It all started at the flea market

Leslie told me about how at the flea market this weekend she passed up the opportunity to buy new kids on the block trading cards (big mistake my friend).

So i did what all other girls of the 80's would do...wikipedia the nkotb just to see once again how cute they all are and to wonder where my nkotb tapes went. It was at this point when i clicked on the link to New Edition's wiki page. I glanced down the page and was reminded that bobby brown was a member of new edition. Could this bobby brown be the same one that later went on to beat whitney houston? Click. Yes, yes it could! But wait, how could this younger gentleman be with such an old lady who is AT LEAST as old as my parents? I figured there was at least a 20 year age difference. So of course I had to wiki her next. To my total shock I found out she was only born in 1963 and NOT in the late 40's like i had previously suspected.

Is my sense of age THAT off? so i looked up who else was born in 1963 and none of the others seem remotely as old as Whitney.
1.Steve Carell. Just hitting the prime of his career. Slightly older but not bad.
2. Greg Kennear. Ok neither here nor there
3. Johnny Depp. I knew he was in his 40's but only because i regularly look him up
4. John Stamos...my personal crush.
5. Only 3 years younger is Halle Berry.

CONCLUSION: how the hell did she age so poorly? But on the bright side she looks great for 60.

Cherry Blossoms galore and Interior decorators

If you've ever seen my apt you know I have a lame futon instead of a couch. I decided it was time to upgrade so we walked over to ethan allan where they have the couch I want. It is impossible to walk in that store without a sales person clinging to your side. So as much as I tried to not get help there he was, my "decorator". we went to pick the fabrics and he showed me the most dull grandma fabrics. I kept repeating that i wanted bright colors so he took one of the dull colors and walked me over to the window to show me its color in its "rarest" form...um what? sunlight is color's rarest form? whatever. this guy was a total db so I went across the street to crate and barrel and walked myself around the couches, picked out the one I wanted, then got some assistance finding the bright colors that I wanted. Such a better experience. Oh yeah I forgot to mention that my ethan allan guy also offered to come to my apt and help me decorate and coordinate the whole thing...not a chance i'm letting him near my stuff thanks!

Then Even though it was really cold we decided to brave the weather and see the cherry blossoms. it was worth it :) they are so pretty! Eventually I'll post pictures.

Darth Vader

Here is a Text Conversation that made me laugh between me and leslie yesterday:

I'm just casually hanging out at home making dinner with peter when-->

Leslie: I just found a rhinestone studded stormtrooper hoodie. its a mens xxl tho. would have gone perfect with your vader grills.

(Explanation: previously i had sent leslie a link to an ebay page full of mouth grills. This conversation later evolved into me wishing they had a darth vader themed grill that played the imperial march every time you opened your mouth)

Me: Holy S. Please tell me you bought that!

Leslie: Why is Star Wars Gangsta Now?

Leslie: I guess Darth Vader was the original gangsta.


Its true. Darth Vader was.

Baseball Season!

Its baseball season again which is pretty exciting. I saw some of the games earlier this week in Japan. Tuesday morning i got woken up to "WAKE UP WAKE UP BASEBALL IS ON TV!" Eventually I got up and watched some, but I am very happy that my boys (the redsox) are coming back to the US and either my exact timezone, or at least a timezone within reason.

In april I have tickets to see the sox at fenway which should be fun as always, and in the spring they are going to camden yards. I have tickets to one game there so far, but hopefully i'll go to more. so let me know if and when you want to go.

how one little disc can hurt my fingers so bad is beyond me

So the other night after work peter and i walked to the little park behind my apt to play a little frisbee before it got dark (got our frizz on as I like to say). After breaking all of my perfectly filed nails, the stupid plastic disc kept slamming into the ends of my fingers. I'm all for playing again, but next time I need a little protection.

I'm thinking these:

Hey there Sloopy

At Peyote during Karaoke...
Random Guy: Hey! is this Madonna?
Laura: um no, its sloopy.
Peter (under his breath): Guy, does that line ever work for you?


So I fully dislike ohio state. But I must say, they have the frickin coolest school song! I dont know what sloopy is, but its a great song, and spelling the state in it is just fun. I wish I went to a school with a cool song like that. All i have is hail to the buff, hail to the blue, hail to the buff and blue. all our lives we'll be proud to say, we hail from GW, go big blue.....BORING

Basketball and Russel Crowe

Sat Laura took me to the Verizon center for two awesome basketball games. First we got to see Duke lose to west Virginia, and then Xavier beat Purdue. Clearly I enjoy watching duke lose, and I was rooting for A-10 Xavier since they are the only ones left representing our division.

