From my new computer. We bought an Emachine - no major bells and whistles or serious upgrading. Just enough to let us have the basics at home. Life without a computer bites. I would suck as a LIttle House on The Prairie character ... reading by candlelight just wouldn't cut it for me, even if sleeping up in the loft would be kind of cool.
Anyway, Lee and I went out "just to look" and came home with our new baby. I was surprised at how reasonable the deal was, and also at how easy it was to get everything hooked up. I guess between us, we know more about this computer stuff than we think we do!
So before we went computer shopping, we had to take the van in for some work this morning. We stopped at Dunkin Donuts on the way and got two large coffees and a bagel with veggie cream cheese to share. We figured we'd be sitting at the shop for a while, and we were right.
So we're sitting in this comfy little waiting area. There's a big screen TV playing all sorts of man-sports stuff (I'm not into it unless its football) for Lee's entertainment, and I've got a book. We're happy as two little clams (where does that saying come from, anyhow? Why do we think clams are so happy, when they're stuck in shells their whole lives and get eaten by seagulls?). Then in walks a lady who is having new tires put on. She's bored out of her skull. And because I had just taken out my toasty, cheesy half of the bagel and was munching, I didn't have my nose stuck in my book.
I am one those people who is both blessed and cursed with a "talk to me!" face that causes total strangers to share all sorts of stuff, with no context at all and in the weirdest settings. My friends always remark on it when we're out, and my ex used to call me "freak magnet." My mother always says "it doesn't matter where they are - her and her father both always end up with an asshole in their ear."
So, this woman gives me her life story. How she never got married or had kids. How she's missing her ritual Saturday outing with her sister to do this car maintenance crap, but is glad she didn't have to take an extra day off work, since she was already out twice this week for doctor's appointments. And then she launches into her medical history and the not-so-pleasant details of the doctors appointments. I nod and smile politely and look at Lee for help, but he's staring studiously at the TV. One thing you learn when you are a "magnet" is that even the people who love you the most will leave you hanging when you reel in a winner.
I take a nice, warm bite of bagel slathered with melty cream cheese. And as I begin to chew, she tells me "Yeah, I have to get my feet checked next. The spaces between my toes have gotten all hard and crusty."
One thing you DO NOT want to hear in the middle of a bite of cream cheese is anything ... anything at all ... about crusty toes.
I'm just saying ...
And wouldn't it just figure that my first post from my new computer is about some strange lady's crusty toes?
I haven't done a Ten on Tuesday in a while (not having a computer at home means you tend to sneak in a few blog quickies rather than actually think through a post), but I saw this one in Florinda's blog and it struck me as a must-do. Plus, I brought home my work laptop and I'm all giddy about having a working computer here for the weekend, so I simply must write something!
10 Best Vacation Moments
West Virginia Summers
As a kid, I spent several weeks every summer with my relatives (my father's side of our family) in West Virginia. There was the great-grandma who let me bang out godawful noises on her living room piano (I never was very musically inclined), made me brush my teeth five or six times a day, and made sure she put me in a dress and dragged my butt to church on Sundays even though I tried my best to explain to her that dress-up was surely NOT what summer vacation was about. There was my great uncle who was a Ronald Reagan lookalike, had a fish pond in his backyard and a pet raccoon who hung out with me in the living room. There were my great-aunt and uncle who had never had children of their own but loved having a campfire and almost making me wet myself, first out of laughter over their fart stories and then in terror over some old mountain region ghost legend. And there was my other great-aunt and uncle who had children my age and let me join their family in the daily rituals of running their farm - milking cows, working in cornfields, and mucking stalls.
Ocean City Summers
Each summer when I was growing up, my parents also made sure we took a family beach vacation to Ocean City, MD each year. Thrasher's french fries doused in vinegar, playing endless games of Pac-Man and Skee-ball in the arcade, laughing with Mom on the beach over men in "bird suits" (I never was much on Speedos), swimming way too far out into the ocean and scaring the heck out of mom, buying cheesy tee-shirts and getting up early to sit out on our balcony with our binoculars for the occasional glimpse of dolphins swimming out at sea.
"THAT" Ocean City Summer
When I was fifteen, I brought my friend Joyce along for our weeklong family vacation. The morning we were supposed to leave, Joyce and I were packing up our bedroom and watching my little sister while my mother and father started loading up the truck. Mom knew we were all bummed that it was time to go home, and decided to cheer us up. She stood outside the bedroom window, flattened her face up against it, bugged out her eyes, made a fish-face and said "I seeeeeeee you."
