beautiful and dirty rich

I love my life and I love my friends. LA part duex is amazing as ever. This time I'm with the notorious Gail and we have Libby all to ourselves!!

Gail and I both got in Thursday night and we stayed up until 4:30am east coast time gabbing away with Libby over cheese and wine. It was fabulous.

Friday we got up and went to brunch with two bottles of champagne in hand to benice... "be nice" or "benice" as in Venice but noone can be sure. Had their legendary banana batter pancakes and drank mimosas. Heart my life.

Headed to Marina del Ray for some serene beach with more champagne and soaked in blissful California sun. This very sun makes Gail want to say FML because she's a little strawberry on her front side.

I, apparently, am immune to the sun and thanks to factor 15 I still look like Casper the friendly ghost. F-M-L. We headed to a Venice Beach bar called Cabo and took advantage of happy hour 2-for-1 drinks.

[Insert team trip to Trader Joes that had us laughing so hard we were crying.]

The best thing ever happened next. Our very own Lady Gaga dance party in Libby's apartment. YES!!! We introduced Libby to many a Lady Gaga songs! Oh and homemade fresh berry mojitos were involved. YUM!  This ended abruptly when the neighbor downstairs rang the doorbell and told us it sounded like we were coming through his roof.  You better believe it, sir.

We made it to dinner by 10pm for Spanish tapas and wine. It was delish despite the wait for a table.  It was BYOB so we had our cheap Trader Joe's wine in tow and it was perfect. Cherry cherry, YUM YUM.

Thanks  to such late bedtime on Thursday, the sun and red wine we all passed out at midnight!  Roll on day two.  We're going for brunch (clearly) and then our daily adventure will begin with a hike.  Stay tuned!

LOVE MY LIFE!

i've lost my wisdom!

Teeth, that is.  Yesterday at 8am I was given more drugs than I thought was legal to sedate me through surgery to remove all four of my impacted wisdom teeth. Here is sad, pathetic me in my 5 year-old tie-dye t-shirt sucking on a tea bag to help clot the blood.  Sigh... so tragic haha.

The lovely, one-and-only, Ms Sarah Root took me there and sat and waited for me and took me home. All the while work was calling her non-stop to get things done.  What a good friend she is and my other friends that have been over to visit or are coming this weekend - I am truly blessed! 

So here is what happened, that I remember.  I go in and I'm super nervous.  They give me laughing gas, I go numbish.  They turn the radio on... LADY GAGA was playing.  I told them this was a good sign.  They put in the IV and put me to sleep with anesthesia.  I semi-remember waking kicking in pain and look up and see three heads around me telling me to calm down and that everything was ok.  I think they shot me with more Novocaine at this point.

They walk me over to a chair and Sarah is talking to me about this and that. Some old man comes over and is talking to us.  I apparently felt the need to clarify to him that Sarah and I were not partners - HAHA. While my mouth was full of gauze and Sarah is telling me "Jillian stop talking, don't touch your mouth!"

Then we go to CVS and this man is asking me about my phone that he sees me texting to the pharmacist with, by this point it hurt to talk and I was listening to the surgeons' advice.  He quickly figures out that I can't talk and says to hold up one finger for "yes" and two fingers for "no".  This is how the conversation went:

"Is that a blackberry?" - two fingers

"Can you text and email on it?" - one finger

"Do your minutes roll over every month?" - two fingers

[receive text message from sarah in the car]

"Oh is that your friend texting you?" - one finger

[him reading over my shoulder]

"You're Sarah Root" - two fingers

"Who's "me", your boyfriend?" - two fingers

... and so it went until the pharmacist finally gave me my drugs and I left.

So after Sarah drops me home I start icing and change the gauze.  My right side will not clot - bleeding profusely.  I run out of gauze.  I remember an old trick from stopping wrestlers' bloody noses and start cutting up pieces of tampon and put them in my mouth HAHAHA.  Sorry for all the male readers - but I was just being resourceful.  

My entire lower jaw remains numb all day.  I have no feeling in my tongue, chin, lips, etc.  Choking on water I worry about taking pain pills on an empty stomach.  I force yogurt down my throat and choke and half of it ends up on my chin but I don't notice this as I have no feeling.  I get a pain pill down and fall asleep.

I start to panic at 4pm when my numbness has not subsided WHATSOEVER.  I was freaking out.  I finally got my blood to clot on the right side by biting down on a moistened tea bag. Hot mess, this girl. Kayte calls the surgeon for me and he calls back and says that they gave me long acting Novocaine so it's just taking my body a long time to metabolize it. 

