Thine Hawse is Wicked Stupid, Kid

As Matt and I were on our way back from the grocery store this afternoon we almost got hit while traveling through a rotary. Sometimes referred to as traffic circles or roundabouts, rotaries in the northeast are a special test of any motorist’s skills.

The rules of the road, at least here in Boston, indicate to ‘yield to the traffic in the rotary’ but unfortunately most people take that as a loose term and unless you are smack dab in front of them when they are approaching the circle, it is anyone’s guess as to just what ‘in the rotary’ even means.

I personally take it to mean if a person is more than half way around and on an approach to cross the place I am entering from, then I yield. If someone has just entered the circle from the next counterclockwise approach and not going to impact my entrance, I enter. To me this seems logical and has saved me from multiple accidents over the years.

The problem of course is that logic seems to escape most motorists, so when I am already in the circle I have to be on guard because their definition of yield may be just slightly different than mine. A good example of this is someone who not only does not yield but doesn’t even look to their left as they approach but rather, simply blasts on through because, well, clearly they should always have the right of way.

That is what almost happened today but the SUV came to an almost brake screeching halt just in time and we proceeded to exit the rotary, shaking our heads, with their front bumper mere feet from my door.

After it happened, we sparked up a conversation about how rotaries might have been a little more challenging back in the days of the horse drawn buggy. Picture one horse T-boning another as their carriage careens out of control toward the circle. With so much power the accidentee would never know what hit him. Poor horse.

Of course just like in today’s times -- ‘It wasn’t my fault, the brakes didn’t stop me fast enough’ -- we both imagined that the out of control buggy driver would surely blame the accident on part of the vehicle itself, saying to the guy with the broken wooden wheel and grain spilling from the back of the wagon --

“Yaw hawse is wicked stupid, kid!”

Of course I had to correct Matt and remind him this was back in the old days when people still spoke in proper English here in Boston; I assured him the crazy driver would have more likely said --

“Thine hawse is wicked stupid, kid!”

As we approached home and pulled into the driveway we started to consider some of the other road rage phrases that might be yelled out from the bench of one wagon to another back in the day. Stuff like --

“Stop chiselin’ that lettah ta ya Motha and drive!”
“Hey fuckah, how about puttin’ both hands awn tha reigns!”

One of my personal favorite things that I frequently utter to myself or whoever else happens to be in the car with me when I am behind someone weaving all over the road is “Go back to the baah!” Of course, in the old days they were more likely yelling “Take thyself back to Ye Old Tavehn!”

Thanks for the screen shot Google Maps.

Sometimes I Just Suck

In the world of infinite choices it seems that I have become lost, floating out into a deep sea of too many of them and I end up disconnecting almost completely from certain things simply because I start to feel too overwhelmed. I find it’s too hard to keep up, so I just stop trying.

After adding in an hour walk on the treadmill everyday, something else had to give, considering there are, sadly, still only twenty four hours in a day. I found what I ended up completely letting go of was technological correspondence via computer. Well not all of it, Facebook remained because that is quick and takes far less effort, but everything else simply came to a screeching halt just inches from the brick wall of proverbialness.

Blogs, email, tweets, they all fell right off my virtual radar in the past week. It wasn’t that I never entered by blog, sure I did. In fact I even wrote a piece just a few days ago. But then once it was posted, I clicked back to my dashboard to check out everyone else’s work, saw the time and thought ‘gee I better get a walk in before lunch or else I won’t have time to edit’.

And so it went. Every day.

So I have sat here contemplating how I want to handle this situation and what do I do? Well of course I completely update my blog template as well as write a new post. I mean, duh? Its not like those 45 minutes would have been better spent reading other blogs, no, no. I have come to the conclusion that online correspondence will just have to happen twice a week during the work week when I’m not walking.

But then again I hate to be so rigid and formal, bleh.

So that’s something else that’s really been bugging me lately. I have completely lost my sense of humor. I have not a clue where I put it, though I know it must be on a shelf around here somewhere. This happens to me sometimes, my wit just dies, and it scares the freaking bejeezus out of me because it’s kind of part of my overall personality so I don't want to let the early onset take it away forever.

