So. I’ve not yet mentioned it on here, but I set myself a goal on my 30th birthday that I would run in a 10k race on Memorial Day and not just any 10k, but the Bolder Boulder - the most popular 10k in the country. Since my birthday was in, oh let’s see, late February, I had a lot of ground to make up, as it were. Assisting me in this challenge is my good friend K, who having run the race last year is in my mind an expert, so I’ve let him set the pace as we train. (and someone please take this shotgun of commas from my hands because it’s getting out of control!)
The first week of running I was not prepared at ALL, as I agreed to run with K the night of my birthday party and I was about 3 sheets to the wind at that point. I didn’t really remember that we were going to go running, so when he called me Sunday night to ask what time Monday evening, I was stumped. Our first run was around Invesco Field and I had NO idea that the damn stadium was that big! It seemed to go for miles and miles and miles and gaaaah. I had to stop halfway to gather my lungs back into my chest so I could continue on with unobstructed vision, finally limping to a stop by K, who had left me in the dust. After learning that our inaugural run was ONLY a mile and a half, I resolved to do better. (and it only took about two or three more runs before I could actually RUN the entire distance without stopping to walk, breathe and not die. Yay, me!)
Over the course of the next few weeks I developed a weird foot condition (wherein my tendons did this ooky popping thing over the top of my foot), developed a weird hip condition (wherein my left hip hurt like HELL for no reason, other than I’m trying to get into shape, dammit, and my body is having none of it!) and completed quite a few cities in our Rock Band 2 world tour.
The foot thing was taken care of with the purchase of a new pair of shoes, the hip thing persists but can be knocked down with the careful application of a crap-ton of ibuprofen and the Rock Band? Well, all work and no play makes ellbee a whiny baby. Besides, I can really wail when I get a few Coronas in me. And what does this have to do with the running? Well, we also worked our way up to 4.5 miles (with a few pauses for stoplights) and were feeling pretty confident about heading into the 5k qualifier held yesterday morning at the poncy mall up north.
K picked me up at 6:45a on Saturday and we headed up to the mall, where we strategized by parking by the finish line, not the starting line like the rest of the hoi polloi. I began to suspect that it just might not be my day when I hit my head against the window of the car as I was attempting to open the door and was foiled by the child safety lock. The fact that I had just been declaiming (for reasons I’ve already forgotten) “I’m a smart person, dammit!” was not lost on K, who laughed himself silly whist I attempted to actually remove myself from the car. My suspicion was soon confirmed when we realized that we had both forgotten to remove our actual glasses in favor of either sunglasses or just going bald-faced, which is what we normally do. We looked back at the car.
“We can’t go back”, K declared, “we’ve gone too far!”
And so we continued on to the starting line area, getting checked in, pinning bibs to shirts (K: “I’m really bad at pinning things to my shirt! I just can’t gauge pin depth, fabric distance, it’s just too much!” Me: “Ha HA!” K: “you do remember hitting your head on my window, right? I wouldn’t laugh if I were you, stupid.”) and wandering around looking for K’s brother and another friend who were to join us at the starting line. Passing the time, we (ok, ME) started making snarky comments on the other runner’s matching headbands/shirts/outfits, till K pointed out that we were both in white tops, black bottoms, and eyeglasses. I shut up. We finally found K’s brother just in time for the start gun to go off, causing a massive, zombie-like shuffle for the line, as we waited for the people in front to get out of the way. Once we were off, K’s brother ditched us like a bad date and we were left to set our own pace.
I was feeling really good, even though I could tell we were faster than normal, and was enjoying the scenery (yes, it was around a mall, but a mall by the foothills! And the flatirons! Which is, coincidentally, what the mall is named for!) as we cruised around the corner, up the first hill and sped off towards the bridge to the next section. We were even passing people on the uphills! I was figuring we were at least half way when we rounded a corner and saw the ONE MILE sign tied to a streetlight. I was crushed. (And yes, I know, I’m only training for a 10k, and this was just a 5k, and it’s not like it was a marathon, but come on! The farthest I’ve run in YEARS was about a mile. Baby steps!) We soldiered on, even holding back at one point from passing a girl until her family on the curb had stopped taking photos (to the girl in the turquoise tank top: I’m sorry that my sweaty, gasping face is in your photos. Hopefully it makes for an exciting action shot…right?)
Since we had been running 3+ miles for a few weeks before the race, I was surprised at how much the course was kicking my butt at the end. Granted, we did kick up the pace, but - we totally got schooled by two girls about our age (yes, K, you’re younger than me, so yes, about is a pretty broad range) in the last 300 meters or so; one of them sped by exhorting her partner to “come on, dammit! We can do this shit! Come on!” Normally this would have kicked in my competitive instinct and there would have been a terrible brawl at the line, all arms and legs and hair-pulling, but I was gasping like a fish out of water at this point and let them scream by with nary a thought. We made it in 29:10, which is not the fastest time ever, but fine for me, as my goal is to run the Bolder Boulder in under 60. After staggering around for a while, sucking down Gatorade, we watched the rest of the runners drift in, applauded the winners of the second wave (seriously, 16:01? Haaaate) and saw some poor teenager wharf up his breakfast and about a gallon of water while his father sat 4 feet away, blathering on about his time. Actual quote heard from Dad? “Aww, geez, (son’s name) was that you? God, stop! You’re going to put everyone off their pace!” Which…besides being heartless was impossible, as the only people that could see the poor kid were the ones like us who had finished the race. The only thing it was going to put us off was the free fries the brewery was offering, but that was no hardship, as the free beer tasted just fine by itself.
All in all, it was a great morning, although I’m just a bit freaked out that the full race is in twoweeksfromtodayomgomgomg!!!
I’d write more, but I’ve gotta run-*sound of door slamming, feet slapping pavement*
(NOTE: Edited to add incriminating photo as demanded by my mother.)
O! O my best beloveds*, I have been gone too long and for that I apologize. I’ve been busy pickling my liver, among other things. Oh yes, I have recently consumed SO much alcohol that my liver has seceded from my body and run screaming into the sunset, inasmuch as an organ can run. Perhaps it rolled. Or flopped, but the point is, my body the temple? Has been trashed by heathens. Evil heathens proffering beer and shots of SoCo with peach.
It started with my 48 hour birthday-stravaganza at the end of February, continued on St. Patty’s day, stalled out for a month and culminated with the 10-day work/drink binge that was my recent trip to Mankato. (And thank you Baby Jesus for that trip…I may have had to beg my way into it, but it was worth it for my sanity!)
However, as much alcohol as went down my gullet in concentrated doses, nothing was as bad (as far as consequences go) to the night of my bachelorette party, which as far as I’m concerned is a night that will forever live in infamy.
My bachelorette party was orchestrated by my maid of honor, a long time friend from my drum corps days. She and I had been through everything together, and the fact that I had once heaved a bag of her chunder out the bus window went a long way towards explaining…well…anyway. The night started with drinks and dessert at a trendy restaurant downtown and after that moved to the underground piano bar where there was a bottle of champagne and a bucket (a bucket!) of shots waiting on our reserved table. We spent the lion’s share of the evening at the piano bar where I drank most of the bottle of champagne myself, did several shots above and beyond the bucket and at one point found myself sitting on one of the pianos while the entire male population of the bar surrounded me and sang “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” which…was AWESOME.
Champagne? Check. Veil? Check. Whip? Check.
Now, bear in mind that my party was on Thursday, two days before the wedding. (I would have had it the weekend before like a SANE person, but as it was smack in the middle of the winterguard competitive season, my weekends were booked.) As it was a weekday, several of the local bars had drink specials and in my inebriated state it seemed a good idea to leave the piano bar and head to the bar offering $1 drinks and a bumping dance floor. I soon found myself shaking my thang with a drink in each hand (vodka cranberry and rum and coke, if I remember correctly.) Obviously, this state of affairs was transient, and after about 20 minutes a feeling shot through my system, a feeling of deep dread that my stomach was completely borked and an eruption was imminent. I deposited my drinks in the hands of the nearest fresh-faced college student, grabbed my maid of honor and demanded that she get me the hell out of Dodge, and fast.
We raced to her car and just as I reached the passenger side the sickness hit and I *ahem* had a Technicolor snake right outside the car. But the feeling didn’t go away and the drive through downtown was punctuated with cries of “pull over!”, tire squeals as she doggedly swerved for the curb 97 times and the splut of snakes hitting pavement. By the time we made it to the highway, I had sunk back into my seat with a feeling of exhausted relief and was trying to make myself comfortable by removing my high heeled boots, when:
self: OMG! Pull over!
long-suffering maid of honor: I…can’t! We’re on the highway and there’s no shoulder!
self: I can’t hold it!
l-smoh: Oh god! Just let me roll down the window!
self: (thinks to self in drunken haze, spies innocent sock on single non-shod foot) I’ve got it! I’ll just…
self: *heaves a chunder into sock quickly yanked off non-shod foot*
l-smoh: Oh god! Throw it out the window! Quick!
sock: *SPLAT*
And that’s how I managed to lose one sock and ALL of my dignity the night of my bachelorette party. The next morning I was expected at my parents house to do all the flower arrangements (because planning a wedding was not enough stress for me, oh no! I designed, made and calligraphed the invitations, made the programs, the center pieces, the corsages, boutonnières and my bouquet. Clearly, I had lost my ever-loving mind well before the sock incident.) I showed up to a house full of relatives, hugged my aunt that I hadn’t seen in 15 years, announced that I was going to vomit and promptly passed out with my head on the kitchen table. Because I’m klassy.
