Serious crazy-time	December 19, 2005

I am getting ready to head home for the holidays – 3 days left in DC. I am terribly excited about seeing my family and friends, but holy crap I have a lot to get done before I leave. Most of it is gift-related (always the procrastinator). I, like a big freaking moron, agreed to design our family calendar this year, and I’m still collecting and scanning pictures. I need to have it done and burned onto a CD by the time I get on the plane, and it’s looking like a tight squeeze, especially since I haven’t received all the pictures yet! It does bring me some comfort to know that my family members are as big of procrastinators as I am.

I am also making a gift that I won’t talk about here, because some of you who are reading this may be receiving said gift, and I want to keep the element of surprise, but I do want you to know that this gift is a serious pain in my ass, and you should feel very special if you receive one.

And then there’s just general Christmas shopping at-large, which I, for the most part, have yet to begin. I am forced to buy what I can on my lunch hour and after work today and tomorrow, and that’ll be the end of it. Fortunately, I’ve done a lot of thinking, so I pretty much know exactly what to buy, I just need to actually acquire it. Ugh.

And then there’s just the general long trip preparation. Dry cleaning, packing, ridding my house of perishables… it is times like these that I am thankful I never got a cat. It’d just be one more thing to worry about.

So, just a heads-up to all… I’ll be out of town from Thursday, December 22 through Monday, January 2, so there won’t be a helluva lot of action on this blog. I suppose that’s allright, though, ‘cause most of you will be off doing exciting things as well. Happy Holidays, everybody!

Wow. A desk.	December 13, 2005

When I busted out my camera to take some pictures of the flowers, it occurred to me that many of you have never seen my office, and wouldn’t it just be fun fun fun to share my little corner of the world with all of you?

So here is a picture of where I plant my ass for 40 hours out of every week. Some of the things pictured may look familiar to some of you! See numbers below to see what the hell I am talking about.

1. The flowers I blogged about not more than 10 minutes ago
2. My sexy view of the building across the street
3. Photo of John Cusack holding a ghetto blaster above his head in Say Anything
4. The toucan bobblehead that I received as part of last year’s birthday gift from SF
5. The Petes on Parade calendar
6. Musical Puerto Rico mug that I use as a pencil cup
7. Italian Renaissance artwork thumbnail magnets from the National Gallery
8. Fortune cookie fortunes
9. Mug I painted with my own two hands at Color Me Mine

FASCINATING, right?

All festive, all the time	December 13, 2005

If you’re lucky like I am, you’ve got a really fantabulous boyfriend who does things like send you Christmas flowers that brighten up your office and make it smell like Christmas (cause the flower people are clever enough to tuck pieces of evergreen into the arrangement). If you’re exactly like I am, said flowers look exactly like this:

Awww. Steve rules. Yay for cuteness.

Oh Christmas Tweet	December 12, 2005

I consider myself a festive person. A few weeks ago, I was at Pentagon City Mall, and they were piping in the Christmas music, and I was liking it, but thinking to myself, “thank goodness I don’t have to listen to this crap all day.” Because I’ve worked retail through the holiday season, and I know how irritating it can be.

My office is in Downtown DC, and there are a lot of street performers in my neighborhood, and when I stroll past one playing a Christmas tune, I generally smile and think festive thoughts. That was, until now.

The Jolly Christmas Flute Player has planted himself right below my office window, and has been there for a solid week now, all day every day. He’s got a rotation of maybe 5 or 6 songs, and they repeat, in high pitched squeakery, from the time I arrive until the time I leave. He’s not a bad flautist, really, and he’s better than the bagpipe man who used to plant himself below my window every day at 3:30, but the festiveness is starting to get old. This is precisely the crap that I expected not to have to tolerate upon my departure from the world of retail. Bah.

Wanderlust	December 11, 2005

A while back, in my introductory post to my new life with the ring, I promised astounding levels of detail, and I’ve totally not followed through on that one.

I am loving the ring. I’m not having any of the bad side effects of hormonal contraception, and I’m yielding all the positive side effects (less cramps, clearer skin, etc.) I am having one small piece of concern with it, however—it moves around on me (or in me, I suppose I should say). In the literature that accompanies it, it clearly states that your vaginal muscles will hold it in place, even if you’re sexually active. But every once in a while, when I check in on it, it’s slipped down a little, as though it’s trying to make a break for it.

Now, the literature also states that the exact position of the ring is not important (see image at right), so I do not fear that its effectiveness will be diminished by the wandering. But the whole reason that the ring is supposed to be so great is that you don’t have to think about it, and now I feel compelled to periodically check in on it and wrangle it back into its intended position.

I’m just reporting, for those of you who may be interested in knowing if/how this thing is working for me. Just FYI –I still feel that the benefits far outweigh this one minor inconvenience!

Allright already!	December 11, 2005

A few people who shall remain nameless have been sending me e-mails, whining that I need to update my blog more often. Well, you know what? I need to update my blog as often as I feel like it, and that’s just the way it is, baby. Why is it that you love me more when I neglect you?

The craziest dream I’ve had in a while	December 5, 2005

I had a pretty interesting dream this morning, between snooze alarms (those are always the weirdest dreams). The exact circumstances are a bit hazy to me, but I had fallen upon hard financial times, and moved into a crappy house with a whole bunch of international students and interns to save on rent. One of my roommates told me that she planned on earning extra money by selling nudie pictures of herself to a wealthy Indian fellow that she had met at school. She indicated that he had a friend who may be willing to pay me for some as well. So I coordinated the whole deal through e-mail with this fellow named Sanjay.

So the pictures are taken, and I am all ready for him to show up and give me a big pile of cash for them. And he shows up – walks right up to me and says “Hello. I am your boyfriend Sanjay.” Through some cultural misunderstanding, when we were talking about selling naked pictures of ourselves, they understood that we were selling them ourselves. I spent a morning with him, trying to figure out how to get out of this deal, while he explained to me how extraordinarily religious he was (making it hard for me to explain to him that I only meant to sell him some porn).

Did I mention that my “day job” in this dream was to scrounge for valuables at unguarded home renovation sites? The dream ended with me getting arrested for this, so I didn’t really have to resolve the Sanjay issue after all.

December???	December 1, 2005

Holy freaking crap it’s December. My mind is having a hard time wrapping itself around that one. For any number of reasons – I have not purchased, nor even brainstormed about what to purchase, a single gift yet; there are parties coming up for which I need to make cookies; I have a flight home but no one to stay with yet (ATTENTION IOWANS: I’ll be in CR from the 22nd to the 29th, if you wanna hang out/lend me your couch for a night!) How did this happen so fast? I mean, I get that there is a quick succession between Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and I get that two of those three happened already, but my mind is still blown.

Oh god. I just remembered the biggest reason why I fear the end of the year. I am going skiing. I am certain that I am going to meet my death out there. As I’ve been saying, my people are a plains-dwelling people. I come from a land of few hills and fewer mountains, and sliding down them speedily on pointy waxed sticks is just not the kind of thing that we’re prone to do in my family. Rest assured, I’ll be coming back with something in a cast. Which is allright – it’ll give me something to doodle on.