holiday shopping finale

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Yesterday, I went to the mall to get the Christmas presents for myself, courtesy of a check my mom sent me last week. It’s kind of an annual tradition in our family. Problem is, the last few times I’ve been shopping, nothing has really looked cute on me. (This is entirely an issue with my self-image and not the clothes, and I know that.) But I also know that I would’ve gotten hell if I had used my Christmas money for something like groceries or utility bills, so I was determined to find clothes that I liked. I hit at least 9 different stores, but by god, I found a few things that didn’t look too awful. So hooray for that, Christmas shopping is officially over for me.

For the most part, my encounters with mall employees were pleasant or unnoteworthy, except for two little things that I thought would make funny anecdotes. Number one: While passing through the fragrance section of a department store, I stopped to smell a couple of things I hadn’t seen before. As I started to leave, one of the fragrance ladies jumped out with her little piece of paper that had been sprayed with perfume to offer it to me. I’m actually a big fan of this type of marketing, as opposed to the women who try to assault you by spraying you with the actual perfume. Sure, give me the piece of paper, I can throw it away in 5 seconds after I’ve decided I don’t like it. I’ll be much happier doing that, rather than having to take a shower to get rid of the smell.

So she comes up to me and says “New fragrance?”, and starts to hand me the paper. As soon as my hand touches it, she says in a voice about 10 times quieter than before, “… by Paris Hilton.” Doh! Too late now, I’ve already agreed to take the piece of paper by reaching for it. There’s no backing out of this little perfume transaction at this point. The funny part was that she was so clearly embarassed to have to push Paris Hilton’s perfume on people, I almost didn’t hear her say the name over the mall noise. So I took the paper and walked away, and it took every ounce of self-control in my body not to sniff it, turn around and say “Gee, it doesn’t smell like skank ho.” And of course, because I fought the urge and didn’t say it, I then got a wicked case of the church giggles in the middle of the mall. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud. I’m sure people thought I was nuts.

The other incident took place on my way out. As I finished shopping, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten in something like 7 1/2 hours. I skipped hungry, and went straight to “If I don’t eat something now, I’m either going to faint or kill someone.” So I decided that on my way out of the mall, I would stop to get a pretzel dog. [Aside: If any of you have not yet experienced this most wondrous creation of the mall food court, do so immediately. It’s like a hot dog, only more buttery and salty. Translation: heaven.] There was a kiosk in the middle of the hallway that had perfumes and lotions, and as I walked past it, the guy working there asked me if I’d like to try something. I don’t know what it was, he had a bottle of something blue in his hands, and I wasn’t listening – I was a woman on a mission. I shook my head and said “no thanks.” That’s actually excessively polite for me when I have low blood sugar. Then he says, “Can I ask you something?” Um, ok. I stopped walking and turned around. He said, “Are your nails real or fake?” I was so confused, I don’t know why I didn’t realize that this was part of a sales pitch. I said, “They’re real,” and held my hand out to show him. He grabbed my hand and started to pull me toward his kiosk. He said, “Can I show you something that would be just amazing for your nails?” This guy obviously had no clue that he had just taken his life into his own hands by delaying me on my Quest for Pretzel Dog Bliss. So I gave him my biggest, sweetest “I’m being polite because that’s how my parents raised me, but if you don’t let go of my hand this instant, so help me, I’m leaving this mall with one of your eyeballs as a rearview mirror decoration” southern girl smiles, and I said, “No.” Very firm, no room for negotiation. A fleeting look of terror crossed his face, and he let go of my hand. I decided to let him live, despite the fact that I would’ve been at least 10 seconds closer to my pretzel dog if he hadn’t stopped me. Oh well.

