2 minute run down

was commanded by diede to post (this is a good procrastination option, it's true), so a brief run down on what's going on:

congratulations are in order to vin who has a new job! she's moving to a new role within her company and we're going out tonight to celebrate! go you!

my boss is back from vacation thank goodness. a lot of the pressure is off now that she is, which is a nice change from the last 2.5 weeks. it seems i actually did an okay job managing things while she was gone which makes me feel pretty good.

my parents have informed me that they are going on a cruise with my grandparents the entire week i have scheduled for my vacation on the cape (week of 4th of july). i'm a little bummed at this - was really looking forward to spending some time with my parents. i'll be on the cape other times this summer, but this is my one big vacation of the year. my siblings will be home as well so we'll just be hanging out and playing pong. party at the lyon house!

i got vip passes to the 'today show' 'no doubt' concert tomorrow morning. this prob sounds cooler than it is, as we have to be there by 6 am to get in line, and we could just stand in the plaza and listen without the passes, but it seems like a fun, nyc thing to do, so vin and i are going to give it a whirl. will report back.

enjoyed last weekend's beautiful warm weather, but kind of okay with the fact we're back to low 60s and cloudy for a couple more days. it just gets so hot here in nyc that the longer it stays cool the better. i discovered that nyc is the northern most city with a humid subtropical climate (thank you wikipedia) which explains a lot. we are planting the flower seeds on the terrace on saturday, so i hope the rain holds off, but otherwise i am just fine with it.

as the previous post indicates, some interesting stuff swirling around in the boy dept. a lot of mixed signals has me feeling unsettled, and too much pong as me unclear on exactly what has gone down, but never a dull moment, and i suppose that's why you keep reading this right? for the conflict and the drama =)

makes a lot of sense

i'm not the sort of person who falls in and quickly out of love
but to you, i gave my affection, right from the start.
i have a lover who loves me - how could i break such a heart?
yet still you get my attention.

why do you come here, when you know i've got troubles enough?
why do you call me, when you know i can't answer the phone?
and make me lie when i don't want to,
and make someone else some kind of an unknowing fool?
make me stay when i should not?
if you're so strong then resolve the weakness in me.
why do you come here, and pretend to be just passing by?
i need to see you - i need to hold you - tightly.

- joan armatrading 'the weakness in me'

guy #1 saga continues. he still has a gf. i still don't think i want to date him. and yet . . . it's not enough to do anything about, just something in the back of my head a lot.

love the wallpaper

went out last night for dinner with my cousin and her husband, and her maid of honor and one of her friends from home. went to dinner at nolita house (god i love their lobster mac and cheese) and then to a little speakeasy-type place in the flat iron district for a really good drink. i had a 'rumble' - with white rum, sugar, lemon and blackberries. yum! the wallpaper in this joint from far away looked like really ornate black flourishes and curly-cues, but up close you could see it was a very tasteful rendition of people doing the positions from the karma sutra. i want it for my living room.

throughout the night was texting with the boston boy, and with a ny boy i met a couple weeks ago. it was red sox-yankees last night, and the boston boy was texting me the highlights from the red sox side as they came back from a 4-2 deficit, and the ny boy was bummed the yankees were throwing away the win. to be fair, the ny boy clearly doesn't know me that well, but was highly amused by that.

speaking of red sox, went to a company women's network event yesterday morning featuring a conversation with doris kearns goodwin - a pulitzer prize winning author. she's written several books on presidents - abraham lincoln, the roosevelts, lyndon johnsons - but she also wrote a memoir on baseball (wait til next year). the moderator mentioned how she was the first woman to be in the red sox locker room, and doris corrected her that she probably wasn't the first woman to be in the red sox locker room, but she was the first woman journalist. also highly amusing. she was a great speaker, and it was really neat to see how someone who has worked with the most high-profile and powerful people in the country is really down to earth, and also does embarrasing things, and procrastinates. tee hee hee.

apt 7 is a lotr-free zone

alright - am delinquent for not updating this, something that several of you have chastised me for over the last few days.

