Murder Mystery

Every spring my office has a Murder Mystery party. It was one of the first things people told me about on my first day back in July, and the past nine months have been a slow, steady crescendo of anticipation. It is the Social Event of the Year.

We got our character assignments and backgrounds a month ago - the theme this year was "Cirque du Slay," and I was Tatiana Torovic, Ukrainian Acrobat. The guy who works in the cube next to me was my acrobat boyfriend. Neither one of us wanted to be underdressed, so last week we went out and rented costumes. We also looked at a bunch of pictures of acrobats online and bought facepaint, so we could be adequately made up.

This shows our costumes, but it's hard to see our makeup.

I was a little bit nervous about going to a work party in basically nothing but a swimsuit, but I ended up winning the Best Dressed award so it was totally worth it. I did look like I was naked as I walked there with my coat on over my leotard, though.

Here we are with the Ringmaster! (you can see our makeup better too)

People take the Murder Mystery really seriously, and were in character all night. I did my best to channel my extended Russian family for my accent, and I ended up being just a few votes shy of Best Performer (it went to Crystal Divine, the circus psychic, who held a seance and got possessed my the spirit of the murder victim).

Not the most flattering angle, but it give you an idea of what I mean by "basically a swimsuit."

Cornelius Barnum, the circus owner, had a nefarious plot to flood the Circusdome after opening night so we could leave town with everyone's money and not have to stay and perform. I had to pass messages and bribes between him and the crooked contractor, even though doing so was antithetical to the values of my Ukrainian village, because if I didn't comply he would revoke my work visa and get me deported. When Barnum got murdered I was pretty sure it had to do with this criminal activity, but it turns out the local beauty pageant winner did it - she didn't like the circus being in town and stealing attention away from her. Her past as a florist's assistant gave her all the knowledge she needed to poison the pie a clown threw at Cornelius with Nerium Oleandar. Although I didn't unravel the murder, I was successful in my other objective for the evening - preventing a slew of other circus women from stealing my Acrobat Boyfriend. All in all, a successful evening!

Cake Wrecks, Sausages, and Board Games

Last weekend my friend Kathrine came to visit, and besides reveling in the glory of Supermoon, we spent some time wandering around Philadelphia. Our best discovery by far was a bakery straight out of Cake Wrecks:

Yes, that is five full tiers of icing stalactites and misshapen clowns with broken necks.

"I will haunt your dreams."

They also had wedding cakes:

Those are plastic gift bows on the bottom tier, lest their expert frosting-work trick you into thinking they are icing or anything else that actually belongs on a cake.

After (despite?) viewing those confectionery delights, we were hungry and decided to have sausages in the Italian market. We over-reached.

Those are theoretically each for one person.

Or rather, we didn't anticipate how truly huge an authentic Italian sausage sandwich would be.

Kathrine looks cool and collected...

... but you can see the fear in my eyes.

After being utterly defeated by encased meats, we went home to await supermoon. In the mean time, a bunch of Ben's grad school friends came over for board game night. One of them brought a new game called "Power Grid." You can tell how fun it is from the box!

We spent about 45 minutes trying to set up the board, which has four separate areas for tracking natural resources, turn order, each player's power plant number and status, and the location and connectivity requirements for all potential power plants. It also requires a degree in nuclear science and engineering from MIT. We were entirely unable to complete even the first round of turns, so we eventually gave up and just played Apples to Apples instead. Usually in that game the people who know each other the best win, but Ben's lab friends all did terribly and Kathrine and I dominated, despite neither of us really knowing anyone but each other. As she so aptly put it, it probably had "something to do with the majority of robotics-y people being language deficient." Too true.

Supermoon!

You guys, Supermoon yesterday was awesome. Also, I felt really smart reading about it, because I already knew what "lunar perigee" meant from the Recess movie. We could see the moonrise over the city from our balcony and it was amazing - unfortunately my attempts to capture it on camera were less than impressive:

This one captures the orange-ness of it, but not much else.

