| More tango, more good eats |
[May. 12th, 2008|08:33 am] |
Dave and I listened to the exhortations of our tango instructor to practice this week -- we stayed for a few dances at the tango practice party after class on Thursday, and then he found out that there's tango at Chelsea Market every Friday night. Since I made him fall in love with The Green Table a while back, we decided to dance a few and have dinner. As usual, we were the most inexperienced dancers on the floor, but felt like we were pretty good at the limited number of steps we know. Every time I see other people not in our baby-beginner class dancing, I get so impatient to learn more! I'm excited that we are finally getting to the ocho (so named because the woman turns and steps in a figure eight) in class this week -- will be cool to do turns at last.
The food at Green Table was, as usual, awesome. Best grilled cheese evah -- in fact, the only place I can think of where you can order a grilled cheese and a glass of wine to go with it and it seems like a perfectly natural and elegant combination. :)
The rest of the weekend was fairly plan-less, since Dave is still in mega-studying mode. We did watch Casino Royale (liked it, but my heart belongs to Pierce Brosnan), and I ended up beating my personal record for 4 miles by more than a minute in the Junior League Mother's Day Race. Yay! |
|
|
| Wango Tango |
[May. 9th, 2008|02:33 pm] |
Wango Tango is actually the name of a hot and spicy sauce at Dinosaur, but at the moment I'm referring to the dance :)
Dave and I are now taking classes at the Sandra Cameron Dance Center, and it's really fun. We started taking classes at the 92nd Street Y, and liked the instructor so much that we signed up for more (since the Y partners with Sandra Cameron to get its dance teachers). While I miss the teacher from the Y, our SCDC teacher is pretty good, too. We are learning very slowly, which is good -- I feel so much more confident in what we've learned than in any dance class I've taken before. Plus, the dance school has tango practice sessions every Thursday night that start right after our class ends, so we can extend the lesson a little bit with some actual dancing.
I'm really glad Dave persuaded me to take tango with him again. I was really dreading it before we started the Y classes, because our first experience with tango was downright humiliating. Not so this time! I feel like I can actually dance (to the very limited extent of my knowledge of steps, of course), not like I'm a complete clod who can't follow. Hey, any teacher who can make a follower out of ME gets big points.
After class last night, we went to Eight Mile Creek for dinner, since we were curious about Aussie food. (I've been to the restaurant once, about five years ago, but all I had was dessert -- an amazing sticky toffee pudding -- so I didn't know anything about non-dessert food.) Got to try two unfamiliar meats in one night -- emu and kangaroo. Dave had emu carpaccio and I got kangaroo skewers with mountain berry ketchup. Verdict: They both kinda taste like beef, which was a little disappointing although the 'roo skewers were pretty good. The prawn-and-crayfish cake I got, though? Frickin' awesome, as was a gigantic artichoke laden with chickpeas and edamame that Dave got. Survey says: Worth your time. |
|
|
| It's just an exercise in futility and I shouldn't bother, right? |
[May. 8th, 2008|07:43 pm] |
The BBQ Block Party, that is.
The food, as usual, sounds amazing. But the problem with food festivals in NYC, particularly when the food festival centers on a category the city has historically been starved of (while quite a few new 'cue places have opened in the past 3 or 4 years, we're still no Texas or Georgia), is that the entire world comes. Which means ridiculous waits in line -- sometimes THREE HOURS at this particular festival.
Two years ago I thought I'd get all sly and buy the FastPass, which buys you $100 worth of 'cue (enough to feed five or six) and, more importantly, the right to skip the line. Unfortunately, even the FastPass was so popular that we ended up waiting in line for, like, an hour, which is better than three hours, but still suckful.
So...do I even try to go this year? Or should I just say the hell with it and go to Hill Country some other time? |
|
|
| Only a month until I get to play Mario Kart Wii... |
[May. 5th, 2008|09:42 am] |
Yes, I know it's out already. In fact, I played it this weekend, because here's the deal: ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) testitest is studying for the CFA exam, and he can get pretty obsessive where Mario Kart is concerned. (I find it addictive, but he is much worse.) So the game is not allowed in our apartment until after he takes the test. But I was dying to play it, and I was visiting my family this weekend, so I bought my niece the game and we played it for hours. LOVE! Well, at least, love the Grand Prix mode -- I think Battle mode was better on the GameCube version.
Improvements: - There's no longer any ambiguity about which way you're throwing a power-up. Sometimes on the GameCube version, you'd swear you were pushing the joystick the right way to make your power-up go backward, and instead it would go forward, or vice versa. That never happened in the Wii version.
