Song Obsession Announcement

I must be stopped...I keep listening to the same song over and over and over...this has gone on for two days straight...please someone help me...

Click on the following link to listen to Wire's "Outdoor Miner":

http://www.grange85.co.uk/galaxie/index.php?article_id=89

There is a longer version out there that I think I need... and apparently, I'm not the only one obsessively in love with it because there is an entire Wire tribute album devoted to this one song ...

Open House March Madness!!

My Apt. Listing

(click the link above to see my apt listed)

OMG! Open House = CRAZY! There was a constant flow of people in and out of my apartment and I felt like I was hosting a party - I basically just stood at the door and let them in and out and buzzed them in downstairs, but it was so draining. It was 4 hours of plastering a fake smile on my face while watching the clock with one eye, making sure no one was stealing anything with the other. But the broker, Milena, is actually very sweet and nice and she made it somewhat fun, because it was basically like having her hang out with me for the day while these strangers came and went. It was odd, because a lot of the people stopped by aren't really interested buyers and they are just curious what someone else's apartment looks like. For instance, an old lady lives next door to me, and her son and his wife came by - and I doubt it was because they are seriously thinking about purchasing the apartment, its just to take a look at the chick who lives next door. And it was also weird to have these people evaluating my things and making comments, opening my closets and such. They all had nice things to say about my place - that they love all of my artwork and nicknacks and such and how beautifully I have it decorated, etc, so they were all very complimentary, its just strange to see all these eyes evaluating me and how I live basically. At the very least, I met a lot of interesting people in a short amount of time. Milena also showed me some of the apartments that are available right now and I'm pretty sure I'll be using her to help me when I start my search for real in the next month or so. As soon as 4pm came, we took the balloons and "open house" sign down and thank god, we were finished - until next Sunday. ARRGHH!! Then Princess Bradley came to pick up her Action Set and drop off my AeroBed and we went off to have a much needed dinner of samosas and saag aloo and nan and some wine that was very tasty - Trinchero Chardonnay from California.

A side note to Charlie: try the Coppola Bianco, which is his pinot grigio - your favorite. IT IS DELICIOUS! Just as much as I love his chardonnay, I love this one too.

Hiking Pics

The lake


Vu and Dean the Leader in the background


Catburgler or Hamburgler? You decide.


Creepy abandoned house by the banks of the Hudson


Deer!


Wolverine!


Vu and Elba


You can sort of see how high we went and how far down we went...look at the road at the top of the picture


The Hudson River

"Wolverine!!!"

