Oh kitty!

My cat has been odd lately. A lot more cuddly than usual, but I think that may be related to kitty anxiety. Steve McQueen has a bad or sad lonely day and then ambushes us for cuddles when we come in the door after work. He also leaves a puddle of cat hair on the couch. He is such a weirdo. But I guess more snuggling is better than no snuggling. Or less.

Unrelated, lately I feel like I have learned lately that I seem to be a head of or an early adopter of some trends, but I think this is pure accident. Well and lots of unfettered internet access with some time to use it everyday to relieve the slog of the workday. So I twitter (a little not on my phone) and I have a collection of reliable bloggers who find cool pop culture and political tidbits, and I look in on them at lunch and in lulls, so I tend to know stuff pretty quickly. This is very weird to me becuase I generally feel like I am the last one to know about everything.

thank you chrissy

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Medium
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Low
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Medium

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Totally on tv

There was an insanely brief shot (well so far but I am assuming that it is all) of my office as "Platinum Cats" in the Patrick Swayze series "The Beast" last night. It is basically exactly how I see it as I walk from the bus dropping me off on Michigan and Jackson, of course when I see there is not a trashy stripper sign with lots of neon. Awesome!

I seem like a fool!

Because I listen to TBTL and laugh aloud at it often, which is kind of embarassing on the bus or walking down the street.  Chrissy, I strongly reccomend this show to you because I think you will really like it also Jim.  Others of you may not like it much I think that Robyn, Margaret and Sara Jo will be annoyed and think it a waste of your time (I am not saying you would be wrong), Jon might like it--it could go either way, Sally you just won't see what the big deal is which is probably for the best because you do not have time for it.  Sisavadty I think you will like it but it will take a few shows to get there.  Teebs you are like Jon and could go either way, either total love or total hate. 

 

Stupid Lauren has made me one of the tens, and I can't go the roller skate party a week from today, but I am seriously thinking of trying to force Sam's brother to go because he lives in Seattle, and I do see the stupidness of this plan.  I do see it.

Do not worry, things are looking up

I mean in general.  There is much less crappiness than last week.  I am again in one of those funks where I just really, really wish life could in general be a little less hard like it seems to be for some people I see outside me.  I mean it probably isn't, this is just my sad puppy perception.  But I do really wish things could stay easier for more than like a week at a time.  Like where did I not learn all the life lessons that make other people seem to get by all happily, you know?  Was that what I traded in the genetic or life lottery in order to get nice legs and red curly hair?  I would gladly trade if that is the case.  And I get that I am responsible for some of the problems I had, that I made dumb choices that had foreseen and underestimated or unforseen consequences.  I get that.  But it just sucks.  I was going to expound on that, but I can't really add anything.  It sucks when you fuck things up.  It even sucks harder when you don't fuck things up but they get all fucked up anyway, that seems to be the theme song of my life lately.  Well, it is not as dire as all that, and that blanket statement could be true of any number of people I know many of whom are like myself far happier and healthier than a lot of others at the specific point in time in which I write this.  I have many things to be thankful for.  And it would probably do me well to be thankful for them and to focus on the things I can change.

Seriously?

Because you know my life needed my job to be totally sucky and kind of bogus after suffering through the hard bits in my personal life, it decided to try to kill me with stupidity and misery all rolled up into one.  There is a trade show in Miami Beach and it has been a disaster at every, every every EVERY front.  Not even joking.  Nothing has gone right, well, or smoothly and all of it has made my life miserable.  Now I take full responsibility for a few things that yeah, they should land at my door and I have been owning them.  They are relatively small wrinkles in this ocean of crashing hellish waves and actually would not have been rippling if other people had held up any tiny little part of their ends of the deal or been anything but totally procrastinative.

 

So yeah, Friday 4pm almost left thinking you know part time retail and busboy is better than this (because that was the moment lots of things just evaporated/disintigrated without warning), but I thought Monday can only be better main boss who I was very mad at is a whole time zone away and schmoozing which means he will NOT be talking with me, and he will be gone a week which is just totally awesome since right now I kind of want to kill him and that will definitely be time enough for me to calm down.  But was today better.  No.  No it was not.  MORE things went wrong that should not have gone wrong again if other people here had even partway done their own freaking job ad the only way I could have fixed it would have been to literally use them as a puppet to do their own job or if I did it for them, but I was already busy doing some of their job and you know MY OWN.  So yes, today worse.   Really would like a day that doesn't totally suck.  That would be great.  And at this point it doesn't even have to be a good day and will still be better than this.  By a lot!

