Take a sad song and make it better

The radio station I listen to has been celebrating The Beatles all month, in honor of that remastered collection thing that you probably heard about, unless you've been living under a rock or perhaps don't listen to a station that decided to talk about The Beatles all month. Tonight, the whole thing culminated in a countdown of the top 50 Beatles songs, as ranked by listeners. (Or rather, as ranked by the listeners who actually took the time to vote. I did not, but obviously that won't stop me from complaining about the results.) It was a reasonably solid list... not that I am any sort of expert on Beatles discography and therefore qualified to weigh in on this, and maybe the fact that I am not a Beatles expert accounts for my reaction when they played the number 1 song. Hey Jude? Really?? The song that starts out promising enough but then ends with approximately nine and a half gratingly repetitive minutes of "Na, na, na, na-na-na-na! Na-na-na-na! Hey-ay Jude. (JudyJudyJudyJudeJudyJude!)"? That song? Better than all other Beatles songs? OK then.

It occurs to me that my dad once voiced that exact same complaint about Hey Jude, so now of course I am terrified I may be turning into my father. Next thing you know, I'll be driving as if every other car on the road is invisible, bringing my own spoon to restaurants, and spouting off about how that Rush Limbaugh really knows what he's talking about. Yeesh. Perish the thought.

In truth, I don't really have a problem with Hey Jude, but best Beatles song of all? Hardly. Of course, now I have to tell you what IS the best Beatles song, which is bound to be a bad idea, because at least 96% of you will disagree with me, and at least half of that 96% will actually lose respect for me because of my disturbingly bad choice. Or so I've been led to believe the few times this topic has come up in the past. Some people are serious about their Beatles cred. It may be on par with the pop/soda divide.

So I won't tell you what the best Beatles song is. Instead, I will tell you what my favorite Beatles song is. And then I will explain why it is my favorite, in an effort to calm whichever among you will tell me it is not a valid choice.

My favorite Beatles song is Yesterday. Not because it is lovely and sad (though it is) and not because I have a scratchy old version of it on a tape that my little sister once dubbed for me--a version that ends with Paul saying, "Thank you, Ringo; that was wonderful," which for some reason makes me smile. My favorite Beatles song is Yesterday because every time I hear it, I remember winding my way up the narrow staircase that circles the interior of Brunelleschi's dome in Il Duomo, the Florence Cathedral. I remember climbing to the top of that dome during the spring break of my semester abroad, with two German boys walking the steps in front of me, singing Yesterday to amuse themselves. Wait. Were they German? They may not have been German. All I remember is that English was not their first language, and as such, one of them mangled the lyrics into something entirely unrecognizable as English words. I know I have mangled some Spanish over the years; I once tried to sing the Tortilla Song that I learned in high school Spanish to a bartender in Cozumel, and though I was confident I was remembering all the words just right, he had no idea whatsoever what I was singing about. Mangled English I'm less familiar with. It's hard to imagine mangled versions of a language you know well. So when I heard the German teenager singing Yesterday and injecting words that were not words, my ears perked up in confusion and surprise. So did the teenager's friend's, because he whirled around immediately to correct him. "Half the man! Half the man!" he sputtered, one hand pounding the other for emphasis. After that chiding, the poor kid looked like half the man he used to be. But still, he kept on singing.

So when I hear Yesterday, I think of Florence. I think of exploring new places and learning new things and realizing the simultaneous fear and exhilaration of being in another country and knowing there is no one on the planet who knew exactly where I was at any given moment. And I think of those two boys in Brunelleschi's dome and I wonder what lyrics they are mangling these days.

Incidentally, Yesterday came in at #11 on the radio listeners' poll, so obviously I am not the only one for whom that song holds a special place. At #12 was In My Life, which is my second-favorite Beatles song (by a very close margin). I don't have a story to go with that one. I've just always liked it is all.

