Who writes songs about that?!

Today as I went to go pick up Marko and Lady Di from the airport, I had my radio set to my usual station. They’ve been doing this new thing lately when a new single comes is played, there’s a quick sound bite from the singer in the beginning talking about why they like their new single (besides the fact that they’re getting cash money for it being played at that very moment), why they wrote it, why you should like it, blah blah blah. And the new single from Christina Perry, which follows this formula, is the title track for the new Twilight movie that comes out next month.

So she’s telling us that she loves the song, yada yada yada and then tells us she wrote it because of the strong love between the two main characters (who, spoiler alert, get married in the last book...I’ve never read a page but the previews totally give it away. I’d be upset if I cared). Well, I just about fell out of my the driver’s seat when I heard that baloney. Writing a song because of the main characters love story? Really? That could be the dumbest thing I have heard all weekend. Back in the day, when I was under the impression that I had a beautiful singing voice, I wrote what I thought would be the next number one hit, but never once did I write a song based fictional characters and their love story! Sorry I had no songs about Ross and Rachel from Friends or Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski, or, to stick with the vampire theme, Buffy and Angel. Even as an aspiring music writer at the tender age of 10 or so, I knew I wouldn't be taken seriously if I wrote about that! And she's the one with the singing career?

I can honestly say that my 4th grade written songs were about things in the real world, like how I’ll one day meet NSYNC or how I would overcome the odds and be a music superstar. Real issues here people.

What to do, what to do...

Wednesday night, I come home from work and when I walked in the house, I was surprised to see my mom reading the newspaper and Lisa reading a book. Now, when your family works like clockwork something like this can be jarring. For example when I get home, Lady Di is almost always watching a cooking show sitting on the couch and Lisa is almost always upstairs on her computer (if she’s home). I had no choice but to be thrown off when I walked in and they were doing something so un-electronic. Well our TV, phone and internet all went out, so essentially we went Amish.

At first, I though, ok, no big deal. Then I was thinking about what I could do since the cable was out and a couple of times, I thought, ugh, fine I’ll watch something online. Nope, can’t do that since the internet is out. But then why is our power on? That’s because it’s just our internet, cable and phone that’s out. This was a conversation that I had with myself a few times that night. Not sure why it was so hard for me to figure it out, and I definitely had some issues remembering it.

I’ll also be the first to admit that we went through a range of emotions. We went from annoyance that it was out, to confusion when we were trying to figure what we could do, to shocked to the 12 hour window that AT&T gave us to come fix it, and then to pissed off when we realized that we were missing Modern Family. Actually I was also annoyed the next morning when I couldn’t watch Good Morning America while I was eating breakfast (since that’s about all the news I can handle).

But thank goodness AT&T came and fixed it Thursday so we didn’t have to continue our Amish-kick. And having 24 hours off from TV, Internet & phone was different but I won’t tell you that it was life changing because how different can it be with just 24 hours so it was more of a cleanse! But Im not hoping to go through another one any time soon. I need my internet...oh hell, and my TV too :o)

And Russell Brand Makes 12

And now, the shocking conclusion to our LA trip!

There’s very slim chance that there’s a place in LA that we DIDN’T hit on Saturday. We were all over the map. First we dined at Rosco’s in Altadena with the Bonino-Britschs for chicken and waffles—some of had that exact combo, some of us had just waffles, some of us had Big Mamma’s Special, and it was sinfully delicious! After that breakfast, we decided to walk some of it off so we headed to Pasadena, did some shopping to boost their ever dwindling economy--yeah right, we’ve all seen the Rose Parade. With only an hour worth of quarters to stick in the meter we and hopped back in the car and made our way towards Hollywood with everyone and their mother. Now in retrospect it was not the best idea, since it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in LA and we knew it was going to be packed but thanks to Tom legit Repetto who lent us his parking pass, we parked under the Kodak and walked out onto the Walk of Fame.