Then that night we all went to Mackey's, and took the metro and walked (i rarely do that). As we walked down the street we noticed some weird trucks and a big light in the air. As we got closer peter noticed a sign that said "Washington Globe", wait, thats not real is it? no, no its not. We looking in one of the trucks in the area and it had something that said "state of play". When we left we were asked to wait on one corner while they filmed some things. We looked over at where the main filming was taking place (not just the background actors or taxis) and we noticed that Russel Crowe was there! Too bad we didn't see Jason Bateman who is also in that movie :(

The nationals hate thier handicapped fans....

unless they are willing to shell out 35 bucks for parking...more than the cost for many tickets I might add.

I'm surprised there isn't more of an outrage over this. My guess is people don't realize yet. I was thinking about it though, there isnt really anything people can do. We are helpless to the nationals and dc. If you wrote someone, would anyone seriously do anything? not a chance!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/19/AR2008031903112.html

One Ring to Rule them All...or is it the power of the force?

so I finally bought Clerks II. As most of you know I'm a really big Kevin Smith fan to the point where i've even watched the terrible and gross movie "vulgar" just because Kevin was the executive producer (i don't recommend that). This also means that at one point or another I have now owned every major Kevin Smith Movie except the first Clerks (a few got stolen).

Anyway Clerks II is hilarious, I especially like the nerdy and innocent employee...which brings me to my beef with the movie. Elias is a Lord of The Rings fan while Randal is a Star Wars fan. This is a major point of contention between them. As peter points out there is a general stereotype that people can only like ONE trilogy, and strongly dislike the other. Why cant you like both trilogies? Personally I love both trilogies and wouldn't put down the other (although i like randal's imitation of the lotr trilogy where they are just walking the whole time). So i'm writing it here officially and definitively. love for the trilogies are NOT mutually exclusive.

WTF is the deal with poppy seeds?

So yesterday I decided that i'd make these good poppy seed cookies (hamentashen actually) that i found a recipe for online. The filling is entirely poppy seeds, honey, and raisins.

Not too hard right?

I went to wegman's during lunch since it was a dulles day. Three of us scoured the grocery store looking for poppy seeds only to find some small and expensive white poppy seed baggie (i'd need 2 or 3). I then asked an employee who informed me that they do not sell black poppy seeds.

Next was to Whole Foods where I ran into Chris who also helped me look. I checked the grain isle where they had buckets of sesame seeds and similar things, and the baking isle...no poppy seeds to be found.

WTF its not like this is a rare ingredient! What about lemon poppy seed cakes? Lots of people make them! infact the Ear cake on ace of cakes was made of that right here in baltimore, so I know poppy seeds must be somewhere!

I've given up for now, but might try safeway if i become ambitious again. not likely

Rachel Net

I'm pretty proud of myself. I set up my wireless in my apt. I didnt want to spend 200 bucks to buy the mac brand airport so I bought a linksys which doesnt support macs but I set it up anyway.

My only problem right now is that I cant seem to set a password on it, so basically everyone in my building can hack into rachelnet right now.

I'll give it a few more shots because I have some ideas. but If i dont get the password working by the weekend....well I dont think I have any other options so I guess i'll just keep going as is.

Now i'll be back to being online a lot, so if you want to ichat or video ichat with me or video confrence ichat lets go for it!

wow please ignore how geeky this blog was.

Another Movie

So last night I watched Indiana Jones the raiders of the lost ark for the first time. Overall I liked it and will watch the next two, plus the newest one when it comes out. I had two major complaints though (besides the little things that didnt hold up to the test of time)

1. The Snakes. I was told that there weren't that many snakes and I wouldn't see too much of them and it wouldn't be too bad. It was bad. Very Bad. I didn't know if i wanted to puke or cry and ended up just closing my eyes and hoping it would go away. It was probably the worst snake involvement in any movie besides Snakes on a Plane and Anaconda, both of which I clearly didn't see.

2. I feel like the ending was kinda a cop out. I wanted Indy to kick ass and kill the bad guys. ***spoiler*** (if there happens to be one other person who hasnt seen it) Instead they just open the stupid box and G-d comes out and melts everyone's face off. I mean thats great and everything, but dont you think that at the time of the Nazis G-d had a little more to worry about than the minions of the big head honcho? I feel like if those powers were released into the world they could have done better and let indy take care of these guys.

