Month: January 2006 (Page 3 of 3)

We are in the throes of negotiating some buys for a potential new client. It is hilarious, to listen to each other. Some of my markets are northern – Sioux Falls, and Fargo – and I immediately revert to my old-school accent as soon as these people pick up the phone or call me. Oh, ya! You betcha! Oh, ok now. mMM Bye. (Did you know that Up North, 90% of the population ends their phone calls with “mmmMMBye”? Well, they do, and that is a statistic. I made it up, but I bet it’s true.)

Kristin, on the other hand, gets up in the occasional grille of a stupid rep, and she just asked about getting into Smackdown, which immediately made me visualize her on the ropes. LEAPING.

And the Junior Buyer (aka, our boss?), he is a never-ending font of questions about the software and has “issues” with it. So yesterday, I told Kristin we’ll be in a better place once the new person starts next week. Because the Junior Buyer is SLOWING US DOWN. Like the gazelle with the broken ankle.

If you don’t love the song “Dance, Dance” by Fallout Boy, then you can just click on “next blog” and move along. Because today, I dedicate my love to “Dance, Dance.” Is it pop-esque? A little bit. It has enough blazing guitar and lack of syntheticness to keep it halfway under the alternative umbrella. (I would hate to lose my alternative music lover’s card – I’m already on probation for the J.Lo and Beyonce songs from last summer…)

It’s one of those songs that make you want to slam dance, or be in a dance troupe, doing a choreographed number at lightening speed. I find while listening to it in the car, as loud as possible without distortion, I become an air drummer. And a triple-time shoulder shimmier. People who see me? Must conclude I am having a seizure. Because I am! A SEIZURE OF HAPPINESS.

I have a feeling this could be an open-ended, ongoing blog – there are certainly more than three things that define my own peculiar brand of Crazy. It seems particularly appropriate for a Monday, so here you go. JenCrazy(tm) at its finest:

*I do not like to open those packages of dough that explode when you press a spoon along the line. I shut my eyes, turn my face, and behave as though I am opening a bottle of champagne that has been in the back of a pickup truck travelling across rutted gravel roads. Speaking of which, I also don’t like opening champagne bottles.

*I do not like to open the small encapsulated pockets that contain cold medicine liquigels. I freak out if I have to tear them open, because I am certain my Herculean tearing will result in the gels bursting open and my medicine ending up sprayed, all over me. At a time when I am most likely to burst into tears from the misery and catastrophe. So, I use tiny manicure scissors to cut a “T”-shaped incision so I can free them. If I had a scalpel, I’d use that.

*I cannot stand the sound of plastic grocery bags being whipped around by wind, when you’re in the car & the windows are down. Just typing this made me shudder & want to scream. Recent discovery? The film wrapping on dry cleaning sounds EXACTLY the same.

What’re a couple choice oddities you possess?

I spent three hours yesterday, cleaning out my Honda (LaFonda). It became abundantly clear why having your car detailed costs so much. I armor-all’d every vinyl surface & now I have a reflective glare on the windshield, it’s so shiny. (I’ve wiped it down again.) I vacuumed, put upholstery cleaner on the carpets, vacuumed again, cleaned the windows, took out everything that wasn’t necessary, cleaned out the trunk and behold! She’s a new car all over again. I then spent the extra cash on the deluxe car wash for her, because after all, she deserved it.

As we were driving to Thai 2000 this afternoon, JWo praised the clean windshield: “It’s HiDef Honda!” We stopped at Super Target (it truly is Super. Thanks for asking!) & I bought new car mats, because hard as it was to toss the factory-installed Civic mats, they were grungy. They just represent my negotiation skeelz, because I demanded they throw them in for free (It was an extra $100! For car mats! With embroidered Civic logo! Highway robbery.), but after 4 years, they needed to go. And, after spending three hours of quality time with our shop vac, there was no way I was going to revive them or bring them back to high-level of cleanliness LaFonda deserves. If I’d installed anything new or fancy, we could’ve called this blog, “Pimp my LaFonda”, but that sounds, uh, kinda bad. I prefer “LaFonda: Now in HD”…..

