TGI–freakin–F as they say. I wonder if our brains have evolved to the point where even a short week no longer feels like a short week. Either that or I’ve just been on the move too much between tidying up, visiting family, family issues and other stuff.

My cousin’s visit has been quite pleasant, actually. I didn’t really think I’d warm to having a house guest, but it has been nice. Mostly because she wasn’t here for a visit, but to find a place to live, so I only had to prep the couch and we did go out to dinner last night but beyond that I haven’t seen much of her & she flies out home tonight.

I’ll be meeting a friend for dinner tonight at Asia Nine. It worked out well for a team lunch the other day and it’s time for a little more sushi. After the night out, I shall rest and rest well. I feel worn out this week!

I’m sure it’s from cleaning the place up and all, but lately my place no longer bears anything more than a passing resemblance to this. I can see my floors, there’s room to walk around, I’m almost at the point where I can use that chair again. I was going through a lot of old food magazines and ripping out recipes that I want to scan into MacGourmet. A virtual cookbook may not be as much “fun” as a regular notebook, but I already have plenty of cookbooks and these days when I’m looking for good recipes, I’m hitting the internet at work long before I get home to flip through the books.

Speaking of flipping, this site has been my “cat toy” this morning: ColorFlip.com. It’s just a cute little flash app, but the page flipping action is addictive!

Ben Folds was awesome, as expected. I’d never been to Wolf Trap before, and as a venue with an “under the stars” option, it’s definitely my favorite. Not that I’d planned on it, but I’ll never go to Nissan Pavilion again unless the tickets are free and box seats and come with helicopter transportation. Since the response of most people where “who?” when I told them who was playing, I just grabbed Justin. We had a quick meal at Tysons Corner before heading over to Wolf Trap with plenty of time before the opening act. Since we had my company’s box seats, we had access to a special lounge with snacks and drinks so we were a few glasses of wine in before the show started.

Much as I love his music, I’d never seen him live and it was a real treat. He draws the type of crowd that shouts out requests and knows the audience participation parts to certain songs. He played right on through, nearly 2 hours with only the standard “encore” break. He got the crowd to do three-part harmony, he played a few tracks that will appear on his next album, and only screwed up once. He says it happens about once every 2 months, which is still a pretty high rate for a professional musician.

Other memorable moments were when he sang a song about falling off the stage in concert in Hiroshima and continuing to play even though he was bleeding all over the place. He writes songs about stuff that really happened “because it’s easier.” And he loves playing at Wolf Trap because you get to learn the signs (ASL) for “fuck.” After that statement, he improvised a song to “test the interpreters” that contained the word “shit” then for a different sign, “poop” as well a few other swear words and some complicated (long) medical terms. The woman handled it all like a pro though and as much of the applause afterwards was for her as him. Overall it was a really good time, not quite on par with the energy built up during Jamie Cullum’s 930 Club concert, but I’d see him again at Wolf Trap or a more local venue.

Having my cousin here isn’t nearly the imposition I thought it might be, but it does make me realize that my apartment is not user friendly. I’ve left her notes about the quirks of this or that (especially the shower that will scald you without a second thought), gave her a mini-tutorial on how to use my universal remote. I can see myself turning into the type of person that might do an apartment exchange with someone, but leave post-it notes all over the place with advice and directions.

3,739,934 views so far, and I admit that quite a few of those were mine. I already love Weezer, but this video was truly inspired. Metaviral is the only word that really fits, I’m impressed that they were able to get the actual YouTube stars to appear and not use looky-likeys, especially Miss South Carolina. Kelly’s behind the scenes extra is great too. It’s not yet to the level of OK Go (to whom a nod was conspicuously missing) but it’s well on its way.

My place is as clean as it’s going to get for the visit. I’m pretty impressed with myself in that the section of the living around and in front of the couch doesn’t even look like it belongs in my apartment anymore. Unfortunately for the coffee table, I just slid everything into a paper bag which I’ll sort through later on, but that method has been working fairly well for me. I’ve done the same thing with old bills and paystubs and it’s easier to go through the bag at once, filing and shredding as I go.

