Do it For the Magic

Today is Leap Day! I’m going to post today no matter what, because I won’t get another chance to post a blog post on February 29th for four whole years!

Sadly, for some bizarre reason this day is NOT a holiday at my work. I ask you, if a day which magically appears every four years, and then disappears just as magically, isn’t a reason for paid time off I don’t know WHAT IS. It’s like the calendar equivalent of Briga-friggin'-doon, for dang sake! What I should be doing right now is playing bagpipes and wearing a kilt and eating dang haggis!

Instead I’m at work. But I’m not letting this day go without some kind of festive acknowledgement. So how am I celebrating Leap Day? 6 words:

Free Pepsi and unlimited Red Vines

Someone had a Pepsi they didn’t want (don’t even get me started on the impossibility of having a Pepsi that you don’t want) so they gave it to me. THEN, not more than minutes later, someone else found one of those eleventy-thousand-pound tubs of Red Vines in their office which they ALSO didn’t want!

I left the tub in their office, so as not to seem greedy, but I think they’ve noticed that I come back in there every 8 minutes to get another handful of Red Vine goodness. Yes, they’re definitely on to me. But it really doesn’t matter, because by the end of the day I’ll have made myself completely sick on soda and Red Vines. Happy Freakin’ Leap Day, my people!

What did you do to celebrate???

Take two of my excuses and call me in the morning.

This is just hard!

So my arm, it’s still boogered up. (technical term) And I’ve got nobody to blame but myself at this point, because apparently I just can NOT follow directions. The PT says “ice it twice daily, exercises twice daily, take anti-inflammatory meds and DON’T USE IT.” But I hear “ice it once a week, and if you remember to do it a second time that same week you deserve a Pop Tart. Do exercises whenever you remember. If you don’t remember at all for one whole day you’ll totally make up for it by doing it 6 times the next day, and don’t worry if doing all those exercises in one day makes the arm hurt more. Anti-inflammatory pills are hard to take, so why even bother. Try to use it more than you think you ever used to use it; in fact use it pretty much constantly.”
The hardest one is to not use the arm. Because what that has made painfully obvious (yes, the pun was intentional) is how much I use my left arm. Apparently my right arm is the brains, but my left arm is the muscle. So if something takes dexterity or agility or any other “-ity’s” I use my right arm, because it is precise and careful and has skillz. (with a Z!) That means I use my left arm for carrying heavy things and pushing stuff and punching the bad guys. And it’s not like I can just stop carrying things or punching bad guys! That way lies MADNESS!

Also I just forget not to use it. I remember eventually, but mostly because my using it hurt something and at that point the remembering is just mockery. My day is filled with this:

• reach for big, heavy hospital door with my left arm.
• “ouch, that hurt my left arm pulling this big, heavy hospital door open!”
• let go of door with left hand, try to open it the rest of the way with my right arm.
• somehow get all tangled up in my own arms.
• look like a complete dork.
• rub my arm because it’s too late anyway and now it hurts.
• wonder how I don’t poke my own eye out with forks more often, given that I’m such a moron.
• buy corks to put on the end of my forks for future eye protection.
• reach for the next big, heavy hospital door with my left arm.
• repeat until crazy/crippled.

And then I go to my PT appointment the next week and I lie to her about how bad I’ve been. I lie to my Physical Therapist. How sad is that? She says “how has it been going?” and I start off honestly; I confess that I didn’t do my exercises as much as I should have. But she always wants numbers and facts and details! It’s like the third degree and I panic! All that pressure, people! (I can’t tell – are you buying these lame excuses?)

The end result is that I usually say something like “oh, I only did my exercises once a day several days.”

“Did you ice?”

“Um, sure! Bunches of times!”

“And have you been trying not to use it?”

“Trying. Yes, I’ve been trying that.”

…but I think she knows I’m full of it, because then she does some “massage” which is actually latin for “hurting, hurting, more hurting and if you hadn’t been a big liar this would feel nice!” Sigh.

(oh, and yes I did use both hands while typing this.)

(oh, and I think I completely forgot to go to my follow-up doctor’s appointment some time this week.)

(oh, and Tuesday I tripped on the same stairs. I didn’t fall, but I’m more sure than ever before that they’re out to kills me.)

Not a Morning ANYTHING.

Today I beat the sun to work. The sun. It’s so wrong I don’t even know where to begin. And so now I’m sitting here, and I thought “hey, this would be a good time for me to do a little writing!” and then I LAUGHED AND LAUGHED AND LAUGHED. Because the actual list of things that this would be a good time for looks like this:

1. Sleep.

Notice the distinct lack of a number 2? Notice? Yeah, I noticed that too.

The dude I dated used to try to wake me up early on the weekends (and by early I mean any time before 9:55am, of course) for a little morning nooky. The first time I truly thought he was kidding, and I’m pretty sure I punched him in the side of the head because morning is not a time for jokes, it’s a time for sleeping. And again, the whole thing is foggy because HELLO, SLEEPING RIGHT NOW!!!!, but I vaguely remember staring at him for a r-e-a-l-l-y l-o-n-g t-i-m-e once I got that he was not kidding at all. Because I couldn’t figure out what else to do, and staring was the thing most like sleeping that I could come up with. (Point in fact, I might even have managed some open-eyed sleeping at that point, just because I knew that as long as I was making some kind of eye contact he’d think I was thinking it over and leave me alone.)

This same person (I hope by now you already get how not at all meant to be he and I were) used to tell me that if I just went to bed earlier I’d be able to get up all cheery and happy and full of bunnies and daisies and rays of sunshine. Ridiculous. The day I leap out of bed with vim and verve is the day someone fills my mattress with stingy, bitey bugs. On fire. Carrying switchblades. And I could probably sleep through that anyway.

ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Diablo Cody, you're my HERO!

