Category Archives: just pictures

Happy Bigtime Birthday, Tracey!

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, holidays don't suck for me, just pictures, no i really do love ohio, par-tay
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I know presents are the reason for the season and all, but I was really back home in Ohio for the past two and a half weeks to celebrate my best friend, Tracey‘s, 30th birthday. While I celebrated my last birthday quietly and with fingers crossed that no one would remember it was my 30th, Tracey celebrated hers with karaoke, gigantic 3-0 candles, and Justin Bieber cupcakes all around:

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday
Tracey pretending that she’s not really into this whole party thing.

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday
Guess who ate these in abundance and wore the Bieber rings without irony. This guy!

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday
This is a hilarious picture until you remember that the noisemakers Tracey bought actually turned out not to make noise.

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday
Only a party at Tracey’s house would include a bowl of just pepperoni.

Tracey's 30th Birthday
Tracey totally made this for her husband’s last birthday and not for herself. Just so you know.

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday
Tracey’s husband, Dan, presents Tracey with her cupcakes while Erin serenades her.

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday
Graham is mesmerized by the non-noisemaking noisemakers.

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Tracey's 30th Birthday

Happy 30th birthday, my best best friend!

You are my life partner, my lab partner, my partner in crime, the wind beneath my wings, my baby bumblebee, the demon seed and the factor!

And I love you.

Deep-Fried Homesickness

Filed under it's fun to be fat, just pictures, no i really do love ohio
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Thinking about going home to Ohio in a couple of days for Christmas has me really craving the kind of fair food I can only get at the yearly pumpkin festival in the town next to mine.

Fried Cheese

Is it wrong that I evidently associate my hometown with deep-frying?

Crazy Cat Lady

Filed under just pictures, super furry animals
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Like I told Cassie today, I took 238 pictures while I was home in Ohio for Thanksgiving last week, and 237 of them were of Tracey‘s cats. (The other one was of myself, naturally.)

I can’t quite tell if cats are like kids in that they’re only cute if you actually know them (or have read extensive blog posts showcasing their darling personalities), so these pictures might make your day or cause your hand to cramp from all of the lord-just-get-me-through-this mouse-scrolling.

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Rupert is the loving one. He’ll slink around the kitchen when he knows you’re in the living room and just meow his fool head off, waiting for you to pay attention to him. He’s always the first to play with any toy and the last to cut your thigh open while you’re just trying to trim his nails, though he will politely box your face.

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Graham has been the shy one ever since Tracey and her husband, Dan, bought a house and moved him from the apartment they had when they first adopted him. When he was a kitten, he was the frolickiest thing I’d ever seen; one of my fondest/scariest memories of spending the night in Tracey and Dan’s old apartment is sleeping on the couch and waking up to see Graham jumping from the armrest to the back of the couch, claws splayed out as he flew over my head.

Tracey's Cats

But Graham is also the most easily-entertained. Tracey keeps scraps of paper from her scrapbooking and taunts Graham by pushing strips of it in between DVDs on their bookcase so that it hangs out over the shelf, way too high for him to ever reach. He and Rupert will sit staring at these things for minutes at a time, making this little noise that they taught each other to do by clicking their jaws up and down.

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT?

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Tracey's Cats

Tracey claimed that Rupert likes it when she does this. And then he immediately bit her.

Tracey's Cats

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I think I can officially be called a crazy cat lady now.

To Not Letting Fall Slip Away

Filed under just pictures, living in new york is neat
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I know Fall isn’t even close to over–especially having spent the weekend in Miami, where it was still 80 degrees–but I’m getting scared for Winter and figured I should post these October pictures before corn and zombies are nonsensical.

Union Square, NYC

I’d like to say that NYC looks this dirty all of the time, but really, Kamran and I were in Union Square after a street fair had just ended. Street fairs here are mostly awful–picture blocks and blocks of stands, only they’re the same smoothie, sunglasses, and bedsheets vendors alternating over and over–but no New Yorker can resist the opportunity to walk down the center of a usually-crowded street.

Union Square, NYC

I love how gothic this building looks against the overcast sky:

Union Square, NYC

The famous magic wand in Union Square is known to stream steam at intervals, but I had never noticed the hand reaching out from above it. Halloween prank or totally-normal-thing-I’d-just-never-noticed?