The only problem was, all the hotel bedroom windows looked alike, and she had miscalculated by one. A little old lady lounging about in her PJ's got the surprise of her life. Mom's mission was still accomplished though - Dad told us what had happened and we all laughed all the way home.
Deep Creek
Another favorite childhood vacation was the year we rented a cabin at Deep Creek Lake. My mother swore that Jason Voorhees was alive and well and hanging out at our resort (and took the fact that someone had carved "Jason' into the dock by the lake as evidence of this) and was going to come kill us all. My father drove into West Virginia and brought my cousins up to spend the day with us. They had never seen anyone eating steamed crabs before and were so traumatized by our gleeful abandon as we chowed down on what to them must have looked like big red spiders that one cousin burst into tears and wouldn't come out of the cabin again until it was time for Dad to take her home.
Spring Break
I was too poor to do the whole spring break trip to Florida in college. No "Girls Gone Wild" for me. But one year, three girlfriends and I did trek to Ocean City for a few days, where rates were cheap in the chill of March and we could still see the ocean. There was a group of guys from another college in the room next to ours, and other than that our hotel was pretty empty. Of course, we all became party buds - especially since one of the girls in my group was the only one old enough to buy beer. One night I had a bad reaction to having way too much alcohol in my system and having my room filled with loud, belching, beer guzzling college boys when all I wanted to do was pass out. In a fit of annoyance I huffed out of our room wearing nothing but shorts and a tee-shirt. I got down to the boardwalk and realized it was actually SNOWING. But I was too drunk, stubborn and fascinated by the sight of snow on the beach to go back to my room, so I sat on the edge of the boards until my butt was completely numb. At some point, two guys came walking up the boards talking in bad Irish accents. They saw me and plopped down beside me, telling me they were theater students on spring break. One of them gave me his trenchcoat. We sat and watched the snow fall and talked forever, and I explained in my college-girl-drunk way that I had a bunch of morons partying up in my room and that's why I wasn't warm and toasty in my bed.
They walked me back upstairs and told the next-door gang to "get their dooomb arses out of the lassie's room." My friends were sick of the beer-bongers by that point too, and relieved. The next morning, we all realized how dumb we were - my friends for letting complete strangers in our room and me for bringing up even more complete strangers to help me get rid of them. But since it all ended well, it became a funny tale instead of a stupid-college-girls-get-drunk-and-get-hurt story.
I did one other college spring break in OC - this one with my friends Sully, Stevie and Moose and my roommate Krista. My favorite memory from that one is Krista and I getting ready to go out in our room one night (the guys were already out) and getting a knock on our door. The guy half of the couple staying next door was standing there looking quite uncomfortable.
"Ummm....your Moose is in the parking lot," he said awkwardly.
"He is?"
"Yeah ...he's kinda passed out under my truck."
I may not have had an "Animal House" college experience exactly, but it came pretty close sometimes.
Florida
Another favorite memory is when my ex-husband I took my niece to Orlando by train. We stayed with a couple I had inadvertently hooked up - one of my closest girlfriends from high school and a guy buddy from college who met when they both happened to visit me and my ex to go pub crawling when we lived in the heart of downtown Baltimore. They both worked for Disney and got us passes to the parks, yet we had a hard time dragging my niece out of their home. She was amazed by the fact that she could go swimming in March, and found their pool even more enticing than The Big Mouse.
But the funniest part of the trip was the train ride. I was snoozing uncomfortably in my seat with my niece beside me in hers, her legs sprawled over me. An attendant came by and asked my niece how she was doing.
"Not good at all," she replied. "My breath stinks because I've been eating Fritos." As if that wasn't bad enough, she hoisted herself up, added a "see?" and breathed right in his face. By the way his nose crinkled, she was right.
OK ... that's only six, but I've been going on forever and its time to curl up and watch a movie or with Lee. I'll write out the last four later, or maybe just cheat and make it a Six on Tuesday. I've already mucked it up by doing it on Friday, so what's a bit more cheating?
Oh, and Sylvester's feelings are hurt because I do NOT trust him near the work laptop. I'm such a meanie, not wanting to have to explain to the powers-that-be that I need a new one because the cat somehow managed to destructo-kitty it. I mean, how could you not trust THIS face?
I meant to blog yesterday, because blogging is good for the soul and all that. But I never did. In fact, I didn't do much of anything at all. That's because:
- I began my monthly five days of It-Ain't-So-Great-To-Be-A-Chick time. You know, cramps, backaches and general blah-itude.
- I had what seems to have turned out to be either allergies or the most short-lived head cold ever. Stuffy nose, runny eyes, heavy head, sneeziness, and major case of the "duhs."
- It was TRUE swamp-ass outside.