OK, so I’ve been doing this blogging thing for a while (and I think I’ve mentioned that I mostly do it for me and because I love it, because I’m essentially a selfish person) and I’ll admit that it’s got me feeling more and more like if I actually had a dream (which I don’t – blogpost on that to come soon. Watch this space.) it would be something around writing for a living. I love the writing, even when I’m not doing it so well (sometimes ESPECIALLY when I’m not doing it so well) and I do think that I do it better than the average bear (their lack of thumbs is no excuse!).

At the same time, rarely have I seen the career guide or online class or seminar called “Writing: it’s a totally easy thing to do for a living and a guaranteed source of massive wealth. Ask me how!” Like all the fun jobs, the really hard part is finding a way to be a truly successful professional writer. I’ve looked on this blog as a sort of “step one” – if I can do this pretty well and regularly than maybe there’s hope for me, blah blah blah, theme song to Rocky, sweep the legs Danielsan, It’s up to you, New York, etc… It’s the step two that I’m not seeing from here.

Until last night!

Now, thanks to Diablo Cody and her amazing, now Oscar-award winning screenplay for Juno, I have a plan. It’s so simple, and yet without her guidance I’d have never seen the path! It is like so:

1. Become a stripper
2. Blog about being a stripper (which is a plus for you guys, after reading this blog all about not being a stripper. What the heck was I thinking?)
3. Write a book about life as a stripper
4. Write an award-winning screenplay (doesn’t HAVE to be an Oscar – I’d take a globe all golden and lovely or even something from the people. (Of the people? By the people? Anyone? Anyone?)
5. Sit back and wait for the fame and accolades and money, money, money.

…of course this is just a rough outline of a plan. I need to nail down some of the details, but I feel better knowing that I have a real plan at last. Oh, and in case you were wondering my stripper name will be Dirty Mama Monroe. (I couldn’t make that one up.)

My alternative beverage lifestyle – let me show you it

So I’m a kid and I’m sick and have the classic cough and scratchy throat. That is, to me, the worst part of a cold: cough and scratchy throat. Little kid me is so frustrated with this long-time cough that I’ve decided (in the best example of 6 year old stubborn logic) that I am just NOT GOING TO COUGH ANY MORE! NOT GONNA! I HAVE SPOKEN! And so I hold my breath (because the first step of each cough is the attempt to breathe, silly me), but instead of no coughs I have several long minutes of tiny, stilted, choked off little sputter-coughs. And I also turn blue. And when I finally have to breathe it’s just aaaaaall cooouuuggghhss. Hack. Sputter. Stomp, stomp, kick the wall…

My mom, being smart in the way that moms are and that she especially is, wants me to drink some kind of warm drink for it would be soothing and helpful. The problem is that I don’t like warm drinks. Don’t like tea, don’t like apple cider, don’t like coffee (plus then all you really get is coughy, bug-eyed little me!), do like hot cocoa but only if made w/ milk, which is not helpful in this phlegmmy time. And no matter how helpful something might be, if I don’t like it I’m not going to eat or drink it. Not. So very, VERY not. I am stubborn, hear me roar. (and then coooough and cooooough…)

So my mom, seeing me trying to cure a cough through sheer force of will and having that mom-gene of “I will fix it, for it is my child and I will fix it!”, my mom turns to her Midwestern roots and she makes me a mug of Jello water.

Mmmmm. Jello water.

Jello water, for those of you who don’t put Miracle Whip on your white bread/turkey sandwiches or top your Tuna Casserole with Velveeta, is made with a box of Jello and 3 cups of hot water and only 1 cup of cold water. And you make it in a pitcher instead of a bowl, and you serve it in mugs. It’s hot and fruity and coats and soothes and totally solved every sore throat I remember having my whole life.

OK, now shoot through time with that woodle-woodle-woodle screen shimmer thing from tv and suddenly it’s this week. I have a cold with a whopper of a sore throat (courtesy of cough-cough-hack-choke-cooooooooough!) and I’ve got a big pitcher of Jello water, for medicinal purposes, sitting on my desk. Black cherry flavor. Which, coincidentally, looks just like blood when sitting in a pitcher. Or a mug. Or coating one’s lips. And I mentioned before that it’s warm, right? So here I sit, drinking my medicinal, blood-colored mystery drink. And as each person asks what I am drinking I explain that I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. No, it’s confidential and I don’t want to talk about it, and get away from that! Get away from my,… medicine!!! (mmm, tasty, thick and warm…)

Drinking tea has never been this much fun, people. (cough, cough, cough…)

Sniffle, Snuffle, cough-hack-DIE

I have a cold. I’m not sick, but I have a cold. It’s NOT the same thing.

If I’m SICK I stay home. I curl up on the couch (unless I’m REALLY, REALLY sick, in which case I stay in bed. But I have to be 2 steps from rushing to the hospital because a body part has dropped off or green stuff is coming out of every orifice.) and I keep a bucket, a thermometer and the phone within quick reach. I find things on tv to sleep through because I’m too sick to stay awake too long, so why get invested in something I’m going to miss? I probably take some kind of medicine for at least some of my symptoms. I’m SICK. It’s SERIOUS.

[tangent: one time I was really, really sick. Like I missed an entire week of work because the doctor said “you have to stay home this week.” And I said “I’ll try to come home early a few days.” And he said “no – YOU HAVE TO STAY HOME THIS WHOLE ENTIRE WEEK. HAVE TO. NO WORK. STAYING HOOOOOOOOME.” This was after I’d had a fever so high that I’d started calling out for the nurse to bring me some water, so very parched and thirsty was I, and called and called for Nurse, Nurse, oh NURSE??? for a really long time before the less crazy part of my brain remembered that I was in the house totally alone. And that I hate water. And luckily I was too fevered and addle-brained to be as completely freaked out by the hallucinations until 3 days later. Good times…]

Where was I? Oh yeah, not sick. I have a cold.

If I have a COLD I just have a cold. I still go to work. I do the dishes and the laundry, at least a little. I mutter through life, usually with a box of snot cloths in tow, but I don’t stop doing life stuff. Remember what the experts say about colds: if you don’t take it easy and really work on getting better you’ll have that cold for 7 whole days. BUT if you get lots of sleep, drink fluids, really take care of yourself the cold will be gone in a week!