Also, I have to give a shout-out to Sally over at Catoptric, who now has me completely and totally hooked on Project Runway. If any of you haven’t seen it, tune in immediately. The bitchiness is rampant. Rampant, I tell you! It’s so great. There are two of the gayest gay men I have ever seen in my life on that show. (And I used to be friends with a drag queen, so that’s saying something.) There’s also a guy on that show with cornrows, who I find oddly attractive. Which is kind of alarming, as I’m not typically a cornrow-loving kind of gal. Last night, they got rid of the girl with the constant sourpuss look on her face. And thank god, I was tired of looking at her, and her dresses were ugly.

another rainy Monday

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I tried to write something last week, but it appears that Blogger has been having problems. Hmm. Ok, the recap. My company’s Christmas party was on Wednesday night – it was at a bowling alley. Apparently our regional director is a bit of a bowling fanatic, which is why we seem to do this at most company functions. Kind of strange. After the last time I bowled with my co-workers and won the “Least Graceful Bowler” award, I decided to sit this one out. So Dave and I enjoyed our free drink tickets and mingled with a few of my co-workers. (The ones that I know, anyway.) Thursday night was Dave’s company Christmas party, which was quite a different scene. It was a sit-down dinner at a very posh seafood restaurant. Not quite the same vibe as the bowling alley. I had a lot more fun at Dave’s party. Plus, his company’s Redmond office is a lot smaller than mine, so he actually knew everyone there. (Unlike mine, where it was more like, “Umm, I think I met that guy once, but I can’t remember his name…”) And the food was a lot better.

The weekend was good, very relaxing. I can’t think of anything particularly notable that we did, except that yesterday we did some Christmas shopping. It appeared that Dave had no idea what to get me for Christmas, so I dragged him around Nordstrom’s and pointed out a hundred or so different things that I liked, so he can get one or two and know that I’ll be happy. I was all excited when I woke up this morning because I realized that I was done with all of my Christmas shopping, and then I realized that I forgot one person: myself. My mom sent me a check with which to buy my own Christmas presents, and I haven’t used it yet. We do this every year; she usually gets me one or two small surprise gifts, but as a general rule, she doesn’t try to pick out clothes for me because it always ends in disaster. (I’m not saying that my mom doesn’t have taste. It’s just that she doesn’t necessarily know what I like. At all.)

I’m in the process of changing and updating pictures, I know I’m long overdue. I’ve changed the name of the Newport Beach photos to just California 2004 because all of our vacation photos are in there now. I’ve also added the ones from the Humane Society Walk, and from Thanksgiving. (Actually, they’re all photos from the weekend before Thanksgiving. I haven’t gotten the actual Thanksgiving photos from my mom yet.)

what do you want to be when you grow up?

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My company has this kind of strange management policy. No one really has a “boss” in the traditional sense – you have a project lead for each individual project you work on, and you have a career manager for everything else. The career manager is kind of like a mentor, but it’s also the person that your project leads give feedback to, so he knows how you’re doing as an employee and can recommend you (or not) for promotions/advances. Anyway, my first career manager, Mo, left the company last month. So now I have a new one, a guy named Jeff. He emailed me and asked me to lunch, since we’ve never met before, and his current project is in my neighborhood. We met up at Racha’s, my favorite Thai place, and went over all of my career goals. That part was so incredibly difficult. Does anyone know what they want to be doing 10 years from now? I don’t have a clue. When I think about work/my career, I can’t see past the next 2 years. I never have been able to think that far ahead. Maybe that makes me weird, I don’t know. Anyway, Jeff seems like a nice guy overall, so I’m glad he’s my career manager – I just hope he doesn’t think I’m a flake for not knowing what I hope to aspire to by 2014.

And speaking of work, my company’s Christmas party is on Wednesday, and Dave’s is on Thursday, so we’re going to be double-whammied on holiday office parties this week. Fun! Mine is at a bowling alley. I think Dave’s is going to be a bit classier (or at least I hope so). Actually, nevermind classy – I just hope there’s free booze at both of them.

