smarty pants

earlier this week i had dinner with a bunch of really smart people.

sometimes i do pretty well in that particular situation, but this time it was a disaster. i just felt so out of it and non-interesting and un-smart and ended up hiding the whole night behind a diet coke with lime and a few lame jokes.

blech.

and then, the next day, i went to pick up my mail at uncle bob's and this is pretty much all that was waiting for me.





and then last night i read a few pages of this before i went to bed.



and then i thought, maybe that explains it?

musicology

on saturday jaron and i made the trek out to merriweather post pavilion in maryland to see vampire weekend.

everyone told us that going to merriweather post pavilion was a total pain. that it would take forever to drive out there, that parking was a nightmare, that no matter what we did we would be walking along dusty paths for miles to get to the amphitheater and that basically it would be the worst nightmare of our lives. but, you know, have a good time!

i didn't see how it could be that bad. i mean, people still go there, after all. and the web site has directions to the venue from space. so i figure if you can get there from space in a reasonable amount of time, you can certainly get there from northern virginia.

turns out all those people made it seem approximately 1 kajillion times worse than it was. or maybe they just have bad luck. because we got there in record time, were directed to a sweet sauce parking spot, and spent the rest of the night dancing our heads off in perfect evening weather to a band for which my love only grows.

and, just to seal the fate of our magical evening, we made a list of six songs we wanted to hear them play and (drum roll, please) they played all of them! that has never happened to me before! every single one. you could attribute this to the fact that vampire weekend has only put out two albums. or you could attribute it to magic. i prefer the latter.

one of our favorites, here.

then last night we made the trek to the 9:30 club to see janelle monae. if you are not listening to janelle monae right now this very second, you are making a big mistake. and her live show is a wonder to behold. crazy strobe lights, a dude in a top hat, catchy catchy tunes (that lady can wail!) and superhuman dancing. if you are wondering whether the goal of my current hip hop dance training regimen is to be able to move like this, the answer is a resounding yes. check it out here and here. (the second clip is a little on the long side but so, so worth it.)

(sidenote: has anyone else noticed that practically every video on youtube has embedding disabled these days? what is that about?)

i am not usually one to have near-religious concert-going experiences, but this was pretty dope. i sort of never wanted it to end. and, luckily, thanks to the residual ringing in my ears, the party is still going on. care to join me?

light up my life

as you may or may not recall, EH and i have had a long-running dining room light dilemma.

because, as you may or may not recall, we suspended a bunch of paper globes from the ceiling to a) cover a truly atrocious light fixture and b) distract from our truly atrocious ceiling tiles, the only unfortunate outcome of this project being that one of the paper lanterns rested directly on the light bulbs that were left bare by the removal of the aforementioned truly atrocious light fixture. and turns out paper on top of a lightbulb is a hazardous combination. we polled all of our house guests for possible solutions, with the grand prize for the best solution being the chance to implement that solution for us, but oddly enough no one was really jumping at the chance to rewire our entire dining room, so we decided to take matters into our own hands.

the solution, we decided, was the remove the original lightbulbs all together, pretend as if the trappings of the aforementioned atrocious light fixture did not exist, and go with corded bulbs instead. the bulb could hang in the center of the globe, safely away from the flammable paper, and we could put the aforementioned atrocious ceiling tiles to good use by running the light bulb cords through the tiles, safely out of sight, and then discreetly down the wall to the outlet.

so, to review. the plan was: hang bulbs in the center of three of the globes. string the cords inside the ceiling, out of sight and out of mind. run the cords down the corner wall to the outlet. bask in glorious, artificial light.

{pause. i just sat here for five minutes playing through in my head that scene from mixed nuts when they are trying to decide what to do with stanley tenenbaum's body and felix proposes a two-step plan and phillip freaks out and says, "well, that's not really a plan, felix. a plan has to have more than two steps. a plan has to go, 'first we do this, and then we do this, and then we do this.'" i love that scene.}

this turned out to be easier planned than done. not because of any flaw in the plan, necessarily, but mostly because our arms are not 15 feet long and we could only shove the cord through the ceiling so far and then we would have to sort of guess how far the cord had made it and take down a bunch of tiles until we found it and then push it from there and rinse and repeat until the cord made it all the way to the corner. you might be interested to know that the space between the tiles are and the actual ceiling is big enough to fit my whole head. i know this from experience.

in the meantime, every time we popped out a tile, a steady stream of shards of sheetrock and other building materials would come raining down on our heads, dining room table and carpet. some of it also fell right down my shirt, a little surprise i discovered when i changed into my pajamas later that night. the fact that a dead bird or something even more disgusting didn't also fall out is proof that god lives and loves us.

it took us almost two hours. but, the happy ending of the story is that we did it! all by ourselves! and now, not only do we have cool paper globes hanging from our dining room ceiling, we also have lights in our dining room and our house will not burn down when we turn them on.

win, win, win.

stealthy, like a fish

as i mentioned earlier this week, i have a new computer. a brand-new macbook pro, to be exact. and why not be exact about these things? she is slim and sleek and shiny and sharp and i am fairly confident she has the moves and attitude of a ninja. so i named her stealthy stella.

also, she sings when you turn her on.

unfortunately, ninjas are masters at secrets, and i haven't been able to get stella to give up the goods on how to download photos from my camera so my scintillating recaps of the weekend jaunt to philadelphia by way of gettysburg will have to wait.

