An Okay Day

I had an ok day.

• Worked out HARD and erased all aggression from my spirit. (Which is good, considering I honked viciously at an absolute moron right before going to gym. Unfortunately, they were going almost my entire way there, so by the the time I turned into the gym's driveway, I'd totally freaked them out like I was going to follow them and beat the snot out of them for that totally bullshit turn on red they took. Which, come to think of it, I was pretty heavily debating. They pulled into an alley and waited for me to pass. HAW. Dorks.)
• Put my Italian Lessons on my iPOD. Because sitting on the desk untouched? Not really working.
• Watered all plants. (sorry plants I'll be better, thanks for not dying)
• Ate pretty well today.
• Was generally congenial and productive at work.
• DID NOT SMOKE EVEN THOUGH I'M FUCKIN' DYIN OVAH HEAH.

The Pope loved his first day of work, and promptly came down with the flu tonight. Chills and frogs in throats to beat the band. This poor guy. He marries me and all he gets is my luck.

I had a very withdrawn weekend. We attended a birthday party, and after I took an hour to get home (seriously, what the fuck Seattle? Is it POSSIBLE to not have traffic. Once?) I crawled into bed and stayed there for about 28 hours straight.

I'd go on, but I'm developing a bad case of ennui.

NOSMO KING

Today was my first day without a cigarette in a very long time.
That is, of course, unless I was so sick I was coughing up blood and I sounded like a stalled car when breathing.

It has actually been about 24 hours without one, now.

Which is HUGE. HAYOOOOGE. Big.

I am wearing the patch. I started wearing the patch (from a pack I bought about 6 months ago and never used) approximately two weeks ago. I immediately noticed a significant decrease in my irritation level, something I think the four or five of you reading this will raise your eyebrows at, because what is Salome if she is not irritated???? And the answer to that is, of course: BITCHY.)

I wore the patch and occasionally smoked until the patches ran out. Then I went to get more patches. My smoking hadn't stopped, but it had significantly decreased, enough to make me want more patches. And at the store I discovered an ASTOUNDING thing.

I bought the wrong patches the first time. I bought Step 3! I tried to cut in line!
The first time I opened the right patch (Step 1, I'm doing it right this time...) I about gagged.

Step 3's patch is tiny and cute and fits discreetly on my upper arm, where I would painfully rip out seemingly endless hairs each morning while removing it. I alternated between arms and rarely was bothered by it, in fact, almost always was able to forget about it completely.

Step 1's patch is not fucking around. It has about 3x more nicotine than Step 3 and is about 20x times the size. It is almost just exactly kind of like stepping into a body-sized flypaper. It covers the width of my arm and extends further than a really bad tattoo. I can't help but notice it, because it wrinkles when I move and is visible in a Tshirt. It also rips out all kinds of new seemingly endless hairs, on a much larger scale.

And seriously, when am I going to rip out all the hairs? I can't possible have this much hair on my upper arm. Gross!

The increased nicotine made the skin around the patch (in bleedy, veiny patterns) bright red, almost immediately. I saw it and was alarmed at first, and then thought, "lung cancer is probably way grosser," so I left it alone. The red is gone now, except for a perfect, patch-sized square that remains no matter how long it has been since I forcibly ripped it off, wincing and dancing every morning in the shower.

And I like it. I'm not freaking out or anything, this high level of nicotine isn't making me loopy or weird like the Zyban generics do, meaning I don't sit and drool vacantly in front of my computer anymore, and I really don't feel a tremendous urge to smoke. I finished out the pack (of course) when I first started wearing them and smoking was nasty, something I had to do, but really wanted to get over as soon as possible.

The only thing that freaks me out about these patches is the dreaming.
I'm dreaming in vivid technicolor, and soooooooo detailed. I'm detailed down the hairs on a dog in a farm in Ireland where I've set up a complicated business of creating paper from words spoken by druids that survived all these years by eating the DNA off of roots of the hairs plucked from Scottish beards. I could probably sit down right now and write you my business plan.

