Let's just go ahead and take the fun out of eating chocolate, shall we?



( one more for good measure )

Grapefruit spoon = kiwi spoon = avocado spoon = weapon with which to threaten one's coworkers when they hover a little too long, crying because they got yelled at for breaking the copy machine.

This cute little yellow spoon, sitting in my desk drawer for the past year, has so many other uses that I'm just now figuring out.

The Breakfast of Motherfucking Champions: One black and white cookie, purchased at Dean & DeLuca in Manhattan yesterday morning, hand-delivered in the afternoon by my sister-in-common-law. Mmmmmm. Unfortunately, half of the cookie may soon confirm my suspicions as of late, that I may have developed an allergy to chocolate. My breakfast is my own highly scientific biological experiment. Delicious, delicious experiment.

I would highly suggest keeping your nose away from my legs today, for I decided to try some of that self-tanning lotion that all the pretty ladies are nuts about, and let me tell you, it STINKS. I smell like a bag of potting soil.

Only 2 days, 22 hours, 6 minutes, and 14 seconds until Grandma's Marathon.

And what are your weekend plans?

Also, stupid work is cutting into my LJ time. More later.

My cat has forgiven me for ripping him from the only home he has ever known and realized the awesomeness that is the new house. He has been vocalizing his enthusiasm for the awesomeness at 3:30 each morning this week. My bed finally arrived and I pieced it together and realized that I am now the owner of the World's Largest Bed. The headboard and footboard bow out, which takes up at least an extra foot in an already-small room. Plus, it's really high. REALLY high. I have to jump to get in it. Kitty has to claw the hell out of the bedspread to climb up. Spatial reasoning is not my strong point. But I'm stuck with it, because after the bed fiasco, there is no way in hell I am returning it. That would just tell the salespeople that they won. No way I'm losing this battle. Giant bed it is! Now who wants to come over for a slumber party?

Every day this week the landlord has said, "The kitchen should be done tomorrow!" Then tomorrow comes, and the kitchen has not been touched, though there are new mini-blinds and something or another has been done to the electrical and plumbing and "a splash of color" has been painted somewhere. I am not a very detail-oriented person and I could care less about new mini blinds or splashes of artificial sunshine in my living spaces. Just give me a damn kitchen because I can't use the old one due to the no-water situation, can't use the new one due to the no-kitchen situation, and my pants are getting a little snug from all of this takeout. If the landlord wasn't such a cute, bald little gay guy I would have kicked his balls by now, but for some reason I have a soft spot in my heart for bald little gay guys.

My boyfriend just surprised me by having Rock Band for the PS3 delivered to me at work. He knows the way to my pants heart, and that is through over-priced, impractical video games that I am too damn old to own. Yet it somehow did not prevent me from jumping and yelling with glee and almost hugging the UPS lady at my professional environment of employment.

I think I should wear the skirt + knee-high boots combination to work more often. It gets me a nice "Hello" or even a short chat from coworkers instead of the usual neutral nod of acknowledgment, blank stare, or downward gaze towards one's feet. Sometimes a skirt will receive the elevator eyes from male colleagues, which I pretend is disgusting but let's be honest here, I'm flattered when someone eyes up my legs or glorious rack. The male coworkers in particular will go out of their way to get a glimpse of your flirty skirt and whorish boots, asking to borrow your lotion (and not minding its feminine scent) or play with your librarian action figure. And people become oh so helpful when you wear a skirt. They hold doors! They make coffee! They assemble PDFs! Yes, I highly recommend wearing a skirt and knee-high boots. It will get you all sorts of attention and you will quickly dismount your feminist high horse to accept it.

Or maybe I'm completely wrong; maybe it is not the skirt and not the boots. Maybe it is the now-dried-up orange juice all over my crotchal region from a breakfast mishap which unfortunately resembles dribbles of urine. Perhaps it has led my coworkers to think I peed myself and they are just being nice because they feel bad for me, the crybaby pee woman who thinks she's hot to trot.

Apparently I forgot to rinse the conditioner out of my hair this morning, because my insanely large head is a hot, greasy mess today. Yuck yuck yuck. The "I'll Cut a Bitch Who Touches My Hair" rule is going to be enforced in an especially strict and violent manner today due to this folly.

Also: Why are my coworkers making jokes about labia flapping in the wind? I am overhearing this critical conversation. I am not offended and I do not feel harassed in a sexual manner despite being the only female on this wing of the building, but I would just like to know: a.) Whose labia could they be referring to; and b.) Why is she not wearing underwear on such a windy day?

I did not buy a leash and harness for my cat. Not because I came to my senses, but because the pet store was sold out of the leash that matched the rhinestone harness I liked so much.

Would you laugh at me if I put my cat in a harness and took him outside on a leash? Because I kind of want to do that, but only if people will make fun of me for it.

