Must Update
I have been exceedingly lazy about updating.
I learned many things this weekend. For example: it's great to have people over, because that means that we absolutely must clean the apartment. Certainly there might be other reasons propelling me to clean, but those other reasons are never strong enough to overcome my laziness. For example, for the past week, every time I encountered my bathroom, I made a mental note about having to clean it because it is getting gross. That's a lot of mental notes. And yet, I found myself cleaning it about 2 hours before I had friends come over, of course.
Something else I learned: I am absolutely terrible at schmoozing. Friday night we went to the aforementioned fancy shmancy event, which involved enormous amounts of schmoozing. That part sucked. But the part where several random strangers gave me compliments on how I looked - that part was awfully nice. So because I am terribly vain and this is pretty much all I need to feel happy (at least for the next 3 minutes), let me recount each compliment I got.
1) "May I just say you look absolutely lovely" (this is from a totally random man with whom we weren't even shmoozing)
2) "You look beautiful" (from one of Vadim's bosses - granted, that one was probably an obligatory compliment)
3) (replying to Vadim introduing me as his fiancee) "You have very good taste!"
4 (and my favorite one, from Vadim's drunk relative that I've never met before, who is also a lawyer that happened to be invited to this shin dig) "What are you doing with this guy? How much did he pay you?"
I tried (but failed miserably) to upload pictures of our suave selves. So I shall resort to a true and tried technique. The pictures are here. (But if anyone can explain to me how I can upload pictures in peace - please for blogging sake help me! Flickr.com is not very generous, it only allows me to upload pretty much 3 pictures a month. And the other program I used - Hello - suddenly stopped working as well.)
The Judge's Dinner took place at Waldorff Astoria hotel on Park Ave. The place was so fancy that Vadim (as always) refused to let me ask random strangers take pictures of us. This is why there are no pictures of us together. Waldorff Astoria was swarming with lawyers - about three thousand of them! Isn't that scary? Well, I suppose this means there were only about 1500 lawyers and 1500 spouses/dates. My favorite part of the evening was the guest of honor, the Irish Tenor Ronan Tynan. If you haven't heard of him, you can read a little bit about his amazing life here. He sang, gave a speech, and made a lot of dirty jokes. He made me cry. I'm so happy that the guest of honor was not a lawyer.
Yesterday evening we had a few (8!!) friends over at our apartment. It's a stressful and draining affair having guests. I really wish I could do it all the time, but I have to admit that thus far, it is still daunting for me. Like the whole need to feverishly clean and all the worrying that people don't remain hungry or sober. Vadim and I made a trip to Trader Joe's in the afternoon and bought out the whole store. Oh yes, and did I mention how expensive it is to host parties? But overall, I think it went pretty well. All the Trader Joe hors d'ouevres were gone, we had amazing desert (with choices ranging from 3(!!!) flavors of good ice cream, apple and chocolate pies), and everyone seemed quite drunk and mellow (especially Vadim, who was starting to get inappropriately frisky). I was going to post some drunken pictures, but alas, I cannot. But here are some of them the shutterfly way.
Today we went to Brooklyn to get Vadim's taxes done. I learned that an unemployed wife is a real asset to a husband in a high tax bracket. In fact, the accountant told me not to look for a job until after January 2006. Don't worry mom, I am not going to listen. And yes, she was joking (I think). After the taxes, we met my parents in a lovely French Bistro called Quercy, where they treated us to an amazing early dinner. The dinner included venison, scallops, foie gras and other similarly delectable dishes. (My parents rock!!! And not just because they paid for dinner of course.) If Time Out NY is not lying, then 10 percent of the cost of our meal is going to be donated to the Food Bank for NYC.
Tomorrow I am going to interview... I mean meet a rabbi who might perform the ceremony for my wedding. His secretary called me to arrange a meeting. Am I the only person who is surprised that rabbis have personal secretaries?
And finally, this morning when we were leaving our apartment, there were two detectives ourside of our building. They held up their badges and asked if we know our neighbor in one of the apartments. We did not. But we opened the door for them and they went inside. Isn't it lovely? There is an "investigated" person living in my building. And I think it's this fairly creepy looking guy. The only one who does not smile and say hello.
I learned many things this weekend. For example: it's great to have people over, because that means that we absolutely must clean the apartment. Certainly there might be other reasons propelling me to clean, but those other reasons are never strong enough to overcome my laziness. For example, for the past week, every time I encountered my bathroom, I made a mental note about having to clean it because it is getting gross. That's a lot of mental notes. And yet, I found myself cleaning it about 2 hours before I had friends come over, of course.
