Alice's Wonderland

alice in a sari, & 200 other indian wedding photos

2012-01-25T13:15:00.000-05:00

INDIAN WEDDING TIME!!

good lord, you guys. indian weddings are INTENSE. this one was 3 days long, with more partying than i normally do over the course of three weekends. and every single bit of it was gorgeous (and most of what went on was completely new to me, so i found everything fascinating).

the first night was a reception on the beach. a giant tent, couches out under the stars, twinkly lights on all the trees, and an awesome live acoustic band. the waves were crashing softly on the beach 10 feet away. waiters were walking around with wine and beer, but ALSO with pre-poured glasses of whiskey & rum, carrying ice & mixers on the same tray so you could get a freshly mixed cocktail without ever having to visit one of the bars under the tent.

the bride & groom were welcomed into the party by a troupe of whirling, acrobatic traditional (to Sri Lanka) Kandyan dancers.

after drinking our faces off, gorging on an amazing indian food spread, spending some time trying to catch crabs in the surf, and then dancing to the band as a light rain started to fall.... we went inside. to really start the party.
so, i don't do shots. however, when the father of the bride leans backwards over the bar so the bartender can pour a shot directly into his mouth, then pulls you over to do the same? you take the shot.
the next morning was spent recovering. i did more than one of those bar shots, and also had about 2198357 whiskey & cokes thanks to those roaming bartenders.

the next night was the sangeet & mehendi, where everyone was encouraged to wear traditional garb, and the bride & groom's friends perform dances they've choreographed for the couple. almost all of us non-indian-lady-attendees managed to find/buy/borrow a sari for the evening... however, NONE of us knew how to actually get the darn things on. we had all youtubed the heck out of instructional videos, and all agreed there was still zero way we'd be able to do that to ourselves (or even to help put one on someone else). (we had all tried, and failed, in the safety of our own homes.) luckily, we found out we could PAY people at the hotel salon to do it for us!
DEFINITELY a better option. excellent use of $7.
(all 5 of us paid to have our saris wrapped for us. no shame.)

here is chris in his kurta, which is the traditional indian dude attire:

he was able to put this on without assistance. lucky man.

inside the (unbelievably gorgeous) party room, there were women available to draw henna on the ladies:

then the bride arrived! for any little girls who always envisioned themselves as princesses on their wedding day, might i suggest having an indian wedding? because just LOOK at her. she looks like a legit, real-life princess, no?
next there was a series of traditions around bringing the groom in, first in regular jeans & a tshirt so he could be inspected, approved of by a barber (..? i think?) then sent off to dress. the procession back in was impressive, led first by his female family members:
..then he was escorted in under a fancy fringed umbrella:
he was fed sweets by his new family to welcome him into the fold, and then was finally allowed to join his bride. next up was the dancing! since chris was one of the groom's best friends, he was called upon to participate in the first dance, symbolizing the groom's life before meeting his wife.
(he's the one in the grey tshirt up there.)

next up, the girls danced to represent the bride's wife pre-groom, and OH MY GOD HOW DID I GET ROPED INTO THIS?!
seriously, i'm still not sure how/why i ended up in there. the groom's sister in law grabbed a few of us by the arm our first day there and let us know we had dance practice in 2 hours. HAAAAAHAHAHA OH GOD. i was there as a plus one - a VERY WHITE plus one - and here i was doing bollywood-style dancing in front of the entire 200-person wedding. ::dies::

(the best part of the night was much later, when one of the indian aunts came up to me and said, "that was the best indian dancing i've ever seen by a while girl!" i'm pretty sure you could see me beaming from space.)

luckily, it turns out they gave us the bollywood-lite version of dancing, because then the REAL choreography started up.

very glad i did not have to try and keep up with that.

(there were more open bars & roaming bartenders through all of this as well, of course. the drinking was pretty much a constant the whole weekend.)

after the choreographed dancing was finished, and another sumptuous indian meal consumed, the dance party picked back up right where it left off the night before. this next picture isn't much composition-wise, but it was an attempt to capture how unbelievably awesome the view was that night anywhere you turned, with everyone draped in such beautiful, vibrant, sparkly, saturated colors. it was like living inside a kaleidescope.

by day three, i was running pretty much on fumes. we all got up bright and early for the actual marriage part of the wedding to start, first off with a traditional ceremony in a scottish church. (a scottish church in colombo, sri lanka. who knew?)

the bride wore white, but it was a beautifully intricate sari rather than a western style dress:later that day was the hindu wedding ceremony. it started with the friends of the bride & groom gathering separately for ceremonial preparations. i couldn't quite follow what was happening with the groom (it involved some string tied in his hair? and being fed more sweets?) but after he was blessed by the hindu priest, an intricate necklace of sorts with his name & his brides name emblazoned in hearts was draped over his shoulders, and a fancy turban was placed atop his head by the priest. we were now ready to go fetch the bride!
one of the Kandyan drummers returned and accompanied us, all hooting & hollering as loudly as we could, through the halls of the hotel, into the lobby, around the hotel's christmas tree, and eventually across the courtyard and to the door of the room where the bride was waiting with her friends & family to let him in.

(it was right about now that everyone agreed that we all planned to have indian weddings when we got married.)

during an initial hindu ceremony, the bride & groom's hands were bound together symbolically with string (and then the bride's friends stole the groom's shoes - as per tradition apparently - and the groom had to haggle with them on a price to get them back).
next it was out to the rooftop terrace for the main hindu ceremony, which was like 2.5 hrs long. IN SANSKRIT.

this was the view off the balcony, by the way.
it took a while (UNDERSTATEMENT) but eventually the hindu ceremony completed. the bride and groom kept getting more & more various ceremonial bits piled onto them throughout all of these ceremonies, until by the end you could barely see what they had originally been wearing.
after that, it was time for reception #3!! my body sort of gave up on me at this point, so i have only 1 picture of the entire reception, when the newleyweds were welcomed into the hall by a troupe of dancers holding flower wreaths with candles & incense.
i left the reception "early" (at 12:30! after midnight!) to catch my flight home. by that point i was actually thinking to myself, "man, that 15 hour flight will be so nice - 15 straight hours of sitting and watching movies!" (whenever you start looking FORWARD to 15 hour flights, it's pretty much a given you're not in good shape.)

it was the most interesting and exhausting wedding i've ever attended, for sure. i don't know how people manage to go to several of these in one year! but man, am i ever grateful i got to experience this one.

Giveaway! (..on my mom's blog!)

2012-01-24T09:25:00.002-05:00

my mom, who is a much better blogger than i am these days, is hosting her first giveaway! (i just - finally - uploaded the pics from the indian wedding into blogger last night, so look for that soon. swearsies!)

in the meantime, visit my mom's blog to enter to win 2 gluten-free cookbooks!

allergy drops: unexpected benefits

2012-01-17T14:24:00.007-05:00

back in the fall, after that hilariously terrible appointment to get allergy tested, i opted to try allergy drops. these are made with the same serum used in the allergy shots that most people are familiar with, but reformatted to be taken daily, rather than weekly, and under your tongue instead of injected.

the benefits to doing this are huge - the dosage is much smaller (since it's daily, rather than weekly) which means the chance of having a reaction is also much smaller. and due to the hyper-low risk of anaphylactic shock, you can take these in the comfort of your own home rather than having to go to the doctor once a week for the shot, then waiting around for 30 mins (to make sure you don't have an anaphylactic reacion).

however.... they're TECCCCHHHHHNICALLY not exactly approved by the FDA. the shots are, and the serum i get in the drops is identical to what they'd formulate for me for shots. but in sublingual form, they're not approved... which means they're not covered by insurance.

additional-however, this is actually a BENEFIT for me. if i had gone with the shots, i'd have to pay a specialist co-pay once a week ($30) and miss at least an hour of work once a week (my allergist is only open during hours i also have to be at work). instead i just pay them directly for the meds, which, hilariously, is less than what i would pay for a weekly co-pay. sort of ridiculous, but there it is.

however, the most surprising beneficiary of the allergy drops so far has been, oddly, my skin. i, uh, do not take excellent care of my skin. i mean, i wash it, and i put sunscreen on it, and i moisturize it (mostly), but... that's about it. i buy spendy face products every once in a while in an attempt to guilt myself into doing a better job, but when it comes down to it i'm lazy. i stay in bed too long in the mornings and don't have time for luxurious face treatments before i have to run out the door. i put off getting ready for bed in the evening until i'm overtired and just want to go to beeedddd.

but the drops require me to hold them under my tongue for about 2 minutes, each and every morning. know what that's a great time for? actually applying the Perricone MD eye products that have been collecting dust on my counter!

this stuff is pretty great. now that i'm *cough*inmythirties*cough* i feel the need for some, ah, HELP in the general wrinkly eye area. this is not a cheap solution by any means, but it seems to be working fantastically, and these tiny bottles last forEVER.

oh, and as for the allergy drops... it remains to be seen whether those are working, since it takes like 6 months to ramp up to the effective levels. and also it's winter, which - while i am allergic to everything on earth, yes - is my least-allergic season. check back in with me when all of virginia is pollinating in the spring.

Sri Lanka: part SECOND TO LAST FOR REALS

2012-01-16T20:26:00.013-05:00

SRI LANKA! remember how i went there like 200 years ago? me too! kind of! let's wrap this sucker up.

our final destination (pre-wedding) was Kandalama, about 100 miles northeast of Colombo. however, 100 miles in Sri Lanka is not like 100 miles in the US. or, you know, anywhere with highways, or roads that don't have cows sporadically meandering around on them. 100 miles in Sri Lanka takes upwards of FIVE HOURS to travel, by car.

here is a very technical diagram i drew of the driving situation in my journal while i was there:

as you can see, this - along with every other road in the country* - is a two-lane road. both sides are lined by shops & huts of various kinds. walking along the side of the road are pedestrians - often in groups 3 or 4 across, and often barefoot. next come the dogs trotting along the side of the road as well. then the people on bicycles, swerving into the lane to avoid the pedestrians and dogs. to the right of them are the people on sputtery mo-peds, who are swerving around the bikes. swerving around the mo-peds are the omnipresent tuk-tuks; passing those on the right are the overladen small trucks and vans, who at this point are swerving fully into the oncoming lane of traffic. finally, you have the perfectly serviceable cars & SUVs, who are passing everything else, still on the right, and 100% squarely in the lane of oncoming traffic. which ALWAYS has traffic speeding directly at you.

it's harrowing, to say the least. and very loud and honky.

*just after we left Sri Lanka opened its very first highway, between Colombo & Galle. but while we were there, there was literally not one highway in the entire country.

anyway!! we made it up to Kandalama, where we were welcomed at the gorgeous Heritance Hotel with lotus flowers for us girls, and fresh juice for all three of us.

it was overcast and rainy when we arrived, which gave the view a very cool mystical lord-of-the-rings feel.

the architect - the same one who built the Triton, where we stayed in Galle - believes buildings should compliment the surrounding environment rather than imposing on it, so this hotel seriously seems like a living, breathing piece of the jungle. in the photo below, do you see another roof peeking out over the greenery, just to the left of those glass walls near the center of the photo? that's an entire other wing of the hotel that is buried in the jungle. the stand of trees just to the left of that is not actually a stand of trees; it's another wing, with the jungle growing ON TOP of it.

our rooms were in that piece. the entire back wall of my room was floor to ceiling glass, opening into jungle. this was my bathroom.

there were MANY signs like this, along with several in person warnings. there were monkeys EVERYWHERE, and if you didn't lock your balcony door when you left the monkeys would pry open the door and trash the place.

we managed to avoid monkey-burglars, and headed off the next morning to the ruins at Polonnaruwa, about 2 1/2 hours (you know, 45 miles) away.

it wasn't long before we saw our first elephant!!

and then more giant lizard things!

and more MONKEYS! SO MANY monkeys. (we were told to steer clear of these kind; apparently they're mean and will bite.)

finally: we arrived at Polonnaruwa! it was the capital city of Sri Lanka in the 11th & 12th centuries. after it was abandoned at the end of the 13th century, it apparently was just sort of quietly reclaimed by the jungle until the 1980s, when UNESCO began uncovering and restoring pieces of it.

it's pretty insane. these beautiful, majestic stone ruins, just growing out of the middle of the jungle. i like this photo, because it just looks like this regal, ancient stone stairway leading into the wilds.

this photo is COMPLETELY UNTOUCHED. the walls were really covered in moss this color.

the remaining 2 - of an original 7! - stories of one of the palaces. (the upper stories would have been made of wood.)

you could just sort of tramp around wherever you wanted. there was nothing roped off; nothing off limits. the only rule at all was that you weren't supposed to walk on the walls.

(i didn't really walk on it.)

the sheer volume of remains there is astounding. you get a sense of the enormity of the city, and how bustling a metropolis it must have been: there are so many buildings, covering so much ground, that it requires a car to get around.

considering all this was covered by jungle for several centuries, everything is in amazing shape. in addition to all the temples and other buildings that still remain, a startling amount of (gorgeous) detail is still in evidence, like these elephants carved into the base of one of the stupas. nearly 1000 years old, and somehow in better shape than churches in europe half that age.

even with all (ALLLL) these photos, i feel like i'm barely scratching the surface of what we saw & did. i still can't believe i got the opportunity to go there. i'm going to have to work pretty hard to top that destination in 2012...

wrapped cats and masked faces

2012-01-03T22:54:00.005-05:00

still not the wedding. i know. one day. in the meantime though, have you seen this?

i mean, it's pretty much the best thing on the internet. although it made me sad that oliver wouldn't let me do it to him.

...or would he?

i got this far, then panicked that he'd freak out any second so snapped pictures while i could. i wish i'd really gone for it though; it appears he may have been totally OK with a more solid wrapping.

next christmas, maybe...

new year's eve was awesome this year. we went the Fancy Person route and sprung for a table at a bar downtown, and MAN is that ever the key to having a good time. A PLACE TO SIT DOWN, THAT YOU OWN. brilliant!

also: booze.

it was a masquerade event! so we masqueraded the crap out of it.

so this is pretty obvious information, but it's EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to get a cab after midnight on new year's eve. as in, you cannot get one. at all. (we tried.) as a result - and i don't actually know how this physically came to pass - we ended up in.. some guy's car. who we paid $35 to take us back to virginia. i vaguely seem to recall (hope?) that he was a private car for hire but really, who knows. we could have just paid some intrepid dude with a car some cash. it worked.

here's to a healthy, happy, lucky, and silly 2012.

and now the more exciting recap... 2011 in travel!

2011-12-30T12:10:00.000-05:00

traveling is one of the things that makes me most happy in the world, which means i'm incredible lucky to be able to travel as much as i do. 2011 was another outstanding year for the wanderluster within me:

in february, chris took my on my first ever cruise:

and then in april, i went to Williamsburg for Shannon's baby shower:

then to Rio de Janiero (!!!):

..Iguazu Falls:

...and Buenos Aires with Chris:

in may, we went up to NJ for my beautiful friend Laura's wedding;

in july, we went up to nyc on one of the hottest weekends on record, on a bolt bus with broken a/c. then we met up with chris's friends for karaoke... at a tiny hole in the wall joint with broken a/c. beer + sake + karaoke = you may sweat to death, but you still stay and sing anyway:

august was another busy month: we went back down to williamsburg to meet the baby i'd thrown the shower for:

then up to NJ for another wedding, this time with the fabulous highschool crew:

..then to annapolis for our annual girls' weekend trip:

..and finally to san francisco for a conference (plus an excuse to visit my sister):

after that ridiculous month, i spent september at home :) then october was back up to NJ once again for fakesgiving:

and of course, the reason we had fakesgiving in october was because chris and i would be in sri! lanka! during actual thanksgiving in november.

one last trip up to NJ for christmas:

...and 2011 wraps up nicely.

so far i have no vacations planned in 2012 (!!) but we already have something like 6 weddings to attend (that we know of!) and none are local. i'll have to figure out how to squeeze in a new country or two around those!

yearly recap 2011

2011-12-29T12:34:00.007-05:00

It's weird - every year i say i'm not going to do this recap. and then every year, i do. stay tuned for my PREFERRED recap, though, which is 2011 in travel :)

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?

went to south america & sri lanka. took a job with a startup. went on a cruise. had my car break down in a blizzard. started seeing a chiropractor. had my home broken into. moved in with my boyfriend (..for more than 3 weeks). rode a horse. experienced my first earthquake!

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

i sort of forgot to make any this year. in 2012, however, my goal is to be more thoughtful.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes! Shannon has a beautiful daughter, Lily. my friend darlene had a son, my friend olivia had a daughter, and SEVERAL of you blog folks had exceptionally adorable babies.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

luckily, no.

5. What countries did you visit?

more on this in the next post, but: the Bahamas, Brazil, Argentina, & Sri Lanka.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?

um. an immersion blender? the ability to be a thoughtful friend/person?

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

April 11th is pretty noteworthy as the day we showed up in Rio de Janiero to find that the company we'd booked the trip with had "gone out of business" after taking all our money & canceling all of our reservations...

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
i'm pretty psyched about having landing this new job back in April. i still love it.

9. What was your biggest failure?

not keeping up the charity donations from 2009.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

HAHAHAHAHAAAA that's a hilarious question every year. short answer: yes.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

hmmm... probably the trip to south america (despite what happened) & the trip to sri lanka.

12. Where did most of your money go?

haha. South America & Sri Lanka.

13. What did you get really excited about?

can i say S. America & Sri Lanka for three in a row...? :) also, while i was too hesitant when it was happening to get excited at the time, i'm retroactively excited that moving in with chris went so great.

14. What song will always remind you of 2011?

i can never do this one. i don't know, that mr saxo-beat one? they played that a ton at the sri lanka wedding.

15. Compared to this time last year, are you:

– happier or sadder? the same

– thinner or fatter? i'm fatter but weigh less. when i stop working out i get all mushy but LOOK thinner because my arms aren't bulky and giant. it's very depressing.
– richer or poorer? richer.

16. What do you wish you’d done more of?

playing piano; blogging.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of?

..watching tv? i'm not sure. i'm pretty bad at being reflective.

