If you think about it, the holiday newsletter was the original blog and so it makes complete sense that I write one here in order to recap my year and to ensure that people don’t delete this blog from their feed or bookmarks or what have you. You people keep me alive.

Now it quickly became clear that the alcohol is not only slowly destroying my liver, but my brain cells have completely deteriorated. Since I haven’t been faithfully blogging daily with my various cute little exploits, I did what any sane person would do and checked my Google Calendar to figure out just what in the heck I did in 2009. And thus, a recap of my year:

January – This seemed to be a pretty tame month. Apparently I went to the eye doctor several times.  Also I went to Belgium but since I still wear the glasses I got at the eye doctor and I completely forgot I went to Belgium during this calendar year, I guess the eye doctor wins. (Belgium was awesome btw. See photos of that expedition here.) On the way back from Belgium we saw Rihanna in our mobile lounge at Dulles airport. I knew it was Rihanna because she acted like a bitch to everyone who spoke with her. The day after we got back I walked two miles down to the Mall to watch Obama’s inauguration, where I stood by the Washington Monument and took pictures and froze to death all by myself in the name of making history. Then I came home and made lasagna. I guess January was pretty sweet.

Obama Swears In

February – I clearly blocked the crappy months filled with schoolwork since February is a complete blip. I started the spring semester AND training for my 10k. There were a series of birthday parties and apparently I went on something I called a “non-Restaurant Week dinner”.  Of course, the major highlight is that this is the month I got my bike from my friend Rachel in Charlottesville, and then proceeded to ride it exactly 5 times during the rest of 2009. It’s really proven to be a cost-effective purchase.

Foggy Bruges

March – Surely I’m forgetting stuff right? As far as I can tell, in March I ran a 5k. I also highlighted my school’s spring break period in my calendar which is ridiculous since I didn’t go anywhere and I still had to go to work anyway so the entire week was exactly the same except I didn’t have class that one day. I must’ve been desperate to put something on my schedule.

April – April was really big. In addition to a couple doctors appointments, I got my haircut.  Do not underestimate how huge this event is. THIS IS THE ONLY HAIRCUT I HAD IN 2009.  I’m not even sure how a normal human goes nine months without a haircut.  I meant to get another one around July/August and it just never happened and it all sort of compounded with being super busy this fall and next thing you know we’re a week away from New Year’s and no haircut on the horizon.  Based on my Google Calendar here are other activities I did in 2009 more times than the number of times I got my haircut in 2009:

• Went to a Nationals game (3x)
• Charity races (3x)
• Visited Grandma in Tampa, Florida (3x)
• Visited Europe (2x)
• Attended weddings (3x)
• Headed out west (2x)
• Went to NYC (2x)

New Year’s Resolution 2010 #1: Get a haircut.

May – The beginning of The Summer of Arlene! Now we’re getting somewhere. I had a very stressful end of spring semester wherein I completely choked through a presentation, worked my ass off on an indexing project from hell, raced 6 miles, attended two big weddings for dear friends and then slept for two weeks before….

View from Neuschwanstein Castle

June – And Germany! Back to Europe with my friend Marc to feast on sausages, beer, spagel and to meet a bunch of American frat boys.  Remember when going to Europe was very bohemian and artistic? Those people must be doing their summers abroad elsewhere these days.  Thankfully we returned from Germany without having murdered the other person or carried home bedbug stragglers. Success! Upon returning I had to present a paper at a conference, and then I visited NYC and ate bo ssam, and then I turned a year older and then I started running a lot, maybe to make the pain go away. Yes.

Cheezin It Up at the Top of the Rock

July – I took a long trip down to sticky humid Tampa Florida to hang with my grandma.  I nearly burned my finger off trying to entertain her with sparklers. I continued to run and also began eating and growing a distended belly to hold all the food I needed to eat in order to simply feel full. Let this be a lesson to all of you. Running makes you fat.

August – I took a very short online course which was misery, I can’t talk about it lest I go on a terrible tirade and directly name the professor on this blog and get in trouble. Basically August sucked.

September – To make myself feel better, and because I had to, I took a week off from work and went to Hawaii with my beau. The exciting part for me was driving through my old little town, seeing my old school and eating manapua. I suppose the scuba diving and giant mountains and warm beach were nice too. Also during this period I began the hardest class of my life. PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE.

