I posted three times via email yesterday and only one showed up. Without its explanatory entry friends it made less sense than was acceptable so I deleted it. I'm not particularly impressed with the "post by email" system, in case I hadn't made that clear previously.

I'm off today. So far I've gotten my teeth cleaned. At 8:00. Awesome. Because on MY day off I want to be forced out of bed earlier than if I were headed to the office.

Later I get to go to the dermatologist and find out how many of my moles are contorting "moldy gargoyle" style into cancer. How many "more", actually, since years ago I lost one mole to the Dark Side; it morphed into a camo-clad Rebel Mole that skittered around my back in grease paint yelling "CANCER! HA!" at all the other moles who were just casually lying there, content to stay within their symmetrical, colorless boundaries.

I sure hope we find something... I mean, what's better than nineteen stitches in your back? I mean, besides bleeding gums. 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, March 29, 2005

  This Loses It About 1/16th Of The Way In. As Opposed To The Usual 1/10th.

Stryo left a very "kick ass super hero" comment the other day in which she described unemployment as being, quote, "The JOINT", end quote.

Not only is this the best fucking term I've ever heard in my life, and will hence be a welcome, welcome and WELCOME verbal replacement for my outdated and, admittedly, turrets syndrome-esque "completely out of control" and "off the fucking chain", but when I read it I sort of stood up in my work chair, like I was somehow superStyrohero drawn to go and punch my boss where it hurts (in her hair). I love Styro. I wish I lived closer to Virginia.

P.S. I mailed the Sticky Guys today. From work. It sort of felt like I was deploying the Sticky Guy Militia... like they all hid quietly, slumped over in their envelopes, trying suck in their sticky breath and lie flat so as not to arouse the suspicion of Kevin (aka: "Hey, What's That?") The Mail Room Guy. So say a little prayer. If your sticky guy is missing in action I'll make you a little sticky bracelet that says "NEVER FORGET" and I'll make it out of like eleven other sticky guys so you really won't be able to forget, not with all those sticky legs and heads on your arm.

Anyway.

We have flood irrigation out here. Which means that when we water the lawn it looks like this.

And when The Jake charges through it, it looks like this.

With a doggy door, you can only imagine the mud horror that can-and must-ensue. And anyone who says that other animals won't use your dog's pet door obviously hasn't been privy to "The Strange Hound Dog And Something That's Either A Sheepdog Or An Alive Blanket And Two Pretty Gross Looking Whore Cats That Aren't Mine" Parade, in which every animal within two square miles charges through my house with all the fury that a strange hound dog, a comforter with lungs and two cats that have sex for money can wrangle.

As a half-hearted deterrent, I sort of pinned The Jake and the Lame Jake Posse outside by closing the laundry room door, thus rendering the doggie door largely useless. Unless he and his friends want to chill in the laundry room. Which they generally don't, unless there are bras or linen pants or sequined silk tops air drying in there. Then the cats get all slutted up and beat the dogs at strip poker. (Not generally hard to do, since the dogs aren't wearing any clothes.)

So everything's cool, The J's outside, dashing around the yard like only a dog that may or may not have a chicken trapped under the barbecue can, when suddenly I hear the seriously horrifying (and really very long-lasting) noise that can only be my dog running full-tilt onto the patio, sliding across an impressive expanse of wet concrete on soaked, scrambling paws, careening (somehow) through the doggie door only to crash hopelessly into a closed laundry room door.

The worst part? To this, the dog who jumped out of a four story window and walked away with only a scratch on his nuts from the sill?...

...That later required a "rush neuter" thanks to THE RESIDUAL NEAR-CONSTANT LICKING, LICKING, LICKING, LICKING, LICKING, LICKING, OH SWEET LORD, THE LICKING?

His goddamned chicken got away.

Luckily the cats were hustling the driveway that night, and it sort of raised The Jake's spirits when he heard through the whore grapevine how bad that chicken smelled like wet kibble and cheese. 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, March 22, 2005

  Consistently Fun So Far For Eight Minutes:

Replacing the first name of any 19th century author with "Bob".

 
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, March 13, 2005

  Assorted. Seriously.

