and so it begins...

Note: there are not a ton of pics on this post, and for that, I'm marginally apologetic. To maintain the reputations of those involved, it's for the best...trust me.

This weekend kicked off the many celebrations of bride-to-be Elissa. First up was the bridal shower on Saturday afternoon. I'd only been to a handful in my life (usually for a cousin or something), so I'd expected to have to dress up all fancy and drink tea, play goofy games and ooooh and aaahhh over pots and pans. Only the ooohing and aahhing happened, and it wasn't so bad. The day was beautiful, really...

The best, and my most favoritest, part of the shower was the gift to Lis from her bridesmaids (I am one! Yessss.): a surprise bachelorette party in San Francisco that very evening. She truly had no idea...and had even emailed us all during the week to see what we were up to on Saturday (and to gauge a certain dress' appropriate-rating for the weekend). Little did she know that we all did have plans, with her! We'd seriously gotten everybody involved: Mom, aunts, Lee (the groom-to-be), other friends. Dammit, if Lee gets more than one, then so does my girl! Here's her reaction to reading the poem that we used to tell her about her plans:

since they're not wearing nametags, that's b-to-b Elissa and bridesmaid Molly

PS: I really want a job that pays me millions to plan fun surprises with and for my friends. Dear Dream Job: I'm waiting!

After the shower, we headed back to Lindsay's to hang out before heading to the City. A few celebratory beverages were in order, and we ended up creating a movie plot - Lindsay's fiance, Mike, even took notes! Annnnd, self-proclaimed paparazzi Linds showed up : ] You should see her snapfish.com album, its packed with paparazzo-goodness.

Jen, me, Lindsay, Molly and bachelorette Elissa
Mike is a fantabulous bartender...and I am wearing a hair helmet (ugh)

when we launched into planning and casting our feature film, Mike decided to take notes...a smart move, since much of this is a blur in retrospect. it'll be a blockbuster, I tell you

We took BART into the City and headed to our fun hotel to hang out and get ready for a night out (just like the good ol' days of getting ready for dances...) before making our way to Johnny Folley's, an Irish pub (where I went wrong, oh so wrong, in ordering a beer...). Up next was an attempt at Cantina for some dancing, followed by the Clift Hotel for some urban-lounging before wrapping up at Swig (and Jack in the Box).

Hilarious (PG-13-ish) moments of the evening:
- getting into a cab from the hotel to Johnny Folley's (fare: $4.45), only to later look out the window of the pub and SEE OUR HOTEL ACROSS THE STREET. Yup, two entrances to that one...whoops.
- getting denied entrance (sorta) at Cantina...the Stewie Griffin-sporting bouncer only admitted scrawny men over 35. So, Molly called him on his ish, and proceeded to storm off before listening to his lame answer. His loss.
- getting flashed: short dresses + wind + running (why?) downhill = bared buns.
- the giant chair at Clift. Huge. Stupid. Fun.
- the fact that everyone in San Francisco was in a foul mood and completely rude all weekend. Ugly attitudes all around, but not with us!
- Elissa's mad dance moves at Swig, some of which led to a bruised bum.
- Jack in the Box = always a shitshow at 2am. I high-fived the guys behind the counter (they were HUSTLIN'!) and Elissa swore her brother was there.
- the bevy of phone calls and texts from (sunburned) Lee, in which we learned that he was A: lost in the woods (on his camping trip, which was a 4-bed/3-bath condo, fitted with a plasma and wood-paneling...cuz that makes it rustic), B: safe just five minutes later, C: feeling amorous toward all of us ladies ("I love you took...").
- at one point in the evening, we crafted a contract (on the back of a Sierra Nevada cardboard coaster - legal like) for Elissa to sign stating that she would not / could not / should not kick any bridesmaid out of her bridal party, no matter the offense...


Wow. I'm now a little nervous for numero dos in Santa Barbara...

i'm on a boat

Last weekend, we trekked up to Sacramento to visit our buddies, Ginni, Ryan and Greg to go tubin' down the American River. The last adventure the five of us embarked upon ended with everyone dressed in toilet paper hats/wigs and clothes, sooooo...

We met the crew around 9:30pm on Friday at Tapa the World , a rad-ish tapas bar in downtown Sac. The area was odd, one block would have lots of old cute homes, then there'd be a block o' ghetto, then a block of solely shops and one of just restuarants...um, okay. At TtW, we were warmly greeted by the third or fourth pitcher of sangria (I forgot to mention the two-hour drive from S-vale to Sacto) and a table littered with tapas of all sorts. We heard that an order of paella had been put in roughly 45 minutes before our arrival, yet hadn't hit the mesa yet.