I wasn't actually planning on talking about the Beatles tonight. I certainly wasn't planning on talking about them for seven paragraphs. No, I was going to talk about my second vacation in the course of a month. Remember? I was so overdue for a vacation that I decided to take two? So last weekend was my long weekend in L.A., where it was ridiculously hot and where I saw more of the highways than of anything else (which, as far as I can tell, is about as accurate a picture of L.A. as one can get), but where I had an excellent time with some excellent friends nonetheless. I went to visit Darren and Heather (who some of you may remember from Look at Me... and Nabbalicious fame). I went with my friend Melissa, who lives in Minneapolis but who I had to meet through another blog friend in California (everybody's favorite tech support and car repair guru, Steve, who is the reason Heather and Darren know Melissa as well). See what a small world it is? Look at the Internet, bringing people together even after their blogs are long defunct. It's almost like... REAL LIFE. Crazy thought.

Anyway, we had a hilarious time. Seriously, I do not remember the last time I laughed so much in a 72-hour span. We went to the observatory in Rebel without a Cause. I saw the beach club that served as 90210's Beverly Hill's Beach Club. (Or was it the beach club that everyone worked at on Saved by the Bell? Were they actually the same beach club? My memory of them is the same.) I had my first In-n-Out burger. I celebrated Guinness's 250th birthday. I lost a bar fight because I had only one arm. We had Darren's famous Cincinnati chili and Roscoe's famous chicken & waffles. We took pictures of creepy statues. And we made more terrible "That's what she said" jokes than Michael Scott has made on all five seasons of The Office thus far. Also, we learned all sorts of interesting things about each other. I learned that Melissa is an exhibitionist and that Heather hates Colonial Williamsburg. (She has a point: Why do Americans need their history safe and spoonfed, like Applebee's and network sitcoms?) In turn, they learned that I spent $18 on a bottle of deodorant, because the Internet told me to.

In short, I had so much fun that I don't even mind coming home with a cold that's left me feeling weak and stuffy for days. I probably picked it up on the plane, but since Heather was sick when we got there and Melissa was sick by the time we left, we've decided we must be passing it along to one another in batches, like Amish Friendship Bread. It is the Amish Friendship Cold. Who wants it next, folks? I've got plenty of germs to share, and plenty of Internet friends I'd love to see. Come on over!

September doesn't officially start until after Labor Day anyway, right?

Just maybe not a full week after Labor Day. Whoopsie. Anyway, hello there. Fancy meeting you here. Wait. Is anyone here? It's entirely possible that after such a long hiatus I am now typing into the text-based equivalent of an empty and echo-y cave. The bad news is, perhaps no one is left to hear me. On the plus side, the acoustics are great!

So then. August happened, and with it came... Man. What the hell did I do for all of August? I know that time speeds up as we get older, but still I would like a recount on this summer's length. Wasn't it June just two days ago? And now it's all leaves changing and spiced pumpkin lattes and skirt and boot season on its way. Madness.

Obviously I could rattle off for you everything I have done in the past month, in inevitably lazy bullet-point format. Frankly, however, August is a blur. I did some stuff. I hung out with some people. I probably had some wine. Most important, I took a vacation! A real one, where I left my house (and hell, the state) for a full week and everything! And it was excellent. I don't know why I don't do that more often. I'm allotted a reasonably adequate number of vacation days, and yet, it had been over three years since I took a solid week of those days at once. That's just wrong, people. WRONG. Must remedy that in all years to come.

You may recall that my plan was an old school family vacation, minus the family. Or rather, with urban family, which if you ask me is a much better way to travel. My pal Carrie and I road tripped it to South Dakota, where they have mountains and rock formations and rattlesnakes, making it feel like an entirely different world that's only one state away.

South Dakota was gorgeous, actually, and if you haven't been there yet, I highly recommend you go. Coming from the east, we made the requisite stops along I-90 at the Corn Palace (the world's largest bird feeder) and Wall Drug on the way out, but I suppose you could skip those trivialities (if you must) and proceed directly to the Badlands. You know, the Badlands! Home to an unspecified number of rattlesnakes that I was convinced would be our undoing. I mean, I suppose I didn't really think a rattlesnake would bite me and I would DIE, but I do admit I was convinced there would at least be a harrowing but ultimately harmless run-in of some sort, not unlike the late night tarantula scare in the motel room when the Brady Bunch went to Hawaii.

