Update: Mean Neighbor

This morning as I left my apartment to get on the elevator, she opened her door like she was going to come out, but it was at the precise moment that I was passing her door and could tell it was opening but couldn't see her. I took a few more steps to the elevator, thinking that once I got there I would turn and give a curt greeting. Instead I turned and saw nothing because she closed her door and didn't come out.

Seriously?

I love my Kindle

No seriously I do. Even though when people ask me if they should get one I often waffle about it and kind of say no. I love my Kindle, but I should never have bought one for myself (which worked out well because wonderful, darling fiancee bought it for me for my birthday). I say that simply because it is a great thing if you have a LOT of disposable income OR you read super slow OR you have a lot of PDF's and Word documents that you intend to read on your kindle (because you can load those yourself or send them at a cost of 15 cents each.

I mean seriously, I can get myself in a bad financial way at a bookstore. Imagine carrying a bookstore around with you? That is what the Kindle is, pretty much as much as it is a book reader, if not more. Plus if you have an iphone or an itouch, you can get the Kindle app on that and do a serviceable job of reading on the go. Now I would say that I prefer the Kindle to the app because after an hour of reading the backlit screen of the app device can cause some eye strain and I don't ever notice eyestrain on the Kindle. Also, I can get The New Yorker on my Kindle which you can't get on the app(actually on the app you can't get anything that isn't a book purchased from Amazon).

However, having the Kindle is a great glorious thing. I am currently reading Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (yeah dudes, I know, but I like the fast paced breathlessness and smartipantsing of his books even if I find some of it kind of dumb, it is always a good ride and DaVinci Code was his worst book), so this morning I got on the bus and opened the Kindle case and fired up the Kindle. I backed out of The New Yorker page I was on to the main menu, and there was my Dan Brown book BUT even better there was the latest Jasper Fforde novel that I had preordered back in like September or something. It just magically appeared like Manna in the Heavens. Of course I will finish Dan Brown (one of those things you cannot help but finish), but Shades of Grey is up next.

And unless you are Sally, I would recommend Jasper Fforde's books (Sally tried some already and didn't like 'em), but they are literary and silly and crazy and mysteries and like spy detective novels but in the fiction world. They are hard to explain, but great fun and like a Harry Potterish world totally for adults (without actually being like naughty, more just over kids heads).

Back to Work

Just a regular day with the regular pain in the ass office comrade! The internet went out for not even an hour, and I got a lecture about how some other office comrade (who works for him) cannot get any work done when the internet is down (web based application in his project).

Umm, DUH! Ummm, what am I supposed to do, especially as I mostly use the internet to shit around and very little for actual work purposes? Also, as a result the one who cannot get any work done usually notices the internet is down RIGHT away, like he is the one who alerts the rest of us. I am usually the last one to know. He alerts our tech team. HE KNOWS BEFORE I DO! Thank you for the lecture douchebag mcgee! I will get right on fixing the internet because obviously I can fix that.

In a different tone, the trip to work today was eerie! I guess everyone is taking this week off or working from home or whatnot, but the buses were creepily empty. It was like something bad happened and I hadn't noticed. It was sooo weird.

Running on Airport Time

Because well, on Wednesday we went to the airport super early to get standby on an earlier flight to Tulsa that Sam's brother was already on. However, we did not get on that flight, and ours was scheduled to leave some five hours later, and we hit up a Chili's for a margarita as big as my head. And some food.

However that was good news as that flight had crew hours troubles and ended up being canceled, so a few hours after he gloated about getting on his early flight, we met back up with Sam's brother who had started that day in Seattle. Then our flight got delayed. Then our gate got moved. Then our gate got moved again. Then we kept getting text messages with inaccurate gate numbers. Awesome town. Then it got delayed some more. Then we did in fact get on the flight about an hour and a half late. And Sam's brother who had been standby on our flight got on it too! So the brother made it to Tulsa for Christmas and we all made it safe and sound. If well after midnight.

Of course it would be too much to hope that three days later the airport would be fine (after gigantic Tulsa blizzard on Christmas Eve!). So I am writing this from the Tulsa airport (bar, shut up delays are better with cabernets) about forty five minutes after our plane was to depart. ORD has a ground stop going, well I guess it just became a ground delay, and we just watched the 10:30am flight from Tulsa to ORD take off. Four. Hours. Late. We hope to get home tonight, and I see a cab ride in our future to get us all the way home.

Although Christmas was great, fun movies with family, fun gift openings. I happened to buy his parents a dvd of something that had been watching on their tivo for a month, so that was a score, and although I got both Sam's parents and his brother a copy of season one Mad Men, it was a big hit. In fact when Sam's mom saw his brother open it, she suggested they let them borrow it until he got back from his post-christmas trip to Japan (they would ship it). I was treated to cute a cute scarf and gloves, some gift cards (to awesome places) AND a gorgeous necklace that is on a thick silver cord with two little bands on it with my birthstones on one and Sam's on the other (go Sam's mom) as well as when I return home it will be to many, many quilting goodies!!!!!

Anyway, let's hope that we get to Chicago in the swiftest possible amount of time. I bet Steve McQueen is pissed at us.

Our Old Lady Neighbor is Crazy and Also a Bitch

For real. I mean she is a bit of a nutty old person (but she is also like 87 years old, so I guess she gets a bit of a pass), but we try to be nice to her and like have her over for dinner, bring her part of our homemade Valentine's dinner as a present, etc. And we try to be gracious about taking all the crazy crap that she gives us for loud parties etc.

