It's been good times since finals ended. I went to Flagstaff for Christmas and saw my family, which is always nice (at least for a few days), and basically have just hung out other than that. I had a brief obsession with Gone With the Wind that was inspired with my friend Anna, and now I'm reading Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, which is good and a fast read. I went and ate dinner at Tucson's notorious Yankee Doodle Italian Cuisine, a truly bizarre place; it's half bar, half restaurant, and the decor includes pictures of George Washington and pasted up stickers of cartoon characters on the windows.
New Years was fun and somewhat embarassing at times. Anna and I went to FLagstaff to see the pinecone drop. Every year, they drop a giant pinecone-like object off the roof of a hotel downtown at midnight, and everybody gets drunk and cheers like mad. Anna and I bought two bottles of wine, a really bad cabernet sauvignon and a bottle of organic white zinfindel, to drink beforehand. We intended to drink all of the first and part of the second so we could leave some for my dad, but instead we drank all of both and stumbled downtown for the festivities. As we were walking, at one point I keeled over on a church lawn and lay on my back for a minute or two, which Anna found way too funny. We finally got downtown, watched the pinecone drop, and headed home because it was very cold and we were rather drunk.
The next morning, we walked to Macy's to meet friends for lunch and coffee. I found a bottle of ibuprofen and a pen that had fallen out of my bag on the church lawn during my laying-down session the night before, provoking more laughs from Anna. We met the friends, walked around for a few hours, and went home to eat again and hit the road. There, we discovered that we had not drunk our organic wine as we had thought; instead, we had downed an entire bottle of my dad's wine. It's rather embarassing to be noticably drunk in front of my family, and that mistake kind of added insult to injury. Ouch!
But New Year's was fun. Yay for the pinecone!