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What happens in Vegas stays on the upholstery

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

One of the bad things about coming to Vegas for an IT conference is coming to Vegas for an IT conference. The last four times I’ve stayed in the same hotel as the conference, I tend not to leave the hotel. At all. In fact, for VMWorld, I literally walked into the Venetian on Sunday afternoon and didn’t leave its oxygenated environment until Friday morning when I left for the airport. I’m sure there’s some kind of cancer risk associated with that. It will likely involve cancer of the genitals somehow, because that’s how Vegas is.

Speaking of that, I still have work to do and my company is in Boston, which means that I crawl out of bed at 5:30 in the morning and log in and bounce emails around and in some cases, participate in mid-morning staff meetings before the sun has fully come up (that I know of, from looking out of windows at the outside). This morning, I was sitting at the little suite table, finishing an article and realized that I was sitting in my boxer shorts on an upholstered chair, which was WAY TOO MUCH SKIN for my comfort level.

I explained this to Esteban, who already knows of my disdain for hotel bedspreads and couches.

“It’s a chair! There’s not chair cooties,” he pffted.

“No, not chair cooties. Chair semen.”

“No one came on the chair!” he laughed.

“Oh, they have. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that people have sex on everything in hotels. I pretty much assume that there are guys who just whip it out and treat it like a fire hose.”

I wasn’t always so afflicted with this mind picture, but a few years ago, Jake and I had adjoining suites at the Wynn. The Wynn is fancy, yes? Super swanky! And these were not cheap rooms (ok, I didn’t pay that much for them, but I’m a hotel wheeler and dealer): They were strip facing, high floor rooms that had recently been refurbished and had  a beautiful view of the TI pirate wench show. And in Jake’s room, on the gorgeous cream-colored leather settee, there was a very obvious semen spray that was only visible when the light caught it at certain angles. You know, like white crayon on white paper?

If I’m knocked up in nine months, blame the boxer shorts/Venetian chair debacle.

Filed in Travel | | Comments (1)

Lost and found

Monday, December 3, 2012

Yesterday Esteban and I embarked upon our separate but equal trips to Las Vegas for a very neat adventure: the very same IT conference. It’s not often that our jobs have  the same venues but things melded this time (there was only one other time so far:last year’s VMworld). We work for two different companies: he works for a tech vendor and I’m a tech journalist, so you’d think there would be more opportunities but you’d be wrong. His flight left significantly earlier than mine, and he connect in DTW while I connected in MSP. As one would assume he arrived in LAS earlier so we wouldn’t meet up again until  I got to the hotel 12 hours later.

As such, I was somewhat cranky about the entire process, because usually he’s there to placate my Pre-trip anxiety but this time he was dealing with his own packing drama. For instance the dry cleaners seems to be slowly stealing our clothes as I swear we keep bringing in clothes and being told that there’s nothing to pick up. It’s a pretty good racket, actually, if there were a black market for very boring business wear and wool sweaters.

So I tried to not be cranky at the world and go with the flow.  My Pre-trip Anxiety was somewhat quelled in that the first two flights in my five flight week were upgraded (through my diligent working the frequent flier system, a fine racket that has even more dubious benefits than the used dry cleaning racket) so I really didn’t have to panic about being a Flier Who Is Of Size (seriously, that’s how the airlines refer to fat people. Ridonk.)

But my flight out of GRB was delayed and my luxurious layover in MSP was looking less Of Size by the minute. Then I got to watch my fellow travelers go into Meltdown Mode. People were filled with anxiety, stressed and each and very one of them was Very, Very Important. So I worked on work stuff and got more and more cranky and then finally got on the damned plane two hours later than planned, after being literally elbowed out of the way so that two of my fellow forward cabin mates could get onto the plane before me. People, there were a total of 20 people on the whole plane that seated probably 100 — it’s not like overhead storage space was in high demand.  The delay and the assholes in first totally destroyed what little calm I had retained after my TSA opt out pat down.

I should also mention that I’m t-minus fifteen seconds from my Princess Time, so my lower back is killing me, I have a low level headache all the time and would much rather sit on the couch with a heating pad, a bucket of chocolate frosting and some pretzels to use as frosting delivery devices than live the not-so-glamourous life of the jetset elite.

So it was in that frame of mind that I was schlepping my carry on suitcase, my 23 lb laptop and my sleep snorkel through MSP. And I trusted the signs that indicated that F concourse could not be reached by theC concourse tram and I’d have to walk the entirety of the frisking C concourse (the sign is a fucking asshole) and the main terminal and then all of the F concourse. And after about ten minutes of solid walking, I looked down and realized that my travel pashmina was missing.

So, it’s stupid, but I have a system when I travel, and one of the important parts of that system is a $25 black pashmina that I got on eBay years and years ago. It claims on the tag that it’s 100% cashmere but like the MSP tram, I suspect the label is not entirely acting in good faith. But I still love that thing. I use it as an extra beefy scarf all winter and then always stow it into my laptop bag before I take off. I must have at least 100,000 frequent flier miles of its own. I use it as a scarf, a pillow, a blanket and a sleep mask. It’s been like a travel pet, plus it keeps my neck warm. I propose that one is only as warm as one’s neck. (Discuss in the comments)

I looked down the concourse. I didn’t see it and I didn’t really feel like I could backtrack for it and remain sane. My back was killing me and I was in hate with humanity (Scientific fact: people act extra dumb in airports). And let’s face it, for a cheap pashmina, it had served a long tenure. Plus Esteban has been asking for Xmas ideas so I would add a travel pashmina to my list.

I kept walking. I had gone probably another 200 yards when I happened to look behind me and see an older man running like crazy down the moving sidewalk. I wasn’t going to think anything of it bit he seemed to have me in his sights rather than some gate off in the distance. And in his hand was something black.

I walked backwards off the moving sidewalk (which…yeah, that’s going to end up on YouTube) and met him between two moving sidewalk junctures, as though we were in a romantic comedy and I was Rachel McAdams and he was Ryan Gosling, instead of two much less attractive middle-aged people.

“Is that my scarf?” I said, not really believing that he was running to catch me. He was another passenger, not even an MSP employee, and he was schlepping his own giant laptop backpack.

