it was one of the best beach days this past saturday. hot sun, cool breeze, warm water; what could be better? after i'd had enough, i went cell phone shopping with my cousin "yuko." we checked out the various providers and pondered which cell phones we liked. in case you're curious, we determined the deal at t-mobile was superior to those at cingular or verizon. (i forbid shopping at sprint.) the Motorola V330 we chose takes pictures and video and has blue-tooth capabilities, although none of that really was the draw. It simply wasn't big and ugly like most everything else we saw. i was shocked at the crappy phone selection; i thought technology and design was supposed to get better, not worse. (brent, i saw the phone you got. very nice! not as small as i thought though. it must be all those features.)

yesterday was good church. Our pastor was back from his 5-week vacation. i WANT one of those!

i'm going to argentina. (have i blogged this already?) i officially registered and gave my deposit for the trip this past sunday at church, so i should be in rosario the last few days in march 2006. now i need some language lessons. dumb american educational system: how could they let me get through 19 years of school without learning any spanish?

my church is organizing a big crusade, so there will be a whole lot of us going over. and since they keep the choir under lock and key, i probably won't even notice that i can't communicate with anyone. But this missions trip includes the young adult choir too (i'm in the adult choir, sometimes called the old people's choir!), so that should make it a little more interesting. it's always good to meet more people, and they're more my age group.

but that's a long ways off. for now, i'm just hoping for beach weather this weekend.

the theme this past week has been "do overs." for example, at work we've been dealing with folks who like to change their minds, which means we're always redoing the drawings. (and yes, they've already started construction.) Now i'm redoing them again, sometimes going back to how they were originally. so much pointless time-wasting is involved with "do overs." (redundant, i know)

Example two is the weather problem at my apartment. you see, it's been raining poo. the toilet on the floor above ours was backing up yesterday, spilling sewage into our bathroom. after scrubbing down the walls, fixtures, and floor with bleach, we experienced yet another poo storm. so now i'll have to re-disinfect. what a nightmare. (see ryan's blog for the start of a catchy song related to this incident: feed me architecture)

but not all repeats are terrible. this saturday i went to the beach again. i could live there.

is a scone not just a failed attempt at a muffin?

As I write, It's 6pm and 93 degrees. We should just shut the city down and head to the beaches. It's really not worth it. Last night was perfect bike-riding weather, so I pedalled over the Williamsburg Bridge (which is just a giant hill!), across manhattan to the West side, and down to the World Trade Center. I went back basically the same way. I never know exactly where i'm going on my bike; I just know the direction i want to go and head that way as much as possible depending on traffic openings and where the streets go. it always seems to work out and i get where i'm try to go. but right now i'd like to just stay inside where it's a/c'ed.

Like Jerry Seinfeld's TV character, I am a big fan of cereal. I have a bowl and half or so for breakfast every day. The actual kind of cereal changes every year or so, but the morning routine stays the same: milk and cereal.

Now that i'm going to the gym and at least pretending to work out i 've been thinking about what else can change in my daily routines that would be healthier or cheaper or whatever. Thinking about my cereal diet, i realized that i consume a lot of dairy. (Plus i'm a big fan of cheese, being from Wisconsin and all.) So i decided to try soy milk to see if 1. i could bear the taste, and 2. if switching helped my weight at all.

This morning was the test. Would it be too unlike milk and too gross to eat? well, the taste was fine. it's different than milk, but reasonable. But by the time i finished my bowl of cereal, my throat was pretty swollen and it was difficult to swollow. Also, my palms were really itchy for the next hour or two, and i was producing all kinds of mucus and coughing it up. Sooooo, it doesn't look like i'll be having the rest of that soy milk i bought. and it seems i have some sort of soy allergy.

I love mondays.

today, though thursday, should really be friday. i should not have to work on fridays during the summer.

i saw the bird man yesterday. he's this guy, probably in his late 20's / early 30's, who goes around with a big feather strapped to his forehead making loud birdcalls. I don't think he's trying to attract birds; i think he's just nuts! Well, he might actually be a bike messanger or something. The noises he makes are really quite startling. They'd work well to get people out of his way and alert cars in close proximity. Yesterday he started out with a WHOO-LALALALALALALALA at the top of his lungs as he rode down the street. It sounded like the African yell/cheer that I heard a lot when i was in Zambia. Then he switched to a loud CAW-CAW.... CAW-CAW. It's shocking, then funny, then slightly annoying.

