Calming the Voices of Reason
My mom is one of those “60 Minutes” mothers: She tunes into primetime news magazine shows, and I tune her out the next morning when she calls to warn me against plastic water bottles causing brain cancer and Nigerian princes maliciously soliciting bank account numbers. But in 2003, just after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, she…
Subject line: “When you have a minute…”
My hands trembled as I typed the email requesting a private meeting in the conference room. An agonizing 20 minutes passed before my manager replied: “OK.” I knew he knew what I had to say, and I rushed past him and toward the conference room as soon as I heard his feet shuffling behind me….
A sentence-long letter is burning a hole through my purse
It’s lunch break at work, and I’m lounged across the backseat of my SUV, sweating in the blazing Florida sun, as I write this. Why? I’ve suddenly decided to give my notice today after lunch. There’s more than a month between now and my preferred final day of employment, and I worry about being prematurely…
Third wheel
- Aperture: f/13
- ISO: 400
- Shutter Speed: 1/640 s
- Focal Length: 42mm
- Camera: Canon EOS 7D
When prompted as a young child, my little sister would consider only two options for her future husband: “Daddy or Barkley.” Our father, of course, was spoken for thanks to Mom, and Barkley, well, Barkley was the family dog. Twenty or so years later, Barkley has passed along, and my sister has been forced to…
How many pairs of underwear?!
While watching my beloved Gators pull one out against Texas A&M this weekend, I began to wonder about what I would need to take with me on this trip. Her and I have often joked about things we would or would not take with us, but I hadn’t seriously considered what I would require for…
On full alert for the best-dressed collection of cockroach corpses
During the past few years, I’ve developed a habit of obsessively researching our vacation destinations before we depart. If the world’s best ceviche or even the best-dressed collection of cockroach corpses just so happens to be nearby, I want to know about it and experience it before I leave. My failure to recognize Barcelona as…
Budgeting or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Excel
Planning this trip has been one of the more difficult things for me to do budget-wise. Having never traveled this extensively at one time, it has been tricky to estimate what costs we will incur along the way. Some expenses like airline tickets and hotel costs can be found online, but with our itinerary still…
So why “CompassWhistle?”
We are aware “CompassWhistle” is an odd name for a blog. For weeks, we Googled synonyms for “travel” and “journey,” researched travel-related quotes and scoured the dictionary for quirky, nonsense-sounding words. (Admittedly, we once harbored delusions of grandeur, imagining we’d hit upon the next one-word URL superpower like “Amazon.com” or “eBay.com.”) I compiled list upon…
I’m the reason you can’t find a single library book on Australia
- Aperture: f/2.4
- ISO: 400
- Shutter Speed: 1/20 s
- Focal Length: 4.28mm
- Camera: iPhone 4S
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but ever since we started planning The Trip, I’ve become a bit of a library book hoarder. Our county’s library system consists of multiple branches, and I’ve come to realize that the one closest to our house – deep in the midst of Snowbird country — has been unofficially designated…
Go west, young man (and woman)
Our trip will begin in Fiji. Two weeks ago we purchased our tickets to Australia. LAX->SYD by way of NAD (Nadi, Fiji). We discovered these tickets because of the price, but we were intrigued by the layover. Fiji. Her remembered the scene in “The Truman Show” when Jim Carrey’s character said, “You can’t get any…