Pen Control

On Thursday I had a list of bloggable items and now I can’t find the list or remember much. I vaguely recall a rant about pens and how there are too many of them and how they gather and breed in our drawers and Bob’s pockets and how I take handfuls to the library sometimes and release them there, hoping to thin the herd. But that doesn’t sound so interesting anymore.

Last Tuesday I read in the paper that the Portland Timbers were going to be playing the San Jose Earthquakes — a MLS team on Wednesday. Willamette Week explains the significance of this here. Being that I’m a big Landon Donovan fan, (remember me getting up at 3am to watch the U.S. defeat Mexico in the World Cup a few years ago?), and since we’ve been talking about going to a Timbers game this summer — I left skidmarks running to the box office to score tickets for this game, which I did. And we had excellent seats and I got to see Donovan play a half. But both teams played great – it was super fun, especially if you were rooting for the Earthquakes.

I’m still coughing from the hippie festival. I’ve spent a lot of time in this chair this weekend working on a writing project and the cough seems worse when I’m here. The open window? Daily incense burning? Psychosomatic avoidance symptom? I need to put in my 15 minutes in the garden so computer is going off.

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Results

Already results — other person is out of the office all week.

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Government Relations

Dang! I meant to post this yesterday but I got home late last night and forgot. I had to contact a government agency for a work research question. The regulations (from 1998) say that the agency was going to work with tribes to develop a particular policy and I need to know if this policy was ever developed. I can’t find anything on it so I’m guessing, no. Whenever you contact a government agency there are several things that can happen but generally never with you getting the assistance you need. First is getting sent to voicemail sometimes with no explanation, or else the person is on vacation or often the person is at “training.” (I’m not sure I’ve ever ranted about government training but I attended a government training on behalf of a client once and you’ve never seen such a gargantuan waste of time and money in your life.) Getting sent to voicemail has about a 50% chance of getting a returned call and in my experience about 1% chance of getting a returned call the same day. The other thing that happens is that the person you contact tells you they can’t help you, because apparently in the government everybody does just one thing and knows nothing about anything else. The person who can’t help you will send you to someone else, and you start the whole voicemail thing again. Assuming you actually do get to talk to a live body, half the time they are completely worthless — you can be as straightforward and coherent as they come and the person won’t know how to help you.

So back to this story. I contacted the government agency last night and sure enough, in my email this morning was a short note, “we only deal with [something loosely connected to your question but not connected enough] in this office and you need to contact [this person].” I have contacted the next person. More as the story develops.

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High Sierra Photos

HIGH SIERRA photos up. As usual, I just did quick half-assed job because otherwise I never would have gotten around to it.

I’m feeling better today. The cough has moved into the painful lungwrenching-rattle which I take as a sign that I’m almost finished with this. I’ve spent the day doing all kinds of things I’ve been putting off. I’m on a roll here and hate to quit. I updated my books read list and it’s more pathetic than ever. How can it be July and I’ve only read 8 books. I think Angel has a lot to do with it.

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All My Information

The sinus ache is a cold and a nasty one. I finally slept last night for 10 hours which was great but I don’t feel like I’m getting any better. I had a headache most of the day. I finally perked up around 6pm — same yesterday. I baked two pies as well (don’t worry, didn’t breathe on them.) I baked one last night for Brian and Bree’s going away party at Karen’s and then another this morning for the writers. Both pies turned out great and I got endless raves. This morning I bragged: “I’m the best pie maker in my writer’s group.” I think I figured out my crust problem or else got lucky two days in a row. Either way, I was pleased with the results and almost took pictures. But I didn’t. Still haven’t figured out what to do with my High Sierra photos yet. Maybe I’ll throw some up now.

I haven’t mentioned Angel in several days — you might be asking yourself, what happened? This is the second weekend in a row with no Angel disks. Bob and I just updated our queue and Angel is next and we just moved Freaks and Geeks disc #2 to the top of the list. I’m ready for some Angel.