I love New York.

hot mommas, it's hot! even the beach was hot this weekend. i was there only four hours before i called it a day, although i had some errands to run and a silly notion that i could get back to the city for a barbeque. There's usually a cool breeze off the water, but on saturday the wind blew from the shore. The water was sooo refreshing, but the wacky wind, though strong, meant no waves.

i'm taking a break from the book i'm rereading because rebecca just lent me her copy of the latest Harry Potter. I hope it's good (for a kids books, right?). well it didn't cost me anything.

I've been doodling a lot recently trying to put something togther for a retirement house on the family farm. (not for me, obviously.) It's funny how you can make everything work out nicely in a sketch. Now i have to st down and see if the hardline versions still work. but it's summer, and so dang hot. maybe tomorrow i'll start. :)

Christina and Judith made yellow-cake cupcakes last night. They didn't have frosting, so we made some powdered sugar frosting and i melted some chocolate chips ont top of some for chocolate frosting. not gourmet, but still tasty.

Ryan finally managed to drag himself away from work so we could watch some more "24" last night. I'm going to lose a lot of sleep becasue of those DVDs. We have three seasons of shows to watch, and it's too hard to just watch one at a time. you've GOT to find out what happens next!

well, it's been hot all week. Time to hit the beach tomorrow. Ry adn C went today those lucky...

This morning at the gym I saw a few of what must be my favorite tv commercials, at least for the moment. The first is the AARP commercial featuring Mr. Yang volunteering all over town, made possible after he somehow cloned himself. I love to watch his wife react as she wakes up to multiple copies of her husband.

But even better is the coffee creamery commercial showing grumpy people. There's the woman who grimaces at the smiley face pin before dropping it in the trash; the woman who doesn't hold the elevator; the woman who hoses down the paperboy on his bike; and in the long version, the girl that nonchalantly pushes a stack of documents onto the floor as she walks by a table at work. I love it. Too bad I always see the short version of that commercial.

I hope the other folks at the gym don't think I'm too weird when I crack up laughing on the elliptical machine, because I can't help it.

church just started, but i'm at work. deadlines suck! how to finish all this drawing? 12 hours at work yesterday.

humid heat hovering in the high nineties, but office temp more for polar bears, well that sucks too.

coworker sharing world-famous cheesecake from soho... that rules!

check out my pics from FLW's Fallingwater and from my family reunion. they're on my main site.

this is my break. i've been doing some t-t-tedious drawing all day and it's driving me to the edge... of something. it's that feeling when you're craving something but can't get any of it - like chocolate. maybe that's what my problem is.

so i'm using this blog as a distraction. ______ problem is, there's nothing to write about. Anybody know any interesting websites? I'd watch some movie trailers online, but since i'm at work it would be very obvious that no work is getting done at my station. what i really need, besides that chocolate, is another day/week/month at the beach (once my sunburn goes away. whoa, momma, did i burn this last saturday! i'm still hurting.)

Thank God it's Fourth of July weekend coming up! I love the hol-i-day!

I just added an XML feed to my website. The link is to the left. You can add my blog to things like your myYahoo homepage so you'll know when I've updated... which ain't all that often.

Exciting news! I cashed in my coins this morning. Okay, so maybe it was just exciting for me. I dumped out my checkbook box and a little tupperware into the machine at Commerce Bank on my way to work. You've probably seen their commercials about this free service, even to non customers. Anyway, wowzers! The machine spit out a receipt telling me I had 1 quarter, 211 dimes, 181 nickels, and 638 pennies. It's always more than you expect. I was hoping for $25, but would have been happy with anything over 20 bucks. The machine said I would get a prize if I guessed with $1.99 of the actual amount. So I guessed $30. When it said I didn't win, I figured I had overestimated. But nope, I was getting more cash than I dared dream: $36.78

I wish paychecks were like that.

There's nothing quite like a holiday weekend. On my walk home from church sunday night I was planning what I needed to do at work the next day when I remembered that I had Monday off for Memorial Day. Now that's a happy moment!

After living in New York for 4 or 5 years, I finally made it to a baseball game. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn't seen any professional sports in New York. (Although I've watched a half dozen or so of Ryan's hockey games. Probably doesn't count.) Now I've seen a Mets come-from-behind win over the Marlins at Shea, and I watched as Boston creamed the Yankees 17-1 in the Bronx. And I didn't pay a dime for either. My friend Dalcy sprung a Mets ticket on me out of the blue, and I filled in for a no-show brother at Yankee stadium. Whoever said nothing's free just had bad karma or something. Maybe he or she wasn't a tither!