My blog is where I like to put some of my paintings when they're complete. Painting is what really centers me and makes me happy. 
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
It's the little things...
Archived from Jan. 2010
Some of us might live in a closet under the stairs, or be tortured daily by a wicked stepmother who puts gum in our hair while we sleep, but for the majority of us, it’s the little things that can make or break our day. There have been books written about how important it is not to “sweat the small stuff”, but really, for most of us, what else is there? It’s not like I’m going to come home one day and find the Publishers Clearing House guys at my door with a giant check. With that in mind, try not to judge me too harshly for the stuff I’m getting ready to bitch about.
I had to go to the full service deli counter the other day. It’s always a traumatic experience for me. The people who work behind the counter don’t actually want to provide full service. It’s a ruse. They really want to stand there wearing a hairnet and talk to each other about last weekend, or what they’re wearing to their cousins’ wedding (who’s marrying that asshole they they know is already cheating on her). That’s why they have the pre-sliced meats sitting there in the case, with the huge slabs of salami or cheese sitting there for display purposes. They want to grab a handful of the pre-sliced crap, throw it in the plastic bag and put a sticker on it, and send you on your way. But I have to come along and fark up their whole day. My husband likes white American cheese. Specifically, Land O’ Lakes white American cheese. Thinly sliced. But not so thin that it falls apart. Thin, but manageable, is the description he likes to give. Why this matters so much when he could easily nom down a half pound before leaving the market is a mystery to me, but that is irrelavent.
I know this is going to be a huge chore for the “full service” deli person, so upon entering the store, I go immediately to the deli counter to put in my request. I ask for a pound of thinly sliced white American cheese, and a half pound of peppered turkey breast. She gives me a pained smile and says, “ and do you have any other shopping to do?” I assure her, that yes I do and I will return after my shopping for the packages. I then proceed to take my time shopping, glancing in that direction every so often, because usually they plop the bags on top of the counter as they are completed so you know they are done. Except I never saw anything on the counter. I have now completed my entire shopping list and am browsing, when I yawn and decide that I will just go stand at the counter so that she will know that I am done shopping and will “get the lead out of her ass” so to speak, and finish my order. So I’m standing in front of the counter, she’s moving equipment around back there, talking to her coworker, I’m twittering, reading a book on my phone, when my husband calls. I’ve been there for about 10 minutes.
“Where the hell are ya? I thought you were just running to the store?” I tell him that, yes, but I stopped at the deli counter for cheese, when I notice some packages inside the case that look suspiciously like my cheese and turkey. I hang up the phone.
“Excuuuuse me”, I say to the girl behind the counter, “ but I think that’s my stuff in there”.
“Oh, this cheese and what, turkey?”
She hands it to me, I thank her, and go to check out. What I really want to do is scream, “What the FUCK did you think I was standing there for?” But I didn’t do that. We must be civilized.
But seriously. Someone is standing in front of the case for 10 minutes, and you don’t
1. recognize that this is someone you just waited on, or
2. failing to recognize the customer, ask them why the hell they might be standing there? (ex. “may I help you?” or “ are you waiting for something?”)
Wow. Like I said, in the big scheme of things it might not seem like much, but unless I am Barak Obama or Lindsay Lohan, what more traumatic things are likely to happen to me on an ordinary day?
Perhaps I shouldn’t ask. I still have to stop at the dry cleaners
Welcome to the most Ignored blog in America---Archived from Jan 4, 2010
So, once again we spent the Christmas and New Year holidays in CT with my husbands’ family. Maybe someday I’ll feel brave enough to write about it. For right now let’s just say that it wasn’t dull. There was non stop drama, people, noise and food the entire time. Oh, there was plenty of snow and freezing cold weather as well. We took a little day trip into New York City one day, of course picking the coldest possible day to walk around experiencing a zero degree wind chill factor.
I love the city. I really don’t know why specifically, other than that I was raised in Los Angeles and some of the crowd and craziness reminds me of a foul weather LA. Except everyone isn’t beautiful, and that probably makes me feel better. Actually, no question about it, it definitely makes me feel better. Wo we started out the day walking down 42nd street and finding a little deli place to have some bad coffee and breakfast sandwiches. There were 9 of us, trekking through the streets and crowding into this tiny deli. From there we went through St Patrick’s Cathedral, stopped at the Walgreens’ and bought those pocket handwarmers and some tights and made our way down to Toys R Us so a couple of the girls who didn’t wear long johns could put on tights in the restroom there. With that out of the way, we determined that the one of us who hadn’t been to New York yet wanted to see the statue of Liberty.
For those who have never been to NYC, the statue of Liberty is viewed from Battery Park, which on this day might as well have been Antarctica. In fact, we had to negotiate the subway system to get down to that area, walk against the arctic wind blowing off the Hudson river and then try to take pictures with our hats blowing down the street while the person who wanted to go there to see the statue huddled behind a monument. We then made our way back to the subway as quickly as possible (it was FREAKING cold) and after much deliberation figured out how to get back to Times square and over to FAO Schwartz and on to Little Italy for dinner. After dinner we went down to Canal street and bought some (presumably) contraband handbags. It was fun and pretty uneventful, except for a little internal drama that I will leave out here. I’m really only posting this because I feel guilty I haven’t written anything here in so long.
Anyway, it’s really good to be back home even though I have to go to work tomorrow. I got to pick up my dog, so he’s home and snoring away. Actually, my husband is on the couch and also snoring away. All the stuff in my house works, I don’t get scalded when I turn on the hot water, and generally stuff happens the way I expect it to here.
Mostly.
