Showers

This weekend is Bridal Shower Weekend. Tomorrow night I'm helping to throw a shower for Tiffany in South Carolina, and Saturday night I'm helping throw a shower for my friend Greta Lyn in Savannah. So this should be a fun, if not slightly hectic, weekend. I'm looking forward to it. I am a bit worried about the shower in SC though, because the girls helping out that live there are being very uncommunicative (I asked on Monday what time they wanted me to get there, and they still haven't told me a time. They even scheduled the shower for earlier than Tiffany's fiance can be there, so the guests of honor will be late to their own shower, all because these girls don't actually talk to anyone). So pray that I will be patient and make the best of the situation and not let any of this mess up Tiffany's party in any way... I really just want her to have fun.

Now the Savannah shower, no worries. Should be smooth sailing.

TV execs are starting to get it

A while back I rambled about how TV execs aren't taking advantage of the internet as another means to get their shows (and advertisements) seen, and instead are prosecuting people who pirate TV shows, treating them as a threat. Well, it seems like they're finally starting to get it - making TV shows available for download the day after they air (with commercials) or letting you purchase them on iTunes (without commercials). Gold star!

Goose Chase

This past weekend we were in Atlanta doing some PEZ filming, and stayed the night with Chris's brother, Sam. We had a great time, and since Sam lives on a farm, had some interesting "animal encounters" that definitely aren't the norm for two downtown Savannah residents. So I took a lot of pictures of the area where he lives. Along with just enjoying some peacocks, we held baby kittens (they haven't openned their eyes yet), some baby ducks, and I was chased by a (very viscious) goose. Here are some photos of our trip:

Sam lives is the little cottage in front of that horse stable.

The peacocks were right outside Sam's house and woke me up in the morning. The male was showing off for all the females and wasn't at all concerned that I was standing right next to him

These are the ducks we got to play with

This is the only photo I managed to take while I was actually being chased by the evil goose

This is the photo I tried to take when the evil goose was flapping his wings and yelling at me and trying to bite me and I was running away.

This is Sam with the magical power to chase the goose away with some secret goose-chasing-power that I certainly cannot harness. Sam had to keep him away so I could leave.

Chris on the farm

Aside from being attacked by an evil goose, we had a good time. It's always fun to hang out with Sam. And I love animals when they're not attacking me, so that was cool.

Rodents, rodents, everywhere!

We've got something (mice, rats, possums?) living under our tub and now in one of the walls of our apartment. We've put rat poison under the house, but I dunno how much good it will do. But they wake me up at night gnawing on the wall by my head, and make all sorts of weird noises in the space inside the tub molding.That's annoying enough (I keep waiting for them to finish a hole in the wall and run into my bedroom), but I'm in Vidalia this week, and last night at the house I stay in I heard something running around above my head. Maybe it's just some noisy bugs... but it didn't quite sound like it. But wait! There's more! I get to work this morning and I hear something scampering above my head in my office at work! At first I thought I MUST either be imagining something, or a bug was really loud in the flourescent lights, but it moved around too much and scampered too much to be a bug. Our super-cool maintenance guy Lucky came by with a ladder and stuck his head up there but he didn't see anything... so I'm just hoping he scared my critter away. Man, Georgia and their rodents.

We didn't have these problems in Florida. Pro'lly because of all the snakes. I miss reptiles.

please explain

I've recently (this week) been obsessed with the absurd popularity of myspace. Notice I didn't say I was obsessed with myspace, but rather I am struggling to understand why it is so darned popular that it is listed as the second-most-trafficked website, and generates a ridiculous amount of revenue.

So far all I've figured out from it is that I can talk to people that I already talk to on the phone, or via email. I mean sure, there's the potential to "reconnect with old friends" but frankly, all I see that as is a means to find them, message them, then move on to emailing or calling them. So why do people hang out on myspace all day and talk about how they're addicted to it, and tell people that a myspace account is about as important to life as an email address or a phone number? Why, why why?

I am most perplexed because I used get why certain things were popular online, being a child of the interet and an early adopter of email (before people knew what email was, I was running up bills on Prodigy when they had a 30-email-a-month limit that I didn't realize existed). So I feel a little out of touch that I can't figure out why it's so darned popular.

Explain, please.