In other words, no matter what I do, I’m going to have this cold. So I just live life. With a cold. But I’m not really sick.

Now trying to explain this to my co-workers.

In an effort to put a positive spin on this big, stupid cold I’ve used my nasty-looking and ughy-sounding symptoms to good use:

• By coughing LOUDLY each time someone approached I was able to keep from sitting next to strangers in the movies last night.
• Two people at work decided not to give me their latest mindless work for me to do after seeing the mound of Kleenex waterfalling out of my trash can – “what if she calls in sick tomorrow when I’m supposed to have this done?”
• People will not begrudge you the last 2-bite cinnamon roll if you’ve snuffled 16 times in the last 30 seconds.

Still, I’m looking forward to this Friday, when the cold should be moving on. (are you going to eat that? Snuffle? Snuffle? SNUFFLE?)

Look Ma -- one hand!

Previously on a very special episode of “Unlikely In Love”…

[Femtastic trotting down fire stairs, slippy-trips and grabs, grabs, GRABS for the handrail. “Aiieee, I fall! Curse you, gravity, you pushy betch!” she hollers as down she falls. She brags, cocky-like, “oooh-di-oooh, look how very unharmed I am! Look how I fall and walk away without a single scathe! Marvel at my indestructible nature and quake! Quake I say!” and then the next day “whimper, keen, oh woe is me and my poor, poor hurted wrist. Lavish me with sympathy if you please. And also bon-bons and free spendy cable…”A trip to a nurse who says “yup, that’s what happens when you let yourself fall down the stairs, dope.” Femtastic whines on her blog “woe is me, I’m all injured and sad.” The readers boggle at her lameness.]

OK, so the safety nurse said “Ice it.” and I did, and gradually it got some better, and then more better, and now it’s almost all better. And yay! But as the wrist was getting better the pain was creeping up and eventually set up camp in my elbow. But say I “so what?”, right? I just have to keep icing and eventually it will work its way up to my shoulder, and then my neck, and then my left eye (ouchies!) and finally a headache that will float up into the ether. No problem!

Unfortunately the ouchies really liked the view there at Camp Elbowatchatoozie and they’re enjoying s’mores and ghost stories and Little Bunny Foo-Foo and won’t move on! So for at least a month I’ve had this stabby little pain in my left elbow. I have it when I pick things up heavier than about 5 lbs. Or if I twist my arm hardly at all. And also when I scratch my back or open heavy doors or about 6 other simple, everyday things. The pokey nature has had me convinced that it’s a piece of something sharp which has declared its independency from a bigger thing and is now floating around inside my arm, reading Kerouac and sketching passing blood corpuscles. Into the Wild, bone-chip style!

I finally called the safety nurses, who sent me to the sad, sad worker’s comp medical offices out by the Costco. The doctor came in, and I told him my story and the evolution of the stabby pain and my theory of a roaming sharp bone chip. I also told him that I’d tried and tried but could find no specific place where I could push on the arm and make the stabby pain happen. And he reached over and said “What about here.” And poked this one spot and I fell over dead from the fantastic pain. Then he told me that there are tendons that connect to the elbow right at Camp Elbowatchatoozie and I torqued them when I tried to stop my fall with the hand rail, which is, by the way, super-similar to ‘tennis elbow.’ In fact, that’s even what he wrote on my file. So now I have a worker’s comp claim for bad backhand. L-A-M-E.

So to make the stabby pain go AWAY I should do the following things:
· Wear this strap on my arm.
· Ice the arm twice a day
· Go to physical therapy and do exercises twice a day
· Don’t use my left arm.

So far I’ve done the following things:
· Remembered the strap

I never remember to do the exercises and ice is so cold and hate to take any pills (thus dooming my future plans to become a raging Vicodin addict. That and the fact that Vicodin freaked me out with no up-side, so…) and what would be great is if it could just get over it please! Sigh. Bruises just go away. Cuts too. What is the deal with internal strains/sprains/idises/etc. that they just linger and loiter? Ridiculous…

Also ridiculous is the fact that every bit of injury from that fall resulted from my grabbing the hand rail. Which didn’t even keep me from hitting the ground. Basically I just wound up lying on the floor, my hand finally clutching the hand raid 3 feet overhead. (and, by the way, worst hand rail usage ever!!) Next time I’m just gonna fall and hope I don’t die. (too much.)

All of this was to say sorry that I didn’t write more this week. I was supposed to not be using my left arm and hand and stuff. And if I tried to write this without my lefties it comes out “Piouly on y pil pio o “Unlikly In Lo”…” Not so good. Hopefully the week off will be the miracle cure I’ve been looking for. (or I could do exercises and take painkillers and ice things. But probably not and also ouch.)

My lameness – let me show you it.

I get to my desk this morning and it’s been liberally sprinkled with things of a chocolate and/or heart-like nature. I think to myself “oh, how nice! My co-workers left me spontaneous chocolate! This must be because yesterday was such a rough day (which it was, but still) and thought I needed a boost. Big, sloppy heart-thumps!”

I look over at my neighbor’s desk. Where normally there would be a file sorter or box of tissue there has sprouted a great, big bunch of fabulous flowers. I think to myself “Wowzers! I wonder if it’s her wedding anniversary?”

A second bouquet of flowers comes through the door, and as I’m directing the lost delivery girl to the right office I marvel at the odds of two big bouquets being delivered on one day. “I will write this in my diary, so unlikely are the odds!” thinks I.

A third person wanders by dressed in reddy-pinky-rosey shades. I wish I’d worn the red shirt I almost picked out, except that it won’t fit over my arm therapy thing (I’ll tell you later), because then I would also be rosey-hued and wouldn’t that be funny!

