No Rex for Luis

Today was one of those days where I expected to be full of things to do, but in the end I did something approaching nothing. Indeed, I did catch up on a bit of blogging, I did take care of some email correspondence that was backing up, and I went shopping and cooked a little bit. On the other hand, I also wasted a lot of time.

To begin with, I got home at 7am, which meant that I was sort of blinking my eyes around midday. I finally got myself together around 13h00 and dragged myself in front of my computer. After being productive for a little while, I discovered this website called Glath. This thing is magical. It's essentially a consolidator of links to video-hosting sites that provide TV shows. At this point, it's mostly animation (which is TOTALLY my bag), which means that I've caught up with the most recent episodes of Drawn Together, South Park, Moral Orel, and Robot Chicken. I've reviewed and admired Clone High, and I've discovered Metalocalypse. Needless to say, this sucked many many hours out of my day (as it will yours if you're TV-less like me).

Sometime in the afternoon, I sauntered out and hit the grocery store. At first, I was only getting some more Diet Coke (or coca light as they call it here), but the lines were so long, I just decided to shop around for a few more things I needed. Not surprisingly, a couple of bars of chocolate made their way into my basket. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity in line, I made my way home.

I had some penne that needed to be finished in order to make room for the rotini I bought, so I set that to boil and pulled out the duck breast I had bought the day before. It still had the skin on (which meant there was a fair bit of flavourful duckfat hidden in there), and the flesh was an amazingly dark red. I melted a mix of butter and oil, browned both sides of the breast, and then set it to pan-fry over medium heat, covered. Once a fair bit of fat had been released, I dumped in about 3/4 cup of my mango salsa and mixed it into the molten fat, letting the sugars in the mango turn the whole thing into a glaze. Once that was done, I took out the breast, sliced it up nicely, and then tossed the pasta into the pan with the mango-duckfat glaze and tossed them together. All in all, a very satisfying meal. I was amazed, however, at how much blood was sitting in that duck's breast. Clearly, this was not halal meat. Even though the duck meat was only slightly pink at the centre (I prefer it that way, to preserve some moisture), it created it's own little red puddle in the dish as it waited for the pasta.

At about this point in the evening, I was still planning to go out to the Rex to catch Gaiser, which I had been planning to do all week. I had felt tired and lethargic all day, but I was hoping that this meal (plus a lot of caffeine) would give me the energy to go back out tonight. Not so much. I ate, watched a couple more episodes of cartoons on Glath, and then packed up and headed to bed. I tried to imagine myself changing my clothes, getting on the subway, dealing with the lines inside and outside the Rex, paying an exorbitant amount of money for tiny drinks, and I finally decided that it didn't sound like fun. Nonetheless, here's the flyer for the event; let's just pretend I went.

Clubbing, Take Two: Mind the Gap at Batofar

Well first, the pre-clubbing (which was pretty substantial):

After sleeping in a bit, I was dragged out of bed (on my day off, I might add) by a rather persistent WiFi problem (read: impatient student). Since I wanted to go to the market anyway, I put myself together, hopped in the shower, and headed out the door. I took care of the WiFi issue and then headed off to the market. I was sidelined at the door by the front desk staff; apparently, there had been some significant issues with guest policies, so I needed to send out a "refresher" email to the students. After hashing everything out with the staff, I finally went to market.

Today, I was checking out the open-air marché at Place des Fêtes, two métro stations away from my place. This one was a fair bit bigger than the one I visited last Saturday at Télégraphe; I counted at least 9 green grocers, 5 butchers, 3 fishmongers, 3 cheese-mongers, about 10 assorted clothing and/or leather goods stalls, a few book sellers, and a handful of specialty vendors. One of the vendors at which I spent an unexpected amount of money was a "Mediterranean specialty" booth. I saw that the vendor had at least 20 varieties of olive preparations, so I asked for a bit of his spicy Catalan olives. Shrewd salesman as he was, he gave me tastings of his almond-stuffed olives while serving me up my order. I got handful of those as well, and he gave me a tasting of his garlic-stuffed ones. I got the garlic-stuffed ones, and he gave me some of his cheese-stuffed ones. I stopped there, noticing a disturbing trend. I also asked him for skordaliá (σκορδαλιά), but he apparently didn't make it. On the other hand, he did have a fresh cheese and garlic spread that was just as good. That plus a half-dozen dolmas, and I was on my way. I stopped at a nearby butcher to get a beautiful-looking duck breast and a paupiette of rabbit meat.

