Products That Make Me Feel Bad About My Life, Part 1

This is cool. I wish I were enough of a globetrotter to need paper shampoo.


(via Mighty Goods)

Come On

This morning I (and the most amazing intern ever) spent 3 hours breakneck-speed researching sex offender legislation and calling and emailing academics, social workers, and psychologists like mad looking for someone to be on our 1 pm show (the most amazing intern finally got someone like 5 mins ago).

Also, for a shorter piece, I spent the morning researching local incidences of dog fighting and whether the police or animal control have had to investigate any complaints in the last couple of years. (terrible fact: one way dogs are trained are they’re coerced into biting a thick branch on a tree and are left to hang there by their teeth, thus strengthening their jaws and teaching them to not let go when they bite). Aside from the fact that I 'm exhausted from the effort of trying to get someone, anyone, to call me back today, this morning’s research has been profoundly depressing. As much as I love this job, I will not miss days like this when I’m done here.

The Oven Is Dead, Long Live The Oven

Last night Aa was in the kitchen, working diligently on dough for pizza crust. He went to put one in the oven, only to discover that the oven wouldn't actually warm up when turned on. The burners still work, it's just the oven. This may or may not cost a lot to fix. Plus, our stove is old. Old, old, ooooold. It's one of the biggest in-home stoves I've ever seen (funny, because our kitchen is wee) You actually push a button to tell the burner how hot to get. So it might just be worth it to replace.

Of course, this is all part of the homeownership deal. And I'm sure way more expensive stuff is gonna happen (of course it will). At this point, I see all this as a very minor inconvenience. I mean, I'm thinking that stove's lived a good, long life. It's certainly done fine by use these past months. It got us through Thanksgiving. Once we get to the point where we decide whether to get a new stove and we have to decide what kind we want and whether now is the time to put gas in and we have to figure out how to get our current hulk of a stove out of the kitchen (and I have to clean the space that's left -ew), then maybe I'll have the energy to complain. But right now? Eh.

Aa did say we might have to move the stove out the back doors that lead to the deck and backyard. He said we might just have to leave the stove in the backyard for a bit. This is both funny and stressful to me. I already suspect our neighbors dislike us because we do no yard maintenance at all, and the woman who lived there before us I think was probably totally obsessive about keeping a perfectly landscaped front and back yard (there are way fussy elements to both yards that make me think this). If we put a stove in our backyard too, well, I don't even know. But it kind of makes me laugh too.

Maybe I'll help Hillary Clinton win

Or not. I don't know. Anyway, I was on Weekend America this past Saturday with a friend of mine who now works on that show. Go listen.

And, also: I disagree with the characterization that I'm "hip to the music scene". Aa is the hip one in our house, and I tell you, you cannot pick that stuff up by osmosis or whatever. I am actually more like a nice elderly aunt, trying to find some common musical ground with her nephew: "well, THIS is an interesting band! Who is this again? oh, they're called Belgium! Well, isn't that funny! There's a country called Belgium too! Ha!"

HARRYPOTTERHARRYPOTTERHARRYPOTTERHARRYPOTTER

birthday and other ramblings...

things i could post about today..
I could post about...

...on this day 35 years ago i appeared on the scene. thanks to alan and carol for making that happen. (and lowell and gail for being there since almost day 1...they were all very much essential.)

...or i could post about my new job...leaving microsoft and such...

...or i could post about the most awesome wedding i've ever been too over the weekend. including the bit about swimming half drunk and fully naked in the pacific ocean with 20 other people at 4am...or the mariachi band that played looney tunes songs between traditional mexican folks songs while we drank champagne and watched the sunset over said ocean...or the fun of riding on the ferry and splitting a beer with my favorite person ever: jeannie.

...or the really great lunch i had by myself at le pichet today...and the happy birthday hug i got from our friend Gretchen who was hosting at le p. today that cheered me up.

BUT...instead of all of that...i'd like to point out that it was kick ass to be able to go to the gym for the 1st time since i left msft. i had to wait for the account to switch over etc. so...it was, and very strangely so, very comforting. can't explain why, but it was nice to ride my bike to the gym, workout, and then get dressed for work. haven't done it like that since i left msft and it was nice to have one little bit of my old routine back. thankfully, it's the only thing of my old routine that i'd like to keep. and thankfully the bike ride is 4 miles not 25.

oh, and btw, DO NOT try and put a double americano into the water bottle holder of your bicycle. it just doesn't work. seriously. it will not work.

Weird, but great, but still weird

I got that job.
I start August 21st.
I'm moving back to my old desk.
I started cleaning out my current desk yesterday.
I found a box of RyKrisp that is probably more than 2 years old. Do they go bad?

I have a new job.
Huh.

Allow me to clarify

When I mentioned "murdering photographers" in my last post about nightmares, I mean "photographers who murder (or at least try to murder) me". Specifically, the photographer is short, thin, and bald, and he wears a white lab coat. And he takes pictures of me and then he takes the pictures and starts cooking them in a frying pan. And then after the picture-frying, the big knife and the chasing and the attempts to kill me begin.

I've been having this nightmare since I was 12 or so, and even though I *know* what's happening and that the lab-coat-wearing photographer is going to try and kill me, I still let him take pictures of me. Why? Because in the dream, I like doing the photo shoot. I like having the pictures taken. Even though I know he's going to fry up all the pictures and then he's going to take out the knife and try to kill me. It's an acceptable risk in my dream-world, even though I wake up terrified every time I have the dream.

No more nightmares about KKK lookalikes or murdering photographers*

I'll instead be having nightmares about Dick Cheney, because of this amazing and terrifying series about him in the Washington Post. Here's one particularly creeptastic paragraph:

"Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

Read it yourself! And never get out of bed again.


*These are the nightmares I have most often

Busy Monday

It's Aa's first day at his new job!
I am interviewing for a new job today! (it's at my same workplace though, but still. !)
Zack is in final edits for his autobiography, "Every Dirty Sock Is Special"! Or perhaps it will be called "I'll Eat Anything, Especially If You Just Wore It"! Or "Victim: Why Cats Shouldn't Beat Me Up"