I have decided that it is time to get rid of my beloved house and move back into my condo. There are many, many factors involved in this decision. I am now going to sell myself on the advantages of condo-living:

Pros
• It’s paid for, no more $2500 mortgage payment every month
• No gas or refuse bill
• Able to bike and walk all the time
• Live near Katie
• Right behind Harris Teeter
• No bugs
• No bird poop on car
• No yard work
• Don’t have to do laundry in the dirty basement
• New windows and much more energy efficient
• Don’t have to deal with home repairs so much
• No tunnels

Cons
• Electric stove, small kitchen
• Squishing 2600 sq ft of stuff into 1100 sq ft (gonna need to rent a storage unit)
• No room for my new fave toy, my gas grill
• No porch (especially no porch to leave packages on)
• No idea what I’m gonna do with all the porch kitties
• No storage
• No more outdoor movie parties
• No big slumber parties
• Will have to paint the condo when I move in
• No more watching the raccoons and the egrets and staring out at the water
• Silly condo association rules

Those are the ones that come flowing right out of my head. I think it’s a good decision, and I’m not nearly as sad about it as I figured I would be. Once I sat down and had the conversation with myself, I realized it was the best and smartest option. Now I’m actually excited to get it all over with and just be settled into my new (old) home.

A special mix for little Anne. Time to celebrate.

1. Brazilian Girls – Good Time
2. N.A.S.A. – Gifted (feat. Kanye West, Santogold, & Lykke Li)
3. Bat For Lashes – Pearl’s Dream
4. Apsci – Tirade Highway
5. Leila – Lush Dolphins
6. cLOUDDEAD – Dead Dogs Two (Boards Of Canada Remix)
7. Björk – Earth Intruders
8. Moloko – Sing It Back (Herbert’s Tasteful Dub)
9. Fujiya & Miyagi – Uh
10. PJ Harvey & John Parish – A Woman A Man Walked By / The Crow Knows Where All The Little Children Go
11. Psapp – Marshrat
12. Hercules And Love Affair – Raise Me Up
13. The Pinker Tones – Gérard & Géraldine, l’histoire d’une piscine

Listen Here

The Japanese DVD is supposed to come out sometime in July. Must order. I can’t stand the Disney versions of Miyazaki films.

{ uploaded by iso.bot }

I have at least 20 bug bites on my upper back alone. Then there’s my butt, and my arms, and my legs, and my sides, and my everywhere. They totally went to town. I’m covered in bites. And this is while wearing nasty deet-containing bug spray, sitting on a towel covered chair, and wrapped in a blanket. Vicious little bastards.

There is a new Múm album coming out later this summer, and they will be playing at Black Cat in DC a few days before my birthday. I’m sure someone must want to go see them with me. And by someone, I mean you, Crystal.

Went to the zoo the other day to get pictures of _____ for a present for _____. Basically, 33% of the zoo was under construction, and the _____ were tucked away inside and I was pretty annoyed with the whole experience. Seriously, they should tell you before you pay to go in that there are closed exhibits. But at least the meerkats were there and being all cute and stuff.

So excited. One more week to go. Björk really gets way too much of my money.

This just in! My beloved Mexican mummies will be traveling to the U.S. next year. The only announced stop so far is the Detroit Science Center, but let’s hope we get something closer. I would love to see my mummies again.

Mexican mummies visit Detroit in October
Kim Kozlowski / The Detroit News

Detroit — A rare glimpse into the mystery of death will be on display at the Detroit Science Center in October with the first U.S. exhibit of 36 mummies from a World Heritage site in Mexico, museum officials plan to announce today.
The 100-year-old mummies will be on loan from the Museo de las Momias in Guanajuato, Mexico.

“This is the largest and most significant collection of mummies in the Western hemisphere,” said Kelly Fulford, spokeswoman for the Detroit Science Center. “It’s a phenomenal opportunity to view something really rare and unique… something you wouldn’t be able to see unless you traveled to Mexico.”

The Mexican museum opened in the late 1800s after mummified corpses of men, women and children were exhumed from the colonial city’s cemetery because their families could no longer pay the crypt fee. Some of the corpses were discovered to have “accidentally” or naturally mummified, meaning nature, not man, stopped their decomposition.

Today 111 natural mummies have attracted visitors to the museum in the city, northwest of Mexico City, since the early 1900s.

Mummy scholars who have been conducting research in Detroit say the exhibit will offer a repository of anthropological, medical and cultural information.

“When you come to this exhibit, you will get to know these people,” sad Ronald Beckett, a Phoenix-based Fulbright scholar who studies mummies around the world. “The exhibit will tell the individual human stories of these long-dead people, and give them their identity back.”

Museum visitors, for instance, will learn about the health of the mummies in the forensic room of the five-room display. This will be done with the help of modern medical technologies such as computer tomography, endoscopy and DNA analysis.

“The study of old pathologies puts a light on health issues today,” said Vivian Henoch, medical exhibit developer. “Anything we glean from the mummies informs what we do and how we advance our understanding of many health issues.”

The traveling mummy exhibit will leave Detroit in 2010 and go on to six other U.S. destinations before retuning to Mexico in 2012.

You can check out the exhibit’s website here.

{ uploaded by iso.bot }

Happy, happy day to one of my most treasured loves. We shall celebrate the night away!

(also happy birthday to one miss ilyssa sky, and happy national gluttony day)