Congratulations, you're still in the running towards becoming America's Next Hot Mess

Forgive me Blogland for I have sinned. It has been 20 days since my last confession, I mean blog post. I have been a right mess and until recently was in no mood for much of anything other than playing endless games of Big Kahuna Reef (it's like Jewel Quest except with seashells and tikis) or watching endless amounts of mindless, syndicated television. Here are 2 important things that I have learned:

1. Tyra Banks is an ass.

2. I need the company of other human beings.

During the first couple of weeks in September I morphed into a weepy, be-sweatpantsed, mascara smeared, unemployed lady-blob.

Early last week I almost reached the tipping point and was moments away from an apathetic and joyless life consisting of eating all my food straight from a can and wearing nothing but mumus, but thanks to a kind email from Gwen with a picture of a kitty, the hope provided by an online Oracle class offered by my local community college, the company of my good friends Jogger and Ladette, and a well timed, real job opportunity I was able to start snapping out of it.

I shook out my pony tail, showered, got dressed again, and put on make up.

I started doing all those things that I had planned to do in order to take advantage of all the free time I had. I started making the bed every day. I finally took down and washed the living room curtains. I got my cholesterol checked (high, but not too bad) and made appointments for teeth cleaning and an eye exam. I even sucked it up and applied for unemployment (even though everyone kept telling me you can't get it when you were a temp, which turns out not to be true) and discovered that being on the dole isn't so bad.

Yes. This upswing lasted for about 4 days.

Just when things were looking up for me I was suddenly and violently shoved back into my sweatpants. I was struck back down into raccoon eyed, ponytail hell by what I can only assume was the flu. I don't know what kind of flu, but to please Gwen we'll call it the Heiney Flu (H1N1) although it could possibly simply be that it's a rotten head cold and I'm a big baby.

Anyhoo... What the hell man? This is like the 4th or 5th time I've been sick this year. Fuck. I like to think of myself as a hale and hearty type, but since last Tuesday I've been wallowing around in my jammies wheeling around a sickroom humidifier, that I rigged up on an office chair with a bath towel to catch any spills, with me from room to room. My glamorous entourage of late, in addition to the humidifier, includes the following:

1. A giant box of tissues with lotion.

2. A bag of sugar-free cherry cough drops.

3. A bottle of saline nasal spray.

4. A tube of medicated lip balm.

5. A box of the most potent decongestant available over the counter. It's the kind from the locked cabinet at the pharmacy counter that you have to sign for because people make crystal meth from it. My philosophy about cold meds is that if it isn't harmful to pregnant women and I'm able to operate heavy machinery then it's no good. I want the hard stuff.

6. A plastic grocery sack filled with all my used tissues - I call it "the sad sack".

So today I'm finally starting to feel a little bit better and I'm learning to live without the humidifier (it broke anyway - I'm sure I wore the fucking thing out) and the meds (I ran out). I started back up again with my online class and found my way back to my blog.

That's all I have the strength for at the moment. Stay well and keep busy.

Love, Lady

Nobody In Their Right Mind Would Need This - Special SkyMall Edition

It has been quite awhile since I've been inspired by a product so dumb that I am moved to actually get up off my ass and then sit back down again in my office chair and create a post about it, but here it is:

The "Head Spa Massager"

Brought to you by the brilliant minds at SkyMall:

What fool can resist Italian design when paired with Japanese engineering?

Please, pretty please wear it to work.

I understand that times are tough so if you crave ownership of this lovely gadget but cannot afford $49.99 + shipping give me a call and I will personally come to your home, hand you a glass of red wine, put a spaghetti strainer on your head and knock you around a little bit until your blood circulation improves and you feel more relaxed.

I'm here to help.

The News Round Up

Hey all... I'm back. Sort of.

I'll be leaving again shortly as MDH and I pack up for a week long stay in a hotel starting Monday when the people we hired to refinish our hardwood floors begin to do so.

They told us that it will take 4 days and after they are finished we won't be able to walk on the floors in shoes or move the furniture back where it belongs for another week after that. That may seem like a long time to have things scattered all over the place, but because it's been this way for so long already, I've become accustomed to living in a pig sty. So whatever dude.

