just for fun

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

i keep having panic attacks in my hotel.

first, i'm on the twenty fifth floor and while i don't hate elevators, i don't really like them much either. its kind of how i feel about airplanes too. i don't fear hights or small spaces. its violently twisted metal and painful deaths that bother me. its also not having any measure of control for the situation.

so. i'm up on the 25th floor. i hop into the elevator and as the doors are closing, the friendly voice that usually announces what floors the doors are opening on, well that voice says, "we are experiencing minor technical difficulties." and there wasn't enough time to hop out of the closing doors. and then the doors wouldn't open. and then the whole thing lurched a bit. yeah, on the 25th floor, the elevator lurched and dropped a bit and the doors wouldn't open. but then seconds later the thing started moving. i got out on ground level and everything was ok. it was if nothing happened. i don't think i had a crazy moment. i don't think i hallucinated. but of course i'm starting to doubt.

not five minutes later, i finally found the atm. i just needed a smidge of cash for a taco bell lunch and tipping the vallet. naturally there are atms just all over the place inside a casino. i swipe the card. punch my pin. hit enter. transaction type: withdraw. account type: checking. at this point, some atms just go to enter in the amount you want and some go to a screen with withdraw amount options (depending on the denomenation options; 10/20/30 or 20/40/06, etc). what did this atm offer? 200, 400, 600, or 1000. i nearly fell over. and while, yeah, i do have some of those options in my checking account, i certainly would rather it be in my account and not in my hand. i was hard pressed to make the machine only give me twenty bucks.

in other news, i'm still not done with harry potter seven. i let andrew read it first and since then stuff has come up, like this work trip. i am making progress though.

Monday, July 30, 2007

parking

on saturday, i met some people for dinner at an italian place in the fashion show mall on the strip. i got to the parking lot and it was a mad house. people fighting over spaces all over the place. i said, wow, this is worse than the airport!

so this morning, here i am at the airport. got to the parking lot, and the first thing i thought? wow, this is worse than the mall!

Sunday, July 29, 2007

i think being just a smidge pissed off has fixed my downward emotional spiral problem.

first, when you are used to doing laundry and groceries for two and suddenly find yourself doing them for one, its a tad disheartening.

until, while doing laundry for one, you discover in how disasterous a shape your spouse's closet is.

andrew goes on unsupervised shopping trips. as most spouses do. here lately, he has been on a kick for buying plastic clothing hangers. and thats fine; we could always use more. most people can use more. and for the most part we aren't really partial to plastic hangers. i swear this rant is not going to end in 'no more wire hangers!'

my side of the closet is very organized. shirts on the left. pants, skirts, and suits on the right. empty hangers in the middle. i try to put the just washed stuff in the back of their respective sides so that i don't wear the same five things week after week after week. i don't think that my coworkers are keeping track of my outfits, but who knows. the people in my office are a bit odd. when i take clothes out of the closet, i don't really always take the hanger and put it in the middle. sometimes. but mostly they get put there during laundry day.

andrew's side is choas. and he owns more clothes than me. and he thinks more things should be hanging than me. i put jeans in the dresser folded. he hangs them. so i thought that was why we needed more hangers.

no.

he's just been buying more and more and more hangers but without ever going through his side of the closet and pulling out the empty ones.

i found like eleventy billion empty hangers in there today.

i'm struggling to get my last two or three shirts hung up. i'm putting two pairs of pants or skirts or sleeveless tops on the same hanger because i thought we didn't have any hangers. but no, he's just hording them all!

ok. i've vented. i feel better now.
everything should be fun. it should, but we all know it isn't.

i'm an optimistic sort. the glass is half full. if the glass should somehow not be half full, the problem is in the glass. you need a different glass and then it would be half full.

i'm a mary poppins. just a spoon full of sugar (or splenda if you do the low carb thing) helps the medicine go down.

right now, its one of those times that just isn't fun. i'm not happy. i'm not ok. i'm not having fun. and its a little of a lot of things (which is how life usually works).