Steph came over with more frozen peas, coffee ice cream (YUM), and gauze.  Then Kayte came over.  So nice to have company!!!

I regain feeling in my lower jaw circa 11pm. FINALLY.  Slept pretty badly and now here I am rambling on and on.  I think it's the percocet, haha.

Sooo if you stopped reading 6 paragraphs ago, I don't blame you!  But visitors are always welcome.  Kayte and Gail are coming over later with movies and smoothies and Kayte said she's going to force me to eat solids... eeeek. :(  But still should be nice!

Thanks everyone for your concern and support! xoxo

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a place to call home

Things are looking up. Yesterday I put first month's rent down on an apartment in Brighton Center. Assuming all goes well today when the landlord reads my application, it's mine.

The apartment has its pro's and con's as all apartments do when you're on a budget. Check out the listing here.  Craigslist may take down the ad soon, though. 

Pro's:

- Modern kitchen & bathroom

- Hardwood floors

- Laundry in building

- One block from 501 express bus into town

- In heart of Brighton Center, close to everything we need

Con's

- It's small

- It's on top a store front

- It's not in Brookline :(

- It's far (relatively) from my Brookline family

Despite the con's, I truly think Christian and I can make it our little home! We promise to host dinner and game parties even if it's no mansion. I can't wait to go "Ikea crazy" on the place, haha. 

However, that will have to wait as it is costing me $4k to move in so I'm broke for awhile, argh. 

What do you think? Is it cute? :)

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now hiring a gym buddy

Too sore to move today. Admittedly I am shocked at how my body can run 10 miles with minimal soreness the next day but just an hour of squats, pushups and weight training has me so sore I want to cry! I know that it makes sense physiologically but don't like it just the same.

I had a free training session yesterday because I just moved gyms. I always dread these free appointments as I have little to no tolerance of meatheads showing me how weak I am. I get it. You like protein shakes and hair gel and I like running sneakers and ipods. Oil and water, I tell you.

I know that I need to be doing things other than running but the gym is infested with protein obsessed meatheads. I also feel 100% stupid doing exercises like he had me doing yesterday. Oh well maybe I just have to suck it up.

I think now I need a gym buddy on top of my running buddies. Here's the deal:

Qualifications:

- Normal amount of enthusiasm (all those with the work-out sunshine and lollypops approach will not be considered)

- Serious distrust of protein powders

- Low-maintenance (please don't insist upon matching your outfits or wearing makeup at the gym)

- No desire to forgo shirts and prance around the gym in just a sports bra

- Don't be too "earthy", must believe in deodorant and shaving

- be slightly (key word here is slightly) more in shape than me so you can show me how to do stuff

- Understand that 30% of the time I will hate your guts

Key responsibilities of the job:

- Making me laugh

- Keeping me in a routine

- Deterring approaching meatheads

- Going out for wine and beer after some works outs

- Calling paramedics if necessary

If you feel you fit the requirements above please send your resume and cover letter to me.

Happy Friday Everyone!  I'll leave you with my favorite You-Tube video of all times. If you closely resemble any of the characters, for the love of god do not apply to be my gym buddy. ;)

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my project is live!

I am proud to announce that the Experian QAS Customer Community is fully live!

Well, you're probably thinking "what the hell is a customer community?" And the very simple answer to that would be that it is the project I've been working on for two months. Doesn't answer your question? Weird...  Well anyway, check it out!  

On to a more nerdy explanation. In an effort to increase value to our customers we hope this community will be a place where they can communicate with our organization as well as other customers. Here's a quick article outlining why communication is key in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). 

To do this, we've put in a forum as a platform for communication and are publishing customer-specific articles on a regular basis. The community also stands as a one stop resource for everything they need from FAQ to training materials.

My biggest involvement was from a technical production and input standpoint but also the most fun bit, if you ask me! :) I worked with our development team very hard on the forum functionality as well as on RSS feed implementation for any new content. I got to test my development skills on all the page content and imagery production. I heart Photoshop... and well I can sometimes enjoy writing HTML when I'm feeling extra nerdy.

Anyway, we are at our very early stages of the Customer Community and are super proud of what we've been able to accomplish so far. Unfortunately most of my involvement ends here as maintenance of the community will sit with my fully capable colleague, the lovely Miss Liz. :)

So what's next? A lot. I am really eager to implement a lot of tedious changes to our site in order to improve our visibility on search engines. It's onsite SEO work for any that know what I'm talking about.

