varieties of fun

On Friday, Amy, Noell, and I went to Madison for the day. I love Madison because it has lots of fun restaurants in its small downtown, and other fun shops too. I got new shoes, Nepali food, and butterscotch cream pie all in the same day! However, it's a college town and school is just starting, so the place was packed with students. passing all the first years on the sidewalk, or being in crowded stores with them, made me feel old. They're furnishing their first dorm room with stuff from Urban Outfitters, they're walking around town in shorts that are too short and in flip-flops that are not the same shape as their feet...they may as well not be wearing shoes, since their feet are hanging off the shoes (often on the inside...weird). I'm not sure about the fashion choices of today's college student, I guess. I'm also not sure when college students started looking so young. I mean, I was a freshman not THAT long ago. Well, okay, 9 years ago this year, but still.

We hung out with Amy's grandparents a bit--they were awesome. They bought us both lunch and dinner, AND Nonna made us cookies! The cookies were amazing. I took some to Richard too, since I should not eat all those cookies. He concurs that they are some of the best cookies ever. Thanks Amy's Nonna! (notice how I just made that spelling up? whatever.)

Yesterday I made another visit to the Apple store--hopefully this time the grey screen of death will be gone for good. I am not excited by the grey screen of death and I pretty much never want to see it again. After 2 hours in the store I have all my photos back in iPhoto AND no apparent death screen. I hope it stays that way! Now I have to learn how to rename photos in iPhoto so they don't disappear but I can also recognize them by file name rather than having a long list of numbers. I also bought an iPod Shuffle (the littlest one) so I can take it with me to the gym. It clips on your clothes! How clever is that? I am downloading French by Podcast and planning to load the french lessons so I can brush up. I'm also thinking of downloading the arabic lessons from ArabicPod so I can keep up some Arabic too. What better way to pass the time at the gym than to immerse myself in languages I already sort of know, rather than mindlessly watching CNN for an hour of the same four news stories repeated ad nauseum? Just saying.

MM made me a cheesecake this weekend--it's amazing. Irish Coffee, made with Jameson Irish Whiskey. It's an incredible tasting cheesecake and I will NEED to spend more time at the gym as I am planning on basically eating the entire thing before heading back to work on Tuesday. :-)

Speaking of fun, I'm off to read a new book. I bought a whole bunch of new ones at Borders last week. Yes, I'm terrible. I need to use my library card more often. Or I need to figure out if bookcrossing is alive and well in the suburbs, or something else like it. The main trouble being, of course, that I don't like to give up my books. I love having lots of books. I grew up in the middle of a huge personal library, and now I have one too and it's awesome. They're like constant friends. But bookcrossing is cool too because then I could travel with my books. So who knows....

off to eat cheesecake and read..ta!