In which I get my hair done! (On a Sunday! Because my stylist was working overtime since she’s going on vacation next week!)
For Christmas, Teh BF gave me a gift certificate with my hair stylist. I was all excited about it because not only is it an awesome gift for a boy to just think up all on his own (and he actually had to go in there and buy it, which to my mind is totally fucking amazing since I’ve never in my life dated anyone who could actually pull something like that off all by himself) but I thought it would actually help me get back in before I had two inches of roots.
Well, it didn’t. I’ve been meaning to call and make an appointment for about four weeks, and didn’t get around to it until Friday when I just could not stand the color of my hair for one more minute. She rushed me in because she knew how long it’s been and didn’t want me to wait until she got back from Hawaii and when I went in yesterday, it had been three and a half months since the last time I’d gotten my hair done. I had hella roots which is, as you know, quite unattractive.
And speaking of unattractive, this is what it looks like when you’re getting your hair highlighted and your eyebrows dyed all at the same time:
Eeek!
I actually scheduled my next appointment right then and there, though, so I’ll be back in time to just get a touch-up rather than an entire expensive foil. I feel like a genius.
You can see my awesome eyebrows here, if you’re so inclined.
In which I might start buying fabric and sewing it into clothing! Or… or not.
My clothes suck. They’re old, or weird and out of context, or cheesy because I bought them from Walmart. Add to this the fact that my body stopped being 25 fifteen years ago and is now oddly shaped, and the whole clothing thing is practically a crisis.
While I do know how to sew, I never really enjoyed it and I haven’t done very much of it. I used to prefer store-bought clothes because handmade clothes struck me (when I was a a kid) as being dowdy and poor-looking, and I’ve always been secretly stuck-up in my own dirty, messy way.
Recently, though, I realized that my favorite items of clothing are not just dresses: they’re unique, one-of-a-kind handmade dresses. All of them.
The last thing I made was a bridesmaid’s dress for a marriage that is already defunct. It–the dress, not the marriage–was an eggplant purple six-panel floor length gown with spaghetti straps and diaphanous off-the-shoulder butterfly sleeves.
I snipped the sleeves off and I still wear the dress sometimes, under a t-shirt, as a skirt. The bride’s mother had promised to do all the hems and didn’t have time to finish before the ceremony, so my hem was tacked up with iron-on facing on the floor in the chapel and I barely had it back on my body before I had to find my place for the processional. The polyester lining in the bodice was once tacked down by hand but has since broken loose and floats around in there with my girls and is generally very plastic and very irritating. I should throw the damned thing out, but it’s EGGPLANT PURPLE and FLOOR LENGTH and has a REALLY KILLER SPIN and I MADE IT. I think I once intended to fix the hem and chop off the bodice and turn it into a proper skirt, but that’s never happened.
Anyway! Last week I spent four entire hours surfing for handmade clothing on Etsy (where I bought a dress, a hoodie, and two demi hoodies) and as I looked through hundreds of hand-made knit items of clothing I kept thinking, “Well, that’s super cute! But pretty expensive. But cute! Hmm. It totally wouldn’t be that hard to make… if a person owned a serger. Which I don’t. But I do know how to make a French seam…”
Since then I’ve been thinking about designing myself some custom clothes. I’d have to buy fabric and set up the machine aunt Sue left at the house last fall when she upgraded her own machine, and cut things out and pin them together and actually sew them up… but I could probably manage to do that, for a cute dress or top or pair of leggings or three.
I’ve discovered that cheap sergers can be had online for about $150. Seriously, I almost bought one last week – even though I haven’t sewn a single stitch in at least a decade – but I decided I’d have to actually produce and wear several items the hard way before buying myself a piece of equipment.
Most of my ideas involve knits. I’m a knitter, and knit is really comfortable to wear and live in. (Am I the only one who’s noticed that the 40-somethings are the ones wearing all the ugly knit track and lounge clothes? It must have something to do with the way your body feels when you’re this age – you suddenly can’t stand things that bind, so you buy what’s comfortable… and sadly what’s comfortable is fugly knit separates from Walmart. I definitely like to be comfortable, it’s just that I don’t want to be caught dead in a fucking knit pantsuit.)
I really adore a lot of the stuff I’ve seen here, here, and here and I have a lot of ideas for clothes along similar lines. (Actually, if I were being honest I wouldn’t call them ‘ideas’ so much as the ‘blatant theft of designs I’ve seen on Etsy.’) Several of the items I’d like to add to my wardrobe are just too expensive to buy (like this $400 dress and wrap combo I’m totally lusting over – OMG I would wear the holy living shit out of that little number). I understand the pricing completely – when you factor in your labor and your materials and your design time, that’s just how much it costs to produce a handmade item – but I’m just not spending two hundred bucks on a knit dress no matter how incredibly adorable it is.
