September 24, 2007

Central Park lovers get engaged, mugged

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — For richer, for poorer? It’ll have to be for poorer after Luke Jacunski and his girlfriend were robbed at gunpoint just seconds after he proposed.

Jacunski got on one knee and popped the question to his girlfriend of six months, Mami Nagase, in a romantic spot at a gazebo in Central Park on Saturday night. She had just agreed to marry him when, they said, a gunman jumped from the bushes and yelled, “Give me your money and get on the ground!”

As Jacunski, 30, and Nagase, 24, got on the ground, he was able to slip the engagement ring off her finger and hide it in his pocket.

The robber took a Rolex watch from Nagase and $125 from Jacunski, who had planned to use it to pay for a romantic dinner at a French restaurant. The robber then ran away.

Nagase, an artist from Japan, and Jacunski, a musician from Cincinnati, spent the next several hours at a police station looking at mug shots and sharing potato chips for dinner. They said they still plan to get married.

“It makes for a pretty good story for our anniversary,” Jacunski said.

He said the night could have been much worse: After he proposed, Nagase could have said no.

…and i’m back. i’m sorry to have kept all of you in suspense over my mccann sighting but exhaustion, a slam-packed week of Swissland activities, bonding w/ miz frances and le kiddies and a not nominal preoccupation with a series of vampire books that shall remain nameless (where ARE you, my edward?) made this a non-blogging trip. oh and there was the period of time where i destroyed the internet. but then it was back. but i could not blog because i needed to read other blogs. about um, something else, that was not in any way related to the previously mentioned vampire books. or the many end-of-book theories. or who could possibly play the main characters in potential movies. and none of these blogs were passed to me by anyone who happens to read kid-lit blogs in her spare time.

carless, yes. my poor subaru was deemed a total loss by the insurance company. so it looks like i’ll be car hunting. bah! today i was hard core and battled with them about paying for my rental car. this is a very long story but after a very long period of time on the phone with 3 different people i finally had to just tell someone that the situation was not at all good for me and that i would like my rental car paid for until today and no other outcome was really going to be satisfactory. i managed to say this in a nice way and luckily they came around.

last night slanky and i attended TWO shows. i am knocked up rockstar. admittedly i did have to sit down for a while at the first show (the flaming lips, lots of large balloons, confetti and santas) because our original position in the crowd got stiflingly hot and made me feel like puking and then the flashing strobe lights started to make me go insane. but after some sitting things were a little better. we got to the peter, bjorn and john show a few songs in but they did a great set of what we saw and there were no strobe lights so that was nice. jodi can also comment on the pb and j.ok, i think that’s the end of my stream of random thoughts. happy friday!

OK, I think I hit rock bottom for lamest things I can do to save money. Going to dinner sponsored by drug reps just to get a free meal makes good sense, even if I feel kind of like a whore. I’ll admit, getting docs to give me samples so I don’t have to pay for medications is pretty lame, but I’ve accepted that. What I am doing to save money on cleaning supplies is where I have reached my low point. I thought going to the dollar store to buy a mop yesterday was bad. That was nothing… My roommate’s vaccuum broke several months ago. I have one, but it is back in Spokane. I didn’t bring it with me because my roommate had one. Well, I’m certainly not going to buy another one. My roommate won’t, because she doesn’t vaccuum anyway. Vaccuuming is too closely related to house work, which is apparently beneath her. Well, since I comb and blow-dry my hair in my room, I end up with quite a bit of hair on the floor by the end of the week. I don’t want to annoy the person who lends me their vaccuum by asking every week, so I had to come up with something to do about all the hair. I’ve finally found a way to efficiently pick up that hair. I use my paper tape lint roller. That’s right ladies and gentlemen.  I lint roll my way to cleanliness at least once a week. How sad am I? O’well, only a couple of more months, then I’m outa this apartment and don’t have to worry about it.

yesterday jody and i were in bern with the kids. sitting on some steps next to the bear pit (not a very nice thing, btw). suddenly there were these japanese tourists in front of us oo-ing and aah-ing at niamh (she was looking awfully cute sitting on the steps with a hunk of bread in her fist) and before i knew it several of the ladies were sitting next to her posing for photos. it was really odd. and kind of funny. there must have been 10 or so people in front of us snapping pictures.

niamh was a bit bewildered at first, but then started crying, as she has a hard time with strangers even looking at her, let alone sitting next to her. this did not deter them however. when i went over to comfort her they just got back next to her and settled for taking pics with me in them.

