POST MANIA

The past week or so has been so so crazy and I've had so little time for anything that I actually like to do, so I'm resorting to blogging in between setting up for programs and checking out patrons and cutting out construction paper seahorses.

(RUN ON SENTENCE MANIA)

(Also, who has two thumbs and loves being a youth services librarian assistant? ::points to self:: This girl.)

(That joke is a lot funnier IRL. I swear.)

(PARENTHESES MANIA)

So, I wanted to talk about what's been keeping me away from my lovely little piece of internet real estate, and what the plan is for when everything dies down. You know what happens next, right?

BULLET LIST MANIA!

Where I've been:

- Cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. My room, my bathroom, the basement, the den. My relatives from the Philippines are coming to stay for a week and my mother wants the house to be immaculate, I guess so that we can impress them with how quickly our family cleans the house under duress. Because, come on. They'll totally know we only dust the piano when we're having houseguests.
- Picking up tons of extra shifts at work. She works haaaaard for the money!
- Gearing up for this weekend, which is my cousin K's wedding. She's the first cousin to get married on this side of the family, and everyone is going totally sheepshit. The whole process has just been harrowing and never-ending. It's going to be this huge ordeal that involves staying at a hotel in North Jersey with my parents for a whole weekend, and now have to hand out programs and bubbles and candy and my mom doesn't like the shoes I'm wearing and I still have to find a strapless bra to wear with my dress and I don't want to do karaoke at the rehearsal dinner but they're gonna make me and AUGH can't we just show up to the wedding and then leave afterward I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS.

- Fostering my D&D obsession. Despite my initial concerns, D&D has proven to be so. Much fun. It doesn't hurt that we're playing with our really good friends, of course, but there's an aspect of fantasy role-playing that really satisfied something in me. I think it speaks to my inner child who never got tired of playing pretend.

Where I'm going:
- The wedding, obv. Despite all my ranting, I'm sure it'll be fun and/or memorable. And my cousin Maven (not her real name, but she'd approve), whom I haven't seen in years because she lives in the Philippines, is staying with us next week, and that's gonna be totally awesome.
- A Phillies game with Matt, my BFF and some of her friends from college. I haven't been to a baseball game since fourth grade, but how hard could it possibly be to understand baseball? Some guys take turns hitting a ball and running around in a circle. That's the gist... right?
- Down the shore, again, before the oil creeps up the East Coast and coats us all in a Film of Doom.

Also, in July I'm going to do the 30 Days of Me meme and Bloggerstock (which I was signed up for this month but epically failed at remembering to do), and I've got all of these plans for my blog that I've been brainstorming but haven't gotten the chance to implement because at the end of the day I just want to eat sorbet and read Fables and pass out. I just need to get through this weekend. Here goes nothing.

back in the saddle

Urghh... I've been away from the Internet for exactly a week, and there are currently 44, count'em 44 unread blog posts in my Google reader right now. I'm going to work on chipping away at that unreal number until 12:45, when I have to go to work. But for now, here's my week in a nutshell.

- My sister graduated high school. She gave a speech. And I was like, MY BABY'S ALL GROWN UP AND SAVING CHINA!

- I went to see Toy Story 3, which we all know is officially The Greatest Movie Ever Made (no seriously, I don't know if there have been any negative reviews of it except for these two douchebags). The experience was so uniquely Pixar. Half of the time I was laughing unabashedly and obnoxiously. The other half of the time I was a whimpering, moist-eyed mess (I don't let myself cry in movie theaters anymore because I cause a real scene). Those of you who have seen it can probably relate. I had to think about all sorts of inappropriately hilarious things and fan my face vigorously to keep myself from bursting into tears.

- Remember when I got all excited about finding people to play D&D with? Well, on Saturday we started creating our characters and we had maybe a little too much fun with it. Matt's character is an eladrin wizard who wears a prosthetic beard loaded with razor blades (because eladrin can't grow beards, what's up with that?), Jewel's character is an elf ranger with "ginormous knockers," and my character is a halfling rogue with a Napoleon complex. Also, that was officially the nerdiest sentence I have ever typed. Scotty gets off a little too much on being Dungeon Master, I think, as he kept on saying things like GOD DIDN'T SAY YOU COULD CHOOSE YOUR AT-WILL POWERS YET, DID HE? I think we may have created a monster.

- We celebrated Father's Day lounging around the house, doing nothing, as per my dad's request. He wanted Father's Day to be about conserving money and resources, and so we didn't go out to eat or go shopping or anything like that. We all just went about our normal Sunday, which for me meant attempting to clean my room but then just falling asleep for several hours instead.

