I Lied

once again i've been negligent in my posting. he won't let me use his computer. ok that's a lie too, but in my defense we've been busy. we attempted a trip to mud island (closed til april 08), went to see juno (beyond awesome), went out and about on the town yesterday (shopping and i got my nails done), played a game of scrabble against his family in which we completely dominated (we got lucky with our letters, i'll be honest), played a game of scattergories in which we did not do well (he did better than i), and now we're at his work for a brief bit to catch up on some stuff before the new year. tonight we'll be downtown partying hardy and looking good, come find us if you're looking for some fun!

Vaycay

in t-minus 9 hours i will be running off my plane into the memphis airport and directly to the reverend. i need sleep now, since i have to get up at 4:30 am to make this a reality. i will do my best to steal his computer while there and get posts up, and expect a plethora of newyear'sinmemphis and katieandpete pictures afterwards. peace out.

Who Knew This Day Would Come?

we all need to take a moment. i have repeatedly asked for this bag, largely as a joke. a serious, i want this bag but know noone will spend $400 on it for me kind of joke.

but then.

i looked online last night and found, lo and behold, that the bag had been Marked Down to half off (!) and that they were out of the red leather on the kenneth cole website. a panicked call to dillard's later and i had one on hold, promised to me at the markdown price. i called pete in excitement, as i had even gone to the length of showing it to him in real life when he was in kc, to let him know i was going to get my bag after all. his response? "don't get it. it's gotten."

what?!?*?#!

so the best man in the world, the hottest, greatest, nicest, smartest, best bloggerest reverend i know tonight bought me my new best friend, thanks to a cell phone call from the dillard's purse counter. it is gorgeous and lovely and quite possibly my favorite gift of forever and i can't wait to show it to him in person saturday morning...i'm so spoiled.

What Goes On Upstairs

they throw a dance party every night and, needing to clear space for the dancing, move every piece of furniture in their apartment.

one of them has OCD and needs to move all the items of furniture in their apartment one foot counter-clockwise every night. (counter-clockwise as in around the apartment, or counter-clockwise as in moving just each piece on its axis? i don't know, but it could very well be both.)

they have waxed their floors, and as a result every time they go to sit on or lean on a piece of furniture, it slides about two feet, and then they have to pull it back into place.

they are in interior design school and their homework is to constantly rearrange their apartment and photograph it.

they buy one new piece of furniture every day and every night must move everything else they already own to find a spot for the new stuff.

in an attempt to both get back at the landlord and eventually see into our apartment, they have decided the most efficacious manner would be to wear grooves in their hardwood by repeatedly sliding their furniture back and forth until they just poke through our ceiling, much in the same manner children think they can dig to china with a spade in their backyard.

and lastly, the theory put forth by my roommate: they are on crack and/or cocaine and have so much energy they literally just can NOT STOP MOVING THEIR FURNITURE.

Merry Merry

christmas was long and eventful. i won the best aunt category by presenting my 3 almost 4-year-old niece with a bike. went over very well. i was given several chai/coffee related gifts, a new digi cam (expect better pics soon), a jewelry armoire which i need help filling (alert: reverend, take notice), giftcards, perfume, and many other things. now i'm snug in my room with the new jewelry armoire all set up, and just awaiting giving my last pile of presents to the man from memphis. also given in the best aunt category: wellesley gear!!:

The Sound of Silence

this was the weekend the internet decided it was tired of visiting our apartment. more specifically, our wireless router gave up on life. i actually have a legit excuse for not posting for once. now i'm at my mom's house on the wireless network there, so i guess it's family time. off to watch it's a wonderful life for the 47th year in a row. god bless us, every one!

Simple Pleasures

cats know how to do it. each night when bowser comes to join me on my bed while i sit on my laptop or with my nose in a book, he stops on my serasoft throw blanket at the end of my bed and kneads it. for a good two minutes, he just sinks his paws into the softness, his eyes narrowing and an obvious look of catly pleasure taking over his face. then he finds a spot that is just right and snuggles right down into the blanket to bask in my yellow lighting and sometimes my cooing and petting. it's easy to take for granted the cushy luxuries i have every day, the working in the #1 architectural marvel of 2007, the having a more-wonderful-by-the-day boyfriend, the feeling of a fifty degree day in late december. here's to not forgetting, remembering to notice and appreciate, and divining the same kind of intense pleasure from those simple things that bowser finds in my throw blanket.

