Nesting

Today was one of those blue-gray rainy days best spent cuddling up in your home. I did a variation on a theme and chose to cuddle up my home instead. In reality, all I did was hang a towel rod and paint a wall. But in my imagination, a huge transformation for the better has been made.

My chosen paint color has been floating around as a swatch for months: getting taped to walls and held up to various pieces of furniture. Having made it through the selection process successfully, one of my living room walls is now Agave. A color named for good times, warmer places, and tequila. How could I go wrong?

I didn't. See for yourself. If you could go for a virtual tour of my fabulous apartment, you would see that somehow, Agave goes with the decor of every single room in my house. Plus, it's very soothing. Now...when you only have 2.5 rooms in your house, and you paint the largest wall of one of those rooms a color, it better be a good one. Cause it's gonna make a statement whether you like it or not.
These are my windows. I can't wait for the leaves to change colors. I've got a great view of the transformation.
Okay, so you can't see this from my window, but this is one of the fountains in Lincoln Park. It's right by the zoo and the conservatory and the playground... I can walk here in less than 10 minutes and it is possibly the best part about my neighborhood.

I looove where I live. I better curb my enthusiasm or else I'm going to be making some enemies with my nauseating spew of giddiness. Come visit! My couch is really comfy and my kitten will snuggle you...

Thunderstruck

2 months ago, on a fateful day, with a fateful phone call (actually 7 consecutive fateful phone calls), I won tickets to the AC/DC show. Believe it or not, this is the 2nd time in my life that I've won concert tickets on the radio. The first time was to a Gwen Stefani/Akon concert...AND I won a meet & greet with Akon for me and a friend. I was gonna take Johanna. It was gonna be fabulous. We were gonna give that Akon a run for his money. Then he dry humped some 14-year-old girl in Trinidad and pissed a lot of people off---rightfully so. So Verizon pulled their funding from the tour, and somehow, the "me and a friend" turned into just me. Having nothing to say to Akon by myself, I forfeited my prize, and just went to the show. It was awesome nonetheless.

THIS time, in addition to the tickets, I also won a $100 gift certificate to this restaurant: www.nacional27.net. I'm saving the dinner for another date night, because AC/DC was awesome enough all on its own.

Here's proof:

a train...a huge train. keep watching...




















This is Rosie. She rides the train. Nobody does larger-than-life blow-up dolls quite like AC/DC. And there's Angus Young. Half naked. Flawless.















Highway to Hell, baby.

I'd have to say my favorite song was Thunderstruck. If only because watching Angus shred the guitar with one hand during the intro was just so freakin inspiring. The buildup and the crowd singing along...whew. Gave me chills. Well done, AC/DC. Well done.

Live music. I can't imagine life without it. I'm sure I'll wax poetic about it at some other date.
Stay tuned.

Twist my arm...

So I'm blogging, after much resistance to the idea that I should subject the general public to the mundanities of my day-to-day life. Then someone suggested that maybe my daily life isn't so mundane. You be the judge.

Today I went to work at 8am, and got off at 10:45am. The rest of my day was spent eating, sunning on the pitiful excuse of a beach that is the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and creating this blog.

Most of my day was rather uninteresting to humanity at large, although I enjoyed it quite a bit. The 2+ hours spent at work might be of interest to some, so I'll divulge. Sparing gruesome details of course, for those who's stomachs have not yet reached my level of solidity.

I saw 2 autopsies today. In one, on a middle-aged woman shot to death by her "man" (husband? boyfriend? who knows?), I learned that bullets, when they pass through something hard (wood? drywall? again, who knows?), tend to splinter and fragment into a jillion tiny pieces that are very very difficult to get out of muscle, lung, breast tissue, etc. And we have to get them ALL out- can't go sending these bodies to their final resting places with pieces of bullet still in them.

The other one was a child abuse case- a baby that "fell" off a couch. Without divulging too many more details (who knows who's reading this thing anyway), let me just say that you don't get bilateral detached retinas from falling 14 inches off a couch. I observed from afar (while digging out bullet fragments), and thought about my fellow med student working on that baby and how she was handling it. She has a 1 year old daughter. As she said last week, "the world is a much scarier place when you're a parent." It made me thankful for this stage of my life in which I am NOT a parent. And I embrace every opportunity I get to be appreciative of where I am RIGHT now.

Enough with the heavy stuff.

Here's something I have re-learned about myself today: I am a quasi-perfectionist. I saw the beautiful blogs that friends and photographers that I know have created, and became immediately frustrated by the templates Blogger limits me to. How can I possibly publish something that I feel is less than stellar, and/or perfectly suited to my personality? I just don't have the time to learn HTML. And I refuse to pay good money for a blog template as long as clothing and shoes are still being manufactured.

This blog is clearly going to be a work in progress, as am I. The evolution of this blog might just take millions of years. I don't think I have that long.