night of the living dead

its a bit past midnight on a chilly and damp evening in redding ca. after tossing in bed for over an hour, i gave it up as a lost cause and got back out. i have been resisting the urge for some pringles all damn day, and decided to give in to it. i threw on some clothes, hopped in the car and headed down to chevron to get me some. and some chocolate since i’m there. and aunt flo is visiting.

as i’m driving, i spot a couple people out. all bundled up and moving kind of slow. all headed in the same direction, out of the neighborhood.

i get to chevron and it is closed. wtf? when did that happen? they used to be open all night. i look across the street and the valero is closed too. I haven’t been down here since the first of the year. guess they made some changes.

i pull out onto eureka blvd, intending to head to walgreens, they are open all night. i can see them from where i am at, but all is dark. wtf?! i want some pringles! i’m stopped on the middle of the street (you can do that in little towns that roll up the sidewalks at 10pm) trying to figure out what to do. i guy staggers across the street in front of me, heading towards… ah! 7-11. excellent.

i have avoided 7-11 for months. the crowd at this 7-11 is pretty scuzzy. the cars in the lot are all old fashioned, scratch-and-dent, american rolling iron. the patrons look like a Jerry Springer stage set. Meth-heads, alcoholics, teen moms, skinheads, wife beaters and hookers. i kid you not. whenever i drive up, I feel like everyone is considering whether it is worth the energy to jump me, steal and sell my car, rob me, kill me and then bury me out in the woods. and if so, which device would be best for cutting up my body. nice, right? you should come visit. lol.

anyway, the usual suspects are in the parking lot. the old chevy pickup with the rebel flag in the back window; the hooker inside (i swear) getting a big gulp and a couple hot dogs (really? after what you stare at all night? maybe its gustatory revenge)l and the tweaker with the litter of mountain dew and two giant bags of carmel corn and chex mix. all stumbling up to the counter, mumbling to the clerk and fumbling their money out.

I pay for my purchases and hurry back into my vehicle. I don’t even try to hide my locking of the doors. another truck pulls in, the driver/tweaker gets out and jitters into the store. the passenger kind of oozes out, staggers over to the wall, and leans on it. He might be peeing, but i am choosing not to look too closely. Wanting a shower, I back up quickly, into a u-turn and pull out into the driveway/exit. coming across the street are two more people. both drunk, both shuffling along. something clicked over in my head.

just like that, I was a participant in Night of the Living Dead. i looked around and saw all the zombies shuffling along, heading towards 7-11 for their beef jerky, pop and cigarettes. it totally gave me the willies. then i started laughing.

run on sentences. and spelling, while we are at it.

two days ago i posted a women seeking men ad on my local craigslist. you can read it here, if you want. i spent some time crafting it, worrying over sentence structure, tone, humor. because those things are important to me. and i forgot that it was CL and that female and conscious are all that are required to be attractive to an alarmingly large number of men.

the responses have been quite varied. i am trying to remain open-minded. and really, who comes off as a total catch in any of these kinds of postings? so I have received a couple of replies that i have not deleted. and what is the etiquette on this? do i send them a note saying no, thank you… or just not respond?

and gentlemen, please, what the hell is up with your punctuation? the spelling is fairly bad too, but I get that kind of. Just because I love words and spelling them correctly is important to me, doesn’t mean that they are important to you. but I did put “literate response” in the post, so your response should be literate. but perhaps you do not know what that means? (ok, i just looked it up and it means, basically, to be able to read and write. it can also mean “well-written, polished” which is the direction I was leaning in. so really, this whole argument is now moot.)

the point i am trying to make here is guys, please, take a minute and use some care and the frikkin’ spell check button, before you hit send.

lets move on to the run on sentences. I have been going back and forth, via email, with an educated woman, a professional woman, well-respected, an educator in her field, blah blah blah and the woman is incapable of using any kind of punctuation. her entire last email to me had zero caps (not that i can complain on that. i don’t caps here, but i do in professional communications), zero periods, zero apostrophes… zero punctuation. its fuckin’ lazy and slovenly.

I type out my texts for cripes’ sake. (with the exception of u for you, and ur for you are. and b4 for before. for some reason, i cannot resist those abbreviations.) i actually have a bit less respect for this woman because she refuses to type her emails out correctly. i used to use thx all the time, but read an article a couple of days ago in which the author lamented that habit. he said  ”what is wrong with a, n, & k?” and now, each time I type thx, I hear that authors’ imagined voice in my head, and I go back and type out the entire word.