Seriously, people, after talking to a NOT HELPFUL friend of Carrie's who had me convinced we would camp in the Badlands only if we had a death wish (his exact words: "They don't call it the GOODlands, you know!"), I was so convinced there would be rattlesnakes at our campsite that I did what any normal person (read: Internet addict who believes Google is the new Magic 8 Ball) would do. I Googled "Badlands camping death." And you know what? No matching suggestions appeared in that little drop-down list as I typed! No valid results returned! Clearly that meant all would be fine, and luckily, Google was right! As far as I'm concerned, the Badlands are full of grasshoppers, prairie dogs, and more than the occasional buffalo, but rattlesnakes? The Badlands are fresh out! Whew.

I was going to do a little photo essay of various highlights of my trip, but you know what? That shit takes time, yo, and if I sidetrack myself with a project like that, I may not hit that "Publish Post" button this week either. So how about you just pop on over to this Flickr set if you feel so inclined, and just imagine my witty commentary interspersed between ten or fifteen hand-picked shots? I mean really; do I have to do everything? Oh. Right. This is my blog. So yes, I suppose I do.

Moving on. Vacation was definitely the highlight of my August, but there were other victories as well. Like my winning a new pair of jeans in Abbersnail's Gap-tastic Pants Party! Whee! If I didn't know any better, I'd think my friends got together and somehow rigged that contest to declare me a winner, just so they could finally see me in something other than the four identical pairs of Mossimo jeans from Target I've been wearing for three years now. I do need a jeans upgrade, I'm well aware, so I entered Abbersnail's contest with the plea, "Help me, Abby-wan. You're my only hope!" And help me she did. Hurrah.

So I have new pants. Or, I will have, once I get myself to a Gap to pick them out. On an entirely different note, what I do NOT have is home-grown tomatoes. Friends, if this one first attempt can be considered a fair measure for future success, I'm going to have to say that gardening is not for me. I am pretty sure tomato season is officially over, and from my stubborn and temperamental stoop-side tomato plants, I got a mere handful of not particularly delicious cherry tomatoes and exactly ZERO beefsteaks. I should have had at least a few, but the damn squirrels got to every one of them just before they were ripe enough to pick. Bastards. When they're not dying in my yard, they're stealing the literal fruits of my labors. (That is, if watering a plant every day can be considered "labor.") So I guess I'll have to continue buying tomatoes like a common 21st-century capitalist. I should have learned years ago that a successful pioneer woman I am not. I've never been a quick study, obviously.

I'm sure other things happened in August, too, but as I said, it's a blur. So that brings us to September, in which, thus far, I have survived a visit from my family, had an uneventful trip to the dentist, went to the quirkiest show I've seen in a long time, and made my first quiche. (Note: I still don't love eggs, but it was delicious.) Oh, and today I took an invigorating late summer bike ride that was altogether lovely and perfect aside from the droves of gnats on a mile or so patch of the river-side trail. I have already showered off the ones that awesomely plastered themselves inside my sports bra, but if I find any in my teeth when I floss tonight, I may be too horrified to bike near a river ever again.

And on that note, I shall leave you, because there's no better way to say "Thanks for reading after I abandoned you for a month" than to end with an image like that. You're welcome.

And what have all of you been up to not-so-recently?

All right fine. Pictures!

You know what's all sorts of fun? Looking at pictures of other people's drunk coworkers! No? That's not your idea of a good use of Web space? It's also maybe not a good idea at all, libel/slander-wise? Yeah. That's what I thought. Hence, my full set of Mexico photos is hiding out elsewhere, in a slightly less public space. The abridged set I'm pretty fine with any of you seeing is over here.

I'll be the first to admit it's not a terribly exciting collection. Truly, I did essentially nothing on this trip except lay in the sun with a book during the day and have a beverage or five at night. Still, how about some highlights?