“We were sitting back there and we saw you look down and we saw the look on your face and we knew you must have lost something. Then we looked down the way and there it was, so we thought maybe it was what you lost.”

“Oh my god! Thank you so much! I was so sad,” I said, but he was out of breath so he just waved and turned around to walk back to his gate, 200 yards back. “Thank you! I mean it, that was so amazing!” I shouted again. He nodded, gave me the thumbs up and headed away.

This is where a homily would go, where I would attribute such extraordinary behavior to Minnesota nice or maybe the karma of walking the length of all the concourses returned in kind, but I’m not going to. Instead I’m just going to remember that people are still amazing and capable of surprising you, even if it’s just a middle aged out of shape guy willing to sprint on the chance that he could make someone’s day less of a bummer. I mean, it was such a little thing. The scarf means less than how hard he worked to get it to me.

He didn’t know me. He wasn’t looking for a reward. He just saw an opportunity to make the world better in just a small way. And he did.

And just like that, my internal grump demon was gone. Because of that guy. Because he reminded me that everyone is self-centered, not everyone is only looking out for themselves, and not everyone is an asshole. He reminded me that every one of us has the chance to make a difference in the world, every single day.

Thank you, guy.  Thank you for helping me remember that. I had forgotten, I think.

Filed in Being a Girl Is Hard, Bitchiness, Travel | | Comments (4)

A little drafty

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Something important happened last night.

I finished the first draft of my novel. Well, perhaps we shall say “finished” in that I got to the end and wrote the final scene, all as part of the NaNoWriMo push.

Long time readers may remember (and let’s face it, all this blog ever attracts are long time readers… hello! You are still very pretty) that I railed against NaNoWriMo in the past. I said that it was stupid to say “Go ahead and write something meaningless. We’ll call you a novelist!”  That it was akin to someone taking a three hour county extension class in anatomy and then calling themselves a brain surgeon. There was a high horse and I was steadfastly sitting upon it, holding a shield of self-righteousness and daring anyone to knock me off of it. And I even told actual NaNo staffers TO THEIR FACES that I thought the exercise was a ridiculous chase in vanity, as though the very act of writing was somehow a noble pursuit and that the important thing was that you tried. There may or may not have been a drunken crack about it being creative writing LARPing.

Oh yes, I went there.

The problem, dear long time reader (seriously, have you lost weight? Because baby, you’re looking fiiiiine) is that Esteban knows my weakness and is absolutely unafraid of calling me on my bullshit.

You see, last year HE decided that he was going to write a novel. During NaNoWriMo.

My husband. Who reads genre fiction for fun. FOR FUN. Like literature should be pleasurable or something. Gah.

“Go ahead! Enjoy that!” I scoffed, barely containing my derision. (Anyone who knows me knows that in fact, my derision is rarely contained. My derision was spilling out of cupboards and closets. My derision warehouse looks like an episode of Hoarders.)

“How’s it going to feel if your husband, who doesn’t even call himself a writer, has a 50,000 word novel draft and yours is sitting at…. what is it again?”

“Twenty-eight thousand.”

“Right, twenty-eight thousand words.”

“That’s a lot of words.”

“It IS! It is a lot of words.”

Then the fucker patted me on the head.

Oh, it was on. IT WAS SO ON. I started with a clean  document and continued the story from where I had left off, while Esteban started a new novel on an interesting idea he had. When November ended last year, we were both exhausted, somewhat resentful and each had fresh, unfiltered 50,000 word manuscripts that were only the tip of the iceberg for the plots we had laid out. I set forth with valiant ideas about how much editing and changing I would do, and then things happened, and I got distracted with short stories and writer’s conferences and a few fiction workshops and editing and real life too, and then viola, it was October. And it was time to talk about NaNoWriMo again.

I hoped he wouldn’t notice, quite honestly. But the man noticed. The man always notices.

“Are you going to do NaNo again?” he asked, like he wasn’t the master of my NaNo destiny.

“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.” I said.

“‘K, think about it. Because I have to finish mine, so I’m doing it.”

“Maybe I’ll just do a bunch of short stories. 50,000 works of short stories is a LOT of short stories, yes?” I asked hopefully.

“You know that’s not the point.” He said with what might have very well been a tad bit of derision.

“Or blog entries? 50K of blog entries?”

“Weet.”

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

As it turned out, I wasn’t thinking about timing and Weetacon’s fall event was scheduled over the first four days of November. So I started out in an absolutely hole. I hate being behind. I hate graphs that show me how much behind I actually am. I’m very metrics driven (hello Six Sigma, please exit my brain so that I have more room for all this derision lying around) and those status bars are cruel mistresses. I spent all of November in the hole, sometimes as much as nine thousand words behind. I wanted to quit several times, even telling him that I didn’t even want to BE a writer and that I should just stick with editing and pretending to be fancy and that I actually hate writing, god! He propped me back up and told me he believed in me, which is basically the worst thing a person who wants to quit can hear. We pushed through it, me with my big writer brain and Esteban, who was flying more or less on the seat of his pants. And last night, both of us finished our last scene and each have first drafts equalling more than 100,000 words.

I am completely aware of how amazing my husband is, by the way. That he would pound out 100,000 words doing something just to keep my competitive streak from being eaten by my apathy is just amazing. Truly amazing. He really is my best friend and, as it turns out, a pretty fucking awesome fiction writer. I absolutely believe that his book will be attractive to agents and publishers in his genre. It turns out that his 10,000 hours as a voracious reader turned him into one hell of a story teller. I can’t wait to read the entire thing.

And here’s where I have to apologize to the NaNoWriMo enthusiasts out there. I’m sorry that I am an asshole. I’m sorry that I mocked the effort of writing for the sake of writing. I’m sorry that I am a creative writing snob. Also, I’m sorry that you’re branded by the stereotype of people writing Twilight fan fiction, because yes of COURSE there should be 50,000 words of additional backstory on Jasper’s travels. Whoops, there I go being an asshole again. But seriously, it’s kind of awful and I realize now that I had such a wall built up about my work that I lashed out at people who managed to be more productive than I was. And honestly, that’s just some fucking weak shit. I’m pretty ashamed that I joined the cool kid mentality and pretended like there was some kind of difference between casual writers and writers with fancy pedigrees. As I’ve said before, the best writers aren’t always getting published, and the writers getting published aren’t always the best, they’re just the ones who did the work. So thank you, NaNoWriMo crew, for being the people who got me to do the work. I mean it.

