July 19, 2008 by karen
Last weekend I met up with my three college roommates, Marisa, Lindsey and Julie, in Chicago. Aside from the occasional wedding, this is the first time we have all gotten to spend a full weekend together since 2002. Here we are eight years after graduation in Chicago. Old ladies, with dogs, and kids and jobs that don’t allow you to skip out for a fishbowl of beer in the middle of the afternoon.
And here we are in Athens, Ohio in 2000, with our friends Stacey and Kristen. Maybe someone could have talked to me about the Sun-in situation I had happening with my hair? Thanks, ladies!
We had a great weekend, eating, walking, shopping and laughing and reminding ourselves of tales from OU. We took a river tour, had some great sushi in Old Town and checked out Second City, which was hilarious. Some photos from the weekend:
Lindsey and Julie on Michigan Avenue.
Julie at brunch at Lux Bar.
In Old Town.
I love these buildings. I don’t know if it’s because of the Wilco album cover or because I love the ridiculousness of a pie shaped apartment.
Check out the rest of my photos from the weekend on flickr.
Tags:
chicago,
julie w.,
karen,
linz s.,
marisa w.
Posted in Events, Travel 
1 Comment »
July 19, 2008 by karen
Some TOAD highlights from the last month….
I can’t think of a single shower that we’ve had this summer that wasn’t a total downpour. Here’s the result of a Saturday afternoon storm a few weeks ago. It flooded our entire patio (as we watched) and then later we wondered “Hmm. Do you think the basement is flooded?” In fact it was. We spent the next several hours drying out the basement. Being a homeowner comes with so many perks.
We checked out the New Amsterdam market a few weeks back where one can find delicious cheeses, breads, and seafood. And directly across the street, you can find some of the best bluefish and lobster burgers at the Fish Market.
The new, sweet fountains around the bridges. Exceptionally nice at night when paired with Brooklyn Ice Cream factory goodness.
We finally checked out Lucali’s pizza in Carrol Gardens. We waited about an hour on a holiday weekend, but it was well worth the wait. This place is run out of the ground floor of a rowhouse that feels like someone’s home. You can watch your pizza being made right in front of your table. It was awesome to see the pizza maker pull a mushroom out of a bowl of fresh vegetables and just start shredding it over the pizza that arrived at our table 10 minutes later. If you decide to check it out, and I recommend you do, remember it’s BYOB.
Do you think there is any chance this phone rings the muppet theme song? I can’t imagine anything better.
While sitting on the tarmac for three hours last week, I stumbled upon this screen while flipping through the channels. You’re welcome Jet Blue.
Check out the rest of the new TOADs on flickr.
Tags:
TOADs
Posted in Events, Food & Drink, Photos on the go, Projects No Comments »
July 1, 2008 by karen
Apparently Alex and I love to write about: Weekends, Brooklyn, Weddings, Robb, Anyone and Shows. At least we did in the last several weeks. Who knew? Wordle knew! Wordle is a fun little site that will generate a word cloud based on a piece of text, website or a del.icio.us account. I ran teamkanestreet.com through the site and it created the above image. I thought at first it would generate the cloud based on the whole site, but it seems like it may just capture one page, because while I know we like Robb and Weddings, we don’t write about them THAT much.
You can play around with the color and layout of the word cloud, but I love how this image displayed. It reminds me of the Ork posters.
What were you interested in the last several weeks?
Tags:
technology,
wordle
Posted in Photos on the go No Comments »
June 28, 2008 by alex
While flying to San Francisco on Virgin America (my new favorite airline, btw) I stopped to watch this show on Current.TV about Brooklyn graffiti artists in New Orleans called Your Neighbor’s Steps:
A New Orleans art collective works to establish installations in areas hardest hit by Katrina, attracting people to see the art and thus see the devastation. We follow a New York artist to New Orleans where he makes a piece for this organization and sees the devastation first hand for the first time.
The show culminates with a piece that I immediately recognized from Union street near us in Brooklyn. In fact, it was a piece that I had taken a picture of last year on November 26th as part of my Take One A Day project:
The show was entertaining and interestingly shot. On that note, can anyone recommend any other shows on Current. I feel like there may be some interesting stuff there but don’t know anyone who watches it (which is strange since I think our friends are probably part of their target demographic, but that’s a problem for another day).
Anyway, it was nice to unexpectedly get the history on a piece of art that I really liked and it definitely peaked my curiosity about the network for the first time.
