Month: February 2012

They have FEET!

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Do you get the Uncommon Goods catalog?  You should.  Because it’s got some cute stuff in it.  A few weeks ago, I bought myself a sugar bowl and little pitcher set.  I couldn’t resist.  I mean, look at them.

They’re just the cutest things.  Then John noticed that the feet look a lot like the Monty Python foot.  I knew there was a reason they called out to me.  It was fate!  And THEN I noticed that when you look at the pitcher from the other side, the placement of the handle makes the little pitcher look like it has a butt.  The cutest butt.

So, no, I don’t work for Uncommon Goods or know anyone who does (in case you were wondering).  I’ve just ordered a few things from them and I really like their catalogs.  🙂  And they sell pitchers with butts.

And that’s why I didn’t leave you a message

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I have it on good authority that I leave bad voicemails.  The kind you never want to listen to.  The kind that go on and on.  And on and on.  And on and –   They don’t have any redeeming qualities, unless you really enjoy the sound of my voice.  I don’t do it on purpose, I really don’t.  In fact, most of the time I don’t leave a message at all.  I figure you’ll notice you missed my call, and you’ll call me back when you feel like it. That’s how I handle missed calls.  And when you leave me a voicemail, if I can see who it’s from, I usually call you without listening to it anyway.  Sometimes, though, I can’t resist the siren song of the beeeeeeeeeeep.  I go in with the best of intentions – short and sweet.  “Just calling to say hi, call me when you can.  Nothing urgent.  Bye.”  But somehow I get off track.  Like as soon as I start talking.  “Just calling to say hi, call me when you can.  Nothing urgent.  But it’s been a while since we talked.  Not that I have anything in particular to talk about.  Huh – sounds like I don’t want to talk to you.  But I do!  Still not urgent, though.  I know you’re busy.  I’ll stop rambling now,  I know you hate that.  You’re probably not listening to this anyway.  Who listens to voicemails anymore, now that every phone ever has caller ID?  Right, no rambling.  I don’t know why I have this problem.  [long pause]  Great, now you have dead air in the middle of this message.  That wasn’t important in the first place.  Gah!  Hanging up now.  Jesus, what a terrible message.  Why can’t I hang up?”  Seriously, I’ve probably left that exact message on someone’s voicemail.  Hopefully, no one listened to it. Delete, delete!

Close encounters of the fender-bending kind

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This week was a bad week for driving.  I didn’t have any trouble myself, but I was WAY too close to one actual accident and one almost-accident in the space of 15 minutes.  (Why is it called a near miss?  It was a miss.  It’d be more accurate to call it a near hit.)  I was on my way to DC for a middle of the day meeting on Wednesday, and traffic was terrible.  Lanes were closed for construction and everyone was inching along the access road where three lanes were merging into one.  While we still had two lanes, I watched a guy rear end another car.  They weren’t going fast, but the one guy hit the other hard enough to buckle his hood.  Not pretty.  Not 15 minutes later, I was on a three-lane highway and I watched a car in the left lane and a car in the right lane both try to merge into the middle lane ON TOP OF a car in between them who was already in the middle lane.  There was much honking and swerving.  I was about four car-lengths behind the guy in the middle lane, and I kept my eyes peeled the whole rest of the trip.  No more incidents.  Today, though, there were a bunch of idiots in a huge hurry on the way home from Baltimore.  I was going about 80 most of the time, in the rain, and these guys were flying by me.  In the rain.  Why do people drive like morons?  Why was I going 80 (speaking of morons…)?

Happy (late) birthday to me!

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Late because it was yesterday, not late because it was forgotten.  I had a great birthday weekend.  A long birthday weekend.  (Those are the best kind.)  Mom and Dad came to visit, and we had delicious dinners out, walked all over DC, hung out at home, stayed up late, drank some wine, and talked and talked and talked.  I am thoroughly exhausted, but very happy.  And I have LOTS of flowers in the house.  John came home from work yesterday (I had the day off and spent it working on homework) with sushi and two bouquets of flowers.  He said he was trying to decide between them and then realized he didn’t have to choose.  Then, right after he got home and gave them to me, the doorbell rang.  More flowers!  Mom and Dad sent some from the road.  I love it.