As penance, I’m doing Holidailies this month. It will be my 31 lashes of blog posts, perhaps amounting to 31,000 words (this one is past 1000 already) to put my money where my mouth is. Or, you know, my typing.

Like starting NaNoWriMo in the hole, I’m kind of being an idiot about Holidailies too. Like Wendy MC, I too have a bunch of travel this month. Tomorrow I start on my 10K miles/4 time zones trips, which means I’m going to have to awaken the old Weetabix who found time to update no matter the time or the place. Well, I will write updates in airports, like a damned boss.

* Want a peek at my novel? The fantastic lit journal Paper Darts has published a snippet of my novel as flash fiction. I’m pretty honored to be in such great company with that journal and if you love really cool fiction that makes your stomach feel flippy as well as amazing illustrations, consider buying an issue or three for an early Christmas present.

Filed in Bitchiness, Esteban Is Awesome, Literary stuff | | Comments (7)

Slurm for all!

Tuesday, September 11, 2012
We went through an entire summer of experimenting with Sugar-Free Kool-Aid replacements.
Using the unsweetened stuff with Splenda was crazy. Splenda is light and fluffy, like Hollywood snow, and it doesn’t want to mix into our giant Kool-Aid pitcher. It refuses. It says “Unhand me, madam, I said good day!”and then makes a huge mess all over the counter. Plus, the taste is bizarre, like melted plastic covered in frosting. I don’t care for it one iota. I kind of managed to trick my tastebuds by blending it with a powdered agave (excuse me… “cactus sugar” which I got from the Asian grocery store downtown. The Asian grocery store is a place very dear to my heart.) but then Esteban pointed out that agave does have calories, and the powdered version is a little weird in that it kind of refused to blend. The man speaks the truth, because normally, you let the Kool-Aid hang out in the pitcher for a few hours and it kind of blooms and doesn’t need to be stirred but the weird yellow cactus sugar did not believe in mixing with the common solution and preferred to congregate in the bottom where it looked frighteningly like bug larva.
I gave up everything and started drinking iced tea, which I like unsweetened but Esteban feels tastes like potting soil water. He’s from the country, though, and they don’t believe in iced tea around here. It’s a fact. He turned to Mio beverage squirty stuff, except tended to just powersqueeze it into his glass of water, obtaining some kind of ultra-concentrated slightly opaque situation that similarly couldn’t be healthy. Yes, I’m aware how ridiculous it is to discuss the health implications of artificially sweetened and artificially colored ultra-concentrated bright red beverages of no actual organic origin.
When traditional Kool-Aid clearly wasn’t going to fly, we decided to debase ourselves with Crystal Light. I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of Crystal Light. Not only does it sound like a skinny stripper in a two dancer strip club, it also tastes watery to me most of the time. Like iced tea that got one too many ideas. Or maybe Kool-Aid that’s been stretched to pull some kind of fishes and loaves miracle. We tried some of the Crystal Light “mocktails” which I didn’t mind (the appletini one tastes like green Jolly Ranchers) but Esteban started calling “Slurm”.
As in, “Hey hon, can you refill my slurm? I’m parched.”
If given a choice between the names “Crystal Light” and “Slurm”, I concede that the stripper name is slightly more enticing.
I basically decided to just start drinking vodka throughout the day, because what other hope did I have? But then, our Targets upgraded to have quasi-grocery stores! And now I die happy because Target with quasi grocery means that I can get weird Archer Farm’s crap that I’ve never seen before.
So I was perusing (cashew/peanut butter! It is a thing! Thank you, Target gods, thank you!) the aisles and found an entire slew of fake Crystal Light from Market Pantry (Target’s store brand) and it was way cheaper than the appletini stuff, so I figured, eh, what the hell. Cherry lime? Sure. If Esteban’s going to call it Slurm, I might as well buy the cheap stuff.
Then the heavens opened up and there was much rejoicing. You guys, Market Pantry? Market Pantry fake sugar-free Kool-Aid pretty much saved summer. The cherry lime flavored stuff tastes like Sonic Cherry Limeades. I even could almost say that it’s tastier than real Kool-Aid’s Tropical Punch flavor. Plus, it’s cheaper than Kool-Aid was all the time. I no longer have to buy $90 worth of it from Amazon because the price is fairly consistent. Thank you, Target, thank you.
Sometimes clouds really do have a silver lining. It is a known fact.
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What not to drink

Friday, June 29, 2012

We all have some level of hypocrisy in our lives. Yes, you too. And while I will happily pay double for a gallon of organic skim milk and we wake up at dawn’s first light to trek down to the farmer’s market to buy locavore produce from people we know and trust, I have a shameful addiction that is counter to everything I hold dear.

We’re addicted to sugar-free Kool-Aid.

Long-time blog readers might remember how I fought with my addiction to Diet Coke in the early OO’s (oh, we were so naive back then, were we not?) and how I almost went into withdrawals craving the sparkly bubbly tingly fake substance with just one calorie not even one calorie per can. Well, let me tell you: I have about one Diet Coke a month at this point, and usually only when we are at a restaurant where their water tastes weird and their iced tea is pre-sweetened. However, between Esteban and myself, we drink about a gallon of sugar-free Kool-Aid per day.

YES. I know! You have no idea how much chagrin I have over this fact. I, who buys special eggs from the farmer’s market and sings praises to the chickens’ all natural diet and technicolor yolks rich with Omega-3, am basically a walking, talking bundle of artificial colors and sweeteners.

Look, I do enjoy iced tea a great deal, and there’s nothing wrong with straight water, but somehow I can hydrate better if my water is filled with chemicals that make it taste like the color red. It’s also a big face off to my hippy dippy childhood where we weren’t allowed anything that was mass produced, which of course makes me want it all the more. And I know that it’s garbage. I fully acknowledge that. The only marginal quality that this stuff has is that it’s filled with Vitamin C, and like, every other fake thing in the world. I get it, and yet, let me make another pitcher. I don’t smoke, but I get my chemical fix in the form of a giant smiling red pitcher who likes to break through brick walls. Ohhhhhhh yeah!

