I'd rather be home gutting pumpkins

Normally I like to take the night off on Halloween and stay home to pass out candy.

This year I am working. I didn't anticipate there would be so many other people wanting tonight off since most of my colleagues do not have kids and are not Halloween dorks like I am.

But a couple of people took vacations and the one guy with a kid took the night off to go begging with her.

So here I am at work while at home my porch light is off and the steps are jack-o-lantern free.

The picture above is from last year. I ended up with six jack-o-lanterns total. Yeah, that Jack on the bottom right step is puking his guts out.

I also put the paper bags out with some cat sand in the bottom and then lit tealight candles to light the walkway.

I did not dress up last year. But I have in the past, including stints as Marge Simpson and a giant Christmas present.

I never did get into the whole deal of putting on a costume to go to work. I mean, it's work.

So today for work I just went with a black dress and a little jeweled spider-shaped pin in my hair.

There is a scattering of Halloween-themed shirts, a lot more people in all black than normal and one guy dressed up in cardboard and foil as some sort of robot.

I guess it won't be all bad here today though. I just filled my candy bowl and before anyone can take a piece I will make them say "trick or treat."

It's been a woe-is-me few days here

Yeah. I have felt a bit like this woeful statue the past few days.
Man trouble. Which is nothing at all like what I think of when I think of lady trouble.
Anyway... Things seem to have settled. At least for now.
That is the reason for the lack of posts here. I have just not felt like I had much of anything to say.
But I shall spare you all the gory details.

By the way, the picture was taken several years back at the Bonaventure Cemetery outside Savannah, Ga. Pardon the lousy scan, but I have a lousy scanner and the photo is pre-digital.
Savannah is one of the most beautiful, haunting, memorable places I have ever been and I really hope to get back there some day.

7 more things about me meme

Yeah, it's all about meme.

1). I take my sushi apart to eat it. As in, I take the piece of fish off the rice ball. Then I eat the rice ball. Then I eat the fish. I really should just order sashimi with a side of rice.

2.) I collect refrigerator magnets, but (for the most part) I don't keep them on the fridge. There is a beam that runs between the dining area and living room area. I put metal panels up there and then put up my magnets. I would say 99percent of them are from places I have actually been. A few were gifts from other travelers. They make quite the conversation piece when people come over for the first time.

3.) I sleep in pajamas because I am afraid there will be a fire or earthquake or some other disaster in the middle of the night and I am afraid I would have to run out of the house without being able to get dressed. I don't want to stand in the middle of the street naked.

4.) Mayo not ketchup on fries. I don't know why. It's just good.

5.) My first husband hit me. One time. And I hit him back. Yep, that was the end of that one.

6.) My favorite type of flower is the tulip. So much beauty in such a simple design. (No, I didn't take that photo. Yes, I wish I had.)

7.) I spend too much time thinking and not enough time doing. I think about what I need to do. I think about what I should do. I think about what I want to do. But only a fraction of it is actually done. I need to do more.


If they are so inclined to share on their blogs, I would love to know seven more things about:

Angela at Blog It Like You Mean It
Lou at Little Earthquakes
Connie at I Digress

Hell, I wouldn't mind knowing seven more things about anyone who wants to share.

Ring of fire

It's gross here. Getting grosser as the day progresses.

There is good news as far as the fires go. They are bringing some of them under control.

No one I know has lost a house or anything and I live far away from any of the burn areas.
The photo is a view from the parking garage at work looking toward the area of the Orange County fire.

It just gives you an idea of the air here.

I feel so bad for the people affected by this.

It's not all Malibu and movie stars.

These are real families losing their homes.

I heard a story on the radio about a family that got out fine, but had to leave pets behind. Apparently they have a real menagerie of about 50 pets. They just had no way to get them all out of there.

Those are the stories that make me the saddest.

I just hate to hear about animals being caught up in that stuff. In our human dramas and disasters.

There was a story about a guy who committed suicide by driving his car off a cliff on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. He had his dog in the car and the dog died, too.

Why? That was what I wanted to know. Why did he have to take the dog with him?

Is that skewed? Or am I normal for thinking this way?

Good for a cheap laugh

I posted to YouTube for the first time today.

And since I got nothing else, here is a video of my cat climbing a ladder then chasing his tail.

Trying to light a fire under my own ass

There is really only one word for how I have felt the past few days: listless.

It is perfect.

Listless is defined as "characterized by lack of interest, energy, or spirit."

Yep.

I lack all those things.

Pretty much the only thing I have had much interest in or energy for is puttering. I basically puttered away my weekend.