I've thought that I should write these down, because they are WAY weird. I mean, no one would believe this stuff. I think my REM cycle treats nicotine like coffee, and is finally like, "Now is MY turn to talk!"

And Brain?
You're fucking strange.
I mean, all along I've thought I was a bit off. But THIS?

This is INSANE.

Last night I dreamt that my brother and I were taking some sort of seminar together, in an area that my entire family was vacationing (because what better time to go to a SEMINAR??).
Each morning a buffet was laid out in my parents' hotel and my brother and I would go there to scavenge it. They had some dish that had cottage cheese and fruit all mixed together like a salad, and it was good, it was really good, and I woke up thinking I needed to write it down so I could make it. They also had a runny, bean-dip kind of salad that had tortilla chips in it and my Dad yelled at me that I was taking too long in line trying to get one single tortilla chip to sop up all the goop with. Looked like it had a bunch of chips mixed in, but every scoop was just more and more bean dip. I ended up somehow with my cousin Ricky and some other person in my tiny apartment in the heart of a city and while I thought we all went out and had a great time, I woke up in the dream and everyone told me I had fallen asleep early and just dreamt that I was a good hostess and they were all annoyed with me. There was a lot more, but I'll move on....

The night before I went to a Bible Study Class and it was cool. Which surprised me after I woke up (of course nothing fazes me in the dreams, except for the night before, which I'll tell you about in a sec) because I've always been reticent to attend Bible Studies Classes because I think I'll end up in a circle of overweight women who don't wear makeup and don't color out the gray in their hair, and they'll wear dresses with anklet socks and scrunchies in their hair. These people (men and women) were hip and cool and funky and real. And later John Paul and I returned there and they hooked me up to a heart monitor for hours, and let me sleep and then fed me a chocolate dessert plate with something lemon on it and I remembered thinking, "I should be on a diet, but honestly I'm on a fucking heart monitor here, so fat can't be the worst of my problems" and then we were driving over big hilly roads and I looked out the window and thought, "these would be a bitch to walk up." and then we were antique shopping with the cool people from Bible Study. (This is about 1/100th of the detail and length of the dream. I kid you not).

The kick-off (I've been on the patches for three days) was dreaming about some book being published on the architectural history of the Paris city of Nantes (CLP!!) and at the last minute it was changed to some other city which I remembered the whole next day but now I forget and I was working with the researchers who were really well respected and somehow in the middle of this I had to run to my hotel to get my stuff out of the room, only when I arrived there I didn't just have enough stuff in the room for a hotel stay, but I had apparently lived there for a many years and my entire life collection of crap was there. So I compromised and took three pillows and a cloth purse (because, of course!), and folded them neatly into my suitcase. But to get to my tiny bungalow hotel, I had to go through some ancient but well preserved 4 star hotel, and the whole thing was a mess of weird hallways and elevators and marble sloped floors that I slapped along running like a primate and I was really stressed and pressed for time, and the whole time I'm learning about this architectural city switching and how the researchers are pissed off because they've been working for months and have to redo everything in two days, and then I'm in class telling everybody what I had just learned (so clearly it was really important to my real brain to listen to it) and then the researchers complimented me as we walked outside and I was walking in a ditch next to them, and I handed them my card and felt really hopeful like they were going to make me famous, and then they walked away and the sun was shining and I walked into the cathedral entryway of what was apparently my college and a man walking with his girlfriend stopped me and said, "you know who they were, don't you? Those professors?" I said no, and he said, "They were two of the 11. The Tina Steenson 11. They were two of them." And I gasped like I really knew what the hell he was talking about and the girl he was with pulled at his arm and said, "Let's just go," and the guy walked away and I heard a BUM BUM BAH! in my head like I was a TV detective and my new case had just been revealed for myself and the viewers.

Needless to say, I'm absolutely exhausted every morning.

Worse.

What's worse than finding little dead rodents every so often on your living room, dining room, bedroom, hallway floors?

What's worse?

WHAT'S WORSE?

Feathers.

Lots and lots of feathers.

Covering the hallway.

