So I know most people really won't get this, but I am really excited because I just got an invite to Ravelry.com, which is a knitting and crocheting community where you can share patterns, and post pictures of your projects, and basically revel in the glory of all things yarn related. I know. I'm a dork. Build a bridge.
So this morning I was standing in the doorway of my classroom talking to my neighbor when one of the adults in my room tells me to come quick. Never a good sign. So I go back to my classroom, and she tells me there is a bat in my window. I was like... ex-squeeze me. I have these metal, cross-hatched grates on my windows because I am right next to the baseball field and balls have broken the windows before. There is about six inches between the window pane and the grate. And there, tucked away in that space... is a bat. A real life, my name is Dracula bat. I have no idea how it got in, and clearly it could not get out. And clearly we could not all get on with our days, myself included, until we had ALL satisfactorily checked out the bat. That includes the classroom next to me, whose teacher I was gabbing to, I mean, discussing a purely work related issue with, before I got called back to my room. I don't really know how she found out... it could have had something to do with the fact that upon seeing the bat, I went running into her classroom, waving my arms and jumping up and down yelling "there's a bat in my window." And they all stared a little. But I eventually won them over and they all trudged single file back to my room and took turns looking at the bat, which WAS actually pretty cool like I had promised them it would be. That is the last time I go running into their room with a lame brained story and they don't believe me. I have them right where I want them. So, back to the bat, it clearly could not get out, and upon my colleague and I inspecting the outside of the grate, there was not a single hole or break in the metal. We have no idea how it got there. So we called the office, and they called the janitor who had to come and unbolt the grate and prop it open while gently nudging the bat with a broomstick to get it to come out. The janitor was not nearly as amused with the whole situation as I was. Nor as hyper. Nevada is weird.
Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone's neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing?
Okay, okay, I get it. I haven't posted in a while. I have been really busy with work. And that's lame. Got it. Today (and yesterday) I had to sit through a training on a test I am going to have to administer. (I am a teacher. A new one. A new one who apparently has to learn about these tests.) And at this training, there was a power point presentation... with pictures... on (I kid you not) what a zip drive is, what a flash drive is and what a cd is. There was also an equally riveting presentation on what "backing up" meant, and how to do it. (This of course was the second part of the presentation because to back up you have to either use a zip disk, flash drive or cd, and if you have no knowledge of these items, say for instance you have been living under a fucking rock for the past 11 years eating grub worms and combing your hair with the exoskeleton of a dried up scorpion, you wouldn't get the complex topic of backing up). THEN (oh yes, there is a then) the group spent close to FORTY MINUTES learning how to burn a cd. The woman next to me was an idiot (I actually pulled out my flash drive from my purse because not only had she never heard of one, but she had never seen one. For reals.), but a very distant runner up to the woman/old man combo (like, there was two separate people sharing half a brain, not like there was a man with a penis and boobs... although, they were both boobs... I digress) that was caddy corner to me. And for this, I had to get a sub for TWO days, and be away from MY students for TWO days, and now they have all probably forgotten what I look like and that I force them with threats of lashings with a wet noodle to love me, I mean, that they love me. It was my first sub EVER. You don't get these moments in life back people. I wanted my first sub ever to be for something REALLY good, like being too hungover from a drunken trip to Vegas or TJ and having to stay home and work up the nerve to peek under the suspicious bandage on my forearm concealing the I Heart Mom tattoo. You know, something like that. But now, my first sub day EVER goes down in the history books as a boring training on the complexities of backing up.
I Heart My Job... dot dot dot...
So this single thing... It's not like it's HORRIBLE or anything like that. Just... uh... different. So I went downtown tonight because there is this like HUGE bar-b-que fair type festival thing for Labor Day. It took half an hour just to find a parking spot, on the the THIRD floor of the parking structure. I walked around the crafts fair, got a new ring, listened to a little music, watched all the little kids playing in the fountain and riding the rides, moved on because I don't have a cute little kid to play in the fountain and ride the rides, saw hot guy after hot guy already attached to good looking girls... then not good looking girls... then girls that barely looked like girls at all... I have to admit it was a little depressing. So now I'm home again, frozen meal for one cooking away. I'll probably try to get some work done for next week while watching reruns on lifetime or Oxygen or some other TV channel that was seemingly created for the sole purpose of single women. Where is Justin Long when you need him?
At least the phrase "going downtown" has been greatly improved (View from my parking garage level):
When you go for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.
