Pop some popcorn, open the blinds and set up shop. This parking lot is free entertainment!

Unless you are living under a rock, you know that the northeast got hit with some snow this weekend.  A LOT of snow.  FEET of snow in fact.  And while this amount of snow is known to lead to entertainment in NYC, it didn’t do too poorly outside Philly either.

I live in an apartment complex with a first-come first-park policy.  No saved spots, no designations, no garages (at least not for free).  This, as I’m sure you can imagine, leads to some interesting viewing during the snow.  My apartment setup conveniently allows for easy viewing of the chaos.  My couch faces my balcony which faces the parking lot.  Now, because I am a very interesting person, I can tell you that I spent hours and hours this weekend watching the action (and in all fairness, I keep the blinds open most days anyway–I like to keep an eye on Conan and watch what goes on in our parking lot.  I’m so super cool and not at all closing in on the years when I sit on my porch and yell at those darn kids to stay off of my lawn).

So the first thing that I noticed about the impending storm was that we suddenly had a lot more traffic in our lot.  A Land Rover that neither Boo or I have ever seen before set up camp on Thursday night.  And they managed to park in ONE of TWO branch-less spots.  The great thing about my apartment is that there are trees all around it.  I love seeing trees.  They don’t have a lot of those in NYC and what trees they DO have are basically sequestered into parks and parks alone.  The bad thing about these trees is that the branches hang over the parking spots.  Sap in the fall, bird poop from the occasional little birdy who stops by and perches up there, those elements are annoying, yes, but not lethal.  Snow, however, makes things a little more risky.  Snow weighs down branches which, under enough weight, snap and land right on poor little Conan’s head.  This hasn’t happened yet and it’s something I work to avoid so I do whatever I can to get the branch-less spots.  These stupid parking lot invaders make this task a little more difficult.

And then there’s the weird driving habits.  All this weekend people were driving around down below.  And not ONE OF THEM WAS DRIVING FORWARD!  Every single person went through this parking lot in reverse.  They backed into the parking lot and they backed out the parking lot.  What’s with all the reversing here, huh?  Is this a snow driving technique that they only teach in Eastern PA?  I’d love to delve further into the potential scientific benefits of only driving in reverse but…well…I don’t really think there are any.  Mainly due to the fact that Boo got backed into at a stop sign on Monday.  Most people don’t even STOP at stop signs and yet Boo gets slammed in the front!  Maybe we should focus on driving forward from now on, yes?

But the biggest reason to keep the blinds open, scouting out the parking lot, are the other inhabitants of said lot.  Ignoring the invaders, there are some regulars who pose a little threat to our cars.  First, there is White Mustang Guy.  I HATE White Mustang Guy.  For about 5 weeks, WMG parked next to me or Boo every single chance he got.  I wouldn’t care so much about this except that White Mustang Guy is a Manhattan export with attitude to boot and every time he parks he flings his door open all willy-nilly and it  flys right into MY car!  My passenger side (since I used to nab the corner spot to save at least one side of my car from just this type of thing) is just “ding ding ding ding ding” all down the side.

And as if White Mustang Guy isn’t enough of a hazard we have the little French kids to deal with.  The kids in this complex are a little weird as it is; they run around here alone, at weird times of the day, never an adult in site.  It’s all very strange.  But the little French kids are the strangest of the strange.  They play in the parking lot.  With the parking lot.  The cars are their hiding places, their “base”, their jungle gym.  So on Saturday afternoon when I saw a head pop up over the hill, I jumped up to get a closer look.  And sure enough, it was le petit garcon Francais, sliding down the hill annnnnd blam.  Landing on the hood of my car.  AWESOME.  After he landed he took of the liberty of brushing the snow off of my hood.  With his scratchy little kid gloves.  And then he moved onto Boo’s car.  Zut.  That was enough for me.  Boo has already had his mirror broken (and Boo is a car guy so he knows that it wasn’t broken by a car but by a person–either a bump at the train station or un petit set of hands) and I didn’t feel like adding any more damage.  So I got up and asked him if he wouldn’t mind not playing near our cars.  He obliged and scampered off.  Until Boo went out to shovel.  He had dug out his own car and was working on Conan when the little French kid popped back up over the hill.  And he skidded down towards our cars again, kicking back all of the snow that Boo had shoveled away.  ZUT!

And so that’s why the blinds will remain open tomorrow.

