Brianne Blogs?

Friday I woke up freakishly early for me (10:30) and after I did my homework ate lunch, unpacked my groceries, I decided to go on a cleaning spree. There’s just something so invigorating about giving your house a good scrub. What’s not so invigorating is a lung-full of bleach. I sprayed the shower with a bleach mixture and then started coughing which interrupted my plan to hold my breath during the bleach spraying and led me to take a giant breath of the aerosolized bleach. I can’t be sure, after all, I’m only a nurse, but I don’t think this is 100% great for my overall lung health.

While on the subject of health, let’s talk about what a great day for sport tomorrow is. First, at 9:00am the marathon tv coverage starts. It’s a nice hour of warm-fuzzy stories about the top marathon runners so we can decide who to cheer for. It’s during this time that I pick a winner  and then cheer them on as they haul ass to the finish line. After the top runners finish the race, we are going to head out to see the regular joe’s finish the marathon and cheer them on. As you have heard before, the New York City Marathon is my favorite day of the year in the city. It’s hard to explain, you just really have to be here. I inevitably tear up when cheering on the runners. It’s such a great day to be a New Yorker. And who gets to experience it for the first time? Maren Stefanie Genow! I’m so jealous of it being her first time.

Anyway, after the marathon, the Packers play the Vikings and then it’s game 4 of the World Series. Seriously, this is a lot of sport to cram into one day and I can only hope I’m up to the challenge.

Saturday sporting update: M Go Blue!

P.S. Happy Halloween!

Tuesday night, I made a pumpkin pie for Zak since he had to miss Canadian Thanksgiving and loves pumpkin pie the most. I decided to take my iphone into the kitchen to listen to some music while I was baking. What happened next is both tragic and funny. I went to pour the pie mixture into the pie crust and some of it poured onto my iphone, slid down the side and into the bottom speakers and area where the charger plugs in. Since then the maximum volume on the phone is about 10% of what it used to be. The volume is so slight that when the phone is right next to me, I only notice it ringing if I look up and see that the screen is lit up. This is not good! And when I told Maren and Zak my sad story, they were both unsympathetic and implied that one shouldn’t bring expensive phones into the kitchen. Rude! Sometimes all a girl is looking for is “sucks to your asmar” and she gets attitude! Moral of the story: pumpkin pie is bad for cell phones.

1. As much as fifty gallons of maple sap are used to make a single gallon of maple syrup.

2. A cockroach’s favorite food is the glue on the back of stamps.

3. Male monkeys lose the hair on their heads in the same manner human males do.

4. Professional hockey players skate at average speeds of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour.

5. A scallop has a total of thirty-five eyes, all of which are blue.

6. A tea in China called white tea is simply boiled water.

(Sorry for the few days of blogging absense. I thought I had blogged for a couple of days longer than I actually had and was unhappy to discover that you were all yearning for my ramblings and weren’t getting them.)

Maren and I were shocked to discover the other day that we haven’t seen Zak in the month of October and it’s nearly over. Due to some extra shifts on Zak’s part, we kept missing eachother all month. So, last night we rectified that situation everyone style, with dinner, drinks and game play. When Meghan left and I had to re-stock the game closet, I bought us some unexpected games like Trouble and Chutes and Ladders. Last night we opted for our first game of Trouble in about 2 decades. It was quite the barn burner with this Genow emerging victorious after a heated battle between the rest of everyone. I’m telling you, if you see this game as an option, get it and play it. I promise you’ll have fun.

If you’re wondering why we played this game on my bed it’s because we didn’t feel like sitting on the floor and we still don’t have dining room chairs. Baby steps to adult living, baby steps. In the photo below, I asked Maren and Zak to look at me and smile and this is what I got.

After our rousing game of trouble, we played Jungle Uno which is just a spiced up and more fun version of Uno. I started out dominating and then somehow lost to Maren. I’m still not sure what happened. Although I think she may have pretended to be bad to lull us into a coma and then kicked our asses. This is however, just a theory. We then tried several times to have Zak stretch out his arm and take a group photo before remembering that cameras come with timer features. And aren’t we all glad? For how else would we have gotten this lovely three-man-prom-pose picture? Credit for this photo goes to Meghan who did not take it but discovered that Brianne and Maren together photograph best when in the prom pose.

