February 19, 2009 | Filed under: I Write About My Feelings, People I Like Even More Than My Job

Normally I take the occasion of Valentine’s Day to write a snarky piece about love lost. Or hours of my life lost on dates with tragically, hysterically, so totally the wrong people for me. It’s a little harder to bring the funny this year, so I’m going to go the mushy route instead.

“Thus endeth the boy,” I e-mailed Sean, back in December. He’d heard weekly, if not daily, reports of our ups and downs and moments of sheer idiocy. It just seemed right that he’d be the first to know things were over. Not a minute later, just long enough for my e-mail to hit the server and be fired off to his BlackBerry, did my phone ring. Not a text, not an e-mail in kind, a phone call: ”I’m sorry, babe.  He’s a moron.”

Never in my life has anyone appeared so sexy.

(Yes, Sean’s quite a catch.  His girlfriend concurs with this assessment.)

Thanks to Sean and Pia and Lori and K and Chrystal and everyone who bears with me as I rant about stupid boys and the stupid things they do. As long as I’ve got you in my life, I really don’t need anyone else.

January 2, 2009 | Filed under: It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It., People I Like Even More Than My Job

This pretty well sums up my night: ten hours of champagne. No, I have no idea how many glasses that is. Yes, my “night” started mid-afternoon. Stop looking at me like that.

I somehow ended up with zero group shots on my camera, despite having posed for many, many of them. But I totally won the battle of dueling cameras — Neal’s picture was my blurry hand holding the camera.

This is the drink of choice for my drinking buddy running partner Scott. I won’t touch it, but I can order one like a pro. (Bombay martini, dirty, up. Unspecified number of olives, unless the first drink comes with too many, and then the proper number is one.)

There I am. In a funny hat. My work here is done.

And as long as I’m showing you pictures, here’s the collage of photos from Prague I put in my Christmas New Year’s letter. Which reminds me, I’ve got roughly 345,762,303,957 more pics from that trip to edit and upload before I take another vacation. Drat.

December 22, 2008 | Filed under: It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It., People I Like Even More Than My Job, The Fam

Every weekday morning I wake up and think, “Fuck.”  It’s either “fuck, I can’t believe how tired I still am” or “fuck, I can’t believe how much work I have to do today.”  During these first few minutes, I have a crucial decision to make:  get up and go into work early (thus reducing some of my stress) or get up and go to the gym (a more effective stress-reducer, but less productive on the work front)?  Or say screw it, and go back to bed for another hour?  (I can tell you which choice hasn’t been selected much lately.)

On the weekends, I’m presented with a slightly different challenge. I generally don’t set the alarm, so I don’t generally complain about how tired I am on those days.  Instead, I lie in bed plotting what I’m going to do first. Go for a run! Clean the house! Go to church! Do laundry before other people are up! Go to Target before other people get there! Go to work before other people park near there! I’m a morning person, you see, and I know that prioritizing something at the beginning of my day means it absolutely, 100% will get done, which is why I’m up this morning telling you this – because my evening is already booked.

I don’t think I’ve been this excited to go home for Christmas since freshman year of college when Christmas break meant clean laundry and no homework and lots of time spent catching up with my high school friends. I’ve probably packed as many clothes for the game tonight as for the entire rest of the time I’ll be home over the holidays. Look, it’s an OUTDOOR EVENT in CHICAGO in DECEMBER — not exactly a balmy proposition. Not to mention that it’ll be NIGHTTIME and therefore even colder. The good news is, Emily and I went to the Ravens-Redskins game in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago and froze our asses off had a great time, so I’m well prepared for this endeavor. Sort of. If anything can prepare one for four hours in single degree temperatures mere feet from an inland ocean.  Look for me on ESPN — I’ll be the girl in the pink ski jacket trying everything she can think of to avoid turning into an icicle, including but not limited to dreaming about her nice, warm bed.

Yes, we are wearing two hats each. And two shirts. And two jackets.

August 13, 2007 | Filed under: Is She Still Talking?, People I Like Even More Than My Job

I haven’t been home since six o’clock this morning. I spent the last five hours talking almost non-stop at two different bars. My dinner consisted of several pints of beer and some onion rings.

It’s the best I’ve felt in months.

July 2, 2007 | Filed under: It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It., People I Like Even More Than My Job, The California Adventure

Pop quiz: One of us left the mall Saturday with four new pairs of shoes. Was it me? Keep reading for the answer.

This weekend marked a milestone in my excursions to San Francisco. (Yes, I went to San Francisco. Again. For the second time in three days. Good thing my friends are worth it!) Even more noteworthy than my spending entirely too much money on a dress — a dress for work, no less, not even a dress for fun — was that this was The Time I Finally Figured Out How to Get Around the City.

Previously, I’d gotten directions, arrived at a specific place and then did whatever I was there to do — attend a meeting in X building, stay in Y hotel, meet people at Z location — but I had very little sense of how points X, Y and Z related to each other. This weekend, though, was the breakthrough. I get it now! I know (roughly) which neighborhood is which and how to navigate among them for like eight whole neighborhoods. I know this leaves much more of the city to be explored, but I’m just happy to finally figure out which way is north. (Hint: it is not the direction of the Bay Bridge, where you came from.)

The world of public transportation though…well, I’m going to stick with either (a) walking or (b) blindly following someone else. That’s not entirely true. I managed to successfully navigate my cable car trip, and I think I can handle the bus. Sort of. But the actual Muni? Definitely employing the sheep methodology. To all you baseball fans attending the All-Star Game/festivities this week, I say: Good luck. And please don’t ask me for directions.

We pause now for some rampant consumerism before I continue with the story-telling.

The dress, um, is apparently not available anywhere on the Internet. It is like this dress, only black and has pockets on the hips and khaki detail stitching around just about everything (collar, cuffs, belt, pockets, vertically along the column of buttons). I love it, but it makes me cringe a little because once upon a time, two dress sizes ago, I owned a very similar dress from Ann Taylor Loft. Which probably cost a third of what this dress does. And I may very well have choked on that price. Sigh. (I miss the dress, but not the dress size.)

(Clickety-click for larger pictures.) I am not 100% sold on the above dress, because the detail stitching, while making the dress interesting, also makes it very memorable and limits its functionality. I may trade it in for this (more boring versatile) one instead.

Feel free to weigh in. Nordstrom will be happy to process my return/exchange.

That concludes today’s commercial message. We return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Day One: Shopping extravaganza. If you guessed that I was the one with all of those new shoes, bzzzzzzzzz. Not this time.

Day Two: Giants vs. Diamondbacks, followed by the Fillmore Jazz Festival. Photographic evidence:

Willie Mays, Giants legend.
Please ignore the disembodied heads at the bottom of the frame. After all, that’s what I did.

Spanking of the D-backs. Please note that the score is 8-0 in the top of the 6th.

I didn’t think it could be worse than the beatdown the A’s delivered to the Yankees earlier in the day,
but the Giants won this one 13-0.

Jazz. Kinda loses something in photographic form.

So that was San Francisco, where the sun shines every once in a while but it never gets above 70. I’m getting the hard sell about coming back for the Fourth, but I don’t know if I can stomach the thought of wearing long sleeves to the beach. In July.

What are your plans for tomorrow?