My Weekend in List Form

1. Friday night I went out with my co-worker and amiga, Casey. Because Casey's a hottie and a model, she apparently has all kinds of connections to various fun DC things. She got us into Art Soiree, a fancy party at The Washington Club, a fancy-schmancy gorgeous building in Dupont. Free is the best price. Especially when you're at an expensive event. Lots of dancing and frivolity ensued.

So fancy, right?

2. Saturday morning, I went to a callback for a Fringe show. It took place on GW campus, which I have officially decided to attend. As an undergrad. Pretending to be 18. It just looks like a fun place to go to college.

3. After my callback, I moseyed on over to Barnes and Noble. My new favorite Saturday afternoon activity, which I have been doing the past month or so, is hanging out for hours at B&N. Reading in bookstores is much more pleasant than reading at home. And when I start feeling antsy, I can wander about downtown Bethesda for awhile! Lovely, lovely. 

4. After my literary afternoon, I went to the children's show that my friends Dylan and Emmy directed, Alice in Wonderland. It was at Children's Theatre of Annapolis, a company that I performed with as a youth. Hence, I ran into several friends and stage moms I haven't seen since high school. The show was  really cute and well done, and the kids were hilarious. 

5. I then met up with my sister at P.F. Chang's. Laughter, chatter, Chinese food. Asian pear mojito. Good stuff.

6. Yesterday, I woke up ready for a day of outdoorsy fun. The Earth woke up and decided the best way to celebrate Earth Day was to crap all over everything (aka be really rainy and cold. I guess rain on Earth Day is fitting. Giving the earth a drink so all the plants can grow is pretty earth friendly.) Whenever I don't like what the weather is doing, I respond by wearing clothes appropriate for the weather I would like it to be, hoping this will voodoo my way to the weather I want. This absolutely never works, and always results in my being extremely miserable. So, I began my day wearing a lovely sundress.

7. I went to the farmers market and got ASPARAGUS, STRAWBERRIES, AND CUCUMBERS. I really can't quite express to you how happy this made me.

8. I then went to Living Social's Beerfest with my friends Kat and Will. A big outdoor party with free microbrews and a shit ton of food trucks. Sounds fantasmic, right? Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, it was also bitter cold with frigid rain beating down on us. Fortunately, free ponchos and free booze turned it into a pretty hilarious party, where everyone was pretty much like "What the fuck? This is ridiculous! Yaaaaay beer pong!"

9. I foolishly drove to this event instead of metroing, and was clearly in no condition to get myself safely home once it ended. Upon this realization, I promptly called my dear friend Jamie, and informed him he would need to pick me up from the metro in ten minutes and hang out with my drunk ass until I sobered up enough to be driven back to my car. He, naturally, was thrilled by the prospect of having intoxicated Katie tag along on all his various errands. Thanks, sug. You're a peach.

10. I ended my weekend by having one of the characteristic four hour long conversation marathons that Ann and I so specialize in. Basically, about once every few weeks, we stay up to an ungodly hour talking about all the feelings that we have about everything in our lives. It was actually one of the more enlightening conversations I've had in a long time. I had several pretty big epiphanies about some things going on in my life right now. It left my brain a little exhausted, but in a good way.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go feed my face some strawberries. Happy Monday!

Here's Some Random Thoughts

I think Kirby is trying to murder Stella.

He's being really stealthy about it. Whenever they're together, he acts completely enamored of her. He snuggles with her and licks her head while she lies there with a "Yes, adore me if you must" look on her face. They play together all day long. They really seem like the best of friends.

However, Kirby has developed a weird habit in the last few months. About 5 or 6 times a day, he goes over to their water dish and scoots it away from their little food station. He just bats it until he's moved it about 6 inches, then goes about his day. Every morning when I refill their water, the dish is about 3 or 4 feet away from its original location, and usually under the kitchen table. 

We've been pretty puzzled by this. I mean, what's the point? And why start now? The location of his water dish was never cause for complaint before. And then the other day, Ann pointed out to me that whenever Stella jumps on the kitchen table/coffee table/counter, it's usually to drink water out of a glass we've left out. When she sits on the edge of the tub while we shower (which she loves to do; if you forget to let her in the bathroom, as soon as she hears the shower go on she starts crying and scratching at the door to come in), it's to lean her little face out and drink the water. She even licks the water off the bottom of the tub after we shower. Ann also pointed out that Stella hardly ever actually drinks from the water dish.

I'm thinking that Kirby, recognizing the utter stupidity that is my little girl cat, has figured out that if he hides the water dish, Stella is probably too dumb to find it. Given the lengths to which she goes to get water from any other location, it seems to be working. It could even be argued that her non-stop delinquency is to achieve the dousing she then receives by the spray bottle, which she can lick off her fur.

I wish you could see the way Kirby stared at me the entire time I've been typing this. It's like he knows. Terrifying.

~*~

MFing asparagus

Do you know what I'm doing after I post this? I'm going to the farmers market and buying some damn asparagus. All my bitching about eating locally and surviving the winter on squash is about to cease, my friends. I'm going to feast on this shit.

Also, I've apparently become one of those obnoxious health freaks that gets excited about things like asparagus. So that's embarrassing.

~*~

This song is awesome.

~*~

I think I'm ready to fall in love with someone.

