You talk funny

I've had my first run-in with a native outside of "the office." I went to a coffee shop downtown last night, just to get out of my suffocatingly small hotel room for an hour or two. Plus, I hadn't eaten dinner at the time, and I had read online that this place does a mean sandwich - although I'm not really sure how you could mess that sort of thing up. Then again, I don't cook, so how would I know? But I digress.

I'm sitting at a table by the window, overlooking the beautiful-if-somewhat-sparse city centre, when a man come us to me. He says hello, and introduces himself as a student at the local university who is completing research for an essay about vocal inflection and intonation, and how it changes/effects an individual's mood. He asks me if it would be alright for him to record my answers to a few questions. What the heck, I'll do it.

He proceeds to ask me some very formal sounding questions about my thanksgiving weekend. I'm hoping for his sake that the content of my answers is not important, because I sounded about as stupid as I might have sounded if I were in the middle of a final interview with a Target District manager. An interview for which I was not whole-heartily prepared. I believe I even had to stop mid-sentence once, pretend I hadn't just said that sentence and start answering his question again.

In my defense, he asked questions about the holiday and family tension. But you see, I did not spend the holiday with family, instead I spent it with friends in the cities. The most tense moment of the whole day was deciding who should reprimand the dog for eating the turkey we had left out. He asked what my favorite part of the day was. My response was "the meal." Two words.

I must have been the worst test subject imaginable. Yet still, I'm intrigued by his research, and want to know just what was his interpretation of my voice, and how I reacted to his questioning. But just as with the number of licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, the world may never know.

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

You get the idea

A classic

To fill the content void.



I really thought moving out here would significantly increase my posts, but it turns out I'm still real boring. So this will have to do.

Turkey?

A photo essay on Thanksgiving dinner:

The Bird

The Beans

The Mash

The Stuffing

The Bones


The End

Potporri

I have found a place to live! It's a condo. Email me for details. Yes, this is a shameless ploy to garner more email -- you realise that my nightly activities consist of checking my email to see who has sent me a message (no one), watching a few episodes of Law and Order, and falling asleep at 8:30 with the TV still on. And somehow I'm still tired when the alarm goes off at 6. Funny, that.

I close on the 15th of December, so its another full month of hotel living for me before my precious, precious belongings make the trip to join me here. The new place has way too many rooms for my current furniture allocation, so I will need to buy lots of neato stuff to fill it up. I am accepting donations. Also, as anyone bought me Six Feet Under on DVD yet? No.

I went for a couple drinks with two of the supervisors from my store tonight. They took me to a "lounge" attached to a motel. We were the only people in the bar. They pretty much spent the night gossiping about people who either work for us, or used to work for us. I recognized about three names out of the roughly 100 they tossed out.

Going out with co-workers is a new experience for me. Especially when the ones I'm drinking with report directly to me. I still cringe a little bit when one of them introduces me as her boss. I don't think of myself as a boss in any sense of the word, although in the traditional sense I suppose they are correct. I tell them what to do . Of course, its completely up to them whether they do what I ask or not. Most of the time they just do what they want, and figure I won't object. Most of the time they are correct. Because I don't know any better.

Supermodel

Perhaps it is true that nothing shown on television during the past two weeks has escaped my attention. I've watched Law and Order marathons until they start repeating the episodes. Tonight though, I saw something different. I'm not sure what to call it exactly, so I'll just explain it.

I suppose it's best described as a contest of sorts. Contestants are asked to strike a pose. Then, as they are posing, another person shoots the contestant with a paintball gun at close range. The object of the game is to maintain your original pose more consistently than your opponent. You get three poses - the winner being determined by a celebrity judge. So what was I watching? The Man show? Or some new malicious VH1 program?

Nope, it was on ESPN 2.

I mean seriously guys, I was cool with the trick shot pool, the professional bowling, and the constant poker tournaments. Heck, even the paintball tournaments are at least somewhat defensible. But don't you think you've taken the definition of extreme sports just a bit over the line here? It's extreme, no doubt, I'll give you that.

Closing In

Another day of house hunting, and finally we have a candidate. I'm putting an offer in on a condo tomorrow, so I may have a permanent address in the near future. The place I like has 3 levels. There's two bedrooms and a full bath upstairs. The main floor has a living area, dining room, and kitchen, plus a half bath. Then downstairs there's a finished room and a laundry/storage area.