Other than that, not much is going on. The weekend was very relaxing. We got a Christmas tree for Dave’s house. We also grabbed some ornaments, but it’s kind of a sparse-looking tree – it probably needs three strings of lights, and we only got two. Also, I tend to think that ornaments are something that you should acquire over time, not buy in bulk at Target (which we did). I made him buy one ornament of a snowman and snowlady hugging with the words “Our First Christmas” under it. He said he’s going to hide it when people come over. I know it’s cheesy, but I love that ornament.

more money drama

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Yesterday was the official 3rd business day since my checking account got looted, so I checked my balance online, and sure enough, I still didn’t have my money put back in my account. So I called the bank. The customer service girl told me that I had been misinformed; that actually, it would be 2 or 3 business days until I got an affidavit in the mail stating that the transactions were unauthorized. Then, I have to sign the affadavit, mail it back, it will take them ten business days to process it, and only after that will I get my money back. I proceeded to flip the hell out on the customer service lady. I started crying and I yelled at her, “Do you realize this is the first of the month? Do you realize my rent was due yesterday? What the hell are people supposed to do when this type of thing happens to them? How am I supposed to live with no money for 2 weeks?!?!!” I finally realized that I was borderline hysterical and this conversation was going nowhere, so I just hung up on her. I called my mom – she was willing to lend me the money, but it wouldn’t get here before the 5th (my landlord has a 5-day grace period), but she offered to overnight a check. Dave also offered to lend me the money. I decided that would be easier, since there’s no postal service involved, and we decided that he’d give me the check today so I could deposit it and still get my rent check in on time.

Then, this morning, I got online again to check my bank balance – it’s sort of become a habit over the past few days. Lo and behold, my money is back in my account. It’s listed as “provisional credit”, so I think that means that it’s just a loan until they get the affadavit processed. But still, thank God. The customer service chick told me it would take 10 days just to get the damn provisional credit, so I guess she was either confused or just an idiot. Either way, all is well now.

In other news, Dave’s mom left on Thursday. We had a little going-away dinner on Wednesday night, which was fun. I’m kind of sad that she’s gone, I had a lot of fun spending time with her over the past couple of weeks. At the same time, it’s nice to have Dave all to myself again. Speaking of which, I plan on wrapping up with work sometime in the next couple of hours, and then Teenie and I are going to pack up & head over for a weekend in Duvall. Maybe we’ll get a Christmas tree. Yay!

people suck

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Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from my bank. I saw the name on the caller ID and almost didn’t answer – I figured they were just going to try to sell me a mortgage or something. (One thing I’ve noticed about working from home is that I get a lot of telemarketing calls during the day.) I did answer, and it was someone from my bank’s fraud prevention department, calling to verify some recent transactions. I have no credit cards, and I pretty much live on my debit card, so this didn’t strike me as too strange. The lady from the bank asked me if I had done a balance inquiry from an ATM on Saturday. Um, no. I never do balance inquiries at ATM’s. If I want to know how much is in my account, I use the bank’s website. So by now, I was kind of alarmed. She then asked me when the last time was that I used my debit card. I racked my brain and the last time I could think of was Wednesday, when I went to the grocery store shortly before my parents arrived. Then she asks, “So you haven’t made any ATM withdrawals today?” Um, NO!! Panic was starting to set in by this point, I could feel the tears rising up.

Basically, it looks like someone managed to get ahold of both my debit card number and my PIN, which is crazy because I’m always very careful about protecting that when I have to enter it, and I haven’t lost my card. Plus, my PIN isn’t even something easy to guess like my birthday, it’s the one that was randomly generated by the bank. So this person did the balance inquiry to find out how much was in my account on Saturday, and then yesterday, they took out 3 separate $500 ATM withdrawals. In one day. My checking account is now overdrafted to all hell. The good news is that I’ll get my money back, and they won’t charge me the overdraft fees. The sucky part is that it will take 2 to 3 business days to get the money back, and in the meantime, my debit card has been cancelled and they’ll have to send me a new one. So I just have to pray that no expenses come up this week that require more than the $20 I have in cash. Oh, and did I mention that rent is due tomorrow? Hooray! I’m more pissed than anything, to know that some stupid piece of shit got away with $1500 scot-free and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it. That’s just infuriating.

