I can’t believe it’s the end of March and I just made my first t-shirt purchase this year. It’s taken some serious self control, but between saving for a wedding and being pretty much of out space for storing shirts, I figured I need to take it easy for a bit.
All three of these came from Threadless‘s $10 sale this month.
Maybe it was because I went into this expecting it to be terrible, but I walked out of the theater completely shocked. Hot Tub Time Machine is this year’s The Hangover. It is utterly hilarious.
There isn’t a whole lot to really say about it other than the fact that it’s hilarious right off the bat and doesn’t let up. Everything about it is awesome, from capitalizing on the ridiculousness of the 80s to Crispin Glover and allusions to the movies that some of these actors starred in in the 80s.
You need to see this.
Rating: A
Great, I’m officially allergic to cats. Well, I’ve been allergic for some time, I guess, but I finally had a doctor test me. In doctor speak, my allergy is “off the charts.” That sounds pretty technical to me. Apparently, I’m also slightly allergic to dogs, but I refuse to believe that. I grew up with a dog and was always fine.
The odd thing is, I don’t think I was always allergic to cats. They never seemed to bother me before. My aunt always had cats and a ton of my friends have cats. Never had a problem. But two years ago, I got a kitten and my allergies started going nuts. It wasn’t really at first–from what I’ve read, it takes a cat until about their first birthday before they start to produce dander–but it happened. I don’t even think I can pinpoint when it started. I have bad seasonal allergies that I’ve had all my life; I’ve learned to live with them and take over-the-counter medication to help with the symptoms, but at the end of last allergy season, nothing stopped. It stuck around and actually got worse. The symptoms were similar, but slightly different too, so I knew something was up. And unfortunately for me, the over-the-counter stuff hasn’t been able to cut it.
I suspected it was either the cat (Leela, the same one you’ve seen too many pictures of) or my fiancée who moved in right around Leela’s first birthday. Though, both of those events happened at the beginning of the allergy season last year so was hard to separate what the cause was. Since I can’t just get rid of one of them for a couple months at a time, I had to get tested.
Anyway, the test came back and I’m super allergic to cats. Whether this is a newer allergy I developed or it was something I always had that was mostly masked by my seasonal allergies, I’ll never know, but this sucks. I’ve already decided that there is no way I could get rid of Leela (dammit), I’m way too attached to her (dammit, again). And my attachment to her is kind of ridiculous too, she’s a brutal human-hating bitch, but I love her. I’m like the abused woman that says she still loves the man who beats her daily.
I’m not sure how I’m going to really work all this out though. Trying to be militant about cleaning, vacuuming, sweeping, and such to try to pick up the dander isn’t really going to work too well. It’s just too hard to keep up with, I’ll do what I can, but she is everywhere, all the time. What’s worse is she has to sleep in our bedroom with us. Sometimes on the bed. Sometimes even cuddled up under my arm. This is a habit that I didn’t start with her, but after months of trying, couldn’t break either. She cries and scratches constantly at the bedroom door keeping me up all night. And nothing can get her to stop. Even going so far as to grab her, throw her in the kitchen sink, and spray her in the face with the hose from the sink does nothing to deter her. She knows it’s coming, she knows what the consequences are, but she perseveres through it because she wants in the bedroom no matter what it takes. When we finally gave in a few months ago and started leaving the bedroom door open at night, she became an entirely different cat. She was much more loving and well-behaved. However, this only my made my allergies even worse. I’ve always let her hang out in the bedroom when I’m home and awake, she likes sitting in the closet window and sleeping at the foot of the bed, but this is just too much for my body to handle.
I’ve decided that I’m going to go to an allergist and try to get the shots and see what happens. I’ll ask about my pollen allergies as well and see if those shots can be done at the same time. If they can, I’ll probably try to kill two birds, but we’ll see. Either way, it sucks because it’ll be months and months of getting shots that may not even help anything in the long run.
Oh yeah, and I don’t even like cats. Like at all. I think they’re cute, but that’s about where it ends. How did I let this happen?
I had a lot of fun with last night’s show, probably because my mic breaks were just me gushing over Zooey Deschanel. I got a double dose of She & Him in there, but I may have considered playing the whole thing in its entirety. It’s an awesome record. I also finally got my hands on the new Ted Leo/Pharmacists album. It’s okay, I’m not super in love with it.
The rest of the show was pretty poppy and fun. The Black Keys song was a request and I ended with a song off of Pavement’s new best of album. I’m not the biggest Pavement fan, but the album was there waiting to be played.
Source: 90.3 The Core
Yesterday, I grabbed my camera while I was relaxing in the backyard and snapped around 70 shots. Nothing too spectacular, a bunch of my fiance stretching and some of random things in the backyard. This was my favorite of the bunch. It’s the upstairs neighbor’s granddaughter’s bicycle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her ride it, but it’s been sitting back there forever now.