But it’s absolutely true. I cooked two dishes in one day. No, I’m not kidding. I made a 3 cheese noodle bake and vegetable lasgana. The 3 cheese noodle bake was okay but I think that it would have been better if I ignored the last directions which called for the noodles and cheese to be layered. It came out really dry esp. on top where there wasn’t any cheese and they got crisp from being in the oven. The vegetable lasgana turned out pretty tasty. But after one day of cooking I remembered why I don’t usually do this sort of thing. I really, really don’t like cooking. It still feels like slavery to me. It is so time consuming and messy. I can’t believe that most people cook most of their meals at home practically everyday. I’m not sure that any of you can realte to this but it totally blows my mind. I know some people enjoy cooking and feel like they are more independant b/c they can cook for themselves but it is such a tremendous pain I don’t think I’ll ever get to this point. So much for turning over new leaves.

With technology as it is, there is additional confirmation that there is a little human still actually growing in me (so weird – especially when that aren’t too many “symptoms” at this point). Legs, arms, fingers, toes, head, belly, heart, brain, spine, kidneys, etc all look in tact. And there was a pretty clear gender shot and it looks like we will have a Baby Harvey (or Baby Melvin) in February. Watch out world!!!

As you know, Jody’s business revolves around ink being inscribed into paper. We have a few machines around our house to help do this. Actually, more than a few — in the past few months there’s been, count ‘em, six different printers at our house!

Here’s a picture of the current printer graveyard. If anyone would like a semi-functional printer that may or may not properly print on cardstock and might or might not have the proper ink cartridges, please let us know.

These three are going away — perhaps I’ll get a small amount of money in return or might just give them away to anyone willing to take one. But alas, most likely outcome is that I’ll take them to the place you can donate used PCs and peripherals where they salvage what they can to distribute to poor countries. Printers, particularly old fat lasers, seem to be their bane — there’s a fee you have to pay to cover the costs of disposal. I had to pay $15 to recycle my dad’s mid-90s vintage 40 pound laser printer.

Ahhh, planned obsolescence and the dumps that make it all possible! Hopefully our new printer has some good years ahead of it…

Hello to Jody and company over in Europe!!!+

In keeping with the NW seafood musical theme I thought I’d share with you a song that I discovered while driving to this year’s 4th of July party.  The Salmon Dance by the Chemical Brothers (they seem to have had a few too many chemicals…or at least the boy in the video has) gave me a laugh plus made me feel like dancing even while I was writing my grant!  Despite “Sammy” not actually being a salmon and some questionable language, there are many reasons why I like this song/video:

1) A beat-boxing puffer fish

2) A fish that refers to his kind as “peeps”

3) It is educational

4) The cat gets dinner

Hope you enjoy!

[youtube]kJEacTZmd7I[/youtube]

http://ginasblogging.blogspot.com/

For a little friday fun I’m attempting to paste in a utube video of John Roderick of the Long Winters singing Acres of Clams at the Pike Place Market 100th Birthday. I’m shamelessly pilfering Andrew’s blog here, sorry Andrew!

Why am I posting this? I’m glad you asked. Here are my reasons, in no particular order:

How often do you get to hear John Roderick live? He’s got a lovely voice and if you’ve never seen him live something is missing from your life.

How often do you get to hear Acres of Clams? Not often enough.

How often do you get to celebrate the northwest in such a silly way? Perhaps too often.

Anyway, we went to the celebration a few weeks ago and it was darn hilarious.[youtube]TWICj1i9_Ds[/youtube]