i should be typing up meeting minutes...

but instead i'm going to finish blogging about my NYC vacation. on friday, shelley and i slept in a bit. we got ready and packed our stuff and then went to meet her friend jon (or "prick" as shells calls him) and his fiance for lunch. we went to a sushi place and by the time we walked there i could have eaten shelley's arm. turns out i should eat breakfast before trekking around NYC with heavy luggage. lunch was really fun and i even forgive everyone for mocking me for being from iowa. (that was a bit of a pattern in NYC...we have gay marriage NYC...do you? oh snap!?!)

after lunch we took a cab to our hotel (thank the lord) and i think we were both very pleasantly

surprised by how awesome it was. here's a picture of our room. the hotel is called The Pod and our room was pretty small, but had everything we needed. the bathrooms were communal style, but they were also really nice. there were four in our area and one had just a shower, one had just a toilet, and the other two had both. we even had little lights above our door that indicated when they were open, allegedly.

after we got settled in, we walked up 5th avenue and checked out some of the stores. before we even got there though, i stopped at some athletic store to get some better walking shoes. ended up with a cool pair of running shoes that made my feet feel very, very happy. after that stop, we went to Saks and Sephora and some other stores. shelley showed me all the crazy expensive stuff in Saks. we looked at and touched a bunch of fur coats. one short, shrug coat made of chinchilas cost $44,500.

needless to say it was a little out of my price range. we also checked out all the

fun shoes. some of them were fantastic and almost all of them were crazy expensive. i picked up more than one pair that cost close to $1000. that made the $300 ones seem much more

reasonable. on the right is a picture of a very fancy necklace we saw in one of the store windows.

while we were walking around (on our way to the empire state building) we ended up near rockefeller center. i'd been on a huge 30rock kick before the trip so it was cool to be there. (i didn't run in to liz lemon though.) i think this was the day we also were on a quest to find a starbucks so that we could have some adult coffees while we wandered. i wisely packed those bailey's minis in my suitcase and they were quite convenient for our purposes. fortunately for us, there are a whole bunch of starbuck's stores in NYC.

we saw times square as well which was fun and then made our way towards the empire state building. we decided to pay to go up the elevator and i'm so glad we did. it was really incredible! awesome views of the city and just one of those experiences that i'll never forget. we saw a bride and groom up there and i'm pretty sure i that one of the security guards was in a documentary that i show to my classes every semester. :) we didn't spend a lot of time up there because it was pretty cold and windy, but it was great!

after the elevator ride back down, we headed to serendipity for dinner. by the time we found it, we were both starving again. by the time we left though, i sort of wanted to get hit by a cab. it is safe to say that we ate WAY too much. the food wasn't all that great (for example, we had the greasiest nachos known to man as an appetizer), but the desserts more than made up for it. in case you haven't heard of this place, it was in the movies Serendipity and One Fine Day and they are known for their frozen hot chocolates. i got the peanutbutter one and it was phenomenal. shelley i think got a regular one and we also shared a slice of carrot cake. i was not well after that. but it was worth it. mostly. :)

once we had sufficiently given ourselves type-1 diabetes, we made our way back to the hotel to get ready to go out with shelley's friend chris. he met us at The Pod and then we walked to Monkey Bar. we picked this place not only because of my love of monkeys, but because it was featured on an episode of Sex in the City. (it's the one where carrie falls for the jazz player.) when we finally found it (there was no sign of course), we found a table to stand around and chris generously bought us a round of cosmos. shortly after our arrival i was chastised for taking pictures of some of the monkey stuff. i still managed to walk out of there with a few though, so take that monkey bar jerks!

after that, we went to a bar called Stag's Head that was close to our hotel and had some beers and enjoyed rocking out to some very loud, but very good music! i didn't get in trouble for taking pictures in that bar, so that was a bonus. :)

after a full day and a lot of walking, i think shells and i were both ready to head to bed! plus we had even more fun planned for saturday.

more on that next time!

more pictures

view from the top of the empire state building!

looking down

library from ghostbusters

me at the plaza

hello kitty

a little preview of the next post. :)

vacayshh continued!

i'm having trouble come up with creative ways to start these posts about my NYC trip. not sure what the hang up is but i guess i'll just jump in and hope you'll read despite having no clever hook.