Despite the temptation, I didn't get any fish that day. All of it looked fantastic, but I knew I wouldn't get around to cooking it that night and it seemed like a bad idea to buy such wonderfully fresh fish, only to let it age in my fridge. I did, however, find and buy some ripe mangoes (FINALLY). The mangoes were from Perú (natch), and I picked out the 3 squishiest ones I could. They were probably overripe for eating fresh, but they were perfect for making my mango+jalapeño salsa). And, of course, I bought some pains au chocolat from the baker.

I headed back home, dropped off the pains au chocolat with the front desk staff (for their troubles) and went upstairs to eat some olives and make the salsa. The mangoes could've been sweeter (i.e., those "champagne" mangoes that come from Manila...mmm!), but they were still far superior to anything I had found in Paris before. I added a bit of orange flower water along with my usual ingredients and stuck it in the fridge to marinate. Then, it was off to my laptop to do some blogging.

One of my colleagues had invited me to go see a play that evening, and I got an email from her inviting me to have dinner at her place before heading out. I got dressed (very smartly, I might add) and headed off for dinner, bringing some of the olives and dolmas with me as my contribution to dinner. After dinner, we headed off to the Théâtre National de la Colline to see the Enzo Cormann play L'Autre.

As the title might suggest (trans. "The Other"), this play is pretty indebted to psychoanalytic theory, particularly that of Lacan. While the play mostly stayed away from explicit psychoanalytic theory, the frequent and lengthy musings on the nature of the Other got a bit tiring. Also, large parts of the play seemed like a far more self-serious rehash of Themla & Louise, but in this case it's hot killer lesbians that get away with it (apparently). There was even the cliché'd "breaking the fourth wall" moment at the end, where the two actors address the audience; how radical! I'm overwhelmed with the desire to conduct a sit-in at a mirror shop.

Once the play finished, I headed back home, changed into something more club-appropriate, and headed back out, timing myself to catch the last train (a bit unwise: I nearly missed my connection in Châtelet).

Cabanne & Agnès, Noé, Frankie @ Batofar: Mind the Gap

23h30-02h30: Frankie? Noé!

Thanks to wok in the comments for clearing up the identities of these two DJs! The names have been corrected in the rest of this post.
OK, I think this was Frankie spinning, but I can't be sure. Nobody I asked seemed to know who he was, but based on the profiles of all the other artists that night on Mind the Gap's website (as well as the featured label, minibar music), and the one black-and-white picture on his own record label's website (Frankie Rec.), I've decided that this was most likely Frankie. Either way, he spun a pretty clickity-clackity microhouse set, although the offbeat hi-hats were almost entirely missing. Most of the tracks he selected made use of the syncopation and slightly loose timing that gives house it's "feel," but the characteristic "BOOM tsk BOOM tsk" was absent. You can get a feel for it from the brief video I took of Noé's set. Ironically, the images I get from the crappy video setting often comes out better than what I get from snapping pictures. I'm still figuring out how to get the exposure just right. Sigh...

Oh, and here'a quick peek at the stage from the back, near the bar:

02h30-04h00: Cabanne & Agnès (live)

Cabanne

Cabanne and Agnès' live set was less clicky and more poundy. Although the high-end complexity was still there, the bass was heavier (unfortunately, it's totally undetectable in the recording below) and had a more forward-driving groove. Instead of the slightly slippery play between the timing of strong and weak beats, everything tended to flow more regularly, the beats subdividing symmetrically.

Agnès

The forward flow came from the the bass kick drums would "fill" the space between beats--usually beast 3 and 4. It's somewhat unusual for the bass kick (the lowest percussive sample in most tracks) to appear on subdivisions of the beat. The result (for me, at least) is this momentary feeling of being pushed forward (i.e. the bass arrived a half-beat too early) and then snapping back into time. It's particularly noticeable when I'm dancing; with this genre of music, I'm used to having strong bass beats coincide with the beginning and end-points of my dance moves, so it's striking to have a bass kick run through my body as I'm in the middle of a smooth, continuous motion (like a body wave, or a shift of balance between feet).

Anyway, check out this short video below. Unfortunately, the bass kick wasn't picked up...but the modified clave pattern was! (You could argue this is a modified bell pattern instead, but it's about the same distance from both.)

04h00-6h00: Noé Frankie!