We hemmed and hawed for bit whether we should take a tour of the Star homes, or if we should just walk, but we decided to get on the van (with a slurpee and packed in the last row like a can of sardines) and hope to see a celeb. We climbed Mulhouland Drive, and saw lots of houses, Quintin Tarrantino, Courtney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, the street Zac Efron lives down (we yelled for the driver to “hang a left!!!” but George our driver didn’t listen), two of Elvis’s houses, the house Michael Jackson died in (it’s been abandoned for the past 2 years-that gives me the creeps!), and many more. Most notably, Katy Perry and Russell Brand’s new house, that they supposedly just moved into in May. So as we were all staring up and admiring the red awning through the trees, George yells, “oh wait! There’s Russell Brand!” He was pulling out of his driveway in his tricked out Range Rover and if we weren’t smushed in the back, I’m sure we would have lost Carly. Side bar: now she talks the big talk about not really caring about the celebrities but when she sees one out among the living, she really loses her shit! When we saw Marg Helgenburger, she almost took me down. Ok back to the story, so we see Russell Brand, Carly’s about ready to jumpout of the van and I was screaming at Lisa to take a picture, but she was taking her sweet ass time, so I have no photographic evidence. Therefore, no photo for the blog. You can bet I’m not going to let her forget that one.

We saw some more houses, all throughout Beverly Hills, but no more stars (and yes I was holding the camera at that point) down to Santa Monica Blvd, and eventually made our way back to Hollywood. We had a free ticket to Madam Tousoud’s Wax Museum where we kept a steady pace as we saw all the stars we never saw on our tour. We saw Brit, JT, Beyonce, Zac Efron, Conan O’Brien, the gang was all there. Definitely cool to walk through, but glad we got our free ticket.

Finally our dogs were barking so we decided to head back to Los Feliz and relive our excitement. I HIGHLY recommend taking a star homes tour, in fact, next time I want to take the TMZ one...maybe I’ll help them break a major celeb story and then be an E! correspondant. Yes, I think that’s what will happen.

Un-Trendy

Sadly, it appears that my birthday has come and gone. Although I am a firm believer in celebrating as long as humanly possible (usually runs about a month) others aren’t so keen on that idea. Rather being the last one singing happy birthday (and in this case to myself) I went to the masses and asked people to celebrate for as long as I could get them to, so away to LA we went!

So Friday, we got on a plane with Lisa and flew south, landing in beautiful Burbank before Regis and Kelly was even over. We spent a majority of our day with Nonni, although her attention on us was soon deflected when Marko, who was down in LA for a court appearance, waltzed right into the house like he owned the place to surprise Nonni, and after a quick lunch, he made Lisa and I drive him back to the airport.

Well, since we were already on the freeway, we decided to head downtown and go to FIDM, as Sarah was wrapping up her class, and kicked it in the campus museum seeing FABULOUS, an exhibit showcasing fashion from the past 200 years. There were some hits (Alexander McQueen) and some misses (the Crayola dress- a bonafide hot mess-in my professional opinion). We walked out a few minutes before Sarah and when we were sitting on a bench for 10 minutes, and BOY did I stick out like a sore thumb. There I was in my Gap zip up, light jeans and flippy floppies, walking amongst the boho chic, trendy and put together people of Los Angeles. People knew I was no student.

So rather than wait around to get ridiculed for our pathetic appearance, we hopped over to the Standard Hotel, went up to the rooftop bar and enjoyed a delicious mojito overlooking all of downtown, including Café Pinot! It was a beautiful day in LA so it was perfect to chill up there, and I could definitely imagine my Entourage buddies kicking it there on a lazy afternoon. Definitely a place to go back to but I was still way under-dressed.

Eventually, we made it back to Nonni’s for some bomb pizza and Carly and Kate finally flew in to join in on the fun. And rather than end the the night there, we hopped in the rental car and went to Dillion’s pub in Hollywood for $3 beers. We kicked it there for a while, along with most of Hollywood and when we decided to call it a night, were decided it was definitely our scene when our tab was cheaper than parking, yes this was definitely my kind of place, and I was finally appropriately dressed..

And so goes 23...

