Flashbacks

*
Man, I don't know what happened to me last night, but it was really bizarre.

T was sleeping next to me, and I was making my latest attempt at reading "The Lovely Bones". Everything was fine. I don't know if it was something in the story that started this, but suddenly I realized I wasn't reading any more. I was staring off into space just over the top of the book, and it was like a movie started in my head.

I was in the basement of the house I grew up in. I was standing by the dryer, next to the door into the garage. The spot where my mother literally spent years of her life standing, making sure our school clothes came out just right. I could hear the sound of the clothes going around in the dryer, the zipper on some jeans or the end of a lace string on a pair of sweats. I imagined pulling the clothes out of the dryer and feeling the heat rise on my face, smelling the sweet smell of clean clothes.... and I was crying. Really crying.

Still watching this movie in my head, I started looking around the basement, and I could see every single detail... things that I never knew I remembered. I saw the words "on" and "off" that my dad had written in pen on the wooden beam where the levers that controlled the water to the washing machine were attached. I saw the old laundry table with the huge cardboard box on it that caught the clothes as they were dropped through a hole we called "The Hatch" hidden in the floor under the sink in the first floor bathroom (another "Rube Goldberg" Dad trick). It wasn't just a hole - Dad had made a lid out of the piece of flooring he'd cut out, so it was tiled with the same tiny baby blue and white tiles as the rest of the bathroom floor. Hey, man, like - it was the sixties, dig?

Then I turned and opened the door into the garage - I smelled that damp smell of cement block underground mixed with motor oil. Saw the weird little shelves along the upper walls, crammed with the myriad weirdness that was the detritus of my parent's lives. My sister and I never had any of our things on those shelves - it was all parental history. I could see the blue plastic sleds that we kept leaned behind the door all year, waiting for the big snowstorms to come, when school was closed and the four of us would go tramping into the woods behind the house to sled precariously and at high speeds between the trees on the steep slopes of the ravine. I did not lead a sheltered life where excitement was concerned.

Then I turned, and walked through the basement, past the magical area that was my father's workshop. To the untrained eye, it was a jumbled heap of unintelligible garbage - pieces of wire, wheels from old television carts, spark plugs, and almost completely used up cans of MinWax wood stain. But to my father and I, it was a place of creation, of unlimited potential. Things could be made, and fixed, in that small area, if you just knew where to look for the tools and things. And my father and I always did - he had a rule. I could go into his workshop and use anything I wanted to.... as long as I put it back exactly where he had left it. This important lesson was learned the day I went in there and "helped" by cleaning the whole place up for him. He nearly had an apoplectic fit, and I couldn't understand why, until he explained that he knew where EVERYTHING was... no matter how out of place it looked to me. So I learned to see through his eyes, and to know where to find the dog-legged-whatchamacallit, which was always hanging on a nail just behind the hoosiewhatsis. He had nailed rows of baby food jar lids to the beams in the ceiling above the workbench, with the jars full of nuts, bolts, and nails screwed up into the lids - one of my dad's favorite ingenious storage ideas. There was a massive black vice attached to the lip of the workbench, and an electric drill/polishing stone machine thing hulking on the back corner. It was a wizard's realm of mechanical bits and bobs, a place that my mother and my sister rarely visited - probably because of the clutter.

Past the workshop, and then past the strange pile of highchair/armchair/stuff that didn't go anywhere else in the house, and then the small refrigerator. This was the place that my dad always had a couple of beers tucked away, right next to the door that led into the TV room, which was the only finished part of the basement. Dad could go downstairs, grab a beer out of his little refrigerator, and sit in his big, green leatherette rocking armchair and watch boxing matches. The TV room had my piano in it - my sister took lessons, too, but the piano was always mine. The piano that I practised on through ten years of classical piano lessons. I could see the big bookshelf-cum-entertainment center which held our TV, our 8-track tape player, and much, much later, our VCR. I could see all the plants that my mom tended so lovingly, hanging and sitting at various levels in front of the big window in that room. The window was made almost dark by the plants inside and the huge rhododendrons growing just outside it. My mother's green thumb is one of my favorite inherited traits.

Right next to my dad's recliner was the beautiful antique Victrola - on top of which sat my dad's pipe stand. He had all sorts of pipes. Once my mom got tired of picking up all the pipes he left around the house, and she began taking them and putting them in a big black garbage bag in the back of her closet. By the time my dad started looking around saying, "Hey, have you seen my pipe?" she had over thirty pipes in that bag. It's not that she didn't like him to smoke a pipe, it's that he used to leave them around without cleaning them out, and they smelled sour and awful. After she gave him back his bag o'pipes, he kept them put away and clean, for the most part.

Then up the stairs. The stairs were wooden, with mulitcolored oval rag-braided mats on each step. Some of the mats would never stay stuck to the wood, even though multiple layers of double-sided tape were used. They would always come up when I vacuumed the stairs. Pictures of my whole family when they were kids lined the right wall going up the stairs. The left side was a wrought iron bannister that you could see through into the TV room, and then a short bit of wall as you reached the top.

The top of those stairs were one of my favorite places. My dad had made a pair of doors with stained glass windows in them, and a wooden cross-bar latch that you could lock it shut with. It looked like something out of a medieval castle, and I loved it. Loved it because I loved anything medieval looking, and loved it because my cooler than cool dad made it.

Once through the doors at the top, I hung a right. There was the guest room, the end of hall closet that was my dad's work suit closet, and the junk room that would one day become my own room when I was in college. In the junk room days, it was my wonderland - I would clear out spaces in the jumble to set up a painting table to do my paint by numbers, or to work on school art projects where no one would think to look for me. I have always loved my hiding places.

Then the bathroom - the aforementioned bathroom with the blue and white tiled floor, the wall-to-wall formica counter with the blue sink dropped in, and the oddly thin blue cloth curtains that hung beneath the counter to the floor, suspended on little brass-colored pinch-and-clip rings. A door separated the sink area from the toilet and tub area, and my dad thought he was the cat's pajamas when he installed a telephone which sat on the magazine rack right next to the toilet. When my mom, my sister, or I was on a call with someone on the kitchen phone, he would sneak into the bathroom and lift the receiver off the hook - not to listen in, but to hold the receiver down in the bowl of the toilet and flush it, cackling loudly. Many, many phone calls were punctuated by the sound of rushing water and my father's trademark cackle. My friends were actually disappointed if they called and didn't get "flushed".

On down the hall, past the amber and wrought iron hanging lamp - another nod to the medieval - and towards the kitchen, which my mother wanted to expand by knocking a wall down and my dad answered by putting up a mural-sized mirror. The kitchen where the kitten I got in first grade had all of her meals until she was sixteen, and I had all mine until I went away to college. The kitchen where my mom made wonderful dinners, and peanut butter milkshakes for her kids.

It went on this way through the entire house - past the fireplace where my mom made scrambled eggs one winter when we were housebound during a three day ice storm, up the stairs that I used to sled down on a pillow, to the huge master bedroom with sky blue rug and daffodil yellow walls that my mom and dad let my sister and I share while they took the tiny bedroom across the hall for themselves...

I still don't know what that whole episode was about, but it was unreal. Like watching a movie while your eyes are still open. Next morning my eyes were so swollen from crying that I looked like I'd been socked. How weird.

Tantric Peepis Mashing 101

I love starting out a blog entry with an attention grabbing (ahem) photo. Those of you who have low tolerance for nudity, the IQ of a llama, or who are easily offended should know better than to be reading this blog to begin with, so bugger off and find something wholesome to do.

T and I were spending some quality time together last night, looking online for some ideas for our next tattoos. T was helping me find some Tibetan/Buddhist designs for the tattoo I told you about a few entries ago.

As with all Google image searches done with balls (ie: "safe search" is turned off, allowing all sorts of naughty bits to be shown with whatever you were actually looking for), we ran across some surprising images and websites. Surprising because the key word we were searching was "vajra", which is one of the Buddhist holy accoutrements. An actual vajra looks like this:

Of course, with some minimal mental acrobatics, we can see some sort of similarity between the actual vajra and the one that is being manhandled in the photo at the top of this page. With the exception, of course, that the actual vajra looks exactly the same on both ends, while the other one has a helmet on one end and an asshole on the other.

Apparently, the website that goes along with the picture is some sort of tantric peepis healing site, and each different mauling is given a name, and a picture to guide you on the road to whangus wellness, providing you can find someone willing to mangle your private parts for that long (with no discernable hope of future sexual satisfaction for themselves, since they have now turned your tallywhacker into a ground beef patty).