Work today tried to undo my wonderful weekend, but it won’t succeed.  Work stays at work, and I’m going home.  Where I have homework to do.  You know what will make me feel better?  Indian food for dinner!  Because you can’t have too many birthday dinners.

Very Important Questions

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  1. While I finish cleaning the house in preparation for Mom and Dad’s visit, I want to listen to music.  Do I want to sing and dance and have a good ol’ time?  Or do I want to listen to classical music and calm my crazy crazy brain?
  2. What are we having for dinner tonight?  We have NO food in the house.
  3. There wasn’t enough wine left in the bottle for a whole glass, so I poured the rest of it into a small tumbler.  Does that make me a wino?  (At least I’m not drinking it straight out of the bottle.)
  4. Why don’t people burst into song and choreographed dancing on a regular basis?

Dear John: A Love Letter (Or Why I Don’t Write Love Letters)

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Dear John, – no, sounds like we’re breaking up

Dearest John – how many of them are there?  Besides 8?

Dear John who I love more than anything in the world,

I love you more than anything in the world. Oh, please.  Start over.

Dear John,

I love you.  I love that you make me laugh.  I love that I make you laugh.  I love how delighted you look when you make me laugh.  I love your principles and how you stick to them.  I love how when you’re excited about something, you fill up the room.  I love that you’re a better cook than me, and when you decide to make something, you throw yourself into it and make it from scratch (and make it better than I could have made it).  You throw yourself into everything you do.  I love that you have more hobbies than you can count and that you always have a pile of books you’re in the middle of reading.  I love that you don’t think there’s such a thing as owning too many books, that you pushed us to get those pictures hung, and that you hold my hand every night as we fall asleep.  I’ve loved you for 14 years and I’ll love you for 140 more.  (Keep an eye out for that deadline in 2152, though.)

Happy Valentine’s Day and every other day.

I love you,

Zannah

Get it together, card industry

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Cards have always tended towards dumb.  If you go to the card section in any drugstore, grocery store, big box store, or card store and pick a card at random, it will be either schmaltzy or cheesy.  A very very teeny tiny eensy weensy small percentage of cards are amusing, and an even smaller amount are actually funny.  And I know this makes me sound old (Get off my lawn, you crazy kids!), but I really think cards used to be funnier.  Or at least less dumb.  I feel like I had a better chance at finding one 15-20 years ago that I would actually give to someone than I do now.  Maybe my sense of humor has changed, but I don’t think that’s it.  (I share my sense of humor with my 6-year-old niece, so I’m fairly certain it’s not me who changed.)  The bottom line is that I don’t buy cards that often anymore.  I don’t even send e-cards as often anymore.  And it’s a little sad.  I used to send cards just for fun.  Because they were funny.  Sending funny emails is not even remotely the same thing.

Funny.  Funny.  What a weird-looking word.  Funny.

Obviously, since it’s Valentine’s Day, I was thinking about Valentine’s Day cards in particular, and how I didn’t buy any (except the one for Gaby’s class, and it didn’t even say Happy Valentine’s Day.  It said Happy Heart Day.  When did that become a thing?  It doesn’t even make sense.  At least say Happy Happy-Heart Day.  Every day would be Happy Heart Day because everyone has a heart, in whatever condition.  You might be wishing someone a Happy Broken-Heart Day.  I need to get out of parentheses.) because they were dumb.  John and I don’t usually do much for Valentine’s Day anyway (takeout and a bottle of champagne tonight), but it’s the principle of the thing, Hallmark.  And whoever else makes cards.  Be amusing or you’ll go out of business.

Somebody lives here!