Two more pitchers and a few tapas later, no paella. After discussing it with our waitress (again), we were assured that it would 'be right out'. Twenty more minutes, no paella. Seriously?! Fiiiiiiiinally, 45 minutes later - and roughly two full hours after it was ordered - the wrong kind of paella joined our party, and was whisked away to have sausage and shrimps (and spit, we're certain) added to it. Further schmoooozing (a.k.a. complaining that a 40-minute dish took three times that long) got us a free pitcher of sangria. Semi-win. The true win with the bill. Five or six pitchers of sangria + $40 dish of paella + umpteen tapas = $102. Win? Yup. A super-win. It could also be referred to as a "lets pay the bill before they notice its wrong and get the hell outta here" win.

A rowdy game of Apples to Apples washed down with Bud Light followed dinner before we hit the hay in preparation for a rough day of sitting in tubes...

Now, in all of my "lets go to the river/delta/lake/sea experience", I've never ever ever hit the road later than 8am. This trip was different. We wandered to breakfast around 10:30am and lingered with Gin & Ryan's rad friends, Dave, Jackie and baby Carter, headed to the store and moseyed to the river with our deflated tubes. We had terrific intentions of blowing up all four tow-behind-a-boat type tubes, the floaty cooler and a one-man nerd-boat with those tire pumps from our cars' emergency kits. About three minutes into Operation Inflation, Boredom and Impatience crept in. A quick trip to the nearby River Rat store and $4/tube sent B & I on their way...

yes, that is a tube in the backseat...
your eyes do not decieve you, there are four tubes and a boat attached to a honda accord

Temps were pushing 100 degrees in the shade, and at last we touched gloriously chilly Sierra runoff close to 2pm...and I'll sum this up quickly by saying that:
A: floaty cooler inventors are my heroes.
B: canned beer floats, as we discovered after Rob took one for the team by toppling his tube to save our floating beer barge from certain puncturation (its a word) in a bank of trees, losing five beers in the process (note: all beers were retrieved and savored). Flip flops float faster than beer, however, and Greg's are now two wolfpacks of one.
C: the riffer draws some interesting folks - people smoking pot in the bushes, a girl-on-girl mud-wrestling match on a sand bar, lots of missing teeth...you get the point.
D: soggy buffulo wings suck (which G & R's pup, Emma, later discovered as well, when she pilfered them and stashed them all over the house). Regular chicken fingers/tenders from Safeway might be the most perfect food ever.
E: underwater cameras kind of suck above water. Two cameras yeilded seven or eight decent shots (read: clear enough to determine who is in the photo).
F: I cannot believe that I've lived in California my entire life and have never gone tubing. This needs to be a monthly (weekly?) thing.

the guy in the canoe at left was totally rockin' Metallica in his custom boat...so loud in fact that our initial attempts to befriend him were futile. finally though, we found out that he 'tinkers around with it a bit in his garage'...dude, how often are you out here?!

Ginni, Greg, Rob, me and Ryan

OooOOh, annnnd...no one got hellaciously sunburned! Triple-super-swirly-with-sprinkles-win! I wish all weekends could be this fun!

I can read, and I like to...I swear!

I seriously cannot finish a book lately. I read 150-someodd pages, get bored, and quit. I quit. Isn't that illegal somewhere?!?!

I tried to finish Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and admitted defeat. Loved the first two sections. He goes into detail about what knives/equipment/ingredients to get your hands on, He expertly gives enough background info on the "culinary underbelly" to make readers aware of what goes on in restaurants, but not so much that no one will dine in public ever again. Then, I got to the third section...and bleh. It sorta fell apart, I got bored, and I ditched it, feeling a little slimy all the while...

I attempted a book that had a promising story line and a fun title, Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him by XYZ, and threw up the white flag on that one too. I waited and read and read and waited for things to start happening in this book, to no avail. When I turned page 200 and still couldn't tell you the story line, I ran.

Real Simple magazine on the other hand, is devoured the minute it hits my mailbox. Seriously.

I've moved on to an author that I've read before, so my fingers are crossed that she can bring me back to the dark side of books...

two and a half weeks in 346 seconds - go!

Three biggies:

1 - Rob's 28th birthday! My honey is getting old...
We celebrated with a whole mess of fellow troublemakers at Rock Bottom. Happy hour lasted three solid hours in honor of Rob's birthday. The sun was blazing when we arrived and it was dark when we left...whoops. Naturally, my camera died immediately after taking this photo:



2 - introducing...the Ring!
Rob and I moved from Casa Saratoga to a teeny tiny minuscule little studio in Sunnyvale. There are lots of wins in this: A - driving the Matter horn twice a day is a thing of the past B - when Rob's away at school, I'll have tons of room to romp (annnnnd its really not bad with two of us here...) C - we're 3 blocks from downtown Sunnyvale and not far from downtown Mountain View and D - Summer lives a block and a half away. No joke.