And then a teensy bird wing, separated at the joint.

And...

Nothing else.

Even though you searched the entire goddamned house looking for a bird carcass.

Sigh.

Dear Eensy Baby Bird,

I'm so sorry. I swear to God I'm going to get that little guy a bell.

Love,

Finny's Mom

p.s. Please, if you are dead and under the bed or something, send your ghost or stink early.

Thoughtful

Today in the mail I received a bubble-pack from Potterchick.
She had called and asked for my zip code, so I knew something was coming.
I asked what and she said, "It's for you. You'll know what it is."

I opened the bubble pack and there was a card and an envelope from her bank.
I opened the envelope first, because I'm really five years old at heart.

Inside was a dried, pressed red rose.
I stood there and looked at it, mystified for a second and then it hit me.
And I welled up with tears, and felt such gratitude for her, for her thoughfulness, and for the fact that she knew I would want this, that she pressed it and found it again and sent it to me.

My beloved grandfather died December 7th.
At the funeral in Ohio, Potterchick came immediately and stayed with me the whole time. She drove in the funeral procession and listened to me alternately cry my eyes out and bitch at my loser cousins.

She took care of me when I drank two bourbons and a huge shot of Jamieson's on an empty stomach. She drove me all over town. She let me smoke a hundred cigarettes and dash away from her whenever I saw someone I wanted to say something to.

She deflected my increasingly strange aunt from talking to me too much.

She was sympathetic when my stomach went apeshit and sent me to the restroom every 13.4 miliseconds for four days. (What on earth was that? Stress?)

She was, in short, my absolute rock the whole time. She was the one person who I consistently looked for when I felt sad, the one I knew was there for me, and would let me cry without feeling like a huge baby. She let me hug her in her gorgeous suits.

At the cemetary, each family member stepped up and took a single red rose from the arrangement on my grandfather's casket. When we got to the wake, I set the rose on her car seat so I wouldn't mush it up when we were inside. After the bourbons and the whiskey, I didn't recall what happened to that rose.

My mother and sister-in-law and my brother kept their roses and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. I remember feeling like a jerk because I'd gotten too drunk and couldn't find mine. (I also felt slightly reminiscent, because getting drunk and not being able to find things isn't exactly new for me. Where's my car? Dude?)

I just pressed the rose into a beloved picture of my grandfather and I.

Thank you so much for your extreme thoughtfulness. It is appreciated beyond anything I can ever say to you.

Recent events have overcome the grief over the loss of my grandpa. But the loss of him is a palpable one. You would have to had known him to know what he meant to me, and to everyone that ever met him. You would have to know my family and I very closely to know that he will be remembered and missed frequently, all the days of our lives.

It is just every so often that someone comes into your life and makes it better just by the fact of them. My grandfather was one such person, and I had the priviledge to have him for 32 years.

Potterchick, you are another one.

Love you.

In the Weeds

It's been a while, I know.

Work has sucked lately. It has sucked, I have sucked at it, and life sucked thusly.

I've finally decided that I'm fat enough to really get motivated about getting UNfat.

Three times working out at the gym this week. Still get done and skip crunches or ab-work, because, honestly? I don't know what I'm doing there and always feel stupid. I saw this teeny woman doing a series of serious ab work and I was floored. I decided right then and there to have six banana splits when I got home. Just to temper the disappointment in my own shape. Ya know.

We don't really have the fixings for banana splits at home.
I know this because if we did I would have stress-eaten them all, separately, this week.

I got a lot of sleep last night and came in this morning to work, refreshed and enervated.
It was a full 30 minutes before I said, "I totally fucking HATE my job."

Which is excellent, this past week considered.

I have fun things planned for this weekend, Baby Brody turns 1!!!
For those of you who don't know who he is, let me just tell you, he is the most precious little guy you've ever met. He is the kind of cute that makes your ovaries release eggs and your pheromones go crazy, pumping out enough scent to attract all the dogs in Wisconsin.