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We hung pictures today and for the first time in probably 4 years (since the downstairs walls were repainted), it looks like people live here.  The books and the food might have been a clue, but pictures hanging on the walls (that we took our very own selves) means grown-ups live here.  (It’s not very grown-up to call yourself a grown-up, but we can all get over that, right?  Baby steps.)  Someday we’ll get around to painting our bedroom and rearranging the furniture.  But first I have to pick a color.  And a new duvet cover.  Hard decisions are hard.

Ideas wanted

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This (from Catalog Living) is almost as hilarious as the llama picture.

A couple of weeks ago, John and I hung a shelf above the couch in the family room.  Now I don’t know what to put on it.  The studs aren’t spaced right, so we reinforced the bottom, but I still don’t think it’s sturdy enough to pack it full of books.   We were going to hang a second one above the TV, but we’ll have the same weight distribution problem.  So what do we do?

It looks a little ridiculous empty, but I’m afraid it’ll come crashing down if we put anything heavy on it.

That’s where the sea monsters live

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I like how the internet is like magic on TV.  Anyone can find out anything in one quick search.  And don’t get me started on the police and the FBI.  All of their databases are connected, all the time, and the TV character doing the search has the right access to pull information from any legal database in the world.  Wouldn’t it be nice if it really worked that way?

Have a pretty picture.

I want to go to there. But only in daylight. That cave would creep me out at night.

Every time I see a great house on the water somewhere, I think how great it would be to live there.  But then I remember two things about me and water:

  1. If it’s still, it will have mosquitoes and I will be eaten alive.
  2. If it’s running, I will have to pee ALL the time.

So maybe I shouldn’t go live in a house on the water.

I burn more calories than this while I sleep

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This may come as no surprise (although who knows what I’ve been writing about lately), but I’m trying to eat healthier, and while eating less goes along with that, today was a little ridiculous.  And not remotely balanced.  Not on purpose – it just worked out that way.  I got up at 5 this morning because I had to leave the house by 6 to get to Baltimore on time (with a stop for gas and Starbucks).  It was 5:50 by the time I made it downstairs showered and dressed.  Not enough time for breakfast.  Barely enough time to make a sandwich for lunch.  So I ate a fig newton.  A whole grain fig newton, yes, but only one.  In my defense, it was way too early to eat.  So I left the house on time (well, five minutes late, but who’s counting since I got to Baltimore with 15 minutes to spare?), stopped for gas, got my calorie-dense and not at all healthy toffee nut white mocha latte (But it’s made with skim milk!  And I don’t get whipped cream!  Too little, too late.), and went to work.

Small tangent.  When I got to the shopping center with the Starbucks, the twinkle lights were still on in the trees.  Like it was still night.  I mean, I get that it was dark enough to still be night, but I don’t want to feel like I could be on my way to a dinner out when it’s really after 6am and I have to go to work.  Not cool, shopping center.

It's the worst picture ever, but you get the idea.

Anyway, it was a busy day at work, and I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich while helping someone organize user lists, and then all of a sudden it was time to drive home.  In the snow.  I had more work to do once I got home, and before I knew it, it was 6pm and I needed to leave for the gym by 6:15.  Dinner?  Not really happening.  So I ate the two fig newtons I didn’t eat with my sandwich for lunch.

Let’s recap: in the course of about 12 hours, I ate 3 fig newtons, one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a Starbucks latte.  And then I went to the gym for 2 hours.  This is not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.  It turned out okay (I wasn’t starving, no passing out, all is good), but I came home fairly hungry.  But you know what else you’re not supposed to do?  Eat right before going to bed.  So what did I just do?  Yup.  I ate half a turkey sandwich.  And I forgot my chips!  Damn.  (I was going to put potato chips on the sandwich for crunch.  SO good.  Back me up here, family.)

Anyway, not a good food day.  Yay I didn’t eat very much?  No.  Boo – I didn’t eat enough to keep a normal person alive.  The last thing I need is for my body to think I’m starving myself and to store all that excess fat.  I wish fat would listen to reason.

