All My Little Words

032508 091

Originally uploaded by violetblack

Finally upgraded WP to support everything, including flickr blogging. Have no idea if it will make any difference in my life or not, but testing it out seemed in order anyway.

Just upgraded to a new v. of WP which supports iPhone. Testing.

This is it. THE END. The last Monday I am working, hopefully forever. After this it is three day weekends, FTW!!!
Top that off with this week being a big three day week, and I feel way better than I have for a while.

I updated my iPhone software to 3.0 yesterday, which is almost as good as having a new iPhone. Yeah, right, keep thinking that, right? Ha! Actually, about the only thing I feel like I am missing is the ability to make videos. Oh Wells!

I’ve also decided that Twitter is the only social networking site/application worth anything. Myspace and I had a good relationship while it lasted, and I still take a look around that ghost town about once a week, but everyone has abandoned it for Facebook.

I personally am kind of fucking sick of hearing about Facebook already, but I contemplated getting an account – for about five seconds. I mean, I actually went so far as to sign up, thinking that I would sign up as my dog, with his name, so if anyone from the past came sniffing around, I could remain anonymous. I figured it was pretty safe seeing as how you can’t “browse” from what I understand. The lack of “browsing” makes Facebook everything I don’t want in a social networking site. I met a shit ton of cool people on myspace, but Facebook seems to be something where you hang out online with people you already know IRL, or seek out people from your past. My past is my past for a reason. If it’s not in my present it’s because it shouldn’t be. So I thought, you know, I’d sign up with not my real name, and use my yahoo email, since I can get that anywhere, and I’ve only been using it a few years (unlike the email I’ve had for ten).

Which leads me to why Facebook can go suck it: How invasive could you possibly get???
Apparently, anyone who ever sent me an email at that email address or received one from me from that account is a potential “friend”. That means that there are ex-boyfriends and people I considered going on a date with for like, a second, that would log on to Facebook and Facebook would be all “HEY!!!! Guess what??? Remember that girl who decided she just wasn’t interested in dating you because you were too weird and blocked you from emailing her? Well, here she is! Stalk her some more!”

Because I swear in the two or so minutes that I had that account, I saw several people that seemed kinda familiar, and then I felt kind of nauseated when I realized who they were. I felt like I walked into a bar that only served guys who had hit on me in bars in the past. Or something like that. So. NO.

It’s just so funny, because everyone talks about Facebook like it is so much safer. Because it has privacy settings (so does Myspace), and because there is no browsing. At least if you are browsing, you have to make some effort to find someone. Facebook, was like “Look! a smorgasboard of people you cut out of your life because they were creeeeeepy! here’s every single one because I spidered your email account and found every trace of every email you’ve ever sent or received, and I found all the corresponding profiles, and here they are! I’ll be sure to notify all of them that yooouuuu’rrrreeee heeeeerrrreee!!!!”

*SHUDDER*

Twitter rules though. Hello, Iran, anyone? (Not like there is anything good about the situation in Iran right now, but it is amazing being able to read up to the minute reports on everything going on over there, rather than just what the media wants to show you)
Not to mention, I am fascinated by the aspect of getting little glimpses of the real lives of celebritites. And not just the ones People mag (or US or whatever) shoves down our throats week after week, but the ones who are interesting enough to have Twitter, and then pick and choose – who can really be funny or clever in 140 characters or less?

I find it amusing that there are “verified” celeb accounts though – it usually seems pretty obvious which ones aren’t real, and if it’s not, a simple check into who the account is following and being followed by will usually tell you everything you need to know.

#facebooksucksit, #twitterrulez, #3dayweekendforevs

Afternoon? Morning? It has been overcast for days now, which is pretty awesome if you ask me. Still warm, but without the sizzling feeling I get when the sun’s rays beat down upon my tender flesh. It makes everything from yard work to driving around in the car to do errands and whatnot just that much easier for me.

It is also cooler in general without being chilly at all as there is no wind. Not that I mind a nice breeze every now and then, but I’m kind of enjoying the oppressive stillness of it all.

Yesterday felt more like a real day off than any in a long time, probably because I didn’t do anything for work. By the time I’d gotten around to considering going to the bank, I’d accidentally left the checks at home after stopping in there.

I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning (YUCK), for which I waited what seemed like a long time, but ultimately, I was out of there earlier than I had thought I would be. I must say that having insurance is not making my life any easier at this point. When I did not have it, I qualified for state run programs which paid for everything. Yesterday, I had to pay $20 for a month of prescription pills (how fucking much is it for birth control without insurance?!? jeebus.), and because our deductible has not yet been met, I will get a bill sooner than later for the visit. Who knows how much that will be?