Floating Head shouted from the top of the mountain, as she bravely fought off the Communist Cubans who invaded our small Colorado town...alright, so we were daydreaming that we were in the movie "Red Dawn" but that’s because we were delirious from THE HIKE. Saturday morning, I met Vu and Elba at Port Authority at 8:30, where we took the bus up to Rockland State Park in Nyack, New York (a very pretty, quaint little town by the way, very cutesy...) to meet up with the Sierra Club for a day-long hike. We started out at about 10:30, hiked up and down the hills and valleys surrounding the lake on one side, the Hudson River on the other. After 3 hours (4 miles), we ate lunch by the banks of the Hudson River and some old abandoned, spooky-looking Blair Witch project type houses, then we hiked (thankfully) along a more flat bike path that was closer to the river to loop back to the park where we started. THE HIKE was not a beginner hike...unfortunately, we chose a more advanced hike as our first and while we got through it - DAMN DID IT HURT!!! Our knees and butts and thighs = SORE! There were a couple of seriously steep uphill climbs where I thought "nope, they are going to have to contact the Donald and get the Trump Copter to get me out of here...but I kept going until I got to a flatter surface at the top and then I would rest for a second (or two..or 45) to catch my breath and regain feeling in my wobbly legs...and then after lunch on the bike path I was fine but into the last half hour of the hike, I had no energy left..I was just dragging myself along the rest of the way...but one thing that helped was that I stayed at the back with the Sweep - he is the person who stays at the end of the group to make sure everyone is doing ok and waits behind if someone needs to stop to "use the loo" or rest or whatever..and thank god for the Sweep, because Dean, the leader was GONE - he was always about 100 feet ahead of the rest of us, for the most part, he hiked too fast we thought - because it was really pretty up there and so occasionally we liked to stop for pics or just to take in the landscape and enjoy it, but not Dean, Dean was out and gone in the blink of an eye. He’s probably done this hike a million times though so maybe that’s why he doesn’t care to stop and smell the roses like we did. But anyway, I stayed behind and walked and talked to the Sweep, who was a man in his 60's probably and told me how he got into hiking and some of his misadventures camping and hiking and such but one of the things he told me was that when he first started hiking, he used to not talk, thinking that he was conserving his energy or it wasn’t worth the effort as you are straining and working hard but then he realized talking or listening to someone talk made it easier to get through the difficult parts because you weren’t so focused on your pain or the exertion - it was like an out of body experience where you just listen to the other person and not pay attention to how much your body is screaming and then before you know it, you are past the difficult part. So he’s telling me this as we near the end of the hike and I’m tired at this point - it’s been 8 miles and 4.5 hours of pretty much nonstop hiking and I see that the flat part of the trail has ended... and what looms ahead is ... a giant hill that curves back up and over the hill we started out on!! And the only way to get out of here to a place where I can sit and rest (and use the loo) is to get over that damn hill...ARRGGGGHHH!! So needless to say, we made it and I thank the Sweep for his help.
Now, the other interesting part of the day was Orange Hat. Orange Hat was a strange fellow with a pedophile air about him. You know the type. 70's porn star mustache, kind of smelly looking like he might not bathe or do laundry on a regular basis, probably lives with his mother and plays with Star Wars figurines even though he’s in his late 40's. From the moment we arrived, he gravitated towards us, like "ah, the ladies have arrived" and he kept on giving Floating Head these weird smiles and looks and would try to join our conversation, meanwhile looking like an animal evaluating its prey. So at the end of the hike, the three of us were leaving the restrooms and the rest of the group had already dispersed and were getting into their cars to leave and who do we see lingering behind? Orange Hat. "Uh, do you girls need a ride, I have a car...uh, I can drive you to the George Washington Bridge..uh, the buses from there run every 30 minutes, uh.." and we cut him off "NO! We are fine, the bus picks us up every 29 minutes from here, NO THANKS! And we know had we gone with him, the A/C would have contained some sort of knockout gas and we would have either been sold as sex slaves in Thailand or ended up in the dungeon he created under the floorboards in his apartment...he probably goes on the Sierra Club hikes to scout for locations to dump bodies or something...or he could have been a slightly odd man, socially inept and he was just trying to be friendly and we are being judgmental, but either way dude, I don’t know you and I’m not getting into a car with you! So then it was an hour and a half bus ride home and then I came back to my apartment, sore as hell and I’m sure smelly, made some dinner and fell asleep for an hour, woke up, had a super hot shower and that was the end of my night.
Today there is supposed to be an open house for interested buyers in the apartment and that is all I have planned today. Stay tuned!

So that Magpie will be proud of me...

I'll have her know that I stayed until after 7pm to finish this!!

When I last wrote you all, I was possibly getting a cold and possibly resting and possibly meeting Floating Head and Magpie for brunch. To update you: I sort of got a cold, which I quickly got over - I want to believe this was due to my astragalus root taking and sleeping a lot... and therefore I felt well enough to meet M and F at East of 8th on Sunday in Chelsea and have a yummo brunch complete with mimosa...earlier in the morning, the owner of my apt came by with a real estate agent to take pictures for the sale of the place and she was gushing about my apt, how nice it was, how she loved how I decorated it and for a moment, I got a bit sad and felt bad that I have to leave it...but then the owner and I were talking about crazy Nazi man upstairs and turns out, he is not a Nazi. He is a Holocaust survivor (albeit an anti-Semitic one) and he is not well in the head - as Raul explained, it's like you see Vietnam Vets who still think they are back there, in the war, in the moment...and for a second, I felt bad for the man, but at the same time, that's just as scary to live under. I think it's terrible that he had to go through whatever it was that he went through, but when I hear him screaming at the top of his lungs "I'm going to get you, you fucking bastards, I see you, I hear you, I'm going to get you", now I know he's not upset at neighbors being noisy or something really happening. So anyway...