in the meantime, perhaps you might enjoy this scintillating article about a weekend vacation at a nudist camp? (not my vacation, of course.) or maybe you'd enjoy this SNL sketch with christopher walken? it's one of my favorites.

very good, then.

citywide rodeo

the first thing i would like you to know is that i am composing this post on my brand-new macbook pro. that is right. my apple conversion is complete and i have a feeling my entire life is going to be revolutionized. get ready.

the second thing i would like you to know is that the downtown crew has voted to change their name. they will now be known as the red line crew. it was determined that this was a more accurate nomenclature, even though sarah points out that it is also code for yuppie a-hole. which is so ridiculous because those kids are not yuppies.

see what i did there? joke! because they are not a-holes either.

the third thing i would like you to know is that the maryland state fair is a place where all your dreams will come true. it surpassed my absolute wildest expectations and i could not have asked for more, from a fair or from anything or anyone else, really.

even though i swore, after my other recent fair experience, that i would not gorge myself on artery-clogging food, i just couldn't walk away from a corn dog, or roasted corn or french fries or sips of everyone else's highly sweetened lemonade or pinches of cotton candy, and i certainly couldn't pass up the holy grail of fair food, the deep-fried snickers bar, which was one of the most delicious things i have ever tasted. truly. i recommend sharing a deep-fried snickers bar, though. it is really too much for one person to handle.

sarah also got a turkey leg, which we are pretty sure was actually ham. we are also pretty sure it was approximately the size of heather's head.

then there was pig racing, skee ball, the ferris wheel and the swings, which were just as fun as i remember them being when i was a kid.

and then, to top it all off, we watched a calf be born! yep. we totally saw a cow birth. it was incredible and so exciting and not at all gross. i sort of loved it.

i did not love that the woman sitting in front of us, also witnessing the cow birth, was eating a hamburger. seriously. you can't make that stuff up.

the only thing we missed was the justin bieber concert, which went down the next day. but, like i need another underage crush, so probably just as well.

i must admit that, after such a magical day, i was worried regular life would seem dull and uninspired.

but then i figured, it's nothing a little something deep-fried can't cure.

i'll pay you a dollar to come up with a name for this post

turns out i didn't need to worry about summer coming to a crashing halt with the first day of september because it is still a million degrees outside. so that's pretty awesome. (not awesome.) i think i am best suited to living in a place where there is only fall and spring weather. if you know of such a place, please enlighten me.

the evenings are getting pretty nice and cool, though, so last night andrew (codename: AWD) and i waited until the sun went down and then rode our bikes to del ray for some frozen custard at the dairy godmother. riding my bike to del ray is my new favorite thing to do. and frozen custard from the dairy godmother is my new favorite thing to eat. del ray is also a surprisingly happening place on a thursday night. you should ride your bike over and check it out.

in work-related news, i am on a new project these days and have been working a few days a week out of a different office. the only downside of this arrangement is that there is no desk for me there, so i am sharing a cubicle with my co-worker, paul. literally, we sit in the same cubicle. it's sort of like a clown car. no one can get in and out without the other person also getting in and out, and when one of us swivels our chair, the other person's chair gets swiveled, too. it is sort of amazing. the upside of this arrangement is that paul e-mails me links to thinks like ninjabread men cookie cutters. i feel like i need these and, why yes, my birthday is coming up.

in three-day-weekend-related news, i think it is shaping up to be a pretty good one. i have to stick around to teach relief society on sunday, but tomorrow the downtown kids and i are heading to the maryland state fair (because if there is one thing i can't get enough of it's fairs) and then becky the wise and i are going to drive to philadelphia for the day on monday, fingers crossed. i have been wanting to do that pretty much ever since i moved here, so i am pretty stoked that it looks like it will finally work out. if you have anything favorite things to do in philly, let me know. at this point my plan is to watch "national treasure" the night before and then do my best to recreate that itinerary. which i think is totally realistic.

i'll let you know how it goes. happy weekend, all!

summerend

it feels like some sort of mean trick that tomorrow is the first day of september, because i definitely feel like we are still at the beginning of summer. where did it go? and what the heck have i been doing? it remains something of a mystery, and a very unsettling one at that.

but, upward and onward we go and so i am trying to squeeze everything out of summer that i can. this weekend that meant starting off with a nationals game thanks to emily h. and NPR. none of our favorite radio personalities were on hand, but we did get awesome NPR baseball caps, and rebecca had her first ever ben's chili bowl chili dog, and i took the plunge and got the half smoke "all the way" (the same one obama orders, fyi), and even though the nats lost they hit a home run and stole home on a wild ball the catcher lost hold of, which might have been one of the most exciting things i have ever seen happen in a baseball game. maybe i jumped up and down and shouted until my throat hurt. maybe. plus, there were fireworks. and you know how we love fireworks at baseball games.













saturday athelia and i rode our bikes to the del ray farmers' market which was a pure slice of heaven, and we both got bold and bought a sprite melon. have you ever heard of such a thing? it's a cross between a honey dew and a pear (!) and it is pretty darn tasty.

then it was pool time (my first this summer. a crime!) and then shopping, dinner and a movie in bethesda with emily. we saw "get low" and we would recommend it.

and now i wish i had been doing all of those things all summer long. maybe it will stick around a little longer?