The fact that I am hopelessly incapable of posting the tattoo paint pictures in an even remotely timely fashion is a fact, I hope, that was accepted and digested weeks ago. Rest assured, I still have them and love them and will certainly post them. Eventually. In the meantime, I have a few pictures from my immediate work environment that I took on Thursday, the day that my department had a meeting from eight to five but, thanks to the darling department secretary having called in "really sad" that day, I was left to lay around my desk, answer the phone that never rang, and cast my votes for Reverse Survivor.

(I'd like to point out that as I was wrangling my way through multiple corporate firewalls and ninja dodging the creepy IT guy who likes to call and announce that "he's got me in his sights" via PC Anywhere (DAMN that stupid software! DAMN the token creepy IT guy!) to reach the Reverse Survivor website, my co-workers were giving a three hour presentation on Business Ethics in the meeting mentioned above; a three hour presentation that I wrote. According to me, personal internet use is seriously frowned upon and grounds for dismissal. And judging by my all caps PowerPoint slide, I'm damned serious.)

Oh, another thing: I've posted like four entries via email over the course of the week, and NOT ONE OF THEM has posted. I checked with Blogger support, and they're aware that posts via email are taking longer than necessary. My dilemma has been whether or not to just go ahead and re-post whatever crap I tried to post during the day when I get home. I've opted "no" just because that email post could land at any time, and no one needs to hear my joke about three inch binders twice. (That's actually "three-inch" binders, not inch binders in sets of three. I mean, what's funny about inch binders in sets of three? Pssshh.)

So? what the fuck was I talking about? Oh. Pictures. Of shit from my desk.

Okay, this is Bill. If you look impossibly close, you'll see that Bill is totally playing Sims 2 on company time. He has a badass poster of some aliens, and also a pair of blinding fake diamond earrings in his inbox hanging folder. He's a lot cooler than he looks. Nah. Not really. A lot of the time he doesn't wear any pants.

And this is Jill. She thinks she's hot shit. She's a little more company focused than Bill, but that's still an eBay auction for Jimmy Buffet tickets that you see on her computer screen. She's on the phone a lot. Mostly with Bill. He tries to trick her into giving up where she hid his pants.

So this guy sits on top of the CD wheel keeper thing. You know the thing. He's been frantically gnawing on that popcorn kernel for five months now. You can almost feel the fiery tension. Or the sorrowful desperation. Same thing when you're dealing with popcorn kernels.


And this, without undo pretense, is a sticky guy.

The sticky guys are, crazily enough, sticky. I am the proud owner of 288 sticky guys, all in assorted colors and flavors.

I lied about the flavors. There's only the one flavor: "chewy".

I will happily send you a sticky guy. Did I mention how many I have? Send me your address and you will receive one sticky guy. And then you will know the joy that is "sticky guy thrown hard against the window."

I'm not kidding.

288.

And (out of nowhere) when I got my hair cut today, the stylist actually said, "What the hell happened here?"

So somebody make me a sign, please, that I can put on the wall of my bathroom reminding me that combs are for weekends, too. I look a lot like a six year old girl on the third day of her divorced dad's visitation; order and hygeine are taking a backseat to candy and borderline seriously inappropriate movies.

At least I still have 288 sticky guys. 
¶ posted by Erin on Saturday, March 12, 2005

 

Lately I've been forced to aerodynamically streamline into Deadwood. Everything comes down to Deadwood, really, and I refuse to apologize for that. I must confess, though, that this week's Sunday television schedule led to something of a CATASTROPHIC EMERGENCY here; while R and I both had our itineraries tuned to the Bullock / Garret clusterfuck (ha, puns), it was also imperative that I see BOTH EPISODES of Arrested Development. Are you watching Arrested Development? Yes, of course you are. Over Christmas, when I was in South Carolina sleeping on my aunt's study floor, it was the Arrested Development Season One DVD set that got me through the indescribably frigid nights. (After my grandparents got wise to the thermostat locale, you could count on that joint sinking to forty-five by midnight. As a sandwich, I was begrudgingly glad for the frost covered floor-to-ceiling windows that served as my bread; we'll call the newspaper pages and wall insulation that I spent countless zombie hours cocooning myself within [particularly my skull... watch the skull! The Skull!] the condiments. At least I could count on being drunk by eight in the morning.)