18. How did you spend Christmas?

at my parents' house, as always. opened presents in the morning, then laid around sloth-like the rest of the day, eating about every 2 hours. it was awesome, in other words.

19. What was your favorite TV program?

game of thrones. period. times 100.

20. What were your favorite books of the year?

the hunger games, probably. and the song of fire & ice series, books 1-3. (4 and 5 can suck it.)

21. What was your favorite music from this year?

uh. adele? i'm.. not very music-y.

22. What were your favorite films of the year?

harry potter 7.2, bridesmaids.. um.. what else came out this year..?

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

i was in NJ for fakesgiving; 31.

24. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

i can never answer this one well. i had a pretty great year; i don't know that anything could have made it THAT much better.

25. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?

i.. tried to have pants on when appropriate.

26. What kept you sane?

the interwebs. you guys are pretty fantastic.

27. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.

do not assume that 50% of your guest list will decline an invitation just because it's the week before christmas.

we interrupt this stalled sri lanka recap..

2011-12-20T11:43:00.005-05:00

...to show you some ridiculous(ly) awesome pictures from my Second Annual Holiday Cookie Party this past weekend. last year, at the last second we taped some wrapping paper to a wall and hung some tinsel around it, and the resulting pictures from the "photo wall" were HI-larious.

so of course we did it again this year!

this is like 5% of the total photos taken. they are all this amazing. i love my friends. :)

sri lanka! part 2 (and not getting any shorter)

2011-12-14T12:26:00.004-05:00

hey! what up, guys? december is kind of killing me over here! not in a bad way, just in a HOLY SHIT HOW DO PEOPLE DO ALL THIS WORK AND ALSO PREPARE FOR CHRISTMAS AND ALSO HOST PARTIES AT THEIR HOUSE AND *ALSO* FINISH BLOG RECAPS??!!?! way.

things are dire on the busy scale, is what i'm saying. i mean, i faceplanted INTO THE WALL OF AN ELEVATOR the other day and didn't even have a chance to tell you about it. (it was comical, i assure you. i have many bruises.)

but! the recap! it shall go on!

after surviving day one, we got up bright and early the next day to travel to Galle, in the south of the country.

Galle is home to a fort that was started by the Portuguese in the 16th century when they occupied the country, then was redone by the Dutch in the 17th century when it was their turn to occupy.

so i probably mentioned this already? but HOLY JEEBUS is it hot in sri lanka. SO, SO HOT. as we were at the fort, some pretty gnarly clouds started rolling in because it just cannot be that hot & humid that long before a spontaneous thunderstorm develops.

as a result, you see people walking around under umbrellas pretty much at all times, since either it's 1 million degrees and so sunny you want to die a little, OR it's pouring on you.

we left the fort right as the rain started, and drove a few miles north to our hotel for the night, the triton.. and were promptly blown away. infinity pool? yes please.

the hotel is RIGHT on the indian ocean, and the sun was just beginning to set as we headed down to the beach.

..which resulted in some pretty outstanding views.

the next day, we got an awesome opportunity to see "cinnamon peelers" at work. apparently cinnamon is one of the few products that we humans have not developed machinery to harvest effectively, so the process is still done (laboriously!) by hand.

first, a woman (it seems to always be a woman doing this part?) shaves off the tough outer bark:

next, this guy rubs the peeled branch vigorously with a metal rod, then makes a vertical slice about a meter long...

..and starts peeling back the thin layer of inner bark, in one giant piece.

(that guy in yellow is a local tuk-tuk driver, who brought us to these guys' house and showed us around.)

it smells DELICIOUS at this juncture, by the way, and is surprisingly juicy.

after it has dried for several days, smaller pieces of bark are stuffed into the large "quills" to made a solid rod.

..and then they sell it to you. by the METER.

holy crap. how have i STILL only made it another day and a half in the recap??

ok. let's do some of this lightening-round style. ready?

flowering banana tree!

roadside dried fish stand!

rambutan!

mangosteen!

giant lizard thing!

jackfruit!

roadside monkeys!

next up is our trip to kandalama and the ruins at polonnaruwa (which, i am not joking, took me about 3 days to learn the name of. polonnaruwa!) which is a post in itself.

and then there is still the THREE DAY LONG indian wedding to show you! anyone want to take an over/under on me finishing this before 2012??

sri lanka! part 1 of possibly one million

2011-12-05T09:00:00.002-05:00

oh my gosh, you guys. i hardly know where to start. sri lanka was outstanding. i was in a daze most of the time i was there - jetlagged at first, then just plain exhausted by the time i got back to Colombo for the wedding, because HOLY COW indian weddings are intense! - but luckily i took 5 billion photos to photodocument the trip for myself.

this trip ended up being extra-awesome, because i got to travel with my friends A & R for the first half. in addition to them being generally delightful people, R's family also happens to BE sri lankan and his parents live in Colombo. how convenient for me!

i turned up at their house at about 5 in the morning, blinking owlishly after about 24 hours of travel (which started AFTER a full day of work!). a two hour nap later, A and i found ourselves being whisked through Colombo with R's uncle Wimal for a brief tour of the city - as well as our first stop at a gem store.

sri lanka is one of the world's foremost producers of gemstones, which i did not know before heading there. but it's true, and a friend from my previous job asked if i'd mind picking up some star sapphires for him while i was there, so gem stores were on the list of places to visit while there.

not on the list, but much appreciated: a roadside stop for fresh coconut water.

while there, R's uncle pulled out a bag of cookies he'd brought with him, and asked the coconut vendor to call the kids out from the slum behind us. a few moments later, we found ourselves surrounded by sweet local kids who were happy to post for pictures (and happier to get packages of cookies, no doubt!)

R's uncle then asked the locals if the fishing boats had come in, and before we knew it we were being brought through the shantytown down to the water on the other side so we could take a look at the day's catch.

all this before noon on our first day...!

after some lunch (and an afternoon nap) we headed back out into the city, this time to visit the polar opposite the Colombo has to offer: the Cinnamon Grand Hotel.

Colombo is an interesting city: very much a third world feel - stray dogs are everywhere; people are walking barefoot along even the most busy roads in the center of the city; there are a truly shocking number of cows roaming freely through the streets - but at the same time it doesn't feel as poor as some places i've been. those slum kids may have been barefoot, but they weren't dirty or hungry. there weren't many beggars (that i saw, anyway). i felt incredibly safe the whole time - i never felt worried for my person or my property while there.

(well, with the exception of one very isolated incident involving some corrupt minister's son & his thugs trying to start a brawl with the wedding crew at a nightclub.. but that was definitely not my general experience with anyone else in the country.)

ok, this is getting ridiculously long. more pictures and less words to come in later posts!

preparations

2011-11-15T16:23:00.004-05:00

YOU GUYS. i made the best salad EVER last night. i was coming from pole, so i wanted something filling, not too unhealthy, but also quick/not involving lots of cooking time. this salad was so good that even chris, the meatitarian,* scarfed it down. (it helps that there is a bunch of meat in it.) but seriously, do this:

1 lb flank steak

1 package sliced mushrooms

blue cheese

craisins

baby spinach

season the steak liberally with salt & pepper, then toss into a pan with a little olive oil on medium-high heat. cook until it's as done as you like it, then remove from the pan to rest for a few minutes. in the meantime, add a little more oil, and dump in the mushrooms (with some more salt & pepper) and cook those up in the steak juice.

toss the spinach in your dressing of choice (i use an easily-whipped-up white wine & shallot vinaigrette) and divide onto two plates. sprinkle blue cheese crumbles & craisins on top, then add the still-warm mushrooms on top. slice steak and place atop the salad.

optionally, hard- (or accidentally soft-) boil some eggs and add those on top as well.

i ate until i physically hurt. that good.

*the opposite of a vegetarian. chris doesn't consider it to be a real meal if meat isn't involved.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

i emailed my bank yesterday to let them know i'd be out of the country (so they wouldn't deny my debit card charges as unauthorized) and i got an email back saying i needed to call them directly to put a travel alert on my account. ok, no problem. i call them up and quickly get through to a customer service rep.

CS rep: ok great, i've verified you as the account holder, thanks. now, where are you travelling?

me: sri lanka.

CS rep: ..where?

me [more clearly]: sri lanka.

CS rep: um... is that a country......?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

so yeah, that whole sri lanka thing! i leave tomorrow! eeeeeee!

i have two (!!) borrowed saris at my disposal for the traditional aspects of the wedding (although no earthly clue how to affix them to myself, despite watching SEVERAL youtube tutorials; i'm hoping there are kindly indian ladies around who will take pity on the white girl and wrap me up properly).

i'm positively vibrating with excitement for this. my friends (with whom i'm travelling around the country before the wedding) left yesterday, so they'll already be at his parents' house by the time i arrive. (which, unfortunately, is at 3:20am. his parents set up a car service for me [!!] at the airport to retrieve me, although it just occurred to me today that this means i'm showing up, alone, on these poor folks' doorstep at like 4am. not at alllll awkward.)

i'll be back.. well, basically in december. have very happy thanksgivings, all you weirdos who didn't celebrate in october. and if you need something to read while i'm gone, go visit my mom's blog!

thoughtful

2011-11-10T16:30:00.000-05:00

i'm a pretty inherently selfish person. i'm a hedonist; i like things that make me happy. in a lot of ways, i don't even think this is a bad thing - i'm easily pleased, for example, and i'm a pretty darn happy person since i'm selfish enough to continue indulging in the things i like.

i do try to make a conscious effort not let my selfishness come at the expense of someone else's happiness, though, and (i hope!!) i've managed to a do a decent job there. but one place where i'm repeatedly reminded that i'm falling short of the Self I'd Like To Be is in thoughtfulness.

i want to be the kind of person who remembers your birthday, and also remembers that one time 3 months ago how you said you wanted to go to that new restaurant, so i make reservations for us as a birthday present. i want to be the kind of person who sees a book in a store that i know you'd like, so i pick it up for you. (i want to be the kind of person who knows what kind of book you'd like!) i want to be the kind of person who always sends real thank you cards in the mail.

basically, i want to be like my friend silvia. we meet up every few weeks for dinner, and at our last outing i couldn't stop gushing about how good my hands smelled after using the restaurant's mrs. meyer's soap. so at our last dinner, she brought me two bottles of mrs. meyer's for my very own. just because. (just because she's awesome, obviously.)

maybe that can be my 2012 resolution! i can never think of one in january, but this is something i'd really like to change about myself. 2012: the year of thoughtfulness.

any suggestions on how i can accomplish this?

Fakesgiving!

2011-11-08T11:18:00.005-05:00

i'd been meaning to write about our Fakesgiving feast for ages now... and what do you know, now that my mom has her own blog, she scooped me.

(given that this happened an ENTIRE MONTH ago, i can't exactly hold it against her.)

thanksgiving is a Very Important Holiday at our house. the only time one of us has missed thanksgiving - in 31 years - is when i lived in france for a year during college, and it was cost-prohibitive to fly back for a weekend. (my poor sister, who lives in california on a PhD salary, is still required to cough up the cash to fly cross country for thanksgiving each year.)

but THIS year is the wedding in sri lanka. which, come on. i can't NOT go to that. when i broke the news to my mom, i couched it by pointing out that if SHE had the opportunity to go to sri lanka for a three day long wedding, even SHE would bail on thanksgiving.

(she agreed.)

so instead, we found a weekend in october where the whole family could meet up - my sister happened to be on the east coast, chris and i were able to drive up from va - and recreate thanksgiving nearly two months early.

one problem with having it so early? it was 80 freaking degrees that weekend. INCORRECT THANKSGIVING WEATHER.

but we still had a turkey!

..albeit it a slightly small turkey, since normally it would have had another 2 months of life ahead of it to fill out. whoops.

and, of course, as seen in that picture of me & my sister, the legendary truffled quail eggs to start (deviled eggs, but made with wee quail eggs, and also truffle butter). i say "legendary" because several of my friends have now tasted these eggs, and reminisce frequently and wistfully about them. they're that good. they're also a staple of any family get together at our house.

the one surprising benefit of having thanksgiving so early is that i'm ready for the christmas season far sooner than normal. i usually get very clenchy and grinch-like about christmas decorations / sales / music / shopping occurring before (real) thanksgiving... but this year, since i've already HAD thanksgiving, i'm ready to start pinning christmas decorations on pinterest, and start planning my (soon-to-be-) annual cookie party. i've even - you may want to sit down for this - bought one or two christmas gifts. ALREADY. I KNOW.

i hope all of your thanksgivings are as lovely as mine was!

EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT!

2011-11-02T14:46:00.006-04:00

you guys remember that my mom's a restaurant reviewer and a food writer, yes? she writes for several New Jersey newspapers and magazines, she used to have her own radio show (!!) and now... drumroll....

...her own blog!

this is Kind Of A Big Deal for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that she had to learn how to use wordpress and publish posts over the last few weeks :) so please go visit http://dinewithpat.com if you like food. or eating. or restaurants. or NJ. or my mom.

completely unrelated, i thought i'd show you the other halloween costume i wore this year, this time for our office party. i couldn't go as just Buttercup, without a Westley... so i grabbed the most awesome dress in the history of dresses (which i picked up years ago at a thrift store, because LOOK AT IT), paired it with a wig i had from an even older costume where i dressed as Jennifer Garner in Alias, and voila:

when people asked, i claimed i was going for nikki minaj.

happy halloween!

2011-10-31T16:04:00.007-04:00

you guys, i am SO DISAPPOINTED how many people in DC did not know who chris & i were.

and i don't mean i'm upset they didn't recognize us on sight. i'm upset that even when we said "oh, we're Princess Buttercup and the Man In Black!" people stared at us blankly.

BECAUSE THEY WERE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE PRINCESS BRIDE. AS A CONCEPT.

Drop. Your. Sword.

this did not prevent us from having a good time, obviously.

but you know, it means one of two things: (a) people around here are lame; or (b) the argument "but everyone in my generation has seen it!" doesn't work when perhaps the majority of people going out for halloween are not, in fact, from your generation anymore. (ouch.)

check out our friends the goslins. they MADE THESE COSTUMES. with their hands.

the wig. she made it. herself.

we had a delightful night though. we started the night at a coworker's party (where, um, we were sort of the loud/drunk crew at an otherwise refined cocktail party. sorry coworker!) then headed to Recessions, which, it turns out, is a Goth club on Saturdays.

awesome.

we also met the Hamburgler on the metro:

and then met up with our friend ~~joe~~ Captain Jack Sparrow, who brought along Hercules. we also picked up a pharaoh along the way.

the Dread Pirate Roberts and Captain Jack Sparrow in one place?! we were some lucky ladies.

the saddest part of this people-not-knowing-the-princess-bride thing was that my masterful rejection of a suitor at Recessions went completely unappreciated. while i was wandering back toward my friends (and boyfriend) on the dance floor, a guy dressed up as some sort of geek/nerd/scientist stopped me and started hitting on me.

me: oh, i'm sorry, but i'm here with the Man In Black.

scientist: yes, but i'm so SMART! i bet i'm smarter than he is!

me [earnestly]: oh no, you see, he beat the Sicilian.

at this point i was rescued from his uncomprehending stare by the arrival of my Westley, but come ON. that should have been an amazing rejection.

happy halloween, everyone! please post pictures of yourselves in costume for me now!

hauntings and demons and crawlers, oh my!

2011-10-27T11:55:00.005-04:00

last weekend, my friend jenn and i bought a bunch of wine, salami, and cheese, and settled in for a night of scary movies while our boyfriends attended a zombie run somewhere in the middle of the woods in maryland.

i like scary movies, but i don't tend to watch them a lot... usually because it's pretty hard to find someone else to watch them WITH. and while i may enjoy them, i'm CLEARLY not going to watch them ALONE BY MYSELF in an empty house, because hahahahahaha no.

so when i do see scary movies, it tends to be in one of these marathon sessions. which is maaaaayyybe not the best idea if i want to sleep at all that week.

anyway, our screenings for the night: Paranormal Activity 3 in theaters, followed by The Descent, and Paranormal Activity 2, since i hadn't actually seen that one yet.

The Descent came highly recommended - both by friends and by rottentomatoes.com - but... eh. i'm clearly in the minority here, since it has a whopping 84% (!) on Rotten Tomatoes, but while it definitely had me jumping while i was watching it, i didn't really find it that compelling. don't get me wrong, it's not like i'm volunteering to go spelunking in that particular cave any time soon, but i'm also not haunted by the movie. like, thinking back to it doesn't make me uneasy, or shivery, or worried about being in caves. we also felt that there was a concerted effort to ensure that the all-female cast didn't veer into chick flick territory, but in doing so the director may have glossed a little TOO quickly over the character development for the main characters. we had no earthly idea who two of the women even were or how they ended up with the group, and found ourselves not really caring if various characters died as a result.

however, if you have a thing with claustrophobia and/or caves in general? i can imagine this movie would be scary as SHIT.

but dude, the Paranormal Activity movies..... i am STILL kind of messed up from those. seeing 3 before 2 was totally fine, since each movie so far has gone further back in the characters' timelines - so 3 happens long before 2, for example. (however: still see #1 first.)

Paranormal 3 apparently hasn't been getting outstanding reviews, but OH MY GOD it was pretty great. if by "great" you mean "i have had trouble getting to sleep every night this week because i can't stop reimagining scenes from it OH MY GOD IS SOMETHING IN MY BED?! *hyperventilate*"

the camera angle set up for this one is pretty genius - both jenn and i initially thought having a camera pan between rooms was going to be irritating, but quickly realized how much extra tension it brought. plus, kids + supernatural is ALWAYS freaky as crap. i'd heard the last 15 minutes of the movie "will mess you up for life," and while i didn't think that was QUITE the case for me, it does provide some significant long-term "holy shit that is messed UP" stuff to think about.

so basically, if you like freaky paranormal stuff? it's a good choice. also good if you don't want to fall asleep for a few days, for some reason.

milestones

2011-10-19T14:51:00.002-04:00

two weeks ago, i turned 31. i was pretty darn unexcited about it - 30, at least, is a milestone! something to celebrate! 31 is just... being in your 30s. yaaaay.

as a result, i mostly ignored my birthday. plus, i was up in NJ celebrating Fakesgiving (...more on that later. i've been meaning to write about it for ages but have not managed to pull the photos off my camera yet) so we had better things to focus on, anyway.

but TODAY! today is chris's birthday, and i'm far more excited to celebrate his than i was to celebrate mine. it's the third time i've had the opportunity to celebrate his birthday: we had just started dating 2 years ago when our birthdays rolled around.

two years later, we're living together. i'm happy and in love. that's a pretty good milestone, as far as i'm concerned.

