stuff i like

while i think this quote really only applies to summer on the cape, a nice quote from my momma:

"summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world."
- ada louis huxtable

sorry for partying

so i realize i have been remiss in posting and it has come to my attention that people want a post. this is because my computer is still being ridiculous and randomly shutting itself off, which doesn't make me want to turn it on, and i started my new job this week so i actually have work to do. after 3 years of working with the same people i'm getting used to a situation where no one knows me and i have no good will built up, and it's a new role, and the situation totally sucks. you really really are dependent on the kindness of people when you start over.

the reunion was amazing. so fantastic. the weather was beautiful so there was that haze over the green mountains and baker looked perfect in the early summer twilight. i'll do a run down of events

- drove up with robin - she's been in class for interior design and she and the boy are buying an apt in bklyn so she'll get to put her skills to good use.

- me, allette, karla, robin, laurak and huyett were in a cluster on the 4th floor of wheeler. i brought my mini speakers and we listened to 'in my head' (JASON DERULO!) and 'bad romance' all wknd, complete with lots of shouting of 'i don't wanna be friends!'

- mainly hung out with the rowers and the sd usual suspects, including some quality time on the sd beach. thanks to a combo of being drunk, hungover or wearing sunglasses all wknd, i didn't have to talk to many people i didn't want to see

- getting into sd was going to be an issue b/c we didn't technically have access to the house. allette rang the doorbell and we befriended the '11 housemanager, who made the risky but right decision to hide her key so we could get in. sd was a bit of a scene all weekend with folks from lots of different groups hanging out. really glad sd is still a place where anyone can go and feel welcome

- apparently my lot in life is to change the music (although i guess i'm the one that feels most strongly about it) and i was happy to discover that the random 'sd pref mix' that i put on still has 'we are family' and then 'like a prayer' as the second song, to rock out to on pref night. that's an '05 tradition that's still around.

- richardson 309 is no more, as apparently they renovated the dorm and renumbered rooms. it truly is the stuff of legends though, and i sort of feel that like 'brigadoon', it will reappear every 100 years or something

- friday night stinson's was out of pong balls (amateur hour) so we were all sticking our stash down our boobs. need a pong ball so i ran over to psi u to beg one. in my haste to get back to sd i ran out the back door of the basement as a short cut. turns out there are cement stairs that i ran into full speed and fell into the bushes. lay there for awhile, stunned, before hobbling back to sd, where i insisted the girls pour keystone on my wounds to cauterize them 'civil war style'. i'm an idiot.

- went out on the river with the '05 crew girls on sat in an eight. it was so amazing to be back in a boat on the connecticut, but i have to say it's really hard to row hungover when your hands are shaking. we rowed up to the starting line, did some pieces and rowed back, including an all eight pause at hands away with the boat set up for about 5 seconds. skips has captured this feat on video. boo yah.

- had a nice little gathering at the d that megh set up. great to see those kids. i also acquired my own copy of 'guy and fellow', the comic strip that ran for awhile. this is particularly relevant as i wasn't the biggest fan of the comic as an undergrad, though the name of this blog comes from a comic, which the d directorate board knew. when they gave me a book (the party after you left - a collection of new yorker cartoons) for being staff writer of the year (one of the awards i'm most proud of) they inscribed it was an apology that they weren't able to give me the 'guy and fellow' anthology.

- sat night we had a lobster dinner in the BEMA. i had to prepare everyone's lobster for them, as apparently lobster eating is not a life skill that everyone knows. and then we headed back to sd to hang out more. i played some pong with a bg '12 who really needs to step up his game if he wants to be respected at bg. but it was fun to hang out. ended up playing pong until 7 am, just hanging out and playing when people showed up. it was so weird for it to be light out but we decided we didn't have to stop playing just b/c the sun was coming up. shuter and i closed down the basement, and then she walked me back to wheeler b/c she had promised laurak she would. it's nice to know oaths still mean something around here.