Although my liver has probably made it to California by now, at least I’m secure in the knowledge that nothing I’ve gone through in the past two months even remotely compares to that escapade and maybe, just maybe, I’m growing up.
But I doubt it.
*phrase stolen from Joshilyn, because I think it and she are awesome.
I was reading a post by the lovely Mir today, and she was writing about her daughter wanting to get her ears pierced for the first time. It was a familiar theme, as 99.9% of young girls (and young boys, or… maybe just my brother? Hey, SuperFuzz!) want to get their ears pierced. It was a common refrain amongst me and my friends and I seem to recall that I was the last person I knew (frankly, according to 8 year old me, the last person on EARTH, OMG MOM AND DAD) to get the coveted piercings. My parents tried to fool me with “rhinestone” stickers (and when you’re dealing with fake rhinestones, you know it’s quality! Or Lisa Frank…) but it didn’t work. I wanted real holes in my ear, just like mom. Except, not EXACTLY like mom, since she got her second hole put in at work one day when her and a co-worker were feeling bored. And, no, she didn’t work at a tattoo parlor, or even the mall. Woman worked at the hospital in an out-patient lab as a phlebotomist! Oddly enough, piercing her ear made her friend so queasy he couldn’t do the other ear, so to this day she has 2 holes in one ear and one in the other.
Moving on!
I was somewhat of a rotten child; not in the Exorcist spitting-pea-soup kind of way, but pretty lazy and a bit of a prevaricator. The worst part? I was BAD at lying, so I didn’t even get away with things. Good call, younger self! I remember fervently assuring my mom during an evening bath that yes, I did SO wash myself all over…twice even! With her eyes leaping out of her head from the force of the eye rolling, she reached over my head and said “then why is this bar of soap bone dry?” I was stumped. What kind of super-detective was this woman?
However, I didn’t really “learn” anything from that event. Case in point? The eventful spring when I (finally!) got my ears pierced. The deal was, I had to be mature enough to take care of them, and do my chores, and be good, and the 50 other rules that went in one ear (heh) and out the other, as I quivered in anticipation on the stool at Claire’s. I think I may have promised to feed and walk them every day by that point, I was so excited. What I do remember is how proud and adult I felt, walking around the mall with my newly-pierced ears. I just knew that everyone was looking at me and admiring my ears.
Fast forward a month. The time? Weekend, early morning. The scene? Me and my mom, in my room. I am told to clean this pigsty up, or I will LOSE my earring privileges. The holes hadn’t healed yet, so this threat had been fairly effective the first hundred times she said it. Thinking everything is taken care of, she heads outside. Some (minute amount of) time passes, and I’m seen running around the backyard, chasing unicorns and butterflies without a care in the world. My mom goes upstairs to my room to check on my handiwork, and POOOOM!!! One of the sliding closet doors blows off its tracks from the volume of little-girl crap shoved behind it.
The unicorns and butterflies in my personal world are rudely chased away by my mom, who drags me upstairs to explain my crime.
mom: what is this?
self: what happened to my dooooooorrr???
mom: it came off the TRACKS because you didn’t CLEAN your room PROPERLY like I ASKED.
(yes, my mom can speak in all capitals… can’t yours?)
self: I didn’t doooooo annnyythinngg!
(dumb. I am dumb)
mom: we are taking those earrings out RIGHT NOW, young lady! And your father will be removing your OTHER door until you can show some respect for your possessions.
(umm…the doors stayed off their tracks till the day I moved out. Did I mention I was dumb?)
So, the starter earrings were removed, and I was told to clean my room, properly this time, and stay there until my mom came up to check on me. She (and my father, hauling two closet doors and muttering under his breath) went back downstairs and out to the backyard where they had been doing yard work. I sat on my bed, and sobbed about the INJUSTICE of it all. Finally, having realized that no one was actually around to hear my cries, I stopped and looked around. I decided at that point (and having watched The Journey of Natty Gann one too many times) that I was going to run away. My actual experience with running away was limited to Disney films and the occasional Beverly Cleary book, so I grabbed my bedspread from the detritus spilling out of the closet and tossed it over the bed. I then threw together a hobo pack that consisted of:
- the entire set of Little House on the Prairie books. In a cardboard display box.
- my radio.
- my favorite stuffed bunnies: Willie and Poof.
- my rollerskates.
My ROLLERSKATES, people. This is not the action of a smart child. I did not wear them, I hauled them on my back. I included no food, no changes of clothing, but if I got mugged by a roller-derby-loving history buff, I was set. I bundled the whole thing together, and took off down the street.
My destination was unknown, so I headed for the park at the end of our neighborhood to get my bearings. I quickly tired (didn’t see that one coming, what with the extra FIFTY POUNDS on my back) and headed for a copse of trees. I was happily listening to what I believe was a Rainbow Brite tape and reading Little Town on the Prarie when our neighbor rode by on his bike, frantically calling my name. I tried to hide, but the bright yellow of my bedspead must have shown through the trees (or maybe it was the siren song of R. Brite…I’m not sure) becuase he slewed to a stop and ran across the grass to me. I was summarily hauled out of the trees and escorted home, where my parents confused the hell out of me by holding me so tight I couldn’t breathe, and then taking me to Baskin Robbins for ice cream.
It’s so obvious to me now what I couldn’t see before. The motivating factor behind all my parent’s actions across the years as I was growing up was love. Love wanted me to be mature before I did something as small as pierce my ears, and love wanted me to know that there were consequences to my actions before I grew up and learned about real consequences. I don’t know what it’s like to be so responsible for something so fragile as a child and yet have to step back and let it make its own mistakes, but I can only hope to do as good a job when I have children as my parents did with theirs. And I am profoundly sorry for all the heartache and trouble I caused when I was young and stupid.
(but still? Rollerskates? Was I dropped on the head as a baby?)
Ok, SASM readers! I’m working on a long post about my dogs, since I haven’t really posted about them at all and I’m sure everyone is DYING to hear about them. To tide you over till then…here is an old e-mail I sent a few years ago to various people concerning the recent activities of my dogs. I’m sure this will only whet you appetite for more dog-scapades…but I’m really not sure why.
(sent sometime in 2006)
Anyway, I’m sure you are all just thrilled to pieces that I have solved the mystery of why
a) Maynard has had a week long case of the poots, resulting in
b) the brain-melting stench of gastro-intestinal “distress”
and has started to resemble a
c) couch
d) in dog form
which we assumed was because he was actually consuming the couch. The fact that he probably IS consuming the couch is neither here nor there, due to the
e) two GIANT cow-pie sized piles of (deleted) that I
f) found in the garage this afternoon, leading me to find the
g) EMPTY sack of dog food that used to weigh
h) 40lbs
which was stacked where we
i) mistakenly
thought the dogs couldn’t reach it.
j) Wrong.
When you’re a child, every family tradition takes on a curious significance. For whatever reason, in our house it became tradition to open all our presents on Christmas Eve, with the exception of our “Santa” present and accompanying stocking. As you can imagine, this led to quite a bit of impatience on behalf of my brother and I. Candlelight services at church resulted in wax splatters on good clothing as we jumped about in anticipation of the upcoming slaughter of gaily wrapped goods. Food was choked down as fast as possible at the dinner table as we sat within 20 feet of the tree and its bounty. And let us not forget the time that my mom was responsible for the Christmas pageant, co-opting one of my few baby dolls to play the part of Jesus. All of my fidgeting on the drive to the church loosened the neck of the doll, which didn’t become apparent until (fortunately for me and my continued existence) right after the pageant, at which point my mom reached into the cradle to pick up the doll. And Baby Jesus’ head fell off.
We had to take turns when opening presents on Christmas Eve but in the morning, the Santa present and the stocking were fair game for our most avaricious instincts. I always saved the stocking for last, taking my time as I explored every inch of my last present. Our stockings were cheerful sweater knit affairs that would hold a respectable amount of loot, if stretched out by a weight at the bottom first. At least, that’s the only reason I can come up with to explain why my parents put an orange in the bottom of our stockings EVERY YEAR. And every year, the orange would be tossed aside willy nilly in favor of candy canes, chocolates and other treats.
Eventually, there came a Christmas when my parents forgot to actually purchase the oranges until it came time to stuff our stockings. Realizing that we never actually ATE the oranges, they came up with a substitute. Imagine our delight when we emptied our stockings out on Christmas Day only to find potatoes at the bottom. My brother, of course, was of an age by this point to find anything out of the ordinary annoying at best and mortifying at worst, so he just ignored the whole thing. I, however, took a strange delight in the potato.
And so it began.
From then on, it became my father’s quest to find the STRANGEST vegetables he could for my stocking. Turnips, rutabagas, once even one of these:
(It took a Google image search with the phrase “butt fruit” to find that photo. You’re welcome.)