Frankie's set was a bit less intense than the previous ones, which I found rather refreshing. DJs tend to constantly try to one-up the previous performer, which sometimes results in an exhausted dancefloor trying to keep up with a manic DJ at 6am. One interesting thing I noticed was that Frankie would occasionally slow down a track ever so slightly while it was playing. It was almost as if he was about to mix in a slower track and he preferred to change the speed of the current track rather than the upcoming one. Either way, the effect was kind of neat, since he didn't overdo it. His set overall was pretty tech-house-y. I think it would still fall under the broad banner of "minimale" here in Paris, but the sound to my ears was not so much minimal as straightforward techno with house sensibilities (minus the vocals).

Once 5h30 rolled around, I took the deterioration of Noé's beatmatching as a sign that I needed to leave. I collected my jacket and sauntered off to the nearest métro station. When I got to my neighborhood, my usual boulangerie wasn't open (they close on Saturdays), but I walked a couple of blocks away to another boulangerie and got myself a baguette, a pain au chocolat and an orange juice. As I sauntered into the boulangerie, I saw the customer in front of me take the last pain au chocolat on the shelf. I asked the baker glumly, "There's none left?" To which he replied "Of course! They're just back here." At which point he walked to the back of the shop, and returned with a hot metal baking tray, filled with freshly baked pains au chocolat. In retrospect, I should've bought the whole tray; the experience of eating oven-fresh pastries is always foodgasmic. I would've eaten them all at once, too...

Juicy Argentine Beef, Research & Clubbing

[Sorry I've been so behind on the bloggin'! I don't have any particularly good excuse, except that I've been both busy and lazy.]

So, sometime yesterday one of my colleagues started chatting with me about what sort of music I was working on for my dissertation and what kind of people I was trying to make contact with. Then, she said, "I have this friend who's a promoter of electronic music events, do you want me to put you in contact?" DING! Trying my best not to sound like an over-eager stalker (so much of fieldwork is like courtship), I said something like, "YES!...I mean, um, why that would be lovely, thank you." My colleague emailed her friend shortly afterward, I was to find out today if her friend was amenable to being contacted by me.

So today I got the green light from my colleague, along with an email address, and I spent a good hour or so agonizing over the wording of my opening email (again with the comparisons to courtship). It's hard enough to write an opening "researcher to potential consultant" letter in your mother tongue, but it's even more difficult in another language. For example, I had to decide whether to use a formal address (i.e., vous, 2nd person plural) or informal (tu, 2nd personal singular). Eventually I went with the informal, but that then posed a problem of letter closings; pretty much any correspondence in French that involves a degree of professionalism requires a formal letter closing, but French letter closings are unbelievably stuffy and formulaic. For example, a common one translates into "I beseech you, dear madam, to agree to my most distinguished salutations." That doesn't work well with an informal address. On the other hand, a formal letter closing communicates that the recipient is important enough to merit one. In the end, I ditched the formal closings for an informal one that bordered on presumptuous, taking the risk that she would not mind being addressed as a friend, since we were put in contact through a mutual friend.

Of course, that says nothing about the agony of summarizing your PhD project in a way that's both concise and non-pompous on one hand, but also interesting and non-condescending on the other. And how do you phrase "I'd really like to exploit you for my project" in a way that doesn't sound like, well, exploitation? Like it or not (and here's another courtship/erotics comparison) fieldwork involves a lot of asking people you've just met to agree to give you a form of companionship in exchange for little more than the experience of having done it. This is especially true in popular music studies, I think; no Parisian DJ or promoter is going to think their career is going to take off after being featured in some overseas dissertation. Ultimately, I went with something that I hope was honest, but not too off-putting: "I work on this topic that is really close to what you do, so I was wondering if you'd be interested in chatting with me and showing me what you do." Or something to that effect in French.

After finishing that letter and staying late for a bit (I got to work late in the morning), I headed home and got ready for this evening. Greg and I had a date for hot Argentine beef at Unico, and then off to the Rex to see Vitalic perform. Unico is this Argentinian parillada (a purist "BBQ") restaurant that won "best latino steakhouse" on LeFooding.com (they sort of make up their own categories). Le Fooding is this back-to-dining movement that seeks to revitalize Parisian dining, but with an emphasis on cheap, innovative and tasty (i.e., the foody equivalent of the search for an authentic "underground" scene). Their selections are often great, although I find their reviews are often cringe-worthy confections of romantic purple prose and authenticity-porn. It's like they hired an American comedian doing a bad and rather bigoted impression of a French food critic.