After brunch, I was off to Home Depot to meet up with ZA and the much smaller-biceped R.N. where we looked at red paint samples and then Zeus and I were off to see his new apt in the pre-moving in stages...and...I'm JEALOUS! It's a really beautiful space and needs hardly any work done to it and it's right up near Columbia, which got me a little nostalgic when we walked around looking for a place to eat dinner...there is the Rite Aid where Veronica and I bought the thing that we were embarassed to buy so we bought a box of Cheezits to cover it up at the register...there is Koronet, biggest slices of pizza ever for a $1.50, there is Cardomat, where we should have bought "too drunk to care!" but didn't, there is Tom's, with the not-on-the-menu most delicious Broadway shake...and we ended up eating at a restaurant that I remember going there when it first opened with Eve and her friend Ben visiting from Berkeley (who I thought was so cute) and his dad was a French professor at Columbia and so then we went to his apt on Riverside Drive and I thought it was so cool to be in a big-time professor's apt and in such a chi-chi Riverside drive address no less...and then Cindy and I used to go there as a treat after hard exams or papers but it was an Italian restaurant then and now it's Moroccan/Middle Eastern and now I'm sitting with Zeus and it's ten years later - how weird is that? And I see all the students walking past and think, that used to be me...next time I visit him, I think we need to go on the full Memory Lane...I can walk down College Walk, with the twinkle lights in the trees, visit Butler, which used to be my favorite spot to do work, I loved being in the stacks searching for books and it's such a fabulous old building, see if UFM is still there and whatever else I recognize...is Rosa the Cigarette Lady still on the corner? Eve and I used to run out in the middle of the night down to her magazine stand to buy Drum (because we thought we were cool, rolling our own), go to the Hungarian Pastry Shop with the cool paintings on the wall... so anyway, it felt kind of nice to be up there again and it made me smile. I wonder if Check-Cashing Kyle is still handing out lollypops? OOH and Mama and Papa Bear should take note: Zeus will be only a few blocks from Absolute Bagels - the best bagels in the entire universe... so you better be nice to him, he can hook you up with some nice egg bagels if you are sweet :-D

My latest issue is carpal tunnel, which is why I didn't blog at all last week...I had to get my desk rearranged "ergonomically" and a joystick mouse had to be special ordered and now I have wear a glove when at work and sleep in a special splint to keep my wrist and arm straight until it heals...that and take 800 - 1000 mg of Aleve and rub Ben Gay or Tiger Balm as well as ice it nightly...it's healing already though, I can feel a difference, so I'm okay with it...last week I was a little freaked out, because once you've got serious carpal tunnel, you can't get rid of it and it seriously hurt last week...but like I said, better now! The doctor gave me stretches and exercises to do too to strengthen my wrist and hands as well.

And hurray for Vox! Because we had a Conspiracy Corner Reunion at Blockheads on Thursday and it was nice to see him again and know that he is doing well without us! And hurray for Floating Head because of her big news that she shared with us and she deserves to be happy and the new "venture" will bring nothing but good things I'm sure...Saturday, I saw them all again for V for Vendetta, which I LOVED except for Natalie Portman's terrible British accent, but that was nothing really, it's an excellent film, very relevant to the times we are living in and the state of the country and world right now...time to blow up Parliament? MAYBE. The Guy Fawkes masks have been placed on order... then we had off to a dinner of Moo Shu Fantasia and a Deep Recharger tonic at Zen Palate (which I had such bad luck with in the past, but the last two times I've gone there, it's been really good) and then Magpie and I went to buy cd's and I (still in Memory Lane mode) bought all 80's - 2 Depeche Modes and the first two Madonna cd's. Lovely!!

