Kill Me Now

Why, yes--I did just spend 3 hours watching the beach volleyball playoffs. Why do you ask?

Because I know you were worried...

The Great Bra Crisis of 2007 has been averted! You may now returned safely to your homes in an orderly fashion!
I got a few of other things too. I spent all Friday night shopping, while Joe went to see Avenue Q (I saw it on Broadway). I got some shirts, a pair of shorts, and found a dress for Kelly's wedding.
I didn't even spend much money. A lot of my purchases came from Macy's and I (finally!) used the gift card Joe's mom gave me for Christmas.
Plus the dress was on sale at JCPenneys. ALL dresses were on sale there (if anyone else is interested), presumably because the prom/school dance season is well over, and the summer wedding season is nearly over.
And I already have heels to match the dress, so I don't have to go shoe shopping. That's ANOTHER crisis averted!

Caffeinated Snot

This morning I went to go take a drink of my coffee, and realized that it smelled the same way a damp basement full of old magazines smells. Since I had made the good hazelnut coffee this morning, that couldn't be possible. I decided it was probably the mug (which I hadn't bothered to wash that morning and had been sitting in my desk cupboard overnight). I took another experimental sip, and managed to slop coffee down my (white) shirt. I jumped up and ran to the kitchen to sop it up.
While in the kitchen, I realized my nose was running. I blew my nose and out came coffee.
No kidding.
I don't know if I actually managed to get coffee UP my nose when I slopped it everywhere, or if I inhaled the coffee that was in my mouth at the time up the back of my nasal passages when I jumped up to run away. But at least it wasn't too hot.
I am corporate material for sure!
Also, in case you were concerned, I did manage to get the coffee stains out of my shirt.
While we're on the subject of TMI, I currently only have 3 bras left that I can wear. Only one of them actually fits. I have dubbed this the great bra crisis of 2007 and I am skipping a beer event with Joe tomorrow to go shopping for these critical underthings.
I will be sure to let you know when we are off red alert.

Finances

I actually managed to pay off my credit cards a few months ago (I got backed up because of the move) and now I've started saving again. Yay for savings!
I use ING direct, which is an online bank. They give you a higher interest rate than most regular banks (just under 5 percent right now) but they are still FDIC insured. I finally got both Joe and Luke to open one of these for themselves. It takes about 1-2 days for me to transfer funds out of it, so I keep some (but very little) emergency money stashed in my savings account that is linked to my debit card too.
I never stopped putting money into my IRA (you can't, or you get charged extra fees and that's stupid). Recently, I split the money that was in there. I kept half in the regular fund I had originally chosen (which is supposed to be a growth and income type of index fund--and has done pretty well so far). The other half I put into an emerging Asian markets fund--as in stocks from India, China, etc. I wish I would have done this a while ago. Those markets have SHOT up. They're risky, but you can make serious money. You can be risky when you're young. And in the end, they are still mutual funds, so aren't THAT risky. When that one gets big enough, I'm going to split it again, and put half the money into another emerging markets fund, maybe a Europe or South America one this time.
On top of this, I actually have a real 401k at work. With matching funds, even. I started putting money into that as soon as I was eligible. Woot. I might not have to keep working until I'm 90. All that money is in a standard stock market index fund. I don't know how long I'll be working here, so I don't want to go sticking it in crazy funds that might be way down when I am forced to take the money out.
The only area I'm falling behind in is my paperwork. I have a mound of papers piling up, including unopened bank statement from the last couple of months. I really need to sort through those and double-check all my numbers and such. Also, Joe and I were going to open up a brokerage account so we could mess around with buying individual stocks that we want--but that seems to have stalled out. Again. We'll see.

