i've been so bad at work today. i haven't gotten anything done. i suck.

had a great night last night :) Alex and I went up to Saratoga for dinner. we ate at this place called Baily's which was very good. we had the saratoga salsa for an appetizer. The salsa was very good, and it seemed homemade. but the chips were cheapy tortilla chips... not baked, just from a bag. i had a grilled portabello mushroom sandwich that had feta cheese and raspberry vinagrette on it. very good. there were good looking things for dessert, including do-it-yourself-at-the-table s'mores (rock!) but we didn't have anything. i'm going to have to go back there for s'mores... that's so cool. afterwards we were contemplating going to see T3, but movies are expensive so we ended up watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail at my place. i love that movie. so yeah, good night :)

work has been so hard to get through today... ugh. over an hour left until the three day weekend. let my people go.

obviously i can't concentrate at work today. i stumbled across this page which almost made it very obvious to everyone around me that i wasn't doing work (because my giggling could not be contained). it's rude foods, a collection of food products with rude sounding names such as: "coming", "cream collon", and "black bush". the funniest ones were the ones from Japan, which made me remember a site that i visited once with all sorts of engrish phrases on it. that page was hilarious... view it here.

i should really do some work while i'm here. sigh. i wish this week was over.

on my birthday hair of the dog is playing at mcgeary's. i've decided that i am definitely going. it's my birthday. whatever! whatever! i do what i want! and i've also decided that everyone that is my friend should be there. so if you are my friend you should come to mcgeary's on thursday, July 17th at 8:30pm. and if you are my friend and you don't come, i will be pouty. don't make me pouty.

albany is going to hell...

shooting in my neighborhood, spider in the fruit... albany is going to hell. ew. i don't want to live in albany anymore or eat the fruit. god, that's so gross. i can't get over that. what if she hadn't looked? she could have been bitten and then fallen over and the spider would have crawled out and found a spider to mate with and produce horrible little mutant killing spiders like in arachnaphobia. EW!!!! meredith just told me that there was an egg sack in the grapes as well. horrible. just freaking too disgustingly horrible to think about. what if she'd reached down and grabbed the egg sack instead of a grape and ate that?! i'm so skeeved out... ew.... ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew...

spider in the fruit...

oh. my. god. i am never buying desert fresh grapes. or really, any grapes. ew ew ew ew ew. some woman bought a bunch of grapes at the BJ's wholesale club in albany and she brought them to work for coworkers to eat and when she opened the container she found a black widow spider in it. EW!! ugh. here's an article about it. ohmygod. i would die if i looked into my container of grapes and saw a black widow in it. i think i'd fall over. or throw the container. which is heinous because the spider would definitely get out. and then try to eat me.

shooting in my neigborhood...

so yesterday i went to my parents' house after work. the six o'clock news came on and their lead story was that of a shooting in an otherwise quiet albany neighborhood. the shot behind the news correspondent looked familiar and i said, "that better not be my neighborhood" and then the correspondent said that the shooting occurred in the Pine Hills neighborhood of Albany and i said, "that is my neighborhood." apparently yesterday at 5:30 in the morning this guy was getting home from work and was parked on New Scotland Ave near Norwood Street (the next street over from my street) when two men approached his car and asked for a cigarette. they may or may not have struggled after that and the man got shot in the chest. the two attackers took his wallet and his car and left the guy on the street. the guy crawled out to the street and waved down a passing ambulance (there are many, many ambulances on New Scotland all the time because St Peter's is on one end and Albany Med is on the other) who took the guy to Albany Med. I guess he survived. This is very freaky though. shootings in your neighborhood are not good. scary. and my lease is up at the end of this month and i just got the new one to renew it... i was thinking of moving before the shooting and i started thinking of it again after i heard about that, but i really don't think i'd be able to get my ass in gear and find a new place for about the same amount of money that would allow me to move in at the beginning of August... so beh. you can read the times union article about the shooting here.