my boss and her boss want to have a nice 'chat' with me about my 'goals.' i have a week and a half to come up with some goals, since i really don't have any at the moment. well, currently i wish to not be bored with my job or angry with my coworkers. i feel like i should come up with some, perhaps say, achievable goals prior to the meeting.

and andrew is in utah. its his two weeks with guard. i'm sure you've seen the commercials for national guard: you can serve your country with only one weekend a month and two weeks a year. this is his two weeks. and i'm not having a fit because he's gone for two weeks. except that in a way i am. its that i never really got over the last deployment. i never healed or recovered or finished all the steps. he came back; life changed. so my problem isn't that he's gone for two weeks; he's perfectly fine (though probably hot and hungry) up in utah. my problem doesn't even exist any more. he's not in iraq and we'll likely talk on the phone tonight but somehow i still feel so devistated. and then i also feel so stupid for feeling like this.

so that's the way it is today. everything should be fun. we all wish it were. we all want it to be, but we all know that sometimes things suck and we just have to muddle along.

Thursday, July 26, 2007







thirteen reasons its great to be a lefty


1. Only 8-15% of the worlds population is lefthanded. it is more common in males and more common in south/southeast asia and eastern european descent. as a lefty female of western european descent, i'm somewhat rare

2. Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with his left hand.


3. Mahatma Gandhi was a lefty


4. The official Boy Scout handshake actually uses the left hand, not the right. The founder of the Scouts was ambidextrous, but he chose the left hand because it is closer to the heart.


5. Jimi Hendrxx was a lefty.


6. When typing, the left hand does most of the work, as the most popular letters (a,e,r,s,t) are on the left side of the keyboard.


7. Albert Einstein was a lefty


8. According to SAT results, left-handed students have higher math scores than right-handed students do.


9. Big Bird is a lefty


10. Not only is matt groening (creator of the simpsons) a lefty but also one of the characters, ned flanders, is a lefty and owns a store in the mall called the leftorium.


11. The only astronaut to fly in all three space programs, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, was left-handed Wally Schirra.


12. Joan of Arc was a lefty.

13. In ancient Peru, it was believed by the Incas that being left-handed was a sign of good luck.



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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

it was only 97 days without any measurable precipitation. and also 77 days in a row with temperatures over 100. but today was finally different!

its rained most all of the day (complete with flash floods and ludicrious numbers of car wrecks). i think this might be the start of the 'monsoon season' wiki told me about...

Friday, July 20, 2007

i pre-ordered my harry potter and am impatiently awaiting the postman. yesterday's email said it was ready to be shipped, so i think it will get here tomorrow. i suppose getting it, without the crowds and lines but a whole twelve to fourteen hours after it is technically available for purchase, isn't too bad. i'm just really really nervous that someone out there is going to spoil the ending for me...especially since andrew and i only pre-ordered one copy and we haven't exactly come to any real final conclusions as to which of us is going to get to read it first...

Thursday, July 19, 2007

my weird husband has devised the strangest toy for the cat.

we insulated the water heater pipes. you can buy stuff just for insulating pipes. it looks a lot like those pool noodles kids play with at, well, the pool. but smaller. and gray. so he installed the insulation and now has a section of nearly pool noodle that is about a foot long.

and the tape dispenser ran out of tape. when he replaced the tape, he saved the little plastic spool and tied it to the end of some pink yarn.

so i'm sitting here on the couch watching my weird husband bat an empty scotch tape spool with a nearly pool noodle. the spool flies across the room, with the yarn tied to it. he snatches it back with the yarn and bats it again.

it took the cat a while to warm up to this idea. she was cowering in terror, much like i was, for a while. but based on how vigoriously she's beginning to bite everything, i think she's thinking, "yeah, this nearly noodle thing rocks!"

