The Crate & Barrel website and a credit card: a dangerous combination. Luckily I escaped only slightly poorer for the encounter, and a new toaster oven (along with other, lesser goodies) should be speedily making its way toward my home even now. Now Chris and I just need a regular (non-oven) toaster and we can have toast races like my parents do. (Hmm, I bet they sell regular toasters at Crate & Barrel….)

They were searching bags yesterday at my subway station. I was on my way out, not on my way in, so I wasn’t searched. It’s one thing to hear about subway searches (and to be indignant about them, as I of course was), but it’s another to be confronted by half a dozen cops flanking the only entrance to the Roosevelt Island station, announcing via megaphone every few minutes that ALL PACKAGES AND BAGS ARE SUBJECT TO INSPECTION. And, in fact, they were searching everyone - not just some people, randomly, as I’d thought they would be.

Theoretically you can refuse to be searched (although the cops at my station didn’t tell anyone this, and nobody I saw tried to refuse), but they won’t let you enter the subway if you do - and it’s not like I can go to another station. It’s all fairly disconerting.

Chris and I finally got ourselves a copy of God of War, which we cracked open last night and played gleefully for several hours. The first time we encountered some harpies, we made sure to rip their wings off, and Chris was immediately sold on the game’s merits. We didn’t much like the hydra boss, or at least Chris didn’t, because it took us so long to figure out how to kill it that his fingers were cramping by the end. But overall - very nice (and very gruesome) graphics, decent controls, and entertaining battles. Our only real gameplay complaint is the fact that you can’t control the camera. Or at least we didn’t figure out how to.

Too busy, too tired, hating the weather - all the usual complaints today. At least July will be over soon, which means that at least we’re closer to comfortable temperatures than before. Wake me in a couple months.

Some weeks, it seems like I’ve barely gotten home from work on Friday before I’m waking up at 5am on Monday. That WSJ article on the Sunday Blues comes to mind - all day yesterday I couldn’t really get into anything and I wondered where the weekend had gone.

This morning it was thundering and raining hard when my alarm went off, and it was still dark out as well. I couldn’t make myself get out of bed until about 5:45, long enough to make just a little bit late for everything else today. But I couldn’t really enjoy an additional forty five minutes of sleep, either, because I knew I was supposed to be up and showering already. Seeing that it’s supposed to be extremely hot and humid on Tuesday and Wednesday makes me just want to take a vacation this week - the kind of vacation where I don’t leave my apartment.

But of course I did get up and go to work, and I will tomorrow and the day after as well (if nothing breaks or unties, as my Grandpa would say).

I just got back from lunch with my friend Melissa at Waterstone Grill on Stone Street - excellent calamari, the best I’ve had in a long time. And a couple doors down is Adrienne’s Pizzabar, where we’ve been twice in the past month or so and were very impressed with the pizza. (A pizza bar that serves good pizza? Who knew!)

I don’t know how it is that I’ve been working in the Financial District for over a year and I haven’t been to either of these places before, but I think I’ll have to start heading over to Stone Street for lunch more often now that I know about them.

A recent discussion of alcohol got me thinking about the vile concoction that was my favorite drink throughout most of my first year in New York - the Red Devil. However, I’ve discovered over the years that few people have heard of it, that it’s almost exclusively an East Coast drink, and that it can be narrowed down even further to East Coast goth clubs, which I guess tells you where I did most of my drinking in college.

But I did a little more digging this morning and finally realized that it’s more commonly known as Red Death (appropriate for a goth drink, I suppose) and under that name the recipe is fairly easy to find. (Other recipes I found included orange juice, but I don’t remember whether the drink I’m used to has it or not.) Looking at the ingredients now, it’s no wonder I liked it before I had really developed a taste for alcohol - it’s more like Kool Aid than a cocktail. I doubt I could manage one these days, being more of a vodka & tonic kind of girl, but maybe it will interest the girl drink drunks among you.

I’m sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday, but you see if I had it would have been acknowledging that a day as awful as yesterday could possibly have been allowed to happen. 96° F but "felt like" 107° according to dear old weather.com. I’m sure some of you in the Southwest or the firey pits of hell are reading this and thinking "Oh you big whiner, it gets to be well over 300° here every single day and we don’t complain." But just allow me to point out that the humidity was well over 90% and it wasn’t raining. And also that it’s my site and I’ll complain whenever I fucking feel like it. So there.

In any case, I survived only by hiding in the office through as much of the day as possible and taking an ice cold shower the instant I got home from my sweat-soaked and odorous commute. This morning, when I picked up the clothes I was wearing from the floor where they had been lying since I peeled them off last night, I found that they were still wet to the touch. Awesome.

Today the forecast includes the words "less humid," which I suppose is something. I will continue to take every opportunity to point out to certain coworkers who made a show all spring of looking forward to summer that this, in fact, is summer.

This morning, the heat and humidity were such that when I stepped out of the air conditioned subway car and into the station, my glasses instantly fogged up. It was like walking into a bathroom while someone’s taking a shower. I wanted to get back on the train and go home.

It was pretty awful yesterday, too. Chris and I went to see Land of the Dead with my brother and his girlfriend, and walking from the train to the theater was like wading through a warm bath. It was maybe a five or ten minute walk, and at the end of it we were both sweating like mad. When I got into the theater I could feel the heat just pouring off me (and of course I was too cold a few minutes later).

We liked the movie well enough, though. Bit of a gorefest, but as it was a zombie movie we would have been disappointed otherwise. I liked the clever gas station zombie a lot. But did notice that movie tickets are now up to $10.75 each, at least at this theater and others in the area. That means that four movie tickets now go for nearly fifty bucks, at least if you buy them online (there’s a service charge for each ticket). Insane! Zombie movies are all well and good, but we’ll have to think very carefully about whether any movie is worth shelling out that kind of money just to see it in the theater. Waiting for the DVD is almost the only sane option at this point.

I’ve been feeling more than a little angsty this week for a variety of reasons, among which are too much work and not enough sleep. Chris has made significant progress in cheering me up, though. There was Ben & Jerry’s last night, for example.

I was in the mood to watch a movie but the DVDs we had from Netflix weren’t cutting it - I had either already seen them or they didn’t seem to quite fit what I was looking for. We checked Movies on Demand, but as usual it was populated with dreck. Finally I thought I would watch one of the movies I already own. I picked out a tape and was ready to watch it when I realized that we don’t even have a VCR set up anymore (and haven’t for nearly a year). So I guess I ought to throw out the remaining few VHS tapes I have and buy them again on DVD.