RAINY DAY CHO-CHO

Wow - so much to fill you in on. First off, our little agender is doing great. We've now heard the heartbeat two times and have been given a new due date of November 6, 2007. We are busy working on our summer travel, as we hope to get as much in before the baby's arrival. We just booked our Bermuda trip for late May and are working on a group trip to the Mediterranean in the summer. We had a great trip to California where we spent time with a lot of our favorite people. Thanks again to Katie and Noah for hosting us and all our Taco Bell trips and Oprah viewings. We're looking forward to my parent's upcoming visit in early June and then we'll be shutting our guest room doors for the summer. Lots of great things to look forward to, and maybe even some sunshine this weekend.

ISN'T IT IRONIC?

Having purchased all the major furniture that we will need for our apartment, it became clear that there was definitely room for Adrian's keyboard in our living room. He's been wanting to get it out of the San Francisco storage unit ever since we moved to New York, so on our latest trip, we did just that. We made sure to grab the various parts as well as a number of piano books and get them to UPS to ship to us. Since it was quite a large load, we didn't stay around to watch them pack it and for the last few days, knowing that it was coming today, we've been speculating on what condition it would be in when it arrived. If we had gone off just the box, it would have been grim. There were large rips in the box, it was a bit distorted, and styrofoam pieces were already beginning to fall out. However, once the box was opened and everything was removed, we saw that everything was in one piece - except that we were missing the bolt that kept the stand together. A bolt that I had very nicely placed in a Ziploc bag for shipping so that it wouldn't get lost. Well, it got lost. No big deal. Then Adrian realized that we hadn't taken the power adapter out of storage - again, no big deal. We went out to buy a bolt and a power adapter. With power now coursing through the piano, the true test came. Would all the keys work? Would the keyboard sound okay? Had it truly survived the cross-country haul? We were both happily surprised when Adrian's assessment came back positive - the keyboard was in great shape and ready to be loaded onto the stand. The stand with the new bolt. The bolt that we guessed would work. The bolt that was really just a screw that only sort of fit in the slot. Adrian and I, together, slowly placed the keyboard onto the stand and just as we were letting go, the stand collapsed, the keyboard went crashing to the floor, doing a full turn, and landed on it's top. We turned it over only to find that the left half side of the keyboard was smashed in and wouldn't come unstuck. We sat there looking at each other in complete shock. I just kept saying, "That didn't just happen. Did that really just happen?" Oh no, UPS and their big, burly men and their tossing about of packages didn't break the keyboard. They lost the bolt, but we broke the keyboard. :-(

PLOTS THICKEN

At last night's "book" club meeting (quotes needed as we watched a movie instead of discussing a book since the current book we're reading requires a two-month time frame - yes, it's that large and boring), I was finally introduced to the system that the club uses to pick upcoming book titles. Or I should say, the system that the book club creator and resident autocrat set forth. It works something like this: each member (there are eight of us) brings three book titles to the meeting and does their best to "sell" them to the other members. Then through an open-voting system, where each member is allowed six total votes (as six books need to be chosen), the titles are picked. But get this - you can cast your six votes any way you want, so if you wanted to use all six towards one of the titles you could. Which is horrible - they told me at the last book-choosing, one member didn't get any of her titles picked, while another had two of hers chosen. It doesn't seem like a fair system to me at all. What Adrian and I think would work better is to pitch your three titles and then let everyone in the group vote for which one out of those three gets chosen. Simple, right. We'd then have eight titles (for the following eight months) and that's only if everyone shows up to that particular meeting. That way, each member has a book to look forward to moderating and no one leaves unhappy. Because, let me tell you, if I go next month with my three titles and not one gets voted for, there will be problems. Perhaps, even a revolt.

CS/13

Almost at the end of brunch today, Adrian pointed out that Glenn Close was seated two tables away from us. She had a baseball cap on and was faced away from the main room of the restaurant, but we were seated at a ninety-degree angle from her, so we could see her profile clearly. There was no mistaking her, but I still did a Google search just in case and found out that she lives in the Upper West Side too with her third husband. Even Adrian's mom made a point to use the restroom so she could get a better look at her.