Some of my favorite moves had exotic titles, such as "Ohen", which showed a picture of the small, white, purportedly female hands ready to roll the tube steak between her palms like so much Play-Doh. There was the not-soon-to-be-forgotten "Velke U", which shows the administrator of wellness trying to palm the trouser snake as a magician would palm a cigarette, making it dissappear momentarily before pulling it out of someone's ear. We can only hope this is not the goal in this scenario.

However inexplicably, some of the moves had non-exotic scary English titles.... like "Juicer". This sounds like the meaty organ is headed for a blender of some kind. Then there's "Twist and Shout" - I don't know what the picture is trying to portray, but if the title is any clue, I would be getting out of there immediately if I was that guy. My favorite has to be "Carpe Diem"... but I don't think it's the day she's seizing. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I can swear to that, despite the fact that I have had days when my boss very closely resembled the prima bonerina in these pictures. "Carpe Dickem" might have been more appropo.

Just so's y'all don't think I'm pulling your...... LEG...

HERE IT IS

Retraction - A Falsity Revealed

A while back, in an entry called "Potential" I posted a picture of Angelina, nude, semi-reclining. Something about that picture, although it was gorgeous, bothered me. I kept going back to look at it again and again. Something was wrong with it.

Then it hit me. She has, for quite some time now, had a HUGE black tattoo across her belly below her belly button. That is nowhere visible in this picture. In the movie "Gia", I saw Angie completely naked from almost every angle... and something about the waist and lower body in this picture just didn't match up.

With T's help (he's good at this detective stuff) I opened the picture in Photoshop and blew it up several sizes. Then, at T's suggestion, I inverted the colors.

BLAMMO! It was as obvious as if you'd cut the picture with a pair of scissors. Someone has taken a picture of Angie's face and superimposed it on someone else's body. They cut the picture right below her earlobe and then went up and over, leaving the original model's jawline intact. They just added the front of Angie's face, her hair, and her ear - they even cut off part of her earlobe, on closer inspection.

It's bizarre how easy it is to be fooled, even when - as I do - you consider yourself pretty on top of things. Makes you wonder how many other people around you are completely fooling you. I wonder about people I work with... which one of them secretly dresses up as a woman when no one is around? Which one of them is longing to move out west and become a cowboy? Which one of them is really a talent scout who is checking me out as a possible supporting character for Angie's next movie? Ar ar arrrrrr.

I know that nobody but me will find this fake picture discovery fascinating, but I haven't written anything for the past couple of days and I am just trying to break the cycle of silence here, folks. The gym has really been taking it out of me this week for some reason (I hear the redcoats approaching) and I've just chosen to stay in bed and snooze rather than get up early and do any writing. I know that writer's block tends to feed on itself, and the longer you don't write, the longer you don't think you have anything to say, so I'm jumping back in.

Two successes:

1) I got a raise at work, after my yearly review. Now that my workload has quadrupled, I am finally making the money that I deserved to make when I started this job.
2) I am now using 25 pound dumbells for my curls at the gym! Pumped is not the word...

Hey, do these things happen in threes?

Honey, I Love Your (melon) Balls!

Last night was too much fun! When I got home from work (where I just had my one year review with my boss and got a raise - HOO YAH!) , I decided that I couldn't go to the gym without first going to the laundromat, since my workout clothes (my faves, anyhoo) were in that load.

T and I jumped in the 'splorer and went toodling off to get the laundry. Then we decided that as long as we were at the laundromat, we might as well go next door to the grocery store and get some stuff we knew we needed, including something to make for dinner.

Got home with the laundry and the food, and began putting both away. A friend called on the phone, and while I was chatting with him, T fell asleep on the loveseat in NASA. After the call was over, I asked T if he didn't think it was a better idea - since both of us were bone tired - to forego the gym and do the workout on Saturday afternoon when he got back from his half day at work. He agreed that it was a much, much better idea, since we were both so tired.

We immediately felt better, and somehow less tired, and went into the bedroom to see what kind of exercises we could think up that involved horizontal positions - just so we wouldn't get tired again... and incredible yumminess ensued.

Then we be-bopped downstairs, still buzzing pleasantly from the aforementioned encounter. I put on some big band swing tunes and we hit the kitchen, where T mixed himself a Melon Ball and I mixed myself a Cosmopolitan and we dove into cooking mode, making a kick-ass batch of chicken enchiladas with refried beans and yellow rice. A couple more Melon Balls and Cosmos made their appearance (and disappearance) during this time, and when T wasn't looking, I was taking some big swigs out of his Melon Balls (hee hee) - they're so yummy!

While we were chopping onions and boiling water and the rest, T decides to start a game of "Which one of these two famous people would you sleep with if you had to pick one"... giving me really really hard choices - some because both were attractive, and some because both were hideous. We took turns giving each other choices, and were laughing hysterically at some of the answers. One of his questions actually made me misty-eyed for a second, because both people were dead, and I had loved them both - Sergei Grinkov (the skater) and Mark Frankel (actor). At the height of the hilarity, and just when thinking up new and hideous combinations of people (I gave him Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, both of whom he despises - HA!) became really difficult, my sister called from North Carolina.

She was in a ripping funny mood - my sister is one of the funniest people on the planet when she gets rolling - and T got on the other extension and we were all three in hysterics on the phone. She told us that while her husband was away for the week visiting his family, she had gone into the garage to get something, wearing only a bra and thong panties. The door swung shut behind her - they have the kind that lock automatically... so she was locked out of the house. No sweat, she knew where they kept an extra copy of the house keys, in a coffee can on one of the garage shelves. The can was empty. Her husband had given the extra copy to my mom (who lives about 45 minutes away from her) so they could take care of the cats the last time they went on vacation. He had never gotten another copy made. The only thing in the garage that she could use for cover was an old towel that the cats sleep on... so she wrapped herself in that (ugh) and went running across the cul-de-sac to the neighbor's house for help, praying that the wife would answer the door instead of the husband.

This story had me weeping with laughter... and then when she launched into her planned revenge on her husband for this embarrassing scene, I was helpless. T told her about the "who would you choose" game we were playing, and the three of us started playing. T gave her a choice between Morgan Freeman and someone else, and she chose Morgan Freeman almost before he got the second name out. T said, "Really, you like Morgan Freeman?", and my sister's reply was, "Honey, I'd do Morgan Freeman if my husband was HOME." We were laughing so hard then that communication was nearly impossible.

Once we got off the phone, dinner was ready and we watched an episode of "24" while chowing down on the best damn chicken enchiladas I have ever had in my life.

What a night!!

Now that it's today, I don't regret any of the fun I had last night, but I am dreading going to the gym this afternoon! Ugh. I think I would rather do a research paper on the migratory patterns of the Albanian Warbler than work out today.

I braved the rain to feed the outside kitty and the birds and squirrels, and came back inside. I made a cup of coffee and wrapped myself up in the faux fur library throw that my dad gave us for Yule, and sat on the stairs, looking at the garden. I pulled the top of the window down so I could feel the cool, wet air on my face and smell the growing things. The birds and squirrels were having so much fun at their breakfast, rain or no rain. There were two little squirrels chasing each other all over the garden - they would stop to eat a sunflower seed, and then take one to bury in the dirt. I bet there are thousands of sunflower seeds buried in my lawn - I hope they don't sprout!

It was so peaceful - I could almost hear the plants growing, stretching their roots to drink and reaching their arms to the sky. I sat there enjoying my little corner of the world until my left butt cheek went numb and I decided to come on up and write. It's really raining hard now, some thunder too - so I better get off the computer.

Mermaid Girl

T and I were coming back from somewhere the other day, and as we neared the driveway, we saw twenty or so little white rectangles all in the street in front of our driveway. T said he thought they were photographs - I agreed they could be, but I found it odd that they should all be face down, especially considering it was such a windy day.

I hopped out of the Explorer and went to find out, while T backed down the driveway. Sure enough, they were photos. They had been in the street for a while, it seems - some of them had tire tracks on the backs and grit ground into the fronts. I ran around, dodging the inevitable traffic which only crops up on our road when you are late for work and trying to pull out of the driveway or when you are trying to pick something up off the street.

I stacked them all together, brushing the worst of the dirt off as I did so, and looked at what I'd found. They were all pictures of the same girl. A small, mousy-looking girl, with a face like an eight year old but the body of a fourteen or fifteen year old. She's wearing braces, no makeup, and has her short blond hair pulled back in a messy pony tail in most of the shots. She's not particularly pretty, but there's something about her smile that's infectious and makes her seem like she might have a good sense of humor.

