Macy's Thanksgiving Balloons

The night before Thanksgiving I went to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloon Inflation.  Basically the night before the parade they blow up all of the balloons outside of the natural history museum and you can walk around and look at them.  It was a lot of fun even if there were ALOT of people there.  Also my new pet peeve is people with strollers.  Just because you keep ramming me in the back of the ankles with your stroller (with your child in it!) doesn't mean I can move any faster when I'm in a crowd of people and can only go as fast as the people in front of me.

Lots of pictures!

I also spent Thanksgiving in Indiana this year!  It was really fun to be with family and getting to see my grandparents as well as my aunt and uncle and cousins (including the baby!)  I just have a few pictures, one of the things we did was go to the botanical gardens and part of it was decorated in a Grinch Who Stole Christmas theme which was cute.  We also saw the Festival of Trees at the Embassy because Santa was there and we took the baby for his first picture with Santa.

Nice Work Pumpkins

Yay for fun weekend activities!

This weekend my roommates had a Pumpkin Bread Bake Off.  Apparently they both had recipes so they wanted to put them to the test.  Both were actually pretty good even considering I don't really like pumpkin that much.  Monica's was in a bundt cake pan and reminded me a lot of a spice cake.  Kari's was in cupcake form and included chocolate chips.  But both were yummy.

Monica's pumpkin bread in the pan

Monica's pumpkin bread out of the pan

Kari's pumpkin bread muffins with chocolate chips

Another random story:

There's a cute coffee shop near me and they had the funniest sign out the other day.  I thought it was cute.

And then today I saw Nice Work If You Can Get It with Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara.  It was sooo cute.  The music is all Gershwin music that I knew and the whole plot is silly and fun with lots of dancing and funny moments.

Basically I realized that the last musical I saw was Avenue Q in September and I get cranky if I go too long in between seeing shows so I decided I needed to see something.  My roommates were busy but that didn't stop me!  Seth was super sweet and offered to hang out with me in line.  He wasn't super excited to see the show so he waited with me and then after I got my ticket we hung out until the show started.

Again, the show was so much fun.  It basically takes place in the 1920s during prohibition and Matthew Broderick plays a kind of dopey, not very smart, rich guy and Kelli O'Hara is the best bootlegger in the business.

Aaaand compulsory show clip :)

Weekly Highlights

Here's the rundown on exciting things this week:

Obama will be president for another 4 years!  This makes me happy.

This week was also my away day for work.  On Thursday we had all day meetings outside of the office.  We went to a hotel called Yotel where we basically had a lot of presentations regarding all of the various aspects of my department and the industry in general.  The hotel is kind of strange and futuristic, but it was interesting.  Here is the what the room we were meeting in looked like:

After all of our meetings we all went bowling, which was a lot of fun.  The bowling alley was probably the fanciest bowling alley I think I've ever seen in my entire life.  We even had our own private lanes in our own private room!  They also had ordered these things called beer towers which was kind of a funny sight.  My coworkers are so much fun and so silly.  We had the best time rooting each other on.  I did find out that I am a terrible terrible bowler.  The first game I bowled a 35....sigh.  Oh well.

Then today my roommates and I went to go see the movie Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I read the book on Friday before seeing the movie and I have to say they are both really good.  I think I like the book more, but that's not surprising at all.  They are also pretty heavy but definitely a good read/watch. Here's the trailer for it:


I also finally saw The Hunger Games movie which I had been wanting to see for a while.  I enjoyed it, but the book is definitely way way way better than the movie.  I think they left out a lot of important things.

And that's about it for me.  I'm getting excited for Thanksgiving to be here soon!

Hurricake Pops

As many of you know there was a little thing called Hurricane Sandy earlier this week.  First of all, fortunately I'm fine.  The power didn't go out, it seems there was minimal damage to structures in my area and overall the effect has only been in public transportation.  Basically at the moment traveling anytime is like traveling at rush hour and traveling at rush hour is MADNESS.

So what does one do when one has the day off from work in preparation of a hurricane?  One makes Hurricake Pops of course! I had bought this kit at Target because I thought it looked fun for Halloween themed cake pops that looked like eyeballs.  I've never made cake pops before but since they always looked so complicated I thought having a kit that had all the ingredients and told me what to do would be the way to start.  Basically cake pops take a long time to make because there are a lot of different steps.