Oh, and are you wondering about the Land Rover?  Well, it sat, covered in snow, under NO branches until early Sunday morning.  And then it backed out without shoveling anything.  The owners didn’t clear off the car, shovel away any of the snow, nothing.  It left as mysteriously as it had arrived and it hasn’t been back since.  Although with snow on the way tonight, I’m sure we’ll be seeing it soon enough.

Bunch of pansies

The people on this side of the state are a bunch of pansies.

(I just lost all my Philly readers, right?  Crap. Come back guys, this will get better, I promise.)

I grew up in Pittsburgh.  It snowed there.  A lot.  As a kid, you’d think that would have rocked.

It did.

On the weekends.

The downside to living in a part of the country that gets a lot of snow is that they are USED to getting a lot of snow so you never get to take advantage of the snow with snow days.  Well…people are mostly used to it.

This is kind of how Pittsburgh rolls in the winter.

Usually there will be some snow in October and when that snow comes, PennDOT will roll out the salt trucks en masse.  They salt the heck out of these roads.  And then the snow comes.  And it turns out not to be the blizzard everyone was bracing for, but merely a few flurries.  So now the roads are coated with a quarter of an inch of salt and there is no actual accumulation on the roads.  Score.

And then it snows a few more times in November and again in December and then in early January reports start coming in about a big storm that is on its way.  And PennDOT gets ready to roll out the salt trucks, only to find that OMG THERE IS A SALT SHORTAGE! WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE BECAUSE THERE IS NO SALT TO SALT THE ROADS WITH!  And then it’s breaking news for the next 2 or 3 nights and residents roll their eyes and go “well DUH there’s no salt, you doused the roads for that hour of flurries we got back in November.”

But somehow we survive the winter. And the kids all make it to school on time.

Which isn’t always a good thing.

The thing about being prepared for the snow is that sometimes the school districts were over-confident about the buses abilities to handle the snow (or the meteorologists weren’t fully accurate in actually predicting the amount of snow we’d get.  You’re shocked to hear me say that after what I said about Phil yesterday, aren’t you?).  The problem with this over-confidence is that sometimes the kids get sent to school anyway.

This happened to me in elementary school actually.  It was snowing all morning but we still went to school.  And really, someone should have caught on to the amount of snow we were getting b/c the elementary school started a full hour and a half after the high school.  But after we all got there, they decided to cancel school.  The middle schoolers took the bus home and that’s where the first sign of trouble was.  My neighborhood is a loop.  A loop on an axis.  That means that to get out my neighborhood I have to go uphill.  Whichever way I leave the house, it’s an uphill climb.  So when the bus dropped off my brother and our neighbor B, the bus got stuck.  And then B tried to shovel it out while my brother went inside to play Nintendo and my mom bundled up to come get me.

You see, after seeing Harry (he was the ex-Marine/corrections officer bus driver that they assigned to the middle school bus because apparently none of the boys could play nice) get stuck in the neighborhood, Mama B and B’s mama (that didn’t confuse you, did it?) decided that no way would they subject their youngest to riding the bus.  So they walked to school to pick up me and K.  And let me tell you, for a shrimpy little elementary school student, that was a long walk with all that snow.  I distinctly remember suggesting that it would probably be fine if I rode B and K’s golden retriever Hamish (who tagged along for the walk to school) home.  That suggestion was most definitely shot down.

And that wasn’t the only time they underestimated the weather.  It happened again when I was in high school.  They decided to call a 2-hour delay at 7:00.  Which was great considering that school started at 7:30 and any decent parking spaces were taken by 7:15 and most buses picked kids up at 6:35.  So we got to school and we sat around the cafeteria for 2 hours.  And then, just when they were getting close to the end of the 2-hour delay period, we found out that they decided to cancel school.  Those of us who had spent the previous 2 hours sitting around the cafeteria suggested that we should be allowed to come in 2 hours late some day since we were prompt enough to beat the school board and their tardy delay call.  That suggestion was most definitely shot down.

With snow in the forecast for remainder of this week and the weekend, I was appalled to sit in bed last night and listen to the 11 o’clock news announce which schools were delayed and which were canceled.  It hadn’t even started snowing yet and these school districts were calling it quits.  What a bunch of pansies!  Because do you know what I saw when I woke up this morning?  I saw about a quarter of an inch of snow.  On the grass and on the trees and on the cars but NOT on the roads.  Nope, the roads were free and clear.  Well, okay, yes, they were wet but what does wet have to do with anything?  That’d be like canceling school for rain.