I became a little bit hooked on the show Drop Dead Diva. In it, the lead character was forever correcting the grammar of her co-workers, the barista, etc. It started me thinking about the phrases we use and how they get a bit twisted. I hear people say “I could care less!”. I hear this all the time. And it is incorrect. It should be “I couldn’t care less!” with the first attempt you are saying that you could in fact care less, so you care some amount about it. In order for it to be the scathing put-down it is intended to  be, you mustn’t be able to care any less about it. you see?

did I really use mustn’t in a sentence?! bonus!!

it is probably very snooty of me to feel this way. I couldn’t care less. LOL.

one last thing i want to point out on my quest for opposite sex interaction: i put my age in the ad. why am I getting responses from a 32, 36 and 61 yr old? And the crazy thing is the 32 yr old is the most appealing based on the emails. go figure. I was kinda hoping to try out someone my own age, which would be a new experience, but maybe this life is all about younger mens? there are worse things…

limbering up the fingers

my fingers are stiff in the morning now. this worries me. typing helps actually.

i was sidetracked by iPhoto last night, when i was trying to post a photo to CL.I had a ton of photos just sitting on it. so i cleaned them out, and will now post some. totally random post today.

saw this car in sacramento a few months ago. those are the most ridiculous rims on the entire planet. and they probably cost more than the car they are on.

 

this is from a few months ago too. this is what it took to fill my honda. my HONDA. gas is out of control.

ramekin. full of ice cream. i just rally like the word. ramekin.

i love this. i love how crayola gets it.

picture of the kitties, knowing that i was sad. this is the day my mom died. i am at my desk, taking the picture. they followed me all around. if i was standing still long enough, manny would sit on my foot and lean against my leg. they are such good babies.

here’s kia. three days after i brought her home from the hospital. she is doing quite well btw. i know she is diabetic and all that, but i really do’t think the insulin is doing much for her. i keep forgetting to give it to her at night, and she is much more active after she eats in the evening. in the am, she eats, i give her the shot, and she goes to sleep somewhere. it kind of worries me.

she seems happier all around those. pissing up a storm. i dislike having the cat boxes in the house, i really don’t like the odor, but wow, she uses them a lot.

ok. off to lunch with a friend.

 

i’m just saying.

just want to grumble about a couple things. telling the cats doesn’t diffuse the irritation, so maybe posting it to the internet will.

poor planning on your part does not an emergency  make on my part. you’ve know for a month that you were going out of town sunday morning. you waited until saturday morning to call for a manicure appointment. don’t be huffy with me when all i have is 4pm. take the appointment and be happy i have an opening at all.

do not  purchase an oak dining room table and four chairs, and then tell me it is my problem on how to get it to you. not its not. when you asked for delivery, i said no. before you sent the money. before it sat in my house for another 10 days, and you still didn’t have a way to get it out of my house. and further more, don’t act all pissy when i sell it to someone else. be glad that i gave you your money back, tool.

On the freeway, coming up on my car really quickly, in a downpour with severely reduced visibility and a car in the next lane, is deranged. flashing your brights doesn’t help. all it does is scare me, and i am already kinda scared. the highway is awash, my wipers can barely keep up with the rain, my car weighs nothing and is being buffetted from side to side in the wind. if i move over, the spray from the other cars tires completely eliminate any visibility, and it is like driving in a washing machine. i tried it once already. so back the fuck off, and when i can, i will get over and you can go by. tool.

don’t respond to an item on CL that says “would like these gone on monday” when you cannot get them on monday. and don’t go all passive-aggressive when i won’t hold the item. not my fault you  live in shingletown and it dumped snow yesterday. its not like that has never happened. Cl is a first-come, first-served sort of situation. everyone knows that. deal with it.

 

Van Halen dreaming

dreams are so weird. i had several bizarros dreams last night, but the one i remember is the weird ass Van Halen dream. I was in a church (it felt like a church), with a solid wall down the middle of the room, front to back. there was a window in this wall, and  I was sitting next to it, to the left. the walls were all white. we were sitting on folding chairs. the room was full of inbred looking people. you know, skinny, stringy hair, less-than-ideal dentition, give-away t-shirts, and only a nodding acquaintance with personal grooming techniques. some people had blue hair. weird.

david lee roth was singing, and everyone was singing along. and it was scary. it was the current david lee roth, aged, still tan, but he had smurf blue hair. the top was super long and flat-ironed, so it hung to one side. the under side, all around his skull, was shaved. almost like he should of had a mohawk, but didn’t make it stand up. and it was that smurf blue. and he looked like an old, creepy perv, and he was dancing and cavorting around.