- Motorcycles! I've not yet mastered the art of popping a wheelie, but it was still pretty fun to ride the bikes.
- Lots of retro boards (including ones I'm not familiar with, since I've never tried the Game Boy Advance or DS versions of Kart). Seeing a couple from the original SNES version was the best.
- Cool new boards, including one where your kart almost turns into a whitewater raft, and another where you're driving on giant tree branches.
- Of course there's all that ability to race others online, but haven't tried that out yet.
Wish-they-hadn't-done-thats: - Team play in Battle mode. Instead of just going one-on-one against an opponent, you now have a team of six members, only one of which you control directly. This means that the winner of the battle is usually determined by what the rest of your team is doing, and not by how well you yourself are playing. Lame.
- In Balloon Burst battle, the boards we tried had VERY sparse distributions of power-ups. It felt like you had to drive around forever before you got one.
So yeah, I am waiting anxiously for testitest to take the test already so we can play at home. Me want Kart! |
|
|
| Spellbound |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|11:35 am] |
Last night I was catching up on my puzzle backlog a little bit, which is how I discovered that this past Sunday's NYT puzzle was by the same 17-year-old whiz kid who stumped me for a good two minutes at the ACPT with a truly evil crossing.
As I was solving the puzzle, I became perplexed. As I finished the puzzle, I realized that I was perhaps at a disadvantage to many other solvers. ( Exactly how I was at a disadvantage is a spoiler. ) |
|
|
| An Objectivist-esque sword |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|10:55 am] |
I read the first three or four books of the Sword of Truth series when I was in college, but quit because I didn't love it enough to allow myself to get sucked into yet another Neverending Series. (I learned my lesson after Robert Jordan...I got completely hooked, and the man didn't even have the grace to stay alive long enough to finish writing the series!)
Recently I've heard a lot of praise for the series from other Objectivists, so I decided to give it another try. Boy, had I forgotten what it's like to stay up late because I'm so compelled to keep reading a story.
I hadn't noticed the elements of Objectivism in the books when I read them in college, but then I wasn't looking for them (and it's not until the middle of the series that Goodkind really gets into it -- I had stopped reading before I got that far). I would say he's not quite as elegant as Rand in making philosophy part of the story rather than beating the reader over the head with it, but it's still good enough to be more than enjoyable.
Wonder what I will do with myself when I am finished with the series (and at the rate I'm tearing through the books, that will be pretty soon)! |
|
|
| OMG OMG OMG genius! |
[Apr. 14th, 2008|10:00 pm] |
An open letter:
Dear whoever figured out how to cut about 150 calories per serving from Ben & Jerry's and still have it taste good,
I love you. You're amazing.
Love,
A very happy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough eater |
|
|
| Move yo' feet |
[Apr. 13th, 2008|11:51 am] |
Friday night was my second tango class with testitest. It was a little frustrating at times, but mostly it was a lot of fun. I'd definitely take more classes with this teacher, as he's really good at using simple exercises to get you dancing rather than jumping into the hard stuff right away.
Yesterday was gorgeous out, so we took full advantage -- first, testitest actually accompanied me on a run, so I was able to show him some of the park loop (he'd never run anywhere in Central Park but the reservoir path before) that I like to run. He did 3 miles and I did 6. Then we went to the 'wichcraft near NYU so we could nosh outside in Washington Square Park. I work near another 'wichcraft location, and I've always thought the sandwich with meatloaf, cheddar, and bacon sounded amazing (especially after I persuaded my coworkers to have lunch there one day and one of them, who has a metabolism like testitest's, ordered the sandwich and was raving to me about it for days), but I know if I have one of those, I'll sleep through the rest of the workday, right? But having just run 6 miles, I knew I was hungry enough to actually finish the thing. HOLY CRAP. Quite possibly the best sandwich I have ever had. The meatloaf was moist and perfectly seasoned, the cheddar was nice and sharp, and of course nothing needs to be said about the delightfulness of bacon...but what they didn't say on the menu is that there's a tomato sauce on the meatloaf, and it is damn good tomato sauce that ties everything together into a little mouthful of heaven. YUM YUM YUM!
