Ilse’s first birthday was January 20. We had a party for her, and her friends Penelope and Toby came over to play. Lindsay took pictures:

Ashleigh is making buffalo chicken pizza tonight. I’m excited because it’s one of my favorite recipes that she makes.

We’re renting a beautiful condo near Recreation Park in Long Beach, and my mother insists that I post some pictures of it. Visit my flickr page for more.

It’s amazing what you can put together using items in your mother’s storage closet.

It’s hard adjusting to the lack of food delivery here in Southern California. I was used to having lunch delivered very often from Say Cheese, Hale & Hearty, and other great little cafes. Now I have to go pick it up myself if I want something that’s not at home. And that means actually getting in the car and driving somewhere, since there’s also nothing in walking distance. The relative inconvenience is assuaged, though, by the availability of cream cheese wontons–which didn’t exist east of the Mississippi.

I got a new car! It’s small, round, and blue, so I named it Stitch. Note the antenna ball.

I thought my friend Stephanie was understudying Ophelia in Hamlet, and I wasn’t looking forward to sitting through Hamlet, but I just realized she’s actually understudying Olivia in Twelfth Night, and that sounds much better to me.

Ash and I are moving back to California in just one week! Technically she’s going on tour for a few months, while I’m moving (with our dog and our belongings) back to California. We’re almost done packing, but it’s difficult because we have to separate everything into three categories: things we need to bring with us, things we want to ship because we don’t trust the movers, and everything else. It’s odd watching our apartment go from being a home back into being a stale room full of boxes.

They opened a Cold Stone around the corner on 9th Avenue. At Cold Stone, all of the employees sing a little song whenever someone deposits a dollar in the tip jar. Every time we go in there, they sing this song that ends with “…and we hope to see you back tomorrow night!” And the funny part is, they always seem to get their wish.

Ashleigh and I went to one of those midnight Harry Potter release parties down in SoHo on Friday night. We wanted to avoid the huge crowds at Barnes and Noble and Borders, so we chose an independent bookstore called McNally-Robinson instead. They had fortune tellers, and a costume contest (no, we were not in costume), and “magic punch for grownups.” Ashleigh got her book just ten minutes after midnight, and then we headed home.

The eerie part of the evening was the visual on the subway platform. It’s very strange to see hundreds of people waiting for an N train after midnight (it also happened to be the subway station closest to the Scholastic store and Harry Potter Place), all of them very quiet, and all clutching the exact same book in their hands, as though they were all part of a creepy cult of children’s-book-worshipers. Oh wait…