With both avarice and poverty spurring me on, it occurs to me that I could easily take my favorite knit shirt, draw a pattern from it, add a 4-panel floor length skirt and a loose cowl, and turn it into a reasonable facsimile of the dress I’m in love with. And if that works out, I could probably come up with some kind of cute wrap for texture and pockets and to slightly disguise my pudge. And from there it shouldn’t be too hard to make a couple of pairs of pants and a few tops and some fun layering items.
I could do it for far less than I could buy it for on Etsy and I’ll never find a similar item in a store, not ever. And, most importantly, it would keep me from buying any more awful knitwear from fucking Walmart because I have no clothes that aren’t old, weird and out of context, or cheesy.
Meanwhile, I haven’t done any knitting in months and the only cooking I do is to fill my lunch box. So yeah, I could totally use a new hobby, yeah.
In which that’s Valentine’s Day, not ‘venereal disease.’ Sheesh!
Friday night, Teh BF and I went out for Mexican food and Becca dropped by and ate with us. Then we went to our separate homes to sleep; me because I had chores to do the next day, and him because he works on Saturdays.
Saturday, I cleaned the bathroom. My aunt & uncle arrived.
Saturday night, my BF took me out for sushi! It was really, really yummy.
Afterward, we crashed at his place but since we were both in Combat Sleeper mode it wasn’t the blissful night’s sleep we usually enjoy together. (He even bailed and slept on the couch for a few hours.) There was a lot of flailing and snoring and we both had bad dreams. Weird, huh?
Sunday, we went to my house where all the local relatives – two more aunt & uncle sets, plus some cousins – descended upon the house and we all had Christmas in February.
And pizza! And I got a killer fleece bathrobe!
I made this cheesy video for my mom, because she lives in Wyoming or something and rarely gets to attend family events, and my brother made this one. Yes, I have a big awesome noisy awesome family!
Sunday night, Teh BF and I went over to my (local) aunt & uncle’s house and had dinner and played pinochle. My uncle and I kicked their asses! And I got leftovers out of the deal, which I used for my lunch today:
Overall, it was a lovely weekend. I love it when my family gets together, even if they are loud and exhausting! Conclusion: Christmas in February = bathrobes and pasta.
In which I contemplate how stupid I am. And then we talk about clothes!
I got wasted on my 21st birthday, of course, but I did very little drinking back then. I started drinking regularly in my late 20’s when I lived in Iowa, mostly because there’s nothing else to do when you live in a fly-over state.
The first year after I left my husband, I drank a lot. It was intentional; I wasted a year being a stupid lump because I needed to.
But now I’m stable. I have a job, a home, and friends. I also have a shitty habit of drinking from two to five cocktails every single fucking day whether I want them or not.
I abstain maybe two or three days per month, which is pathetic. Clearly I’m drinking too much – pouring nearly a fifth of vodka through my liver each week, and I’ve been doing so for the past eight or nine months.
When I wake up pissed off and groggy in the morning and remember that I had three or four drinks the night before, I resolve that today I’m going to give it a rest. But then I work all day, and when quitting time rolls around it just seems like a really swell idea to have an after-work cocktail. Or two. Or three.
I have a few on Saturday nights after Teh BF gets off work, too. And we often have a couple on Sunday afternoons before I go home. Just because we can, and we’re in the habit of doing so.
This is fucking ridiculous.
Exacerbating my drinking problem is the fact that the bartenders at the PnE pour really, really, really heavy, and three drinks there is more like five or six.
And no one needs five shots of well vodka on a school night, not ever.
Alcohol is poisonous. It’s bad for heart health, it’s bad for mental health, and it’s a total waste of money. Plus my kidneys are going to fail if I don’t cut this shit out.
Turning into a drunk because you’re miserable and your life is fucked up is one thing; turning into a drunk because you’ve developed a habit of doing a particular behavior at certain times (“It’s eight-thirty so it must be time to drink” or “It’s Sunday afternoon so I should have a bloody mary”) is just stupid.
Oh, and there’s a history of alcoholism in my family, too.
So. Being that all these things are true, I’m boycotting booze. Starting right now. For at least two weeks. If I go out, I’ll have water or soda. If I stay in, I’ll have water or juice. I have never been a daily drinker, not even in the darkest depths of the post-marriage year, and this is not a habit I want to keep.
Not to mention that all of those empty calories are wreaking havoc on my pudge.
In other news, yesterday I spent my tax return (after dutifully observing Vuboq’s 2nd Annual 10% Refund Challenge) on some new clothes: I got this dress in chocolate, and this hoodie in midnight.
I already have the dress in a wacky bluebird color that totally doesn’t match anything else I own. I bought it about a year ago, and I wear the crap out of it because it’s soooo comfy and it just layers so well! And do you know what?
You: No, what!
Me: The maker said that I can send my old one in and she’ll freshen up the hem and the color for me! Can you beat that?
