Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Hi!

Guess what!  This is my 100th blog post!  I've had so much fun writing these posts and I can't wait to write more!  I've also just recently passed 5,000 views.  Thank you so much for reading! :)

On our Puerto Rico trip I read the book Yes Please by Amy Poehler, which I got for my birthday!  I absolutely loved it.

I had the best spots ever to read while we were in San Juan :)

The book is split up into three sections: Part One: Say Whatever You Want, Part Two: Do Whatever You Like, and Part Three: Be Whoever You Are.  Amy describes her book as part memoir, part advice, and part essays, and each sections contains several of each of these.  There are tons of old pictures, papers, etc. "taped" into the book, and those are so fun to see!

She talks so much about improv, which I loved reading about.  She tells the story about when she first realized that she liked being able to choose what came next while she was on stage.  You get to read all about the different groups she was part of and/or started, such as the Upright Citizens Brigade, and how they grew and evolved over time (even currently!).  She tells stories about the people she performed and worked with and how she moved to Chicago and then New York City.

I loved hearing about her time on Saturday Night Live, too!  She tells what the process is like every week during the season, writing sketches, reading them, finding out which get to be on the show, rehearsing with the guest hosts, staying up until the early morning on Saturday, the day of a show.  It sounds so fun and so stressful!

There are lots of stories about her baby boys, some about her ten-year marriage to Will Arnett, tons about her childhood, growing up with her parents and younger brother in Massachusetts, the drugs she's done in the past, and the ones she's stayed away from.  Just a lot of good stuff!  She doesn't try to make it sound like she's had a perfect life, but she acknowledges that she's lucky to have grown up in a safe and loving home.

Her show Parks and Recreation is another huge topic, of course, and I loved hearing about what it was like to work with the cast of the show!  It sounds like they had such a blast.  Alex and I watched the two new episodes of the last season last week and it was even more fun to watch it now that I've read her book!  She talks about how they're like one big family and you can tell that they all must be great friends!  I'm sad that this is the last season of the show.  It's so hilarious.  

It was so fun to read about the different pranks/skits she did while hosting the Golden Globes with Tina Fey twice (the most recent time was too recent to be in the book!).  It sounds like so many of the famous people Amy knows and is friends with are just so nice and fun!  Like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Louis C.K., Seth Meyers (there are tons of great stories about them meeting and becoming great friends, and he also wrote a chapter of the book!), Maya Rudolph, all of her SNL and Parks and Rec friends, etc.

I already knew it, but after reading her book, I can just tell even more that Amy is such a normal, real, nice person.  Parts of the book are hilarious, because she is, but so much of it is normal stories about her normal life.  Some parts are a little bit sad, some parts talk about how lucky she knows she is to have her life, but also how hard she had to work to get where she is today.  It's a very good book and I loved it!

I would definitely recommend this book to anybody who loves Amy Poehler, likes comedy of any kind, or just wants an interesting, funny, book to read!  Have any of you read this yet?  What did you think??

Thanks for reading!

Library Cards!

Hello!

This morning Alex and I went on a nice walk around the neighborhood!  It was in the 30s but we bundled up.  We walked down to the Washington Monument and then we walked over to the library!  We've walked past it before but never when it was open.  It was open today so we went in and got library cards!

We didn't stay in there very long (we got hot because we were wearing so many warm things!) but I can't wait to go back!

It's so pretty inside!


I got lots of fun mail today!  A package from my mom and my Birchbox!

So fun!!!  One of the things my mom sent me is a lettering textbook from when she was in high school!  I can't wait to look through it at all the fonts and practice!  I got so many great samples in my Birchbox, too!  I'll write more about them soon.

Last night my improv group Moonbot had a show!  There were four improv groups total and we went last.  It was so much fun!

Here's the poster for our show.

We took a group pic after of all of the performers :)

It was a fun night!

Alex and I just started watching Mildred Pierce.  We're on the second episode (it's a mini-series and there are only five episodes).  It's good so far!  A new SNL is on tonight!

Thanks for reading!

Serial Podcast

Hi!

Have any of you heard about the podcast called Serial?  It's pretty new - there have only been six weekly episodes so far - and it's good!  Alex found out about it from listening to This American Life.  These two shows have the same creators.  The narrator/host and executive producer of Serial is Sarah Koenig.  She used to work for the Baltimore Sun.

Every Thursday, a new episode of Serial comes out.  It follows a true story from the past and we don't know what is going to happen or how it ends!  This season (the first one they've done...I don't know if there will be multiple seasons) happens to be about a murder case from 1999 in Baltimore.  A teenage girl was murdered and her ex-boyfriend was convicted with her murder based on one person's testimony.  He has been in prison since high school but he and his family continue to say that he is innocent.  Sarah was presented with this case recently and decided to look into it because there seemed to be inconsistencies with the story and there wasn't a ton of evidence proving that he was rightly convicted.

You have to listen to the episodes in order so you get all of the background information.  Every week goes deeper into the investigation and you get to hear court recordings, learn about evidence that was found throughout the investigation, listen to telephone conversations that Sarah has with the convicted murderer from prison, etc.  It's very interesting!  It's really hard to tell if the man who was charged with the girl's murder is really guilty or not.  Alex and I have been going back and forth with what we think.  

If you like true story mysteries, you will probably like this!!

It was cold today!  Alex and I went to the Inner Harbor to go to this flea market that we had heard about and it was nowhere to be found!  Maybe they canceled it because it was raining earlier in the day. We got Starbucks (I got a peppermint mocha!) and walked to a store and then came back home.  We saw two different groups taking wedding pictures while we were down there!

Tonight, we went to a professor's house for an end-of-first-term dinner party.  Here's the pretty sunset!

The party was so nice!  They had a very nice house and there was so much yummy food!  It was nice to meet a lot of the people that I hear about from Alex.  Everybody is so nice!  

Alex is watching the U of A vs. UCLA football game right now until the new SNL starts in a few minutes!  Chris Rock is hosting and Prince is the musical guest.

Tonight is the first time we'll have to do Daylight Savings Time!  We get an extra hour tomorrow!  Weird :)

Thanks for reading!