and i'm back!

well, sort of.

really i just couldn't let this article pass by without sharing.

election day

please, go vote! i only waited an hour in arlington this morning. and the time flew by when we took this quiz from this morning's wapo.

after you vote you can get lots of free things.

happy halloween!

and to celebrate i made salted oatmeal cookies, which are delicious! but i didn't stop there - after they had cooled enough i concocted an ice cream sandwich with two of the cookies and pumpkin ice cream in the middle. obviously it was SO good.

walking to work this morning there were signs everywhere reading: halloween celebrations. georgetown streets closed. expect delays. let's just say i'm very glad to be getting out of georgetown before the festivities begin - can't wait to get down to charlottesville!

new york city

last weekend i hopped on the double decker megabus up to new york city. true, it's a bus, but it only cost me $22.50 round trip. that's cheaper than tolls - or even gas at this point. plus the ride up was pretty empty and i read, and finished, twilight.

friday was spent doing what i love the most - frolicking around the city. i got a cheap manicure, strolled through the farmer's market, grabbed lunch, stumbled upon the grand opening of crumbs and got a cupcake (giant red velvet - it was alright), walked through central park and saw my cousin's gorgeous apartment on the upper east side. and that was just during while the sun was out. dinner plans were for the spotted pig, but we were too hungry to endure the two and half hour wait. instead we walked a few blocks over to the meatpacking district and grabbed dinner at spice market. the highlight of dinner was while we were waiting for a table at the bar - i asked for a glass of cava and got a glass of malbec instead. um, it's not even the same color. after dinner we grabbed a drink at gaslight (where ashley saw gg filming one night last summer). the cab ride home was spent singing subway commercials and tupac - good times.

what's the best thing to do on a cloudy saturday in new york? go shopping, of course! we walked up to bloomie's and went to town. seriously, i love that store. on the way back home we conveniently walked right by buttercup and picked up a box of cupcakes to snack on while we watched the uva game. i was initially thinking we might need those cupcakes to cheer us up when we got slaughtered by georgia tech, but what do you know - the hoos pulled out an upset!

dinner on saturday night was over in the east village at a cute little italian spot called paprika. kind of reminded me of locanda, but better. seeing as it was pouring we hopped in a cab and headed downtown. we didn't even make it five blocks before we rear ended another cab and were stuck in the middle of an intersection. and the best part? this is not the first time i've been in an accident in a cab. ugh.

so we finally made it to our destination and got a table by the window (not really a great night for that since the rain was coming down so hard - oh well). but, the food was well worth the trouble getting to the restaurant. fresh pasta with delicious homemade sauces - definitely my kind of place. and luckily we were getting penn state updates all throughout dinner since there was no tv to be seen.

after dinner we headed back uptown to nikki beach - a club modeled after the one down in south beach. we got the mojitos flowing and then there was dancing on tables and then it was definitely time to go home. luckily the rain had finally stopped by then.

sunday morning in new york city - of course we went to brunch. down on irving place is the homey looking friend of a farmer. it's a tiny spot and the line to get in was down the block. although being a group of three (and willing to sit outside) allowed us to bypass almost everyone in line. we were seated in no time and had a plate of cornbread and chunky applesauce waiting for us. first up - coffee. in a french press! wonderful. and the food was delicious - eggs benedict, eggs, pancakes, pumpkin pancakes, sausage, potatoes - the food just kept coming.

but then it was time for me to travel back to dc. my trip up was so smooth so by default the way back had to be disastrous, right? i got there early hoping to catch an earlier bus, but there wasn't one. so i hung around and got in line to get on the dc bus. the buses pulled in early but they waited to board them until right before we were supposed to leave. big mistake. the bus employees are pretty much incompetent and kept shuffling people around on the two different buses (one went to baltimore and one all the way to dc).

so we finally got moving only to stop at a gas station in jersey to switch drivers. then some little french girl got up and asked the bus driver if he could play a movie. well you have to listen to the little french girl, right? so we sat at the rest stop for thirty minutes while the idiot bus driver tried to figure out how to turn the movie on. with the movie on we finally got moving again. but the icing on the cake was that the bathroom on the bus was all clogged up. let's just say i had to hold it for a long time.

next up: homecoming(s) in charlottesville! it's gonna be great - but can it top last year? we'll have to wait and see...