The Greatest Car Ever

I keep meaning to blog about this, and i dont think I have, but if i did I apologize.

So there is this amazing car that I see a minimum of once a week. Its a fairly new white Nissan maybe an 06 or 07. Its always parked up on capitol hill area.

Inside the car are 3 life size white tiger stuffed animals and 3 or 4 smaller ones. Its a whole family of white tiger stuffed animals. They are all across the back seat and one stretches up the middle to the front seat.

I haven't even gotten to the best part. Every single one of the tigers is wearing a redskins ear warmer.

One day I saw this car driving, and the man in the driver seat had his arm around the tiger that goes up to the front seat, and he was petting the tiger as he drove.

Wow. I wonder what this guy's apartment is like!

My new Computer

So it Finally arrived last night! My macbook pro. Sleek. Silver. Fast. It works so much better than my other computer running vista. Its not even funny how much faster it is. I have been a pc girl my whole life, and adamantly against mac's untill vista came out. but there is no choice now. Its ok, i've gone over to the dark side and its not all that bad.

I had been tracking the package all day, and it arrived at 12:21 pm, and I left work early and got to the front desk at 5 to ask for my package. They told me in the 5 hours it was sitting there they didnt have time to sort it and couldnt give it to me and could i wait. WHAT? I told them I couldnt wait and they needed to find it. 20 min later they finally looked for it and now Its all mine.

I have transfered over all my photos and half my music and I set up ichat and all those fun things. If you have a mac lets video confrence! Leslie already vetoed that...but it will happen...someday.

Vegetate

Last night a small group of us went to try a new restaurant called Vegetate. Its a vegetarian restaurant. Diana and I were pretty excited to try it, but the boys were more than skeptical. The weird thing about this place was the location. It is located at 1414 9th street, which if you dont recognize the address its pretty much between the 9:30 club and the convention center in a totally dead area with nothing around it...but plenty of parking.

I started with a Chai, soy, and vodka cocktail. That alone was enough to convince me to go back. Best drink ever! but really small.

For appetizers we had a cheese plate, also really small, but again really yummy. Then for the main meal I got blue Cheese skillet cakes which were DELISH! (but small as well) . All the other dishes looked good too so I'll definitely go back to this place.

The only thing is that the desserts were terrible. TERRIBLE. They all sounded a little weird, but we decided to try them anyway. One came with a mound of Chocolate Ganoche on some lime puree surrounded by balsamic vinegar. The lime puree was the grossest thing ever! i cant even describe it. Diana got one with white cakes with a hint of lavendar and a shot of some ginger liquid. gross.

The prestige

Sorry that my blog seems to be turning into a movie review site, but after my controversial blog yesterday I feel like I should blog positively about some movie.

Last night we watched the Prestige. I had wanted to see it when it first came out but never made it, and it was on some movie channel last night. This movie was pretty awesome.

Whats better than a little Magic, Mystery, and Murder? Seriously! Oh yeah and it had some awesome movie science that may or may not be remotely close to real :) The characters were lovable yet awesomely evil and corrupt. At parts of the movie you were rooting for both sides to achieve different things.

This quickly moved up into the top three Christian Bale movies:
1. Newsies
2. Batman Begins
3. The Prestige

And for those of you who no longer trust my movie opinion after bond and there will be blood (probably mainly leslie) Peter also liked this movie for what thats worth.

Oddly enough I dont know anyone else who has seen the movie. have any of you? If not you should probably go watch it.

Do I look like the kind of person who cares?

So I watched Casino Royale this weekend. It was my first Bond movie ever. First off I think the guy that plays bond is a little lame and fake. I dont buy/like him at all. I mean the guy who PLAYS bond is super hot, I could go for him, but Bond...meh.

Second I knew that Bond drove some sweet Aston Martins etc and was looking forward to some great driving scenes. Besides literally driving around the corner, and one two second car wreck the only driving scene occurred in a Ford Mondeo. WTF

Third...where were the gadgets? The only gadgets he used were cell phones, tracking devices, and a defibrillator. LAME.

Fourth the story left a lot to be desired. I like movies where you are thinking the whole movie and trying to figure out the puzzle. With this movie you didnt really do that.

I probably wont ask to see any more bond movies, but i'd go along to another one and give it a second chance.

