Fish in the Sea and in the Freezer

Tonight I came home with a plan of action: Cook dinner, get my huge expense report ready to turn in, and email the girl who winked at me on the Onion Personals.

My expense report is complete and ready to put in an envelope.

My dinner has been cooked and eaten.*

The girl's wink has gone unrequited. I didn't mean to not write her, it's just that somebody else wrote me a real email on the site and I felt I should answer it first. So I did, and now I'm going to go to bed, winker ignored. I'm going to bed without emailing partially because I'm tired and worried I'm getting sick, and partially because it stressed me out to have two email strings going at once.

All you ladies out there, you can rest assured I would never cheat on you. It stresses me out to date two girls at once even when it's allowed.


*I made the pre-packaged, frozen, pre-spiced cod steaks from Trader Joes. Those and some peas constituted dinner tonight, and I was excited by the ease and healthful nature of the meal. Unfortunately the cod steaks came out with the consistency of an elegantyly sliced gummy worm and the spices where a bit much. I'm hoping the salmon steaks will be a little less bouncy, and taste a little less bad.

The Problem With Tempe

My issue with Tempe, other than the plywood and springs method of bedding at the Comfort Inn, is the humidity, or really the lack there of.

Tomorrow at 2pm, the humidity in Tempe will be paltry 14%. Tonight, the humidity in my living room was 70%*. One of these places keeps my lips feeling soft and supple, and the other leaves them cracked, flakey, and arranged in kind of an angry bite-kiss shape.

They are on the road to recovery now, but my lips were in bad shape in Arizona. And I know I could put on chap stick, but I haaaate chap stick. It feels so disturbingly icky. I don't want any part of my face to be to sticky or gooey. Putting on chap stick for me is akin to being hit in the face with a stick of bacon and not reaching for the nearest handy-wipe. Or perhaps like going to bed with a slab of butter nestled between my lips. It might be a culinarily lovely way to spend an evening, but it's going to make my face feel gross until I wipe it off.

And so my lips remain, uncomfortably recently exfoliated, but recovering unaided.

*I turned on my dehumidifier and now it's 50%. I don't much care for dry skin, but I also don't like indoor rain storms.

Dream Analysis

I went to the dentist and it was determined that I needed a bridge. A bridge in this case meant that I needed to have each of my teeth removed and fitted with two small metal ends where the roots should be. On my gums a receptacle would be installed where each of my teeth would plug in. (Picture, if you can, the interface between an overhead projector light bulb and its socket.)

The best person to do the bridge procedure was a dentist in a little wooden house on a hill. I went up to his house with a basket of offerings, mostly candy and bread. I realized that the offerings were for him to eat while performing the operation when he answered the door and accepted me as a patient saying, "I hope you're prepared. It's an 8 hour procedure at the very least. After I've started there's no stopping, so I'll be done when I'm done."

When I woke up I had to think for a while about who the dentist was. He looked so familiar. I knew he looked an awful lot like Larry Hagman from I Dream of Jeanie, but it definitely wasn't him. After a minute it came to me: Chief Justice John Roberts.

Travel Heater

I'm having some trouble with the temperature of my hotel room. At night I'd like it to be cold, and in the morning I would like it to be warm. Two nights ago I compromised by just turning the fan on, and that worked pretty well. But last night I was just a little too hot, so I turned on the AC. This morning I woke up just seconds away from full blown hypothermia.

When I got up I turned off the AC and headed to the bathroom, but since I have no bathrobe and hotel towels are all the size of cocktail napkins, I had nothing with which to keep me from freezing to death while on the toilet.

At my apartment I solve this problem with a space heater. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to pack my space heater, so I did the next best thing: I took the wall mounted blow dryer off it's stand, and then took the stand off the wall, unfurling the plug to its full length. This gave me just enough cord to get the blow dryer into the bathroom so I could sit on the toilet in relative comfort, selectively warming all of my bits.

Tomorrow I think I'll just turn on the heat first thing.

Briefly

Because the Cheesecake Factory used up my evening (it was worth it) I've decided to go to bed instead of talk about the extraordinary number of women with breast implants who are out and about in Phoenix.

I did, however, manage to write some haikus.

Here

Ah Tempe, last bastion of the thick soled flip-flop. A city where all the women are blond, and the airport cops ride around on Segways.

Tempe reminds me of Albuquerque, with less adobe and no turquoise stripes. I don't think I'd like living here what with all the flat and the hot, but it's nice to have 70 degree weather in January.