Like the liquor dispensers(!) in my room (which might have been more exciting had it been higher quality liquor or had the mini-fridge been stocked with more suitable mixers for said liquor). Still. Liquor! On tap! I would like a similar setup at both home and work, please.



And how about some towel animals? Word has it that some people on the trip got the very same creature each day, but look how ambitious my housekeeping staff member was! (I probably should have tipped him despite the hotel's instructions not to, eh?)









Please tell me I am not the only one who thinks that last one looks a wee bit vulgar. After much examination and discussion, I think I have finally decided it was supposed to be a lobster, but no one I showed this picture to thought that was obvious on first glance.

And speaking of animals, there were several around our hotel. Namely, lizards, noisy blackbirds, strange unidentified furry rodents, and monkeys. The monkeys probably would have made for the best photo opportunity, right? So of course, I got no pictures of them.







This dude isn't alive, but they were all over the place, too.



I did on occasion leave the compound... Here is some proof of that.















Why would I need to leave the hotel, though, with swim-up bars and banana hammock sitings and weird desserts at my ready disposal?







Oh yeah. And the beach, too. That was the best part, of course.

I'm tempted to use that famous Go-Go's line as a title, but "Had to get away" is less relevant when you're not getting away from much.

Hello! I am back. Did you miss me? (Please, don't answer that.) To answer the question that really only one of my friends was asking (hi, Ang), Yes! I am home. Have been for a full 26 hours now. And what have I done in those intervening hours? Let's see...

• Nearly fully unpacked (within two hours of my return--surely that is a new record for me).
• Had a particularly unproductive day at work.
• Had one of my most prolific Facebook days to date. (No, that last item isn't necessarily related to this one; I'm just surprised to notice that today's Wall activities take up a full screen length.)
• Went grocery shopping to ensure that a meal encompassing more than just the Refined Carbs and Processed Foods group might again be possible in my home.
• Shoveled the snow Mother Nature was rude enough to leave for me in my absence.
• Watched another Presidential address without heckling. (Seriously, when will this start to feel commonplace to me rather than make me smile involuntarily in relief and hope?)

What I have NOT done is even open my feed reader. I am far too scared to do that without a few free hours in front of me. Have I missed anything particularly notable? Well of course I did. Blog Share was the day after my last Bloglines check-in. I'll catch up eventually, I suppose. Meanwhile, if anything of particularly notable import happened in the past several days, feel free to fill me in.

So. Mexico. Honestly, I don't have a whole lot to tell you about that. Nothing about it was so exciting as to warrant an enthusiastic "It was FUN!!" summary, but it would be awfully lame and ungrateful of me not to appreciate the mere fact that I spent three and a half days basking in the sunshine (sans any sort of layers) in the middle of February.

As you may recall, this trip was with my coworkers, so perhaps the weirdest part was being away from work for several days, only to come in this morning and think, "Huh. Haven't been here in a while, and yet, I just saw you yesterday!" Strange. In a way, it was a long weekend without a weekend, but since that weekend included free drinks and the aforementioned sunshine, I suppose I can't complain too much.

It seems I really should have some sort of recap, however, but as 9:00 p.m. has somehow quickly become 10:56, I'm afraid that recap is going to happen in quick and lazy bullet-point form. Let's see. Some high and low lights...

• Yes, there were liquor dispensers in my room. I thought about providing a photo as evidence, but I fear that doing so might only remind us of the cold, sad reality that there aren't liquor dispensers everywhere in life. You say I'm too lazy to upload a photo; I say I'm just helping you out. (Disclaimer: If you are my Flickr friend, you'll probably see photos within the next day or so, actually. I'm just not getting to it quite yet.)
  