And it didn’t stop there. I remember finding a potato in the top rack of the dishwasher one afternoon, or driving from their house back to college and going straight to class, opening my purse to find a pen, only to come up with a big ol’ russett. The most memorable was one of the summers I was in drum corps. My parents would usually drive me to the fire station where we would depart from and pick me up at the end of our tours; if they couldn’t, my car would be waiting for me with the key hidden under the fender. One one of these occasions, I got into my car to find THREE very wizened potatos…one impaled on the turn signal lever, one on the stick shift and one crammed between the visor and the ceiling of the car. The summer heat had caused them to wither and ooze, resulting in a car that smelled like potato chips for the next few months. Hilarity ensued, at least on the part of my parents, who thought that was the funniest thing they’d heard since, well, probably the butt-fruit in the stocking.
Our kitchen had a rubber snake that lived on the oven hood, named Mr. Snake. (The snake was thusly named, not the hood. In case you were confused.) There was also a rubber snail (Mr. Snail) who sat on the phone. Mr. Snail even had a theme song that I can still sing to this day. Trees were named. (Albert and Benjamin, to name a few.) Cars were named. I’ve yet to figure out why their house even features an inflatible moose head, but there it sits, large as life, and twice as weird.
All of this has rubbed off on me in ways I can’t even imagine, and yet, despite it all, I can’t even think about living life as a “normal” person. Would I still have the friends I have today if I hadn’t decided that nothing was too weird or dumb for me and joined colorguard? Maybe. Would I have had the chance to have the job I did for a year if I hadn’t decided that playing with giant dolls and dressing them was fun? Maybe. Would my husband still have married me if I hadn’t cadaver-napped a plastic skeleton from his college apartment and ransomed it back to him and his roommates? (Ok, actually, he might have married me SOONER…bad example)
I might still be the person I am today if I had been raised in a more main-stream household, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have had half as much fun along the way. Thanks, Mom and Dad…I love you guys!
Oh, like Gandalf's staff DIDN'T have a rubber duckie on top?
Lately, since joining Facebook, I’ve been thinking about my drum corps days. Seems every time I log on, I have another friend request from someone I haven’t thought about in years, but who I can instantly remember and say “My god, remember the time that we hid in a train tunnel to avoid a tornado/had a disco party on the bus/performed in a thunderstorm/were threatened with a trip to the pokey in Alabama?”
In a nutshell, drum corps is like marching band. It’s horns and drums playing music and a colorguard spinning while marching on a football field, (flags, represent!) but it’s a culture as well. It’s the distilled essence of band geek and the most athletic activity 90% of the performers will ever do.
Soon after this was taken, I used my abs to crack a coconut open. And my hair ate the camera.
It’s an entire summer with 127 other performers, traveling across the country in a caravan of buses, semis and assorted support vehicles, all full of people whose only job is to keep the corps rolling so all you have to think about is the performance. It’s cut-throat, intense competition with other groups, all of you hell bent for leather as you strive to be the best of the best, but it’s also years later, coming across someone who might have marched with another group, and spending the entire time laughing till you cried about how incredible the experience was.
I’ve started going through my old photos and scanning them in to my computer, and my god! Film pictures! How archaic! I’m surprised the buses we rode in didn’t have stone wheels…thanks for not having modern day essentials like digital cameras and cell phones as standard equipment, LATE NINETIES!!! Way to be! And let us not, let us NOT forget that iPods were a thing of the distant future! The CD binders, they were immense! The AA batteries for the CD players were ubiquitous! My punctuation usage is getting out of hand!!111!!!!11
Ahem. Sorry.
One of my favorite stories begins, as all things should, with clothing. Or lack thereof… You see, when you’re traveling across country in old Greyhound buses, your packing space is limited. Pretty much one giant duffel-type bag, and one sleeping bag (or air mattress and blanket, which was my preferred method for sleeping on high school gym floors EVERY night) per person under the bus. Of course, the amount of crap you could squeeze ONTO the bus was only limited to your ingenuity and the amount of patience your seatmate had.
Not shown: kitchen sink.
The other factor to take into consideration was the heat. There are numerous places in this country where it can get to eleventy-million degrees in the summertime, and I think we practiced in them all. One tour through the Cascades (um…supposed to be moderate there, right?) featured 90+ temperatures and sunny skies! Hell, the year I taught, the staff bus engine caught on FIRE driving through the Washington mountains, and we all just stayed on the bus, because it was cooler than outside.
Anyhoodles, since we practiced outside 99% of the time, all day during the summer, the accepted uniform for a female in drum corps was a bikini, boy shorts, tennis shoes and a small notebook tied round the waist with “dots” or coordinates listed inside that told us all where the hell we were supposed to be at any given point in the show. The string was a convenient place to clip a Sun Smacker lip balm or two, as well. (But NEVER the yellow “sport” flavor, ‘cause that shit tasted like a backed-up toilet used by a vomitous skunk.) In fact, most of the girls in the guard omitted the shorts and shoes part of the equation, because at a certain length, what are boy shorts but bikini bottoms anyway, and who wants to be wearing TWO layers? Not the person whose knees just started sweating, that’s for sure. Many of us would also forgo shoes whenever possible, ostensibly so we could dance better, but mainly to avoid the dreaded sock tan line, that most obvious of all drum corps tell tales.
We're smiling because we're dehydrated and delirious!
Now due to the packing constraints, most of us ran out of clothes before we ran out of days on tour, and laundry day came but once (!) a summer. We would all cram as many bathing suits as possible into our bags, along with socks, undies, towels, actual clothing, toiletries, uniforms, shoes, and in my case, at least 50 books. At one point I think I had 12 bathing suits, but even that was not enough. We would string rope and bungee cord across the bus and wash the day’s suit in the shower to hang and dry on the bus overnight.
By my third year, my seat mate and I had enough seniority to claim two seats each, and as we didn’t want to sit in the back of the bus (some things never change, and the fact that the cool kids sit in the back of the bus is one of the rules chiseled in stone) we had the entire front row to ourselves, which happened to feature one of the only working windows on MY side. As the air conditioning in our bus was laughable at best, the window stayed open most of the time, so I stretched my bungee across the opening and safety pinned my drying suits and towels to the line.
Picture this: 3 coach buses, two full-size tractor/trailer rigs (one semi hauling a trailer full of equipment, the other a trailer converted into a traveling kitchen), one conversion van pulling the small souvenir trailer and an RV serving as the command center and head of the operation, driving through the absolute backwoods bayous of Louisiana. We were on our way to a competition at Tiger Stadium on the LSU campus, when the unthinkable happened. My day’s swimsuit bottoms (blue bikini with a daisy on the hip) were sucked right out the window. Gloom descended on the front of the bus, as Mama Pickett the driver (rightly) refused to pull over so the whole bus could look for the wayward bottoms. It was a dark few minutes, till a shout rang out from the girls with the only other functioning window on my side. Most of the bus crammed their heads out the windows to see, down by the back tire where some long gone Greyhound driver had years ago hit something and ripped a small piece of metal up from the fender, my bikini bottoms. Flapping frantically in the wind of bus, they were the object of much pointing and waving as cars passed the caravan by. Mama Pickett was by this point on the CB with the other drivers, as they all tried to formulate a plan that didn’t involve stopping the caravan, but would allow for retrieval of the bottoms. Just as someone made the suggestion to try to snag them with a flagpole held out the window of one of the other vehicles, the bikini bottoms flew off the metal spar and landed by the side of the road, where they started to sink gently into the bayou. As the entire guard bus began to mourn the passing of the bottoms, the van full of volunteer cooks and support staff bombed over to the side of the road, and one of the dads leapt from the vehicle and WADED through the swamp to rescue my bikini. And there was much rejoicing.
It’s amazing to me that this is the kind of memory that sticks in my head, displacing the memories of the competitions we competed in, or the scores we received. And yet, it makes perfect sense because what I remember the best is the bonds I built with my friends, and how those can never really go away.
. . .
I’ll be writing more on my experiences in the next few posts…stay tuned for such adventures as What Not To Throw Out the Bus Window and Yes, Virginia, There Can Be Tornadoes In Denver.
* I recently (like, 20 minutes ago, after a bit of a search) came across my journal from my four years in drum corps, and that was the title. The sub-title was “A Book of Semi Inspiration”. Why potted meat? Well, someone (cough, DAD) hid a can of Hormel’s Potted Meat Food Product in my tub of bus snacks for me to discover one lonely night on the road. And so I give you this:
I think I still have the actual can of Potted Meat somewhere...
I am SO recycling this from my Facebook page, on the off off chance that anyone reading this blog is not actually related to me. Or a friend on Facebook. And it contains a paragraph from a previous post. It’s one giant ouroboros of cheating!
So sue me.
1. I’m left-handed, and have to do that stupid turn-my-paper-sideways to write ANYTHING. And it still looks like someone handed a penguin a pencil and told them to have at it. (I also once launched a ball of chocolate ice cream into a dish of sprinkles while trying to operate a right-handed ice cream scoop…but that may be because I’m an idiot.)