(oliver is kind of an asshole when we're sleeping and he'd prefer we not be. so he'll climb onto delicate things - like computer monitors - or knock vases off of shelves to speed along our awakening. so i bought chris a nerf gun that he can shoot oliver with, without ever having to get out of bed.)

belated bloggery

2011-10-03T11:07:00.006-04:00

first off: big news!

WE HAVE WALLS!!

yes, just five short* weeks after the earthquake, the gaping holes in multiple walls have been filled, sealed, and repainted. it's like we live in a normal house again! that doesn't require chicken wire nailed to the exposed studs to prevent cats from getting into water heater closets! ahhhh, luxury. we haz it.

*not at all short.

in completely unrelated news, i had a lovely weekend a while ago out at some virginia vineyards to celebrate my friend olivia's birthday.

this is olivia. isn't she gorgeous?

her lovely husband offered to drive the family minivan as a makeshift drunkbus, which i found pretty hilarious. here are three fully grown women crammed into the backseat of a minivan, on our way to a day full of drinking. in a minivan. i don't know what about that i find so hysterical, but i do.

our first stop was corcoran vineyards, where the tasting includes a LOT of wine.

not even all the wine.

only a few of us went for the full tasting. olivia and i were among those brave souls, naturally.

check out that photobomb! well played, cindy :)

corcoran ALSO has started a brewery, turns out. so of course we also went there.

i have to admit that i hardly tried any of the beer - i was still reeling a bit from the wine tasting (which they rushed us through - they had a big group coming in after us, i guess, so they basically forced us to chug the last several [generously-sized] tastes). so i mainly careened around the group taking pictures and making dorky finger guns when we got the beer pourer to take a group shot.

the whole drinky group

it was a GORGEOUS day for drinking. and probably also for other things too.

the oversized pours + forced chuggage took its toll, unfortunately, and we cut the day short after just the one vineyard (plus brewery).

judging by this photo, it was probably a good time to stop.

a tale of darwinian selection at work

2011-09-26T22:55:00.008-04:00

this is not news to anyone on twitter (or anyone who knows me) but i have some wicked allergies. none to food, as far as i know - for which i am incredibly grateful, since the other thing you may know about me is how much i love eating.

i take an antihistamine religiously every single day, and use my dear, dear friend the netipot regularly. i can't take most decongestants (sudafed and the ilk) because i'm allergic to them, HA HA OH THE IRONY. (ok, technically i'm not allergic to them, but psuedoephedrine - aka sudafed - gives me heart palpitations. so, you know, not something i should take daily.)

anyway. things had been getting Even Worse lately. terrible, crippling sinus headaches that were affecting not just my ability to do fun stuff, but my ability to work. sinus infections all. the. time. i finally decided that i would go see an ENT and see if they had any advice or suggestions.

WELL. that was a sort of hilarious visit, starting with the doctor not really taking my vague complaints very seriously... until she took a look into the ol' schnoz, and, no shit, gasped.

(as we know, this is never good. and keeps happening.)

"oh my GOD," she exclaimed. "can you breathe? like, right now?"

"i.. um.. yes?" i answered, confused.

"i mean, i've seen some pretty big turbinates before, but yours are, like, OUT THERE. IN MY FACE."

i had no idea what that meant, but she sounded impressed. i told her uncertainly that i didn't actually feel congested right then, that i'd consider this a good day on the breathing scale. her eyebrows shot up, and she ordered a ct scan for my face. she also prescribed me a nasal steroid spray and suggested i get allergy tested.

the ct scan revealed pretty much the same thing she had already said: i have GIGANTOR turbinates on the right side of my face. turbinates are bony protrusions in your nose & sinus passages that are covered with helpful tissue that lets you filter & humidify the air you breathe through your nose. i looked up what normal ct scans look like, and... yeah. i'm not sure how i can breathe through the right side of my face, either. i've also got bone spurs on my septum, which is partially deviated. the doctor suggested surgery to get rid of the bone spurs & reduce the size of the mutant turbinate - although it's completely up to me if i want to go ahead with that.

next up! the allergist. i've "had allergies" since college, but never knew to what, exactly. when asked, i just sort of shrugged and explained they were "seasonal." i couldn't explain why i seemed to have them in ALL seasons, but whatever. i'm not a doctor.

so off to the allergist i went. and in short order found myself injected with the preliminary (!) 40 shots to see how i reacted to a slew of pollens, molds, and animals.

"by the way," the allergist had explained as she was administering those first 40 shots, "some people occasionally find their symptoms might get worse during the testing."

within minutes of being injected, i had several welts developing on my forearms. very, very itchy welts. "wow!" she exclaimed while measuring the size of them a little while later to record on her clipboard, "we sure won't have to retest you for a bunch of these, huh!"

all the shots that didn't initially react - or had smallish reactions - were retested on my upper arms. where they pretty much all turned into itchy bumps, to go along with the still agonizingly itchy welts on my forearms. i think i ended up with a total of 75 shots in the end.

the itching, however, was certainly not RESTRICTED to my arms. one hour into the testing, i couldn't stop scratching my face, scalp, neck, legs - anything i could reach, basically. i also started sneezing and quite suddenly sounded as if i'd developed a cold.

by the time the testing was concluded, she was rubbing cortisone cream on my arms and urging me to take an antihistamine ("i keep these on hand for people who react like you!" she explained cheerfully) to try and reduce my leper-like appearance before i headed into work for the day.

and at the end, she pulled out my results sheet for me. "i'll just highlight the ones you're allergic to," she explained as she uncapped a marker.

ah. so... all of them, pretty much.

"i guess i should have just highlighted the ones you WEREN'T allergic to," she admitted. "...you're DEFINITELY a candidate for allergy shots."

(she did explain that i actually AM allergic to all seasons, interestingly enough. seeing as i'm allergic to what appears to be every pollen on the planet, that covers plants that pollenate during the spring, summer, AND fall. and in the winter, i'm covered by dust mites and the two furballs i live with. i win! ..no, wait. i don't think that's right.)

so! to sum up, i am allergic to ALL THE THINGS.

i also need to decide if i want to get sinus surgery, try allergy shots (or drops - has anyone done these? they're the same serum as the shots, but taken sublingually at home?), try both, or just continue to do nothing, which is obviously the most attractive option.

except that i'm home sick today because my sinuses currently have me resembling a leper with consumption. so. yeah.

yay marriage

2011-09-23T11:19:00.004-04:00

you guys. i got this flyer in the mail from an apparently local baptist church yesterday.

WHAT THE EFF IS THAT SUPPOSED TO EVEN MEAN?

"his love, regardless of her respect." ...WHAT?

i mean, i can't even tell if i should be offended by it. as a woman, i mean. is it a seminar on how men can foist their love on women even if the woman doesn't respect them? or how women should respect men even if the men don't love them?

HELP ME UNDERSTAND.

Cooking with Pinterest

2011-09-22T09:24:00.003-04:00

in addition to the occasional crafty inspiration from pinterest, i've been cooking up a storm after pinning delicious-looking recipes left & right to my food board. i really enjoy cooking (even if i'm not really that great at it - i definitely am the type of person to Need A Recipe) and feel much more virtuous about myself if i cook dinner from scratch rather than eating out or relying on something processed from the freezer section.

it's been a bit harder since starting this job back in april though - only because i now metro to work, and i didn't realize how convenient it was to be able to swing by a grocery store on my way home to pick up whatever ingredients i lack for that day's recipe inspiration. but with some meal planning (and subsequent targeted weekend shopping) i've managed to pull together several home-cooked meals to try out new recipes in the past few days. some poor quality phone-pics of those meals? don't mind if i do!

first up, 2 dips i had been dying to try out:
artichoke dip (originally from my man's belly) and beet hummus (originally from simplyrecipes). the verdict: the beet hummus is... interesting. i'm really not sure if i like it or not, but it's definitely interesting. i'm not sure it's worth the hassle of preparing / cooking / peeling beets for, but it's certainly a striking, gorgeous color. it went much better with the plain cucumber slices than the pita chips i'd made - i can envision making this as individual-sized apps, with a spoonful of the hummus on top of a cucumber slice, all laid out on a platter.

the artichoke dip is deeeelicious. the only problem i had with that one was that it called for 1 clove of garlic... and i used the biggest clove of garlic known to man, assuming that more garlic is always better, because duh. unfortunately, Gigantor Garlic completely overwhelmed the other flavors and very quickly became too much for me to handle. i'm definitely going to try this again - it's really quick/easy to make - but with a more reasonably sized garlic clove (or maybe saute the garlic first to take off some of the bite?).

next up: bacon & egg toast cups (originally from annie's eats).

these were a big hit - chris described them as "like egg mcmuffins.. but.. like.. real." they were a little trickier to put together than i'd expected, but just LOOK at the result! they're freaking ADORABLE. also: tasty as heck. a definite make-again.

and then last night, i pinterest-mined for a side dish: these parmesan potatoes (originally from foodlush).
(the rest of the meal is just italian sausages in red wine and sugar snaps steamed in the microwave.) holy cow, were these some tasty potatoes. i mean, of course they were: they're sprinkled in parmesan and garlic powder and then cooked in butter. YES PLEASE.

some other recent finds that were worth note (although i took no crappy phonepics):

pink bites' mongolian beef. this was SO SIMPLE to prepare and really tasted like chinese takeout.
kayln's kitchen's roasted green beans with mushrooms, balsamic, and parmesan. i made this to go with the mongolian beef, so i nixed the parm, and it was still SO. FREAKING. GOOD. i see why everyone raves about roasted veggies now - i'll definitely be doing variations of this with different veggies & flavors.
food lush's wilted baby bok choi salad. i would seriously eat this every single day if i had an unlimited supply of baby bok choi.

do you have any other good recipes for me? please share!

The second-to-last pic might be my favorite bridal portrait ever. Like in all of history.

2011-09-20T09:29:00.003-04:00

you guys all know marie, right? so you probably also know how she done got married this weekend?

(cue girly happy noises)

it was SUCH a fun day. first off, how gorgeous is our miss marie??

and then, because she and matt are delightful in addition to good-looking, there were many awesome & whimsical touches throughout the whole thing. like, for example, our "place cards" letting us know at which table we were seated.

those, of course, immediately went to good use.

there was a full-on photobooth area set up with additional props, too:

i expect marie & matt will have a grand old time looking through THAT sd card.

the location could not have been nicer. there was a fantastic fire going in this adorable little courtyard area:

..which led to some Feats of Bravery, once a few cocktails were consumed:

and how stylish are these two??

stylish: definitely. stuffy: most definitely not.

a seriously fantastic day for a seriously fantastic couple. congrats, you two crazy kids!

(all pics here, if interested!)

i need cheaper hobbies

2011-09-14T20:56:00.006-04:00

oh hey guys, how's your wednesday night going? not bad? yes? yeah, mine's not too bad either, seeing as i just bought myself tickets to sri lanka.

sri! lanka! i'm going there! eeeeeeee!

i'm going here!

and here!

and maybe here!

and i don't even know where else! except that it will be super awesome!

(also: i am not using gotmyfare. OBVIOUSLY.)

i am so freaking lucky. one of chris's best friends is having a destination wedding there, so i get to tag along. and THEN, one of my good friends from highschool happens to be MARRIED to a sri lankan, and they'd been meaning to take a trip over there anyway... so we worked it out that i'd go at the same time as them, and spend the week before the wedding traipsing around the country with my friends as guides.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

i've been excited about this for months, but the act of buying the tickets tonight solidified it for me and i am practically bouncing off the walls with glee. sri lanka!

the flight over is kind of a bitch - that trip spans two nights (!!) and i get into colombo at like 3am. and actually, the flights out are pretty insane as well: international flights out apparently either leave at 3am as well, or not until like 8pm, which tacks another day of travel onto the return timeline. so i am both entering and leaving the country in the middle of the night.

whatever. totally worth it. also, i hear that qatar airways, who i'm flying, is pretty fantastic as far as airlines go. i mean.. i'm still in coach. tickets to colombo are approximately one MEEEELLION dollars just for coach class. that puts business at, like, 8 meeellion. approximately.

sriiiiii! lankaaaaaa!

more pinterest-inspired crafting!

2011-09-11T23:09:00.010-04:00

as is.. well, pretty much everyone.. i'm addicted to pinterest. the three major ways i use it is to hoard recipes (which is going fantastically - i've cooked more in the past few weeks than i have all summer), to take note of fun party decoration ideas (for the.. uh.. one party i throw every year or two) and to organize DIY decorating ideas, even though history has proven repeatedly that i am neither artsy nor craftsy. yet i fantasize about hosting whimsically-decorated parties where i serve delicious food to people while they comment admiringly at all the decor which, they are shocked to learn, i made myself. self-depricating laugh!

uh, anyway. i have this sliver of wall that had been bugging me, because it was very empty. please pretend i have access to Fancy Editing Softwares (and didn't just paste some offwhite rectangles onto this picture) since i neglected to take a "before" picture... but here is chris's entertainment system area.
directly to the right of the entertainment shelf thing is a door to the patio - a door which opens INwards - which severely limited the size & shape of the shelf chris was able to stick there for electronics, or else the door wouldn't open all the way.

tooootally nothing on the wall in this shot, either...

when i moved in and started doing what girls do (read: hanging things on walls, adorning surfaces with tchotchkes) i never put anything on that wall since, you know, a door opens into it. also it's a skinny awkward area, and with the fireplace already offcenter on that wall i didn't want to draw attention to the imbalance.

well. then decided all of that reasoning didn't matter, and the door is practically NEVER open anyway, and that wall needed something, darn it. inexplicably, i decided that that something was a set of small mirrors.

enter the 2812735763 homemade sunburst mirrors posted on pinterest. the one that caught my eye was this one, originally from nesting place.

pretty, right? and it's made from posterboard! i figured i could do something similar, but on a smaller scale. three small mirrors, hung vertically, with interesting-yet-not-overwhelming cardstock that would bring in some colors from the room. (don't i sound fancy?)

i went to michael's and bought some patterned scrapbook paper, some cheap small mirrors, and then at the last minute grabbed stick-on mosiac tiles to create borders around the mirrors to try and fancy things up a bit. then i got to work cutting out various sized leaf/wedge/burst petal things to see what size and shape would work.

what didn't work: that fat one.

i found a layering pattern for the petals i thought would work and taped together my scrap paper pieces about 1/4 of the way around the mirror as a model. then i cut out one meeeeeellion little wedges from the nicer scrapbook paper.

i neglected to take photos of this process, but i more or less followed the original blog post. i used that skinny petal in the photo as my guide and traced it onto a folded scrapbook piece (to make sure all the pieces were symmetrical) and then glued each piece on with a gluegun. i did all the tiling around the mirror rims first, actually, THEN got to hotglueing.

here's the result:

i'm not 100% sold on them yet, BUT i am pleased that they don't look entirely like reluctantly displayed artwork from a second grader. you can't tell in that last shot, but the 2 brown ones especially have a bit of dimension to them since the paper is thick - more like the original version i copied - so they don't look quite so much like 2D stickers glued to the wall as that picture implies.

so now that makes two pinterest diy projects that weren't complete busts! i'm practically martha over here.

a post for the nosy

2011-09-07T22:33:00.008-04:00

i saw this over on Suburban Sweetheart's blog yesterday, and couldn't believe how much i loved reading in great detail about everything she had in her purse. i'm a nosy one, it would seem. and in case you are as well, i present: the contents of my purse, too!

shall we zoom in a bit?

(click again for extra embiggening)

from the top left, we have:

two packs of birth control. thanks, annual ob/gyn visit yesterday!
my "big wallet." this holds stuff like membership cards (to library, health care, etc) and business cards for various doctors etc. basically, stuff i need but don't NEEEED all the time.
my "small wallet." this goes with me whether i have my purse or not, and contains my ID, credit card, debit card, metro card, and any cash i have at the moment.
my business card holder. i don't actually usually have this with me, but i was at a conference for work all last week.
extra business cards
decongestant. crippling sinus headaches that come on all of a sudden are NO JOKE, people.
hand sanitizer. it's about 6 years old. i do not sanitize frequently.
l'occitane hand lotion. LOOOOOVE.
random lip gloss (made with.. carrots? or something?) - swag from Blogher. Blogher '09. oops.
burt's bees chapstick. cannot live without.
unopened eyeliner that i believe i received as a secret santa gift last christmas. *possibly* something i can remove from my bag at this point..
random change. into the change jar it goes tonight!
i love this thing: it's a collapsible purse hanger (sort of like this one) that my mom gave me for christmas one year. i use it all the time.
blood donor card. i'm O Negative! best blood ever!
ONE MEEEEELLION pens. turns out i had those 6 identical ones stashed in an inside pocket - they're from my old job, when i went to a charity thing at a school like a year ago and needed things to hand out to kids.
a shocking amount of gift cards that i need to use.
free samples i got after a facial last weekend
coupon for kitty litter. i lead a glamorous cat lady life, people.
two checks i need to deposit
gum. i ALWAYS have gum in my purse, although i've never tried this flavor before. (i'm.. sadly excited to try it.)
almonds & cranberries from a starbucks meal things i had completely forgotten about
recommendation (along with accompanying drawing!) of something called a "thera-cane" that the last masseuse i saw recommended i buy, because my back is THAT MESSED UP right now. it's a post of its own, but you know the rib dislocation problem? NOT RESOLVED.
key card for work
jump drive. never leave home without one!
pepper spray
"backup" makeup pouch. inside is:
- bare escentuals foundation
- ulta concealer
- maybelline great lash mascara (classic, but awesome)
- ulta eyeliner (meh)
- covergirl blush
i.. don't wear a lot of makeup, turns out.
dog paw

speaking of dog paws, have i ever shown you guys chris's dog, dozer?

dozer, meet the internet.