thursday night after riding the subway for about 45 minutes, i popped off and met up with my friend jared. i met him in albuquerque and it was really good to get to catch up again. we headed over to a bar where i had a fantastic watermelon beer. hopefully i can google it or shelley remembers what it's was called. it really was quite remarkable. shells and i were super excited to see each other again and it was great to meet some of jared's friends as well. after we made a schedge, we ended up dropping my stuff off at jared's (thank goodness...i was growing weary of the shoulder-dislocating-carry-on that i brought.) then we headed out and got food and more beer (queue pork slap ale). we actually got to this place (the name is evading me) around 9:30 and slowly ate and drank waiting for the happy hour to start at 11. once the hour struck though, we were informed by our waiter that they weren't doing happy hour because of a private event or something. keep in mind that the place was packed with people with no indication of a private event. and that he knew we had been waiting for happy hour. he knew this because we asked him immediately upon our arrival "when does happy hour start?" he said "eleven." we believed him. needless to say, we weren't too happy about that. jared ended up talking to a manager and somehow worked his magic because our $150 tab ended up being about $70.

we took our surly selves to a bar near columbia that was pretty packed with people. more beer was consumed and good times were had. i managed to leave a $10 bill instead of a $1.00 for a tip on the first beers for shelley and i. luckily the bartender was awesome about it and gave me my money back. thanks new york! after much beer consumption and long distance mocking of a seeming douchey guy and his entourage of women who seemed to just be tolerating him, we went to the restaurant made famous by Seinfeld. i ordered something called gravy fries, which are fries with gravy on them. go figure. :) they were actually pretty good though. shells and jared and i then went back to his apartment and went to bed. i was definitely exhausted after not getting a lot of sleep the night before. big thanks to jared for hosting us on night one of new york fun!

gotta love vacayshh!! part 1

over fall break i had the opportunity to go to new york city with my friend shelley. this was a fantastic way to round out the last few months in the Year of Kate! i've been wanting to visit new york city since i was a kid. i had lofty goals of going to NYU when i was looking at college materials my junior year. (my plan was to major in everything so i'd probably still be finishing my bachelor's degree had i actually applied or been accepted.) now...many years later, i finally got to see the Big Apple and it was nothing sort of a fantastic trip.

shelley and i devised this plan a while ago based on our mutual love of the show sex in the city. sometime during the summer, an insanely cheap ticket popped up from MLI to JFK and finally our NYC weekend came to fruition. shells lives in philly and we haven't hung out since my ABQ days so we were WAY overdue for some girl time. it was great getting to share my first NYC experience with her!!

the beginning of the trip started out with a bit of drama. on wednesday after classes and meetings, i was scurrying around my apartment trying to get everything packed and organized. i rented a movie from iTunes so i could watch it on my phone and in the process of trying to get it transferred over, iTunes asked me if i wanted to update my software. i hesitated for a minute, wondering what the correct answer to that pop-up box was, and then clicked "yes" thinking this would not be a big deal. that turned out to be a HUGE mistake. not being a computer expert, i can't explain what happened next. i will tell you that my windows software also decided to update at the same time and somehow in the process of all of these updates, my iPhone exploded. not literally, but indeed something was very wrong with it. in my attempts to fix the situation, i'm sure i made it worse and before i knew it, the only option was for me to restore my phone. i gave it a shot and that didn't work either. i would get an error message and it wouldn't let me restore it. thus the catch-22 begins. i decided to reboot the laptop, since this is sometimes a useful solution. because of the windows update, that process took a very long time. it literally said it had to update 17 different things. 17. so while it was taking it's sweet-ass time doing that, i washed some dishes, made sure everything was packed, took my luggage to the car, took the garbage out, and when all that was finished it installing update 14 of 17. keep in mind that my plan was to meet my friend jeremy in the quad cities for dinner and then he was graciously going to let me stay at his place so i could catch my flight at 6:15 the next day from moline. so all of this phone drama is putting me behind schedule. after the computer finally rebooted, i tried to restore my phone again and it didn't work. again. this is the point where i start to panic a bit, because i figured that i would need my phone on this trip. this...my first trip ever to NYC. the trip that is giving me a little anxiety about traveling on subways by myself with luggage. plus, like most of you, i don't have people's numbers memorized anymore. so i might need shelley's number at some point. as well as my friend jared's, who we stayed with on the first night. and probably jeremy's since he was likely wondering what the hell was going on. i emailed jeremy to let him know the deal and that i would be in touch when i had a working phone. i grabbed my old motorola and managed to locate it's charger (which was a miracle.) then i hauled to davenport, making it to the at&t store two minutes before they were closing for the night. yes...i'm sure they hated me. but i think i won them over with my desperation. fortunately they were able to get my iPhone restored and because i had the good sense to bring my old phone, some of my contacts were also retrieved. i was so happy that i hugged the nerdy guy who works there which probably made him very uncomfortable. seriously, i can't express the relief i felt when the phone was operational again! i grabbed some food and then headed over to jeremy's about 4 hours after i planned to be there.

