Scarlet Fever

Apparently it's 1842, because I have scarlet fever. Freakin L.A. - it makes you sick any way it can...

so is it 'my' city yet?

I go through phases when I’m ok with the fact that the only wildlife anywhere near me is a squashed worm on the sidewalk, and then other days I wake up and I’m so depressed about the lack of trees that I have to immediately drive to the nearest home depot and lurk in their potted palm section. I think this explains why I have like 8 potted plants in my office. Anyways, this weekend when I woke up instead of making breakfast I decided I was going to start taking advantage of the new coffee bean a few blocks away, and I even remembered to NOT walk on the block with the dumpster that smells like hot Tijuana cesspool at noon. So I walked to the coffee shop, got my latte and sat around for a few minutes trying to guess what language these people were speaking and watching the news, then I walked home. Then I realized I was wearing a camo waffle-weave long sleeve shirt. Maybe I should have left that one in FL.

Vodka watermelon

I started making these at parties where there are those annoying girls who say things like "I don't drink...... I'll just eat the fruit..."

yeah, ok, you do that ;)

1 liter of cheap vodka
Medium sized watermelon
3 limes
1 bag of sweetened coconut flakes

cut the watermelon in half, use a melon baller to get all the yummy redstuff out.

let the bite-sized watermelon balls sit in a colander as you hollow out the rinds, so some of the natural juice drains off

put the balls in 2 ziplocs and add 1/2 a liter of vodka to each bag o melon. Let this glorious mess sit in the fridge overnight. Or don't, whatever.

when you're ready to serve it, pour one of the ziplocs into an empty rind (presentation is everything) and top with the juice from half a lime and a handfull of sweetened coconut flakes (you might have to top it off again as it gets eaten).

The best way to rescue the balls of glory from the watermelon - vodka lake that forms as people eat these seems to be (after intense, careful study) bamboo skewers for shish kabobs.

Stressball?

So I've started having pains in my jaw, which means one of three things according to WebMD -

1) I'm having a heart attack

2) I have TMJ (which i DO NOT Have, or if I do, I'll never know, because that requires a trip to the doctor and/or dentist)

3) I'm stressed out

so I’m goin' with #3, which is odd because I've had a pretty packed and hardcore 2 weeks at work, but I thought I was being remarkably calm. Evidently, I'm being calm during the day while grinding my teeth for like 8 hours a night. Awesome. So like any good librarian, I did research on how to reduce stress levels. Apparently massage, baths, lavender smellie things, puppies, chocolate and meditation all reduce stress. My apartment is too small for a puppy (DAMN), baths are really boring, and usually too hot or too cold, my boyfriend gives lame massages, I'm not wild about chocolate, and whenever I've tried to meditate I've fallen asleep. So it's off to the aromatherapy store conveniently located in the building next door.... where the woman behind the counter tried alternately to sell me a $45 candle – "I think that watching that burn would actually INCREASE my stress level"- and portable lavender roll-on body scent - "I don't want to smell like lavender, I want to small like Chanel. I just want to calm down"- but she just kinda cocked her head to one side like my dog does when i make a cat noise, and wafted by in her fuggy haze of dirt and gardenias to show me a twig diffuser or some such nonsense.

I'm a slacker, I know, I know...

ok, I know it's been forever and frankly, not posting makes me feel guilty and its easier to just completely ignore this blog.

But I'm going to honestly make a real effort to post, I promise. So far this month I have started going to the gym again and using those festively hued ankle bands the physical therapist gave me and now I can (DRUMROLL) actually wear (low) heels again :)!! The downside is that working out makes me eat everything I can see. Today (it’s 11:30) I’ve eaten a stuffed pepper, 2 cups of edamame, green beans, a slim fast, coffee, and two bananas. In the immortal words of Lewis Black, piggy piggy piggy f*ck piggy piggy.

I am so glad it's finally football season, even though the Seminoles are playing about as well as my VJ soccer team did in 9th grade. We went to some guy's house (a friend of a friend through Cam's work) to watch the Alabama game Saturday, and it was almost like being at a frat party. There were like 5 fat labs begging for food, lots of hotdogs that had been sitting out far too long, somebody's half-good homemade sauce, Vidalia onion dip, and everyone who lost their halftime predictions had to eat a spoonful of dogfood. Plus, I may have actually met some cool girls in LA, which seemed until now to be virtually impossible.

