Someone who shall remain nameless (my mother) went out and bought me this thing in a desperate attempt to stop the constant cycle of ear infections that plagued me this spring. Due to her unfortunate use of direct shipping, we've ended up on the damn mailing list for Torture Me German-Style with Useless Yuppie Shit Magazine Hammacher Schlemmer.

In an attempt to stave off insomnia and prevent any chance of a pleasant dream last night, I was flipping through the pages of mindless consumerism's horrendous swan song when I came upon THIS:




Yes, that's right. They're actually selling an $1800 mechanized saddle and calling it a "core workout." A piece of advice: If that's what you're into you can arrange it a great deal more cheaply on any given Saturday night in Austin. There's no need to resort to mail order.

Which has led me to reflect on a disturbing trend in at-home exercise equipment. They're just recycling the accoutrements normally reserved for those folks with a particular skip in their grooves and reselling it as exercise equipment.

Case in point (besides the saddle). Picture it. Saturday night.

Okay all right, I'm fixated on Saturday but bear with me. Saturday night. Third date (or whatever. God.)

After a candelight dinner and a stroll for ice cream, you make your way into the living room of that someone special only to encounter this:




Some of you would know it was a pilates machine. But I submit to you that at least 70% of the population wouldn't. IF you didn't, 70% of the remaining population would be headed towards the door with a barely mumbled excuse about having to get up early and a strange feeling like your scalp was ablaze.

I left a margin for the folks who might really be into it. To whom I say...go ahead and strengthen that core! Woot!

I do reserve the right to write a letter to the Hammacher Schlemmer people if I'm ever flipping through the pages and find a SWING, though.

The full story later on, but I bought an iphone.

It required I spend 4 hours in the blazing sun and three hours in the apple store itself, but I did it.

I am never ever buying something like this on the first day ever again.

Long story short, though. NO ONE can EVER buy ANYTHING from Shabby Chic at the Domain or anywhere else. They're a bunch of bitches. I am SO writing them a letter about their treatment of the iphone people today.

I was putting a large knife away tonight and almost ended up dead. Since 'almost' only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes, you can decide for yourselves the extent to which I'm being over dramatic.

The knife is the biggest one in the set that we got for our wedding, and the wooden block it belongs to was sort of wedged under the cabinet behind the base of a tiny kitchen aid mixer. My attention to the task of sliding it into the slot was less than complete and it caught somehow (either on the cabinet or on the block itself) and flipped, landing point first just under my rib cage.

Not IN it, of course. It didn't rip my shirt but it did leave a tiny red mark that serves as proof of my icy cold encounter with mortality.

I started giggling uncontrollably, which devolved into a minor hysteria that involved my saying, "oh my god I just almost died." Christophe is convinced that if I had gotten stabbed he would have been convicted in the case, as "no one but you could have such an accident."

He may be right.

The feeling of almost committing accidental sepoku was a strange sensation to say the least. Not one I wish to experience again.

Then, just to add insult to non-injury, I cracked my head on the corner of an open cabinet while putting away a pot. Since that's kind of a standard event it doesn't get a file # of it's own. It HURT though. The dishes are a dangerous place that no one should have to go into alone or (evidently) distracted.

I joined a league at work. My god what was I thinking.

I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow, as I've clearly pulled something in my right quad.

Ow ow ow.

I'm thinking about getting a personalized (aka 'vanity') plate for my new rollerskate, largely because I can never remember my tag numbers in a pinch.

This is not a big deal when your car is down in the garage and you're just trying to renew the registration.

This is a big deal when/if your car gets stolen and you're trying to quickly relay the details to the cops.

I've been in both situations, neither recently. Neither is pleasant.

I digress.

I was running my idea for my plate through the Texas database and found myself in a state of unrepressable glee at some of the choices for "organizational" plates.

Some favorites were:

Texas State Rifle Association (let's see the fool who will carjack that car)
God Bless Texas
I Love Texas
Native Texan (although I don't qualify...and yes I have seen that episode of King of the Hill)
Smile Texas Style
Texas...it's like a whole other country
Fighting Terrorism (proceeds go to the improvement of Texas highways...because terrorists HATE a well-paved road)

Etc.