- the 'hard guy' tshirts made a reappearance with 'hard guy reunion: i didn't even go to this school'. well played.

- drove back to nyc with karla, who is going to grad school at berkley this fall for urban planning, and huyett who doesn't yet know what she's doing this fall. we were all on the struggle jet to struggle town, but we made it.

- someone's facebook album had a comment that 'they wanted to friend every '05 they went to school with'. it was pretty accurate. we're all obsessed with dartmouth and each other. karla and i decided there needs to be more of a commitment to getting together without major life changes like weddings. it's only going to be harder and harder for us to keep getting together and in the words of a raffi song 'the more we get together the happier we'll be.' :)

this past weekend was also ridiculous. friday night we did a ferry friday on a perfect night for it. had about 20 people come out for it which was fantastic. rode back and forth a couple times until we had drunk all the beer on the boat, so we got off and ventured into to statan island looking for a dive bar. we found one - karl's klipper. we all thought we were going to die, but we had some 'statan island ice teas', played some pool and then ventured back to manhattan to 'jeremy's ale house' in the financial district. went to 'commonground' and then down to the lower east side to a bar the boys like called 'vig 27'. drinking whiskey on the rocks was prob not the best idea, but i think it impressed the boys.

sat i rolled out of bed to go up to dana's bar 'dylan murphys' to be in a college-humor type video that a friend was shooting. my role was to look disgusted when the boys tried to pick us up with offense/dumb pick up lines (you girls on myspace?). then headed down to watch the soccer game with the crew. just kept on going out from there - things are a little hazy - i know i took a nap in the bar for a bit before ending up back on the ues at dylan murphys. things come full circle eh?

going to be a long week this week but my eye's on the prize of going home to the cape on friday for a week! wheeeeeeeeee! vin and rowena are coming along for the ride and my fingers are crossed for great weather and some fantastic fireworks. i need to go home so badly. can't wait to be where 'the wind and the water are free'.

mixed emotions

'mixed emotions' happens to be a rolling stones song. been in a rolling stones kind of mood lately, but i tend to like some of the deeper cuts, rather than the obvious ones like 'she's a rainbow', 'emotional rescue', 'shattered', 'anybody seen my baby', etc. got to know some of the off-the-beaten path songs listening to boxa's copy of '40 licks' while studying. needed some music that i didn't already know all the words to in order to focus while studying, and the stones did the trick.

i'm def feeling some mixed emotions this week as my last day at work was yesterday and todat starts my five year reunion. lots of transitions and reflections on where i've come and where i'm going. sort of feeling like i'm graduating all over again - starting anew. as far as the five years since graduating, well, most of that is chronicled here. a lot of fun, memories, great trips and wonderful people that i've met and i'm happy to say, many that i already knew and are still in my life. we graduated not knowing where our lives and/or careers would lead and i think it's safe to say we've sorted some of that out, though it will forever be changing every day.

i've been a guest on campus as an alum so many times since we graduated that it's a little weird to think about going back up to spend a weekend in hanover that's all about me. and it's weird to think about how there was a time when it was my campus - had a place to live, classes to go to, things to do and all the people i wanted to see were in one place. i am fortunate enough to have made many more dartmouth memories after graduation, but this weekend is about celebrating my undergrad memories.

a lot of you will already know these stories - but here are five of my favorite undergrad memories to usher in reunion:

fifty mile hike - the appalachian trail (hence forth to be referred to as the AT) runs through hanover, and the dartmouth outing club maintains 50 miles of the trail between hanover and mt. moosilauke in warren, nh. every fall the doc does an event called the fifty mile hike, where you hike continuously from hanover to moosilauke. freshman fall me and marta won the lottery for a spot to do the hike, but rosi, our crew coach, wouldn't let us do it during crew season. rosi said if we waited she would do support for us in the spring.