19 days until the election!

and that means nineteen more updates to this. amazing.

free ice cream!

everyone is already planning on voting, right? well if the current state of our country isn't enough of a reason to get you out to vote then maybe free ice cream will do the trick. head over to ben & jerry's on the evening of november 4th for a free scoop of ice cream! so glad i work right next to the ben & jerry's in georgetown!

austin: day five

since our first four days in austin were relegated to the downtown area and zilker park, we figured we'd take our last day to explore a bit more of what austin has to offer. without a car we had to stay in walking distance and decided we both really wanted to see the university.

the campus is located about ten blocks north of the state capitol and looks like just about every other college town in america. in anticipation of touring the campus we printed out ut's very own walking tour and went to work. as our very own tour guide i read all the neat tid-bits about the school and we walked around among the thousands of nike-clad students. seriously, i felt like i might have been at oregon with the amount of nike clothing i saw.

so the campus was cool (well, hot actually - but you know what i mean). loved the statue of césar chávez. and ut's corner (aka "the drag") had a fun mix of shops - including potbelly - so jealous! we also found a fun little coffee shop for breakfast. you can always count on a college town for good coffee spots. and we made one final stop at the pool - come on, you know i had to see the place where all these olympians have trained. not nearly as nice (i.e. new as the afc), although it was really big (kind of like the natatorium at penn state).

after our cab debacles of the weekend we determined it would be best to call a cab to take us back to our hotel. and then it was off to the airport! and it turns out the austin airport has an outpost of the famous waterloo records along with a few of austin's finest eateries - including amy's ice cream!

so, overall austin was pretty awesome. we tried to see as much as we could, but obviously missed just a few things. although i would imagine i'll be back there sometime in the future...

austin: day four

it's amazing how much long days in the sun wear you out. luckily we had lots of great music to look forward to on sunday. that and being able to watch the skins game in cowboy territory, but more on that later.

here's who we saw on day three of the festival: priscilla ahn (filling in for adele, but very impressive nonetheless), tristan prettyman, gillian welch, start, xavier rudd, silversun pickups (i still don't get their appeal), blues traveler, okkervil river, gnarls barkley, the raconteurs, band of horses, tegan and sara and the headining foo fighters. we only got to see half of a lot of the sets since a lot of the sets we wanted to see were overlapping. but i really liked band of horses - perfect music to listen to just as it's getting dark. minus all the crazy drunk people making tall towers out of their day's worth of beer cans. ugh.

keep austin weird of the night: when walking home from the concert that night we passed what is possibly the best sign of life. it's for a business called mermaids, which has private hot tub rentals by the hour. ok, granted this is the most disgusting sounding thing ever - i'm pretty sure sitting in a hot tub after the weekend we had would have felt amazing. but don't worry - we didn't.

austin: day three

i forgot how much i love blackout shades. with our hotel room just like a cave, we were able to sleep for hours. after we couldn't sleep any longer we got up and got ready for day two of the festival. the fact that it was saturday morning made it a bit easier to find a brunch place. we found ourselves at a nice hotel downtown where the dining room was half-empty, which was great since we were starving! when we asked for a table, however, the teenage looking host told us it would be a thirty minute wait since the kitchen was backed up. seriously?

desperately in need of a cup of coffee, we headed over to the bar and found a table for two where they would serve us food. score one for sus and rach! and our food came out in like ten minutes - so much for the kitchen being all backed up. and the best part was we had a pretty sweet view into the bakery. no, scratch that - the best part was we sat next to robert plant!! seriously, very exciting!