We must have done the world’s fasted dishwasher purchase yesterday. I’m embarrassed to admit we did almost no homework. We walked in with a budget. We knew Kenmore was a good brand. There was one, under our maximum, on sale with a rebate that would cover the installation. One swipe and signature and we were out of there within 30 minutes. That includes a side trip to look at refrigerators. We almost bought a new one of those too. Such boring grownup stuff to buy but I can’t WAIT to get a working dishwasher again.

When I got my computer cart I was thrilled to have my desk back so I could do things like write in my notebook or balance my checkbook on my desk rather than on the floor or at the kitchen table. Since then, I managed to pile all sorts of random crap, papers, magazines, projects, bills, statements, notebooks — all over every bit of free space. The desk is worthless other than a staging area for extra junk. I should have seen this coming.

My last item for today has to do with giving out my phone # and address information which I am pathologically stingy about handing out. This is probably ironic considering I’m keeping a weblog but we won’t get into that. For years I have managed to stay off of UCSB’s alum radar and this week I got a call from them. The first thing I said was, “I’ve managed to ditch you guys for years, how did you finally find me?” She didn’t reply but instead started telling me they wanted to confirm my information and I said I wanted to be on the no call list. “Are you sure?” she asked. Did she not hear the very first thing I said when I found out who was calling? Does anyone want to be bothered at home by random phone calls? The Alumni association only calls for money. It’s not like they want to do anything for you. This call along with the variety of political type people asking us to help with campaigns or put signs on our lawn has led to me to suspect that when I exercised my fantastic right to participate in the political process and went to the democratic nominating caucus and filled out that forking piece of paper — that I consigned myself to the mailing and phone pit of hell. All my careful work guarding my contact info, undone in a morning.

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I N S O M N I A

argh. We returned from High Sierra on Monday night and I took Tuesday off and did a recovery day with lots of laundry duty and other chores like buying food. Tuesday night I slept poorly due to some sort of sinus type thing which felt like the inside of my skull was being polished with a putty knife. I figured it had something to do with dancing around in the dust all weekend. I felt crappy on Weds, my sinus ache started to feel like a cold — blowing my nose every five minutes, generally fuzzy head. I slept poorly again Weds night. At HSMF I bought this frozen fruit on a stick, dipped in chocolate and peanuts treat that was so fantastic, I couldn’t stop talking about it so we invented our own home version (Bob did) using Magic Shell and I thought that might be contributing to my sleep problem. Dragged my ass around all day today. Didn’t eat any Magic Shell, sugar or take anything that had a ghost of a chance of keeping me awake and had a refreshing adult beverage which I thought would help. No luck. I’m not even sleepy. I tried all my usual insomnia tricks but I keep coughing and having to sit up and blow my nose. I’ve already taken two calms forte — three is my record. And that’s not making a dent in my sleeplessness. I wouldn’t mind being sleepless if I didn’t know that it means tomorrow I’ll be dragging ass and probably cranky and incapable of getting anything done. And we have a busy day planned. Breakfast with Ken and Joyce, new dishwasher buying, mailing off packages and taking foam peanuts to the mailbox store. And that’s just for starters.

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Come Sail Away

Yes, again I keep thinking I’ll have time to sit down and write a quick catch up and then never get to it. This will be quick as well as I’m trying to get organized here.

Just discovered Freaks and Geeks. We’ve heard so much about it so we signed up for a dvd from netflix and it’s been requeued (is that a word?) a number of times to re-position Angels but it arrived this week and I watched the first two. I knew in the first 3 minutes of the pilot that I was going to love this show. Set in high school in 1980? Excellent soundtrack. Great characters. Love it! Most classic TV moment of all time is at the end of the pilot at the dance when Sam wants to slow dance with Cindy and the song is “Come Sail Away” by Styx (how many Styx songs did I dance to in H.S.?) and right when they go to dance the fast part of the song starts. CLASSIC! I think this actually happened to me.