P.S. Isn’t it a bummer that Zak didn’t get the memo on wearing stripes?

Today I tell you about the yummy food we ate in Lichtenstein. As you have already read, we expected to mock this tiny country and instead fell in love and talked about moving there and making our own denture fortune. When we got hungry, we didn’t have high hopes for this tiny hamlet and we were again wrong. We went into this hole in the wall Filipino food/gelato store and were in for the best lunch of our trip. For those of you who are concerned about the combination, I tell you that this is a New York specialty and so we felt right at home. Not the Filipino/gelato combination specifically, but the combination of odd things. For example, the cell phone/yogurt shop that Zak frequents or the Mexican/Chinese food restaurant on 78th street. Needless to say, we were happy to find an odd combination so far from home.

Above is our super yummy lunch of noodles and veggies and rice and goodness. After our yummy outdoor picnic lunch, we went back inside to try one of the many handmade flavors of gelato.

We tried the cheddar cheese and the purple yam flavors and they were really really good. Even the bits of cheese that I alread told you about were a nice and fun treat.

We had gelato many times on our trip in France, Italy and Lichtenstein and liked this one the best. And look at the super-cute cup our gelato came in. It’s a party both for the eyes and the taste buds!

Still in Switzerland on our world tour of cuisines, on the day we spent entirely in the town where we were staying, the lovely Lucerne, we opted for a Chinese feast. We did this at a restaurant whose sign fell down out front while we were inside. Luckily this was not foreshadowing of a bad meal.

We started with some vegetable curry and some sweet and sour chicken. This chicken was hands down the best sweet and sour chicken either of us had ever had. And we live in New York, where it’s practically on every street corner.

Our meal also came with some spectacular egg drop soup and egg rolls. I won’t show you the egg roll as I’m pretty sure you know what it looks like.

This is the front of the restaurant and the entire bing haus sign fell and hit the lantern and also brought down the lantern when we were halfway through our meal. For a brief period of time, no one could get in or out. Also of note was how funny it was to be served Chinese food by a german-speaking swiss family after ordering chinese food described in german on the all-german menu. Switzerland really is an interesting place.

Confession: In addition to carrying around one book with me wherever I go, I ususally carry a second, back-up book. There are a few rules of the back-up book:

1. It can’t be overly dramatic or sad. It needs to be of a genre that can be read in five minute increments without me having to be too focused.

2. It has to be small and light so as to not weigh down my bag.

3. It has to have short chapters so that I can read an entire one in a short amount of time.

4. The characters and story have to be interesting enough for me to remember them while reading another book and since this book doesn’t get read everyday.

I find it particularly helpful if the safety book is a short story book. That way I can read a story or two while waiting for the day nurse to arrive in the morning at work or while on the subway or while waiting to meet someone for an outing. My current back-up book is the O Henry Prize winning stories of 2008. I must say, each story I have read so far has been really really good. What I like about this collection is how different each story is from the one before. The first story about a man and a bird is light and funny and a little sweet. And the next story is about a woman with an infant who was suddenly widowed when her husband was hit by a car. This was decidedly not light or funny. I appreciate the switching of moods and feelings and themes that comes with the stories in this book. It meets all of the requirements of the back-up book and is serving me quite well.

Confession within a confession: I used to hate short story collections. If I picked up a book and saw that it was a short story collection, I’d put it back down. I used to hate getting attached to and interested in the characters of the story only to have their story end and new characters and stories thrown at me. I used to really really resent this. Until Erica made me read Interpreter of Maladies (Pulitzer winning short story collection by Jhumpa Lahira-who wrote The Namesake) and I loved it. Perhaps I had matured enough to get over my short story resentment. Whatever the reason, I now love short story collections. And I love them now for the same reason I hated them then. I like the new people. I like that I just get a snippet of someones story or life and then it ends suddenly and I get to move on. I find that interesting.

