Happy New Year!

Ok ok, I totally fell off the blogging bandwagon as we approached year's end, but I'm back (for now) and blogging from Kim & Natty's NYC pad. I was going to wait to update after I got home, but I feared there would be too much to say at that point and I didn't want to delay any longer.

So, 2005! Wow. I made a point not to plan or commit to any big and wild new year celebrations and I pretty much had no idea what I was doing even as Friday approached. I decided completely last-minute to hop a bus to NYC to visit with my favorite West Village-dwellers, Kim & Nathaniel, whom I had not seen at all yet over the holidays. My idea was to try and keep the usually overrated hoo-haw new year thing as low-key as possible. I knew K&N were my people for that!

Ringing in the new year with them did not disappoint. We baked personalized chicken potpies and enjoyed Kim's ridiculously delicious homemade mac & cheese. Then, using Nathaniel's new black (opaque) wine glasses, we played a fun wine tasting game. You see, the idea is that you cannot see what kind of wine is in the glass, even if you look in. So, after a very complicated process, we each had glasses of wine in front of us and none of us knew of the contents. I, not too surprisingly, guessed incorrectly that I was drinking a white when it was actually a red. Before you laugh, it's actually a lot harder than you'd expect! We knew this was true after Mr. Wine Enthusiast Nathaniel guessed incorrectly on his second glass. (We think the fact that the red had been chilled played a role in the difficulty.)

As midnight approached, we prepped some champagne and each got ourselves a dish of 12 grapes. Nathaniel had previously informed us of a tradition originating in Spain, in which everyone is supposed to eat 12 grapes for good luck as the clock strikes 12. We weren't exactly sure of the technical aspects, but we made up that we had to eat one grape for every second after the ball dropped. It was kind of awesome! You felt like you were taking shots, but you were actually just stuffing your face with grapes. Anyway, it was another fun and random activity of the evening.

Other highlights: watching old Tivo'd episodes of "Desperate Housewives" as we waited for midnight to roll around, seeing fireworks from the window of the apartment for a good 10 minutes after midnight, and posing with Kim in front of the X-mas tree as we reminisced about our days of Mickey Mouse hats and Limited Too sweatshirts.

Don't worry, photos of many of these exciting events are to come...


Other than that I've been hanging out up here, which usually means great food and lots of TV time on the couch. I did manage to have my next NYC celeb-sighting on New Year's Day as we walked to SoHo, though. I saw the blonde bassist guy from Green Day. I know, random sighting... like, who even knows what that guy looks like, right? But when you saw him, you could just tell he was a rock star, with this crazy all-white outfit, bleached blonde hair and a few random piercings.

Today I strolled to Chinatown to pick up some of those cheapie slippers for Auddie & Kam. You know what I'm talking about-- Urban Outfitters sells them for $10 and girls can actually be seen wearing them out, like, doing something other than getting the mail or walking around the house. But in Chinatown, it's 4 for $10.. for that I can deal.

On my way back I stopped in SoHo again to kill some time in the Apple store. Oh, the cult! I quite love it. I kinda need an actual Apple computer to be complete, though. I can't ride this iPod wave forever (what a poser I'd be!). Anyway, the Apple store in SoHo kicks the booty of any other store that I've been to. It's two stories and it is ridiculously packed with people... all of us really doing the same thing, strolling around playing with stuff and then strolling around some more. I could do it for hours, really. But! Here's the catch.. on the second floor of this place, it's like a mini-auditorium setup. Reminds me of one of the old lecture halls at school, actually, but with nice blue velvety chairs and a huge projection screen right in front. There was a guy up front with a mic and a computer giving this Photoshop lesson. I was like, "!" The other day when I was there with K&N, he was doing a GarageBand demo, but I didn't realize it was a daily thing. So I took a seat in the front row and got comfy. Who knew, this whole time I've been doing photoshop lessons with a family friend, I could have been coming to the Apple Store and taking notes from the front row! It was kind of awesome. I stuck around til the end of the lesson, which had me there for about a half hour. The whole tutorial, I found out, was 3 hours long! And afterwards there was a CS lesson! If I'd known sooner, really, I would have been up here months ago hanging out at the Apple store all day. It's really amazing though, that they offer those services for free. There must have been about 50 or more people watching the lesson, some with their Apple laptops open following along (cult!!). So great. [End Apple promo.]


Thanks to Laura, I just started reading Who Let the Blogs Out?, a lovely informative look into the world of blogs. I'm learning a lot so far. There are 3 basic components of a blog: Chronology, Frequency, and Focus. I might be falling off the Frequency boat a bit, which leads to longer posts (and a lack of focus), which are generally less-desirable to read. So I'm going to try and stay on top of it, and there are a few interesting factors that will come into play. For one, I'm starting my internship in one week, which will impede my ability to be on my comfortable home computer for hours and hours on end. However, my thoughts and hopes are that the internship will also spark a lot of new and interesting things in my life, which will allow me to blog about things besides the people at my gym.

On that note, let that be my wordy resolution for now... to discover new and interesting things in my life (read: be less antisocial) and be here to tell you all about them.

Happy New Year to all. Many cheers as always.