She believes in Cleveland

Here's my friend Ana when I visited her in Cleveland last year.

Pong

Last Saturday, some of my co-workers and I competed in a "corporate fitness challenge" that pitted us against other companies in a table tennis tournament. We represented The Dispatch as best we could, but this photo is pretty indicative of our playing style. Here, we see Kevin and Ally, our mixed doubles team.

At least we were the only company team to have matching headbands.

Natalie

Halloween

Yes, I realize Halloween was almost two months ago. Shhh.

Here's my friend Drew while I was helping him with his zombie face paint (we're not done yet at this point):

Here's Mike, as Johnny from The Room, which I mention all the time on this blog. I'm really not THAT crazy about it. I promise.

Other Susannah tasting the cider:

Natalie and Susannah...

"You are tearing me apart, Lisa!"

Oh, I guess it's August, now.

July 2010 zoomed by faster than any month has in recent memory. There have been lots of life changes for me, but I won't bore you with the trivial bits. Instead, I've got some shout-outs...

To mid-summer: Thanks for your amazing sunsets, pal.



To the Jeni's Ice Cream on Grandview Avenue (OK, any Jeni's): Your wildberry lavender, cherry lambic and goat cheese flavors are my favorite combination for an end-of-the-day treat in 90-degree weather.



To Club 185 in German Village: Thanks for giving my group of friends a great Friday-afternoon spot for drinks.



To COSI: You (and Jen, below) are so hypnotizing.

I'm back! And ready to talk about movies

Some of the "fun times" I mentioned in my last post were different significant movie experiences I've had recently. First was The Room. Now, I had already seen The Room many times, but the Drexel Theatre here in Columbus shows it on the second Saturday of every month and encourages interaction with the movie a la Rocky Horror Picture Show. For "Room virgins," they even put together a pretty fun explanation of the movie (it's not really appropriate for kids):

Mike, Gia and I went to a screening and found that the big-screen version let us discover all sorts of new things and made certain scenes all the more disgusting.

And, of course, I took a couple of photos.

A few days after The Room, some friends and I headed over to the Wexner Center to see The Life Aquatic projected on a big screen outside...

...and on the opening night of Toy Story 3, Joel, Natalie and I saw the magic of Pixar's latest release in IMAX 3-D, which may be obvious from the following photos.

Good. Times.

One of my newer friends in Columbus, Jessica, baked me a cake for my birthday. It was strawberry-flavoed and was decorated with a bunch of tiny plastic babies with purple frosting turbans.

Absurdism is really the only surefire way to please me, and somehow Jessica knew that, so bravo to her, and bravo to this lone cake baby, who managed to maintain buoyancy in such light, fluffy frosting on the last piece of cake.

I had a couple of days off at the end of April, so I used them to go down to Athens to visit some friends, buy some new rollerblades from another friend, and catch some films at the film festival there.

It ended up being a great trip, and staying with my friend Ana is always very peaceful. Her apartment is so clean and "unplugged," both figuratively and literally, which inspired me to take the last photo there.

Noah (pictured above) and I went on a rollerblading adventure, and even though it was a Wednesday, we agreed that it felt like a quiet Sunday.

Ana, Noah and I got some Chinese food and picked up a fake mustache from a 50-cent toy machine on the way out of the restaurant, thus the psychedelic mustachioed self-portrait.

I ended up seeing only one Athens Film Festival screening (Skatopia: 88 Acres of Anarchy), but it was still a well-spent jaunt down to Appalachia.

I snapped this when my friend and I were making a bathroom run to DP Dough on High Street at 2 in the morning. Can you see the desperation?

Living Energy System

Two of my friends from high school are in a pretty cool hip-hop band called The L.E.S. Crew.

These photos are from their March 20th show at Skully's. The lighting was especially low that night and was probably most challenging concert lighting I've ever encountered, so I'm glad I was able to end up with some OK photos.

Living in the same city as Joel (pictured in an earlier post on this blog) has given us plenty of chances to hang out. I've been going over to his friends Dan and Jessica's house lately, and this is one of their crazy dogs.

Dax had been staring at me in this pose for several minutes and, frankly, creeped me out a little, so of course I had to take a picture of him.

Out of the darkness...

This year's January-February-March dreariness seemed especially dark to me. It could be that this is the first year in a while that I've had more free time in that particular season, so I actually had time to notice how much of a bummer that weather is.

Now that it's May, though, I've noticed in my photos that I saw darkness more than it existed in reality. When I got the photos onto the computer, I tended to want to edit things with a red tint, and I was drawn to images of red things. Maybe I was trying to create warmth where I didn't see it in everyday life?

Anyway, the top two photos are of Natalie and me, respectively, as seen through a giant ball of string (proof of my habit of getting into crafts in the dregs of winter). The last is of the cup I fill with water every night and place on my headboard in case I wake up and get thirsty. I assume other people keep up this childhood comfort, too. I don't know why, but that washingtonpost.com cup just seems to make night-time water taste better.

Living in our new apartment means we live closer to Natalie's sister, who has visited a couple times. This means that we also live closer to Natalie's nephew and new niece, Cami, who stopped by about a week after we moved.

Natalie and I checked the mail before starting the big move-in to our new apartment. Earlier, we had talked about how great it would be that we wouldn't be sweaty and hot while moving furniture, but we hadn't realized there would be so much snow and ice to clear...

After getting dinner with her friend Courtney, Beth and I headed out on a Goodwill mission. I didn't buy anything, but I like imagining who actually DOES buy some things--I know the stuff ends up somewhere, because it's in the store one week and gone the next. What is your future, orphaned clown head?

My friends Ana, Carrie and Joel and I headed out to rural Nelsonville to the Pencil Sharpener Museum on a mini-adventure. Paul Johnson, the owner, has a collection of more than 8,000 sharpeners in his little museum beside his house. It was really fun getting to talk to him (you have to call him to come out and unlock the museum for you).

Natalie and I went apartment hunting last week. It was an eye-opening pain in the neck.

The other night, my friend Natalie and I went out to my sister's house in the country so that we could destroy her pristinely snowy hillside with silly little fireworks that Natalie's brother had given us.

Jackson finally got a respectable amount of snow, so Natalie and I celebrated it with a walk in the woods. We were looking for good sticks to use for a DIY jewelry stand I wanted to make.

I visited Athens over OU's winter break and stayed at my friend Drew's apartment there (his roommate was in her hometown, so I made use of her bed). One night, I turned some lights out and tried to head to bed, but he kept leaning into the dark hallway to show me videos of Diane Rehm, our favorite white-haired radio talk show host.