An Act of Kindness? archived from Sept. 2009
I had a really nice weekend. The kind that make me want to stay home an extra day because I just don’t want to go back to the office. Actually, I experience that even when I haven’t had a good weekend, but whatever. I painted a lot on Saturday, and Sunday I decided while out running errands that I would stop by the Goodwill and drop off some stuff I’ve had in my car for a few days.
So I pulled up to the donation door, where the worker (not a very happy fellow, by the way)gestured toward a big yellow bin on wheels. So I pushed it to the back of my car and started unloading stuff into the bin. I noticed a young man walking toward me on the sidewalk of this strip mall where Goodwill is located. The sidewalk runs right through the donation area. He was wearing a lot of black, and a ballcap and a backpack. He walked around my car instead of through the area where I was unloading, so I was surprised when I looked up and he was standing right next to me.
“You want some help with that?” He asked quietly
“Maybe just this box right here,” I pointed, “It’s heavy”
He hoisted the box into the bin for me and said “No problem” when I thanked him profusely. He kept walking in the same direction he had been headed.
The guy inside the Goodwill donation center, however, was still kind of a dick. I was thinking that the backpack guy surprised me with his chivalry, but it reminded me of the time I was at a restaurant on the beach buying a cup of milk for my younger son when he was only about 7. My husband liked to call him “Mr Spill” (an earned nickname) so I asked for a plastic travel top for the cup. There was a small service cart next to the counter with an assortment (more of a jumbled mess) of plastic tops to fit various cups, so I and the kid who was waiting on me were down on the floor at the bottom shelf of the service cart trying to find a top for this cup and finding it fairly amusing. Finally, success. I walked away thinking what a nice young man he was and how much he reminded me of my older son, who was about 16 at the time.
Flash forward to a couple of weeks later when I’m watching the morning news and they are discussing a couple murdered on the beach, apparently just for fun. It’s all caught on security video, and they’re showing a picture of the 2 guys who comitted the murders. I almost spewed my coffee when the kid I was buying the milk from is staring at me from the TV screen. It’s confirmed when they show a picture of the restaurant where the kid worked and it was the same restaurant I had been in.
You just can’t tell about people.
So while I was temporarily warmed by the young man’s kindness at the Goodwill, I also gave a little shudder when I thought about the fact that he may have just been wondering if he could shove me into the back of my SUV and drive away without anyone else interfering and had decided against it, or was just a genuinely nice kid.
It’s a shame I’ll never be able to really know the answer. And a shame I can’t just assume the latter.
Man’s need to screw with stuff
2009 September 13
Okay, I’ll admit I haven’t been here in awhile. I’ve been extremely busy painting pictures for my friends’ salon, enjoying the summer boating, going to Vegas, and of course, the pesky job.
But what I found when I got here was that they have been screwing around with this site to the point that by the time I figure out how to get into my own blog, I’ve either forgotten what I was going to say, or just don’t give a shit anymore.
This makes me wonder why in the world people are always messing with things that are fine as they are. I just “updated” some iphone apps that were better before the update. I just tried getting some hot dog relish out of a squeeze bottle (NOT a good idea, by the way) that caused me to give up on the whole idea of relish entirely. The thing has a hole in the top the size of my pinkie finger, yet when you turn it upside down and squeeze it, you get a bunch of relish-flavoured liquid on your hotdog, and the relish remains in the bottle. Where, as far as I am concerned, it can remain until the end of time.
I’m pretty sure it’s all about money, though. Because, (and here’s the part that actually pisses me off) the Heinz company decided to put relish in a squeeze bottle. Nevermind that it doesn’t actually work. That’s irrelevant. Some idiot in a meeting decides it’s a great idea, they don’t apparently test it out, and they flood the market with squeeze bottles of relish that don’t work. People buy them, cause gosh, wouldn’t that be handy at a picnic?! Then it doesn’t work. And I, and most other people, are not going to take it back to the store because it costs a couple of bucks and we just won’t buy that one again. Meanwhile, the Heinz company has probably made more money than I will ever make in my life on these stupid bottles that don’t work. It kinda makes you sick, and just illustrates the old adage that life isn’t fair. Remember, these are the people who brought you green and purple ketchup in years past.
They’ve got some real geniuses working for them. Maybe I’ll present some of my weirder ideas to them and see if they bite. I’m working on a cheese jerky right now.
What? It’ll be a hit with vegetarians.
Contemplative Commuting
2009 June 25
Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve checked in here. The moon must be in Gemini or something, that seems to be when I start reflecting on past events or non-events in my life.
I was thinking this morning, as I was driving to work in my SUV with satellite radio, about some of the folks I used to hang out with, how we were all barefoot granola eaters. We were all non materialistic music lovers who planned about five minutes ahead. Some of us must have had dreams or goals in mind. I can’t think of too many specifically, I know several of them wanted to be musicians, and most of them are. Not full time, but perhaps doing what you love for a living isn’t always the best way to keep loving it. I know that back when I wanted to be a singer, getting up early on Saturday morning and fighting the traffic out to Alkai beach to take voice lessons, followed by daily practice, skimming the trade papers for audition opportunities and talking to some real whackjobs for the privilege of working with them soon descended to the point where I didn’t even want to sing in the shower. To this day I don’t sing in the shower anymore. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
So now I paint, always looking forward to the day I won’t have a regular job anymore and I can just paint or draw all day, while in the back of my mind is this little nagging feeling that if I stop working and paint for money, I’m going to lose my love for it.
But back to the barefoot granola eaters. Most of those people didn’t seem to change much. Some of them have changed their names to stuff like “Free”. Yeah, I know who you are, I saw you on Classmates. My friend “Free” wound up marrying a nice girl who makes her own soap and is on the “catch and release” program of dealing with insects, and they adopt children from underprivileged countries.