I was going to try for a standby flight today, but instead I woke up early and hiked a mountain and bummed around the desert. My college best friend/roommate is on her way over from her house on the northwest side of Phoenix. I haven't seen her for 2.5 years! I predict happy hour in my very near future. I should walk down to the liquor store and stock up before she gets here.

Dudes, I have to go home tomorrow. To the land of no mountains, no flowers or fresh backyard citrus, no heat or sunshine yet. And I have to go back to work. This (Phoenix) is definitely not the city for me--I am not tan enough or skinny enough and I have all my original parts, though I have the skank part down pretty good--but I'm definitely not ready to go home yet.

So my LJ choices are:
a. Post from my Crackberry
b. Post from my sister's computer, which does not have a backspace key

I chose B, so don't judge my misspellings or poor grammar. In fact, don't judge me for that anyway, because most of my posts are on my phone lately, which is just about as difficult as you can imagine, even with a full (tiny) keyboard.

So, the snowstorm in the mountains. It looked a little like this, and also like this, and a little like this too. If you don't want to click on the links, they basically say "Arizona 100-car pileup kills two and frightens the hell out of cross-country travelers trying to get from Minneapolis to Phoenix."

While we were sitting on the freeway, not moving, at all, not one bit, for an hour and a half, we placed calls to our dad, whose best advice was to take the next exit. That's wonderful, Dad, but we haven't moved for an hour an a half and we're in the mountains, so even if there were exits to be taken, we cannot get to them. Cars were flipped over everywhere we looked and pretty banged up. Ambulances and fire trucks. I've spent nearly my entire life in Minnesota, and this was the worst winter weather I had ever experienced. Visibility was just a few feet and the roads were completely iced over (I know this because we and hundreds of other travellers were growing weery of the wait and got out of our cars to explore). We found out that the holdup was a hill up ahead, which no cars could make. We were waiting on the DOT to come by and plow and salt so cars could get some traction, and we were warned that we may be spending the night on the mountain, in our car.

I have to say now that it was the most bizarre thing ever, and we did not purposely drive into a mountain snowstorm. As we approached the mountains, I took pictures of the summits covered in clouds, not realizing we were about to drive straight up and into those clouds. It was sunny and pleasant; I figured we were okay.

Somehow traffic got moving again and we crossed our fingers as we fishtailed up the hill. There were tire marks all over the medians and cars had wiped out all over the place. We were at 8000 feet at the time and the situation did not clear up until we were down to 4000 feet.

And then everything was beautiful and sunny again. The drive down to Phoenix was incredible. We arrived at my sister and brother's house just an hour and a half after sitting in a blizzard. Their house is very cute and the neighborhood is nice. Today we grocery shopped and got Jill settled in a bit and went out for sushi lunch. I'm about to go outside and enjoy the sun and grill some dinner tonight.

So that's it. I think the only other two highlights I left out was the lack of gas in Kansas (every gas station for many miles had signs saying, "No fuel", which makes me think we are in some sort of secret crisis) and my boyfriend forgetting my brithday, which I find hilarious. I hope to meet up with my uncle for a green beer tonight, my college roommate tomorrow, then head home the next day.

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes! If I don't respond to your comments or posts it is because doing so on my phone is a pain in the ass. I will try my best.

I last wrote as we were entering New Mexico and the land made this sudden change from flat fields of oil and cattle to little tiny mountains and later, bigger mountains.

The towns in NM (that's easier to type!) look like they haven't changed in 30 years. It was extremely windy and we found ourselves in a dust storm, tumbleweed and all. It was awful, but we had no idea that this was nowhere near as treacherous as what we would encounter later in the day.

Other than the dust storm, NM was unremarkable. Even Albuquerque left much to be desired. I had pictured NM as this beautiful, serene state, but the parts I saw were neither. Western Arizona was even less exciting. No "This Land is Your Land" or all-American beauty on display. Seriously, I started wishing we were in Kansas again.

Near Flagstaff we admired towering mountains with summits hidden behind clouds of precipitation. We got stuck in traffic for awhile and should have been clued in that something was up when truckers were pulled over on the side of the road while we were creeping along. We were hearing reports of interstates being closed, but it was nice and sunny so we didn't worry about it.

We finally got out of the jam and started south. It was snowing a tiny bit and there were advisories of winter weather. Being hardy Minnesota gals, we figured we could handle it. Before we knew it we were in white-out conditions in the mountains. Cars were in ditches or banged up, truckers were pulling off the road, and then we were at a dead stop.

To be continued because this damn phone hurts my fingers. Sneak peek: an hour later we were still stranded on the mountain road.

We are coming up to the New Mexico border, and Jill is driving. It is very foggy and there is not much to look at but feedlots. I really hope the fog lifts soon because I have been looking forward to watching the terrain change from flat fields of cattle and oil to desert mountains.