There were pictures of her sitting on a sofa by a picture window at home, standing in front of a drugstore, several very closeup and off-center pictures of her smile - just her chin and mouth visible, one closeup of her forehead taken at night with the flash on, and one or two of her with her boyfriend- an equally small, skinny, blond kid who looks much younger than he apparently is, if he's got a girlfriend. I'm assuming these pictures belonged to him, and that he is the photographer of all the shots of her. Perhaps a family member took the one picture of the two of them on the couch together, as it was a posed shot.

But of all the photos, the ones that made me smile were the ones taken in the family's backyard pool. The one at the top of this post is my favorite - apparently the boyfriend got one of those vacation cameras that you can use underwater, and he had fun taking pictures of her and the two of them underwater, and there were several of just her body (in a two piece bathing suit) under the water. Exactly the kind of stuff I would have done when I was a kid.

I wonder why the photos were all in the street. I looked hard at the pictures that showed part of the house and yard, trying to recognize them from our neighborhood, but to no avail. I've never seen either one of those kids in our neighborhood before. The fact that the pictures were in the street made me wonder if they'd been thrown from the window of a moving car. Did the girl break up with him, and he didn't want to be reminded of his great summer with her?

I thought maybe that someone had left the pictures on top of the car and forgot them - but for them to have fallen right in front of our house means they would have to have been parked very near our house when they pulled away, because as windy as the day was, you wouldn't be able to get all the way from Main St. to our house with the stack still intact.

It's just a funny little incident, and as much as I love pictures (even pictures of strangers I'll never meet) I just couldn't leave them in the street. They're a little vignette of a boy's summer with his Mermaid Girl. Whoever and wherever they are, whether they're still together or not, I hope they kept the negatives.

One Year

Yesterday was both a triumph and a complete letdown. It was my one year anniversary at my job. I had to pry a half-hearted, out of the side of his mouth "congratulations" out of my boss, which of course was completely non-gratifying.

The thing is, if I worked for some huge corporation that had been in existence for 80 years, it wouldn't really surprise me. But the company I work for has only been around slightly longer than I have. This means I came in on the ground floor. Basically, there were three people working for this company the day I started. The boss, a friend of his, and me. I was the receptionist, personal assistant, handyman, shipping person, interior decorator, and whatever else no one else had time to do. Now, we've got five offices spread over Long Island and into NYC... the company has come a long way since I got there, and I would like to think that part of the reason it did so well is because I did so well. But you'll only hear it here, folks.

My boss promises great things on the front end- sure, you'll get raises, sure, there will be promotions, and blah blah blah. I've gotten my raises, but only after wrestling him to the mat and using his own words to force him to come across or fire me. It just makes me tired.

I know there are millions of you out there in the same position, but what I wonder is why it has to be this way? I understand that some bosses have employees that steal from them, or do shitty work. In those cases, you do what you have to do to keep your company stable. But what about the rest of us? The folks who are working hard, getting the job done, and showing up every day? Those of us who don't take two or three trips to 7-11 and Starbucks every day? Those of us who may not have the most glamorous, highly visible positions in the company, but who have a tough job because of that fact - we do all the slog work, get none of the glory?

Would it really kill the boss to just remember that we are the infrastructure of his little kingdom? All it would take would be a handshake and a "Thanks for all your hard work" every once in a millenium, and to schedule your yearly reviews without making the employee hire a private detective to find your location.

Another thing that irks me is that two men have been hired after I was hired, and 1) I was never offered a shot at the position they now fill, and 2) I know for a fact that they are making much, much more money than I am. The reason I know this is I'm friends with someone in the company who gets to see everyone's paycheck, and they didn't give me numbers, but they said I'd probably jump off the nearest bridge if I could see the difference in our pay.

So, sometimes I rant and rave and complain, like today. And then I remember that the world in which my boss operates is completely run by money. His entire life is caught up in worrying about what kind of car he drives, does his wife have the very newest in breast implant technology, and where his next million is coming from.

This makes me remember that while money is certainly more of a stressful issue for me, seeing as I don't have much, my life is not all about money and how much I have. It's about every moment. It's about having what I need, not what I want. It's about talking to people that nobody else sees. No, not ghosts, although I have been friends with them on occasion, too. I mean the janitor at the airport, or the old lady in the grocery store who can't reach the canned peas. People that my boss would never notice, because they are invisible to him. It's about growing my garden and enjoying the flowers as they bloom. It's about making Asian dumplings with my husband and giggling because they're slippery and fall off our chopsticks into the dipping sauce.

Once I get my head back into the right place, the whole issue about my job and my boss and how unappreciated I am sort of seems unimportant. Sure, he should treat me better. But the fact that he does not is taking a toll on his karma, not mine. I will never be able to change the kind of person he is. And maybe, if he was not the kind of person he is, he wouldn't own our company and I wouldn't have a job.

There are always things to be thankful for, if you know where to look.

Playing God - Not Bad!

Okay, I know, what - two blog entries in one night? Obscene, isn't it? But I got a new Angelina movie to add to my collection, and I wanted to write about it. Unfortunately, the DVD that I bought did not have the cover picture shown above (I'll have to hunt it down). My cover just shows Timothy Hutton and David Duchovny. Rat bastards. (The cover artists, not Tim and Dave - although they might well be rat bastards, but how would I know and would I really care? Nah.)

In any case, this was one of those I-have-no-idea-what-this-is-about movie picks... obviously, I only bought it because I'm obsessed with Angelina Jolie and I didn't have this movie in my collection yet.

So T and I settled down on Saturday evening, with some tall, frosty, brain-freezy frozen melon-balls concocted by T. And we were pleasantly surprised. (By the movie, not the melon-balls... we KNEW they'd kick ass!)

The movie was actually pretty good! The plot held together, and even the improbable parts were okay because the premise was based on a guy that was hooked on drugs - so if he did improbable things, it was really all par for the course.

My only complaint was that the romantic relationship between Angie and anyone else in the movie was basically inferred, rather than acted out. There were no raw sexual scenes, which is a complete waste of Angelina's animal magnetism. Although I have to say, she was a little bit soft-looking in this movie - a little round in the face. I guess she must have been young and still blooming when this was filmed. She didn't have the angular "I'll kick your ass if you don't come over here and take me up against the wall" kind of fire in this one.

They also had a lot of scenes of her in tight pants and high heels, from behind. Not her best shot. If she's going to be shot from behind, she needs to be wearing a dress. From the front, pants are OK. I can't explain it, just mark it up to someone who notices the tiny details of everything when it makes no difference to anyone in the world whatsoever.

But all in all, it was good anyway. It strikes me funny that in almost everything David Duchovny is in, he narrates. I guess he's just that kind of guy.

I WILL NOT

Today was one of those days when I just hated myself. I've lost a little weight since T and I have been hitting the gym hard, but not enough to get into my "thin clothes"... so what happens is, the "fat clothes" don't fit right either, and they look loose and sloppy and make you look even fatter, and when you try on your other stuff, it's almost too tight to button.

This makes me irritable and grouchy and I end up being crochety and impossible to get along with. And whatever you do, don't LOOK at me when I'm getting dressed! Poor T - I just about lopped his head off when I got home from work. I'm just not worth the bother when I'm having one of these days.


I have decided something, though. (Drumroll please)....

I am going to be this fit again....

And

I

will

NOT

ever

look

like

this:

There, now, doesn't that make you feel better? It sure makes me feel better. I'm allowed to be shallow sometimes, and today is my day. Suck it up!

Cop Stories

*
Bear's story about the possum made me think of strange tales from my days as a police officer. Both of these scared the shit out of me, although I can laugh about them now.

It was a dark and stormy night. Okay, so maybe it wasn't stormy, but it sure was dark. Cold, too - colder than a witch's titty. And I should know. It was also about 2am, and there was about a foot and a half of snow on the ground. One of those nights when you just wish all the bad guys would stay in bed and let you hover over your car's heat vent with a cup of hot chocolate in your hands.

But that was not to be. The radio crackled and fizzed, and the dispatcher called my car number. I answered. She gave me a house alarm, and the address. I acknowledged, and moved on. Since we didn't have partners, I was riding through the night alone, and since a house alarm call is not considered a "hot" call, especially in the winter when forming ice sets off alarms every five seconds, nobody chimed in to back me up.

I pulled onto the street - it was a cul-de-sac. My heart sank a little when I saw that this was not an inhabited neighborhood. It was a brand new development, and some of the houses weren't even built yet. The house in question was dead center at the end of the lollipop. All the houses were dark and empty, their windows looking at me like dead eyes. There weren't even any street lights for comfort.