fortunately, that was where my travel woes ended. the flights to NYC were good, though a little delayed. the subway ride was uneventful and pretty easy to navigate. and before i knew it, i was in manhattan, giving shelley and jared hugs, making a schedge for the evening, drinking a beer that tasted like watermelon (and then another called Pork Slap...it didn't taste like pork), eating yummy pizza, meeting new people, exclaiming often "I'M IN NEW YORK!," eating gravy fries at the Seinfeld diner, and generally just having a GREAT time. there is a lot more to write about, but since this post is already on the long side, i'll write more later.



WE'RE IN NEW YORK!!!!

i have no idea what i was going to blog about...

but i won't let that stop me from posting something. i fell out of the practice of blogging for a while and would like to change that. so please tolerate some rambling.

last week was a really busy week for me and i'm finding it a bit difficult to adjust to having less on my plate now. and of course, that's a relative term, since i have plenty of stuff to do before school starts, but my time is mine to use as i please, unlike last week.

fortunately i got to split my time between something that wasn't very fun (research project) and something that was a lot of fun (hanging out with my nephew luke.) luke and i had a great time and managed to do a lot of awesome dubuque stuff in one day. i think we were both wiped out by night time. he was sad to be leaving the next day and honestly, i was sad to let him go. i know he had good times with grandma and grandpa but it was so great seeing the sites with luke and even doing things like making mac-n-cheese with hotdogs and watching how happy he was to get a free birthday sundae at happy joes. gives me hope that eventually i'll be a pretty good mom.

the research project was not as fun, mostly because i didn't get the template for how it needed to be designed until after i had put 18 hours in. that was quite frustrating to say the least.

this week i'm hoping to get some syllabi done and then i'm going to spend some time with dennis and mom and dad this weekend. i'm even planning on making it a long weekend and getting some quality time on mom and dad's deck before heading back to dubuque. (cross your fingers for good deck weather.)

other than that, this summer has gone really fast. i can't believe that i'm going to be heading to ASA in San Francisco next week already. i'm really excited about that trip and in now way ready for it. :D

alright, enough pointless rambling for tonight. i promise to have more intelligible posts next time. maybe. ;)

wrapping up vegas

i am finally getting around to finishing my blog about this trip. (jody just pointed out that we've been home for a week, but it already seems like we were in vegas a long time ago. figure that one out?!)

we woke up late and got ready for breakfast at New York, New York. by the time we got to America (the restaurant...i know Vegas is in America smart-asses) it was 11:30 so we got the modified "you're too late for real breakfast and should be eating lunch" menu, but we still made out pretty well. if memory serves, we did some gambling after this in ny ny and jody got the longest and most amazing bonus game at a monopoly penny slot that i've ever seen. we also kicked off the early afternoon with some vodka cranberries that did not taste like ass (unlike sahara.) i even had a cigar while wasting my pennies away.

eventually, jody and i decided not to waste the beautiful 107 degree temperatures by staying inside (that was sarcasm, people!) so we got ready to go to the pool at the MGM. we got there around 4 which is peak vegas hot-time. needless to say though, it was really relaxing out there, for the most part. towards the end of the first hour there was a flock of drunk loud girls chatting up some dude who was really, really sunburned (we called him sunburned guy) very obnoxiously and non-stop, but it's hard to stay mad when you're enjoying some sun, reading a magazine, and mocking people with an old friend. :)

speaking of mocking people, we saw the tannest white guy ever. he was so tan that i ended up taking a picture of him just to prove to you that he exists. we called him tan man....'cuz damn.

