Wednesday

What happened today:

I learned that the impression I've been harboring is, in fact, correct. It's not a good idea until SOMEONE ELSE comes up with it. Good to know; takes the pressure off.
I need to just stop thinking--everyone else is happier that way.

I learned that my boss at CHFJ, while nice enough, has the attention span of the average slow-witted six-year-old. She wears this weird multi-colored ring, though, which distracts me when I talk to her. It's like I'm a bird or something. On the bright side, I find that if I only half pay attention to our conversations, they're less one-sided.

I went to the gym and did not desire to vomit. I call it progress.

I got shoes! For the wedding! They are fucking adorable! I danced about the house! Jessica Simpson is a talentless pop tart, but wow. She slaps her name on some cute ass shoes.

I absolutely aborted this recipe from Gourmet. I don't even know why I bother with recipes for anything except baked goods, anyway. It's like a have a constitutional inability to follow them, or even remember to buy the right goddmamn ingredients. Which is how I wound up with "crushed tomatoes" (what I would call fucking tomato sauce, if I hadn't bought the organic shit) instead of diced tomatoes, and wound up substituting gin for vermouth. I knew I didn't have the right liquor at the house, and I thought about stopping to buy it. Thank god I didn't though, because I remembered the recipe as reading sherry. Which, yeah. Not the same. The gin was fine, though. I guess. Next time I'm going to just ignore the fucking recipe entirely.

Two minutes for the garlic? My undulating right buttock.

And finally? Oven rebellion. As we were wrapping up dinner--an entirely stove-top affair I might add--the oven began to beep in a truly annoying manner. And the oven latch which is put in place for the self cleaning function had decided to engage itself. So, basically, my oven locked itself in its room like a petulant teenager.
Meanwhile, the shitty LED display showed some error code, a quick Google of which indicated that it is some kind of error having to do with, you guessed it, the door latch.

We finally unplugged it to make the beeping stop. It's like The Boy says, "It's the fucking appendix of the oven." I have used that self-cleaning "feature" exactly once, right when bought the house. I don't really get the point. I don't frequently spill grease and shit in my oven, so it I guess I don't feel it's that dirty. Further, it's regularly hot as hell because it is a goddamn oven after all, so I figure it's already reasonably sterile. If I had need of a kiln I might have an opportunity to put this to use. As it is, this is sizing up to be a plot to make me part with money on something lame. Like a new lock sensor or some horseshit.

*sigh*

I'm going to bed.

CarpetGeddon 2008

A full and detailed accounting of this entire catastrophe is to follow, complete with photos, but until then...two words.

Distressed urban.

Work with me, people

Just When You Thought It Was Safe...

So, yeah. It's been like 70-odd days since I last posted anything. Except for pointing out that my life is pretty fucking uninteresting and admitting I'm a lazy slob, there isn't much I can do about that. I will take this opportunity to suggest that have found yourself sorely missing my participation in the blogosphere, then perhaps you should explore new avenues with your psychiatrist--what you have must not be working.

I guess there are a few things that have dragged me from the morass. Today, as I was sitting in a Corporate Happy Fun Meeting and contemplating burning myself with lit cigarettes, I came to the conclusion that yes, I do have a dead-end pink-collar wage slave job for which I'm grossly underpaid and hideously overworked, but that I might as well try to mine it for humor. Or an opportunity to judge others. Or both. Whatever.

As though the ongoing, slow motion car wreck that is my job isn't enough to make any sane person (which I'm not) batshit crazy (which I most assuredly am), I'm also planning a wedding.

Now, lest you get the wrong idea, I am pleased as punch about marrying The Boy. Further, since I know that many of the misanthropes who read this blog are also future guests, I want it to be clear that I'm happy to be celebrating our commitment through the public statement of our vows and the steady hemorrhaging of money.

All kidding aside...I am totally excited about this whole getting married thing, and I GLADLY declined the offer to elope. That said, planning a wedding has put me back into the mix with other people planning weddings, which means that I spend a decent amount of time surrounded by people who have completely surrendered the restraints of this Earth and are floating around in some sort of la la land covered in tulle and lacking Google. I want to share the stupid with you, my readers.

And, as though having a stupid job and a big fucking party to throw weren't enough, I'm about ready to embrace some home improvement projects. The roommate is moving out; The Boy is moving in; and the carpet needs to go see The Jesus. It would seem, I guess, that my brain is fucking melted--I KNOW nothing good can come of this.
But...I seem powerless to stop.

Of course, at least I'm not in their shoes.

Yeah. The next couple of months should be awesome, interspersed with the occasional hospitalization.

September Sucked, Episode One

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Yardageddon

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

This weekend is going to be Yardageddon 2007. It’s been a long time coming. From a tolerable distance, my backyard doesn’t look too bad. It’s shady and mostly green. A bit overgrown, sure, but I’m into that English Woodland Garden look.

Up close and personal though, it’s rather a clusterfuck. I have a superabundance of ivy, which looks fine, but allows for all manner of little fly-y bite-y creatures to breed without restraint and fuck with me mercilessly. There is tree life that knocks on my side door and invites itself in for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. I think a vine just tried to eat Bennet.

It’s time to get all NoCo on this shit.

I have a weed whacker, and I hope that I have better luck with it than I have with my nemesis the lawnmower. I also have some trimmer thing, I don’t know what it’s called. I don’t need to know what it’s called because I don't care; it will chop plants into smaller bits and that is a good thing. I am going to borrow some lop shears.