I was trying to ooze thorough the window to the other side of the wall. have no clue what this dream was all about. i don’t like the new van halen song, “tattoo”, but i don’t think i dislike it enough to dream about it…

and what a stupid idea for a song. i can jsut se them, sitting around the kitchen table, slugging ensure and passing around a doobie, trying to figure out what to write about that will appeal to the kids now. hey, i know, tattoo’s!! they all get ‘em these days. and body piercing, that’s relly popular… i really hope the next single isn’t about body piercing. how about teenage pregnancy? that seems to be making a come-back. god.

technology as a time saver

about a month ago, i received an email from one of the credit unions that i use, telling me that they are changing up their credit card services. that i will no longer be able to use Billpayer to pay my Bill. Furthermore, that i have to go to the website to fix it and make other arrangements to pay the bill, so as to avoid incurring late fees.

nice of them, right?

yesterday, i received a reminder email. today i went online to take care of it. the problem is that i haven’t been online with this credit  union in some time. so none of my stuff worked. i could get in with the username, but no further. i found an 888 number called it, and after a series of hoop jumping, was able to get a new access code. then i was required to log out, log back in, and change the access code. did all that. then tried to get into my visa statement. it wouldn’t let me. then I couldn’t find the 888 number again. i referred back to the email, found a different number there, and called it. it was the billpayer department, and they couldn’t help me. they weren’t the credit card department.

they gave me the 888 number and i called it back. i got the same woman, antonia, and explained the sitch. she looked at some stuff and it was determined that I wasn’t using the billpayer function to pay my visa bill. the payment was coming from another institution. the email was a blanket email. just in case. awesome. 35 minutes of my life that i will never get back.

frikkin’ hilarious.

based on all the internet/techie/email shit i have dealt with in the past couple of days, i think I am going to just bite the bullet and drink the apple iCloud koolaid. trying to set up new email via charter was no fun. plus they say i will have trouble reading their mail with my mac. i could use google, but i feel like i am just trading masters if i do it that way. and i have to learn the new masters preferences etc. too much work. go with the master I know.

lolas dresser

i love it when i get a project done. especially one that has been looming for a few months. and when i say done… i mean substantially completed.

my mom has this dresser. she had it for years. she lugged it around from place to place. it had a couple screw drivers for handles where one had been lost. not much to look at, it was a solid, unexciting 5 drawer chest on legs with wheels.

When I was going thru her stuff, the dresser is one f the things that i saved for last. sine it had been with her for so long there where things in there that were special to her. it was kind of rough going through it. once i got it all emptied out, i pulled out the tacky shelf liner that covered the bottoms of the drawers.

low and behold, the drawers were gorgeous. wood, and glowing with that rich mellow lit-from-within patina that only old, well cared fro wood can achieve. the top drawer is divided into three compartments. i have been told this is a lingerie drawer. for bras, panties and slips. slips! how quaint.

one of the small drawers has the front portion sectioned off, with a clever little tray that slides back and forth. somewhat like a mans desktop butler i think.

initially, iw as going to use it at work, for linens and things. i brought it down there and installed it. and it never quite worked. looking at it day after day, i decided to clean it up, paint it and use it in my bedroom.

Finally got to it this weekend. Went bold, too. I oiled the insides of the drawers, and will recover them with shelf liner. what ever happened to old school shelf liner? the somewhat waxy kind that you tacked in with thumbtacks? now it is all about that thin foam-like stuff. and it is $7 bucks for 4 feet of it. that’s like $40 to cover the all the drawers. i’ll figure something else out.

Painted the outside white and then the drawer fronts teal. and a bold ass teal it is. I am going to paint a henna pattern on top of that, in white. i haven’t quite figured out how, exactly, i am going to do that. make a stencil? a ton of work. and i would have to make 3 of them. hand paint it? maybe. for now, the drawers are sitting and curing. next weekend i might tackle one.

UPDATE: i’ve decided to do henna designs, drawn free-hand. less work. i think, lol. i have been going through my henna book and looking at stuff. i have three drawers after all, to cover. should I do all the same? that’s so boring… i have a couple designs that i like, so i think i will start with the tops drawer and do the badge image (the yellow ish background), then maybe the line art. or i might save the line art for the lower drawers. we’ll see. i’ll post more as i go.

procrastination

i have been wrestling with the admittance that i am a procrastinator. i do not want to be thus, but i most definitely am.

I know this because i ended up eating my thanksgiving dinner at 10:30pm last night.

I bought a turkey breast before i went to LA, 9 days ago. realizing that cooking it the day before I left was a poor idea, i froze it. This past weekend, I had 3 days off and planned to cook it saturday so I could enjoy it all weekend. one thing led to another and I didn’t end up starting it until 6pm last night. starting, that is, the prep work.