It is not, however, nice to have jumpy elephants in the hotel room above mine. If they persist in the night time gallivanting I'm going to have to see about getting a different room. Perhaps one with a view of a different portion of parking lot.

Stupid Phone People

I'm currently on the phone with the slowest, most uninformed phone survey guy ever. He keeps asking stuff like, "Which of the following best describes your internet access?" ... ... "hello?"

"Are there options?"

"Yes."

"What are they?"

He did that to me 4 times during the call. If the question starts out with "which of the following" then you have to read me the things that follow.

Then after we had established the fact that I make long distance calls from my cell phone, and that I live alone he asked how many people in my household make long distance calls. Hmmmm. Let me go around the room and count. One. Yep, just me.

"So one then?"

"Um, ... yeah."

"Which of the following best describes your household income? ... ... ... hello?"

"What are the options?"

"Below fifteen thousand? Fifteen thousand to twenty-five hundred? Twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred? ..."

Hmm. The incomes ranges went up for a second and then came back down again. I guess when he says hundred he means thousand.

When asked why I canceled my SBC long distance service I explained that they said it would be free if I didn't use it, then a month later started charging me a monthly fee. I'm a reasonable fast typist, so it took me less than 10 seconds to type that sentence. It took the survey guy literally 5 minutes to get that all down. I guess the survey company hiring standards are a tad low.

In other phone news, the Asian business community here answers the phone, "hello?" It's very confusing. When calling around the city looking for 12 volt 8 amp-hour rechargeable sealed lead acid batteries, one doesn't expect the shop owner to answer the phone, "hello?" I kept having to look back down at the phonebook to ask if I had indeed reached Acme Battery Company. Say the name of your company people. It will save us all a lot of time.

Gone, Again

Norbert is gone, again. She went off to Oakland, and then came back the next day after it was realized that med school and a cat don't mix well. But the very same day I learned she was returning, somebody at a facility I go to all the time said she wanted a cat. So it worked itself out. I think.

My sense of relief is not all I hoped it might be now that I've dropped her off. The saucer of milk worried me a little, and then having to answer the question, "How do you clean her?" made me a little apprehensive. But what can you do? It's not like I could say, "Never mind. I think I'll keep her."

I think I'm going to make a fake SPCA pamphlet and give it to her tomorrow. Hopefully writing some basic cat facts down will unmix my very mixed feelings about being rid of Norbert again.

Nerding It Up At Work

Today I went to Electronics Plus and got two diode chips that I'm going to put back to front inside one of our pumps in hopes of recreating a broken rectifier chip that they don't carry.

Whew! Now that that's out of my system I can tell you about how I'm being shipped off to Tempe, AZ to help shuffle mattresses out there for a week. I've never traveled for business before, and I'm not sure if I'm going to like it.

There are pros:
-Free hotel stay.
-Free meals.
-It should theoretically be less cold than it is here.
-I get paid for flying.
-Flying takes up part of my work day on both Monday and Friday, so I'm really only working 4 full days next week, but being paid for 5.

But there are also cons:
-I may have to socialize with people I don't know.
-I don't get to go home and then end of the day.

Ok, so there are only two cons, but the first one worries me the most. New people are scary.

Never the less, I think it will be well worth it for the following reason: There is a Cheesecake Factory 18 miles from my hotel. So there will be at least one meal of Chicken Madera.

Does anyone know any good places to eat in Tempe? (EhhemCatemmm?)

Some Quick Things

- Norbert has gone back to Oakland, this time for good. I'll miss her sitting on my chest while I watch TV, but it'll be nice not having to sweep every 4 minutes. With Norbert out of the pictures my new couches have been uncovered, there's no water bowl in my sink, and there's a litter scooper on my kitchen counter. My apartment is on its way to cleanliness, apart from the scoop on my counter. I forgot to pack it with the rest of the cat stuff. (I think on the kitchen counter is definitely in the top 10 places I would least like to find a used litter scoop. Some of the top 5 being in my dinner, in my bed, and jumping out at me in the shower.)

- I just washed my Brita water pitcher tonight. It may have been the first time it has been washed. Yeah, the first time ever. I think its going on 4 years old. I also changed the filter. We'll see if my water tastes oddly fresh tomorrow.

- Now that I've got my couches uncovered I think they may clash with my walls. I'll post a picture tomorrow and let you be the judge. And then when you all weigh in nothing will change because I'm not getting new couches nor am I painting the walls. And you know my thoughts on slip covers.

