Note to Self

When you leave for work in the morning, and you look back and think to yourself, "Hmm. Looks like the cats are really low on food...." you should walk back into the house and feed them.

You should NOT walk out and think that maybe now they'll eat all the food they've spilled on the mats, and save you the trouble of cleaning it.

No.

You should go back into that house and feed the cats.

Because if you don't......

FINNY WILL GET TAKE-OUT.

Dear poor rodent thing. I'm sorry my boy was hungry. I'm sorry he flattened you to a pancake. I'm REALLY sorry for the unsophisticated way I tossed you into the ravine.
I'm sorry for so many things.

But mostly I'm sorry I didn't feed the fucking cats.

Thoughts on a Friday

I made an iPod playlist called Girl Rock. (Not all girls rocking - but it was rock for this girl. This girl here. Me.)

Regina Spektor - Fidelity
Amy Winehouse - You Know That I'm No Good
Tegan and Sara - This is Everything (Live)
Indigo Girls - Romeo & Juliet
Lily Allen - Smile
P!nk - Stupid Girls (usually skip past this one - def a mood-specific song. Like where she's going with it, though. Wish more celebrities were going there, too.)
Outkast - Hey Ya! (because I've never owned and have loved it forever)
The Strokes - Between Love & Hate (this chorus is my motto)
Feist - Mushaboom (similar to the Regina Spektor, but came first and enthralls me)
Ani Difranco - Cloud Blood (again, lyrics on this one and how she plays with the combination of sounds blow me away)

The Regina Spektor song has a great chorus, where she plays with her voice while singing the line, "and it breaks my heart" over and over. The song is about love, but I hear this refrain and I think of Lauren, and it just so encapsulates (in a weird way I won't be able to explain to any of you, EVER) how I feel right now, and have felt since December 19, 2005, regardless of whether I'm talking about it or not.

You know, basically my whole life I've been heartbroken. I am constantly breaking my heart on people, things, trivial events that most people shrug off and go jogging over. And I realize how ridiculously sensitive I've been my whole life. Because when your four year old niece has a brain bleed that causes her to be unable to use her right arm (still not using it - everyone is worried) your heart fucking breaks for real. My brother is my brother and I am me. And neither of us has ever been perfect, or even nearly so. But my brother's genetics combined with my sister-in-law's produced what is as close to perfect (twice, because Camryn is a phenomenon, too) as I think I will ever see. And the fact that something so completely out of our control has happened to her, and that this something will make her life hard in any way, it kills me. It kills me and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart.

I'm listening to it over and over and over and over and over. I don't know how many of you reading this know how I listen to music. When I hear a song that resonates with me, I listen to it over and over - hundreds of times in a row, until I know every lyric by heart, until I have so closely identified with the emotion expressed I may as well have written it myself. I listen to a song I like until I can pick it out in .35981 seconds of the first note.

I wish I wasn't such a complete idiot about HTML and could do fun stuff with my blog. I've attempted to alter the HTML code a couple of times with things I wanted to add, and am unbelievably unsuccessful. Which drives me batshit. I even have a book (admittedly not really talking about how to do things in Blogger) but STILL CAN'T FUCKING DO IT. I have seen songs uploaded and linked on blogs, but haven't the faintest clue how to do it.

I tried to figure out how to add something in the sidebar last night (with the book) and failed. Which sent me out to the couch with a big glass of wine - where I fiercely and quickly knitted a scarf for the cat.

Which, OHMYGOD. Please get me a life, STAT.

A girl that worked for one of my tenants knew I liked Tegan & Sara. She gave me a bunch of B-Sides, which thrilled me to no end, and one of the songs was the Tegan & Sara song above (but not live). I played it for my husband, and while he likes Tegan & Sara, he listened to this song, (the three times in a row he permitted me to play it aloud to him) and watched me listening to it, and said, "You're dark."

Is it bad that that brief statement gave me more pride than most compliments ever do?

It is true, don't be mistaken. It was just having it recognized, in spite of my often effusive and cheerful demeanor, that meant the most to me.

Again, with the tangents. I know. But hey! Those of you that are actually checking in with this have all spent a great deal of time with me at some point in our lives, and if you could follow my train of thought then, I expect it isn't too shocking now.

p.s. Scarf! After the apeshit destruction of scarf #1, I knitted another one in four days that I actually made no mistakes on and was able to finish off and give to the Pope. He doesn't wear it, of course, but it is a passable scarf. Vindication.

A Plague! A Plague is upon me.

