Month: February 2001

here. I apologize if I passed it on to any of you, and rest assured that I’ll have McAfee running all the time from now on… Lordy, I feel like I spent all day walking and cleaning. By the time I was done with my daily unending Walk of Death and cleaning the downstairs, it was almost noon. I guess that would be because I lolled about in bed for half an hour or so instead of getting up when the alarm went off at 6:45. It’s just so damn hard to drag my ass out of bed when it’s as gray and rainy as it’s been here lately. I don’t remember the last time I saw the sun (okay, slight exaggeration. I’m sure I’ve seen the sun at least once this year…), and there’s no end in sight, according to weather.com. Upon checking that link, I find that I’m a big fat liar. The rain’s supposed to end Friday and the next week or so will be partly cloudy. But the temperature’s going to drop from the mid-sixties, where it is now, to the fifties. Brrrr. Could this get any more exciting, talking about the weather? I rented and watched The Philadelphia Story this weekend, and enjoyed it a lot – hard to believe I’d never seen it, isn’t it? The only thing that really annoyed me is when Tracy Lord’s (Katharine Hepburn) father told her that the reason he was philandering is because he didn’t have an adoring young lady at home who thought the sun rose and set on his ass (maybe not in those exact words, but you get the idea). He was blaming his screwing around on his daughter! What an asshole. But, as Fred pointed out, it was made in 1940. One would hope that these days Tracy Lord would laugh in his face. Katharine Hepburn was just luminously gorgeous, wasn’t she? Well no one can be ugly in black and white – it’s a rule, I believe – but she really was pretty. Back in the day, six years or so ago, I worked as an order entry operator at LL Bean. The word was that Katharine Hepburn would call from time to time to place an order for (I believe) fatwood, and she was a colossal pain in the ass, not wanting to give out her name or credit card number. I never took a call from anyone famous – not that I know of, anyway – but my sister was sitting next to someone who took an order from Christine McVee, she of Fleetwood Mac fame. The funny thing is that we were very sternly warned, during training, that if we got someone famous on the line, we were NOT to act starstruck, but to calmly take the order in a professional manner. And yet, if you DID take a call from someone famous, you could fill out a little form describing the call, and they’d either tack it up on the wall or put it in a binder (I don’t recall which). I also remember hearing that someone took an order from Burt Reynolds, and they spent something like an hour helping him out, and at the very end of the call, he got pissed because something wasn’t in stock and canceled a huge order. Burt Reynolds an asshole? Who’d’ve thought it?! (I am NOT a Burt Reynolds fan, ’cause he was such a flaming asshole when he and Loni broke up. Not that I’m a Loni Anderson fan, either, but couldn’t he have acted with the slightest bit of dignity and tact? Hell no, he was flogging his story to the tabloids in three seconds flat. Asshole.) At the time I was working at Bean’s, I spent the entire time combing through the database trying to come up with a home address or phone number for Mike Mills of REM, due to the Mike Mills obsession I was then going through. Yeah, I was a truly productive employee… Oh, the other thing I saw recently was an anti-smoking commercial. In said commercial, a boy offers a girl a cigarette. She declines because she knows that smoking won’t help her win the karate (or judo, or whatever) tournament they’ll be competing in soon. At the end of the commercial, we see that she’s kicked his ass and won the ribbon. I have no problem with any of that; hell, I’m all for non-smoking commercials. What I have a BIG problem with is this: as the ribbon (or medal or whatever) is put around her neck, she looks at the boy, the one who offered her the cigarette, and what does she do? SHE MOUTHS "SORRY!" AT HIM. Why? WHY? Why should she be sorry? I mean, I know it wouldn’t be sportsmanlike to do a little "I kicked your ass" dance in front of him, but why in god’s green earth would she APOLOGIZE for NOT smoking and therefore having the breath to wipe the floor with his ass? Oh, that’s right. Maybe ’cause she’s the GIRL, and she’s not supposed to win. Silly me, it all makes sense NOW, it wouldn’t be LADYLIKE to win the medal and not APOLOGIZE. Now I get it! On a side note, it used to infuriate me when my mother would say to me "That’s not very laaaaaaadylike!" I always responded with "Who the hell wants to be a LADY??" Okay, I never said "hell" to my mother, at least not until I was out of the house, but I certainly thought it. Who the hell, indeed. "Sorry!" Did y’all have a happy Valentine’s Day? Fred and I agreed that we would only swap cards this year, and I stuck to my side of the bargain, but Fred surprised me with a candle and a little bendy heart with arms and legs. Mighty cute it was, and a nice surprise. Next year, I told him, we’re going out to dinner or something. Happy Valentine’s Day if you like, or Happy Wednesday otherwise! —–]]>

