Update on my Apartment

Well, several weeks ago I said I would post more picture of how my apartment is looking and I've finally cleaned it enough to feel good about posting pictures of it. The only big thing I still need is a couch, which I am getting in two weeks thanks to Aunt Cindy! Here are the pictures:

The Seaweed is always greener, in somebody else's lake!

I keep getting a lot of grief when I go too long without posting on my blog. This is what I have to say to that; too bad. Somehow I am very busy everyday, still trying to get settled, planning trips to and from New Jersey, and being (as dad likes to call it) a social butterfly. So, I do try to blog whenever anything interesting happens, so please keep checking because you never know. When I let it go a week without posting, I haven't forgotten about my adoring public, I'm just busy!!

Okay, now on to the point of this entry. I went to New Jersey this weekend to visit boy again and had a great time...once I got there. And so begins another tale of a 10 hour trip up the east coast to the beautiful town of Hackensack, New Jersey. I managed to make it to my bus (megabus again this time) BARELY on time. I literally walked on and the bus left as I sat down. Anywho, I figured this has to go better than last time for the following reasons: the bus moves, the bus left on time, I got my own seat with no one sitting next to me (yay!). We got to Baltimore in what I thought was pretty good time, about a half hour behind schedule, but with Washington DC traffic, I was not complaining. We then continued on to New York without any hitches until we got to the line for the Lincoln Tunnel. For those of you who do not know, in order to get in to NYC, you have to take a tunnel or bridge, and I have gathered that everyone and their mom goes through the Lincoln Tunnel when I am on a bus trying to get through it. We entered the traffic jam waiting for the tunnel at 5:30pm (45 minutes after we should have arrived in NYC, again, I was not complaining thinking we'd be about an hour late, much improved over last time). We exited the tunnel at 7:30pm much more behind schedule and much crankier (fyi, the distance we traveled was about 5 miles, 4 miles of which we traveled in the last 10ish minutes of that two hour window). So I get to Penn Station at 7:45, the same time I got there last time with the broken bus delayed train fiasco. So, I get to Hackensack at 9pm, again, the same time as my last trip for a door to door trip duration of 10 hours...again. Anyway, once I got to NJ, things got much better :)

On Wednesday (2 days before above trip), Matt surprised me with a wonderful surprise (I know I said surprise twice, but I didn't know what else to put). Matt got tickets for us to see The Little Mermaid on Broadway!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Basically, I was thrilled as I have never seen a broadway show (or been in new york outside of the train station) and The Little Mermaid is my favorite Disney movie. So, on Saturday night, we got all dressed up and went in to the city for a night out on the town! We went out to dinner at a cuban restaurant, wandered times square, and made our way over to the show. The show was, as expected, spectacular. The entire cast was so talented and really seemed like they were having fun. All of the songs from the movie were included plus 10 new songs, all composed by the two men who originally wrote the songs for the movie. Matt and I were both especially impressed by Ursula; she had a great voice that was really awesome for those minor key villain songs and she had a cool costume!

The only down side to the night was that I left my camera in Alexandria :(. I bought a disposable one in times square, but didn't take 24 pictures, so I'll have to post pictures later when I finish the roll, I almost forgot how to take picture through the viewfinder!

Coming back to DC on the bus went off pretty much without a hitch, luckily, however I think I am done with taking the bus...from now on it will probably be plane, train, or automobile.

I have new respect for Gob

Okay, today, I did something I've been wanting to do for at least 6 years...I rode a Segway!!! My friend Tim who I know from Ann Arbor but also now works at the Patent Office invited me to go with him and his girlfriend (also my friend from ann arbor) on a Segway tour of DC. I needed no convincing to say yes to that, even if I was third wheeling it. We went through a company called Capital Segway Tours (I believe they do tours in other cities but I might be wrong). We got to ride segways for two hours while getting a guided tour of many of the landmarks in downtown DC.

The segways were a little wierd to get used to at first, the hardest thing for me to master was going up hill. They are really smart and do most of the work for you, so its hard to tell yourself not to lean forward or back when going up or down hill. But after a little while, they start to feel really natural and wind up being a lot of fun. We had a tour with 15ish people, and there were some older women who had no trouble, I was impressed with them, so anyone can do it! I recommend segways to anyone, it was so fun. Here are several of the pictures I took (disclaimer: I don't look good in helmets):