2. I love to read.
3. I will ALWAYS sing along with music in my car. Or your car. And probably dance along, if the song has a good beat. I’m that person at the light next to you who looks like they’re speaking in tongues and flailing at invisible bees.
4. I’m deathly afraid of drains. I can’t find a technical “phobia” term for this, but I can tell you that it includes pool drains, dams, and (somewhat inexplicably) toilets.
5. I’m always trying to get into shape, but have a terrible time mustering the will power to actually do anything about the situation. For example? Procrastinating RIGHT NOW and writing this instead of
getting my exercise on.
6. I can’t stand children in advertising. I think the person responsible for the Pepsi campaign (several years ago, twee little girl with curly hair) should be shot.
7. I was knocked out of the school spelling bee in 6th grade by misspelling “library”. But I still got a trophy for participating, which is hooey.
8. I know how to sail; in fact my father and I were very competitive in the local racing circuit when I was in high school. I cannot, however, ski.
9. The above is baffling if you consider the fact that I was born, raised and still live in Colorado.
10. I’m about to turn 30, and I still wonder what I’m going to do when I grow up. What happened to my plans of being famous?
11. Until I turned 29, I had never gotten a speeding ticket. Recently I’ve gotten 2, to the tune of several hundred dollars and many points on my license.
12. I just had to rewrite the word “recently” from that last sentence FIVE times over because I kept spelling it with an apostrophe instead of an “L”. Perhaps some typing classes might be in order?
13. When I was in 5th grade, my mom took me with her to the Bahamas to spend some time on a research vessel working with wild dolphins.
14. I have a very quick temper, and have a bad tendency to let things of very little import set me raging.
15. When I take a shower, I always waste time (and hot water) by just sitting down and letting the water flow over me. It’s a great time to think.
16. I don’t really like chocolate all that much, but if I’m going to eat some, it had better be dark chocolate.
17. I enjoy cooking, and collect recipes both online and in books. I don’t, however, usually follow them. This often results in a fantastic meal that I can never duplicate, because I never write down what I did. (Chicken Tortilla Soup, I’m looking at you!)
18. I have a fake laugh that I tend to use in social situations like at work.
19. My brother can always make me laugh, for real, until I cry. When we were little, he used this “talent” to torture me. Like if I had a sore throat, or a headache, or I don’t know, had just had my TONSILS out?
20. I have a great deal of useless knowledge in my head. I’d probably never win on Jeopardy, but I’m always yelling answers at the TV.
21. I was in the musical “The Sound of Music” in high school. I played the part of Liesl, and Rolf, my love interest, was 4 inches shorter than me. That was fun.
22. I CANNOT, under any circumstances, tolerate TV shows or movies or even books that have a character placed in a potentially embarrassing situation. This…somewhat limits what I can watch without running from the room. Other related issues include 90% of all reality shows and more or less everything on MTV. When you get down to it, I apparently hate conflict. Which…is the basis of storytelling. Frankly, I’m surprised that I can survive as a functioning member of society, let alone read as much as I do.
23. I don’t own any hand weights, so I have been using two very large hard back books as weights when I do my exercise video. (The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, if you’re wondering.)
24. For years, I felt I was defined by my job teaching colorguard. “What do you like to do?” “Oh, I teach colorguard!” Then I had to give up teaching last year when I took a new position at work. I’ve recently realized that I don’t “do” anything anymore, and I’m struggling to come up with a way to make my life more challenging and fulfilling again.
25. I hereby declare that on this, my 30th year on earth, I will find something to do with my life that will challenge and enrich me.
It all began with a chicken. Well, actually, it all began with an orange*, but this part of the story begins with a chicken. A small ceramic chicken that was a gift from my parents to me. For my collection.
self: Um, gee, thanks, guys! A chicken…
mom: For your collection!
self: Oh, yeah! My…what?
mom: Well, your father decided you needed to collect something. So we bought you a chicken.
dad: [nods emphatically]
self: Riiight.
This then multiplied to a flock (a cluck?) of chickens. The most recent came as a house-warming gift and was the straw (feather?) that broke the camel’s back.
self: I don’t WANT to collect chickens!
mom: yes you do!
self: Are you mental? I think I’d KNOW if I wanted to spontaneously collect figurines of flightless dometicated birds! What the hell am I supposed to do with a bunch of cermaic chickens?
dad: talk to them!
mom: Cluck!
self: [bangs head against counter, slowly oozes to floor]
At that point, it became war. We had given my parents a key to the new house, and came home the next day to a suspicious absence of chicken… until they started turning up. In the dryer. In the medicine cabinet. Every time I opened a door, I cringed in anticipation of a beak in the dark. After several days, I rounded up ALL the chickens and dumped them in a basket, abandoning them in the one room we haven’t unpacked yet…a horrifiying seething combo of office furniture, computer stuff, spare home decor, craft supplies and laundry called the Disaster Room. Those chickens were as good as gone.
Or so I thought.
There came a time recently when my mom called and requested the return of a disk of programs she had loaned me several months ago. I promised to dig it out and leave for her to pick up, and completely forgot. I was at work when she texted, asking if she could go get it. I explained that the disk was really easy to find…I’d convienently left it in a spindle of blank CD’s but that the spindle was on top of a box of computer stuff and hard to miss. She trooped right over to my house and texted me when she found the CD:
mom: got it, thanks.
mom: cluck.
self: Yay! I was worried you had gotten lost in the disaster room…oh SHIT.
self: Um, are you clucking for any PARTICULAR reason?
mom: Why, yes!
self: Crap. There had better not be a chicken in my underwear drawer or I’m going to be very upset.
The basket? With the incarcerated chickens, hidden from my parents? Was right next to the box of computer stuff. I have NO idea what I’m up against when I get home, but I think it’s not going to be good.
*(to be continued…at which point I’ll hopefully explain about the orange)
Well, that last post was cheerful, no? I’m just a giant fricken ray of sunshine over here, folks. I’ve been trying to look on the bright side of this whole “losing my position” thing, and have come up with a (very) few positives.
1. I don’t have to keep buying chargers for my various electronic devices every time I leave one at home. (This is an actual problem, people! I traveled with 2 phones, iPod, laptop, camera, other LARGER camera, and thanks to SantaParents, a GPS. I own 4 iPod chargers and SEVEN chargers for 2 phones!) (You may wonder why the HELL I need so many electronics. It’s a sickness, and I blame my father.)
2. I’ll get to sleep in my very own bed every night! Or the couch! Or have a slumber party on the kitchen table! The possibilities are endless!
3. Um…
4. I have to give back my corporate phone (lowly assistant managers don’t get PHONES, are you nuts?) So I am relying again on my personal phone, which was due for an upgrade, and what better way to celebrate losing a job (but retaining employment) then to spend some money on an iPhone!
Yup. That’s how I roll. Got told on Friday my position was being axed, accepted crumby assistant manager job w/ same company on Saturday, bought an iPhone on Sunday. This was my last week in my current position and so, iPhone in hand, I went off on my penultimate trip (I’m off to South Dakota tomorrow for one more store visit.)
That’s a shot of not only my dashboard, but the exit sign to Grove, where my family always went for summer vacation. I’ve driven past it countless times since I began traveling for my company, and never had the time to go back. Sigh. This is also the photo I sent my mom, with the subject line “one hand and no brains on the wheel”. She was less than pleased.
This is also the stretch of highway near the asylum, so the highway is lined with signs that say “do not pick up hitch hikers, as they may be escaped inmates.” Way to take a picture of an EXIT sign, and not a cool
WATCH OUT FOR THE DAMN CRAZIES sign, self!
Ok, now that WEE little white sign over the side view mirror is a 2007! Quality! Award! Winning! Rest stop! sign. You might be impressed, until you notice that every single rest stop on I-44 has one. Look, Missouri, if everyone is special, then NO ONE is. (Oh, yes, I’ve driven the entire length of 44 with a friend, and not only is every rest stop special, but there are more adult bookstores than I’ve ever seen in my LIFE.) (Of course, the adult bookstore billboards are comingled with the fundamentalist Christian billboards. I think good ol’ Missouri is a bit…confused.)
Awww…this is the liquor store that Rosie and I would drive up to when we were working together earlier this year. Sadly, the county we were opening the store in was a <gasp> DRY county, so we had to hightail it across state lines to get the booze. Which we may or may not have left in a friends’ freezer to “chill” for way too long, resulting in a high-velocity assualt on a bag of frozen peas by a ballistic wine cork.
. . .
I’m really going to miss that job, and all the iPhones in the world can’t really make up for it. Sigh.
Really? Really?
Fuck. I’m pissed. Bloody hell damn ass pissed. I just found out today that my position was eliminated at work. They still want me to stay on, so I guess I can’t complain, but the position offered me? NOT what I want to be doing. Not at all.
Bitter, party of one…right over here.
In honor of the holiday season and the spirit of giving and goodwill towards men, I’ve decided to compile a list of things I can’t stand, or have issues with, or things that just generally freak me the fuck out. Of course, this will be soon followed by a list of things I DO like, just to keep my karmic balance in line…and to ensure that Santa doesn’t skip our house for years.