  
• My ex-boyfriend who is also my coworker is in seemingly a really not very good place right now. To everyone who for some reason keeps asking, "So, now that he's divorced, do you think you two will get back together?" I say again, "NO!! What am I, some kind of masochist??" The most important fact is that his ex-wife was in no part any of the reason he and I broke up. He did not meet her until over a full year after we parted ways. Yes, I think his divorce somehow helped me to finally let that wall of bitterness fall down. I can say in some lame, karmic way, "OK, we're even now." I might venture so far as to say enough time has passed that we could maybe even be friends again. (We were extremely close friends before, and the fact that our romance didn't end badly should have meant we could be friends after as well.) But does that mean I want it to be my turn again relationship-wise? Hell to the no. I still feel that it was largely me who helped him pick up the pieces after his first divorce. Damned if I want any part of that role a second time. Besides that, I am already possibly making the same mistakes I made once before with one ex-boyfriend. Why would I add another one to the list?
  
  
• You don't have to go on a Carnival cruise to have a different animal-shaped towel sculpture in your room every day. Again, if I had actually visited Flickr before I started this post, perhaps I'd have photographic evidence of this.
  
  
• Yes, I realize I again made allusion to The Buddhist in that second-to-last item without actually telling you anything, and also wrangled what could possibly be a post in and of itself about an ex-boyfriend into a poorly summarized bullet point. You're just going to have to accept that for now.
  
  
• The food at an all-inclusive resort isn't always awful. It's still nothing to write home about, however.
  
  
• When you're gone only three (plus two travel) days, there really isn't much to write home about at all, actually. Or so is the story for those of you who might be expecting post cards. (i.e., Don't hold your breath for those.)

And honestly, that about wraps it up. I ate too much, drank almost too much, read a book and a half, and came back with what I'm certain will be a sadly short-lived sunny souvenir vacation glow.

So. What have you been up to since I heard from you last?

It still wasn't as scary as when the creepy girl crawled out of the TV at the end of The Ring

Allow me to sum up my weekend in fifteen words or fewer: wind, wind, friends, wine, cookies, wind, chips, wine, wind, boat, board games, wine, wind, wind.

In case you didn't get that, it was windy. "Too chilly to jump in the lake" windy. "Is that tree going to fall on us?" windy. Tragically, "no campfire tonight" windy. At one point I asked no one in particular how it could be so dang windy for so dang long, and although logically I agree with the friend who replied that surely there isn't a finite amount of wind in this world, I still think that if the weather was going to be like that, the Weather.com prediction for the weekend should have said, "Dust Bowl. Minus the dust. No campfires for you, ya hear?"

Despite the less-than-ideal-for-summer-cabining weather, however, we all had a lovely time. As usual, we had a fantastic spread of both sweet and savory treats, and as usual, I ate entirely too many of them. I got a bit of color on my pasty white self, and my team kicked some proverbial ass in Taboo. I even found a few quiet moments to steal away with my vampire book. All in all, thumbs up on the weekend, I'd say.

Speaking of the crazy vampire book, I was reminded this weekend that, despite the number of grown women who are obsessed with this series, Twilight was, in fact, written for children. How do I know this? Because we had children with us at the cabin, and their twelve-year-old eyes lit up when they saw me pull my book from my bag.

"You're reading TWILIGHT?!?" my friend's daughter and her best friend exclaimed. "Do you like it?? Oooh, it is SOOOO GOOD!!!"

I'm not sure if I was suddenly the coolest grown-up at the cabin or the strangest one, but both girls excitedly gushed to me about how good the sequels are and how poorly cast they think the upcoming movie version is. (Edward is not nearly attractive enough, it seems.) They asked me how far I was in the book, and when I explained that Edward had recently told Bella that she could tell her friends they were secretly dating, both girls swooned with the memory of it all.

I would like to think my relating to the current obsessions of preteens ends there, but last night, flipping through the channels while I ate my dinner, I stumbled across the opening credits of the Disney Channel's exclusive Jonas Brothers movie Camp Rock (something else we heard a lot about this weekend) and I will admit, I watched the whole damn thing. If it redeems myself any, I didn't enjoy it. Seriously, it's no High School Musical, folks. But I'm just going to step right out of this hole before I dig any deeper, OK?