so again i was working at a good pace getting a lot of stuff done today when suddenly my concentration left me and i couldn't do a thing. so i decided to see who was playing at mcgeary's this week. and on the 4th there's this band called enter the haggis playing. rock that name. they're a celtic rock band, which really sounds interesting. they have pipes and everything. and from the pictures on their site they look like they put on a fun show. they have sound clips on their site but as i am at work and do not have speakers on my computer i cannot listen to them. they have a pretty cool site altogether. i really enjoy the format of their picture page. i'd love to do something like that for my photo album... that's something to think about... anyway. so yeah, that band looks great and it looks like it'd be a fun time but i don't think i'll be going because i have no plans for the 4th and i don't think i'll be able to get anyone to come. >:-(

went shopping today with michelle. had a good time, and was hella proud of myself for not buying anything. after i dropped her off i did purchase one thing: i went to linens and things and got these ice cube tray bottle things. you don't spill when you take them from the sink to the freezer, and once the things are frozen it doesn't matter what why you stick them in the freezer. this is a bonus for me as my freezer is always packed and i have no convenient shelf to stick the ice cube trays.

i found blinds on my porch. since i've moved in here, i haven't been able to look at my porch without being dissatisfied. there were pull down shades on the windows, but that looked just so hella ghetto to me. i wanted matchstick blinds for it, because you could leave them pulled down and get privacy but they'd let the breeze through. matchstick blinds, while relatively cheap are too hella expensive for this ghetto girl. so i never purchased them. well, this evening i wanted to sit out on my porch and read (starting the harry potter series all over again) and i was irritated that i wasn't getting a cross breeze from the front of the building. i used to have a screen in the window that faced the front of the building, but it fell out one day and i stuck it in the storage closet on my porch because the little cat was clawing at it. i went to retrieve the screen from the closet today and i noticed that something else was in that closet as well: blinds. i dug out a few sets that were all wrapped up on each other and discovered that they were those cheap paper (felt?) blinds that filter in light. on each end of the top of the blind was a hole i looked up at the windows on my porch and there were nails on each side underneath where the pull down shades hung. so i hung up the blinds. they're hella dirty, so i'm going to have to figure out how you clean them, but i like them much better than the pull down shades. now what i need for my porch is some sort of shade for the bulb on the ceiling and i'd love a little bistro set (even if it was one of those plastic ones) because dining on my porch would just be too cool. i should probably get some plants as well. i have a big old hook out there for a hanging plant. i should get one. but really, there's probably no point to me getting a plant because i'll probably just kill it...

so anyway... the blinds still look kind of ghetto to me compared to my vision of matchstick blinds, but hey, they're free. i think i have a porch inferiorty complex because the woman right behind me has such a pretty porch. she has a topiary on the windowsill (that looks just so... nice. not frilly/frumpy) and she's got a scarf draped across the top of all of the porch windows. her porch doesn't look right out onto someone's deck, so she doesn't need the privacy that i do, but i can't help but be all jealous of her nice porch. i have to keep reminding myself that she's in her thirties and has been living on her own much longer than i have and that's why her apartment is so grown up and pretty looking. my apartment will someday be grown up and pretty looking as well.... hopefully...

so the bonus about having a beetle is watching little kids punch each other wherever you go. on the way back from lunch today i was behind this old van from ohio that had like 4 kids in the back and when we stopped at a light one of the kids looked behind him, saw my car, and immediately punched the kid sitting next to him. then they were all wailing on each other. it was great... :)

so i was working along at a good pace this morning. i really felt like i was getting shit done. then suddenly my ambition to do anything dropped completely. i cannot work. i cannot concentrate on anything. i cannot wait for this day to be over, and i really cannot wait for this week to be over. at least it's a short week, so i only have to get through three more workdays after today. ugh. i don't hate my job. but i don't love it either. i wonder if anyone does love their job though. i know that this is not what i want to do for the rest of my life, but i couldn't tell you what it is that i want to do. i guess i'll just stick with this for now. suck.

not really much to post about this weekend. i read harry potter for most of it. finished the book. it was pretty good, went very quickly... didn't feel like 850+ pages. sad it's over... but yeah, quiet reading due to all the reading. i did get some cleaning done: cleaned the bathroom and did the dishes (rock!). went to lake george last night for dinner, which was very nice. didn't spend too much time in the village though. it was hella crowded up there, i forgot that the 4th is this coming weekend already. i wonder if they're having fireworks over the lake this year. they didn't last year, the townies didn't want to deal with the traffic. i don't have any plans for the 4th :( i really like this holiday because i love fireworks. last year i went to the fireworks in clifton park with my family, and i might do that again this year. i dunno. beh. anyway. what a boring post. sorry...