I, on the other hand, am driving the aforementioned SUV on the freeway every day to a job that completely frustrates me, and have my properties regularly sprayed by a pest control company so that I never see an ant or spider. I buy my soap in the supermarket on my lunch break from the list I keep on my iphone. And we had our own kids. They look like us, talk like us, and love their gadgets like us.
I just can’t figure out how I changed so much. Granted, it’s been a gradual change, but the same 25 plus years have gone by for everyone else as well. Most of them live in the same town or very nearby. Maybe I just like constantly moving in a direction. I know that when I visit someone’s home and it’s been years and nothing has changed it always amazes me. I would get so tired of eating off the same plate night after night, listening to the same songs day after day.
Anyway, in a sense, we all seemed to get what we wanted. They wanted to be musicians, they are. I wanted to be a painter and a writer, I am. Not the way we thought it would be, but maybe better after all.
Home Improvents, or Why Home Depot does such a good business…
2009 January 21
We spent the Christmas holidays at my MIL’s in CT, which was for the most part fun, but before we left, we hired a guy to install a concrete floor on the first floor of our house. I was going to have tile put in, but Joe kind of knew this contractor who does poured concrete floors that look like tile, wood, whatever you want. Which I thought sounded pretty cool, plus it goes down faster than tile, which was also helpful because it involved almost the entire bottom floor (and thusly everything except the bedrooms and bath upstairs). Well, the guy asked if he might start taking out some carpet and trim in preparation so that they would be done by Christmas and could take the time off. We said sure. The idea was that we would come home to a completed floor.
2 days before vacation we come home from work and the stove, fridge, dishwasher, etc are all crammed into the dining and family rooms (the only rooms not getting the new floor) and there is a sticky orange goo covering the whole floor. So we have to have slip on shoes so we can walk across the goo, remove shoes, get on the carpet to do whatever, then put on shoes to walk across the goo again. And we have a dog (who doesn’t wear shoes). So with all that going on, we had to go out for every meal and try to prepare for vacation (oh, and celebrate Christmas in the confines of 1/2 the family room with our oldest son who couldn’t go to CT with us), you know, so wrapping gifts, etc. was a real joy.
So, while at MIL’s house we get an email with a pic of our new floor. It’s pink. We asked, repeatedly, for gray. AND we went to another one of his clients’ homes and looked at her floor and I said, “that’s great, just do this at our place”. Hers was not pink. So we get home and he can’t seal the floor because it’s the wrong color, and he tried to correct the color by spraying gray on top. Still looked pink. Now he doesn’t know what to do. Because the whole thing needs to be darker. So we suggested that he simply tint the sealer with gray and the whole thing would be darker. We try it in a small area and like the result. Now he’s afraid to make a move on his own so he tells me he will be back at 7am to start applying the tinted sealer all over, and I should see how it’s looking and once he gets going I can go to work and it will be all done when i get home. Great. Only when I get home, the kitchen where he started looks great, and as he moved through the hall and entryway, it looks like a large quantity of roofing tar has been applied with a roller in 8 foot strokes. The hall and entry way are blotchy and black, and the kitchen is a nice slate gray. With some big white scratches in in where they dropped the dishwasher trying to put it back in.
My husband called the guy up and reemed him a new one. He came over the next morning with no explanation as to what may have happened to create such a difference from one area to another, especially since he spent about an hour trying to “make sure he got the color formula just right”. His suggestion was that we pick out tile or he pour another floor on top of this one and we start over. We opted for the second one only in the interest of time.
New floor poured and now we’re back at the coloring stage. He appears to have no idea how to go about this. He makes an attempt at coloring the floor, and I wind up hanging around on saturday to help him. I have to walk around after him like he’s a four year old, telling him where to spray the paint. We escape to the cabin so he can seal the floor (it’s stinky). The next day we come home, and there are odd spots and blotches all over the place, and a footprint in the entryway. It’s sealed, so again he has no idea what to do. He comes back a few days later to attempt a solution, again clueless, so I wind up crawling on the floor painting over the blotches with acrylic paint and his assistant seals them. It’s still not perfect, but we’re living with it for now.
And it only took a month
Got Water?
2008 July 27
So we got a shut off notice from the water company the other day. Not for the house, for the cabin that we go to on the weekends. The town which, up until recently, had no water meters and just charged everyone in town a flat rate regardless of usage. They still charge a flat rate, but because they have the meters, they can see if you are using a large amount of water and charge you accordingly.
I had gotten the water bill a few weeks earlier, and since we were up at the cabin on the 4th of July, I decided I’d just drop my payment in the drop box on our way out of town. Figured I’d save postage and time. So we pulled up to the city hall, and I dropped the payment in the nite slot. Then we get the late notice. Joe called them about it and she says that we should send a new check, because they can’t find it and have no idea where it could be. I don’t think she believed him. After a while, I guess she called him back and said they had found the check, no worries. She said I must have dropped it in the wrong slot.
Um, there’s more than one? Seriously, on a building the size of an espresso hut? This town has 200 year round residents. My water account number is 8. Eight! So, for the sake of argument, let’s say I dropped the payment in the “wrong” slot. If it were on the opposite end of the building it would only be 10 feet away. So say you work there and you collect the checks from the box, and one of them is not for a traffic citation (how many can there be?), it has a water bill stub attached to it. You can’t toss it on Betsy’s desk and say, “Oops, here’s someone’s water bill. Tee hee.”
Is it really that hard?