Friday, July 13, 2007

an ick factor i may never get over

about thirty minutes ago, i was sitting at my desk reviewing some paperwork and a water roach fell out of the light fixture and onto the papers, missing me by milimeters.

i feel twitchy all over. i just want to bathe in bleach.

most of my coworkers have been half hysterical; it could have been them. the rest keep mumbling about friday the thirteenth.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

how tiny

i'm sitting in the charlottesville, va airport and its so tiny! there is only one terminal and five gates. there is no food or shopping to be done inside security. even lexington airport was bigger. i discussed this with andrew and he confirmed that the army airport in tikrit, iraq is bigger than this airport. hee hee.

i have only a few more hours left in virginia

then its back to the airport. whew.

my rental car was a dud. apparently last time they change the oil on it, they sorta forgot to put more oil back in. i don't mind doing car maintenence on my own car, but i'm not really big on doing it for my rental.

i did drive by the strangest place. "the tavern: a pancake house." really. i found a pancake tavern. ha! the place looked pretty sketchy so i didn't go in, just stared and drove on.

otherwise its just been work work work lately. i'll be glad to get home tonight. at least there when people complain about how hot it is, they have something to complain about. its in the 80s here and people think the world is ending. that's thirty degrees cooler. thirty!

Sunday, July 08, 2007

people here are scary.

we saw a drunk driver on the way to the airport this morning. yup. sunday morning. around 6am. we ended up passing the car and the girl driving, with the window rolled down, looked seriously trashed as she continued to drink something out of her red solo cup, the universally known container for trying to disguise booze. yup. not only was she driving drunk, she was continuing to drink. again, sunday morning, 6am. aside from all the other obvious legal issues and the availability of taxis, mass transit and sidewalks, i think most decent people should be already to the point of sleeping it off, not continuing.

you should stop partying when the sun starts to come up...

Saturday, July 07, 2007

on thursday, as i was randomly lurking through the internet, i happened upon one of those a question a day meme sites: thatsmyanswer.com. one of the questions for thursday was to list the funniest movies of all time. you were to create a box set of comedies but weren't given any further critria such as number of movies or type of comedy.

so i began thinking of what i would put in my box set. personally, i think four or five is the perfect box set number. any more than that and the box set is probably going to be too pricey to purchase. any less and its not hardly even a box set. i also think that romantic comedy is an entirely different catagory of movie from comedy. one is a romantic movie with a smidge of comedy and the other is a comedy with a smidge of romance. i enjoy both but think this box set should not mix and match.

i also think that they just don't make comedies like they used to. happy gilmore, dodgeball and talladega nights may be funny movies, but i don't think they make the list of Funniest of ALL Time. not everything in life needs to be clever but it shouldn't be brainless either. i think part of my problem with recently made comedies is that i've never really been a big fan of physical comedy. some here or there is certainly funny but it shouldn't be the bulk of the movie. the home alone movies were kind of funny but the aftermath has been a huge reawakening of the three stooges type plots. i think if home alone hadn't made so much money, will farrell would be doing something a bit differently these days. while it may be profitable for hollywood to crank out a thousand movies that are all basically the same, i'd like my box set to be well rounded.

i think a box set of all time funniest movies should include either the burbs or joe vs the volcano but i can't quite decide which. while i love most of the lampoon vacation movies, i think they get to be in a box set all of their own. i think this set also needs a john candy movie, possibly canadian bacon. i think it needs some steve martin; top contenders could be planes, trains, and automobiles, sgt bilko, or dirty rotten scoundrels. and then any two of the following: monty python and the holy grail, farris bueller's day off, noises off, young frankenstein, city slickers, or gallexy quest. in the end, i've got twelve movies options here for my box set of five...

Monday, July 02, 2007

another haircut, another weirdo

i went back to the same salon that gave me the great hair cut a month ago. the stylist wasn't there which meant i had to take whoever was free. brian. he kind of had peewee herman hair so i wasn't entirely sure i wanted to let him cut my hair. but he did a fair job. except he was also very animated about it. you know those stylists that are all about waving the sissors all in the air and throwing the cut hair everywhere, makes you think of edward sissorhands. at one point, he was studying my hair and said, "yeah, that's great, i'm the man..." i blinked a dozen times and nearly said, "dude, you have fruit punch mouth, get a life," but since the cut wasn't over, i didn't want to upset him. it did turn out to be a great cut.