I bought a copy of MacGourmet, which will help me get rid of the stacks of food magazines and newspaper clippings. It’s quite cool the way you can add new recipes right from a few sites’ webpages and others can easily be dragged in from the clipboard. I’ve tried the paper recipe notebook before and it never really worked out. With the new macbook, it’s much easier to cart it to the kitchen with me and read the info right off the screen. Though more of my items are still simple dishes, so it mostly helps me put a shopping list together and with its large print “chef view”, I can follow it from across the room.

I’m glad it cooled off today, my condo board hasn’t decided that it’s hot enough to turn on the building’s air conditioning, so I’m relying on moving air through the windows. Yesterday’s mid to high 80s did not feel good, but waking up to 60s this morning was a welcome change. We had some sprinkling of rain, but I hope all that will be gone before tonight’s concert. I’m playing a bit of shell game with meeting my cousin and getting her settled, then meeting my ride for Ben Folds, but I’m sure it will all turn out all right. The weekend can’t come too soon. It’s a short week, but it sure doesn’t feel like one!

Heck of a weekend… for other people, I’m sure. Mine was spent cleaning the heck up out of my place. My cousin accepted a job in DC at a veterinary hospital and is coming up this week on a “find housing” trip. I am very glad that she didn’t ask for my help in finding a place since I have no connections, but she did ask for crash space. This is something, barring emergencies, I’m not good at providing. My place isn’t large, and since our storage area’s been off-limits to residents for nearly the past year, all of my stuff is in my place. With the lights off, for most people my place is a deathtrap.

They just allowed us to move stuff back into storage a few weeks ago, but they made the new rule that we can’t store anything in cardboard boxes. Well guess what everything I had was in? So a quick trip to Target and recommendations from Michael netted me a few Rubbermaid tubs and I managed to clear out some of the stuff, even overcoming my pack-rat tendencies and throwing some stuff out. Even so, there are some things I want to keep that I don’t necessarily have space for, so they’re just going to be “things in storage” until I have a larger place. Some fun during my trips downstairs to take more stuff out, was seeing a resident who’d been dumpster diving carting some of my stuff back upstairs. I’m glad since I did put some items in the unofficial “please take” spot of our trash area out back, it’s good to see some things being reused by someone… just not me.

I also did my usual “6 loads of built up laundry” chore. I always promise I won’t let it get to that point since it only takes 60 mins total to wash and dry, but still when I get in from work, laundry is the last thing on my mind. And while I could have used every machine available to do these, I knew that if I had 6 loads of clean laundry upstairs all at once, they’d never get folded right away, not when I have MarioKart calling my name. So I used 2 machines and 1 dryer (which can handle 2-3 loads of wash) and kept rotating out. On one of my trips down there, I saw that clearly I didn’t understand the concept of “the building shares a laundry room” because a woman was not only using every single available machine, she was also about to take out my wet clothes and those of someone else. I said, cheerfully but loudly, “I’m here, those are mine!” and she responded with a heavily accented, “Oh is yours?” Now I appreciate the stupid gringo routine as much as anyone, but don’t use it on me when 1: you’ve seen me doing laundry that day and 2: I’ve seen you speaking perfect English around the building before.

So my place is firming up. I still have some cleaning to do, and I need to get a key copy made and juggle her visit with a concert tomorrow night and another friend in town, so it’ll be a busy week. My inner introvert may well be curled up in the corner and crying by the weekend, but I’ll drown it with a few gin & tonics and all will be right with the world.

During one of our daily chats, I told Michael about the site Not Always Right with some hilarious anecdotes from employees dealing with some absolutely nutty customers who really push the boundaries of its namesake phrase. He responded with the site SEND, which has tales of mostly office e-mails and instant messages that ended up going to the wrong person or really should never have been sent.

I told him I’d have to share the following video with him. It’s another quick clip from man stroke woman, a sketch show which unlike so many others, actually could be ported over to a US network as the situations are very universal.

For this reason, I’m really glad we don’t have any form of intra-office messaging because generally there’s no such thing as “Reply to All” with IMs, thank goodness!