I can’t believe I did it again, but I followed up last year’s Rita’s tour with an even bigger and better tour this year. I’m not going to lie, it was intense. Last year was tough and mistakes were made, but we aimed higher this year. We hit four locations last time, but we wanted ten this year.
We couldn’t make it. Time wasn’t on our side. We were only able to make it to eight total locations over the course of nine hours. However, those nine hours did include a trip to a wedding venue hopeful that the fiance and I had already made an appointment with and a trip to Stuff Yer Face to get some food into us. I think we could have pulled off all ten locations still, but the one in Morristown didn’t exist anymore–damn Google for saying it was there–and another location was a few miles away from where we thought it was. But all-in-all, I think our efforts were quite impressive.
We improved on some of last year’s mistakes. This time, we made sure to eat real food beforehand and include a food stop later on in the trip. We also brought water and took advantage of sugar-free flavors at some locations to keep the sugar intake down. Additionally, we used self-control to not finish any serving. A regular sized ice at Rita’s is a pretty decent size, but trying to have eight of those in a day is enough to give you diabetes on the spot. I only consumed a third to a half of each one and in a couple locations requested just a kids size instead. And one last thing that I think may have helped was that my fiance and I went for a five-mile run in the morning.
Unfortunately, we got tempted by a random cupcake place we drove by in Denville, NJ. We saw Sugar Mommy’s Cupcakes and had to stop. Three of the four of us got cupcakes there which was not good for our sugar levels.
Ultimately, 21 flavors were tried by the group. Pretty impressive, I think. I also experienced flavors that I never even knew existed like RitaBerrious and Strawberry Margarita. The flavors that I tried myself were:
I’d like to think that this is a pretty impressive list, much better than last year. Last time around, we didn’t have a lot of choice at most of the locations, but I was very impressed this year to find that every location was pretty well stocked with flavors. Also, while most locations had lines 2
0-30 people deep at any given time, they moved quickly. Impressive.
Overall, I’d consider this to be a success this year. Much better than last time. I didn’t feel sick at all or over sugared really. Still, I think even more improvements could be made for next year and we could hit up to twelve stops. What probably killed us the most was the time it took to check out the wedding venue. That also kept us from staying more local. We ended up having to make a huge loop around instead of hitting a bunch of locations all within about 20 minutes of our apartment. To the right, is the map of the locations that we hit and below are a few pictures that I took. Also, for another account of the tour, check out Foodosaurus Rex. Enjoy!
Unfortunately for everyone, there was no edition of The Playlist this week. I was suffering from what I’m willing to say was the worst allergy day of my life and couldn’t make it to the station. I could barely open my eyes. Though, it at least prompted me to finally make a doctor’s appointment so that I can get the ball rolling on determining whether or not the suffering I’ve been going through lately is because of a newly developed cat allergy or something else.
Anyway, I finally made my first t-shirt purchase of the year last night. I can’t remember that last time I went this long, but I’ve been trying to save money for the wedding and such. Plus, I really have no where to store these damn things anymore. However, Threadless is running a $10 sale that’s good an all shirts. It’s a pretty awesome sale, actually. I had to take advantage. I’ll post pictures of the shirts when I get them.
I’ve been listening to the Against Me! album a bit more and it’s definitely growing on me. There are a lot of parts that I like a lot, but I’m still not digging about half of it. There are few bands that could put out an album that I’d put this kind of effort into liking, but I really want to like this.
Lastly, Saturday is free Rita’s day and I’m planning on doing the tour again this year. But I plan on correcting the mistakes that were made last year. We’ll spread it out of a larger portion of the day, eat a real meal in the middle, and get sugar-free flavors at a few of the stops to help ease the sugar overload. It’s going to be intense though. We’ve been swapping proposed maps back and forth and it looks like we’re shooting to double the amount of locations we hit last year. I’m sure I’ll post about it all afterwards, but I’m a little scared!
PS: Yes, I called it “water ice.”
Okay, so Against Me! and She & Him are not two bands that you’d normally talk about together, but they’re two of my favorite bands and they both have records coming out.
Against Me!’s new record will be called White Crosses and is due out in the beginning of June, but it’s already leaked. No, I don’t have a link for you, the one I used is dead already, sorry. Tom Gabel doesn’t really seem to care too much, he said there was “no drama” and even posted all the lyrics on his blog. I’ve only listened to it once so far and to be honest, I’m not really impressed. Like many people, one of my favorite things about Against Me! is that everything they do is a progression over where they’ve been. They don’t stick with anything too long and always push forward. I really love that about them. But, I’m not quite sure that I like this push. When they signed to Sire and worked with Butch Vig for New Wave I don’t think anyone really knew what to think, but the product was stellar and really exceeded a lot of expectations. But this time around, I feel like everything I feared was going to happen with New Wave did happen. White Crosses feels very polished and major labely. I’m not going to say that that’s inherently a bad thing, but I’m not sure that it’s what I want in an Against Me! album. However, Against Me! is one of the few bands that I have learned not to judge too quickly. I hated Searching For A Former Clarity when it first came out, I thought it was going to kill them for me. It wasn’t until shortly after its release when I saw them at a party at CMJ that I feel in love with the record. Based on that, I’m willing to give White Crosses some time, but that first listen was horribly disappointing.
