leben ist lecker

i write this afternoon in celebration of uncharacteristic jubilance on a wednesday! uncharacteristic jubilance lends itself to increased use of exclamatory punctuation.

1. today, roommate and dear friend AMY THE FIZZ is officially a year older than she was yesterday. kat, caroline, and I surprised her with a really amazing breakfast (orange macadamia french toast from heaven, plus bacon and eggs and pineapple and tim tams), a decorated dining room, flowers, gifts. i love celebrating people i love, and i hope that that love gets communicated, because FIZZ is a definitely a gem. The only moment of cleverness I was able to muster, however, was the bottle of IZZE juice turned FiZzE juice --->

2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3. I am wearing very Professional Wendy clothing (CEO in the office necessitates such) - but with my daily-wear green sneakers on my feet. es freut mich. Listening to my ipod in the elevator up to the chiropractor office, I grabbed onto the handicap-assistance bar and was doing ridiculous ballet moves all the way up. Pat Benatar was playing when exited my truck in our work parking garage, so I was duty-bound to leap & dance around on the open concrete before heading upstairs and resuming semi-professional behavior. I'm going to eat a Milka bar from Deutschland right now.

3. I just buzzed the postman in. He delivered Happiness (capital H) to me in the form of a medium sized white envelope from Schweiz. With glee, I tore open the paper, the cardboard, and finally the toilet-paper wrapping to uncover....MY CELL PHONE! i kissed it. though i've managed without it for 15 days now, its return only made me realize how very much i adore this amazing communication-facilitator. i've felt (i mean no disrespect by this) like an amputee without it, and today was the blessed day of limb reattachment (doctors seem to think it's tough to reattach limbs after this much time has passed, but i am of the opinion that it is, at the very least, emotionally possible). the battery is so very dead, but i expect a revival sometime tonight.

Hooray!!!!!

dining with ms. ellis

Sara Ellis is my work neighbor. We are privileged to spend the bulk of our weekday hours in close proximity to the ocean (the very edge of the continent!), the Promenade, and a variety of other Santa Monica delights. We celebrate the neighborhood and our friendship by having lunch together as often as our schedules permit. During one such lunch last December, I realized I had a camera in my purse. We decided to take pictures. And then we decided that we'd take pictures EVERY time we had lunch. No real reason - it's just fun. and funny.

By my camera's count, today's lunch marked the 19th we've shared since that day in December, and because 19 is an arbitrarily interesting number, I'm going to celebrate it (the number, the lunch, and Sara Ellis) by posting a few pictures (for the full-blown retrospective, you'll have to wrestle mein ApfelmuessTron [aka, my laptop] away from me).

lunch #1 in december:

laying down on the Promenade to commemorate 2006's last lunch:

usually the pictures are ridiculous or horrifying. and sometimes they look like engagement pictures. sometimes it looks like we have toupees and manly facial hair.
lunch today (how quickly could you tell I cut and pasted both our bodies into this picture? it's hard to take full body shots of your accidental-dressing-alikeness when your arm isn't 6.4 feet long):