But the winner, and the one that proves that the license plate designers in the state of Texas are either 1) entirely lacking or 2) over endowed with a sense of irony is this one. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Ruby Red Grapefruit, the State Fruit of Texas.

My god, who could resist?

So I get it, the Livejournal people are just trying to help those of us who so very desperately want to post but somehow can't.

However, this is the worst idea I have seen yet.




I will not be sharing gruesome specifics about the best, worst, or otherwise impressive bathrooms I have seen in my life.

I will, however, drop clues just because I'm in that mood.

( the squeamish can avoid it, really. it's funny but not that funny. )

This evening took a baroque turn during the clearing of the dishes when Ruby decided to, on little to no provocation, Kick Truman's Ass.

Things have been getting increasingly tense around the food bowl, and apparently when he went in for a drink of water after his own dinner, she sensed invasion and knocked him over. His ear got bitten up very badly, but after a strenuous amount of investigation at the emergency vet there aren't any stitches necessary or possible. So it was a $250 clean-up job.

Not good.

Before that had happened I'd been evaluating the following phenomenon:

On the strength of her interview on the Colbert Report, I ran out and bought Janna Levin's, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines," and managed to slog about halfway through it before I just ran out of gas and gave up. I'm not usually prone to dumping books, so I'm trying it again.

This lead me to make the following list.

Books that have defeated me...the literary walk of shame.

1) Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

2) Mason & Dixon (Actually, Thomas Pynchon is sort of a theme)

3) Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

4) Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

5) A People's History of the United states

6) Winter's Tale (Mark Helprin) (I know that parisgarters will have her word to say)

7) The Assassin's Gate (this more sort of collapsed under the weight of my own aggrevation)

8) The name of the rose (Umberto Eco...apparently indicating an overall problem with medieval tales)

It's not as though these books are bad, so I wonder what it is that creates the ability to stick with the others vs. these?

I'm not planning on taking another crack at Pynchon any time soon.

I've been casually saying lately that my Palm Treo 350 was my worst phone purchase ever and that I was considering putting it into a blender.

Evidently, Truman's language skills are a LOT better than I gave him credit for, because he snatched it off the kitchen table this morning and destroyed it. I mean DESTROYED it. It's still making some residual cracking noises as it moves.

The problems here are 1) dangit, Truman, Don't take anything off a table and destroy it.

2) It's still mercury retrograde, which is a terrible time to try and buy a phone.

3) The release of the new iphone is a month away, and it'll be a gigantic mess to get one on the first day. Plus I'm not sure our corporate plan will cover it.

I'm going to go purchase a "Go" phone this afternoon and put my SIM card into that. This will give me some time to figure out my next move. Blackberry vs. iPhone. Discuss.

Taken from shrijani

16 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

All other links, after this one, will pale in comparison

Small Japanese woman randomly living in some guy's closet. For A YEAR

Imagine having to explain that one to your closest friends and family.

Actually, no. I swing between "imagine having to" and "imagine GETTING to" explain that one.
Because you'd be simultaneously getting to talk about the most random thing in the world and having to justify less-than-scrupulous housekeeping policies.

"Yeah, so I'm so bad at housekeeping that for a year I almost totally missed the presence of another human being squatting in my house...but in other news there was a woman living in my house for a year and I had no idea."

My to-do list for the weekend just got longer. Examine all the places in my house I haven't been for a year and make sure there aren't any strangers amongst us.

EDITED: spiffybee indirectly pointed this out. Who here thinks the publishers of The Registry just ripped of one of the plot points from Real Genius?

Me, the camera, and a random cat attack.

Well, a cat attack from my cat.

Those of you familiar with the saga will appreciate this on a different level, but it's happy news just the same...

Christophe got his green card in the mail today!!!!

It only took 7 years!!!!

I will never grow out of my penchant for emotionally insurmountable personal projects.

As a result I am simultaneously this weekend preparing to go to France and moving out of the second floor of our house so that the ceilings can be scraped and the entire thing painted while we're away.

I have to go buy 43 gallons of paint tomorrow morning. And pack.

I am also now the proud owner of a ring I've had a desperate crush on since I was 14 years old.