And a quick retraction: My sister pointed out that every time I’ve talked about Dave’s guest room, I’ve called the color lavendar, and the word is actually spelled lavender. I looked it up and she was right. Dammit. I hate it when I misspell words. The funny thing is that every time I read it with the -er, I thought someone had made a typo. Oh well.

Turkey Day recap

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I picked my sister up from the airport on Wednesday in kind of a panicked state. Her plane was a half-hour early, so I was still at my apartment when she called to tell me that she had landed. I met her outside baggage claim, she said she didn’t wait too long. I guess de-boarding time and all that. We went to Redmond to meet up with Dave for lunch, who was unusually quiet and well-behaved. I think he was more nervous than he let on. But lunch was fine, and then Tracy and I shopped for a while before we headed back to my apartment. (We both managed to find Christmas gifts for our mom, who is the most impossible person in the world to shop for, so hooray for that.) After chilling out at my apartment for a couple of hours, we went back to the airport to pick up my folks. They were supposed to get in at 7:00, and when we were at lunch, I could’ve sworn that I told Dave to meet me at my apartment between 7:30 and 8:00. I guess there was some miscommunication there (my sister heard the same thing Dave did, so apparently I was wrong), and my phone rang at 7:00, which was Dave, asking me to go downstairs and let him into the parking garage. Oops. I told him to go to the Irish pub around the corner and have a beer, and I’d call him as soon as I collected my parents and got back to the city.

Meanwhile, back at the airport, Tracy and I found my folks – my dad managed to make it almost 5 minutes before asking me if I had gained any weight. I suppose that’s progress. We got back to my place, met up with Dave, and went to dinner. That actually went pretty well. My mom seems to really like Dave, and he even got a couple of laughs out of my dad, which is amazing. After dinner, we got my parents settled in at their hotel (a block & a half from my apartment), and called it a night.

Thanksgiving Day, we loaded up the car with goodies and headed out to Dave’s house. And I must say, I think Mags and I managed to pull off a mighty impressive Thanksgiving feast. (Dave gets props too – he made the house look great before we all arrived.) But I’m SO glad that Mags was there to make the turkey, because it turned out amazing, and there’s no way I could’ve pulled that off. Everyone seemed to really like the food, and the families all seemed to like each other, so yay! I was incredibly stressed out and snapped at people a lot because I kept feeling like my family was nitpicking every little thing I did – even down to things I can’t control, like why is it so cold and rainy in Seattle. Dave, bless his heart, kept refilling my spiced rum and diet coke, which helped to relax me a lot. After dinner, we played Cranium and Pictionary, which was hilarious. My dad is the most random pictionary player ever. He draws boobs on a stick and we’re supposed to guess that that means “Miss America.” And his cars look like space shuttles. It’s kind of insane. Makes for a fun evening, though.

OH! The biggest breakthrough of the day: Greta, the semi-feral cat, actually let me pet her. I think this is all due to Mags, who is like Dr. Doolittle with animals. She had gotten to pet Greta, which may have made her realize that humans are not all bad. So when I managed to get her to eat a piece of turkey out of my hand, she let me pet her while she ate it. That was so cool. Who knows, she might actually turn out to be a normal cat someday.

Friday, it finally stopped raining, so I dragged my family through Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. We were going to do the Underground Tour of Seattle, which I have wanted to do for ages, but the last tour was sold out. This is the 2nd time that I’ve tried to go on this tour and not been able to (the other time was because we missed the start of the last tour of the day), so I’m starting to think that’s a sign that I’m not meant to go. We were all pretty exhausted by early in the evening, so we got deli food from one of my local grocery stores, rented “Cold Mountain” (had to fast-forward through the sex scene at the end because there is No Nudity when my dad is in the room), and chilled out.

This morning, everyone is getting ready to leave, which means there is no sleep to be had in my apartment. My sister has already left, and my parents will be going soon. As soon as I get back from dropping them off at the airport, I plan on taking a nice 4 or 5 hour nap.