after fueling up it was off to catch the shuttle for day two. it was just as hot and maybe even dirtier - but we had just as much fun! day two bands: the fratellis, sharon jones and the dap kings, css, eli "paperboy" reed and the true loves, erykah badu, mgmt, the nachito herrera all-stars, john fogerty, conor oberst and the mystic valley band, iron & wine and robert plant & alison krauss. my favorite? hard to say, but it was probably sharon jones. that girl (well, really 50 year old woman) can dance! she put on quite the show in the mid-day heat.

day two really took it out of us. our plan was to take the shuttle back and then catch a cab back to our hotel. well, let's just say it's nearly impossible to hail a cab in austin. i mean we were standing on the corner waving our hand out (assuming that's the universal way to hail a cab) but literally none of the cabs stopped for us. we had to walk up to the bar district and literally hail down a cab. and then some guys tried to steal the cab from us - nearly a disaster.

keep austin weird of the day: we were walking to catch the shuttle and passed some guy who was (supposed to be) cleaning up the street (like those bid guys in dc). so he has a walkie talkie and out of nowhere someone (presumably his supervisor) comes onto the speaker and says, "look, there are a lot of pretty girls out there today. let's try and stay focused on the task at hand."

austin: day two

this was day one of the festival, so we decided to rest up so we could last all day out in the sun. we headed downtown for some breakfast, which turned out to be harder to find late on a friday morning than I would have guessed. from breakfast we decided to play tourist for the morning and walked up to the state capitol building. being from dc I think I’m a little jaded about all of the security measures in place and have gotten used to not being able to get close to any important building in town. well, austin is nothing like that. we literally walked right into the capitol and just roamed around wherever we wanted. the dome room was pretty sweet and had the same echo qualities that the capitol building in dc has. and let’s just say that texans are so much nicer than anyone in dc will ever be. it was a pleasant surprise.

after learning more about texas than I ever wanted to know, we walked back downtown to catch the shuttle to the festival. talk about organization – wow. these people in austin sure know how to run a music festival. after about a ten minute bus ride we pulled up the zilker park for austin city limits. first stop: filling up our nalgenes at the free water faucets. then we tried to get a lay of the land, before settling in for our first show of the festival: vampire weekend! just as we expected their hour long set consisted of every single song on their debut cd, plus a few new ones. it was a really fun set, dampered (is that a word?) only by the hot, hot sun.

after vampire weekend we frolicked around and by the end of the day we had seen: del tha funky homosapien (my coworker’s brother!), delta spirit, jamie lidell, m. ward, googol bordello, jenny lewis, n.e.r.d., antibalas and g. love & special sauce. well, we also heard the mars volta as we were walking out of the park, but they were no one we wanted to wait around to see. plus we had other plans on the agenda: another night out in downtown austin.

so, when you spend ten hours outside in the sun with sunscreen on walking around in a dusty field all day you are bound to get pretty dirty. i wasn’t really ready for the black grime all over my body by the end of the day, but what are you going to do? that shower friday night was one of the best showers of my life. a five dollar cab ride later, we were back downtown and ready for some food and drinks. seeing as there was a ut game on saturday, the streets were already pretty packed with people (in fact they shut down the streets to cars after a certain point). and i might be exaggerating a bit, but it felt like there were a hundred different bars in a five block stretch on sixth street. knowing they have some competition, all the bouncers are yelling at you when you walk by to try to get you into their bar. but, they’re all the same – cheap drinks, loud music and lots of college kids. good times.

keep austin weird of the night: a guy (who later introduced himself as keon) came into the bar and grabbed susie’s hand and proceeded to dance with her. it was great.

keep austin weird II of the night: some guy sitting on the curb throwing rose petals on the sidewalk. seriously.

austin: day one

first of all thank goodness for southwest and direct flights to austin! and our slight ocd got us checked in early and allowed us to get some pretty good seats. i hadn't flown southwest before and was a little surprised by the casualness of the flight attendants. and the guy announcing everything on our flight was a little bit of a comedian, however i've since been informed that it's the whole southwest shtick - lame.