spring rolled around and rosi tried reallllly hard to talk us out of the hike, but we were adamant. so memorial day weekend found me, taylor, marta, susie, gretchen, diebold and zana marching out of hanover towards moosilauke. it was an incredible experience. it took us 27 hours and 44 minutes, hiking with only short breaks for food and to change clothes. we hiked over five mountains and through some of the most beautiful woods in new england. all of us had times when we felt like we weren't going to make it, but we did (though trikiniki said we looked like a refugee camp when we made it to the lodge) and it was an amazing story, bonding experience and accomplishment.

ledyard challenge - dartmouth is on the border of vermont and new hampshire and, the story goes, it's legal to be naked in public in vermont, but not in new hampshire. the ledyard challenge involves you going down to the river by the ledyard canoe club, swimming naked over to vermont across the connecticut river, and running back across the bridge to nh without getting caught.

i did the challenge a couple times, but the most memorable one was sophomore summer, when a couple of us decided to go down and do the challenge after an event at sd. walking down to the river we noticed campus security patrolling, so we kept an eye out as we stripped down and swam across the river and then as we were preparing to run back across the bridge. we saw a car turn in to the parking lot on the other side, and then leave, so we ran over the bridge and back into the parking lot. as we were running through the parking lot headlights appeared from behind, so we dove into the bushes to hide. turned out to be some kids messing around, so we climbed out of the bushes and finished the challenge uneventfully. except for the next day when we discovered we all had poison ivy from head to toe. that made for an interesting finals period for all of us (ever tried to take a test while your poison ivy is weeping through your shirt?) and a great story.

sleeping on the roof of the library - dartmouth has an extensive library like most colleges, and there's an old area of the building called 'the stacks'. just rows and rows of books for about 15 floors. lots of people have hooked up in the stacks (it's part of the 'dartmouth seven'), and i've heard of one or two sleeping in the stacks overnight, but i've never heard of anyone sleeping on the roof of the library. me, taylor and marta discovered a window in the stacks that opened out on to the roof soph summer and decided we would do it. we climbed out on to the roof around midnight before the library closed and spent the night debating what would happen if we got caught (trespassing?). fortunately, we didn't, the night was uneventful and the story went down in the books. kind of 'mixed up files of mrs. basil e. frankweiler'-esque.

rope swing - freshman fall i heard about an amazing rope swing about 15 minutes up the river. we would row past it during practice and i was dying to try it out before it got too cold. i blitzed out to the freshman crew team - this was maybe 2-3 weeks into the school year - and a girl named taylor responded. i didn't know her very well but we headed out through pine park to find this swing.

the swing was intense. you climbed up on a platform and then swung out over the river and it was the kind of thing where if you stood on the platform and thought about it too long you would lose your nerve. the sign next to the ladder said 'lifeguard on duty: charles darwin' i went first and while it scared the shit out of me, all was fine, but i had a really hard time attaching the swinging rope to the rope that hauled the rope back up to the platform - it was just a little too short to be easy - so we decided we'd tie the ropes together before jumping to make it easier.

taylor went next and like the idiot freshmen we were, the rope got tangled and she crashed into the shallow water. i was freaking out - this girl i hardly knew just almost died 15 minutes away from help out in the middle of the woods. fortunately she wasn't seriously injured, though we both are fully aware of how much worse things could have been, but all's well that ends well, and she's still one of my favorite partners in crime. though she didn't get back up on that platform to do the swing for at least 3 years.

streaking the library - by now i'm pretty sure you're noticing a theme of people and activities, but junior spring a couple of sds streaked novak. we were sitting around on collis porch one afternoon talking about how funny it would be to start a rumor that people were streaking and then just not do it. so diana blitzed out to sd that we'd be streaking around 10:30, which of course got forwarded to the frats and the rest of campus.