Yes, honestly, he's that cute. Holding him makes my husband want a baby.
Holding him makes me want a baby. Actually, a baby like him. Because holding him kind of makes me worried that there's no way my temperament could ever produce a child this mellow and happy. Mine will be screaming constantly and will smoke at the age of 6 months.

I am sure of this.

Thinking about all of this has made me want to pull my husband into the bedroom and try to convince him to have a baby 6 months earlier than we've been planning to try to have one.

Excuse me.

More Letters Because I Keep Thinking of New Ones

Dear Asshole in the Mercedes SUV:

You're an asshole. Flooring it alongside me in the merge lane for the 5 Freeway was a dumbass thing to do. You might have realized that when I threw myself on the horn for a full 2 minutes after you forced me to slam on the brakes in a busy merge situation.

Listen, DICK, nasty women struggling with anger issues always have the right of way.

One more thing, congratulations on driving a Mercedes. The second I saw your pallid, thin face I knew you worked in Systems Programming at Microsoft. And before you puff up your boyish chest with pride, IT IS NOT A COMPLIMENT.

No matter what you do, no matter what you drive, you will always look like you're on your way to Nerdapalooza. And any hot woman that sleeps with you is only doing it for the money. And you'll know this deep down in your conceited heart, and it will eat at you for the rest of your life.

Enjoy the car,

Salome

Dear Darling Little Girl At Target Today:

I walked past an overstuffed rack of boy clothes and caught your movement below. I looked down, and there you were, peeking out from under the clearance rack of winter boys clothes. You were so mischevious and just about the cutest thing I've seen in days. I smiled at you and you beamed back at me, a smile so sincere and bright that it lit you up like a roman candle. You made my day, sweetie.

Keep on Keeping on,

Salome

Catching up on my correspondence....

Dear Man in Seat 12C:

Thank you for reclining your seat as far back as possible on this 2 hour flight from Colorado to Seattle. I appreciate your consideration, especially since United has the least amount of leg room I've ever flown with. Further, thank you for not believing you were reclined all the way, and repeatedly throwing yourself backward in your chair, and crashing into my knees with each throw. I couldn't appreciate that more.

The next time I fly with you, sir, I intend to purchase the seat in front of YOU, and batter your knees bloody as often as I can.

Sincerely,
Salome

Dear Middle-Aged Couple at TCBY in Denver Airport:

Listen, folks, it doesn't take 20 minutes to order frozen yogurt. I appreciate that you think of each other as "cute," and let me tell you, repeating it for the entire 20 minutes while the line behind you grew 15 people deep, well, that was CUTE. Totally cute. So cute that my teeth hurt, and sugar poured out of my tear ducts. I could have invented yogurt in less time than it took you to order one large Old-Fashioned Vanilla swirled with Juicy Orange Sorbet. Yes, that's right, two spoons. No, two spoons. See, there are two of us, and we're so CUTE. Hey, we got our yogurt, honey! I'm going to rearrange my wallet right here, right now, while the angry young lady behind me is trying to pay. Because I'm cute.

Sincerely,
Salome (the angry young lady who sighed loudly at the contents of your wallet)

Dear Lady Behind Me On The Plane With the Really Annoying Laugh:

You're not funny. Whoever you were sitting next to? Not funny. Nothing could possibly be so funny that you had to laugh that godawful laugh where you trilled up to a closing, "Ha Ha HAAAAAAA!" every thirteen seconds for a two hour flight. I appreciate your general sense of good humor, trust me, I do. If you've read my correspondence file, you'll see that I could use a bit of good humor, in the general sense, in my life. But while I appreciate that you are FUN! and you really think things are FUNNY! I was in agony listening to you. I hated you so much that I sat in my seat, knees bloodied, and thought of ways to cut out your vocal cords with the items commonly found on airplanes. I sincerely regretted the fact that you can't bring explosives on board, because I wanted nothing more than to stuff you full of bombs and set you off. I fell asleep and dreamt of leaping over the three rows that separated us and ripping out your tongue with my bare hands.

