at least you can pick your friends

one of the many nice things about my blogmate's new neighborhood is that she lives stumbling distance from the four corners (affectionately self-dubbed T4C) on taylor street. admittedly, liking T4C is about as challenging as liking death cab for cutie - it's a perfect bar, right down to the light fixtures.

yesterday, as my blogmate and i sidled up to the bar with the cribbage board while we waited for mb to get back from swimming, i instantly fell in love with bartender. tall, punk, devastatingly attractive british boy with an almost comically sexy british accent. he was like a character in a nick hornby novel, without the requisite broodiness. i was so busy gawking at him that my blogmate was left with a pretty lousy cribbage partner.

eventually another hot british guy with an equally soul-melty accent ("what'll you have, love?") replaced the first, and just as i was thinking that i was never going to another bar ever again, the music was muted and everyone turned their attention to the metromix review of T4C that came on TV. apparently "hot bartenders" gets billed just below, "ten beers on fancy european taps," and "tater tots" as the bar's main perks.

before i could get good and depressed about the reality that i wasn't the only one who knew about the dreamy bartenders, in came twinset with a personal crisis that i found so entertaining that i forgot all about my new soulmate(s).

for reasons that are ultimately generous and nice, twinset's mother-in-law is moving to chicago this weekend. let's start out by saying that 1) this is not a surprise and 2) twinset is fundamentally pleased with this decision. they've been talking about this at least as long as i've known them... so it's a bit of head scratcher that suddenly this whole thing is going down in such a flustered state of chaos. it seems that all of a sudden mother-in-law sold her house (somewhere east-coasty) much faster than anyone had anticipated, leaving twinset and her husband not very much time to work out alot of details like, where was she going to live?, and how was she going to get here?

but the real question has become, what are they going to do about the baby grand piano, which apparently must accompany mother-in-law to chicago? apparently there are no relatives anywhere up the eastern seaboard who want this piano and NO ONE (not even mother-in-law) actually plays the piano, but someday potential grand children may need piano lessons.

twinset and her husband live a 2 bedroom lofted sort of place downtown and cannot, WILL NOT accommodate this piano, so the decision has been made that the baby grand will go with mother-in-law into her (drumroll please) ONE BEDROOM DOWNTOWN APARTMENT.

as you can imagine, a transcontinental piano move is an expensive, big deal. and it's probably not a reasonable suggestion (though it mother-in-law did put it out there) that the piano could get put on its side and shoved in the walk-in-closet.

my blogmate, mb, and i were in stitches by this point, with mb saying that if it were a shiny white baby grand that he himself could make room for it, fulfilling some kind of john lennon fantasy in which my blogmate played it while wearing a white ballgown and he stood by and gazed at her while wearing a white tuxedo. we all made helpful suggestions like, "maybe your mother and law can put down an egg-crate and sleep on top of the piano," and "maybe one day you guys could use it as a baby crib." then we started placing bets on how long it would take for the piano to wind up in twinset's apartment, as we described vivid disaster scenarios on moving day. "what it the piano exceeds the weight restriction of the freight elevator?" and "what if it won't fit through the door?"

good times.