had a great time in dc - only issue was bus trip FAIL. bus was an hour late to pick us up on friday, so we didn't get into dc until midnight, and then coming back had '20 mile delays' so we went 30 most of the way, and the 4 hour trip ended up taking 7 hours. we are NOT going to dc this same weekend next year (you may recall our epic trip last year). something about the intersection of spring breaks, i-95, delaware, on this weekend, who knows. have a theory that 95 in ct is at least predictable; if you drive it at certain times it's going to be bad, whereas 95 south is just a crackshoot of when and where the traffic will be bad.

when we did get to dc we found a lovely spring saturday. went for a run in georgetown along the chesapeake and ohio canal path (LOVE locks - was wikipediaing them a few weeks ago) on saturday morning, then home for brunch with caro and liz.

headed over to a bar with a patio around 1 on saturday and sat outside drinking sam summer and soaking up the sun all afternoon. the patio didn't have music, but fortunately i had my cell phone with lots of music on it, so we played the random assortment of songs that don't have DRM on them on my phone. ray came to meet up with us as well.

was pretty wasted when we got home around 6 - scarfed some thai food and had a fiesta siesta (party sleep) before heading out to an apt party at metro center around 8 (things start early in dc).

hung out at this party for the rest of the night. there was hell hole playing. cherry jello shots. tequila shots. hooking up in the bathroom. chips. connecticut college football players. people coming and going. debauchery. i realllly miss apt parties. maybe now that spring is here there will be more in nyc.

around 3 am i made the decision to go see the '08 i hook up with in arlington, which found me wandering around virginia looking for this boy (note to self: virigina sucks. never go there again.) in the early morning. i'm sure the cab driver thought i was a prostitute, except for the fact i was dressed extremely preppily, b/c i had no idea how to tell him where i needed to go. the boys kept asking me if i had gps - which i do on my phone - but they meant my car. um - what car?

hung out with the boy most of sun morning, discussing international warfare, pirate-thwarting strategies, and james bonds, while waiting for the gang to come pick me and lingley up in va. sent lopez and liz a 'thanks for rescuing me from virginia' somecard, which they appreciated. it was musical apartments on sat night, as no one slept where they were supposed to. vin and i headed out to brunch with her cousin and friends from duke at an awesome restaurant in columbia heights and then it was back to the bus for the aforementioned road trip from hell.

when we got in fri night we were tired, so we didn't go out, but vin and i were also giggly and laughed for a good hour or so after we went to bed. we did, however decide on the following goals for the month of may, summarised by the accronym AFROG.

A - ask for what you want
F - plant our flowers on the terrace
R - no hooking up with anyone that reminds us of lord of the rings characters. apt 7 is a lotr-free zone. no hobbits, gollums, trolls, ents, elves, wizards, etc.
O - hook up with someone older!
G - guidelines. we were going to go with boundaries, but we decided guidelines was better, as we're not interested in setting up berlin wall-like boundaries, but setting some ground rules in our social lives that we follow.

tuesday night played 5 games of pong with the coworkers/d '08s at the bar in ny with a pong table which made for a rough wed. had to come home and put myself to bed at 6:15. vin is off to vegas this weekend for a bachelorette party so i've got the apt to myself. looking forward to a weekend in nyc! my cousins are in town, as dartmouth women's lax is playing columbia on sunday, so we're all going to brunch and then to the game. woo dartmouth!

why worry

why worry, there should be laughter after pain
there should be sunshine after rain
these things have always been the same
so why worry now
- dire straits 'why worry'

f is for friday. friday starts with f

more sesame street! charlo just sent me a link to the dvd of tina fey on sesame street - tina and the bookaneers. aka - a group of pirates that love to read. tina fey? reading? pirates? sesame street? i like all those things!

but even better, was the link from that site to the 'top 50 sesame street moments' and their youtube videos. SO many classics that the sesame street generation will remember: teeny little super guy, 'here fishy fishy fishy fishy', the yip-yip aliens that scared me half to death when i was little b/c i thought they were going to materialize in my living room, i've got a new way to walk (walk walk), 'u really got a hold on me' (the only reason i have that song on my ipod is sesame street) and the ladybugs picnic.

they're missing monsterpiece theatre's 'the taming of the shoe' (i don't wanna. i wanna dance to the mall). good times.

pbs kid through and through

if you're a child of the 80s and all your parents let you watch growing up was educational shows on pbs, fortunately most were pretty entertaining, then you probably remember all the classic tv shows, including sesame street. everyone knows sesame street.