Last NYC post - yummy food

So I think this is the last thing I promised to rave about from our trip to New York... the food. I think I will just have to say that I don't think I can ever enjoy Olive Garden again after eating Italian in Little Italy. I honestly didn't know that olive oil could taste so amazing... and their pasta tasted homemade (another thing I'd never had)... it was just so fresh and amazing, I couldn't believe it. And we found a great sushi place in the East Village that had 50% off all their sushi all the time, so we got to get fancier sushi than usual and still pay less than we would have getting boring sushi back home. Yum! We had a crazy experience at a chinese restaurant in Chinatown (no one spoke english, even our table-mates, and they gave us forks because we're white). And we had most fantastic Thai food in Soho. OOh! And bagels! The only place to get bagels in Savannah are Atlanta Bread Company and Panera... and they're $1 for a plain bagel... so we were excited to be able to walk a block or so in any direction and get bagels every morning... real bagels, not Sam's Club or Atlanta Bread bagels.

Really, pretty much every meal was yummy and fun and all we had to do any time we were hungry was pick a random part of town, ride a subway if necessary, then walk a couple blocks looking at all the available options until we picked one that looked yummy and affordable. The only time this failed us is when we were in Tribeca later at night and our only option was a mexican restaurant that served hamburgers and didn't speak english and closed at 9pm... we just barely got there in time.

So we're kind of sad to be back in Savannah where there's no such thing as good bread or good bagels. But we do have cheap japanese and good pizza within walking distance of our house, to at least we have that to console us. (I actually decided that I preferred pizza-by-the-slice at Vinnie Van Go-Gos in Savannah over the Official New York Pizza at Ray's Pizza and Bagels in the East Village... that surprised me). And we can get reasonably priced Thai downtown, too. And burgers. But I will forever miss the italian and the bagels, which are pointless to look for in Savannah (unless Angela is cooking for us... she makes some killer italian food. it's in her blood).

Fear in America

So there's a website out there where someone wrote instructions for how to make your own real-life Super Mario Blocks (you know, from Super Mario Brothers) and suggestions to hang them up around town in public spaces to bring smiles to people's faces. Being a child of the 80s I think it's great... I loved Super Mario Brothers! And a lot of people have made them and hung them up around their towns, as evidenced on the website that started it all.

Recently some high school girls created their own and placed them around their town in Ohio. And... people called the cops because they were afraid of the suspicious packages they saw. And the girls "turned themselves in" explaining that it was just for fun and meant no harm. But they still may face criminal charges because "The potential is always present when dealing with a suspicious package that it could be deadly," McCoy said. "In today’s day and age, you just cannot do this kind of stuff."

I don't know if I'm outraged at the ridiculousness of this situation and these police officers who think that pressing charges on teenages who didn't do anything wrong is the right thing to do, or if I'm just sad at the state of our nation that people are scared by powder residue left by doughnuts and shiny gift-wrapped boxes.

Andrea Zittel - Critical Spaces

One art show Chris and I saw while we were in NYC was Andrea Zittel's Critical Spaces show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. I'd learned about her in art school and thought she was pretty cool, but I just really fell in love with her work when I got to see a lot of it ... then I saw a HUGE book of her stuff at an art museum in town, and had a lot of fun looking at it, so I just wanted to share and point you in the direction of her website to learn about some new art going on. My best description of her work is that she is all about conserving space and minimalism... and considering my apartment is crammed full of my husband's stuff that he can't bear to part with, I tend to gravitate more and more towards the idea of minimalist living (considering it's something I'll never experience). She started her artwork while living in a 200 sq ft apartment in Boston, which I think is an understandable start to this kind of work. :)

Anyways, she's basically all about interior design and conservation and establishing order and organization... and she totally lives out all of these things that she creates as art... and I think it's pretty awesome... and that's about it.

Spring Forward!

If you're like me, and you don't pay attention to these kinds of things, and last fall you learned that the world had set their clocks back an hour when you looked at your cell phone and it said 10am instead of 11am and you realized you could have slept in, and no one at work sends out mass emails to remind you and your church newsletter ALSO doesn't remind you about this, then you definitely need me to tell you to SPRING FORWARD tonight... that's right, there will be no 2am on April 2nd, the world will automagically shift to 3am ... and your clocks should do the same, or else you will miss church or work or Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC... or whatever you do with your Sunday... until you check a computer or a cell phone and realize the time is different.

Of course, I learn almost every daylight savings day that EVERYONE but me and Chris inherently knows when these things happen, but NO ONE thinks it's necessary to remind anyone because they think everyone else inherently knows, as well (something about everyone but me watching the news or reading the newspaper?). So since this year I thought to check and set my calendar to remind me, I thought I would remind all of you, too, just in case it slipped past your magic radar.