when i read earlier this week that indiana isn't on a single timezone, i cracked up. i mean, could that state be any more of a pain? they get in my way between chicago and michigan, *and* they can't even agree on what time it is? sheesh. i guess now they've finally decided to all move to daylight-savings time. of course, they're still in my way, though.

yet another reason to love chicago: we're the home of the twinkie, which is celebrating it's 75th birthday! you can read about its history here.

i was looking at my blog posts lately and realized i have had no news at all lately, and that my life has been even more work-oriented than usual (disclaimer, and this isn't just for my boss's sake: everything has been going very well, and i'm feeling quite good about things at work).

and so, although i certainly didn't do it for the sake of something to blog about, i decided i needed a haircut.

sorry, loyal readers. i know that's lame, but that's the news.

i didn't get it all chopped off, but this was still a 'big' haircut for me. first, i have only gotten my hair trimmed twice since moving, so it's grown quite a bit. i didn't get it cut because i was swamped with work and hadn't yet formed an attachment to a hairstylist. so it was a big deal for me to decide to try the same hairstylist again, and to ask for something other than just a trim of my split ends.

i had him cut me some bangs. it's the first time i've had them in years, and i have no idea how to style it yet, so it should annoy me (and probably amuse my coworkers) to no end as i play with it push it constantly out of my face. steve thinks i should curl some of them up and back into the style that was popular when we were in high school. even though it would be damn funny, i don't think i could pull it off.

so, as for the hairstylist... i've never had a man cut my hair before, and it's fun. well, at least it has been so far. he's not gay (weird, i know) but he is pretty funny. he's about two years younger than me and moved here from yugoslavia a few years ago. he's got a bit of an accent and every now and then can't think of the words for what he is trying to convey. somehow we also get into conversations that i believe are probably not the most salon-appropriate, like the size of his wife's breasts (he thinks they're 36-C) and how he's cut hair drunk before. he does a good job, though, and i get to laugh and blush a bit in the meantime, which i definitely didn't do with my darling marie in michigan.

speaking of michigan, steve and i decided today that we'd head out to michigan this weekend. he's gotta be there for work next week, so he'll go out early and i'll tagging along. unfortunately for me, it'll be one of those day-and-a-half trips since we arrive around midnight tomorrow night and i leave at 6 on sunday. still, i'm looking forward to seeing old friends. there are a few people that we haven't seen since moving that we're trying to arrange to see.

hopefully someday i'll have friends in chicago that i consider old friends.

how long does that take, do you think?

steve and i disagree on whether or not this is cool: tonight's season finale of smallville will feature an 8 minute preview of the upcoming movie batman begins. i wanna tivo it and check it out, but steve thinks 8 minutes of previewing will ruin the movie. thoughts, anyone? are you going to watch it?

oooh! oooh! i wanna go! canigo canigo canigo? after all, they have george lucas, 58 R2 builders, and dioramas!.

if this were in chicago, i would so totally call in sick and go. thank goodness it's not.

ohmygod i am never doing the leg weights with steve again. we did them saturday afternoon, and i'm so sore i couldn't sleep and now i can barely walk!

i'm soooo excited about this (even though i don't watch the show as regularly as i'd like, considering how it makes me laugh until i nearly pee my pants): paul reubens is joining the cast of comedy central's Reno 911 as a guardian angel who has "basically elected himself the local crime fighter" according to series creator thomas lennon (aka lieutenant dangle). yet another thing about summer to look forward to (the third season starts in june).

as for things i'm currently grateful for:
* the cute pharmacist at the CVS downstairs from the office
* agreeing on buying an apartment in our building (we didn't agree on *anything* when shopping for fort awesome)
* the ridiculous sign in my office's elevator bank that uses a thermometer to track the maintenance progress (don't you just love thermometer "progres" signs?)
* the manager of the grocery store in our building giving us free produce a couple of times
* steve taking me to the gym and training me on the scary looking freeweights
* weekend days when it's supposed to be rainy, but it ends up sunny

if you're going to be in las vegas next week, make sure to stop by the silverton hotel and casino (where?!?). they've got lots of cool stuff going on, like concerts by hootie and the blowfish (for which the silverton is renaming one of their bars hootie & the blowfish’s shady grove lounge), an on-site bass pro shop, and -- on the 22nd -- newt gingrich will be speaking. now that's entertainment!

steve and i got a kick out of this here voicemail, which was supposedly recorded by an operations manager at Jack in the Box who was calling his boss to let him know that he was running late for some sort of meeting.

can i get it canigetit canigetitcanigetit?

i don't know if you know this, but one of my favorite things to have as a late night snack is Nestle Quik chocolate milk. i can't get into the Hershey's syrup thing, but the powdery "NesQuik" stuff is wonderful. yummy and chocolately like a dessert, but less filling.

so i'm reading this book with my bookclub. it's about bhutan, which is a fascinating place. and the author's experience (and telling of it) is pretty engrossing. but what's really stuck with me the most, so far, is the following passage, where the author (who is a canadian teaching in bhutan) is speaking with one of her students:
"I remember the day I got my own library card and checked out ten fat children's classics, I tell him, discomfited at the gap between our worlds. He is not disconcerted at all, and plunges into the gap, and we end up debating the most fitting symbol of decadence. A TV in every room in the house, I say. Imelda Marcos's shoe collection.
"Chocolate milk," he says.
"Chocolate milk? How do you even know about chocolate milk?"
"From an ad in a magazine. When I saw that, I thought, it's not enough to have milk? A whole bottle of milk is not enough? People have to add chocolate to it?"


