Well that was exciting! Was a pretty big weekend, and there's a fair amount to get through. Which is pretty disappointing, to be honest, because I find that I'm funnier when I don't have things to talk about. But what are you gonna do? Just a quick recap to the previous week's weekdays - saw a few movies: Chicago (awesome) and Daredevil (execrable), learned how to marinate meat (which is SO MUCH easier than it sounds. The only problem is that you really have to think ahead - by at least half an hour, and preferably more. This is not a skill I have. However, I am good at forgetting things, so I learned that if I put some meat in a marinade and forget about it, I usually find it again within a day or two, and it's really tasty), and took naps in preparation for the weekend.

Friday night was supposed to be me getting some of the apartment ready for the party on Saturday - it's not a big apartment, but we have a few common rooms and I wanted to get at least one of them cleaned so we didn't have to do it all the day of the party. Because I knew I had a lot of things to do that night, I decided to take a big step and drop off my laundry at the laundromat to have it done (instead of staying there with it for 2 hours of my night). This was probably a mistake, since there is very little chance that I'm ever going to do my own laundry again. Total cost for all of my laundry (accounting for about 3 weeks of clothes) was $12; it would have cost me $6 in quarters (each of which, as anyone who does their own laundry knows, is worth far more than twenty-five cents) to do it myself, and two hours of my (infinitely precious) time. I truly believe that my time (which pretty much would have been wasted at the laundry, book and iPod notwithstanding) is worth far more than the $6 extra dollars (amortized over two hours, mind you) I paid to have someone (who was already going to be at the laundry) to do my wash. All I have to do is find a way to save six dollars over the course of three weeks. In New York, this is an incredibly easy exercise - my current plan is to starting bringing my Diet Coke from home instead of buying it in the CUNY commissary. In three weeks, this will save enough to do my laundry twice in a single trip, and still have enough left over to pay for a round trip metro card. You can take your Chinese food delivery at 3AM, your pharmacy delivery, your Urban Fetch (oh, I guess they took that one already)- drop off laundry is the greatest service available in any of the boroughs and the surrounding boroughs.

Since my laundry situation was squared away, I was free to get done some much-needed housework. Obviously, for the rest of the night, I used that freedom to have a few beers and play basketball on the Playstation with Ton (who had come in from Ithaca for the party! So huge!). Eh, what are you gonna do?

Then Saturday. There was a serious amount of stuff to get done by this point. The first thing Sam and I did was head into New Jersey to get some gas for his company car (usually gas is considerably cheaper in New Jersey than in New York. However, since it would require a serious inflation to permit gas stations to increase the current price of gas these days, New York gas stations have taken to asking you out of the car and kicking you in the groin when you get a fill-up. To offset the lack of cheaper prices in Jersey, instead of cheaper gas New Jerseyites don't get kicked), and to buy beer at the Costco. You all have something like this near you (unless you are living on a military base, in which you have a PX which is the same thing only cheaper and in olive drab). These are the storefronts that have everything in vast quantities. I have some seriously mixed feelings about them. On one hand, since Sam took his first trip there after he moved in, we haven't wanted for toilet paper (nor will we again for at least another 6 months, and that's including the fact that I'm planning on dressing as a mummy for Halloween). On the other hand, the toilet paper and the paper towel take up so much space in the apartment that I'm considering asking it to pay rent. Which, when looked at from the point of view of the toilet paper, is somewhat insulting; I'm pretty much going to be asking it to pay for the privilege for being around so I can wipe my bottom. On the other hand, I know some people who (metaphysically speaking) are in relationships like that, so who am I to judge?

There was a lot of "Oh, we need some of this. But we don't need a 4 pound bag. We'll go to the supermarket for it" I think all tolled, we got six things that weren't beer, and two of them were packages of socks. New socks come up so huge. If I had known I was going to buy socks on Saturday, I might not have done my laundry had my laundry done on Friday.

There was house cleaning to do (it's funny how wiping down an ostensibly clean table can leave a paper towel the exact opposite color it started). And cooking. A lot of cooking. Well, most of the stuff was cold, but a lot of preparation anyway. We really went kind of nuts with the food, actually. Pita and hummus, chips and salsa, french bread and brushetta, mixed nuts, stuffed mushrooms, vegan dip, crudite with ranch dip, and pigs in a blanket. Oh, and a bowl full of M&Ms. That, and jello shots (which I took some abuse about making, but were really the hit of the party. I wanted to make five packets worth [one for each color band of terrorist alert] but those suckers take up a lot of vodka. [At least the way I make 'em]). We ended up with red, blue, and green - coincidentally the same as the balloons hanging on the lattice outside my house.

Well, this is getting a little long, so I think I'm going to cut it off here for now. More tomorrow (hopefully) about the party, and some words about NCAA Basketball's NIT and Womens tournaments.