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I realize that it’s Wednesday night, which is slightly late for a weekend update. Strangely, I feel that as I am less busy at work, I post less. It might be because my days are much shorter, and I spend a lot more time talking to my coworkers instead of sitting in front of the computer.

The title is appropriate because not only do I have a few pictures to recap the weekend’s highlights, but much of this weekend was spent in pictures of one type or another.

What is probably our last big snowstorm of the year started on Friday morning and extended until Friday night. It was pretty messy, with at least as many ice pellets as snowflakes. But Saturday morning dawned clear and sunny. On the way to church, I got a snapshot of the snowy sidewalks of the East Village. Wait, who’s the hot girl in the red coat?

Sunday morning, Jannine and I joined Jeremy and Erica for brunch at Alias. As I have written here before, Alias has great dinner food, particularly for their Sunday Supper, which is one of the better restaurant values it the city. The brunch had received similar high reviews.

The brunch received mixed reviews from our panel of foodies. First, the positives. The service was prompt. My cheese grits and collard greens were delicious. And the fruit compote that came with Jannine’s waffles were great.

However, overall, the food seemed fairly average. Jeremy didn’t give rave reviews to the eggs benedict. The Alias brunch has a nice southern twist, but it certainly isn’t on the level of Clinton Street, 9th Street Market or Sarabeth’s.

After brunch, we headed over to Brooklyn’s Stay Gold Gallery for a show called Blowup, featuring photos from Holga, Lomo and other “toy cameras.” It was such a great show — I highly recommend you stop by before the show closes this coming Saturday (March 24). We ended up so entranced by some of the photos that we ended up buying two. We were excited because it was our first gallery purchase.

On the way back, I took this picture out the window of the J, which is elevated in Brooklyn. Yeah, I know, still not ready for a gallery.

From Stay Gold, we went up to the MoMA to see the Jeff Wall photography exhibit they have right now. Wall is largely known for his huge (wall-sized) gelatin-on-glass prints which he puts in light boxes, which really makes them come to life. One of Jannine’s coworkers had recommended the show, and we were glad we went, because there were some great photos. We also decided to join the MoMA. A dual membership is only $120, and at $20 per person admission, we’d only have to go three times over the course of the year to recoup our money. Plus, we can buy up to five $5 guest tickets every time we go, so if any one wants to go see the MoMA with us, just let us know.

After we finished with the Jeff Wall exhibit, we went down to the fifth floor to see the Van Goghs and the Monets. I love the water lilies so much — I could sit and look at the three panels for hours. Here’s a shot of the center panel, which doesn’t even begin to do justice to the scope and the depth of the painting.

Finally, we ended our day with a lovely dinner. But that, dear readers, is a topic for another post.

For those of you who don’t know or can’t remember, I work with little people for a living. Specifically, I teach music and art classes for toddlers every morning. It’s quite a living, I must say, as it does not pay nearly as much as other professions do, but from what I can tell, is so much more fulfilling than said professions. That being said, there are times when I don’t necessarily enjoy arguing with a 2 1/2 year old about putting his/her instrument away.

However, today, as such an incident arose, I had some much-needed assistance from one of my students, Evelyn. To give some background, Evelyn has always been one of the more precocious and linguistically-gifted two-year-olds in our class. So, at around 9:40 am, when I was locked in a showdown with an impeccably dressed little girl named Ryan over a small percussive frog**, Evelyn came to my rescue. I try to make it a point never to grab anything forcefully out of my students’ small yet terrificly strong hands, as this generally results in mild hysteria. But, apparently, Evelyn has the right touch. The following is verbatim:

Me, the “Teacher”: Ryan, please give me the frog.

Ryan, stubborn, yet fashionable student: No, I put away.

Me: Ryan, you need to give me the frog.

Ryan: (shaking her head all the while, with hands behind her back): No.

Enter Evelyn: Ryan! You need to listen to Jannine. Give her the frog!

At this point, Ryan looks over at Evelyn, lets down her defense, and in one fell swoop of the hands, Evelyn recovers the frog and places it in my hands. Then Evelyn ran back to her other friends looking quite pleased with herself, and all was well.

**In the music world, there exist small, medium and large intricately designed wooden frogs. They come with stickes that are used to scrape against the frogs bumpy heads, thereby producing a distinct “rrribit!” sound.

Rob, my good buddy from law school (he was one of the few normal people there), is back in the blogging business.

Rob blogged at el bloggo during law school. However, given his now-exaulted status as an official juris doctor, he believed that el bloggo was so 2006 (or possibly so “law student”). Seeing as Rob is always on the forward edge of the fashion, he quickly ditched el bloggo and went onto the next big thing.

And so, with great pleasure, I direct you to thisnextthing.

But this referral comes with a warning: Rob is whip-smart and frequently very funny. Do not read his blog while drinking liquids or eating food, or you may see your food/drink on your computer screen.

Saw a link to this tech blog at Yahoo this morning, which warns of yet another identity theft risk: newer copiers, which keep copies of everything they copy on hard drives.

I don’t know who the genius was who decided that it would be a good idea to build copiers so that they remember everything that they ever copy. However, it is apparently the standard technology now. So when your HR person copied your Social Security card and drivers license on your first day of work for your W-9 form, those id docs stayed on the office copier. When you ran into Kinkos to photocopy your taxes before sending them out, all your financial information stayed at Kinkos.