I am also eager to improve the Canadian site lead production through a mix of new PPC/SEO strategies.

Finally, I hope to hone in on Web analytics and start studying site user behavior to help identify further improvements. Web analytics is highly complicated but hugely important so I'm excited.

YOU CAN WAKE UP NOW I'M DONE TALKING ABOUT MY NERDY BORING JOB (that I love so much haha)!!!

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01:41:41

Broad Street Run 2009 - 23,093 finishers - holy crap! I was one of them! :D

Ten miles, I did it!  I can't believe it but I actually finished the 10 mile race without stopping to walk or fall too much off a 10 min/mi pace.  I think the more impressive bit worth mentioning is that the last two miles of the race it POURED cats and dogs rain on us!  I did anticipate some rain, and it was just scattered sprinkles throughout the majority of the race, however, I wasn't prepared for the downpour during the two most physically challenging miles!  

Here is a "before" picture.  The "after" picture is literally so bad of me that I really can't share it.

 

So Mike and I finished the race side by side like two mops in a bucket.  The other bad part about the rain was having to SLOWLLLLY walk through these crowds to get food and water after crossing the finish line. We were soaked through and through.  Got back to the minivan and said… let’s bounce!  The Downingtown Running Club had a bunch of stuff to tailgate with, too.  So it was kind of a shame.  It totally would have been my style to eat a burger and relax in the sun.  Unfortunately, shivering in the rain made everything less fun.

But all in all, the race felt really good.  I felt really comfortable with my pace, as slow as it may be.  It managed to keep Mike by my side and he has never run more than five miles.  He certainly kept me going through certain miles that felt longer than others.  He also put up with my weaving traffic of slower runners – I get annoyed easily, we all know this. haha.

We finished in 1 hour 41 minutes, a time I am pretty proud of.  I think I will be just fine to run a half marathon in the near future.  One of my aunt's friends running with us said that once I've done 10 mi then I might as well train for a marathon.  According to her (a very experienced marathon runner) it's making the jump from 3 mi to 7 mi for non-distance runners that is the hardest bit.  I don't know if I am convinced.  She said that I could do a marathon in the fall if I wanted to.  If I wanted to.  Hmm. 

I was thinking if I were to do a marathon, obviously I've toyed with the idea in the past, then I would want to wait until next spring.  I would like to build my stamina as a runner and speed up a bit if at all possible. So my thoughts were to make it a destination marathon like London Marathon or Copenhagen Marathon.

Again, those lofty and ambitious goals of mine.  I still have to tackle the half marathon next.  I had the very quick idea to do the Big Lake Half next Saturday with Carissa in New Hampshire.  I took a look at the race description and thought that "rolling hills" is a good thing when describing a drive in the country but not to run.  I just, to be honest, have incorporated very few hills into my training.  Boston can be pretty flat, especially along The Charles.

I also will have you all know that the race was over as of like 11am yesterday and I still haven't had one single drink! I could really go for a cold beer right now.  I am in the airport which is one of my favorite places to grab a beer but PHL is telling me that despite all this rain my flight is actually ON TIME.  Never (ever) happens in PHL so I'm not sure what is going on. Do they serve beer on puddle jumpers? ;)

Oh wait, just made an announcement.  My plane due to depart in an hour hasn't even left Boston, yet.  On to finding a suitable pint of beer!

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i'm scared... mostly of me.

it's a friday night.  i've spent 1 hr on f**king craigslist apartment hunting, 15 min on facebook, 15 min on twitter, and 15 min rereading old blog posts. i am a loser. this is what forcing myself to not drink and eat out does to me. i will now promptly watch 3 episodes of friends season 5 and pass out halfway through the 3rd.  this is why i'm scared...of me.

however!! i will hopefully be able to cross the finish line on broad street this sunday. no toxins in this body to be found - just try, go ahead... lots of veggies, fruit and PASTAAAA (my favorite part of running distance, pasta consumption is mandatory).  

haven't even so much as flirted with a glass of wine in over a week.  round of applause!!!  

but nothing funny has happened in over a week, either.  coincidence??

it is going to rain, 80% chance, on sunday. if you see what looks like a blonde wig mop laying across broad street, please scrape me off the pavement before the street sweepers come by.  thank you citizens of philadelphia.