we got to austin safe and sound, picked up our festival wristband and hopped on the shuttle to our hotel. we did a quick turnaround and decided to hit the town. we were starving (read: indecisive) and didn't know where to go so we just asked the concierge for a good mexican recommendation. walking downtown we got to take in the sights and ended up on sixth street for some dinner. first order of business was getting a nice cold adult beverage. and seeing as we were out "west" they had fat tire! mmmmmm beer.

the hostess must have read our mind because she seated us at a table by the window so we had prime seats for people watching! let's just say they're pretty spot on when they say "keep austin weird." try and visualize this: a crazy homeless man in camoflauge get up, dreds in a ponytail with the rest of his head shaved and a spelunker light on the top of his head. we ended up seeing him around town all weekend, but tragically never could get close enough to get a picture (but you can check out all of our other pictures here).

lots of other crazies walked by, but there's too much to even get into here. instead let's talk about how we saw carson daly(!) walking down the street in front of the restaurant. i mean he's pretty much a nobody these days, but growing up in the heydey of trl (r.i.p.) i'll always have a special place in my heart for carson daly.

from dinner we figured we should get a feel for austin. we walked around sixth street for a bit before settling in at a bar that was essentially a big deck. needing another adult beverage we headed to the bar where we discovered they only had cans of beer and liquor. clearly, this was a very classy place. keeping with the mexican theme we got two cans of tecate for a whopping four dollars. and the best part about this bar was the giant projector screen they had. so we watched usc lose and befriended a crazy oregonian in the process. overall, a pretty successful first night in austin.

austin was great!

much more to come when i have a few minutes to spare.

in the meantime...happy new year!

fall is here!

yesterday was the first day of fall (crazy, huh?). even though i love the summer, i always get excited about the changing of seasons (reason #42 why i could not live in the real south). i get most excited because it means i basically have a whole new wardrobe to choose from - because let's be honest, i'm totally sick of all of my summer clothes.

also fall means there are lots of other fun things to look forward to:

• new tv - after the writer's strike last year it looks like we have a full season of tv to look forward to. although i'm already slightly overwhelmed with the number of shows we are dvr-ing.
  
• apple picking - and cider, cider donuts and all the baking/cooking!
• football - not too excited about the hoos this year, but maybe the skins will finally pull it together this year?
  
• election day - and this year virginia is in contention!
  
• pumpkin ale - i already had some at chef geoff's last week. and dogfish has their punkin ale on tap already. who wants to go?
• thanksgiving - i hate holidays (minus the fact that you get off work), but i can certainly handle all of the eating that goes along with thanksgiving.
  

potus

friday night we headed up to the source theater for some improv. the show was potus among us and for those of you who don't know potus stands for president of the united states. it was basically an hour long improv about the political campaigning process.

when we got to the theater we were asked to come up with some issues we'd like to see the "candidates" run on. let me tell you - it's hard to think of funny stuff on the spot, which makes me respect the actors even more.

so the premise is the five candidates run on randomly selected issues (all of the audience member's issues were put into an uncle sam hat). the candidates glanced at their issues and then did a quick monologue on what they were running on and why you should vote for them. from there we voted on two candidates (votes = claps) and the rest of the play was made up of little improv segments on the campaign process. our two candidates were running on platforms of reducing gaps between parallel parked cars (vp pick = platform of eliminating traffic circles) and eating more organic food (vp pick = oprah). needless to say it was hilarious. the last shows are this friday and saturday - i highly recommend it to everyone!

and the night was made even better by the fact that i had picked up a box of cupcakes from hello cupcake on my trek through the city on friday afternoon. final verdict - good, but not as good as baked and wired. and believe what you've heard about those peanut butter ones - i don't even like peanut butter and i thought the icing was good. also, lesson learned - cupcakes are a great conversation starter.

austin city limits

less than a week until we head down to austin, tx for city limits! clearly i can't wait. and we've been busy compiling lists of things to do while we're down there (if you have any suggestions, let me know!). but the one thing i know for sure is the music is going to be awesome. lots of bands i don't want to miss: vampire weekend, nerd, sharon jones, foo fighters, gnarls barkley, g.love, okkervil river, jenny lewis, drive by truckers, del, tristan prettyman.