Our friend Sherry wanted to get a group dinner together that night. I proposed the Hawaiian Tropic Zone as a joke, and was surprised when Sherry thought it was a great idea! I've been curious about going there for a while, since I knew they had a celebrity chef (David Burke, of davidburke & donatella) designing the menu. I knew the waitresses were bikini-clad before we got there, but at least one of our friends (a swingin' bachelor) who came along did not. It was hilarious -- testitest and I were sitting at the bar, and our friend walks right by us as we're calling his name (LOUDLY) because he's totally mesmerized by all the boobies. Then it took him about ten minutes to order himself a Corona because his brain just wasn't working. *snicker* My verdict: Pretty good dancing (I didn't realize there were dance routines as well as the waitress beauty pageant), and the food was, as Gael Greene put it, "so much better than it needs to be." The one weird thing...OK tourists, just because the restaurant is in Times Square, it doesn't mean it's a family establishment! There were a few teenage boys with their eyes falling out of their heads, but far creepier was the family with two daughters (probably age 7 and 10 or so) -- when the catwalk was empty, the girls decided to come out and dance around on it, swinging T-shirts over their heads. WEIRD!
This morning I ran the Labrecque Classic 4-miler in Central Park, and took a minute off my personal record! RAWR.
As for the rest of today...I have nothing planned, and I like it that way. I deliberately made sure there were no plans for this weekend (except last night's group dinner, which was a last-minute thing anyway) and it feels so NICE to just relax and not have to worry about running around somewhere for a change. I'm going to read my book, maybe go to the gym to lift weights, and that's IT! |
|
|
| Welcome to 2001, Stella. |
[Apr. 8th, 2008|01:07 pm] |
I finally ordered an iPod. Just the Shuffle, mind you. I have an mp3 player that I use when running, but I have to put it on an armband, which sometimes chafes. So I finally noticed how far the Shuffle's price has dropped, and how little they are (meaning I can just clip it onto my singlet instead of using the cursed armband), and of course it doesn't hurt that the little guy comes in purple. Sign me up!
Went to louaudioguy's this past weekend -- he recently got Rock Band and was clamoring to have a Rock Band-fest. Lou's much more of a rock guy than a pop guy, so I had some trouble finding songs on the list that I actually knew, but "Roxanne" and "More Than a Feeling" worked pretty well. Some people were really getting into it, especially Lou's friend Richard (who was showboating it up whenever he got the microphone) and Lou himself, who got so manic playing the drums that he snapped the bass drum pedal in half. Oooops.
Got a phone call yesterday asking if I'd be interested in a job working for the Ayn Rand Institute's soon-to-open East Coast office. I'm really flattered to have been asked, though I had to say no (I'd have to move to DC, and more importantly, the job functions aren't what I'm good at or enjoy very much). But look for more news from me on the Objectivist front in a few months...I have something cool going on! |
|
|
| Please tell me there are good composers in Australia. |
[Apr. 2nd, 2008|02:29 pm] |
Last year, my choir sang Hope There Is by Clare MacLean, and I hated it. It was a collection of sound effects rather than music, and the lyrics sounded like Yoda wrote them.
This year, we are doing Past Life Melodies by Sarah Hopkins, which makes the MacLean piece seem like Ein Deutsches Requiem by comparison. The only words in the piece are "Ah," "Yeah," and (wait for it) "Nair, nair, nair, nadula nair." For most of the piece, there is no melody to speak of. There are three full pages of instructions on how to sing the piece before the first line of music -- they have a very earnest tone, but to me the instructions are just trying to hide the fact that the emperor has no clothes.
Reminds me of Ayn Rand's description of Richard Halley in Atlas Shrugged -- I'm paraphrasing, but he "wrote beautiful melodies in a time when nobody wrote melody any more." Pieces like this remind me how much I wish we were singing music by the Halleys of the world.
Surely there is SOMEONE in Australia writing music (not sound effects!), unlike MacLean and Hopkins. I hope. |
|
|
| Deferred embarrassment |
[Mar. 30th, 2008|05:31 pm] |
Well, the dance instructor never ended up showing up on Friday night. Boo! I mean, I was kind of dreading the embarrassment of being as awful at dancing as I am, but I *did* still want to learn. Hilariously, a couple of girls thought testitest and I were the dance instructors. I suppose we might have LOOKED that way, especially me -- I had specifically chosen the least restrictive clothing in my wardrobe, which not coincidentally looks like dancewear, and I'd gone to the trouble of buying real dance shoes instead of trying to dance in my Aerosoles again. I do have cut calves these days, too -- but I got them running in Central Park, NOT dancing! Anyway, testitest persuaded me to stick around in the empty dance studio and at least see if we could try to remember anything we learned in that tango crash course a couple of years ago. My memory was nonexistent; he was able to at least remember a couple of very basic moves, so we practiced those for a while.
