the long national nightmare is over: with any luck, in two hours i should have submitted my last graduate school application, sent off with many kisses and much arduous editing from tommy, kriston, and jessica. thanks to you all. you took statements and essays that were large steaming piles of rhetorical doo-doo and polished them up into smaller, not-so-smelly piles of somewhat coherent wording (hey, you did what you could).

and so the Weekend of Birthday Fun can officially commence. having your birthday on a tuesday can kind of suck (despite many goodies from tommy, all i did that day was come home, change into my pajamas, bake a loaf of banana bread and proceeded to eat 2/3 of it), so i'm taking this weekend to celebrate. the itinerary:

friday: drinks and dalliances with many a friend at the helix lounge. i've never been there before, but i chose it because it looked like it had lots of good girly drinks and was within a reasonable distance of our house. anyway, i can only hope that the night doesn't grant me too many bombay sapphire martinis, but i'm betting by monday there'll be photographic evidence of me on the internets puking up olives all over the place.

saturday: if i can drag anyone out, i think i'll head to the monopoli show at dc9. i have yet to see a concert at that venue, and i hear monopoli is pretty good for d.c. "for d.c." being the operative words in that phrase, so we'll see.

sunday: tommy and i will head out to ceiba for some restaurant week action. kanishka has a full report of his experience at ceiba here.

and the best part of all? natania, the girl with whom i shared many a glass of wine on our balcony overlooking the alps in italy, is coming down this weekend to visit. so if you see two girls, out on a drunken red-wine bender, stumbling and muttering incoherently in italian - well, just stay the hell out of our way. for your own safety.