mmm...pie

This is what I am, what are you?

find your inner PIE @ stvlive.com

the geek within

Is it completely dorky of me to be excited for the new Star Wars movie? Because I really want to see it. I've done a pretty good job of keeping my inner geek hidden up until now, didn't mention my childhood affinity for Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, my prized Princess Leia action figure, or my intimate knowledge of everything ever written by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. Guess now I can own up to the Halloween when I dressed as the Childlike Empress from The Neverending Story....when I was 20.

for the foodie in all of us

Check out the new sister site to this one, geared for the foodie in all of us: gourmania.blogspot.com . For people living in the Bay Area, there are restaurant recommendations (reviews to come), for everyone else there are yummy recipes and links to other food related pages. Enjoy!

haiku wednesday strikes again!

I would be so glad
If just for one brief moment
This job didn't suck

all points south

Due to arriving back in town with a bad bug, I never managed to write anything about the vacation I went on recently. I have, however, been finding myself telling people all about it, so clearly I should share it with y'all. As I mentioned before, The Boy and I had a whirlwind trip to the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles a few weeks back. First, we went out to the Mojave, where a friend of ours has a grant, more or less, to do some work out there with the National Parks Service. She was originally supposed to be on a dig, but plans changed after she was already out there and she's now doing surveying/mapping type stuff and just generally wandering around exploring and taking notes and pictures. Our friend picked us up at the Las Vegas airport around 7:30 that Tuesday night and we stopped and had dinner at a little Cuban restaurant on our way out of town. By out of town, I mean, out of civilization; we drove on the highway for about 35 minutes, passing some podunk little gambling spots, until we came to a random off ramp where we exited the highway and the paved road. The house where she's living is approximately 40 minutes off-road, down narrow little dirt pathways that really shouldn't be called "roads" as they are rocky and uneven and filled with both wet and dry gullies from earlier rains. By the time we got out there it was dark, and the only things lighting our way were our jumpy headlights and a partially full moon, which just barely illuminated the little rabbits darting back and forth in front of the car as we made our way into the preserve. Her house is on a piece of land that used to belong to a cattle rancher and there are boarded-up outbuildings surrounding the property. Creepy in the daytime, even creepier in the dark. The house doesn't have a phone line or internet access and cell phones don't work off of the paved roads. They have power, but only via a generator, which they turn off at night. All clocks have to be battery powered, as a result, and she only stocks non-perishables in the fridge.

--Intermission (ie: I'm at work and have to accomplish things for a little while). Will post more later.--

learning the life of meme-ing

So, I recently learned the phrase "meme", and am doin' it here and now! This strain is swiped from ZenGrrl, who swiped it from someone else.

Are you more…
01) In a shower where you can’t get the temperature just right, likely to set the temperature to hotter than you like or colder than you like? Hotter! Even if it's so hot it turns my skin pink, keep cranking!
02) In a restaurant (that you MUST eat in) where they can’t get the spiciness just right, likely to order the food spicier than you like or blander than you like? Blander, I'm generally a spice wuss.
03) A person who sleeps soundly or a person who sleeps very lightly? I sleep so lightly, it's ridiculous.
04) Aware of your prejudices or believing that you have no prejudices? Aware.
05) A great neighbour to have or an undesirable neighbour to have? I'm a fabulous neighbor; I bake and I grow produce, both of which I like to share.
06) Believing that people, as a species, are capable of a lot more than we think or believing that people, as a species, simply are what we display now? Uhh...I think answering this question might require me to be the former, but I may be the latter.
07) Likely to throw a drunk idiot out of your party or likely to mutter quietly and just not invite them again? I would never throw myself out of my own party. That's just silly.
08) Yourself when around adults or yourself when around children? Always myself, except around teenagers.
09) Into the 12-grain whole wheat bread or into the regular white bread? I like a good 6-grain. 12 is just crazy talk.
10) Someone who couldn’t go 3 months without beef or someone who couldn’t go 3 months without chicken? Chicken – it's just so versatile! Although, three months without a cheeseburger is an awfully long time.

comments free-for-all

I've just adapted the Comments option to allow anyone and everyone (hello, anyone?) to comment should they desire to do so. (This was requested by someone via my Survey, and I aim to please!)

fabulous new trick

I've just discovered a nice little feature of Blogger that I didn't even
know about before - you can post via email! Yay! Not that makes much of a
difference for people who want to be able to post while they're on vacation
or something, because if they don't have web access to use Blogger then
they probably don't have access to email (unless they're the Blackberry
sort of folks). However, for those of us who like to blog from work, this
is fabulous. No more big blaring web page announcing Blogger or that my
blog has posted, or anything like that. Now, I can just send a discrete
little email to myself!

survey revisited

I'd like to invite y'all to take the survey that I created a couple of months ago. I didn't get many responses, and I'd love to hear people's opinions. Here's the link (or you can go to the March archives and click from there). Thanks!

weekend happenings

This weekend was pretty fun, if a little soggy, and of course not long enough. Went to a friend's apartment party Friday night, which was good and mellow, as usual. Saturday morning, I woke up fairly early with nothing in particular to do, but felt compelled to make good use of my time somehow since The Boy was off playing poker with a friend, so I ran some errands and called up a friend who I hadn't seen in a while and we went to brunch at one of my favorite open air cafes. She's a fun but kind of a bad influence friend, so we ended up going shopping, too. We hit up our favorite secondhand clothing store and I had to fight the urge to buy a pair of teetering Manolos that were on sale, and got a practical and cute pair of pink flats instead (much cheaper!). Saturday night, The Boy and I got dressed up like Young Republicans and went to a horse racing themed party (in honor of the Derby). Smallish party, probably due to the rain, but a friendly crowd and a good time. Knocked back enough mint juleps to send me off into a deep sleep that night. Sunday, I got to sleep in a little finally, and then went out to lunch with another friend I hadn't hung out with in a while. We went to Barney's, where I couldn't resist the urge to get their amazing seasoned curly fries. Mmm. Afterward, we went window shopping in the little district around my office and then spent some time playing with kittens at the local animal shelter. Of course that inspired pangs of wanting to take one or more fuzzy little creatures home with me, but unfortunately no can do. Capped the afternoon off with a movie: Talk To Her, which was kind of slow at the beginning, but managed to earn it's reputation by the end. Made a big ol' veggie laden dinner for The Boy and I (had to combat the effects of all those curly fries, afterall) and watched part of a movie on, what else, poker.

