What is a blog really for, if not to tattle on your spouse?

So, last night, we opened the vertical blinds in the living room. Greg’s getting ready to go to band practice, and I’m doing something in the kitchen I think, but getting ready to take a shower, so I ask him to close the blinds. And he does.

Except not exactly.

I’m starkers, about to get in the shower, and I remember I left a candle burning on the mantelpiece in the living room, so I go to blow it out. From the hallway, the blinds look closed, so I head over to the mantelpiece, and am blowing out the candle when I hear some hooting and hollering from outside. I look over, and the blinds are only half-closed, such that from the angle of the hallway they look closed, but from the angle of the mantelpiece, bitches in the parking lot can totally see me in all my nakies. !!!

So I ran back and got a towel and then shut those damn blinds properly. And then demonstrated for Greg when I got home from work tonight the difference between “NOT actually closed, thank you” and “ACTUALLY closed.”

Ugh. I’m a horrible blogger. Or a very lax one, at least.

In my defense, I’ve been busy crafting for the Hogswatch party, which went very well, and I’ve got pictures and a video to post. But not tonight, I’m afraid – I took a much-needed bath (by which I mean, an actual soak-in-the-bath tub to relax, followed by a shower to get clean), and I’m still too neurotic for my taste, so I’m going to try to meditate and chill the fuck out. Just thinking too much about dumb shit and letting it get to me. I need to learn to let go, ALOT, basically. (I think my new therapist is going to be very good for this.) So I will not be processing pics and vids to post, but following my bliss, or some other similar hippy-dippy thing.

Also, I think I finally (finally!) got that etching to work, so I’ve got to remove the toner (without obliterating the etching, like I did last time, because it hadn’t etched deep enough) and see. But so far it’s looking good, so hopefully I’ll be posting pics of it soon and sending it off to Denmark.

Alright. I hope all of you had excellent holidays, winter breaks, solstices, Hogswatches, or just a good couple of weeks at the very least. Whatever flips your switch. And now I’m off to go chill out.

In my attempt to pander to my vanity and capture the true purpleness of my hair (which didn’t really show up in those last pictures too well), I snapped some shots in a bathroom in the library after I got off work the other day, because the bathrooms seem to be better lit at the sink than anywhere in our apartment. Who knows. Anyway, vanity ensues:

Tonight, Greg and I met Kate (who’s in town from Richmond) and her friend Suba (apologies if that’s misspelled) at The Spotted Dog for delicious, delicious dinner. After dinner, we went to Tyler’s for a drink, and I had one chocolate martini, which was pretty good. And since I’m a lightweight, I got a little tipsy. I got rather silly on the drive home, and convinced Greg to take pictures of me as a “bandit” in my cold weather accoutrements:

I know I must be like the last person on the planet to take a bandit picture, but in my defense, I was pretty tipsy (almost drunk, even), and it was funny at the time. This is what you get when I’m tipsy: goofballness, and occasionally monkey impersonations. I’ll leave those for another post, though, as I wasn’t quite drunk enough to stoop to it tonight.

Greg was a darling and DD’d. Then we came home and watched an episode of The Prisoner, and he drank some scotch, and I ate cheesecake. And any minute now I’m going to go to bed, earlier than usual. HOORAY! Sometimes, especially when it’s cold outside, sleeping and being cozy is so awesome. Even more so when you’ve got snuggly jimjams.

Aha – got Photobucket to do my bidding. Pictures ensue:

You’ll have to forgive me if this post is a little spacey. I had a gnarly panic attack right before I left work, and had to take the maximum dose of klonopin. So I’m not panicky anymore, but I’m a space cadet.

So, Friday was my birthday, and it was pretty awesome. Greg took me out to Sitar for dinner, and a bunch of our friends showed up, and I had a great time. I was totally blown away by everyone’s generosity, too – I was just thinking we’d eat together and hang out, but everyone came bearing gifts, and I felt very loved. Greg gave me a supercute dress from Torrid – I’d model it, except like a dumbass I took it off and left it on top of the dresser, and now Chalupa’s hair is all over it, so it needs to be washed before it can be properly shown off. He also gave me Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch (my new favorite books, and I’m anxiously awaiting publication of Final Watch), as well as the Lost Room dvd. Very sweet! I am spoiled. Dara and Tiffianna gave me a lovely bottle of dessert wine (because they know how I do): Apex II. Jeremy and Kimmie gave me a wonderful bamboo basket filled with all sorts of good-smelly bath salts and bubble bath, some delicious-smelling Miso Pretty perfume splash, a Fiestaware mug (since I mentioned loving Fiestaware while we were watching The Lost Room), and some Traumeel for my busted-up elbow. (That Traumeel stuff really works – my elbow has basically stopped hurting and being sore, except when I lean on it right on the tip. But other than that, it’s like a normal, functioning elbow again. Score!) Jj and Amanda gave me a goody bag of good-smelly soap samples (can you tell I like good-smelly things?), including a grapefruit salt scrub bar, a raspberry patchouli bar, a masala bar, and a tiramisu bar. Yum! I see a ton of good-smelly and relaxing baths in my future (possibly with some dessert wine and KOL within reach of the tub). Will and Kimberly gave me Crochet Me: Designs to Fuel the Crochet Revolution, which is gorgeous, but also dangerous since I basically want like at least one of everything in it. And Mel and Jess gave me a beautiful, slinky, fringed scarf – I don’t know if I’ve mentioned my scarf stash, but it’s kind of large. I do love a decorative scarf, especially this newest one. And then Saturday night, Jess graciously spent several hours bleaching my hair and dyeing it purple. I love how it turned out. It’s not the same exact shade throughout, but more like different shades of purple, and I think I like it even better that way. It’s hard as crap to photograph, though. Here’s the best I’ve gotten so far, and I think you can’t really tell it’s purple – you can in person, though, so maybe I just need a better lighting setup? I don’t know. Jess also cleaned up the cut a bit, fixed the bangs, gave me a blowout. It’s looking pretty good today (and yesterday). I kind of don’t want to wash it, because I suck at blowouts, but it’ll have to get washed before much longer, or it’ll start to look filthy. Photobucket is being a little punk about letting me log in, so I’ll have to post pictures later, when Photobucket stops being so poopy.

