Happy Labor Day Weekend!

Labor Day…does anyone really know what it means to Americans (other than the obvious 3-day weekend!)  Well according to Wikipedia, Labor Day originated in the 1880’s when New York’s Central Labor Union decided it would be a good idea to give the “working class” a day off.  Thank you Central Labor Union!

My Labor Day weekend consists of me spending much of my time outside of San Francisco.  Tonight I will likely head over to ROFLCon, if nothing to be amused by LOLCats but also to have a few drinks with some friends.  It’ll likely be an early night as I committed to driving my brother to the airport at 4:30 am.  Oy vey!  Toss in a morning run, I’ll be meeting up with friends to head to Napa around the noon hour.  I’m actually quite excited about this: we were able to get on a tour of Palmaz Vineyards and this is what they say about their tour:

“The tour consists of a walk through of several levels of the cave where we show how our wines are made using gravity-flow winemaking methods. Then guests will join us for a tasting where three winery-only white wines and three vintages of the Palmaz Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon are featured and paired with hors d’ oeuvres.”

After that we’re heading over to Tres Sabores for a picnic of sorts amongst the vines and watching A Fish Called Wanda al fresco!  Really looking forward to that.

Sunday I’m heading down to the South Bay to assist in filing music for our choir.  Not the most exciting thing to do on a holiday weekend, but one of my dearest friends is librarian so I want to help him out.  I’ll head back to the city in the evening to help celebrate my friend Rachel’s 3Xth birthday!  We’re heading over to Trax in The Haight…they’ll never know what hit them with this crowd!  Or maybe they will…it is after all a gay bar!

Monday…for the first time in years I do NOT have choir rehearsal on this day…what’s a girl to do!  I’m tentatively wanting to organize a picnic in Dolores Park…weather is meant to be gorgeous so we’ll see.  Ping me if you’re free that day!

What are your plans for the big holiday weekend?  And if you’re not living in this country, please let me know what you’re doing anyway. 🙂

Pleez to haz a break?

Time and time again I find myself being run down and exhausted because I’ve become TOO social. Is that possible? Yes, quite. My friend Tim would probably disagree with me, but considering I’ve not had a night to myself in about 3 weeks, I’d say I’m due.

So what have I been up to? Well lets see, there was the Date My Friend Event last night at Supper Club . For $10 you can get shots of wine, eat cookies, bad cheese and brownie bites and mingle with some of SF’s hottest…or nottest! Wednesday night we had a surprise birthday party at La Fondue. The food and service were outstanding. Definitely worth a visit if you even want to make it a point to be down in Saratoga. Reservations are a must though and expect at least a 3 hr meal. Tuesday night was Yelp’s Elite Event at Butterfly. There was a great pic of me taken at this by my friend Carlos.

My true love...

My true love...

It was a great chance to catch up with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while and overall, I liked the event. The restaurant has a cool layout and the food was really good! Definitely will have to keep that on the list of potential date places. Monday night I had a date with a guy from OKC. Had drinks at Madrone and dinner at Herbivore (he’s a vegetarian….ooh!). It actually went a lot better than I would expect any first date to go. We had been chatting for almost a week and it was very natural and great. I’ll keep you posted on this one! Sunday was WordPress’ Scavenger Hunt. Pics can be found here. Team SoberFAIL didn’t win but we were the most coordinated team out there.

Check us out:

Team SoberFAIL

Team SoberFAIL

I think that catches up my week. I’m off to see Radiohead tonight. I’m not going to link to that because if anyone DOESN’T know who Radiohead is…well, lets just say don’t admit to it on here for fear of retribution!!

What I’m listening to right now…

Being a musician and someone who is extremely passionate about music, I have no doubt that I’ll be regularly posting songs up here that are either special to me, have some relevance to my current state of mind or that I just think rock.

