By the way, if you haven’t poked around at Metroblogging lately, you really ought to. We’re up to 37 cities now, with Vancouver, Miami, Islamabad, and Dubai all launching in the last week.
Fun Metroblogging Fact: Aside from the US, Pakistan is the country with the highest number of Metroblogs with 3- Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi.
This is what happens when you give a kitten some turkey for Thanksgiving.
He gets blurry. And sleepy.
Whilst wandering about after our movie today (The Ice Harvest doesn’t come close to living up to its potential, btw) we decided to get a jump on our Christmas shopping.
We did pretty well, picked up a bunch of stuff for most of the people on our list, and are feeling pretty victorious. Didn’t even spend that much money, either.
Of course, we’ll then have to ship the gifts for my family. It’ll be my first Christmas away from home… ever. Eek.
It’s Sparkle Season Christmas time in Pittsburgh… The PPG tree is sitting in the midde of the ice rink in the plaza. Yay!
Happy Thanksgiving, all. I hope you’re all able to share a good meal with people you love, and then pass out from food coma and enjoy a day of relaxation. That’s certainly what I plan to do.
I am thankful for:
-My sweetie, who patches me up when I am bleeding profusely from stepping on a piece of glass, who tolerates my little neuroses quirks with affection and total aplomb, and who is the only person in the world I can stand to plan a wedding with. 
-My family, who always has a guestroom ready for me when I come visit.
-My cats, who provide me with hours of entertainment, all for the cost of food and litter.
-My coworkers, who make even the crappiest days at work fun.
-My friends, who introduce me to cool music, who join me for our weekly pubquiz and pho dates, and who always have my back.
Enjoy the day… I’ll be passed out from triphophan coma here in a bit.
Tom and I went to the steeplechase on Saturday in Leesburg. A consulting client of his is the law firm that represents the event and the farm it takes place on, so they were sponsoring and had bought a hospitality tent. Being friendly types, the partners invited us out for a day at the races.
Upon approaching the area where the hospitality tents were, we noticed a sign that said, “No admission beyond this point except to invited guests of hospitality sponsors.”
Tom leaned over to me and said, “I think that sign is to keep out the riff-raff.”
I said, “When did we suddenly become not the riff-raff? How did we get respectable?”
Upon arriving at the tent, the firm’s office manager gave us our nametags. Tom Bridges and Tiffany Bridges (our passes had been addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Tom Bridges).
This made me giggle- Not only was my last name not right, my future last name was not right.
I’ve been, uh, finding mashups mysteriously in my iTunes library like crazy lately. There’s one I’ve had for a couple of weeks but started listening to like crazy today. It’s “Constant Sorrow” from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack mashed with Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.”
I know some of you are screwing up your faces in disgust and horror, but you’ve got to listen to it. It works. In fact, I have no use at all for that particular Stefani song except as part of this mashup. I’ve been inflicting it on my coworkers all day and now they’re all hooked too. I recommend Googling it… but if you know me, you can probably find a more efficient way of hearing it. It’s brilliant. Seriously.
If you’re a mashup junkie like I am, I recommend checking out Mashuptown. The stuff they post is kind of hit-or-miss, and a lot of it is the generic “rap song with a consistent beat over a famous instrumental track” type of thing, but there are some real gems in there.
Good heavens!! My birthday. Is tomorrow. Will be 27. And I think that’s the point where I officially start being weirded out about how close I am to 30. Today, am 26! Young! Beautiful! Idealistic! Tomorrow, well, we just won’t think about that yet.
Anyway, except for a phone call from my mom on Saturday to ask me what I wanted for my birthday, I haven’t thought it about it all. I seriously have almost forgotten my own birthday. What, that doesn’t get taken away when you’re planning a wedding? I still get a birthday? How does that work?
My mom said she didn’t think I had updated ye olde Amazon wish list since before we got engaged, and while that’s not entirely true, I realized this morning that I hadn’t gone through and removed items that Tom already owns. We will not need two copies of Garden State between us, after all. I should take the time to do that before the Blogger Secret Santas start up again.
After we went through our abusive and codependent relationship with disposable Swedish furniture this weekend, we moved all Tom’s books and whichever of mine were hanging around over there to the shiny new bookshelves in the living room. The hazard of us both having political science degrees AND similar taste in literature is that we’ve got a lot of overlap in the books we own. And they’re not small books, either. We tend toward the thousand page, intricate, geeky books- Clancy, Stephenson, etc. So we’ll have to give away some books.
And then there are the CDs. Tom had a radio show in college, so he’s got all sorts of CDs, and I don’t have nearly as many, but there’s still probably a couple of crates’ worth. We figure we’ll pack them up and put them into storage. “Baby, someday we can show them to our kids and talk about how back when WE were young, we actually had to buy physical media if we wanted music, and walk to school barefoot in the snow!” Unfortunately, we can’t just get rid of them, because they’re our physical license to the mp3s we have on our hard drives, should the RIAA come a-knockin’. (Bitches- if you’d jumped on the digital music bandwagon years ago like you should have, you would have had lower distribution costs, I could have saved money AND space, and I wouldn’t be fearing your wrath if I dispose of what is essentially just packaging materials for music I lawfully purchased.)
Anyway, what started this massive digression was my birthday and how I nearly forgot about it. I do not expect presents, y’all, but if and only if you are one of the people in my life who might have been considering that anyway, and if you were stuck for ideas, allow me to remind you that iTunes is the gift that keeps on giving, doesn’t take up space, doesn’t require dusting, and will not require Tom and me to figure out where to keep it when the house holding one person’s stuff suddenly has to hold two people’s stuff (my iPod will not get any bigger from the addition of tunage). Also? Instant delivery with no shipping charges, yo. What’s not to love?
So I have to take a minute, in the middle of all this catering-angst, to focus on something cool about all this crazy wedding stuff, lest I forget that it’s just a party and isn’t really the point.
I bought a couple of White House Historical Society Christmas ornaments the other day. It’s a cool only-in-DC kind of gift, they aren’t terribly expensive, they’re pretty, etc. I mentioned this to Tom, and suggested a couple of possible recipients, “…or we could just keep one for our own ornament collection.”
He looked up from what he was doing and gave me a little grin. I grinned right back, because I suspect he had the same flash of feeling I did about the idea of Our Christmas Ornaments.
One of the moments that resonated with us the most in Garden State was the part where Large and Sam are floating in one end of their friend’s pool, musing about “home.”
Large: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Large: You’ll see when you move out- it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.
It all feels so home-y. Our Christmas ornaments for our Christmas tree, spending holidays together when one of us isn’t the interloper into the family. Maybe for us, “home” just really means “ours.”
Just when we thought the plan was coming together, some deceitful bastards see an opportunity for price-gouging. Read our tale of woe in dealing with Ridgewells Catering at Metroblogging DC.