(you'll note that while you can't see it in motion here, his large and enthusiastic tail has rearranged all my purse contents behind him.)

dozer is.. pretty large. like 115 lbs large. although he doesn't seem to realize it, and would gladly climb into your lap if you'd let him. i don't particularly recommend it though; 115 lbs of lab is not as comfortable as you might think.

he's such a good dog. enormous and barky when strangers come to the door, but a total pushover goober 5 seconds later. (he was not home during the burglary, unfortunately, for anyone wondering about that.)

aaanyway. my purse! voila! please to let me know if you do the same so i can peer into your personal items too...

Annapolis and California and Metallica, oh my!

2011-09-05T20:51:00.003-04:00

hello friends! it's been a ridiculous few weeks around these parts. as we know by now, we had an earthquake two weeks ago which kicked our house's ass.

(that situation, by the way? completely unresolved. the walls looks exactly the same as they did in that post a week ago, except that the fans are gone and chris moved all the furninture back for me - against the holey walls - since he know how crazy it was making me to live like that. it's actually a MAJOR improvement, as far as my mental health goes. i can pretend the holes aren't there when i need to, now.)

then last weekend, aka the Annual Girls Trip to Dewey Beach, was superceded by Hurricane Irene. i was... displeased.

however, we rallied (more accurately: the other girls rallied, while i bitched and railed angrily against the unfairness of the elements) and we spent a day and a night in Annapolis, cramming in as much fun as we could before the hurricane hit.

first stop: the famous Pusser's, home of the infamous mind erasers.

we even - miracle of miracles - found a bar in Annapolis that serves Grapefruit Crushes, the hallmark (and uber delicious) drink of Dewey Beach.

it was a delightful day. we promptly came back and held a hurricane party to protest Irene.. who amounted to just about zilch in our area: some rain, a few gusts, and some short-lived power outages. i like to think we got a tiny break after the ridiculouness the earthquake wreaked on us.
a great weekend, with great friends. i'm glad we salvaged it.

and then! i spent all last week in San Francisco, at Dreamforce. it was pretty great - i learned a lot, met some great people, and even saw Metallica.

(they were absurdly great, by the way. and i'm not even a Metallica fan.)

(Metallica! at a software conference! i know!)

and now it's the end of the labor day weekend, bringing the summer to an unofficial close. i am so thoroughly ready for boots and layers and jackets, omfg. also hopefully a slightly less insane schedule, with maybe even a weekend or two in a row at home.

walls optional

2011-08-28T10:49:00.004-04:00

so the good news is that my neighborhood is better equipped for a (pretty weak) hurricane than for an earthquake, and while we did lose power for about 8 hours, our particular condo didn't sustain any (additional) damage due to irene. yay!

the bad news is that after spending a day and a night on a girls' getaway in Annapolis, i walked back into my place yesterday morning to this scene:

that, in case it's not clear, is a passel of workers who are busily ripping out our walls and carpet.

the really exciting thing is that after punching out the lower portions of the wall between our bedroom and the living room, and between our bedroom and the water heater closet on our deck - and ripping out the padding under the carpet anywhere nearby - they left. as in, all our furniture is still smashed into the middle of each room; i slept last night unable to get out of the bed except by scooching all the way to the foot because we have furniture piled up against it on all sides; the cats are getting from room to room by walking straight through the walls.

we've added another industrial fan to the mix (that's a grand total of 3, in addition to our industrial dehumidifier) and we're now waiting to see if THIS was enough to dry out the walls.

it's very, very hot in our house with all of these industrial machines going 24/7.

oliver, stymied by my super-professional job of chicken wire nailed to the exposed studs to prevent him from frolicking in the now-exposed water heater closet.

the good (?) news for me is that i'm getting on a plane first thing tomorrow morning for a week in california, for a work conference. so i'm HOPING that by the time i get back on friday, this will all be magically completed, with our walls back to being structures that divide rooms from each other, carpet replaced, drywall reinstalled, walls repainted. our house is the opposite of a haven right now - i feel very agitated when i'm here, sort of like when you first move into a place and you have piles of boxes everywhere, and it just doesn't feel OK until you move furniture into their proper places and make your bedroom functional? that's how i feel now, with gaping holes in the walls, desks leaning against the bed, couches in the middle of the room.

fingers crossed that next week will be enough to get this all resolved.

natural disaster week!

2011-08-25T21:44:00.004-04:00

i get the impression that if this was all we came home to after the earthquake, it would STILL be more damage than most people saw:
but as we know... photos and books falling down on a bookshelf was the least of our woes.

this is the current state of our bedroom.
that's an industrial fan and an industrial dehumidifier.

late tuesday night, some contractors showed up at our house to assess the situation. our neighborhood sustained a surprising amount of damage - ours was not the only building affected by a burst pipe, for starters! - so it was nearly 11pm by the time they got to our place.

they cut some big pieces out of the drywall in our water heater closet so that they could try and dry out our walls from the inside - hopefully drying everything out enough this way that we don't need to replace / redo any walls or floors.
it took a while for the cats to warm up to the enormous, noisy machines scattered around the house...
the other surprise, which i didn't notice until a little later, is the crack up one wall. i was vacuuming the condo on tuesday night (did i mention we had houseguests coming on wednesday?!) when i came upon a pile of plaster dusting the carpet:
it looked like someone had drilled a hole in the wall to hang shelves or something, but obviously we hadn't done anything like that. which was when i realized it came from the brand-new crack running from the carpet all the way to the ceiling.
oh.

i mean, i don't think it's incredibly SERIOUS, like structurally unsound or anything... but on the other hand, A CRACK FROM FLOOR TO CEILING! goodness. thanks, earthquake!

so, you know, that's happening. we're waiting for the contractors to come back eventually and check how the drying is going before we know more.

MEANWHILE, i have tomorrow (friday) off because it's time for our annual Girls' Weekend In Dewey Beach, wooooo party weekennnnnd!

....except, HAHA, we have another fucking natural disaster on the way! Hurricane Irene has effectively shut down all beach plans for the entire east coast - a state of emergency has already been declared in every state from North Carolina to Connecticut.

mother nature: you are clearly trying to send a message. i wish i knew what it was so you could STOP REPEATING IT.

one of 45 million earthquake posts

2011-08-23T20:38:00.004-04:00

as everyone on earth is no doubt is aware, we had ourselves a freaking EARTHQUAKE here in virginia today. we've had earthquakes here before - two that i can remember in the past decade, in fact - but those were more "earthquakes." like, they definitely happened, but we needed an outside authority to confirm that what we felt (if we felt anything at all) was, in fact, technically considered an earthquake.

let me tell you, you don't need outside confirmation of a 5.9 earthquake. it is PRETTY DARN APPARENT.

there are some on the west coast who have been smirking into their sleeves about how cute we east coasters are with our adorable panicking over an itsy bitsy earthquake, when trust them, this was nothing, they hardly even notice earthquakes of that size over there, teehee!

i've seen a few choice rebuttals to those types of comments, among them:

a. talk to us next time you get hit with a blizzard, and we'll offer our sympathy.
b. talk to us the next time you've had a terrorist attack hit your region - almost exactly 10 years ago - that involved some significant crashing and shaking, and see if your building shaking violently doesn't spook YOU.

my own rebuttal? aside from a general irritated muttering that if your first explanation for what you're feeling is that the construction on the floor below you must have gone horribly wrong and the building is collapsing, YOU'RE ALLOWED TO PANIC A LITTLE BIT?

when i got home today, we discovered that the earthquake had caused a pipe to burst in the apartment above us. i got home 2+ hours after the earthquake hit, and presumably the pipe had been gushing water since then. by the time someone was able to turn it off, water was dripping through our bedroom walls, and had soaked a large spot in the carpet.

another wall - across the apartment, unrelated to the burst pipe - has a crack in it now, from floor to ceiling.

and yeah, half of the pictures and books and knicknacks on our shelves had fallen; pictures were hanging crooked on the wall; a wine glass had vibrated itself loose from our wine rack and was sitting halfway across the room. also: STRUCTURAL DAMAGE. from our adorable, cute, earthquake.

it may have been small by california standards, but that doesn't mean it was completely insignificant.

hair woes

2011-08-16T11:25:00.007-04:00

so the other day, i was perusing Style Lush and came across a post about creating gorgeous no heat curls. sounds fabulous, right? and easy! even i can manage to wrangle my hair into a style that only requires SLEEPING on it, no?

please click through to the Style Lush link, because you really need the visual of the resulting curls at this juncture. go ahead. i'll wait here.

(seriously. take a looksie.)

can you guess where this is going?

let's just say that despite the tips for thin-haired girls that are sprinkled throughout the video tutorial, this is NOT a style for thin-haired girls to attempt. those lovely soft curls, it turns out, are a result of the hair wrapping not just around the headband, but around ITSELF, which creates a nice thick barrel curl. my hair? with its practically negative mass? yeah... every. single. wrap. around the headband was essentially only the width of the headband itself, since my hair is so thin.

which means that instead of curling my hair, i basically CRIMPED my hair. except in a spiral.

this is after brushing the "curls" out about 30 times, as well as 2 hours pulled back into a ponytail because.. no.

oh cell phone photo. where is the rest of you?

instead of gorgeous no heat curls, i gave myself a gorgeous no heat PERM. awesome.

not to mention the person who got here searching for "how to tell if your forehead is big."

2011-08-10T16:27:00.004-04:00

statcounter, which i use to (spoiler!) track the stats on this blog, appears to have added a new feature where it tells you what your page rank was in a google search that led to your blog. for example, someone got to my blog today by googling "alice's wonderland blog," and there's a little note letting me know that my blog is the #1 search result when you google that phrase.

neat! makes sense; that's the name of my blog and all.

interesting, but not entirely surprising, is that i'm the #3 result on google when you search for "descending angel pole one leg," due to this ms paint masterpiece.

VERY surprising - to me at least - is that i am the SECOND MOST RELEVANT RESULT when you google "i didn't get arrested." i mean, a) really? that seems.. unlikely. and b) that's a pretty weird thing to google. it's not a question, and it doesn't really appear to be a statement you'd use to research something. like, for example, "how NOT to get arrested." whatever, googlers.

(sadly[?], no one googled "alice in wonderland porn" or "alice in wonderland peeing" in the past day or two, which are both popular searches that have historically directed people here. i'm curious how EFFECTIVELY they get here with those searches, now.)

(ok, i just googled both terms myself. i am not in the first 3 pages for the porn search - yay! - but am the SECOND RESULT for "alice wonderland peeing." BALLS.)

i'm on a horse!

2011-08-09T13:22:00.020-04:00

you guys remember the Old Spice Guy commercials?

turns out when you put a bunch of dorky city folks on horses, they also proclaim "I'M ON A HORSE." a lot.

chris: he's on a horse!

i was also on a horse, although this is all the proof you'll get of that, since it's pretty darn difficult to take a photo of yourself on a horse while still on said horse.

me: also on a horse!

this was my first! time! ever! on a horse, despite the whole farm school childhood thing, so i was pretty excited. i'd been AROUND horses, so i wasn't scared of them or nervous about their size or anything.. just pretty much excited to finally get in a saddle.

me, not in a saddle. also not even the horse i rode. details.

it was pretty terrific. it was a swelteringly hot day, but we were up in the hilly countryside where there was a nice breeze from time to time.

after about 20 minutes of walking along at a nice calm pace, though, i came to two conclusions: 1) i really wanted to go faster, now. at least a trot. maybe a nice gallop to really scare the crap out of me, and 2) my Delicate Lady Parts were ALREADY getting a bit sore, so i can't imagine how sore they'd be if we actually HAD trotted or cantered or galloped or other-horse-verbed, oh my goodness.

(i also spent a considerable amount of time daydreaming about how all the characters in the Song of Fire & Ice books - with which i am currently obsessed, and of which i am currently on book 3 - spend so much time in a saddle, and how much nicer that would be than walking miles a day, but how the saddle sores they talk about are probably very real and very unpleasant.)

(YES, i'm aware that they are ficticious characters. irrelevant.)

also! this weekend marie and i went to a self defense class in DC. i've been meaning to take one of these forever - i felt it was kind of ridiculous that at 30, i still had taken no proactive steps to protect myself, aside from buying some pepper spray and a general vague commitment to be aware of my surroundings.

it was awesome. i mean, i'm under no delusions that all of a sudden i'll be taking attackers out chuck norris-style, but it was really empowering to learn a few simple actions i could take to help myself in a bad situation. and i mean, yeah, i know that if someone is determined, Bad Things Will Happen. but i can't tell you how helpful it is - mentally, anyway - to at least have a PLAN that includes one or two things i could do if i find myself in a bad situation. considering my previous plan was something like "panic. and also probably cry."

i highly recommend a class like that if it's something you're at all interested in - i found it completely worth the price. (if you're local: DC Impact, where we took our class, has regular classes and is located right by the chinatown metro.)

sorry i'm not home right now..

2011-07-29T12:19:00.003-04:00

sooooo. if you follow me on twitter, you already know this story, but if not.. hey! interesting night last night! it's a pretty long story, so i'm basically just going to copy & paste from an email i wrote to some friends this morning.

last night when i got come, oliver wasn't in the apartment. it's immediately evident when this is the case, because he always sprints to the door to greet me / see if there's an opportunity to escape into the hallway. bella typically cannot be deigned to get up from wherever she's napping for something as pedestrian as greeting a human. so when BELLA came to meet me, and oliver was nowhere to be found, i knew there was a problem.

(part of the) long story short, i eventually found oliver OUTSIDE, which is impressive because we live on the 3rd floor of a condo building, with huge heavy doors leading into and out of the stairwells, so oliver either got through 2 sets of those doors just by waiting for neighbors to open them.. or he took the elevator down with someone, which i derive great amusement from imagining was the case.

anyway, i naturally blamed chris for letting oliver out, because oliver was locked in the bedroom when *i* left, and chris is the only other one who uses the door after i leave. (FORESHADOWING!!)

anyway, ages after we'd both been home for the night, chris went to take the trash out and noticed the door didn't shut right. then he noticed that the deadbolt wasn't actually WORKING. then he noticed that the metal plate on the doorframe was bent completely out of shape, and that the front of the door next to it had pry marks bent into the surface.

so then we start looking around in bewilderment, like... wait.. if someone broke in... why is all our stuff still here...? i had my macbook, ipod, both of our little point & shoot cameras, etc all sitting out on the coffee table/kitchen counters. all of our electronics were still here. then i went to check on my passport.. and noticed the drawer i keep it in was slightly open. as was the same drawer on chris's charger station. and actually... hey... all the drawers to the dresser were slightly open (which drives me NUTS, so i am super sure i didn't leave any that way).. and there are clothes on my bedside table which are now closed INTO the drawers under it, which i definitely didn't do.

so. someone had been in, had been through all our shit, and had let oliver out, but apparently hadn't taken anything. they'd been in the drawer with my checkbook.. but it was still there. chris's nice watch was sitting on display on top of his charging station.

we called a locksmith to come out ASAP to replace the broken deadbolt.

eventually we also called the police, just to file a report, which we almost didn't do at all since.. you know.. nothing was GONE. but the police took it pretty seriously, sent a cop out to take our statements and get all our info; eventually 2 other cops arrived and took pictures of our busted door frame and actually canvased our neighbors to see if anyone had seen/heard anything suspicious. apparently there have been several reports of "suspicious activity" in the neighborhood and they're trying to crack down.

by this point, we were pretty creeped out by everything. someone had gone through the trouble of breaking into our house - and ours specifically; we checked other doors on the hallway and none had pry marks around the bolt - and then just to.. what, touch our stuff?? it was around then that i finally realized what WAS missing: my lovely nikon dslr. waaaah. also: EXTRA CREEPY OMG. they came in SPECIFICALLY searching for MY CAMERA? WHAT THE HELL?

(the police totally hinted at crime show motives, too, like.. had i taken any pictures recently that when i was looking back through them, i found something... odd? or maybe suspicious? in the frame? you know, like, did i accidentally catch a crime on camera and someone broke in to steal back the evidence?!?) (i noticed no such thing, btw.)

so no matter how you slice it, it's disturbing. the camera was one of two places: either sitting on the dining room table, the first thing you see when you come in, or else i'd managed to actually put it away (which = in a camera bag, deep within the closet of the guest bedroom). so dude either reeeeally wanted the camera - which means he knows who i am, where i live, and that i owned that specific camera - and went through our shit until he found it, without taking *anything* else of value... OR, he found the camera right away, and then still felt compelled to go through everything else in our house just to.. what.. touch it? OMG I HATE BOTH CHOICES.

anyway. we're feeling pretty lucky that whoever this creep was didn't actually take more things, or tear up our apartment or anything. we have a new, expensive, much higher quality (double) lock on the door now. and we're probably going to invest in lifelock, or one of those id theft security programs, just for peace of mind.

we also changed the sheets, just in case. shudder.

if this is a kitchen, i'd very much like to get out of it

2011-07-26T17:03:00.009-04:00

hey! so i bet you haven't heard anything about this heat yet, huh? completely brand new subject, no doubt!

still. you guys. THIS HEAT. it's not great. but you know what's even not greater?

taking a bus from DC to NYC on a day when the heat index was 120° (yes, literally 120°) when the bus has no a/c.

heat index of 120°. bus with no air. 5 and a half hours. it was every bit as miserable as you might imagine it would be.

we'd been waiting (outside!) for about 20 minutes when the bus came, so i was already sweating like a champ, heavy navy tshirt and jeans getting increasingly hotter and grosser (and damper) by the minute. so we were all VERY HAPPY when the bus rolled up - hurrah! a/c! - until we got on. OH HAR HAR HAR.

after about 30 minutes on the bus i just gave up and stopped trying to fan myself or prevent heatstroke. the back of my shirt was soaked through and it was only going to get worse.

in delaware, i led a revolt to make our driver stop and let us buy water. (ok, not exactly a REVOLT per se, but i did yell up to the front that we needed water, and after initially declining, our driver relented and gave us 10 minutes to bask in the glorious, glorious a/c of the rest stop. and to buy liquids. and STEAMING HOT FRIED CHICKEN, if you're chris. weirdo.) (several other bus passengers came up to me and gratefully thanked me for speaking up.)

so, you know, that was pretty awful. but it did make walking around nyc in the heat wave surprisingly not bad, in comparison! which is.. well, kind of pathetic. and not actually worth it.

nyc, however? always worth it. we went up primarily so chris could hang out with some of his best friends, but i also snuck in a full day with two of my lovely girls from highschool (brunch! pedis! starbucks! much gossiping!). we also ate at both peter luger's and at ippudo.

now THAT'S a bowl of ramen. soooo good.

peter luger's was sort of hilarious. the maître d's wore spiffy suits, with one even sporting an errol flynn pencil mustache to compliment it. the waiters were gruff and brusque, and informed YOU of what you'd be ordering half the time. my favorite exchange of the night happened when our waiter was serving out a side of potatoes we'd ordered onto our individual plates. he'd just scooped a huge serving onto my plate:

me: that's good, thanks!

waiter, completely seriously: I'LL tell you when it's good.