Had some friends over for dinner last night. I made Coq au Zin, a nod to the still-cold weather. (Where is this global warming people keep talking about?) It turned out pretty well.
This morning I ran the Scotland Run 10K in the park. My first 10K, so I automatically set a personal record (58:44), but I bet I can beat it pretty easily. Trying to cram 8200 runners into two lanes = serious congestion, especially for the first mile, so I couldn't run as fast as I would have been able to on a clearer course. No big deal; mostly I wanted to chalk off another of the 9 races I need to run to get guaranteed entry to next year's NYC Marathon.
Yes, of course there were guys running in kilts. It's the Scotland Run, after all. |
|
|
| Spoiler for today's NYT |
[Mar. 28th, 2008|05:26 pm] |
|
Okay, I normally would be fine with a time of 4:17 for a Friday. But when the puzzle has gimmes (for me, anyway) like ( Spoilers )?! Come ON. That's SLOW. |
|
|
| I'm afraid. Very afraid. |
[Mar. 28th, 2008|01:41 pm] |
testitest has been bugging me for a while now about taking dance classes at the Y. I was hoping to sign up for Basic Six, an intro class -- although we've taken lessons before, it's been a long time, and I am naturally clumsy, so not only have I forgotten most of what I know about dancing, I'm also predisposed to be bad at it. So I definitely wanted to do the raw-beginner thing. Unfortunately, Basic Six wasn't available, so I let testitest persuade me into signing up for Argentine tango with him. The course description didn't really say whether it's a beginner class. I dearly, dearly hope it is.
See, a couple of years ago we took a "crash course" in Argentine tango as a birthday present for Dave. Silly me...I thought "crash course" meant "for beginners." It didn't. It meant "refresher course," and everyone in the class except us had done the tango before. Some were very experienced; others had less tango experience but plenty of ballroom experience. We had neither. It was god-awful. I was so bad that, even though there were far fewer women than men in the room, which meant that some men had to go without partners for some songs (we switched partners every song or so), one guy refused to dance with me. Like, he actually preferred to go without a partner than to dance with me. Ouch.
I'd say "pray for me" if I were a theist. But you get the idea. |
|
|
| I stand very much corrected |
[Mar. 28th, 2008|10:26 am] |
As some of you know, I've had a love-hate relationship with Peter Gordon for a long time. Love for his excellent work as the NY Sun and Sterling puzzle editor; dislike for some of the communications I've had with him, both verbally and in email. I made an offhanded comment about nasty rejection letters from him in someone else's blog, and Peter saw it. He was surprised that I felt that way and wanted to know if I could recall which rejection letters I thought were so rude.
Turns out my memory is not as good as I thought it was; a particularly rude phrase I "remembered" was in fact a distortion of what was actually said. And while I *am* pretty sure that Peter actually did say something that bothered me at the 2005 tournament, after our recent email exchange I can see that the comment was not made with the intention of upsetting me. In fact, during the exchange, he very politely said he hoped I would start submitting to him again (I haven't done so in a long time).
Time to re-evaluate, and time to eat crow. As I get older, I have less and less patience for rude people, and that's not going to change. But when I've placed someone into the "rude people" group based on faulty premises, I can do nothing but change my mind once the error is brought to light. So, publicly, I apologize for a mistaken assessment, and I hope we can have a mutually beneficial relationship in the future. |
|
|
| The best kind of recipe |
[Mar. 23rd, 2008|11:32 pm] |
is one that is almost comically easy to prepare, and is lip-smackingly good. Such recipes are rare and wonderful, and whenever I find one, I file it away for lots and lots of future use.
So, I give you lamb chops with apricot sauce. I could not believe how easy this was to make, and how tasty the results were. It's a good thing I only bought four lamb chops (two apiece for testitest and me), because I totally would have downed, like, five of them if there had been that many.
Make these, I tell you! |
|
|
| A very interesting Easter weekend |
[Mar. 23rd, 2008|07:59 pm] |
No, of course I didn't go to church. You know me better than that! (Then again, I was in a church last Easter eve, but only because my choir had a reciprocal agreement to sing two or three Masses a year in order to get rehearsal space for free; we no longer sing in that church, so I no longer have to participate in endless Easter services. Whee!)
Last night I saw the closing performance of Macbeth at BAM. Patrick Stewart had the title role, which was just as awesome as it sounds. I mean, the man could read the dictionary and I'd get chills. To see him live, portraying Macbeth's descent into madness, was amazing. I enjoyed most of the rest of the production (which put the story in a vaguely Soviet Russia-esque setting), with the exception of a few bits like having the Weird Sisters do "double, double, toil and trouble" in an almost hip-hop way. Anyway, if you're thinking, "Patrick Stewart as Macbeth! I'm sorry I missed it," the show is moving to the Lyceum on Broadway, where it will stay for a couple of months. I recommend!
