Category Archives: Media

weather disasters and MP3 players

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My parents moved into a new house this past weekend. It’s been a long, arduous process, and they’re both completely exhausted. I move approximately once a year, so I’m familiar with how stressful it can be – however, I only move my little one-bedroom apartment, not a 4-bedroom house that I’ve lived in for 20 years. I can’t even fathom how much stuff they’ve accumulated over that amount of time. They’ve had at least 3 yard sales over the past 6 months just trying to get rid of all their junk.

Last night, I called my mom’s cell phone (they don’t have a land line yet) and my dad answered. I asked him how things were going, and after the quick unpacking recap, he said, “And your aunt Si is on her way here now.” Um… What? This aunt is actually a great aunt (she’s my mom’s aunt), and in my 28 years on this planet, she has never to my knowledge set foot in my hometown. We always see her when we go to New Orleans for family gatherings, but I honestly didn’t think that the woman ever traveled at all. So, my curiosity peaked, I asked my dad why she was coming, and he said “Oh, you know, just to visit…” I must have made some kind of confused “huh??” sound because my dad cracked up at that point. He laughed and explained that it’s because Hurricane Ivan is heading toward New Orleans and the local authorities have issued a mandatory evacuation of the entire city.

So my 90 year-old great aunt, her middle-aged daughter, their dog, and some nephew related by marriage who my parents have never met were all on the freeway headed out of New Orleans, moving along at a top speed of about 4 miles per hour. I guess that’s what happens when everyone in the city tries to leave at the same time. They had even changed the incoming freeway lanes to outgoing – no one can drive into the city at all. Pretty scary. My parents live about 200 miles north of New Orleans – they were predicting that my aunt and her posse would arrive at about 4 a.m. I haven’t called to get an update today, because my mom is totally stressed. Not only does she have 3 unexpected visitors (plus a dog), but they’re all going to be staying in a house that my parents have lived in for less than a week, and they can’t even get to the guest beds because they’re surrounded by boxes. Yep. Should be a rockin’ good time. It’s funny, I’m always happy that I don’t live in Mississippi anymore, but sometimes I’m REALLY particularly glad that I’m not there.

In other news, I got an iPod yesterday. Oh. My. God. It is so cool. I’m copying my entire CD collection onto it, I’m on the D’s right now. (Yes, I alphabetize my CD’s – my obsessive-compulsive disorder is just mild enough that it doesn’t require medication, so back off.) I’m not even using 2 GB of space yet, how am I ever going to fill up the 40 GB that are available? Oh happy happy happy…

exploding sheep trucks

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I got the pictures from our trip to Atlanta posted – it seems kind of strange to have all of these happy smiling photos for a trip that was, overall, anything but happy. But my family’s get-togethers are always pretty fun, no matter how shitty the reason for the get-together may be. And there are some really good pictures in there, which is why I wanted them online.

So, this week had an interesting side-note. On Tuesday morning, Scott called and asked what I was doing on Wednesday night. I didn’t have anything scheduled, and he told me to leave it open, but it was a surprise and he wouldn’t tell me what it was. So Wednesday night, I meet up with Scott & Ted and we start walking toward some unknown venue for some unknown event. Turns out that Robin Williams was playing at the Showbox in Seattle, apparently trying out new material in small clubs. Somehow, Scott managed to get tickets, which is amazing when you consider how big an act Robin Williams is, and how small a venue the Showbox is (I believe the sign at the door said max capacity was in the 900 range). The show was really funny – except for the stupid bi-atch sitting next to me who I swear NEVER shut up for the entire show because she talked to her boyfriend the whole damn time. Even after the woman in front of me turned around and asked her to please keep it down because her talking was kind of distracting, she still kept on yakking. I wanted to punch her in her big peroxide-blonde head.

Oh, for those of you who are wondering, that subject line relates to a story that Dave told me earlier this week. A guy on his way to a local fair crashed his truck, with a trailer full of sheep, on the hill on Dave’s street. The truck caught on fire – the guy got out & was ok, but the sheep were slightly singed. Not hurt, though. The neighbors all rounded up the sheep, and apparently there were chunks of slightly burnt wool scattered all over the road. It’s one of those stories that wouldn’t be funny if anyone (or the sheep) had been seriously hurt, but because everyone got out ok, I thought it was hilarious. And I think “Exploding Sheep Trucks” would make an AWESOME name for a band.

