The Monday Top 5!

Top 5 kinds of guys, starting with those who dig me the most:
1. Ass men. These guys really dig me. I have a size 8 ass grafted onto what would otherwise be a size 4 body. Needless to say my husband is an ass man.
2. Breast men. The ones that are not anti-ass dig me. Some breast guys are anti-ass, though.
3. Leg men. These guys are all anti-ass. Plus I'm short. And I don't have particularly skinny legs.
2. Foot fetishists. These creepy wackos are the reason I don't get pedicures. Also I have wide feet, and these guys tend to like narrow feet.
1. Guys who only like chicks who look like models. Personally, I think these guys are all either (a) gay, or (b) wildly insecure. Or maybe I'm just jealous.

Disclaimer: Being happily married, I don't really give a shit who digs me. If you're not my husband, and you dig me, please keep it to yourself.

Unrelated link: The Lonely Whale

Tough Puzzle.

I wrote this puzzle for my company's actuarial newsletter. Only one of our actuaries solved it (not sure how many tried to solve it, but it's at least 10). Good luck! Feel free to email me with your solution.

Restaurant Tour
Six couples each stayed for one week (Monday through Sunday) in New York City. There were seven restaurants that the couples wanted to try, so they had dinner at one of the seven restaurants each night they were in New York. No two couples ever had dinner at the same restaurant on the same night. From the clues below, can you figure out the full name of each tourist and which restaurant they ate at on which night?

1. Aquavit was the first restaurant the Norrises tried, and Chanterelle was the last.
2. The six women are Henry's wife, Mrs. Quinn, Betty, Emily, Gregg's wife, and Mrs. Packard.
3. Alice and her husband ate at Aquavit, Nobu and March on consecutive nights.
4. Babbo was visited on three consecutive nights by Larry, the Ogilvys, and Emily.
5. On Sunday, Kevin ate at Nobu while Flora ate at the Four Seasons.
6. Isaac and his wife ate at March, Babbo and Aquavit on consecutive nights.
7. The Norrises never ate at any restaurant the night after the Ogilvys had been there.
8. Per Se was the first restaurant the Ogilvys tried, and the last restaurant the Montgomerys tried.
9. James, Donna's husband, and Mr. Roberts all agreed that Chanterelle had the best atmosphere of all the restaurants.
10. On Wednesday, Carol ate at the Four Seasons, Henry ate at Aquavit, and the Quinns ate at Per Se. None of the six couples were eating at March that night.
11. The couple that tried Babbo first tried Aquavit last.
12. Henry ate at Chanterelle the night after Alice, who ate there the night after the Montgomerys did.
13. The Robertses ate at Per Se, Babbo and the Four Seasons on consecutive nights.
14. On Monday, Emily ate at the Four Seasons while Henry ate at Nobu.
15. None of the couples tried the Four Seasons on Thursday night.
16. Betty tried March later in the week than the Four Seasons.

Puzzle

Enter the numbers 1 through 8 in the grid so that no two consecutive numbers are touching vertically, horizontally or diagonally. I found 2 solutions - I believe these are the only ones.

Difficulty Level: Easy.

Tomorrow I will post a really hard puzzle. I wrote it for the actuarial newsletter at my company, and only one person (out of a hundred or so) was able to solve it.

The Monday Top 5!

My 5 Favorite Words:

5. Detritus
4. Hallux
3. Onomatopoeia
2. Ribbit
1. Transfenestration

*********************

Bored today. The Wibbles spent his first night away on Saturday night. We missed him, obviously, but other than that it was uneventful. The Wibbles was fine. I got 6 straight hours of sleep, which has not happened since I was 5 months pregnant.

Saddest Picture Ever

Oy.

I have an umbrella that says, "¡Hoy!" on it. Every time I tell people about it, they think I'm saying that I have an umbrella that says, "Oy!" on it.

Ten Most Adorable Things About the Wibbles

10. The Wibble Wander. When he's sleepy, he walks circles around the coffee table with a dazed look on his face.

9. His red hair.

8. The way he used to bite noses, although he doesn't do this any more.

7. The fact that he likes to shake hands with people.

6. When he gets really worked up he runs around on his tiptoes.

5. When you ask him where his nose is, he doesn't point to his nose. He wrinkles his nose and snorts at you.

4. If you have your back turned, he sneaks up on you.

3. The faces he makes, especially the Poodle Face (wide-eyed with his lips in a straight line), Predator Face (the same face he makes when you ask him where his nose is), Scientist Face (when he's examining something) and Doody Face (when he takes a dump). One day I'll get a picture of the Doody Face and post it here.