Witty, snappy, quick comebacks used to be my specialty. I think maybe I’ve been working on this book for too long, I have become my analytical female lead character. Damn it. Well at least I know what’s happened and that means sometime within the next couple months the old me will be back again.

At least she better be. I’m kind of tired of sucking at being me.

New to Me, New to You, Old Concept -- BTPTh

So a few nights ago, think it was Sunday, I had a very strange dream. I was being shown an x-ray of my own skull and the doctor or whoever it was pointed out a small spot on the film. I was squinting to see it so they further explained that they would be removing it and this is how…and then this crazy machine with an enormous drywall screw attached to the end bored a hole into the forehead of a dummy across the room and as I was fainting in the office, I woke up in my bed with my heart racing.

I didn’t look this one up in my dream book because there is no entry for lobotomy. At least I don’t think there is, I’m really not sure and frankly I just don’t want to know. I know that to dream about a brain is roughly translated into the actual act of thinking so perhaps I was trying to convince myself to turn off my brain for a while or something.

Regardless it freaked me the fuck out.

I guess this is what comes from releasing toxins from my body. The new treadmill is here and let me just say it is my favorite thing to do, despite the wacky night visions. I pull up a good short Netflix movie, something in the ballpark of 75 - 90 minutes, hop on the old spinning belt to nowhere and walk my literal and figurative ass off. With all the water I’m drinking on top of the exercise I’ll be back into my usual size in no time.

Not only that but eating healthier again has been such good motivation. I have not consumed as much beef in the past five years as I did while we were in California, oddly enough. Prime rib for Christmas dinner, burgers and everything in between it was no wonder I felt like a slug for a week after getting back home. Only one meal with meat in the past ten days has made a huge difference in my energy level, its weird.

In the spirit of even more newness, I also ordered us up two new phones. Our old flip phones were dying -- not holding battery life and the buttons were literally beginning to peel off mine not to mention I had painted mine more times than I care to mention while working -- so since Verizon does that whole ‘new every 2’ thing I explored our options and picked up a couple snazzy new LG enV3 devices in a shiny blue. Aren’t they pretty? As a heavy texter it is going to be so much nicer to have a QWERTY keyboard too.

Learned a little jazz in my drum lesson today. That was fun but, oh, how can I put it? Awkward. I can already tell I’ll be more comfortable as a rock drummer but it was super cool to play the tat-ta-tat-ta-tat-ta-tat-ta, albeit very slowly. I love listening to jazz so it was nice to try, and I’ll keep trying because my homework is to work on playing a few measures over & over so I can speed up. I seriously can’t wait to pick up some equipment for real, it will be so much more fun to practice when I’m playing an actual instrument as opposed to an electronic kit.

I’ve managed to get a little over a third of the first round of edits of my novel complete so far which I’m very happy with. Figuring by the end of this week I should be halfway done, if not further. My goal is to have the hand written edits done by the 25th and then complete typing them up by the end of the month. That way I can make it through the second and third round by the end of February. It likely won’t be perfect to the critical eye of an Editor but it will at least be to my personal standards and I’m thinking that’s where an agent will come in.

An opportunity to pursue a job as a Social Media Marketing and PR Rep has cropped up and I’m seriously considering doing it. Because I will be able to still work from home and the company is offering me the flexibility to select my client load it allows me the opportunity to make some money at something I’m already good at, but to still have plenty of time for the book and blogs. It’s a big step because I haven’t worked for a company in almost five years so I really want to weigh the pros and cons before agreeing to an eight week training and management of a real life client.

After getting back from the west coast and seeing photos of myself with this drawn look I realized it was time to cut my hair off again. My new hair dresser was recommended to me by S and she could not be more awesome. She gave me the last cut too and though the cut itself was fantastic, I had to admit to myself that I’m just a short hair kind of chic. This time around she did two and a half inch layers all over my head which is more girly length than I’ve had it in the past and with the slight curl I have it creates these cute little flippy bits that I really like.