Sunset Beach, North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii

October – I cried about learning programming language and then I ran ten miles. My mom had hip replacement surgery. We argued about which was more painful.

November – More programming language, lots of birfdays, Thanksgiving and final projects. ZZZzzzz.

The Cells of Alcatraz

December – Well it’s not over yet but this month was dedicated to procrastinating, then actually completing, and finishing my final projects, thus ending my graduate school career with the bestowing of a master’s degree. I will never, ever, ever do that again. Also I went to San Francisco, my new favorite place in America where I had the best thing I’ve ever eaten: pork belly slider with aioli and kimchee. Then I came home and it snowed a lot and I bought everyone crappy Christmas presents. Then I sat down to write this letter, then I stopped for the day and started writing it again the next day and eventually I managed to pound it out. Then I did some cleaning and made some peanut butter blossom cookies and did you know you really should take that “1 inch” rule about the dough balls really seriously because I started off with these humongous cookies with a speck of a hershey kiss in the center when, in reality, a perfect peanut butter blossom has a 1:1 cookie to hershey kiss ratio and I keep forgetting that in addition to buying gifts I have to wrap them too, where in the heck am I going to find wrapping paper…..

All in all, I think 2009 was pretty damn successful. I’m most happy to have shared it with all of you fine people.  ♪ You are the sunshine of my life ♪ yeah ♫ That’s why I’ll always be arooounnd

Happy Holidays from Arlene and Gummi!

me: is it tacky of me to ask for something for Christmas?
boy: yes.
me: okay, i won’t say anything.

[silence]

me: I want the momofuku cookbook.

I long ago realized that buying anything for certain people, like your boyfriend, your mom, your boss, and literally everyone else on the planet is a giant pain in the ass because they are impossible to please and they usually buy whatever they want during the normal course of their life, like any normal person with a credit card would do. So my gift to you this year is to tell you exactly what I want to make your holiday shopping easier.  Please e-mail me to get my correct address for delivery.

The Momofuku Cookbook. I’ll pretty much take any cookbook ever but I’ll be really touched if you did some research on quality, unique ones.

A dutch oven. I really don’t care what brand so long as it is made of enameled cast-iron, of substantial size and not known for shoddy construction.  I would prefer to get one in a…quieter….color but it’s not like anything in my kitchen matches anything else so that’s sort of a non-issue.

Kiehls Creme de Corp. I bought this last year and used it up through the winter and I effing love this stuff. Unfortunately I also seem to have acquired the cheap gene and can’t bring myself to buy it again. Please ensure I have moist baby soft skin this winter! Heh, moist.

Miss Dior Cherie.  I’m actually not a huge perfume wearer but I think it’s classy to have on hand and I really liked this scent when I got a free sample from Sephora. Curse them and their clever marketing strategies.  Let’s be honest, I can barely remember what it smelled like. All I know as I liked it and it didn’t send me into a sneezing fit when I put it on. And the bottle is pretty.

These Frye engineer boots. I’ve been obsessing over these all autumn and effectively talked myself out of them.  I barely even want them anymore. BUY THEM FOR ME. Size 8.5. Brown.

Workout gear, particularly stuff for running outdoors in the winter.  I’m (stupidly) doing the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler in April which means almost all the important training is done in the depths of winter. This is coinciding with canceling my gym membership. And I know absolutely nothing about workout clothes. 90% of my sports bras were $10 from Modell’s house brand. They are crap. I have nothing to run in the rain. Nothing for my ears, head or hands. I need workout gear. I linked to lululemon because I couldn’t think of a single activewear brand; I read about it in New York magazine once. Please, someone do this for me. I don’t have the brain capacity for it.

A full length mirror. Like a huge one, the kind you find in loft apartments. I’m embarrassed to say this but there is no full length mirror in my house.  I have not once left my apartment knowing what my shoes look like in relation to the rest of my clothing (except of course, as I imagine it to look in my head). Does this effectively prove I’m not a female?

Liquor. And I don’t mean bottles of Stoli, Bacardi and Maker’s but a well-curated collection of base cocktails for having some fun with cocktail experiements.

