Inventory: April 2018

Making: time to write! Hooray! 

Cooking: nothing - I've been eating out shamefully too much and there's no end in sight at least until the weekend. 

Drinking: last night, the most hilarious "flight" of champagne that just consisted of three splits brought to my table in a giant ice bucket. We couldn't stop laughing.

Reading: Celeste Ng's "Little Fires Everywhere," just like everyone else in the world (at least those who aren't reading Meg Wolitzer's "The Female Persuasion.")

Wanting: just about everything in the Anthropologie new releases. 

Looking: for flights to Portland for Theresa's dissertation in May!

Playing: a lot of Cards Against Humanity with the roomskis lately - Laura bought an expansion pack and the freshness is hilarious. 

Listening: to Youngblood Brass Band, after Dave turned them on en route home from Monterey on Sunday. 

Wishing: for a perfect tiny French bulldog puppy to love, cherish, and spoil rotten. 

Enjoying: Bay Area "spring," which is basically the same thing as Bay Area "summer," "fall," and "winter."

Waiting: for Royal Baby #3's name! 

Liking: duh, every single Tweet and Instagram post in the entire internet about the #RoyalBaby. It's me. Who's surprised? 

Wondering: what to wear to the ballet tomorrow. (I just typed "baller" instead of "ballet," which I think disqualifies me from being anything remotely resembling functional this morning.)

Hoping: that Dave gets his schedule for next year soon so we can figure out a summer and fall full of concerts and entertainment. 

Marveling: at upcoming travel I'm planning!

Needing: to pick out a car - my Civic's lease is up in July and I've done shamefully minimal research on what I even want to do next. (Someone talk me off the Tesla cliff!!!!!!)

Smelling: Anatomy of a Frangrance's Wildflower Bergamot - I bought the soap, lotion, hand sanitizer, hand cream, and perfume at Anthropologie because I am so in love with the scent. 

Wearing: a dress! It's 75 degrees in NorCal! Spring! Whee! 

Following: Gary Janetti's account and the #frenchiepuppy hashtag on Instagram, and if you're not, you're missing OUT. 

Noticing: abs and triceps fighting their way through just a little bit more after every gym session. 

Knowing: that I should wrap this up and actually get to work to head off a rampaging boss...

Thinking: a lot about my love life. 

Bookmarking: new black flats - the sole of mine legit just ripped away from the shoe and I'm more than mildly annoyed (and without a backup pair for the day, BLEH).  

Giggling: at the most absurd conversation I'm eavesdropping on down the hall - people are utterly ridiculous, campers. 

Feeling: Pretty good, all things considered. 

Things I love online right now...

A few utterly, shamefully frivolous joys in the last 24 hours...

1. This video of a polar bear cub in the UK exploring its home for the first time, which I have watched a couple times and will likely revisit again before the day is over. 

2. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt's outrageously gorgeous and moving collab on "Found Tonight," a mashup of songs from "Hamilton" and "Dear Evan Hansen" benefiting the March for Our Lives initiative. Listen to it on Spotify or download it on iTunes, it's just stunning...I may or may not have listened to it all day yesterday (I did). 

3. The @garyjanetti account on Instagram is hilarious, primarily because of his snarky Prince George memes which crack me up every time I see a new one. 

4. RELATED: Prince Harry's wedding is in less than two months and that means it's time for ALL THE STUFF. I just downloaded Katie Nicholl's new book "Harry: Life, Loss, and Love" (That title is so dramatic and I am so here for it), and was ecstatic to see that the hotly-anticipated Lifetime movie biopic "Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance" has a teaser trailer out. I can't wait to drink wine, eat snacks and relentlessly mock this. It reminded me of this delicious recap of the William and Kate Lifetime movie, which I can still not read without truly laughing out loud. 

5. In the "TV I am actually very excited to watch rather than just to mock" lane, we have "Sweetbitter," a STARZ series coming out in May, which is based on a book I couldn't put down last summer and am currently re-reading. Set in a high-end restaurant in NYC, the series looks promising based on the trailer. (Also loving the new "Queer Eye" on Netflix, wanting to re-watch "Mozart in the Jungle [yes, again], and started "Love" on Netflix with Dave a couple weeks ago/never finished...)

6. Finally, someone please block Mark and Graham on all my devices or I will truly fall victim to the "if it's not moving, monogram it" life philosophy. (I do not need a monogrammed striped shirt, I do not need a monogrammed striped shirt......)

A Monday giggle.

I had the BEST weekend with my parents celebrating my birthday (MUCH more detail to come soon!), and am correspondingly in the happiest, sunniest mood today. What's not to love about a weekend that combines the Olympics, wine tasting in Napa, eating Michelin-starred food, and tourist-ing all over my home with my two favorite people? Nothing is not to love, I tell you. Add to that the fact that I've got a vacation coming up on Thursday and I am feeling pretty grand about life in general. 