2. The way he flings himself at you to give you a hug.

1. The way he laughs.

No one is lamer than me.

I am eating my lunch. Alone. At my desk. With a spork. A plastic spork.

10 Fads I'm Proud I Never Wore

1. The leggings-with-oversized-blazer look, in the '80s.
2. Acid-wash jeans. Say it with me, folks - ick.
3. Gaucho pants. I was too young for them when they first came around in the '70s, but they have come back this year. I am staying far, far away!
4. The mullet.
5. The hobo bag. I fucking hate hobo bags.
6. Head-to-toe logos. Tacky, tacky, tacky.
7. The creepy skin-colored lipstick everyone was wearing about 5-6 years ago.
8. Square-toed pumps. Why would anyone want to look shorter and fatter?
9. Argyle. I've been seeing more and more of this in the last few years. Why would anyone want to dress like a dork?
10. Ultra-lowriders. There are NO women who look good in these. If you have any shape at all, they make you look like a fat pig with lovehandles. If you have no hips, you don't look fat, but then you're just showing off that you have no hips. Also it's impossible to find underwear that doesn't show when you sit down.

.... and five fads I'm ashamed to say I did give into:
1. Platform shoes. I'm really short. They were too tempting.
2. The "Rachel" haircut. I had that for about a year and a half.
3. The overplucked eyebrow. Thankfully, they've grown back in now.
4. Blue eyeshadow. Shut up. I hate you.
5. Wearing a suit with sneakers to walk to work. No one does this any more, including myself. But I did it in the '90s. Now we all wear flip-flops to work, apparently.

My friend is an actress.

I was bored today, so I decided to Google the names of some of my childhood friends from Ottawa. I didn't expect to find much - I was only 12 when I left, too young to want to be friends with boys, and I figured most of my friends would be married now and have different names.

The only names that came up with anything were my 2 best friends, and this guy Neil Reaume who was my "boyfriend" for about 2 minutes and who is apparently now a brain surgeon.

Anne Hepplewhite came up only in connection with being an archivist. My mom is friends with Anne's mom, though, and I already knew that she was an archivist and that she's living in Thunder Bay with her husband and three (I think) kids.

My other best friend was Birgitte Solem. And now she's an actress! That's her, and the guy is her husband, who is also an actor. Unfortunately I won't be able to see Birgitte's work because she does only theater and some Canadian TV guest spots. But I can rent Godsend, which her husband has a small part in.

The Monday Top 5!

Top 5 things that amaze me:

5. The indescribably horrific smell of the elevator leading down to the Union Square subway station. It's definitely an organic, as opposed to chemical, smell, but it isn't dead bodies, or urine, or feces. It smells worse than any of those things. The suckiest thing about having a baby in the city is that you are forced to use these elevators to get in and out of the subway.

4. The sounds that sometimes come out of my husband's ass.

3. That someone can sit and watch the entire Great Expectations movie (the one with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow) and not notice that 99% of the clothing is green. And the remaining 1% is black (except for the white outfit that Estella wears at the end, to symbolize that she's over the whole man-hating thing), which doesn't count.

2. That there are people on this earth who don't like chocolate. I've even read that chocolate activates "universal pleasure centers," whatever that means. My 14-month-old son does not recognize any new object as food. I have to eat a little bit of it and make yummy noises before he'll try it. When he does try it, he nibbles it very slowly and keeps his eye on me the whole time. The first time he saw chocolate was last week when I brought a couple of squares of bittersweet out to the living room to eat myself. Before I took a bite, he yelped and snatched it out of my hand and had gobbled it up before I could even figure out what happened.

1. How fast time passes. Sadly, this will always be the thing that amazes me most. And it will only get worse. Poo.

Planetarium

If you have not played the Planetarium puzzle, then drop whatever you are doing and play it now! NOW!!!!!! This is the best puzzle ever. Trust me.

Bite me.

I ordered my usual drink at Starbucks today. When the barista called it out when it was ready, some dude waiting for his coffee snickered. So what if I ordered a decaf grande vanilla skim latte? If you want a drink with less than five words in its name, why the hell are you at Starbucks? Get your goddamn coffee at the deli.

My 25 Favorite Books

1. Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alastair Gray
2. The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
3. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
4. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
5. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
6. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
8. The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison
9. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
10. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
11. This Book Needs No Title by Raymond Smullyan
12. The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
13. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
14. Demian by Hermann Hesse
15. Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem
16. Cigarettes by Harry Matthews
17. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
18. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
19. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Slapstick, or Lonesome No More by Kurt Vonnegut
21. Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau
22. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
23. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
24. Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
25. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec

... and the top 10 books I'd like to read, when I'm done studying for my exam:
1. Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
2. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
3. William T. Vollmann, The Atlas
4. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
5. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
6. Alan Lightman, The Diagnosis
7. Carlton Mellick III, Satan Burger
8. Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang
9. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (embarrassing that I haven't read this yet!)
10. Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers

Wibble Pictures!