Tags:
art,
brooklyn,
graffiti
Posted in New York, Thoughts No Comments »
June 27, 2008 by karen
The working title Less Annoying Than Twitter is still under consideration, so for now we’ll just start calling these updates… oh I don’t know. Random Stuff Going On. Or Karen’s Kibbles (and bits and bits). Whatever. It’s an update for now. Anyway….let’s start with:
- Happy Friday! I hope you have a fun weekend ahead of you.
- This is our first weekend home in Brooklyn in three weeks. Originally we were supposed to be in San Francisco this weekend, but due to some work stuff, I am in Brooklyn this weekend and Alex is flying home from SF right now. I am happy to be home though—I miss my city after a few weekends away.
- But unfortunately I have a mid-term due on Monday, so I may be indoors working most of the weekend. The assignment is to design and build a CSS Zen Garden. If it turns out ok, maybe I’ll post it and share it with you nice people. Won’t that be exciting?!
- And while there is CSS to be done, I also want to check out the once in a while New Amsterdam Market at the seaport this weekend, as well as the Unfancy Food Show.
- And then if we do all that eating I suppose I should fit in a work out or something. Or just watch So You Think You Can Dance on Tivo. I do so much toe pointing and toe flexing when I watch that show, it’s practically a work out.
Posted in Thoughts No Comments »
June 24, 2008 by alex
To complement Karen’s post about Robb and Sarah’s wedding in Rhode Island as well at Karen and Matt’s interpretation of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, I wanted to (belatedly) post a selection of photos I took that weekend. Here goes…
Oddly enough, this felt like a bit of a bargain.
Indie rock album cover?
Matt and his little slide.
Every wedding weekend needs a ghetto blaster.
A couple of artsy photos for you and yours.
A super smiley Karen after a Smiley wedding.
Sarah and Robb make their entrance. Hooray!
Our crew (not pictured: Matt - he hates that)
Just one of the many personal details that Robb and Sarah personally tended to.
We thought W might be sneaking his way down the East Coast on Ground Force One but then realized it was just a cleverly spruced-up Chinatown bus.
Check out the rest of my photos here.
Posted in Events, Friends, Travel 1 Comment »
June 23, 2008 by alex
Here’s a great interview with my buddy Jon, whose movie, The Wackness, comes out on July 3rd. It’s looking like Karen and I are going to the premiere + after party this Wednesday so we’ll be sure to post a quick review (as well as blog the crap out of the rest of the evening!).
The soundtrack is a veritable who’s who of hip hop deep cuts from 1994. Check out this interview that highlights how music came to play such an important role in the flick:
Talk a little bit about why that era was so important to you, in particular 1994.
For me it was two-fold. First off, I saw a great deal of authenticity in the story. If I were to try to write kids today, it would have come off as disingenuous. In order to get the authenticity that I value so much, I needed to go back to 1994. That was the year I graduated high school.
Beyond that, I think there’s a rich tradition of movies that focus on the high school years of a decade or two decades ago. We wanted to follow in that tradition and have people feel the same nostalgia for that time that I was feeling when I was writing it … When you can be one of the first people to look back at a time — remember this music and remember what people were wearing -– you just get this rich wellspring of goodwill. People like to remember these times.
Check out the whole interview here
Posted in Events, Friends, Thoughts No Comments »
June 17, 2008 by karen
We spent this past weekend up in Narragansett, Rhode Island, celebrating the wedding of our friends’, Robb and Sarah Smylie. We had a great time road tripping, cruising around the coast of Rhode Isand on a sunset cruise, eating tons of fresh seafood and just generally being happy for the newlyweds.
The wedding itself was amazing and can be categorized as one of the most thoughtful weddings I have ever attended. They did almost everything they could do themselves from not only designing the invitations, but printing them on a Gocco, printing flags in honor of flag day to baking all the desserts for the wedding. A whole buffet of desserts! Why don’t I have a picture of that? They were delicious and I am impressed they banged out something like 75 mini pies the week of their wedding. It sounds like they had a busy week before the wedding getting everything in order, but I suspect in retrospect, they know it was totally worth it.
Based on the photos I have seen from their fauxto booth on flickr, I think they know we had a great time. Especially Matt. Have you ever seen a sweatier wedding guest? The good news was that people steered clear of us on the dance floor.
Some photos from the weekend:
Sunset cruise around Rhode Island.
The Gotham kids and the groom.
Awwww. Sarah and Robb!
Cocktail hour at sunset farm.
Sarah enjoying her wedding.
Amazing basil mojito. Can I find this in NYC?
Hooray!
Mr. and Mrs. Smylie!
Dancing machines! Two words, Matt: white shirt.
