Stephanie has been telling me how great the Ritz Chips are (raving about them, actually) and I just sort of nodded & went “uh-huh” – but today, she has been validated. They are awesome! The remind me a little of the ol’ Chicken in a Biskit, texture wise. But they’re much crunchier. I like crunchy things.
I am ready for lunch.
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Got my car. I am so exhausted with this experience, I feel like putting it all down will just make me need to go back to bed. I’ll topline it, and acknowledge that looking back at my anger, I admit I’m channelling some “other” anger into the situation. However, in my defense, I really dislike alarmist car service men, and the facts do support I was being treated this way because I’m a woman. ARGH!
At 5:00 I got a call saying they wanted to KEEP MY CAR some more. He’d already installed four new fuel injectors into it. (Methinks this was an overreaction!) We argued back and forth over the fuel situation. I read to him from the ethanol website the facts of how a high ethanol fuel can trigger some cars’ computer emission detection systems. John was pacing outside my office, because we had a very synchronized after-work process already in place to go to HIS car dealership, in his roommate’s truck, and then I would follow him, driving his truck, out south to my dealership. (He had two trucks, I had none. More on driving a truck later!) Anyhow, fifteen minutes of me losing my temper on the phone resulted in them giving up MY CAR. He actually said, “Your car is sick. I need to find out what’s making it sick.” Here’s the amazing part. We got there right at 6:00 (phew!), and I made John go in with me. I swear the resulting experience was different because a MAN was standing next to me, and that makes me NUTTY-O! Suddenly we’re all calm about me taking the car. We’re fine – and the light that wouldn’t go off – it’s now off! The fuel injectors are now firing at the correct whatevers. See, honestly, I don’t care. It’s a Honda. They are not known for lemons. So what they want me to do is drive the car until I use up the current tank of fuel, then put mid-premium fuel in for the next tank. Oooooookaaaaay…….? I just wanted my car so I was not in any state to be quizzing him, but John said exactly what I was thinking (oh, and I forgot to mention that the majority of the conversation about my car took place towards John’s head – the first minute he did it, I started to smirk & it was all I could do not to bust out laughing. so transparent!) – back to what I was thinking: “So why didn’t you siphon out the fuel?” (if said fuel was the culprit and problem? and it took some stammering & jumping around, first referencing that I’d already paid for the fuel – hello, if I bought a really nice Wusthof knife, and accidentally jammed it into my thigh? I don’t care about the fact I bought the knife, it’s in my leg & it shouldn’t be, let’s take it out! – and then he finally had to say the fuel was not harming my car. Excellent, and I have a witness. I suspect he called Iowa to discuss ethanol fuel, because – duh – everybody in Iowa drives on ethanol. Long story summed up: got my car, only had to pay for the exorbitantly-priced services I’d already agreed to, and now I am turning over the Car Maintenance portion of this marriage over to James. Yay!
Driving a Ford-150 pickup truck was both nerve-wracking & fun. I am too confident sometimes about things, which is usually followed by terror flashes that in my confidence I’m missing something really basic & apparent. Like will the back end of this giant pickup go crazily skidding across another lane of traffic when I go around the fountain circle? YIKES! (It doesn’t, at least not at 35 mph) I felt self-conscious because John was right in front of me, and it’s his truck. I also didn’t feel terribly secure in knowing where I was in the lane, like centered vs. hugging one side or the other, because a Civic is lower to the ground & I’m used to it’s size. But it definitely was fun to drive & be up high, I see why everybody buys SUV’s, it’s just unfortunate they’re such gas guzzlers and oh say killer vehicles if they hit someone in oh say a Civic.
Well, hey, it’s Saturday, Princess Day of the Week, and I’m gonna enjoy some hot wings that my sweetie brought be back from Hooters. Love the wings, think the dining-in experience is sorta stupid. At least they don’t pretend to be a family restaurant. Honesty is scarce in America, especially at a car dealership.
OK, those mother-F’ers at my Honda dealership are in big trouble. Alarmist fascist pigs trying to take advantage of the fact I am a woman, and that I could have possibly, irreparably caused DAMAGE to my freakin’ ENGINE by using ETHANOL based fuel in it. Oh, mah god. Because I radio edit not only for workplace particulars, but also extreme language, here is what I think of them, and it is NC-17 and not very nice to read.
Pissed
And I had to leave my car overnight, so I’m still relying on the kindness of OTHERS and my schedule is dependent on them – who knows how I’m getting back home & to my car tonight! sheesh. And I’m going to have to wrangle with them ALL over again today on the phone, but hopefully now that I’m white-hot poker pissed, I will not feel the terror I felt yesterday that I had done very expensive, non-warranty-covered damage. OH. I must not revisit this for a while or I will keel over from my blood pressure spiking.
