rov dogg went in for surgery on tuesday morning. he had to get a tumor removed from inside his ear. i still haven’t heard back about the biopsy but they were able to remove everything, which is great! this is the last time rover was coneless, his last taste of uninhibited freedom before i dropped him off.

 

the vet is right by grindcore house and i had to call off work to get him to and from surgery, so after dropping rover, i spent a good chunk of the morning working on pages for Year One at grindcore house. it was nice to be there on a week day. it wasn’t so crowded.

 

this is the dog that was returned to me. rover was pretty sullen the first few days back and keeps running into everything with his cone. he especially has trouble getting it up the stairs still, but is getting more confident about moving around with it. this is the photo i put on tumblr that helped me raise the entire cost of his surgery in donations, thankfully! now i just have to send 40 personalized thank you packages to everyone who helped out!

 

in my head i call him cone-an the barbarian, someone who was over last night called him coney island baby. haha.

 

we had really beautiful weather this week, unseasonably warm and sunny and bursting with colors

 

it made for great days with my nanny baby, who is getting so big and self-aware (he’s 7 and a half months now)

 

his grandma was also in town visiting this week, so mimi mama and i went on the town together a lot, doing grocery shopping and visiting little places she had wanted to go while in philly and getting lunch out at restaurants. not bad for a day of work.

 

sitting in rittenhouse square with asher and mimi mama

 

this is a weirdly crisp photo, and really colorful. i started going to la columbe, a coffeeshop near rittenhouse. it has really good coffee.

 

i also had my first full week of my olympic lifting class! it was a lot different from crossfit, mainly because it was slow. it took a few days of getting used to. in crossfit we usually do a strength portion, a skills portion, and a warm up and mobility portion, and then we do an intense fast paced workout which you usually do for time. so you’re racing through it as hard and as fast as you can for the best time. in oly classes, there are only 2 lifts you really focus on, the snatch and the clean and jerk. and then you do front and back squats for strength at the end. so you spend the entire time just working on form, for those two lifts. it’s slow and methodical, but really nice in that way.

 

class is 2 hours a session, four sessions a week. so it’s a lot of putting heavy stuff over my head, which means i’m going to get a lot more explosive and a lot stronger pretty quick, which is great, because those are two things that are lacking in my crossfit skillset. there are only 4 of us in the class. and we take turns doing 3 reps. our coach watches us attempt the lift three times, and then gives us a correction. and then you rest while everyone else goes. and then you attempt 3 more reps with the correction in mind. and then maybe you get to add weight. and then you do it all over again.

 

during saturdays class, we were doing oly downstairs, there was a wedding workout upstairs for two crossfit members who were getting married that day. the bride and groom were able to invite who they wanted to come complete the crossfit workout. it made for a really chaotic scene. there were soo many people crammed into our tiny gym, all moving as fast as they could. it was fun to watch.

 

back downstairs, this is corey doing a clean and jerk

 

this is jordan, who didn’t get enough sleep the night before because she had to work a night shift. and that’s coach jim threatening to step on her.

 

after class, i went over to the royal tavern where everyone was getting brunch. shira had driven up from DC for the philly zine fest.

 

checking in with coney island baby

 

then i met shira and laura at the gold standard. laura interviewed me for a journalism paper for schoool about zine stuff.

 

and then amy leigh arrived from toronto!

 

she joined the ranks of people who have laid on rover’s hoagie bed and gotten covered in dog hair

 

after hangin at gold standard a while, lizz joined us and we all headed down to staples for a night of zine fest preparation

 

soon, a whole bunch of other folks preparing for zine fest also arrived, and coincidentally, two of them were our friends aaron and heatheranne

 

we were there for a few hours, so people were getting hyper and stir crazy. i found amy leigh skyping with her partner in australia, in the middle of staples!

 

in december, she’s going to australia for two months. she better still be around online. she’s a crucial gossip friend.

 

whenever a photo of me mysteriously turns up on my camera, i always post it, even when they’re out of focus, just because so few of the photos on here actually have me in them.

 

for some reason, claudia, amy leighs amazing friend who was also visiting from toronto, started rolling fake cigarettes out of post it notes. lizz looking ‘tough.’

 

heatheranne, always crucial

 

we were just going stir crazy and getting weird while waiting for our copy jobs to finish. yep.

 

from left to right, it’s aaron, claudia, me, lizz, heatheranne and shira

 

sometimes i have really good people in my life. this weekend i kept thinking about how so many of my favorite people are from out of town, and while living in chicago that was a huge bummer because people didn’t travel there as often, living in philly it’s actually fulfilling enough because people are always traveling through or willing to get to philly. it reminded me that while in baltimore, half the reason i loved it so much despite not having a huge circle of really close friends (just a small handful), it was because i got to see my out of town friends so often.

 

aaron and heatheranne were making their first zines! exciting.

 

zombie leigh

 

after staples we went to lucky’s, a west philly staple, for cheap chinese food.

 

we spent the rest of the night watching bad movies and folding and stapling piles of zines

 

we woke up on the early side to prepare for zine fest. we stopped by greenline for breakfast and coffee on the way.

 

there was a great turn out again this year. i had gone to philly zine fest for the first time last year. it was the trip that made me decide to move here!

 

sitting at my table, trying to catch up on weekly comics. i’m so behind!

 

my nanny baby and his parent’s stopped by! it was really sweet.

 

max and i shared a table. man. i was looking sleepy i guess.

 

my setup. i want to sew a new sign for tabling.

 

my old roommates came down from new york! the ones i first lived with in philly before jacob and lizz.

 

this funny dog was hangin out

 

and so was this gal

 

after zine fest we went to the bath house, where cat vet live, for a taco potluck. lizz’s sweetie from DC came to town too!

 

dirty dancin in the kitchen

 

keith telling a story about dinking, or was it doubling?

 

back at home, we played bananagrams and people drank beer, a classic household social event

 

we also ate blueberry pie and coconut ice cream

 

lizz fed it to people who were busy with a round of bananagrams

such a good weekend. more folks come to town, please.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 8:47 am and is filed under Philly Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.