Actually, I've never been more excited to stay at a hotel in my entire life. It's just the crappy Ramada down the street, but it will be a week of living like a semi-normal person again. I won't have to turn sideways to walk through my kitchen and I already know exactly where the phone book will be (in the nightstand drawer).

The floor people were able to schedule the work in just the nick of time. I've gotten so used to living in this mess that one more day of it and I would have begun wearing nothing but mumus and eating all my food straight out of the can.

In the comments of this post, which contains the majority of my bitching, somebody made the clever suggestion that we move everything back to it's proper place until time came closer to the actual date when the work was to be done. Yes. Thanks for that. Marvelous idea. I hear you. It makes perfect sense and would probably have been a fine thing for us to do if we were not the two laziest people on planet earth and possibly galaxies beyond.

Anyhoo... now there is an end in sight.

Meanwhile I realized that not only have I been neglecting my blog I've also left it hanging with a couple of untidy loose ends that I intend to take care of in this post.

Like first of all:

Whatever happened between Gaydar and Jogger? Remember that whole thing with the old man with the crush on the young girl and the mysterious packet of Oreo cookies? Well I swear on a stack of chocolate cream filled cookies that the very next day after I wrote that post - what should I see displayed prominently on my very own desk when I got to work? Yes. A mysterious packet of Oreo cookies.

Anyway... here's what happened... Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was weird and I half wondered if Gaydar hadn't read my blog post where I all but called him a dirty old man because his annoying harassment of Jogger seemed to end right after I wrote it.

Jogger and I still don't know who gave us the cookies.

and loose end number 2:

The Case of the Olive Garden Charges
In this post I wrote a few months ago about a mysterious charge I noticed on our family credit card statement to the Olive Garden to the sum of $52.83 and the arguments and accusations of bad taste that ensued between me and MDH. A week or so later I called my mother who thanked me for the Olive Garden gift card I had sent to them for their anniversary. What a relief! Neither of us remembered having eaten at the Olive Garden because neither of has had.

And now a numbered list of random bullshit:

1. I dyed my hair back to my "natural color". At least I think it's my natural color. Over the years my blond highlight just kept getting lighter and lighter and my hair was starting to look fried. It's brownish now and very shiny again.

2. MDH does not like my new old hair color. He said he finds it "jarring". Too bad mutha fucka.

3. I drove around the block and wrote down the address of the house where the dog lives that barks all goddamn night and keeps me awake. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, probably call the police the next time it happens. I have also toyed with the idea of finding out the phone number of the house too and then calling these assholes at 2am when they let their dog bark and howl for hours on end.

4. I have become addicted to the new HBO series True Blood. I know, I know. Vampires. But trust me, it's really good.

5. I have also become addicted to the MTV show called Exiled where the little spoiled rotten assholes previously featured on My Super Sweet 16 are hauled off like criminals in the night, made to live among families in third world countries and forced to perform chores such as making huts out of cow poop and sleep on dirt floors. It's wonderful. A feel good festival of grins and evil giggling.

6. Mr. Boo got me last week. I vowed that I would never let this happen, but it did and I am ashamed. You see, I was deep in conversation with my back to the cubicle aisle way and the asshat snuck up behind me and burst a handful of bubble wrap in my ear. I won't go into detail about what happened or what I said to him afterward, but suffice it to say that he limped away from the experience holding onto his ball sack for dear life and has still not been able to look me in the eye nearly a week later. I have no fear that he'll ever sneak up and scare me again.

Stick Around for Joy

Don't get too excited. The picture above is my pipe dream - hopefully soon a reality. The before picture is the current state of our living room floor - filthy and stripped bare. The after picture is of our master bedroom floor, which was already refinished when we moved in a few years ago, but the model of what we hope the rest of the floors will look like when the job is finally completed.

Meanwhile my life is in chaos because my house is in a total fuckin' shambles. I want to move somewhere far, far away. To a place where all the rooms make sense. Where the kitchen is the kitchen and the living room doesn't echo and give me splinters.

What feels like an eternity has passed since my darling decided to rip out the nasty carpets in our house. It was a spur of the moment decision even though we have always planned to refinish the floors in our house. We just hadn't planned to start ripping up carpet that very second.