Anyway, off we went to Unico. One of the greatest things about this place (aside from the food, of course), is the décor. Unfortunately, the photo available from the review of the resto is dark and doesn't really display the restaurant's interior very well (although it captures the ambiance). The place is a garish mix of 70's-era mod design, apparently partially left over from an old butcher-shop. One corner is wallpapered with a green-yellow-white serialist design of iconic wineglass shapes in various rotations. Teardrop-shaped orange blown-glass lamps hang from the ceiling, and the chairs are straight-up Eames (Carla, you'd love this place!). Near the kitchen, there's a nearly-pornographic black-and-white picture of a man's torso+crotch, in case you had any doubts about the waitstaff. All in all, a thing to see.

The menu was concise in the most wonderful way. There are four entrées (appetizers): ceviche, empanadas, salad, guacamole (all with various garnishes and such). There are four choices for main dish: steak, steak, steak and steak--actually it's for different cuts of steak increasing in price from 19€ to 24€. There's three options for sides with the meat: potatoes, vegetables, salad. And then there's four dessert options (I forget). 10/10 (or 20/20 in French) for menu design. If you made it past the cow-anatomy print on the front window, you're here for the meat, so this menu does a great job of slimming down choice while maximizing quality (i.e., fewer options means faster turnover of sauces and cold preparations in the kitchen).

The wine list was the opposite, running pretty much the entire gamut of Argentine wine. After spending ages thinking about and selecting a wine, our decision evaporated when the waiter told us that he could offer us a 2002 of a particular Malbec wine for the price of the 2005 (i.e., 19€). Sold!

Needless to say, the food was fantastic. I had a ceviche to start, which was prepared like a Peruvian tiradito (thin slices) of tuna, with a little shot-glass of lime juice on the side. Greg had empanadas, which were also fantastically delicious, were it not for the fact that I was mesmerized by the ceviche.

The meat was certainly the main attraction here (thus the title of this post). I got this massive square slab of beef, seared to dark-brown on all sides, spooging with blood in the centre (I asked for mine "bloody"), soft like butter, and with a little sprinkle of salt on top. For those who are not a fan of barely-cooked beef, Greg's steak was reportedly delicious as well, and his was cooked to medium-rare. But I do think that well-done would be a waste of a perfectly good cut of meat, in this case. Creutzfelt-Jakob Disease be damned.

Greg and I shared dessert, which was a banana rolled in crisp pastry and fried, with three of the world's smallest alfajores. The alfajores were a bit different from the Peruvian variety I'm used to; the cookies were made of a sort of puffy pastry (rather than shortbread) and the filling was closer to dulce de leche, rather than manjar blanco.

As we waited for our bill, Greg pointed out a distinct downside to this place: bo-ho fashion crimes. Now that this place has been listed on LeFooding, the place has apparently become irresistible for the bo-bo (bohemian-bourgeois) dumpster-chic crowd. Greg alerted me to a woman, preparing to leave, who had jeans with symmetrical tears just under each asscheek, a gold lamé fannypack, a hoodie, and oversized smoked-glass sunglasses. It was as if Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen moved to Paris. Anyway, we got our bill, chatted in Spanish and Portuguese (BR) with the waiter, and dashed for the door. It was already 00h30 (our reservation was at 22h00), and we wanted to make it to the Rex before the métro stopped running.

After a brief stop by Greg's place, we headed over to the Rex. Of course, we should've known. Vitalic is a bit of a hometown hero in Paris, and everybody and their dog had shown up (on a Thursday night, no less) to see him. The lineup seemed pretty long when we got there, but my experience has been that lines at the Rex tend to move quickly. This line, however, wasn't going anywhere. We got there at about 1h30, and stood in line till about 2h30, with no discernible change in place. For a while, we were moving forward because the crowd was getting impatient and pressing in, but we weren't going anywhere. From the snippets of yelling I overheard when the security guards finally lost their tempers, it sounded like the place had already been at capacity when we arrived, and they were running on a "one out, one in" policy. In the meanwhile, Greg was doing a valiant job defending our spot in line against line-cutters. Once it became clear that we had already missed most of Vitalic's set, we threw our hands in the air (not waving them like we just don't care) and headed home.

SOLDES!! and Canadian Bars

So, this morning I was waiting for the bus to get to work and I noticed that a woman near me was wearing a black jacket with a white maple leaf on the back. I got a bit closer, and noticed the following in badly-silkscreened lettering: "Enjoy the relaxing lifestyle of Canadian nature."