Susan and Shane graciously gave me a giftcard to iTunes, and I got a shit ton of music. I got altogether like 256 songs, for about 16 cents each, average. This is because music from the 20s and 30s is super cheap on iTunes (especially on the Top Hits of the 1930s comp), and that’s what I’ve been wanting to listen to for a while now (since I got obsessed with the Thin Man movies and stuff).

I may have forgotten to mention this from last Thursday, since I was probably thinking about the elbow/ER-trip and shit, but I had my first meeting with my new therapist, and I like her alot already. I think she’s a good fit for me, and I’m really looking forward to therapy. She does a CBT approach with some zen-philosophy/mindfulness training thrown in, and I think that’s going to be wonderful. Probably rough as hell, but wonderful. We talked a bit about my family history, and I got teary-eyed, so I think obviously they still have more of a hold over me than I’d realized. And we talked about…getting on different terms with my fears, so they don’t overwhelm me or scare the shit out of me, and I’m sure following up on that will be rough, too, but ultimately extremely rewarding.

I got to go to the hospital tonight. On my way out of my exam, I fell down the stairs, and pretty much landed on my left elbow. It hurt excruciatingly, and looked gross, so we thought I’d better get it checked out. Then, on the way out of our apartment, I slipped in the entryway (because that no one shuts that damn door and it was raining all day, so the entryway, which is tile, was slick as fuck), and landed on that bitch again. Fun stuff. So, Greg bought me some x-rays as an early birthday present.

Several medical people (doctors, nurses, managers, whatever) came in while we were in the hospital, to ask how I managed to fuck up my elbow. I kind of think they thought maybe Greg beat me. It was interesting.

Taking two minutes out from working on my paper to post this from our new laptop. Woo! I have dubbed it “Scrappy the Lappy.” It’s pretty cute, and working well so far.

Now back to my paper.

I’m making cookies right now for a cookie-decorating party today. I’m baking premade cookie dough because I tried a new madeleine recipe last night that *sounded* like a good recipe, but turned out to be utter, utter shit. Apparently it’s in the getcrafty book, and I highly recommend you NOT use it. There’s way, way, way too much butter in it, so whenever I opened the oven, it looked like there was fucking dough soup bubbling in the madeleine depressions. It makes a lot of batter/dough/whatever, so I tried to salvage it with the successive batches, and they all came out fucking horrible. Greg tried one of the ones out of the last batch, and he claimed to like it. I don’t know. It’s not a proper fucking madeleine, I know that, and as a cookie, well, in my opinion it fucking sucks. I was so mad at the end of it that I just gave up and decided to make slice-and-bakes today. (I was forced to use a new madeleine recipe last night because my tried-and-true recipe is somewhere in the storage space, probably in a box. As is my tried-and-true recipe for oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies. Sigh.)

This morning, I got to do poopwatch again, because Chalupa was constipated. I holed her up in the bathroom with the litterboxes and plenty of water, and dosed her with a large amount of hairball stuff to lube her up, as it were. It seems to have helped: she’s not crying, she’s not hunched over or slinking around with her tail between her legs, and her, ah, posterior region is looking much better than it did. (Plus, she pooped, but I’m not sure if that was, uh, “all of it.” I’m hoping it is, because she looks like she feels much better. If that wasn’t the end of it, she might be playing Mr. Hanky later, and I’ve already let her out of the bathroom, so I won’t be catching her again today unless I’m lucky.)

And Greg found a deal on a laptop on Craigslist, so we decided to get it as our Hogswatch present to ourselves, only we couldn’t wait til Hogswatch lest someone else buy it first, so now we have a laptop again. Woo! It seems to work pretty well, plus it’s a Windows lappy (instead of Mac), which means I can watch Netflix movies on it from the lazy comfort of my bed or couch or wherever the fuck I want, instead of being tied to my desktop when I want to watch Netflix online.

Alright, the first batch of cookies should be done soon, and I need to shower and get dressed, so tata for now.

Man on phone: Man, sometimes when I be wakin’ up, my body be like “Alright, let’s do this!” Then a few minutes later it be like: “Naaaah, fuck it!”

Overheard by: Stepheb

AMEN.