Also, I have a mental sickness. It’s ridiculous, but I won’t pay more than $X for certain things. It’s like my fragile little brain can only keep track of the price fluctuations on a certain number of consumer goods, so I won’t buy Special K for more than $1.50 a box and I won’t buy toothpaste unless it’s under a buck but if you asked me how much mozzarella cheese costs, I have no idea. A quarter? Fourteen dollars? I don’t know — I just need some cheese.

Yes, I am a sad and pathetic adult. I recognize this.

And I’m bringing this up because Kool-Aid is one of those things. I won’t pay more than $2.50 for a canister of 6 2-qt envelopes of sugar-free Kool-Aid. Mostly, that threshhold got stuck in my brain because in early 2010 Amazon had a deal where you could get 6 canisters of sugar-free Kool-Aid (or 36 2-qt envelopes) for $10. Yeah, I bought $30 of each flavor and we basically didn’t need to replenish our Kool-Aid stash for 8 months (which led to the unfortunate six week stretch in 2010 which I call “the days of purple” while we worked our way through the grapes).

Honestly, I don’t think I’m unreasonable. You can buy unsweetened packets of Kool-Aid in crazy flavors for like ten cents a packet. I recognize that whatever poison they use to sweeten the sugar-free Kool-Aid packets costs more than ten cents, and I’m willing to pay for some convenience, but seriously, it’s not worth five times the price of an unsweetened packet. It’s just not.

Because I’m insane frugal, I tend to demand our Kool-Aid purchases be made at the pain-in-the-ass warehouse-esque grocery store (the one with the ookie meat) where it’s only $2.29 per canister, and that’s cheaper than Mal-Wart. Since we only go to the pain-in-the-ass grocery store for a few items (our preferred brand of chopped garlic, salt and vinegar Dirty Chips, True North pistachio crackers) once every few months, we basically buy all the canisters they have of Kool-Aid (or whatever feels like a not-embarrassing amount. This is usually about 15-18 canisters, for the record, but varies on whether Esteban is feeling self-conscious about our other purchases that day.) The last trip, however, we didn’t have our usual friendly disagreement about which of the three sugar-free Kool-Aid flavors was supreme (Esteban falls soundly into the Grape camp, which I feel is an aberration of nature that will not be tolerated and also, it angries up my flutter tummy), because they only had my preferred flavor of Tropical Punch on the shelf. I puzzled over the missing other flavors, but Esteban pointed out that it was a mistake in my favor, so what did I care?

Did you hear that? In the background, John Williams is tapping his conductor’s wand and telling the brass section to flip to their “Foreboding music of doom” scores.

This month, both Esteban and I have been trading off trips: we both went to Indiana for my Writer Camp and an meeting of the Southern Ohio/Northern Kentucky Weetacon contingent (whut whut!), then he went off to Orlando and then I went off to San Francisco, both for Very Important work doings. When I got back from SF, we went grocery shopping and Esteban pointed out the sugar-free Kool-Aid, priced at an egregious $3.49 per canister. I turned up my nose and said that I’d trek out to the pain-in-the-ass grocery store on a Kool-Aid run. Which I did, only to find that all the Kool-Aid had been replaced by the far-inferior Crystal Light.

That’s when I learned that Kraft Foods has discontinued all sugar-free Kool-Aid from now until the end of time. No more sugar-free Kool-Aid singles. No more sugar-free Kool-Aid Knox blocks. No more sugar-free Kool-Aid happiness.

That’s it. Summer’s cancelled. Thanks a lot, Kraft Foods.

The good news is that you can still buy sugar-free Kool-Aid for the princely sum of $44 for 6 canisters on Amazon, or by the 2 qt. envelope over on eBay.  Or you could make your own sugar-free versions by taking the unsweetened packets and adding the fake sweetener of your choice to it, like you’re some kind of Martha Stewart or something. Or you could go the natural route and make unsweetened iced tea, giving up fakey fake chemicals for natural antioxidants and flavonoids. Like some kind of Whole Foods-loving punk or something.

Now it’s up to you. Hit me in the comments with your favorite hydration secrets. Share with me your low- and no-calorie summer beverages. Bonus points will go to people who suggest things with the least amount of work involved.

Triple bonus points will go to the person who sends me a giant box of sugar-free Kool-Aid in Tropical Punch flavor.

*The above photo has nothing to do with anything but I searched my computer for “punch” and apparently had tagged this photo from Weetacon 8 with “Punch and Janey Show” and it made me laugh. That’s Plain Jane and in reality I tower over her. Also, we’re just funning here, because I know she’d totally kick my ass in an actual fight.

 

 

Filed in Bloggy Goodness, Casa Bix, Product Reviews, Question | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (14)

A tale of three poops

Monday, June 11, 2012

I have been plagued with poopers this month.

So, somewhere in my neighborhood, there lives a crazy lady with a pet beagle. She’s crazy. I mean it. Crazy. Once, I was outside talking to Eric (my new brother-in-law!) and she was walking down the middle of all the front yards. Now, none of the houses on my street have sidewalks, but most people just walk in the street because it’s a pretty quiet street that’s only three blocks long. Crazy lady? She was tromping down the lawns halfway between the road and the street, with her beagle doing its AAARROOO ARROOOO and pulling at the end of her leash. She was being dragged along and was talking on her cell phone, so we didn’t say anything, but as she passed us, we couldn’t help but notice that the woman’s ass was hanging out. No, not “you wear your pants too low and I see a whale tale” but rather, her sweatpants had fallen down below her ass cheeks and she either hadn’t noticed the cool breeze on her behind or she didn’t want to stop talking on her cell phone long enough to hike up her drawers.

Ever since Crazy Beagle Lady: The Assening, I’ve been giving her the side eye. I mean, she never carries a bag, and second, she always tromps across the yards. How can that not be suspect, I ask you. Also, her beagle takes a SPECIAL INTEREST in our yard. I’m not surprised about this: not only do we live on the corner, we have a fire hydrant, so it is the preferred pee spot for many a neighborhood dog. What’s more, it is the pug’s own personal lavatory, so it’s probably chock full of interesting smells.