- I have successfully made it through another week of being incidentally vegan, and I've learned one very important thing:

insane in the membrane: the story of my weekend

This weekend Matt and I descended upon Lambertville, NJ, a small, historic town near our alma mater that is known for its art community, antique shops, and all-around quaintness. It's the kind of place that I guess people go to retire. Honestly, after spending the weekend, now I kind of want to live there when I retire. It was awesome, is what I'm saying.

Some of the highlights of the trip:

• The FOOD, OMG. We just picked restaurants at random but we happened to end up at the best places in town. And the breakfast our B&B served was insane in the membrane. Warm scones with blueberry preserves, fresh fruit from the farmer's market, and blueberry-cornmeal pancakes from scratch. I nearly died.
• Touring River Horse Brewery and facepalming (in amusement) when Matt insisted on asking the geekiest questions like "What sanitizer do you use on  the bottles?" and "What kind of machine you use to flash-chill the beer?"
• Stumbling upon a secret room in an otherwise typical curio/antique shop that was literally jam-packed with pop culture memorabilia, records, action figures, old magazines (from Tiger Beat to Rolling Stone), pulp fiction books, and kitschy toys. Matt, who is a collector of classic rock LPs, found original presses of Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience AND Aqualung by Jethro Tull and he bought them both for FOURTEEN DOLLARS. 
• The fact that the B&B had A Mighty Wind in their DVD collection. It was slightly less exciting when the DVD crapped out just before all the good stuff happens, but still. It's the concept. 
• Discovering that I fucking love B&Bs and I don't care who knows it. All I can say is that instead of being worried that it would be lame and annoying and I'd have to make chit-chat with pretentious Princeton retirees [note: I actually did have to do that, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be], I should have been more concerned with the monster that a B&B would unleash in me. As soon as we got to the house and dropped off our bags I dragged Matt downstairs into the common area for way longer than necessary in the hopes that we would run into the owner again or come across another couple. So, yeah -- the B&B experiment went, like, outlandishly well.  

And now. Pictures.

Here's the pop culture room I mentioned before. I seriously had to catch my breath when I first walked into this room. It's like Geek Heaven.

This is Peddler's Village, where Matt and I had dinner and window shopped. I took this picture while he was buying us some ice cream. 

Our room. It was way bigger than it looks and so cozy. That bed was the most comfortable bed I've ever slept in. I have to admit, though, when I saw the flowered wallpaper I had a bit of a moment from the episode of Gilmore Girls I talked about last time. You GG fans know what I'm talking about. And no, there wasn't actually any foil in the paper.

I just needed you to know that our toilet paper looked like this when we got to our room. This is the level of service we received, people.

I can't believe I'm even posting this, but I just wanted to show you how Matt has this uncanny ability to ruin pictures of us. 

See?

And of course, the obligatory food picture. This is Matt's order of Chocolate-Banana Coconut French Toast. I bet you can guess what happened approximately 1 minute later.

Gone.

Pros and Cons: Saturday, May 1

Pros

• I went to a party and I met a girl from Canada. I accidentally told Matt she was from Ottawa even though she told me she was from Toronto.
• Actually, what she had said was that she was "from Tronno." Which was a huge pro.
• At the same party, I saw some of my cousins and we had a lot of laughs. 
• And a lot of cake.
• I drank wine, which is almost always fun (barring the Arbor Mist Debacle of March 2009)
• My sister and I had an epic Boyz II Men sing-along in the car on the way home. 
• I learned the corniest and best joke ever, but you have to know a little French to get it: The One-Two-Three Cat and the Une-Deux-Trois Cat had a race in the swimming pool. The One-Two-Three Cat won. Do you know why? 
• Because the Une-Deux-Trois Cat sank. (Say it out loud, French speakers. Say it out loud. Then groan. Then feel free to backhand slap me through your computer screens.)

Cons

• Said Canadian girl told me she hates the Flyers. 
• Boo on not being able to bond over a sport because of team rivalries.
• I got eaten alive by mosquitoes because we were sitting outside the whole time.
• I hardly got any good reading time in, which sucks because I'm like 40 pages away from finishing V For Vendetta.
• I feel like I just need to finish it so I can start reading it again
• Because holy shit I have almost no idea what is going on in that book.
• I kinda lost my voice a little bit from all of the epic sing-alonging. 
• Nobody laughed at my corny joke. Sad face.

Well, so far this weekend the pros and cons are neck-and-neck. Tomorrow I'm hanging out at my old college campus with one set of friends during the day, and then, in the evening, I'm going over to my engaged friends' house with Matt to eat pizza and play the incredibly geeky game Setters of Catan. So we'll see what the tally looks like on Sunday. Keep on having a good weekend everyone, and DFTBA.