Party like it's 1999

This last weekend was packed with wild and crazy times--so I'm going to try to rip through it for ya'.
First of all, my friend Kelly, whose wedding I'm going back to Madison for in a few weeks, was in town for a visit. So Friday night we grabbed food in North Beach (we ran out of time trying to wait to get into a crowded italian restaurant and wound up grabbing burgers) and went to a comedy club. Christy, of course, decides that it would be a fantastic idea for us to sit in the FRONT ROW. This is a bad idea. Usually I worry about Joe, who tends to get picked on at things like this. But no, Kelly was the one who got all the flak. Every. Single. Comic made a comment about how bored she looked--she would smile but didn't laugh. Plus, we were so close, it was hard to keep looking up at them. We were looking right up their noses, so they made fun of her for looking away. Which made it all the more hilarious for us!
The next morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed early...to catch a limo to Napa Valley! That's right, a limo. One of my coworkers had decided to gather a group of people to all pitch in on a limo together. We first went to a winery that specialized in sparkling wines. I'm not usually a huge fan, but they had a few tasty ones. Next we went to V. Sattui, which also has a deli inside. I LOVE their wines. Joe, Christy and I shared 2 different tastings, so that we each got a sip of almost every wine they have. The guy serving us was really nice, and we even convinced him to let us try the Vin Santo that they stock. Which we rewarded him by buying a bottle each of, and then a few other kinds as well. We got sandwiches and sat outside on a picnic table and ate lunch with everyone else. It was so packed there, I was a little annoyed at first, but it was really fun to sit outside with everyone.
Then we went to one more, one of the "big name" wineries. The kind you can find in a liquor store in Wisconsin.
Bleh. There was not a single one of their wines that I liked--and the tasting was outrageously expensive. The grounds of the vineyard, though, are stunning. It you can see the mountains all around. I hear that their tours are actually quite good, but you have to make a reservation ahead of time. I kind of wished we would have planned a little better, but other people didn't want to "lock" us in to a schedule. Oh well. Next time.
On the way home, while cracking open bottle after bottle in the limo (hey, one bottle split among 12 people does not go far. You get about a third of a glass each), everyone talked the 3 of us into going to a party (that another one of my coworkers was throwing) in the hills of Oakland. I had already told her no, we wouldn't be attending, because we will have no way to get home from there.
Yet somehow (the copious amounts of wine perhaps?) we were convinced to go.
And I'm very glad we did. I had SO much fun. Totally worth the chaos that came later. There were a lot of people there I knew, I hung out with coworkers that I don't get to talk to much, Christy and Joe had fun, there was a turkey burger cook-off, a trivia contest and a dalmation who kept licking the cheese and crackers in my hand. People played music in the garage for a while. The view from their backyard is STUNNING. You can see all of Oakland. When I say they are in the hills, I mean they're halfway up a mountain.
We tried calling a cab. A lot of us did, because a lot of us needed to get home. We called over and over, but this is Oakland, and apparently the rules are not the same. ONE cab came. For 10 people. We sent off the first four and waited for more. No more came. Eventually we sent 3 more people off with one of my friends, since they were only going to the other side of Oakland.
We waited. I lost Christy for a while and freaked out. I drank more sangria.
Joe and I were prepared to crash on the couch there, but Kelly (who was not with us) was going to be getting back to Christy's house soon, so Christy was (understandably) determined to get back to her. In retrospect, we should have crammed Christy into the first cab that arrived, then Joe and I would have just stayed. And actually, Joe had decided that he was not going to sleep on a couch but rather, out on their lawn so he could watch the sun rise over Oakland. I would have liked to see how long he lasted.
Finally, one of my work friends (who had not been drinking) volunteered to drive us all the way back to SF. He's a sweetie.
I must have drank more than I thought (Their sangria was delicious!!) because the next morning I was moving
verrrrrrrrry.
verrrrrrrry.
sloooooooooooooooowly.
I was still better than Joe who didn't move at ALL until, oh, noonish.
By the time we got going, we just managed to make it to Golden Gate Park to meet everyone at the Japanese Tea Garden, which was a relaxing way to spend the day. Then we went back to Christy's for a BBQ. Her roommates went all out. We had chicken, beef, guacamole, burgers, homemade chicken nuggets...and sangria. Which I'm sure was delicious, though I couldn't make myself have any.
We dragged ourselves home--we were the first ones to leave. Usually really packed weekends annoy me. I just want to relax. But I had so much fun this weekend, that I was actually excited to go into work on Monday. I should party with my coworkers more often!

Journals

Last week I bought a new journal. This may not seem like a hugely momentous occasion, but you see, I haven't had a journal in a really long time. The last journal I had was unlined, and that bothered me more than I would admit. I refused to get a new one until this one was filled.
The one before that was cheap and the pages kept falling out.
I got out of the habit of carrying one around with me. Sometimes I would make journal entries in my writing notebook, but it's been harder to keep track of things in that mess lately.
So I finally bought perfect new one (screw those empty pages on the last one. They mock me), soft and pretty, covered in green flowered fabric with a leather tie to close it.
My freshman year of college, I started a brand-new journal on the first day I arrived there, and finished the last page the night before I left. I love having that account of my first year away from home, and I can tell you what I did almost every single weekend that year by referring to it. I wish I had more of that for my time in New York and now San Francisco.
One of the biggest reasons I decided to start journaling again was because of all the people I'm meeting. I have a huge volume of people moving through my life, and I'm sure I won't remember a lot of them in a few years. Which is sad because they're interesting.
I think of this as refilling the well. If I write about people I've met, and about my dreams--which are intense--I will always have something to write about when I sit down. It's a good feeling.

More on the Great Yogurt Search

I think I've found my yogurt. Safeway carries a store brand called "O Organics" which appear to be sort of organics for the masses. I don't know how sustainable or truly organic they are, but every food I've had of this brand I've really liked.
I like the yogurt especially because it is fairly low-fat and low-cal, but there is no aspartame. In addition, there is no high fructose corn syrup in it. Instead, it's sweetened with evaporated cane juice. Why is high fructose corn syrup bad? Well, there are debates. From a SF Chronicle article a few years ago:

"The theory goes like this: The body processes the fructose in high fructose corn syrup differently than it does old-fashioned cane or beet sugar, which in turn alters the way metabolic-regulating hormones function. It also forces the liver to kick more fat out into the bloodstream.
The end result is that our bodies are essentially tricked into wanting to eat more and at the same time, we are storing more fat."

Here's the article from the San Francisco Chronicle about corn syrup. The wikipedia entry goes into more detail, but is a little harder to translate. Basically, even today, we still don't really know if this is worse for our body than regular sugar. A lot of people think it's like the aspartame issue: that it's a lot of hype. Other people think this could be at the root of the obesity epidemic. Corn Syrup is in EVERYTHING now.
I have decided to be distrustful of extra chemicals in general. There is nothing in this yogurt that I can't pronounce, and that can't be a bad thing.
There are other organic yogurts, but they tend to be very expensive. This is a good happy-medium. It costs more than Dannon but less than Stoneybrook farms. Plus, many of the other organic yogurts only have full-fat versions.
Unfortunately this brand is only available at Safeway, which I think is only on the west coast. But check some labels. I'm sure they're not the only ones out there.