Besides, I’ve called city hall before and I’m pretty sure it’s always the same woman working there.
I guess those are the growing pains of a booming metropolis.
Chelsea
2008 July 10
Last nite we took our older dog, Chelsea in to the vet for the last time. It was heartbreaking for us all. She had been struggling with her breathing and going further and further downhill, losing her hearing, most of her sight and her teeth. After the long holiday weekend and watching her snort and her chest suck in as far as it would go, we scheduled the procedure for after work on Tuesday evening.
I came home to Chris and Joe sitting in Joes’ office, everyone on the verge of tears, watching her walk around. Actually, not on the verge, IN tears. I went into the kitchen and made her a PB & J and cut it up, started feeding her the pieces by dropping them in her food dish, because she would take your hand off for food if you weren’t careful. And that’s the real puzzler about this whole thing. This dog and I never really “bonded”. I tried, but she was kind of mean, you couldn’t pick her up and she snapped at me several times and actually bit me right through the thumbnail once. She really wasn’t one of those dogs who jumped for joy when you came home. Her biggest concern was just whether or not you were around to feed her. For a 12 pound dog, she was all about the food. I think she was a little more affectionate before Gunnar arrived. He’s an attention hog, very lovable, but would plow her over to get to you and put his head in your lap and gaze up at you to pet him.
So she was crabby. And smelly and semi-incontinent (or just too stubborn to go out, I was never really sure which), but she was like a grouchy old aunt who lived with you and you became accustomed to having around.
We took her in to the vets’, and I was sobbing before we even got in there. He gave us the option to stay with her, which I didn’t want to do, but felt she shouldn’t die alone. After all, I was in the room when my mother died, I should be able to handle a cranky little dog. They muzzled her (remember, she bit and the vet knew this) and injected the solution. As she started to slink down and relax, the vet had his assistant take the muzzle off, which I was thankful for. We stroked her ears and spoke softly to her, telling her she had been a good dog and that we were sorry this was happening. Pretty soon she was completely laying down and it didn’t look like she was breathing. He checked her heart and said she was gone, and then left the room to give us some time with her. We only stayed a moment, we both needed to get out of there.
I don’t have anything cute to say in following, I’m crying too much
Connecting with the past
2008 June 20
I’ve never really spent much time communicating with people I haven’t kept in contact with. Maybe it’s because when I was a kid we moved every 2 years and I had to start all over with new friends. You know, everyone says, “I’ll never forget you, keep in touch” – but of course most of us don’t. So I actually surprised myself when I was googling something the other day- I don’t even remember what or why- and I stumbled upon an obituary for my ex father in law, which led me to read who he was survived by, which led me to my ex sister in law who apparently remarried after her divorce. She married a guy she would never have even considered dating in high school. I know this because we all went to high school together, and believe me she wouldn’t have gone out with this guy. Not that there was anything wrong with him, he was a great guy. But he was a little on the nerdy side, not the typical jock most of the popular girls seemed to go for. And he’s now a veterinarian. Which seems fitting, he was always a kind soul and very smart. Actually the kind of guy I would seek out (if I were looking for someone, anyway)
So I signed up on classmates.com and found a few people. Most of my best friends are not really active on there, I guess they felt like me (we have better things to do than live in the past). But I found out a few interesting , though maybe not surprising things.
1. The more popular you were in high school, the less likely you seem to be to leave that town. Ever.
Seriously, one of the most popular girls married her high school sweetheart and is still married (though not without some difficulty it sounds like) and still in the same town. And you can tell from looking at her profile, she’s still in high school in her mind.
2. The mean girls have changed. They are now reaching out for someone, anyone, to contact them and some of them have had a pretty rough road after high school. The kind of stuff that would have given me some satisfaction to know back then. But now as an adult, it just makes me sad.
3. Some of us who had lots of advantages back then still couldn’t get it together and stay out of jail.
For those of you who’ve kept up with your alumni this may not come as a revelation, but this stuff fascinates me since I’ve never even looked any of them up since then. Like 30 years. Kinda funny, kinda sad.
But mostly funny. Hey, some of us didn’t change at all.
No Thumbs? No Problem.
2008 March 31
My 18 year old son decided that a cool way to spend spring break would be to go camping on the coast with a bunch of his friends and their girlfriends. Nevermind that he dislikes camping immensely, it was gonna be great to go to a campground on the beach with his buds (all pampered suburban dwellers like himself, the girls probably all brought their coach bags with them) and no parental supervision, sleep in tents, etc.
So, on the Monday after Easter, off they went to the blustery Oregon coast. In March. I guess the first day and evening went pretty well, although it was a little chilly, the boys huddled in their tent to keep warm, and the girls likewise. At one point in the nite, Chris got up to take a leak, stepped outside and saw a furry bandit lumbering off with a bag of chips. OK, whatever. Later in the wee hours of the morning, they heard more noises and apparently they noted about 6 more raccoons messing around by the picnic table and around the coolers, which they decided was not really a threat because raccoons don’t have opposable thumbs. They started joking about it, making little hand jestures similar to hitchhiking, demonstrating their superiority to those dumb animals without thumbs.
When they decided to get up, one of them went to the cooler to get a drink, and noticed that some of the sodas were gone, and apparently everything else in the coolers. So much for the lack of thumbs. They then went to the Pig N’ Pancake for breakfast, where Chris left his cell phone. We only discovered this when the waitress called the number for “Dad” and let him know. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get ahold of his girlfriend to let her know where his phone was. Finally got that accomplished, and he went back to the restaurant to get his phone.
The spent the final couple of nights in the car. So much for the great outdoors.