Happy Travels,
Salome

Dear Contact in My Left Eye:

I have no idea what I've ever done to you that makes you want to hurt constantly for two days straight. I'm merely trying to see, and go about my life supressing an extraordinary amount of anger. Your tiny little pain spot in the left arc of yourself is present upon every blink. You have travelled up into my eyelid 15 times since I put you in one short month ago. I would throw you out and replace you, but your right eye counterpart is fine, and I am cheap. Please have the courtesy to get your fucking act together.

Sincerely,
Salome

Dear Inexplicable Facial Breakout:

What the fuck?
I mean, seriously, what the fuck?
I'm serious. What the Fuck?

I Hate You,
Salome

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.

The end of the world is nigh.

I have joined YouTube and discovered that my digital camera has a movie feature.

Who knew?

Certainly not Finny.

I better get him an agent.

Thank You God

Lauren had her angiogram today and came through fine. She woke up and wanted butterscotch pudding (the hospital must have just restocked itself from the 100 previous puddings she's eaten).

My mom called and was effusive with joy.
The AVM is flat, like a pancake, which surprises us, because from all the websites and descriptions we thought it was a bulge.

The doctors are releasing her tonight into the care of her parents. My brother and sister-in-law are the greatest parents I've ever seen. With their loving guidance and gentle ways, Lauren will recover quickly. This I know.

They've recommended a type of radiation "surgery" called Gamma Knife. I've done research (oddly enough, I'd already heard of this while researching a potential tenant) and it is pretty spectacular. Beams of radiation are focused on one spot in the brain (precisely located within a fraction of a milimeter to the intended area) and are beamed from several locations outside of her head. Each ray individually is too weak to cause any damage or effect to the matter it passes through. The only danger comes when all beams converge, and this is focused on the spot the doctors want to "die." And it should die. There will be no incision, no hole in her skull, and no danger to the areas they would need to get past, to get to the center of her brain where the AVM is. Good news.

Only downfall, as opposed to surgery, which cuts out the AVM entirely, this procedure kills it, leaving it in her head. 2-3 years is the typical amount of time to know whether the Gamma Knife surgery has been entirely effective. But still. Her brain won't be poked at by surgeons, who, despite all their best efforts and technology, will still have to move areas apart and cut through areas to get to the AVM. The risks of which are astronomical. No matter how good they are.

Thank you, God. Thank you Grandpa. I know you were there, watching over and alerting us to the danger in her head. Thank you. Please stay with her until she is all clear.

In other astoundingly good news, Lolobird was up and walking yesterday!! (Another reason they are releasing her). She hopped all over the room when my mom was with her and was so excited to be moving around. She told my brother that she can't go to school yet until her legs are "fixed." She was scared at first, but then really really excited.

Thank you to all my friends who were so worried and praying for us. And my astounding company, who has been so supportive. I have the best bosses in the world.

A Broken Heart

On Tuesday, December 19, I received a call that instantly and completely broke my heart.
My 4 year old niece, Lauren, had been rushed to the hospital with what was discovered to be a bleed on her brain.
Turns out that she has a genetic condition known as AVM (arteriovenous malformation). It is a tangle of blood vessels located anywhere in the body, but more predominantly in the brain. That senator from South Dakota (Iowa?) who recently had brain surgery had an AVM.

They can rupture. Unless they rupture, you don't always know that you have one. You certainly don't routinely do MRIs on a perfectly healthy (and unbelievably precious) 4 year old girl.

Lauren's ruptured during naptime at daycare on December 19th. She woke up from her nap crying and unable to walk, move her right side, talk or open her eyes. They called my sister-in-law, who called 911 and Lauren was rushed to the hospital.

A few hours later, she was airlifted to Kaiser Permanente Oakland (from Sacramento Kaiser) where she was admitted to Pediatric ICU.

My parents caught the next flight out of Toledo to be by her side. The pope and I flew down on Sunday to see her.
She is talking again, although with some difficulty. She does not have full use of her right hand and can't stand on her right leg. Her smile comes and goes on the right side of her face - sometimes it is perfectly fine, other times she smiles and only the left side moves.