Old Friends

So yesterday (Sunday) I spent the day in Annapolis, MD. In case you do not know, Annapolis is the capital of Maryland and also home to the Naval Acadamy. It was really cute small town, reminded me a lot of up north Michigan (Petoskey/Harbor Springs/Charlevoix sort of vibe). It was especially exciting because I got to spend the day with one of my good friends, Kelley, from middle school. Kelley and I became friends in 6th grade because we both played cello in the orchestra, so we always sat next to eachother. We did duets together every year in the state competition and she is actually the one who introduced me to my first cello teacher, Mr. DiFiore (who could probably provide enough material for his own post), and got me to start taking private lessons. Unfortunately, at the end of 8th grade, Kelley's family moved to Baltimore, MD. Surprisingly, the whole group of friends managed to stay in touch with Kelley through all these years, helped by the fact that she came back during thanksgiving break every year because all of her relatives still lived in Michigan. She always said she wanted to come back and go to U of M, however she ended up at University of Maryland and is now a nurse working in Baltimore. Well now that I am out here in DC, I only live about 40 minutes from Kelley so we made arrangements to hang out yesterday. She suggested we go to Annapolis because it is a really cute town with lots of quaint little shops and waterfront with lots of boats, and because her sister happens to be a senior at the Naval Academy, so we were able to hang out with her as well. We did lots of shopping and went out to dinner, all in all it was a fun day. I would definitely recommend checking out Annapolis to anyone who comes out to visit me :)

Busses, Trains, and more trains

Well, this past weekend I ventured up the east coast again to visit the boy and had an even more interesting (generous word choice) time than last. Lets just get right down into it:

I decided to take the bus again (megabus this time instead of boltbus) and arrived (barely) in time for my 12:15pm bus to NYC on Friday. At about 12:30, people start to wonder why we haven't left DC yet, and by 12:45, people start to get cranky. We can hear random mumblings from the bus driver about "the gas" and after the bus had been started and restarted around 5 times, we begin to think that maybe there is a problem. People start to ask the bus driver what is going on and after about 10 people pester the poor driver, they manage to put the story together that something is wrong with the accelerator and the bus won't move. The guy sitting next to me on the bus proceeds to call the company to ask if they can send another bus or see what they can do for us. The response is that they are not sending another bus, and the next 4 buses (approximately 1 per hour) are booked solid, which by the way we all had a hard time believing because our bus was barely half full, but whatever. So by now its around 1:00/1:15, about an hour after the bus was supposed to leave and we have moved negative 2 feet. At this point, people start to bail and I call home to enlist the internet searching skills of mi madre to see if there are any trains leaving soon and how much they cost. Dad was the only one home, so he heard my whole saga up to that point and after some coaching, managed to find the train schedules for me from DC's union station to NYC's penn station. He tells me there is a train leaving for nyc at 2:05, so I decide to bite the bullet and shell out some dough to take the train. Hey, at least it will get me there faster right?

Not so fast George Banks...I get to union station to buy the train ticket ($144 one-way compared to my $17 bus ticket) and the woman says "the train is 45 minutes delayed." Of course it is, whatever...at this point, I just want any mode of transportation that will eventually get me to NYC. So, the train leaves DC at about 3:00 (almost an hour late and almost three hours after I was supposed to leave DC). We get to somewhere in Delaware and start going pretty slow, after a few minutes the conductor comes on the speaker and says "you may have noticed we are not traveling at our maximum speed (I would hope so since we were only traveling at a moderate jogging pace). Someone installed our engine upside down, and theres only one tool in our galaxy that can fix it...and its in Madagascar." Thats what I heard in my head at least. I think what he actually said was: "We are having signal problems in the area, which means we can not coordinate as easily with the other trains in the area." Translation: We have no idea if another train is coming at us on the same track, so we have to go 5 mph so that when we crash, only the people in the first few cars die. And unfortunately, this signal problem stretches all the way to philidelphia, so you passengers are just going to have to die a long agonizing death while we inch along to philly and watch the turtles, snails, and worms pass us.

We FINALLY get to philly and start going fast again, and then I finally get to my stop, Newark airport at 7:50pm; 3 hours after the train was supposed to get there, and 3 hours after my bus was supposed to get to NYC Penn station. I finally made it to Matt's place at 9:00pm, 10 hours after I left my apartment to catch the stupid megabus. At least I don't have to take the megabus again...O wait, I do because I booked two weekends at the same time, so I'll be updating on how trip number 2 goes the weekend of August 22nd

Stay tuned...

I Was So Glad

I FINALLY GOT MY BED!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's beautiful and very comfortable. It's really tall though! I feel like a king (queen?) when I lay on it.

There was still a little drama with the delivery today but everyone finally got on the same page and managed to get the key to my apartment so they could come in and assemble it etc...

Here it is:


Also, I don't think I've posted pictures of my dressers yet, here's what they look like after I painted them and replaced the hardware, just as a reference, here is what the old drawers looked like:

Quite a difference eh?

I'll post updated pictures of my apartment soon...

I Was So Mad: Part Deux

So, in case some of you were deprived enough as children to have never read any of the little critter books, I feel bad for you. The picture below is the title of my favorite book in the series. Do you see a theme?