So when Avi discovered Stranger Danger poops in the yard, my spidey sense screamed Crazy Beagle Lady. I mean, come on, right?

Esteban told me that I was being unfair to the neighborhood eccentrics and that in general, I’m too quick to judge. This is absolutely true. I’m all about the judging. But it did not change the fact that the Stranger Dangers were of the size and consistency of a beagle perpetrator.

Yeah, that’s right, I’m now dog poop CSI. Gladys Kravitz had nothing on me, baby.

Then, a week or so ago, I was working in my office and heard the very unique AAAAARRRROOOO coming. I watched Crazy Beagle Lady walk through our side yard, letting her beagle do the very obvious “I’m going to poop” sniff. Aha! I thought. I will catch the dirty pooper in the act.

This is where it becomes clear that I’ve had a mental breakdown — I got up from my desk and I went from window to window, tracking her until they disappeared behind our garage. I decided I was being insane, so I was just about to sit down when they reappeared in our front yard, right in front of the open screen door. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to watch the action unfold from the hallway, would it? No, not at all, said the Greek chorus inside my head, forsooth she is the stealth pooper.

I waited to see if my suspicions were correct, and sure enough, that beagle started the hunched posture that indicates that poop is imminent. She stood there, empty-handed, let the dog finish poop-walking (apparently it was a walking pooper, a technique favored for maximum poop dispersement) and then started off down the street. See? I was fucking right! VINDICATED!

“Crazy Beagle Lady just let her dog shit in our yard and didn’t pick it up!” I tattled to Esteban, who always keeps his windows drawn in his badger cave office.

“Did you stop her?” He asked, incredulous.

“No?” I hadn’t realized it was even an option. I was so full of self-righteous excitement that I had basically planned on stewing in my justified side eye for the entire afternoon. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of a confrontation. I hate confrontation! I’d much rather just cultivate a simmering dislike from afar.

“Go tell her to pick it up!” he said, and turned back to his computer. Easy for him to say. He talks to our neighbors. I wouldn’t even know their names if he didn’t tell me what they were. They would all just be called things like Hippy Tribe and Racist Old Creeper and The Clampets.

Before I could chicken out, I went to the front door and shouted “Hey, are you going to pick that up?”

She stopped, shocked that anyone was home during the day. “Oh, hi. I always forget to bring a bag, so I memorize where we stop and then come back later.” Sure you do. Because I’ve worked at home for 18 months and I’ve never once seen Crazy Beagle Lady without her dog or holding a poop bag.

“I’ll give you a bag.”

“No, it’s ok. I live just over there. I can come back.”

“Let me give you a few bags so you don’t have to come back.” Translation: please never come back.

I gave her a bunch of plastic grocery bags from our ancient stash (seriously, we’ve been using cloth bags for years and we still can’t get through our cache of plastic bags. I think they’re multiplying) and she made an awkward attempt at picking up after her dog. Her distaste and general ineptness for the task were betraying her that this was not standard operating procedure.

After she left, I realized that I had just signed us up for guaranteed Stranger Danger beagle poops from this point forward. Then I pushed it out of my mind as further damning of humanity, which I really have to stop doing. I should mention that I’m absolutely fine with people letting their dogs poop in our yard. Poop happens. Just pick the shit up. That’s all I ask. Pick up after your dog, because they don’t have thumbs and you do.

The next day, I was dropping Avi off at her doggy daycare.

(For some reason, the doggy daycare dropoff always irritates me. Something about the way people park their cars that sets it off. There’s an overhang drive through and you can fit four cars by the door, or as few as one car if they centered it under the canopy and then left their freaking driver door open when they go into the building (which has happened more times than I care to think about). When it rains, it’s especially bad, as people park their car square under the canopy, basically ensuring that the next person has to park completely out in the rain, because god forbid the front of their car gets wet or they leave space so that people can get to the door without walking in the rain. And yes, this is why I need to stop damning humanity, because shit like this makes me angry.)

So, someone had parked their car in an inconsiderate manner and was walking her poodle into the doors. It was a nice day, though, so I  pushed back my inner hatred monologue and got Avi from her car seat in the back (yes, I know how ridiculous we are) and brought her into the first set of doors. The lady with the poodle was still standing there, coaxing her dog into the doors. This is not unusual, since the daycare is also a grooming place and sometimes dogs are having none of it. Then the smell hit me: the dog was shitting on the carpeting in the vestibule while she held the door open. You guys, she was literally a foot from the outside. Anyone who has a dog should have an inkling that their dog is about to take a dump, or at very least, react in a timely manner by scooping the dog up and taking the dog outside to finish. Not this lady. She stood there, saying “Come on” to the dog while it pinched off a loaf on the rug in the vestibule. Avi, of course, was all “What the hell is going on? I need to sniff this immediately, as this seems to be alien poop” as dogs tend to do.

I pulled my dog back and tried to step around the steaming pile, but the lady sees this and pulls her dog through the second doors into the daycare, letting the door she had been holding start to swing closed.

Over the pile of shit on the carpet.

It started to draw a big smear arc of fresh dog offal across the floor. I caught it and then was trapped there, holding the shit-covered door in one hand and trying to keep my dog from inspecting the crime scene. Meanwhile, the lady went into the daycare and instead of asking for some paper towel or apologizing to the poor, underpaid daycare folks, she just stood there, talking to her dog, leaving the pile of her dog’s crap in the middle of the entryway.

I am not making that up.

I am really trying not to be a bad person inside my head, but I’m pretty sure that things like this are how super villains are created. This might just be my origin story. God help asshole pet owners when I come up with my plan for world domination because you know that they are going to be the first up against the wall.

Then, just this morning, as I was taking our our recycling, Crazy Beagle Lady was walking her dog. She waved and me and I thought “Oh come on, let’s not turn this into a wacky friendship with the amusing story we will tell our friends at cocktail parties, because the friends will be imaginary and the cocktails will be our hands cupped around air that we will occasionally bring to our mouths as if to sip.” I smiled an uptight, white lady smile and waved. She waved back and continued on her way.