This morning I swished with Listerine and cat hair. I didn't find it any more effective than Listerine by itself. It doesn't remove the need to floss like you'd think it would.

Nose Woes (Non-Verse Version)

Last night I settled into bed, rested my head upon my pillow, and relaxed to an online episode of Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. Perhaps sensing my calm, Norbert climbed up on my chest, turned a little circle, flopped over, and started to purr. As I stroked her neck and shoulders she closed her eyes and nestled her head down onto my chest. With each stroke she relaxed a little more until a little cat fart snuck out. She may not have even noticed, but I nearly died. It was the worst smell I had ever had the misfortune to meet - until today.

Today I walked into the bathroom at a rehab facility in Fairfield. Now you're probably thinking that I'm going to describe some disgusting, unwashed, hole of a toilet or something. But that isn't the case; in fact it was just the opposite. When the lady walked out of it and handed me the key I thought to myself, "Oh, she smells a little like a rose." It wasn't her, however, that smelled like the rose, it was the bathroom. And there was a reason I could still smell her rosieness 6 feet after she's left the bathroom: it was the most pungent, omnipotent rose smell ever.

The air was roughly 5% oxygen and 95% rose smell molecules. On the walls there were no less than 3 bowls of potpourri and a tiny castle with plastic, scent-exuding nozzles. My nose and throat burned and my eyes started to water. I coughed* long and hard while I was in the bathroom and continued coughing intermittently during my half-hour drive home.

If you want a clear mental image of what it was like to enter the bathroom, picture the following scenario: You are a death row inmate talking your last walk into the gas chamber. You're not looking forward to it, but you've made your peace and are resigned to your inevitable end. As you walk through the door into the room you notice a small sign on the wall:

This gas chamber is maintained and operated by a joint partnership of Hallmark and the perfume counter at Macy's. Whether it be Heaven or Hell, you'll love the way you smell.





*It is VERY hard to pee and aim and cough all at the same time.

Divide and Customize

Now, with this weekend's purchase of a loveseat and chair and tonight's purchase of a great big rug, my apartment is starting to look like an apartment**. I've been trying to move away from the dorm room motif ever since I moved in, but the going has been slow.

The first step was to get a real bed. I realized when I was watching The Office and a character on the show made a comment about grown men sleeping on futons that perhaps I should upgrade.

Step two was to put up pictures, paintings, and things in frames instead of posters of Wallace and Gromit, Radiohead, R.E.M., and Out-of-Focus-Batman*. Now I have framed photographs of "Suicide Clifford", "Sink on Fire", and "Mystery Mexican Family" among others. (And I was holding out on taking down my enormous R.E.M. poster until Norbert starting tearing it off the wall.)

The final step was to remove my futon completely from my apartment and get some real seating. And while I was at it, a carpet so it didn't feel like you were sitting on a couch in the kitchen.

So now I've accomplished all those things and won't be embarrassed to take a date back to my apartment. Which I will some day do, assuming I can avoid discussing bedsores, describing myself as completely friendless, and driving for hours in circles. Maybe I should focus on that stuff now.



*OoF Batman was a poster I bought at my local video store in high school. He's a glow in the dark Batman, but the glow stuff is slightly off center so when the lights are on he just looks like he's out of focus.

**I know, not a great sentence. What I am trying to say is that it looks like somebody who is 3 years off 30 lives there instead of 3 years of 20.

Poop Poop, Fuzz Fuzz, Oh What A Nice Cat She Was

Norbert is leaving this weekend. (I think she is anyhow.) Luckily she's thought ahead and left me all the stuff I need to make a new Norbert, namely bits of poo and tufts of cat hair the size of Roseanne. I figure I can scrape the poo bits off my floor and press them together in the shape of a cat, and then upholster my creation with all the residual cat hair from behind my stereo equipment and from off my blankets and chairs.

This poo-kicked-out-of-the-litter-box-and-squished-to-the-floor stuff is a new and highly unwelcome development. I've been made fun of for never, ever walking around barefoot. And I realize it's cheating to say a retro active I told you so, but every time my slipper sticks another turd to the tile I feel vindicated.

Cat Makes Discovery: Levitating is Harder than Previously Assumed

Today I got some new furniture for my apartment. Specifically a chair and loveseat to replace my god-awful futon. And because I think it's kind of nice to be able to walk through my apartment unhindered, I decided to get rid of my coffee table.

