Not really a lot to say here. I watched the show from the re-boot with Christopher Eccelston up through the most recently aired episode. I’ve really enjoyed it and plan to keep doing so. In fact, I liked it so much that I also started watching its spinoff, Torchwood.
82/101 left.
Jen recently went to Japan in one of the most broad and far-reaching instances of “things that I’m wildly jealous of” in recent history, but due to the way her vacation time worked out, upon returning to the states, she found herself with a couple of days to kill in Chicago before heading home. I have somehow never been to Chicago, despite having been told that I would love it there more times than I can count. My sister also recently moved there for her new job, so I had intended to visit for a while, but kept putting it off. With all this lined up, it would have been negligent on my part to miss the opportunity.
There’s a lot of things to do in Chicago, if you were wondering. We spent most of Saturday in the Field Museum (awesome, if you have the chance to see it, by the way) and barely saw 1/8 of the exhibits. We also checked out the Adler Planetarium, which I really enjoyed (or as Jen might call it, the power nap that you need a ticket for), and took a river architecture tour. It was incredibly foggy, and I should have been annoyed, but to be honest, the kind of added to the experience. I liked it. After all the touring, we ended the night with dinner at the Chicago Diner. As a non-vegetarian, I can honestly say, that was some of the best meatless food I’ve ever had. We liked it so much that we even bought the cookbook.
Sunday, we took the train to Oak Park and spent a good long while in The Book Table, which was among the best bookstores I’ve ever been to. I recommend it highly, although if you’re traveling by air, you may want to do a better job of estimating the space in your luggage than we did. We capped off the weekend with an early dinner and a milkshake in Wicker Park at the Earwax Cafe.
We had a lot of fun, and I really want to go back, if for no other reason than to see more of the Field. That place is MASSIVE, and full of dinosaurs and cool dioramas.
83/101 to go.
I have long considered actually donating blood before. I even attempted to do so a few years back when they had blood drives at my work, but due to tattoos, piercings or medication, they always found a way to disqualify me.
Well apparently, they revised the standards for recent tattoos, so I’m eligible for the first time in my adult life. And that’s good for them, because my blood is awesome. I’ve felt guilty about my past inability to donate, because I am O-, aka everyone on earth wants some of this blood. Everyone. It’s the good shit.
I went with Bianca and Linzy, we were all relieved of our bodily fluids, and we capped off the morning with brunch at the Continental, where I (once again) did a terrible job of being frugal by ordering two dishes and a couple of drinks. You can’t tell me how to live, Red Cross. I’ll have greyhounds with my brunch if I want to. Fight the power.
84/101 left.
Another fairly unimpressive goal, but at least through the encouragement of the list, I’m accomplishing the less lustrous things in my life that I’ve put off (in this case) for ten years or more.
I’m at least able to feel somewhat more proud of this one in that I braved gale-force winds and a torrential downpour on my trek to the library in order to fill out the application. I’m still not sure how much I’ll use the library with my unnatural desire to collect books, but it’s good to know that it’s there, should I decide to take it for a test run.
Anyway, Jen swears by the thing, and she hasn’t steered me wrong yet.
85/101 left.
It just so happened that the night before leaving to go to Columbus to visit Jen, my boss decided to tell me that due to the success of a few projects I’d been working on, I should reward myself by taking Jen out to a nice dinner. The exact words were “Get an expensive bottle of wine, don’t worry about money, and spend a couple hundred bucks. Bring us the receipt and we’ll pay for it.”
Naturally, I was pretty damn excited.
After a little discussion, we decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to try out Dragonfly, which has come up more than a few times in conversation. Once we took our seats at the restaurant, we somehow decided that rather than choose what we would eat, it would just be easier to order one of everything. We reasoned that the pizza of the day and the soup seemed superfluous, so with every course, we just asked the waitress to bring one of everything else.
Now: I’m not a vegan. And Jen only is sometimes, but a lot of the dishes were goddamn fantastic, even without any meat or dairy. Coming from me, that’s saying a lot. All-in-all, it added up to: 3 appetizers, 3 full entrees, 3 desserts, 3 cocktails, 2 root beers and a bottle of champagne. I liked damn near everything, and despite boxing up our leftovers and expressly trying not to gorge so we could make it through the meal, upon returning to Jen’s house, we pretty much fell into motionless food comas for 2 hours before going to sleep at 11pm. I know. We live on the edge.
Really good though. Would gorge myself there again, no question.
86/101 things left to cross off.
This one is pretty unimpressive, and there’s not much to write about. I loaded up two large trashbags with clothes I don’t wear anymore, and my parents were kind enough to drive them to a donation center so I didn’t have to lug them onto the bus and across town. But, an unimpressive list item is still a list item and I’ll take it. I hope someone enjoys all the brand-new-with-the-tags-still-on pants I was given on various Christmases that I didn’t actually like. Cheers, thrift shoppers with poor fashion sense.
