Fatsby

We took Gatsby for his yearly vet appointment yesterday. Turns out he’s a very healthy little guy with the exception of one thing: he’s fat.

Apparently the little porker has packed on an entire pound since this time last year. I’ve probably gained that much in the past day alone (I ate an offensive amount of spaghetti for dinner last night), but one pound is actually a lot when it counts for 1/6 of your body weight.

Clearly, Gatsby has really let himself go. Time to break out the doggy treadmill.

I plan on sitting him down tonight, giving him a pep talk and showing him this Super Bowl commercial for inspiration:

Does anyone else think that all the best Super Bowl commercials this year involved dogs? (Like this one!)

Lazy weekend

Yes, Will and I had a “game night” last weekend. We made this for dinner and played Monopoly.

Who won, you ask? Didn’t you see the blimp and sky-writing planes Will hired to broadcast his victory to the world because he’s so super humble? No?

Will also started teaching me how to play Risk, but my sleepiness/wine drinking/ADHD/lack of intelligence kicked in and shut my brain off before we actually got started.

And yesterday, we had a very small Super Bowl Puppy Bowl gathering at our apartment. It was really just an excuse for me to drink mimosas, which I realize is not a typical Super Bowl beverage, but I don’t care so you shut your mouth.

I’d say the crowning achievement of my weekend was successfully executing this recipe for mango avocado salsa. Even without the cilantro (Trader Joe’s was out) and the habanero chile (I don’t do spicy), it was really quite tasty, if I do say so myself.

February Photo a Day: 10 am

At 10 am this morning, I was drinking coffee and lamenting over the fact that none of the Jason Wu for Target clothes or accessories that came out today are available in my size online. NONE.

You know how excited I was about this.

Oh well. I don’t have time to sit here and stew (anymore). Some of our friends are coming over for the Super Bowl, so I must dry my tears, clean the apartment, take a shower and then drown my sorrows in a delicious mimosa.

(Please note that I am being overly dramatic. I promise I’m not crying over this. I’m not even really stewing. That much.)

February Photo a Day: A stranger

Let’s just get something out there: it’s really hard to take a picture on your phone in the city without feeling like a tourist or some sort of creep. And when you’re trying to take a picture of a stranger, that creep factor is amplified.

I nonchalantly snapped this photo of several strangers on the Merchandise Mart brown line platform on my way home from work last Thursday.

My rendition of “nonchalantly” means looking around furtively and quietly humming to myself. Which may not seem all that discreet to you, but public transportation is rampant with weirdos, so I blended right in.

I know it’s blurry, but I amped up the saturation a little, and it kind of looks a little like a painting, no?

Are you ready for some…

Puppies???

Puppies!!!

Yes, the Puppy Bowl is almost upon us! Only two more days until these little masters of growling and the gridiron toss around the pigskin and probably chew on it a little too.

By now, I’m sure you’ve perused the line-up and picked your favorites.

I’m quite partial to little Joni here:

Perhaps because she bears a slight resemblance to one Mr. Gatsby Bliss Irwin, The Cutest Dog in the World.

But I also have a soft spot in my heart for Shiloh:

According to her stats, she’s read all of the Harry Potter books! I’m impressed. Even I didn’t have the stamina for that (I stopped after the first one).

May the best puppy prevail!

February Photo a Day: Words

So the inspiration for today is “words?”

Oh, I GOT this one. Words are my job. I make words my b!tch! (You know, because I’m an editor/copywriter. And sorry if you’re offended by my censored language. Being this bad-ass makes me a little uncomfortable. Now I feel the need to end this post with a smiley face.)

🙂

Read about the February Photo a Day challenge here.

A pair of Paris stories

Over the course of the past few days, I finished reading The Paris Wife and finally got to see Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (thanks to my friend Liz and her very well-timed Netflix arrival!).

Since both of these stories are about the expatriate writers and artists in 1920s Paris (Hemingway, Pound, Stein, The Fitzgeralds, etc.), I feel like I’ve been immersed in that  period with those people and it’s been a grand time, old sport!

Just as I suspected, I loved Midnight in Paris. Love, love, love, love. LOVE! (Please let me know if you require more emphasis in order to truly understand how much I liked this movie.) It was fun and beautiful and I felt like I could relate to the perception that the “golden age” is always in the past and how it feels like previous eras are always better than the present. I used to wish I had lived in the 1960s until I came to the conclusion that I’m probably too uptight to have participated in any of the fun stuff of that era anyway. (wah-wah)

I liked The Paris Wife too, but not enough to warrant any annoyingly repetitive exclamations of love. It was really interesting, but I didn’t like the narrator (Ernest Hemingway’s first wife) all that much – she didn’t seem like the type of woman Ernest would actually have fallen in love with. And even though it’s based on a true story, a lot of it just didn’t seem believable. Maybe because I couldn’t relate to their artistic, jet-setting lifestyle. Has anyone else read it and felt the same way? I will say that I really loved the ending and would still recommend reading it.

But here’s the thing – now I really want to go back to Paris. LIKE RIGHT NOW. And that’s probably not going to happen. I also would really love a chocolate croissant, which is a bit more feasible.

Ahh, c’est la vie…

Images from here and here.