The four of you that read this will notice I've been gone awhile.
I got sick. AGAIN. For the second time in two months. Almost exactly a month from when I was so sick the last time.

This time my head was so stuffed up that I had free access of my nostrils for about the 3.2 miliseconds it took them to realize that that loud noise they heard was me blowing a quart of snot into a preciously too-small piece of tissue. I would honk out a liter, then stand there as my nose pressure instantly increased back to ridding my vocabulary of most intelligible consonants.

I couldn't eat in front of my husband, because the noises I was making in order to combine breathing with swallowing and chewing were abominable. Horrendous, B-Horror-Movie noises of something waiting in the wings that was dripping with slime and looked vaguely like that thing that exploded from that guy's stomach in Alien. (which pretty much describes my unshowered and honking visage to a T.)

AT THE VERY SAME TIME Seattle experienced Part II of why Global Warming sucks ass. We had another snowstorm, this one cheerfully followed by four days of temperatures so cold that all the snow and ice that was created on day one is STILL THERE. Today it is supposed to be warming up and I'm desperately hoping that one day of temperatures a squeak above freezing will be sufficient to melt four inches of ice and snow off that big hill I need to take to drive myself to work tomorrow.

I don't drive well in ice and snow. It scares the hell out of me.
Today I'm going to ask the Pope to drive me out of here, just to prove to me that it can be done, and I'll take a picture for you of the hill I'm talking about. On Friday, which was day two of the lingering ice and snow, there were 7 cars that couldn't make it up the hill stopped where they stood. Which makes two-way traffic on that hill very challenging. Especially the asshole who didn't even bother to pull over to the side, he just stopped in the right hand lane and walked home. Dick.

Gimme a Pop - UNGH!

There are some things I don't do.
I don't curl my bangs and puff them up with hairspray. I did try that, back inna day when it was so tres vogue, but my feather-fine muppet hair took 8 gallons of hairspray to stand up, and then promptly sat down again, 14 seconds later.
I don't talk on my cellphone in public. I rarely talk on the phone at all, actually, but never in public - especially crowded areas just BRIMMING with people who couldn't care less what I have to say to my close friends.
There are a lot of things I do not do.
Yesterday, I discovered one more.

Step Funk! with John. At my gym. John is an awesome instructor, he's subbed for my Pilates class and he is hard but funny, and I usually laugh through the class and go home ouching. So he told me about his new class and I said, "SURE! I'll try that!"

I have, in my not-so long life, tried Jazzercize for preciously 7 minutes. With the grapevining and the complicated moves, I was out of breath and out of pride in record time. I calmly rolled up my mat and stomped out the door (I was probably 23 when I tried it).

I thought a step class sounded fun, though. Stepping on and off something, hey, I do that every day! I could do that a hundred times in an hour.

FUN! Eff Yoo Ehn. FUN.

So apparently a step class is very much like aerobics, only you step up on things and then do the complicated moves like grapevine, the MAMBO move and Pivot, or as I like to call it, "the sure-to-completely-fuck-up-my-knee move."

(I'm pretty sure I'm developing a wicked bum knee. It clicks when I put weight on it to go up stairs or pretty much any movement that bends it. It doesn't hurt, yet, but it clicks increasingly louder. That grinding noise? Pshaw, they both do that.)

There were about 15 people in the class, a couple of whom I recall from the Pilates class, and they're funny and cool. And the gym is not at all about hardbodies. There are a couple, but they are typically grunting with enthusiasm in the weight room, while the rest of us softly rounded humans are sweating and beet-facing it on the cardio machines. It is a cool gym, I really like it. So the class was made up of all ages and body types, and yet STILL I was the only one who apparently can't keep it straight what foot we're starting on. RIGHT, Salome. Right foot starts until he says, LEFT. Dammit.

Oh, and the Funk! part? That's where you SHIMMY as you do the grapevine, and when you do the (ingeniously named) "walk-up" move - you POP! at the mirror. Apparently a pop is a sort of hip-hop triumph move. I have no idea. I don't POP! at anything. I get pretty enthusiastic sometimes, but I don't believe I have ever done a triumph, full body seizure POP! at anything. And part of me really wants to. Ya know. Stay current and all of that.

My POP! was sort of a half-assed rictus of movement, with an embarrassed grin, and several glances around to make sure I wasn't looking like a complete idiot. And Hey! I was. Grrreat.