Maybe that's why I find this so giggle-inducing: I'm reviewing a memo that one of my colleagues drafted about a very technical valuation process, details intentionally vague. The memo kept referencing "morality tables," and it took me a couple seconds to parse out that the item under discussion was actually a "mortality table." For those of you who aren't hopeless, helpless nerds, a mortality table is used to determine a person's statistical probability of death. They are, in a word, morbid, but are hugely significant in industries like insurance, accounting, and planned giving (ding ding ding!). 

I got the giggles when I started thinking about what a morality table would actually look like - some kind of chart that tells you how to be a good person? A sliding scale of how moral an action is relative to situation, agent, and recipient? A scatter plot of the judged morality of a person on an x-axis of, let's say, age and y-axis of, hmm...privilege? A "moral brightline" as the mean in a scatter graph of moral judgments? I sat there musing on it for a solid few minutes, sort of laughing to myself and sort of actually contemplating how interesting and revealing it would be to actually create a morality table for myself. 

And then, because I've got sh*t to get done today, I control F'd "morality" and replaced it with "mortality," and that was that. 

Happy Monday! 

The Girl Scout cookie conundrum

Welp, so much for writing daily in February, hahaha. Oh well - Rome wasn't built in a day, nor was writer's block overcome in a minute. 

You guys, I'm in a quandary. I've been trying so hard so far this year to eat better and to exercise - yoga twice a week, Pilates, lots of homemade paleo lunches and dinners up the wazoo - but I'm in crisis mode. It's Girl Scout cookie season, and the Girl Scouts of Redwood City, CA, have it figured out. 

Our local Safeway is my go-to for meal prep runs, and I tend to pop in there at least two or three times a week. (Aside: I am aware that this is an ineffective, time-wasting way to do my grocery shopping, but I don't care - it still beats ordering takeout, so there.) The place is generally a zoo, and always seems to be understaffed for the number of people who are flowing through on a daily basis. Going there is an experience that, by nature, leaves me a bit stressed out and spastic from time to time. 

And now, every time I want to go in Safeway, I have to run the gauntlet of adorable Girl Scouts who stand outside hawking their devil cookies. Turns out this is a thing here - they get to set up a cute little table or two, with homemade, hand-lettered signs in their wobbly little bubble letters, and stacked with their cookies. They all show up in their uniforms, with their missing front teeth and their little high pitched voices, and ask you "Excuse me miss, would you like to buy some cookies today?" 

I AM POWERLESS TO RESIST cute children being cute. Always have been, always will be. I am even more powerless to resist cute children trying to sell me things. I once went to the bank before going home from Target because the neighbor kids had a lemonade stand and I didn't have cash to buy anything from them. The Girl Scouts are my kryptonite. Couple their adorableness with how freaking good frozen Thin Mints are (don't even START me on Samoas), and I'm a dead woman walking. 

So I fell victim, the first time, about two weeks ago. I couldn't help it, the little Brownie kiddos were so cute - so I bought a box of Thin Mints and brought them into work, and left them in the break room, taking three for myself as a reward for not eating the whole box. Then it happened again. This time, they were older Girl Scouts, and I felt bad for them because, while nobody can resist a precious little first-grader, it's a lot easier to ignore the older girls. So I got Samoas this time, and did the same thing. 

Then on Sunday it happened AGAIN, and now it's starting to get ridiculous. My key mistake this time was accidentally making eye contact with one of them - once you've established eye contact with a Girl Scout, all is lost. And THEN her mother made eye contact with me, and I crumbled faster than the Vikings defense against the Eagles in the NFC championship. I bought a kind I don't even like so that I wouldn't be tempted to eat them, and the cute little Girl Scout made change (with the aforementioned mom's help), and I went on my way, kind of frustrated and also kind of gratified and mostly just stressed out by the whole experience. 

Thing is - Girl Scout cookie season isn't like a short little one-week thing anymore. I feel like it's been going on forever, and we're barely into February right now. Couple that with the fact that they've definitely raised the prices a lot since I was a Girl Scout ...they're like $5 a box here, and I'm pretty sure we sold them for around $2 back in the nineties (god, I'm old and lame). Anyway, this is going to be a very expensive guilty weakness for me if this keeps up - either I'm going to have to grow a thicker skin, or I'm going to have to stop going to Safeway altogether at the rate we're going. 

In the meantime, if anyone actually likes Savannah Smiles, there's a box of them sitting in my car with your name on it. Send help - you'll find me desperately seeking courage in the parking lot of the local grocery store. 

today:

- bought "Hamilton" tickets to see it in New York in three short weeks

- made a to-do list that is too long to feel even remotely humane 

- kicked ass in a meeting this morning, got my ass kicked in a meeting over lunch, and saved someone from feeling like his ass was getting kicked in a meeting this afternoon

- checked off three annoying little "adulting" tasks I've been putting off for weeks

- actually felt like writing it all down and popping in here to say hello

- briefly changed my desktop background to ^that picture up there, then decided I would just post it up here instead and call it a day

...and there you have it. Hi, campers. Bye, campers. Happy Monday, chins up, et cetera ad infinitum.