I have shown great success this past NFL season (yes, I know it’s not over, but it is over for the Chiefs) in developing my ability to comment on the game, and I would like to take this moment to also state that I am an excellent judge of yardage. Might be all the knitting, might be me trying to find one area in which to excel, but I’m good.

So, last week, James was going to bed at 5:00 or something crazy, because he’s practicing to be a dairy farmer when he retires (and he gets up at the crack o’ dawn for the waterfowl hunting), and I’m standing by his side of the bed, getting more & more wound up talking about something. I end my statement with both arms straight up in the air by my head.

JWo: “So, now that you’ve shown me the referee’s signal for a touchdown, show me what they do when the kick is no good.”

I pause. I think. I wave my hands in front of me, crossing wrists.

JWo: “Very good! Now show me holding.”

I think again. I know I know it. I give him this:

JWo: “Noooooo. What is that? THIS is holding.” and he proceeds to show me, and I immediately go, “Oooooh, yeah, yeah, right.”

(Correct Referee Signal:)

We’re both laughing, and JWo says again, “What was THAT?” referring, of course to my incorrect signal.

I say, “Oh, it was holding. It was the ‘Bein’ HELD DOWN BY THE MAN’ hand signal.”

Needless to say, I’m setting the bar & getting ready for next year. Why, right here, I’ve discovered a transgression called the Illegal Crackback. How snappy is that? I think that could work in the office. Shut up! I’m not taking your call, I call Illegal Crackback on your ass. I see a lot of potential, integrating all this into daily life. Perhaps Kristin will learn Ref signals, too, and we can handle faux pas in meetings by, say, simply standing up & kicking the back of our foot (to indicate tripping). My problem is, she’ll be calling me constantly on the Facemask. I’m grabby like that, and I don’t always have good boundaries.

I’ve mentioned before my cheap thrill of glibly lying to strangers in situations that harm no one, but amuse me greatly. Here’s another one, starring many of the same characters.

Two days ago, Miss Kristin and I did our usual LunchAdventures! where we go eat something and then search for magical Life Solutions in the form of yarn, office supplies, or random things obtained at CostCo. This week, it was office supplies. I view office supplies as a way of getting closer to my personal, unattainable deity, Goddess of Organization. I firmly believe that having the right set of pens when the sun is in the fourth quadrant and you’re born in the Year of the Monkey, you can Become Organized. I guess it’s like Cleansing Your Thetan in the Church of Scientology, but pens? MUCH CHEAPER.

So we are standing at the altar (checkout) of Office Depot, and Kristin is in front of me, purchasing some pens (Salvation!) and an excitedly-discovered “My Chores” list complete with sparkling stickers. The checkout girl is literally checking her out. In both ways. I swore, she was SO friendly, I thought she was trying to swoop in and take advantage of the office supply frenzy & convert Kristin to Lesbetarianism and finally get that toaster oven. So, she’s fawning all over the “My Chores” item, and talking talking talking, and I pipe up, “Is that for your niece, Denise?” and the very act of saying this takes me to that hilarious & awful place. You know the one, where you can barely breathe, your legs feel like they won’t hold you up, and anything you try to say comes out in little wheezy gasps & tears are coming out the corners of your eyes? Kristin did not hear me, and turned and said, “What?” and that made me paralyzed AND frustrated, because I wanted to sustain the lie, to keep the niece Denise alive & waiting anxiously for her gift from Auntie K, because it would also keep the checkout girl in a forward-motion of continuing her efforts to lick Kristin’s forehead.

Alas, my amusement at myself worked against me, and I couldn’t speak until we got to the car. All I can say is, our niece Denise is lucky to have such thoughtful aunts & we will sure teach her about the Office Supply Religion.

We are a Netflix home. And we absolutely love it. In fact, JWo has mentioned several times in the past week how he doesn’t understand why anyone would even GO to the video store anymore. And I chuckle, because the notion of someone who, say, has more money than Midas and say, owned a whole bunch of video stores that might constitute a dying industry, amuuuuuses me greatly and that’s all I’m going to say ’bout that. I digress.