I go to start my official list for the day and write “Thursday, 2/14/08” at the top. And then I bonk my head on the desk, because clearly there’s nothing in this big melon of mine to be damaged by head-bonking! Clearly any brains inside this piñata on my neck are ornamental! Clearly I’m as observant as a blind sloth on LSD, because hey, guess what everybody? It’s big, dumb VALENTINES DAY!!!

I return to wallowing in my lameness – I hope you got candies.

The Art of Foamy War

So who was Mr. Nerf? Because that guy? Genius.

My nephew’s official birthday party is tomorrow and one item on his list was a Nerf gun, which I put dibs on. Today I strolled through the Nerf section of the toy store. Strolled and considered how much of my 401k could I divert to Nerf products and still retire before age 90.

They didn’t have this level of cool Nerfness when I was a kid, right? I mean I didn’t miss out just because of the lack of penis? That would so piss me off! But I’m pretty sure that this was a reflection of the incredible progress that’s been made in Nerf technology over the last 2+ decades, right? There are MIT graduates and ex-members of the CIA and science fiction wizards from Hollywood all devoting their time and energy to new foam brilliance.

No kidding, there is stuff that glows and there are Nerf crossbows and bow-and-arrows and big, glowing balls. You can get battery–powered stuff but there’s also technology powered by hand pump (shut up, dirty boys and girls). The one I got for my nephew is the Nerf Rapid Fire 20. Here’s what I loved about it:

-Nerfness
-No batteries necessary
-SHOOTS 20 DARTS AT ONE TIME

Twenty darts. At one time. It’s like the Jackie Chan of Nerf guns, taking on all comers at once! You can shoot one at a time, if you’re being stealthy and planning your attack and are some kind of GREAT BIG NERF WUSSY! OR (and I really can’t stress this enough) you could stand on one end of the room and pump the gun full of all-powerful air and pull the trigger and send 20 tremendous Nerf missiles of soft, squishy death hurtling through the air to suction cup all over your enemies! I mean come ON! How COOL is that???

My nephew is going to be 10 but he’s already Mr. Junior Sun Tzu – he knew enough to specify that he only wanted one Nerf gun, because if he got more he’d be forced by his very fair-minded parents to share with his siblings. He’s the youngest of three, so it behoveded him to request this advantage. With the Rapid Fire 20 I’ve essentially given him two big guys who will travel with him everywhere and rough up anyone who annoys him. Except that they’re big foam guys, with suction cups for hands.

It’s 2:30am, I should have wrapped it already but I’m stalling. Because I’m still a little bit thinking of keeping it all for myself. For home security, of course. (man, I’m just so weak.)

Hello Internets -- Are you Ready to ROCK?!?!

I confess: I have joined the ranks of the Guitar Heroes. I didn’t want to, and I fought it. I tried to be all individual and jaded and “stupid Guitar Hero...” and sneer ala Billy Idol at those playing and bouncing around. This tactic worked great right up until they put the axe in my hand.

Damn you, Pat Benatar, and your catchy-yet-spirited anthym for the every woman telling the every man what’s what! One time through “Hit me with your best shot!” and I was hooked. (picture me jamming, while simultaneously shaking my fist at the heavens)

One of my preconceived notions about the game was that it just shouldn’t be that hard, because after all it’s not like you’re playing a real guitar! It’s 5 buttons and a toggle bar. And people, 5 buttons and a toggle bar does not a guitar make! (not even with the whammy bar and the snazzy, rock-centric stickers.) However apparently 5 buttons and a toggle bar are more than enough to kick MY ass! (stupid buttons)

By the end of the night, though, I’d found some kind of groove and jammed my ass almost 100% through Schools out for Summer by Ms. Alice Cooper (funny-looking girl, but lovely singing voice) in one shot. Lookit me, I’m a rock star! Take that Pete Townsend! Take that Edgey-poo! It ain’t so tough!

(What’s that? There are other levels beyond “easy”? No thanks, I’m good. Also I know there’s bonus points for free-styling and what not, but I’m apparently much more comfortable with my “no-styling” mojo. Thanks all the same.)

So THEN I go to my sister’s house. I wait patiently until those pesky children finally go to bed – then it was the grups turn to rock it hard, my friend. Because the sister, she has Rock Band. Or, as I like to call it, Guitar Hero and his friends Drum Champion and Master of all Microphones battle the evil Doctor Tonedeaf and his minions of no rhythm! And battle we did! Never before have Blue Oyster Cult or Nirvana been rocked by a more style-less, dorkytastic trio! All of the Rolling Stones were spinning in their graves; even though I think they're all still alive.

Now it cracks me up how I’ll hear a song on the radio and I’ll be listening for that awesome guitar line I totally know how to play. Play on 5 buttons. And a toggle bar.

Thank you, and good night!!!

Shuffle, ball, step, whizzz

OK, so I’m taking the tap class which you already knew. I’m so loving it, and I’m super-glad I decided to do it. Even doing the performance class, which does mean that in June my wee little class of 5 tappers will shake our booty on stage in front of something like 300 people. But I’ve been distracting myself from that knowledge by saying “that’s months away, and we have all this time to get it totally worked out in the meantime.”

This system was working really well up until last Saturday. But the stupid dance school had this stupid showcase. Where we had to do our stupid dance in front of stupid people. Big, dumb, stupid people! Also the closest I’ve come to wetting myself in front of an audience for years, so there’s that! (and can I also add “gleah.”)

So the thing that got me into taking the class, you may remember, was watching my 9 year old nephew do his performances the last 2 years. Plus I’d always come to his showcases to cheer him on, and I’d never really thought about why they did these showcase performances in front of people. But on Saturday I so had that lightbulb moment. This is pretty much just to give all us crazy dancing fools a chance to do this in front of people once or twice before we have to do it on the fancy stage. With the fancy costumes. And the fancy lights and maybe props and also the heart-wrenching terror and aneurism-inducing panic and stuff. So really it’s very smart of them. For being so stupid.