Why has it been dubbed "the Ring", you ask? Our studio measures 410 square feet, and we saw nothing but a floor plan before renting the place. As you can imagine, me + one month lead time on a move = over planning to the extreme. I can attest that its quite difficult to plan and re-plan your furniture layout without a reference to the size of the room. In attempts to discover what else on earth might be 410 square feet, I turned to Mr. Internet, who informed me that a boxing ring is typically 20'x20'. Yup. We live IN a boxing ring.

our front door's on the right
(interior pics on their way, once we clear out the cardboard jungle)

we tossed a few boxes into our new pad and practically sprinted downtown to our fave Wednesday night haunt: Murphy's Law. moving can wait, I have beers to drink and bbq to eat.

3 - Fourth of July. Go big or go home.
After a lazy morning of farmers marketing and unpacking our apartment, we joined Summer, Katie and John for a no-pool-pool-party at Casa LG. Usually, np3's are laid-back affairs, with no one getting, shall we say, out of control. This was the exception of all exceptions.

To sum it up briefly, five people killed two 30-packs of beer, ate all of two frozen pizzas, christened K&J's triple beer-bong Sally Jesse Raphael, somehow got ahold of sparklers (Casa LG still stands) and greeted Sum's sis Faryn with a bathing suit-clad rendition of "kum-menih-yayhaaah!" from Saving Silverman. (side note: Faryn just returned from 6 weeks in Vietnam...and the first thing we do? Ask her to go on a beer run for us. Winners.) Let's point out: no one drove home, we were safely contained, and Sunday was a much mellower day for all involved...

meet Sally. she'll rock her signature red glasses soon, don't you fret...

(and yes, we were drinking Bud Light. it was practically free)


Faryn brought us keychains from Vietnam...who ever said there's no sense of humor over there?

To protect the reputations of folks featured in the 897 photos taken on the Fourth, you get three psuedo-shots. Its probably for your benefit, anyways...

a placeholder...or...a promise

Oh, Blogger. How I've missed you. While buzzing around other fave blogs today, I discovered two things:

1 - I haven't blogged in two-plus weeks. I suck. I've even had things to blog about! I could blame it on lack of internet, but since moving off of the Matter horn, that excuse is slowly dying. I could say I'm sooooo busy, but I've not been swamped.

2 - I speak/express myself much more clearly and articulately when I'm blogging. Really. My stories are funnier, my points are more to-the-point, and I feel better about what I have to say.

The excuses end here. I'm going to hope - nay, promise - to blog at least weekly. At least. Not a terribly unattainable goal...but when I have a boring week, I won't bore my (three) readers to tears by writing just for the sake of writing. And I know that a few people (ahem, Summer.) will hold me to my newly minted promise. So there.

...no nekkid posts...

Arizona - December 2008

note to self:

It's been like pulling teeth to even attempt to think of something witty enough to post, much less on a regular basis. The sky opened up and the sun shone on me today, when this little doozy hit my noggin.

So Summer and her bff Susannah are preparing to embark on their own Euro-adventure (just a few months too late...because God knows I tried to get them to come visit me there. Losers.) and asked my advice on Dublin, Ireland the other day. I droned on and on about what sites rocked and what airlines to avoid, places to check out and sights to skip. An unfortunate coworker nearly lost an ear by asking for tips on what to see in Prague. Elissa also made the minor mistake of making me pine for Greece, so my mind has been in full-blown travel mode. I even said to myself the other day, "Self, you should probably put this in a blog post so you can remember it for the next time you circle the globe (because oh yes, there WILL be a next time...)", so here goes:

AirNinja.com = the. sickest. site. ever. It lets you plug in your dates and cities, and it'll spit out the cheap-o airlines that fly that path, annnnd it'll load the data into Expedia, Orbitz and Kayak for you, so you don't have to type it a hundred times while you comparison shop. Yes, it sounds like it'd take three whopping seconds, but searching those sites on your own takes lots o' time. It saved me time and money...win.

I became very close friends with TripAdvisor.com on this trip. I used the site a TON, and never really disagreed with their recommendations. The site even pointed out things to go do, rather than just where to stay and what to eat. A few pics even helped us find our elusive hostels...

Hostelworld.com rocked too. Their reviews were legit, and we enjoyed most of our hostels (read: not the one in Istanbul).