..and he continued right on serving me potatoes. well ok, then!

it was a lovely weekend, overall. especially since the bus on the way home had air conditioning, THANK ALL THAT IS HOLY.

paintings of the pole: volume REAL LIFE

2011-07-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

i've been sitting on these for ages because.. well, i'm still not ENTIRELY sure i should be posting these on the Internet Of Foreverness and all, but fuck it. i'm pretty proud of them.

remember how maaaaany moons ago, i was prepping for a pole photo shoot? wherein i got 15 minutes to try out my best tricks while simultaneously trying not to look like an idiot? (it turns out i was not wrong to be worried about the looking-like-an-idiot part, incidentally. the incredibly awesome, super sweet photog - also a pole student - kept alternatingly chiding me to smile, then suggesting i try and relax my face from the rictus-grin i kept plastering on my face.)

remember this, from my post about trying to learn to backdrop?

well check it out! LIVE AND IN PERSON!

or, this, from the post about a no-hands descending angel?

with REAL SKIN holding me up this time!

(that one actually looks considerably better in person, huh? it's pretty hard to draw these things. am not an effective arteest.)

these ones i don't have ms paint replicas of :) but they're fun. helicopter:

uh... crap. i can never remember the name of this one. jasmine, i think?

and finally one of my favorites, gemini:
so... that happened. everyone promise to never send this post to my dad.

i should have let him burn himself on the iron

2011-07-11T23:01:00.004-04:00

he may LOOK cute and innocent, but i've documented oliver's asshole tendencies pretty frequently here.

add this post to the pile.

as i dozed between my first and second alarm snoozes this morning, i was jolted wide awake by a loud crash. oliver has broken enough things in my house that i can instantly tell if it's something fairly minor (glass foolishly left on the counter overnight, begging to be knocked off by devious cat paws) or something more substantial (large mixing bowl i was unaware was appealing and/or able to be batted off a counter). i could tell this one wasn't minor.

RIP, lovely wine decanter.
he actually accomplished this particular act of destruction by nudging a heavy ceramic candle pot off of a ledge in the kitchen ONTO the decanter, which had been placed in a fairly oliver-safe zone. i mean, had he not resorted to PROJECTILES to ruin it.
jerk.

pinteresterrific

2011-07-08T12:31:00.007-04:00

i was one of the many skeptics of pinterest initially, for all the same reasons everyone else was: i didn't need more sites to check! i can't keep up with my interwebbing as it is! but man, since the minute i joined? have not looked back. it's brilliant.

anyway, i found a pin with this DIY bulletin board makeover from Name 5 Things and instantly repinned it to my own DIY board. i recently became the proud owner of chris's beat up, childhood bulletin board, which had been living at his parents' house until now, to hang over the desk in the guest room at our apartment. it was perfect! except.. well, bulletin boards don't age very well, apparently.

it's not the best picture, but as you can see it was faded in all sorts of interesting patterns, plus the board itself was pretty beat up - there were large gouges in the cork, plus lots of smaller (but very visible) holes and lumps. you also can see the delightful deep forest green rug that the previous owners felt was a good choice for the entire main area of the condo.

anyway! i bought a yard of fabric, a spool of $1 ribbon, some spray adhesive, and some thumbtacks, and within about an hour had this to show for myself:

(sorry, all of these pictures are at night in a not-very-well-lit house. i'm not home while it's light out.)

it actually came out better than i expected, given my general lack of attention span & attention to detail when it comes to crafty things. i used thin fabric on purpose so that it would still be easy to pushpin through, but that did mean that most of the board's imperfections are still visible through it. but since they're PRETTIER imperfections now, i don't care.

i also initially considered using spray adhesive on the ribbon, but ultimately decided i was too lazy (and that spray adhesive is pretty messy) so i just put a tack through the ribbon every few inches and it looks good enough for me.

the one thing i did take the time to do was to iron the fabric carefully and thoroughly to get all the wrinkles and fold lines out. which means, naturally, this is what i came back to after hanging the bulletin board up:

he's very helpful, this cat.

happy 4th of july! i didn't get arrested!

2011-07-05T16:11:00.003-04:00

happy crappy tuesday after a long holiday weekend where you don't want to be back at work, everyone!

i had a lovely and packed 4th of July weekend - full of food, booze & friends. and fistfights and arrests. although i am pleased to report that i was neither involved in the fight NOR was i arrested! congratulations, me!

i've written before about the wonders of the barra brava section at DC United games, but suffice it to say that an enormous communal tailgate, much drinking, and then cheering and throwing beer to celebrate goals is generally a pretty good time. so on saturday, my friends and i headed to rfk stadium once again to eat, drink, and learn spanish cheers in honor of our friend's birthday.

all was going well - we ate! we drank! we were standing in the barra brava section, singing in spanish! - when things went REALLY well: DC United scored the first goal of the game, and our section went wild. many, many beers were thrown exuberantly into the air, and a fine mist of beer droplets (along with the occasional more drenching downpour) rained down on us all.

apparently, some dude in the front row was unaware of this tradition. (the front! row! of the barra brava section! how did he even GET there if he wasn't with other barra brava members?) i guess someone a few rows up must have thrown a beer on the full-ish side, because dude got pretty well doused.

dude - we'll call him "doucherton," for short - turned around, and decided that the middle aged white guy directly behind him - he was about 45 or 50, and wearing a kilt, so we'll call him "kilt" - must have deliberately poured the beer on him. kilt had not. kilt may have thrown his beer, but he did not upend his beer directly onto doucherton. this mattered little to doucherton, though, who proceeded to start furiously punching kilt in the face.

somehow - and this part i didn't see - kilt's wife ended up crumpled on the concrete floor with her foot twisted underneath the hard plastic seats. i did see her a few moments later, though, when she was crying, and shaking so hard she couldn't get up for a good 10 minutes. (technically, i don't know if she was his wife - could have been a friend or a sister, i suppose, but for simplicity we'll assume they were married.)

meanwhile, kilt recovered from the initial attack and wasn't taking things lying down. he lunged at doucherton, knocking him up against the railing, and looked about ready to kill him, had not several people quickly intervened to drag the two of them apart. they got to both guys before kilt was able to get a good hit on doucherton; kilt had angry red welts on both cheeks, but doucherton just had his well-coiffed curls slightly mussed. (and very full of beer.)

at this point, the general raucous celebration from the score was dying down, and more people were noticing that the hoopla up front was more scuffle-y than joyful. both men were still being restrained, but doucherton started to look a bit uneasy as more barra brava members began noting the dynamic - like kilt's wife on the ground, still crying & shaking. people started to look a little ominous. doucherton took the opportunity to get the hell out of dodge.

within minutes, police & EMTs had arrived. the police started taking statements from people in the row directly behind doucherton while the EMTs began icing the woman's leg and taking vitals. some very earnest college students next to me gave full statements, along with very detailed descriptions of doucherton. shortly thereafter, the cop asked the college boys if they'd come ID doucherton, who they believed they had in custody up in the stadium.

i was the only one of my group who happened to be right next to the fight, but it turns out a few of them had missed the scene because they had gone to get more beer... where they saw a drunk guy, with well-coiffed curls, cuffed by the cops and ID'd by some college kids.

kilt's wife was taken away in a wheelchair, which i'm hoping was precautionary and that her leg is just a bit banged up. kilt looked like he'd probably be pretty sore around the face the next day, but otherwise OK.

it was an ugly incident, but all around i have to say i was pretty impressed with everyone's reactions. the cops were on the scene almost immediately but kept things low key and localized. the EMTs were kind and professional. and in a section full of inebriated, rowdy soccer fans, the outsider who started an unprovoked pummeling of one of their own was restrained, but not subjected to mob justice. (it's likely his choice to flee was a wise one, though i'm fairly certain i saw some barra brava members head grimly after him - but evidently, to hold him for / turn him over to the cops.) basically, it felt like the incident COULD have been a lot worse and a lot messier, but everyone (aside from doucherton) handled the situation really well.

so! how were your weekends? arrest-free, i hope?

fool me once, shame on you..

2011-06-27T17:30:00.004-04:00

i went in last weekend to get mah hairs did, but the lovely gal who gave me that gorgeous red earlier this year wasn't available, so i went with a stylist i'd seen before but hadn't loved. i figured all i needed was a touch up of the exact same color, so it would be fine, right?

i think you know where this is going.

it's not BAD, really, not like some travesty that needs to be fixed or anything. but the thing is, i went in and said "hi, i just need my roots done and my color brightened a bit! and also a few inches chopped off," and my lady was like "ok, yes, that's such a pretty color! although i think darker, it will look better?"

(she has a bit of an accent.)

"oh, yeah, well, i do really love the color i have now. it's.. really nice. i like it," i said, as firmly as i could. which, granted, is not The Firmest Ever, because i don't do Firm very well.

"yes, yes, i do too! but you trust me - i do this EVERY DAY! - just a LITTLE bit of darker red will be SO CUTE. see? like this? SO CUTE, no?" she pressed, hold hair swatches up to my face.

"well... yeah, maybe.. i just really like how this color looks NATURAL, you know? like, people assume this is my real hair color now, which i like," i tried.

"oh yes, this will be natural! even MORE natural in fact, look at this color with your skin, you see?" she insisted. "SO CUTE, it will look even better! you trust me, i color hair EVERY DAY. i know what i'm talking about."

"well... that's true. ok then. let's do it! i trust you!"

and i did! for a bit! i mean, she should know better than me. i'm not a hair specialist. but i started to get worried when, while brushing out my newly-dyed, still-wet hair, she started to cackle about how great the color looked.

"you see? this will be SO BEAUTIFUL. it's good you trust me. you know, i make EVERY SINGLE ONE of my customers change hair color this week! every one! i always know best color!"

uh, great. so your priority is not to take into consideration what the customer wants, but to have some weird power trip about forcing all your clients to change hair color..?

dudes. my hair is BROWN now. again. to be fair, it's a lovely color - a kind of rich chestnut - but... brown.

i miss my red hair. it makes me sad when i think about it.

and also. ALSO! i do not overly enjoy making small talk at hair appointments in any situation, but ESPECIALLY when the small talk goes like this:

stylist, out of the blue: are you doing anything for father's day today?

me: yeah, going to dinner with my boyfriend's family & his dad.

stylist: that's nice. [pause] i don't have a father. he's dead.

me: ..........uh. i'm.... sorry?

i'm going back to the first girl next time, even if it means i have to rearrange weekend plans.

spring cleaning

2011-06-15T14:08:00.006-04:00

at our house, we have one of those fancy double-sink vanities in the master bathroom, which is quite lovely. mainly because chris and i can both brush our teeth simultaneously without fear of spitting on each other.

the cats also enjoy the two sinks, because it means there are more faucets to try and drink from, and more sinks to shed in. my sink tends to get the larger share of exuberant shedding, since both cats are fond of throwing themselves at me specifically while i'm at the sink, purring agressively, while headbutting my hands / the end of my toothbrush sticking out of my mouth / the contact i had been trying to put into my eye / etc. so pretty much every morning & evening, i finish my toilette by splashing water all around my sink basin to wash the newly accumulated 3-4 lbs of cat hair down the drain.

so it was surprising when chris's side of the sink started severely backing up last week. he'd run the faucet just long enough to wash on his face, and the entire bowl would be full of standing water. after a few days he'd had enough, and not having any draino on hand, decided to pull out the stopper to investigate.

i wish i were exaggerating when i told you that what he pulled out of his drain resembled - in both size, shape, and general horrific disgustingness - an intact, decomposing mouse. i mean, it WASN'T (um, I HOPE) but the resemblance was uncanny. i can't actually rule out actual-dead-mouse only because i was unable to look directly at it for more than a few milliseconds without full on gagging. i'm not sure i can adequately describe how foul a 5-inch long, grey, goopy hairball coming out of your sink is. i'm getting queasy just writing this, and i am not exactly a delicate flower when it comes to gross shit.

so surprisingly, this is something we CAN'T blame on the cats. for once. and i really really REALLY don't want to spend any time thinking about how the previous owners managed to build up such a clog oh god gagging again ok bye.

i decorated my wall! sort of!

2011-06-05T21:47:00.006-04:00

remember how a while ago, i asked for your input on printing out some photos for a large, awkward blank wall in our house? including this highly accurate sketch of the wall?

i finally went ahead and ordered the prints! aaaaaaand after all that hemming and hawing and trying to match another print with the black & white amsterdam bike prints, i decided maybe the wall COULD handle some color and for the love of god i would never find one that matched those bikes ANYWAY so, uh, now we have this:

(do you see that situation i was working with, by the way? so much extraneous shit on the wall!)

so, um, that's a very hard wall to take a flattering picture of, turns out. it doesn't look QUITE so sad in person. i hope. i wanted to get a picture of the whole wall (so you could see! the SITUATION! so many vents and switches) but it sort of makes the prints look tiny and pathetic.

ok, now i'm all self conscious about my prints again. let's just pretend this conversation never happened.

Let's just pretend I wrote this a month ago, shall we?

2011-06-03T16:27:00.006-04:00

OH, INTERWEBS! HELLO! HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU!

the all caps shouty-fest might seem overenthusiastic and unnecessary, but i have been overwrought - OVERWROUGHT, I TELL YOU - with this unexpected blogging hiatus. especially since it's not like Things Haven't Been Happening. Things! they keep Happening! and i'm not sharing them with the internet, NOR am i reading other blogs, because it turns out that when one starts a new job, and one has a computer screen that faces Everything On Earth, one is not as inclined as one has been in the past to keep a window with blogs open in it all day long so that one can read a blog every few minutes in between tasks.

(i am working in a conference room today, and my screen is facing a wall, and IT IS GLORIOUS.)

(and no, i don't know why i don't/can't blog at home. i just.. don't. computers are for the daytime, apparently.)

i never even finished posting about south america, eesh. so, uh, here are some quick highlights from our last stop, Buenos Aires. we scrapped all our original plans after the gotmyfare disaster, and my lovely friend JM graciously let us stay the whole time at his sweet apartment - plus he picked us up from the airport, took us to nice restaurants, and showed us around the city. not too shabby.

first up: the San Telmo market - a large outdoor antiques/craft fair that springs up in one of the neighborhoods.

i have a strange affinity for cemeteries as it is, and love visiting large / old / interesting ones while travelling, so La Recoleta was really, REALLY up my alley: an entire miniature town made up entirely of mausoleums.

there are a lot of wealthy neighborhoods in BA, and apparently all the wealthy people get dogs, and then hire professional dog walkers to take their pups out during the day. so all around the city, you see these guys (and gals) with an enormous tangle of leashes all around them - we regularly saw walkers with more dogs than this, even.

i feel like my BA pictures are not that great - they definitely don't do the city justice - which i'll blame on the fact that i was fairly unwell while there. i experienced my very first Visit To An ER While On Vacation In Another Country, which was surprisingly pretty great, all things considered. like the fact that the cost of a full round of antiobiotics WITHOUT INSURANCE was a whopping $25. the pharmacist apologized profusely for how expensive it was, and urged me to submit the paperwork to my regular insurance when i got home.... where the copay would likely have been more than $25 anyway. unreal.

uh, but anyway! onwards! the hugely touristy - yet still interesting & worth a visit - La Boca neighborhood:

supposedly this neighborhood was built by Genoese immigrants who were super poor, living in slum housing.. so they painted everything all cheery colors to remind them of home. it's still not located in the best area; JM warned us not to visit and night and/or stray off the tourist-friendly path, since thugs in the area had taken to jumping tourists and cutting off their fingers to steal their rings.

we stayed in the touristy areas.

one of the best parts of BA (for me, anyway) was the super-great food you could get for practically free. we ate at some amazing restaurants, and paid about 1/3 the price we would have paid in the states.

we even hit up a milonga - a tango club where you can come first to learn, then the rest of the night is devoted entirely to dancing the tango.

(things at which i am not naturally gifted: the argentinian tango. eesh.)

so! BA! that was awesome. the entire trip was crazy fabulous (um, once we got the vacation back on track, i still hate you gotmyfare.com) and i thoroughly recommend taking a trip down that way if you should get the opportunity.

so, um, yeah, that was over a month ago. hah. whoops.

since then, i've been settling in at my new job, which is a TON of work, but i'm really enjoying it so far. it's good work - i feel like i'm doing interesting, challenging things, and not just busywork. it's a neat company to work for, too: i'm officially the 200th employee, for example, so they held a small ceremony (with cake!), had me ring a gong, and made me a special "200th employee" tshirt. also they have a keg every friday. :)

i really miss everyone online, though. i'm may just have to relocate to this conference room permanently.