 

Tomorrow seeing Spamalot!  Here is hoping that will assist in the bettering of my day.

Lauren, Lauren, Lauren

I blame you.  I blame you for corrupting my days with TBTL or its full title Too Beautiful To Live at Seattle area talk radio show that airs at night, but that I download from itunes and listen to on my ipod.  It is led by Luke Burbank who would be familiar to you if you are a big fan of "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me an NPR news Quiz" because he appears on it and does hosting duties when Peter Sagal is on vacation.  I have liked him on there for quite a while.  And Lauren kept raving about this show and how wonderful it is, and I bit.  I downloaded it one day and in hour one I was like eh, this kinda sucks, and hour two I was like well it doesn't suck but it isn't as wonderful as Lauren says, and hour three I was like motherfucking Lauren I like this.  Dammnit.  However, did I mention the three hours were just 1 days worth of this show.  Thank God I listen to podcasts at work otherwise this might ruin my sleep.

 

Ummm, yeah, so I also kind of reccomend it, and I want to go to their roller skate party on the 30th of January and yeah.

 

Also I have worked out quite a bit this weekend and my legs hurt.  They hurt.  They hurt kind of a lot.  BUT I am 1/4 of the way to the 5% initial buy myself an itouch as a reward goal (because then I can get the thingy that goes in my shoes and tracks my workout and stuff.  Which means I lost 2 pounds since initial weighing.  Only 14 more to go to 10% and 6 more to go for the 5%.  I have also saved $50 towards the purchase of said future itouch.

 

And as for rough patch of last week's bemoaning, considerable progess has been made towards returning to smoother patches, good progress.

Sometimes relationships are hard

I think we all know this. The boyfriend and I are in a hard patch. I don't believe it is an unendurable hard patch, but certainly a very bracing and learning hard patch. That's really all I feel like saying about that.

For the record, no one is breaking up, no one is doing awful things to the other, nothing like that is happening. There is some fighting and some misunderstanding and some crying because that is what happens the best of us in rough patches.

bad weather bad tummy

The weather outside my window is shaping up to be just as awful as they predicted. Almost as awful as my tummy illness of today. It started last night and this afternoon I started to feel better. But suckiness of gettin over stomach flu like things is that once you can eat food again you are starving and slightly wary of being illprepared to digest all but the blandest of foods. Yeah, that as kind of gross. Sorry.

My calendar is naked

Well, not naked, but pretty bare.  Especially considering the last months and what not.  Having two jobs fills up the calendar, so does having a play, and two jobs and a play turns out to be a killer.  Right now, I am in hiatus mode on play.  I have one job.  So there is a grand total of 1 play related commitment on my January calendar and then a second maybe committment--it is rough because it conflicts with a boyfriend related thing, so it may depend on which one I go to (also on weather, if it doesn't totally suck I may go to the far off one, if it does totally suck I will NOT be going to the far off one). 

 

In fact my main conflicts of the moment are trips or visits.  In exactly 24 days, my parents come to town for a weekend.  In 32 days I go to Mexico, and in 47 days I go to the Pacific Northwest (kind of all of it, weather permitting we will hit Washington, Oregon, and Idaho) for 9 or 10 days.  It should be great fun. 

 

But boy does my calendar look unfamiliar because of it.

Sunday, Sunday

I am tired. I had a pretty busy holiday season, and I was hoping for the New Year's portion to be a little easier, but then my sister came and my free time to accomplish things disappeared in a poof of smoke.

Anyway, as a result I was kind of a whiny brat to go home early from a birthday party on Friday night, and I fell asleep in a big heap on the bed at like 11pm and slept and slept and slept until today.

Having my sister and her boyfriend here was wonderful!! We ate out, we hung out, and we did very little other stuff besides the new year's eve party. Everything was great, and I am so glad she came.

On other news, Sam and I are trying to be better at eating and spending by trying to eat in during the week. There was a big grocery store trip today in order to prep for that. It should be fine. I am also suggesting that we drink out a little less and when we do that we don't actually need to buy drinks for everyone else every round or so.

Sister is in the air!

They bought tickets last night, and they are here through Friday.  They should be over the friendly skies of Salt Lake City right now, and I will see them around 5pm.  They are even braving the el system all by their selves.