Being a good cop, I didn't just drive by and see if everything looked OK from where I sat in my PD. I got out of the car, flashlight and gun in hand, to check each door and window for signs of breaking and entering.

Front door was good - locked tight. No windows were broken. Time to move to the back. By now, the alarm's siren had stopped wailing, so the night was once again silent as the grave. I moved along the side of the house, cursing mentally as the drifted snow wedged its way into my shoes and socks.

I got about four feet from the back corner of the house when I heard it. Coming from behind the house. The sound of footsteps coming toward me through the snow! My heart began to race, the blood pumping in my ears. I gripped my gun tighter, and steeled myself to meet the burglar face to face. Who knew if he had a gun, or how big he might be?

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. The sound of those footsteps in the snow was about to drive me mad.

I decided to move first - rather than let him come around the corner, see me, and have time to plan his attack.

I turned the corner in a rush, flashlight and gun pointed....... at a rabbit.

RUN AWAY!!!! RUN AWAYYYYY!!!!!!!

Poor little sod was probably just trying to get home to his warm den, and nothing more. But his hopping through the snow had sounded just like... well, at this point I was just glad that nobody had backed me up on the call, and my embarrassment was unshared by anyone except the rabbit.


And THEN there was the time.....


It was broad daylight, in the spring, and as warm and sunny a day as you could ever hope to live through. I was wearing my uniform without the jacket, and the shift was going about as well as I could have hoped. A couple of light calls here and there, no families beating the shit out of each other, nobody dying in a car accident - a good day.

Then I got the call. House alarm. The easiest call you ever get as a cop - because 99% of them are false alarms. That's where the danger is, though - if you handle a call as if you already know the outcome, you lose big time when you get that one-percenter. So I always went ready for anything.

This house, as I found out when I got there, wasn't a house but a trailer. Yes, there are still trailer parks on Long Island, Virginia. They're a dying breed, but some still remain. This particular trailer had a raised deck built on the front of it, with lattice covering the opening from the deck floor down to the ground. A couple of sparse bushes were planted in front of the lattice in an attempt to make the place look homey instead of homely. I can't say it worked.

I had my holster unsnapped, just in case, but I really didn't think anything was going to be amiss on this gorgeous day. Just the same, I approached with caution. I started going around the trailer from the back, figuring if anyone was going to make his escape, it wouldn't be through the front where my police car was parked.

All the windows were secure, the back door locked, so I proceeded to walk around the front of the trailer. As I was angling for the stairs to go up on the deck and try the front door, I heard a sudden rushing sound come towards me from under the deck. The dry leaves of a thousand falls were under that deck, and they just amplified the sound of whatever that was coming at me, making it sound like a hundred pound pit bull. Which it very well could have been.

I whipped my gun out and pointed it at the lattice - couldn't see shit, didn't know what was coming - and then, out from under the lattice came.............. a chicken. A fucking chicken!!!!!

How did the folks in Hong Kong get hold of my story???

You would have to live on Long Island to understand how unlikely it is to encounter a live chicken outside of a petting zoo or game farm. It just doesn't happen. Unless you live in a trailer park, apparently. Jeez.

No shots fired, embarrassment count: 2.

Hairy Thoughts

So - I'm getting bored with my hair again. It's really long, down to my waist in the back, and thanks to the sun, it goes from a dark brown/red at the top to a lighter auburn with gold at the bottom. There are some weird layers in it, too - I got a little crazy with the scissors at one point, but luckily did not completely destroy my years of trying to grow it long again.

Bought a box of black Feria hair coloring yesterday. No, I'm not going goth (Although I was for years - all black hair with blue or purple roots)... but I am considering one of my favorite hair tricks - it's not as extreme as Cher's in this picture, but it does give a kick to the mundane.

I start by making a shirt out of a large plastic garbage bag. It's fun - poke a hole in the bottom of the bag to stick your head through, and then poke holes just below the corners of the bag for your arms. It sticks to your boobs and makes you look like a deviant sex goddess from Planet Hefty. Before doing my hair color, I like to run around the house and scare the cats, and tease T, just for the fun of running around naked except for a plastic bag.

Then, I part my hair down the middle, all the way to the back of my neck, and pull the two halves forward over my shoulders. With protective gloves on, I mix up the black magic, and squirt it into my gloved palms. Leaning over, I apply the black coloring to just the bottom three or four inches of my hair, coming up slightly higher in the front where it's angled.

On someone with blond hair, this would be a really extreme effect, but on someone with semi-dark hair to begin with, it just sort of catches the eye. I've done it once before, and I liked the way it came out in pictures. The funny part is when you wear black clothing - it makes your hair look like it's shorter than it is, because the black fringe at the bottom sort of disappears against your clothes. White clothing brings out the contrast more, but you have to be careful that you've washed your hair a few times since the coloring, unless you want weird, dark purple stains all over your nice white whatever.

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do, but that box of black Feria is calling to me from under the bathroom sink...

More spring fever.

BTW, yesterday about five minutes before I had to leave for work, I went out to feed Jack (the outside kitty) and the squirrels, and check the bird..... feeder...... which was lying on the ground! My beautiful new squirrel-proof birdfeeder! The goldarned squirrels had decided if they couldn't figure out how to get the seed out of the feeder, they'd just chew through the rope it was hanging from and knock the whole contraption out of the sky! Little fuckers. So on the way home from work, I stopped by good ole Home Despot (staying carefully away from the caulk and glue aisle - ha!) and got thirty feet of small black chain. T helped me get the feeder hung again, from the chain. Let's see you get your little theiving teeth through THAT, ya buggers! And what really peeves me is that I bought sunflower seeds just for the squirrels, and put some out every day for them! That's the only reason they even bother the bird feeders... they scoop out all the yellow seed onto the ground where it gets wet and moldy, and steal all the sunflower seeds! So I figured since I finally found a bird feeder that would just feed the birds, I would give the squirrels something of their own. Ungrateful buzzards.

Egad - Tax Time!

Here it is, tax time again, and like last year, it's the last minute and my shit still ain't straight. I have the easiest tax form in the world, or should, because basically I don't have any money. No IRA, no stocks, bonds, what have you. I have a job, I have a checking account, and I have a mortgage and some incoming rent. That's it, that's all. But every year something happens that causes my CPA and I to become phone tag champeens of the world.

This year, it's because my mortgage company sent me a form for the finances AFTER last year's refinancing, but not BEFORE the financing - five seconds ago on the phone, Bill the CPA told me that as of now, my taxes owed are hovering around four grand. WHAT THE.... ?!?!?! He asked me to call my mortgage company and get the state taxes and interest paid from before the refi.

So I called.... they're not in until 9am... but I should have been able to get the info off the automated phone thingie. So they asked me to punch in my SS#, which I did, and then..... then..... they ask me for a FOUR DIGIT PIN NUMBER! Oh, sure, like I ever call these weasels in the first place, now they have some secret pin number which I don't ever recall getting, have no record of anywhere, and which doesn't match the four digit PIN number I usually choose for all my accounts.....!!???!!? Sometimes I reeeeeeeeeeally hate technological bullshit - just have a 24 hour help desk for the sake of all that's holy, can'tcha? It's TAX time, and we're down to the wire, and all you can say is "customer service personnel will be here to help you at 6am Pacific Time".... screw Pacific Time, anyway!!! This is New York, goddammit!

Great - just what I needed. And my allergies have started up again - my left nostril (why is it so much more annoying when it's just one nostril?) is running like the freakin' Niagara Falls and when I blow my nose it takes all the makeup off, so I end up looking like Rudolph the RNR.

Just peachy.

It's All My Fault

Okay, folks - this is what I get up and look at every morning of my life. Ewwww, you say! What, am I a bad housekeeper? Don't I ever scrub that tub of mine? OF COURSE I DO! That being said, this mess is still all my fault.

The house was built in 1925. The last time the bathroom was updated was maybe, oh, 1960??? But I digress. When we moved into our little cottage, I noticed the caulking around the tub was peeling away from the corners.

Being a good little worker bee, I headed off to Home Despot and purchased a big tube of stuff that said "Bath and Shower" on it - thinking it was just what I needed. It fit right into the caulking gun no sweat, and I proceeded to squirt it all around the edges of the tub. It was a lot thicker than any caulk I had used before, and it didn't look quite as white as the caulk I had used before, but I thought hey, this stuff is really heavy duty - it's going to make a great seal!