Minnesota was unremarkable and the coffee was awful. Iowa was icy and cold. Missouri was hilly and blanketed in snow. The landscape started to green up in Kansas, and in Oklahoma it was safe to say it was spring. Texas is precisely what I had imagined; all of the states were.

We quickly abandoned our plans to switch drivers every gas stop when I declared I was perfectly content behind the wheel for the first 17 hours and 1000-plus miles, and Jill was equally happy in the passenger seat. We had hoped to stop sometime after Oklahoma City, but it was early in the evening so we continued on. In western Oklahoma, I was weary, but no hotel had vacancy until Amarillo. So that's the story of how I came to wake up in Texas on my 26th birthday.

Gotta go--my ears are popping and it suddenly turned very hilly(!) so apparently we're not in Texas anymore.

I never imagined I would be so thrilled to be typing on teeny tiny Crackberry keys in a lumpy bed at the HoJo in Amarillo, Texas, but at this moment, this stinky motel room is just about the best thing ever.

My plans for next week look like this:
( Read more... )

My household is stuck in an endless cycle of resentment lately. The damn cat stays up all damn night, meowing and clawing up the damn curtains, which makes me angry and threaten to bring him to a shelter, which makes the boyfriend upset, which stresses out the cat, who stays up all damn night, meowing and clawing up the damn curtains. Last night was the last straw because the damn cat pissed on my damn backpack. We've never had a single spraying problem from the damn cat until last night, when he was so damn angry at me.

On the plus side, I've been getting to work at 6:00 a.m. because I can't sleep. Once at work, I start my mad Googling, "Make my damn cat shut the hell up". I already invested in a spray bottle and a laser pointer, put in a good hour of hard playtime before bed, and pretty much do everything the internet tells me to do. Now I'm pricing out baby gates and expensive miracle potions. I don't understand how the best cat in the world has turned into such a bloody terror. Damn cat. I get no damn sleep and the damn coffee is terrible today.

In other news, good friends Don and Elizabeth had us over for Don's birthday dinner. 100 percent, made-from-scratch goodness. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, biscuits, banana cream pie with cookie crust, and some store-bought cookies (our measly contribution, plus we brought the oil). Holy crap, now I know why America is fat. Everything I had for dinner last night and everything I ate in Michigan = delicious enough to eat every night of my life and completely worth having to invest in larger pants.

I'm going to try this new thing; I like to call it "Doing Whatever the Hell I Want." It was inspired by a dream I had last night where I took a job as a public librarian in New Jersey, moved into an awesomely-tacky apartment with an ugly chandelier, and had random sex in a Jersey City bar bathroom while my boyfriend was at home doing the dishes.

The first step is to make public posts every now and then, starting with this one (HI MOM! SORRY I DIDN'T MAKE IT TO DINNER LAST NIGHT; I WAS ON A SHITLOAD OF COCAINE AND MAKING LESBIAN PORN). Maybe some stranger will stumble across me, not run from the crazy for a change, and we will be lifelong friends.

The next step is to download whatever music I want, despite the eye rolls and snide comments from my boyfriend. This was a good choice. Reminds me of wonderful, careless times and annoys the hell out of my boyfriend. Perfect.

Then I'm going to start playing the harmonica again. Because girls and harmonicas = sex. Also because I seem to have no other musical talent (DAMN YOU, SANTA! I ASK FOR THE SAME THING EVERY YEAR AND YOU CONTINUE TO FAIL TO DELIVER.)

I'm going to go to the zoo more despite the fact that people feel the need to tell me that I am contributing to animal cruelty by going to the zoo. I like baby orangutans. I'm going to the freaking zoo if I want and I will go alone if I have to.

Speaking of animal cruelty, steak is tasty and I shall eat more of it.

I should probably pain more often too. People like my paintings and I like making them.

I like beer. I like enjoying beer outside of the comfort of my own living room. The boyfriend does not like bars. Will find new people to go to bars with. Also, will find people who will let me enjoy beer in the comfort of their living room.

This Plan is a work in progress. Feel free to offer suggestions.

Impulse purchase of the day: Trip to New York, departing Friday.

Did you know that I love cake? And that I have severe body image issues? Of course you did; you all have been reading my LJ for longer than three days!!!


But now Hostess has introduced the 100 calorie cupcakes. Three (little tiny, really tiny) moist yellow cupcakes with that (little tiny bit of) familiar Twinkie filling, covered with (the smallest dab of) chocolate. Save for eating out, I pretty much eat organic nowadays. But when a girl needs her cake, she NEEDS her cake. And this girl needs her cake today. So 100 calories worth of chemicals can't be that bad for me, can they?

I also just discovered that these contain beef fat. So all those years when I thought I was a fat vegetarian munching on safe, delicious Hostess cakes, I was really just fat. Shucks.