Things I Like # 16

Perfect Sundays

Sometimes Sundays suck, like if you hate your job and know Monday is eminent, or if you're a student and have a term paper looming over your hungover shoulder. But if you don't hate your job and you're out of school, Sundays can be pretty great. This weekend I had a perfect Sunday:

My blinds in my bedroom are super dark, so when I opened the blinds to sun it was a wonderful surprise! Anyway, woke up late to a sunny day, toasted my pre-brunch slice of toast to a crispy perfection, did a crossword puzzle, showered for the first time in a day or two, picked out a cute dress, and got picked up for brunch by K (I didn't even have to drive!). We went to the Laurelhurst/Belmont area to eat at The Screen Door , which has delish modern-Southern fare. We had to wait for an hour to get in, but spent that time outside chatting with young men, so even waiting was pleasurable on my perfect Sunday, you guys! Once seated, K and I pulled our usual brunch scheme of ordering the two dishes we can't choose between and splitting them evenly. We missed our third musketeer, M, who usually orders the healthy dish and gives our meal some substance, counteracting our orders of like, strawberry and mascarpone stuffed French Toast or a fatty Cinnamon roll. So what I'm saying is that K and I ordered biscuits and gravy and a praline and bacon-strip covered waffle. Yeah. Therefore we spent the rest of the afternoon waddling around Laurelhurst ooh-ing over cute babies (sidenote: I wish I could wear children's clothes. I would kill for this dress) and adorable houses. And then we found the fruits of K's labors:

K literally spent half of her first year of real-world work figuring out what streets had potholes and deciding where on those streets to put up signs addressing that problem. God bless her little Enginerd heart. We were pretty thrilled when we found one of her signs. After our adventures in NE Portland, we went to my house and passed out on our patio in deck chairs until it started to get cold and we started to get cranky from food-fatigue. Once K left, I pulled on my ratty yoga pants and watched "Cruel Intentions". PERFECT SUNDAY!

Health Update

I have some bad news for TeamLara members:

I bruised my coccyx. Yes, that's right, my tailbone is bruised.

I have no idea how I did it, but it wasn't a drunk accident, and the chiropractor at my work said that it was quote "kind of normal" to not remember serious bruise trauma. I have a contusion the size of a grape. How do you not remember that?? But anyway, it'll take about 6 weeks to stop hurting, and in the mean time I have to alternate icing and heating my ass. I know I have a reputation for being a huge baby and hypochondriac, but this things seriously hurts. It hurts more than when I sprained my ankle. It turns out the spine is kinda important to your well-being, so please, I urge you, take care of your own, lest you end up like me, sitting on a donut pillow.

Professor Falafel

Falafel

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Professor

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The Sublime

Last night was an epic Portland experience; a cheap bar off Hawthorne followed by the best falafel I've ever had, served to me by a young, hot falafel-maker. I don't know his name, but we bestowed upon him the nomiker "Professor Falafel", which turned into "Doc Falaf" (we wanted it to rhyme like "Doc Oc" real bad, but it just wasn't happening). I believe this started by me telling him, "You're so good at falafel making, I bet you have a PhD in it". Doc Falaf, I'll be back; keep that falafel griddle warm for me.

Let's Get Modern

The below video has been making its way through the blogosphere this week, but nonetheless, I wanted to post it, mostly just to have an easy link back to it.

I love the MoMA, it's 100% my favorite museum (ohhh, nerd alert), and it makes me really happy to see lots of my favorite paintings in one video without the ubiquitous YouTube background music, i.e. Ke$ha. So, enjoy!

Dance Party

Last night's Passion Pit concert = me sweating off 5 lbs. in a dance frenzy and enduring tinnitus.

Easter

Every year my family goes to midnight mass, as do all our friends, and afterward the parish holds this gigantic feast. Picture Beowulf's Mead Hall scene, but with less bloodshed and more suits and ties. There are like, 4 cafeteria tables worth of goodies including caviar, marinated shrimp, homemade meatballs, smoked salmon, sushi, ham, souvlaki, and more ham. And then in the "Fireside Room" there are 5 tables full of desserts. I'm not joking. Best of all, there are two tables of champagne bottles. There's basically one bottle per person. The first time I got drunk was because of this event, ahh memories!

Anyway, almost every kid I grew up with is there, so it's a crazy reunion party, too. We all get to meet new boy/girlfriends (and judge them), hear about someone's annoyingly perfect younger/older siblings, and complain about that one chick's creepy dad who almost ran one of us over in the parking lot one Easter (true story). We all consume a shit ton of the stuff we gave up for Lent (ie booze, chocolate, candy, meat), feel ill, walk around outside for awhile, then eat and drink some more until we're kicked out by the priest around 1am. It's pretty epic, and I don't really know of any other church that goes as balls-out as mine does for Easter.

Anyway, the Saturday night feast means no one in my family eats (excepting Easter Bunny candy, duh) until Easter dinner with the whole family, at which we consume pretty much the same amount as we did the night before. Except this time we don't have to make small talk with a family friend who used to drive me to soccer practices. This year there was a family contest to see whose Peep could be microwaved the largest. Exploding Peeps are disqualified. We also did a Peep battle, aka Peep Jousting, in which you insert toothpicks into the chests of each Peep, face the Peeps toward each other in the microwave, and see which Peep expands enough to poke the other in the chest with its toothpick first. Mine got second place.

And that was my Easter.

Lime Time

We had a fun, sexy time celebrating Lauren's bday