On Sunday we pit-stopped in New Haven for some pizza at Frank Pepe’s. Delish!
Check out the rest of the weekend photos on flickr.
Posted in Photos on the go No Comments »
June 9, 2008 by karen
Yesterday, one the hottest days of 2008 so far, The Bear Mountain Brawlers (TKS is on this team!) ran the 50 mile relay race Need for Speed from Bear Mountain down to New Rochelle, New York (you might remember we ran this race last year). And you know what? It was f*&$ing hot out yesterday! Look at this weather report! Take note of that heat advisory!
We started off our day at 4:45 a.m. at our apartment. To avoid schlepping to the UWS, Matt slept over and enjoyed some Meat Pasta the night before. Despite Matt’s complaints, we toasted up some bagels with peanut butter and hit the road to pick up Brad. By 5:30am we had Katie in tow and were on our way to Yonkers to meet up with the rest of the team at Tom and Ag’s new gigantic house.
Once everyone arrived, we were on our way to the mountain for the start of the race. As you know, the day was looking to be warm, and when we got to Bear Mountain the temperatures were already pretty high, though luckily we had a 7:45 a.m. start so hopefully our morning runners could beat the insane heat.
“Team 161?… Team 161? Team 161!?” That was the announcer calling our first runner to the start. Katie was in the port-o-potty when we needed to get started. She raced to the start, made it just in time before the officials honked the race horn, kicking off her leg of the race.
Go Katie!!!
The race is really quite beautiful in some areas. Here’s one shot on our way to the first exchange where Katie would hand off the RFID bracelet to Brad.
Here comes Katie!
And there goes Brad! Go Brad!
At this point Matt realizes how awesome the race is and decides to call his Mom and ask her to come cheer him on. J-Bird agrees to come for beers and wings at the end of the race.
Back from his trail run, Brad is stoked to hand off to James.
Super marathoner, James, takes off on his 9 mile run. That’s right: 9 miles. In 90 degree heat. I don’t have a photo but trust us that he returned alive and in good health.
Filling in for Ag’s Mom this year, Ingrid, in from Savannah, had no issues with the heat it seemed. She did great and flew into the exchange in no time after her 3 mile run. She handed off to Tom, we watched him run into the full sun and then drove to our next exchange where we pulled up some grass in the shade. Here you’ll find a slowly melting team.
We started to wonder where Tom was after about an hour. We had estimated everyone’s arrival times and Tom was way late. Is he ok we wondered? He was! He was just saving someone’s life on the trail. Someone has passed out and Tom stayed to make sure an ambulance showed up for him. The life-saver award goes to Tom K.!
Rookie Matt was up next. He had my leg from last year and I promised him there was some shade, but after we took off in our van to find the next exchange and started passing through the course we realized there would be no relief for Matt. Was he prepared for this 6.5 mile leg?
Turns out he was! Yay Matt! He hands off the bracelet to me and I am off!
I ran. And then I walked. And then I ran. Ugh. It was terrible, but it turned out I wasn’t much slower than I would have expected. I ran into some geese on my run, who wouldn’t move off the trail and hissed at me when I got too close. I also encountered a strange photographer who took photos of me at no fewer than four spots on my route. I thought he was an official photographer until I realized he kept showing up at nearly every mile of my run. I never learned what his deal was…
I got to my exchange about an hour later, handed off to Ag and then was hosed off by an old man! It was the best thing that happened all day. Thank god for the old man with the hose!
Ag had an excellent run despite the heat. She took off and was back in no time for the final exchange to Alex.
Alex had the final (read: glory) leg of the race. He originally had plans to run the last section of the race with his new ghetto blaster, but considering most people were dropping like flies without an additional 20 lbs of audio gear, he opted to run without it.
We hurried to the finish line and in came Alex in what seemed like third place (maybe not, but it looked like it)! He had a great and sweaty finish!
The Bear Mountain Brawlers dragged our tired butts to the end of race party for some wings (what? gross!) and beers, but we were hurried out before the awards ceremony thanks to an incoming thunderstorm. Turned out that while we were able to finish the race, the organizers had called the race due to the heat advisory and all the dropping runners by the 6th leg for most teams. Couldn’t they have called the race at say… 7:45 a.m.?
Despite the crazy heat, we all had a great time and held up really well against mother nature. It seemed like with each leg more and more teams had dropped out since the previous exchange, so I am curious to see what the finals stats are for the race and how many people actually showed up this year.
Check out all the water and gatorade we consumed yesterday! See the rest of the photos on flickr.
Posted in Photos on the go No Comments »
Recent Comments