Life is good.

Where once they shared...





They now compete.

I voted this morning, because I like that actual "election day" vibe at the polling place.

Some woman had a meltdown at the door for no apparent reason. She had one of those backpacks with roller wheels on it that suffice as a giant laser project-o-beam of "teh crazy" in women over 45. She just started shrieking that this was why people don't vote, because it was such an aggravation.

It was so random that I looked over at the republican table for clarification of what the hell was going on.

After my vote this morning, they gave me my special yellow card that allowed me to go back and caucus this evening. What I've discovered from that experience is that, while I'm politically motivated, I'm not at all motivated to discuss political issues with strangers in public. This was not a goal shared by my fellow caucusen, who sensed themselves amongst the like minded for the first time in years and just WENT FOR IT.

There's a lot of discussion on CNN right now about how disorganized the democratic caucuses have been in Texas, and to a very real extent they're right. I stood in line for an hour, then went in a room and signed my name on a sheet of paper. The true genius thinking of which room it was held in was that it had only one door, thus clogging the entrance with the exit and vice versa. I blame the precinct captain, who looks like he was only marginally legal to vote at all.

Otherwise there was no drama. It's clear Obama was going to win at least my precinct, but the Hillary line was expanding as time wore on. There are a lot of Katrina refugees living in my neighborhood now, which I think tips the scale.

Mercury retrograde began today and will run through 2/17.

Don't:

Sign Contracts
Buy Electronics
Trust anything electronic
Expect deliveries on time.

Word to the wise, people. Good Luck.

Many of you will remember that Ruby had to have significant knee surgery in May. While it was a resounding success, it required her to go to physical therapy and basically do nothing on pain of crippling disaster for two and a half months.

On Sunday, Truman did a mysterious something to his elbow that has caused him to be referred to the same orthopedic surgeon. The story is we'll do 10 days of crate rest and pain killers and pray that whatever it is is miraculously healed by time. Otherwise, he has to go to be "scoped" and have what in theory is a tiny piece of loose cartilage removed from his leg.

This really could be worse. It'll probably mean that our share of the economic stimulus package will go to a guy who already owns an airplane and several horses, but the surgery isn't nearly as severe and I know from experience he'll be okay if he has to have it.

What SUCKS is this 10 days of trying to keep a six-month-old puppy quiet in a cage except for bathroom and meal breaks. That 9-week-crate rest we did before seems almost mundane compared to that challenge.

I got my red shoes in the mail today. They fit, and they are just the perfect shade of red.

THEN...as a surprise graduation gift from my friends J and M I got this !

(It's a tiny little camcorder, for those disinclined to click on Amazon even to relieve what I can imagine is considerable suspense)

So now stay tuned for youTube videos of my dogs. And my feet. And my husband.

Excellent.

I busted my ass today.

First, let me share that after much debate I purchased these shoes even though I still have creeping doubts about the "they don't match" thing. They're red, they're Campers, and they're on sale at the web site so Nordstrom dropped their price to match. Rock!

Moving on.

In honor of today being the first "class" weekend that I'm not participating in, I worked all afternoon clutter busting the master bedroom of my house. This included a closet, the bathroom, and the entire bedroom. I didn't keep count of how many bags I used, but it ended up being about 2/3 trash 1/3 goodwill. The goodwill stuff is already loaded in the station wagon and ready to go.

The clutter had become a real source of shame. To give you an example, the paperwork from the resort hotel at which we stayed in Cancun almost a year and a half before the wedding was hiding behind my jewelry box on the dresser. There were tons of shopping bags, boxes, and other various trash crammed into the space between the dresser and the wall.

I also got rid of a metric ton of shoes and all clothes of sizes over 12. All of which feels pretty good.

My plan right now is to keep on going until the whole 2nd floor and kitchen are done, at which point we will be in a state of readiness to have the ceiling-popcorn removal guys come back. With a minimum of crap to pack up, this should be...still dusty but less painful.

The Onion A.V. Club reviews KFC's "Famous Bowl."

...as I drove the Famous Bowl home it sat on the passenger seat next to me like a sullen runaway I'd picked up on the interstate.