I am not a person who has ever suffered from stage fright (shocking, I know – I seem just SO shy!) and I’m not nervous about crowds (because I was raised by a crowd). Despite all of that, about 5 minutes after things got rolling I SO had to pee! Psycho-symatic nervous bladder if ever I’ve had one. I’d already peed at home, so I knew this was my body giving me the excuse to make a break for it! I resisted, though, and sat there and waited and nervoused and got that ulcer started that I’ve been putting off and putting off…

What I loved, though, was watching that young nephew of mine. This is his third year of classes and showcases and performances, so he’s the perfect picture of “whatever….” Blasé by age 9 – SUCH the cool dude. So I’m sitting in my row and we’re giggling and tittering and craning to watch every other group as they get up and do their thing. And each time they announce the next three groups coming up we’re hoping and dreading to hear out name, right? And there’s my nephew across the dance floor. And he’s reading. He doesn’t look up at the other dancers even once. He’s up to his elbows in some book and couldn’t be less worried if I’d paid him! He’s all ‘read, read, read, get up and do his dance without a single mistake, back to book, read, read, read…” Way, way TOO cool for any kind of school, my friend. I so want to be him when I grow up!

At the end of the concert— what? The dance? Oh, it was fine. I made a bunch of mistakes that I’ve never made before even once and felt stupid and afterward my adrenaline had me vibrating like… something that vibrates. Don’t go there. Plus we had to go right after this dance by the tap company which is made up primarily of class teachers and other dancing hotties and oh yeah the OWNER of the school, and the dance was so incredibly cool that I stood there, off-stage, with my big, dumb mouth just hanging open in gawkitude. A proud, proud moment. To be immediately followed by my mess-ups. And thank GOD we’ve got another showcase in April so I can have one more shot at doing this dance, this dance which I TOTALLY KNOW AND SHOULD NOT BE MAKING ANY MISTAKES IN, doing this dance in front of people without messing up. Because every single mistake was just me being flipped out about SO MANY PEOPLE. Like I didn’t know this was coming…

Anyway, after all the dancers were done one of the teachers calls my too-cool-for-school nephew up to the stage to tell everyone that it was his birthday (it was – 9-year old nephew no more, for now you are ten!) and have everybody sing to him. Which he stood and graciously took. And the second the song pittled off he turned to her and said “can I go now?”

Ten years old, going on thirty.

This is Me, Testing a Blue Pen

First, before I explain this other thing that you should know about me, you should know this about me: I love pens. LOVE them. When I’m stressed out at work and need a little pick-me-up I don’t ask for chocolates or flowers. I want a wee trip down to the local stationer to peruse the aisles and aisles of fabulous ink-squirting utensils. One of the things that I take with me to work every day, and bring home every night for fear that if left behind someone will ROON it, is this set of 10 pens. I love that they open up as a stand (an award-winning stand!) and come in such colors, including yellow, which is completely absurd as a pen color but which I love anyway, and I impress everyone at work when I arrive to a meeting with my super-cool pen set. (and by “impress” I mean “they look at me and understand the smallness of my life. And they feel sad.”) Yep, I love pens. LOVE them.

Now, when you go to find new and glorious pens you must first, of course, try them out. You can’t bring home just any pen. It’s got to have good flow, and just the right amount of ink on the line. You need to be able to write smoothly and fluidly, and it has to be able to write both cursive and print. Both! Except nothing less! Fortunately the purveyors of fine pens understand this, and they normally have little pads just for to be trying out your pen choices.

But then you have to decide what to write. What, of all the writable things, will you write with this, your one chance to test a pen before you fill out the papers to take it home!

If ever you’re in the pen department at your local pen emporium (or Penporium) and you find tester pads that say “testing a blue pen” and “checking out a pen of red” know that it was me. I write “this is me, trying out a blue pen.” Or “this is the black pen I’m trying out.” “Hey, look at how this red pen writes.” “this is how this green pen looks when I write with it. Like I am now.”

Today a fellow administrative monkey (we’ll call her Jeans Girl) offered me up a pen from the box of new pens she’d ordered, and so I had to try it out. After I wrote “this blue pen writes like this.” she asked me why I would write that, of all the things to write. I explained to her that otherwise I get completely stuck by the multitude of options!

Otherwise you’ll see me in the pen aisles, stymied! Staring at the blank tester pad with no direction! Should I write my name? Someone else’s name? A famous name! What about a quote, like Shakespeare or Noel Coward. Should I write “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” so I can see how the pen writes all the letters? What about numbers? What if I get this home and find out it just SUCKS at the number 4 and question marks? I could try to draw something, but I suck at drawing, and then I have to decide if the sucky drawing is because of a sucky pen or just me sucking at drawing. Don’t get me wrong, because I love pen shopping, but the choosing of a quality pen should not take several hours.

Now I have a simple system that takes my far too active imagination out of the equation. I should probably come up with systems that do that for the rest of my life too. You SO don’t want to see me picking out underwear.

Me vs. sub-freezing temperatures

We got snow on Sunday. A lot of snow. Not a lot of snow for Alaska, or New York or Denver, or Wisconsin or even cold parts of California or heck even Alabama or anywhere else at all! But for Hippyville it was a LOT of SNOW. It was somewhere between 3 and 4 inches, depend on what news channel you watch. It brought the town to pretty much a grinding halt. You see, because we never, ever get any real snow here we only have a couple of snow plows. And one runs on hemp gas and the other is made of macramé, so you can imagine what a 3rd of a foot of snow can do.

I lived on the east coast for several years, and pretty much every year I was there we experienced The Blizzard of the Century!!!! In the end they weren’t really blizzardy, but they were a nice, big dump of snow. For days, instead of an afternoon. Enough snow so you actually had to worry about driving and all the big parking lots would have mounds of snow in each corner the size of Snow White’s cottage for weeks afterward. So when we get our cute little snow “storms” I just can’t take it seriously. You could say I’m a snow snob. (actually you could try, but you’d find that is much harder to say out loud than you’d expect. Go ahead, try. I’ll wait…)

My snow snobbery meant that the people who couldn’t even get into the office by Monday? I scoffed at them and in my head I called them “wimp!” and “weeny!” I slathered judgment all over them like judgy-butter on a bagel (again, in my head) and pounded my chest in my manly navigating of the lightly-snowed streets!

