These are a few of my favorite things...

Too often we only realize how much something means to us after we lose it. In an effort to try to appreciate things while they're still a part of my life, and not afterwards, I've compiled this list. Most of the things and people listed here will not be a part of my life once the summer is over.

1. Riding my bike. I've ridden Clochette (that's the name of my bike and also the French name of Tinkerbell) to and from school everyday this summer, and I just love the healthy, happy feeling that it gives me. It's sweating and getting Clochette up and down the apartment stairs that are the problems.

2. My Shakespeare professor. He quotes Billy Joel songs in his lectures, shows us the young and modern movie adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, compares King Henry and Prince Hal to Anakin and Luke Skywalker, and makes a lot of other attempts to try and seem cool. It's actually pretty funny.

3. Ann Marie. Ann Marie sits in front of me in Shakespeare class. She spends every class knitting, and she always has something interesting to say. But the prize for the best comment in that class has to go for me for, "I think that maybe Iago is actually in love with Othello and that all his hatred really stems from his inability to express this desire." Half the class laughed, and the other half gave me weird looks.

4. The crepe myrtles. The crepe myrtle trees on campus are still in full bloom, which is a little unusual for this late in the summer, but I'm not complaining. They look and smell gorgeous. I always walk by a crepe myrtle tree full of pale pink blossoms on my way to work, and it is so beautiful that I look forward to it everyday.

5. Mater Dolorosa and Cousteau. These are two pieces of artwork currently on display in the art gallery where I work, and I have a very good view of each of them from my desk. Mater Dolorosa is a needlepoint of the Virgin Mary, and Cousteau is a watercolor of a small spaniel named after the French explorer. Cousteau hangs on the wall directly beside my desk, so I like to pretend that he's my dog.

6. If We Fall in Love Tonight, by Rod Stewart. This is one of the CDs that my boss keeps in the gallery, and I usually play it when I'm at work. I've listened to it so often this summer that I should have gotten sick of it a long time ago, but I haven't. I especially love "Downtown Train," "All for Love," and the horribly cheesy "My Heart Can't Tell You No."

7. Sam. Sam is probably my favorite co-worker. Our hours don't overlap very often, but when they do, I like talking to him. Over the summer, we've discovered that we both love a lot of the same things -- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Law and Order: SVU (and the possible romance between Elliot and Olivia), and the unbelievable head-butt that Zinedine Zidane pulled on Marco Materazzi earlier this month.

8. The birds. I've eaten lunch in the oak grove everyday this summer, and I always feed my bread crusts to the little birds that land beside my bench. I've seen many different kinds come looking for crumbs -- finches, blue jays, robins, sparrows, mockingbirds, and the occasional squirrel. I feel like I have twenty pet birds with cages that I never have to clean.

9. The two guys who have the lab station next to mine in chemistry class. I don't know their names, but these guys are hilarious. They're always telling jokes, and even the professor cracks up and lets them get away with quite a lot (they once threw a cup of dry ice onto the floor -- it disappeared!). They like to joke about having to inhale all the fumes in the lab because their lab station is right next to the fume hood.

10. Cream pops. On a spur earlier this summer, I bought a bulk box of cream pops at the grocery store. Cream pops, popsicles with an ice cream center, were one of my very favorite treats when I was a little kid, and I hadn't had any in a very long time before I bought this box. I still have a few more in the freezer, and I hope to make them last all summer, so that in the future I can refer to Summer 2006 as "Cream Pop Summer." Or maybe cream pops will become an annual summer tradition for me.