Then just an hour ago, I heard the telltale sound of a beagle walking down the street. I looked up. This time it was her friends walking the dog, friends who are similarly crazy and disheveled and similarly tromp across the lawns far closer to the houses than most prudent people would walk. I sighed and watched them watch the beagle shit in our side yard and then they walked away. I went to the front door and said “Hi, could you please pick up after that dog?”

And they shouted back something unintelligible and then kept walking.

I shouted “Do you need a bag? I can get you a bag!”

They shouted back something even more unintelligible and continued walking like total fuckers.

So…yeah. Come on down to Casa Bix, as it is now Ground Zero for poop free for all.

Prediction: The dog days of August will soon have a new meaning.

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Hold the bacon

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Working from home, we’ve been cooking a lot more over this last year. It’s just so much easier to start dinner going in the late afternoon — get the skirt steak marinating, start browning up some mushrooms– than when you are stuck in a cubicle across town, obvs. In 2011, we dramatically reduced our restaurant meals and burned through our home cooking repertoire in the process. Not that I don’t still roll my eyes in ecstasy for Esteban’s spaghetti sauce, but the man doesn’t want to make it once a week (which is what I would like, because HOT DAMN). This means digging out the cookbooks, trolling the food blogs and haunting Pinterest like the freaking Grey Lady.

For Christmas, my bff Jake gave me the Momofuku cookbook. I’m a super fan of pork buns, you see, and Momofuku has reportedly one of the finest pork buns in all the land. I inhaled the book over the Christmas downtime and zeroed in on the entire pork ouevre. The Momofuku pork buns required quite a bit of prep, including procuring a slab of pork belly. Green Bay, as you know, is not exactly the hot bed of culinary trends, so in order to get pork belly, I had to special order it from the good meat place, and basically tell them that when they got fresh pork belly, they needed to save me a slab and DON’T turn it into bacon. The good ladies at the good meat place were confused and asked me repeatedly “You don’t want it like bacon, right? Slab of bacon? No?”  No! Pork belly! After explaining that I wanted it uncut but I wanted the skin taken off, I had completed the ishy details of the entire endeavor. I was bolstered with Top Chef fantasies that Collichio was going to taste my amazing pork belly and say “Bix, you are the winner of a weekend for two in Aspen.” Or at very least the pie showdown in Celebration, Florida, because let’s be honest here — a weekend of nonstop pie action? That I won, so I kind of had to go to? Yes please.

It took two days to get the call from the good meat place, and another two days for me to have time to create the rub and slow roast the beast. So that was the weekend of New Year’s, when I opened the vac-packed giant slab of pork belly and started getting to work with the rub. Except… what’s this?

There was a nub. A fleshy white fat nub of cartilage there on the fat layer of the pork belly. Weird, I thought. Well, I wasn’t going to actually use the fat layer anyway once it was cooked, so no big deal. Then I spotted another one. And then another one. And then a fourth.

And then I realized that they were all in a straight line.

You guys, it was the pig’s nipples.

The pig’s nipples.

Nipples.

To my credit, I braved the horror movie music that was playing in the background and sliced off the strip that contained the ROW OF NIPPLES, but then felt guilty about being so squeamish and tucked it into the roasting pan anyway. Then I cooked the fucker at 250 degrees all the blessed day, every minute getting more and more disgusted by the smells permeating the house. The smells of roasting nipples.

When it was finished, I dutifully drained the fat and saved it in a jar, as David Chang had assured me it would be great for all kinds of things. And I tried a tiny piece of the non-nippular area of the pork belly. Cognitively, I knew that it was delicious. That if I had a time machine, I could go back to earlier in 2011 and I would have raved about the meat bacon melty magic in my mouth. But outside of my brain, my entire being was saying one word and that word was “NO!”

I haven’t eaten pork since the Nipple Incident. Needless to say, I didn’t make pork buns and ended up tossing the entire mess, including that jar of NIPPLE FAT that David Chang said would be great for frying eggs and maybe other nipple-worthy fare. I don’t even know why the nipple thing bugged me so much. It’s not that I don’t know that pigs have nipples. It’s not even that I haven’t eaten even more disgusting things than that (Cock’s comb, much? Cow’s thalamus gland? Freaking brain cheese? Guilty as charged.) It was just an impression, a visceral reaction that I can’t get past. It’s been five months. I don’t miss it in the slightest. I do miss the easiness of cooking. I can’t make things that call for proscuitto or pancetta, for instance, and we have cut down on doing take out ribs (although I find that brisket is a more-than-adequate substitution for any pork BBQ). And when we do go to restaurants, ordering is a bit more difficult because people want to put bacon in pretty much everything. (PS. Chili doesn’t need bacon! Just let chili be chili, damn it!)

Unlike the vegetarians who are vegetarian except for bacon, I have no pork cravings whatsoever. Esteban assures me that I’ll eat pork again, but it is starting to feel like it’s a prayer against my porkless future. This does remind me of when I was a vegetarian during my twenties. It didn’t happen because of moral or ethics, or even the ecological implications of eating meat– it was all because of a natural aversion. Meat stopped smelling delicious and started smelling ooky.

I still eat other things with nipples, though, like the aforementioned beef. I’m cool with lamb. It’s just the pork thing.

Apparently nipples are a game changer. Remember that in your future dealings with nipples. You’ve been warned.

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Wendy Bix reviews the IGIGI Tatiana dress (and a giveaway!)

Friday, April 27, 2012

 

This past Weetacon, we were given another chance to try out some IGIGI fashions. We had a little fashion show and there was much squealing and delight… and that was just in my living room when Suzanna and I were unwrapping all the dresses before the weekend. Seriously, though, the IGIGI fashion event is always well-received by the Weetacon audience, many of whom run home and tell their bffs about the amazing quality plus-size fashion they saw strut down the improvised runway of the Waterford room. Of course, having the designs modeled by our lovely ladies of Weetacon doesn’t hurt IGIGI either. They are certainly savvy, those IGIGI ladies.