Some of you may not care and can therefore stop reading at this point. 🙂
I heard this song shortly after 9/11.  I thought it very fitting for that time where there was so much chaos going on in our country and inciting much fervor across the world.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P_TIMBP_oE]

The lyrics are especially poignant. I hope you enjoy.

we’d gather around all in a room fasten our belts engage in dialogue
we’d all slow down rest without guilt not lie without fear disagree sans judgement

we would stay and respond and expand and include and allow and forgive and
enjoy and evolve and discern and inquire and accept and admit and divulge and
open and reach out and speak up

This is utopia this is my utopia
This is my ideal my end in sight
Utopia this is my utopia
This is my nirvana
My ultimate

we’d open our arms we’d all jump in we’d all coast down into safety nets

we would share and listen and support and welcome be propelled by passion not
invest in outcomes we would breathe and be charmed and amused by difference
be gentle and make room for every emotion

we’d provide forums we’d all speak out we’d all be heard we’d all feel seen

we’d rise post-obstacle more defined more grateful we would heal be humbled
and be unstoppable we’d hold close and let go and know when to do which we’d
release and disarm and stand up and feel safe

this is utopia this is my utopia
this is my ideal my end in sight
utopia this is my utopia
this is my nirvana
my ultimate

What I'm listening to right now…

Being a musician and someone who is extremely passionate about music, I have no doubt that I’ll be regularly posting songs up here that are either special to me, have some relevance to my current state of mind or that I just think rock.

Some of you may not care and can therefore stop reading at this point. 🙂
I heard this song shortly after 9/11.  I thought it very fitting for that time where there was so much chaos going on in our country and inciting much fervor across the world.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P_TIMBP_oE]

The lyrics are especially poignant. I hope you enjoy.

we’d gather around all in a room fasten our belts engage in dialogue
we’d all slow down rest without guilt not lie without fear disagree sans judgement

we would stay and respond and expand and include and allow and forgive and
enjoy and evolve and discern and inquire and accept and admit and divulge and
open and reach out and speak up

This is utopia this is my utopia
This is my ideal my end in sight
Utopia this is my utopia
This is my nirvana
My ultimate

we’d open our arms we’d all jump in we’d all coast down into safety nets

we would share and listen and support and welcome be propelled by passion not
invest in outcomes we would breathe and be charmed and amused by difference
be gentle and make room for every emotion

we’d provide forums we’d all speak out we’d all be heard we’d all feel seen

we’d rise post-obstacle more defined more grateful we would heal be humbled
and be unstoppable we’d hold close and let go and know when to do which we’d
release and disarm and stand up and feel safe

this is utopia this is my utopia
this is my ideal my end in sight
utopia this is my utopia
this is my nirvana
my ultimate

WordCamp *squee*

Picture taken with my crappy phone but here I am at WordCamp 2008. Got here bright and early at 7:00 am to assist with Registration. Everyone seems super cool although I must say a lot of what is being discussed is above my head. Still, it’s great to be in this environment and seems like there’s every level of blogger here.

Looking forward to the rest of the day…

And Sara, I promise if I run into Matt I’ll say hello to him for you. I guess he’ll remember the American girl who interviewed him in Italy. 😉

Venturing into *gasp* the world of online dating…

Some of you may be asking yourself, why would Melanie bother with online dating? Doesn’t she go out enough on her own?

Well, yes I do. But to be quite frank I needed a distraction. Recent drama in my life has been giving me stress and I thought the best way to get around it would be to have some fun and join OK Cupid. I’ve had two friends tell me of their success (well, some success) on the site and I thought it would be a great way to distract my attentions for the time being.
Now, I don’t know how many of you have done anything like this before. Years ago I was on The Onion’s personals but times have changed! I signed up Monday morning and the madness started almost immediately. As of today, I’ve received over 100 emails…I can’t keep up! They’ve ranged from very interesting to wtf. I particularly enjoyed the fact that two men from Egypt and Jordan felt the need to message me….talk about long distance! 😛

Trying to figure out a system of how to go about this has been difficult.