I think the notion of a shared Netflix account, one where you don’t ever really discuss the movies you’re picking, you each just pick them & add to the list, and then at times reshuffle the Queue Order to launch things to the top? This is worthy of a psychology student’s thesis on marriage. I am the first to admit that our 90+ list of movies, patiently waiting to come & visit us, are dominated by my picks. (That’s what happens when you decide you must see Nip/Tuck, all seasons, and The Office, all seasons, and oh, looky! They have all the Prime Suspects, too! Those are all like, 5 discs for a season.) The account is in JWo’s name & email, so he’s the one who gets the updates on “movie returned” & “incoming movie”, and when I open the little red square envelopes, it’s always a surprise, because I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the Queue. I pick and mess around every couple of weeks, but it’s not on my daily radar. I realize I can add my own email, and have my own Queue and blah blah blah, but quite frankly, I enjoy the surprise of it all. And sometimes, there are unexpected surprises, like tonight, when I opened the first envelope and saw we had moved “Devo: Live In The Land Of The Rising Sun” to the top of our Queue. What the hell???? Granted, I rolled my eyes when I saw “The Dukes of Hazzard” in our Queue, but I hadn’t even seen this one on the list. This was an “Add and Accellerate” selection. Like buying that box of teddy grahams because they’re 2 for $5 and they’re right there in front of you on the endcap and by god, that sounds like a GOOD IDEA and we’re gonna buy that Cool Whip right there, too, and dunk ’em. Dunk ’em. Dunk ’em good.

I had no idea I’d married a Devo fan. He called from backgammon tonight, just to chat – and I asked him, what was up with that movie? Apparently? JWo is a HUGE fan of the Devo. And now, I’m going to have to hide all my good bundt pans before he decides he needs to wear them around the house AS HATS.

I am a hybrid mix of loving a bargain, and spending money on things I don’t need. Not that those are mutually exclusive, but all the same, if I’m going shopping, I love a deal. Conversely, I also hate buying things I know will be on sale, like holiday gift tags for $0.99 before Christmas, and in two days will be $0.49. Or anything at Hobby Lobby that isn’t already on sale, because eventually, it will be half off.

So this is why I never buy calendars until after the start of the new year. I know they will be marked down by 50%, and I can muddle through a couple of days without a calendar. The only hitch is that if you want your calendar to perfectly express who you are, you are throwing the dice with this shopping maneuver.

Over lunch, I ran up to Half Price Books, and was a little worried at first. I thought they only had two rotating displays of calendars, and the selection? Scary. The first one was dominated with kitten calendars. Mmm. Works for the cat lovers, but for me? Not so much. I found a Gustav Klimt calendar and snatched it up. On the next display (and by now I saw there were more stands, spaced apart), I was horrified by large drooling GOBLINS! Goblin calendars! Oh yes! And Camelot! And Bible songs, and Outhouses. This calendar industry sure does find their niche groups, hm? Well, where’s my Kittens in Goblin Suits planner, hm? I settled on a Christopher Marley insect art calendar for home, because there were no black labrador retriever calendars to be found, and then randomly found a knitting calendar, complete with patterns, plus a dog desk calendar, and then the store gave me a free calendar, so I’m now up to my gills in calendars.

None of which (except the knitting) are really speaking for me? But hey. They were allllll half price. And I know, at some point, I’ll go back out and find & buy the day-by-day Get Fuzzy calendar. Even if it’s not on sale…. (but it better be.)

Like a new pair of sneakers
Gleaming white, never worn
A new year before us
Ours to tend, ours to shape

We silently whisper
Promises and goals
Ideas to be hatched
Dreams to be followed

By springtime, we discover
Life is not kind
Mud puddles and scuffs
Shoelaces break

Sandals replace
Our footwear, come summer
By fall, our sneakers
Are in a pile by the door

Whatever you dream,
Whatever you whisper
To yourself in the dark
At the start of the year

Be kind and realistic,
Take each day as its own.
Our journey is Life
Built upon each single day

Not on a paper with boxes
And numbers, and letters
Or sneakers
Or dreams.

Just on placing each foot
In front of the other
With direction and focus
The journey is ours

Laughter and love,
Peace and good health.
Dreams come to fruition
Is my wish for you.