You: Um, no?
Me: No, no, you cannot beat that! Not even with a big stick!
In which WT flying F, people.
I was on the phone with this one guy for over twenty minutes verifying his wiring, and his DSL modem just would not train up. His connection had bounced about 25 times the day before and I figured it was either an improperly conditioned line or a bad DSL modem. So I let him go and got Qwest on live chat and asked them to check the circuit, and lo and behold the DSL came up and there were no errors on the line. None.
How did it suddenly come up? Probably that’s about when the customer went ahead and did what I’d asked him to do, which was make sure his damn modem was plugged into the damn wall jack… or maybe Qwest fixed something. Or maybe gnomes did it.
I called the customer back and we reconfigured his modem – he probably really had pressed the recessed Default button, even though he claimed he hadn’t when I asked him – and it authenticated and he was online and his email downloaded and it was like Christmas and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.
One of these three things is true:
1. The customer lied to me about his wiring configuration and fixed it after we got off the phone.
2. The Qwest tech fixed something and didn’t cop to it.
3. The DSL came up miraculously by itself in a totally unrelated way.
The weird part about my job? Is that I will never, ever know which.
It’s amazing I can even sleep at night. Srsly.
In other news, if you were losing sleep yourself wondering about the über-phallic banana keeper from last week’s bento explosion, it’s on the wall next to my desk:
Feel better now? I figured you would!
In which I am in total heaven because today I received THE BENTO BOMB!
This is what happened to me today (in pictures!):
I got a big giant huge massive collection of bento-junk goodness in the mail today!
Food! Bento accessories! And two new boxes!:
Now. How did this awesome explosion of straight-from-Japan bento lurve happen, you ask? Good question! I shall tell you!
Long story short:
I befriended someone on Flickr in one of the bento pools. She’s an ex-pat living in Japan, and as a NW girl she misses Tillamook cheese, among other things. So we arranged a swap!
I sent her a box of stuff (cheese, crackers, Neutrogena eye cream, flour tortillas, Mexican spices, stuff she can’t get easily over there) from my local grocery stores, and she sent me a box of stuff (the highly-anticipated BENTO EXPLOSION FROM HELL!!!) from her local stores. She put post-it notes on some of the items explaining what they were or giving useful translation details (like “not microwave safe” or “this is a giant Cheeto”). She also included a really cool tourist guide for Tokyo, and a lovely hand-written thank you note for the box I’d sent to her!
I’m so happy I could just pop!
I spent over forty dollars in shipping (cheese and tortillas are heavy!), BUT IT WAS SO. TOTALLY. WORTH IT.
In which I totally got some this weekend. Yum.
Saturday night we went out to the P ‘n’ E for dinner and drinks. We sat in the bar. Right before we were served our dinners, a dude walked up to the bar and ordered a double 151 and orange juice. The bartender – also our waitress – brought our food out a couple of minutes later. She sat next to me for a moment and whispered, “That dude? Is like walking liver failure! A double one-fifty-one? Am I even supposed to serve that?”
She went back to work. Not long after, the dude stood up and headed for the head. He got the hallway door open and then proceeded to fall down. Twice. Several kind and concerned patrons helped him to a table, where he nodded out for awhile.
The whole vibe was weird. People were trying to be helpful, but you never know. Was the dude shitfaced when he got there? Having a heart attack? Narcoleptic? Diabetic? What! You just don’t know, so the bar tender called an ambulance.
The EMTs checked the guy’s blood pressure and left. Apparently there were tracks on his arms, so maybe he’d just hit before walking in, and had failed to make it to the john before his nod came on. Who knows. All I know is that the whole episode made me unusually uncomfortable for some reason, and as soon as we were finished eating, we left.
Back at Teh BF’s house, we cuddled into the couch watched one of the best! episodes! of Doctor Who! of ALL TIME! (The penultimate episode of the fourth season rules, IMO. Everybody’s in it.)
When we went to bed, I got mercilessly ravished, for a really long time. Which will teach me to shave… more often. (Heh.)
Sunday I slept in in peace, then a cup of coffee was placed on the bedside table and I got a back rub. (True story. Man spoils me absolutely rotten.) Later we ran errands, stopping at Walmart and the Asia Oriental store for HABA and bento stuff, with a brief interlude at Ti Kalli – one restaurant that hasn’t closed this month – for lunch.
I absolutely love Mexican food, and I love being back in a town where there’s tons of it.
Then we watched the Super Bowl. I read the #superbowl hashtag on Twitter throughout the entire game – it was sort of like being at a huge online party, and it was a laff riot to boot. (I nearly fell off the couch when everyone started freaking out about Bruce teabagging the camera man, OMFG. So funny.)
After the game I got Teh BF take me to the grocery store for veggies, and then he dropped me off at home. I rescued my laundry from the basement, packed my lunch, and went to bed a little past midnight.
