oh, if you only knew

We just got back from Capitol Steps, which was really good. We both had seen the show when they came to Saint A's back in the day, but neither one of us really remembered it. Even if we did, the show changes all the time, so it wouldn't have mattered. Anyway, they had a song about the Metro. It was really funny and after about 10 trips on the Metro in 3 days, I could identify with a lot of what they said. But I wanted to stand up and scream "YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LUCKY YOU ARE!!!!!" The Metro is clean, well lit, organized, timely, their ticket system works, and the employees are extremely kind. I'd take the Metro with any of it's faults over the T.

Must See TV

I have a lot to say about our trip thus far. The two most important are: don't waste your time on the National Geographic Society Museum and make sure you devote AT LEAST 3 hours to the Newseum. I'm serius - the Newseum. We only had about 2 hours to wander about and I think 3 hours is the minimum to get everything out of it. It's proabably the best hidden gem in the city. But it's only the hidden gem because it's so new. It only opened this year. As soon as people catch on there will be lines upon lines. Take advantage while you can. You'll regret it if you don't.

Try to to put words to it..... it's the coolest museum in the city. It's basically the history of news. Newscasters, newstories, what makes news, what we think makes news, what doesn't make news, but we as a society foolishly thinks it does, what news will look like in the future, what news looked like in the past.

You have to see it in person, and I wish I could put into words what I saw today. But a professional journalist I am not. I can only tell you, make sure it's on your Must See in D.C. list.

And the Nat Geo museum sucks and is a complete waste of time. And this is coming from someone who loves museums.

Summer Daze

beach!

I heart my flip flops.

mmm.... more beach!

hubs in the pool

Molly's car for the pool. I wouldn't say she loves it, per se

Essential pool accessories

Pete, flapping in the wind

I know we will make our mothers proud...

That was a quote by Barak Obama's half sister. It reminds me of my favorite quote from my favorite television show. Paris Geller told Rory "We are the daughters of Hilary Clinton". And a lot of my fellow 27 year olds who grew up watching Bill and Hilary do run the country knew exactly what she was talking about. We are the daughters of Hilary Clinton and we worked hard to get her back to the White House. We tired, and we came further than anyone else has before.

But we didn't get her there. We tried, and we came a long way, but we're still not there yet. The DNC chairman didn't quite understand that when Hilary lost we wouldn't automatically stand behind Obama. Honestly, the DNC has a lot to learn about us. We were for Hilary. If we wanted Obama, we would have voted for Obama in the first place. I don't understand their confusion, but they still don't get why the transfer of support hasn't taken place. The Democratic party is changing, and the establishment should change with us.

The DNC is on tonight.... and yet we keep switching to Princess Diaries. Though, to be fair, Teddy Kennedy isn't on yet. And really, what is more interesting than Teddy K?

We heard President Carter talk about Katrina and Nawleans and the working class... but he did not captivate anyone in the room I was in. Personally, I'd rather watch Princess Mia take princess lessons.

I hope they understand that we are the daughters of Hilary Clinton.

Firefox vs. IE

Which do you use? (if you aren't using Safari, that is)

We use Firefox at home and I believe Andrew uses it at work. I have to use IE at work and it drives me nuts. Especially since I can't even download the IE that has tabs. That would make it a little easier to deal with. Sometimes at work, I actually look for the Firefox icon and then get frustrated when I have to use IE. Not very bright of me, since I have never used Firefox at work...

Anyway, the reason I bring this up, is I love Firefox for many reasons, but my favorite reason is the automatic spell check. If you are a longtime reader of my blog, you'll know that I never use spell check - and you probably won't believe me, but I actually am a pretty good speller. It's typing that I have the problem with. I know how to type and can do it quickly, but I tend to rush a lot and make lots of mistakes. And then I don't use spell check, and it's a big mess. But Firefox does it for me as I go!

It doesn't take a lot to make me happy.

another last

I've finished my last summer semester of my grad school career. And I'm so very happy about that! Not so happy that summer is almost over, but I have to take the bad with the good.


I'm also very excited to be on vacation as of 4:51 tomorrow afternoon. I can't wait! 10 whole days off! And we're actually going somewhere! When we sadly had to put the brakes on SoCal, I figured we'd spend the week in Falmouth. That would have been a fun week, but I had been looking forward to GOING somewhere! But thanks to the magic of Marriott reward points and free attractions in D.C., we can actually afford to go! Now our Marriott points are used up, so no more free vacations - but this one will be worth it. I should be at home packing and getting ready (must remember social security card.... must remember social security card..... MUST REMEMBER SOCIAL SECURITY CARD!!!) but I'm in Quincy trying to finish up laundry. Then I have to run around like a chicken with my head cut off to get all our travel sized items. I hate this stupid 3oz rule. I know we could avoid it by checking our luggage, but somewhere along the way we decided it would be easier to not check luggage. I'm not sure I realized that would mean me running around on my Last Flex of the Summer trying to get all this stuff done. Vacations are a lot easier when someone else does all this work!

It's the end of the world as we know it

Okay, maybe not. But it is almost the end of summer, and to me there's not much of a difference. I have another week of work, and then next week is my annual Week Off From Work. I'm very excited. I'm more excited that as time of publication, in 9 months, 1 week, and 5 days I won't be forced to take the last week of summer as my vacation. In fact, I could take 2 weeks off from work if I want! The possibilities are endless, really.

Anywho, back to present day. I'm very excited to be on vacation, but I am NOT excited that it is the last week of summer. That just sucks. I do enjoy fall weather, but I like summer weather better, and the fall weather means winter is just around the corner. I only tolerate winter for skiing, but those endlessly long months are painful. It's just a long dark cold monotonous mess. And it's only 4 months away!