last night at oak marr

the playlist last night for the old lady's water aerobics class (in no particular order):

• your body is a wonderland (oh, really?)
• woman by maroon 5
• under pressure (or was it ice ice baby? indoor pools are not known for great acoustics)
• kiss from a rose (i really don't get this one - do they think if they listen to seal they'll look like heidi klum?)
• some sort of country song that i obviously didn't recognize

i'm thinking this class could use some more upbeat music. although some of those water aerobics classes w/ techno remixes of random songs are pretty awful too. i guess you can't win.

things that annoy me - part VIII

it's been a while since an annoyance post...

44. people who don't use blinkers.
this is just plain unsafe. and i hate when people use the excuse, "well, there's no one behind me." don't you know it's just as important to use your blinkers for the people driving the other way?!

45. people who spell my name wrong.
ok, i realize that a lot of people spell rachel with an a. that's fine, and i don't really mind if i get a rachael once in a while. what really bugs me is when i send someone an email and in their response they call me rachael. my name is correctly spelled in no less than three places (my email address, my signature and i usually also type out my name). are people really that lazy?!

46. walking and reading.
i see people doing this all the time. i just don't get it - is your book that good that you can't wait until you can sit and read it? i mean seriously people - it's kind of dangerous to walk and read.

47. rolling briefcases.
are these really necessary? i mean if you can't carry a bag i think you have a pretty big problem. and in my eyes they just cause a lot more commotion at the metro stations.

48. arlington police.
now that we've moved we're living right by the arlington county police department. it's great - there are cops everywhere and i feel so safe! the problem is that they park all the cop cars in the street and leave them all on. why on earth do they need to leave the motors running?

overheard on the metro

on the metro somewhere between courthouse and metro center...

little girl: mom, how many people do you think are on this bus?
mom: you mean the whole train? definitely more people than in our town.

how much do you want to bet that this family would be one to stand on the left? gotta love tourists early in the morning!

quote of the weekend

at the warner theater saturday night for the lombardi doo wop concert for cancer...

an old guy in one of the doo wop groups: ok, next we're going to do a song by the king. most of you know him as elvis. our kids know him as michael jackson's father in law.

61 days until election day!

wow, these next two months are sure going to be a doozy.

1. so obama is getting pounded on his apparent lack of experience. ok, i'll bite. do we really want our next president to have the experience of the past eight years? i certainly don't. obama offers a new, fresh change to washington - a change i think we need.
2. i get that sarah palin is a hockey mom (and for those of you who were wondering a hockey mom is alaska's equivalent to a soccer mom - it's just too cold up there to play soccer). but i don't think the republican party can blast the press for digging up dirt on her family when she is clearly running as a working mother with her family in the forefront. sorry, but you can't have the good without the bad.
3. i never realized being a p.o.w. was a requirement for being president. every speech at the rnc this week (yes, i've been watching it) has highlighted john mccain's experiences in hanoi as being crucial in his bid for the presidency. i understand, and respect, that he made a sacrifice for this country. but last time i checked obama didn't grow up when the us was actively involved in a major war like vietnam - should be be penalized for that?
4. have you noticed that there are only white people (in cowboy hats, to boot) at the rnc? the republican's theme of the election is "america first." well, color me confused - i'm pretty sure whites only constitute 75% of the american population. so did they mean to say "white america first?" what about the other 25%?
5. and just for fun - let's hope tina fey is slated to make some appearances on snl this fall - she's a dead ringer for palin.

and for those (most?) of you who aren't really into politics, there are still some fun ways you can get into the election spirit. buzz in alexandria has elephant ears and donkey tails for sale and will keep a running tally up to election day. if pastries aren't really your thing you can head over to baskin robbins and choose from their two new flavors - straight talk crunch or whirl of change. and i'm sure some bars will be getting in on the action just like they did in the primary season (i'm sensing lots of blue and red drinks this fall).