Chubby Cheeks

he is abnormally strong. he's been holding his own head up practically since he was born, death gripping my finger, and now going for my hair at any given opportunity. he is easily mesmerized by lighty-uppy things. we have pictures of him with glazed eyes and drool as he watches baby einstein. he's been kind of anxious since he was born, with some level of separation anxiety - brayden can entertain himself on his own forever with nary a worry, but tyler gets fussy and upset should he not be able to see people for a second. his dad can always calm him, smooshed to his chest with a bouncing movement to get him to sleep, while his mom can always make him laugh and smile his chubby smile. he can be finicky, but when he smiles and laughs he is the greatest little man around. he is tyler blake.

Notions of Grandiosity

two hundred pages into the bio on john adams and i feel kind of...inadequate. the man, from mccullough's glowing descriptions, virtually established our nation, founded the navy, established education as a necessity for a stable american society, wrote the massachusetts constitution, acted as an emissary to france, and this is all before he became president. i'm only at the point where he's 44 years old. not to mention he had about a zillion children with a woman he not only adored and loved but respected, admired, and valued, walked five to ten miles a day, and was often forced into periods of geographical estrangement from all that he knew and loved.

and then there's me...granted, i'm only 23, and at this point in his life john adams was a schoolteacher in worcester, but i cannot pretend to suppose i will reach one eighteenth of all that adams accomplished by the age of 45. he lived in a time where people were expected to converse in french and english, read greek and latin, know intimately the texts of all of the esteemed ancient roman and greek philosophers, and to not only intimately be able to work in these and more modern texts into everyday conversation but to analyze them and draw new and dynamically appropriate lessons and conclusions from them. i barely remember my italian, and cannot pretend to even know all of the letters of the greek alphabet. i wonder...if our modern politicians were expected to uphold themselves to the same levels of learning our founding fathers did as a matter of course, would they have possibly, maybe, somehow learned a LESSON somewhere in HISTORY that might have stayed their hand from getting involved in, i don't know, afghanistan/iraq/iran? i might be just a lay historian now, but the more i read about pretty much any period of the past previous to the past three generations or so, the more lamentable, ignorant, uneducated, close-minded, and lazy i find my current society. no offense, guys.

Resist This

he is flirty. he flashes his two-toothed grin at anyone that'll look at him, jam one or more fists in his mouth, and squeal like a high-frequency ham radio gone awry. while his younger cousin tyler will make noises of the goo goo ga ga variety, in an obvious attempt to form words, brayden merely tests out his vocal range with extended sounds. so extended that people look around the restaurant we are in, wondering where the emergency broadcast noises are coming from. he loves his light-up toy, his ducky toy with the chewable legs/arms/feet/hands/face/tag/body, and my glasses. if given the opportunity, he will pull your drink over, steal your silverware, and eat your napkin. and then flash his teeth. he is brayden alexander.

Lazy Days

yesterday and today were my days off. i have done nothing more eventful than sleeping, reading, and eating. i actually slept a great deal, due in large part to closing my blackout curtains and being sick. i am still fighting bronchitis, though at least the debilitating exhaustion that accompanies it has finally worn off. just the coughing, coughing, coughing is left. i finished one book (the hotel new hampshire) and started another today (john adams, by my favorite biographer, david mccullough), and am consequently deeply embroiled in the events of our nation's founding. these events make for a much more dynamic and interesting read once you've actually been to boston and philadelphia, for some reason. i advocate taking all schoolchildren of the nation to these sites...nothing like bringing history alive. also, i am a nerd.

also also, i had a visitor today, his name is gizmo:my roommate's sister's dog, gizmo was under my watchful eye briefly as they went to the store, during which time we enthusiastically played with a cat toy. this was the peak of energy i expended for the day.

Sisters

i have nothing to blog about, so i figured i'd introduce you to my sisters. aren't they charming? this was four summers ago, at the 4th of july, and they were miserable in the heat. now these two are mothers. tremble at the thought.