In case you were wondering, the combination of having your period, a head-cold thing and swamp-ass weather is sort of like a reminder to be good or you'll go to hell - and by the way, THIS is what hell feels like.
I was glad when bedtime rolled around so I could write yesterday off.
I did manage to drag my butt out to buy coffee and coffee creamer, because coffee and coffee creamer are not luxuries or wants, but must-haves in my house. And I swear, someone was trying to tell me to cut back on the caffeine or something. I went into the nearby convenience store. This store always sold the International Delight creamers, which Lee and I both love. They stopped about a year ago, and we were quite pouty about it, because that meant we had to go to a real grocery store and stand in a real grocery store line just to get creamer. But they recently started selling them again, so I went there yesterday for my White Chocolate fix.
I grabbed the creamer and went in search of coffee. None. Well, there was decaf, but decaf doesn't count. I decided to get the creamer anyway, and got in line. When I got up to the register, the clerk takes my creamer and starts trying to scan it, and it won't go through. "Why won't this work," she yells over to the other clerk after the third or fourth try.
The other clerk comes over, stares at my creamer like it is some sort of illegal substance, and says "Hey! We don't sell that!"
It takes me a minute of stunned disbelief to realize what's going on. Even when they stopped selling the creamer, they kept bottles of it in their takeout coffee station for customers to use when they made their cups o' java. The clerks apparently don't know they're carrying the stuff for sale again, and think I just grabbed one from their coffee station and tried to buy it. Like I would pay top dollar for used creamer.
While all this is going through my head, the clerk is looking at me like I'm a creamer-grabbing piece of bug shit. I'm hot. I'm crampy. I'm stuffy and sneezy. I'm achy. And I want my creamer. So I smile and say "if you don't sell it, then why is it in your fridge, Einstein?"
Really, I'm not usually that mean. But I did get my damn creamer.
Today I am working at a frenzied pace to get caught up enough to have my long weekend. I'm in serious need of these four days off, for sure. I plan to spend them working on the spare room, swimming, computer shopping, reading, and avoiding the swamp-ass weather at all costs unless I'm floating on a raft in a pool.
Happy Thursday! Being computerless at home has me woefully behind, but I'm reading as I can and thinking of all of you! Unless I'm fortunate enough to actually fix my computer situation at home this weekend, I probably won't be updating again until Tuesday, so happy weekends to all too!
Things That Suck:
- My schedule today:
Meeting: 8:15-9 am
Meeting 9 am - 10 am
Session 10 am - 3:30 pm (with short lunch break tossed in as an afterthought)
Meeting 3:30 -4:30 pm
Meeting 5-6 pm
And they wonder why we're always behind on tasks?
- I feel like I gain and lose the same 10 pounds every day - in my HAIR. I leave the house in the morning and it is all soft and wavy and light. By the time I get home, it looks like several birds have come and nested in my hair - it turns into one big puffy, frizzy, heavy, human-hair sign that says "I hate humidity!" During the Swamp-Ass Season, I only have good hair when I don't have to go outside.
- Not having a computer at home. I miss being able to read and blog and post photos whenever I want. I miss being able to jump online and check the weather or the bank account.
- Dropping the van off to have some work done on Saturday only to find out they have to order a part and it will have to go back in NEXT Saturday too.
Things That Don't Suck:
- That because I don't have a computer at home I spent much more time working in my yard and reading real books (with pages and stuff) this weekend than I usually do.
- Fresh squash from my mother's garden - grilled and seasoned or fried up and dipped in just a bit of ranch dressing. Yum! We had it for dinner at my mother's house on Sunday, and Lee and I brought some home and cooked it up again last night.
- Taking a colleague who was stuck in town over the weekend to The Pub and having him feel right at home. I have to admit that I subconsciously gage my new friendships by how people react to The Pub ... if you mostly like it (it's OK to find it a little ... um ... different... but you gotta at least be entertained) there's a chance of us having a lasting friendship, but if you're totally turned off by the VERY "real folks," no-frills, lack-of-anything upscale, lots-of-idiocy feel of the place, we're probably not gonna have much in common.
- Watching The Vinster and Sly interact - they are just so damn cute. Sly is fascinated by Vin, and Vin's just all "whatever" about Sly. Sly pats him to try to get attention, and Vin just gives him "the look" and goes about his own business, which is usually curling into a weasel ball and snoozing. We don't let them hang out unsupervised, but they top evening TV in terms of our weeknight living room entertainment.