Wow.

I really wanted to sneak a picture of the back of her jacket, but I was at the bus stop with a crowd of people, and I would've looked really creepy, snapping a picture of the back of a middle-aged woman's body in public. So you'll just have to believe me when I say I wasn't making this up.

After work, I headed over to the grands magasins, such as Printemps and Galeries Lafayette. Why? Because there's:

SOLDES!!!! SOLDES SOLDES SOLDES SOLDES SOLDES

...or at least that's what all the ads around town have been saying. In fact, the Galeries Lafayette ads say "Soldissimes," which sort of translates into "super-soldes." Anyway, soldes is a French word for "sale." The grands magasins of Paris (Printemps, Galeries Lafayette, BHV, Samaritaine, Le Bon Marché) tend to have their sales at the same time, and the January sales here are similar to Boxing Week in Canada or Black Friday in the States. Everyone is getting rid of their holiday stock, so you encounter some pretty amazing sales.

I partially just went to see the human drama that is sale-shopping in France. It's consumerism as blood-sport. In Printemps, people were diving through bins of t-shirts, clutching their favorites to their chest; in the shoe department, people were clustering around the wearied workers, trying on anything that would fit, while the Prada shoes salespeople, with their "not on sale" sign, were left untouched. I managed to be completely unimpressed by what was on sale. Sure, there were some nice things, but generally the nice things weren't on sale. It was the first day of the post-holiday sales and I couldn't find anything to catch my attention.

Also: what's up with Levi's jeans in Europe? I mean, I always heard about how jeans in general are so much more expensive here, but Levi's jeans are NOT luxury items in North America (and they're viewed as the basic, cheap, non-label), but in Paris there was a whole section devoted to Levis jeans, right next to Diesel (and at similar prices). It's mad, I tell you. Besides, nobody's ass looks good in Levi's.

Anyway, I had better luck in Galeries Lafayette. There were some nice scarves on the main floor (alas, all cashmere and zillions of dollars) and a few nice ties. I eventually got a set of 3 really cute ties from the Nodus booth. I think I have more ties than I do shirts at this moment. I had made it upstairs and was chuckling away in the men's underwear department (it's hilarious to watch 9-5 businessmen shopping for thongs as if it were no big deal), when an announcement came on saying that the store was closing. It was only 8pm! Nonetheless, everybody made a dash for the cashiers. In total non-North American retail practice, all the salespeople started to walk up and down the aisles, telling people to wrap it up and get out. If ONLY we had been allowed to say that to customers when I was working in retail. When I was in retail, you booked at least an hour after work to wait for the final stragglers to leave and close up the shop. The woman who accosted me in the underwear department already had her purse over her shoulder, ready to head for the door.

After all of that mess, I headed over to the "other" Canadian bar (they're both owned by the same company), The Moose. The place is a short walk from the Odéon métro stop, on a small side street. The bar itself is pretty straightforward, doing their best to present an (anglophile) Canadian pub. The menu had standard pub-grub, Moosehead on tap (not my favourite, but alright) and a series of Unibroue beers in the bottle (Maudite, Fin du Monde, Trois Pistoles). Of course, they also had hockey on the TVs. What did I do? I got a Fin du Monde, a big bowl of poutine, and I watched the game. Beauty, eh? Fer sure.

The bar itself was rather OK. The poutine was recognizably poutine, but they used grated cheese instead of fresh cheese curds. Meh. Also, the staff hiring policy was obviously "grumpy quebecois hippies or breast-enabled anglophones only." For whatever reason, the bartender kept on slamming his hand on the bar to punctuate phrases. I don't think he was doing it consciously, but it made my beer froth up. Also, the crowd was mostly French people, treating the place like a French Bar. That is, huddled in tight groups around tables, talking only to themselves.

One poutine and two beers later, I headed home and settled in. I managed to finally get the new memory installed into my laptop (see yesterday). Although I was a bit nervous as I did it, the new memory worked fine and my computer ran a fair bit faster. The change is most noticeable in startup times; the OS loads quicker and my programs open in 2-3 seconds. Also, content-heavy webpages load a bit more smoothly. All in all, I'm very happy I finally got around to it!