can, without warning, release a stink that burns off your nose hairs? Purring all the while? Damn, I love that picture. She looks so very content, laying there getting her wiry little cat hairs all over the spud’s sweater. We are being forced to go to a PTA meeting this evening, and Fred and I are both pissed off about it. How is it that we’re being forced to attend, you ask? Simple – they’re holding our child hostage until the end of the meeting, wherein she and the rest of the 6th-grade band will play three or four songs. Do I want to go sit through an eternal PTA meeting, listen to endless amounts of people babble endlessly? Um, no. Does Fred? Um, HELL no. If you have PTA-related information to share with me, send it home in the form of a newsletter; don’t FORCE me to attend by using my child as collateral. I’ve told Fred several times that this is the only way they’ll get people to show up for the fucking thing. No doubt I’ll end up sitting in the parking lot, reading by the overhead light, and checking the gym every fifteen minutes, so that I won’t miss seeing her play. I had to go get my driver’s license this morning, since it expired a month ago and I can only justify driving around illegally for just so long. If I were to go on tempting fate, I’d get zinged sooner or later, I figured, so I sucked it up and went to the grocery store (the DMV has offices in the Bruno’s around the corner). Because I actually had a book with me to pass the time while standing in line, there was no line at all, and it took me something like five minutes before I was on my way again. The picture came out about like you’d expect, but not as bad as my previous driver’s license picture. As I was out running errands, I started thinking about this goofy little thing that Fred and I do from time to time, and started laughing my ass off. Don’t you hate it when you’re driving along laughing so hard you’re practically crying and everyone driving around you is staring at you like you’ve recently been released from the loony bin, or is it just me? Anyway, the goofy little thing we occasionally do is that, out of nowhere, I’ll bust out, for no reason, with "Who let the Poo out?" (yes, very original, I know). Always, ALWAYS, with no lag time whatsoever, Fred responds with a "Meow! Myow-myow-myow!" to the tune of "Who let the dogs out". It invariably cracks me up. Maybe you just have to be there… ]]>

Body for Life" program. As a result, he’s developed muscles, and therefore cannot stop gazing lovingly at himself in the mirror. It was bad enough when he’d spend the entire day looking at his biceps, poking at them, tapping them, and then kissing them. I’m not kidding, people, he’d kiss his biceps from time to time. He claimed that he was only doing it to annoy me, but you really have to wonder, don’t you? The last thing I do before climbing into bed is to put on my nightgown and pee. This particular sequence of events has become rather difficult to complete, since he’s inevitably standing in front of the mirror, gazing at his muscular arms, his muscular chest and – heaven help me – the baby six pack he realized over the weekend that he’d developed. Twenty-six thousand times I have been the witness to his yanking up his shirt and looking at his stomach. After looking down at his stomach for a few minutes, he then counts the six bulging muscles. Onetwothreefourfivesix, yep still all there! He also likes to puff out his stomach so that he looks like he’s 6 months pregnant, then rub it while tightening it until his six pack is visible again. When following him from one room to another, I have to make sure there’s a good six feet of distance between us, since he enjoys stopping in his tracks, striking a pose, and looking down at the muscles which have developed on his calves and thighs. When we’re sitting in the living room, he’ll reach out and hook his foot under my knee, then lift my leg up. I thought it was a love-pat sort of thing, until he informed me that he was doing it because it made his muscles pop out, which he would then sit there and admire. My husband, Narcissus. I’m going to start sneaking pounds of lard into his food… ]]>

