And a Cherry on Top.

OMFG (still can’t believe there were Gossip Girl ads with that), I. Love. My. New. Mac.

I love being able to, oh, BLOG, without my computer crashing mid-entry so that I have to go back and remember, what was the turn of phrase I used to describe my deep and abiding love of prosciutto/Gossip Girl/my new pilates class?

I also love being able to upload to my Flickr (hells, yeah, vacation photos!), and download songs without risking only half the album making it into iTunes.

While I am spreading the love, let me tell you what else has been rocking my world lately:

1. Peter Thomas Roth’s Instant Mineral Sunscreen

I am so lazy in the morning that I often don’t even want to deal with smearing sunscreen all over my face. This stuff is the best. A little poof, poof and I’m assured of not aging for another day (this is what I tell myself).

2. Hollywood Forever, brought to you by SUMMER!!

I recreated my last picnic there, only this time it was prosciutto-melon-camembert sandwiches, and lox with lime-cilantro butter sandwiches, AND I tried my first paninis, a basic tomato, mozzerella, and basil. I made the curried potato salad again, skipped regular salad for time, and made adult ho-hos, holy crap, awesome.

The movie was The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of the few Hitchcocks I hadn’t seen, and the picture above is of the glow-in-the-dark snap necklaces of old, drunken peeps sitting behind us set against the starless, palm-tree-lined sky of Los Angeles.

3. (Slowly but surely growing on me, rather) The thought of having a roommate.

I have not had a roommate aside from someone I thought would be my mate for life since 2001. But I would like to save for a home, pay off my loans more quickly than I am currently progressing, and I’m real scared, but I’m going to give it a shot. Luckily, I am giving it a shot with one of my best friends in the world, Neeta. Sure, she is deathly allergic to cats, but I have the Dyson and the keen desire not to be responsible for her demise.

I have had a lot of internal angst, A LOT, trying to figure out whether to do this. There are logistics to settle, I’ll no longer have a separate room for the cats and their box o’ stank, where will the stuff that I’ve currently been fitting into two walk-in closets fit, can we cram our joint supply of frozen food into my freezer, etc.? There are also the personal questions, what am I doing getting a roommate now, at 31? I question a lot whether I’m taking a step back. But I have to remind myself that I’m taking a step forward, to home ownership, and won’t the cats and I enjoy having someone to watch Gossip Girl with?

I think we will.

4. Maraschino cherries.

When I bought the marshmallow cream for the ho-hos yesterday, it was right next to some maraschino cherries. I’ve never had them at home, but I love them and will steal one from your drink if you’re not looking, watch out. I never even considered that I could have them at home, like, to EAT, on a regular basis.

But I do now!

5. Teenage love… now with with vampires!

OMgoodness. A coworker recommended Stephanie Meyer‘s books to me, and while they are no Graham Greene, they’ll do in a pinch — cool kids’ lunch table, vampires, curfews, girls’ choice dances, werewolves. I was a HUGE Christopher Pike fan when I was in junior high, and this is like that, only better even. It takes me back, WAY BACK, to the days when you could just feel. so. much! When your heart hurt just at how MUCH you felt. Now my heart just hurts if someone heartlessly dumps me the morning after I’ve spent $150 getting my hair done to attend his stupid work event. Back then, my heart could hurt just out of feeling so much.

If reverting back to my roommate days could also bring that back?

Oh, the maraschino cherry on top.

Would Be a Lot Easier to Blog…

If my computer didn’t overheat every five minutes.

Last weekend I was out of town, but this weekend…

MacBook here I come! Scared I won’t know how to turn it on or navigate my way around, but more scared of Vista!

And In Such Small Portions

Newsflash to those living under a rock (me): apparently there is an outbreak of salmonella in the world of tomatoes.

What did I bring to the Lakers-Celtics barbecue I attended this evening?

A platter full of red and yellow tomatoes, carefully sliced, alternating colors, interspersed with oh-so-thinly sliced red onions, sprinkled with balsamic and extra virgin olive oil, some kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, chiffonaded basil selected from my very own basil plant artfully scattered on the top, and apparently, oh, a splash of potential death for good measure.

Awesome.

People ate them anyway.

This doesn’t exactly correlate, but for some reason it reminded me of one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies of all time, Annie Hall, a joke really, where Woody Allen/Alvy Singer is reciting the conversation of these two old women vacationing in the Catskills at some resort which in my mind always looks like the place in Dirty Dancing, and one woman says to the other, “The food is terrible,” and the other says, “I know, and in such small portions!”

One of the reasons I haven’t written in so long is that I was in Costa Rica, somehow right in the middle of off-season Tropical Storm Alma.

I loved it anyway.

Really, I could have been anywhere, doing anything, so long as I wasn’t at work. So what if I spent two days in my hotel room in the rain? I read 4 books and did an insane number of word puzzles, man! So what if my legs were so bitten by bugs it was almost embarrassing to go out? I wore cute pants and ate some of the best meals of my life, dude! So what if I applied sunscreen so poorly that my feet are still peeling three weeks later? OK, for that I have no solution and am still leaving a breadcrumb trail of dead skin everywhere I go, but still, boo-yah! suck it, work!

Vacation (photos to follow eventually) was not quite what I expected, but definitely, it could have been longer.