First off is to bake the cake part.  In this case it was red velvet cake.  After baking the cake as normal you put it in the fridge for about 15min or so to let it cool.  Meanwhile you mix together a small amount of frosting.  After the cake is cool, you cut it into cubes and crumble the cake into a mixing bowl with the frosting and mix it together until it is a consistency where you can shape it.

Cake/frosting mixture

After you have the cake mixed, you use it to form little balls that then get popped into the freezer for about 20min to harden.

Cake balls

 After the cake has hardened, you melt these things called melting wafers and after inserting sticks, coat the cake in the melting wafer frosting and then stick them upright so they can dry.

Drying cake pops

After the cake pops have dried, you can decorate them with regular frosting!  Since these were Halloween cake pops they were all supposed to look like eyeballs, but that got boring so I ended up making several different designs just for fun.

Finished cake pops!

The pop on the left Monica calls my "Lambchop Cakepop"

I brought in some of the leftovers to work on Thursday (when I could finally get into the office) and they were a big hit!

Another random story:  I had heard that if you think your power is going to go out you should freeze gallon size ziplock bags of water.  That way if the power goes out you have extra water to drink, but also the giant ice blocks help keep your food colder for a longer time.  My roommates and I decided to do this just to be on the safe side and after the hurricane mess was mostly over we took one out and defrosted it in the sink.  It was so funny because it looked just like a pillow!  Well until we had to run the water and the water melted a hole in the middle.  Then it was a donut pillow.

Donut Ice Pillow

And then finally, I alluded to this earlier, but this is a picture I took at the subway station when I was on my way home from work on Thursday:

Luckily I'm smart and realized that if I walked up and around to a different set of staircases at the other end of the platform there were far less people.

Trees and Tragedy

On friday I went on a company community service outing.  They picked us up in buses and took us to a park in Brooklyn where they fed us pizza and then we planted a lot of trees and flowers at a public park.  We went through an organization called New York Cares which I guess organizes most of the corporate community service days in the city.  It was a lot of fun to do good in the community and get my hands dirty.  It was raining when we started so we definitely got pretty muddy.  They also gave us t-shirts!

Getting down and dirty

The other thing I did this weekend was Sat night I saw a play at Columbia.  The play is Antigone, which is a Greek tragedy that I remember having to read in middle or high school (I'm not really sure when).  One of my friends was in it which always makes a performance more enjoyable I think.  He was excellent and the play was good just very...tragic.  But, since it's a Greek tragedy, that's probably what they were going for.

The rest of my weekend is slated for running errands and today I'm having lunch with a friend! :)

Aca-scuse me?

This weekend I actually did not go see a musical or play (gasp, I know right?) but I did still have singing people in my life!

I have been excited to see the new movie Pitch Perfect since I saw the trailer.  My best impression of it was that it is what you might consider Bring it On: Glee Style.

It wasn't something that I figured Seth to be interested in so I figured I couldn't drag him so I've been waiting for the opportunity to drag Kari or Monica instead.  Well, it happened that the movie ended up getting great reviews and Seth decided he wanted to see it.  So we saw it on Saturday!  and I LOVED IT.  It's silly and funny and filled to the brim with very talented singers.  The music was so fantastic that I immediately had to buy the soundtrack.  The funny part was that when I got home after seeing the movie Kari was sad that I had already gone because she decided she wanted to see it...so I saw it again on Sunday.  It was just as awesome the 2nd time around :)

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Another weekend story:

You might remember I did hula at Willamette.  Well, the weather has taken a turn for the colder here but the building has yet to turn on the heat (it's a city-wide kind of thing).  So Kari and I were chilling out (well literally...it was freezing!) and instead of huddling under blankets we decided it would be fun to hula for warmth!  So I ended up teaching Kari a dance and we had a lot of fun.  I was sooo sore the next day though, I always forget that part of it.

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Vaguely speaking of Willamette they had an alumni event on Monday.  It is this thing they do called 7 Cities 1 Night and they have alumni get togethers in 7 cities across the country, including NYC.  So I forced Kari to go with me and we ended up having a great time.  It was at this very swanky restaurant in a hotel right by central park.  It also ended up being an open bar and then waiters circulated with trays of appetizers.  I ended up chatting with some people I had known during my time at WU so that was a lot of fun.