It was a run of the mill wood framed table with glass top on which Norbert had enjoyed countless hours, nose a half inch from my dinner, or trying to put a paw in my cereal. So I cleaned the top and wiped the food chunks off the frame and put an ad on Craigslist. To keep Norbert prints off the glass, I leaned it on the wall behind my bedroom door.

When I sat down to wait for the guy to come get the table I discovered a great new game for Norbert and I to play. It's called watch the cat try to jump onto the glass top table when there's no glass. I'm not sure how well she likes it, but I think it's hilarious. She leaps off the couch with all the confidence a cat can muster, and only when she starts to pass through the middle of the table does she start to look surprised. 2 more jumps later and she's got it figured out. First get onto the frame, and then step onto the glass. Nope. Fell through the middle again.

Alas, about 30 seconds after she very carefully fell through the table the guy came to collect it. But it was fun while it lasted.

I don't understand slipcovers.

I'm looking for a couch and chair for my apartment. At the moment I have a futon in my livitchen which makes a fairly nice bed and an awful couch. Unless I sit bolt upright with my legs up on my coffee table, it's extremely uncomfortable. I'm 5'10"-ish, and if I sit all the way back in the futon my feet barely touch the ground. If I stretch out on the futon and don't have some pillows adjusted just so I get terrible neck and shoulder pain. And it's ugly.

So I'm searching through criagslist to find myself some better seating arrangements and I'm finding billions of sofas hidden under slipcovers. If it's a nice sofa, then I'm sure the slip cover is meant to keep it nice. But nobody can tell it's a nice sofa because slipcovers are so ugly. Like putting a Ford Festiva suit on your Mini Cooper. And if it's an ugly sofa, then it's going to be an ugly sofa under an ugly slipcover. Rather like dressing a turd up in a vomit suit.

With that said, if I go buy the chair/couch combination tomorrow, I'm going to have to cover it up to keep Norbert from ruining it during her last week here. So hypocrisy will be only temporary, and therefore discountable.

Referrals

Somebody found my blog by searching MSN for swollen limp noids. That makes me happy. Two people found my blog by asking Yahoo for woman pooping stories and females pooping school toilets. That does not.

Apparently there are other people out there who have nothing with which to fill their weekend evenings.

Say Aw

Has anyone ever tried flossing when your TMJ is acting up? It's almost enough to make me not want to floss.

Actually flossing is enough to not make me want to floss, but I've been doing a good job anyway. Tonight, however, I'm tired and I know that my jaw will be sore if I wrench my mouth open enough to get my fingers in there. In addition, I managed to cut one of my flossing fingers at work, so the floss gets in the cut and tries to pull it apart.

The cards are truly stacked against my mouth this week. I hope brushing and Listerine are going to be enough. I also hope that I get back into the flossing when I can open my mouth again, pain free.

As the late, great Mitch Hedberg once said, "it's as hard to quit smoking as it is to start flossing."

Since it's 11:31 and I need to wake up at 6am, I'll just write the following two things:

1) I have some new boxer shorts. I've been wearing a pair all day and I haven't had a single wedgy. Hooray for Hathaway Sport.

2) The reason it's 11:31 and I'm still up is that I just got back from watching King Kong: The story of the love between a girl and a great big monkey. It was pretty good, but that's not what #2 is about. My observation for this section of the post is that there were several scenes where Adrian Brody it looking off to the camera's left and where his nose is looking right into the camera. It's as if he was drawn by somebody with a bad sense of perspective.

Bed time.

The Great Floods of Aught 5

Because somebody has to be available to shuttle mattresses around the greater bay area 365 days a year, and because I wasn't on call for Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, I had to be on call for New Years weekend. I wasn't too worried about it. Over Christmas there were hardly any calls and the tech only had to go out twice. My luck wasn't nearly so good.

By Friday night I had 3 Sacramentos and 2 Napas. Saturday morning brought an additional Emeryville and a Corte Madera. So despite the fact that I had friends in town, I got up early on Saturday to do all my pickups and deliveries. It turned out to be harder than I thought it would be.

On the way to Sacramento it was pouring and the wind was blowing something fierce. As I passed Fairfield going east on 80 there was so much water coming from the west that the waves were lapping over the concrete divider of the freeway. But things seemed to be holding up, so I continued up to Sacramento.