South America, stop 2: Iguazu Falls

2011-04-26T22:47:00.002-04:00

oh my goodness, y'all. i haven't started a new job in a long time, and MAN is it stressful/exhausting. don't get me wrong - new workplace seems pretty great and everyone there is absolutely lovely - but i had The Nerves for the first few days and it makes for a very tired alice. and since i feel i probably shouldn't spend my first week reading blogs, i still haven't even opened google reader since returning from south america, and seem to have stalled out after posting pics from rio. but lo! tonight i post more pictures, and maybe one day i'll read your blogs, too!

so our next stop after rio de janeiro was iguazu falls, the second largest waterfalls in the world. HOLY SHIT, PEOPLE. we almost missed this stop (another extra special gift from gotmyfare.com: when they finally rebooked our flights at the last minute, they changed our iguazu flights so that we were arriving at 7pm and leaving at 10am the next morning. AWESOME OPPORTUNITY TO VISIT THE FALLS with the parked closed at night and all) but i'm super glad we paid to change our flights so that we'd have some daylight hours here. this place is stunning. comparisons to niagara are ridiculous, even though niagara is the next biggest waterfall in the world; it's like comparing the grandeur of a mariott hotel to versailles.

this is the "small" end of the falls, our first sighting:

the thing that makes these falls so breathtaking is that in addition to the massive head of the falls - which is actually a lot like niagara - the waterfalls spill over a ravine almost 2 miles long, and the entire thing is actually made up of 275 individual waterfalls. so basically you walk along this pathway built along the ravine, where every few feet you get a more and more amazing view of more falls, peeking through lush rainforest vegitation.

we got there right as the sun started setting, which made for some even more absurdly stunning vistas.

i know, right??

we eventually made it to the head of the falls - the Devil's Throat - where 14 falls cascade down in a 350 ft high horseshoe.

you see that wee, rickety-looking bridge down at the bottom of the picture? it's neither wee nor rickety - it's about 8 feet wide, and made of concrete - and going out there is like putting yourself into a hurricane. from that vantage point you can hardly see the falls behind you, from all the mist - which is being blown at you with gale force winds. you're soaked through within moments.

but see the corner of the walkway, in this picture?

from there, you're basically standing at the bottom of the Devil's Throat AND standing directly above the precipice of a new tier of waterfalls. it's the most amazing view. and feeling. (and, sadly, not someplace you bring a 'spensive fancypants dslr.)

the SOUND of the falls here was ridiculous. even shouting, you could hardly hear anything else.

(please note we're soaking wet in this picture. this is post-bridge jaunt.)

if you ever find yourself anywhere near this part of the world, GO HERE. so very worth it.

how to completely eff up a vacation but still have fun

2011-04-24T23:32:00.009-04:00

you guys! i'm home! and alive and in one piece! ...although BARELY, given some of the most ridiculous events i've ever encountered while traveling, as all of you who follow me on twitter are already aware.

very very long story short: that fucking awful agency, gotmyfare.com? apparently decided that answering customers' phone calls and emails was just Too Much Work, and abruptly went out of business. the hilarious part is they did so without, say, contacting any of their customers who were currently in the middle of - or about to embark on - trips with them. trips their customers had, let's remember, PREPAID IN FULL FOR. which is why it was such an especially unpleasant surprise to arrive in Rio de Janeiro, tired and grumpy after a 5 hour layover in JFK followed by a 10.5 hour redeye, and a) not have anyone pick us up at the airport, as promised, and b) get to the hotel and learn that our reservations had been cancelled the day before since no one had ever paid for them. awesome, right? since WE HAD, IN FACT, PAID ALREADY? it was a clusterfuck for about a day, but ultimately we hunted down the local travel agency that gotmyfare partnered with, showed up at their doorstep, and begged for their help... which basically entailed re-paying for the entire Brazilian portion of our trip, in full, directly to that travel agency since gotmyfare had "gone bankrupt" without passing any of our money on to any other vendors.

we ended up meeting 8 other people who were stranded in Rio, in the exact same situation as we were, all having gone through gotmyfare, all who'd had their money taken and pocketed. i can only imagine how many other people in other South American cities were in the same boat as well. so i mean, fine: companies go out of business. these things happen. what you DON'T do is steal your onetime customers' money, and NOT EVER INFORM THEM that the foreign country they're about to show up in? yeah, they'll be stranded there with no accommodations or anything. oopsie! sorry! bankruptcy court, our bad!

i'm actually really pissed that they're already out of business, because i'd planned on so thoroughly ruining their reputation across the interwebs that *i personally* put them out of business. so i'm annoyed i no longer get that pleasure. and, you know, also annoyed that they stole our money and stranded us in a foreign country - where they speak portuguese, remember! i only learned like 10 words in portuguese because i wasn't planning on having to plead with locals to not kick me out of their hotel for nonpayment.

BUT. we did get it all sorted out (ie re-paid for the Brazil portion of the vacation on the spot, and had my very awesome friend in Buenos Aires say we could stay with him in Argentina rather than rebooking a hotel there) and once that was out of the way, we were able to thoroughly enjoy ourselves.

i didn't actually know Copacabana and Ipanema were real places. they are, and they're just as lovely as they sound.

we did so much in Rio - it feels silly just posting 6 or 7 photos to cover everything, especially since i feel like everything requires *explanations.* like that guy selling bikinis up there! there were dudes roaming the beach selling EVERYTHING you'd ever need. during our day at ipanema we bought sunglasses, more sunscreen, water, lunch, and a whole coconut with the top chopped off and a straw stuck in it without ever leaving our beach chairs. it's pretty sweet.

we also went to the corcovado - the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue on the mountain overlooking the city:

the fog even parted for 20 seconds right before we left so we could get a full glimpse of him:

we went to the super-amazing Selaron staircase - this guy has been tiling the street where his studio is located for the past 20 years straight. it's unreal.

Rio is interesting - has a third world feel to it, especially with the presence of the favelas stacked up on all the hillsides surrounding the city.

..and they have some of the most intricate and impressive graffiti i've ever seen - these are not extra special examples; it's like this all over the city:

more Rio pictures are on flickr here - the crazy modern Catedral Metropolitana, our night out in Lapa, the crazy sand sculptures and the elaborate Sao Bento Monastery - but i start my first day at the new job tomorrow! bedtime for me.

leaving, on a jet plane

2011-04-10T23:08:00.002-04:00

ages ago, when i lived in a crappy house, i also had some less-than-stellar roommate issues. the straw that broke the camel's back was when i came back from a weekend away one time and discovered that my dad's guitar - which i kept in my bedroom - had been "borrowed" while i was gone. i found it tossed aside, upside down on a couch in the basement, with 2 broken strings.

that was over four (!!) years ago. i've been saying "i really need to replace those strings!" for four years. but.. you know me. i'm not so good with the proactiveness.

however? i live with a very very sweet boyfriend who got it restrung for me, as a surprise.

how awesome is that? he's a keeper, this one.

------------------------------------

in about 12 hours, i should be boarding a plane to JFK, and then (many hours later) another plane to Rio de Janiero. i have confirmed flights and ticket numbers now (yay!) but the sole "confirmation" we have upon landing is the name of a hotel at which we ostensibly have reservations, and - supposedly - some dude will be waiting for us at the airport with our names on a sign to bring us there.

um. wish us luck.

however, all the bad mojo for this trip HAS to be used up already, right?? i hope to have nothing but amazing stories and photos for you when i return in two weeks!

do not book with www.gotmyfare.com - UPDATED!!

2011-04-07T10:21:00.005-04:00

****UPDATE!!****

after 200 calls/emails/you name it, i eventually called an AFFILIATED travel agency that we learned does the actual bookings for gotmyfare (or.. something along those lines?) and i complained to them. she said she'd call the agency directly and get them to call me back.

VOILA, 2 hours later, my agent at gotmyfare.com miraculously called me AND sent confirmation of my ticket numbers, along with an extra-shady "excuse" / reason why she didn't reply to my emails yesterday (uhh.. how about the fact that you were supposed to send me this info 2 weeks ago WITHOUT 15 vms from me..?) but WHATEVER, the end result is i DO have tickets and - hopefully / theoretically - WILL be flying to south america on monday praise the baby jeebus OH MY GOODNESS. incidentally, i still wouldn't exactly recommend this company.

*********

today's post was supposed to be about how i was going to be MIA for the next few weeks, since i'm leaving for williamsburg tonight to host a baby shower on saturday, then monday i leave for that amazing 2 week trip in south america.

well, i THOUGHT i was leaving monday for south america.

i've been unreasonably busy the past few weeks. i haven't had a chance to write about it here, but in addition to moving in with chris this month, i also got an unexpected job opportunity, so i ended up interviewing extensively with a new company, accepting that offer, and giving notice at my current job, WHILE devoting a ton of time to the scavenger hunt and also planning a baby shower remotely for a friend in a different city. so it just occurred to me the other day that i was supposed to have received my travel vouchers & confirmations from the tour operator two weeks before my departure date, which... had passed.

since i didn't have anything (checked my junk/spam boxes, yes) i thought maybe they'd real-mailed the docs, and they'd gone to my old house. so i emailed my travel agent lady asking if maybe that was what happened, since i hadn't received any documents yet.

another agent wrote back with "Hello Alice, you're going to receive the vouchers by e-mail."

i replied "yes, but i leave in 6 days! i was supposed to receive them 2 weeks before my departure!"

... no answer.

i called the main line for the agency and was sent immediately to hold music. after 10 minutes, i got a message saying "all of our agents are busy helping other customers. please leave a message! *beep*" and then you have no choice but to leave a vm and disconnect.

i called about 5 times yesterday. i left messages on the vm of the main line, and on the personal extension of my rep.

i emailed my rep 2 more times, increasingly agitated. i emailed the main "info" email alias twice as well.

i found the twitter for the company, and sent several upset tweets.

no reply. to ANYTHING.

this morning, i checked on my flight info. i had record locaters for each flight, so that seemed fine. but when i pulled the itinerary up, it had a big warning note that the flight was not ticketed. that means i have a reservation, but no ticket, because NO ONE HAS PAID FOR IT YET.

did i mention we prepaid this trip? in full? in december?

i researched the company before putting money down, since i'd never heard of the site, gotmyfare.com. there were a few complaints about not getting travel documents until the last minute (O IRONY) but i figured that was from people who didn't read the fine print saying they wouldn't get their documents until 2 weeks prior to travel. they're listed in the BBB, with an A- rating. they're supposedly legit.

i suppose it's still possible that someone will mail me my confirmation info today, with ONE BUSINESS DAY LEFT before we're scheduled to leave. but considering the business may not exist anymore from the amount of response over the past few days, i'm not counting on it. i guess i need to contact my credit card now and dispute the charges.

the worst part is that i really, really, really wanted to go on this trip. it was going to be a super amazing vacation, to a continent i've never been to, to see new places and to be able to take a real vacation away with chris.

folks, please DO NOT ever use www.gotmyfare.com. do not give them your money and do not believe their reps.

(and if anyone miraculously has contact info for this company that DOESN'T go straight to vm, pleeeease share.)

fix my house for me! again!

2011-04-03T21:54:00.004-04:00

so here at chris's house, we have a spare bedroom that is small and awkwardly laid out from a where-to-put-things-so-they-don't-block-windows perspective. as a result, the layout that you'll see below is the only way my crap fits in there, so rearranging the furniture is not currently an option.

that being said, what the HECK am i supposed to do with this big window??

it's killing me a little that the layout is so uncentered around that nice big window but there's nothing i can do about that right now. what i CAN do is put up curtains. uh... somehow. or.. something else? i.. don't know?

i suspect that putting normal curtains up will... not work. it will just accent the non-symmetry of the layout. but that sad bare side of window casing needs something, right? i ghetto-hung some fabric up on JUST that side. is this an option?

(obviously my first choice would not be a curtain the same color as the wall, and also too short. this is for hypothetical visualization purposes only.) but if i put a curtain rod up over the window, and hung just ONE curtain, would that be.. OK? a terrible idea? what if i sort of swagged the fabric over the top of the curtain rod and then had it hang down that bare side? sort of like this idea, from a place where i lived many moons ago:

or something else entirely that's a far better idea that i didn't think of because i'm terrible at this? please remember, suggesting i rearrange the furniture is NOT a useful tip because it's just not in the cards at the moment. that said: help meeeee!

unwise comment to make if you're a man, #283752

2011-03-31T10:13:00.004-04:00

in preparation for the pole photos last weekend (still waiting to see them! eek!) i went and got some, uh, personalladythings taken care of. that involve wax. i think we're all on the same page here.

i had a lovely, very sweet, very accent-heavy asian lady taking care of my bidness who was also very chatty. after asking all about my boyfriend, what "special occasion" warranted the wax, and reminding me i'm lucky i'm not arab since "arab lady need whole body wax! it take hours! poor ladies!" she started in on tales of other clients.

like the woman whose husband insisted on not only coming with her, but being in the room with her for the entire appointment. and who then proceeded to admonish his wife that the pain was "all in her head."

i presume it was solely the fact that my waxer is a rather diminutive woman that prevented her from forceably giving this man a free trial on his own pubic hair to see how that statement held up.

the HUNT results!

2011-03-28T22:09:00.011-04:00

oh, you guys. so close. SO SO VERY CLOSE. team R.A.S.H. (Really Awesome Scavenger Hunters) came in second. SECOND! by a supposedly very slim margin. we are... sad. SO CLOSE! first place trophy... you shall be mine one day. OH YOU SHALL BE MINE.

i guess you'd like to see some items, yes? unfortunately i can't show you one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITES, which was our team informercial, which was.. um.. gosh. how shall i put this delicately? a product to remove your.. shmanal shbeads.. when they get shtuck. that looked and sounded a lot like a shvaccuum. IT WAS BRILLIANTLY DONE.

but! onto the ones i am willing to share with the general public (which, i think you'll soon agree, do not really have much in the way of reserving any of my pride or decorum):

*entire team dressed as superheroes:

*a sign with burned out bulbs, making something else funny:

*the most pimped out ride you can find:

*adrenaline (this one was open for interpretation... so naturally we had to work pole in somewhere!):

*double dizzy bat tug of war:

*and then our final video: zombie invasion of a public place. we rolled this up into a number of additional items on the list, as you'll see:

we completed 44 items out of 45, for a final 15 minute long video. it was seriously a thing of beauty. team RASH - i can't wait until this time next year :)

hair rant! only the most hard hitting topics on this blog, folks.

2011-03-25T12:56:00.009-04:00

oh hey! remember how i mentioned i dyed my hair red and then never brought it up again?

this is what it looks like (although granted, not what *i* usually look like):(this, as i'm sure you've guessed, is another scavenger hunt item. partly. more to come on that next week after the presentation of the hunts this weekend.)

this is more what i usually look like, dopey facial expression included:
I LOVE IT.

i've had some feedback that maybe i would look really good if i tried like a brown? that had red in it? *helpful face* but i wanted RED, darn it. i now have red. i am happy.

one reason i love dyeing my hair - completely unrelated to the resulting color - is how much better my hair behaves when it's colored. my hair is super super fine, and very thin. also limp, and resistant to retaining whatever styling i try and force upon it. and also necessitates showering EVERY SINGLE EFFING DAY, due to aforementioned thinness and fineness.

now, this is where everyone on the ENTIRE INTERNET explains to me that if i just TRAINED my hair, i could totally wash it every other day! and i can't just expect my hair to go from daily washing to every-other-day washing overnight! trust me, explains the internet stranger who has never met me and has not seen my hair. i know EXACTLY WHAT YOUR HAIR IS LIKE because i have a friend with thin hair, and i convinced HER to wash her hair every other day and now she's happier and prettier and richer and seriously you should just TRY, and listen, you have to realize it won't happen overnight, m'kay?

and this is where i explain to everyone who has ever condescendingly explained this to me that they are wrong. and i know this because when my hair is dyed, i only wash it once every other day - or once every THREE days. I KNOW! THREE!

the fact is that my hair is very fine, very thin, and very permeable to oil when left to its own devices. however, when it's damaged a bit by color? or in this case, being bleached out THEN colored? it becomes HARDY! like... normal people's hair, i would assume!

and GOD IT IS FANTASTIC. it is so freeing not to have to wash it every day. i washed it on TUESDAY NIGHT this week, and while it could *use* a wash today, it doesn't DESPERATELY NEED a wash the way my old hair would after just one night sleeping on it. we're not talking "eh, i guess i can see what you're talking about; it IS a tad oily," we're talking "dude, did you.. maybe.. spill salad dressing? ..on your hair...?"

so when my hair is colored, i happily go about my business like normal-haired women of the world, washing my hair when i WANT TO, which is never every day, and all is well.

and then about 6 weeks later, my color starts to fade, my roots start to become super noticeable, and all of a sudden i notice that i can't go two days without washing my hair anymore due to the salad dressing issue.

so, well-meaning but condescending internet people: it's my hair. it has nothing to do with "training" it. i think 6 weeks of training - on VIRGIN HAIR up at the top of my scalp - would be enough to change my hair's mind, if it was going to be changed. it won't be changed. except by hair dye, THANK YOU JEEBUS FOR CREATING HAIR DYE I LOVE IT.

boy. apparently that rant was a long time coming, eh? nothing like a good friday afternoon rant to gear you up for the rest of the work day.

ok fine, one more scavenger hunt item:

fried

2011-03-22T16:00:00.006-04:00

i have too! many! things! going on right now. so many things, in fact, that everything in my brain gets exclamation points just like that. i can't fall asleep at night because my brain's all hey! tomorrow! we need to think about decorations for that shower! that you were supposed to think about today! but didn't! also you haven't picked up the visas for brazil! and maybe order those prints for the wall one day! but you still have to pick which two to use! which means we need to sit down and think about that! but when can that happen! there is no free time! except imagine that times ONE MILLION.

after this saturday, however, things should hopefully calm down in my brain a little bit. this saturday is the Big Reveal night for the scavenger hunt - which, while incredibly, super awesome, is also causing a lot of my stress because must! finalize! video! by then! except i still need to record a few items! and when will i get time to put together the intro piece! and then the credits! much less edit the whole thing together! and find music to put with it! YOU SEE HOW THIS IS GOING.