On an entirely different note from an entirely not-G-rated film, how many of you have any recollection of The Serpent and the Rainbow? I brought that one up during a late-night conversation about the scariest movies we've ever seen, but the truth is, I don't really recall if it was inordinately scary or if I just saw it at a particularly fragile age. I've always been a big old 'fraidy cat who could find horror in a bowl of oatmeal, so it wouldn't surprise me if the movie wasn't nearly as scary as I remember. In fact, despite how much it traumatized me, I really don't remember very many details. When I read the plot summary at IMDB, in fact, the story didn't even sound familiar at all. So tell me. Was The Serpent and the Rainbow the movie in which some sinister scary man planted a bug larva in a woman's makeup compact and it later grew under her skin, beneath a big nasty red welt, which finally broke open to allow hundreds of tiny spiders to crawl out? Does that ring a bell to any of you? Because that horrifying scene has been embedded in my brain for 20 years now (and I'm sorry if it's now embedded in yours), so I really ought to know from whence it came. Also, I ought to know that something like that is highly improbable in real life, and therefore when I feel the beginnings of a zit high on my cheek bone (an area typically not at all prone to acne), I should tell myself confidently that the sensitive red spot IS, in fact, just a zit, and no swarm of spiders is going to crawl out of my skin later this week. I mean, not that I'd ever think such a thing. Particularly not today. Nope, not me. (If you'll excuse me, I have to examine my cheek in the mirror once more.)




P.S. Are you all ready for Blog Share 3.0? I am not, since I've yet to write a single word of my anonypost, but ready or not, Blog Share is this week. If it's anything like the last two, you can expect to read secrets and scandals and catharsis galore. I haven't decided which route to go yet, but I'll be hiding out somewhere on these here Interwebs come Wednesday. See you then.

Not everyone in Boston knows my name, and it is not always sunny in Philadelphia (but I had fun in both places anyway)

All right then. Spring vacation recap. I promised you one of those, didn't I? Of course, by now, NPW, Noelle, and Lara have it pretty well covered, but I'd feel remiss in not posting my version anyway.

I had a lovely long weekend, and I hope the lovely ladies and gentlemen with whom I spent it did as well. There are those who might say the Internet is not real life, that I'd be insane to plan an overnight visit at the home of a blogger I'd never met in person in real time (or moreover, that said blogger would have to be insane or downright foolish to provide her home address and invite me to fly to her city and stay with her). But as Lara, NPW, Noelle, and I chatted in NPW's living room in our pajamas Friday night, I looked at each one of them and couldn't help saying, "I don't feel at all like I just met any of you tonight!" In our case at least, who we are online translates quite accurately to who we are in real life, and I feel like crying "No fair" because I don't get to hang out with them again any time I like.

I have a hard time summing up the past few days in any sort of coherent narrative, so instead I'll recount the weekend photo essay style, with random and possibly incomplete and incohesive segues in between. Sound fun? I thought so. Let's go.

Lara and her husband Rob picked me up at the Philadelphia airport early Friday afternoon, and I got in their car to drive several hours to Boston with them immediately thereafter. One might think a road trip into New England rush hour might be a surefire way to unravel an Internet friendship in record time, but luckily, we made it to NPW and Chris's house in Boston still excited for the weekend of togetherness ahead. Unfortunately, Aaron bailed on our group dinner plans due to an alleged stomach bug, but the rest of us had a fine time enjoying noodles and ice cream anyway.







The next morning it was off to Harvard for Noelle's swim meet. After my brief visit to that campus, I'm pleased to think about how I can now casually drop the line "Yeah, I went to Harvard. No big deal, really..." into future conversations. Noelle, on the other hand, gets to say she not only went there, but swam there, so I'm very excited about that on her behalf.







From there, we commenced our sightseeing adventures, but we didn't make it very far before we realized it was after NOON and we'd not yet had a drink, which, while on vacation is simply not right. So off to John Harvard's Brew Pub we went.