Do you respond to everyone, even if you’re not interested?

If people are adding you as a favorite, do you look at their profile?

If they “wooo” you (yes, this is a function on this website if you can believe it) do you bother checking them out.

Decisions, decisions!

I’ve mostly just been checking out the people who take the time to write a message. That being said, I can’t respond to everyone. One particular gentleman wrote me twice…the second time saying something along the lines of, “write me back, I don’t bite!” So I wrote him a quick note to tell him that I was overwhelmed as still going through a lot of mail, etc, but that I was saying hi (FYI, not really interested based on his profile).

This was his response back:

Nice to hear from you. Thanks for saying hello. So your inbox is overflowing with desperate, lonely, sensitive men, eh? How… nice for you. haha! Beautiful women on this site get a lot of attention. Enjoy it! It’s nice to feel appreciated.

But I’m afraid you’re going to have to work a lot harder to keep my attention. Sure, you’re ok looking I suppose, but show me some of that quick wit and charm! Wow me!

Oh, and I’m on to you! You say you’re looking for decent men (yawn), but I think it’s just a ruse to find someone who is exciting, charming and fun. You can’t fool me.

As you can tell, I’m in something of a playful mood. Hope you’re feeling it, too. Write back after you get done letting all those decent (boring) guys down easy. I’ll be here. 😉

Cocky much? 😛 Why is a guy like this even online? Oh wait, yeah, because he probably get shot down when girls meet him and he opens his mouth!

It is truly amazing some of the responses I’ve received back. But for the most part, there DO seem to be a lot of decent, good guys out there…at least from what you can tell online. The good news is that it’s restored some hope in me that I am attractive and worth making an effort for.

Happy Hour

It’s a time honored tradition.

Long day at work, drinks after…we know the drill. I never used to be a big drinker but living in SF has not been kind to my liver.

There are some great bars in the city but who can resist $2 beers & well cocktails?! Welcome Jade.

I’ve been here a few times but strangely enough, NEVER at Happy Hour. Recently I went there for a friend’s birthday and I was surprised by how crowded it was. But when I saw the $2 price tag, I realized why. Despite it being crowded, we managed to score a spot upstairs. I always think it’s interesting when bars have lofts -you have to manage to carry your drinks upstairs to sit down…drinkFAIL is definitely a possibility. Somehow we managed and even though it was a small bar area and the bar was crowded, our gay-straight bartender Johnathan managed to get drinks out quickly and efficiently. I also managed to check out the downstairs for the first time. There’s a second bar down there that I didn’t know about – but was packed during the happy hour. The ceiling is quite low so we all felt a bit claustrophobic and quickly headed back upstairs.

I think there’s a good chance this could become a regular happy hour location for my friends…which is good in some ways as it’s a short bus ride away from my house, but I can already hear my liver crying.

For you local people, where are some other good happy hour locations? I know there’s a ton downtown (Dada, House of Shield’s, etc). I’ve also heard The Tonga Room is supposed to be great but I’d like to hear your thoughts. And for those of you who aren’t local, where do you go in your town/city? What dictates a great happy hour spot?

You should’ve known better…

For some reason I somehow have this strange belief that after you turn 30 you stop doing the stupid things that you do in your 20’s.  That some great wisdom comes over you that prevents you from doing the things that will hurt you the most.

Yeah, that’s a bunch of crap – but the question remains, will I ever learn?!

Sorry for the emo post….I don’t let this side of me come out too often, but every once in a while it escapes.

You should've known better…

For some reason I somehow have this strange belief that after you turn 30 you stop doing the stupid things that you do in your 20’s.  That some great wisdom comes over you that prevents you from doing the things that will hurt you the most.

Yeah, that’s a bunch of crap – but the question remains, will I ever learn?!

Sorry for the emo post….I don’t let this side of me come out too often, but every once in a while it escapes.