Finally, Friday. Bless you, Friday, the second runner-up in the Pageant of Days. If Saturday should lose her crown due to salacious photos surfacing from her youth, and then Sunday decides to improperly get drunk at a publicity appearance, you, dear Friday, will be the one to take over the role of Happiest of Days.
We promise, no swimsuit competitions.
To the untrained eye, I look like Chaos. Swirling, piling, heaps of unorganized STUFF. Martha Stewart would shudder indelicately at this Life Lived Untidily.
However. Within the chaotic storm still lies a deep-seated need for order. A little obsessive-compulsiveness surfaces every so often, much like a bluegill ripples the surface of the water as it eats the bug that has landed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I have not done a good job of lunching this week. Today, I did not eat lunch, but instead consumed about 3 handfuls of Chex Mix, followed by an equal amount of mustard-flavored pretzels. Five minutes ago, I just poured a “serving” of Mike-N-Ikes out on my desk. And I was eating them two at a time, which is how I always eat candy at my desk: Gummi bears, Hot Tamales, all the chewy types. I lasted less than a minute, randomly grabbing pairs of bolus-shaped sugar bombs, and then all the flavors had to be sorted. Into like flavor groups, and paired up. The pairs are then eaten, in ascending order, from least-favorite flavor, to most favorite flavor. (each side of the mouth then has a symmetrical, candy-consuming experience.) I am not as obsessed with the M-n-I flavors as I am with gummis, or Starbursts, so it was less of a hierarchical structure to adhere to. Whew! When a certain pairing is off by one, then the odd-candy-out is paired up with the next flavor in the lineup. With M&M’s, they are eaten by least favorite color to prettiest color.
I do not like juice from my beans to touch my pork chop. I don’t go so far as to have cafeteria trays in my house, but I like things to occupy their own space and not drip into their neighbor’s. It messes with the flavor & expectation for the eating experience.
I like consistency. I like having a known “base” for my expectations & experiences. There are always things that are uncertain, all these factors over which I have no control. Maybe pairing up my candy & creating some sort of “order” under which the candy is consumed is my effort to control my own universe……… wouldn’t it be great if I challenged some of that energy into a little more cleaning?!?
Oh, and everyone on my team now thinks I’m utterly insane because I told them that I’m afraid to be around little people because I worry I will be compelled by some unknown force to try & pick them up. This is in the same drawer as the irrational fear that when I am around a police officer, I will lose all control & try to get his (her) gun out of their holster.
Now THAT would be spontaneous!
I have to admit it. Face it, Trace it, Erase it. I have a thing for the Beastie Boys, and it’s not an ordinary thing. Not like “oooooh, Marky Mark/Denzel/Usher, he SO hot.” it’s more like a queasy, Oh my god, I could give up my entire life to clean your apartment, and I can’t even pick between the three of you so I’ll clean all your apartments. (Mike D, I am afraid you’d make me live in a box under your bed, but I’ll still take that chance.)
They are the Uber-Geeks who Hit the Big Time (not on the scale of Bill Gates, but please. GeekLove has its limits.) I’ve always had a thing for geeks. Bobby Melvin in 8th grade. Big round owlish eyeglasses, and short. Bowl haircut. He was smokin’. My ardor was, sadly, unrequited. He was probably too busy building a space shuttle replica and knew that being involved with a girl would drag his grades down. He was the sort of geek who got shoved into his locker a lot. His abuses only made me love him more. After 8th grade, he & his family moved to North Carolina.
Bobby M, you coulda been a Beastie Boy. Here’s to all the Beastie Geeks who don’t need model looks & societal mores to make it big & flip girls’ stomachs everywhere.
Well, unless I stay home. Unfortunately, I did not stay home today.
I wish I was here:
Now accepting donations for a big ass tub. I imagine I’d have to install it in my laundry room, but that’s ok. I can live with that.
I am almost done with the Slipperiest Scarf Ever, made with electric blue Flash & peacock-ey Eros. Very simple pattern – just YO, k2tog, however, it is SLICK and with all the hairy Flash and railroad ribbon, it requires mindfulness. Mindful you get both strands, mindful you don’t pull through the gap in the railroad, mindful you don’t drop a needle & have all the stitches fall off.
Mondays are not so great for Mindfulness, but I hope to finish it tonight. Then, it’s a stunning chihuahua sweater, followed by the poncho!