later on we were talking about it and decided we had to do it. so me, whit, allette, karla, and sarah fink streaked novak about 5 minutes before all of campus thought we were going to do it. i'm told there was a mass exodus from berry down to novak to see it happen. memo to self: if you're going to streak, don't tell campus when you're doing it. we ran from SAE towards the shower towers (which no longer exist!) and thought we were home free, except as we ran out of the library towards the shower towers we ran past campus security. we hid in a bathroom in the shower towers for about 30 minutes while we could hear the 'doot-doot-doot' of s&s's walkie talkies outside. finally we decided we had to bust out and booked it from the bathroom in separate directions. whit and i ran to the native american house and pretended to be in a study group for awhile before making our way to phi delt and back to sd. no one got caught, and it was the talk of the campus for a bit. these days streaking the library is de riguer, but when we did it it wasn't done all the time. sigma delt - setting the bar high.

so good times all around. need to finish packing and then i'm heading up to hanover with robin. burning a basement mix as we speak and i have to defend my mayorship of stinsons on 4sq. we'll miss the kids who won't be back this weekend - it won't be the same without you. time to meet back at the local saloon - have a good one kids!

love,

lyon

Five in five

Five years to the day since we graduated. Partied like an undergrad
last night and slept in the XH library with a sweatshirt for a
blanket. I wish I could say that was the first time that happened.
Also played a lot of pong ('p some p'). XH doesn't play team saves,
which I don't agree with but when in rome.

The house we're staying at is 3 miles up a mountain in vermont. It's
an hour to hanover one way. Yesterday I drove it 4 times to pick up my
brother for dinner and go back to campus.

My sister's rental car is a gold mustang convertible with florida
plates. We are those people.

It's beautiful, green and wet and I aint got nothing to do but enjoy
the new england splendor and bond with the family. La dolce vita. :)

--
Sent from my mobile device

ob la di ob la da

as far as life going on, a couple usual suspect updates: congratulations are in order to diana, who got engaged over the wknd, and megh, who is off to bschool this fall. celeste's bday was on monday - she's in italy for another week - but there will be celebrating when she gets back, and brogiin has arrived in nyc for the summer as well.

i'm headed back up to hanover on friday for my brother's graduation weekend. staying with the family at a house in woodstock - way way WAY up a hill - no cell phone reception. lots of bumming around and a canoe club dinner is in the works and my sister is bringing her bf from texas to meet the fam and see new england. this should be interesting.

i've agreed to go with vin to her duke rugby reunion in charleston in late july. as charleston is also where my grandparents live, i will have to put in some family time, but looking forward to some chilling on the beach and being indoctrinated into the duke world. plus - who doesn't love a house party? (answer: haters).

and lastly, i'm twiddling my thumbs at work (ergo the barrage of recent postings in different fonts than normal), counting the days til i start my new job. i'm sure soon enough i'll wish to have this much time, but for now i'm bored bored bored, have already read all my favorite blogs and websites, and going out of my mind.

seems folks really liked the 'in memoriam' blog post and the trip down memory lane inspired by my former facebook group membership. there's more where that came from - i'll see what i can do.

girls just wanna have fun (& run)

big weekend here in nyc and the northeast. kicked it off with kickball on thurs night - 45 minutes of actual kickball and then 5 hours of flip cup at a bar on the lower east side. this league not only has kickball champs, it has 'bar champs' as well, which the team has one for three consecutive seasons. needless to say, we're on a mission to repeat.

we won our game and managed to start a dance party in the middle of the bar, which ought to help, and then me and this kid on the team who happens to have a house 2 miles from mine on the cape and i went to get chicken nuggets (with honey!) from mcdonalds before grabbing a beer at stumble. went to bed at 1:30. it only took 5 years to find someone to carpool with to the cape!