---
damn skippy, they do!

is nothing, um, sacred?

according to the nytimes, in a departure from ancient ritual, the announcement of a new pope - traditionally signaled by white smoke - would be driven home by the ringing of bells.

to add insult to injury, there was a nice little SNAP at journalists:
"This way even journalists will know," said Archbishop Piero Marini, the master of papal liturgical ceremonies.

bummer. i was really looking forward to the smoke thing. i was hoping some website would have a live pope/smoke cam.

this is a big week for me. although i'd been to wrigley for some wonderful afternoons of old style, hot dogs and (oh yeah) baseball last summer, this week marked my first white sox game.
it was a beautiful day for opening day yesterday, and although the game was pretty damn uneventful (1-0, and was so speedy that it was done in under 2 hours), i have to say i loved the vibe at good ol' comisky. lots more mellow than the frat party at wrigley, and the bars in the 'hood around bridgeport were laid back like my fave places in ann arbor. the whole shebang inspired me to invest in my first piece of chicago sports team apparel: a st. pat's day green sox cap. :)

sheesh... 19 percent of the 500 million computers worldwide installed with some version of windows are still running Windows 98, 98SE and ME. that's 95 million machines still running those pieces of crap.
sheesh.

please, do me a favor. go here to see the homepage, and then go here to see the homepage and watch the commercial.
ouch.

here's a marketing website's commentary on how papa john's ended up, um, trump-ing domino's.

wow -- walmart is doing something cool! well, if you're a dork, that is (and yes, i'm a dork). they have a series of events around the star wars episode III called 48 Hours of the Force, where (according to brandweek) they'll have "toy & game demonstrations from Hasbro, product sampling, Star Wars character appearances, and, while supplies last, free Star Wars force detection collectable cards" (!!!). in addition, they're going to have an early bird special, where customers who receive a certificate can mail it in to get four action figures (Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2-D2, and Chewbacca), which is the same mail-in figure promotion that was done in 1977.
mark your calendar now!

m&ms also has a star wars tie-in: they're launching dark chocolate m&ms in conjunction with episode III. apparently both the new dark and the original (milk) chocolate m&ms will feature special star wars-themed colors and packaging. i'm pretty excited about "Darth Mix", which features black, maroon, purple, dark blue, and silver m&ms. the milk chocolate "Jedi Mix" contains beige, cream, pastel green, gold, and light-saber blue. oooh!

i suppose i should have mentioned it earlier, since we decided a week ago: we're buying a condo. we've decided to go the easy route (steve's personal motto is "give me convenience or give me death") and buy in our apartment building, which is converting to condos this summer. we're not buying the unit that we're in, since it's facing the lake and there's about a $50k premium for that (plus they're building a whole frickin' neighborhood, so the view is *totally* going to change).
anyway, it's a mirror image of our apartment, with a city view. it's also 14 floors higher and has "kitchen upgrades" like granite countertops, a cooktop stove and a better sink.
so we're pretty excited. of course, now we're going to be poor for awhile, saving up for the down payment and making sure that we rebuild the nest egg that we had prior to giving the developer a big fat check.
so that's what's new with us.
we're assuming we'll make a pretty darn good return on our investment, and since things seem to be going well overall with life here in chicago, we're happy to stay awhile and plunk our money down to gain some equity.

on a very different note, it was awesome to be able to see a few old friends on a mini-trip back to michigan (right about 40 hours, including two very full nights of sleep since i've been sick). hooray for old friends! hooray also for the supermixed crowd at the habitat on weekends!

also (and this is for zac), i think the pay-for-placement thing is lamer-than-superlame when you're talking about force-fitting a product like fast food into rap songs. what will those crazy marketers think of next?!?

i know online ads aren't exciting to 99.9% of people, but i'm quite smitten with this target site/ad, which is really well designed and has some fun music.

if i were a rap superstar, i would definitely design a line of jeans for more ample-bottomed women than other brands. oh, wait -- nelly has already done that. god bless him!

mad props to my bro , whose recent film project was written up in the lansing state journal noise. the article includes a v. cool photo of him too. go, pasky, go!

now you too can make marshmellow peeps!!! happy easter!

wow! steve is on the homepage of the free press today. in case you are too lazy to click, here's the photo:

thanks, mike, for pointing that out. steve's out of town today, but i thought he was in michigan for safety work, not in NY for his side job in the auto show dancing troupe.

i thought i'd take this opportunity to tell you all that i'm very glad to have gotten in touch again with a few long-lost friends:
* my dear old h.s. chum megan, who gave an amazing performance at last week's 2nd Story storytelling festival
* fred thomasw (who is the cute boy with the pink tie on the photo --and yes, that w on the end of his name is there for a reason -- a very old h.s. joke), whose bands songs are so catchy i can't get them out of my head
* eva, who just got a bitchin' tattoo

my life is much better now. thanks, you three.