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TV Update

No Angel disks this week. Long story why. I spent some time catching up on EURO2004 tapes. What happened to all my teams? Italy=out. England=out. Germany=out. France=out. Pretty much the only team left for me is Netherlands and I’m afraid to care — they’ll get out too.

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Random Unrelated Notes

Bob is on his way back from New Orleans tonight and his plane is delayed. He said if it was after 11pm he would take a shuttle home but I told him I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep if I was waiting for him to get home so I’d just come get him. Of course, now I’m sleepy.

I have a bunch of random unrelated notes and I’m going to stick them here in one un-thematically linked entry.

This morning on my walk I came up the hill on Walnut and looked up and there was a buck. Well, I guess actually it’s called a spike. I’m not exactly a hunter person. It didn’t have actual antlers yet but little nubbins and it stopped and I stopped and we stared at each other. It was huge and just standing in someone’s driveway. After a minute it took a half dozen slow steps and then jogged out of my sight and probably down the hill more towards the train tracks where there aren’t any houses. As I walked the rest of the way up the hill a woman came out of her house and asked if I saw the deer and pointed up the street and said she saw it come from there.

So what is the proper method to style bangs? When Cha does my hair she flicks her wrist and my bangs look perfect. She could be using a pitchfork and a blowtorch and flick: perfect. I use products and hair dryers and round brushes and they end up looking like stunt bangs from Something About Mary every time.

I know I’m not a parent but I don’t understand parents and kids sometimes. I saw some lady walking out of the market tonight and her kid looked perfectly normal except a bit fidgety but it was a boy, maybe 8 years old so not outside of what you might expect and here goes the mom hauling off smacking the poor kid in front of the store where God and everyone (me) could watch. And the kid was kind of big so extra humiliation factor. Then I’m inside the store and the most obnoxious, not-cute, whiny girl is screeching at her Dad to push the cart faster and buy this or that — clearly a moment where a good smack might have come in handy and the Dad does nothing and for next fifteen minutes everyone in the store gets to listen to this. Can he at least try to quiet her?

Bleu cheese — I though I hated it. I associate it with this nasty smelling salad dressing my mom made on Saturday nights. But when Bob and I were in Tacoma we had this asparagus dish with a sauce of balsamic vinegar and bleu cheese — try this at home, seriously, it’s the best thing ever. So we’ve been buying bleu cheese and I’ve been eating it on crackers and crumbling it on salads and this is like the best food discovery since brown betty.

I have some more stuff to write about Angel, because I’ve watched at least three more episodes since I wrote last. But I’ll spare you. But really, it’s so painful to watch, knowing where they’re going, especially Wesley, and again, knowing how they all end up.

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Running Around

I cleaned out my closet yesterday. I desperately need to buy some summer clothes. Too bad I hate shopping and have spent a bunch of money on other things like writing conferences and facials and car repairs and computer carts and very soon, Seattle Opera: Ring tickets. I usually don’t get rid of stuff (clothes) until I have new stuff to replace it but some of the stuff in there was so old and ratty I put it in the recycle bag for Goodwill. I found a skirt I forgot I had and wore it today. It’s a sort of weird cut and a teensy bit awkward fitting but otherwise, it works just fine and will stand in one day a week. On the top shelf I found a box with a pair of shoes that I had no idea existed. I guess I can’t call them running shoes since they’ve never seen any running but I guess they are my old walking shoes that I never tossed. I wore them today to see how worn down they are and I think they need to be chucked and now that I think of it, my current walking shoes could probably stand to be replaced, too.

It’s almost 10pm and I’ve been running around since I got home — watering front and back and catching up on some computer things, tidying up a few things, putting some stuff together for lunch tomorrow. Oh, and in the interest of complete honesty: I watched another Angel. I’m almost done with Season 3 so the craziness will stop soon. I’ve got the France v. Switzerland game on in the background (taped it earlier today) and I run in when I hear something happening. I think there’s one more free game tomorrow and then we go to 3 day delay. I’ll have to check FoxSports and see what the deal is.

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