The Mother from Northern England

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I met Dave’s mom, Mags (or Margaret), on Friday evening. I was really excited about it until just a few hours before, then I started to get nervous. As it turns out, the pre-mom-meeting jitters were completely unwarranted, because we hit it off immediately. She is a total riot. We went to the Mexican restaurant in Duvall, because she was still a bit jet-lagged from the trip and wanted to get to bed early. It’s one of those Mexican chain restaurants where the food isn’t particularly great, but it’s simple enough and pretty reliable. Afterwards, we walked across the street to the new sports bar for a drink. (Apparently Duvall is growing into a regular little metropolis; you heard it here first. Next thing you know, all the alpacas will be wearing Louis Vuitton). The sports bar is actually kind of an odd place. It’s owned by the Chinese restaurant next door and they share a kitchen. So if you order food in the sports bar, it’s from the Chinese place’s menu. And the chairs and carpet are the same as the Chinese place. So basically, the only thing that makes it a “sports bar” is the fact that it has a pool table, a dartboard, a jukebox and a couple of big TV sets where they show sports-type events. But it’s smoke-free and the drinks are good, so no complaints. Anyway, we had a great time and called it a night around 11:00 (which was something like 7 a.m. for Mags with the jet lag; she mentioned that it felt like she should be ready for her morning coffee).

Saturday, I had a lazy day at home while Dave and his mom shopped and ran various errands on the eastside. We met up that evening to go to dinner at the Waterfront Restaurant at Pier 70, which is definitely my favorite restaurant in Seattle, and possibly the world. It’s one of those super-posh restaurants that’s too expensive to go often, but it’s perfect for special occasions (i.e., a mom visiting from 5,000 miles away; owing your girlfriend a favor for helping with home improvement projects, etc.). Pretty much everything on the menu is pure mouth bliss. That’s the only way I know to describe it. Anyway, we had a great time again, and after dinner we came back to my apartment so I could show Mags the view from my building’s rooftop deck. We took a few pictures up there (which I’ll post as soon as Dave emails them to me). The strange part of the evening was that I started to feel like I was talking to Mags so much that I was neglecting Dave. I spent a lot of time with him on both Friday and Saturday nights, but I felt like I hadn’t really seen him.

For the next couple of days, Mags is going to stay with Cheryl, who is Dave’s ex-mother-in-law. I guess that might seem strange to some people, but they became friends when Dave and his ex were together, and they’ve stayed in touch in spite of their children’s divorce. Which makes sense to me, they have a friendship that is completely separate from Dave and his ex-wife. Anyway, last night, they decided that the three of them (Mags, Dave and Cheryl) would meet up and have dinner, and then Mags would go home with Cheryl afterward. It’s a bit more social than Dave dropping his mom off at Cheryl’s house, I suppose. Then Cheryl’s other daughter (Dave’s ex-sister-in-law) and her 2 year-old baby decided to come along, plus the daughter’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, who I’d already met once before. (Yes, this is a very complicated family.) Dave seemed very anxious about the whole dinner idea, and I offered to go along for moral support. And selfishly, because I am incredibly curious to learn about the ex’s family. Dave seemed happy that I wanted to go, and I was glad that I could be his designated driver, because he certainly seemed to need a couple of drinks before we left the house. When we were in the car, I reassured him that when you go to a restaurant with a 2 year-old, she’s pretty much going to be the focus of everyone’s attention, so that’s going to dissipate most awkward situations. And I was right. It didn’t feel weird to be there at all, surprisingly enough. The ex-sister-in-law was perfectly pleasant to talk to, and I squeezed Dave’s hand under the table when he seemed tense. I’m sure the evening was a bit rougher on him, but I had a good time. The baby is totally adorable, she sucked down chow mein noodles “Lady and the Tramp”-style. So cute.

The good part about the ex’s family is that they are not night owls. Dinner was at 5:00, and we were out of there by 7. And since Mags left with Cheryl afterward, that meant that I got a few hours of “me and Dave” time, which was great. I’ve had a blast chatting with Mags all weekend, don’t get me wrong. But I was starting to miss Dave, despite the fact that I had seen him three days in a row. Go figure.

Forty-eight hours until my family shows up for Thanksgiving. Whee!