Fancy Pants

Tonight I got to go to a TFA fundraising dinner for work, and all I knew about its location ahead of time was that it was in "the Navy Yard," whatever that means. It turns out that means awesome, because the Navy Yard is where the Navy used to build battleships, but now companies get lots of tax breaks to move their headquarters there and fix up the space. This event was in "URBN," the headquarters of the Urban Outfitters/Anthropologie/Free People brand, which spans several buildings (although we were only in one) and is probably the coolest place I have ever been or will ever be. I didn't think to bring my camera, so all I could get was some low resolution cell phone pictures, but I think they still convey how hip it was:

Fancy sitting area.

A pile of giant chains, of course.

Aqua Buddha? You can sort of see some of a workshop area in the background.

This vase was taller than me, and wearing a knit sweater.

I think this is their Christmas decorations.

Some trendy umbrellas. The bright lanterns are hanging off of old struts, which I guess had some involvement with boat manufacturing.

I have no idea what these machines do. Maybe they make the skinny jeans.

Magic twinkle lights!

I found a neat article about the renovation, which I would recommend checking out if only for the pictures!

First Condo Meeting

Tonight was the annual condo association meeting, and for some reason I was oddly excited to go. I thought it would be fun to meet other people and learn a little bit about how the building runs, but it turns out groups of people meeting to decide things is never fun.

First danger sign: I was the only person there under 60 - apparently all the young, working people in the building know not to bother showing up at these things. As a result all the attendees are the retired people, who aren't exactly in a hurry to get stuff done.

Second danger sign: There were three candidates running for three spots on the board, and we still had to vote on them. Oy.

Third problem: The budget for next year is slightly (3.5%) higher than this year, but because there was a bunch of money saved up in the reserves, the monthly fee we pay will actually be lowered. What's not to like about paying less money? Plenty, apparently. People were so confused about paying less for a higher budget, and upset that we didn't get copies of the line item budget, that they made the building manager go back to his office and print them out.

Next problem: The big building project for next year is to redo the hallways, since they have been the same since the building was built in the 1970s, and are kind of dark and dingy. Tonight they introduced the architect from the firm that will be designing the new hallways, and the goal was just to tell people that by next summer he'll have drawn up sketches we can vote on. Instead, there was a full 30 minutes of people getting up and sharing their opinions about hallways - ranging from, "I was in a building once and they had really lovely red hallways" to "why can't each floor have its own theme?" to one gentleman's impassioned speech against the "disturbing homogenization" of hallways across America. I felt really bad for that architect.

I finally gave up and left over an hour into the meeting, since by that point I was starving and the conversation had moved on to an argument about hallway temperature between the residents of the top floors ("they're far too hot!") and those on the bottom floors ("they are freezing!").

As far as I know, the meeting is still going on. I think this will be my first and last experience with attending.

Meeting My Hero, and Miscellanea

One of my personal heroes is Doug Lemov, founder of the Uncommon Schools charter network that I am so obsessed with (the one that made me cry when I visited it as a first year teacher). So I was beyond thrilled when I found out that he was coming to Philadelphia to lead our first year corps members in a session on classroom management yesterday. I didn't actually get to see the session because I had to be outside doing boring administrative stuff, but afterward I got to actually interact with him for a full thirty seconds! I told him about visiting his school and it transforming my beliefs about what was possible for my students, and he thanked me for sharing with him - he said it was the most rewarding part of his job! My friend took a picture with my cell phone, and it motivated me to figure out how to get pictures off that thing for the first time ever:

You can only see Doug Lemov's back, but you can totally tell how awesome he is.

Also, now that I know how to get pictures off my cell phone, here are some random interesting pictures from the past year:

This was in the bird room at the Camden Aquarium, where we went for our staff retreat.

Our old carpet floor with our new wood one, when it was still in boxes.

I saw these at a random gas station once, but was too weirded out to try them.

My sister gave us a chicken from the farm she worked at, and Ben was very proud of himself for roasting it.

When Ben and I first moved in together, I couldn't resist the temptation of putting on all of our class rings and giving myself Brass Rat Knuckles.

26 Days

Remember when I said that I saw a throw pillow on 30 Rock that I wanted, and wondered how long it would be until I could buy it somewhere?

Since then I've been watching alchemy requests for that very pillow pop up on Etsy for increasing amounts - $40, $40,  $75 - but it wasn't until today that I finally saw it listed in a shop ($45 + $10 shipping). From the day the episode aired (November 4) to the day the pillow was listed for sale (today) was 26 days - not bad!

Now the question is, can I really justify spending $55 on a joke pillow...

Something To Be Thankful For

My favorite part about coming home for holidays, besides seeing my friends and family of course, is finding out about high school assholes who are already on the long decline from their adolescent peak. Past delightful information has included the jock who couldn't get into med school and now lives in his parents' basement, another jock who got into TFA in Baltimore and quit after a month (who's hard core now??), and the mean girl who got really, really fat.

Anyway, last night I went to a local restaurant with my friends, none of whom are living in their parents' basements, and was absolutely thrilled to see another high school athlete waiting tables there. Not only that, but he had gained a lot of weight, and later facebook snooping yielded that he failed out of college and is once more living at home. That will teach him for being an asshole to me in middle school.

I love delayed gratification.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Since my actual Thanksgiving plans involve seeing Harry Potter 7 again and eating Boston Market, let's pretend this photo (from my Dad's birthday last weekend) is my family's Thanksgiving dinner:

This group includes Ben, me, my sister, my parents, two aunts, two uncles, two cousins, a cousin-in-law, three cousins once removed, two cousins once removed-in-law, two second cousins, and a great aunt.

Now that Ben and I live in Philadelphia, we are conveniently located right next to my father's rather large extended family. It's sort of like My Big Fat Russian Wedding, except instead of a wedding there were two birthdays, an engagement, and a new pregnancy (twins!) to celebrate. Plus, Ben and I somehow ended up going home with all the leftovers. I never want to leave Philly!

Harry Potter Mania!

Sorry for the lack of posts all week, some friends from work and I decided that we needed to buckle down and do some serious prepping for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows today. Starting on Saturday we watched one HP movie a day, each over dinner at a different person's house, culminating in the midnight premier of HP7 last night (this morning?). It was really fun to visit everyone's homes, and interesting to see the differences in how and what each person made for dinner, as well as how they obtained and showed their movie: one person owns them all already, one person got theirs from Netflix, one person has fancy on-demand TV, one person downloaded theirs and used a projector to show it on the wall...guess which one I was!

The midnight premier was SO AWESOME!! I don't want to write about the movie itself because I don't know if people have seen it yet or are planning to, but I think I might die from having to wait until 2011 to see the finale. We didn't get home until 3 am and I was pretty sleepy at work all day, but really my only regret is that I didn't have a cape to wear.