I so did not want to get up this morning. It was a really rough wake up for me, so I comforted myself with an awesome veggie omelet and a big mug of tea. Feeling better after that, I went to take a shower… and ran out of fucking hot water before I could condition my hair! GAH! (The side apartment shares the water heater with the house proper and there’s currently a couple with two kids stuffed in that tiny 1-bedroom over there.) (Come to think of it, I ran out of hot water last Monday morning, too, so apparently they both shower on Monday mornings.) Running out of hot water pisses me off, but it was ultimately good for me in the sense that I was ready with enough time to walk to work this morning instead of driving my brother’s truck.
I know, I know. This entry wasn’t worth the time it took to write it; I just wanted to gloat about the AWESOME NOOKIE, that’s all. Can you blame me?
In which I don’t talk about things because too many people I know IRL actually read goblinbox.
My posts have sucked for awhile because I have a lot to say that I can’t say (I’ve been writing awesome posts in my head, though!) on two topics in particular:
The first topic is work. I could go on and on and on about work, but since management reads the ‘box on occasion I’d probably get fired because you don’t talk about your company’s solvency on the Innartubez.
I have lots of backseat driver observations about how things are done that I could recount in acerbic, witty prose and we’d all enjoy my cleverness… but since I want to stay employed, I will recall to myself that I’m a drone and not a manager because I’m a drone and not a manager.
In a nutshell, though: the economy, it’s affecting our customer count. Which means I’m worried about my job security. And since we all are, I think it’s okay to say at least that on my blog and move on.
The second is the band. I could go on and on about how I ‘only turned down one lousy gig and haven’t been called back since!’ and how I’m all offended that I essentially got fired before I could quit, but the guys have been known to check in here and I don’t want to burn any bridges especially since I get the impression all I have to do is call the band leader and say I’m still interested. Can you say run-on sentence? I knew you could.
In other news, um… well, there is no other news. I’m not doing much lately. Haven’t even gotten my vacation schedule for the year figured out yet, but I’m certain it involves a visit to NYC! Oh, and I bought another bento box. Yes, yes, I know: I’m a freak! I’m sorry!
Oh, and the third is the relationship: I suspect it’s in bad taste to compare one relationship to another in public, so I haven’t gushed about how nice it is to be with someone who doesn’t {insert scathing complaint about ex here} and always manages to {insert cute thing current BF does here}. But trust me, there’s a lot of that going on in my head. Apparently, if you hook up with someone that likes you, they do shit like bring you coffee in bed in the morning, and they don’t think you owe them for it. It’s way cool.
In which I decide to honor my extroverted side’s need to be totally fucking antisocial.
Last week I had pretty rotten PMS. Emotionally I wasn’t all that much bitchier than usual, but I was as waterlogged as a long-dead corpse in a stagnant Midwestern pond and I decided to spend my weekend at home alone, where I couldn’t piss anyone off with my rotten, cranky attitude.
The Curse started Saturday morning and accordingly I spent all day in bed, except for a trip around the block with the dog and a brief dinner trip to Rosita’s for delicious chiles rellenos. I spent all day in bed Sunday, too, and never left the house once. Both days Teh BF dropped over briefly, but not long enough to piss me off.
I played with the Eee PC. A lot. I played with my new 20X External DVD Rewritable Drive w/Lightscribe, too, and my cell phone and my iThing. I watched Wall-E, the fourth Indiana Jones movie, the third Mummy movie, half of the X-Files movie, half of the Holy Grail, and about four episodes of Torchwood. I surfed for ebooks, yarn, and porn. I napped. I drank a latte. I finished Parable of the Sower and started Escapement.
It was lazy and decadent and, overall, just plain awesome.
I felt mildly sad leaving the house this morning, because it meant my weekend of self-imposed aloneness (which wasn’t all that alone, because G’ma was home and has no problems whatsoever just talking up the stairs at me) was over. But it was 11 degrees out even with the sun shining, and my sweet BF got up early on his day off just to drive me and the blue dog to work (I could have used the walk after all that lying around, but the dog probably would have gotten frostbite with her tiny little not-very-heeler feet) so that made me feel all special and loved and nice.
I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that perhaps a smidge of the sadness was actually at doing the right thing and leaving the beloved tiny notebook at home; I don’t really need to have it at work with me, but when I do I just can’t keep my hands off of it because it’s so hella adorable! and I don’t want to lose everyone’s permission to bring in their laptops occasionally by over-using the privilege.
Oh, yeah: in my defense, while I didn’t do laundry or get properly dressed or even bathe all weekend, I did clean the sink and toilet in the front bathroom. Poorly. But still! It’s something!
In which I get a third package.
This morning I received my 2Gb RAM stick and used my trusty BMI pocket knife to install it into the Eee notebook.
Yay!
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