She knows she has an owie in her head and that is why she can't color with her right hand as she used to.

I can't talk too much about it right now, because I'm exhausted from the quick trip to Oakland and the visits by my beloved niece's ICU bed.

They need to do an angiogram (where they inject dye into the affected area) to trace the blood vessels and pinpoint exactly where the AVM is to help them understand the risks associated with the surgery. SURGERY. My 4 year old niece will have brain surgery in the next week. That is a fact. They will go in and try to cut this out so that it never bleeds again. All we know is an approximate location: deep in the center of her brain near her basal ganglia.

I'm posting this so that you pray for her. Please please send a prayer for her. She is the light of our lives. She is the most beautiful little girl that I have ever seen. She is the loveliest, smartest and most precocious little girl I've ever met.

This is Lauren:

Please keep her and my brother & sister-in-law in your thoughts.

OH MY GOD.

Tonight on my way home I realized that my lights weren't on.
No problem, right?

Wrong.

I was HALFWAY home. Which means I'd been on the freeway for at least 10 minutes.

OH MY GOD.

Typhoid Salome

I flew home and within 24 hours of being with CLP she came down with stomach flu.
The very same day she drove home, her mom was afflicted.

Right before I left, I transferred all various and sundry germs to my sister-in-law. Luckily, I had exactly the kind of medicine that would help her! The odds!?!

My sister-in-law promptly submitted said germs to my father's attention. Father is reviewing them now.

Before I even left Seattle, however, I gave them to my husband.

I cut a swath of sickness everywhere I went.
If I was still this potent on Monday and Tuesday, just imagine how many people in my tightly packed seminar in SF I felled? I am drunk with the power.

In other news, we bought a CAR!!!!!



In way old news, I'm really fat! Hey, there's me with a gorgeous new car. I'm really fat!

In our continuing story, my husband is really terrific, and so, so handsome.

That is all. I have storm pictures to post, but I'm currently smoking S's cigarettes, left here in August. And don't bother asking, that whole quitting smoking thing is going just fine. I haven't bought a pack in days.

Saloooooooooooooooooooooomeo

p.s. CLP, driving home from the dealership, I ran over a huge piece of someone's car. You'd have been proud. I'd been driving the car for a total of 10 minutes. :)

Donald Frederick Wilhelm

My grandfather died last Thursday at 5:45pm.
He was surrounded by my aunts and uncles and grandmother, who laid her head next to his as he was dying and said, "Thank you sweetheart. Thank you for so many wonderful years of love and friendship and for our wonderful children."

I flew home early yesterday morning and cried when I saw my mom. I cried when we got home and saw my dad and Uncle Bob. I cried when I saw my grandmother, but she won't let anyone cry over this. She says he is in a better place, and he had such a full life, we should not cry for him.

My aunt Joycie came in about an hour later, when she and I saw each other, we just stopped where we stood and burst into tears. We cried in each other's arms for a while. Everyone laughed and said they knew we were going to do that.

We have a showing today from 4-8pm and another one tomorrow from 2:00pm - 8:00pm. He will be buried on Tuesday.

My brother flies in today with his wife and girls.

We have collected about 200 pictures from my grandfather's very happy life.
My cousin PJ made a slideshow to play at the memorial home and showed it to us last night. My uncle Tommy couldn't hold back the tears, and everyone gathered at my grandmother's house cried themselves into headaches.

My grandma would tell us the stories behind all the pictures as they flashed up. She had told a story of how my grandfather wrote her a song and wouldn't play it for her until she agreed to go steady with him. He carried his violin in the backseat of his car for two years, ready to play it for her when she agreed. One night they were "necking" in his car and she told him she would go steady with him. He whipped out the violin and played her a song he called, My Darling Nancy. A picture of my grandpa leaning against a car flipped up on the screen and my grandma called out, "that's the car we were necking in!!"

My grandmother fell in love with my grandpa at first sight. She told us all that, but said that she still made him wait two years until she would go steady with him. Because she was a good girl.

My grandfather loved my grandmother with all his heart for all his life.