OK, I had a brunch/lunch sort of thing Sunday. But that pretty much zapped all my energy for the rest of the weekend.

Maybe this was brought on by my cold last week. But I started feeling much better by Friday as far as that goes.

Maybe it is the weather here. It was about 95 degrees when I was driving to work today at noon.

Maybe it is the foul air here. In case you haven't heard, Southern California is one big bonfire.

Or maybe it is a slight case of depression. I get that once in a while.

It's not nearly as bad as I got when I was going through my separation, divorce and re-entering the dating pool.

But I do recognize the basic feelings. Listless. That is always the underlying feeling.

When I get this way I really have to force myself to do stuff. Today I had to come to work. So that wasn't a choice.

But over the weekend (Sunday and Monday for me), I really had to tell myself to get up, do some chores, run some errands, eat something... And it felt good to get even the smallest of things accomplished.

Maybe next weekend I will get more done.

Maybe by then the heat will be gone, the fires will be out and the smoke will have cleared.

Maybe that is all I need.

And now for my next trick... **updated**

Let me start by saying I was not looking for Britney news.

I was checking my Yahoo e-mail and this was one of the headlines:
Britney Spears turns herself into police

Nice trick.

Maybe I can turn myself into Oprah just long enough to transfer some of her money into my savings account.

This kind of stuff just bugs the hell out of me.

Obviously she went to the police to turn herself in. She didn't morph into a cop.

But the Internet will save journalism. Right. I keep hearing that.

I heard it just last week from our new publisher. And god I hope he is right.

But if we really want to be saved, as an industry we need to take more care and pride in what we do.

I do not lay this at the feet of print people. All the print people I know would mock that headline just as I have done.

I know the Internet is all about speed and instant updates. But that story happened LAST NIGHT. There was plenty of time to get that headline right.

Sorry. A rant, I know. But c'mon people!

**I just went back to Yahoo and saw that they fixed this. Hmmm... I wonder if someone complained. I am not vain enough to think they saw it here.**

OK, so maybe I really AM a bitch

I love going to Costco. I really don't buy much.
I mean the stuff comes in huge quantities. But it is fun to go look at things.
Usually when I go I stock up on cleaning supplies, paper goods and beer.
I like to slowly wander the book and CD aisles.
I take a gander at the seasonal items and browse the wine section.
I also go there to buy gas since it is usually the cheapest in town, even with the membership factored in.

But there are a couple things I hate about going to Costco.

The first is the parking lot.
I don't understand these people who park it in the middle of an aisle and then just wait for someone. They must be waiting for someone to shop, pay, load the car and leave so they can get that spot 50 feet from the entrance.
No one wants to walk an extra 100 yards.
No wonder this country has an obesity problem.
We buy our frozen lasagnas six at a time and don't even want to walk too far to get them.

I tend to head toward the outer reaches of the parking lot and grab a space well away from the mini-van moms and the caddy-boat captains.

Because at the Costco by me, that is what you have.

I tend to go in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. Thursdays are usually the best time for me since I work at 4 p.m.

The place is full of track-suit clad moms with "JUICY" emblazoned across their ample asses and cell phones glued to the sides of their heads.
The other demographic is the, shall we say, more mature set.
Don't get me wrong, I think old people have every right to get out and shop. I applaud the ones who push their own carts filled with 100 rolls of toilet paper and a case of Metamucil. What I don't applaud is the sense of entitlement they seem to have when it comes to right of way in the parking lot. Yeah, this isn't England. Get on your own side, bub.

Just don't push your fucking cart into me.

That is when I have a problem.

So I am in Costco this most recent Thursday. I actually didn't go to wander. I went to buy candy to restock the supply I have at work. I keep a bowl on my desk and a couple giant bags in the drawer. People wander by and have a Kit Kat and say hello.

So I grabbed my three bags of mixed candy bars and am standing in line minding my own business when this woman just barrels through with her giant cart.
She was close enough to the tips of my peep-toe-pump-shielded toes that I had to look down to make sure she didn't take off my toe-nail polish.

As she cluelessly pushed her way through on her way to the next line (instead of wakling an extra 10 feet to go around the man behind me) I said "I think the phrase you are looking for is 'Excuse me.'"

OK. Yeah. Normally I say it, but not quite as loud as I did this time.

She looked around... "Were you talking to me?"

"Yes," I replied. "You almost took off my toes with your cart. All you had to do was say 'excuse me' and I would have moved out of your way. You know, like polite people do."

"Geez," she said, shaking her head and turning her back on me to unload her cart.

OK. Was that bitchy of me? I mean, I didn't call her a name. Not any kind of name referring to any kind of female body part. Besides, I keep the community candy bowl at work stocked on my own dime. And with the good stuff. Would a real bitch give away chocolate like that?