He is not typically a man of action. In fact most of the time he mainly stays very still, so I don't know what came over him. At the time (Labor Day weekend) because he was supposed to be simply shampooing the carpets, I was thoroughly prepared for a carpet cleaning project. We moved all of the furniture and breakable items out of the way and created a situation that I thought would be temporary, like for one day.

I left him alone with the shampoo-er machine for less than 5 minutes and returned to find him wild-eyed and grinning, on his hands and knees, looking up at me and barking proudly "Look at this! - These floors are perfect, why didn't we do this before??"

Because you need a plan crazyman.

To be honest, at first I was kind of excited to finally get the wheels in motion, but that was a few weeks ago and at this point I am tired of living like an animal. Meanwhile, the estimates have all come in, a deposit has been paid and the job has been scheduled - in another 4 weeks.

So I am writing to you now from a cramped space that I have carved out for myself in the office by moving several large piles of crap. I'm going to post some pictures tonight and reassure you that I haven't dropped off the face of the planet. It's just difficult to get in the post writing zone when I'm drowning underneath all of the crap piles.

Here is what used to be my kitchen, filled with all of the crap from what used to be the dining room and some of the crap that used to be the living room... and some other crap that I have just started piling on top of it because I have no fucking idea where to put it anymore...

Here is what used to be the entry way filled with more of some of the crap that used to be in the living room. We have to tilt the pizza boxes to get them through the door. What? You think I'm going to try to cook something in this shithole?

Here is some of the crap I had to move to get into the office, including the ever present shop vac... like those American Express ads, it's everywhere I want to be...

Here is one of the few rooms in the house I can stand to be in... our lovely empty dining room...

A Quick List of CrabbyLove

I've been such a crab apple lately. Quick tempered. Ugly mood swings. Just generally unpleasant to live with. Even the cat doesn't want to be around me anymore except when I fill his food dish. Ungrateful bastard.

See what I mean? I'm foul.

Anyhoo... I started trying to think of things that I love so that maybe I can start to snap out of this horrible queen of the harpies phase that I seem to be going through right now. So I'm taking a deep breath and in no particular order here goes -

Love:

1. Mashed potatoes - and keep the gravy away or I will stick a fork in your eye. Gravy sucks.

2. Having 10 items in my basket and no one else in line at the 10 Items or Less check out line. It'd be heaven if I had cash with correct change.

3. Finding out yesterday on NPR that those stupid detox foot pads are a big hoax - just like I knew they were. Oh yeah. This reporter put them on her feet before she went to bed and when she woke up the next morning said they were disgusting, gooey and gray, but she took them to some lab at UC Berkley where they compared the amount of minerals the company who makes the pads claim they remove from your system in an unused pad to the gray gooey one she had used and found no difference. HA. Then to explain the gray gooey part she took a clean one and held it over a steaming tea pot full of hot water and guess what? It turned gray - that's what. I knew it was bullshit and I love being right. You can listen to the story here.

4. My haircut. I hated it when I came home from the salon, but it's grown on me, so to speak and now I love it. On a less lovey note though, I have noticed that no matter what hair style I come home with, when I style it myself I do it exactly the same as I always have done. No wonder it never looks like it does when my stylist does it. I always ask for something modern and updated, which she does beautifully, but my hands and arms are in some kind of style time warp and still treating my head like it's 1993.

5. Discovering the other day that Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor did another motorcycle around the world series called Long Way Down. Fuck Ewan McGregor, he's OK I guess, but I'm all weak in the knees for Charley. I know it's strange and there is no accounting for taste, but I have this weird thing for Charley Boorman ever since I saw him half naked in The Emerald Forest, and think he is just about the sexiest man alive. Yeah. Well I did until I watched episode three in which while camping in Italy, he laid down on the ground with his knees in the air, held a Zippo to his ass, lit a fart and laughed like a hyena. I still love him any way. Maybe more now.

6. Marlboro Ultra Lights in a box. Don't worry. I'm not smoking again. Much. No really. I'm not - I'm just thinking about it a lot lately and choosing to over eat instead.

7. Clean sheets.

8. Dental floss.

That's it. I've been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to come up with 9 and 10 and I just can't do it. Why don't you tell me what YOU love... Make it good.

Love, Lady