[deleted] I told you about where it’s $20 to set up and $20 a month after that, unlimited internet access? Well, I got the disk from them today, and do you suppose it worked? Of COURSE not!! Fuckin’ A!! So, I was SO pissed off that I was going to clean (gasp!), but my clothes were in piles all over the living room rug (’cause I was doing laundry (double gasp!), which desperately needed to be vacuumed, so I decided to bake instead. I looked through the cookbook to see what I could make, and I ended up making an "Easy Fudge Cake", which is that cake Mom used to occasionally make, with the fudge sauce on the bottom. So I made the cake part, and I was attempting to measure out the brown sugar that went in the sauce part, and of COURSE it (the brown sugar) was hard as a rock, so I was scraaaaaaaping it out, a little at a time, and a big ol’ boulder of brown sugar came flying out and disintegrated all over hell and creation. But I remained calm. I finished making the cake and put it in the oven, and went and got the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed up the foot and a half of brown sugar coating the kitchen floor, and then I decided to take the garbage out. And, because no one bothered to tell me we’re almost out of garbage bags, I didn’t bother to buy more, so I went around the house and tried to fit all the garbage in one garbage bag. Well, in the bottom of the kitchen garbage can, there is a cup of (clean) kitty litter (because it absorbs odors), and when I upended the kitchen garbage can over the garbage bag I was filling, retardedly forgetting that there was kitty litter in the bottom, kitty litter went everywhere. And at the same moment, the FUCKING smoke detector went off, ’cause some of the sauce in the cake had spilled over and landed on the bottom of the oven and begun to burn, thereupon sending billows of reeking smoke throughout the house, which I somehow had failed to notice. And I yelled "Any fucking thing else?!", addressing, I guess, God. But he didn’t answer. So I vacuumed up the FUCKING kitty litter and had a frozen pizza for lunch, and some of the "Easy Fudge Cake" with vanilla ice cream for dessert, and it was GOOD. And I’m still waiting for that stupid-ass cat to shit out that ribbon. And [the ex] may or may not be going to start work at the BOQ (which is different from the BEQ, which is where he is right now) at night. Because the woman working at the BOQ right now has put in a request to be moved to days because she is a single mother with a one year-old, and she has to pay a gazillion dollars for daycare (I mean nightcare) while she’s at work, and then she has to go home and take care of the kid all day long, too, so she isn’t getting much sleep. I hope he DOES start working nights, ’cause I sure wouldn’t mind at all, except for the fact that he’d be around all day, which would be a great big pain in my ass. I NEED A JOB!! Hey, if I came back to Maine, would you hire me back at the errand service?!* (har de har) Take it easy and write back when you can. *Refers to the fact that I put "Deb’s Errand Service" on my resume to bulk it up at one point, and claimed that I’d worked at said errand service for three years until the owner, Deb, quit the business to go back to school. Needless to say, there never was a Deb’s Errand Service, but Deb was willing to pose as the aforementioned owner and give me a sterling reference should anyone call to check. No one ever called to check, but I did get a pretty good temporary Admin Ass job from it. People in charge of hiring never really seem to check references, at least in my experience. Y’all have a good weekend! ]]>

