Insert Jack Donaghy Quote Here

Guys, I have a new job! Sort of. It's still within TFA, but it's a promotion and it's on a new team: Admissions. I flew to Chicago for the first part of this week to start training with my new manager, and when I returned this morning my cube looked like this:

The Admissions team is sort of spread out across the country (hence my manager being in Chicago), but there is one other team member who works from the Philly office, and he took it upon himself to welcome me to the team in an awesome way. My three favorite signs are:

The Admissions team refers to itself as the "A-Team."

This one took me a little while to work out.

I'm super excited about my new job, and about going to NYC next weekend to meet some more of my new team members. You know your new job is Serious Business when it involves two pictures of Mr. T in your cube.

Deck the Halls

Well guys, I finally got the condo decorated for the holidays. Now as soon as you walk in the front door, you will see our very own Christmas Tree:

I know. I'm practically Martha Stewart over here.

Then and Now

Since my sister and I moved out, my mom uses our return every Thanksgiving as an opportunity to take our annual holiday card photo. This year she decided to duplicate her greatest hits.

1994

2011

1990

2011

After two days of these painstaking reenactments, we have created our family's 2011 holiday card. I think it's our best one yet.

Front

Back

Maybe in 10-15 years we can recreate these photos again with our own kids. I hope neither of us has boys, or, if we do, I hope they don't mind wearing dresses.

Ready for my closeup

They are filming a movie where I work! Last week a small village of trailers sprang up seemingly overnight, and ever since then there have been guys setting up complicated lighting contraptions and giant camera things all over the block. I wanted to take a picture of all the trailers, which are actually quite fancy, but there are a lot of big scary guys around and I was too chicken.

Based on the fact that one of my coworkers saw Julia Stiles in the sandwich shop next to our office, and another saw Bradley Cooper on the street, we have surmised that this is the movie being filmed. Now we are spending our lunch hours hatching elaborate plans to put on all our TFA gear and try to get in the background of a scene. Some people are also hatching elaborate plans to run into Julia Stiles and/or Bradley Cooper, but those seem less likely to bear fruit.

Antici....

Look what arrived and is just hanging out in my closet taunting me:

Wedding dress!

How am I not supposed to put it on every day when I get home from work and prance around the house in it??

Schmaltz

I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, but I made a horrifyingly cheesy baby sampler:

Ben's sister had a daughter, and she is really into pink and princesses, so I thought it seemed appropriate. It actually turned out to be somewhat difficult to stitch, since it is so detailed:

Unlike the cartoon-ish stuff I usually make, this pattern called for all sorts of complicated shading and other nonsense - it had nine different shades of pink alone. The way it worked was kind of neat, though - after stitching a base of all the different pinks, yellows, greens, and browns in a pixelated mess, you stitch an outline around the main figure and suddenly it looks like something.

Before outlining

After outlining

It's cool how your brain works.

No such thing as a free bed

My parents came up to visit a few weekends ago, and offered to bring us their old bed frame. Our mattress has just been on a cheap platform since we got it, so we were excited about getting a real, adult-looking, and free bed. We hauled the pieces of the bed frame into our building, assembled them, and triumphantly lowered our mattress into place, only to find:

Sadness.

It didn't fit.

You aren't supposed to be able to see that part.

Apparently all these years we have had a full mattress, and for some reason I have mistakenly believed it was a queen. I always thought our sheets seemed kind of baggy, but assumed the sheet companies must just give you extra room, you know, to be nice or something. I am very good at rationalizing.

Anyway, after a few days of precariously climbing in and out of the too-large bed frame to get to our mattress, we finally caved and bought a new, correctly-sized one.

So now we have a nice new free bed, and it only cost us one mattress.