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Monday at work we had another one of those baking days and the theme was Pears.  Now that was a challenging one as I don't think I've ever really baked with pears before.  I ended up finding a recipe on the Betty Crocker website, though, and made Sugar Cookie Pear Bars.  They turned out great and were a big hit at work :)

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I also wanted to share a couple pictures I took one evening.  Seth lives in the part of Brooklyn that is closer to Manhattan and there's a park you can walk to where you can look out and see the statue of liberty and the skyline.  It's pretty cool.  We walked down there at sunset and it was really pretty to see the colors against the buildings.

A Trip to the Museum

This weekend was low key but still fun.  I spent the majority of it relaxing in my pajamas and enjoying my shows (this weekend it was the season finale of Doctor Who and the season premiere of Once Upon A Time).  But I did manage to get out of the apartment long enough to have a fun outing with Seth.  We went to the Museum of the Moving Image.  I've been there once before and it was just as much fun the second time.  We ended up being able to create a flipbook and I made a couple of little movies using stop motion animation!

Here are my masterpieces ^_^

And that was my weekend!

Another Broadway Weekend

It has certainly been a fun weekend!  Starting with Thursday night I finally got to try the 20 at 20 off Broadway show deal that was happening the past couple weeks.  We tried for Avenue Q tickets and actually got them!  So I got to see Avenue Q for $20.  I actually have already seen this show in New York but hey, it's a good show!  It was just as funny as I expected it to be and I enjoyed it immensely.

Then on Saturday I mostly slept in and relaxed.  I then met up with Seth and we took a quick tour of Grant's Tomb.  The tomb is actually right near Teachers College and so I've definitely walked past it before but have never been inside.  It actually reminded me a lot of Napoleon's Tomb in France.

Then today was the Broadway Flea Market!  I knew that this happened but I've never been and I'm so so so glad that I went.  Basically it's a huge fundraiser for Broadway Cares: Equity Fights Aids.  So a lot of different Broadway shows and other theatre organizations have tables where they sell everything from random stuff to signed props from shows to pictures with cast members and all of the money everybody gets goes to Broadway Cares.

I ended up getting a Wicked t-shirt, a couple posters, and won 2 tickets to Phantom of the Opera in a raffle!  It was also just fun wandering up and down the street to see what everyone had at the different tables.

Me with the Newsies cast!

Roomies with matching Wicked T-shirts!

This poster was only $1 and it's the same cast I saw!

Yaay Neil Patrick Harris! ($5 Woo!)

This was the cover they put over the How to Succeed program
For 25 cents I had to have it!

As you can see I got a lot of great deals and had a lot of fun and supported a fantastic charity!  What a good day!

2 Shows 1 Weekend

This weekend was a lot of fun.  Kari's sister Katy and Katy's boyfriend were visiting and so I wandered around with them for a lot of it.  They waited in line on Friday and were able to get rush tickets to see Once. (You usually have to get in line around 6am or earlier to get tickets).  They were super nice and got me a ticket too!

Once was such a good musical.  I was a little surprised I liked it so much because mellow musicals are not usually my forté.  The show itself was so mesmerizing.  It was a little thin on plot, but this is the basic plot: Boy plays music but is sad and wants to give up on music and life. Girl comes in and shows him through music that life is worth living. Boy and Girl are happy again.

Yeah...plot left a little something to be desired.  But the real magic in the show is in the music and the movement on stage.  The actors are also the orchestra so the majority of the show is filled with music. Sometimes it was almost like interpretive dance in the way that they moved around with the music.


The other show I saw was Evita, which I also really liked.  Ricky Martin was in that one, and he is really really talented.  I don't think I quite realized, but it was fun to see him perform in person.  The ensemble were also really talented and the dancing was fun to watch.  The actress who played Eva Perón was talented, but it was a little hard to understand her when she went for the higher notes.  So I'm still not entirely sure what some of the lyrics throughout the show were.  I found a couple good videos for Evita so the first one is the trailer where you can hear Elena Roger sing part of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" and the other is the Tony performance where you get a little more Ricky Martin.



We were waiting in line a long time so we ended up taking some fun pictures too :)

Other random adventures for the weekend:

Well this is before the weekend, but last week the tv show Smash was filming across the street from my office so I took a couple of pictures.  I think they were filming inside the theatre (hence the super bright lights aimed towards the closed windows)

I also went with the visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  One cool place we went to was up on the roof.  I had never been and the view was great!  They also had this strange art installation piece.

The art piece

I also was invited to Seth's parents' home for Rosh Hashanah on Sunday.  I ended up meeting a lot of his family and had a good time :)