Sadly our little Green Group died out. With only about 5-6 of us showing up every month and about half of us being from out of town, Melissa decided it was no longer environmentally a sound option to cook all the food, buy the wine and run her electricity (not to mention our car!) every month, so for now we’re getting updates in a newsletter and its nice to read the latest even if I don’t belong to her community. Perhaps it is something we’ll start in our own to bounce ideas around come the spring. We shall see.

Created a couple new recipes this past week, some with very positive results, others, yeah not so much. The sundried tomato and basil hummus from soaked garbanzo beans came out amazing. The fried tofu with avocado, walnuts and grapes in whole wheat wraps with lettuce? Well let’s just say that meal will from now on be referred to as ‘tubular shaped bland goo’. Won’t be trying that one again. Sometimes tofu just is not a good substitute for chicken. So to make myself feel better I made some chocomole. And feel better I did. Especially right now as I eat it before I have my dinner. I'm a rebel so I can.

OK that’s enough now. Later friends.

A Collection of Positivity Twenty Years in the Making

Fortune cookies completely fascinate me. To think ‘if I had grabbed for that one instead my little jolt of positive reflection would have completely changed’ is something I relish in. Call it fated destiny or whatever blah, blah you like but I love to open up those little sweet treats to find the inspiration inside. I have been collecting some of my favorites for apparently much longer than I remembered as I discovered a whole slew of them yesterday.

Wait a minute, let me back up and share the full story.

The day we got back from Cali I ordered a treadmill. For the past few months I have been weighing (pun very much intended) the options between the gym or a treadmill for my home. The treadmill won because I considered that when I used to go to the gym that was typically the only thing I used anyway. For just slightly more than an annual membership fee for just one of us, now Matt and I have that gym right here in our home (wow, how infomercial does that sound?).

Well, not yet exactly.

It should be arriving this week so for the past few days I’ve been doing what I do best -- de-cluttering my environment to make room for this extra large item that is coming in.

There are a few boxes we have yet to unpack as I knew that they were things we couldn’t do much with. Framed photos we don’t really have wall space for here, fabric for OPP (other people’s projects) and a final box that I have been carrying around with me for what feels like forever -- “Memorabilia”.

Within that box is another smaller box I labeled “Box of Memories”, this is the one in the photo above. I created it out of corrugated cardboard that I fashioned into a base and sides which are scotch taped together, then a top that is “hinged” on one of the longest sides. The cover and opposing long side have holes punched near the edge and the whole thing is held together by a fluorescent orange shoe lace. It was quite an ingenious bit of MacGyver-ness if I do say so myself!

Every so many years I go through this box and I’m always re-surprised by some of the items that I find: a mug received for graduation that has every class member’s name printed on the back, my bible and diploma from graduating CCD, a 6” railroad nail I salvaged when they took the line out in the early 80’s, the lyrics to both The Rose and Amazing Grace (for Holly ♥), a postcard from a pen pal who visited Astoria, Oregon where The Goonies was filmed, the program and ticket stub from when Dane Cook starred as Danny in our high school production of Grease (and a stub from his very early years act at the now defunct Catch A Rising Star in Harvard Square), Svetlana Boginskaya’s autograph, and all 4 years worth of my varsity letters for gymnastics.

Sorting through the box instead of just bringing it to the basement was just too tempting as I considered how long it had been since I had last done so. Ticket stubs and programs from productions and sporting events, postcards from other places, my HS diploma and then at the bottom of the box, plus taped all along the inside of the cover, were tons of fortunes from cookies that I had been collecting for I’d guess more than the past twenty years.

As a self proclaimed clutter free kind of gal it mystified me that I would keep such a thing as tiny little scraps of paper but then I started to read them:

“If you continually give you will continually have.”
“Serious trouble will bypass you.”
“He who knows he has enough is rich.”
“You should be able to undertake and complete anything.”
“Your life will be happy and peaceful.”
“Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.”
“Trust your intuition. The Universe is guiding your life.”
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“You are going to have a very comfortable old age.”
“You are a person of another time.”

All of a sudden it hit me. All of these awesome self improvement gurus are just doing what I’ve been doing all of these years, collecting their fortunes and following the advice inside as a way of daily life!

My older ones were definitely uplifting and they all remained inside the box but as of now I am living my life by one of the more recent ones I have taped to my computer monitor:

“Love is a present that can be given every single day you live.”

