ingrid + more

monday night hijinks: recap

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
So it’s fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys

— ingrid michaelson, “breakable”

it took me pretty much all of yesterday, but i think i’m recovered from monday night’s events! staying out late to attend a concert is approximately 3.5 jillion times more fun than being on call, but it still packs a wallop, energy-wise. no amount of caffeine would have been enough to buoy me through the day yesterday had i stuck to my usual (early!) wakeup call, so i just slept in as much as i could (6:30!) and gave myself a bit of a break from working out, cooking, reading, and the like. i may have even fallen off of my media diet, but you know — desperate times, right?

here is a brief photo recap of the evening, beginning with dinner at my absolute favorite standby diner, elmo’s. josh and i have been frequenting elmo’s on a regular basis since our early days in durham, and luckily they have 2 locations — one closer to our old house (durham), and the other relatively convenient to our chapel hill apartment (carrboro).

i am the sort of person who gets into restaurant ruts. as in, at a standby place like elmo’s, i’ll order the same thing every time, because i just can’t bear to venture from my favorite lest i be disappointed in an alternative. i begin to crave my rut dish as soon as i see the menu — it’s nearly pavlovian. but i actually did decide to make a change at elmo’s, because after seeing food inc, i’m trying to avoid meat and poultry that does not conform to my free-range, organic standards.

so i said goodbye to my precious spinach salad with chicken, eggs, tomatoes, and pecans . . . and hello to a delicious bowl of vegetarian chili.

PLUS, a chickenless side spinach salad, as part of a combo deal.

brilliant! although we won’t get into whether these eggs are cage-free or not. one step at a time . . .

we finished by sharing this decadent and delicious slice of peanut butter pie three ways. OMG.

and here is the (almost) birthday girl! my sister enjoying her last few days of being 26

i didn’t ruin her fun by telling her that it all goes downhill from there. just kidding!

onto ingrid

glad we had gotten tickets beforehand!

from elmo’s, we headed to the cat’s cradle, the venue where ingrid was performing. this smallish concert venue is a fantastic place to see artists in a fairly intimate setting. i’ve seen a fair number of shows there, although right now i’m drawing a gigantic blank and all i can remember is matisyahu with siobhan and jeremy several years ago! ha. remember him? oh, and josh and i once saw badly drawn boy there, which was underwhelming because he seemed totally drunk (probably was) and played for an inappropriately long time — we actually left!

but anyway, the cat’s cradle is great for intimacy, for convenience, and it has pretty good acoustics. it can be bad if you are short, as both my sister and i are. but after having my visual fields blocked completely by one linebacker-sized guy after another, we both worked our way closer to the front and enjoyed a decent view for most of the show!

ingrid really delivered a wonderful concert. she didn’t make it onstage until 10:20, but played solidly until midnight. and despite this being waaaaaay past my bedtime, i was captivated the whole time! onstage at least, she has a personality that is both endearing and kooky, so there was plenty of goodnatured silliness — she joked with the audience members, playing off the fact that there were 2 children in the audience. she was very sweet, and complimented the crowd multiple times, adding to the good vibes.

but the highlight was her music! vocally, she sounded at least as good as she does on the albums, and she put fun little touches into her songs that added interest to the live performance. not only did she cover a wide variety of songs from her 3 albums, but she did a beautiful cover of radiohead’s creep and rapped the intro to fresh prince of bel air without missing a beat.

i left happy and ready to listen to all of her songs over again, another mark of a great performance in my book.

from my vantage point in the crowd:

ingrid is the one with the glasses and longish blonde hair. she looks entirely normal and un-hollywood-ized.

they remind me of a college a capella group or something up here! they all looked like they enjoyed themselves.

i certainly did too!

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9.22.09

workout: rest day. monday, i did an interval run but i am data-less because my footpod battery died! i need to switch shoes anyway, so this is probably just as well. i made the best of it by just running for time, alternating 5 minutes of fast with 3 minutes of slow to approximate the 5 x 1K intervals that were on my schedule. i think i did about 5.5 miles, but it is so weird not to know for sure!

doin’ time: pass . . .

reading: and pass again. but ingrid was worth it!