Some of us might live in a closet under the stairs, or be tortured daily by a wicked stepmother who puts gum in our hair while we sleep, but for the majority of us, it’s the little things that can make or break our day. There have been books written about how important it is not to “sweat the small stuff”, but really, for most of us, what else is there? It’s not like I’m going to come home one day and find the Publishers Clearing House guys at my door with a giant check. With that in mind, try not to judge me too harshly for the stuff I’m getting ready to bitch about.
I had to go to the full service deli counter the other day. It’s always a traumatic experience for me. The people who work behind the counter don’t actually want to provide full service. It’s a ruse. They really want to stand there wearing a hairnet and talk to each other about last weekend, or what they’re wearing to their cousins’ wedding (who’s marrying that asshole they they know is already cheating on her). That’s why they have the pre-sliced meats sitting there in the case, with the huge slabs of salami or cheese sitting there for display purposes. They want to grab a handful of the pre-sliced crap, throw it in the plastic bag and put a sticker on it, and send you on your way. But I have to come along and fark up their whole day. My husband likes white American cheese. Specifically, Land O’ Lakes white American cheese. Thinly sliced. But not so thin that it falls apart. Thin, but manageable, is the description he likes to give. Why this matters so much when he could easily nom down a half pound before leaving the market is a mystery to me, but that is irrelavent.
I know this is going to be a huge chore for the “full service” deli person, so upon entering the store, I go immediately to the deli counter to put in my request. I ask for a pound of thinly sliced white American cheese, and a half pound of peppered turkey breast. She gives me a pained smile and says, “ and do you have any other shopping to do?” I assure her, that yes I do and I will return after my shopping for the packages. I then proceed to take my time shopping, glancing in that direction every so often, because usually they plop the bags on top of the counter as they are completed so you know they are done. Except I never saw anything on the counter. I have now completed my entire shopping list and am browsing, when I yawn and decide that I will just go stand at the counter so that she will know that I am done shopping and will “get the lead out of her ass” so to speak, and finish my order. So I’m standing in front of the counter, she’s moving equipment around back there, talking to her coworker, I’m twittering, reading a book on my phone, when my husband calls. I’ve been there for about 10 minutes.
“Where the hell are ya? I thought you were just running to the store?” I tell him that, yes, but I stopped at the deli counter for cheese, when I notice some packages inside the case that look suspiciously like my cheese and turkey. I hang up the phone.
“Excuuuuse me”, I say to the girl behind the counter, “ but I think that’s my stuff in there”.
“Oh, this cheese and what, turkey?”
She hands it to me, I thank her, and go to check out. What I really want to do is scream, “What the FUCK did you think I was standing there for?” But I didn’t do that. We must be civilized.
But seriously. Someone is standing in front of the case for 10 minutes, and you don’t
1. recognize that this is someone you just waited on, or
2. failing to recognize the customer, ask them why the hell they might be standing there? (ex. “may I help you?” or “ are you waiting for something?”)
Wow. Like I said, in the big scheme of things it might not seem like much, but unless I am Barak Obama or Lindsay Lohan, what more traumatic things are likely to happen to me on an ordinary day?
Perhaps I shouldn’t ask. I still have to stop at the dry cleaners
Welcome to the most Ignored blog in America---Archived from Jan 4, 2010
So, once again we spent the Christmas and New Year holidays in CT with my husbands’ family. Maybe someday I’ll feel brave enough to write about it. For right now let’s just say that it wasn’t dull. There was non stop drama, people, noise and food the entire time. Oh, there was plenty of snow and freezing cold weather as well. We took a little day trip into New York City one day, of course picking the coldest possible day to walk around experiencing a zero degree wind chill factor.
I love the city. I really don’t know why specifically, other than that I was raised in Los Angeles and some of the crowd and craziness reminds me of a foul weather LA. Except everyone isn’t beautiful, and that probably makes me feel better. Actually, no question about it, it definitely makes me feel better. Wo we started out the day walking down 42nd street and finding a little deli place to have some bad coffee and breakfast sandwiches. There were 9 of us, trekking through the streets and crowding into this tiny deli. From there we went through St Patrick’s Cathedral, stopped at the Walgreens’ and bought those pocket handwarmers and some tights and made our way down to Toys R Us so a couple of the girls who didn’t wear long johns could put on tights in the restroom there. With that out of the way, we determined that the one of us who hadn’t been to New York yet wanted to see the statue of Liberty.
For those who have never been to NYC, the statue of Liberty is viewed from Battery Park, which on this day might as well have been Antarctica. In fact, we had to negotiate the subway system to get down to that area, walk against the arctic wind blowing off the Hudson river and then try to take pictures with our hats blowing down the street while the person who wanted to go there to see the statue huddled behind a monument. We then made our way back to the subway as quickly as possible (it was FREAKING cold) and after much deliberation figured out how to get back to Times square and over to FAO Schwartz and on to Little Italy for dinner. After dinner we went down to Canal street and bought some (presumably) contraband handbags. It was fun and pretty uneventful, except for a little internal drama that I will leave out here. I’m really only posting this because I feel guilty I haven’t written anything here in so long.
Anyway, it’s really good to be back home even though I have to go to work tomorrow. I got to pick up my dog, so he’s home and snoring away. Actually, my husband is on the couch and also snoring away. All the stuff in my house works, I don’t get scalded when I turn on the hot water, and generally stuff happens the way I expect it to here.
Mostly.
An Act of Kindness? archived from Sept. 2009
I had a really nice weekend. The kind that make me want to stay home an extra day because I just don’t want to go back to the office. Actually, I experience that even when I haven’t had a good weekend, but whatever. I painted a lot on Saturday, and Sunday I decided while out running errands that I would stop by the Goodwill and drop off some stuff I’ve had in my car for a few days.
