June 4, 1997
12:11pm EST

Well, it really has been a year now that I've been working at The Chronicle.

And the sky hasn't fallen on my head;) But it IS a beautiful day, warm but not hot, with blue sky and puffy white clouds. A perfect June day if you ask me;)

I'm about to head off to Borders to pick up some maps, a new road atlas for our upcoming trip to Atlanta, and a map of New York City for Sabs to use in his Werewolf game. I love maps. I collect them, sort of, every time I go somewhere I pick up a map and I keep it. I was just looking through my collection of maps from my Junior Year Abroad last night. Maps of Venice, Galway, Cork, Dublin, Geneva, my Paris Metro guide, maps of Europe, Belgium, France, Switzerland. I subscribed to National Geographic recently and I've gotten 2 wonderful maps from them so far. I've always loved National Geographic. When I was little my mother had a subscription which came to us while we lived in Europe.

When my brothers and I had school projects, my mother would haul out her stack of National Geographic magazines and we'd leaf through them looking for pictures to paste to our text and articles that would serve as sources. I never thought about it back then, but I was using English articles for reports I was doing in French ... so I've been translating things a lot longer than I thought ...

Anyway, now that I'm out on my own, I find the presence of those shiny, bright yellow-framed magazines sitting on my coffee-table to be comforting, somehow it makes the apartment seem more like home, a connection to where I've been so to speak and even perhaps a link to where I'm going, as I keep thinking that some day, my own children may leaf through the pages to cut out images for their reports ... provided the world doesn't become too technology-ized in the 10 years or so.

Sabs had a nightmare last night which really scared him. So I just wanted to put a little note here for him ... You're the one, my dear ... never fear I'll always be here ...