Currently

...listening to john legend and my neighbors upstairs move stuff around.
---wearing a green tanktop and pink comfy pants and my plushy green cozy socks.
...reading The Hotel New Hampshire by john irving.
---battling a minor headache.
...debating whether or not to turn on the tv.
---considering going to bed.
...thinking that reading in bed is just as restful as going to bed.
---feeling too lazy to blowdry my hair.
...having fuzzy thoughts about the reverend.
---counting the days til my memphis new year's trip.
...wanting someone to make a scrabulous move.
---craving something but just not sure what.
...determined to finish more of the two books i got out of the library tomorrow.
---running out of verbs to start these sentences with.

I Choked on Air

still in bed. all day. with a brief break for vietnamese for dinner, and an attempt at a drive to the plaza which rapidly ended when i was seized with a coughing fit that had tears streaming down my face and me nearly throwing up in my lap while i drove as fast as possible to a bottle of water. that was not fun, and will teach me to leave my house and try to buy things for other people. guess i learned my lesson. tomorrow, another attempt at going to work. gearing up.

Word of the Day

bronchitis.

so now i'm on meds, hoping to get over bronchitis before new year's and the ill party i'll be attending.

this is what i wish for:i just need someone to squeeze into a cat carrier with. but how nice and warm and cozy does that look?

Me + Bed = Good

that is about as coherent of a thought as i can put together right now. i have been in bed for the past two days straight and i kind of don't want to leave it. let's see how tomorrow goes. so far i've been feeling detached and floaty a la tylenol pm hangovers, exhausted, and just not-wanting-to-get-out-of-bed-y. i may have brought up once or twice before how comfy my bed is, but here is the official proclamation that my bed rocks and is comfy and i might just never leave it. i'm tired. wah. starting to feel like the dude with the man cold from the video below. i callllleedddd.....

Hi My Name is Katie, I Am Paranoid

last night was the biggest brouhaha to hit our house since move-in day, and it all started because i felt weird.

let me preface the whole thing by saying that i have a cold, haven't been feeling super great, and spent most of yesterday lounging around in bed. after an entire afternoon of being a blob, i was feeling lightheaded, with a mild headache and kind of dizzy. i hadn't had much to drink, so i could've been dehydrated, but my mind sort of naturally went straight to carbon monoxide. because that is the first logical response to feeling weird, right?

so when my roommate nikki got home i asked her to let me know if she started feeling strange, so i would know if i were crazy or not. she remarked that, oddly enough, after hanging out at home for a while the previous day, she had started feeling strange. feeding off of each other and the reverend yelling at me to go get a detector, nikki and i went out in the ice storm to get a carbon monoxide alarm.

bring it back, open it up and put the batteries in, and not 2 minutes later it goes off. red light flashing, screaming at us to seek fresh air. we run around in circles in a lightheaded (in my case) panic, nikki putting the cats into a carrier as we go to the other apartments in the house to let them know. lo and behold we come to discover that carbon monoxide has been a problem in this house before. awesome. we go outside on the front porch in freezing rain and 30 degree temperatures, call the fire department and our parents, and wait. the fire truck roars up with lights blaring just a couple of minutes later, and the guys go in with their little CO detector doohickey. then i find out that an ambulance is on the way for me, as i'm the one with the symptoms. the firefighters go all through the house and find zero ppm carbon monoxide. good ending, except here i am, drama queen, with the poor paramedics rushing in to help me for something that is apparently all in my head.

i refused assistance, they left after filling out some paperwork, and i laid down to relax from the carbon monoxide symptoms i had apparently inflicted upon myself. it was then that i realized that i had taken two swigs of delsym cough syrup earlier in the day, from a bottle that is over a year old and probably has distilled itself to a higher potency. it left me feeling so woozy and dizzy that i slept until 3:30 pm today. most dramatic night in a while, all for nothing. but better safe than sorry!

I Caaaalllleeddd...But You Didn't Cooommmee...

(thanks to dooce, i'm borrowing this)
this video truly speaks the truth. i cannot possibly remember all the times i have helped some poor bereft guy with the sniffles, laid low by something that would barely be a hiccup in my day. this video makes me laugh til i cry.