friday night was 80s prom. cut out of work around 5 and headed to charlie's to pregame with an 80s powerhour. everyone had gone all out for the event - charlie's apt is now strewn with make-up, glitter, and heels. prom was fun; all the 80s high school movie cliches were present, including the popular girl dating the captain of the football team. he introduced her as 'my girlfriend who looks like she's from a whitesnake video'. she did. 'saved by the bell''s dustin diamond was also in attendance; i think they were under contract to say 'saved by the bell' anytime they mentioned him. the post-sbtb years have not been kind, but it did kind of up the wow factor. also ran into celeste and a couple of her coworkers in fine form. i think this is the closest thing to a formal that we're going to get in nyc.

post prom the gym turned back into the club, so we danced for awhile longer. they put some boxes out on the stage and so of course we danced on those. i think it's our lot in life to dance on the highest thing in the room, whatever that may be. blame the benches in the sd basement. charlie had the brilliant idea to go to the 'continental' after prom. this is the bar that gives you 5 shots for $10. so we played shot roulette. everyone ordered one kind of shot for their five, and we ended up with 45 shots on a platter. we went around the circle, chose one and threw it back without stopping to think about what it was. dangerous. and then we went and ran it back. 10 shots in 10 minutes. oof.

quick stop at charlie's for more beer, and then we went to 'whiskey river', sat in a booth and played 'either/or' until they kicked us out at 4 am. always eye-opening, i vaguely recall a heated discussion about age and hooking up. never fails to be an interesting debate.

sat am vin dragged me out of bed at 7 am to catch the train to new haven, where we picked up the zipcar. this was our first time trying this train/automobile thing out, and i actually really liked it. less driving (new haven is 2 hrs north of the city), skipping traffic (i-95 in connecticut is the worst), cheaper (zipcar charges by the miles). i think we'll be doing it in the future. the car we were driving was a toyota prius - a hybrid - which was interesting. the key stays in the car at all times and the power button is pushed to turn it on and off. it's also super quiet - according to my sis you can sneak up on people in them b/c they make no noise under 6 miles an hour. which i imagine to sort of be like the 'killer cars' segment from monty python's flying circus. i was not a fan overall, but beggars can't be choosers, and i guess this is why you test drive before you buy.

drove up to hanover on a beautiful sunny day and met up with my bro and sis for a brief run (read: jog) down to the river to swim and hang out on the docks. stopped by the hop for some hangover chicken tenders and a big ice water from the ice machine. the hop ice machine may be, in the words of the ggmm, a BAFFINGLY LARGE INEFFICIENT, BORDERLINE-USELESS DARTMOUTH INSTITUTION O'THE DAY, but it sure helps a hangover. swung by sig ep to pick up a bequest that charlie had asked me to pick up. went down in the sig ep basement and found a brother and said, 'this is going to sound really weird but charlie stoebe asked me to pick up something for him in the npr?'. they trustingly (and stupidly) handed it over, no questions asked. i'm contemplating not giving it to him, as it has a lion on it with the phrase 'king of beverages' (aka dr. pepper). tbd.

met up with ceppity and her entourage at the hotel in lebanon, and then we all drove to woodstock for the pre-race community pasta dinner at the woodstock country club. if you have never been to woodstock i highly recommend as it is just adorable, beautiful and about as new england as it gets. post-dinner we had some time that we couldn't kill by playing pong or drinking, given the impeding race on sunda. this was a new one for us, and while we briefuly discussed some water pong ala the dry days of the crew team, we decided instead to play mini golf in quechee before a pit stop in hanover and off to bed.

sunday woke up to pouring rain. basically rained from the time we woke up until we were an hour down the highway towards nyc. fortunately while the rain was chilly before we started running, it was a good temp for running and i actually really like running in the rain. listened to my ipod, enjoyed the rustic vermont scenery, ran through a covered bridge and past two others. vin and mike were our ace cheerleaders and lugged our gear all around in the rain. there was a brutal hill at mile 8, and the last three miles were pretty painful, but all in all it was totally worth it and a lot of fun. i ran a 1:50, had been aiming for under 2 so it felt good to have a goal and accomplish it, even if i was not the most dedicated runner of the bunch. all around - a plus weekend.

