Monthly Archives: March 2013

A Day in the Life

Posted by katie ett on March 25, 2013 – 12:15 pm
Filed under a day in the life, adventure time, just pictures, living in new york is neat
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• Tuesday night, my friends Ash and Kim came over to . . . well, I don’t want to say they came over “to” watch The Skulls on Netflix streaming, because it’d be embarrassing to plan a night around a 2000s-era teen heartthrob secret college fraternity movie, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. Kim and I had basically spent the entire afternoon having an online argument about the types of people who have a list of celebrities they’re allowed to cheat on their significant others with–apparently this type of person is everyone but my BFF, Tracey, and me–that eventually escalated into Kim and Tracey–who have never met nor spoken before–exchanging words over a Google document the three of us were editing together and then somehow resulted in me telling Kim I’m ambivalent on whether or not she has a brain. Um, but The Skulls was surprisingly entertaining! I thought maybe Kim was speaking metaphorically when she said there’s a duel in it, but there’s definitely a duel in it.

• Wednesday: “Survivor”! “American Idol”! Have I mentioned that I’m aaaaall over this Burnell Taylor kid? He has such an interesting tone that I really think he can make anything sound good, even a song from a musical. This is the performance that really got me. Even Kamran likes him. I downloaded the “American Idol” app so I could vote for the first time ever this year. I haven’t, you know, done it yet, but I could.

• Kim came over again on Thursday night so she could tell me about the first date she had with a guy who asked her what her credit score is as a way of deciding whether she’s wifely enough. I won’t say anything else about the night so as to not lessen the impact of a man asking her credit score on the first date to determine if she’s good wife material.

• Friday night, it was unclear if anything was being done for happy hour, so there were just four of us left at work when we decided to go out. We work in the Financial District, so by the time we got to this new bar I wanted to try, it was so packed with suits we literally couldn’t get ten feet in the door. We went to an old standby bar instead, and my friend Jeff has an amazing way with waitresses without even trying, so we were led to this upstairs room filled with Victorian-ish furniture that was totally uncrowded and where they were playing everything from my iPod at a totally reasonable level: Cold War Kids, M83, Imagine Dragons, Band of Horses, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Passion Pit . . . it was, um, basically the best time I’ve had in a bar?

Nik and Jeff in repose:


Dranks:


• Saturday night, Kam and I went for a tasting menu at Tocqueville in Union Square, which is one of our favourite restaurants, one of the best restaurants in NYC, and one of the restaurants most deserving of a Michelin star that doesn’t have one. We were treated like a king and queen and then went home to watch “X-Files” and The Game, which I’ve basically been thinking about nonstop since, especially this song, which is so annoyingly and catchily 1960s.

• Yesterday, we watched Safety Not Guaranteed, which was adooooorable, and Midnight Cowboy, which was well done but totally depressing and made me feel like I will pretty obviously end up living in a condemned tenement building someday and almost killing children with stolen coconuts. Also, thank god Angelina Jolie looks like her mother and not her father.

Later in the afternoon, we went on a walk up the East side of Manhattan and into Central Park, which I’m using as an excuse to use my Adventure Time logo:



the Queensboro Bridge at the edge of Manhattan, looking over Roosevelt Island


a modern building with art-tastic balconies and doors


looking down the East River toward lower Manhattan


a crazy wild boar statue surrounded by all sorts of marine life and snakes eating toads and stuff

Apparently this is Sutton Place Park’s replica of Porcellino, a sculpture by Pietro Tacca from 1634. Bill Clinton liked it, too, although for a completely dumb reason.


a Colonial-looking house with a vibrant door

This place had a private drive and a private park overlooking the East River. A Latino-looking person driving a Honda–obviously the hired help–wanted to leave but waited to open the gate until Kamran and I were well across the street. We talked about how we spend so much of our lives feeling better-off than everyone everywhere else in the U.S. that it’s annoying to see someone wagging their rooftop solarium in our faces.


New Yorkers play tennis inside giant balloon-domes


Magnolia Bakery cupcakes from Bloomingdale’s


a store devoted entirely to buttons


Hans Christian Anderson in Central Park


apartment buildings on 5th Avenue behind the Central Park conservatory


the Alice in Wonderland statue, which is totally freaky and not at all for children


squirrel/rat


an elaborate temple on 5th Avenue


sunset over the Central Park conservatory

My Once and Future Home

Posted by katie ett on March 20, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under guest post
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My former co-worker/former friend/now bitter enemy Adam was one of the most admired/most feared people at my company because of his crushing sardonic humor. I figured I would never be on the receiving end of it because I kept him well-supplied with Bit-O-Honey candy and because we have a shared homeland: the lush, rolling hills of Ohio. So when I asked Adam to write a guest post for me–because his brilliant blog has now been dormant for a year–of course he decided to write about Ohio sucking.

I’m not entirely sure why Katie asked me to guest write this blog. Maybe she’s trying to throw me a bone because she feels sorry for me that I have 2% of the number of followers she has on Twitter. I don’t need your charity!

I like Katie’s blog, so I agreed to write a post for her. I don’t want to go into completely uncharted territory my first time, so I decided to write about one of her “favourite” topics: Ohio.