i love love LOVE sesame street (it's one of my interests on fb) and we have home movies of me at age 1 dancing in my highchair to the theme song when my dad sings it. i mainly like it because it's so clever - i love puns and wordplay (hi tracy jordan) and according to blink, sesame street emphasized that stuff so that adults would enjoy watching the show with their kids. ergo, i still enjoy sesame street, esp the classic ones. some of my favorite quotes, as you know all too well, are from sesame street. (asking questions is a good way of finding things out. - prairie dawn)

but you might also remember:

square one: this show might be the only time i liked math. although i was good at math up through algebra in 8th grade. and exeter math just destroyed me (alex in the desert anyone?). check out the video for a catchy tune and a primer on probability.

ghostwriter: LOVED ghostwriter. am a sucker for a serial mystery story (exhibit a: this blog). i remember being so excited for friday when we finally figured out what the answer was.

where in the world is carmen sandego: geography is fun! we even had the computer game. you know, for our ibm desktop? between this show and geo safari, i kicked ass at the geography category at trivia on wed.

bill nye the science guy: science really did rule with this show. he also had pretty catchy science-related music videos. am so going to make my kids watch this (i am my parents' child clearly)

and last but not least, reading rainbow. that show prob did more to get me where i am today than any other. was thrilled to discover yet another catchy music favorite from the show on youtube: teamwork. enjoy!


heading down to dc tonight with vin to see lingley and the gang. 75 and sunny tomorrow! yipee!

time capsule: intro

so, i would like to introduce a new feature on the blog i'm going to creatively call 'time capsule'. was reading a blog that reviewed a book called 'no one cares what you had for lunch' - ie it had suggestions for how to get creative and interesting on your blog. now, everyone i know thinks this blog is fascinating, but i still checked out the suggestions, one of which was to go back to an old diary and post an entry.

i keep a journal in addition to this blog - it holds the really emotional stuff so i don't bore you with it here. however, upon re-reading, i'm still not ready to post my most intimate feelings about things that most of you already know about.

that being said, everyone reading this knows how integral gtalk is to my life and i realized that i have been on gmail and been using gtalk ever since it was launchd (self-call) and thanks to the archiving feature, i have tons of content waiting to be mined. some of it will be used in the book i write chronicling post-college life through gtalk, but i thought i would do a post every now and then where i go back to +/- 3 days of the date ,1, 2, 3 years ago and post interesting or funny tidbits from emails or gtalks, edited for content and clarity. just another snapshot of life.

without futher ado:

gtalk convo with diana 4.18.06

lyon: from ally and charlo (who went to cornell and yale respectively and are forced to be around us d people at all times)
12:14 PM we made a platonic web of sketch on sun b/c we know EVERYONE in such weird ways
so charlo says on ally's fb wall:
yes the green paper social matrix is crazy sweet.

what have we learned from this exercise?

a) we know everyone in new york
b) those people we dont know went to dartmouth and we will eventually meet them "unexpectedly" at a bar
c) upon meeing said "D People", everyone will discuss how ridiculous it is that people dont spend their entire adult lives in new york playing pong WITH PADDLES in basements.

and ally replies on charlo's fb wall:
so true. and:
d) even when we do get to know said "D people" they will be gone every other weekend when the hanover umbilical cord snaps them back to rural new hampshire, so close friendships are futile
e) it is only a matter of time before we, too, start referring to people, animals, and select inanimate objects as "friend"
f) and that scares me.

hmmm - doesn't seem like much has changed. ;-P

'don't say what, say pardon'

well kiddos, quite a weekend here in nyc. good friends, good food, good times!

boxa got here around 8 on fri night. came back to the apt to dish with vin and charlo, and drank copious amounts of wine, which seems to be a recipe for my downfall as of late, as it tends to make me very depressed. had not been out in manhattan without an agenda in ages, so we decided to go check out a bar my coworkers had told me had real dartmouth pong.

i'd heard about this bar before, but dismissed it as urban legend. however, we trekked down to murray hill and entered this dive of a bar, and discovered, that yes, they did have a ping pong table and paddles of the dartmouth variety in their back area, which was sort of like the pit at gamma delt.

so we go get next on the table after these kids that have been playing beruit all day lose. everyone in this bar is pretty young, and strangely enough, immediately associates us with dartmouth, which was a bit different but pretty good for meeting people. only the kids who held the table had been playing beruit since 7 pm that night and refused to let us play pong by moving to another table after our turn to play came up.