1. Toilets. Ok, it’s not that I don’t like the concept of toilets, and you’re not going to find me in the backyard with a roll of tp, but the inner workings of toilets creep me OUT. I absolutely refuse to lift the top of a toilet tank to diagnose any problem. If the toilet starts making weird noises, or running too long or even seems to eyeball (flapper?) me in a threatening manner, I’ll quickly shut off the water flow from the wall, and run screaming for BD, who rolls his eyes in disgust. (this is a fairly standard reaction of his to my quirks, FYI) I’m not sure when the toilet thing started, but it’s all tied together with my fear/loathing/hatred of drains. I used to stand on the high dive for what seemed like hours when I was little, paralyzed at the sight of the huge bank of drains right under the board. This is still an issue today, and has even extended to the sight of dams (they’re really just giant bloody drains!) although with dams, it’s some sort of twisted fear/fascination thing. Like a moth to a flame, am I to a dam. Which…is odd. Moving on!
2. Squeaky things. Or more specifically, a wet sweatshirt rubbing on itself (ook!), cutlery being dragged across a plate (gah!), a hard lead pencil/dry marker on paper (eesh!!), the squeak of snow underfoot when it’s really cold (gargh!) and the absolute worst: the sound of Styrofoam rubbing on itself or cardboard (ARGH!) I have actually managed to give myself GOOSEBUMPS just sitting here typing these things. They are absolutely fingernails on a chalkboard for me (which…also sucks major ass, but no one has chalkboards anymore, so that threat is mercifully diminished.)
3. Embarrassment humor. This is another one that BD thinks is absolute hooey. I CANNOT, under any circumstances, tolerate TV shows or movies or even books that have a character placed in a potentially embarrassing situation. This…somewhat limits what I can watch without running from the room. Case in point? The movie Meet the Parents, which was the movie BD and I saw on our first date. I wanted to slide under the seats in a puddle of oozy discomfort but couldn’t due to the fact that I was sitting next to A Boy! That I liked! It took me about 5 years to admit to BD that that was possibly the worst movie I had ever seen. Other related issues include 90% of all reality shows and more or less everything on MTV. When you get down to it…I apparently hate conflict. Which…is the basis of storytelling. Frankly, I’m surprised that I can survive as a functioning member of society, let alone read as much as I do.
4. Cilantro. Hey! I know! Let’s all put soap on our food!
5. Advertising. Ok, not all advertising, but there are several instances that drive me straight ‘round the bend.
A) Kids in advertising. Really? Really? I don’t need some twee little child shilling material goods in my general direction. Specific call outs include the Pepsi girl from several years ago, the Welch’s grape juice urchin, and the commercial where the kid asks the father about mutual funds or retirement plans or whatever the hell it is.
B) The word “extreme”. Especially when spelled without the “E”. ARRRGH! Get a dictionary, advertising people! Pizza is not extreme! Flavored sugar water beverages are not extreme! You know what is extreme? My loathing of this word!
C) Deliberate misuse of the letter “K” to make a name sound better/cuter/whatever the hell who cares? Kountry Kitchen, Kalico Korner, etc. I’ve had a discussion on this topic with a friend in advertising, and his point of view is that it’s easier to establish a brand identity with a unique spelling, but then he also has used the word “extreme” in his work, so his opinion is highly suspect in my book.
6. Skittles. Well, ok, I actually love me some Skittles. I’m not a huge fan of chocolate in candy bar form, so my go-to vending machine choice is always Skittles (but it’s gotta be the original red package. That other shit is nasty!) Anyway, the issue with the Skittles is the disproportion of colors. (Which, as everyone knows, are the flavors. Ever had anyone ask you for a cherry Skittle? Nope! It’s always “gimme some of those red ones”. Greedy bastards) You see, I have to sort mah Skittles before I eat them…I have to get the yellow, orange and green ones out of the way first. And there are always more of those then the good colors (red and purple.) But, I soldier on so I can get to the good part…the purple and red candies! However, I’m strict about how I eat those, as well. If I can’t match the red and purple ones up exactly, two by two, I have to eat ALL the extraneous ones first. I can’t be having any non-matched up Skittle pairs. So, the problem is (other than I’m a loon, and just eat the candy already!) that there are NEVER EVER EVER a matched amount of purple and red. Why not? Is it too much to ask for a little consistency across the high fructose corn syrup board? Why god, WHY?
. . .
Whew! That was a load off my mind. And now that you’re all completely convinced that I’m insane, let’s talk about you. If, in fact, “you” existed. I’d ask everyone what their pet peeves are, but I’m reasonably certain that the only readers I have are my parents (hi, Mom and Dad!) and I’m sure their issues include daughters who complain about stupid things and cuss a lot, so there you go. Although…if there is anyone out there, let me have it!
Soon to come: the other side of the scale, or things that make me all melty and goopy. Now with more schmaltz!
What, exactly, does it mean when you blow your nose, your ear goes *poink* and the world goes pear-shaped?
There I was, minding my own business (and battling a cold) at a stoplight. I blew my nose, and suddenly I thought I was drunk. (And had a fondue fork in my ear.) Shit was spinning, the light post started going wavy, and I halfway expected to see Wayne and Garth on the sidewalk doing the finger thing and going “doodly-oo doodly-oo doodly-oo…” (and if you get THAT reference, my friends, let me be the first to welcome you to being old.) Frankly, it was a damn good thing that the light stayed red for the duration of the freak-out spell, becuase yanking my car into the bushes in an attempt to keep it between the (wavy) lines seems like it could have been a problem.
I love cold season.
Holy moly! It’s a little dirty around here…hold on…
<phoof, phoof>
Ok, that’s better. Sorry if I phoofed dust in your eyes. CLEARLY, someone has been letting the ol’ website languish away in some dreary corner of the Internet. Ahem…don’t look over here, although I did actually predict something like this happening, back in this post. It’s entirely possible that I have devolved into the aforementioned homicidal googly-eyed maniac, although it’s not due to the stress of moving so much as the stress of NOT BEING HOME EVER EVER EVER OMG.
My eyes are starting to twitch as we speak.
But! I’m home now, until all the way far away Tuesday! Hooray! This time, it was the getting home that was a real pain in the old keister. For starters, I was a bit wardrobe challenged yesterday. Let’s pretend that I own a fabulous red trench coat, mmkay? Well, I have to start thinking a bit more about what I wear WITH the red trench coat. And what I haul around while wearing the red trench coat. Otherwise you end up with me yesterday…green casual slacks (from Old Navy, and they rock!) bright BLUE carry-on wheely bag (so’s I can tell which one is mine, natch) and the happy bright red trench coat and matching red leather gloves. I looked like a box of crayons.
Of course, when the plane landed at DIA yesterday, I could have cared less what color my coat and gloves were, because it was SNOWING. And I was on a turbo prop that you exit via a staircase. Into the SNOW. So that was fun. My seatmate and I took one look at the blowing snow outside the window, and flatly refused to get out of our seats until we saw our gate-checked wheely bags unloaded onto the cart. (Oh yes, my travel life is so glamorous that 9 times out of 10, I’m on a plane that is too small to hold wheely bags in the overhead compartments, so they take them planeside, heave ‘em under into the cargo bay and return them as you deplane.) Bag firmly in hand, I gingerly minced across the icy tarmac, because I was wearing (of course) snakeskin ballet flats. In my defense, the weather didn’t call for snow when I left Denver, and my other choices of footwear were equally bad, as they both involved high heels. So, mincemincemince across the ice, into the terminal, on the train, up the stairs, out the door to the parking garage. Not that I park in the parking garage, because it’s to damn expensive ($18 a day? Are you KIDDING me?) but so I could walk through the parking garage to the outlying lots, where I had cleverly parked close enough to walk, so I didn’t have to wait for the shuttle. Of course, I totally would have taken the shuttle NOW, but I failed to remember where I was parked, so I wouldn’t have been able to tell the driver which row and section. I’m sure that a feeble wave and declaration of “somewhere over there-ish…I think” would have just enraged the other passengers, as we weaved around searching for my car.
So, I hoofed it. And it was bloody cold. I spent most of this time on the phone with my mom because
a) I like to call my parents when I come home from trips to let them know I’m not dead
b) I wanted someone on the line with me that could call 911 if I gave in to exhaustion and collapsed into a snow bank. At least she could tell them I was in the east parking lot, somewhere over there-ish.
Off I trudged, dodging snow plows all the way, looking for my damn car. It took a while to find, because clever me did a pull-through, and although I remembered pulling into a spot on the north side of the row, I was actually on the south (duh.) There were small drifts all around my car, which a normal person wouldn’t have noticed, but a person wearing ballet flats? Oh, that shit got noticed. Stomp stomp stomp to the back of the car, up with the hatch, in with the bag, over to the driver’s side. Of course, this entire time my conversation with my mom went something like:
“fuck bloody fuck fuck my feet are bloody freezing this f-in sucks ARRRRGGH! My shoe just fell off! Really? Really? FUCK!”
(fourtunetly, my mom is a-ok with the cussing.)
