Optimist Under Siege

Is it bad that I just finished (and, except for a couple of exceptions, started) my Christmas shopping today? I just kept thinking I had another couple of months before the holidays. Isn’t Christmas supposed to be in February?! Seriously!

But hey, at least I’m DONE now. (It feels so good to say that!)

Of course, I was Christmas shopping at Starbucks because there have been a couple of days lately where the heat in our apartment wasn’t really working. This is me a few days ago. It is not staged…this is actually how I was sitting and working!



Now it’s snowing, but at least the heat has come on (and, in case you forgot, my Christmas shopping is done!).

Last night we threw a “get to know your neighbors” party for the 15 apartments in our building. We’ve lived here for a little over two years now and we barely know, heck we’ve barely seen, anyone. So I figured it was time to make a stand and throw a party!

We bought some wine and cheese. I even made some spiced cider and rum. By 7:00 pm last night the brie was baked, the candles were lit, and the door was left ajar.

By the time 7:20 rolled around and my husband and I were still sitting around by ourselves in a sad looking party room with way too much cheese and bread laying out, we finally had our first guest. Phew!

All told, we had three other apartments come join us and had a rather fun, pleasant evening. We chatted, we watched the Red Sox (who lost…oh well), and we compared apartments. It wasn’t the raging crowd we might have had, but it was a good time and I think was a very good step toward becoming friendlier with our neighbors.

Of course now we have enough food and cider left to throw about four more of those parties…I guess it’s bread and cheese for dinner tonight!

I went out with a friend last night for Manicures and Martinis (it seemed epic enough to capitalize!). It was basically the perfect girly event. As you can see, we had our lovely fingers made even lovelier before heading out to grab some girly martinis. The fabulous martini in the picture is a key lime pie martini with a graham cracker rim and whipped cream garnish. It’s really one of the best things ever! The hand you see is actually hers, not mine, and is quite pretty, no?

As I recall, I rebelled against girliness somewhat while I was growing up. I was by no means a tomboy, but didn’t wear much pink, had never had a manicure, and didn’t really know how to apply makeup (I can’t really say I’m ALL that good at it now, to be honest!). In recent years, however, I have learned to embrace my girly side, to revel in the pink, sweet cocktail, cool clothing, mascara, frilliness of it all! I will drink my girly beer (ie. blue moon or wachusett blueberry), wear my girly high heels (thank you DSW), do my yoga (my husband claims this is a typical girl thing to like…so be it!), and read my cheesy Laurell K. Hamilton books (hey, I like them…back off!).

I would say that I am, at least mostly, at home with my girliness. Pink is not such a bad color after all. And manicures and martinis is just about the best thing to spend a Tuesday evening doing!

I’m finally getting around to doing the preliminary set up of my new “holly and eric” site. As I’ve previously mentioned, the purpose of the site is to create an organized social hub in the Boston area that allows people to get together to do fun things and meet new people (but especially us!).

It’s basically supposed to be a cure for the post-college, post-grad-school, no kids, young professional problem of not being able to keep meeting new people and making new friends. I, of course, love all my old friends, but it’s fun and interesting to incorporate new people as well.

But where are you supposed to make new friends outside of a school context and with no kids? In a bar? At the supermarket? Now I know that a lot of people enjoy hanging out with their coworkers, but what if you end up in an office where everyone else is 20 years older or younger than you? And hey, let us not forget those of us who WORK AT HOME!! What are we supposed to do?

So I’m making a website. I should have something minimally functional by the end of the day (and will link to it once I do). I’m trying something a bit different (and potentially disastrous) on the website design for it. My plan is basically that of trial and error. I’m going to keep moving elements around and adjusting borders and colors and things until I like it. It probably won’t win any design awards this way, but we’ll see. I’m sure everyone will be waiting with bated breath (I don’t know why, but I just love that expression!) to see how it turns out. Stay tuned!

This past Saturday night I once again proved to myself that I am in fact not getting old and boring! Not that anyone would ever have suspected that, of course! I’m wild; I’m crazy!

On Saturday night, I got dressed up in a sexy dress, went out dancing late into the evening, late enough and furiously enough that I even indulged in a late night slice of pizza at a local place that stays open for just that purpose (and OH, was it amazingly delicious under the circumstances!). I slept in nice and late and even had a mild hangover to show for it all (which normally I wouldn’t consider a good thing, but it was evidence!). I completed this lovely sequence of events with a fabulous carbohydrate-packed breakfast of french toast and strawberries at a local restaurant.

That’s right, world, look out, I’m still around and I am awesome! Oh yeah! Old, married, and boring…NO WAY!

Last night my husband and I took advantage of restaurant week in Boston by visiting a fondue restaurant we’ve enjoyed in the past called The Wine Cellar (near Mass Ave. and Newbury St. in Boston). We enjoyed a lovely prix fixe three course meal of swiss cheese fondue (extremely delicious appetizer- my favorite part), shrimp and beef fondue (entree), and dark chocolate fondue with cookies and fruit (yum, dessert!).

Wait a minute, scratch that. We did have the cheese and chocolate fondue, but only I had the shrimp and beef entree fondue, while my husband ordered a fish plate. And let me explain why!

