parking hazards.

i've been keeping my car with me at our apartment pretty frequently these days (you may be wondering why i don't keep it all the time if it's mine. well the car is mine (and missy's) as in we-drive-it-but-don't-want-to-pay-insurance-for-it-so-it-sits-at-our-parents'), which is nice, because i've gotten to take some fun little jaunts around queens. having somewhat switched teams from neighborhood pedestrian to neighborhood motorist, i've now become privy to lots of stuff around here that i typically don't notice. like no parking signs. "no parking due to tree pruning" signs.

seriously.


i've been driving around the five boroughs of NYC for 12 years (eek!) now and honestly never saw anything like this before. i thought it was a joke at first. people actually prune the public trees?! in the outer-boroughs, no less?!

well, turns out they do. when i returned to move my car the next day, this sight was waiting for me:

that's some major pruning.

thank goodness i had taken the sign seriously enough to park across the street.

catching up.

i'm thinking i'm going to stop with the whole day-countdown thing i started. clearly i can't handle the daily photo duties anymore, and its gotten to the point where i avoid even looking at my poor little blog since i don't have a snapshot of the day to contribute. all wrong. plus i have all these weird random shots of nothingness on my camera (that i just never bother to upload) and so when friends are looking through the photos i inevitably hear "um, hey, what is this picture of yogurt for?"

embarrassing.

and so, a few odds and ends from the past week or so.

in the supermarket this weekend i overheard a fellow customer ask for assistance in the produce aisle by shouting "excuse me, mr. produce man" to the shoprite worker stacking tomatoes. i found this wildly amusing.

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i've fallen madly in love with archer farm's spinach & artichoke tortilla chips. to the point that i even ate them in bed earlier today and i NEVER eat food in my bed...i imagine i just subconsciously wanted to sleep next to such amazing crumbs. they are ridiculously addicting (i'd provide a link or photo, or further information, as to not be a tease to my dear readers, but there's none to be found), although only found at Target, making access to them difficult. vexing!

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also wonderful, and blissfully easier to find, is ben & jerry's new flavor "mission to marzipan". we'd have purchased it for the name alone, but it turns out to be a most awesome addition to the b&j oeuvre.

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even more wonderful, although not edible, is steve martin's new(ish) cd "the crow". although i wouldn't suggest it if you're not a fan of the banjo (but how could anyone hate on a banjo?!).

139, evening brief.

after watching just the opening credits of the new show "i'm a celebrity...get me out of here" i am fully convinced that there is no hope for humanity.

139.

i've been a poor correspondent.

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i had to make a couple of big decisions this week - some horrible, some less so - which basically crippled me from paying attention to poor old loveandcyanide here. it's weird though how quickly everything changes once you make up your mind...even if you're not making your preferred choice, you just feel 1000% times better once you pick something and stick with it. as an indecisive pisces, this is an incredible phenomenon to me, and i imagine life would be at least 30% simpler if i could just make up my mind a teensy bit faster.

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i'm sure i've mentioned it in the past here, but i hate yogurt. abhor the stuff. even frozen, masquerading as ice cream, i can't stand it. i'm sure it's psychosomatic, but i'm convinced i can actually feel the live cultures in my mouth whenever i try it, and really, who wants to feel themselves ingesting bacteria? blech.

but despite the hatred, every year or so i find myself in the dairy aisle telling myself to give yogurt another shot (this was not one of last week's "big decisions", although for consistency-sake, we'll pretend it was). seriously - i don't know what it is that makes it the one food i shun that i consistently try to make myself like. i would never do that with stinky cheeses. maybe the shape of the container? the portability factor? the brightly colored fruits emblazoned on the packaging? that i'm trying to acknowledge the fact that i am a woman and it's supposed to be beneficial to my health? i don't know. so during my weekly supermarket excursion last week i found myself in my "oh chrissy, go try yogurt" phase and after much deliberation settled on a peach variety and a mixed berry one.

and lo and behold, for the first time ever, i was actually able to finish the little container. it probably helped that every time i put the spoon up to my mouth i told myself "this is delicious!!" (i figured if that method can get babies to eat strained peas, it might work on me), but i'd like to believe that maybe my taste buds are maturing.

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a scary-but-true yogurt story (and now that it popped into mind, perhaps a contributor to my (possibly former) hatred of the stuff): when missy and i first relocated to staten island we often played with the other children living on our street. directly across from our house lived a family with four boys, two of whom were around my age, and so they were regulars in our games of tag and board-game sessions and, dare i say it, they taught me how to play dungeons & dragons. (before you fall out of your chairs, i'm no dungeon master. to be quite honest, i was 10 and had no clue about the intense culture of the game and really just liked the pretty various-colored and multi-faceted dice. there was a deep teal one i was particularly fond of.)

but i digress. so our little crew of neighborhood kids made the rounds from one house to the next during our summer days of play. as one might expect, our parents' provided the group with snacks depending on which house we were at. as one might not expect, when we were at the boys' house, we weren't given cups to drink our hawaiian punch/juicy juice/kool-aid out of; instead our "cups" were empty yogurt containers. no joke. considering my 10-year-old self was pretty similar to my current self, you can imagine how horrified i was by having to drink out of a vessel that had once held such a filthy product, and in general just aghast at such a lack of proper hostessing skills.

i was never thirsty when we hung out at that house.