Now, I was supposed to take a day off tomorrow but it's not happening so I'm going home to try and get to bed early and get my head back on straight after a very crazy and frustrating day at work... nothing seems to be flowing well yet.

Later Gators!

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away...

there was a girl who used to update her blog with her comings and goings... but then she got busy and overwhelmed and a bit sick and so the blog lay untouched and unupdated for days and days and days...and people wondered "will she ever post again?" ... well ...

I'M BACK!!!!

Okay, you can all stop your dancing and hugging and general merriment now... I've just been a bit overwhelmed lately so I'll just give you a rundown on all that is going on...firstly, I have to move out of my apartment... the owner is selling it and I don't want to buy it since the place is paper-thin, I have crappy ghetto neighbors below me and a nazi above me who may or may not be spying on me in the bathroom (yes, lucky him!) ha ha...and I think I just need a fresh start anyway... save some money and hopefully maybe be able to buy a place in a few years ... so I'm looking at this as a blessing in disguise, its the excuse I wanted to have to leave because I haven't been happy there, I've been getting by, making do and to be honest, I've had it with making do. It's up to me to make my life, myself what I want it to be - good and bad - and getting by or making do is just letting someone or something else make your life happen for you. So me moving = me taking control of a situation and trying to make it better. So there. I stick my tongue out at you, noisy apartment!

Other than that, I've just been working a lot - as always, the PeopleSoft issues keep rolling in, but I'm feeling better educated and more adept at handling them, so I'm not as overwhelmed and hopeless as I had felt last year. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, I swear I see it!! Other items of interest? Last week, I was a bit sick, I woke up on Tuesday morning feeling very lightheaded and very much like I did in January when I fainted at the airport..so I was worried that it was a repeat of that whole thing...so I called in sick and slept almost all day and it took a good 3 days to feel normal again...turned out to just be a stomach flu of some sort - how do I do know? DON'T ASK! I just know...Friday, I went to Forest Hills with Frinee and had wine and pizza at Nick's and decided I could live here, so maybe I'll look at some apt's here as well...Saturday I got my hair highlighted and Isabel worked some magic - I love my hair! It's got great blonde streaks of varying shades...then I spent Sunday with Floating Head and we watched the Oscars with some friends and had champagne cocktails and made fun of everyone - how fake white the teeth! how fake orange the tan! Last night, I went to St. Patrick's Cathedral for a free concert of Irish music which was lovely and then continuing the Irish theme, we went to the Pig n' Whistle where a lovely cute Irish guy with that lovely cute accent seated us and made sure we got some Harp and a delicious shepard's pie. Hearing an Irish accent always makes me want to do my version of several scenes from In the Name of the Father (one of my favorite movies by the way):

1. Little girl enters a pub: "Da? The IRA's got our Gerry!"

2. Gerry and Giuseppe in prison: "And you know what I did, Da? I wrote your stupid fuckin Giuseppe name in the sand and I fuckin pissed on it" My mother gets a kick out of me doing this, in full brogue, but inserting "Charlie" instead Giuseppe. Charlie, on the other hand, does not approve of me using "fuckin".

Then, it was home to bake a cake for Mr. McGee's (The Boss) birthday and to figure out that yes, I am getting a cold, so most likely the rest of the weekend can be spent resting and reading and trying to feel better - and hopefully calling the Overoye and Delgado households, because I haven't been home enough to do so for months! And I'm ashamed, but I'm hoping they will understand and love me anyway. And I will be meeting up with Magpie and Floating Head for a brunch at some point, where, again, champagne cocktails will be enjoyed...we were supposed to go on a hike with the Sierra Club on Long Island, but we can't quite figure out how to get out there so we decided to abort the plan and hopefully go hiking next weekend up in Westchester where the public transportation is better.

That's all for now - stay tuned!