 

Tonight we head out to dinner at a Brazilian style steak house called Zed451, and I feel that a mega feast of meat, meat, meat, some not meat, and a lot more meat will make them very, very happy.

So much has passed

The first holiday vacation with Sam's family.  His lucid grandmother is ADORABLE!--a spunky fun 80 something, and I would love to be like that when I grow up.  His other grandmother is not so lucid and in her 90's and very fragile, but I am very glad I got to meet her if for no other reason than it seems to make Sam feel better (she had a fall and a health scare about 10 days before we got to Tulsa that made it seem as if I would not get to meet her without an unexpected and very sudden adjustment to our trip).  His parents are wonderful as always, and his brother is no where near as awful as they make him out to be.  It was 76 the last full day we were there and we filled it with good Meixcan food and a walk with the dog.

 

My brother called me as Sam and I sat in the plane at Midway for the 18 or so years it seemed like we were tracked there.  He just got engaged and will be married on the 4th of July.  This all seems very sudden to me, and he is my younger brother so I of course project the fact that I have been dating my significant other for a year and a half ish and am not quite prepared to actually marry him and I am old, so obviously he cannot possibly be prepared to marry his significant other of a few months at his age.  I get that there are some serious flaws to that logic, but I have not seen this brother since he started dating this woman (who we have all know for something like 20 years), and I did see him in August, so I think that my difficulty in dealing with this information should not be read as a meanness on my part.  This is a whole lot of change to believe in while having no concrete evidence in front of me.  I just want him to be happy and have very little with which to reassure myself.  When I see them in February, my hopes are that all will be assuaged.

 

Oh yeah, and I "get" to be in the wedding.  I HATE being in weddings, and I think I would rather NOT be in the wedding, but I also am fairly certain that my brother and future sister-in-law will be VERY disappointed if I were to have told them no (to be fair I have been in 2 weddings in my whole life--as a flower girl at 5 and a maid of honor at 23--and after the second one I swore that I would never been in one ever again much to my sister's utter abject horror because OF COURSE I meant no other wedding except hers at which point I told her  yeah I don't want to be in yours either because it will be a wedding right? so it isn't against their wedding it is a general anti-participation prejudice against weddings, I find them far more enjoyable as an audience member and NOTHING more).  Theoretically, I won't have to wear a hideous dress.  Supposedly I get to pick a knee length black dress for myself.  Oh and that sister will be in wedding with me.  But so will sorority girls and actual cheerleaders.  Seriously, my brother is marrying a sorority girl who was a college cheerleader and is now a cheer coach.  I have nothing more to add to that.

 

Also, it seems likely that my sister and her boyfriend will come in to town tomorrow for a few days.  Sam will meet her for the first time and her boyfriend will meet me for the first time.  This will be totally AWESOME!

oops, forgot to tell you I AM in Tulsa

We arrived at 10am on Christmas Eve.  But only after another hour or so of delay.  But that was one hell of a storm.  We were rewarded today with 75 degree weather here in Tulsa.

Yes, I am still NOT in Tulsa

So, 5 hours of waiting in Midway plus three hours of waiting on the plane at Midway (because we were about to take off but we had been de-iced so long ago that the wings had refrozen so we had to go back to the gate which took forever since all the gates were full, so we needed more fuel, so they had to recalculate our load, and we needed more water and then we headed back out to be de-iced AGAIN and finally got in the air), finally flying to St. Louis and then being told (after hanging out on the flight for a half an hour or so since our southwest flight was continuing to Tulsa) that they were NOT flying us to Tulsa because our crew was over its hours.  Yeah.  Because it was weather no free hotels or food (well they brought us crackers and water and pop).

 

At this point it was past 1am, and they needed to help us rebook for today.  It took them a half an hour or so to tell us that in fact there would be a replacement flight created for us first thing in the morning at which point we looked into renting a car and freaking driving the last six hours (because FYI if we had driven to Tulsa we would have already BEEN there).  So we wait in line for a good hour and a half to get rebooked.  Book a room at a local Marriot and grab a few hours of sleep before heading back to the airport.

 

Where MORE indignities occur.  See, we "bought" our tickets less than 24 hours in advance, so the TSA needed us to get extra special searched when we went back through security.  So that was awesome, and then we discover that our 8 am flight is now an 8:30 flight because the crew did not get enough rest.  Well, no shit sherlock, we didn't either.  Also couldn't simple math have figured that out last night?  But whatever!