I'm also getting frequent calls from my mother, who is in south Florida helping her parents move to Tallahassee. It's a clusterf*ck of truly mythic proportions, she hasn't moved in about 35 years so her version of 'change the address on their ID cards' involves not only a two hour wait at the DMV but also the joy of being lost in a orange grove. (fyi, http://www.hsmv.state.fl.us/dhsmv/900.html). About two years ago someone told me that men and women didn't get along because of a difference in their approach to problem solving. According to him (and I have seen no evidence to the contrary) men solve problems, and women share. Although I sound harsh towards my sex I have to completely agree. My mom's a sharer, I'm a solver, so when I get a phone call saying she's "lost in the wilderness" my instinct is to googlemap her out, her instinct is to giggle incomprehensively until she mistakenly drives herself back to civilization. Meanwhile, my 89 year old grandparents are in the backseat pretty sure she's become completely unhinged. I'm serious; woman called me this morning to tell me she didn't know where the Salvation Army was. Not to ASK where it was, just toe tell me she didn't know.

In other news, Pear Vodka + blueberry Italian soda = :)

My dog is fuggin' brilliant

So you know how people say animals have psychic links to people they love? And dogs can do weird stuff like seem to know that their owner’s died from like 3,000 miles away? Well, Honey pulled her inner ESP out this Saturday night and it was really amazing.

I have a friend Ann, who lives in my building with her boyfriend. Honey has known her for like 4 years and LOVES her. Honestly, the dog gets more excited over A than she does me (BTW, that’s Ann’s dog in my rack – Pirate) so Saturday Honey and I spent a good part of the afternoon hangin’ with A and her guy. Then they went to a Fucking Champs show and Honey and I went home to watch the history channel and knit *we live right on the edge*

At about 11:30 I decided I was going to bed and I took Hon for her evening constution (I had to wake her up to drag her outside). When we got back inside she flipped her shit – whining, panting, shaking, drooling. She has done this exactly three times before, two times when she had an intestinal blockage, and the first night Cameron worked late and she and I had to go to bed alone. At this point, Cam’s been out of town for 4 nights and Honey hasn’t cared that much, ok at all, and she’s totally physically fine. I had spent the last 3 days with her and nothing weird had been eaten, no meals skipped, no baths given, no new food introduced. So she starts throwing herself at the door, scratching at it, whining and barking, which she has never, EVER done before. When she needs to go out she simply stands directly in front of me and wags her tail until I take her out. So I take her out again, and as soon as we’re outside the building she calms right the fuck down, just strolling down the street, and won’t go to the bathroom, even though I asked her to. So we go back inside, and she promptly flips her shit again. I try to ignore it but unfortunately she’s stubborn-er than I am. So out we go. Again with the calm walk down the street, not trying to pull or go in any certain direction, and this time we run into Ann’s BF, who’s alone. He asks me if I’ve seen A, because she apparently left him at the show 45 minutes ago. At this point I should illuminate that the show was in a neighborhood so charming that I won’t go there in broad daylight. There was race riot there earlier this year (remember that whole LAPD firing rubber bullets at crowds containing children??). He’s walked home from there alone, which is scary enough, but A is out there (waving arm out behind me, over downtown LA) alone, at 12:15 am, and has only a drivers license in her packet, no keys, no cash, no phone. Great. So now I’m flipping my shit too, I have a sick dog and a lost friend. So I do the only logical thing I can think of, I go inside and call Cam, who’s in Florida, and I ask for advice. As soon as we walk inside Honey starts the hurling herself at the door, and even though I had her talk to Cam on the phone, something she usually LOVES doing, she ignores him and keeps trying to break down the door. So back out we go.

At this point I have resigned myself to the fact that I will not be sleeping at all, but strolling up and down the street in front of our building all night. I tried letting Honey lead, not that she doesn’t always, but if she tries to pull me towards the parking garage I know she’s looking for Cam. She didn’t seem to want to go anywhere, just walk up and down the street and not smell stuff. It was weird. If she had been going to the bathroom a lot, or eating grass, I probably would have taken her to the vet, but she was so totally calm once we were outside that there was obviously nothing really truly wrong with her. This walking goes on, twice more I tried to take her back inside, twice I lost the battle of wills and within 5 minutes we were outside again. God that dog rules me. At about 1:30 I noticed that a cab had pulled up and was parked in front of our building, and I walked back towards it to see if maybe A had come back, ‘cause then at least I could focus all my worrying on the dog. We walk to the (all glass) building front door and I see A’s dog in the hall in front of my apartment, so I go inside and grab his ass before he escapes the building and gets hit by a car (in gratitude, I’m sure, he pees all over me & my favorite yellow “I buzzed my tail off at Tybee’s Bat Mitzvah” t shirt). So I open my front door, stuff honey inside and head up stairs to A’s apt to return the dog and check that they’re ok. I run into A in the hall and return the dog, give her a hug ‘cause she’s ok, then book it back to my place to prevent the Hun from ripping the door off its hinges. I walk in….. and she’s got a ball in her mouth and is wagging her tail. No shaking, drool gone, no whining, she didn’t attack the door when I locked it, just played fetch for about a half hour and then fell asleep on the bed with me.