I was given the opportunity to try out the Tatiana dress. It’s one of those stretchy, flowy designs that I LOVE from Yuliya Raquel. You know, the kind with amazing prints and a lining that allows the fabric to kind of drape over everything in the whole Grecian goddess way. These dresses are kind of Barbara Walters fuzzy lighting for your least favorite body bits. And it’s got my favorite thing in the world going for it: it’s impossible to wrinkle. You see,  I travel. I travel a LOT, and with tight business trips, I almost never check a bag, which means that all of my stuff must fit into a miniscule bag that fits snuggly in an overhead bin. I suspect I could shove this dress into the bottom of my laptop bag, shake it out and it would still look perfect for dinner, drinks and dancing into the wee hours of the night. Plus, the neckline is low enough to keep things intriguing but not so low that you’re going to be called down to HR, you know?

Also, brace yourselves for what I’m about to say: the Tatiana dress has pockets. OH YES. POCKETS. Pockets that somehow lay on either side but add zero volume to your hips. How does IGIGI accomplish this? I don’t know, it’s a mystery. A mystery that I adore. And there’s a long sash! Super long, that you could either wrap around yourself twice and have a nice bow, or go for the long low drama with dangling tails. Or not wear it at all, like our friend the model did on the left. Isn’t she pretty? I wish my bangs looked that good.

I do know that I’m extremely fortunate that I got hooked on IGIGI a million years ago, so my closet is seriously stuffed with Yuliya’s designs, but it’s an addiction that feeds my joie de vivre. I could literally go on a series of twelve job interviews and never repeat a design. I know that many plus size sisters break into a sweat when they have a wedding coming up, or a formal dinner or a cruise, but once you go IGIGI you’ll never worry again. It won’t be that sick feeling of dread where you’re thinking  “What can I wear?” but instead a feeling of delight, thinking “Oh my gosh, how will I pick?” And that right there is worth it.

We’re giving away more than $1000 in IGIGI fashion!

I want you to experience some of that joy for yourself. If you’re a plus size lady and you haven’t tried IGIGI, if you have a few key pieces or if you are an IGIGI hoarder like I am, IGIGI and Weetacon wants to give you the gift of fashion. Here’s the deal: Go shopping on the IGIGI website right now and pick out a garment that you’d like to have. Then come back here and leave a comment and tell me what you want and where you see yourself wearing said garment. IGIGI is going to give one commenter a $50 gift certificate to spend on anything on the IGIGI site (yes, including sales and clearance!). It’s just that easy.

But wait! There’s more! You have more than a dozen opportunities to win $50 IGIGI gift certificates!  Just go check out the other participants in the Weetacon 2012  fashion show and leave comments on their reviews too. It’s just that easy. No catch. Just fun and fashion.

The fine print: Participants must fulfill all requirements of the contest to win. Only the first comment from any one commenter will be counted. Individuals may win multiple $50 gift certificates in the Weetacon IGIGI giveway. Comments must be received by May 15 at midnight. Reviewers received products in exchange for honest reviews but IGIGI has no input on what goes into our descriptions nor do they have any ability to edit or alter our views. All opinions are that of the author(s) of the reviews. Did you really read this far? If so, I love you more than every other reader out there. However, that love will not influence your ability to win the gift certificates, however I will definitely tell you that you are very very pretty. And you are.

 

 

No, I’m not wearing white tights. Those are my actual legs. Yeah, I really am that pale. Do not be concerned. Go look at the other photos where the sun was setting on my Victorian pallor and we can all pretend I have some melanin. Now leave some comments or the pug will be very very sad.

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I’m a unicorn no longer

Thursday, December 29, 2011

After much ado, Hodor has left the building.

Hodor is the name that Jane gave to my evil twin lump in my noggin. It was a pretty good name and also, I am likewise reading A Game of Thrones and found it funny. And also, my lump would frequently shout “HODOR!” by means of giving me a low throbbing skull ache.

I went in to have Hodor removed and my adorable doctor took one look at Hodor and said “Yeah….. I’m not touching that. You need to have that done by a specialist and shit.” She didn’t say shit. It is authorial intrusion. Forgive me. The evil twin makes me want to swear.

True fact: when you have an evil twin growing in your noggin, they send you to an Ear, Nose and Throat guy. For real! Even if the evil twin has nothing to do with an ear, a nose nor a throat.

I went to the ENT dude, who was, by the way, DELIGHTFUL, all expecting to be de-lumped that morning. However, so sadly, he looked at the lump and said “Uh… yeah….I’m not touching that in here. We need to have that done in a hospital and shit.” He might actually have said shit. I don’t recall because of all the brain juice being sucked up by my evil twin.

(It did actually occur to me that perhaps the evil twin was using some kind of telepathy to subtely change these doctors’ minds. It totally could happen!)

Because I thought I had an assload of travel coming up in January (actually, I’m still traveling in January, just not an assload), he offered to de-lump my skull on the very next day, which was a Saturday. Apparently with the holidays and everyone’s insurance being jacked up by the evil insurers (who may or may not have evil twins of their own), the specialists end up working every single weekend in December, removing polyps and nodes and nodules and creepy badness from the population. Who knew these people had such sucky Decembers? Yeah, I kind of feel bad for the medical staff under their own crushing insurance woes.

At this point, I really didn’t care what they had to do. My three month headache was about to turn into a four month headache and I was ready for it to be pretty much over. If he told me they couldn’t do it once I was in the hospital, I probably would have gone at it with a melon baller or something. Or for a holiday motif, I could try using an ice skate, like Tom Hanks did on his rotten tooth in Castaway.

On Saturday, Esteban decided to go brew beer at Scotty Boom Boom’s, and I was pretending to be tough and noble, so I told him it was fine and that I could drive myself. And truthfully, I was actually fine, until I walked in and saw the freaking operating room, complete with giant doughnut thing to hold my head still while they SLICED INTO IT LIKE A CANTALOUPE.

True fact: when an ENT is going to slice into your noodle, they wrap you up in a sheet and then clip it closed using giant binder clips so that you don’t freak out. Unless being basically confined in a straight jacket freaks you out, of course, and if so, you’re screwed.

The ENT staff were basically jovial and had a little comedy routine to distract me from their grisly task. The only part that really sucked was the Lidocaine, which I already know sucks and I already know that my body metabolizes it way faster than normal people and I need like four times more than most people. After it finally took hold, though, the entire thing was done in the matter of minutes. Best part? ENT dude said it was just small enough that he could perform the lumpectomy without shaving my hair off, and the stitches are all internal, so I don’t have to go back and have anyone poke Hodor’s old crib.