Well a little before Thanksgiving we had her over for a dinner she bullied us into having for her, and Sam made cookies (a peanut butter with chocolate chunks and candied spicy walnuts) which she loved, loved, loved but somehow got into her head that I made instead of Sam.

So this week, when Sam made a big batch for a work going away party, Sam saved a few cookies for her. I put them in a ziploc baggy and put the ziploc in a plastic grocery bag and hung it on her doorknob with a little note saying Sam made some cookies and we thought she would like them Merry Christmas.

She returned two of the cookies with a note saying that they were the worst cookies she has ever tasted, and she could not believe that I wouldn't even bother to make her my cookies, and she had never been so insulted and a greeting card is customary. And on and on about how awful we are.

I guess that she took it as a Christmas present, and if she thought it was, yes it was disappointing. But we literally gave almost no indication that it could be a Christmas gift as well as both of us being better bred than to give an old person a gift that wasn't much more proper. We just thought she would like her favorite cookies.

Poor Samicorn is very upset and took it very badly that she didn't like his cookies and that she doesn't think he makes good cookies. Poor guy. Stupid bitchlady.

Lucky Punk

We all have been broke or nearly broke sometimes.  Some of us more than others.  I know that feeling where you realize that you have $23.48 to last you until your payday, in a week or ten days.  This is when you try not to use any of it ever, so no more eating or going out.  This is when you eat all of the food left in your cupboards, creating strange meals from a can of chickpeas and some tomato paste or convince yourself that a bag of microwave popcorn is too dinner.  It happens.  And it happened to me frequently until I started seeing Sam because well, he is way better at money than me and also happens to have way more of it than me.

 

Well this past week he went a little overboard on the Christmas spending and the celebrating with some friends at a piano bar where he feels compelled to tip the piano players extravagantly and then also the waitstaff and even the bathroom attendant (PS I hate bathroom attendants, it is weird and creepy) lest anyone feel slighted.  So there he was on the Friday before a Tuesday payday and pretty much broke.  I pointed out that we would be taking public transportation or walking for the events of our weekend, and he whined about it, but I told him it was his own dinged fault.

 

Well when I am this broke I just have to suck it up and deal.  This occaisonally bites me in the ass when I do get paid and go on a bit of a spending spree, but I deal with it all myself, like you do.  Unless you are Sam.

 

So in the apartment we decide to walk to the restaurant, which will be chilly but we will have to walk quite a bit even if we take a bus, so we suck it up.  However, on the way out the door, the doorman to our apartment building chooses this precise minute to pay Sam back $20 he owes him.  And the next day, Sam runs into another doorman, who pays him back $100 we lent him when he hurt his back and was out of work for three weeks about three months ago.  At dinner, one person paid in cash and everyone else split the bill on their credit cards which made Sam somehow end up with nearly $200 to last three or four days while he was broke.  Because that happens.  No.  Wait.  That never motherfreaking happens!!  Not to me!  Not to regular people, just no.

 

I might have told him to fuck off when he got the first $20 because he thought it was hilarious when we had just been talking about how broke he was.  I was less amused.

My Apartment is next door to a fire

And that meant I awoke in the middle of the night to sirens and bullhorns and helicoptors and beeping and other DISASTER related sounds. One lady (apartment where fire started) was killed, 12 people were injured (mostly smoke inhalation), and a bunch more were evacuated into FREEZING DEATH WINTER cold. So the fact that my sleep was disrupted is sort of well let's just say diminished.

As a result, lots of streets were blocked off when I went to walk to the bus, and there was a news crew broadcasting Live!-like local news crews do-from my front door. Seriously, our lobby was in the shot.

Then my glasses fogged up on the way to the bus stop (scarves do this in FREEZING WINTER DEATH cold), and then the fog froze and I had to scrape my glasses. Again, still less bad than actual death and being evacuated in whatever you can pull onto your pj's.

My house is like a snow globe

And by house I mean apartment, and by my I mean the one Sam bought that I reside in but that he owns. Right now lovely substantial but not fat and fluffy flakes are falling all around us, and since one half of all the walls in our apartment are big glass windows. The blowing snow and the big windows makes it feel as if I am in a snow globe. It is kind of cool!

I done lost my mind last night

Like I got a little frustrated with a little thing that should not have been a big deal and all of a sudden started yelling and freaking out about it.  In my head I knew that I was behaving totally incorrectly and very, very badly, but I couldn't get myself to stop.  And Sam found it partially funny and partially terrible behaviour (which I am SURE that it was), but he would giggle or argue with me, and it made me worse and worse.  I was like the Hulk and once you start turning green and Hulking out, you cannot stop it.  So finally after five-ish minutes of this, I attempted to ask him (but it defiinitely came out more as an order) to please not make any noise for fifteen minutes so I could calm back down.  This whole time I was yelling and I kept telling him that I couldn't stop it and that I knew I was out of control, but I couldn't stop.

 

About ten minutes later, I did calm down and then kept apologizing because I was such a jerk (I was going to write felt like a jerk, but I feel it was pretty clear that I straight up was a jerk).  He said it was fine because we did get it under control pretty swiftly.  Then he wondered what it was.

 

And I don't really know.  Although I strongly suspect it was the prescription medicine I take to keep my sinuses under control (because although saline works fine on the front ones most of the time, I tend to have a lot more trouble with my deepest sinuses while the front ones remain clear).  I don't take it super often or even everyday because it seems to be seriously hardcore, but it does say on the label that it may cause irritability and can cause mood swings.  I would guess that my snapping was clearly within those symptoms.

 

Super weird.