Cut to last night. I’m hanging out at my sister’s place, and her house is built into the side of a butte. So in front of their place is a fairly steep driveway about 10-12 feet long. And while we’re hanging out in the house it’s pseudo-snowing outside. The wet, slushy snow that doesn’t get anywhere and can’t be used to make anything cool, except maybe a tropical drink (when mixed with the right booze and juice). Time comes for me to leave, and I trek down the driveway with confidence.

About 3 feet from the street I hit a slick patch. This is when I realize that between the end of the slushy snow and right then the temperature did a pretty big dive. Some things have become icy. I check this off in the “good to know” category and I head to a new path. But that one is slick too. And that one, and that one. And not only is that direction slippy, but holy crap I’m having a foot cramp!

I spend the next 5 minutes inching myself in one direction or another, almost losing it entirely and cracking my rump over and over, and occasionally standing around on one foot while I zen-yoga-contort the other one trying to un-cramp it. I’m stuck. Three feet from glory and I’m stuck. I did what anyone would do in that situation.

I called my sister on the cell phone.

“I’m stuck in your driveway.” I say.

“Do you want me to come out and help you push?” she asks.

“No, I mean me. I’m personally stuck. In your driveway.” Looooong Pause… “How do you usually get down your driveway when it’s slick?”

“I normally stay home when it’s slick.”

…-

“I’m stuck. In your driveway.”

…-

“That silence better not be you laughing…”

Finally my brother in law came out with excellent traction boots (for him) and some kind of high-tech scrapy tool (for the driveway) and made me a path. A path upon which I humbly slunk over to my car and manlessly drove myself home. And never, ever judged the snow-challenged ever again.

(Stupid slushy snow.)

Perspective

Here in Hippyville it is cold.

No, sorry, that's not right. It is COLD.

I biked to work this morning at 6:30 in the Holy Crap morning and it was 20 degrees. And I know there are places where it gets whole bunches more cold, but it's not supposed to get this cold here! Temperate Climate, people! And I was going to write a whole long post about "biking in when it's so cold is hard!" and also "should skin be that pink?" and the classic "crap it's so cold!"...

But then I saw this.

Oh internet, how I love you and your important life lessons!!

Wii = Whee?? Oui!

First, a little back story: those readers who are over the age of about 22 may remember the ancient times, when video games roamed the land in packs, called “arcades” (pack of dogs, herd of cows, mob of crows, arcade of video games, etc.) They were much larger than they are now (so take that, you crazy people who don’t believe in evolution!) and they were slower, much more rudimentary. You could easily fool one of these prehistoric video games with the well-placed hand jive or a bottle cap.

This was my time. I would spend hours with an arcade of video games that had settled down near my work, and I would play with ones called Tron or Crossbow, but probably my favorite was a quirky little member of the tribe that was called “Rampage” Rampage was a very social game; liked to play with two or three kids at a time (as opposed to the more skittish, easily spooked games like the Pac Men who required you to approach carefully and only interact 1-on-1) and Rampage loved noise and high energy! Oh yes, I used to play with Rampage often, but then slowly the arcades of video games became more and more scarce. Now you’ll find some arcades in refuges built either in the corner of a shopping mall or pizza parlor, but they’re practically extinct. There are newer, faster, much more sophisticated, domesticated video games, used to living in a home with a family which loves it. But I never found one that I could really warm up to. This new evolution, called “game systems”, is just too flashy for me, and tends to thrive on really aggressive play, like Halo. Not my thing.

So I’ve lived without the companionship of a video game for years, watching as various new species hit the market but not terribly impressed. Thus endeth the backeth story. Eth.

OK, so the most biggest party our family does each year is not Christmas. It’s not New Years. It’s not July the 4th. It’s my Dad’s birthday. Early January, right after all the other holidays and about when you’d think that nobody wants to do any more partying, and yet it’s the biggest blow-out of the year. I don’t even know for sure how he does that, and in a classic example of the Coming of Age rite of passage where a child wants to surpass their parent, I think each year that I want to top it. But I don’t even get CLOSE.

One of the examples of the excellence of his party is that it is invariably the longest day of the year for many of us. People stay at his party much, much later than they stay at any other party.

For instance, this year I was rushing home, racing the sun, just wanting to be in bed (not even asleep, mind you – just not standing up!) before the sun was actually lighting the world. I just BARELY made it. Then I had close to 5 hours of sleep with hourly check-ins from the kitties – “getting up now? Now? How about now? You know the sun is all up and stuff, right? Would it help at all if one or both of us were to stick our cold noses in your eye? And again? And again? Is this helping?...” – finally culminating in my getting up around noon and sitting on the couch staring at the front yard. For an hour.

So what would I have been DOING until 7am? Playing with the Wii! And what was I playing? RAMPAGE, BABY!

Yes, I admit that after years of shunning all this new-fangled technology I may have finally found a way of playing with video games that I can get BEHIND! Even better than my ancient Rampage, with the punching of buildings and kicking of cars with my little joystick. Now if I would like to, say, utterly crush a fleeing fire engine I bring my fist down with vicious fury! If I want to scoop up some hapless SWAT guy I don’t just nudge a timid little controller – I swing my arm into their midst and there I am nom-nom-nomming that guy! Nom-Nom-NOMMING! To DEATH! So excited was my little nephew that he would literally vibrate across the floor, invariably ending up standing right in front of me.

You may ask “do you have to stand to play the game?” Why no, you don’t have to. And by practically dawn I admit I’d plopped down in a chair for my destructive flurry. But when you’re in the throws you just feel like you can’t sit down. Who sits down to completely and utterly wipe the city of Dallas, Texas from the map??? (no offense to Dallas – we also wiped out San Francisco, Las Vegas and London. Our destructive wake was international, y’all!)