This yr I somehow managed to never eat a true thxgivig dinner, so decided to make my own. made stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, turkey breast and gravy. I kinda used recipes, kinda not.My 25 yr old betty crocker cook book doesn’t contain a recipe for turkey breast, only the whole bird, so I looked htat up online. the turkey turned out perfectly; juicy and done.

(i am beginning to hate this program. i can no longer insert photos as i go. it will not let me type after the photo. so i have to write the whole thing, then go back and insert the photos. what a pain in the ass.)

Mashed potatoes were a tad thin, too much milk. but i did discover that heating the milk  before you add it makes a big difference. the stuffing turned out well. maybe a hair too much marjoram, but i like it. th corn was not good. freezer burn. the gravy, not so good either. tasted burnt. but it was my first attempt at gravy and i don’t feel to bad about it.

all in all, it was yummy. my kitchen, however, was a complete disaster. it is small, with very little counterspace. i ended up covering it all. clean up began at midnight. just looking at it wore me out. I decided to deal with it in the morning. i would pile it all in the sink, wipe down the counters and start fresh in the am.

i was getting into bed when this fleeting thought zipped through my brain: i have a dishwasher. this is the EXACT scenario for which this particular appliance was invented. I hadn’t used it in maybe a year, and was totally amused at  myself for forgetting i have one. i even had real dishwasher soap. not dish soap. {did that once. it really does produce a huge mound of bubbles that completely overflow the machine and spread across the floor. really.}

I h ad forgotten how frikkin loud the thing is though. I have been sleeping without my earplugs, but had to put them in because of all the grunting and clanging coming from my bathroom, which is the wall the dishwasher butts up against. still, it was nice to open that bad-boy up this a.m. and have clean dishes.

 

not again

i am not sure i can do this all over again. kia pissed on the carpet tonight. i am giving her subcutaneous fluids (100ml a day), and she is pissing up a storm. I recently installed a litter box, actually two litter boxes, in the back bedroom. thought it might be better if they (read: kia) had a place to pee inside the house, instead of having to go outdoors.

with the fluids, she is pissing out cups of water. seriously. she loves to come in when i am on the computer, or working at the table, and take a smelly dump and piss like a racehorse. it is almost like being married again. (that’s funny!)

i cleaned it out about 2 hours ago… ok, maybe more like 4, but today, ok, i cleaned it out today. the litter is crystal and you are supposed to leave it alone and the magical crystal formula is supposed to render the urine inert. but she pisses so much, it doesn’t have time to do its work before she is back. and she saturates 1/4 to 1/3 of the litter, craps in the other side, so there isn’t really alot of room for a two shot, you know what i mean?

so she comes in, scans the soggy litter, ignores the 2nd litter box, which is completely free of eliminations, walks out into the hallway and squats. AHAHHHAHAHAH!!!! i shoot over like the flash, snatch her up, invert her, and carry her back to the other litter box and shove her inside. where she proceeded to unleash a flood of urine that might have been mentioned in the bible.

i wasn’t able to completely stem the urine flow with the snatch however. it kinda sprayed a bit. like those previously hilarious videos of boy babies urinating on their startled fathers. no so funny now as i contemplate the light smattering of pee-pee drops decorating my clothing.

I can’t go through the peek-a-boo pissing again. i did it with claudia, and then briefly when Kia was grieving for my mom. i cannot do it again. whether it smells like hooney or cat piss, it is not ok. I have always prided myself that my house doesn’t smell like cats. but it is kind of starting to. that is so not ok. fuck.

TGIF

what a difference a week makes. I haven’t been this excited about a friday in a very long time. things were going so well, and them blam! not so well. I have the next 3 days to get my head back on straight and adjust the attitude back to the positive.

Kia is much improved. She really doesn’t like the potasium goo that i have to squirt into her mouth twice day, nor the antibiotic. she is much more excited about the wet food she gets to eat evry couple hours, plus the chicken she had as a snack. guilt breaks down any reservations I had about feeding her when she begs.

I have been reading up on diabetic ketoacidosis. it is some very nasty stuff. I have been prideful of the pampering I give my kitties, but I have totally dropped the ball with Kia. but ow I know, and I know what to watch out for. So the future should be brighter, and more comfortable, for her.

Work was pretty good this week. busy, full days. I have got to get a better handle on my time management. it seems that halfway through the day, I am behind, and scrambling to catch up. I really do not like that.

Thought there was going to be some rain in the future, but the weather folk are rearranging their opinion on the issue. now they say no rain. it is crazy dry here. no snow on the mountains. i think lassen is open, which is crazy in January. mt shasta has no skiing. there is no snow, so it is hard to ski. lol.

i was going to write up a long post, but now I feel like crawling in bed with my book. get up fresh and ready tomorrow.

sleep well, all.