"Consider these teams officially tortured"

You know any article with a headline like that is going to feature Cleveland prominently. Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, from ESPN.com ranks the top 15 most tortured teams in professional sports and wouldn't you know all three of Cleveland's professional teams are on the list, at the No. 10, No. 5, and No. 4 spots. I'll let you guess which team is where, although I'm sure it's kind of a no-brainer. There's probably a valid argument for switching No 5 and No. 4, though. Anyway, I guess at least we continue to win in these types of rankings. Yay us.

Wide awake and philosophical

I'm actually really tired but when I lay down, I can't sleep. My mind is so full of all these projects I'm doing at work... I guess they call that stress. So, I pulled out my laptop and spent nearly an hour wandering the Internet aimlessly, half-heartedly googling old boyfriends and crushes and reading celebrity Twitter feeds. Maybe I should start tweeting? I've debated about it for a long time but since I haven't started yet, I guess that really is my answer, isn't it? I could maybe start by logging in to Facebook more than once a month and updating my status more than once a year. Yes, maybe I should make that a 2010 resolution.

As much as I'm enjoying my new solo living situation, it's turned me into quite a lazy person. I need to change that. There's nothing wrong with calming down my schedule and not being out four nights a week but I shouldn't exchange that for sitting on my couch staring blankly at the television for hours, like I did yesterday and today. Well, last night I actually ran some errands and didn't get home until nearly 9pm, so really it was just today I was uber lazy. And I did go out three nights last week. And the week before that, I spent most of my time after work back at the old place cleaning it. And this Thursday is our next librarian Happy Hour. Come to think of it, maybe I'm not as lazy as I feel. Regardless, I do have a bunch of projects to do around the house that I should perhaps work on while I'm sitting on my couch watching television. And one of those projects is to get the slipcover back on that couch. Ha.

Book review: Open

Open is the autobiography of tennis great Andre Agassi. I'm not sure what my opinion was of Andre when he was in his prime (probably apathy), but after reading his book, I can't stand him. All he does for 90% of the book is whine. He hates tennis. He must tell you 8000 times in his book how much he hates tennis. Okay, I get that at first - his dad pushed him way too hard to basically follow his own dreams, regardless of what Andre wanted. But okay, by age 18, Andre was an adult and had probably a million dollars (or at least way more than a typical teenager with a high school diploma, which Andre does not) so if you hate tennis so much, find something else to do. Or, for the next 18 years while you remained a professional tennis player, you could have gotten out at any time. No one wants to hear your sob story when the biggest problem in your blessed life was your overbearing dad. I just feel like Andre has spent a lot of his life feeling sorry for himself and not making any real effort to change. Well-written but a totally unsympathetic autobiography.

Moved!

It's been just over a week but I didn't get my Internet connection working until today so this is the first time I've been able to officially announce that my move was successful! Yay!

This was the first time I used movers and while it was more money than I wanted to spend, it wasn't all that much more than renting a truck and bribing some friends to help. Plus it went really smoothly. Well, except for the movers temporarily putting the elevator at my old place out of service. That had me worried, since all that was left in the apartment was the big stuff. But it was only temporarily out of service, like 5 minutes. The other worry was that I had paid for the movers for three hours and desperately did not want them to take any longer than that. It took them about 90-100 minutes to load the truck. So I was worried. Luckily, it only took about half that to unload it.

Last week, I spent time trying to unpack and organize the new place while simultaneously trying to get everything out of the old place and get it cleaned. The latter item took much, much longer than I planned, but I'm confident that I should get my entire security deposit back. The former item is a work in progress, of course. I do have just about everything unpacked, but I can't guarantee that everything is in its final resting place. I'm still trying to figure out where the best place to put everything is. Of course that will take time.

In the meantime, I am so psyched about my new place and especially the prospect of having a place all to myself. It's so, so, so fantastic; I don't know why I was waiting so long to ditch the roommate.

I Want One: Cash Cab Trivia

Who doesn't want to go on Cash Cab? All two times I've been in New York City, I hoped to get picked up by the Cash Cab - and one of those times I didn't even take a cab! Anyway, this is the next best thing: Cash Cab Trivia. How fun! (via)

Book review: The Lost Symbol

I'm going to try to write more book and movie reviews in 2010. We'll see.

Anyway, I read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown over my vacation. My book club selected it for our next meeting. I'd read Dan Brown's earlier books (Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code) years ago - for another book club - and remember enjoying the first one but thinking the second one followed the exact same formula. Like those earlier ones and the movies that have been made from them, this was a fast-paced action thriller starring symbologist Robert Langdon, who is brought to Washington, DC, under odd circumstances and finds himself embroiled in a mystery regarding Masonic legends and a box he's been asked to hold onto by his mentor, who is the Director of the Smithsonian or something powerful like that. Beyond being interested in the locale, I did not enjoy the book at all. I felt like it was at least 100 pages too long. Literally, some of the chapters kept saying the same things. Even once the bad guy was caught, there were another like 40 pages before the book ended! Who needs that? Some of the symbology and science (the Director's sister studies Noetic science) was quite interesting but even that seemed to get shoved down your throat in an almost condescending tone. The book almost seemed like an advertisement for Noetic science. And the major "reveal" about the villain was so obvious that I can't imagine that anyone didn't see it coming from a mile away. I'm sure the movie will be much better, as they'll be able to edit out all the crap and make it into a more streamlined story. So my suggestion to all is to wait for the movie!

Happy New Year! Back in DC

Today was my first full day back in Washington, DC. I got back last night about 11pm. It was a relatively easy drive, although it was scary for about an hour in the middle of the hills of Pennsylvania where it was blizzarding a bit. Luckily, it passed over... or I passed through it.

It's been so windy here and my apartment is freezing. The sliding glass door to the balcony in my bedroom basically lets the wind pass right through and although I have had my heater going most of the day, it only gets as warm as about 62 degrees. Brr. That's way too cold for the inside of a house. I can't wait to move next week!

Oh so I knew I was going to forget something at my parents' house, what with making sure I brought everything back that I had brought plus the new stuff I bought and the new Christmas presents, plus the belongings that my parents had been storing that I didn't have room for in the apartment I'm leaving. Anyway, about halfway through my trip, I realized I forgot my new Nintendo Wii console. Oops. That was only by far the biggest present I'd gotten and I forgot it! So now we have to figure out how to get it to me, either by mail or by me buying one and sending the receipt to my parents to return the one there.