Here are my photos from June 12, 2010.

After working out I went to my favorite place in Tempe…the Public Library.  And this visit earned me the mayorship on Foursquare.

I ended up getting a book on CD (a book I’ve read about five times…don’t ask) and the newest James Patterson paperback.

Nobody has ever been able to give me a definitive answer to this very important question: is it legal to drive while listening to an iPod?

I stopped at work to get some crap done that I knew I wouldn’t have time to do next week.  Summer Camp is both fun and exhausting.  Eleven hour workdays are draining.

This is my in-box.  Half of it just needs to be filed away.  The other half is crap I haven’t had time to look at yet.

Stopped and had coffee with Drew at Lola Coffee in Phoenix.

I love this building.  Hanny’s is an old department store that they’ve turned into a restaurant/bar.  Totally over-priced but the building is freaking cool.

Too many people are tweeting about and Facebook about soccer.  Totally bugs.  Maybe I’m just jealous that I don’t get it.

Thanks to a review on Yelp, Drew and I found a quaint Vietnamese place that was delicious and cheap as hell.

This is Chloe.  She is too hyper to sit still for pictures.  This is the best one out of about 100.

I hate the term “night-cap” to describe an alcoholic beverage sipped right before bed or at the end of an evening.  Therefore I will not use that term to describe this Coke Zero and Vodka beverage that was consumed before calling it a night.

The ever-so persistent D.  Gotta check my blood before bed.

I’m pretty sure I’ve read more books than this…I’ve just kind of gotten behind on writing about them here.  But whatever.  I’m only updating this list to keep count.

#22 – The Truth About Stacey – Babysitters Club Book No. 3

#23 – Lullabies for Little Criminals – By Heather O’Neil

#24 – Cross Country – By James Patterson

#25 – Slouching Toward Bethlehem – Joan Didion (okay…I’ve read this book about a million times, but I recently re-read it front to back on a Sunday evening)

So I’m only a quarter of the way to 100.  And the year is about half over.  So there is really no way I’d ever be able to read 100 books in a year.

When you work for ten plus hours with the same group of 100 kids, you start to create different ways to entertain yourself.

One of my primary sources of daily entertainment includes getting kids to sing for me.  I do this two ways.  The first is a tit-for-tat sort of thing.  I say “do you want to do activity X?  Then someone in here needs to sing me a song that I like or tell me a joke that makes me literally laugh out loud (LLOL).”  Kids get up and I audition their talents.  It’s funny because the kids have started to figure out that I really like songs from commercials, and they’ve been testing out any commercial song they can think of.  Right now just about every kid in the Club sings “London Gold…it’s the best” subconsciously.  That stupid jingle is stuck in EVERYONE’s head.
I’ve also been teaching kids songs that they’d probably normally never know…like Manic Monday by the Bangles.  I just randomly yell “It’s just another Manic Monday” and the kids respond with the Woo-woo-woo part.  Here’s an audio sample of our greatness:

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Crap, it’s going to be a long summer.

I was going through the photographs I had on my cell phone and was deleting a bunch of them.  And I thought that maybe I should post some of them here for safe-keeping…you  know, for when I want to look at them later.  So here, in no particular order are a few cell pictures with mini-explanations:

Perhaps this is a bit nuerotic…but I like to keep my closet in ROYGBIV order with white as my  starting color and black as my end.  Don’t judge me.

Four girls put together a thirty-second dance routine at work and wanted to do it for the Club.  And we’re a place that helps foster creativity…so we made the time.  (The truth is we were short-staffed that day, and when they came up to beg me to perform for everyone it was a really good way to stretch out our afternoon announcements.)

I’m really bad at making bulletin boards.  This is the Club announcement board I put together a couple of weeks ago.  Bleh.

I was trying to explain to Drew how organized my desk (right) is compared to my office mate’s (left).  So I snapped a photo and texted it…but when I look at this picture I see that I’ve got a lot of kid art and toys cluttering my space.  But notice how clean my actual desktop is.

Diet advice from the building managers?  I Twitpic’d this…but I thought it was funny.

This one freaked me out…I noticed on Tuesday afternoon that I had a mysterious 1:30 appointment blocked out with no explanation or title.  There were no corresponding appointments in my Outlook calendar or my Google calendar.  So I was truly perplexed.  Wednesday came and went, and nobody showed up at 1:30.

This little guy provoked a fight between 2 members at work, and was on my desk as evidence right next to the behavior citation I got to deal with that morning.

I Facebook’d that Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs should come hang out at my work for a while.  This picture was taken after a small incident on Wednesday.

