Girl Seeks Southern Hemisphere

Or anywhere, really.

I am a total Bill Bryson freak.  At any given point in my life I'm in the process of "reading" at least two of his books. I use the term loosely mainly because I spend the same amount of time laughing at the words that I do looking at them. I'm currently reading Notes from a Small Island, and aside from giving me a violent, insatiable case of wanderlust, this book has boosted my determination to become a travel writer. You can't beat such nuggets of literary genius as this:

"The windows, I recalled, could be opened only by means of a long pole. About ten minutes after we arrived each morning, one subeditor so old he could barely hold a pencil would begin scraping his chair about in an effort to get some clearance from his desk. It would take him about an hour to get out of his chair, and another hour to shuffle the few feet to the window and finagle it open with the pole, and another hour to lean the pole against the wall and shuffle back to his desk. The instant he was reseated, the man who sat opposite him would bob up, stride over, bang the window shut with the pole, and return to his seat with a challenging look on his face, at which point the old boy would silently and stoically begin the chair-scraping process all over again. This went on every day for two years through all seasons.
     I never saw either of them do a lick of work. The older fellow couldn't, of course, because he spent all but a few moments of each day traveling to or from the window."

Or this: 

"Among many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, 'You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.' Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows." 

I promise I had a point to this post when I started, but I think that point has long since escaped me. 

Hang tight for this week's overdue So That Happened. I'm working on it.