so after i really passively aggressively/hostility thinly-veiled by sweetness attempted to persuade the boys on the table to let us play pong, they say we can play if we win the table by beating them in beruit. so vin and i play the beruit game of our lives to kick these kids' asses and get to play pong. only all of us are playing absolutely terribly, no rhythm, taking forever, etc. which i took very personally, and in a very bad display of behavior was mean to just about everyone. i had to go sit in the corner for a portion of time i was so upset, which is ridiculous and unacceptable, and i apologize to everyone i offended. so bottom line, there is a bar in nyc with a pong table, and cute boys which we all appreciated, but it is unclear if i can ever go there again given my bad behavior.

the weird thing was, when we left to go uptown, the original beruit kid, who i had continued to do nothing but be mean to all night, wanted to come with us, and of course ended up with him in my bed on sat morning. he also wants to call me. wtf? it's official - the way to get boys to do what you want is to be despicable. or in the words of bridget jones: 'can officially confirm that the way to a man's heart these days is [. . . .] merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.'

after a lot of apologizing on sat morning, boxa and i headed out into the pouring rain and down to the lower east side to hit up the tenement museum with charlo. discovered a hole in my galosh, which was terrible timing, and arrived at the museum to discover that instead of buying 3 tickets for a 12:15 tour while wasted the night before, i had bought 1 ticket for 12:15, 1 for 1:15 and 1 for 2:15. oops! fortunately, the woman at the museum was able to finagle all of us onto a 1:15 tour, so we got to learn about immigrants on the lower east side at the turn of the century. was very interesting, we all enjoyed learning some history about nyc, and suddenly appreciated the sizes of our apartments a bit more. according to nyc law, we all technically live in tenements btw - building with three or more different families living in it. check!

wandered down to chinatown for soup dumplings and pan fried noodles for a late lunch, and then back to the upper east side to recover from our late night out, and ambitious rain-soaked saturday by napping, watching tv and lounging. didn't make it out on sat night, but enjoyed catching up with boxa, who has some big med school changes coming up in the next year, namely sorting out what type of doctor she wants to be and learning where she'll be doing her residency. she def wants to come back to the east coast, but that is up to the powers that be, so we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed.

boxa headed out early on sun am, and vin and i swung into action for the urban family easter dinner we were hosting at the apt later that afternoon. charlo, megh and vin's cousin joined us for a tradition we started a couple years ago. charlo made pork loin with a delicious sauce (grand marnier, berries and butter figured prominently), i made scalloped potatoes and asparagus, vin roasted cauliflower with goat cheese sauce, and we had salad and fruit salad, along with megh's easter egg cake. a delightful way to celebrate the holiday and a sunny, if not very spring-like, easter sunday. will be eating leftovers for a week.

vin headed out to cali for work early this morning, so i'll be holding down the fort for the week. boss is out, so am anticipating some craziness, and looking forward to a quieter week of work and taking it easy, before we headed down to dc to see lingley and the gang on friday night to run back green key in dc.

and lastly, in a very unexpected turn of events, got a text from the boston boy yesterday after several 'happy easter' exchanges, asking me to call him. it is not a good feeling when a boy you're supposedly not seeing wants you to call him, let me tell you, so i was pretty irritated, but i called him up to see what he wanted. turns out, he thought he had made a mistake by telling me he didn't want to see me anymore a few weeks ago, and thought he really might like me and what did i think about that. i told him that i appreciated that he had the guts to both tell me he didn't want to see me anymore and that he might have made a mistake and did want to see me, but the facts of the matter remained the same - if he didn't have the time to date me beyond seeing each other every couple weeks for 12 hours - and he wasn't okay with us just hooking up - then we prob shouldn't keep doing it anymore. he said he almost had the time, and why didn't we talk a little more frequently, and he'll come down here in a couple of weeks. so i said okay. was happy with what i said - i think i was pretty honest and true to what i am thinking and feeling, which is that i don't want to stop dating other people yet, but we'll see how it goes. so the plot thickens. and it goes to show you never can tell.