Kitchenaid Stand Mixer Pasta Attachments.  I’ll make you homemade pasta. Nuff said.

Now if you’re really looking to splurge and blow some serious dough on my precious self (and I know you just love seeing me grin from ear-to-ear), here are some big ticket items I really really really want. Really.

• Nikon 10-24mm AF-S lens. drool.
• Set of stainless steel cookware. Fine, I’ll say it. All-Clad.
• $1000 gift certificate to a reputable framing place. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH FRAMES COST!? It’s thievery.
• The best humidifier on the planet. I hate winter air and humidifiers are expensive. The one I want probably hasn’t even been invented yet so you’ll be dropping a lot of dough on R&D, patent lawyers and that sort of thing. But you’ll stand to make millions! Time’s a wasting, better get to work. Chop Chop.

And thus we end what a Christmas list looks like when someone suddenly becomes very cheap and practical and lives in an apartment with no storage space.  Is this list boring? Someone give me new, exciting things to cover!

For those of you agonizing over it (all none of you, because who do I know in high school?), allow me to demonstrate what happens to you less than a decade out of high school.

friend: do you remember how many classes we had to take in high school? was it 6 or 7 classes?
me: um. let’s see. we had four periods a day and a rotating schedule.
me: wait. am i getting this right? omg i don’t remember school
friend: i don’t either! it was block scheduling. i think you’re right. we had 8 periods and 7 classes. 4 classes one day, 3 the next.
me: right, that’s what i’m thinking. although…what was the 8th period used for? i don’t remember having any sort of study hall.
friend: hell if i know. oh wait i was a TA!
me: me too, but I was a TA instead of taking math (Ed note: 10 years later, you still don’t need math kids! you can be a librarian like me!). let me think about this. first period: spanish. second period…….
friend: TA was first period for me. that’s all i can remember.
me: i’m fairly certain i had english after lunch but i don’t know if that’s the first or second afternoon period. WHAT OTHER CLASSES DID I TAKE. physics!
friend: physics was junior year.
me: oh. maybe it was chemistry?
friend: GERMAN. that was my 8th class.
me: so i know i started with spanish then…government?
friend: i now remember all 8.
me: great. I remember 4 of the 8 of the periods I had senior year. what the hell did i do in place of math? omg was it marketing? fucking sports marketing! THAT’S HOW I WASTED HIGH SCHOOL.
friend: lol. i remember that class (as in, it was the easy one).  getting high school transcripts is such a fucking mess. i just spoke to mrs. wheeler.
me: who was she?
friend: the school counselor.

I still haven’t identified the final 8th period of senior year. I blame it on grad school.

A while back, the poor dog owners of one lost viszla, Molly, got an earful from DCist commenters since she was stolen while tied up outside the Whole Foods while they went inside shopping. Poor kids had a hard enough time already without the DCist commenters but they should’ve know that those Whole Foods lines move like molasses. It’s never a quick trip to Whole Foods. But anyway, based on what I witnessed this morning, I’m inclined to think that tying your dog up outside should be tantamount to child abuse.

The owner of this poor dog tied him up and went into a nearby establishment.  At first it was just really pathetic to watch because the dog watched the door like a sad little puppy, made all the more sad by the snow slowly accumulating on his brow.  But then a passing family came by and this kid started petting the dog in the way that some kids do to animals – overly interested, totally overbearing and aggressive – and the dog freaked the fuck out. The dog was one more head pat from biting the kid (seriously, teeth were shown) when his parents called him and the kid moved on.  Unfortunately for the dog, his attempt to escape from the kid’s touches led him to be tangled in the bike post in a torturing manner, which is what you see above: he’s standing like that because he can’t move at all.  Two girls sitting behind me also saw this and got up to go untangle the dog, but before they could get out there the dog jerked free and RAN AWAY, leaving part of his leash there for his owner to discover.  At this point the girls were just pointing in the direction the dog went and not really sure what to do.  Right then my order was called so I got up and when I got back to my seat, the remainder of the leash was gone and so were the girls.  Who knows what happened to that dog and the owner. But jeebus, people. From the Official Arbiter of All Things Critter, don’t tie your dog up outside. In the course of your “five minute” errand you could have a cold, strangled animal, a potential lawsuit, and a lost dog on your hands.