Not that there is a someone, mind you. It's just that, for the past nine months, while I've been pregnant learning how to be single, falling in love with someone was a bad idea. I think my relationships for the most part have been very loving and healthy, but I also have a bad habit of getting too wrapped up in significant others. I realized that after my last relationship ended, and spent this last year trying to remedy that. I finally think I'm in a place where I could love someone else and not lose sight of myself in the process. 

I'm still loving being single, and am in no rush to find someone. It's just nice to know that, when B.o.B. or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or some other perfectly nice, non-famous dude comes along, I won't go all 10 Things I Hate About You on him. 

7th grade Katie thought Kat was the coolest.

~*~

I will now leave you with an adorable photo shoot of Stella and I, to prove that, despite my constant raging against her, I actually think she is the cutest thing ever and love her a lot.

Aw. I'll make sure Kirbster doesn't kill you.

Happy Sunday!

How Ann and I Were Murdered by Ghosts in Gettysburg

Oooh, ghosty.

Ann and I recently stayed the night at the Farnsworth House in Gettysburg. For those of you who don't know, the Farnsworth house was used in the battle at Gettysburg. Snipers hid in the attic and shot out through the window. One of the snipers was responsible for accidentally shooting Jennie Wade, the only civilian killed in the battle.

Farnsworth is also supposed to be haunted as crap. It's been ranked by tons of tv shows as one of the most haunted places in America, ghost experts conduct ghostly experiments there all the time, complete skeptics stay the night and emerge believers. It's cray. Naturally, Ann and I decided this would be a good place to sleep.

I'll preface this all with saying that I'm pretty open to the idea of ghosts. I wouldn't go so far as to say I definitely believe in them, but there do seem to be a lot of things that happen that we haven't found concrete explanations for. It also seems unrealistic to me that we have figured out exactly how everything in the world works. It seems more likely that there are some things we haven't figured out yet. When Louis Pasteur came up with the germ theory, everyone thought he was crazy. The idea of invisible little things floating around and making everyone sick seemed stupid. Thing is, they just didn't have the tools to see germs yet. I think maybe supernatural stuff is the same way.

Anywho, Ann and I decided to be real scientific about this thing. We brought notebooks and wrote down everything that we felt and experienced. We decided not to tell each other what we were writing, so we couldn't trick each other into experiencing the same things via the power of suggestion. Anytime something weird happened, we tried to find a physical explanation for it first. For example, when our door started shaking on its hinge like someone was trying to get in the room (terrifying), we realized after standing in the hallway for awhile that it did that every time another door in the inn closed. Not ghosts. Just an old house.

Still, a lot of little weird, creepy things happened. Here are a few highlights.

One of the ghosts that supposedly haunts the inn is a little boy named Jeremy. Apparently he was trampled by a horse and carriage in front of the inn. He was carried inside and died in the room we stayed in. There is a whole dresser filled with little toys for him, and a lot of people leave them out to see if he moves them.* We set up toys and coins all over the room, and took pictures of everything to see if they moved. Here's what happened.

When we went to sleep, the pennies looked like the first picture. When we woke up, they looked like the second. We didn't leave the room, and no one else came in. After I noticed this, I shook the table a few times, to see if one of us could have accidentally bumped the table and made the pennies slide. Every time I tried it, the pennies went pell-mell. I couldn't make them move into a neat formation like this. Also, if you look closely, you'll see that every single penny face is facing the exact same direction in the first photo as the last one. I can't think of how the pennies could slide and just happen to all keep facing the same way. Also, I just now realized that the wipes moved as well. Hmm.

Then, this happened to Ann's shoes.

Again, the first picture is how they looked when we went to sleep, and the second is how they looked when we woke up. At first we thought maybe the rug had slid, but it's in exactly the same place. Like the pennies, we practiced gently kicking and nudging the shoes to see if we could have accidentally moved them. We couldn't find a way to do it that got them to line up this neatly. They just kind of scattered.

At one point, when Ann and I were about to go out for lunch, we heard a sound coming from the dining room. It was empty, but the swinging door that went to the kitchen was creaking. It seemed like that was the direction the sound had been coming from, so we went over and looked at it. While we were watching, the door opened several inches, hovered there for about a second, and then closed. This resulted in a lot of us yelling and freaking out a bit. Then, we started to mess with the door. If you pushed it in, it swung really easily. If you tried to push it out though, (the direction it had moved), it was very heavy and hard to move. Also, every time we pushed it, it immediately swung back shut. It never hovered like when it moved on its own. We left, thoroughly freaked out, and passed a couple on our way out. The next morning, they told us that right after we left, they heard the door moving and went to go investigate. It opened several times for them. He filmed it opening about 6 inches.

It sounds like people in the other rooms had a lot more activity than we did (which is kind of annoying, since we paid extra to stay in what is supposed to be the most haunted room). The couple had their bed shake and felt someone touching them, and a mom and daughter had things moved to complete opposite sides of the room. 

Now, obviously, none of this is proof. For all you know, I moved the stuff in those pictures around myself. Also, what is the point of all of this? Was a ghost really like "HahaHA, I'm going to slightly wiggle your pennies around! How fearsome!" I'm not even completely convinced this was ghosts. Much like my attitude towards God, it seems implausible to me that we could guess completely correctly about this kind of thing. Maybe there's residual energy from the battle moving things around. Maybe there is a physical explanation that I just didn't figure out. Who knows. I definitely think there's something going on in the house (really, in that whole town). Too many bizarre things happened for me to think otherwise. Like this.

Horrifying.

*People also leave candy for him. I may or may not have stolen some of the dead ghost baby's candy and eaten it. I will likely be haunted forever.