Hmm…thinking about this change in literary opinion makes me wonder if I should re-read To Kill a Mockingbird or any of the other books that I hated in the past. Nope, not ready to be that big of a person.

The random information fact for today is that “In ancient Rome, women counted their age from the year they were married.”

What?! Who came up with this? I do not like it. Although, in that society, I would be extremely young, never planning to marry. And with each passing year that Maren is married, I could mock her for her old age. Although, I ‘m sure in ancient Rome single women over the age of 22 were probably stoned to death or forced into prostitution or buried alive or some other less than awesome fate.

Let me tell you about my awesome weekend. Maren was in Canada, so I had the house all to myself for the first time in a very very long time. Needless to say, I was pumped. I could have gone to Canada with Maren since I didn’t work all weekend, but opted to stay home instead. Let me tell you all about the nothing I did this weekend:

1. homework-okay this wan’t enjoyable, but it had to be done and I rocked it. i don’t want to jinx myself, but I’ve now had to 80% in a row on my quizzes. a far cry from the unfortunate 50% of my early classwork.

2. general hospital-that’s right, me, the big tv and my soap-this is living.

3. sports-i watched some Yankee games and lots of football. additionally, michigan won, ou lost and ohio state lost. what a great weekend for sport!

4. reading-i read a magazine and made a lot of progress in my current pulitzer winner which is really good and I can’t wait to finish and tell you about it.

5. cleaning-i know this may not sound like fun, but I actually like a nice cleaning. I cleaned my room, did my laundry, got a new rug for the kitchen, cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom. it was surprisingly awesome!

6. cat war-yes, the cat war continued. she wasn’t allowed in my room and she was fed sparingly to avoid her frequent vomiting. at one point i thought we might be able to call a truce but she clawed me badly enough to draw blood-on my abdomen!

7. turtle bath-i also changed the water in the turtle’s tank which hasn’t been done in a long time

8. pumpkin latte-i don’t like starbucks actual coffee, but they make a great chai tea which i drink reguarly and they make great flavored drinks for holidays and this was my first pumpkin latte of the pumpkin season. it was excellent.

9. no call zone-this weekend I screened calls, didn’t make any calls and didn’t answer any e-mails. aside from the blog, I shut down all communication with the outside world and found the silence spectacular.

See, I did pretty much nothing (on purpose) and loved every minute of my solo weekend. I hope you all had an equally great weekend.

Let’s take a moment to talk about why I hate Maren’s cat.

Maren’s cat is, quite frankly, a bitch. She’s mean and rude. You can never pet her because she’s likely to hiss at you and bite you. When Maren wants to pet her, Maren has to distract Luna with one hand and pet her with the other hand. How ridiculous is that?

Luna and I had been having a truce of sorts in that I didn’t talk to, touch or look at her and she basically did the same. I let her sleep in my room when I’m not in there and she can’t come in it when I am asleep. This seemed to be going pretty well until Maren went away for the weekend and Luna went crazy.

I was minding my own business on Friday night, catching up on General Hospital and Luna walks up to me and bites my foot. Just like that, out of nowhere, bites my foot! Evil whore! And then seems shocked when I’m mad and move her away from me.

Then later that night, just as I was trying to sleep, she went nuts and was running back and forth in the loft for a long long time. Now, I know what you’re thinking-how loud could a cat running be? Well, it was loud enough for me to hear over the sound machine I use that plays me a rainstorm and loud enough that more than once I had to remind myself that it was not an intruder in the house but merely the STUPID cat!

That’s it, Luna, the truce is off. I will no longer merely ignore you and allow you to do your business, this is war. I am coming after you. I’m going to flick water on you when I have the chance and not let you sleep on my blankets or in my room. I certainly will not ever give you a treat. And if you ever want to drink some leftover milk in my cup, guess what? No way!

Isn’t it nice that I live such a cozy life that my greatest nemesis is a cat?