You'll note that I had a cider rather than a beer, which I'm sure is some sort of travesty within spitting distance of Sam Adams's grave. Luckily, Lara and NPW had greeted Sam with a hearty "Thank you, Sam!" moments earlier, so I felt a bit better about betraying Boston with my beverage choice.



Besides that, while Boston may be a notably beer-centric town, it is also home to the Omni Parker House, which, in addition to having invented the Boston Cream Pie, had the ingenuity to bring us the Boston Cream Pie martini as well. Should you make it to Boston at some point, I highly recommend you sample one of these.







If you could also try the pumpkin martini and report back to me on your thoughts, that'd be great. We have a tendency to neglect the pumpkin from December through September, and I'd like to do whatever I can to remedy that.



When NPW first pointed out the Omni Parker House (hereafter known to me as, simply, "the hotel with the delicious Boston Cream Pie martinis), it was actually too early for a drink. Not too early in our view, mind you (we did have our first drink of the day at 1:09, after all), but those crazy folks at the "the hotel with the delicious martinis" seemed to think a bar need not open until 4:30. To keep ourselves busy in the meantime, we walked to Mike's Pastry for Florentine cannolis--a detour I highly recommend should ever you find yourself in the area (or within reasonable distance of it) yourself. If you've read NPW's and Lara's recent posts, you may think the cannolis have already been well documented to an unnecessarily thorough degree, but you would be wrong, my friend. You know that guy in The Godfather? The guy who says, "Leave the gun; take the cannoli"? If that was a Florentine cannoli from Mike's Pastry, I can say with resolute certainty that he made the right choice.





Once we started drinking and snacking, I had an even harder time than usual focusing with any sort of reverence on things of historical significance, so instead we just made friends with statues and curbside mascots around Boston.







After our sightseeing eating and drinking adventures, we were a tad worn out, so we retired back to NPW's house to rest up for dinner. That is, if your definition of "rest up" means cracking open a bottle of wine and playing Wii tennis and bowling. Nothing says "down time" like getting your ass kicked in fake bowling; wouldn't you agree?







Eventually, we did tear ourselves away from Chris's giant TV long enough to walk to dinner, where we met up with the hilarious and charming Red of The Cupcake Tent fame (along with her lovely friend Carly) for late-night burritos and drinks. I think a fine time was had by all, even if the restaurant did run out of guacamole before we arrived. Seriously! A Mexican restaurant with no guacamole! I was at least as verklempt about the news as Red was, but no one captured a photo of it in my case.



Luckily, Red's friend Sam was there to soften the blow. And clearly the rest of us managed to cope as well. Lack of guac didn't prevent any of us from enjoying our fine meal.





All in all, we had a lovely time together, as evidenced by this post-dinner group photo.



(Sing it with me now: "One of these things is not like the oth-er"... Red, perhaps you'll want to invest in some eyewear before you hang out with us again. Obviously in this group, being a four-eyed brunette is the way to go.)

Sunday morning we had a lovely breakfast and said our goodbyes to Noelle, Chris, and NPW, and then Lara, Rob, and I headed off back to Philadelphia. It would be entirely too boring to go straight to Philly, however. Instead, we enjoyed a detour in Marblehead (where I bought a book, saw a lighthouse, and met Rob's mother) and another stop for dinner in Salem--home to the expected witch-related museums and trinket shops but also to a gem of a liquor store named "Bunghole." Seriously, I couldn't make a name like that up. (Or, I could, but I didn't. See?)



Hence, we arrived at casa del Guinness Girl and Wilman well after midnight, a fact for which the "high-compliance" Rob (note: his word, not mine) apologized at least 17 times. For the record (even though I know he will not read this): Rob, I absolutely did not mind stopping in Marblehead so you could see your mom and grandfather, and I was not seething that you left me waiting at the airport for an extra 20 minutes earlier in the weekend either. Internets, I assure you: Rob is one of the nicest and most considerate men you will ever meet, but it is a good thing he did not accompany Lara and me on our rainy day adventures in Philly Monday, because I am 100% certain he would have spent the day apologizing for the weather on the city's behalf.