So I pulled up to the donation door, where the worker (not a very happy fellow, by the way)gestured toward a big yellow bin on wheels. So I pushed it to the back of my car and started unloading stuff into the bin. I noticed a young man walking toward me on the sidewalk of this strip mall where Goodwill is located. The sidewalk runs right through the donation area. He was wearing a lot of black, and a ballcap and a backpack. He walked around my car instead of through the area where I was unloading, so I was surprised when I looked up and he was standing right next to me.
“You want some help with that?” He asked quietly
“Maybe just this box right here,” I pointed, “It’s heavy”
He hoisted the box into the bin for me and said “No problem” when I thanked him profusely. He kept walking in the same direction he had been headed.
The guy inside the Goodwill donation center, however, was still kind of a dick. I was thinking that the backpack guy surprised me with his chivalry, but it reminded me of the time I was at a restaurant on the beach buying a cup of milk for my younger son when he was only about 7. My husband liked to call him “Mr Spill” (an earned nickname) so I asked for a plastic travel top for the cup. There was a small service cart next to the counter with an assortment (more of a jumbled mess) of plastic tops to fit various cups, so I and the kid who was waiting on me were down on the floor at the bottom shelf of the service cart trying to find a top for this cup and finding it fairly amusing. Finally, success. I walked away thinking what a nice young man he was and how much he reminded me of my older son, who was about 16 at the time.
Flash forward to a couple of weeks later when I’m watching the morning news and they are discussing a couple murdered on the beach, apparently just for fun. It’s all caught on security video, and they’re showing a picture of the 2 guys who comitted the murders. I almost spewed my coffee when the kid I was buying the milk from is staring at me from the TV screen. It’s confirmed when they show a picture of the restaurant where the kid worked and it was the same restaurant I had been in.
You just can’t tell about people.
So while I was temporarily warmed by the young man’s kindness at the Goodwill, I also gave a little shudder when I thought about the fact that he may have just been wondering if he could shove me into the back of my SUV and drive away without anyone else interfering and had decided against it, or was just a genuinely nice kid.
It’s a shame I’ll never be able to really know the answer. And a shame I can’t just assume the latter.
Man’s need to screw with stuff
2009 September 13
Okay, I’ll admit I haven’t been here in awhile. I’ve been extremely busy painting pictures for my friends’ salon, enjoying the summer boating, going to Vegas, and of course, the pesky job.
But what I found when I got here was that they have been screwing around with this site to the point that by the time I figure out how to get into my own blog, I’ve either forgotten what I was going to say, or just don’t give a shit anymore.
This makes me wonder why in the world people are always messing with things that are fine as they are. I just “updated” some iphone apps that were better before the update. I just tried getting some hot dog relish out of a squeeze bottle (NOT a good idea, by the way) that caused me to give up on the whole idea of relish entirely. The thing has a hole in the top the size of my pinkie finger, yet when you turn it upside down and squeeze it, you get a bunch of relish-flavoured liquid on your hotdog, and the relish remains in the bottle. Where, as far as I am concerned, it can remain until the end of time.
I’m pretty sure it’s all about money, though. Because, (and here’s the part that actually pisses me off) the Heinz company decided to put relish in a squeeze bottle. Nevermind that it doesn’t actually work. That’s irrelevant. Some idiot in a meeting decides it’s a great idea, they don’t apparently test it out, and they flood the market with squeeze bottles of relish that don’t work. People buy them, cause gosh, wouldn’t that be handy at a picnic?! Then it doesn’t work. And I, and most other people, are not going to take it back to the store because it costs a couple of bucks and we just won’t buy that one again. Meanwhile, the Heinz company has probably made more money than I will ever make in my life on these stupid bottles that don’t work. It kinda makes you sick, and just illustrates the old adage that life isn’t fair. Remember, these are the people who brought you green and purple ketchup in years past.
They’ve got some real geniuses working for them. Maybe I’ll present some of my weirder ideas to them and see if they bite. I’m working on a cheese jerky right now.
What? It’ll be a hit with vegetarians.
Contemplative Commuting
2009 June 25
Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve checked in here. The moon must be in Gemini or something, that seems to be when I start reflecting on past events or non-events in my life.
I was thinking this morning, as I was driving to work in my SUV with satellite radio, about some of the folks I used to hang out with, how we were all barefoot granola eaters. We were all non materialistic music lovers who planned about five minutes ahead. Some of us must have had dreams or goals in mind. I can’t think of too many specifically, I know several of them wanted to be musicians, and most of them are. Not full time, but perhaps doing what you love for a living isn’t always the best way to keep loving it. I know that back when I wanted to be a singer, getting up early on Saturday morning and fighting the traffic out to Alkai beach to take voice lessons, followed by daily practice, skimming the trade papers for audition opportunities and talking to some real whackjobs for the privilege of working with them soon descended to the point where I didn’t even want to sing in the shower. To this day I don’t sing in the shower anymore. It just wasn’t fun anymore.
So now I paint, always looking forward to the day I won’t have a regular job anymore and I can just paint or draw all day, while in the back of my mind is this little nagging feeling that if I stop working and paint for money, I’m going to lose my love for it.
But back to the barefoot granola eaters. Most of those people didn’t seem to change much. Some of them have changed their names to stuff like “Free”. Yeah, I know who you are, I saw you on Classmates. My friend “Free” wound up marrying a nice girl who makes her own soap and is on the “catch and release” program of dealing with insects, and they adopt children from underprivileged countries.