I’m not asking much (just a token really, a trifle)

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I had plans for this evening.  My plans included homework.  My plans got derailed by Homeaway.com.  The slightest passing reference to a possible trip to the UK and I get sucked in.  Not a good use of my time.

Now I’m watching the clock.  I’m doing that thing I do where I start to feel tired a few days in a row (late nights, early mornings), and I know I need to get more sleep, but it’s hard to get to bed earlier.  So then, every time I look at the clock, I’m calculating how many hours of sleep I can get before I have to get up.  It’s 10 to 9 right now.  If I can be asleep in 10 minutes, I could get eight hours tonight (I’m going to Baltimore tomorrow and I have to get up at 5).  I won’t even be ready for bed in 10 minutes, let alone asleep, so 8 hours is not happening.  And that’s mildly upsetting because it means I’ll be tired tomorrow.  Actually, it means I’ll be visiting Starbucks at 6am tomorrow morning, which is not so good for my health.  But when I have to drive an hour and a half when it’s still dark outside, you better believe I’m going to allow myself to have a tall skim no whip toffee nut white mocha.  Is it too much to ask to be able to sleep in at least until the sun comes up every day?

Wherein I over-emphasize

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So…I bought new yoga pants yesterday because I found a hole in my old pair.  I’m sure the hole came from overuse and the fact that they were cheap pants and is NOT a commentary on my weight.  I’m sure of it.  (Me?  Defensive?  No…)  Anyway, I was inspired to get rid of other old clothes – clothes I don’t wear, clothes that even if I could fit into them I wouldn’t wear, other clothes that are so old they also have holes in them.  I went through every drawer in my dressers and filled one garbage bag with clothes to give away and another one with clothes (old socks, old underwear, a pair of sweatpants that has holes AND is covered in paint, etc.) to throw away.  Okay, the trash bag of trash isn’t filled with clothes.  I don’t have that many things that were so torn apart they had to be thrown away.  Although I am throwing away the pair of red nylon running pants I ruined with a hot iron.  I honestly can’t remember why I tried to iron those.  Seriously, let’s think about this.  For one thing, I HATE ironing.  I do it when I have to, but usually I just ask to John to iron something of mine when he’s ironing his work shirts in the morning.  For another thing, these pants are NYLON (or some other synthetic fabric that MELTS when it gets hot).  I had that information before I tried to iron them, really I did.  I knew what would happen, but obviously, my brain wasn’t present at the time.  For one more thing, these were jogging pants.  Why would I be ironing them?  They don’t get wrinkled in the first place, and even if they did, who cares? Maybe, just maybe, the pants happened to be on the ironing board while I was in the midst of ironing other things (unlikely – see my first point), and I just happened to set the hot iron on one of the legs.  But that doesn’t ring true.  We might as well assume I’m an idiot.  It would be closer to the truth.

Am I right or am I right?

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I’ve read in lots of places (I can’t name a single one, but at this point, it’s probably in the public consciousness so I don’t have to) that to be successful at losing weight (or at anything), it helps to set up little rewards at certain milestones.  I found my first little reward.  But I can’t have it yet.  I had the afternoon off work today (left early to take my data modeling exam (got an A), and had a couple of hours left over), so what did I do?  I went to the mall.  Horror of horrors.  I wasn’t in a shopping mood, but John needs new brown work shoes and he has enormous feet so no one ever has his size in stock.  I went to Nordstrom because I know they’ll order or transfer shoes from other stores so he can try them on before buying.  Nice people there.  And while I was at the mall, I decided to shop for skinny jeans.  Not because I’m particularly skinny, but because it’s time.  Sadly, I’m between sizes.  So my reward for losing the next few pounds will be a pair of skinny jeans.  Mostly so I can wear my boots over them.  My shopping mood didn’t last long (it never does), and I escaped from the mall before it could ruin my day.  Malls have a way of doing that.