This one captures the moon-ness of it, but not the orange-ness or super-ness.

I need to invest in a better camera for when supermoon comes back in eighteen years.

Philadelphia Flower Show

This weekend my parents came to town for the Philadelphia Flower Show, and it was out of control gorgeous.

It was crazy how many flowers/trees/plants they had brought into the convention center, if I didn't know better I would have thought I was outside.

They had just about everything made out of flowers you could imagine:

A peacock

A unicorn

A literal flowerbed

 There were also lots of different flower-based competitions:

The windowbox competition

The front yard competition

The flower hat competition

The daffodil competition

There was even Art made out of flowers:

I have about a million pictures of different flowers, none of which do justice to the beauty of the real things, and I imagine it would be boring to post them all here. So instead, check out this crazy flower hat:

And this dorky picture of me "balancing" a flower arrangement "on my head:"

This was my mother's idea.

Lastly, I got overwhelmed by flower frenzy and bought two miniature orchids.

I will consider myself a successful plant owner if I can make it to Easter without killing them.

At the Grocery Store

I usually do the grocery shopping independently, but today Ben decided to tag along. Halfway through, I heard him frantically yelling "Caroline! Caroline! Caroline!" from several aisles over. I ran over expecting to see someone mugging him, only to find him grinning like an idiot and pointing at his handiwork:

"Get it? Get it? The controversy continues!"

No more grocery shopping with nerds.

Yay, it's up!

Remember when I raved about Kaya Henderson's closing remarks from one of the sessions I went to at the TFA summit? Well, video of that session is now up! In case you're not up for watching the full thing, the part that I really liked starts at 1:12 - right after she talks about peeing her pants.

When Michelle asked me, when she decided she was going to step down and she said, "I need you to do this, I need you to stay" I was like, "stay, are you crazy?" That was not the plan. See, the plan was to come to DC Public Schools, to work for seven years - the three years of the first Fenty term and the four years of the second Fenty term - and then go make some money, open up a new consulting firm that told everybody what we did, go back to our lives where we traveled and chilled and I could get a haircut in the middle of the day and, you know, have a life. I'm forty years old, I need to have a baby - there's all kinds of stuff going on! And this lady says, "I need you to stay and be the superintendent of DC public schools," are you smoking crack? But at the end of the day, I could go. I could leave today... I could go make a whole lot of money, I could have a life where I work a few days a week, I could go have a baby, I could do whatever I want to do. It would be really comfortable. It would be really comfortable to leave what I've been doing, and to do what would make me feel good. Except it wouldn't make me feel good. At the end of the day, despite the fact that some nights I don't go to sleep, despite the fact that I have crazy people screaming at me all day, it is absolutely uncomfortable, but I can't go home and sit down and make money when this pressing issue is here and there is something I can actually do to contribute.

Visitors!

We had friends visiting last weekend, Ben's parents this weekend, my parents next weekend, and more friends the weekend after that - whew! So we have been eating at a lot of restaurants and going to a lot of museums, but the only interesting photograph to come out of any of it is this:

That is us with our friends from college, inside some of the Art that adorns Penn's campus. Don't ask my why a giant broken button is Art.

(Actually, this wasn't my first encounter with the principal that oversized household objects are Art:)

At the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2006

In the completely opposite direction, yesterday we went to the Mütter Museum, a museum of medical history and anatomical oddities that I have vaguely traumatic memories of visiting as a child. In addition to all the preserved fetuses of conjoined twins, midget skeletons, and photos of truly horrifying skin conditions, there was also the Chevalier Jacskson Collection of Swallowed Objects and a Giant Colon, that contained forty pounds of feces when its owner finally died (after not pooping for months). Very disturbing.

Lastly, our college friends took a picture of us on our balcony, and since we don't usually take pictures of ourselves in our (sort of) new house I thought I'd share it:

Everyone is happy because their colons are functioning correctly.

Fun times accomplished!