To my credit, I lasted 17 minutes and one loooong drink of water until I quietly grabbed my towel and fled from the room. Only, FANTASTICALLY, I fled on a grapevine, and collided with the woman next to me, who had to be about 159 years old, and was grapevining and POP!ing to beat the band. Sigh.

To my further credit, when all I really wanted to do was go outside and smoke and kick things, I then went straight to the treadmill and walked fast on a steep incline (because running? Oh please....) for an additional 15 minutes, and then did my pull-ups and the dips on the Gravitron thingy, that is basically like my own personal medieval torture chamber - only it takes two days for the pain to be felt.

But because I was a quitter, I didn't reward myself in the steam room, which I love, and which I will sit in until I'm going to pass out, or until the magazine I illegally bring in with me (because God Forbid I'm left alone with my thoughts) starts to disintegrate.

Because I am a quitter. And quitters never win. But they do go outside and smoke. And then they go home and have a knitting fit and basically go apeshit on a poorly knit scarf.

The scarf story is my next installment in a new series which I will entitle:
I have good intentions, but basically I'm a ridiculous perfectionist who has hissy fits when I'm not perfect, and that's rough, because I'm so far from perfect, perfect can't call me on a cellphone.

Oh and my 17 minutes? Well, that has equated into two VERY sore calf muscles that are tender enough to make me walk funny today, and by tomorrow will basically have me immobilized, where I walk with sharp exhalations of pain and a wincing expression. Don't worry, all my work-mates are totally used to seeing me like this. Sigh.

Smells

You know how you can smell someone after they've walked through an area? Like a lingering of their perfume or pheromones in the air?

My engineers always tell me that they know when I'm at work because they can smell my perfume. "But not in a bad way," they'll say. "In a good way. You don't wear too much. Just enough in fact! Totally just enough." Flatterers.

Well, as the property manager in a building with approximately 600 people in it, one who is often running back and forth between my office and our engineering department - I smell a lot of people. Mostly they are good smells. There is the one lady who leaves the bathroom smelling like Fritos, which is totally weird, but not terribly unpleasant. There have been those ladies leaving the bathroom smelling quite a bit worse, so Fritos, while odd, isn't bad.

And then there is the lady who uses cheap soap. I want to buy her some good smelling soap and give it to her as a gift, so she'll stop stinking up the bathroom with the cheap soap smell, but alas, I've never seen who she is, and the Aveda lady would probably snag it if I left it there undirected.

Well, today (and this is a long, tangential post trying to get to this point) I walked into the corridor and strongly smelled.... dirt.

DIRT. Good, old fashioned dirt. And it wasn't the telephone lady, who smelled like minty gum. It wasn't the security guard (who smells like farts or some musky essential oil, depending on which guard it is) no it was someone else who smelled like dirt.

Like it smells when you garden and you turn up fresh earth. Slightly metallic smelling, but overwhelmingly natural and earthy. Dirt. There's just no other way to describe this smell.

And it got me wondering. When they get wet, do they smell like mud?

Because, eeew.

Pickles, oh my sweet hots.

CLP sent me spicy pickles from the homeland.
Thank you, Potterchick. I immediately opened one and ate three of them.

I'm having a frozen pizza tonight (EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE HEALTHIER THINGS TO EAT IN THE KITCHEN, OH RESOLUTIONS, I HAVE NO RESOLVE) and already I'm thinking about dunking pizza slices in the juice.

I love these pickles like no other pickles on earth.

Tony Packo's Sweet Hot Pickles & Peppers. Sooooooo soo good.

Best way to eat them:

Cracker
slice of cheddar cheese
smear of raspberry/honey stone ground mustard (served with them once, I've been looking for this kind of mustard ever since)
pickle

Eat like a tea sandwich.
Repeat.

www.tonypackos.com

If you've never had them, you MUST MUST get them. They are the best.

Happy 2007!!

Well, not really, but I won't get into that here.
New Year's Resolutions:

1. Blog More
2. Exercise More - at least 3x per week for at least 30 minutes each time.
3. Eat better. When the choice of really tasty or healthy comes along, pick healthy.
4. Have a better relationship.
5. Make efforts to make and retain friends that are local.
6. Care of my soul - do something weekly that nourishes me as a person, creatively or spiritually. I'm a complete wasteland, lately.
7. Cut out frivolous spending. With my brand new car payment, this should be easy to do.
8. Let Lucy sit on my lap more often.
9. Keep the house cleaner, and make efforts to improve the stuff I can improve with paint and elbow grease.

I went to a very mellow, low-key and friendly party last night. Alone. It was a disappointing start to a new year.