Ridiculous.

Punxsutawney Phil should probably just retire

Yesterday was Groundhog’s Day.  And did that stupid little rodent see his shadow?  Of course he did.  Does that mean more winter weather?  Of course it does.

But here’s the thing–even if he hadn’t seen his shadow, we’d probably end up with six more weeks of winter.  Six weeks from now is March and March is not a warm month! People always seem to forget this and assume that spring is warm and fall is cool and then they get all annoyed in early June when it’s still only 60 out.

So I’m wondering why he still has a job.  Oh, right, I forgot, it’s tradition.  Blah blah blah.  I’m not so sure that tradition matters to P.E.T.A., who is constantly trying to free P. Phil.  (But you never hear them saying ANYTHING about the Easter Bunny, do you?)

But I say that this tradition is just a let down.  It’s a disappointment AND A LIE!  Because poor Phil never has a chance to NOT see his shadow.  Have you ever seen pictures from Gobbler’s Knob?  There are so many paparazzo there you’d think that Lady Gaga just announced she was marrying Robert Pattinson and they were going to have Madonna officiate the ceremony (with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit as matron of honor and best man, respectively).  How the hell could poor old Phil NOT see a shadow with that many lights?  You’ve got video flashes, digital camera flashes, point and shoot flashes, CELL PHONE FLASHES!  He has absolutely no chance.

So I think he should probably retire.  He could move somewhere like Iceland, where they’ve only got like 3 weeks of sunlight anyway (what, did none of you see Insomnia?  Yeah, I don’t blame you, the US version was just trash.)  Or maybe he likes seeing his shadow all the time.  Maybe he digs the celebrity.  And if that’s the case, he could probably set up camp on a private island in the Caribbean somewhere, right?  I mean, he’s gotta be making bank for all the press he gets.

Neener neener neener

So remember how I told you all to not over-do it this year with the resolutions?  Do you remember that?

Well I would to just let you all know that I accomplished all of my resolutions as of Sunday.

Sunday, January 31.

That’s right my friends.  I started shopping at Whole Foods (I’ve been twice) and I learned to make a soup.

I didn’t just learn to make a soup either, I learned to make a soup so well that I was able to tell someone else how to make it.

But in all fairness, it only has 5 ingredients.

On last Friday’s show, my favorite lady, Rachael Ray, made this 5 ingredient tortellini soup.  And I have to tell you, it is AMAZING.

HOW DELICIOUS DOES THAT LOOK!?

Okay, this soup…people…it is SO easy to make.  You buy a can of chicken broth.  You buy some tortellini.  You buy some spinach.  You buy a lemon and some Parmesan cheese.  Boil the broth.  Cook the tortellini.  When the tortellini is almost done, put the spinach in.  By the time the pasta is done, the spinach will have cooked down enough.  Then you ladle it, put a little lemon zest on top and some Parmesan and DONE!

HOW EASY IS THAT!?

And seriously…so so delicious.

And do you want to know what makes it even more delicious?  Knowing that learning how to make this soup means that I knocked out both of my New Year’s resolutions by January.

Neener neener.

Neener.

THON On! For the kids!

Today is February 1st.  And February is, at least for me, all about THON!

You guys remember THON right?

This year, some pretty exciting things are happening with THON.

On Friday, Twitter was blowing up with THON retweets thanks to Khloe Kardashian.  That’s right!  Mrs. Kardashian-Odom found out about THON, encouraged people to donate, retweet and tell her their THON stories.

The THON office made a little video for Khloe, the number of followers for @abolishcancer increased a TON b/c of the promise to donate $1 for every new follower, and donations soared! (Check out the post that AbolishCancer wrote about it!)

The day started out with Khloe posting a little something on her blog about THON.  And then followed that up with a thank-you post after hearing how her tweets helped to launch THON into the Top 10 trending topics worldwide!

And then this morning I woke up and saw that Perez Hilton had featured THON as a worthwhile cause!

So the point of this post?  I am BEYOND PROUD of the recognition that THON has gotten online in the past few days.  PR like this will help so many kids and families and I just wanted to remind you guys about THON.  I know that the internet can really rally around great causes and what cause could be more important than helping these kids?

So as you start into this new month, I just want to encourage all of my lovely readers to head over to thon.org and donate!!

(B0o and I donated to THON in honor of our wedding guests!)