(i'm loathe to post anything here before the presentation night, since there are some other Hunters who i think read this, but here's a wee sample of the awesome we have going this year: the item was "recreate a movie poster")normally, i would just dedicate friday night to the completion of the video. HOWEVER, complicating that a bit is the fact that the OTHER thing i have scheduled for saturday is a photo shoot at my studio - eg, anyone who wants to can sign up, and we have a lovely professional photographer come in a shoot you for 15 minutes doing whatever showoffy tricks you want.

this is slightly stressy for a number of reasons:

a) i have not had time to practice my tricks / poses - making sure the tricks look good in a static photo, with your head facing the right direction and not having arms sticking in weird directions and stuff actually takes quite a bit of thought. i have not thought.
b) CHOOSING the tricks/poses in the first place! i also have to do that!
c) i also need to find time to prepare on a more, uh, basic level. it's too late to not have stress-eaten all month (ALAS) but i need to do things on a more granular scale in preparation for wearing wee shorty shorts and a sports bra. i think you know what i mean.
d) AUGH also i need to figure out what i'm wearing! and a pedicure! i should get one! WHEN? i'm working saturday morning and the shoot is at 1:30 gaaah!

the thing that's the most irritating about this is that these are both VERY FUN activities, and it's pissing me off that i'm tainting them with The Stress.

but! i'm actually taking tomorrow off in an effort to get my brain in order. one of the things that GETS me into this Stressy State in the first place is feeling like i have so many things going on that i don't have time to mentally tackle ANY of them - by which i mean sorting out for myself what needs to get done, figuring out when i can do it, all that good stuff. right now i just have a maelstrom of Things! That! Aren't! Being! Done! swirling around my head and i'm in such mental disarray that i'm inadvertently flaking on friends and responsibilities, which i hate hate hate.

so tomorrow: a personal mental health day, in the truest sense of the word, to organize my brain enough to handle the rest of this week.

and the baby shower i'm throwing in another city in 2½ weeks, for which i am completely unprepared.

and the south america trip i'm taking 2 days after that, for which i am even more unprepared hahahahAAHAHAH SEE THIS IS WHERE I START GETTING PANICKY AGAIN breeeeathe, self.

tomorrow i will make lists, and it will be good.

new print options! eh? eh?

2011-03-11T10:14:00.004-05:00

ok, all this input has been VERY helpful. things i have decided with the help of your feedback:

i need to keep that cliff in color
i think i really need 2 b&w photos. there's a lot going on in that space (even if not on that wall) and i think i need both prints in b&w to help tie the space together.

that being said... DAMN, that bicycle print is a hard one to pair up. so! here are more choices for you to give me opinions on! first up, what seems to be the current favorite "pair" of photos (i, uh, may be forcing a lot of people, including coworkers, to weigh in on this for me) which were both taken in amsterdam within a few minutes of each other :

the issue i have here is that while i like the row houses, it's not a picture i'd really print out on its own. and if i'm printing out a 16"x20" canvas of a photo, i feel like it should be of one i really like, not just one that matches well.

(for the record, i am FULLY AWARE of how unnecessarily i am overthinking this entire decision. humor me.)

so! next up we have a nice shot of the town of Cesky Krumlov, which is another one that looks FAR better in color (alas) but i don't believe brings on quite the feelings of dread when desaturated that the b&w cliff invoked in some of you:

eh?

and then! a new contender that i just b&w'd this morning on a whim: a sunset shot from a long-ago weekend in md:

so imagine them staggered, as per the handy diagram in the last post, not stacked on top of each other.

are any of those better options?

internet! decorate my house for me! UPDATED

2011-03-10T00:07:00.005-05:00

PLEASE HELP ME YOU GUYS. i have been staring at photos for approximately 2 hours now and my eyes are about to fall out of my head and I JUST DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.

here's the deal: chris and i have a large, empty wall to decorate. and i just bought 2 livingsocial coupon thingies to print out 16"x20" photo prints. perfect, right? except AUGH WHICH TWO PHOTOS HELLLLPPP MEEEE.

i have several photos i'd LIKE to print out, but it seems like no two of them GO together well enough to be on the same wall. here's the one i'm nearly certain will make the final cut:

that's from amsterdam a couple of years back. i like it.

here's one of chris's top picks, which i also like:
except! not really super-going-well with a graphic b&w print, you know? so chris was like duh, just make that one black and white as well.

oh. ok.
so here's where i desperately need someone else's guidance. i need to know:

a) does that photo lose all its impact when it's desaturated?
b) do those photos look too ridiculous together ANYway?
c) if yes to a) or b), can you please come over to my house and look at some photos with me and tell me what to print?

aaaaaand go!

(there's SO MUCH else going on, which i am failing to blog about, like, you know, moving in with my boyfriend and dying my hair bright red and stuff but PHOTOS THESE ARE CLEARLY MORE IMPORTANT PLEASE SAVE MY SANITEEEEEEE.)

*UPDATED*
attached now please find a highly professional skilled rendering of the wall the prints will be. all that crap on the left side are various weird vents / switches / whatevs that are built into the wall (though painted same color as wall, at least) which prevents anything normal from going over there AND from anything being centered on the wall, as a result.

it's like my body's just mocking me at this point

2011-02-28T19:04:00.003-05:00

in class last wednesday, i pulled my right trapezius. it was surprisingly painful, considering i hadn't done anything specific that i knew of - like, i didn't catch myself from a fall and jerk the muscle that way, etc. but partway through class, my trap was really starting to hurt, and by the end of class it was majorly sore and knotted. ah well. these things happen.

by the weekend, the knot was starting to dissipate (thanks to some excellent massage work by chris!) but the shoulder area was not actually getting any better. by sunday, the knot was completely gone and the muscle had stopped spasming... and the pain had migrated to the front of my shoulder, basically right on my collarbone. except the pain was.. weird. not sharp, not really affected by rotating my shoulder; just sort of a weird pressure where it felt like something was not sitting right in there. i knew it wasn't a joint issue, given my ability to rotate my shoulder without pain, and i knew it wasn't a muscle issue, since my trap was fine now.

does this remind anyone else of that time i pulled a muscle in my torso, except it was actually a rib stuck out of alignment?

me too! i was HOPING that was the case, actually, since that turned out to be a pretty easy fix.

except... i happened to already be seeing a physical therapist back then, which i no longer am. i would need to go to my normal doctor, get a prescription for physical therapy, and then get an appointment with my therapist before i could see her. and that's assuming that my normal doc chose to believe i actually had a subluxated rib, when more likely i'd be sent in for x-rays to check on the clavicle, and then probably referred to an orthopedist, THEN finally given a script for physical therapy. and i hurt NOW, darn it.

know what you don't need a prescription for? an appointment with a chiropractor.

so i got a referral from a coworker, called up a guy close to work, and got an appointment for the same day. i figured that if it WASN'T a subluxated rib like i hoped, i'd still get an adjustment out of it, so.. no harm, right?

at the chiropractor, i explained the progression of my symptoms, the fact that i'd had a subluxated rib last summer, and now the pain under my clavicle.

"yup, that sounds like the first rib, all right!" said the chiro. "let me feel your spine and shoulders and ....oh. hmmmm."

doctors keep making that noise when i see them. it is never good.

turns out? the first ribs on BOTH SIDES OF MY RIBCAGE were subluxated. both! sides! both of them! so off we went for me to lie face down on a table for my very first chiropractic adjustment.

a little pressure on my back... turn my chin this way... and CRACK! except it was really more of a whole freaking EXPLOSION, so loud and violent that i actually YELPED OUT LOUD in surprise.

because it ALSO turns out that my ribs have been out of alignment for AT LEAST FIVE YEARS. apparently the more explosive the crack, the older the injury - i'm guessing because it's more settled in place? i don't know. but the chiropractor was all "oh yeah, you don't get a crunch that loud with a recent injury. those have been out of place for YEARS."

so to sum up, BOTH OF THE RIBS under my collarbone, on both sides, have been stuck out of alignment for between 5 to 10 years. and whatever i did in class on wednesday just aggravated the one side enough for it to finally cause me enough pain to seek treatment.

i am very, very poorly put together.

(my mom begs to differ on this front, by the way; she maintains that i was put together just *fine* and that my injuries are due to user error.)

PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TI-- no wait. SCAVENGER HUNT TIME!

2011-02-24T11:29:00.003-05:00

folks! i have been meaning to post this ALL MONTH but i have not (obviously) and now it might be too late, BUT:

the infamous Annual Scavenger Hunt is coming up in March. i know some of you were interested in maybe participating this year? yes? YOU SHOULD. teams can be located anywhere (last year's winners are in Cali!) and can be between 2 and 6 people. registration ends, uh, feb 28th (SORRY!) but if you're AT ALL interested, leave me a comment / email me, and i'll get you the info!

a reminder of why you should do this, if you didn't click through to that link:

just think. that could be you.

DOOOO IIIIIT. in addition to it being really, really fun, i think i'll probably also get awesome bonus points if i bring on the first ever Internet Team.

racks & cruises

2011-02-18T09:07:00.007-05:00

on valentine's day, chris and i opted to stay in, and i cooked us dinner. i decided to try my hand at rack of lamb (this recipe, incidentally, which i HIGHLY recommend. make the salad, too!). i had told my coworkers about it the night before, so when i came in on tuesday, my buddy asked how it went.

coworker: say, how'd the lamb turn out?
me: great, actually! it was easier than i thought it would be!
coworker: i do love that mint sauce stuff...
me: oh, actually, this recipe used a spice rub. so like cumin, coffee, and cocoa rubbed into the lamb--
coworker: rubbed into what?
me: ...into the lamb--
coworker, with MEANING: rubbed into... what?
me: ...
me: ...oh. into the rack. i rubbed the rack.
coworker: *triumphant grin*
me, thoughtfully: i think chris really liked my rubbed rack.

hey! remember how we went on that cruise? yeah, i hardly do either! it was GREAT. so insanely relaxing, and experiencing warm sun after this frigid, gray winter we've been having was outstanding. all relaxation gained from the vacation was wiped out fairly instantaneously after returning to work, but dude. cruise itself? totally money.

paintings of the pole: volume 6

2011-02-14T17:18:00.002-05:00

i'm aware that i'm a terrible blogger right now, folks. i haven't updated this since before the cruise, i haven't updated with pictures FROM the cruise, and i haven't been reading your blogs either. work = killing me dead. it's crappy.

however! after going to pole this weekend, and coming back with new friction bruises on my dang RIBS, i thought it might be time for a new mspaint party up in hurr!

so there's this move called a descending angel, which is not complicated. you do a regular invert:
..then you let one leg drop back behind you, and you grab it with your hand. the reason it's not really that hard, though, is that you've got a DARN good grip on the pole with your dominant hand still (eg my right hand, in this case) AND lots of friction with your leg, including being able to hook your foot behind the pole.

look at me! i'm a descending angel! even though i'm not actually going anywhere!

so the next step up from THAT is do a descending angel with no hands. NO! HANDS! this is problematic, because it's taking away my primary not-falling-off mechanism. if i were to just pull my hand away, i would look like this for about .005 seconds:
..then i would look like a heap on the ground under the pole, because i would have slid right off. OR i would start crying because my ENTIRE BODY WEIGHT would be supported by the friction on that one leg, which... ow. trust me.

(i should point out that Advanced Pole Folks hold their entire body weight by very tiny patches of skin all the time. i, however, am not an Advanced Pole Folk and i still cry like a little crybaby when i have to support myself via skin friction. CRYBABY.)

so ANYWAY, the way to do this without falling off and/or ripping the delicate skin off one's thigh? remove your shirt, naturally! (sports bra remains on, horndogs.) then you get the entire expanse of your ribcage on your right side to friction it up on the pole:
i didn't draw that exactly right - my torso would actually be more fully to the side of the pole, and the main drag of tension would be a slightly diagonal line from my right hip bone up to my armpit. but, trust me when i say that after practicing this move - along with its mate, where you are in the exact same position, but with legs reversed (eg left leg on the pole right leg hanging off) - it looked like someone had painted me bright red on the right side of my torso. basically from indian-burning my own skin.

it's sort of surprising i enjoy doing this, really.

The Great Thundersnow Commute: Epilogue

2011-01-28T20:58:00.002-05:00

i woke up at 6am the morning after my commuting ordeal, unable to go back to sleep due to Elevated Fret Levels about my car. was it still there? was it completely plowed in by now? did someone else push a car into the same lot and lose control and hit it overnight? how much was it going to cost me to fix whatever the hell was wrong with it?

when i eventually called Geico later that morning, i could not have talked to a nicer, more helpful agent, who assured me that they'd get a tow truck out there just as soon as possible. which happened to be anywhere from 6 to 12 hours, given how many cars were currently requiring assistance. oh well. i settled in and worked from home for the day, and at about 6pm got the call that a truck was on its way to pick up my little civic. we got my car loaded up, towed it to my mechanic, and left it there overnight.

so this morning, i called my mechanic to give him the background on the dead car that had been dropped off on his doorstep overnight.

"oh yeah, the civic," he said. "i have NO IDEA what's wrong with it."

my heart sunk. this was going to be more expensive than i thought.

"i mean, it turned on fine this morning. we drove it around the block a few times," he continued.

it's... completely fine. they couldn't find any problems; it's turned on over and over all day long and is running smoothly.

so, yeah. my car apparently just had a hissy fit after 4 hours in traffic.

i, however? am leaving on a cruise for the bahamas tomorrow. i'll catch you guys on the flip side.

pretty sure this wins my Worst Commute Ever award

2011-01-26T22:21:00.002-05:00

OH MY GOD, PEOPLE.

so. my 7 hour commute. it started at 3pm this afternoon, when the THUNDERSNOW!! (which is a real thing!) started in Sterling, where i work. "holy crap," i said to myself. "i'm getting out of here before this gets bad."

so off i scooted to my car, where i drove (carefully) home.

well, almost home. i got about halfway through the Pit of Despair called Tysons Corner, then at about 3:30, traffic came to a dead halt. just.. stopped. not like, "oh man, we sure are moving slowly!" more like, "have i literally gone 0.5 miles in 2 hours? i... believe i have. fuck."

at this point, the snow started coming down in earnest. i noticed my rear window was getting hard to see out of. my side windows were completely covered in snow. it was kind of funny at first, like "ha! i'm getting snowed in WHILE IN TRAFFIC! who'd've thunk?" but then it became pretty scary. i was in the left most lane of three, and started thinking maybe i should pull into a restaurant or something and wait the traffic out, but how do you merge across two lanes of traffic when you can't see out any window but your front windshield, and both mirrors are covered in snow??

at this point, people were regularly getting out of their cars to clear them of snow. like, while in the middle of the road, in traffic. because it was coming down so hard and sticking so quickly that within literally minutes, you'd lose complete use of your mirrors or windows.

it was one of those traffic jams where you assume at SOME point it has to break and get better. i mean, they all do eventually, right? ....right?

yeah. FOUR HOURS into it, i was still in traffic, and now we had LEGITIMATELY stopped moving, for good. there's a median on the road i take, so you couldn't turn around and try another route. it became pretty apparent that something was blocking the roadway ahead - there was a big hill coming up, so i thought maybe cars had skidded down it and collided. this would be a problem for me and my little civic even if they moved out of the way, since.. well, it's a civic.

and the roads were SERIOUSLY terrible by now. the entire storm had taken place WHILE the roads were gridlocked with traffic, which meant that all the sleet, followed by the several inches of snow that had already fallen AND continued to fall, were being beat down into a thick layer of solid ice. since the roads were completely blocked with cars, there was no way trucks could come through to treat or plow the streets. if cars were skidding up or down a hill, it was a pretty good bet that i would be too. crap.

turns out i wouldn't have to find out how my car fared on the hill, because right then it died. kaput.

i'm not sure what happened; i was running really low on gas after FOUR HOURS stalled in traffic, but the gas light never actually came on. the battery has been under a lot of strain since i've drained it a couple of times recently (my headlight chime that lets you know your lights are still on stopped working, and.. uh.. turns out that's really helpful). in any event, my car was completely dead. in the middle of a traffic jam, in the middle of a blizzard. in the middle of the road.

what do you even DO at that point? it's not like a tow truck or an emergency vehicle could get to me; there were literally MILES of traffic backed up on all sides of me. i tried calling Geico roadside assistance for advice; they had a 2-3 HOUR wait to talk to someone. i tried calling the non-emergency police number, over and over again; i never got through to someone there either. the entire region was an emergency. there was no way i could get through to someone about a disabled vehicle.

at this point i just about lost it. i called chris, but what could he do? he couldn't come get me, seeing as the roads were impassable AND i was stuck in several miles of traffic. but i couldn't just leave my car - it's illegal to abandon a vehicle, plus it was just sitting in the middle of the road. a black car, at night, in a snowstorm, with no hazard lights because the battery ran out while i had them on. THAT wouldn't cause an accident!

but dude, chris came through in a huge way. i hope all of you are dating someone as great as my boyfriend, because even from his house he still managed to save the day. he realized he knows someone who lives near where i was broken down; he called another friend, got this guy's number, called him, and asked him to come help me. and the guy did. this guy barely knows me, but he walked in a freaking BLIZZARD to meet me at a starbucks, bought me a peppermint mocha after seeing my bedraggled state, walked all the way back to my car, and pushed it across two lanes of traffic into a parking lot. he is my freaking hero. i don't easily get super despondent, but without this awesome guy coming to save the day i would have... not been in a good place.

at this point it was about 9, and i'd been wandering around outside for almost two hours between trying to get my car to start, calling various people, calling chris in increasing amounts of panic/despair, and then finally moving the car. it was still snowing like a motherfucker. i was not dressed for outdoor blizzarding, and i was cold and soaked through. but my car was temporarily ok and i felt 1000 times better about the situation.

so then i spent the next hour walking home two miles through the blizzard, where, THANK ALL THAT IS HOLY, we still had power and i was able to take a hot shower.

so! now i'm home, with tea, and feeling a little delirious (good thing i wasn't home sick the past two days, right before spending 3 hours in a blizzard! oh wait! HA!) but i'm HOME. with tea. and heat. so it's ok.

all i've accomplished this month: not getting cancer.

