Chocolate covered honeycomb

Today was my first day of work, and I cooked black beans for dinner.  Yesterday I ate chocolate covered honeycomb for the first time in my life and was fairly astounded.  Work was good, but I feel kind of strange writing about it here. So maybe we should talk about this on an individual basis.  I'll try to sum it up in any case--I suspiciously followed a lady into the building to get in since the password was reset over the week, talked to my supervisor on the phone since he was out for the morning, called the help desk and reset my computer's password, toured the building for about the second and a half time (which I appreciate), got a county id so that I wouldn't look so suspicious (it says "Sarah Gates, VISTA Menmber," but misspellings are quirky, right?), talked to the id lady about humidity and licorice jelly beans, visited two conservation projects with my supervisor on the Poudre River Trail where the corps were renovating a barn and removing invasive species, talked to my supervisor about what I'll be doing this year, and refilled my water bottle several times.  Overall, it was a good day...

Otherwise, I am reading Jay Parini's biography on William Faulkner and learned that he (Faulkner) essentially plagiarized T. S. Eliot's poems.  That's a slight stretch -- but some of his poems are a little bit too similar to T. S. Eliot's.  It's humorous, since he's such a great novelist.  I really like the biography so far -- it's satisfying my craving for non-fiction, but I don't see that craving ending anytime soon.  I feel guilty for abandoning fiction temporarily, but it seems too serious right now.  Not that a biography on Faulkner isn't... But I want to feel like I'm reading about something in the real world right now, or something that seems more concrete.

I may ride my bike to work tomorrow, although I fear it's a decision I'll come to regret by the end of the day.  I guess there's only one way to find out, um.

Should I update my blog now?  I guess so... I have been quite negligent of it recently (every blogger has to say this once in a while, I suppose), probably because I really had no idea how to talk about everything that happened right when we got to Colorado.  Like too much wind hitting your face.  But now I've found the public library in Greeley and gotten lost enough times, so it's beginning to come together.  I started writing down directions on notecards every time I left the house, and now they're kind of crowding my cup holder.  I will take pictures once I get back (since I'm in Albuquerque now) so that you won't have to try to piece it together in your mind from google maps.  But the main thing I want to describe right now is the food...There is a nice health foods store called Sprouts with good deals on fruits and veggies and other delicious things to put in bags.  I was at a loss about what coffee to drink when I first went to the store -- no Community Coffee, no River Roads... but when I went to Sprouts, I realized that I could buy their beans and grind them there, for about as much as I normally would pay to buy coffee and not an absurd amount.  In addition, mama, Will, and I discovered on our rafting trip that Boulder (1 hr away) and Fort Collins (30 minutes away) have two of the highest densities of restaurants to people in the country.  Awesome!
Right now, though, I am in Albuquerque for my Americorps VISTA (Volunteer in Service to America) training, which is overwhelming just because there are so many interesting people here.  I hope that I'm able to keep in touch with some of them once I get back to Colorado.  Yesterday we had sessions that related to the Americorps mission, along the lines of helping people out of poverty, which was certainly a touchy subject, but very interesting, especially hearing people's personal perspectives.  Then today we talked more practically about what we'll be doing in our organizations and the idea of workplace culture, blah blah blah.  I don't really mean blah blah blah, because that kind of stuff is important to me, but I don't want to bore you too much with it here. 
I've used the gym twice while I've been here, fairly stuck in this hotel, though I ventured into the downtown with my roommate last night, but we've been fed a lot of food on platters, and I'll be glad to get back in my car tomorrow and drive a pretty interesting 8 hours to my pantry, refrigerator, and bed...
This is all very exciting, but still--I miss the lakes at LSU, and people.