My favorite kind of weekend.

If there is one thing I truly love, it's a relaxing, at home, by myself, lazy weekend. I enjoy weekends chock-full of shopping or visiting or doing various other fun things well enough, but my favorite weekends, the ones I look forward to and miss the most when they're over, are those that include nothing more than laying on the couch in my pajamas for 2 straight days.

That's why this past weekend was, in a word, AWESOME!

My roommate left Friday after work for the weekend so Tibby and I were left to roam the pad alone for 48 blissful hours of TV and takeout starting with a giant Reuben sandwich and a week's worth of re-run One Tree Hill episodes courtesy of SoapNet and TiVo. I believe I've already mentioned that I'm no stranger to the Hill but SoapNet is now airing their 4th season, the one I mostly missed, so all of the episodes I watched Friday night were new to me and cheesily fantastic to boot. I hate the "Peyton and Brooke aren't friends anymore because Peyton likes Lucas and Brooke kind of doesn't but she doesn't want Peyton to either" story. Actually, I hate the "Peyton likes Lucas" story because it felt forced when the stupid show premiered and I refuse to believe that any right-thinking, sighted person would choose Lucas over Jake but Bryan Greenberg went and got his own show so they had to jettison his stories for good and thus we're stuck with Lucas. Whatever. Digression aside, though I think the writing on OTH is...not good, I still really enjoy watching it. One Tree Hill - the guiltiest of pleasures.

The geniuses at TiVo central began including advertisements on the TiVo home page (not the internet home page but the "on your TiVo box" home page) some time ago. I guess it was their mea culpa to all the folks whose commercials get fast-forwarded through since the invention of the TiVo. I quite prefer it. For one thing, I only have to watch ads for things I am remotely curious about. For another, when I am remotely curious, I get a ton more information than just your average 30 second spot provides. On Friday night, the ad du jour was for Gossip Girl.

Now, I'd actually intended to watch Gossip Girl when the season premiered in the fall - I TiVo'd the first episode even - but it was a busy time and there were a lot of new and returning shows to keep up with and Kristen Bell was only narrating and not appearing, and at the end of the day, how many television shows about teenagers does a 31-year-old woman really need in her life? At some point, don't I have to move on to watching television shows about people my own damn age? Long story slightly shorter: I deleted the pilot without watching it and didn't feel as though I was missing anything. Cut to all these months later though: Gossip Girl is something of a phenomenon and there is buzz aplenty. Having watched every bit of Josh Schwartz's first foray into rich teen TV (The O.C.) I know that the man can get a job done up right but I also know that 1/2 a season and the introduction of one sweaty-lipped psycho later, the bloom is off the rose and then the world at large falls out of love with the new show (for good reason) but I'm left watching out of habit and obligation (it is SO hard for me to give up on a show once I've given it a season pass - that's why I watched all 6 seasons of Dawson's Creek!) and I just couldn't go through that again, no matter how good the final season of The O.C. was. Except, TiVo advertised the show on it's home page, and out of morbid curiosity, I blooped.

One bloop turned into two and then three and before I knew it, I was in the Unbox menu downloading all 13 existing episodes.

As you can guess, that's how I spent my Saturday - vegetarian Pad Thai and Gossip Girl. If you've never seen it, let me tell you what Gossip Girl has going for it: EVERYTHING! Penn Badgley is charming and gorgeous. Leighton Meester is the best scheming, conniving, slutty-pilgrim-dressing, bitch ever committed to film. Blake Lively's skin and hair are so gorgeous I want to make out with her. Seriously. Girl crush doesn't even begin to cover it with that hair. Ed Westwick? The worlds first (and hopefully only) sympathetic, sexy date rapist. The parents are awesome. Lilly Van der Woodsen and Rufus Humphrey are possibly my favorite characters on the show. If all of that isn't enough for you, Kristen Bell as Gossip Girl herself? You know you love her. XOXO.

Sunday was Starbucks and some TiVo cleanup - Jason Segal on Letterman, Kristen Bell on Craig Fergusen, an old Christmas episode of Kate & Allie, the season (series?) finale of October Road, the end of Akeelah and The Bee (sniff!) - followed by the second (yeah, that's right, I already watched it once and knew how stupid it was but I watched it again) viewing of Material Girls starring the sisters Duff on Showtime which I watched specifically because I have a mad crush on Lucas Haas as the Legal Aid lawyer with a crush on Hailey Duff. I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who thinks Lucas Haas is hot? Hmmm....

The weekend wasn't ALL lazing around, I also got my old car ready to sell, did several loads of laundry, dusted the house, cleaned the kitchen, visited my brother and my parents and played with the Tibbster a LOT. Then the roommate returned home just in time to watch the new episode ot The Tudors (poor, sad, almost headless Sir Thomas Moore. He's a religious wackadoo but he's a good man, it'll be a shame to watch his head roll) after which I showered and was tucked into bed by 9:00pm.

Damn! I miss the weekend already!