My Toasty Apt Building
What condition are you about to have when you smell toast burning? A stroke? I think they say you're supposed to smell toast burning, but then again my dad had a stroke at the young age of 38 and he never mentioned such nonsense. Anyway, I digress.

Since moving into my apartment building, I smell toast on a daily basis even when I'm not toasting any. It comes in from my hallway at random times and smell's like someone is cooking grilled cheese or about to have eggs and toast. Several friends of mine have commented on it when visiting me.

I think the eccentric old guy on the first floor has a thing for toast. He lives by himself but also has two cats that roam the halls and meow like birds. I love cats and enjoy petting them, but I tell you their meows freak me out. His apartment is long and narrow, train style like and whenever he opens it I see lined up tin cans and hear Telemundo on the TV. He also carries in a classic red bicycle in and out but I've never seen him ride it, only carry it. The weird thing is I keep running into him around the city and I smile but he has no idea who I am, lol. I saw him in Central Park watching the Marathon in October and at the supermarket last week.

Blogging Beyond the Men's Club

Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?

By Steven Levy
Newsweek
Read the full Story

Well, I love that I'm an oddity, sort of, and being among the female bloggers :)


Happy St. Pat's Day!
Despite being Italian my first name, Tara, is of Irish decent. In Gaelic it means 'The Tower' and Tara
is also a town in Ireland, where they used to crown the ancient kings. I've never been, only to Dublin, where being as name obsessed as I am, I took a photo of Tara Road and a leather shop called Tara Leather, lol.

Gas-Mask Car Shopping?
I just spent a long weekend escaping the city up in Quechee, Vermont. I tried cross country skiing for the first time. I had been downhill skiing since I was four-years-old, but had never done the Nordic Track workout version of xc-skiing till now. It was fun!

While up there, me and my girl friends were at a loss as to what to do after hours, since everything closed around 8 p.m. Seriously, when we were eating at Chili's they were mopping around our table by 9:00. We knew of a nice bar but there was a cover and we didn't want to do that. Even though I don't drink beer, we went to the 7 Barrel Brewery, which was supposed to of had a live band, but because of the snow storm they didn't show.

So, on Saturday afternoon when we were getting some coffee and loose tea at at this coffee shop in town. I asked the young hippy guy behind the counter if he could suggest a place to go or some things to do in town that evening. The guy, Travis, was from the nearby town of Woodstock, VT and had captivating blue eyes, I couldn't stop staring, but his hair was all Rastafarian. He was sweet and drew me a map to the aforementioned brewery and suggested sledding on this big hill at night. I was excited about going sledding, but it appeared I was the only one though, so I had to nix that idea unless I wanted to sled solo :( Being bold, I ever so casually gave Mr. Blue eyes with the tangly red hair the phone number of our condo, in case I said if he thought of anything else to do. After a fun evening of hanging around with my girls--eating way too much food (I cooked my famous pasta sauce, with pork and meatballs) and singing with silly accents, "I would walk 500 miles" outside in the snow, we fell asleep to an episode of The West Wing.

In the morning I noticed the answering machine light was flashing, indicating that we had a new message. It was Travis. He was saying hello, and because we didn't answer he said we had probably found something fun to do, which he said was 'awesome.' He added that he was calling because his buddy suggested we try going car shopping with gas masks on(period) No laughter, no teasing. It seemed like he was totally serious. My friends and I were like, "car shopping with gas-masks??" WTF? lol. My friend Stacy didn't seemed as surprised though, saying it sounded like a very rural New England thing to do, but of course she still found it odd.

Have any of you heard of this? Is this a typical outing for bored townies, like cow tipping? Am I missing out on some fun? Honestly, I am intrigued and am a little sorry I missed his call ;)

Link: the above cartoon comes from a google search which led me to the book, An Action a Day Keeps Global Capitalism Away which mentions this idea.

All the rage this summer
I've been asked by my out-of-state friends and fellow bloggers to report on some of the fashion trends in New York City and considering it's snowing here right now, I thought I'd escape with thoughts of summer.

OK here it is, this summer Moccasins are going to be all the rage! So buy now, while they are relatively cheap. I picked up the ones shown below, but in magenta. Remember the brighter the better.

Wedged heels are going to be big too!

Fur...hopefully fake though.

Ponchos are out, they have been out, only tourists wear them anymore.

And thanks to the Christos art in Central Park, everyone is sporting Orange lately. I've seen orange suede and leather gloves, fluffy saffron scarfs and even men wearing wearing bright pumpkin colored silk ties and shirts under their midnight blue suits.

Big 80s sunglasses, I'll have to tell my mom that she can break out some of her old ones.

Shrunken suit jackets.

Wide skirts, also called trumpet skirts, and 50s style dresses.

Also silky scarves tied around purse straps are still happening.

I'm sure my friend Karen will have more to add :)

After all Tomorrow is Another Day...
Why People Overcommit
By TaraMetBlog

The idea that time is on your side may not always be true, according to a recent study by the American Psychological Association.

Research by two business-school professors reveals that people over-commit and overspend because they expect to have more time and resources in the future than they have at the present.

?All of us are busy, all of the time, but people continually think they will have more of a resource in the future and are willing to overbook and take on more future tasks, as long as it is not now,? says Gal Zauberman, PhD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who conducted the study with John Lynch Jr., PhD, of Duke University.

He explained that if you asked someone if they would rather work an hour today or three hours, three weeks from now, they are more likely to say the latter.

?But if you asked them three weeks from now, they would say, gee, if it happened today they would never have said yes, because they are busy again,? Zauberman said.

They suspect that because every day is a little different: ?The nature of time fools us and we ?forget? about how things fill our days.?

New York University graduate student, Sarah Kaufman, 25, at the School of Public Policy agrees with the study. ?I make really long to-do lists that are usually not attainable for the week ahead," she admitted.

Rebecca Weissman, 22, a psychology senior, also at NYU, plans during her Spring Break to read the eight articles that she put off reading during the semester.

?Ideally, I?ll get more done because I won?t have classes,? she said. Like the study?s participants, she believes the future is nearly ?limitless.? But on reflection, she conceded ?That?s probably the problem.?

Zauberman says that although surveyed participants believed that both time and money would be more available to them in ?a month? than ?today,? they believed it more strongly for time than for money. He believes people are less optimistic when it comes to their finances and are more aware of their expenses because of planned payments like reoccurring monthly bills.

?Money is more planned, but time is less predictable? he says. ?You deal with expenditures of money more regularly but things come up that you never plan.?

Kaufman says she can plan her finances well, but admits that she tends to overbook social events not realizing that she will most likely be equally busy in the future too.

?You never really know how long something is going to take, and it usually takes longer than you expected,? she observed.

(This was an excerpt from my 3/8 spot assignement, the quotes were obtained through a phone interview)
The actual study appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 134, No. 1