Blog Comments

I hate when you read big blogs like wwtdd or obama's blog and after the article instead of just commenting the first commenter claims his or her spot with "yes! 1st!" so everyone knows and then they can leave thier actual comment.

I think i'm going to start doing this on the blogs where I am one of the few commenters, even if i'm not first. Probably mostly on Joe's because I think i'm the only commenter there so its even more amusing to me.

Super Mario Galaxy

So for about a month now we've been playing super mario galaxy on the Wii. I try my best at each level, get frustrated, and hand over the controller and the level is beaten.

For any of you that dont have this game or a wii, its a two player game, and while the second player doesn't control mario, they play a very important role in holding off bad guys and collecting star bits. So When I play the second player I feel like I can take some amount of credit in beating the level.

There are 120 level exits each resulting in a star, and 120 stars beats the game. Or so I was told.

Well after 90 stars we were given the opportunity to play the final level. The first half of the level took a few tries, but the bad guy was beaten on the first try!

Roll Credits.

So we've beaten the game, saved the princess, and now returned to the original map to get the final 30 stars. There are two weird things about this, 1. all the characters still tell us to help save the princes...how did she get caught again? We totally saved her. 2. there are new levels that we couldn't access before, so i guess you have to beat the game twice in order to get all 120 stars.

Oh also, the end of the game tries to be all deep. You beat the bad guy, his star implodes and with it sucks in the rest of existance, but they explain that every time a star dies new stars are born carrying with it parts of everything before and then dumps you out in a higher resolution world that resembles earth. So this game is attempting to be both deep and scientifically accurate at the same time. interesting.

F- You Parking Signs and new Nats Stadium

So I read online maybe a week ago that there were going to be new parking restrictions for the area around the new Nationals Stadium.

I figured that not only would they wait till baseball season to impliment it, but also it would only be in effect on game day.

WRONG.

Last night I got to the area, and tried to park. To my dismay all the signs were new. One side of the street was resident parking only until midnight, and the other side was two hour parking till midnight.

I found 10 spots (i counted) that are 9:30-6:30 like a million blocks away. All the rest are 7Am-midnight.

Seriously? I basically can no longer get there before 10 if i want to try for half the street, and if i cant find parking there i guess i just have to wait till midnight to go to the other side of the street. F- that. I'm staying home.

mint brownie phenomenon

So the cover of cooking light this month has some amazing looking mint brownies on it. I promptly cut out the recipe and stuck it in my purse to make.

Later, chatting with laurie in MN I found out she had seen them too, and we decided to wait and make them together when she came to DC. Then I got an email from Leslie that she also had cut it out and already made them and they are fabulous.

This same thing happened a minimum of 10 more times. I dont know what it is about mint brownies, but I'd say its safe to say this is probably the highest selling cooking light ever!

So tonight Laurie and I are making them. I am beyond excited. So if you want to try them you can try some of mine :) Just let me know.

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1714574

Caps VS Bruins

Tim Thomas Saves Nothing!

You might recall from last year I blogged about some crazy bruins fans cheering things like "tim thomas saves lives"....Well this year they had the most pathetic loss ever to the caps.

I guess there is a promotion where if the Caps get 6 Goals everyone in attendance can get a free lb of wings at austin grill. I saw that sign and laughed, its pretty rare for a hockey game to score that high. almost impossible i said.

Moments later I wished I had kept my mouth shut. With a final score of 10-2 We sure got our free wings.

Also there is this segment during the second intermission called "up close with the caps" where they follow some players off the ice to some day time activity. This time 4 of them took a segway tour (like my parents did when they visited). They started to get cocky, and green decided to weave around some planters...and hit one dead on and fell over. it was hilarious. They replayed it like 5 times and then flash to ugly, but hat trick earning ovetchkin laughing hard.

Despite the loss for my hometown boys it was a good game.

Stupid Rite Aid

Sunday night we were meeting some of my college friends at ben's chili bowl for dinner, but arrived a little early and decided to kill some time by going to rite aid.

I picked up some hair clips and got in line where we kinda hugged a bit, but nothing inappropriate by any means. Its my turn and the guy at the registrar tells us to get a room!

Flash back a couple months and this was the same rite aid that had kicked out a gay couple for hugging in their store resulting in a planned "hug-in".

Turns out they are equal opportunity jerks. At least Peter and I didn't get kicked out though.