By this point, Lara had already figured out that I generally require little more in terms of a sightseeing plan than "let's just walk around and look at things (oh, and maybe stop for wine and snacks several times)," and she had no problem being my tour guide with that in mind.

I couldn't justify being in Philadelphia and not seeing the Liberty Bell, so we popped over for a quick photo there. In case you haven't heard, it's a big bell with a crack in it. And that's still just about all I know about that.



We also tried to go to the U.S. Mint, for no other reason than it was right there and we'd both heard it was a worthwhile tour (and one Lara hadn't yet done). If ever you happen to attempt this yourself, here's a tip for you: the U.S. Mint does not allow cameras or camera phones carried anywhere on your person. The man at the door will be very official and adamant about that rule, but he will offer no solution as to where you might safely stow or check your camera, and he will act as if this is a problem that has never come up or occurred to him before. He will also not do much to sell you on the interestingness of the U.S. Mint tour, though (Us: "Well, what does the tour involve, anyway?" Him: "You see how money gets made."), so you could probably just do what we did, which was say "Screw you, Mint" and go get a Philly-style soft pretzel instead.





From there, we went to the Mutter Museum, at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Although they did not confiscate our cameras nor force us to leave them on the street for a vagrant or hoodlum to walk off with, they also do not allow photography within the museum, so this is the most I can show you of our visit there.





Suffice it to say that "Disturbingly Informative" is an entirely apt tagline. I made it through the conjoined twins, the wall of skulls, the wax model samples of encephalitis and other infections, and the rows upon rows of babies in jars, but when we got to the tumors and skin diseases, Lara and I both agreed we'd seen about enough. Oh, and also, surprisingly, we said, "I'm hungry. How about lunch?" and we headed off for a cheesesteak at Jim's.





Are you tired of my lengthy play-by-play yet? Don't worry. I assure you; I am almost done. Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent posing as and near statues and public art, because I am apparently six years old and that sort of thing is still amusing to me. Luckily Lara is still six years old as well, so we had great fun with it, obviously.



















That last one, of course, is the Rocky statue outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I had to run the steps just like Rocky did. There are 72 of them, in case you are curious. Perhaps that will help you out in a game of bar trivia some day.



We finished off the day with a tasty Thai meal in Lara and Rob's neighborhood and then retired to their gorgeous old house in Manyunk, where I nearly died when I forgot Rob's warning that the bathroom is the BROWN door, not the GREEN one. "Be sure you don't open the green door!" he stressed when they first gave me the tour around their house. I thought maybe they just didn't want me to see that their basement was haunted (or possibly is where they store illicit substances), but it turns out it's just an abrupt and unexpected pit of death. So. Should ever you visit Rob and Lara, word to the wise: BROWN door, not green. Remember that.





After my luckily not-fatal fall, we had some more wine and played some more games, which is when I discovered that Lara is not only a Wii bowling savant but an unbeatable Boggle pro as well. People, I swear to you, I am tremendous at Boggle. I think most of my real-life friends will attest to that. But Lara could beat Peggy Hill in Boggle tournament play. It was a humbling experience that was good for me, I suppose ("This must be what it's like for other people when they play Boggle with me," I said), but not so secretly I'm actually a little glad Lara lives so far away, so I don't have to face her as competition again any time soon.

And that about wraps up the trip, I think. I had a fantastic time meeting everybody and like I said, I am sad that I can't go hang out with them again next week. I very much hope this blogger meet-up was not the last. Meanwhile, I'll be brushing up on my skillz with my electronic Boggle and killing time reading all the books I acquired from my generous and bookwormy friends. When I left on Friday, I had one book with me (the one that's been in my sidebar entirely longer than it should be). When I returned yesterday, I had crammed ten more in my luggage and carry-on. I'd better get reading, hadn't I?



Thanks, Noelle and Lara, for giving me ten more reasons to stay up too late. Thank you NPW, Chris, Lara, and Rob for your generous hospitality in your fair cities. And thanks to all of you plus Red for being just as awesome in person as I'd hoped.