Anyway, this afternoon marks the beginning of Bumbershoot, which is a huge 4-day music festival here in Seattle. Dave and I are going this evening, and I just got a phone call from Krissy and she apparently wants to tag along, which should be interesting.

goodbye sleep, it's been fun, I'll miss you

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This weekend I did something that may prevent me from rejoining society for the next few months: I got a Game Boy. It all started because Dave bought one, and since he knows how much I love old-school Super Mario Brothers, he bought the game for me. Of course, I ended up stealing his Game Boy & not giving it back, so eventually we came to the conclusion that I needed one of my own. And I bought a new Super Mario game (Mario & Luigi Super-Stars! Yeah!!), so I haven’t slept much this weekend. I just lie in bed with my Game Boy and work on building up good calluses on my thumbs. Fun stuff.

Actually, though, it was a pretty productive weekend. Our Thanksgiving plans are now set: my whole family is coming here, and Dave’s mom is coming over from the UK, so we’re going to have the Big Meeting Of The Families on Thanksgiving. I’m really excited to meet Dave’s mom, she seems like a hoot. I’m a little nervous about inflicting my entire family (parents & 2 siblings) on Dave & his mom, because we can be a pretty loud bunch. I think they’ll all like each other, but I’m a little worried about my dad. He hasn’t really ever met any of the guys that I’ve dated – or if he has, they were just introduced as “friends” so he didn’t know I was dating them – but he’s never been particularly friendly to any of my sister’s boyfriends. Granted, my dad is just not an overly warm guy in general – for example, Kris was my college roommate for 3 years and has been my best friend since 1996, and to this day, he still refers to her as “that ol’ gal, you know, your friend what’s-her-name…” Nice. So, I’m excited, but I’m sure that I’m going to be more than a little bit tense when the time comes.

Anyway, we’re talking about having our big Thanksgiving dinner at Dave’s house, since he has way more space than I do. (Four-bedroom house vs. one-bedroom apartment… hmmm, which to choose?) And to that end, we’ve now started to try to make Dave’s house look like an actual home, rather than a work-in-progress. It’s a really great house and has potential to be really beautiful, it just needs some work. So we started that this weekend – we went shopping for a sofa on Saturday, and ordered one (and a coordinating chair, boo-ya!) that I think is going to look amazing – that is, it will look amazing when it’s delivered in 4-6 weeks, by which point the living room will be painted and the carpet will be replaced with hardwood flooring. And yesterday, we painted Dave’s office so he can actually start using it.

By the way, does anyone happen to know if it’s difficult to install hardwood floors yourself, or is it something that requires a professional? We’re both down for any do-it-ourselves project, but that’s one thing that we don’t want to get screwed up.

Oh, and yes, I’m referring to all of these home-improvement projects with “we” even though it’s not my house – I’m marking my territory there, and Dave is cool with that, so it’s fine. 🙂

Alright, I gotta go see an Italian plumber about saving a princess from an evil monster…

Vegas, baby!

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Ok, the recap of the trip:

Arrived on Thursday afternoon. Checked into the hotel, met my roommate (nice girl, but very very quiet & shy – not the type of person I’m going to be best buddies with), changed clothes & headed over to our evening meeting. We got lost trying to find the casino where our meeting was, so we were about 20 minutes late. However, this led to my one celebrity sighting of the trip. We stopped at one of the hotels’ information desks to get directions, and at the registration desk was Wee-Man from “Jackass”. He looked at me, probably noticing the fact that I was staring at him like an idiot, and probably waiting for me to say something. But I couldn’t come up with anything to say, because it seems lame that a 28 year-old professional female should recognize a professional skateboarding little person (especially in the presence of 3 of my co-workers), so I just stared & kept my mouth shut. I heard later that he was in town for his bachelor party. Good for him.