State of Mind

I am a total sucker for New Year’s Eve. As a night person, it’s the one holiday where I am strongly encouraged to be myself and with the shopping over and done with, a belly still full of yummy holiday goodness and a focus on love and friendship, it really is a night that’s tough to beat. It is a firm belief of mine that the following year will be loosely shaped by what is going on at midnight.

As a young kid, grammar school age, my mom used to throw a pretty rockin New Year’s Eve party every year. Her friends and some family would come over and celebrate with food and champagne. There was always a slurry rendition of Auld Lang Sine as the clock ticked over, though no one really knew more than the first verse, and most years my sister and I were allowed to stay up to midnight if we made it that late. I recall one year that landed on a Saturday and SNL was on. This parody commercial came on where kids in snowman sweaters were calling home to tell their parents they loved them while sitting on grandpa’s lap beside the Christmas tree, when suddenly grandpa grabbed the phone and demanded a ransom and I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s pretty likely that is the year my warped sense of humor was shaped.

When I was a teenager I used to cry just about every year when the clock turned over. I guess I found it hard to say goodbye and my friends would laugh as it occurred every single year. One year a small group of us got all dressed up and went out for a nice Italian dinner in Lexington center. I was experiencing my typical melancholy and picked up the grated cheese to shake onto my ravioli. The entire top came with it onto my plate, sauce splashed all over my white sweater and the four of us didn’t stop laughing all night. I figure that’s the year I learned that I would never be one of those women who can wear a white outfit and not spill something on it.

As I grew and my mom stopped having her party I began venturing out to spend the night with friends in the city. Quite a few years were spent downtown watching drunken vagrants wander the icy cold streets as we made our way to the edge of the Harbor to check out midnight fireworks. That was a lot more fun the year S brought a couple of her cutest college boys back home and we all drank champagne in the middle of the street to keep warm. I had no idea one of them had brought a bottle in his backpack but as the fireworks began he popped the cork and if I do recall we swilled right out of the bottle. That was the year I stopped crying at midnight.

A whole bunch of years later, after a particularly life altering break up, I decided to spend the holiday in a completely different state with a friend that I rarely saw on that night. I headed off for North Carolina just after the Christmas holiday and planned to spend close to fourteen days there before a new job began in January. It was the famed Y2K and none of us could have cared less if the power went out at midnight. We spent the early part of the night drinking at what I affectionately called the senior center watching all the 55+ peeps dance with each other as my friend’s aunt sang. Collectively we decided to watch the ball drop so we raced back to a friend’s apartment, sparked a bowl, held our breath for one second at midnight and laughed off the silly tech fear as nothing happened. Regardless of the mind altering drugs, that was the year I gained a whole bunch of life perspective.

Almost every year since, with the exception of one year we were at my sister’s through the holidays, we have spent with S&B. Most years we head out for dinner, have a great meal, a couple drinks and laughs big enough to fill an entire room. Then we end up back at one or the other of our places, pop champagne, watch the ball drop, hug and kiss our respective other half, knock back the glass full of bubbly and end up asleep well before 12:30. When Matt and I were living in New York we still made our way back to the Boston area to see them on New Year’s because to us it was really important to spend the holiday with people we care about, and to follow with tradition as well. Those were the years I learned what real, true friendship is and how it can grow stronger over time into a bond more like family.

For many reasons, those friendships included, I have remained in the northeast my entire life, but anyone who knows me understands that my heart belongs in southern California. My soul too, so I left both of them behind in order to collect them when I end up there for good. Soon. This was an entirely new experience for me as we spent the holidays in the Palm Springs area with Matt’s dad and step mom, who we rarely see as it is, and as long as I have been around, never on Christmas or New Year’s. S-MIL was pushing hardcore for us to move out there, we even toured a couple model homes and explored neighborhoods we might consider living in. There are past mistakes, messiness and issues that need to be addressed and fixed before we could go, not to mention a couple building blocks that need to be securely mortared in for us to build a life on out there, but we are both ready to make the change.

This was the year I learned how excited I am to watch our lives become everything we want them to be and more.