On the opposite end of the expectation fulfillment spectrum is She & Him’s Volume Two. This record comes out next week, but it’s currently streaming in its entirety over at NPR. This album is everything I could have hoped for in a sophomore release from She & Him. They pick up right where they left off with Volume One, yet avoid regurgitating the same songs back to us again. There are thirteen songs and, this time, only two covers. Each of the songs is cute and sweet and Zooey Deschanel’s vocals continue to the best by any female singer out there. Friends and long time readers of this blog know my obsession with her–my fiance refers to her as my girlfriend–so I am pretty biased, but if you can listen to this record and not fall in love with her voice like I have, then you’ve got no business listening to music at all. You’re going to want to pick this one up.
In the meantime, check out the video for the first single, “In The Sun.” It’s pretty much the cutest thing you’ll watch this month.
The Playlist last night didn’t feel notable in any real way. Usually, I feel positively or negatively about a radio show afterwards, but I’ve got nothing from last night. Everything flowed and worked, but nothing really stood out about it. The playlist was probably about half the same as last week’s show, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
One thing that I’ve noticed though is that I’m more consistently getting calls than ever before. I can almost guarantee that I’ll get at least one call per show now, last night’s was a request for Voxtrot, I made it happen. I’m not sure if it’s a result of being an hour earlier than I was for years, an overall increase in station listenership, or what, but I like it. One call per show may not seem like much, but think about how often you call radio stations when you’re listening. So even getting one call per show feels good.
Here’s the show’s playlist. I’m switching to posting it as a simple list rather than an HTML table so that the Facebook import won’t look like a pile of garbage.
Source: 90.3 The Core
I like to run. It’s something that’s relatively new to me, as a kid, I was active, but I hated running when it wasn’t a part of doing something else. However, in the last couple of years, I’ve developed quite a fondness for running all by itself. Besides enjoying the activity itself, I like that I’m staying in shape and how it makes me feel about myself afterwards, I feel accomplished, energized, and all around much healthier. When I started, I didn’t have much of a goal other than keeping in decent shape, but in the course of the last year, I realized that I would like to try to run a half marathon. A full marathon may be a bit of a stretch for me based on the amount of time I can devote to training and the state of my knees–which actually don’t bother me when I run, only when I stand still for more than 15 minutes at a time. But a half marathon feels doable to me.
So I decided that I’d run the Rutgers Half Marathon next month and I started official training about a month ago. Since my normal run is usually about five miles and I’ve done a couple of ten mile runs for fun, I knew that my training didn’t need to be super intense. But the thing that I’m finding out, is that this half marathon is making me hate running. One of the blogs that I often read likes to mention that training for a marathon can have a huge effect of your life, both in your outlook and your attitude. The writer likes to mention how he learned a lot through the process and looks at life and situations differently because of it. But you know what? I’m just not seeing it.
Training for this half marathon is a chore. It’s taken all of the fun out of running. Instead of having fun and being able to run when I want and how far I want, I have to keep a schedule and work my life around that. I’m starting to find myself extremely stressed because of an overall lack of time in my life for a lot of the things I want and need to get done. Running can take up a lot of time and it also means that you need to have time to shower afterwards before doing something else. You also need to pay more attention to what and when you eat as well. It really messes with your whole schedule.
Additionally, I need to push myself sometimes when I really don’t feel like I have it in me to run an extra couple miles or so that day. Sometimes, at the end of the run, I’m glad that I was able to push myself a little more than I would have otherwise. These are the runs where I got past the block that was holding me back. But sometimes, I feel like I had to push too hard and afterwards I’m done for the day. I’m not energized after these runs and I didn’t have fun either. These runs do not feel worth it at all.
For an actual athlete, this is what you’re supposed to go through, but for something that I do just as fun, I don’t know that it’s worth it. I’m sure that at the end of the half marathon, I’ll feel accomplished and proud of myself for finishing the 13.1 mile run, but I don’t see gaining much else from this. I was hoping that if this went well, I would be able to do the Disney full marathon in January, since I’ll be there that week already, but now I’m debating even doing the half marathon there. I guess we’ll see how that turns out and it’s silly to make any decisions a month before this race, but right now, I’m feeling pretty negatively towards it.
I’m sure in the end, it’ll all seem worth it, but I worry that I’m not going to find running fun anymore after the race and I’m not going to want to continue doing it.
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