To be fair, the hot oil fondue in which you cook the raw beef and shrimp before dipping them in various sauces isn’t all that amazingly good tasting, but it’s fun and that’s the point. Just like sushi has its own ritual with wasabi, soy sauce, and chopsticks, so fondue has its own fun procedure. You take one of your several fondue skewers, hook a piece of meat, and rest it inside the hot oil fondue pot where there are special slots to hold it. Usually you have more than one piece cooking at once in order to have something to eat more of the time.

I, for one, quite enjoy the whole concept. Besides the fun of the ritual, it also forces you to slow down, talk, sip your wine, and otherwise relax and enjoy the scrumptious fancy meal you came for. My husband, on the other hand, avoided this particular meal because he just wants to eat! He doesn’t want to have to wait and “take forever,” especially while he’s hungry.

In a way, I think this serves as a metaphor for our two personalities and takes on life. I savor the whole process of doing things and like to step back and watch what’s going on around me. I can’t get enough people watching and I love to do all sorts of pointless things like dressing up for Halloween (which is coming up…yeah!). My husband is more of a results-oriented kind of guy. He appreciates a nicely prepared meal in an elegant atmosphere, but wants to eat his food, pay the check, and move on. He’s not the type to linger. He wants to have had the meal, have accomplished a cool activity.

Now this isn’t entirely fair to either of us, but the fondue incident does show something very interesting about how we each interact with life. Deep thoughts over fondue.

This weekend is going to be AWESOME! I get to do one of my very favorite things, dressing up! My husband and I are invited to a black tie wedding at a hotel on Boston harbor for one of his coworkers. And, let me just say that his coworker is now one of my favorite people ever. By making his wedding reception black tie (I’m sure he was thinking of me when he planned it, obviously!), he is forcing my husband to wear a tux (which he will look SO cute in…um…or handsome, debonair…whatever you prefer!) and I get to wear the beautiful long green silk grecian-looking dress I originally bought for my own rehearsal dinner.

I’m also going to get my hair done! This is mainly because I’m completely useless at doing my own hair- it’s not one of my many skills- and I want to look good for his coworkers, but I’m also secretly (or not so secretly) looking forward to it simply for its own sake. At the wedding, we’ll dine, we’ll dance (Oh yes, husband, we will!), we’ll mingle, we’ll drink champagne. How great is that! Oh yeah, and somewhere in there they’ll be a wedding or something (lest us not lose sight of the purpose here!).

Assuming that we’re on top of things enough to remember a camera (neither myself nor my husband are great on the picture taking front), I’ll add pictures to a future post. Three cheers for the black tie wedding!

Okay, maybe doomsday is a bit of an overreaction, but tomorrow they’re shutting down the electricity in our building, which unfortunately leads to a several hour long down time for all of my websites (this blog included!). My uncharacteristically pessimistic view is not because I’m afraid of disappointing the millions of visitors who may try to access any of my websites tomorrow (millions of visitors…that’s funny!).

The real thing that’s got me worried is that I work so hard on my SEO and a few hours of the search engines finding nothing where my sites ought to be is likely to set me back a few steps. And each of those steps was a slow, sometimes painful, process that I hate to retake. SEO is definitely always a work in progress, never “finished,” but I don’t want the progress that has been made to be too stunted by my web server doomsday tomorrow.

My resourceful husband and I have been looking into options like buying a battery at Best Buy, which we probably will do tonight, but that will only buy two to three hours. Looking at it optimistically, of course, means that that’s several more hours my websites WILL be accessible, several more hours when the class will be decidedly half full!

So wish me luck as I won’t be seeing you much tomorrow, and we’ll see how it goes! This, of course, is the disadvantage of running your own web server instead of paying a hosting company to take these worries away. But what would be the fun of being worry-free?

Look out, work at homers! There’s a new adversary on the loose! Make sure to plug in your laptops and batten down the hatches (ie. make sure your cable modems are up and working properly). The free wifi access at Starbucks is timing out! *Dum dum dum* (dramatic music here).

You may remember that I raved about the wonderful new free internet access at Starbucks as a huge boon to the work at home, freelance, and traveling business person’s existence. Now I don’t mean to complain too much since Starbucks is certainly not obligated to provide wifi for me just because I’d like it. And they continue to provide a pleasant work environment outside of the home which I very much appreciate.

But…!

But now that I’ve gotten a taste of it, enabling me to get out of the house and work more effectively at Starbucks, I just don’t want to go back. My vocal chords may once again wither due to my lack of human contact (and thus opporunity to talk!).

Come on Starbucks, please, PLEASE clean up that internet connection. The work at homers of the world (who would rather be work at Starbucksers…maybe that’s not such a good term) will thank you! We will be a grande amount of happy and thank you venti times. (Hey, forgive the cheesiness, my internet’s not working!)

As the weather turned hot, my husband and I were faced with a dilemma. We put our relatively small air conditioner into our relatively large window. This, of course, left a lovely (and quite substantial) amount of space around the AC. This less than ideal situation wasn’t particularly energy efficient, and, well let’s face it, was rather silly.

Last summer we had solved this same problem by squishing one of the old, stained pillows from our old stained couch into the open space. Since then, however, we’ve acquired a new (and not so old and stained) couch with no pillows we wish to destroy.

So what’s a hot girl and her hot husband to do?

Well, two is, as they say, better than one. And so we had our solution!

And hey, they’re both energy star ACs which is probably better than one bigger non-energy star unit, right? I’m quite pleased with our creative solution thank you very much!