I am just constantly amazed at how people have lost the simplest forms of common courtesy.
Now I know I probably should have held my tongue and let the moment pass. But these things happen all the time and the frustration builds in me. Then I say something.

There is such a rush-rush, have-to-be-first mentality. No one wants to wait. No one wants to give an inch and let the other guy get ahead in traffic, in the store or in life.

Slow down. Relax. Let the other guy have that inch every once in a while. It might make you feel better.

And in the end, no matter how much of a rush you are in, it doesn't really take that much time to just say "Excuse me."

NC-17

Angela,
You will be happy to know that the last post earned me the coveted NC-17.
Fucking a!

JustSayHi - Free Personals

Why the fuck do we curse anyway?

The people at The New Republic looked into that.
It's a fucking good read. A little long and long-winded at times.
But all in all, it is a great piece.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, "This is really, really, fucking brilliant" on the air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation's airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define "indecency" as "material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities" and Bono had used fucking as "an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation."

and

Had it passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast the words "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "asshole", and the phrases "cock sucker", "mother fucker", and "ass hole", compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).

and

The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the syntactic classification of curse words. (California Representative Doug)Ose's grammatically illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified them as "phrases," it didn't even close the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking.

If the fucking in fucking brilliant is to be assigned a traditional part of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective and only adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really big. Yet "adverb" is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to include in his list! As it happens, most expletives aren't genuine adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say That's too fucking bad, you can't say That's too very bad. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How brilliant was it? Very, you would never hear the dialogue How brilliant was it? Fucking.

finally

Many people feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one's morals.

There is so much more in this article. Fucking brilliant.

Butting in

Let me start this by saying that I am not a smoker. And let me say I also do not work for Tribune.

But when I read this, it kinda pissed me off.

Basically, Tribune is going to start charging employees who smoke or an additional $100 a month. If they don't smoke, but have dependent(s) on their insurance who smoke, that also will cost $100 a month.

The author raises good questions. Who is next? Where does it stop?

Will be be charged for excessive drinking? If so, who determines what is excessive?

What about weight? Should fat people have to pay more than thin people?

I am worried about how slippery this slope is gonna get.

As the blogger also points out: The other thing that gets me is that there’s no reward for not being a smoker. If the company imposed a surcharge on smokers and then gave a proportionate break to all the non-smokers I could maybe be a little more positive about the whole thing.

Yeah. Because if they are going to start charging me for my fat ass, I am going to need to get that break from not smoking.

Red wine... I love you... Red wine... I hate you

Yep, I drank too much last night.
Red, red wine.
Evil elixir.

It has been a while since I have drank so much that I felt like puking.
I am not even sure how it happened.

We had some leftovers for dinner. Pot roast. Yum. Big glass of Cabernet. Yum.

More Cabernet.

Out of Cab. How about a glass of Zin.

That Zin was so good. But quite strong.

I did feel quite foggy-headed this morning when I rolled out of bed at 9:15.

But I am feeling better now after a big glass of water and some tea. I think I might make it after all.

But no wine for me today.

Bad association there for at least a few days.

My body is a taco stand

So I need to explain the title.

I am not really a John Mayer fan. He is OK. I can take or leave his music most days.

But he had that song a few years back, "Your body is a Wonderland."

And I heard that at some sound checks he would change the lyrics to "my body is a taco stand."

I just thought that was funny and it has stuck with me.


nataliedee.com

The post about my boobs and some of the responses to it got me thinking about body image.
I especially liked Lauren's comment that people should say nice things about their bodies more often.

So here I go:
Sure, I could stand to lose some weight. But my body ROCKS.

We have already established my fascination with my own boobs.

I also love being 6' tall even though it means I have a 38" inseam and cannot just go to the mall to buy pants.

I don't so much love the size 12 feet, but they go with the height and if they were smaller, I would fall over all the time.

I love the fact that I have curves and I love the fact that there are some great men out there who love them, too. Sure, my type ain't for everyone, but I don't have a problem with that.

I also like food. I like to cook it and I like to eat it. Hell, I will be conceited enough to say that I am a damn good cook.

No way would I ever be described as a "delicate flower."

I am more likely to be called "the chick who would win in a fight."

Which is fine by me.

Don't get me wrong. I have my weak moments and my self-doubt.

I have days when I change my clothes 7 times before deciding on an outfit because "nothing looks good on me today."

But most of the time even if I don't feel sexy, I at least feel confident.

I walk with my head high and I usually do it in high heels.