in memoriam

today it came to my attention that facebook has gotten rid of groups. while this is only one instance of the all-to-frequent facebook changes annoying me, this one is kind of sad. while many of my group affiliations were not the most professional, i still felt like they said a lot about me. and many of them were downright accurate in the observational humor type way.

so on this day, i would like to take a moment to reflect on some of my former group affiliations. and as many of them were formed as an undergrad, take a little trip down memory lane.

i tried to ford the river but it snowed so i drank 15 keystones instead - in the category of well-played fb groups', harvard had come up with a throwback reference to the popular game of our youth 'orgeon trail' with a facebook group called 'i tried to ford the river but my fucking oxen died'. i got a really big kick out of this and was sitting around with maynard one day discussing and we came up with the dartmouth equivalent. the group description contained the phrase 'upset by this loss, we drank heavily', which i still love and use to this day.

guess what - i don't give a shit how much you drank last night - this one was linsalata's - i believe it was a reaction to the dartmouth self-call culture. yeah - we get it. you're so ragey and drink your face off. me too. we don't all need to hear about it, let's just run it back.

we need a 4th - an all too common occurrence at school. i was walking home to sd late night one night senior year and ran into a couple of '07s from psi u carrying a case of keystone over to sd to play pong. they needed a 4th, my most favorite thing in the world is late night pong, the group was created.

you know you go to dartmouth if . . . kind of self-explanatory, but it did chronicle all the things that make dartmouth unique. brainstormed with cody for a lot of the dartmouth indicators and then opened up the group and let the dartmouth network go to town.

sd beach - sigma delt has a great back porch that didn't used to have a roof over it. senior spring we spent a lot of time hanging out on the back porch, talking, tanning, drinking. it was just sheltered enough to make it 5-10 degrees warmer than the green and nobody cared if you were tanning in a bikini (except maybe the christian science monitor building across the street). after the '05s graduated we did a great usual suspects trip to puerto rico for some real sd beach time. many happy hours spent chilling on the sd beach.

lochness not-so-secret-anymore secret society - the '05 freshman crew team didn't always make the best choices and rosi, our crew coach, had to get us out of a lot of scrapes. but we did have a ton of fun. one of our less intelligent ideas was the 'lochness secret society'. we would meet at the oak tree at the top of the hill (i think there's a dorm there now) at midnight each sunday of freshman spring (read: april) and then go down to the boathouse docks and jump in the river. kind of like a polar bear jump, only nine 19-year-olds, in the dark, with no way to rescue each other if anyone needed rescuing. not our brightest idea, but it all turned out fine, and like most things - is a great story.

beruit sucks & pong should be a varsity sport - self explanatory

fins to the left, fins to the right and you're the only bait in town - a nod to the jimmy buffett fans on campus. there weren't a lot of them, but we did manage to get our sd soph summer shirts ('03X!) to be 'wasting away in sigma deltaville'. score one for parrotheads.

the babysister's club - one night senior year ceppos, cody and i were chattering away in my room in sd. boxa was attempting to sleep or study or something and shouted out that we sounded like we were having a meeting of the babysitter's club and needed to pipe down and the group was born.

i'm an honorary sigma delt - there were so many people that regularly hung out at sd that weren't technically sigma delts that we created this group and all the officer positions to recognize them. i think my favorite was the one laurak came up with for lauren brown: 'not a significant other but still allowed to know the doorcode'

when i was your age tubestock was a big weekend - created this group about the time the 'when i was your age pluto was a planet' groups were being created. tubestock, the soph summer big weekend, was prob one of the most dangerous things i've ever done, but a total blast. all the greek houses would build rafts and then take them down to the river and booze all day. everyone had inner tubes and keystone floating everywhere, but it was def dangerous. the chi gam raft was 4 pieces of wood attached in the middle, and if you stepped in the middle the thing snapped shut like a trap. the psi u raft flipped over with about 30 people on it. i def can't blame the town of hanover for canceling it, which they did after the '07s soph summer, but i know the younger classes missed out by not getting to experience it for themselves. nobody rages anymore.