The downside is that it needs to be entirely repainted. The walls have a little orange peel texture to them, and the last time someone painted they filled in nail holes with compound. Unfortunately, they used too much compound, so there are patches on the wall all over the place. I'm having an estimate done for getting it professionally repainted, but if that ends up costing too much you can expect to be invited to a rather large-scale painting party in the next month or two. Yes, wine and cheeses will be provided. Of course, this is all contingent upon agreeing to terms, inspection, etc, etc. But it's progress.

Television is my Friend

Bravo is showing one of my favorite episodes of Six Feet Under tonight. It's the episode in which Nate accidentally takes Ecstasy. The stray pill that David had hurriedly hidden in the family aspirin bottle during a previous episode. David has recently come out to his mother, and she arranges a family dinner. Nate takes the pill for his headache before the meal, and ends up high at the dinner table. This episode is one of the early defining moments for the show. A lot of the plot lines start to take root, and begin to develop more seriously. Also its damn funny.

I miss this show -- especially the first three seasons. Its just so good. Someone buy it for me so I don't have to watch the edited-for-television version.

Also, the Sorkin movie American President was on tonight. I haven't seen the movie since before the West Wing started, and I forgot just how many people form that movie are in the television series. Not to mention the number of West-wingers who found their way onto Studio 60. Well okay, just Bradley Whitford.

I Like to Watch Cute Football Players Play Football

And score ridiculous goals.

STARBUSTS

Living in Wisconsin is already entertaining. Today one of the supervisors was running to get coffee, so I asked her to get me some. "I'll take the lightest roast they've got," I said. So off she goes to get me a cup of java. She returns just a few moments later and explains, "They only had one roast, so they added some hot water for you."

Yes, I asked for a light roast and I received a watered-down-something-or-rather roast. I'm not prima facie anti-Starbucks or anything, but this is bizarre behavior. I hope it was her first night on the job.



Also

Yesterday: Sunny and nearly 70
Today: 7" of snow by noon and cold cold cold.

The Trifecta

A week or two before I found out I was moving to Wisconsin, my friend Lexi was in the cities paying a visit. She's been working for an online baby magazine in New York for the past few years. During her visit, she received a call from another magazine offering her a job. The catch was she'd have to move out of NYC, and into a much smaller community in Massachusetts. Of course, she accepted the offer, and is now finding herself in a similar position.

Then, maybe one week after I found out about my move, Cupcake gets an offer from a competing firm in NY. And she's in transition now as well. Although admittedly not leaving Brooklyn anytime soon. The downside for Cups is that she has to train in her replacement.

So there you have it. A collective "movin' on up" for all three of us. I've heard before that bad things always happen in threes. Maybe the same anecdotal law applies here as well. Way to go chicks! Now you can afford to come visit me.

It only takes 5 minutes

of watching The Truth about Cats & Dogs to be reminded of what a genius that Janeane Garofalo is. Too bad about Air America.

Went to see the motion picture version of Running with Scissors today. Gotta say this is one occasion where I may have enjoyed the film more than the book upon which it was based. Burroughs writing in Scissors always seemed exaggerated and just a little too over the top to be true. The movie does a good job of making the situation feel uncomfortable, bizarre, and slightly dangerous, but I never got the feeling that it couldn't really happen to someone the way I felt when reading the book.

Sure, they leave out most of the graphic sex descriptions, but that's why you've got that imagination of ours. You can fill in the details.

Buy this House!

I looked at more than 20 houses yesterday. Of the places I saw, there is one (1) I liked enough to consider making an offer.

For anyone who maybe didn't know this already, buying a home is a pain in the ass. There's a whole different language spoken in the real estate world. Not to mention a slew of important considerations that were of little to no concern when looking for apartments. I've been apartment hunting enough times to be able to tell a good layout form a bad one, but when it come to some of the more subtle nuances one should look for when buying I have a lot to learn.

How old is that furnace? These windows look like they need to be replaced. What is the condition of the roof? How much are the taxes? It looks like there's some water damage in the basement. What's that, the siding is giving way on the corner of the house?

Fortunately, price cures everything. Unfortunately, price cures everything.