Well, the stuff started to dry before I could smooth it out with a wet sponge, and the wet sponge made no impression whatsoever on the lumpy, smeary goo that was now completely set. As a matter of fact, the sponge nearly got glued to the tub along with the gloves I was wearing... I got them unstuck in the nick of time, just before they became permanent and unwelcome modern art exhibits in my bathroom.

I grabbed the cannister of "caulk" and read it again, more closely.... alas, it was not caulk. It was GLUE. Glue for attaching those plastic shower walls to your drywall! ACK!

In no time, the muddy color of the glue turned black in places (I have tried bleaching it out, to no avail) and basically my tub now looks the way you see it in the above picture - like shitola.

The reason I took this picture was not to share it with all of you before you've had breakfast. Actually, I found an ad in a magazine touting a new TV show where they choose the most horrific bathroom they can find to "make over". I'm entering the contest. Wish me luck.

Bad Ass Bootsch

Not much time to blog this morning.... gym killed me yesterday, too tired to get up any earlier...

I GOT MY NEW BOOTS! YAY!!!! This episode of my blog is "an homage" (say om-AJH the way Hollywood people do, dahling) to Camera1, the girl whose blog I found these bootsch on in the first place. T and I went down to the water (about four blocks from our cottage) and he snapped some snappy pix of my newly clad feet. It was cold and windy, and we were freezing, but it was fun anyhow. T is cool like that - he jumps into weird situations I dream up and enjoys himself. Of course I get all bossy and tell him which pictures to take, where to stand, how to hold the camera (like he needs my help) - I'm surprised he didn't throw me in. He really does love me.

So now I have to start breaking these puppies in - they're gonna be around for a long, long time. The leather is unbelievably thick, and the harnesses around the ankle area make getting them on a bit of a job, but they'll relax as I wear them. They feel really good on my feet - it's been a long time since I've had boots as great as these! I wore my plain black Harley boots until they had holes in them, and just never got around to replacing them. There are a couple of dress boots lurking in my closet, but those are mostly for wearing to work in the winter when I don't feel like shaving my legs. These new lovelies are going to be my every day going anywhere boots.... I love them, and I feel like Christmas came early this year!

Woo-hoo!

To Da Dump, To Da Dump, To Da Dump, Dump Dump!

I only have a couple of minutes to blog this morning. Didn't do yoga, didn't sleep in, I went to the town landfill to get rid of a load of crap that had mysteriously materialized in various locations on our property and in our house. (Including all those emmin' effin' cardboard boxes!!! YAY!!!)

Got there no problem, there wasn't even a line. Drove onto the scale. Lady in the building says, "Whaddya got there?" I tell her - old bicycle parts, three old mailboxes, scads of cardboard boxes, and a couple of plastic flowerpots. She says I have to give her my license, then go through to the dump, get rid of the plastic flowerpots, and then come back to the scale on the other side, to pay four cents a pound for the non-metal non-cardboard items. Sigh.

So, I dutifully drive to the dump, get rid of the four or five plastic flowerpots I have, and two small stacks of magazines. Then I drive back to the scale stage, and she charges me $2.40. By my calculations, that would mean that I got rid of 60 pounds of flowerpots and magazines. I'm telling you that isn't so. But who is going to argue over a dollar, when it's 7:30 in the morning, you still have to go to work, and your hair is a wreck, your makeup non-existent? Not me.

I swing back around, go back to the same place I just was, and get rid of the other stuff in the back of the truck. A guy in a backhoe nearly creams the front of my truck - luckily I was close enough to the horn to warn him that I was there. Not only do you get to do laps around the property a few times and overcharged to dump your piddling little pile of stuff, you get a little blood-pumping excitement, too.

I'll have to remember this place next time the movie I wanted to see is sold out.

Funny Stuff Is Happening In My Pants

Oh. My. God.

I just read PaperTrap's latest blog entry, about a "meme" (what the fuck is a meme????), (obviously a funny word for a mind game), where you insert the words "in my pants" at the end of the titles of your favorite songs.

I just had to come up with a list of my own, so along with T (who won't stop spouting titles long enough for me to get this prelim typed out.....!!!) I am going to provide you a start to your own evening of hilarity....

1. Eagles - You Can't Hide Your Lyin' Eyes In My Pants
2. The Beatles - I Wanna Hold Your Hand In My Pants
3. Boston - More Than A Feelin' In My Pants
4. Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear The Reaper In My Pants
5. Walt Disney - Someday My Prince Will Come In My Pants
6. Meat Loaf - I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won't Do That In My Pants
7. Doris Day - Whatever Will Be, Will Be In My Pants
8. Helen Forrest - I Don't Want To Walk Without You In My Pants
9. Bing Crosby - Did You Ever See A Dream Walking In My Pants
10. Baha Men - Who Let The Dogs Out In My Pants
11. Joe Jackson - Is She Really Goin' Out With Him In My Pants
12. Van Halen - Jump In My Pants
13. Cinderella - Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone In My Pants
14. Lynyrd Skynyrd - That Smell In My Pants
15. Skid Row - Eighteen And Life To Go In My Pants
16. Bob Seger - Til It Shines In My Pants
17. Paper Lace - The Night Chicago Died In My Pants
18. KC and the Sunshine Band - Play That Funky Music, White Boy In My Pants
19. Chicago - Baby, What A Big Surprise In My Pants
20. Journey - Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin' In My Pants
21. And, of course, the Cars, with their memorable melodies such as:

• You're All I've Got Tonight In My Pants
• I'm Not The One In My Pants
• Tonight She Comes In My Pants
• It's All I Can Do In My Pants
• Shake It Up In My Pants
• My Best Friend's Girl In My Pants
• Why Can't I Have You In My Pants
• You're Just What I Needed In My Pants

Okay, okay, I have to stop now before it takes me over and I never, ever stop. You can have hours of fun at home making up your own list of "in my pants" song titles! It's fun! It's free! Oh, man, am I really sitting home on a Saturday night doing this? Yes, I am!!!!

Potential

Okay, now that I have your undivided attention... it's a gorgeous, sunny Saturday morning. I got up when T got up to go to work (he has to work a half day today, poor man) and I'm sitting in my cushy robe with a cup of hot chamomile tea. I was going to jump straight into the huge list of things I have to do today, but I decided to take a few moments aside to appreciate the potential of the day, and life in general.

The picture above is, of course, Angelina - who else! When I see this picture, I see potential - the potential for me to someday look as hot as that, with repeated corporeal floggings at the gym, and a serious downturn in the recurrence of Girl Scout cookies. A probability? Maybe, maybe not. But potential? LOADS of potential. It's all out there, waiting for me. Dumbells, elliptical trainers, squat machines, ab crunchers, all shining quietly in their big glass showroom, waiting for me to arrive and use them roughly.

The last few days they've been showing one of my favorite movies, "G.I. Jane" over and over and over again on TV. SweetLethe recently blogged about how sometimes something really mundane, like a billboard you see while driving to work, or a song on the radio, can feel like a personal message to you from the cosmos. I agree with her, and the fact that this movie has been on almost every day since I started going back to the gym makes me feel like the universe is aligned behind my desire to get rippin' fit. I don't know about the one-armed pushups (I'm a little tall for that - usually shorter people do better at those) but I'm damn well going to give it my best.

The sun is coming up, and the birdies are (finally) eating happily out of the new birdfeeder. The daffodils are blooming, and not much else... but you can feel it in the earth when you walk out into the garden... the potential. The energy of the plants just below the surface of the dirt, getting ready to punch upward toward the sky and become part of the gorgeous garden that we enjoy every year. The ground fairly hums with the gathering energy - the potential.

I feel the same energy buzzing in me, and I'm going to hit this house like a ton of bricks today. At my current weight, that shouldn't be difficult. That aside, I am going to tear NASA apart with my bare hands - dust all the mung off of everything on the computer desks and bookshelves, get rid of the myriad cardboard boxes, take everything off the floor and vacuum the damn place, and basically whip shit into shape around here. I'm glad T is going to be at work - this ain't gonna be pretty.

Then I've got chores to do - pick up and drop off laundry, grocery shop, get the wheelbarrow fixed, go to Home Despot and get new mailboxes for us and our tenants (our mailboxes look like they belong at 1313 Mockingbird Lane) and other stuff.

See? There's so much to be done, and I'm gonna do it.

But right now, I'm curled up in front of my computer, sipping my tea, feeling the tingly, tight feeling in all the muscles that I pushed to the limit yesterday evening.... savoring the potential.

