There's no place like home...

I moved yesterday for the eighth time in nine years. 

Just let that sink in for a second. 

And with any luck, next summer I will move for the ninth time in 10 years. In fact, as I watched my furniture enter my newest apartment, I mentally inventoried what would not be coming with me next year. It was comforting.

Our place still looks like a bomb went off, even after two days of organizing. Granted, now it looks more like it was a poorly constructed homemade bomb rather than one of the atomic variety, but still, more chaos than I'm totally comfortable with.

However, karma came down on me like an anvil this morning (the timing!). I remembered I should be grateful for having a roof over my head when I found two stories about homeless individuals. Oddly enough they both involved those people having more personal wealth than I will probably see in a lifetime. 

Zee News reported on the donation of $100,000 to Hebrew University in Jerusalem from the estate of a homeless woman in Manhattan. The woman, a Holocaust survivor, died two years ago at the age of 92 and requested her donation be used for scholarships for medical research students. Her last known job was for a New Yorker who paid her in room and board for moving his car around to avoid parking tickets. 

In the other story, a homeless man named Richard Walters left an unexpected $4 million in gifts to charities in Phoenix, Ariz. Walters, also deceased in 2007, was a retired engineer and apparently renounced worldly goods when he left the working world. According to a friend at the Catholic Mission, he slept on the mission's grounds, used its telephone and ate in its cafeteria. Among his few possessions was a radio; he enjoyed NPR's programming and included the station in his will, according to the NPR website. 

(Photo courtesy of wetcircuit.com)

Mmm...chocolate. And other good ideas...

Most of you know I am not a giant fan of driving. I don't really know why, but I've just never seen the appeal of road trips, and I really don't like being stuck in a car for hours on end. I will make trips that are four hours or less simply because the hassle of flying (which I actually hate more than driving) is too much for me. But maybe what develops out of the following story will improve my dim view of motor vehicles. I mean, how can the addition of chocolate make anything worse?

Researchers from the University of Warwick in England have built an F3 race car out of biodegradable materials that can go up to 145 mph, and it runs on chocolate factory waste. Seriously. I found in on msnbc.com, so it must be true. : ) Can you imagine, driving down the Mass Pike and all you smell is chocolate? That would make my trips surrounded by Mass-hole drivers much more bearable. Maybe in this time of the restructuring of the car industry, the people on top will take notice that it is possible to build a fast, environmentally friendly car.

Yahoo! announced the winner of the most-publicized job search in the world yesterday. A British man is the lucky one chosen for the "World's Best Job" - blogging about northeastern Queensland, Australia. He gets free accommodations in a gorgeous locale for a year just for blogging about how terrific the reef is. He also gets paid $111,000. This guy sounds perfectly suited - having ridden an ostrich and kissed a giraffe. Yes, Virginia, dream jobs do still exist...

Yahoo! this morning had the final story for today. Clayton Homes has created the "i-House" - a prefab, "green" home that is so far from a trailer that it's not funny. It has bamboo floors in addition to solar power and other energy-saving appointments. It has a V-shaped roof which holds a roof-deck, and at $100 to $300 per square foot, it's much cheaper than green AND conventional alternatives. I'm not really a fan of modern architecture, but this looks appealing, even to me. 

(Photo credit: msnbc.com)