- Appreciating the absurdities of life. Like yesterday morning. I came into work REALLY early (as much to get some 'personal" computer time as to start the workweek off.) It was pouring down rain outside, and had been for most of the night. But yet, outside my office building, the auto-timed sprinklers came on and started watering the grass. It was like they were trying to outdo the storm. Also, someone planted two tomato plants just outside our building. Who would have thought cube farms came with real veggie-growing?
Things I'm Looking Forward To:
- A 4-day weekend, starting Friday
- Clearing out the "computer room" (not the work itself, but the end result).
- Getting a new computer
What movies do you have memorized? Bonus points for sharing your favorite quote.
Submitted by Andymatic.
I don't know that I have any movie completely memorized. But there are a few that I've watched enough that seeing them again feels like hanging out in the living room with a crowd of old friends.
One of those is "Office Space," which is not only funny but pretty much defines how I feel about work. Oddly enough, the first time I saw it, I found it kind of slow-paced and boring. I didn't hate it, but it certainly wasn't a film I saw myself watching again and again for years to come.
I think that might have been because I was fresh out of college and not ingrained enough in or jaded enough by office life to appreciate the truths and humor in the movie. The first time I watched it again years later, when I was channel-surfing and it just happened to be on, I was like "holy crap - this is brilliant!"
I think my favorite part is the neighbor who is in construction work and always talks to the main character, Peter, by yelling through the thin walls in their apartment building. Peter has an annoying chipper woman in his office (don't we all), who responds to him being less-than-enthusiastic in returning her greeting by saying "oooh, someone's got a case of the Moondays!" (think of a squealy yet schmoopy and drippy voice that drags out 'Monday' forever).
Peter asks his neighbor whether anyone at his work site says that, and the neighbor goes "Hell, no. Where I work, you could get your ass kicked for that!" Classic, and a line that had office-drones everywhere wishing they worked in the great outdoors instead.
On a more embarrassing note, I also know quite a few of the lines from "South Park: The Movie." In fact, it was on TV the other night when my friend and Lee and I came home from The Pub. When Cartman broke into his song "Kyle's Mom's A Bitch" I found myself singing along with him, and not just because I'd had a few beers.
I might need a life.
That's probably because it's Friday, and my attitude always improves when I know the workweek is almost over.
A bit of randomosity:
- I meant to blog about this earlier this week and I forgot. When I was at the pub the other night, I heard one of the regulars tell an old guy who was pissing her off that he was "so on the bucket list and just needed to leave her alone." I had no clue what she was talking about, and later realized that "The Bucket List" is a movie about people who are gonna be dead soon or something. As insults go, that's pretty darn harsh!
-Lee did some research and found a place real close to home that can take a look at the computer. Not to fix it, necessarily, but to try to retrieve the stuff we have on the hard drive that we, being jackasses, did not back up. Mostly just our pictures and my failed attempts at great American Novels. As for replacing the computer itself, it really does seem like it will be a lot more affordable than I was thinking. The last time I bought a computer was a REALLY long time ago - I stretched this one way beyond its last legs. I am going to try to stick to my guns and fix up the spare room before getting another computer to put in it though. It'll be like incentive or motivation or something.
-I've got no major plans for the weekend, and that feels perfect. I m hoping to get started on the room, catch up on some sleep and reading, go swimming, and maybe hang out a bit with my work consultant who ended up getting stuck in town over the weekend after the scare at BWI Airport got his flight canceled yesterday.
- I am sooo liking this idea more and more employers are having of moving towards 4-day workweeks as a way to help employees with gas costs. I doubt if my employer will bite on it, but it is a fun pipe dream. Especially since I already end up working 10-hour days anyway!
Happy Friday, and good weekends to all!
I'm just having one of those weeks, ya know?
The weather around here has returned to a mucky state of swamp-ass. We all know how I feel about swamp-ass. And it seems that the elevators in the building where I work on the project aren't so fond of it either.
Three different times yesterday, I came back from a meeting, lunch or coffee run to find the maintenance gang and/or the campus police in the process of freeing someone who was stuck in the elevator. The building's old-timers, the people who have worked there for years, all just sort of shrug and say "it gets like that when it gets humid. They always get people out."
Um ... Dudes. Am I the only one who finds that downright CREEPY?
The idea of being stuck in an elevator at work is really one of my ideas of hell. I work on the 6th floor, which is perfectly walkable going down and bearably so going up. But the air conditioning doesn't work in the stairwells, and did I mention that it is swamp-ass? Oh, and I wore girl-shoes yesterday. I really am too clutzy to do stairs well in girl-shoes.