TGIF

Poor T tried all last night and most of this morning to post a blog entry – something weird is happening with blogger.com, apparently. Why can’t people leave well enough alone? They keep on changing the site, making newer and better (NOT) changes… why can’t they just leave us alone and let us blog? I don’t care about the new blog page for new bloggers who want to blog about new stuff – I don’t care about rock bands who have blogs – I don’t want the attachment for the new blog theme song – I JUST WANT TO BLOG! It’s all about the writing, the process, the accessible space. Don’t they get it?

Yoga was tough this morning. It’s weird how the same exact workout can affect you so much more when you get yourself in the right place mentally. Two weeks ago, I did this same tape (Rodney Yee’s Power Yoga for Flexibility) and didn’t even break a sweat. Today, I could hardly see for the sweat running down my face. Same tape, same workout, different mind/body. I love that – it means I’m getting it back! Now I just need to lose enough weight to be able to do the full push-up position without wimping out…

I gave my weight loss program a little boost yesterday by helping to rid the house of Girl Scout cookies. I discovered a secret cache of them in the snack drawer (a genius hiding place, I know) and devoured three or four of them after my lunch. Just doing my part to remove all dieting obstacles from our path. It’s not easy, but then it takes a special kind of person to be willing to sacrifice like that for the sake of the health and well-being of others. Later in the evening, I did another good deed and drank one of the beers I found lurking in the bottom drawer of the fridge. One less carb-filled demon to haunt our nightmares! Ye gods and little fishes, Elektra has nothing on me!

Talked to my mom on the phone last night. She sounded really happy and upbeat, which made me happy. The last few times I spoke to her, she sounded worn to a frazzle (a Mom-ism). My grandmother, her mom, broke her hip recently and was in a hospital about three hours from where my mom lives. My mom is a registered nurse (RN) and can’t stand for anyone in the family to be in a hospital far away where she can’t make sure everything is being done right. So after they discharged Grammy, she convinced her to come home with her for a few weeks, and now she’s really happy. She gets to spend some time with her mom, and she knows that Grammy is in good hands and well cared for. My grandmother lives way up in the mountains of North Carolina, in a little town called Pigeon Roost (I kid you not) and we all worry about her because she’s getting on in years, and she won’t leave the mountains and come live with either of her daughters, my mom and my aunt, who both live in the Charlotte area (and who both desperately want her to come and stay with them). She’s a mountain girl, my Grammy, and I have news for you – you can’t take the girl out of the mountains, either! She and my grandfather got married in their early teens, raised four kids on almost no money whatsoever, and she’s a tough lady. So she lives in the mountains, and will until she dies, I think.

Yesterday when I got home from work, it was still light and it was sort of warmish. I couldn’t stand it any longer, and ran to get my work boots and gardening clothes on, and attacked the back gardens. I cut ivy, pulled weeds, dug up and pulled out grass in the flower beds, dug up zillions of onion grass clumps (but still have zillions to go), scrubbed out the bird bath and filled it with fresh water and a butterfly stone, raked leaves and piled all the crap at the back fence where it will stay until this weekend, when I either get a new wheelbarrow or get the old one’s wheel fixed. Boy, it sure felt good to get my hands back in the dirt! Now the flower beds are ready for the bulbs we bought to put out this year. I need to buy some chicken wire from Home Depot first, though, to keep those naughty little squirrels from digging them up.

I found a blog called “Come Here I Want To Show You Something” – this chick has pictures of herself in all these different places – actually, just pictures of her feet. In all sorts of shoes, but mainly these really cool boots, which I have been looking for forever. I posted a comment on the picture I liked best, and she told me where to get them! I rarely ever buy clothing or shoes, and even though these boots are on the expensive side, I ordered a pair. If you know how to take care of them, they’ll last more than ten years, so I think it’s worth it. Yay, new boots! New ass-kicking, pool-hall strutting, Harley-riding, if you don’t like ‘em why the hell are you looking, was I talking to you anyway boots! If you’d like to check her site out, it’s chiwtsys.blogspot.com. 8-)

Hitting the gym tonight. HOO-YAH!

This is all my version of spring fever.

Office chatter

Of course I'm due for a good rant after yesterday's cheery musings.... it's just that people in my office are so annoying, I can't really understand how they keep their jobs. It's not like they DO them, after all....

So Vegan Chick comes back from a vacation in Florida. Of course she's still skinny (bitch) and now on top of it she's tan, and of course she's got those perky little vegan boobies on parade in a low cut, tight shirt so everyone can see the tan in her cleavage. That's fine, though - it's a silent offense that one can easily ignore by keeping one's eyes on their computer screen. The fact that every man in the office suddenly finds it impossible not to come over to her desk fifteen times in a row is easy to ignore. Whatever.

On top of this, though, she brings photos of herself and her cousin which were taken while they were on vacation together - in one of those period costume dress-up poses. They were saloon girls. So she's passing these pictures of herself wearing a corset and a few well placed feathers around the office. You can almost hear the erections hitting the undersides of the desks. I want to turn her upside down and use her to scrub the toilet.

On the upside, while she was away she put this stupid sun highlighting stuff in her nearly black hair, and turned the top of her head orange. Not all of her hair, just the top of her head. Very funny.

So just when I think the furor has died down, she starts moaning about her personal checking account. She just KNOWS that she had seven hundred dollars in it, and the bank is telling her that she only has two hundred and fifty! So she proceeds to whine aloud about it, making phone calls to the bank, asking me every five seconds what I think the problem could be... (excuse me, do you see "bank teller" tattooed on my forehead?) and basically spends the entire morning doing absolutely no work whatsoever, annoying the shit out of me, and trying to drag everyone in the office into her little financial drama. Even the VP of the company!! If I pulled shit like that, I would be on the unemployment line as we speak. But little miss Vegan Chick just happily peeps away, secure in the knowledge that allowing the men to view her tight little assets gives her carte blanche to use the office as her personal stage.

I don't really have time to rant properly about the rest of the crew - the brokers who think the office is their personal circus, who lean on MY DESK and have loud conversations on their cell phones, the VP who constantly leaves his office door open and his cell phone (set on this obnoxious ring music) which constantly rings, even though there are signs throughout the office saying "all cell phones must be on vibrate when in the office".... and the former telemarketer-turned-broker who comes to my desk when he wants to take a break, and recites rap music lyrics to me.

How the hell am I supposed to concentrate on anything in the middle of all this, I ask you?

SUCCESS!!!

They say energy breeds energy, life begets life, success breeds success. At least, I think they do. If they don't, they should, because it does. So today I am writing about success - celebrating the successes, however small, that I enjoy. Not to toot my own horn, but to let the gods know that I appreciate it when good things happen to me, and to say, "More, please!"

* Yesterday T and I were getting ready to go out and do some errands. On the way down the stairs, he said, "Look out the window". I parted the curtains, and there, on the birdfeeder (yes, the stupid new birdfeeder that had sat untouched by birds for three weeks) were..... BIRDS! Big ones, little ones, fat ones, not-so-fat ones, all chowing down to their little birdie hearts' content. Not only were they eating from the new feeder, they weren't waiting in line, either. They were shoving each other off the perch trying to gain a spot. That made me happier than I can say, and I'm not sure why it was so important, but it was. I feel better just knowing they're out there eating up the seeds and drinking from the birdbath, even as I write this. YAY!!!!

* Even though I am approaching 40 and have put on some weight in the past few years, I am not giving up. I am getting up and doing yoga during the week, and I am going to the gym three nights a week and working my ass off. Literally. I can feel my body responding to this already - tightening and gathering itself back into the shape of a woman. A powerful woman who can lift some serious weight and do cardio until most people's lungs would fall out. My success, while not complete (it never is where fitness is concerned - it's the process), is nonetheless celebratable (is that a word?) because I have not given up hope - I have started down the road to being fit and looking the way I want to look once again. YAY!!!!

* Even though I thought I would never get married, never find anyone who really "got" me, I have married the most wonderful guy in the world. Again, like fitness, this is not a success that I sit back and admire - it's always a work in progress. With marriage, like fitness, if you try to rest on your laurels, your ass gets away from you. (Or you become an ass, whichever.) But I appreciate the give and take that I share with T, the pushing and pulling and doing things together, the working out of problems, the joy of just being together. The ways our minds work together to reach goals that we choose. I am grateful that this endeavor, which started out as a date to play the bagpipes, has been so successful and fulfilling (and FUN!), and will continue to be so. YAY!!!!