Afterwards, though, I got a little shaky and spazzy. I drove home in somewhat of a weird shock and then hated everything. I had to go out and run an errand and as I was backing my car out of the garage, I pulled out at a weird angle (or had parked at a weird angle) and managed to crack the passenger mirror on the garage door like a fucking female driver stereotype. Then I was pissed, sore AND a numbskull.*

I took pictures of Hodor, of course. It was FASCINATING. Even the doctor was impressed at how large it actually was, and after seeing the little bastard rolling around in the specimen cup, I’m surprised the headache wasn’t worse. It was an unbelievable thing to be trapped between a skull and a scalp. It was bigger around than a nickel, but it was spherical, so imagine something as big AND as round as a nickel. Also, it was surprisingly weighty.

You want to see the photo, don’t you? I knew you would.

I wanted to take it home with me, to float it in formaldehyde in a jar on my desk and point to it whenever I was at a loss for a particular word (I blame Hodor for all of those words that are on the tip of my tongue. Hodor took them and keeps them locked up in a box, only taking the words out on special occasions) but the medical people needed to medical stuff to it and make sure it wasn’t cancer.

True Fact: It wasn’t cancer.

If you like medical rubbernecking, read this: Hodor was probably caused by some violence done to my head when I was a teenager, which caused a tiny nip of skin to get tucked into itself/healed over and then the hair follicle of said skin nip then started growing bigger and juicier and then growing a conscience and then sentience until it became HODOR! and began punishing me with nonstop headaches. And for you, here’s a video (keep in mind that the camera is distorting my fingers to look bigger and Hodor looks smaller because its further away, but in reality it was probably about as big as my thumbnail.) If you want to read more about Hodor’s actual diagnosis, here’s the wiki on it.

Speaking of headaches, I had been hoping that my constant headache would go away the moment Hodor was ripped from my brain. Alas, it was not so. There was a ton of swelling and ache-y crap that I ended up plopping an ice pack on the back of my head and holding it there with a long towel most of the weekend, all the while putting up with the same damned Hodor headache I’d had all along.

BUT! About a week after the OR visit, I noticed that the headache was definitely subsiding. I still have a bit of one but my regular doctor said that there are probably a few toxins still hanging around in the general area and it might be as long as a month. However, given how much the headache has already gone away, I am pretty optimistic that my evil twin has done its last damage.

Esteban, however, postulated that perhaps Hodor wasn’t the evil twin. Perhaps it was the GOOD twin and now the evil twin is writing this here blog entry. Interesting concept. If so, I can only hope that Hodor was keeping me from becoming the evil genius that I was destined to become all along. They have the BEST secret lairs, after all, and also, I am quite looking forward to having henchmen.

Truthfully, I have some ambitious home improvement projects planned for 2012 and henchmen would really come in handy.

*That was actually one of the ENT doc’s OR jokes. A riot!

 

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I’m a unicorn

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Here’s a very true fact: our cat Jincy is the boss of all of us.

She’s the boss of me, she’s certainly the boss of Esteban and she’s even the boss of Avi. The pug weighs twice what the cat does, but you wouldn’t know it for the furious ass kickings that are doled out nightly in our den (aka The Thunderdome). What’s more, Jincy has decided that Avi’s nice big cushy dog bed is in fact the perfect place for a 10 pound grey and white cat. Please be aware, Jincy already has her own elevated kitty beds in my office, Esteban’s office (where there are TWO) and the den, as well as a super cushy smaller cat bed of her own. Not to mention that the entire loveseat in the living room is basically hers as well, as it is covered with Ikea sheepskins and one of my fleece hoodies that has also had the misfortune of being Jincy’s favored sleeping places. No. She also would like the pug’s giant bed, please and thank you.

It’s so sad: Avi will walk into the living room, spy the cat in the dog bed, and then sadly slump off to sit in the only cat bed that is pug-accessible. There, she spills over the side and crushes the top until she gets more or less comfortable and then sighs a giant world-weary breath and closes her eyes against the cruel world.

I realized that I’ve been doing that for the last year. The sighing, the making do, the tiny ridiculous attempts at getting comfortable.

I have a giant lump on my noggin. It’s not a tumor. It’s completely normal or normal for me or something. It might be something gross or it might be something even more gross or maybe it’s a vestigal horn or a third nipple or (here’s my hope) it might be an absorbed twin fetus (fingers crossed).

It was pea-sized since I was a teenager and was something I kind of lived with, but in the last year, it’s started hurting off and on. Then it started always pretty much being a low grade headache emanating from the lump. I mostly blew it off because I figured my life was a fucking mess with my grandmother’s illness and death (something, in retrospect, I have not been dealing with well) and why wouldn’t I have a stress headache pretty much all the time? Except that it just got worse and worse and then just when I thought I could deal, it got even worse. Incidentally, the lump is also in the same spot where my neck muscles always seize. Coincidence? It turns out maybe not, since the lump is apparently full of evil. That’s what my doctor said. She used the word “evil”. When I become a super villain, remember this absorbed twin fetus thing for my origin story.

I let Sarah feel it in October and she compared it to a malted milk ball. I let my sister feel it over the weekend and she pulled her hand away like it was going to bite her. It’s the lump that keeps on giving.

How long do you put up “wait and see” before you do something about it? Or is the twin inside my brain trying to chew its way out of my skull and maybe the neck pain is the little malformed feet kicking their way to the surface? Because if so, that’s going to be the fucking BEST story at parties.

Tomorrow, my head is getting cut open and my lump/twin fetus/devil horn is going to be cut off my skull. Just my luck, my super short haircut should show off the shaved section quite nicely for the holidays. Maybe I can ask the surgeon to use red and green stitches.

Unfortunately, there’s no similar hope for the pug.

 

PS. I updated to tell you this because I’m trying to be a better, more consistent blogger, especially now that the NaNo business is done. But you don’t have to comment to say anything about good wishes or hugs (or huggggsssss!!!!) or anything like that. I assume that you guys wish me well. I really just posted so that you could rubberneck my weird medical drama, quite honestly. Peace out!

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