Infotech-shopping with "les chinois"

At 9am, the buzzer on my door went off, signaling that the femme de ménage (cleaning lady) had arrived to clean my studio. One of the slightly ambivalent perks of staying in the care of the University of Chicago is that they pay the residence an additional sum so that the cleaning staff do a weekly cleaning of the student's apartments. However, it's not a full-service cleaning. They will come and mop the floors, wipe down the kitchen and bathroom surfaces, dust your table/desk--but you're expected to tidy up before they arrive. So the night they visit is always a late night of doing dishes, putting crap away, and generally clearing space. I had taken care of all of that last night, but I got to bed late. This, combined with the cleaning staff's tendency to arrive early in the morning, made for a rude awakening. I ran to my door, threw on a bathrobe (before she let herself in with her skeleton key) and asked her politely-but-groggily to give me 5 minutes. She headed down the hall to take care of another room, and I quickly threw on some clothes and went downstairs to grab a coffee while she took care of my room.

My day at work was wonderfully quiet, especially compared to the day before. I spent a bit of time towards the end of my day planning to head over to rue montgallet to buy some more memory for my computer. Rue montgallet is this street in the 12th arrondissement that seems entirely interchangeable with every other chinatown-computer district I've ever been in. As you can see from the pics below, the stores all have the same "EVERYTHING IS ON SALE!", wallpaper-the-window-with-signs approach. What's even more interesting is that most of the shop owners have put together an online meta-store, rue-montgallet.com, where you can search for a specific item and compare the prices across stores. Of course, you'll notice that there is a bit of fine print saying that the quoted prices aren't a guarantee of actual prices (i.e., you may have to argue to get them to honour their prices), but at least you save yourself some time, since there are nearly a hundred little shops that all look like this:

Thanks for pics mostly to Florian's Blog.

I headed over there after work, with the precise model of memory I needed in one hand, and a list of stores and their alleged prices in another. The first store I went to said they would have the stock "in an hour" and the part would cost about 20€ more than listed ("oh, but it has a warranty!"), so I headed over to the next store on my list. They had what I needed for a more reasonable price, so I took care of it and headed home.

I got home all excited to install the memory in my laptop, but came to the realization that I didn't have a screwdriver small enough to get at the tiny little screws that hold the metal plate over the computer memory. !@#$ !! Ah well, I'll drop by work tomorrow and borrow their tools.

For dinner, I had passed by my boulangerie and picked up a pain tradition, which looks like a half-baguette, and is sort of the purist's bread--French law states that you can only sell bread under that name if the ingredients are flour, water, salt, leavnening and nothing more. I was in luck; the bread had just come out of the oven. I it was really, really hard not to eat the thing on the way home (I did have a nibble). When I got home, I threw together a leftover-sandwich, with some raclette cheese, some rillets, some little pickles, dijon mustard and mayo (it was a very French sandwich). I had also intended to make a salad and heat up some leftover lentils, but the sandwich was so filling, I couldn't eat anything else. Hooray for eating! I had been eating pretty light this past week, so I didn't feel too bad about tonight's dinner. However, tomorrow must be a salad day...

"Get Crap Done" Day

My plan for the day was as follows: breeze through a truncated day at work (Mondays are my "light" days for very good reasons (see yesterday), head straight home, clean up, do the dishes, finally put away the crap I brought back from vacation, settle my Xmas credit card bills, transfer money to my French and Canadian bank accounts, and answer all my outstanding email.

However, there was a wrench thrown into my plans, which came in the form of a voice message on my cell phone as I got out of the shower. There was a student waiting for me at work with a substantial computer problem that was probably going to require taking apart the laptop. Now, the time has come for me to put the lid back on my work-related blogging, so I'll just say that the problem could've been much worse, but nonetheless I was at work for nearly twice as long as I had expected. Oy!

I raced home, stopping by the grocery store to get some fixings for a salad, and then headed off home. I managed to take care of a great deal of the things on my list, but I was up into the wee hours of the evening, putting crap away and washing dishes. Alas, my day wasn't particularly exciting, but there was a certain satisfaction to getting my apartment back in order, especially because I left it in a bit of a mess when I departed for the holidays.

Ouchie

Ow! After going out on Saturday and getting home as the sun was coming up, I was--to put it lightly--a bit tender. I slept in until some ungodly hour past lunch, and then rolled out of bed, fixed myself some leftovers, and spent the rest of the day toiling away at my blog post for the previous night.

All in all, it was actually a pretty decent day. I was still sleeping off the effects of last week as a whole, so it was nice to have a day to just stop, sit around, and get a bit of contemplative work done. But then monday came along...