This weekend

This weekend, I believe Marc and I singlehandedly--I guess that would be doublehandedly, technically--pulled the U.S. economy out of this nasty recession. What started out low key enough with a BYOB Indian dinner on Friday ended in an ORGY OF RETAIL CONSUMPTION (albeit a very tame one).

It was a good weekend (Except for the fight we got in Sunday night at Target about leggings. What have you done to the fabric of America, Lindsay Lohan?)


I got these adorable clogs on sale at Anthropologie, which means they were still expensive, just not as high as my portion of the mortgage. They're so very comfortable and I think it's true love. If you're a size 7 or 9, they can be yours too. We can be shoe twins.

No pictures yet, but I also stopped by the Jayson Home and Garden warehouse sale and picked up an old schoolhouse light to install above our kitchen sink. Right now, we have one of those Ikea Fado deals up there. It's not bad, but it's super hard to change the lightbulb and it's kind of blah and filthy.

Jayson Home and Garden is kind of like the Anthropologie of home stores. Stratospherically out of my budget, but it was kind of fun and worth it to go to the warehouse sale for this one item. Plus, there were ladies with dogs in their purses there, which makes any shopping experience extra fancy. Was the light as cheap as a Fado? No way man, but it was a steal at $99 vs. its original $550 (say what!) price tag.


It's not unlike something you'd find at Schoolhouse Electric, but it's the prettiest pale jade green.

Not to be outdone, Marc went and bought himself a bike.


It's so pretty. I usually don't like new bikes (I had my grandma's 1960s Schwinn until it got stolen a few years ago, and I replaced it with the exact same bike in red), but it's a really simple and lovely thing. No joke, people were nudging each other and pointing at the bike and stopping him to ask about it when he was walking down the street yesterday. It was like he was strolling around with a super hot lady. My clogs and I were a little jealous.

So all of our consumption may mean we're going to be eating lots of canned goods and spending quality time with ye olde Netflix queue, which is more than fine by me. It's getting to be about that time of year in Chicago when everyone hibernates anyway. Ugh. Sick of it.

P.S. Posting may be light this week (not that it hasn't been this whole year...but hey, blogging is something free I can do, right?). I'll be in New York until Sunday for work. Have a great week, everybody!

P.P.S. I almost forgot--I dyed some chunks of my hair pink! It's so fun. Circa 2000, Gwen Stefani, look out! I'm coming for you!

Not even phoning it in today

I'm still down with the sickness* and having a very tough time coming up with a post for today. Does that ever happen to you?

I have a few on the back burners, but they're far too complex (i.e. they involve more than three hyperlinks and one picture) for my stuffed-up mind to wrangle into anything approaching coherence.

Instead, I'll leave you with a picture of the kickass lamp I'm picking up tomorrow night (provided I'm not dead). Thanks, Craigslist!



Netflix was nice enough to send me Children of Men and Away We Go. Which one should I watch tonight as I chug NyQuil from the bottle and bury myself in wadded-up Kleenex? (Sadly, this post is not sponsored by either of those brands.)

* This is about 90% due to a nasty cold and 10% sadness that we're back from San Francisco, where I had a fab time hanging out with Jess and her husband Chris. More to come on that when I can muster the exclamation points that shrimp tacos and Peter Cetera songs deserve.

If you want to sing out, sing out

Harold and Maude is my favorite movie in the whole wide world. I watched it for the first time about five years ago and immediately went out and bought the DVD. I never do this. That's what Netflix is for, right?

I historically hate romantic comedies. They're just goofy and usually short on the comedy part. Just a few weeks ago, I watched Sleepless in Seattle for the first time. Ugh. Imagine me making a raspberry noise and giving the double thumbs down. Soooo corny. This makes no sense because I'm a big old softie and get all weepy at the drop of a hat. I misted up last Saturday night at dinner with my parents while talking about the evils of Wal-Mart.

Related: Thanks A LOT Museum of Science and Industry Omnimax movie about the Great Lakes for making me want to cry like a baby over an old, stinky fish.

Ok, maybe that one was hormones.

Anyway, what I think I like about H&M (the real H&M) is that it feels authentic. And dark. And maybe a little bit weird. I mean, you've got a death-obsessed 20-year-old-guy who falls for a septuagenarian Holocaust survivor who lives in an abandoned train car and makes wooden sculptures that look like vajays. What's not to love? Add an all Cat Stevens soundtrack to the mix, and I'm hooked like that sturgeon in the Great Lakes movie. (sniff, sniff)*

I got to thinking about H&M earlier this week when I read this article about director Hal Ashby on Slate. It kind of bags on the movie, but I started poking around the Net (starring Sandra Bullock) and lo and behold, many others are WAY into this movie. It's inspiring all sorts of people, including:

(hold up. you have to imagine me reading this like a scrolling list of community college courses)


Decorators!



Puppeteers!


Architects!


Jaguar/hearse enthusiasts! (what a dreamy demographic)


Wes Anderson!



Designers!

aaaand painters.

Since I'm not a total nut, I'll just take the Belgian poster.


Ok ok. And the French t-shirt.

*Seeing has how the movie was about a 50-year-old man who loved and was tracking a 120-year-old female fish who had survived the environmental Holocaust that was the Industrial Revolution, the two stories are not entirely unrelated....excuse me. I need a moment. Anybody got a hankie?

The Unwatchables

OMG! I know this problem! The guilt associated with returning a Netflix you haven't watched!

In my three years of subscribing, I can only think of two movies I've sent back without watching: Born into Brothels and Blue (just the other day, actually. I felt like such a failure).

Oh yeah, and I lost my copy of The Departed before I could watch it. Whoops.

I think I may have a pretty decent track record because we don't have cable, so there's nothing else for me to watch. Don't get me wrong, this isn't me being all haughty and intellectual or anything. If I were going that route, I'd be all "la di da...we don't even OWN a TV. Blah blah." (As an aside: SO TRUE. Have you ever noticed how people who don't have TVs take great pains to make sure you know it. Most pretentious thing ever.)

ANYWAY, this is me admitting that if I were to let myself have cable, I'd probably be unemployed because I wouldn't be able to tear myself away from "Brett Michaels and Flavor Flav hang with a bunch of sluts" or some other horrible show and go to work. Bad TV is an addiction for me. I can't just have one show, so I sit tight on the wagon.

That being said, I do love Netflix because I can stock up a never-ending queue of documentaries like "Breasts: A Documentary" or "Bingo! A Documentary" Hey, I have breasts AND I play Bingo! I love you, Netflix!

This weekend, we're moving to our new apartment, which is very close to a Dominicks with a red box. We'll see what that does to my Netflix batting average. Both Mike and Marc are excited at the prospect of watching what Marc calls "real people normal movies" instead of spending an evening with me, a bottle vodka and another treatise on America's debt problem.

Guys, what are you watching? What are you pretending to watch but really just returning? Who wants to be Netflix friends with me?