Like Katie, I am from Ohio. Unlike Katie, I am not proud of this. I am from the part of the state that is best known for–depending on your age and your politics–the transvestite from the TV show “MASH”, or Joe the Plumber, or nothing at all. And while I was raised and educated in Ohio, I wasn’t born there, which allows me to honestly answer questions about where I’m from without mentioning the state.

Why my hostility to Ohio? It’s nothing personal. But this blog is normally filled with Ohio-pride, so I feel it’s my responsibility to temper that.

The best I can say about Ohio is that it isn’t that bad. I mean, you never hear of anyone dreaming about moving to Ohio. Today, that is. Tomorrow is another matter.

Two things make up Ohio’s northern border: Michigan and Lake Erie. Michigan is notable for being shaped like a hand. Lake Erie is notable for being one of the five Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are notable for holding over 20% of the fresh water that currently exists on the entire planet.

Lake Erie is the second smallest of the Great Lakes, but it’s still a pretty big lake. At almost 10,000 square miles, it’s bigger than 6 states, including New Jersey. And at one time it was almost as polluted as New Jersey. In 1969, a river that feeds Lake Erie caught fire. That river and others like it had been catching fire sporadically for 100 years by that point. But the 1969 fire was a significant enough embarrassment to virtually every level of government that it served as a catalyst to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Global warming, climate change, tree-hugger chicken-little bullshit… whatever you prefer to call it, if it’s actually happening, access to fresh water may become a source of wealth and power, much like access to energy sources are today. So it’s actually conceivable that people will dream about moving to Ohio in the future.

God, I really hope that day never comes.

A Day in the Life

Posted by katie ett on March 14, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under a day in the life, living in new york is neat
Tagged as ,

Lisa told me that my blog is antiquated because I still live in the LiveJournal era when people wrote about their crushes and clashes with family and DIY abortions using vitamin C. In a way, I love what most of the blogs I read have become–themed posts, usually about clothes or crafts, using beautiful photos that have been manipulated in one or more editing programs–but a lot of me still misses those days of locked-down super-personal posts that you worried about your father finding and made your best friend promise to delete if you ever died prematurely.

I don’t have a lot of juicy life happenings these days, but I still like the idea of keeping a record of my goings-on. So as consistently as I can, I’m going to try to do a weekly “a day in the life” post. Here’s the first:

• Tuesday, I went to lunch with my friend Ash at Ippudo, which is supposed to have some of the best (if not the best) ramen in NYC. (Here‘s her review of her first visit without me.) Is ramen a huge thing right now where you are? It seems like every blog I read is talking about it, and everyone I know is eating it. Soup is dumb. But soup with pork belly in it is something special.

• Kamran left to take a deposition in California on Wednesday, so I had my friends Ash and Kim over to my apartment on Wednesday night. We watched the end of “Love Actually”, which is OLD at this point, guys, and Kiera Knightley’s constant half-shirts show it. Remember when we used to think belly buttons weren’t gross? Then we watched two episodes of “Girls”, which were amazing (Lena Dunham’s tweets, which I read for the first time later, indicate that she actually had OCD as a kid), and Varsity Blues, which was terrible aside from that Collective Soul song, “Run”. We drank gin and juice, because my roommate/landlord/co-worker/super great friend, Jack, recently became obsessed with hosting and built himself a home bar that rivals those in the offices of “Mad Men”. We mostly talked about vaginas, periods, and how to style our hair.

• On Thursday, I watched Stranger Than Fiction and cried until Jack came home from a “business trip”, and then we finished season 2 of “Boardwalk Empire”, which was SHOCKING.

• Friday, a few co-workers and I went to Fraunces Tavern for dinner. George Washington, like, signed the Declaration of Independence there. Or was born there. Or died there. Or something. It’s an important place. It’s also a restaurant, and the fish & chips there are not good.

• Saturday, Kamran and I went to Babbo for lunch despite having been to another Mario Batali restaurant recently and thinking it was just okay. It seemed like they were actively trying to make it a bad time for us, but the food was so good we couldn’t help but enjoy it. Even after I spewed red wine all over Kamran while laughing at a thought I was having.

On the way home, we saw:


this guy doing sand art in Washington Square Park


some tiny, sleepy dogs, barely able to keep their eyes open


this sign at a seafood restaurant

The end.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Internet

Posted by katie ett on March 5, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under administrative
Tagged as

I have a crazy backlog of food photos building up on my hard drive and no time to blog about them because I’m always busy rubbing your nose in my self-importance here, so I think I’m going to focus more on that for the moment and officially ask for your support of my food blog, donuts4dinner.

In case you need visual prodding:

I know it’s hard to think of a hundred different ways to say “that brown sugar cake you ate at that restaurant I’ve never heard of and will never visit sure looks tasty”, but

a) Kelly, Jessica, Ellie, Ash, and Tracey do it, and

b) I always find incredibly insightful things to say about your pets/kids/clothes/hot husband, so you can probably swing a “yum!” my way every now and then. (Meaning every day. (Miss a post, and you’re dead to me.))

j/k! Love you!

Here’s the RSS link if you just want to go ahead and add that to your reader right now: donuts4dinner RSS. And I’ll see you there.