Well, the baby shower yesterday was wonderful. It was out at the ends of the Earth, yet it was wonderful. I didn’t get a pic of the hooded baby sweater, but she loved it! Her MIL, Betty, is also a knitter, and from the stories I’ve heard, a bit wonkers. So imagine my astonishment to hear the first thing Betty says to me: “I like your style, Jennifer. You’re my kind of person.” I was terrified Julie might disown me as her friend. She can’t remember any stories she’s told her to create an opinion of me, either. Oh well! I figured one nutty Betty was going to be the max for the day. {ooooh, foreshadowing!}
So since I was already skirting the edge of the Universe, a.k.a., Olathe, I decided to zip over to Knit-Wit & see about some Koigu. That store is always BURSTING at the seams between people & yarn, and they’d just gotten a huge new shipment in, so boxes spilled over with bags of yarn. Ordinarily, that’d be fun. But it was already after 2, I had a long journey home, and I just wanted some Koigu. I couldn’t find it. So I found me some Squiggle, and because the cube holding it was bursting, I ended up buying a couple of skeins (and dropping a couple more on the floor because I was afraid if I continued to try & put them back, I would topple everything!) – they will be a novelty scarf. Color: Cool Jazz
The only koigu they had was clearanced out, and in mostly hideous colorways or solids. Not fun. I bought one skein for a tie for James, and then picked out a couple of Waterspun skeins in a periwinkle variegated for the pigtail hat. I’ll look like a complete & utter goofball in that hat, and I embrace it. I also bought some inexpensive alpaca wool in scarlet & gold for that chihuahua sweater for Monica.
So, as I’m paying, I spot this woman who looks familiar. It’s Betty the Hater! OMG! What do I do? Pelt her with skeins of yarn? Linebacker-check her into the bookcase by the door? Shout obscenities? Knit some scarlet i-cord into the letter “H” and staple it to her t-shirt? I took a page from Ghandi and paid for my stuff & left.
Then I went to Pier 1 & cut my finger on a basket, jammed a splinter in so deep I couldn’t remove it! I bought the baskets I had picked out & fled there as well. I should have gotten the “injured customer” discount, just like students get. Why do they do that? Show your student ID & get 15% off! Well, I work hard for the money (oo oo, oo oo) & I’d like to save!
Today is gonna be a blur. I’ve already been to the ATM, car wash, gas station & grocery store. Loads of cleaning to do, homemade pizza for dinner with Roger & David, prep tomatoes for sauce for tomorrow to cook in the crock pot, uh, more cleaning, and then collapse. And the work week will begin again! Let’s hope it’s a little less cliquey & little more fun this time.
Well, hubby put the mail in two piles last night, so I didn’t discover the Knitter’s magazine patiently waiting for me at the bottom of the heap until this morning! There’s not a single sweater in it I’d want to knit, but hey, I love to look & get ideas. There is one hat that WILL be mine:
And, it’s out of Koigu, so I can jump on
Kristin’s Obsession Train
Today is Julie’s baby shower, I’m going to snap a pic of the baby sweater I knit for her & get it posted; I also need to wind the Cascade 220 so I can get crankin’ on the felted door mitten sample for
I’m excited to teach classes there this Fall! I hope I don’t get so excited I trip & stab myself with a straight needle or somethin’.
This weekend is off to a great start, because American Family Insurance sent me a check for $557 because apparently they had my old apartment in the wrong “zone” and their new software caught the glitch. Hooray for new software! And it makes my $164 “I’m starving & had the worst day EVER” shopping spree at Target last night a little easier to swallow. (Granted, half of my purchases were home needs like dish soap, a fan (on clearance!), a new padlock for the kennel, heat patches for JWo’s ankle, color printer ink (what’s with the highway robbery on the printer ink. I swear sometimes just buying a new printer would be cheaper). The rest was snacky candy stuff, mac n cheese, baby presents & wrapping materials for today, and now that I really think about it, there wasn’t anything truly delightful just for me! Hrmph! I guess that’s why I have to buy something today then, eh?
I miss Lizzie Lou. I am envious of Shelley, who is visiting her this weekend. I hope they call me! They’ll probably wait until they’re in Crate & Barrel so we can pour the kosher rock salt right directly into the wound.
I think it means something if, while watching VH1 Classic, I have flipped out over hearing the Sisters of Mercy. Man I was into them. The lead singer does look uh, pretty Goth.
“Some People get by….. with a little understanding…… Some People Get By….. with a whole lot more……” heh. JWo just said, “Who the F is this?” and I replied, “It’s the F’in’ Sisters of Mercy and they F’in’ rock!”
But then, I also groove to the Scissor Sisters. Go figgah.
They’re not exactly sisters to the Sisters of Mercy. Think any of ’em are gay?
http://www.universalrecords.com/quicktime/scissorsisters/
Because www.scissorsisters.com ain’t workin’.
Did I miss the bus to GothLand? I didn’t think I was so classifiable.
Which flock do you follow?
this quiz was made by alanna