Tis The Season

i spent all day shopping. and then all evening wrapping and boxing and prettifying. plus two trips back out to the store for things i forgot. those are the worst kind of trips to the store...makes me feel like i may or may not have early onset alzheimer's, how often i have to turn around and get all cold-weatherified to go back outside and back to the store to get some one single ingredient that i had forgotten. but at least i am dedicated enough to go out instead of just scrapping the whole shebang and curling up in bed with a special on LC from the hills. combatting that urge though is my compulsive need to do something right.now. and it must happen that second or else the world may possibly cease to exist. this is what makes me go to walgreen's at 9 pm to get gift tags. because WHAT IF I WRAPPED MY PRESENTS AND DIDN'T TAG THEM THIS SECOND OH.MY.GOD.?!? but don't worry, it's all done and wrapped and tagged.

Update

no one has yet stepped up with a donation for my dream bag. there is still time! don't be left out of the donation pool and therefore my affections.

my knee is being wonky. old war injury...i inflamed my kneecap playing racquetball in college, and it is flaring up again. i feel like i might be able to let you know when cold fronts are coming through.

the streets are icy. it is sleeting. i am now going into hibernation.

i need to go to the library tomorrow. i have high hopes of finding the hotel new hampshire back in, but if i don't i think i'm going to start tackling my list of david mccullough biographies.

i have become gainfully employed a second time over. i will be working in a well-known home decor store for part-time hours. this is essential if i will ever come out from under my credit card debt. so hellooooo 60 hour work weeks.

my dinner was vegetarian in nature tonight. it consisted of wheat thins chips (multi grain), rice with kc masterpiece bbq sauce, and awesomely sauteed asparagus. what did i really want? a steak.

Good Intentions

i had all good intentions of posting last night. i was reading a very captivating book (the devil in the white city by erik larson) after catching up on tila tequila's latest antics, but had left my laptop open and on so i could squeeze in a short post before bed. and yet somehow i found myself shutting down the computer and going to bed, without ever posting. i do this a lot, telling myself i will do such and such at a specific point in time, and then completely forgetting to do so. i of course realized i hadn't posted the minute i laid down to sleep, but at that point the computer was irretrievably turned off and there was no going back. also this small entry goes to show what a l.a.m.e. friday night i had, sitting in bed reading and watching tv. but ok, this is what i do every week. so maybe it is just me that is l.a.m.e.?

Piano Man

tonight my friend jen and i went to the billy joel concert in the new sprint center in downtown kc. i love being in midtown, only ten minutes down main st. from the new big arena and lots of great shows. you may remember me going to go see the so you think you can dance show in the same arena, but this show, i have to say, blew that show out of the water. we were in row 21 off of the floor, at billy joel's 8 o'clock (so sort of behind and to the left-ish of the stage). this is basically our view:besides not playing uptown girl, the piano man did it right and kept us amazingly entertained for 2 hours solid - no intermission. we had a blast, and the best moment of the show was the encore: his singing "piano man" along with the entire audience, all of us standing and singing together. it was really, really cool. good show.

Same Old Story

every time the reverend and i are together, we have a through-the-roof kind of good time. i'm sure it gets old for my four loyal readers, but it's true. and we apparently can't help it.

we made it to many kc tourist attractions, including:yj's, the hippest hipster spot for coffee in the crossroads,fritz's, where a train brings you your dinner,union station & its ginormous christmas tree,the zoooooooooooooooooo!!!,and finally, the nelson-atkins museum of art and its oldenburg/van bruggen shuttlecocks. we covered most of the greater kc metro area, had amazing meals, went to crazy fun places, and had an all-too-short but intensely amazing visit. now we're back to a t-minus situation, and it's jumped back up to over 3 weeks. but he always tells me to focus on the positive so huzzah! 3 weeks is less than 4!

Bullseye!

you have just lost a game of pool to your girlfriend. then, to add insult to injury or rub salt in your wounds, you lose a game of darts to her as well. a second game is well underway, and you appear to be falling behind once again. this is when it's time to go balls out and try to shoot with your eyes closed:you shoot, and before you can remove your hand from your eyes, you hear your girlfriend say, "HOLY SHIT."bullseye. you shoot two more darts, and in some freakish spasm of luck, hit the exact numbers you need to get to zero and win the game. you then raise your arms in the air in your V for victory stance and strut around the dartboard area of the bar, proclaiming to all who can hear and see your skills at darts.then you take a cheesy picture with your winning board, and promptly lose the next game.