camp firewood - this is the name of the camp in 'wet hot american summer' - which became a cult favorite of many dartmouth kids and a movie that laurak and i still love to quote today.

i'm an adoring fan of the doodad and mullet radio show - senior spring i attempted to increase my media experience at a liberal arts school by adding radio to my newspaper proficiency. i did a solo radio show on sundays (basically a recap of the weekend. the precursor to this blog methinks. kevin would blitz and tell me he was listening while cleaning his room. and one day i think i made all the rowers studying in the 1902 room crack up simultaneously), and dj'd the fm station 99 rock on thursday nights, and mulley and i ended up hosting a radio show on mondays. we would discuss issues of the day, try out many of the random cd's scattered all over the studio ('eli the barrow boy' anyone?) and goof around. we created this group to allow our fans to express their loyalty and keep them in the loop. it was a lot of fun.

and now - a moment of silence to remember the way we were: as undergrads and when facebook was 'only for smart schools'. ;-P

digital media dork

also, b/c i work in digital media and am a dork, two interesting websites if you're a social media dork and do twitter and/or foursquare:

1. tweet o'clock. tells you what time of day is the best time to tweet someone. check out charlie's prime tweet times here: http://tweetoclock.com/#chucksto.

2. when will i be mayor. find out when you'll become mayor of a location on foursquare. whenwillibemayor.com

have funnnnn!

thoughts on a wed afternoon

in no particular order:

kentucky fried kickin
the kickball season kicks off (haha - see what i did there?) tomorrow night. week 1's theme is 'proud to be an american'. as such, my kickball name for the week is '[first name] 'born in the usa' lyon'. we've also been picking out at-bat songs. i ultimately went with 'shipping up to boston', b/c the first 45 seconds are amazing, but i also considered 'crazy train' by ozzy osbourne, 'live is life' by opus (cue a dartmouth hockey game) and 'thunderstruck'. the other team should prepare to be intimidated.

these speakers go to 11
ditched work for the long weekend around 3 on friday and headed to 'channel 4' - the unofficial bar of our company (side note: how come this locale hasn't been featured on '30 rock'?). had a couple drinks with hearn and ece before heading back to our apt for some pong. in the cab on the way to the upper east side hearn confessed that he thinks my current ipod speakers suck and ruin his pong experience with static when the music gets turned up really loudly. so we whipped out his ipad, fired up amazon, and drunk purchased me some new speakers, which he now refuses to allow me to pay for b/c they are 'for his pong playing experience'. incidentally, i got my old speakers as an impulse purchase for $20 in line at tjmaxx and they've been damn good speakers all things considered, but i am pretty pleased to have the new ones.

working 9 - 5
i am also pleased to announce that i accepted a new job with a different division of my company! new team, new office, new role, new direction. i'm a whole bunch of emotions - slightly freaked that i did it, sad to be leaving my team, excited by the potential of the opportunity, scared by my new responsibilities, ready to leave and get on with it, etc. it's been awhile since i had to start a new job, but i'm ready for the change. start date is tbd, but most likely mid-june, and it means i get to take the week of the 4th off to be on the cape - wheeeeeee!

going the distance
psyched and ready for 80s prom on friday with a killer outfit. we're pregaming with an 80s powerhour and then it's off to the high school gym. good chance this will be significantly more fun than my actual prom, which i attended with my exbf. we didn't speak to each other most of the night. i also think this may be the closest we get to holding a formal in nyc.

sunday is the covered bridges half marathon, so vin and i are roadtripping up to nh/vt on sat for some hanover facetime and to meet up with ceppos and then the race is from woodstock to quechee on sun. eeeeeeeek!