But I still have 2 weeks of summer and I need to keep reminding myself about things I like about fall/ winter

* the smell of the air in fall
* sweater season! (chubby girls love sweater season!)
* TV shows come back on
* apple scented candles
* back to school ads STOP playing
* the 1st snow of the season (as long as I don't have to drive in it)
* PATRIOTS!!!! (and my favorite facebook group - The Patriots Beat You Because You Suck, so Get Over It!)
* the first skiing run of the day when I've managed to get up early enough to ski the corduroy.

But today? Today I'm going to the beach.

It's a small world after all

Watching the news lately makes me seriously think that the end of the world is coming.

First of all it's an election year and people are so nasty about trashing which ever candidate they oppose, that it makes me sick. Yes, I support Obama. No, I don't think McCain is the anti-christ. I'd rather NOT see him as the next President, but I don't think his supporters are idiots (well, I do think some of them are idiots, but that has little do with McCain as a person). Stop focusing on trashing the opposition and spend more time promoting the good your candidate can do. In short, stop being a Dbag.

Secondy - Hello, Russia. Stop. Georgia would have let you have South Ossetia. There's no need to take over the entire country. Yes, we all know Russia is a big powerful nation. However, you are not the USSR, so stop thinking that you can take back all those countries that asserted their independence. And FYI - if you try to have a monopoly on oil pipelines from Asia, someone is probably going to try to stop you. Georgia's pipeline is not the end of the world, nor is their desire to be part of NATO. So just stop.

Thirdly - no matter what the Chinese say, those girls are NOT 16. The IOC should be ashamed of themselves for letting people get away with cheating. What kind of world do we live in that it's okay to cheat and lie at the Olympics? Doesn't that go against what the Olympics stand for?

Canobie!

I never went to Riverside Park, Whalom Park (you'll have a Whale of a time!), Lincoln Park, Story Land, Water Country, or any other of the amusement parks that were around New England when I was growing up. I did, however, go to Canobie Lake Park every single year, mostly because my father's company had an outing there once a year. I would just get so excited every single year - aside from Disney World when I was 6 (back in the day when only The Magic Kingdom and Epcot existed), Canobie was the only amusement park I ever went to. In fact, to this day, it's still the only amusement park I have been to, excluding the trip to Disney in 1987.

You can imagine my joy when my office had an outing to Canobie Lake last Friday!!!

To my dismay, the Matterhorn no longer exists, and the people I was with had no desire to go on the Bumper Cars. Actually, I was seriously bummed out about the bumper cars, because for most of our Canobie trips, I was too short to go to on the bumper cars. And now that I am tall enough, I wasn't with people who wanted to go on them! But I went on the Log Flume, the Yankee Cannonball, that stupid corkscrew rollercoaster (I hate corkscrew rollercoasters - they hurt my neck!), the Pirate Ship, the Star Blaster, the Boston Tea Party, the glass maze, and so many other fun rides. All of these rides pale in comparison to 6 Flags (or so I am told - but I have nothing to compare them to, so they are fine for me!), but what can you expect from a little family orientated amusement park in Salem NH?

Now if only I can make it to Water Country before I die... I will be a happy child of the 80's!

a non-techie review

I've been busy, so I apologize for the lack of blogging.

As you read from my previous post, last week Andrew and I got iPhones. Andrew's worked as promised, mine was a nightmare. From the very beginning it did not like to turn on after it had gone into sleep mode. We had to hard re-start it 5 or 6 times from Saturday morning through Monday afternoon. On Monday, Andrew took it to the Apple store twice and I took it a third time. After three visits to them in an 8 hour time period, they finally handed me a new one. And since Monday I haven't have a single problem.

I do like the iPhone, but there are some things that I wish I could change. First of all - it is only available on the AT&T network (which you probably knew). But we had Verizon and I really like the Verizon network. Despite AT&T's "more bars in more places" marketing campain, Verizon has the superior coverage, at least here in New England. But staying with Verizon wasn't an option. I'm not crazy about AT&T the coverage can be spotty and the calls aren't as clear. But they do have roll-over minutes which Verizon does not. So that's a definate check mark in the AT&T column. The biggest drawback is now calls to other Verizon phones are no longer free. Almost everyone I know has Verizon, so we are actually going to have to watch our minutes.

Also, getting to the actual phone on the iPhone is somewhat annoying. It's very easy to receive a call, but making a call isn't as easy as pushing your speed dial button. You have to get to the home page, click the phone option, and from there you can choose your favorites, contacts, or the keypad. Not a huge deal, but definately not desgined for speedy dialing.

The speaker phone is also sub-par in my opinion. There's not enough power to really speak to or hear anyone through the speaker phone. Then again, I don't really like speaker phones.

On the flip side, it's really nice having the internet at my fingertips. You can save your favorite pages as icons on your homepage, so I have CNNmobile, NPRmobile, Wikipedia, Googlemobile, and Boston.com on my homepage. My email is synced with the email function so I'm never without email contact. I have other favorites saved in Safari.

So there are definite pros and cons to the phone. I don't love it, but I also don't hate it. It's going to take some getting used to, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Grumpy

My iPhone (which, by the way, I bought 2 days ago) is not currently working - yesterday morning the screen wouldn't come on. Andrew finally managed a hard restart and it worked all day. This morning? Yep, the screen won't turn on. We had to plug it into the computer to get the screen to turn back on. So back to the Apple store we go.

Which means we have to cut our weekend short and head to an Apple Store. Only the stores around us don't have an 3G 8GB black phones. So.... if the nice people at the Genious Bar can't fix it and I have to be given a new one, I won't have a phone until they can get one to me.

I'm seriously annoyed with Apple right now. Apple is supposed to be better than this.