lying on the floor, you found me, you found me

i am on week 4 of the 8 week travel extravaganza. i am sitting on the floor of the denver airport. i felt so glorious after my flight out of SD had been delayed, and yet i was one of the only people who had enough time to still make their connection. only to arrive at the gate and find that the plane i reached in such a timely manner has some major mechanical failure and now, for snow-unrelated reasons, i find myself sharing the only active outlet near our gate with a man charging his ipod. and me on the floor. on top of this, i ruefully realized that both of my phone chargers are in my checked baggage. and my phone is dead. kaputska!

why are there two amish farmer looking men wearing nehru collared suits at my gate?

other people in colorado are so hilariously active looking. all fleeced out and puffy vested and with utilitarian shoes.

last week in new york was a crazy chaotic mess work-wise, which turned out ok in the end, as so many messes seem to do. there were bright spots though, personally--i ate twice at les halles, the french restaurant at which tony bourdain was head chef for many years, i met up with misha again (who reminded me why i love my friends so dearly, when she requested, instead of going to the palms to indulge in their steak and lobster for 2 for 89.00 special as i suggested as a treat, that we go to applebees and indulge in the quesadilla burger which she had been craving for months.) also met up with moriah, an old friend from high school and we had way too good a conversation, because it lasted for over 6 hours and that meant we drank a detrimental amount of red wine. totally worth it, but just for general friend knowledge, low carb diets and red wine are not an excellent combination in the end. the end meaning the next day.

it was discovered yesterday at a bridal shower that i have been doing the low carb thing wrong (not being intensely low carb enough, and drinking alcohol occasionally, and eating too many stupid tomatoes, which i don't even like that much) and that is why the weight is more like slowly shaving off rather than dramatically melting and falling off. luckily that wasnt totally the point, the point was more to be off sugar for lent, which was done fairly successfully. i definitely notice the effect of any sugar that unexpectedly makes it into my food and everything tastes sweeter. but we are getting to the end of lent and i am about to go to india and so i want to transition on to weight watchers. i feel this is particularly necessary since i recently found out that i have high cholesterol. boo. i turn 30 and thus begins my parade of health problems.

I see your Escort and I raise you an El Camino

So I was reading yet another crazy article today about some arsonist in Oregon who has a vendetta against Ford Escorts.


My little sister Lauren (whom, in very russian fashion, can also be known amongst our family as: Lol or Lolly, which are short for Lollipop which is the accepted nickname for Lauren, as is the more traditional, Laur)and I wholeheartedly agreed that while we would never choose to drive a Ford Escort, if we were to systematically firebomb a certain type of car in an unquenchable vendetta of flame, that car would definitely be the El Camino.


what a fugly car. now that would be a public service.

I feel something in the air tonight...is it the Alamo?

So, when I was perusing the morning news, I came across the headline "Collins stops singing to focus on Alamo" and I was wondering what Alamo they were referring to because it did not remotely occur to me that it could be referring to the actual historical American Alamo in Texas. And yet it was. This is the AWESOME article about crazy phil collins. He's going to be like that eccentric old grail obsessor in the Da Vinci Code. Or the American guy in Possession who set up an institute to William Randolph Ash in New Mexico. Look at the group of people he is speaking to this weekend. Hysterical.

I wonder how much clout the International Criminal Court has in arresting and prosecuting the president of Sudan? I mean, it's a great move and highly worthwhile, I hope it isn't just symbolic. I hope whenever he sets foot out of his country they grab the s.o.b., or in his country, I don't care.

In other news, I love the chubby dance that the two msn chat characters do as you are logging in. It's like two fat penguins engaging in an elizabethan dance. circle circle, don't touch!

Oh how do I love my origins ginger perfume? I want to eat myself.

the man with the steel ball

mmm, for your breakfast enjoyment, a snippet of jim wallis and his moral analysis of the new budget. It isn't very detailed, just an overview of why he thinks the budget is a step in the right direction, morally.

so yesterday my grandpa (Hartle, of fur-lined lingerie fame) broke his hip kind of badly tripping on a piece of rogue carpeting that was upturned in their house. so we went to see him and my quasi grandma in the hospital. gramps was totally out of it, but grams said that he had been in extraordinary pain the whole day. so that was totally vexing, not to mention the whole curse of the broken hip in which an extraordinary amount of people die within 2 years after hips breaking. there are a few things going for grandpa. one is that if he hadnt met my quasi grandma 20 years ago he would surely have already died many many moons ago. so i would say the last 15 years have all been bonus. another is that his unstoppable humor will aid him. yesterday when in severe pain he was still cracking all sorts of lewd jokes about how he now has a steel ball in his body. he also had the capacity to mess with one of the nurses who looked at his wristband and asked "what's your name?" and he said "ivan blesemovitch" and she looked perplexed and said, please say that again, and he repeats "ivan blesemovitch" and then he finally says, ok, ok, dan hartle." and there's my grandma, playing the straight woman. they crack me up. anyway, it's going to be brutal recovery for him trying to walk again.

well, i have to go and force my officemate to listen to me prattle on and on about eligibility and fair housing for the housing choice voucher program.