Here’s the thing, though, does anyone have any suggestions for how to kill plants at the root? I looked at Roundup, but Roundup costs A Lot of Money, and I am poor. Roundup is out. Off brand weed killer has proven no match for the plant life around here.

Here are the things I’ve been told:

I’ve been told that drilling several holes into the trunk of a tree and pouring salt in will kill it. Done. The house next door has some piece of shit weedy tree just at the fence line that is trying to move into my house. I could cut it back, but why? They have all but abandoned that house, making no moves to sell it or rent it or reattach that siding that blew off last July. Fuck it. I’m sending the tree to see Jesus.

I’ve been told that plain white vinegar will kill plants reliably. Is this true? While not entirely thrilled about the possibility of my yard smelling like a cheap douche, I’ll give it a shot.

Any other ideas? At this point, I would probably put down some fucking Agent Orange if I knew where to find it.

Confession

I am not proud of what I’m about to say. I am not pleased, or happy. No, rather, I feel a sort of quiet, secret shame.

Tonight was only the second time I’ve ever used a lawnmower.

I am 30 years old, and have only cut grass twice in my life. Once. Twice. That’s all.

In my childhood, my parents nurtured my nascent laziness on the whole lawn care front. God bless’em both. When the husband and I moved from an apartment to a rental house, my undisguised abhorrence for lawn cutting left no doubt that I would not be doing it. After we bought our first house, the husband’s inner Old Italian Guy began to surface, the one fortunate result of which being his anal obsession with grass care (I was less pleased his compulsive criticism of my housekeeping and his irresistible urge to hide money from me).

In fact, one of the final nails in the coffin that was my marriage involved an uncut lawn. The husband went away on a business trip and left behind a huge, tall, Florida Forest of uncut yard. I had offered to hire someone, but he insisted he wanted to do so—then he left. Embarrassed by the frolicking antelope in the front yard, I finally broke down and cut the grass on my own, and then went inside to cook a heavy meal, get drunk, and bitch to my best friend on the phone.

That was a Monday; I decided to get divorced on Wednesday.

Last summer, my ex-boyfriend was generous enough to hire someone to cut my grass for me all summer long. For awhile I felt sort of guilty about that, but now? Now I just see he was paying for my parting gift up front.

Which leads to tonight, and me and the Barbie Lawnmower I borrowed from my mother. I hope the neighbors weren’t watching, because I looked more than a little retarded. It is painfully obvious that I have no fucking business operating any sort of machinery that involves rapidly whirling blades.

Did you know that when you run over maple tree gumballs with a lawnmower it kind of sounds like popcorn popping, or perhaps exploding hamsters? I didn’t know that, either, but it totally does.

I need condo. I’ll explain later how my exterior wall came to be um, for lack of a better word, bleeding.

Beaver Riots and Malevolent Ponies or, a Sunday Wasted

I had intended to do yard work today, as right now my property looks much like the site of an angry beaver riot. I decided against it, though, as no small part of the work that needs doing requires a chain saw.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that the idea of me wielding a chainsaw is simultaneously 1. ridiculous and 2. terrifying. Especially if one were to add, say, a ladder into the mix.

I bought a house because I felt I had something to prove. Finally at 30 I'm beginning to recognize that my need to prove things results, more often than not, in really fucking stupid choices on my part. Emotionally trying and frequently expensive, my "proofs" are what one might call "follies" in someone who was not as stubborn as I. And, you know, if you were the kind of person to use the word "folly" at all. Which I am. Clearly.

Anyway, so now I'm stuck with a house with a really big yard with many trees and their attendant leaves, gumballs, fallen sticks, etc. The only upshot is the squirrels and birds. The leaves I don't mind. I figure if god didn't intend for leaves to lie on the ground, s/he in his/her infinite wisdom would have solved the problem by now. As for the rest of it, I am torn between my natural loathing for outdoor labor and my desire not to have the white trash house on the block. If the weather doesn't completely go to shit, I might just go a-chainsawing next Sunday, Christmas Eve for those of you who keep track of those things. Since I am declining Christmas this year, I'll have the day free. Plus, I will probably have some hositility brewing anyway. What better way to express dissatisfaction than with power tools?

Yes. I should have bought a condo. Next time.

So instead of righting the various wrongs of my yard, I cleaned my car instead.

There are people in this world who, for various reasons, love their cars. Mandy and The Baby, for instance. Then there are the people who treat their car with a certain reverance, as an extenstion of themselves and the image they want to project. My ex-husband. Then, there are the vast majority of people who treat their cars as functional tools. These people regard their cars with a large measure of indifference tempered by a bit of respect or affection. They expect their vehicles to work in a predictable way, and they are usually not disappointed.

Then there are the people like me.

I regard my car in much the same way I expect a carter 200 years ago would have regarded a malevolent pony. I keep waiting for the miserable beast to bite me. Again. My relationship with my car is one of mutual wariness and distrust. I am always waiting for the fucker to randomly stop working. The "Service Engine Soon" light has been on for months. Because earlier this year the bitch spent about a month in and out of the shop in an ultimately futile effort to determine the bit of engine that needed servicing, I am ignoring the light. I figure the only thing that needs servicing is that light, and my proposed solution involves wire snips.

However, the bitchin' Sentra had devolved to the point that even my habitual comfort with a certain amount of chaos and automotive filth was exceeded. It was a serious disaster. And now it is clean. So I feel I accomplished something with my weekend.

Anyway, tonight my friends over at the Tin Ceiling are doing their last night of Flu Season. Wish I could have seen it, guys. I'm sure it was lovely.