Sanctuary.

A six-year-old painted this cute picture last Friday.  He told me that the bottom thing under the letters is a guitar.  Super cute.  I tweeted “I didn’t paint this, but I agree.”

And @Adaman09 replied “But now it’s in your possession. ” 

Perhaps it is.

I really don’t know why, but cursive writing reminds me of pubic hair.  I seriously think of pubes every time I use cursive (which is not often) or when I’m helping a kid write in cursive.

Gross, right?

And my cursive writing is so ugly (see above).  Why did we waste so many hours in elementary school on a skill we’ll never use in our adult lives?  I think it’s time for us to slowly phase out the use of this sickening form of writing.

This has kind of been driving me nuts the past few weeks.  Every morning I pass a plant nursery that has a rather large sign out front that says “HUGE TREE SALE.”  And every morning I’m disturbed by the ambiguity of it.  What is huge?  The trees?  The sale?

I guess it’s more funny that disturbing.

I really doubt that anyone is walking into the nursery and is disappointed when he finds that the sale is large and the trees are just normal-sized. But I really get a kick out of syntactically ambiguous statements.

I listen to The Savage Love Podcast, and too often callers call in and state that they have a “big [FILL IN THE BODY PART] fetish” and I laugh because I imagine some guy getting his rocks off on extremely large feet.

I really like in the evening news when the talking heads are reporting on stolen items getting recovered and say something like, “the stolen vehicle was found by the 101 in Scottsdale.”  It makes me think, “good job, 101 for doing your civic duty and finding a stolen car!”

And newspaper headlines are notorious for this…basically because they omit qualifying information that makes the headline sensible.  I read The Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Lower Case” column and they collect funny ambiguous headlines (like Squad helps dog bite victim or my favorite Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge).

When I was telling my buddy Drew about the “Huge Tree Sale” sign he made a good point.  He said, “I don’t really think that “Extremely Large Sale on Ordinary Sized Trees’ would fit on a sign.”  Touché.  I guess I just have to let this one go.

Today a nine-year-old introduced me to his five-year-old sister like this:

“She’s only five. She’s kind of weak, and a little dumb, but I like her.”

The first day of Summer Day Camp is done…only 47 more to go. But who is counting?

In the past couple of months I’ve found that I’m spending fewer idle hours on the internet.  Which is good, I guess.  But my Google Reader is full, and it’s making me a little anxious.

First, if there are any non-nerds reading, I should define Google Reader as a web-based aggregator, which is capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds on or offline.  Umm…still confused?  How about this: it’s one website where you can read all of your favorite websites when they are updated.

Good.

So I subscribe to 124 feeds.  And I’ve got everything categorized into fifteen folders:

* Blogs (written by people I know…virtually or otherwise)
* Local (local food and news)
* Productivity (ironically one of the biggest time-sucks)
* Design & Coding (web stuff)
* Android (phone stuff)
* Orange County Politics
* Diabetes Blogs
* Design (like interior design)
* Technology
* Entertainment
* LGBT
* Blogging
* Links to me (I created a feed that shares links when someone links to this website)
* Work (things related to my profession)

I easily get over 1,000 articles a day in my reader.  And when I was reading things every day, that wasn’t a huge deal.  Granted I used to breeze past a lot of stuff…or just mark entire folders as read if I wasn’t interested that day.  But I kind of feel like now I’m overfed – too much to read, not enough time to read it.  So what goes?

I’m kind of impressed with my abilities this afternoon.  Today, with two sharpies and about fifteen pieces of paper, I re-worked What Some Would Call Lies.

If you’re reading in a reader, click through.

This scribbled, doodled, kind of look had been something I wanted to throw together for some time.  It was inspired, actually by a valentine card from a few years ago.  Anyway.  It’s new.  It’s cute.  Enjoy it.

The only thing that I don’t love is that depending on your screen resolution, you may not be able to see ALL of the doodles in the background.  So click here to see the image full-sized.

In the Teen Center at work yesterday a group of boys were sitting around watching the Suns VS Lakers game and as teenage boys tend to do, they started talking trash on one another.  After a few warnings about their shitty language, they finally started censoring the cuss words.  Here is one exchange that took place between Oscar and Luis:

Oscar: “My dog just had another set of puppies.”
Luis: “Your dog had puppies like three months ago.”
Oscar: “I know…she has a lot of puppies.”
Luis: “That’s because your dog is a…” he paused to think about the word he was going to use.  “That’s because your dog is a H-O-R.”