Now, I know Honey never actually saw Ann, but I know she could smell her and knew she was home. And the timeline of the irrational slip out fits exactly with the Ann-lost-in-a-shitty-neighborhood timeframe.

From now on, I lease cars.

After about 3 months of waffling I’ve decided to sell my beloved truck. Large block V8’s aren’t as practical in LA as they were in FL. Also gas is like $47 a gallon and who can afford to feed it? So I place a ‘for sale’ add in the LA times and the check engine light immediately comes on. So I take it to the mechanic and apparently it needs a new fuel pump, which is like $800. He also informed me that I had never had my spark plugs changed, and taking into account that I did it myself one time, I think he’s full of shit. But oh well. Maybe somebody who runs a lawn business will buy it and I can spend money on stuff other than parking spaces and supporting sandy countries.

Anyways, aside from learning that my truck is going to cost me a shit ton, yesterday somebody spit on me from the second level of the train station and then when I got home someone else threw about 60 of those annoying little firecrackers that pop really loudly when they hit a wall at my kitchen window and freaked out my dog. I guess I did something karmicaly bad.

Ah, crap.

So I have this friend who’s always encouraging me to write. And that’s great, lord knows I need it, my fear of being unemployed is so much stronger than my need to create that I just kept my head down and in a book until I had a good stable job, but now I’m in a place where its like pulling teeth cause I’m so far removed from any creativity. I’ve tried to set up a few poetry groups here, since nobody will let me join theirs, but I’m kinda worried I’ll wind up with a bunch of nutters mumbling at me and that’s not good for anyone.

So back to the friend – he has given me a due date for 2 poems, and I’m not going to lie, my first instinct was to snag two old ones and pass them off as new. The thing is, its hard for me to write unless I’m like horribly unhappy, that over caffeinated jittery unhappy, except sometimes then I haven’t done anything creative for months and I get this awful sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and write completely unrelated words like a list until I feel like I’ve purged it all.

I also think that he may be intending for me to read whatever drivel I come up with in front of people, which is worrisome because I’m always afraid that writing poetry makes me a self indulgent twit, and that’s probably at least a factor in why I never write any more.
I started going through some old journal last night, trying to get a start on something or at least an idea and there were a couple good lines in there, but not all that many – I wasn’t completely let down, but I was hoping for some diamonds, so I didn’t have to think. My main themes seemed to be: things that taste like metal, rotting flowers and drying vines. I think I used to focus on food a lot but it seems to have transitioned into plants, and those odd bits of scrap you’re likely to find at a marina. I guess I’m going to have to come up with something I wont be horribly embarrassed to read to someone I don’t know. Shit. How the fuck did I wind myself into this? I hate it more ‘cause it was my idea. Entirely.

First Post

Once I had a blog for like 30 minutes and I wrote down all the cool stuff I did, and then someone gave the URL to my dad and I dropped it like it was hot. Maybe it's time to give it another go? Nobody give my dad the URL? kthanks.

I'm going to start by telling you what I did yesterday (the 4th of July)

1) made my guy and my dog breakfast in bed - french toast & sausage

2) made 2 cakes out of the plums KP brought me from her tree. The goal was like plum - almond upsidedown cake, but I should have used marzipan instead of just ground almonds, becasue they made the consistancy of the cake weird. Anyways, I accidentally swallowed a plum pit and started to freak out because I think I remember reading somewhere that they have cyanide in them? So I called poison control (really) and the woman told me that in order for the cyanide in fruit pits to affect you, you have to eat like 4,000 of them and chew them up really well. Good to know. and BTW, poison control is 1-800-222-1222.

3) had the inside of my truck shampooed and armoralled within an inch of its life, and took pictures, so if I ever do actually put it up for sale I'll have nice clean photos to post with the add.

4) bleached the kitchen and the bathroom, drank beer and read Harry Potter #4 during the commercial breaks in the History Channel's Revoloutionary War special.

5) sat on the floor with AW and JM (neighbors / friends) who went on vacation to mexico and brought back this traditional mexican booze that tasted like pollen and sambuca. Tried to keep Honey off the pollen / sambuca liquor.

6) comforted Honey (Honey = the dog) when the fireworks started.

7) fell asleep on C while he played video games (this is like my favorite hobby ever).

and thats about it. I especially like the plum pit - cyanide - pollen / sambuca triangle. Kinda stoked I'm not sick today :D