Union Square, NYC

Lovely corn in the Union Square Greenmarket:

Union Square, NYC

This zombie locked eyes on us from across the park, and we both tried to ignore it until it was clear that he was ambling right for us on his stiff zombie legs. We accepted the haunted house flier he was handing out and admired his costume as he stopped to let me take his picture, but after he started hunting another couple, we realized that we figured him for a Halloween stunt all along and never once considered that he could be an actual lunatic. We’re clearly unprepared for a zombie uprising.

Union Square, NYC

The Last Thing I’ll Say About the Hamptons This Year

Filed under just pictures, travels
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Our trip to the Hamptons a couple of weeks ago started out pretty ominously. My roommate (who prefers that I refer to him as my landlord), Jack, and I met our friend Jeff at his new apartment in Queens that has one of those old-style elevators where you have to close an outer door before the door inside the elevator will close. So we loaded our suitcases full of clothes, duffel bags full of liquor, backpacks full of Xboxes, and arms full of cameras into this 2-by-3-foot thing, let the outer door close behind us, pressed the button to go down, watch as the inner door slid closed . . . and just sat there.

It took Jeff about three seconds to silently flip out and then press every button, ring the emergency bell, and begin calling the super repeatedly. After about five seconds of that, I started looking around to figure out if any fresh air was getting into the thing while Jack, I’m sure, was contemplating which of us would be more delicious to eat if it came down to that: the kid raised on Caribbean food or the kid raised on steak and potatoes.

Eventually, Jeff and Jack pried open the inner door and figured out that the outer door just hadn’t closed all the way. So after stopping on every floor thanks to Jeff’s button-pushing, we were on our way to the loveliest dollhouse on the East coast:

The Hamptons

It was dark by the time we got there, so we spent the first night hanging out inside, but as soon as the sun rose (okay, more like 11 a.m.), we were out the door for some lemon ricotta pancakes and some buttermilk pancakes with crispy bacon:

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

As soon as we got back to the house, I walked across the street to the beach. Now, I hadn’t expected the water to actually be warm enough to swim in, but I hadn’t expected the crazy waves. These things had to be eight feet high:

The Hamptons

and green!:

The Hamptons

and coming so far up the shore in some places that they were making separate pools and cutting out big sand cliffs:

The Hamptons

I understood why some of the houses had boards on them still from the hurricane weeks before. And I hope you’re not bored yet, because here are 15 million more pictures of them:

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons
butterfly!

The Hamptons
closer butterfly!

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

Jeff and Jack drove by the beach to pick me up so we could meet everyone at the grocery store to stock the house for the weekend. I found this greeting card resting on the pizza I was about to buy, and it actually did dissuade me from buying that pizza. But not the one next to it. BOO-YAH.

The Hamptons

Our friends Anthony and Chantee arrived that night, and we spent the evening eating Anthony’s cheeses on bread drizzled with honey and solving world problems.

The next day, we went on a loooooooong walk on the beach that included so much propping-Anthony’s-camera-up-on-flip-flops-and-things-to-take-pictures-of-ourselves and then went into “town”, which is a five-block strip of boutiques (that all sell ice cream in addition to whatever their actual purpose is) and restaurants on one street. We took uproarious photos that are all trapped on Anthony’s camera and stopped by a bakery where I got something so delicious it’s getting its own post on donuts4dinner.com. Just knowing that it’s in one of the bags in front of Jack and Anthony is kind of making me mouth-froth right now:

The Hamptons

While everyone else sat out on the deck reading, I got up the nerve to stick my feet in the pool for, like, a whole half an hour before they turned blue. Then, that night, we had a family dinner at the house and then drove to the end of the peninsula to see this:

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

And all the joy we felt can be expressed in this picture of Chantee and me:

The Hamptons

It’s just so great there, you guys. The house is three stories of plushy couches and TVs and stereo systems, so there’s always something going on somewhere, and everyone gets along when I’m not accusing someone of having bad taste in music, and everyone stays up so late talking about so much, and we walk to the beach in sweaters at midnight, and we stand out on the balcony and look at the moon and are perfect.