Maybe 10 minutes later I saw a 90s Camaro do a complete 360 traveling at roughly 70 mph. It was truly amazing. All of a sudden his headlights started to rotate toward me (I was in the fast lane, and he was one lane over), but his speed and direction of travel stayed the same. The Camaro smoothly spun around as it glided across 2 lanes of traffic, finally ending up facing the right direction and damage free on the shoulder. If you set a photograph of a car on an air-hockey table I think you'd get roughly the same movement, which is kind of serene if you don't happen to be driving 70 mph.

One of my destinations in Sac was a pickup as somebody's house. I had called them Friday evening and asked if 11am or so would be a good time to stop by. The lady said that it would, and that's when I showed up. I knocked on the door and listened for signs of life as I checked the door to make sure I was at the right apartment. Maybe 5 minutes later an enormous woman in a night gown answered the door. I stated that I was there to pick up the air mattress, and she grunted and waved me toward a bedroom. In the bedroom with the hospital bed and mattress were two sleeping people. Not wanting to wake the two sleeping people, I didn't turn on my pump to deflate the mattress, nor did I turn on the light so I could adequately see what I was doing. Alas, my efforts were all for naught as about halfway though getting the mattress off the frame, enormous woman #2 (the sleeping one), opened an eye, grunted at me, got up and shuffled into the kitchen where she let out a soul-shaking belch.

I gathered everything up and took it to the van, and came back to have my paperwork signed. While Enormous Woman #1 signed off on the pickup, and Enormous Woman #2 let out another seismically significant burp, Enormous Woman #3 (who hadn't been awakened by the burp noise nor vibration), rolled over and started snoring like her esophagus housed a garbage disposal and somebody was trying to force a spoon down there. As icing on the cake, when I left the house I noticed that I smelled like an ashtray.

When I left Sacramento my boss called and told me that Napa was flooding, and the guy in Corte Madera called to say his power was out. So I put all those off until Sunday and set my sights on Emeryville. No problem I thought. I'll get home a little early I thought. I kind of have to pee, but I'm cruising along and I can wait until Emeryville I thought. Then I hit the traffic.

While I had been listening to a David Rakoff book on tape and not listening to the radio, a levy had broken near Fairfield and 80 was closed in both directions. This, apparently, was the same water I had seen lapping over the divider earlier in the day. And now I was stuck in the after effects, averaging .5 mph, no exit in sight, and bladder that was seriously questioning my Emeryville bathroom decision.

I had encountered this situation once before while stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge. But in that case I had the distinct advantage of having an empty water bottle handy. No such luck this time. In the spirit of MacGyver I looked around my van for something that might come in handy. And there it was: the candy dish.

During the holidays my company gives out candy dishes with our name and phone number printed on the side. I had been eating the candy out of one during the week, and it was sitting on the passenger seat. With no other options available I empted the remaining candy onto the seat and transformed my candy dish into the worlds smallest plastic urinal, complete with a convenient handle. And since the candy dish doesn't have a screw top, and since there was an awful lot of waste water on the freeway already, I dumped it out the window. Nobody was the wiser, and I felt 100% better.

And that, dear readers, was how I spent New Years Eve day.

Finally Back

I seem to have finally emerged from holiday mode, which consists entirely of working, packing, shopping, or hanging out with family. All of those things are fine and dandy, but they don't leave much time for things like TV, email, phone calls, or blogging. They also, ironically*, don't leave much time for thank-you notes. But since the holidays are over, and the thank-you notes are ready to be mailed, I'm ready to get back into gear.

And while I planned to write about driving around and redistributing mattresses in the great California rains of ought 5, doing the dishes used up my evening. So I'm just going to write about Wendy's.

I had a craving for ground beef today. Wendy's seemed like the natural lunch choice, so I pulled through the drive through and ordered a #2 with a lemonade with no ice. Then I pulled up to the window, handed the guy my $5.58, and put my hand out for my food. He handed me a bag and closed the window.

I knocked on the window and asked if I could have my drink too. He said he was sorry and handed me the drink saying, "Sprite**, right?" Sure, whatever. I took my food and pulled out of the lot, and while I waited for a break in traffic I fished around for a french-fry. No luck.

I drove around the block, parked, and walked into the restaurant to ask for my fries, which they unquestioningly gave me. They must have known that the guy at the drive through was an idiot who often gives people 1/3 of their order. I should have said that he forgot to give me my fries, frosty, and $40 gift certificate.

*I never feel totally comfortable using the word ironic. But it seems like that sentence had a reasonable chance of being correct.

**It was indeed lemonade.