it needs more cow bell

If you get the title of this post, you'll want to go here.

it must be five 'o clock somewhere

Unfortunately, it's only 10:30 here. So, even though it's Friday, there's no celebrating yet. I've got a bunch of parties to go to this weekend, in fact too many to be able to make it to all of them. When it rains it pours, I guess. Though, I'd rather have them staggered to spice up more weekends!

my ratio

I always thought I was 85/15....turns out I'm only 60/40. Want to find out what I'm talking about? Check out: What Gender Is Your Brain?.

goings on

reading: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
listening: my favorite mix cd w/ plenty of Postal Service and Bright Eyes
watching: Sin City

haiku wednesday

I came across a guy's blog one time where he announced it was Haiku Wednesday. I looked through his archives, but couldn't really figure out if this was an ongoing thing or just reflected a spontaneous need for abreviated poetry. Either way, I like the idea of Haiku Wednesday, so here is my haiku for today (feel free to comment with your own):

If a blogger blogs,
And no one is there to read,
Where does the work go?

full house - no, the other kind

I have to take this opportunity to gloat a little. You see, The Boy is something of a poker fiend and, as his girlfriend, I often get dragged around to seedy little casinos and card rooms and whatnot so that he can get his poker fix. This has been going on for close to a year now and, at the beginning of it all, I was also taught how to play Texas Hold 'Em and I enjoyed it and was fairly decent for a beginner. I attended a couple of The Boy's semi-weekly poker nights with his friends and managed to hold my own...that is until the other guys, feeling the threat of being beaten by a girl no doubt, decided to make the affairs a boys' only kind of thing, and I was thus ejected from future games with them (though I did manage to win a poker night with a different group of guys). Anywho, this has been a little bit of a point of contention for me. I tend to dislike boys' only things in general, probably stems from trailing after my older brother and his friends growing up, and I kind of resented being rejected from the games simply because I'm a girl, particularly since I don't consider myself a very girly girl and no one else's girlfriends or wives had even expressed an interest in coming, so it was clearly aimed just at me. Boo. (In the meantime, the couple who originally taught The Boy and I how to play poker have asked me on a couple of different occasions why I no longer play and have shared my sentiment about the suckiness of being excluded from the game.)
Anyway, last night, The Boy was again fiending for a few hands of Hold 'Em, so I offered to play him for a little while after dinner. The game went on kind of slowly for a while; we'd take turns stealing each other's blinds or catching weak winning hands. At one point, I was getting pretty short stacked and I thought I might be done for...but then it happened, the Poker Gods looked down favorably upon me, the little girl who just wanted to be allowed to play their game. Long story short, I kicked his monkey ass myself. Once I had gotten a clear chip lead, I offered to end the game so that we could go to bed (it was getting late), but he insisted that the game wasn't over until someone was cleaned out. At that point I had no choice but to sic not one, but two full houses on him and thus relieve him of all his chips. So, haha. Who says girls can't play?

one of five

There are only five of us in the office today. Needless to say, it's very quiet around here. I feel compelled to urge everyone to play around today, but no one else seems to be feeling the same urge. Hopefully, before 5:00 today, I can convince everyone to let loose a little. Otherwise, the rest of the week is going to be pretty grim.

fingers crossed

The boy is still in the midst of business school madness, though it's getting awfully late in the application season. He's gotten nay's from two of the five schools he's applied to, which is a bummer because one was his top choice and the other was the only school he could go to without having to move. He's already interviewed with one of the remaining three and has an interview scheduled for another (though that's gotten all messed up and delayed in the past couple of weeks, so hopefully everything is still kosher), but no word at all from the fifth. All of this is quite agonizing. Why would someone willingly put themselves in this mess? I suppose I will have to follow the same process sooner or later, though...got to grow up some time! In the meantime, however, I get periodic emails from friends checking in to see if we know our futures yet. (No, we don't.) I'm an inextricably linked to this whole process, of course, what with being somewhat attached to the boy and all, and am probably even more on pins and needles than he is, if that's even possible. In a word - yarg!

baby cakes

My coworker has the fatest, cutest baby in the whole world. She's sooooo adorable, I have to steal her away whenever he brings her into the office, including today when he was on a phone call and I darted in and babynapped her for a little while. One of the best things about her is that she reciprocates my adoration for her by saving a big drooly smile for me whenever she sees me. No one else, just me. : )

my unknowing debut

I received an email last night from my writing teacher, who was sending around dates and places for a handful of my classmates who are giving readings of their work at local bookstores in the next couple of weeks, as part of an annual promotional event that the school puts on. I was a little confused by the email, having never heard that certain people were going to be giving readings, but I assumed that perhaps this was something discussed on one of the days that I'd missed. I was going down the list, curious to see who the brave souls were, when I got to the bottom of it and saw my name next to a particular date and bookstore. I'm giving a reading?? What the? More pressing than the usual What will I wear?...What on earth will I read??