I get into the car, wipe my poor feet off with some random article of clothing left in the front seat, and start the damn thing so I can let it run and heat up while I get out and scrape the windows (I tried to just use the wipers, but they got stuck after moving 3 inches. Stupid snow. Stupid ice.) Or, at least that was the plan, because the alternator? She is dying in the poor car, and I had to keep revving the engine to keep it from giving up entirely. So I ended up opening the door and standing with one foot in a drift, the other in the car firmly on the accelerator. This meant I was working a one-handed scraping operation, but I persevered until I got the wipers unstuck, at which point they went FOOMP, and dumped an entire boatload of snow down my cleavage. (Red trench coat? I hate you and your stupid neckline!) I lost it at that point, got back in the car, turned it to defrost, cranked the vents up to 11, and waited until shit started to melt. I then spent twice my normal commute home stuck in traffic, because OMG! Snow! In Denver! Clearly, the end of the world is imminent!
Lord love a duck, this traveling all the damn time has got to slow down after Christmas, or I may well go completely batshit crazy. Hopefully I’ll keep you updated. But till then?
I’m off to Fargo next week.
A recent conversation between my husband and I via e-mail. (Note: I usually travel around during the day, but am stuck in one place today becuase BD’s pickup is in the shop, so he has mah car!)
____________________________
To: BD@work.com
Well, I don’t actually have that many e-mails to send today. And my phone has been suspiciously silent…nope, just checked it. It still works.
I have a crap ton of paint chips, plus I wandered through the store and grabbed a few things (artwork, a big ass vase) that I was thinking of getting for the house. I have them on hold so you can check them out at some point in the next few days. I’d like to make some decisions on paint so we could start on that ASAP. And maybe get some better measurements at the house, so we know if the couch will fit, and stuff.
I also need food. I think I’m going to wander over to Starbucks, as I have a gift card from there, so it’s FREE!
____________________________
To: ellbee@work.com
Let’s do this…
I’ll come get you and then maybe we could go load up the doggies and take them over to familiarize them with the new place. Then while they’re in the garage/outside we can get some more measurements and look at paint. I found this link that talks about using different shades of the same color on behr’s website so it sounds like you know what you are doing…
____________________________
To: BD@work.com
DOOD! i’m totally getting this e-mail tattooed on my forehead. I can’t believe you said I was right!!!
Anyway, I’m down. Come and get me!
____________________________
To: ellbee@work.com
How bout I get it tattooed on my knuckles then punch you in the forehead….WOOOHOOOO
____________________________
To: BD@work.com
Do you know how stupid I look, sitting by myself and laughing my ass off? (oh, sorry, LMAO?) Thanks for that, boy genius.
____________________________
And that’s how we spread the love in our little corner of the world.
I have been working on a post for a while now, and I don’t think I’m ever going to finish it, because frankly? It’s a tad boring, really whiny, and just plain meh. Here’s a synopsis:
a) I’ve lost several pounds becuase
b) I spent most of a month in charge of opening a store for my company, which
c) was really really stressful, and even though
d) it was one of the most successful store openings in store history, I
e) thought I could have done better.
f) I’m a whiny baby.
g) The end.
So. That’s that. I wanted to get that out of the way becuase…
(drumroll)
We bought a house! And it’s shiny and pretty, and YAY! Well, shiny in the metaphorical sense, not so much in the literal sense. Literally, it’s woody and splintery. See?
hooray, house!
Yes, my car is filthy. Just ignore that. Please direct your attention to the driveway, which is currently occupied with my car, my dad’s pickup, and still has room for many many more cars. We are SO getting a snow blower. Also, note that my mother was only in the house for about a half hour, before heading outside with a pair of pruning shears and a wild look in her eyes. See those huge pots of mums? She’d already beheaded most of the dead ones by the time I managed to ask her where the hell she had gotten a pair of pruning shears, anyway. As it turns out, the previous owners had been in the house until 5 in the morning the day of the closing, and had just given up on moving everything. They left tools and remodeling materials in the garage, a gas grill in the backyard, and several bottles of wine and six packs of beer in the basement. Oh, and an old kegerator. I would be upset they left everything for us to deal with, but I love me some wine, so I can’t complain.
clinging to the door like I own the place...oh, wait!
I love this red door. The coolest thing? The window wells on the side of the house are painted the same color. Please ignore my terrible posture and general frumpishness in this shot; clearly, I fail at standing up straight. I’ll tell you a secret, though. You can’t see it, but the key to the house is stuck in the lock. Oh yes, the departing owners graciously installed a new handle and lock, and the first time we put the key in the door the whole thing jammed up. Since it was such a nice day, we left the door open, and as one or the other of us would stroll by, we’d periodically tug on the key to see if the magic key fairies had visited and instructed the lock to relinquish the key. About 5 minutes after this shot was taken, I gave the key one more tug and the ENITRE lock mechanism pulled out of the handle and launched the tumblers pell-mell across the hardwood floors. Oops.
now all we need is a bearskin rug...
However, I’m not the only one that broke something in the few hours we were in the house on closing day. BD was “just adjusting” that spotlight on the left when the entire thing pulled out of the ceiling and dangled there like an airplane oxygen mask. Classy. I give the previous owners full marks for creativity on their remodel, but I’m going to have to deduct some points for general haf-asserey. (See also: tumblers, launching of and painting, basic rules of.)
drool...
And then there’s this. Stainless steel. Gas range. New cabinets. If it was possible to make out with a kitchen, I would SO violate this one. (But I’d call it the next day, since I’m a class act.) At first I was concerned about my shiny red kitchen appliances against the green back splash but I’ve found some ceramic home accent pieces at work that have both red and green in a vaguely Tuscan theme, and I think I can pull the whole thing together. That, and BD flatly refused to let me re-re-model the new shiny kitchen. Also of interest? The goddamn chicken by the wine bottle. Let me state for the record that I DON’T collect chickens. My parents think I NEED a signature knick-knack and have thus far purchased me three ceramic chickens. My parents also used to give me turnips in my Christmas stockings and hide potatoes in my car. My parents need help.
we should really find the screens
See? My father (the prime culprit behind the chickens, the root vegetables and my stellar ability to burp) thinks it’s funny to take pictures of me taking pictures. And then point out how much better his camera is than mine. And how much cooler his pictures are than mine. I can’t even refute either of those statements, as
a) he has a D80 and,
b) he is an excellent amateur photographer who puts me to shame.
Of course, HE doesn’t have a sweet bathroom!
and a jetted tub!
Oh yeah, baby. And there is a bathroom in the master bedroom, which means BD gets that and this pretty pretty princess is ALL MINE BWA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
(Sorry. But dude! Heated tile floors!)
very serious, here
And self portrait, to prove that my posture…well…this is pretty crappy posture too. But hey, MY bathroom has a sweet full-length mirror.
Anyway, that’s about it for now…we’re not moving till next weekend, if that, since we haven’t actually “packed” or “planned” any of the move. I think that BD and I have been burned so many times on this loooong house hunt that neither of us actually expected the deal to go through. That, or we’re horribly lazy.
Nah.
I’m going to attempt to post more, now that both the house hunt and the store opening are over and my stress level has decreased from “homicidal googly-eyed maniac” to “mother of god, if I think that moving is going to be LESS stress, I’m out of my ever-lovin’ mind”.
On second thought, look for me in another month.
Seriously, but this damn town cracks me up. I’m sitting here in the bar of my hotel, and I can count no fewer than 15 cowboy hats. Now, I’m from Colorado, and I know from cowboy hats, but generally one doesn’t see this kind of concentration anywhere outside of a country/western bar.
And FYI, there are only about 25 people in the whole bar. I feel so remarkably out of place, and I have to hit the bathroom, and mother of god! I just wish I could catch the waitresses’ eye so I could get my goddam tab, but that might be problematic, seeing as I sat here for 40 minutes before she even came over and asked if I needed anything. Apparently, she confused me with “another girl that was sitting at that exact table on a laptop! I totally thought you were her! I’m so sorry, this first drink is on me…”
(Ok, that part was awesome, I’m not gonna lie.)
UPDATE: Apparently the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association is having its annual conference in this hotel. Hence the proliferation of hats and plaid shirts. Man, does my company know how to pick its hotels! This is one big partay…
UPDATE THE SECOND: A woman just meandered over and asked if I minded that she steal one chair from my table. She then asked if I was studying. I was somewhat dumbstruck, and could only anwser with a apologetic (and completely fib-tastic) yes, since I’m not sure what else one would call the daily perusal of my Google feeds. I don’t think blog reading ranks very high on the list of daily activities of ANY of the attendees of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association.
UPDATE THE THIRD: I think I may EXPLODE. Did I mention that this hotel has a 5 story water feature in the lobby/atrium? The sound of the water is driving right through my skull. And my bladder, for that matter. (Oh! A rhyme! This post is clearly going to need its own catagory that implies alcohol is involved…)
And, a very small man with a very large cowboy hat just wandered over and tried to make small talk with me. Which I responded to with a head toss and hearty laugh, because, hey! I can fake laugh with the best of them…
Check, please!
I can pretty much guarantee that this is what I looked like for most of the day today. I must have had a bowl of stupid for breakfast, because every new challenge was met with a wide-eyed stare and a profound sense of “wha?”