* I started reclaiming NASA last night. NASA, as you may remember from previous posts, is our computer room. Or it used to be, before it was suffused with junk. I have decided that this room needs to be exorcised of all the detritus and flotsam which has bogged it down and turned it into a veritable dung heap. T and I discussed at length the things which might be done to improve the space and utility of space in this room, and make us actually able to walk across the floor once again. We're looking into finding a good computer desk for two. This may not seem like such a success to those of you who live in big, roomy houses or condos, but let me tell you, when your entire living space once used to be someone's two car garage, you are jealous of every square inch of space. There are no "guest rooms" to move things into when you want to empty another room to paint it or fix something. There is barely space to turn around without putting your elbow up your own ass. So yes, reclaiming one room and making it enjoyable to be in is a success. YAY!!!!

Well, that's all I have time for this morning, and in the spirit of success I want to successfully get myself dressed and ready for work. My office is just down the street from my house. YAY!!!! (Had to get one more of those in here...)

Meet Toru!

This is Toru - my bonsai. T gave him to me when we first moved into our cottage, and he is thriving happily in the front window. He lived in the same little pot for five years, and it occurred to me that it was probably time to repot him.

I looked on ebay and in other places, and found that bonsai pots pretty much run from $30 to $40 for a 7" pot, and the prices go up as the sizes go up. I wasn't happy with that, and I was also confused by the variety of soils and different types of additives that were available. I kept on digging around the 'net until I came across a great deal - a "repotting kit" which included the lovely blue oval pot you see here, the wire mesh to cover the drainage holes with, the potting soil, and the pebbles for the top dressing - all for $14.95! I ordered it immediately.

I was expecting Sunday to be nice and sunny and spring-like, and it turned out grey and cold and windy instead. So I decided that my yen for gardening would not go to waste - I spread newspapers out all over our kitchen table (which T and I made by hand, you can see some of it in this picture) and repotted Toru.

I've never had a bonsai before, but I am really proud of the way he's turned out. The repotting project was a resounding success, I trimmed his long arm and rewired the curve at the tip to keep him spiralling hapilly downward, and he's all set for another few years of growth in his new situation.

In the asian countries, they leave their bonsai outside all year round - but Toru lives in the kitchen window where I can enjoy him every morning before I go to work - which is what I need to be doing right now.

Happiness is a warm stunt gun

Well, there they are, folks - the stunt guns used by Angelina Jolie during the filming of "Tomb Raider". They were live auctioned on ebay. Starting bid was $300. Winning bid was $2,500. I consoled myself by adding 60 new pictures to my Angie collection. Am trying to find a suitable scrapbook (with clear pages to display both sides of magazine clippings) for my huge Angelina clipping collection.

Got up at 6, did my yoga, and am psyched to go to the new gym tonight! My body feels lighter already, although I know it's just psychological. That's okay, whatever gets me motivated to work out more is fine by me.

I should be getting dressed for work right now. The sun is starting to come out. Yesterday looked like it was going to be nice, but actually it was grey and crappy. Today I have to go to work, so the sun is coming out. I feel like playing hooky. There are a million things I need to do around the house. Like my taxes. I don't even want to think about the stupid taxes, but there's not much you can do about it. The 15th is creeping up oh so quickly....

My tenants annoy the shit out of me sometimes. The due date is the FIRST of each month. How difficult is that? And every month, around the third or fourth, I have to call them and ask if I can please have the rent check. So yesterday (the THIRD) I call and ask for the check. The wife comes over and gives it to me - and I frolic off to the bank to deposit it. (My wonderful bank is open on Sundays.) The nice teller mentions that, um, well, there are not sufficient funds to cover the check, and would I like to forego the $32 returned check fee by deciding not to deposit it today? Thanks, thanks very much, yes, I think I'll hold on to that for a little while. So I call the tenants. She says sweetly, "Oh, I dated that check for the fifth - the money will be there then." Nice. Late with the rent on one hand, and you postdate the check. Might be nice to mention that to somebody, asspad! Argh. And then she tells me that her brother in law will be staying there with them until June. Oh, dandy. Someone else to turn the heat up and leave the windows and doors open, run the hot water, and drive the utility bills even higher.

T and I watched four episodes of "24" last night, season 2.... I really love the show, but sometimes they do the dumbest things - like Jack leaves an empty machine gun where Nina can get to it - and she's got the ammunition. Durrrrrrrrr. Like that would ever happen. But it's fun to see how many times they take each other captive before the last seconds of the show tick away...

The new squirrel-proof bird feeder that we bought from Home Depot three weeks ago is still hanging there, full of bird seed. A couple of squirrels have tried to get to it, but they failed. It really does work. The birds, however, apparently do not trust any feeder that the squirrels cannot get into. So it hangs there, full of birdseed, completely unused. Not a bird near it. They all yell at me in the morning when I go out to feed Jack. They're pissed off. I'm sorry for them. The food is right there - eat it!!! What is up with these stupid birds?

Made banana bread yesterday. Am going to eat some right now for breakfast. MMMmmmm!

Happy Monday.

Hosta lilies and the Barrett-Jackson auction

Amazingly, I had almost no hangover the morning after my last post. I woke up at around six, grabbed a couple of aspirins and drank a nice big glass of cold water, and went back to sleep. When I woke up for real, I felt completely fine and actually went to the gym with T later in the day. My stomach did hurt a little, but that was from laughing my patootie off reading my drunk post – egad!!!

I love our new gym – we found one really close to our house that’s just amazing. I think my favorite part, aside from the sheer immensity of it, is that they have personal television screens on every one of their cardio machines (treadmills, ellipticals, bikes, etc. – they all have it!). The only frustrating part is that if you’re only doing a 30 minute cardio, but you start watching the Gilmore Girls, then you don’t want to stop because you’ll miss the last half of the show. 8-) For neurotic people like me, they also have a couple of music channels on their network.

When we used to go to the YMCA gym, I was the youngest, thinnest person there. Now that we’re going to “Fitness Utopia”, I’m the fattest, oldest. That’s good, though – gives me something to work towards.

I could be hallucinating, but I think I actually see sunshine coming through the curtains this morning… I’m wondering if this will be the day I actually get some gardening done! I reserve judgement until I stick my nose out the front door and get a taste of the temperature. I’ve got clumps of grass and even more clumps of onion grass growing in my flower beds, and I want to get all my stomping around and digging done before the first perennials start to poke their little heads above ground.

This year I’m going to split my hosta lilies and transplant the new sections to other areas around the circle garden, under the trees where it’s too shady for most other things to grow. That’s the neat thing about hostas – they get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then you just stick a shovel smack in the middle of them when they first start coming up out of the earth, and you can split them – the original bunch that stays in the ground has more breathing room and loves it, and the second half that you move elsewhere also goes to town because it also has more breathing room in its new location. They’re wonderful plants.

T has a wristwatch that has an alarm that you cannot turn off. It goes off every morning no matter what you do – there is no “alarm off” selection. That sucks, because if you want to sleep in, you can still hear that little “beep beep” from anywhere in the house. Well, maybe not anywhere – haven’t tried the freezer yet. The only way you can not hear it in the morning is to set it to go off during the afternoon, but then you’re at work and people are looking at you funny. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Last night when we got home from the gym, T cooked up a wonderful chicken dinner in the wok he bought me for Eostre. Tons of fresh veggies, a little chicken, and it was healthy and extremely yummy. We watched some of the Barrett-Jackson car auctions from Florida while we ate. My dad is down there this weekend, and his wife gave him tickets to the auction as an xmas present. I was looking to see if I could find him in the crowd. I didn’t see my dad, but I saw a bunch of delicious pieces of machinery that made me drool.

I just love cars – especially old cars. Something about the flowing lines, the shine of immaculate paint, the sound of the engines revving, the silver glint of chrome… it evokes an emotion something like lust in my soul. I can thank my dad for that – he always took me along to all the car shows he got press tickets for, ever since I was a little girl.

I learned the difference between an air filter and a carburetor before I knew how to hook a bra strap together. That’s one of the things I like best about my childhood – my dad really enjoyed spending time with me, and he included me in his hobbies and the things he loved. He treated me like I was a real person, and not a little girl. He didn’t limit me to dollies and pink ponies because I was a girl – he taught me how to throw a baseball “the right way” and to throw a football in a perfect spiral. He taught me how to change the sparkplugs in my car, how to drive, and how to ride a motorcycle. We had fun, and I also got important training that would serve to keep me from ending up one of those helpless females who need a man to do every last thing for them.