jody left me out there for a while so she could get ready for our evening and i just wasn't ready to leave the pool yet, so i hung out for another hour hoping i could get a little tan (not like the saddlebag over there -------------> ).
mostly i get more freckles in the sun, but whatever, that has to be a step up from pasty white, right? i also was freakin' thirsty out there (107 degrees?! hello!) so i ordered bud lime and got carded. so apparently, even in las vegas i look under 21. thanks mom! :)

eventually i ventured back up to the room and got ready myself. our plan for the night was to go to the MGM buffet and then hit NYNY again for the dueling piano bar. we even got a little dressed up! the buffet was pretty good, though it was not as good as Mandalay Bay (which is the only other good one in Vegas i've been too.) we were on a quest to eat our body weight in crab legs and they had them, but on ice. still good, but not the same. regardless, i managed to eat WAY too much.

after all these desserts we made our way over to the dueling piano bar. i have to say, i'm a BIG dueling piano fan and the times square bar in nyny doesn't disappoint. we had some beers (eventually...i was so full that i had to give it a bit), sang along to a bunch of songs, and even danced a bit. it's even possible that some boys hit on us. always good to have an ego boost! we closed down the bar and then headed back to MGM to get some sleep. i think by the time we were finished chatting (just like high school days) and packing, it was close to 3 a.m. the next morning, we got up, got ready, and packed up the rest of our stuff. jody was my hero and went for a quest for coffee for us. once we were checked out, all that was left to do was wait for our shuttle back to the airport. unfortunately we were in different terminals so jody and i had to say adios at security, but we still mocked people via text. :) then after a very long travel day (which included a 4 hour stop over in denver and a ride back to Dubuque from Madison in a nasty thunderstorm) i made it back home in one piece, having had a really awesome vacation. i'm thinking this is something jody and i should make an annual thing. not vegas necessarily, but somewhere fun. :D

we're freakin' adorable!!!

here are some random shots:

random, tiny closet in my bathroom stall at sahara (of course)

















rod stewart.


okay we didn't really see him. that was on a giant screen while we were waiting to check-in to MGM but it sure looks like he was right there.













Paris!


















i took this picture because the T is in quotation marks. i'm a big fan of inappropriately used quotation marks. nice one, bonanza's.
















our view from the MGM room...and a reflection of my pants apparently. :)















sweet relief. thanks denver airport!

vegas day two

so, day two. i slept in for a while given the lack of sleep from the night before. we got ready and decided to head back to the champagne brunch, because as i realized after some thought...it's sunday! (it's easy to lose track of time when you're tired and in vegas.) though we didn't intend to relive morning one, we sort of did. we checked out of our sahara room, took note of the bread tab thing that was still in the hall, and left our bags with a crabby bell hop so that we could go across the street again to bonanza's. you see, there was this talking stuffed animal parrot that we both fell in love with the day before...mostly because it does a parrot whistle and then says "hey. you. go f--- yourself." (next time you come over i can show you the awesomeness.) we headed back to the sahara and did some gambling on the penny slots, unable to resist the game "dam lumberjack beavers." it's fun. trust me. then after losing money, we retrieved our bags and jumped on the monorail to head to the MGM.


the ride was uneventful, but i think jody and i were grateful to only have to spend $5 to get all the way to the other end of the strip. and luckily it wasn't a long walk to the MGM once we got off the train. (this was good news because our feet were already killing us.) when we got to the registration area, there were long lines every where. we got in line behind the man you see below...i dubbed him "angry man." you see, he was asked by an MGM staff member to inform everyone who got in line behind him that this line would be closing as soon as he was helped. this made him very happy. especially because his line was the shortest, thus the first one everyone who wanted to check-in stepped into first. jody and i moved over to the next line and quickly found ourselves already ahead of our poor, angry friend. it turns out there was some dude (our douche as jody called him) holding up angry man's line looking at pictures of suites and stuff. i put my sunglasses on the back of my neck the like guy holding up the line and said something like "is this the cool thing to do now?" to which jody responded "no, now you look like that douche." this comment cracked up the strangers behind us which is one of the great joys in life. making total strangers laugh. classic.