Boston Public and then read an article about Hannibal before you go to bed? Well, I don’t know what happens when YOU do, but when I do, I immediately fall into a deep sleep wherein I dream that Harry Senate from Boston Public and I catch Williams Hinks, the serial killer who was stalking Lindsay on The Practice, and after we’d caught him, we cooked him in a spicy red sauce and served him over angel hair pasta. Yeah. I had some weird dreams last night. In fact, I’ve had weird dreams the last few nights. I wonder if it’s ’cause I’m supposed to be starting my period today, and thus my hormones are running wild? That, or the fact that I’m staying up a little later than usual these days, because when you can sleep in until 6:45 am, 9:30 pm is just a tad too early for bed, even when you’re like me and really really like to sleep. Last week sometime, on Beth‘s forum board, the topic was door-to-door solicitors and how you deal with them. I posted a reply that said, in part, We get the occasional solicitor, but much in the way I refuse to answer the phone if I don’t recognize the number, I don’t open the door if I don’t recognize the person. I don’t give a shit if they can see me or not; if I don’t know them, I don’t open the door. I was on the phone with Fred, who was at work, on Monday, and as I sat on the loveseat and chatted, the doorbell rang. "Who the hell is that?" Fred asked. I snuck to the bedroom window and look out to see a nicely dressed woman standing in the middle of the driveway watching another nicely dressed woman who was standing on the porch ringing our doorbell. "Oh shit, it’s church people!" I hissed to Fred, and then ran into the bathroom to hide until they went away. This morning as I was sitting in front of the computer, I saw a nicely dressed young man across the street knocking on the front door of our neighbors. I got up and went to clean out the litter box, and as I was cleaning said litter box, the doorbell rang. I stepped in toward the washer and hid there until he went away. Yeah, that’s me, not giving a shit if they can see me or not… —–]]>

Slow Motion by Dani Shapiro, which I liked a lot. I caught Dani Shapiro’s name in one of the myriad magazines I read – Glamour? Marie Claire? Cosmo? I don’t remember which – where she’s a frequent contributor, and read the review of the book, immediately purchased it, and left it sitting on the shelf for something like 2 years. You know, if I had ANY self-control at all, I’d wait to buy these books ’til they come out in paperback. God knows I always have more than enough books to last me for the better part of a year, and yet I keep on buying. What’s up with that? But I digress…) or take a nap, and Fred informed me that he was going to take a bath. "Want to take one with me?" he asked with a come-hither look. I just grinned and went back to my silent contemplation of my two options – book, or nap? Nap or book? He shut the bathroom door behind him, and a few minutes later opened it and gave me the waggly-eyebrow look again. I smiled, he shut the door, and two minutes later the whole scenario played itself out again. After about the fourth time, I decided he wasn’t kidding. The last time we tried to take a bath together, there was 208 pounds more of us, and we hadn’t had much luck. Hell, we were lucky the tub hadn’t cracked down the middle and sent us through the floor into the basement. Since there was an entire Rosie O’Donnell less of us, I decided to give it a go. Fred turned off the water and sat down in the tub. Once he was settled, I stepped into the tub and sat down facing him. He was sitting with his legs along the outside of the tub (it’s a garden/ jacuzzi-type tub, if I haven’t mentioned that), and when I settled in, my legs were kind of tucked under his, with my feet resting dangerously close to his butt. Pleased that we’d managed to fit comfortably in the tub, we splashed and passed the bath bomb back and forth, making conversation and tickling each other. Keep in mind that we’re both still fat, people. Though we’ve lost a lot of weight, we still have a ways to go. And the tub isn’t really a tub built for two, either. After about five minutes, I said I’d get out of the tub so he could go on with his bath. And then it occurred to us that we were going to have one hell of a time figuring how to move around so that I could get out. The bath bomb had made things a tad slippery, you see. Finally, Fred told me that he could move to the side and kind of prop himself up while I got my feet under me. With visions of having to call the paramedics to rescue us dancing in our heads, he did so. "Careful!" he said repeatedly, worried that I was going to do damage to the family jewels. I flailed around, trying to get my slippery feet under me, the slipperiness of the tub not making it any too easy. His cries of "CAREFUL!" changed to "Hurry, I can’t hold this position much longer!", and then, just as my foot grazed his ass, just as I was about get my feet under me and triumphantly rise to a standing position, before I knew what was going on, I felt a violent chain of bubbles hit the top of my foot and at the same time Fred let out a gentle moan. As I drew in a breath to ask what was going on, a rancid stink drifted past my nose. He’d farted on my foot. The bastard. —–]]>

Shelley and her brother did when they were kids (I think it was Shelley…) Actually, I did go through a stage about five years back when I circled the shows I wanted to watch in the TV Guide. It’s no coincidence that that was back when I was still with the ex.]]>