Something else I learned: I am absolutely terrible at schmoozing. Friday night we went to the aforementioned fancy shmancy event, which involved enormous amounts of schmoozing. That part sucked. But the part where several random strangers gave me compliments on how I looked - that part was awfully nice. So because I am terribly vain and this is pretty much all I need to feel happy (at least for the next 3 minutes), let me recount each compliment I got.
1) "May I just say you look absolutely lovely" (this is from a totally random man with whom we weren't even shmoozing)
2) "You look beautiful" (from one of Vadim's bosses - granted, that one was probably an obligatory compliment)
3) (replying to Vadim introduing me as his fiancee) "You have very good taste!"
4 (and my favorite one, from Vadim's drunk relative that I've never met before, who is also a lawyer that happened to be invited to this shin dig) "What are you doing with this guy? How much did he pay you?"
I tried (but failed miserably) to upload pictures of our suave selves. So I shall resort to a true and tried technique. The pictures are here. (But if anyone can explain to me how I can upload pictures in peace - please for blogging sake help me! Flickr.com is not very generous, it only allows me to upload pretty much 3 pictures a month. And the other program I used - Hello - suddenly stopped working as well.)
The Judge's Dinner took place at Waldorff Astoria hotel on Park Ave. The place was so fancy that Vadim (as always) refused to let me ask random strangers take pictures of us. This is why there are no pictures of us together. Waldorff Astoria was swarming with lawyers - about three thousand of them! Isn't that scary? Well, I suppose this means there were only about 1500 lawyers and 1500 spouses/dates. My favorite part of the evening was the guest of honor, the Irish Tenor Ronan Tynan. If you haven't heard of him, you can read a little bit about his amazing life here. He sang, gave a speech, and made a lot of dirty jokes. He made me cry. I'm so happy that the guest of honor was not a lawyer.
Yesterday evening we had a few (8!!) friends over at our apartment. It's a stressful and draining affair having guests. I really wish I could do it all the time, but I have to admit that thus far, it is still daunting for me. Like the whole need to feverishly clean and all the worrying that people don't remain hungry or sober. Vadim and I made a trip to Trader Joe's in the afternoon and bought out the whole store. Oh yes, and did I mention how expensive it is to host parties? But overall, I think it went pretty well. All the Trader Joe hors d'ouevres were gone, we had amazing desert (with choices ranging from 3(!!!) flavors of good ice cream, apple and chocolate pies), and everyone seemed quite drunk and mellow (especially Vadim, who was starting to get inappropriately frisky). I was going to post some drunken pictures, but alas, I cannot. But here are some of them the shutterfly way.
Today we went to Brooklyn to get Vadim's taxes done. I learned that an unemployed wife is a real asset to a husband in a high tax bracket. In fact, the accountant told me not to look for a job until after January 2006. Don't worry mom, I am not going to listen. And yes, she was joking (I think). After the taxes, we met my parents in a lovely French Bistro called Quercy, where they treated us to an amazing early dinner. The dinner included venison, scallops, foie gras and other similarly delectable dishes. (My parents rock!!! And not just because they paid for dinner of course.) If Time Out NY is not lying, then 10 percent of the cost of our meal is going to be donated to the Food Bank for NYC.
Tomorrow I am going to interview... I mean meet a rabbi who might perform the ceremony for my wedding. His secretary called me to arrange a meeting. Am I the only person who is surprised that rabbis have personal secretaries?
And finally, this morning when we were leaving our apartment, there were two detectives ourside of our building. They held up their badges and asked if we know our neighbor in one of the apartments. We did not. But we opened the door for them and they went inside. Isn't it lovely? There is an "investigated" person living in my building. And I think it's this fairly creepy looking guy. The only one who does not smile and say hello.
posted by SmallWonder at 7:26 PM
4 Comments:
I don't want to encourage you to be vain, but my god Alla, you are so skinny! Anyways, if you resize your pictures before you upload them to flickr, then it is more than enough space for a month. I host all my blog pictures on flickr but I shrink them to about 450 pixels wide before I upload them. That's how big they show up on the blog anyway usually.
For the first sentence of your comment - may I just send you a big french kiss over the internet right now??? Ok ok, i'll try to restrain myself. As for the resizing the pictures - thanks a lot!!
alla, i was coming over to your blog to tell you to update, but i guess you are psychic.
i was also going to give you some advice on resizing your pictures, but you already got that stuff, so instead i will move on to my next point: you look fabulous in those schmoozy-event pictures! what a great dress for you.
Aaaw, Sonsi! Thanks! You guys are spoiling me today!
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