So there was I, along w/ my aunt who we'll call Ruby (after her favorite monster), at 5:45am, putting the finishing destructive touches on a bank, a parking garage and two honkytonks in Dallas, and completely oblivious to the time. Having TOO MUCH FUN. But that’s my idea of the kind of thing to lose track of. Give me an entire night of too much fun over too much sleep any time!

(what happened between 6am and 7am? Oh, just a little drama-infused surgery is all. Wii!!!!)

So,... just me then?

Hey, have you ever been on a really long trek on your bike and all the sudden you freak out because you realize you're not wearing your seat belt? That is, until you remember that you're on your bike, not in your car, and that bikes don't have seatbelts and that if you're going to worry about anything you should worry that you're not wearing a helmet because you can't wear your earmuffs under a helmet (or over one) and right now you're going to wear your earmuffs no matter what, at least until the weather warms up enough that muffless ears won't fall off of your head like two chunks of ear ice? Anyone? Anyone?

Yeah, me neither.

Trip-Ta-Fantastic!!

I

Made

A

Turkey.

No, seriously, the woman who can burn juice successfully defrosted, unstuffed, stuffed (sort of), cooked, cooled and CARVED a gosh darned turkey!! And also? Nobody was wounded or maimed and I didn’t die of food-poisoning! It was a red letter day, people!!

(to which you ask “all by yourself??” To which I answer “are you mad??”)

Here's the deal: my work gave everyone free turkey or free pies for the holidays, and of course my first thought was “Mmmm – Free Pie!!” (because that’s actually one of my life mottos – “Mmmm – Free Pie!!” I’ve got it tattooed on my right butt cheek, across from my other life motto tattoo, “There is no such thing as a good morning”) But then I thought to myself “some day all the grown-ups might not be around to cook us a turkey on Thanksgiving or Christmas. The Horror!” and, fueled by the idea of sitting down to my Christmas balogna sammich, I grabbed me a frozen turkey and bypassed those pies! Shunned them, even!

Of course then I was just some clueless boob with a frozen turkey and no idea what to do with it. And kind of wishing I had a few pies to console me.

Next step: I called my Mom, a woman who has made successful turkey after successful turkey; a woman who is not easily flapped by a cooking disaster; a lovely, generous and PATIENT woman… I called her and asked “please oh please, oh mother of mine, would you teach me the Jedi ways of the cooked turkey?” And then I bribed her with brownies. (And can I just say thank all the cooking gods for the invention of the boxed brownie mix, from which excellent brownies come and which is so very impossible to screw up, at least beyond the second time? Oh yes I can.)

This woman, this wonderful Mom-woman, she spent her Sunday afternoon and evening helping me to do this. And as those of you who have ever cooked a turkey already know, it is the classic example of the “hurry up and wait” project. She got there and helped me to confirm that yes, the insides of this bird were still 80% ice. Which, apparently, is bad. And then it was a couple of hours of thawing tactics, as well as yanking things out and pouring things in and chipping things loose…

Once it was thawed we put stuff in it and lavished it with yummy, yummy butter and stuck it in a box ever so hot. And then it was ‘wait thirty minutes, check-poke-slather, wait thirty minutes, check-poke-slather, repeat until crazy…’ She was smart enough to have other chores and errands that she could run during the waiting periods, but even at the end she still came back, at 8pm that night, to show me how to carve a turkey without also carving my thumbs.

Some things I learned:

• Turkeys actually keep all their internal organs collected together in a little plastic bag. Smart thinkin’, evolution!
• The little “I’m done!” indicator on a turkey lies, it lies! Listen to it not, for that way lies madness!
• You can never put too much butter on a turkey. Go ahead, try. It will never be too much. Never.

I know that science (those big show-offs) are saying now that turkey doesn’t make you any sleepier then any other meat. I don’t care – I was still falling asleep on the couch by 11pm. But it was the blissful sleep of the turkey-stuffed, the lucky few who know they have enough white meat in their fridge to feed them turkey sandwiches all week long. There is no better sleep.

Breakin' the Law! Breakin' the Law!

(Note: I actually posted this over the weekend, but due to some various technical thingies it ended up on 1/13/07. Last year. So for any of you who just happened to be reading old, old posts between Sunday and Thursday I clarify that no, this did not happen to me two years in a row! I'm just stupid is all. And now I post this again, but this year, just to be crazy...)

One of my break lights is more dark then light right now. Dad pointed it out (since it’s pretty tough to notice things on your own ass) a while ago and I keep thinking about it in extremely convenient places like in bed at 4:30am or just as I’m lathering up my head in the shower or sitting in a movie theater. But I am aware of it, so that’s something, right?

So then the weekend before Christmas, as I was pulling into a parking space across the street from our big used book store, I happened to notice that these ladies sitting in the car parked behind me were staring, SUPER-staring, at my car’s rump. And with kind of a “we hate that car, hate it SO MUCH!, and specifically the car rump! Hate!” sort of facial expression. So much so, in fact, that I just had to go see what could cause such rancorous facial expressions about a car’s behind.

As I’m coming around the car I remembered the brake light. “That’s probably it” I’m thinking, “It’s probably that my brake light is out and that’s against their holistic 'all cars should be in good working order' spiritual way and so my dark brake light horribly offended their auto sensibilities. That’s probably all it was… or maybe it’s that my license plate tags are expired.”

Gah!

Oh, and not like “gosh and golly, my tags expired 20 minutes ago”, but more like “Wow, I’ve been driving around just asking for a ticket since the END OF NOVEMBER!” Again I go Gah!