– Jack Handey
So, okay... I went to this play last night, and it was really fun. Lake Tahoe has an outdoor theater that houses the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival every summer. It is LITERALLY right on the lake, and you sit in beach chair on the side of a hill in the white sand. I went to see Taming of the Shrew (Romeo and Juliet was also available, which I happen to enjoy, however, I don't really need a long, drawn-out tragic love story right now... dot dot dot) Okay, so it was cool. So cool in fact, that I was freezing my ASS off. Apparently this lake, Lake Tahoe, has ocean-like qualities. It has waves. At night. It was a little freaky. I just thought the waves during the day were from all the boats that were driving all over it. Not so much. It also has this incredibly COLD ASS wind that comes every evening with the tide. Yes, it has a tide as well. ITS A FUCKING LAKE. It is not some ocean in northern California, it is a lake. It should not have tides, and it should not have winds every night to freeze your ass off in. It is a self-contained body of water, an overgrown puddle, if you will. Oh, you know who knew about the freezing ass cold wind? Everybody else. EVERY.BODY.ELSE. So, not only was I the ONLY one there single (uno, solitary, no friends, no boyfriend, nada, zip, zilch, party of one... dot dot dot) but I was the only one there in shorts because just a few hours before it was ninety-five degrees. It's not cold at night in Reno, or Sparks, but apparently it is freakishly cold at night 40 miles away in Lake Tahoe. Whatever.
So, this is the knowledge you need to have lest you judge me when you hear the tail of my tragic fall into a life of crime... I stole a blanket. Somebody left this blanket on a railing. It was there when I went into the theater, and when I went to the restroom at intermission I noticed, as I was standing in line in the freezing ass cold wind, that it was still there. So I thought, surely by the time I go to the bathroom and get back out here, the owner will have remembered and came to retrieve it, right? They probably just left it there because the play started and they were going to get it at intermission, right? So I come out of the bathroom-- no warmer for having sat my naked ass down on a cold ceramic toilet seat-- and the blanket... is still there. I thought... it's go time. So I walk up nonchalantly, as if I had left it there all along, and I reached out and grabbed it off the railing and walked casually (swiftly) back to my seat. When I took the blanket, there were like three people talking about the fact that the blanket had been there the whole time. Then, this funny chica, who was there with her friends AND her boyfriend- her sarcastic boyfriend who made funny jokes the whole play long-- (all young and beautiful and fabulous with their coolers of wine and bowls of fruit-bitches) gave me a weird look because I had sat behind her and her entourage (alone) the whole first half of the play and she was like three people behind me in the bathroom line (so I didn't retrieve it from my car), and clearly knew that it wasn't my blanket. And she knew I was alone because when you go to one of these events-alone- people have this habit of leaving room around you, as if there is someone else coming to join you, because SURELY nobody would go to a Shakespeare play and drink wine by herself! That would be ridiculous. So I had, like, this bubble of shame around me. Yeah, she gave me weird looks after the play. I HAD TO. It was one of those velor ones, you know? The kind they have on hotel beds. OH, and the best part was that it was WHITE, which, in a dark outdoor theater with spotlights, practically GLOWS. It was screaming "Look at the pathetic little alone girl who didn't know that it would be ten below zero and has no boy-toy to cuddle up with and no friends to drive her home so she can't even stay warm on wine like the rest of us so she has resorted to stealing this probably nasty, disease ridden blanket from a stray railing." (The stray railings are the shady ones). Okay, it didn't quite say all of that, but it wasn't exactly blending in either.
So then after the play, I was just trying to get out of their quickly and inconspicuously as possible, and there is lady in front of me, and she makes a bee-line to the garbage can and throws away this huge quilt. HUGE, FLUFFY QUILT. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen. I thought for a moment, is this what they do here? Should I just throw this away now? I mean, everybody rented beach chairs to sit in, were the blankets just disposable? I was so confused. Did I mention it is velor? I couldn't throw away a velor blanket! Are you crazy?! But apparently I can steal them. I kept waiting for rats or spiders to crawl out of it and kill me. but it was a perfectly fine blanket. I think. I put it in the back of my car and drove away and I have not looked at my pile of fluffy, cuddly, velvety sin since. God I hope there were no spiders in it.
So I relate this whole story to my God-daughter. My wonderfully understanding and kind god-daughter. Who promptly tells me... You are the only person I know who that would actually happen to, like, in real life. I can't even pretend to be indignant. All I can say is... yeah, I know.