Anyway, I finally got to the meeting & found out what this “team activity involving creativity & fun” was all about. They took all the new hires (read: me, plus about 50 other folks), divided us into teams, and told us that we had to come up with either a skit or a love poem that demonstrated our passion for technology. There was also a list of technical terms that we got bonus points for using. The skit/poem would have to be performed in front of everyone (about 200 people) at our meeting the next day. Upon learning of this assignment, I decided to start drinking heavily. We opted for the love poem instead of the skit, and decided to make it as dirty as possible (i.e., “my firewall burns with desire”, that type of thing). Turns out that pretty much everyone had the same idea as we did, and it was very embarassing to do this in front of a crowd of people the next day (after we had all sobered up), but they also gave us props/costumes to use. And it occurred to me that you can do just about anything when you’re wearing giant clown sunglasses, a witch’s hat and a feather boa. But it was still pretty awful.

As for the bowling, I tried. I really did. But I suck, and the 5 or 6 beers I had consumed beforehand didn’t help my cause. I bowled the first 7 frames, at which point I had a total score of 18. (I had some of the prettiest gutter balls you’ve ever seen.) I asked one of my teammates to start bowling for me after that, because I didn’t want to be the person with the lowest possible score. As it was, at our meeting the next day they gave out the winner/loser awards, and I won “Least Graceful Bowler”. Yay me. My prize was a shot glass. As if that’s going to help me improve my aim. In any case, there was a big powerpoint slide on the projector screen, with my name in big bold letters on it, which led to the most surreal moment of the whole trip…

This girl came up to me during one of the breaks & asked me if I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. I said yes, and my brain was trying to place where I knew her from. Turns out she’s someone who I went from 1st through 9th grade with. How strange is that? I haven’t seen this person in over 13 years, and boom, there she is. She’s based in Phoenix now, and she’s a developer, so the odds that I’ll see her at work are slim to none. She looks pretty much exactly the same as she did in 9th grade, too. She’s lost some weight, but her hair is still huge, and she still wears frosty blue eye shadow – all the way up to the brow, not a speck of eyelid showing. It was good/weird to catch up, but that moment just totally freaked me out for the rest of the day.

Oh yeah, after bowling on Thursday night, I ended up kissing a co-worker. He was on my love poem/skit team, and it was one of those rare instances where we met & instantly started picking on each other. I’m hardly ever at ease that quickly with someone, so that’s cool. He’s based in Denver so I’ll probably never see him again – or at least not until the next regional meeting. So no big deal. But damn, he was cute. And a really good kisser. Hey, what happens in Vegas….

Anyway, I got back to town late Friday night & collapsed. Scott & I got massages on Saturday (that was awesome), and Saturday night I went dancing by myself because no one else seemed to be around & up for it. I met a really cute Air Force guy, who’s probably way too young for me (he’s 23), but he was also a damn good kisser. So there’s been lots of good male attention happening for me lately. I must be having a good mojo week or something.

sleep sweet sleep

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Apparently Blogger has completely changed their format, which I think is kind of cool, although it may take me some time to get used to it.

The weekend recap: Friday night, I did absolutely nothing. I ordered a pizza (low carb be damned, but I’m back on the wagon today), lay on the futon and stuffed my face. Saturday I cleaned/unpacked (still not finished with that yet), and then that evening, I was supposed to have a date but I think I got stood up. It was very strange, I had one phone conversation with this guy, and he said he’d call me the next evening to go out, but he never called. Which was fine, I wasn’t really looking forward to it – just from the one phone chat, I thought he was kind of a jackass. And judging by the fact that he never called again, I’m guessing that he felt the same way about me. Oh well, what are you going to do? The only thing that bugged me about that was that I specifically stopped cleaning and started getting dressed up because I was planning for the time frame that he said he was going to call me. And then he never did call, so Saturday evening was essentially a waste of make-up. Instead, I went to the tattoo shop to meet with the artist who I want to do my tattoo. He’s a super-nice guy, and he had some really cool ideas for how we could do my design, so I think it’s going to turn out to be even more beautiful than I had originally imagined. I also got to look a bit more at his portfolio (only a fraction of it is on the shop’s website), and he’s done some amazing work. So I’m really, really excited about it now.

Oh, after the tattoo shop, since I had no date & nothing to do, I went to Blockbuster & rented “Le Divorce”. I liked it. Also over the weekend on my cable movie channels, I watched “Iris” and “Laurel Canyon”. Iris was depressing as hell, which I should’ve figured out 5 minutes into it, but for some reason I continued to watch it anyway. Bonus for guys: Kate Winslet gets naked more than once in it. Laurel Canyon was good, and if any of you boys have an interest in seeing Frances McDormand’s breasts, this movie is your chance (she’s much more flat-chested than I had imagined, kind of made me feel good about myself). LC also features Christian Bale with his shirt off, which is a good enough reason to watch any movie, if you ask me.