I, on the other hand, am driving the aforementioned SUV on the freeway every day to a job that completely frustrates me, and have my properties regularly sprayed by a pest control company so that I never see an ant or spider. I buy my soap in the supermarket on my lunch break from the list I keep on my iphone. And we had our own kids. They look like us, talk like us, and love their gadgets like us.
I just can’t figure out how I changed so much. Granted, it’s been a gradual change, but the same 25 plus years have gone by for everyone else as well. Most of them live in the same town or very nearby. Maybe I just like constantly moving in a direction. I know that when I visit someone’s home and it’s been years and nothing has changed it always amazes me. I would get so tired of eating off the same plate night after night, listening to the same songs day after day.
Anyway, in a sense, we all seemed to get what we wanted. They wanted to be musicians, they are. I wanted to be a painter and a writer, I am. Not the way we thought it would be, but maybe better after all.
Home Improvents, or Why Home Depot does such a good business…
2009 January 21
We spent the Christmas holidays at my MIL’s in CT, which was for the most part fun, but before we left, we hired a guy to install a concrete floor on the first floor of our house. I was going to have tile put in, but Joe kind of knew this contractor who does poured concrete floors that look like tile, wood, whatever you want. Which I thought sounded pretty cool, plus it goes down faster than tile, which was also helpful because it involved almost the entire bottom floor (and thusly everything except the bedrooms and bath upstairs). Well, the guy asked if he might start taking out some carpet and trim in preparation so that they would be done by Christmas and could take the time off. We said sure. The idea was that we would come home to a completed floor.
2 days before vacation we come home from work and the stove, fridge, dishwasher, etc are all crammed into the dining and family rooms (the only rooms not getting the new floor) and there is a sticky orange goo covering the whole floor. So we have to have slip on shoes so we can walk across the goo, remove shoes, get on the carpet to do whatever, then put on shoes to walk across the goo again. And we have a dog (who doesn’t wear shoes). So with all that going on, we had to go out for every meal and try to prepare for vacation (oh, and celebrate Christmas in the confines of 1/2 the family room with our oldest son who couldn’t go to CT with us), you know, so wrapping gifts, etc. was a real joy.
So, while at MIL’s house we get an email with a pic of our new floor. It’s pink. We asked, repeatedly, for gray. AND we went to another one of his clients’ homes and looked at her floor and I said, “that’s great, just do this at our place”. Hers was not pink. So we get home and he can’t seal the floor because it’s the wrong color, and he tried to correct the color by spraying gray on top. Still looked pink. Now he doesn’t know what to do. Because the whole thing needs to be darker. So we suggested that he simply tint the sealer with gray and the whole thing would be darker. We try it in a small area and like the result. Now he’s afraid to make a move on his own so he tells me he will be back at 7am to start applying the tinted sealer all over, and I should see how it’s looking and once he gets going I can go to work and it will be all done when i get home. Great. Only when I get home, the kitchen where he started looks great, and as he moved through the hall and entryway, it looks like a large quantity of roofing tar has been applied with a roller in 8 foot strokes. The hall and entry way are blotchy and black, and the kitchen is a nice slate gray. With some big white scratches in in where they dropped the dishwasher trying to put it back in.
My husband called the guy up and reemed him a new one. He came over the next morning with no explanation as to what may have happened to create such a difference from one area to another, especially since he spent about an hour trying to “make sure he got the color formula just right”. His suggestion was that we pick out tile or he pour another floor on top of this one and we start over. We opted for the second one only in the interest of time.
New floor poured and now we’re back at the coloring stage. He appears to have no idea how to go about this. He makes an attempt at coloring the floor, and I wind up hanging around on saturday to help him. I have to walk around after him like he’s a four year old, telling him where to spray the paint. We escape to the cabin so he can seal the floor (it’s stinky). The next day we come home, and there are odd spots and blotches all over the place, and a footprint in the entryway. It’s sealed, so again he has no idea what to do. He comes back a few days later to attempt a solution, again clueless, so I wind up crawling on the floor painting over the blotches with acrylic paint and his assistant seals them. It’s still not perfect, but we’re living with it for now.
And it only took a month
Got Water?
2008 July 27
So we got a shut off notice from the water company the other day. Not for the house, for the cabin that we go to on the weekends. The town which, up until recently, had no water meters and just charged everyone in town a flat rate regardless of usage. They still charge a flat rate, but because they have the meters, they can see if you are using a large amount of water and charge you accordingly.
I had gotten the water bill a few weeks earlier, and since we were up at the cabin on the 4th of July, I decided I’d just drop my payment in the drop box on our way out of town. Figured I’d save postage and time. So we pulled up to the city hall, and I dropped the payment in the nite slot. Then we get the late notice. Joe called them about it and she says that we should send a new check, because they can’t find it and have no idea where it could be. I don’t think she believed him. After a while, I guess she called him back and said they had found the check, no worries. She said I must have dropped it in the wrong slot.
Um, there’s more than one? Seriously, on a building the size of an espresso hut? This town has 200 year round residents. My water account number is 8. Eight! So, for the sake of argument, let’s say I dropped the payment in the “wrong” slot. If it were on the opposite end of the building it would only be 10 feet away. So say you work there and you collect the checks from the box, and one of them is not for a traffic citation (how many can there be?), it has a water bill stub attached to it. You can’t toss it on Betsy’s desk and say, “Oops, here’s someone’s water bill. Tee hee.”
Is it really that hard?
Besides, I’ve called city hall before and I’m pretty sure it’s always the same woman working there.
I guess those are the growing pains of a booming metropolis.
