February 2009
1950s Party!
So, this past Friday, Carianne called me and asked me if I wanted to go to a 1950s party. All of my clothing is so basic that I can pretty much pull off any decade after like the 1940s, so I put on a pair of khakis, a red sweater, and a tie, and left to meet her at her boyfriend’s house.
Her boyfriend has been in Argentina for the past week or so, so Carianne took the opportunity to become little Ms. Imaginary Housewife. “I wash the sheets like every three days,” she said in response to my jealousy over the fact that the house has a washer and dryer, two things that I miss terribly. The house is also equipped with a massive kitchen (at least in comparison to my miniscule kitchenette) and Carianne and I decided to put it to good use and cook dinner.
I hardly ever cook. Unless you count making peanut butter sandwiches and scrambled eggs as cooking. I nearly died from excitement when we went to the neighborhood grocery store to pick things out for our meal. We ended up purchasing two loaves of fancy bread, organic whole wheat pasta, pesto, baby tomatoes, carrots, sun-dried tomato vegetable dip, and chicken. As we prepared the dinner (and by we, I mostly mean Carianne, as my culinary skills pale in comparison to hers), we listened to old Latin and jazz music on the kitchen’s stereo. It was one of those orgasmically domestic moments when you wish you could fast forward a few years and own a house of your own to make fancy dinners in.
A little later, Adrienne and our friends Amelia and Rebekka from out of town came over. It took a little while for everybody to get into their 1950s getups (Carianne insisted on researching 1950s hair-styles and watching clips of Grease on YouTube before she settled on anything). We finally left to catch the bus at about 11pm and looked like a pretty ridiculous group considering the chilly temperatures.
Inauguration!!
So, I know I’m super way behind on this and that Obama has been President for like, what, a month now, but please forgive me because my internet is SLOW. It seriously takes about a year for one photograph to upload on my miserable connection. I don’t even know why it’s like this. We pay for internet and the Verizon connection speed tester says we have lightning fast speed but Verizon LIES. Anyway. Inauguration.
So, as you probably gathered from the post previous to this one, Russell and I headed down to Washington D.C. at the end of January to witness the historical inauguration of Barack Obama. It was pretty awesome. Luckily, a few friends of ours from Buffalo had come down to the city as well and we met up with them at the actual event. Our location was pretty perfect, too. Upon our arrival to Washington, people kept spewing facts at us about how many people were going to be at the inauguration (a bajillion), the proportion of porti-potties to people (1 for every 400), and the standing space that would be available for each person (roughly the size of a folded newspaper). I was totally down for the whole suffering aspect of the experience, it was a historical moment, after all. Luckily, we didn’t have to suffer. Instead of waiting at obnoxiously long security checkpoints with thousands of people, Russell and I met up with our Buffalo pals towards the end of the mall at the Lincoln Memorial. At that point, we bypassed all security and were able to sit comfortably in front of a massive jumbotron the entire time. The crowds were hardly as large as they were on the other side of the Washington Monument and we were a mere twenty feet away from about a hundred vacant porti-potties.
The only somewhat unfortunate aspect of the nearly seven-hour wait for the Inauguration was the freezing cold temperatures. Despite wearing nearly five layers of clothing and wrapping my head entirely in a scarf, my entire body was pretty much numb after sitting in the cold for an hour. We were forced to buy about twenty packages of heat packets, stuff them in any place they would fit, and form a giant pile of cuddling bodies in order to keep warm. Still, the entire experience was so much fun that I would have endured much harsher conditions to be there.