so frickin' excited

brief update on random stuff:

i'm sore from bowling on wednesday. my forearms are killing me. why didn't we bowl more as training for crew? maybe b/c when we did bowl with the crew team we were drunk and dressed ridiculously in flare which is not exactly conducive to serious training.

there are few things as unsatisfying in life as when you see news crews running around or there's, say, a big accident that stops traffic on 91 south for hours on end, but you can't find out why the news crews are around or what happened to cause the back-up. it's impossible to find these things out after the fact. like i said, unsatisfying.

my boss is out for the next week and a half starting on monday, so it's been crazy at work trying to firm stuff up before she leaves. fortunately i feel like i'm making good progress, so it's good in that aspect, just waiting to see what goes down/have to deal with while she's gone.

the aforementioned bowling on wednesday was fun. took place at port authority, which is a terrible place. vin kept justifying everything with 'well we're at a bowling alley in port authority'. pretty fair really. ran into a kid i know from exeter - we were bowling in a media bowling league, and i kept looking at this kid b/c he looked very familiar (i'm good with faces). finally i asked someone from our group who we were bowling against and he said 'ny magazine'. and then i knew i was right b/c i had been reading 'ny mag' on tuesday and noticed a by-line of a kid i had known at exeter and that is who i thought this kid was. he didn't remember me but did say i looked familiar as well. used to row with my bf at the time. small world after all!

bowling itself was not pretty, had not done it in a year or so (since our work offsite last feb in fact), but vin and huyett came to hang out. vin hangs with the coworkers at work functions so often that my coworkers think she works for our company, which i find hilarious. i hang with her coworkers too but at non-work functions, i think that's the difference. we all dished for a bit, i finished bowling our set and then vin and i headed out. mind you, we didn't leave until 11 or so, and we went to the stumble inn around the corner from our apt, so of course beruit was going to be played. ended up playing beruit, making out with our opponents and staying out til 3 am, which is a terrible idea when one has to get up at 7 for work. am paying the price by being sick sick sick yesterday - went to bed last night at 7 pm. am hoping this goes away in time for the best thing about this weekend: BOXA is coming to visit! (and i don't have to go on a bus. yay!)

poems about rain

good one for those april showers courtesy of my momma =)

these are my two drops of rain
waiting on the window-pane.

i am waiting here to see
which the winning one will be.

both of them have different names.
one is john and one is james.

all the best and all the worst
comes from which of them is first.

james has just begun to ooze.
he's the one I want to lose.

john is waiting to begin.
He's the one i want to win.

james is going slowly on.
something sort of sticks to john.

john is moving off at last.
james is going pretty fast.

john is rushing down the pane.
james is going slow again.

james has met a sort of smear.
john is getting very near.

is he going fast enough?
(james has found a piece of fluff.)

john has quickly hurried by.
(james was talking to a fly.)

john is there, and john has won!
look! i told you! here's the sun!

- a a milne 'waiting at the window paine

good times, great oldies

morning all! rainy monday here in nyc, of course my galoshes are at work from friday's rain, but i suppose this is necessary for the plants to bloom. and a nice yellow sweater will go along way today.

had a great weekend all around - lots of fun! kicked things off on friday night with coworker karoke. am pretty sure this whole private room karoke scene in nyc is unique. no one ever tells me they go get a room at a (reallly) sketchy place in koreatown (4 blocks of midtown between 5th and 6th aves that suddenly become a little chinatownesque place out of nowhere) to drink and sing your face off to crappy songs in other cities, but in nyc it's a fairly common occurance. this place was really sketchy. think sd pool room before we renovated it, but after we took out the pool table, the 15 mini fridges and the sd bodegas. yeah.

vin's brother had come down from boston so he came out to meet up with us, and we
sang from 7 to 11 or so before we got kicked out. we had had beer delivered in, and still had a fair amount leftover so we headed to the east village to an apt to continue drinking. i took off my shoes when we got there (per usual) and cut my foot on a piece of glass, which put a damper on things and made it hard to walk. the coworkers risked life and limb to clean me up, and we went back to playing taboo. it was a rough weekend for party injuries, as i also have a ridiculously big bruise on my forearm - no idea where that came from. discovered that i had left my favorite sweater at the karoke den, so i insisted on going back to midtown to get it. no one thought i would make it back out, but i am a champ (self-call) and triumphantly returned to watch our coworker nikki kick ass at pool (she's really good) and drink more which i def don't think i needed.