The closest I’ll ever come to a TMI:Thursday post

There is something about marriage that people don’t tell you: when you or your spouse is ill, it’s not RUDE for the healthy person to ditch the sick one and sleep on the couch.  It’s SMART.

And I can say this now with great authority.

For the past few weeks I’ve had an on-and-off sore throat.  You know the type.  It’s sore for a few days, you are CONVINCED that you are getting sick and then it goes away.  Like, you’re sitting there, watching Chuck and you swallow and realize you’re fine.  And so you sail along for a few days, you’re doing great, and then the sore throat comes back.  But it doesn’t REappear as abruptly as it DISappears, oh no.  You just wake up with it one day.  You think that you just slept with your mouth open or something and that it’ll go away but it doesn’t and then you’re right back where you started, with a sore throat, CONVINCED that you are getting sick.

So while I was doing the sore throat dance, Boo somehow managed to steal my sore throat and get a full-blown cold from it.  He had the scratchy throat and the achy body and the runny nose.  And the worst part?  He was on his work pager this weekend and the poor guy was up all night working when he should have been passed out on NyQuil (I’m giving you all a break and NOT linking to my NyQuil post this time…you know…since I just did it yesterday.  PLUS you guys really should have read it by now, yes?)

So anyway, while he was a snuffly mess, I thought about sleeping on the couch but we’re newlyweds and we didn’t live together before we got married (hell, we weren’t even in the same STATE before we got married) so we like to cuddle.  Apparently, cuddling is one of the reasons that you are supposed to sleep on the couch if you are the healthy one.  Falling asleep with my head on Boo’s chest leaves me right in his line of breathing.  Which means?  Yes, you guessed it.

Cold city baby.

And this vicious beast has taken on a life of it’s own.  It’s growing man, and it’s not taking “Vitamin C” for an answer.  It has rebuffed my use of ALL of my normal meds.  The elderberry isn’t taking effect yet.  The Vitamin C has done nothing for me.  The decongestant?  Well I’m still fully congested, so take a guess as to how well that is working.

Tuesday was one thing.  I had the stingy sore throat and the aches.  And I could have lived with that.  Do you know what stage of the cold I spent yesterday in?  The perpetual runny/twitchy/verge-of-sneeze nose.  The nose where you constantly feel like you need to sneeze but you can’t?  Sneeze constipation is one thing, but then you have the dripping thing.  There is only ONE thing you can do on a day like this.

You spend the whole day with a tissue shoved up your nose.

Classy, right?

Message to tourists: please keep walking

So remember how I said that I realized a lot of people don’t ever read the title of the post and just wander onto these posts and have no idea what I’m talking about because my first sentence is the second half of a thought I started in my title?  Well, you should because it was only like a week ago (remember now?).  So anyway, if you didn’t read my title today, could you take a second and read it real quick?

I’ll wait….

We good?

Okay, great, so that title was a actually a six-word memoir that I entered in Smith Magazine’s six-word NYC memoir contest.  And guess what?  It was one of the winning entries, which meant that I, along with the other winners, was invited to read my memoir at the six-word memoir event at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday night.

The event was basically a round-table discussion with Amy Sohn (author of, most recently, Prospect Park West), A.J. Jacobs (author of, most recently, The Guinea Pig Diaries) and Ben Yagoda (author of, most recently, Memoir-A History) as well as Larry Smith, the founder and editor-in-chief and Rachel Fershleiser, senior editor.

It was a really cool evening.  It was great to sit in a room full of people who love to write and love to read and listen to people who love to write and make a living out of it.  I was in nerd heaven.  Afterward I was able to meet the authors/panelists, get some autographs, and talk for a few minutes.  I was also able to hand these out:

Boo made me business cards to hand out!  It was just a good way for me to get my blog and info out to some other people.

Sunday night was also the first time I’ve been back to NYC since I moved (almost 4 months exactly from my move-out date!)  Cait and I took the train up on Sunday, sthpoooooned in the hotel on Sunday night, and took the train back on Monday morning.  There is nothing better than a girls’ weekend (no offense baby!) and we had a great time!

We had 2 criteria for the weekend:

1) Shopping

2) Dinner at Fetch to see if we could, once and for all, solve the mystery of the mac and cheese.

Missions accomplished.

la

*I also managed to get a cold while I was in the city (super, right?) so I’m writing this through the Nyquil haze (as if you had any doubt) and I’ll be back to the regularly scheduled posting here asap.

