Slothfulness

This was actually an accidental photo -- I meant to take a shot of the vast underground tunnels, but due to the shutter lag of my camera, I got this shot of a train pulling into the station instead, which I think is kinda neat, no?

Today I took my last, and hereforeto undiscovered, discretionary day of the year. Yippee! I really, really needed it. I slept 11 hours last night (EUREKA! a solid night's sleep at last!) and spent today just puttering around and doing a whole lotta nothing (she says, trying not to think of all the tasks around the house that await her: assembling the console table, going through mail, laundry... you know, life) since I haven't really had a chance to just veg out and rest in a while, and sometimes you just need to do that (i.e., nothing very productive).

Made an oddball yogurt shake (iced coffee w/ milk + fresh blueberries + plain lowfat yogurt) with stuff I had on hand -- since no one else but me had to drink (or like) it, I felt free to experiment. As the book Alone in the Kitchen With An Eggplant points out, we are more relaxed about trying/eating weird food combos when no one else is there comment, disapprove, or be grossed out.

Also got sucked into an episode of The Young & The Restless since (a) it is part of my home-on-a-weekday guilty pleasure routine, and (b) one of the younger characters is going through chemo for breast cancer. Her fake bald head is a little too shiny (and her acting is still pretty lame) but they remembered to put in the blue shadow from having her head (ostensibly) shaved, and the chemo drip looked realistic. HEY! Come to think of it, if her character is having chemo (3-hr. drip) for the first time today, why is she already bald?! That's bass-ackwards! Well at least they're trying to get it right, I suppose.

Then had a chance to chat with my friend Helen in London using my newly downloaded version of Skype (yippee! free "phone" calls to London, Beijing, and Abidjan are in my future!) after discovering that yes, once again, various versions of my name have already been taken. (FYI - My Skype name is my full name with a hyphen, so: FName-LName, and it's linked to my yahoo e-mail address.) This was after my friend Ellen told me to go look at a hilarious video of remixed footage showing squirrels dancing to Michael Jackson (and I thought I spent too much time on my 'puter -- this person spent HOW many hours messing with the video till the squirrels were synchronized to "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough"? [or whatever the title of that song is]).

Staying home also allowed me to see one of those midday, apocalyptic thunderstorms, where the sky got so dark that I looked up since the living room was suddenly dim. The clouds were even darker than in the picture, but this will give you an idea of what it was like:

It reminds me of the microburst the other night, with some really spectacular lightning strikes, and winds that decimated about 100+ trees in northern Central Park. This photo of a venerable old tree, violently uprooted, will give an idea of the strength of the winds, since the root system is wider than this little girl is tall!

Okay, more later (most likely food porn of recent birthday dinner outings) but right now I am off to seek ACTUAL food: hungry!