It’s not like I’m under the hood of the vehicles in the driveway every day, I pretty much take my truck to the shop when something goes wrong just like everyone else, but I know which parts do what, so they’re not going to rip me off by putting bogus parts on my bill. Not that Mike (the shop owner) would do that anyway, he’s a good guy. It’s just that having the familiarity with engines in general stands me in good stead, even if I’m not holding the wrench.

I think it also translates to life in general, at least for me. I don’t sit around waiting for someone else to come along and help me if I get in a jam. I start looking for solutions, and working things out on my own. I tend to help other people out of problems, too. I think the way my parents treated me when I was a kid has a lot to do with the amount of self confidence I have now.

I wish there was some way they could have worked out their problems and stayed married. I miss the days when our family was a unified thing, instead of diluted and spread out all over the place. Last weekend when I was visiting my dad, we drove past our old house. It’s hard to believe it’s the same place, that we used to live there together, that I learned almost everything I know now inside those walls.

In Angelina news, I reduced a waist-high stack of magazines down to one small cardboard box full of clippings, which I am going to assemble into a scrapbook, once I can figure out how to display oversized pages that have Angie on both sides of them. I actually did not go back and see what happened to the stunt pistols from Tomb Raider that were being auctioned on ebay, so I may try to do that now.

Someone wrote me a comment asking me why I am so crazy about Angelina. To you, I say go back to my archives and read a selection called "Regarding Angelina". That's really all I can say. I don't understand it too much myself, I just enjoy it.

Friday Night and I'm Drunk Off My Ass

Okay, so this is the photo I would have used if I was thinking clearly the day before, that being yesterday. Are we supposed to be putting our clocks ahead tonight? Well fuck off, my clock was already ahead an hour this morning. Geez, I keep having to go back and correct my typing because I just had a birthday party for a friend and I drank maybe six or seven or maybe even five Cosmopolitans of my own creation (heavy on the vodka and lime juice and ice, light on the triple sec because we're almost out, and heavy again on the cranberry..... have I told you how much I love these big huge wine glasses I bought at Linens 'N Things? They're HUGE!) Also, they are real crystal so they sing to you when you're washing them, like woooo-oOOOohhhhooooo-OOOOoooooo. Very exciting, even when you're sober as a priest. AHhah.... is that an oxymoron???

We had our friends Aonghus and Brogan over for a belated birthday party for Aonghus. His birthday was March 24. However, we blew it off completely and decided to have a dinner in honor of his birthday tonight instead. Tonight being April 1st, of course. No relation to April Fool's whatever, however. Just happened to be that this Friday was 4/1/01.

Brogan (aka Larry) decided that we HAD to see the movie "Defending Your Life" tonight, so he went out to Blockbuster after eating T's wonderful homemade antipasto and my wonderful ravioli with meat sauce (cooked before the fiveorseven cosmos, thank you verymuch) and got that movie, which T immediately fell asleep during, after the intro credits, of course, and he got up and went to bed, which left me watching the movie with Aonghus and Brogan until the end, which made me cry and completely embarrass myself because they laughed at me and I was all weepy and said, "Hey, you guys never said it was SAAAAAAD at the end!" To which Aonghus replied, "It wasn't sad, it was romantic...." to which I replied, "Same thing." And sniffled a lot. I think T did better by going to bed early. He will probably have a much smaller headache in the morning.

Oh, man, was I pissed off today. First off, it was Friday an d almost everyone else at my offic ewas on vacation , and there I was trying to pull off being at work. Which I hated oryally. I mean royally. So I decidde I mean decided to take a mental vacation and do as little work as i possibly could. So I did a tiny little eeeensy bit of work, and then went on ebay.

But I didn't go on ebay to try and buy anythint I can't afford, I swear it. I went o nthere to get more pictures of Angelina Jolie, who I have a very not secret crush on. I had a very snarky attitutde about the wholel thing, and I assumed that I had almost every picture there was to get of the beautiful Ms. A.J...... but guess what? I ended up with maybe sixty or more new pictures of my favorite star, becuase people on ebay are too stupid to put those protective big letters across their images which prevent you from wanting to copy their pictures, except if you're really goo d at photoshop an dyou have the time to really work on them and take the stupid words off and get the pictures anyway.

The really funny people are the ones who have these little popup window thingies that say "hahah, you can't download this picture".... but anyone with a brain knows you can capture the screen and then just cut and copy the area that contains the picture you want to save.... they just make it one step harder to get, but it's totally do-able, even for an incompletely developed computer geek like me. Where there's a will, there's a picture of Angelina to copy!!!! Anyone who buys a picture of her is an idiot, when every picture is there for the taking. Aside from personally signed things, of course, which bear the power of her angular fingers....

So each time I found a new picture to add to my ever-growing collection of adoration, I would email them to myself at my hotmail address..... and when I am sober again, I will take them off my hotmail address and save them to CD, to add to my collection. I have also started to cut the HUMONGOUS stack of magazines that I have collected, to make a scrapbook of Angie pictures and mag covers.... but not while I am drunk. I only handle razrobblades while I am sober, unlike Angie herself, who used to cut herself with knives while she was drunk and in bed with someone. Man, THAT will take you places in your mind you've never visited beofre.

So, T went to bed around three and a half minutes into the movie. Lucky him. He had a headache, but he doesn't drink so at least he won't have a hangover tomorrow. Unlike me.

I am tempted to try that "Audio Blogger" thingie tonight, but drunk dialing is probably not the way to start off letting my readers hear me. As if this blog is a good impression..... NOT!

Oh, yeah, that reminds me.... I am totally pissed. Oh, yeah, and also pissed OFF.... ebay has an auction for a pair of dummy pistols that Angelina ACTUALLY TOUCHED and used during the filming of Tomb Raider.... the auction is a "live auction" and not a regular ebay auction... the bidding starts at $300... reserve is not met yet.... which means that peons like me who would grovel in the mud at her feet to get the replica guns she held in the movie shoot don't have a chance in hell of joining the auctioning fray.... but I put it on my "watch this auction' list as if I were a millionaire just toying with the idea of bidding on these little rubber molded guns.....

I have to go and see if anyone has bid higher on them now..... I must!!!

Brogan brought over two UK magazines tonight with Angie on the cover - in homage to my Angelina fetish.... nice man!

We're supposed to go to Aonghus' workshop tomorrow and do constructive things, but I think I am going to have one hell of a hangover.... yikes.

Am considering now whether to watch Firefox or go to bed.... If I thought I could rouse T to a sexual encounter, I would go to bed.... maybe I should let him sleep and watch Firefox instead.... as he was feeling under the weather today....

Must check ebay to see if anyone has upped the ante on Angie's stunt guns....

Let's (NOT) Do the Time Warp Againnnnnn.......

Jeez. You know how usually when you screw up the time, it's because you think you're doing fine and then find out you're late because your dog drooled on your wristwatch and rusted the gears together?

Well, today was the oddest time warp I've had in a long time. T's alarm went off at 6am. He woke up, feeling like crap, called in sick to work, and came back to bed. I sat up, reset my alarm for 7am, since it's redcoats week so yoga's on hold, and I am also feeling like crap. Went back to sleep. Started having these really weird family dreams involving family (of course), homemade bread, pipe tobacco pouches, and Brad Pitt (guess my brain just threw him in there for decoration) where all these deep feelings about death were being unearthed. Suddenly, in the back of my sleeping mind, I realized the alarm should have gone off already.

I startled awake (I hate that) and grabbed my alarm clock. I'd forgotten to push the button back to "run", so the alarm setting I'd chosen was just staring stupidly back at me. I slid the button over, and the time was 8:22. Bugger. I have to be at work at 9, and I haven't showered, put on makeup, or done my hair. Bugger-bugger-bugger!

So I went into high gear - straight into the shower, dove headfirst into my makeup bag and came out looking slightly Tammy Faye, but better than I had hoped for at this rate. Crammed my hair back in a clippie, and threw on some clothing that vaguely matched. I turned to check the clock in NASA (the computer room which serves as my dressing room, since my closet is in there), and it said 7:55. I stopped short, thinking how odd that the clock should have stopped at that particular time... but then I saw the second hand still ticking away. So I grabbed my pager. 7:55. Then I grabbed T's wristwatch. 7:55. What the......?!?

So all that running around was for nothing. My alarm clock is an hour fast. How the hell that happened, I may never know. I don't think the cats are that good. Seems like opposable thumbs would be necessary for something like that. Aliens, perhaps? If I find out, I'll let you know. Or I won't, because I'll be sipping inter-galactic margaritas with someone named 3orzak.

Well, would you look at that? The time is now 8:22. Bugger.