Whew... what a week. So I moved and am almost 100% moved in. Most boxes are unpacked. For the most part, the move has been surprisingly uneventful-- in a good way. Here are the highlights:
Went to a Rascal Flatts concert that was AMAZING!! I know, not all of you appreciate country, but it was loud and cool and awesome and way too much fun. So nice to go to a concert where the entertainment doesn't tend bar during their breaks.
Cable company is comprised of complete fuck ups. They told me that I had to call them to "provision" my internet before I could hook up (I still don't know what that means) and after two twenty minute phone calls (the first one ended when I told off the lady and she quit talking. Like, she literally just stopped talking but wouldn't hang up. I was like, are you there bitch? I wasn't really happy when she told me my IP address was bad and I needed to call Apple for them to give me a new one. Fucking idiot.) After 40 minutes they still could not connect me to the internet, nor did ANYBODY in the entire tech department have any experience with Macs. They told me to call Apple, which I did, but my warranty expired and they were going to charge me 50 bucks to connect me. So I ran a diagnostic program, by myself, and the computer was connected to the iternet in 30 seconds, y myself. Because Macs don't need fuck ups to mess with their numbers and yank their dicks like PC's do. Yeah, that was fun.
Oh, and I lost one of my keys. They gave me three keys, one goes to my mailbox and two regular sized ones, which I assumed were two copies of my front door key. I put the mailbox and one of the door keys on my regular ring and tossed the others aside, where they apparently have been taken hostage by apartment gnomes. The other key-- the one I lost-- gets me into the pool and spa. Yeah, I'm an idiot. It has never left this apartment, where the fuck is it?!
Uh, and I think that's it. I found a fabulous mall today amidst a huge, two mile long shopping area. Big cities have their perks. And it is Hot August Nights this week. It's this HUGE classic car show and cruise. It's not really my scene, but seeing as how I am now a resident, I had to go out and show my support for the locals. Before returning home and staying up late eating ice cream and watching Sex and the City. You can take the girl out of the quiet hick town...
So I am moving (this morning) to a new state. As we speak my dad and brother are loading the uhaul-- I cannot help because I am still IN SHOCK at the amount of money I had to pay to rent the Uhaul truck for a single night. Surely I will recover around when the truck is packed and ready to go. Because I am helpful like that. Then we will drive to this new state, drop me off in a town that is roughly 100 times bigger than the town I currently live in (not an exageration) where I do not know a single soul to teach a classroom of severely handicapped children that is probably completely devoid of anything helpful such as curriculum... I love it. I keep waiting for the nerves, or the nostalgia, or some other such emotion that would be normal for a person moving away from home to a large, impersonal town of strangers would have. But... dot dot dot... not so much. Maybe I am nucking futs. Maybe my hometown is a black hole that sucks people in before draining them of life and soul before spitting them out empty and alone. Hmmm... not bitter. See ya suckers!
12o? What's that, you ask innocently? That is the number of F-ing balloons I blew up last night while watching tv. An hour and a half of the heaviest breathing I have seen in a long time, pathetically enough. For what? For 32 whiny, sniveling little brats at day camp to play totally awesome and cool relays and games with, which I researched for two hours on the internet. Who paid for said balloons. That would be me. And Again, who blew up all those balloons by herself? Me again. And how were all my efforts received? Did the kids appreciate the gesture and fun games by listening attentively while I was explaining each totally cool relay and game? No. Did they enthusiastically play and enjoy the game with the attitude and spirit with which they were conceived (the games not the kids)? No. Did they continue to be the ungrateful, whiny, potty mouthed, complaining, life draining, pain in the ass kids that they have proven to be time and time again, all summer long? All signs point to yes. And why do I go out of my way planning way cool games that involve popping 120 balloons in the course of an hour when I could have done the same old boring games that all the other camp leaders do? Because I am a sucker. S-U-C-K-E-R. You might as well paint Hoover on my forehead and pay me for the advertising. I suck. Kids suck. I hate them. I am definitely reducing the number I am going to have to only 27. That'll teach 'em.
So, I am afraid of spiders... And I'm not talking a silly little childhood, funny little, "ha ha I don't like spiders" fear. I'm talking FOR REAL. For realsy reals even. They make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. If one is crawling towards me, or on me, I totally freak out, my heart stops, I freeze... usually scream. I cannot kill them myself or be anywhere near them. They have this, like, extra joint in their leg that makes me want to vomit... the way they walk... I just threw up a little thinking about it. Anyways, so this thing I have with spiders is very, VERY real. That back story was absolutely necessary for the story that is to follow.