In other news, I was given a harmonica by a pretty awesome girl, and I’m starting to learn a couple songs. I’m not comfortable crossing that one off yet because I don’t think I’d say I’ve “learned” it yet, but I’m working on it.
87/101 left in the deck.
All I’ve been hearing for the past few years from everyone I know is “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS SHOW EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIKE SCI FI OH MY GOD JUST WATCH IT.” I don’t even have anything against sci-fi, really. I think I just put it off on principle, for the same reason I keep putting off reading anything by David Sedaris. What can I say? I’m genetically predisposed to avoid bandwagon-jumping. I can’t help it, even when it goes against my better judgment.
Anyway, I finally did it. And yes: unsurprisingly, everyone was correct. It’s a fantastic show. It was jam-packed with complex characters (although for some reason I was really resistant to remembering any of their names with a few exceptions for almost two seasons), and interesting and long-term plot devices that really kept me invested. What I think I liked best of all, however, was the line they walked between utopian and dystopian futuristic things. Too often, space is portrayed as either perfect, shiny robot land with all freshly imagined weapons and problems, or a total wasteland of crap that make me wonder how these people got off the ground to begin with. BSG did a good job of keeping things reasonable. Nuclear weapons are still the really bad shit that everyone is afraid of. Food is still a problem. Cancer is still around. Things break, but they can be fixed. For being a space fantasy, they did a great job of being realistic. I liked that.
My only major complaint was the final movie. It was utterly pointless. It was almost entirely comprised of things I had seen already, and just had more of a depressing tone. I don’t give a shit what sidekick from Quantum Leap’s perspective was on the whole thing. It dragged on forever, and only served to ruin the really satisfying ending of the series.
The long and the short of it is that now I am one of those people that will tell you YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS. But I will be suggesting that the final movie be skipped. It was rubbish.
88/100 to go.
Now technically, I do concede that I only spent most of a weekend in New York, but I’m going to count it anyway because we were there from first thing Saturday morning until late Sunday night, and enough activities were done to make me feel justified in marking it off.
That being said, I had a fantastic time. Jen and I took the Bolt Bus up bright and early the day before Valentine’s Day, and made our way to our hotel by 11am. And whoa boy, was it ever a nice hotel. Everything about the place was beautiful. Giant flat-screen TV, huge black stone tiled shower, enormous comfortable bed, full-wall picture windows with a remote controlled blackout screen…it had everything. I’m still sad that we had to leave. After enjoying the hotel for the afternoon, we went to dinner at Blossom, a fancy vegan restaurant, that I was more satisfied with than I would have imagined. After we’d finished, it was off to BAM to see the Magnetic Fields. We closed the night out with a couple of drinks in the hotel bar, and then went upstairs to get some sleep.
The next morning, we walked over to South Street Seaport for a little while (it was an absolutely gorgeous day, luckily), and then we set off to see the New Museum, but along the way accidentally stumbled across Chinese New Year in the middle of Chinatown, so we spent the majority of the afternoon looking at dragons and setting off confetti poppers and just milling around the area. It was an awful lot of fun. When we’d had our fill, we got lunch in a cute little cafe in the Upper East Side, and then walked to Strand, because yes: we go to bookstores on vacation. After a few more stops, we headed home and got some much needed rest.
It wasn’t the most lengthy of all trips, but it was a really nice little escape for a couple days. I actually can’t recall another weekend that I had more fun for such an unbroken period of time. Good stuff.
89/101 left.
Somehow in my twenty-nine years, I have never had the opportunity to send a girl flowers. I finally got around to doing that this year, the week before Valentine’s Day. There’s not much of a story to it, so I fear the recap will be a bit boring.
They were supposed to arrive on the 9th, but I received a call from the florist that the blizzard had killed all of the peonies in Ohio, and my order would be delayed by a day to allow time for a replacement to be shipped from Holland. Not ideal, but the peonies are Jen’s favorite flower, so it seemed worth it to wait. I’m told that it was.
And that’s about all I’ve got, other than the reaffirmation in my belief that roses are never the correct choice. They’re common and thoughtless and really nothing to write home about. Use your imagination, folks. It tends to pay off.
90/101 to go.
Zombieland was a pretty good movie. I’d seen it before, but I can now say with authority that it’s one of those movies that are best viewed in a large group. The entertainment value of a zombie getting its head run over by a car is exponentially increased by a large room full of whooping viewers.
There was a raffle, but alas I did not win. I had my heart set on a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to give to Jen, but I’ll cope. However, I got to have a good Monday night out of the house with a couple fun people, so I’ll call it a win. That’s about the best you can ask for in the grand scheme of things. Special thanks to Linzy for the running movie commentary.
91/101 left on the docket.