vin had joined us in the east village and met the rest of the coworkers she hadn't already met, so me, her and her bro grabbed some delicious pomme frites in the east village post-bar and headed home around 4.

woke up early on sat to meet whit and huyett for brunch on the upper west side. whit says the wedding was a blast - best dance party of her life. coming from us sd kids, that's extremely high praise. she and the boy had a minimoon in florida before returning to real life. they'll be doing their honeymoon this summer, and are moving to boston in the next few months so that the boy can go to hbs.

caught a bus up to boston around 1 and arrived in time for the festivities for christine's bday to begin with pizza and champagne. danced around a bit with the 'top tits 2008 trophy' and a swiffer (love swiffering) and then headed out to central in cambridge to meet some of the folks. had some of christine's bday shot called 'sex with an alligator', which was a new one for me. really sweet and syrupy with a concotion of liquor - dangerous.

got the dance party at phoenix landing started early with the crew and heard a lot of the favorites, including 'paper planes', which we have a dance down for - people are generally impressed - before meeting a boy. thoroughly enjoyed talking, dancing and kissing him, and i ended up in allston on sunday morning. has a fair amount of potential that i wouldn't mind realizing - his bro lives in murray hill in nyc - and we all know that i have a pretty good track record of turning one night stands in other cities into recurring options, however, i cannot continue to date boys in boston (it's nyc, not me, i swear) and he is the youngest boy and he asked me if i was catholic about 30 minutes into our convo, which means it's an issue that i'm not jewish. sigh. still, it was a lot of fun, i have acquired a key chain from ethiopia and told him to call me the next time he's in nyc. about all you can do right?

christine came and picked me up from the public transportation dead-end that is allston and the green line on sunday morning, and we went walked over to harvard square for lunch at legal seafood with her parents. christine got me extra oyster crackers which came in handy when a major accident on 91 south as i was heading home had us sitting in traffic for an hour. got back around 11 - not too bad. great time all around but i am glad to have a little break from boston traveling in the next month or two. have been in boston 4 out of the last 6 weekends. that's a lot of time on a bus.

looking forward to this week - lots of fun on tap. bowling on wed with the coworkers, plans to hit up mcsorley's on thursday and boxa comes on friday. good times.

silence is golden but singing is fun

as i just gtalked ceppity, it's going to be another no voice weekend.

karoke tonight with a big group of the coworkers and then boston and phoenix landing tomorrow night for christine's bday means i won't be able to talk on monday. and i doubt my feet will be clean.

i love spring.

time we have wasted on the way

hey friends - up early b/c my quarterly review is today and it was supposed to be at 1, so i figured i had time to prep for it today. at 5 yesterday it got moved to 9:30, so into work i go.

allow me to step back for a sec - over the last few months have become friendly with my coworker over our mutual love of pong. somewhere along the way the topic of this blog came up, which he wanted the link to. after lots and lots of searching he was unable to find it (we know now b/c search engines don't crawl it, so all you partners in crime should feel perfectly safe about your appearances in it) and finally it came to the point where enough non-coworker/friend stuff (booting, ridiculous behavior, roadtrips to hanover) had happened that reading my blog wasn't going to change his opinion of me. so i gave him the link.

once i did that i was a little thrown - though totally okay - primarily b/c this was the first instance of someone who hasn't always known me (as opposed to random, annon people who read it and people who show up in it every day) who had access to the 3 years of my life that are chronicled here. and writing about what you did yesterday isn't strange, but those yesterdays pile up and then suddenly that's your life that someone can go and read like a story about things that happened before they knew you. like reading my diary maybe? anyway, had me doing some thinking. sorry hearn, this is the price of admission. ;-P

in non-thinking related stuff, went to the stumble inn last night for their wednesday night deal. charlo and vin came out, and of course some beruit was played. in addition to my issue with beruit of having no opportunity to respond to your opponents shot, you also spend a damn a lot of time chasing the balls as they bounce around the bar. granted, you do do some of this in pong, particularly if you tend to hit it long off short tables, but i would argue time spent tracking down the ball is considerably reduced.

was out late on tuesday night too, so tonight it's bed for me. tired all around - 45 degrees and cloudy does not look good on me. there is some budding on the terrace plants and trees on the street. spring is creeping in.