throw pillows and peace & quiet

After a rip-roaring bunch of days last week I decided to take it easy this weekend and purposefully not make plans. As a newcomer to the area, "not making plans" is synonymous with "being at the whim of anyone who might happen to call me" or "lazing about my house doing nothing", which actually was fine with me. A brief chronicle of events:

Friday:
At 4pm on Friday, the beer bash started at Apple, which basically means there's free food and beer. Somewhere along the way, someone made some interesting observations about the Applers tastes, because there's always a lot of cake, strawberries, and smoked salmon, which is served sans cream cheese or any garnish. Personally, I am accustomed to lox a) for breakfast, or b) with some sort of creamy accompaniment to assuage the salty fishy breath one might have after eating smoked, uh, salmon. Instead I end up having stinky breath and hanging out with my co-workers over beer on a hot Friday afternoon. Hey, I'm not complaining, not at all.

After the beer bash I went to sushi with a small group of MBA/Apple Interns. Half of them live in Apple corporate housing, which is a gigantic rip-off ($900 for a SHARED ROOM per month, and with an undergrad as a roommate!) and also are without automotive transportation, so they really appreciated getting out of the 2-block radius in which they've been confined for the past 1-2 weeks. Afterwards we headed to Palo Alto for drinks, where we grinned and beared it through a Stanford MBA2 band's rendition of "Sweet Home Alabama" and the like. Coming from another MBA band (p-hat - see the link in the sidebar!) I can relate with the level of humility that a show like this requires but certainly NOT with the volume level - I think you could hear the band on Mars if they hadn't been in an enclosed structure. We saved our few remaining ear-hairs and camped outside in the patio area two walls from the ruckus.

Palo Alto is a nice place and I am a little disappointed with myself for not applying to Stanford. Not that Stanford is better, just that Palo Alto is much better than A2. Oh well. Maybe I'll live in P.A. next year.

Saturday:
Ok, so I didn't really know what "hot" was until Saturday when it was too hot to sleep, read, walk around, eat, exercise, or do anything besides retreat to some air-conditioning bastien such as the grocery store. After watching two incredible soccer matches (Ghana defeating Czech Rep. and U.S. being demolished by crappy refereeing, oh, and tying Italy) I dragged my heat-exhausted self to Trader Joe's for some shopping. Oh gosh, I do love that place, with its limited selection, small footprint, campy feel and terrific prices. This week I bought some buffalo burgers that I ate tonight (Sunday) for dinner. Yum yum.

Saturday night I was fortunate enough to tag along with my friend Kevin to "the city" for some drinking and dancing. We visited a bar called gravity, which more aptly should be entitled "reincarnation of Matthew's Mug" (Vassar readers will appreciate the reference) because it felt just like college: harmless, fun, sweaty, and longingly juvenile, which suited me for the night. After 2 dirty martinis, 1.5 date proposals and gettin' down for 4 hours we came back to South Bay at 2am. I think that was my workout. Good thing I wore flats.

Sunday:
Up for World Cup again but subject to lackluster games this morning. I made myself some banana blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup (thanks Trader Joe's!) and camped out in the empty house one more day. Oh, and I started a good book, Sammy's Hill, which was written by Krisitin Gore (not related to Al) and reads just like my writing....at least the character feels similar. It's very strange.

I took a surprise trip to Target in search of a couple more towels and pillows (I guess you could really call that "nesting") and came out with a new outfit and as many pillows as I can humanly carry. I justified it to myself with the thought that I could definitely still fit everything into my car for the trip back to Michigan at the end of the summer. Good stuff.

Will try to be more regular about blogging and coming up with interesting things to say. Ciao.