Serious Business

Guys, look what I did yesterday:



The songs are what was popular with the cool kids each year that TFA has been in Philadelphia. They all have crazy names - in order, they are:

• A-town stomp (this was how we started, but it's not on the video)
• Chicken Noodle Soup (my kids in NYC still did this one a lot)
• Wu-Tang
• Souljah Boy
• D-Mac
• Stanky Leg
• The Jerk
• Dougie
• Cat Daddy

Can you figure out which one is me?

At the Airport

What do you do if your fancy ceiling clock breaks, but it is mounted to the ceiling so you can't easily replace it?

Glue another clock to its face!

(As a sanity check we found another, non-broken ceiling clock to confirm that they aren't supposed to have secondary clocks attached to them. They're not.)

Compare and Contrast

I re-made my first sampler for a friend, and I fixed the mistakes I made the first time (and also made a new one). Altogether there are five differences between the two versions:

Take One

Take Two

Can you find all the differences?

(There's not really a prize if you can, but it's a good indicator that you probably have too much time on your hands.)

I hate the homeless

...ness problem in this city.

I made a housewarming present for my friend, who loves Dr. Horrible:

(From this song)

I bought the pattern, but then modified it. The little landscape in the middle took forever - there are three different colors of green in those trees!

Maybe now I can finally get into the Crafty League of Crafts.

Seen around Philly

BIG BELLY IS WATCHING YOU.

Shiny!

We could only see four fireworks displays last night, which was anticlimactic after the six we saw on Fourth of July Eve. Why would there be more fireworks the night before than on the actual holiday? Philadelphia works in mysterious ways.

We did get to see our friends Julie and Dan, though, which was great because I finally got to give them the present I made for them like two months ago:

Julie and Dan introduced me to Firefly, for which I am forever in their debt. This quote is from one of our favorite episodes, and it seemed like a good enough life philosophy to merit embroidering on a sampler. I'm proud of myself because I made the pattern up by myself, and if you don't look too closely at the Serenity logo it looks quite circular!

It's hard to make a circle out of a bunch of squares.

I couldn't quite fit in all the lines for the Chinese characters, but you get the idea...

I can see fireworks from my house

Last night we heard the popping sound of distant fireworks, and so we went out onto our balcony wondering if we would be able to see any. It turns out we could see six separate firework shows - one across the river in Camden, and then one each at points Southeast, South, Southwest, West, and Really Far West. It was super cool - especially because each of them had their grand finale at a slightly different time, so we got to watch six grand finales without so much as having to put on pants. I love our new house!

The Best Day Ever

Today was the Annual Super Scooper All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival, which I have been looking forward to ever since we moved to Philadelphia two days too late for last year's. My goal for the day was to eat something from all twenty ice cream vendors, which I achieved in less than an hour without even breaking a sweat. (Well, I was actually pretty sweaty, but that was mostly because it was really hot and I was in a tent with several hundred other ice cream lovers).

With some friends from work, about to eat my first ice cream of the day.

Although the event is a fundraiser for a charity that fights pediatric leukemia, I think they should have used a different slogan:

This makes me imagine licking a cancer-ridden child, which in turn makes me uncomfortable.

Even if they still want to use an ice cream-related pun, I think they could have come up with something slightly less disturbing:

• Let's cream leukemia.
• Let's put leukemia on ice.
• One good churn deserves another.

Okay, maybe that third one is kind of a stretch.

There were some other interesting things at the festival, like a kid with a pet rabbit, that she was walking on a leash:

What? And more importantly, why?

And a giant cow, with a creepily-veined udder:

This was on a trailer hitch, and I really wish I had been able to see it zooming down the highway instead of just sitting at the festival.

In the end, I ate something from every single booth, even though that meant I had to eat some flavors that I really don't like (coffee, yuck), and towards the end I had to be strategic about conserving stomach space (like when I ate all the cookie dough out of one scoop but threw out all the vanilla ice cream that had surrounded it).

My final scoop was Ben and Jerry's oatmeal cookie dough, which is also one of my favorite flavors.

Now I am feeling quite triumphant, but also sticky and disgusting because I am covered in a film of sunscreen, sweat, and melted ice cream. I'm going to go hose off.