In short, just be careful what you copy, and where you copy it.

Zipcar sent out an email the other day announcing that they were about to launch a redesigned site.

If you don’t know about Zipcar yet, you should. It’s an hourly car rental service that helps car-deprived people in cities like NYC, Boston, and San Francisco get a car for those vital runs to Ikea or Costco, or daytrips to places where public transportation does not serve. (While it is true that most worthwhile destinations are served by some sort of public transportation, be it subways or commercial airlines, there are, believe it or not, places worth going where Continental or the MTA do not deign to run.)

Zipcar is fast, convenient and (relatively) cheap. Where else can you have the joy of driving a mini for $12 per hour?

The Zipcar experience, according to the online demo, is about to get even better. Their new flash-based website appears to make finding an available car matching your preferred time, location and style much easier. Plus, it makes heavy use of Google maps, which I adore.

The new system looks so cool that I want to rent a car just so I can have an excuse to use it.

My coworker forwarded this Dilbert cartoon to my entire practice group a couple days ago. It tells the story of my life pretty much perfectly.

In other work-related news, my deal finally closed on Wednesday. So for right now, I am in the glorious between-deals phase, where I have very little work to do and can relax without being barraged by dozens of emails, phone calls, and demands that documents be finished five minutes ago.

The closing was fine, although we hit a few snags along the way, none of which were necessary and all of which were manageable, but together they conspired to keep me at work for one more all-nighter and delayed the actual closing by a couple hours. But the money finally moved and then there was much joy at various locations around the country as people became richer than they already were.

Such a worthy avocation, mine is.

Lawyer humor is like pizza rolls: even when it’s good, it’s still pretty bad.

So take this quote, which I currently find hilarious, with a grain of salt.

It came at the end of an extended email dialogue about getting some additional signature pages for a document, which had to be on safety paper (you know, the nice green patterned paper like they use for printing checks). Instead of scrapping the pages we executed yesterday and starting over, we could just execute additional copies.

After we had finally confirmed that we didn’t need to waste paper and time redoing all the pages, the counsel for the company emailed the whole group and said:

Always happy to save a tree, even if it’s an odd-looking safety-paper tree.

See, I told you it wouldn’t be that funny. But I think it’s hilarious.

(Credit for the opening quote goes to Michael Rosenberg, comparing MSU and U-M basketball: “Michigan State is like pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s pretty good. The Wolverines are like pizza rolls: even when they are good, they are pretty bad.”)

When you’re closing large corporate deals, you typically have a long list of “closing conditions” — milestones that must be met prior to the money moving. It’s a long list of documents that have to be signed, opionions that must be given, collateral that must be secured, factual conditions that must be met and everything else necessary for the bankers to feel comfortable giving away a few hundred million or some billions of dollars.

Right now, 30 hours before the deal is supposed to close, I’m in my own “closing condition”: I’m tired and I’m drained. It’s two rather different conditions. Being tired can be cured with some sleep. Being drained is an ongoing condition, and no matter how much sleep you get, you aren’t going to suddenly feel “not drained.”

I need a break, not like a vacation (although that would of course be nice), but a break from the stress. I looked back at my time reports today, and since early November, I’ve had 15 days when I didn’t bill any time (note that that period contains six holidays). That’s a long time with no real weekends.

I would write more, because I actually had a fun weekend despite all the work. But the car service just called and said that my car will be here in two minutes. So I’m off for now — maybe I can get three hours’ sleep if I’m lucky.

Thursday around 8:30 p.m., I had my typical nightly dilemma. It was time to order dinner from Seamless Web so that I could sit at my desk and eat out of takeout containers while working. Always a good time. If you want to to be romantic, you can turn off the light and pretend that the glowing computer screen is candlelight. After six months of work, I’m getting somewhat tired of the available options, despite the 180 or so restaurants on the list.

Then, I noticed a new option: Barbarini Alimentari, an Italian restaurant on Front Street in the South Street Seaport area. The menu descriptions sounded interesting, so I decided to try it.

I ordered a red beet and dried ricotta salad and spinach fettuccine with roasted tomato puree. The beets were fresh and juicy, and the ricotta had a nice, tangy taste. The fresh-made fettuccine was perfect, and the tomato puree was one of the more interesting tomato sauces I have had. It has a cream base, but the tomato puree gave it a great texture and taste.

As I researched the restaurant today, I discovered that one of the owners is a former chef from Paprika, an excellent restaurant in the East Village.

Anyway, I’d highly recommend stopping by there if you’re down in the seaport. It’s a nice switch from the mediocre tourist-friendly places around there.

Just now, I was responding to an eVite invitation. You know how when you are responding to eVites, they always take you to a red envelope ad. I presume the advertising logic goes something like this:
1.) You’re responding to an eVite, therefore you have friends.
2.) If you have friends, then you need to buy gifts for them.
3.) Your friends must want useless gifts that don’t really match their tastes, because nothing says “You’re a great friend” better than a random novelty gift ordered off the internet.

Anyway, today’s ad was for a “circle of friends votive holder.” I don’t know who designed this thing, and I don’t know who buys them, but all I can think of is some kind of cheesy cartoon with stick people of many colors holding hands, dancing across the screen while singing “We are the World,” with maybe a nice encore of “Kum by Ya.”

Of course, I’m sure some of my diabolical readers have already picked out my birthday gift.