It's my final day of being 23 and looking back on the past year, I have to say it was solid. Here are 3 high points and in no particular order:

1. Winning $500 on my birthday! My fave radio station had a promotion where listeners had to simply enter a contest and if they call your name at 8, 12, 5, you have 10 minutes to call back. I signed up solely because I wanted to win $500 and I jokingly said it would be awesome if I won on my birthday. I hoped I would win from my pals, Sarah and Vinnie, but no dice and didn't pay attention in the 12:10 hour when they called my name. But thank goodness for my boss's husband who heard my name and tracked me down. What a way to start off 23!

2. Being MOH. So many awesome things about this. From the being drunk on power, planning, visits and of course the VEGAS, I loved being part of Team Wedding. Sarah and Tom's wedding was ridiculously awesome (thank goodness we got the pictures so we can recap for years!) and July 3rd was definitely a sad day as I relinquished my crown.

3. Italia! We went for Marko's 60th Birthday and as much as I hate flying, it was a super fun trip. After we spent some time with everyone and their mother in Roma, then Lisa and I went to Austria for a few days to explore and I am SO happy we did, that was one place I regretted not going when I studied abroad. We trained it back to Italy for 12 hours and finally ended back in the mother land and kicked it with Nonni (and eventually the p-units) and the relatives for a few days before heading home. Definitely worth it!

Surprise, surprise I can't think of anything and I am getting sleepy. Maybe I'll post some new ones when they come to me. But in the likely event that it doesn't happen, it's been real and it's been fun 23....but now it's on to 24!

Kudos and Boos...delayed version

Kudos that the month of October is here! My favorite month because of the obvious...my birthday! But with a new month brings some new monthly goals and by just looking at the calendar, it looks like it's gonna be a quick, busy month! Starting with a trip this weekend to LA, then participating in the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival, an engagement party and wrapping it up with Halloween. Bring it on.

Boos: New Jersey Houswives imploding! Last week some mysterious bombshells dropped and not only do we have no idea who the key players are but we have to wait until next season to see what happened since no one is talking, and his season is just wrapping up (it could easily be the longest season ever). As much as I loved this show at the beginning of the season, they're just too much sometimes and beginning to lose me as a fan. We still have one more episode to go this season, and I can only imagine that the reunion show will be a doosie. Only time will tell I suppose.

Kudos to Arrested Development! My prayers have been answered and not only are they doing a movie BUT they are also bringing it back for a few episodes. Now this was super smart, rather than just jump straight into a movie and waste half of the movie setting up story lines, they are going to take the episodes to set them up and then have a super good movie! I cannot wait. The writing is genius, the characters are AWESOME and I can still laugh out loud whenever I watch it. If you haven't seen it, what are you doing? Go watch it!

Boos to Jersey Housewives not knowing who the current the vice president is. This question was during the most recent episode and directed towards Melissa, Teresa and Kathy. Not your most shining moment on TV, and believe me, this season set the bar pretty high-or rather low.

Kudos to Melissa McCarthy on SNL this week. She's on a roll and just keeps getting better! I'm surprised she's finally getting the recognition that she deserves since she was on Gilmore Girls! Looks like I was ahead of the group--surprise surprise :o)

Boos to, well I got nothing so moving on!

Happy Belated Birthday Lady Di!!

I'm two days late, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY LADY DI!

She had a great day -- I was working so I'll have to take her word for it. But the San Carlos Bonino's showered her with love and attention. We went to this pop-ping Italian restaurant in Palo Alto, Osteria. This place was sinfully delicious and PACKED! When we walked in I thought, Oh silly Marko, you didn't need to throw a fit about reservations last week there's plenty of places to sit. Then no sooner do we sit down, that I start to feel claustrophobic and have flashbacks to Italy! Well that and that Lisa and I killed a bottle of white wine between the two of us. The food was delicious and if I were a yelper, I'd yelp about that Sole that I had--e buona! And of course we completed the night with some delicious Vanilla Moon cupcakes--again if I were a Yelper! All in all, a solid evening!

Oh but the celebrations don't end there...we're having a "joint" birthday celebration tomorrow night, but Lady Di has already picked the menu AND the dessert. Some "joint" celebration Lady Di! "Oh Julie, you can pick a side dish..." Surprise, surprise.