Guest Blog

Guess what? I am so cool I got to write a guest blog post for the national Girl Scout blog! (TFA has a new partnership with the Girl Scouts, so they asked for staff who are GS alums to volunteer). I'm famous!

Internet Famous

After I cross-stitched my Community sampler I didn't really know what to do with it, so I donated it to the Regretsy alchemy fund. It was included in their most recent fundraiser, and, believe it or not, someone paid money for it. In fact, on the main site, several people lamented that they didn't see it in time to buy it themselves. I should probably quit my day job and just sell pop culture cross-stitch samplers on etsy.

Also, since Megan Ganz tweeted it, the sampler's imgur album is this close to having a million views. Woah.

Two Cool Things

First, my xkcd cross stitch was featured on Mr. X Stitch yesterday! In the world of needlepoint blogging, that's a Big Deal.

Second, my Unknown Gnome* surveyed all my coworkers for adjectives about me, and created a word cloud that is probably the most accurate description of me of all time:

My favorite parts are "sedentary," "Excel," "Hermione," and the fact that "ice cream" is on there twice.


*Our office's non-denominational version of Secret Santa.

Ready for my closeup

They are filming a movie where I work! Last week a small village of trailers sprang up seemingly overnight, and ever since then there have been guys setting up complicated lighting contraptions and giant camera things all over the block. I wanted to take a picture of all the trailers, which are actually quite fancy, but there are a lot of big scary guys around and I was too chicken.

Based on the fact that one of my coworkers saw Julia Stiles in the sandwich shop next to our office, and another saw Bradley Cooper on the street, we have surmised that this is the movie being filmed. Now we are spending our lunch hours hatching elaborate plans to put on all our TFA gear and try to get in the background of a scene. Some people are also hatching elaborate plans to run into Julia Stiles and/or Bradley Cooper, but those seem less likely to bear fruit.

That name is my name too

First my dad got me this candy that shares my nickname:

It was a chocolate covered orange slice, yum!

And then we got this junkmail with a familiar return address:

I kind of want to go there.

And then my job got featured on CNN Money as a best company to work for, even though technically we're not a company. Other than that the article is pretty accurate, except everyone in the picture looks super serious and actually people at work are usually smiling and aren't robots.

So in conclusion, I have a good name and a good job, and even though my vacation is over and I won't have a summer vacation for the first time since I was four, I don't really have anything to complain about.

One more step towards obscure fame...

Those of you who read my teaching blog might remember that on my very last post, a grad student commented and asked if I would let him use my blog in his dissertation on identity formation in beginning teachers. I said okay and basically forgot about it, until this arrived in the mail for my review:

 

(Sorry it's fuzzy, it's hard to hold the camera still so close)

That's not his full dissertation, that's just my chapter. All 78 pages of it. Apparently it took so long because mine was the "most intimidating" so he saved it for last.

Now that's two obscure academic works my writing will appear in this year! I'm basically a grad student myself at this point.

I'm famous!

Okay guys, one of the things I do in my new job is send out a weekly "email blast" to all the Philly corps members, to tell them about current TFA goings on. I was pretty excited to learn about this part of my job, since for the whole two years I was in the corps I always wondered about the mysterious person who sent out the blasts and who, as far as I could tell, existed only in my inbox.

Fast forward to today, when a corps member had to come into the office to make photocopies or something, saw my name on my cube, and said "wait, are you the Caroline who sends out the email blasts?!"

Yes!! I am finally famous!