So I am going to bed (head out of gutters please) and I'm all tucked in, got some nice relaxing music going, and I decide to read for a little while to make me sleepy. So I pick up my book from the night stand, which I haven't read in two nights because I was house-sitting and forgot it behind the last two nights, and I casually open up to the dog-eared page (bookmarks fall out and I always loose them). And there... inside my book... just waiting to jump out and kill me... was a reasonably sized spider. Now, by "reasonably sized" I mean definitely big enough to bite me, crawl all over me with its super creepy way, kill me and take over the world with it's pure evil. Hiding... in my book. So, I did what any grown up would do. I immediately threw the book across the room the first insta-second that I saw it's creepy little hairy legs. (Guess how fast an insta-second is... go ahead... guess... It's fast. So fast I made it up. Sucker.) It crashed. (The book, I mean) Apparently nobody else in the house cared, or even bothers to check my crashes anymore because they are so used to spider drama. And then, like a three year old, I watched the book for a few seconds, frozen in fear, and then quickly turned off the light, pulled the covers up and told myself that it was okay now, go to sleep. And I laid there... lay there?... I was there, in bed, unable to move, or sleep, or think about anything but this reasonably sized (tiny) spider that could be crawling over me at any second. I don't know if I killed the spider... I don't know if it crawled into my sheets that night and is still there, quietly waiting to make it's move... I don't know if it crawled into the nearby boxes that sit packed and is waiting until I take it away to Reno where it will kill me and then continue to take over an entire metropolitan area. Because I am three. And, clearly, the grown up thing to do when presented with a dilemma in life is to throw things... quickly... and possibly scream like a little girl... although I do not recall such events... I hate spiders... dot dot dot.
I have decided I am in love. With Justin Long. The name needs work... or does it? Hmmm... Anyways, he is the mac guy on the mac guy vs. pc guy commercials. He also happens to be in the movie "Live Free or Die Hard" which I went to see on the 4th of July. He is SO fabulously geeky and BRILLIANTLY sarcastic in the movie. BRILLIANTLY sarcastic. Fabulously geeky. Cracked me up. I want to marry him and have his ibabies and live in his little ihouse with a little white ifence all around the yard to contain our millions of ichihuahuas. And yes, I realize that he is an actor and therefore every word out of his mouth is written for him by other fabulously sarcastic people, but I firmly believe that anyone who is that funny delivering those lines truly is that sarcastic and geeky in real life. Which makes him strangely attractive to me. Perhaps I am icrazy, but I love him. For realsy reals.
So like these people decided I needed a blog... ahem... daphne*blue... ctrl.alt.destroy... because I am interesting... or something. I beg to differ. I have faith I'll prove them wrong. In case you haven't noticed... I like dot dot dots... a lot... and yes, that is what I call them... dot dot dots.
Right now I am house-sitting for the parents of my high school best friend turned sworn enemy-- dun dun dun... dramatic reverb. I am also best friends with my ex-husband's ex-wife. Top that. Oooh, snap. Anyways, so far I have only had a few fights with the house, which I have named Bessie. I like to name things. The first one was when I accidentally set off the alarm and in order to punish me the house waited until I drove out of sight and then left the garage door open all day. Passive aggressive, I know. In order to make sure there wasn't an ax murderer that had been hiding in wait for me all day (because coincidentally Bessie also left the door in the garage unlocked), I had to talk on my cell phone to one of my friends as I was walking around the house. Cellphones not only emit cancer causing rays that can fry rats in a single bound, but they also offer a sphere of protection from ax-murders who may be hiding in the closet. Betcha didn't know that. Sucker. Then last night I was trying to pimp this silly blogger page (for daphne*blue and ctrl.alt.destroy) and Bessie lacks wireless Internet, a major flaw, so I plugged my laptop into the DSL. She totally sabotaged me and refused to upload my banner, so I tried using their desktop, and again I was thwarted. Bessie clearly took advatage of my temper and lack of patience with all things technological. So all those who read this-- all two of you- must give me props for this boring page because it was a pain in the ass.
And no one should ever name their child Bessie or any derivative thereof, such as Bessina, Bessty or Bessatrude. It's just wrong. Hey, you know where there are a lot of Bessie's? In Vegas.