Since part of my job involves supervising and participating in new store setup for my particular employer, it’s generally my job to be part of the solution, not so much the problem. However, today I discovered something that I did two weeks ago caused some other shit to happen, and the end results were some things got done broke, and it’s pretty much my fault. Nothing too extreme, but the sad part is when I first discovered the problem, I didn’t even recognize it as my doing. I was full of righteous anger and, being none to shy about it, was venting my frustration by keeping up a steady stream of profanity.
It’s true, you know, you can construct a sentence using only the words “the” and “fuck”.
And I did. At great length. I even called Rosie, since she was one of the only people that had ever dealt with this particular object, and would be able to commiserate. Sadly, she shot me down by pointing out that
A) she had warned me this might happen, and
b) it was really my fault for not paying attention last time, so
c) buck up, Buttercup, because you’ll have to take this square on the chin.
Fine. You know, the damage is nowhere NEAR as bad I thought it was… this is totally fixable!
Of course, not an hour after my blowup and subsequent phone call (or two, or three, all to Rosie) I managed to screw up AGAIN. This time, making a mistake that Rosie and I had done the first time around, earlier this year. In fact, we had made such a big deal about how dumb we were, and what a stupid mistake, that we had even turned the whole thing into a decent anecdote, which I was regaling my helper with AS I WAS MAKING THE SAME MISTAKE. Let’s just say it’s like I was building a house, and forgot to put in doorways. (yes, that obvious of a mistake.) Assume, for the sake of my story, that I realized my mistake only after the house was almost complete, and had to spend quite a bit of time trying to put the damn doors in the house. Now, say I decided to build ANOTHER house, and while telling everyone the story of the doors, and how stupid, no one forgets the DOORS…I forget. To put in. The. DOORS.
(Pause while everyone re-reads that paragraph to arrive at the point that I’M STUPID.)
This, of course, necessitated another call to Rosie, who declined to answer her phone at this point. (Pshaw. Like she was actually trying to work, or something.) I left an intelligible message that sounded something like:
<beep>
MOTHERFUCKWHYCANTICOUNTTOFUCKINGTWELVEMOTHERFUCKER
<click>
And the day went downhill from there, prompting me to anwser every quesiton put to me with a wide eyed stare and an awkward “HAHAHA I’LL ANWSER YOUR QUESTION BUT I’M STUPID SO DON’T BLAME ME WHEN THE STORE FAILS AND YOU ALL GET FIRED AND HAVE TO LIVE IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.”
Tomorrow I’m going to say “no thanks” to a shot of stupid in my coffee.
This house hunt BD and I are presently engaged upon is enough to make me go completely ’round the bend, letting all my crazy flap in the wind.
We’re told this is a buyers market, especially out here, which I guess explains why EVERY single house we want is under contract the very SECOND we entertain the thought of maybe making an offer. It’s enough to make a questionably sane person stab someone right through the eyeball.
If I may…
House #1 was a fixer-upper, and by that I mean there was an engine just chillin’ in the backyard. Honda, I believe it was. We could tell the bathrooms were an opportunity for a little upgrade. But that’s probably just because they were all in a pile. On the porch. None the less (and completely ignoring the ominous “crawl space”, which just screamed “dead bodies r us”) we thought it had some great potential. One acre of land in the middle of the city? All the homes surrounding it costing upwards of $200,000 more? How could we NOT buy this diamond in the rough? Well, probably because it was under contract. The first day we looked at the damn thing.
(The saga of house #2 has actually been updated since I began this post, but it all ends the SAME way.)
I got a call from BD a few months ago when I was in some other state for work, as happens quite often around here. He said that he and his mom and sister had found a house they all absolutely LOVED. It was perfect, he said. A 3600 sq ft house (yes, we want a LOT of room, shut up) on a large lot (1/2 acre!) in a neighborhood where all the rest of the homes were much more expensive. Again, it was a foreclosure/fixer upper, but we’re cool with that, so… The sneak and his cohorts even managed to give themselves a tour of the house, since both the gate to the backyard and the patio door were unlocked. (What’s a little B & E among friends, anyway?) Of course, when BD called to get an “official” showing of the house so I could see it, the damn thing was under contract. Natch.
Fast forward to last month. After a loooong day of looking at houses with our *new* realtor (BD’s sister Ams, who just passed her exams) we were taking a break and reviewing what we had seen so far. BD started moaning about house #2, and how it was perfect, blah blah blah. Ams decided to call the realtor on the off chance the contract had fallen through, and (cue celestial music here) it had! We raced out to the property, took a whirlwind tour, setteled on a bid (which we now realize was WAY low) and proceeded to place all our hopes and dreams on this ONE house. Which…of course…was a terrible idea. The bank rejected our bid, and by the time we had another one prepared, the house was (all together now) UNDER CONTRACT.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. We have missed the mark on FOUR more houses since then. Sigh. We just spent our ENTIRE Labor Day weekend driving around, looking at houses.
I think I’m starting to dream in square feet.
We’ve got our eye on a few more houses, but I’m not telling which ones, so that the real estate gods can’t curse us again with the under contract nonsense. I’ll know more by the end of the week, so I’ll end this on a cautiously optimistic note…fingers crossed!
WTF? Where did my last post go? I’m so confused…
I feel compelled to admit that I’ve been a bit spoiled growing up. I’ve spent my life in Colorado, living right next to the mountains AND close enough to the city to get myself in trouble on more than one occasion. (Most notable being the “sock in the night” incident…but that will have to wait for a later date.) What really skeeves people off when I tell them that I live in Colorado is when I admit that I have only skied a handful of times in my life, hardly ever hike, bike or do anything outdoorsy on a regular basis.
The notable exception that comes to mind is the few camping trips we’ve taken with our friends over the years. For instance, the first year involved a hike up the unofficially named Mt. Disappointment, a thunderstorm and a trip into the town of Ward, which is straight out of your choice of horror movie. Take one twisty, winding mountain road down into a valley, throw in mist, rain and no cell phone service, and shake. Garnish with a handful of dilapidated houses, one broken pay phone and a run down general store (now with less stuff!) and you’ve got a bad slasher flick just WAITING to happen!
Honestly, when the proprietor of the store answered a timid request with a menacing “we ain’t GOT no working phones ‘round here, ya’ll had better just get outta town…” we knew we were but one bloody scene from total carnage. Fortunately, since not a one of us had the urge to ill-advisedly take a shower in a stranger’s house OR head up the nearest available staircase in search of mysterious noises, we escaped, found the friends we were trying to meet up with, and spend an enjoyable weekend roasting Slim Jims over the fire.
Well, clearly we were roasting Slim Jims…this particular time was right after the beer-chugging portion of the Woodlympics, and just prior to the “speed whittling” event.
. . .
Note to anyone reading this…don’t ever ever ever ever ever attempt “speed whittling”. It’s just going to end badly. Trust me on this one.
. . .
Anyway, see? (If you’d forgotten, and not that I blame you… the original POINT of this post was why I’m spoiled.) Living in Colorado, even if you don’t take advantage of nature on a daily basis, is pretty nice. 300+ days of sunlight on average, little humidity, warm days, cool nights, and the occasional snowstorm in the winter, which in the city, melts within a day or two.
Having said all that, what I’m driving at is that I don’t have a lot of experience with the stranger aspects of nature as it relates to places outside of Colorado. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been caught in torrential downpours, and till this spring had not had the pleasure of the all day monsoon rain that I experienced while in Arkansas for work. My colleague, however, lives in Missouri, and had been sending me daily updates on whether or not she could drive home or if the flood waters had crossed the highway. Having had plenty of experience with that sort of “Come to Noah, Pass the Ark Please” sog-fest, she felt it only fair that I be the one to drive and learn how to deal with a deluge. The only thing I brought to the table as a rainy day wet road driver was the quaint family game of “Kill the Villagers” that my mom and I invented.
Now, you’ve got to use your imagination for this one…picture all the puddles in the road as enormous lakes surrounded by communities of primitive beings, eking out a precarious existence in their small huts. If it helps your conscience, you can imagine they’re all cannibals. You’ll want to keep that in mind, because the next step is to floor it in your vehicle and drive straight through the middle of the puddle creating an enormous tidal wave that will totally wipe out any cannibalistic villagers. This is only effective if you do this while screaming “KILL THE VILLAGERS!!” at the top of your lungs. This works slightly better in Colorado than Arkansas, the difference being the puddles back home can’t actually stop your car’s forward momentum, due to them being only about 3 inches deep and not actual LAKES, with flotsam and jetsam and wildlife and all.
Anyways, the rain kept falling all that day and into the night; we didn’t even leave work till about 9 pm and it was still chucking it down. The quickest way back to the hotel was a gentle winding road through a soon-to-be subdivision, which we usually took at about 60 mph. Having conceded about 15 mph to the rain, we were swerving wildly, hunting villagers and careening through the night. There was only one other car on the road, coming up in the left lane behind us as we crested a hill and saw one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen (at least in Arkansas, and that’s saying a LOT.) There was a DUCK, swimming down the middle of our lane. Oh yes, it had rained so much that the local wildlife had taken to the streets. So, with no chance to swerve out of our lane, (high curb to the right, car to the left) and no time to brake, we had no choice but to scream bloody murder and drive straight OVER the duck, which was, as you can imagine, fairly put out about the whole thing. Now, before you call the ASPCA all up on me, I didn’t HIT the duck, I straddled it with the tires of the rental car, and it came out just fine on the other end.