 

So here I am at the gate in St. Louis (hi Ken and Mandy) waiting to board in the next twenty minutes, so that hopefully we will get to Tulsa before 2009.  Here's hoping.  At this point I will not believe that we will get to Tulsa until we land on the freaking ground.

Holy Airport Hell

It is about 6pm.  I have been in Midway airport since about 2:30 pm.  I should've left on a flight to Tulsa via St. Louis at 4:45pm.  It didn't.  I has been delayed many, many, many times.  The airport sucks balls and is totally crowded (which may have to do with its inability to allow me to enjoy anything about it right now, oh yeah that and the delayed plane.  In fact the only worse airport to be stuck in at this moment is probably O'Hare where Southwest does not fly.

 

However, I just received good news as I started to type this rant blog.  The good news is that our plane, coming in from Pittsburgh is in the air!  Midway and the FAA have serious restrictions on planes they are letting come here, so if it is on the way, it should (oh please oh please oh please dear deity) land here, and then we get on it and then we get to St. Louis and then to Tulsa all before midnight.  Although it turns out that I may not have needed to take off work today anyway.  I guess I just wanted to hang out at an airport ALL DAY AND NIGHT.

 

OK, that's all.  I hope all of your holiday travel adventures are nicer (right about now Sally and Dave are very, very glad they killed theirs early and I cannot say that I blame them).

Christmas Ornaments

The first one is the glass globe ornament that I loved but that didn't seem to sell as quickly as other ones last year, either that or they way overstocked. The other two are a series of ladies that Pier 1 has been having. The flamenca was from last year, and the Indian woman in the sari was this year (this year also has a Japanese woman in a kimono, but she isn't as pretty as the Indian woman).

Busy weeks

I had a work holiday party Friday night, Sam and I threw our own holiday party Saturday night, Sunday I went to a matinee of "Dirty Dancing the Musical" which is the most awesomely bad thing I have ever EVER seen and which made me shake with glee for most of it, Monday we had our very last performance of the musical episode of the Ville where we rocked the house, and Tuesday I went shopping for my work's operation Santa Claus.  Yesterday I rested and took the kitty to the vet and got a fever from Sam who was sick with a fever.

 

Yeah, busy.  Tonight I gift wrap (for Operation Santa at work) and holiday gift/winter boot shop.  Then Friday and Saturday I have to somehow get to a a party, two plays and work at pier 1.  And then we are in the home stretch to holidays in Oklahoma.  Whew.

 

Although I won my friend Sallyacious' 1,000 comment contest and I get a cool book!  Pictures of ornaments this weekend or early next week.  Maybe tonight.

Poking around on the internet can be bad

It can be.  It sometimes is.  Or not bad so much as unsettling.  Like when you find the you tube page of an ex boyfriend who now dresses up like Jesus and ministers to people in Virginia, that is unsettling.  Although instead of getting really angry, like I used to whenever talk of him and Jesus connected (this is the ex now known as Jesus boy), I was mostly really proud and happy for him.  Even if I disagree with a lot of what he espouses as the true way to follow Christ and be a believer, I am proud of him for really making something of his life and happy that he seems to have found a peace which he never had when I knew him.  He was a deeply unrooted person when I knew him, and I think that fed a lot of his general unease with the world.

Christmas Online Shopping

I ordered a book online for the boyfriend's dad for Christmas, and so of course I ordered some books online for me too.  In fact, I realized I could get the whole set of Thursday Next books for like $18 plus like $12 more in shipping and handling, so I did of course (I was getting them all used thus the excessive shipping from amazon).  Then they all start arriving, and actually every single one of the 5 separate shipments is delivered on the same day (which is way impressive on its own) EXCEPT one.  There are 5 books in a series right, coming from 5 different locations.  Guess which book in the series didn't come? 

 

That's right!  The very first one is the only one missing.  I have yet to receive "The Eyre Affair" which I was hoping to start and then read on the planes and trip to Tulsa and back.  I mean I still have time, but they said it could come as late as December 23rd at which point I will be at work and leave from there to go catch my flight so I won't be able to grab the mail back at Sam's house hoping it would be too big to fit in the mailbox that I do not have a key too so it would be shelved below.  Ugh.  It better come soon.  I don't want to reread them out of order!