Avoid RyanAir and Olympic Airlines like the swine flu. Wear a mask if you must. I whole-heartedly recommend spending an extra fifty bucks to go with an airline that doesn't suck ass. Between a 245Euro excess baggage fee to the near-riot getting through the gate (twice) to the hellacious customer service, RyanAir might be the devil in airline form. And Olympic Airlines'll delay your flight and insist that you'll be fine to make your connection, only to offer you a whopping 12Euro in food vouchers when you miss your flight.

Things I could not have lived without on this trip - in no particular order, I swear:

• Rob (my travel guru...he kept me sane and calm when all I wanted to do was lose my shit)
• my money belt (totally dorky, I know, but I didn't have to worry for one second about slimy pickpockets - if you want my stuff, you come and get it bud)
• travel adaptors (duh)
• my camera
• a laptop
  

Things I want to buy before our next trip:

• a better backpack. I'm a funky in-between size and my little kid's pack was too small, but Rob's grown-up pack was too big. Either way, I want a new one.
• this camera. Its like my big Nikon SLR and my point-and-shoot had a baby...perfection.
• other stuff, I'm sure.

This is one of those posts that'll be updated as I think of other things that I'm bound to forget...and since posts are better with pics:

on our way through the US to Europe...soooooo long ago

And yes, I am fully aware that we've been back an entire month and it appears as though I might be a bit hung up on our trip, so gimmee some slack. I was gone for four months, so it'll take me at least four to get over being back...

week in a nutshell

Since my life is faaaaar less exciting now that I'm not flitting around the globe, I've been at a loss for things to post. Do I describe a day at work? My exciting 10-minute walks around the block? Kali's latest escapade? Nah. Lame. However, in an effort to give my four readers something to do instead of work, here's my week in a nutshell:

Monday
Going to work flat-out sucks. I was SUPER bored early in the week, since my heart is certainly not there and I, until Thursday, basically had little to do and refused to willingly take on a project (yes, I know this is a terrible attitude to have, but it's fading...and thanks to a new humungo project I got later in the week, I'm busier now).

Tuesday
We'd been dying to get back into yoga. Conveniently, in our absence Summer, who previously despised and talked trash about yoga, converted and became a yoga-holic. We'd been hearing about instructors badBarb and radChuck for the whole four months we were gone, and the time had come to visit bB.

The woman yacked and yacked and yacked. About what? No clue. I do vaguely recall something about facia, the stuff between your muscles and skin and bones and stuff. She kept saying "fass-ci-al fuzz", stretching out the word over six or so sylables, and I SWEAR that I was the only one that noticed that facial (as in 'of facia') and facial (as in 'of your face') are the SAME WORD! Maybe I should be a wordsmith or an editor...

Side note: bB talked a lot yet forgot to mention how we should be breathing...um, isn't breathing a giant part of yoga?!?! Anyways. We also held poses for 0.4 seconds...but, something musta been working, because I was sore the next day.

Wednesday
By far the funnest (is that a word?) evening of the week. Since we'll soon be moving to Sunnyvale (a dangerous two blocks from Summer and a precarious four blocks from downtown), we decided to get a jump on scoping out our future haunts (a.k.a. bars 'n' pubs). After an excruciatingly long day in the office, we headed to Summer's adorable pad and walked to downtown Sunnyvale.

It might be a food mecca...that's to be determined in the verrrry near future. Name a style of food, and it's probably got a restaurant dedicated to it on Murphy Street. We unknowingly stumbled upon the Sunnyvale Summer Series, a weekly concert/street party through the summer, with live bands and food booths and people drinking on the streets. Win.

We chose an Irish pub called Murphy's Law, and quickly fell in love with the place. $3 drafts from noon to 7pm...including Sierra Nevada and Guinness (properly poured!). Yesssss. Out back, there was a huge raging barbeque with tasty pulled pork sandwiches. Let's just say that Murphy's Law will be seeing us frequently...

Thursday
Were supposed to go to yoga to experience the glory that is radChuck, but I tweaked my back at work and was too grumpy for bendiness. Somehow, the Orlando Magic managed to blow a 12-point lead and lose to the disgusting Lakers, so Thursday night was pretty much a bust.

Friday
Rob and I visited an old friend, BJ's Pizza and Brewery after work before catching up on some Ace of Cakes on TiVo. Maybe I could quit my job and help Duff & Co. make cakes...although that would entail living in Baltimore. I don't like cold, so perhaps its time to rethink that one...

Overarching theme of this post: I maybe kinda sorta want a new job, but don't know what. Maybe I could be a perma-vacationer...