Sunday was errand day – Home Depot, drug store, and groceries. I bought plants for my balcony at Home Depot. This is my first attempt at horticulture since the time I killed a cactus in high school (which is extremely difficult to do, I might add), so we’ll see how they do. I got petunias because they’re purple & cute, and I bought catnip so Teenie can have the kitty equivalent of home-grown angel dust. I pinched off a twig for her yesterday and she completely flipped out. But hopefully now that I have plants out there, my stupid upstairs neighbors will realize that someone lives in my apartment and they’ll stop throwing their f***ing cigarette butts on my balcony.

I think the highlight of my weekend was that I finally got to sleep – I’ve been averaging about 5 hours a night for the past month. Combining Friday & Saturday nights, I think I slept 19-20 hours total. It was lovely, I need to do that more often.

just call me the Happy f'ing Homemaker

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I think I almost killed my apartment last night. In addition to packing, I’m also trying to make sure that the apartment is as clean as humanly possible when I leave so I can get my deposit back. I swept out the garage over the weekend. A couple of days ago, I cleaned the stove & the burners, as well as those little catch-sinks under the burners. Last night I thought I’d tackle the oven. I have a self-cleaning oven, but I’ve never used the self-cleaning feature. I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person, and it seemed fairly logical to me, so I took the can of oven cleaner (which, btw, also cleans up that grimy stuff at the bottom of your bathtub really well — it eats through all kinds of gunk), sprayed the inside of the oven, then turned on the self-cleaner.

I noticed a couple of minutes later that there was a lot of smoke coming through the vent, so I turned on the fan over the stove and disconnected my smoke alarm, since I have the most sensitive smoke alarm in the world & it goes off if I have too many candles lit. Happy that my oven was now cleansing itself away, I went back to watching the episode of “Queer Eye” that I had taped the night before.

A few minutes passed, then I started coughing. I looked into the kitchen, and it was FILLED with smoke. As in, I could no longer see the cabinets and they were only maybe 20 feet away. And the smoke was rapidly filling the rest of the apartment. I ran into the kitchen, felt my way to the oven & turned it off. Then I opened my bedroom window, my front door, and the sliding glass door to let the place air out. That wasn’t really helping too much since the smoke was just hovering, so I grabbed a fan, rigged it up in the kitchen (choking & coughing the whole time) and aimed the fan toward the door so it would blow the smoke outside. I grabbed Teenie & my cell phone, and we sat out on the balcony (the only place I could breathe) while I called my mom to ask her what I should do. Mom, of course, has never had a self-cleaning oven, so she didn’t have a clue.

Since my mom was no help, I called Kris, who asked me “did you read the bottle of oven cleaner to see if you’re supposed to use it on self-cleaning ovens?” Umm… no. Duh. By this point, the apartment was clear even though it still smelled really bad, but I figured at least I wouldn’t die of smoke inhalation, so I went back in & looked at it. Turns out you’re supposed to spray the stuff, wait 2 hours, THEN turn on the self-cleaning feature. Oops.

A few hours later, I went at the goo inside the oven with a washcloth, and it wiped up pretty easily. So I guess it worked. But I’m not using my oven for the rest of my time in this place, because I’m afraid it’ll start smoking & smell weird again. And when I woke up today, I was all congested & could barely breathe. I guess inhaling toxic chemicals will have that effect.

Oh, and speaking of toxic chemicals, this story is fascinating, but it totally messed me up yesterday. I have been unable to get some of these images out of my head.

a couple of weird items to break up the monotony of your otherwise hum-drum week

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Only a couple of miles from one of my former apartments in Memphis, a girl bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod. I have no idea if this story is actually true or not, but they gave the exact street address (on Poplar Avenue), which makes me think that it just might be real. And it is a pretty ghetto neighborhood that they’re talking about — believe me, I know, I used to live there — so I don’t think this type of violent activity would be all that far-fetched, given the area.

Finally, something important to remember.