Also…I didn’t feel like I had any overwhelming votes one way or the other about the email/comment responses so for now I’m sticking to my old system.

A question for you, my loyal readers

So I don’t actually have a post for you today.  Instead, I have a question.

What are your thoughts on the whole comment/comment response thing?  Generally I respond to your comments on the post itself but I realized something today and that is that no one ever goes back to the post after they comment.

I comment on a TON of blogs and never necessarily know if the author has seen my comment, read it, or responded to it because I don’t leave the page open and refresh and wait for a response to my comment.  And while I know that hearing back isn’t the point of commenting, I feel like not knowing if there is a response is kind of like yelling into the wind (pardon the terrible cliche)–you just don’t know if anyone ever heard what you said.  You miss out on the conversations and the banter and the relationship building.

One of my favorite bloggers, Not So Jenny at it’s always like this always e-mails her response to comments.  A lot of times, this leads to a back-and forth volley of e-mails which I love!

So my question is this: am I the only one who has no idea if their comments are being heard?  (Okay, I lied, I have 2 questions)  Would you guys like it if I e-mailed you back when you comment or would you prefer that I just keep my responses on the post?

I know he’s Jack Bauer, but he can’t teleport yet, can he?

*WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILER ALERTS FROM THE NEW SEASON OF 24 WHICH NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT AREN’T ACTUALLY SPOILERS IF YOU’VE SEEN THE FIRST 4 EPISODES OF THE SEASON.  WHY AM I STILL YELLING AT ALL OF YOU?*

la

As most people probably know, 24 premiered on Sunday night.  At this point, we’re now 4 hours into the day/season.  This time around Jack Bauer is in New York with a whole crop of newbies working at CTU.

And they don’t know shit.

Except Chloe.  She knows what’s up because she has worked at CTU and with Jack Bauer before and she knows what he is capable of.

But has anyone had any faith in Chloe so far?  Nope.  No they have not and so far they have been SHOWN UP.  But I digress.

So anyway, CTU New York is being run by this guy Brian Hastings.  Hastings has been running around, thinking he’s the poo because he’s in charge, but I’m not so sure that he’s qualified to run CTU.  And I’ll tell you why.

CTU is supposed to be all about government security and anti-terrorism and they know how to hack computers and stuff and yet they let this Dana Walsh character in.

If you’ve seen any of the first few episodes of this season, you know that Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character is dating Katee Sackoff’s character Dana.  Or should I call her Jenny?  Yeah, uh huh, CTU is managing to employ someone who has an entirely false identity.  She created a whole new I.D. and no one bothered to do a background check on this chick?  Chloe is getting a hard time because she can’t keep up with the new computers, software, or whatever and Dana/Jenny isn’t even who she says she is.  And no one has found this out yet?  I mean, Chloe hacks a computer in the office and someone knows about it immediately but this chick sneaks right into the government agency?  HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE!?

And another thing.

I know that I haven’t watched in a few seasons.  24 isn’t exactly a show you can watch if you don’t have a VCR (back in my college days) or a DVR (yes, I have caught up with technology) and you have a varied schedule.  Before Hulu there were no options.  You were home for 24 or you missed it.  And they got a lot done in an hour.  I mean, these are some of the most productive people on television.  Because their hour is a REAL hour.

And that’s where I run into my problem.  Even during the first season when they were stationed in L.A. Jack would hop in a car and then 13 minutes later be outside of the city.  I have been to L.A.  I have ridden in cars in L.A.  And I know that there is no way in hell that you could get out of the city in 13 minutes without a jet pack or some sort of teleportation device.  And now they are in New York.  And in one of these first few hours Jack managed to get from CTU (which from the look of their helipad is actually located in New Jersey?) to whichever outer borough that Russian guy went to when he killed that other cop and then he managed to get to the UN in time to save Freddie from getting a bullet in the head.  Now, listen, I’ve gone from Midtown to Brooklyn by car.  And I’m going to tell you that there is NO WAY Jack made that drive in under 30 minutes.  But according to the handy countdown timer, he made the trip in approximately 9 minutes.  Even with the police siren wailing, there is NO WAY he could do that.

Continuity what?

A post about boobs

Oh man, I tricked you guys AGAIN didn’t I?

Listen, no hard feelings, but I’ve been battling a cold/stomach bug combo for the past few days and so you only get one post per blogs.

But, if you want to read about boobs (and you aren’t a male who is related to me) then you should probably skip over to street cake and take a look.