Today, chrismasto and soleilfraise, whom I hadn't seen in ages, invited me out for the special Easter lunch at Plattduetsche Park on Long Island. I generally avoid Long Island whenever possible, but I'd been intrigued by Plattduetsche (not a misspelling, btw) ever since reading the NY Times $25 and Under column review of the place last year. The German food turned out to be quite good, but what really made it worth the trip out to Long Island (besides the company, of course!) was the hilarious entertainment. See, there was this guy who had to be at least 75 years old playing...a MIDI accordion. The accordion was accompanied by a Casio drum kit, and occasionally he would sing along. Whenever he would play the accordion, he would always be a beat or two off from the drums, and then when he started singing, that would be in yet ANOTHER tempo. Hard of hearing or incredibly adept at creating complex polyrhythmic systems? You decide.
My favorite song from this afternoon:
Im Himmel gibt's kein Bier,
Drum trinken wir es hier.
Denn sind wir nicht mehr hier,
Dann trinken die andern unser Bier.
He sang this verse in English as well, and it means:
In Heaven there's no beer,
That's why we drink it here.
When we're no longer here,
Our friends will drink all our beer. |
|
|
| This is clearly an animal with a death wish. |
[Mar. 18th, 2008|07:40 am] |
testitest's and my apartment faces the back alley, not the street. This is a good thing (street-facing apartments = garbage trucks and other noise all night, as I learned the hard way in my last apartment). Or it would be if there weren't a deranged alley cat that comes by several nights a week and makes sounds you'd swear were coming from a domestic violence scene.
This morning the demon-cat woke me up at ten minutes to seven and wouldn't shut up for a solid half an hour. I have often had fantasies of selling this cat to some unscrupulous chef who would serve it up in a stew, but never more so than this morning.
Oh well, at least I'll get into work an hour early and finish the slide kit I'm working on, I guess. |
|
|
| Ha! Awesome. |
[Mar. 13th, 2008|02:08 pm] |
The sandwich shop around the corner from my office has a sign up that says:
Eisenberg's proudly introduces
SANDWICH #9
THE SPITZER
HOT TONGUE ON RYE
That's pretty good. |
|
|
| Then the village boys could stop and sell their concertinos |
[Mar. 9th, 2008|04:28 pm] |
Above is one of the many nonsensical lines from the "Ingrian Evenings" section of Veljo Tormis' choral series Forgotten People. Those Ingrian Evenings have been plaguing me for months, and now I'm finally free! (Yeah, right. Those songs get stuck in your head like nobody's business.) That is to say, we had our choir concert last night, and fortunately it was not a total train wreck, despite the comparatively small amount of time we had to prepare for this one.
Let me explain a bit more about "Ingrian Evenings." The series is called Forgotten Peoples because it collects the folk songs of several Balto-Finnic peoples whose language and culture is now extinct (thanks in large part to the USSR). The series aims to preserve the language and music in the form of folk songs. Unfortunately, we had precious little time to learn all that music...so with the exception of certain choruses that didn't have translations, we sang the whole bloody mess in English. Including lines like "With a boy I'll go away and screw him on the quiet." Yes, really. Kind of missing the point to sing them in English, but I'm glad enough not to have had to learn 50 pages' worth of Finnish dialect.
One funny-annoying part about "Ingrian Evenings" is that, in certain portions of the music, one is supposed to sing multiple verses of a song, but replace a single measure of singing with a loud intake of breath in each verse. Except, in each verse, it's a DIFFERENT measure that you replace. Do you see where this is going? If you said "Inadvertent one-note solos!" you're right. Count me among the guilty (and I'd been so good at avoiding it in rehearsal!). At least I wasn't the only one...but ooooooops!
Today I haven't done much...except set a personal record in the 4-miler! Only by 8 seconds, but I'll take it, especially since I didn't even run the race thinking I wanted to go my fastest. (It's one of 9 I have to finish to get guaranteed entry to next year's NYC marathon, so that, rather than setting a PR every time, is my ultimate goal. Plus, I'm dealing with a minor injury, so I wanted to keep that from getting worse.) So I wasn't even trying, and I still did it! Sah-weet. Of course, I've been so tired from the race effort that I've done nothing else with myself all day, but I refuse to feel one whit of guilt about being lazy on a Sunday. So there! |
|
|