So I compromised, and planned coffee runs and out-of-building travels in tandem with co-workers I liked. I figured that way, if I got stuck in the elevator, I'd have someone to talk with to keep me from panicking. I'd get in the elevator and cross my fingers, hoping that a.) we wouldn't get stuck and b.) if we DID get stuck, no one who drives me batshit would have gotten on board in the meantime.
I made it through yesterday, and today I wore tennis shoes, so the stairs are a bit more appealing.
In other news, my home computer is finally and totally dead. I think. It just won't start at all. It is old as dirt by computer standards, and has given me many warnings that it was about to shit itself. But I've put off getting a new one because they're too expensive for me to buy outright and I have a dysfunctional fear of debt that keeps me from buying ANYTHING I can't afford to pay for straight up unless it is practically a life-or-death need.
But for reals ... a computer kind of IS life or death for someone who goes a little psycho when she doesn't get to write, isn't it?
We'll see. I think the first step may be to try to live without one long enough to do a complete overhaul of the spare bedroom where the computer lives. After all, the excuse not to do that before has pretty much been "but I don't want to muck with moving the computer." That excuse is as dead as the PC. Then maybe I'll price some new computers and see what I can do. And in the meantime, I'll just read books and do productive things like clean more at home and come in a little earlier or stay even later to blog from work when I can.
I'm kind of excited about the idea of a new computer, but at the same time I dread it. As embarrassing as it is, although I am employed as a project lead in an implementation of a COMPUTER system, I am horrifically challenged when it comes to things like hooking up PCs, setting them up to access the internet, and all that. When it comes to those things, I am a technological spaz. Lee's a bit better at those things than I am, so hopefully it'll all work out.
Oh, and I realized too late this morning that I had no milk or creamer in the house, so I had to venture into work without coffee. I have reached a phase in my life where I think black coffee tastes like ass, and I can't even drink it as an emergency measure because it turns my stomach. I'm lucky I didn't walk out in front of traffic or fall off my deck or something. My big old cuppa Starbucks I have now does taste extra yummy, though.
Yep. Someone peed on my karma.
If you could leave notes for the future, what message would you have left in the past for today?
Submitted by Nameless.
"Do yourself a favor and stay in bed today!"
... and I thought I had a bad attitude sometimes.
This was a conversation I heard when walking across campus to a meeting yesterday:
Cute, perky, probably-still-a-teenager-college-girl 1: "So, if reincarnation was real and you could come back as anything, what you would pick?"
Cute, perky, probably-still-a-teenager-college-girl 2: (Sips her coffee thoughtfully). "A praying mantis."
College Girl 1 : (scrunches up her face and looks disgusted). "Ewwww. Gross. Why?"
College Girl 2: "Because then after I had sex with a man it would be totally socially acceptable for me to just bite his head off and be done with it."
What question do you hate being asked?
Back when I was married, it was "why don't you have kids yet?" or "When are you going to have kids?"
I didn't have kids because I wasn't ready for a multitude of reasons, and I wasn't sure if I ever would be or wanted to be. But that's really tough to explain to people who really just think you "should" have children.
Now, the question seems to be "when are you gonna get hitched?"
I really don't HATE this question as much as find myself kind of bemused by it. Lee and I will go down that road someday - we're sure of it. And we're not putting it off for any particular reason. I guess maybe we're weird, but in our way of thinking it really doesn't define our committment to or love for each other. That definition comes from how we live, how we love, how we treat each other every day, and the plans we make for a future together.
My divorce wasn't a bitter one, and it didn't make me bitter about the concept of marriage. But I have to admit that what it DID do was make me place a lot less importance on marriage as a "defining point" or "next logical step" in a relationship.
We don't plan to be Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed or whatever her name is, being together 20-some-odd years and never tying the knot. Sure, Lee wanted to be a rock star at one point, but "Playboy Playmate" never came up as a goal on all the "what do you wanna be when you grow up?" tests I took. We just don't feel any sense of urgency about it, because honestly, being married wouldn't change a thing about our relationship other than our tax status and our ability to have a joint healthcare plan.
What bemuses me about the question is the way it is asked, like we've been together FOREVER. It has been just over two years, which really isn't all that long. I think people think I'm getting OLD and better get hitched quick!
And the other thing is, neither the "having kids" or the "getting married soon?" questions really bother me when they come from people who are close friends. I don't mind talking about personal stuff like that with people who are in my life. They bug me when they come from work acquaintances or people I see once in a blue moon up at the pub - people who don't really know me personally or have much involvement in my life. Which is weird of me, I guess, because I also have no problem pouring my feelings out in a blog where ANYONE can read them, but think casual aquaintances asking those kinds of questions makes them nosy!
Links from my Friends and Family
Emily's new blog
A wonderful site for those interested in writing tips and...