we eventually got checked in and were happy that our room was really nice. we settled in and then did some walking around. we went to see the MGM lions.
































we checked out the miracle mile shops in planet hollywood, went over to new york new york, walked up to the bellagio to see the botanial gardens and the fountains. (it's hard to tell from that picture of smoky the bear, but the water was dripping through him since he was made entirely of moss and stuff which made it look like he was really sweaty. understandable given the 106+ temps while we were there. we also thought that water orb was really awesome.)















































eventually we headed back to the room and we were both pretty exhausted. we had thought about going to a dueling piano bar, but we were both wiped out and hungry so we decided to order a pizza and watch tv for a while and call it a early night. we called papa john's and i learned of jody's intense hatred of sausage, peppers, and onions. :) about 40 minutes later we headed outside to meet the delivery guy. as we were waiting, we had some fun people watching/mocking. at one point this giant limo pulled up and jody predicted some sort of rock star type or skinny ho-bag would jump out. we were surprised when instead a very large family exited it instead. just goes to show you that you never can accurately predict what is about to happen next in vegas.

i spotted our pizza delivery guy from a distance so trotted off to get our pizza, which we promptly devoured, while sitting on the floor watching sex in the city. (i made the point that sitting on the floor having a pizza picnic would have been unthinkable at the sahara.) so that was the end of day two. we went to sleep happy and full and ready to get some rest to prepare for vega

what happens in vegas ends up on my blog

or at least some of it. :) jody and i had an AWESOME time in las vegas, so i thought i should share some of the fun with you, my beloved reader(s). if you'll bear with me, i'm going to attempt to upload goofy pictures from my iPhone as i go.

i left dubuque at the flat-out ridiculous hour of 2:30 a.m. in order to catch my 6:00 a.m. flight in madison. thankfully, my friend clete gave me a ride to the airport so i wouldn't sleepily crash into a cow or something on my way there. the madison airport was surprisingly bigger than i thought it would be. i debated whether i should bother with having a coffee, having slept exactly not at all, and decided that it probably wouldn't hurt anything. while standing in the line with other travelers who made the same choice as me, an older lady walked past all of us to the counter and asked if she had to stand in line for coffee. the cashier was a bit stunned by the sheer stupidity of this question, given the fact that this wasn't elizabeth taylor or the queen of england or someone, and informed her that indeed, the rest of us were waiting for coffee. i know it was early, but what the hell else would we have been doing in that line. but i digress...

my flights to vegas were thankfully uneventful and i met jody at the airport at 9:30 vegas time. we took the shuttle to the Sahara, which at one time was the scene for such greats as The Beatles and all the Rat Pack dudes. now it's the scene for...people on a budget who needed one night in a hotel before they get to their good hotel. i didn't take a picture of our room, despite it's cool wall paper, but i did get a shot of the their ingenius logo...















the bread tie thing that was in our hallway during the entire stay...




















and the teeny tiny shot glasses that we got with our $1.00 kamikaze shots...(i'll spare you the picture of jody's champagne ice cream float...because...damn. :P)




















and this last picture gives you a sample of the aforementioned wall paper. you'll also note that someone added to it by slapping their levi's size label thing on the wall. can't have nice things at the sahara.


























what we can have though is some classy advertising for some of the high quality food that you can eat in this desert-themed masterpiece of a hotel. here are the two best examples.





what are they getting at? :) needless to say, we didn't eat either of these things...mostly because we stuck with the champagne brunch...and well...you can read.









one of our first ventures out of the sahara was across the street to bonanza's naughty town. we saw it on the shuttle ride and were thrilled to find that it was located so close to our hotel. though naughty town provided a great deal of hilarity, we both agreed that it wasn't all that naughty. i started calling it "moderately inappropriate subdivision."

here is a sample of some of the things we saw but didn't purchase.









damn i love those squirrel underpants. that's funny stuff.

we wrapped up day one by getting a taxi to the in-n-out burger where we had AWESOME food. there was probably some gambling and drinking and debauchery (side note: we had to explained to the guy who checked us into the MGM what that word means...how can you work in vegas and not know?). it's a little hard to remember all the details of day one because of getting exactly one hour of sleep. i think i'm going to have to split this into a few posts, so for now i'll leave you with this.




love ya jody!