2011-01-20T09:31:00.003-05:00

well! you know it's been quite a month when you send an email to your entire family entitled "no cancer for me!" and the highlight of the month so far is managing to NOT pass out in a doctor's office, but here we are.

remember back in november, when i had the not-so-great experience at my dermatologist when it took about 45 calls and 3 weeks to find out that the results of a mole biopsy were actually Not Good, and that i had to come back in to get the surrounding tissue excised to remove all dysplastic cells?

yes! well! i went in last week to get my cancer hole embiggened, as i had taken to calling it. the original procedure just sort of lopped off the mole, leaving a shallow hole about the diameter of a pencil eraser on my thigh. i assumed the follow up would enlarge this hole slightly, just sort of cleaning out the areas immediately next to it.

yeah. not so much. if you're squeamish, you may want to stop reading right about now.

my appointment was at 7:15am (after storming out of my previous appointment 1 hr and 20 mins after my appointment time, having never been seen or checked on, they gave me the Super Early We're Not Even Technically Open Yet timeslot to ensure i'd be seen "on time"). i usually eat breakfast (by which i mean "drink a cup of coffee") when i get to work, so it didn't occur to me at 6:30am to eat anything. plus, i already did this once, and it was totally no big deal. he shot me in the thigh with some numbing stuff, did a quick little lop, and put a bandaid on me. no worries.

this time, however, there were MULTIPLE numbing shots. along a several inch long area of my thigh. and then he picked up a scalpel.

"say," i asked the doctor casually. "how big is this going to be?"

he eyeballed my leg for a minute thoughtfully, then answered "oh, about an inch and a half, i'd say."

i was surprised, but not really concerned. he asked if i was a fainter. "not really!" i assured him. i mean, true, i sometimes faint while driving, but not usually due to pain or gore or anything. in fact, i started telling him the story of the time i was dancing in NYC years ago and the guy i was dancing with accidentally ripped my big toenail off right in the club, and it got stuck lodged in my toe pointing straight up. during this story, i am acutely aware of the VERY weird sensation of being able to feel him tugging around in my leg, but not feeling it. like, i could sense all these weird pulling and tugging and jostlings happening in my thigh, but it didn't hurt or anything. it was... unsettling.

i resolve to be extra careful not to look at whatever is going on in my leg, just to be safe, so in an effort to not accidentally get an eyeful of what's happening down there i start casting my eyes around the room in any other direction, which is how i ended up idly looking at the counter behind the doc where he'd laid out his tools and gauze and stuff, while still chatting about the gross toe story.

which is when i noticed the intact, and very sizable, hunk of MY OWN LEG that was sitting there on the counter. a wedge-shaped chunk of my flesh. an intact piece of my leg, that he had cut out of my body. sitting on the counter.

"um, i hate to say this, but i'm going to need you to lean this chair back," i announce weakly.

my derm looked up from where he'd been stitching my leg back up, took one look at my ashen face, and dropped the chair back to such an incline that i actually had to hang on with my heels a bit to keep from sliding off.

"JUICE!" he yelled to an assistant, while running a paper towel under cold water so he could pat my face and try and keep me conscious.

"with that story you were telling me, i was sure you'd have no problem with this!" he exclaimed. "yeah," i mumbled. "noshure what happ'nd."

"hey. stay with me. did you eat anything this morning?"

"nossomuch," i whispered.

"that's probably it. hey. still with me? here, drink this."

so yeah. that was embarrassing. i did at least have a gnarly frankenstein-looking stitched up gash on my leg - substantially larger than 1.5" long, by the way - to justify the incident. but still.

however. yesterday morning, i had a follow up appointment to get the stitches out. another pre-8am appointment. and you can bet your ass i not only had my coffee first, but i also shoved down an entire starbucks scone beforehand as well.

(turns out getting stitches removed isn't really a fainty sort of event, but i wasn't taking any chances.)

anyway, the results from my Major Leg Chunk came back fine, so i am officially melanoma free. and haven't fainted in, like, a week. go me!

one last 2010 post SO SUE ME

2011-01-04T14:56:00.012-05:00

Jess did an awesome roundup of her 2010 trips on her blog last week, which seemed like a darn good idea to me. And also means i don't have to come up with my own topic. Score!

Without further ado, my 2010 trips:

In February, Chris and i went to Williamsburg and i got to see my friend Shannon:

i also went to New Orleans in February, to see pseudostoops run her half marathon:

April had a trip with Chris to Charlottesville to attend Gold Cup:

In May was the first of two Vegas trips, this time as a girls' weekend:

...a trip to Cali to see my friend Carrie and her gorgeous daughter Miss Leyba:

...and a weekend spent in San Francisco with Chris, to see my sister and attend Bay to Breakers:

In July, we had another girls' trip, this time to Annapolis:

..followed by a trip to the Homestead with Chris to celebrate our first anniversary:

August was another busy month, starting with NYC to celebrate a girlfriend's wedding shower:

...a family vacation to Montreal:

...another trip to Vegas to celebrate my friend Christina's birthday:

...AND our annual girls' weekend in Dewey Beach for our friend Alyssa's birthday:

In September - also the fifth weekend straight traveling for me at that point - Chris and i went to Cleveland for one of his friend's weddings:

(fyi: is very windy on the shore of Lake Erie.)

In September I went up to NJ for the wedding that went with the August shower:

And then, of course, back home to NJ for both Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I think i like this even better than the questions meme.

NYE 2010

2011-01-03T15:30:00.005-05:00

so! NYE came and went. it was a great one for me, not least of all because i got to spend it with chris, and even got a new year's eve kiss. new year's eve kisses NEVER work out for me - like last year, when chris was in a different country. but this year! i got one! yay!

i only had to work until about 7, which was excellent, because it means i got to toddle off to a party with my friends.
um. and then things started getting less... well, sober.

here's to a happy and healthy 2011, with hopefully no more hangovers as severe as the one i experienced on january 1!

2010

2010-12-30T20:36:00.004-05:00

Yearly recap time!

1. What did you do in 2010 that you’d never done before?
started volunteering as an escort at women’s clinics. learned to touch my toes. had a suspicious mole removed. won a poker tournament.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
YES! My Year of Charity was a (personal) success. I’d like to set another resolution this year, but I’ll need to give some thought to what it should be.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? 
Some internet friends, but I’m in a (short-lived) local friend baby lull.

4. Did anyone close to you die? 
no.

5. What countries did you visit?
Canada! Most of my trips this year were domestic.

6. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?
More international trips. Good thing I just booked two of those! :)

7. What dates from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Probably my 30th birthday, because I wasn’t really looking forward to entering my 30s, but the night was so fantastic anyway.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? 
I guess following through on my charity pledge. I’m not good at following through on, say, anything. That and touching my toes. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW EXCITING THAT IS FOR SOMEONE WITH HAMSTRINGS LIKE MINE.

9. What was your biggest failure?
see question 10...

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

HA. HA HA HA. HAHA. HAAAA.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
my macbook pro! and, uh, tailbone physical therapy.

12. Where did most of your money go?
Rent. And booze, probably.

13. What did you get really excited about?
the rally for sanity. and the Scavenger Hunt, every year!

14. What song will always remind you of 2010?
I’m not really one of those “music brings me back” people...

15. Compared to this time last year, are you: 
– happier or sadder? An interesting mix. Mostly happier, sad about some specific things.
– thinner or fatter? Probably exactly the same.
– richer or poorer? Richer. Yay!

16. What do you wish you’d done more of? 
I don’t know that this answer is ever not “travel” for me.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of? 
eat crappy food. I feel so much better – physically, and about myself –when I eat better.

18. How did you spend Christmas?
At home in NJ with my family, as usual.

19. What was your favorite TV program?
Criminal Minds!!

20. What were your favorite books of the year?
the Girl With A Dragon Tatoo series.

21. What was your favorite music from this year? 
uh. um. maybe.. hmm. pass.

22. What were your favorite films of the year?
I, uh, guess I didn’t really see a lot of movies in theaters this year.

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
partied with all my friends and my sister! The big 3-0.

24. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
immeasurably?? Nothing, really. I had a good year.

25. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?
I literally have not brushed my hair in 2 days.

26. What kept you sane?
This is implying I am currently sane. I’m at work at 5:31pm on New Year's Eve, after working until 9pm last night. NOT SANE.

27. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010. 
Giving to charity is something I can and should be doing more of. I don’t think twice about dropping $50 on dinner and drinks out with my friends; I can easily put that money toward a good cause more frequently.

all in all, 2010 was pretty fantastic. considering 2011 is starting with a cruise AND a trip to south america with chris, it's looking pretty good too. happy new year!

the Year of Charity in review

2010-12-17T18:59:00.007-05:00

as we all know by now, my 2010 resolution was to donate to a different charity every month. and with the exception of being late a few times, i've succeeded. i believe this is the first time in my 30 years that i've a) been successful at a new year's resolution or b) followed through with something that lasted more than approximately 3 weeks.

it's been... well, fantastic, mostly. and oddly embarrassing. here's the thing: between january and december, i donated $50 each to 14 different charities. i donated three gift cards when the bloggess kicked off james garfield's christmas miracle. i donated $25 every time anyone else asked on their blog for a cause / needed a donation for a race / etc - i didn't keep track of them, but there were probably about 15 of those. i figured that if i was spending an entire year focused on being more charitable, i shouldn't be discriminatory: if someone asked me to contribute, i would. so i did. december i've had earmarked for the groups i've always donated to at the end of the year: the leukemia & lymphoma society and st jude's. (and my grammar school, highschool and college, although those aren't counted as charities, obviously.)

so the embarrassing thing? i haven't felt any financial impact from this at all. it's made me extremely ashamed i haven't been giving more. more often, and more of it. it's terrible that i hadn't done this before now.

everyone says the best gift is to give, and blah blah tritecakes... but, i mean, it's kind of true. i received an email that made me cry at my desk from one of the families to whom i sent a gift card. and knowing that i'm in a position to be able to donate to so many different places this year has made me so, SO thankful for my own life and what i have.

i don't think i was really tending toward a mopey woe-is-me existence in the first place, but MAN am i definitely not headed there now. if you follow me on twitter, you know that i had $1000 stolen from my checking account a few weeks ago, which was a royal pain in the ass. it involved fraud paperwork, speaking to a detective and filing a police report, and about 2.5 weeks before i got the money back in my account. it was irritating, but overall i just couldn't believe how LUCKY i was that i could have $1k stolen from me and... be ok. i don't want to sound like i'm bragging about it - that is definitely NOT my point - but the fact is that a few very short years ago, the loss of $1k, even temporarily, would have been disastrous. it would have meant i couldn't pay rent or utilities. i would have had to ask my parents for help, and i wouldn't have been able to eat for those 2 weeks until the money was replaced. i was EXTRA lucky in the timing of this, since i'd been hoarding money in my checking account with plans to buy a new macbook, but HELLO, i was PLANNING TO BUY A COMPUTER and it is not lost on me that that's a very nice option to have.

so i guess my point is that i got a lot out of this too, and will definitely be continuing. and that i'm glad my life is good. and that i'm glad that i KNOW my life is good, which is something i don't think everyone is lucky enough to realize.

the downside, though? holy shit has my junk mail skyrocketed. you donate to onnnnne environmental charity, and next thing you know you're getting mail from every other environmental group in the country. multiply this times 13 other charities, in all sorts of fields, and i'm now chucking several envelopes a day full of charitable pleas. NOT VERY ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY, charities.

bad cat, part 12835182734

2010-12-13T17:06:00.006-05:00

do y'all remember last year, when oliver ate through a box in order to get to some sparkly string he was obsessed with?

special cat, that one.

when i pulled out my wrapping paper supplies this year, i figured there was no way oliver would remember this box, or at least not the contents of this box, or at least no longer be as obsessed with the contents of this box. naturally, i was wrong. this is oliver we're talking about here.

within minutes of the box coming out of storage, oliver was trying to paw through the hole he'd chewed into the top last year. i put the box under my front hall table in an effort to deter him, but there was still about 5" between the top of the box and the bottom of the table, which clearly wasn't going to work. my roommate keith had the brilliant idea of putting a SECOND box, a nice flat one nearly the exact size of the wrapping materials box, on top of the first one to keep him out. smart!

....except this is oliver.

that there is an EVEN LARGER hole that he chewed through the side of an industrial-strength corrugated cardboard box, as well as every single sheet of tissue paper i (used to) own, shredded into ribbons as they were pulled through that hole. also that flat box, now discarded next to the big one and not covering anything.

that one large hunk of tissue paper ACROSS THE ROOM was mostly intact, if you count "chewed & shredded on most sides" intact, i guess.

how kind of me to move the box back out into the open! now he can go back to ruining the contents from the top, as preferred.

bad cat.

don't cry for me, argentina... or brazil.

2010-12-09T15:12:00.004-05:00

i've been feeling a bit bummed recently that i have no Major Awesome Trip on the horizon to look forward to. i'm kind of a travel addict: i've spent the majority of the past 8 years (holy shit) having either just come from a fabulous destination, or planning a new trip to an exotic locale. except the last exciting trip i took was last october - like, of 2009! - when i went to eastern europe with my bud alyssa.

except, um, that's a COMPLETE LIE. in talking to my mom yesterday, i realized that not only have i done a fairly excessive amount of domestic travel in 2010, but as my mom pointed out: hey, moron, we also went to CANADA, which is a whole other country.

i went to williamsburg, new orleans, california, hot springs, VA, new york city, vegas (TWICE!), dewey beach, cleveland, and took multiple trips to NJ. and, you know, went to canada as well.

however, in my head, a "big trip" apparently requires either a) a plane ride over an ocean and/or b) the destination to be non-english speaking.

which is why i just begged chris to come with me on a 10-day vacation through brazil and argentina. and he agreed. YAY! WE'RE GOING TO SOUTH AMERICA!! IN APRIL!

i am BESIDE MYSELF with excitement for this trip. rio de janiero! copacabana! iguazu falls! buenos aires! not only 2 new countries, but an entirely new HEMISPHERE for me! why is it not april yet whhhyyyyy??

so, um, i'm pretty happy now. huge exciting trip on the horizon to look forward to? MOTHER EFFING CHECK.

in other news, turns out i completely screwed the pooch on a november charity. since my october charity was to S.O.M.E., which is a big charity around these parts for Thanksgiving, i just sort of mentally assumed that was my november donation since thanksgiving = november. but no! i donated to them in october! WHOOPS. so to make up for november, i'm donating today to toys for tots. it may be meant for november, but since we're officially in the christmas season i couldn't help making the charity holiday-themed. if you'd like to chip in for toys for tots as well, you can do so here.

then you can book yourself an awesome vacation and feel no guilt because you're also donating to charity, which basically means you OWE yourself a vacation. true story.

to be fair, we don't KNOW he wasn't a poodle herder.

2010-11-28T22:31:00.004-05:00

so! thanksgiving! that happened. chris, near-saint that he is, came and spent 3.5 straight days with the full aliceblogs family, which is not a feat to be taken lightly. my sister and i even broke out the long-dormant tradition of me playing the sheet music to The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast while my sister... well, "performs" is really the only word for it. it's a captivating mélange of dance and interpretive song that truly needs to be witnessed first hand. my dad, alas, refused to reprise his part in the Gaston song, which was a shame. i suppose he was trying to retain some semblance of Fatherly Dignity in front of chris.

of course, most people come to my mom's house for the food, not for the musical numbers.

we started with the aliceblogs family traditional Truffled Quail Eggs (= deviled quail eggs using truffle butter, = YOU HAVE DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN) along with caribou pâté picked up from our montreal trip. then of course a heritage turkey cooked to perfection by my mom, and then after this point i was too busy stuffing my face to remember to take any more photos, but i assure you it was all delicious.

after lots of quality time with the fam, we headed back to VA on saturday. on the drive back, we passed a car with vanity plates that read "PDL HRDR." i am incapable of not trying to decipher coded vanity plates, so i immediately started making guesses:

me: pedal hoarder! pedal herder? p...oodle? OOH! OOH! POODLE HERDER!!
chris: um, it's "pedal harder."
me: ...oh. hey, well done! how did you know?
chris: the bike on the car's roof was a hint....

paintings of the pole: volume 5

2010-11-22T10:47:00.011-05:00

it's been a while since my last pole drawing! those of you who have seen these before may remember this picture from my post about doing a handstand to the pole, when i then tried to sit up and grab the pole from there: (this picture is actually titled "HUNNNNHH.jpg" on my desktop.)

the problem i had with that move wasn't the ab muscles it took to do a sit up from an upside down hang, nor was it even holding onto the pole with just my legs while i attempted said sit up; it was the fact that i have the tightest hamstrings known to man and cannot touch my own toes. which makes grabbing the pole up by my ankles incredibly difficult. i eventually got around this, when pulling up from the handstand, by essentially "walking up" my legs: i'd sit up as far as i could, then kind of grab my thighs and pull on them for the extra leverage it took to wrench my upper body within grabbing distance of the pole, and then the second my fingertips made contact i'd be able to release my legs and not rip my hamstrings out the back of my legs.

so, not exactly the most graceful / effortless look, but i made it work. what was driving me CRAZY, though, was the reverse of this move, which i just could. not. do. for the past year. this one starts with a pole climb, then when sitting up high on the pole, leaning back and bringing your legs up until your ankles catch behind the pole, and then releasing with your hands and leaning all the way back until you're in an upside down hang facing away from the pole. except: when you can't get your ankles up to the pole, you're pretty much shit out of luck. so this is mainly what would happen:

in other words, i'd climb up the pole, then leeeeeean back, and then grunt and struggle a lot while trying to make my feet reach the pole. which they do not. (i'd also apparently change colors. this is what happens when i have to make a custom "alice-flesh" color each time i re-open ms paint.)

so! in Extremely! Exciting! News! after a YEAR of struggling to do this, my hammies have loosened up the extra 2 inches required to allow me to reach. yay!

...which quickly turned into: OH GOD. because now i can hook my ankles, sure... but now you want me to LET GO? while i then slowly invert AWAY from the pole??

see, all these tricks are not really that dangerous, all things considered, because if something starts to slip it's always easy to catch yourself. like in this one, for example:

if your grip starts going? you can put your hands RIGHT BACK on the pole. or reach up over your head and slide into a supported handstand. or do any manner of things to mitigate the situation, basically.

whereas this? the next move from here is to lean back until you're vertical, which give you nearly 180 degrees of places you could fall with virtually no way to catch yourself.

HOWEVER. i am pleased to report i finally am doing this regularly. backdropping! it's not a very advanced skill - i mean, i was supposed to be able to do this A YEAR ago - but it's very exciting for ME. although you can definitely tell i'm still nervous to let go based on the bruise level of my legs. you have to be gripping REALLY GOOD-LIKE to bruise this attractively.