We, however, took to calling the rental car Duck Dodgers.
. . .
I returned to Arkansas a month after the duck incident, and spent the evening with a few friends in their backyard. Their back patio is composed of pebbles, and I was happily digging through the rocks, enjoying the feel of the cool stones on my bare feet while drinking wine and listening to the conversation. It was late in the evening, about 10:30 pm, and we were just sitting around, shooting the breeze. As I kicked through the pebbles, I felt something on my foot, and reached down to flick it off. Except…it was a SLUG. A big old squishy slug, crawling up my own personal foot.
I lost it completely. I commenced yelling, which started a chain reaction of screams from my friends, and ended with all the dogs in the neighborhood barking their fool heads off.
Self: “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!”
JW: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
Self: chucks slug across lawn while simultaneously leaping on top of chair
JW: falls out of chair entirely
Self: “AAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
Rosie: “AAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
RW: “What the hell? Why are you all screaming?”
Self: “Slimy! Foot! Slimy onna foot! SLUG!!!”
Neighborhood dogs: “BARKBARKBARKBARKBARK”
RW: “really? A slug? Overreacting much? We get those all the TIME around here.”
Self: attempts to gnaw foot off at the ankle
Neighborhood dogs: “BARKBARKBARKBARKBARK”
It took a good fifteen minutes for all the damn dogs to shut up, and after their initial reactions, even JW and Rosie didn’t feel sorry for me. But, come on! A slug? I’ve never even SEEN a slug in Colorado. Maybe I am spoiled, but I sure am grateful. There’s really only one thing to say:
Hooray, Colorado!*
*(with all apologies to folks that may live in Arkansas, or the surrounding areas. I actually think that part of the country is beautiful, gorgeous and green, but damn! Slugs? No thanks.)
I really need to start packing for my work trips earlier than, say, the morning I leave. This whole thing wouldn’t have happened if I had been on the ball, or so I tell myself. Now, that is…
My flights almost always leave at 10 am, and while I have been sprinting-through-the-airport-puke-on-my-shoes late more than once, I have been getting better. The earlier I set my alarm, the more time I have to check a few e-mails, pack and dress before it’s time to head for the airport.
Unless, as happened last week, my flight is scheduled to leave at NINE. (You may take it as read that I realized this only AFTER waking up, meandering downstairs, and casually looking over my itenerary while perusing e-mail.)
I sprinted back up the stairs at nine hundred miles an hour, and began to frantically pack, scuttling back and forth from the closet, dodging dogs, and trying not to wake up BB, who was peacefully snoozing in bed. The whole time my brain was running a dialogue something like this:
Black clothing! Yes! Into the suitcase! Wait, we hate that shirt! Back to the closet…yes! This black shirt is much better! Ooh, a WHITE shirt! Yes! Confuse everyone…pack a color besides black! Quick, back to the suit–OH SHIT!!
At this point, I stopped and lifted my right foot up. And there, lodged in to the ball of my foot at a jaunty angle, was a drill bit.
A. DRILL. BIT. (1/8″, if you’re wondering.)
There I was, not even dressed, clutching a shirt in one hand and a bloody be-drill-bitted foot in the other. I was amazed! The damn thing went in at an angle; there was about an INCH of drill bit in my foot. (You may wonder HOW a drill bit came to be on our bedroom floor, and the sad answer is that I’m LAZY. I brought it home weeks ago from one of my stores and it just ended up in a pile with all the other crap that comes out of my pockets at the end of the day. In my rush to get packed, I had bumped into the speaker that had all the pocket detritus on top, and the drill bit, being of the cylindrical persuasion, just rolled right off and onto the carpeting.)
Anyway, I stared at the drill bit for a second before I registered what happened.
It didn’t really begin to hurt until after I pulled it out, and that’s when I started whimpering, which woke up BD and sent him screaming down the hallway for towels and band-aids. He refused to let me stick my entire foot into the automatic ice maker in the freezer, even though I begged. He insisted we clean it up (which involved such stunts as hobble-to-the-sink and try-not-to-puke-and-faint-while-your-husband-scrubs-the-wound-and-dumps-half-a-bottle-of-peroxide-on-top) then I bandaged it, and limped out the door 20 minutes later, made my flight just fine, and spent the next few days trying to explain to everyone that yes, I’m an idiot and no, I don’t need a wheelchair.
One week later, and almost better, I headed to the high school to help out with the guard for the first time since last season.
If you’re wondering? One week later and almost better does NOT mean a person can spend a few hours prancing around the football field, choreographing flag work and dance phrases.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here with my foot in the freezer.
W Well, hello there! Welcome to my blog. In an effort to get past the awkward “getting to know you” phase, I’ve taken an idea I’ve seen on numerous blogs, and viola! Getting to know ellbee (yes, yes, pretentious un-capitalized nom de plume, but I think it looks cleaner) in 100 statements.
1. I’m left handed. This means I have to turn my paper 90 degreees sideways to write comfortably. When I was in college, there were only 3 left handed desks in my art history classroom…and they were always taken by right handers.
2. WTF, people who take left handed desks!
3. I love veggies that begin with A. (And other veggies, but those are the best.) However, I HATE cilantro. Deeply.
4. My husband hates all veggies.
5. Despite this, my husband one of smartest people I know.
6. I love to cook.
7. However, I almost never do, because I’m very lazy.
8. I would rather read than watch t.v.
9. But I’m not hopelessly lazy; I did spend 4 summers in thecolorguard of a drum and bugle corps.
10. 10-12 hours a day all summer is enough exersize for a lifetime.
11. I have the coolest parents ever.
12. My dad encouraged me to burp loud and often when I was younger.
13. Mom was not thrilled.
14. She taught me to cuss loud and often.
15. Dad was not thrilled.
16. My first words were “Jesus Christ”.
17. Not in a pious way.
18. My husband and I have two dogs.
19. My husband hopes daily they’ll run away and never come back.
20. They’re pretty stupid.
21. Seriously.
22. They eat grass. And tomatos. From my garden, dammit!
23. I always used to deride Apple products as too trendy, propriatary and damn expensive.
24. Then I got an iPod touch.
25. I’d make out with it if I could.
26. Most of this was written on my preshuss, preshuss iPod.
27. It’s a good thing it has spell check.
28. Because the letters are small and hard to hit with my fat thumbs.
29. I have a very large vocabulary.
30. I don’t take advantage of it very often.
31. I’d rather use made up words.
32. Like re-cock-ulous.
33. I like to cuss.
34. I also have an exorbitant amount of useless knowledge in my head.
35. I’m a good person to have on your side in a trivia battle.
36. I hate incorrect apostrophe use.
37. Haaate!!!
38. I love to read science fiction and fantasy.
39. I also love me some video games.
40. I got a PS3 and Rock Band for Christmas.
41. SCORE!!!
42. I’m a decent singer.
43. I’m tragic at the drums, though.
44. I played cello for many years.
45. So that’s how I hold my guitar.
46. I live in Colorado.
47. And don’t ski.
48. I sail, though!
49. I own a boat as old as I am.
50. I call it “Mudball”.
51. You can probably guess how attractive it is.
52. I have to have chapstick or lip gloss on me at all times.
53. I find a lot of chapstick tubes in the laundry.
54. Usually empty.
55. The heat of the dryer melts them.
56. Oops!!!
57. My husband is much cleaner than I am.
58. This drives him crazy.
59. I’d also much rather avoid an argument than talk it out.
60. That kind of makes me sound like a guy.
61. I’m not, though.
62. I do always have to be wearing at least one piece of jewelry.
63. Preferably a big ol’ necklace.
64. I wear seven rings on my hands.
65. And one on my pointer toe.
66. If that makes sense.
67. The three largest toes on my left foot are all the same length.
68. I have one tattoo of colorguard flags.
69. On my lower back.
70. Should have thought about the placement a little more.
71. Tramp stamp!
72. I have a few body piercings.
73. I went to college to major in theater and left with an art degree.
74. And the aforementioned body art.
75. I actually use my degree in my job.
76. Sometimes…
77. I have taught high school colorguard for about ten years as a side job.
78. I got a promotion at work that has me traveling every other week.
79. So I have to give up colorguard, for the most part.
80. This bums me out.
81. And all my travel is to Oklahoma and surrounding states.
82. Yawn!
83. At least I get beau coup frequent flier miles.
84. That’s about all you’ll hear about my job; I wouldn’t want to get Dooced.
85. I bite my nails.
86. I can stop for months at a time, and then blammo!
87. Back to square one.
88. This usually happens when I’ve been drinking.
89. I should stop.
90. Mmm… alcohol.
91. I love red wine, especially a fruity Zinfandel.
92. And good beer.
93. And vodka tonics!
94. This is my first attempt at a blog…
100. Let’s see how it goes.