100 Things About Me

I suppose this is the proper way to start my blog....

1. I live in Manhattan.
2. I am an actuary.
3. I am married (my husband being V.)
4. I have one child, a son born 7/11/04 (we call him The Wibbles).
5. I went to Stuyvesant High School.
6. My favorite color is vermilion.
7. My favorite book is Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alastair Gray.
8. My favorite food is lobster. But if I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, it would be Sugar Smacks. I suppose that would end up being a pretty short life. But I wouldn't care.
9. I don't have a favorite movie.
10. I was raised as an atheist. At one point I became an Orthodox Jew, and stayed that way for 7 years. Now I'm an atheist again. Don't ask.
11. My husband is twelve years younger than I am.
12. I can't say the word "booger" without laughing.
13. The person I most wish I could meet is Douglas Hofstadter.
14. I am fluent in French. My Spanish is pretty good, too, and I also speak a bit of Japanese.
15. I double-majored in math and computer science.
16. I work in a tiny cubicle.
17. I like to paint, but I don't paint any more because I have a small apartment and I don't want The Wibbles breathing in the fumes.
18. Even though I can paint pretty well, I can't draw for shit.
19. It bothers me that I suck at chess.
20. It bothers me that my parents didn't give me a middle name.
21. I have a little brother.
22. He is my parents' favorite. This doesn't bother me as much now as it used to.
23. It bothers me that my son can't talk yet. I'm not worried (he's only 13 months), but it would be nice if he could let me know what he wanted without shrieking.
24. I miss my son terribly when I'm at work. I even miss the shrieking.
25. I haven't thrown up in over ten years. Not even while I was pregnant. This is in great contrast to V., who throws up at least twice a week for no apparent reason.
26. I talk in my sleep. Sometimes I laugh in my sleep and it wakes me up. The Wibbles does this too.
27. One of my coworkers recently got me hooked on SuDoKu.
28. Corin See recently got me hooked on the Set puzzle.
29. I'm running out of ideas here.
30. I go by my maiden name at work.
31. I have low cholesterol. Bet you didn't know that could be a problem.
32. I don't drink caffeine. This has nothing to do with the fact that I have low cholesterol. It's just a personal choice.
33. I lied about not having a favorite movie. My favorite movie is The Matrix. I'm just embarassed to admit it. So there.
34. I can't believe I'm only a third of the way through this.
35. I am 5'2".
36. My husband finds short women more attractive than tall women. I'm pretty sure he's not just saying that. He's the only guy I've ever met who had that preference without being short himself. His reasoning is that tall is masculine and short is feminine. Whatever.
37. I plan to run the New York City Marathon in 2007. If I can get in by lottery, I'll run in 2006. I just don't have time to run in 9 qualifying races this year to guarantee a 2006 entry. But I will guarantee myself a 2007 entry if I can't enter in 2006.
38. It will be my first marathon. The longest I've ever run so far is 12 miles.
39. I have green eyes.
40. I burn first, then tan.
41. I have never been on a cruise.
42. Yes, I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
43. I am really running out of ideas now. I've decided to stop at 50.
44. I think James Lipton is a pretentious fart.
45. I'm obsessed with lipstick. I must have 30 tubes. I never leave the house without it. I have a tube at my desk and I reapply every 15 minutes. Other than lipstick I don't wear much makeup.
46. My pet peeve is people who say/write "try and" instead of "try to."
47. I used to think I had straight hair. Then, sometime around the late 90s or early 00s (I have no concept of time... more on this below), female celebrities started straightening their hair pancake straight. Now I think I have wavy hair.
48. I have no concept of time. I have "today," "recently" (a week ago or less), "somewhat recently" (within the last three years), "a while ago," and "when I was a kid." I also can never guess how long something I need to do will take me to do it. This does not go over very well at work. I have learned to answer "about a week" to everything. If their eyes boggle, I try "about a month."
49. I have a better memory for names than I do for faces. I am the only person I know like this.
50. All my childhood memories are of times that I learned something that surprised me. My earliest memory is from nursery school. We used to get a snack of two Oreos and a Dixie cup of milk. I would alternate bites of Oreo with sips of milk. I would always run out of milk before I finished my Oreos, and one day I complained about this to my father. He said, "Well, you don't have to alternate!" I'm not as stupid as this story makes me sound.