See, here’s the thing: the post office doesn’t like to deliver mail sent from the Dept. of Motor Vehicles to my home address. They don’t flat-out refuse to do it, but they won’t do it every time. They’ve got about a 65% compliance rate. And it’s not that they’ve got a mistake in my address – I’ve checked. They’ve checked. I’ve asked uninterested third parties to check. We all agree that the address they have is totally my address. The post office has confirmed that there is no reason why they wouldn’t deliver mail addressed thusly. And yet some stuff just never arrives at my house, and this is the second time that an undelivered piece of mail is the one to remind me that my danged license plate tags are about to expire!

Seriously, gah.

OK, so I first realized this on the street on Christmas Eve, when I know there’s no chance of my getting to the friendly people at the DMV right then. I know I’m gonna have to keep driving around all fugitively from the law. Which I’d been doing, at that point, for practically a month. But I didn’t KNOW it before. I thought I was all law abidy and such back then, in my innocent days. Now that I knew that I was a law breaker the cops were just EVERYWHERE! I left the book store and make two left turns, and hey, there’s a cop! I make two more right turns and hey, there’s that cop again! I make a right turn, a left turn, a right turn, another left turn, down a long street… and pull up right next to that same dang cop. Same. Dang. Cop.

I know that they aren’t going to notice my expired tags just driving around, but remember that I also have the much more noticeable single break light. Or as I like to call it, the huge sign on the back of my car that says “Hey officer, look at me, I bet I'm doing all sorts of illegal stuff!!” And sure enough, I spent days surrounded by Five-O until the holidays were over and I could go out and get the tail light fixed. (Because fixing the break light is much cheaper then fixing the tags, which I’ll get to right away. Ish.) In the meantime I am the most law-abidiest person you ever did see. No speeding for me! No iffy parking, no under-feeding the meter. I’m Johnny-Legal, that’s me! Wish me luck.

Not a good season for art

I like to think that I’m a photographer. (I also like to think that I’m skinny, brainy and the King of all the Trees. So whatever) I took classes in ‘the big city’ and have a real camera (digital, but digital SLR, so that entitles me to official camera snootiness.) with removable lenses and filters and accessories and I can talk about aperture and ISO and “depth of field” as though I actually know what any of that stuff means. And in past years I’ve won three, count ‘em THREE, ribbons in the photography exhibit at the county fair! (let us not focus on the fact that they were “honorable mention” ribbons which our photography judges give away like suger-free candy. They were ribbons. That’s all that truly matters.) For all these reasons and more I like to think that I am truly a photographer.

Also I really enjoy taking pictures. And I get all googly-eyed when I have a great photographic triumph like this or this or especially this – so cool! But as much as I like these pictures, that’s how much I hate flash pictures. I hate them. I hate how everyone always looks shocked and how the colors are sand-blasted and you just know that the picture right after the picture that was taken is of someone being very annoyed about the damned flash. Even I, who champions the rights of the shutterbug to click away all they want, have been known to say “enough with the flashes please!” at a busy party. Give me available light whenever possible.

Easy to say during the spring. During the Summer. Even during most of the fall. But man, when it’s winter it’s just really tricky to get good pictures. I don’t know how someone like Dooce does it – either there is always sun in her house, always, always, still and forever, or she has the best, biggest, most light-providing lens in creation, or her monthly lighting bill is astronomical. Regardless, I’m jealous. I want me some sunny days! Some artistically lit days!

We had sun on Sunday, and even though I was groggy from lack of sleep (oh, I haven’t covered that yet? I will, I promise) and unclean and everything I still dragged my heiny out to our bestest park and took pictures of the children of strangers. (the key to that? Every once in a while I smile and wave to an imaginary kid across the park. Presto: now I’m just someone’s Mom, taking their picture as a good mom should, rather than some creepy stranger stealing souls) Highlights of my picture day included watching a road-trip parrot being coaxed into pooping (bird poop stop – in case you thought it was a myth), the baby that kept falling, face-first and quite purposefully, into the sand box and then CRIED and CRIED, and the mass game of tag w/ players from age 11ish to probably college-age.

I got a couple of things I like, but within an hour the sun was fading and my hands were mostly just purple lobster claws from all the cold. So now what I think is I need a trip to the Bahamas, just me and my camera and the sun and the lack-of-cold, so I can take pictures of the children of strangers.

For my fellow Santa Snobs

OK, so I got some cool websites in response to my post about how superior and awesome my parents were when I was kid, which now I realize probably should have been called either "the ways in which my parents were superior to everyone else" or "just one more reason I should be whacked a whole bunch more often then I currently am." I've been remiss in passing them along. I shall be remiss no more:

Land of Nod: (thanks Nicole!)

I love this store for the cool name alone! Of course it's not someplace for folks who are where my parents were financially when I was a wee winky, but if you have a little silver to rub together you should rub it around these people. (or something like that)

Sassafrass Enterprises: (thanks again Nicole!)

Specifically for the cookery-types among you, and even more specifically for those cookery-types who have had wee cookery-kids. Who knows, if I'd had some of this stuff as a kid maybe the idea of making cereal wouldn't give me the cold sweats?

Etsy: (thanks always, Risky!)

I've probably already mentioned this site, because it's awesome and because a chum and fellow-blogger has stuff there. But though I think it gets most of it's publicity about jewelry and art-stuff, this website also has cool toys. Toys that a Santa could make!

Uncommon Goods: (thanks to several people!)

I actually got introduced to this website last year and kind of forgot about it. (so lame!) So I was really thrilled to have it returned to my radar!! I have received excellent things from this very website as gifts for 2 years running, and invariably they're some of my favorite things.

I can't help -- must gush. Check out these cool things that people loved me enough to gift!:
SZECHUAN SCARF KNIT KITS -- I knitted this, despite the best efforts of my new
kitties (a last year gift) to stop me. And now I wear it and love it and ha, ha, ha, I MADE it!
CAT TAO GLASSES SET -- Things that someone knew about me when purchasing this gift = I love cats, I love LARGE glasses (I spit at you, silly little juice glasses), I
am not at all Zen and I love cats.

HEMA: (thanks Julie)

OK, so I can't tout the products or the mission or anything. But go there. And wait. And trust me...