Anyhoo. I had to watch Arrested Development from seven thirty to eight thirty. Both episodes. WITHOUT. INTERRUPTION.

So R, seeing that Deadwood is on at seven, and, being "that guy" who starts snoring at seven forty-five whether he's asleep or not, he decides that seven is when he's watching it.

Oh, compadres. I freaked out in the vein of so many other "people" who are legitimately passionate about their television (and who may or may not be expecting "their" periods like, within six hours) would.

I'll spare you the details. It was a lot of head flailing and squinting and NONONO I CAN'T WATCH HALF! AND ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT? OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO GO WATCH IN THE BATHROOM.

Because this is where our other TV is.
In the bathroom.
Cozy.

Drip.
Drip. Drip.
Drip.
Not my idea.
Drip.


(drip.)

I was foaming at the mouth (this entire escapade, really, in retrospect, seems somewhat unflattering) when R acquiesced and moved on into the back of the house to prevent my witnessing the first half hour of Deadwood prematurely.

In superficial retrospect, it was like watching an itchy rhino change territory. When jabbed and jabbed and jabbed AND JABBED to the point of discomfort, he slowly got to his feet and moved out of the room, shooting a hurt and sour glance at me over a gray itchy flank.


R watched at seven.
I watched at ten.
R has no memory of me jumping on top of him (safely) asleep and snoring in bed and screaming "PICKLING HIS DICK IN THE CUNT BRINE OF ANOTHER" at 11:17. Even though frontier penetration jokes are our "thang".

I may need lessons from the "Pick Your Battle" handbook.
And the handbook of appropriate "thangs". 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, March 08, 2005

 

I drive an hour to work and an hour plus home. Every day. EVERY. DAY. It's not like on Thursdays my office suddenly picks up and migrates forty miles east and sets up convenient shop on my side of town, like some of your offices do. IT'S EVERY FUCKING DAY. And you have to know that if there are any ways to expedite that trip even slightly, I'm doing it. Like that last minute lane change before the US 60 merge? On it. That probably saves me, I don't know, eight seconds? And I only almost get slammed from behind by a tractor trailer like twice a week.

Although, I do seem to have some sort of "foreign body in the road" tractor beam.

I've hit four French guys and a Polynesian.

And every enormous, heart-quaking, fist-clenching, teeth-gnashing pothole on the worst road in the warehouse district of Phoenix. And ladders. And big pieces of metal. And the French. And mattresses (on which the French are lying supine in tight striped tee shirts, smoking expensive cigarettes). It seems like the harder I try to miss something, the closer I will come to nailing it with all four tires.

Anyway. This is all completely immaterial. My sole point here was that I'm obsessed with my commute. I jockey for position and pass "WIDE LOAD" trucks bearing nuclear generators at ninety miles an hour like only a girl who's chronically three minutes late every SINGLE DAY can.

So I listen to the traffic reports on the radio, right? And this one station plays traffic about every eight minutes (which, frankly, I think is about five minutes too sparse. On satellite radio they have all these traffic channels so you can listen to continuous traffic if you want to, nothing but traffic, just you and cars and jams and roll-overs all day, all the time, but the danger there, I found, is that if you're accidentally making crucial directional decisions based on what is surprisingly the traffic conditions for greater Miami, sometimes that's more of a liability than a help. Turns out a lot of major US cities use the "streets" and "avenues" routine. Not all cities have a beach, though. So. Listen hard for "beach".)

And today I'm listening to this station, and I hear the little traffic horns leading into my chopper guy and I get all juiced up and ready to drive around some shit, and the regular DJ asks the Chopper Guy how he's doing:

"Well, Steve, I'll tell ya... on days like this, when the sun's just glistening on my tail, well, it makes me feel all shiny."

Fly on, shiny Chopper Guy. Fly on.

Just... stay in Phoenix, though. 
¶ posted by Erin on Friday, March 04, 2005