Chelsea
2008 July 10
Last nite we took our older dog, Chelsea in to the vet for the last time. It was heartbreaking for us all. She had been struggling with her breathing and going further and further downhill, losing her hearing, most of her sight and her teeth. After the long holiday weekend and watching her snort and her chest suck in as far as it would go, we scheduled the procedure for after work on Tuesday evening.
I came home to Chris and Joe sitting in Joes’ office, everyone on the verge of tears, watching her walk around. Actually, not on the verge, IN tears. I went into the kitchen and made her a PB & J and cut it up, started feeding her the pieces by dropping them in her food dish, because she would take your hand off for food if you weren’t careful. And that’s the real puzzler about this whole thing. This dog and I never really “bonded”. I tried, but she was kind of mean, you couldn’t pick her up and she snapped at me several times and actually bit me right through the thumbnail once. She really wasn’t one of those dogs who jumped for joy when you came home. Her biggest concern was just whether or not you were around to feed her. For a 12 pound dog, she was all about the food. I think she was a little more affectionate before Gunnar arrived. He’s an attention hog, very lovable, but would plow her over to get to you and put his head in your lap and gaze up at you to pet him.
So she was crabby. And smelly and semi-incontinent (or just too stubborn to go out, I was never really sure which), but she was like a grouchy old aunt who lived with you and you became accustomed to having around.
We took her in to the vets’, and I was sobbing before we even got in there. He gave us the option to stay with her, which I didn’t want to do, but felt she shouldn’t die alone. After all, I was in the room when my mother died, I should be able to handle a cranky little dog. They muzzled her (remember, she bit and the vet knew this) and injected the solution. As she started to slink down and relax, the vet had his assistant take the muzzle off, which I was thankful for. We stroked her ears and spoke softly to her, telling her she had been a good dog and that we were sorry this was happening. Pretty soon she was completely laying down and it didn’t look like she was breathing. He checked her heart and said she was gone, and then left the room to give us some time with her. We only stayed a moment, we both needed to get out of there.
I don’t have anything cute to say in following, I’m crying too much
Connecting with the past
2008 June 20
I’ve never really spent much time communicating with people I haven’t kept in contact with. Maybe it’s because when I was a kid we moved every 2 years and I had to start all over with new friends. You know, everyone says, “I’ll never forget you, keep in touch” – but of course most of us don’t. So I actually surprised myself when I was googling something the other day- I don’t even remember what or why- and I stumbled upon an obituary for my ex father in law, which led me to read who he was survived by, which led me to my ex sister in law who apparently remarried after her divorce. She married a guy she would never have even considered dating in high school. I know this because we all went to high school together, and believe me she wouldn’t have gone out with this guy. Not that there was anything wrong with him, he was a great guy. But he was a little on the nerdy side, not the typical jock most of the popular girls seemed to go for. And he’s now a veterinarian. Which seems fitting, he was always a kind soul and very smart. Actually the kind of guy I would seek out (if I were looking for someone, anyway)
So I signed up on classmates.com and found a few people. Most of my best friends are not really active on there, I guess they felt like me (we have better things to do than live in the past). But I found out a few interesting , though maybe not surprising things.
1. The more popular you were in high school, the less likely you seem to be to leave that town. Ever.
Seriously, one of the most popular girls married her high school sweetheart and is still married (though not without some difficulty it sounds like) and still in the same town. And you can tell from looking at her profile, she’s still in high school in her mind.
2. The mean girls have changed. They are now reaching out for someone, anyone, to contact them and some of them have had a pretty rough road after high school. The kind of stuff that would have given me some satisfaction to know back then. But now as an adult, it just makes me sad.
3. Some of us who had lots of advantages back then still couldn’t get it together and stay out of jail.
For those of you who’ve kept up with your alumni this may not come as a revelation, but this stuff fascinates me since I’ve never even looked any of them up since then. Like 30 years. Kinda funny, kinda sad.
But mostly funny. Hey, some of us didn’t change at all.
No Thumbs? No Problem.
2008 March 31
My 18 year old son decided that a cool way to spend spring break would be to go camping on the coast with a bunch of his friends and their girlfriends. Nevermind that he dislikes camping immensely, it was gonna be great to go to a campground on the beach with his buds (all pampered suburban dwellers like himself, the girls probably all brought their coach bags with them) and no parental supervision, sleep in tents, etc.
So, on the Monday after Easter, off they went to the blustery Oregon coast. In March. I guess the first day and evening went pretty well, although it was a little chilly, the boys huddled in their tent to keep warm, and the girls likewise. At one point in the nite, Chris got up to take a leak, stepped outside and saw a furry bandit lumbering off with a bag of chips. OK, whatever. Later in the wee hours of the morning, they heard more noises and apparently they noted about 6 more raccoons messing around by the picnic table and around the coolers, which they decided was not really a threat because raccoons don’t have opposable thumbs. They started joking about it, making little hand jestures similar to hitchhiking, demonstrating their superiority to those dumb animals without thumbs.
When they decided to get up, one of them went to the cooler to get a drink, and noticed that some of the sodas were gone, and apparently everything else in the coolers. So much for the lack of thumbs. They then went to the Pig N’ Pancake for breakfast, where Chris left his cell phone. We only discovered this when the waitress called the number for “Dad” and let him know. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get ahold of his girlfriend to let her know where his phone was. Finally got that accomplished, and he went back to the restaurant to get his phone.
The spent the final couple of nights in the car. So much for the great outdoors.
Just moving in.....
I've changed my address, and hopefully for the better. I'll be moving my archived blogs over, and hopefully contributing more often now that I have better access. See ya soon.
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