After all that, I had decided that I better get to Macy’s and use my gift card from Xmas finally. I had heard Macy’s was having a big sale, and sure enough they were, but I was not finding anything I would actually want for the sale prices they were charging. After a while, I found a new set of bathing suit bottoms for $20, and then went off to look for something to spend the rest of the card ($40) on. Unbelievably, I couldn’t even find a pair of shoes that I liked. I mean, I saw a few pairs that were okay, but most of those were not anything I’d get much wear out of (Jessica Simpson pumps, anyone?).
I finally headed over to the purse department, and after just a few minutes I saw a bag that for some completely inexplicable reason, I really liked. Even it’s sale price (which was actually indiscernible, due to the fact that some things were already marked down, and others the discount was taken at the register) seemed a bit much, and it is truly impractical (white!). I wandered around, looking at what must have been every bag they had, and not a single other one did a damn thing for me. So I went back and looked again, and decided that even if it was the most expensive price, I might as well still get it, as the card was paying for most of it still. But, I carried it around for like, another half an hour, just to make sure. I was, and when I got to the register, i was pleased to discover that I was only going to paying for $26+tax for both items.

While I was at the mall, I decided I might as well got lunch and stop into the Payless to look at cheap shoes. On the way, I couldn’t help but stop into the Wet Seal (in the 80’s, I wanted Northgate to have one of those so badly) I only ended up getting few things – who can pass up 5 t-shirts or tanktops 20??? and $3 sunglasses????
My lunch was horrid – who would think you could go wrong with Taco Time? Well, you can. Blech. There were no shoes to be had at Payless, I only found one pair I liked, and they were $26. At Payless??? And they weren’t even the American Eagle shoes I love so much.

The rest of the day involved grocery shopping, lots of food prep, and quite a bit of Twitter, thanks to the Iran election. Bity came by to give me tiny basil plants, and Jaxon showed up a few minutes before her (she walked, he drove!) to talk about the cafe he wants to open. I would be soooooo happy if that happened right next door to work.

We had already been out ofr our evening walk (30 minutes per night), and after that I got in a whole episode of Breaking Bad before I was tired enough to actually want to go to bed.

Speaking of Twitter, if you have it, here’s how you can help the protesters in Iran.
I figure it’s the least we can do. I’d want free people to do the same for me.

It’s a slow day at work today, which is fine by me, as it just reaffirms that dropping Mondays is a good decision. Only two more to go after today. I can’t wait.

Alex has been tearing up the back yard to regrade and add french drains (or french trenches, as I have recently begun calling them, thanks to a previous owner of the house).
As he removes grass, he keeps finding things – a patio/walkway made of pavers and bricks, sort of randomly selected, it seems, and today, a garden hoe or shovel of some sort. I think I’ll hang that on the fence somewhere, and hopefully, we’ll find some other interesting stuff.
As soon as the grass is gone, we get to get a Ditch Witch (or Trench Wench, whatever you wanna call it) to dig the drains.

I had to move a bunch of plants around in the yard and plant some things that were gonna die if I didn’t plant them soon. Surprisingly, I got all the yard things done. Mondays (for now) are a big disappointment though, because I can never finish everything I need to on Sunday, and I can’t just pick up where I left off. Oh well, only two more weeks.

Apparently, we are trying to lose some weight again, starting immediately. Only 17 pounds for me. Shouldn’t be too horrible. I hope.

We are rapidly closing in on a year since the sleepy Sunday afternoon when I was lying in bed looking at real estate listings on my laptop and I found our house. I knew it the instant I saw it, that it was THE ONE. Logic told me that there was no way I could know for sure that this house would be our house, but I did. I was sure of it. No other house had looked so perfect or made me feel so excited. I jumped up and insisted that we see this house RIGHT NOW. No, we could not wait.

In retrospect, maybe we could have. Maybe no one else would have wanted it, and we could have gotten a better deal. I’ve worried about this the entire time, that maybe we could have gotten it for less, or found another house for less if we hadn’t gotten that one. But it doesn’t matter, because I still look at listings to see if we did the right thing, and every time I found the same thing: We did.
I just completed another round of searching with the same parameters I had a year ago (something which I still do every now and then) and as there have been all along, there were a few listings that I’d have wanted to see if we were still looking. But I can tell you right now that none of them would have been right for us. None of them would have been as perfect for us as our house is. The one that looks the best to me of all the ones I saw today is right up the street and a friend of ours actually really wants it. But it’s not our house, and it wouldn’t have been right for us. But you know what? I think it is HIS house. I think it is the perfect house for him (even if the listing does say the scary words “as is”) and just like I felt like I knew that our house would be ours, I feel pretty sure that this house will be his. It just seems like a good match anyway, but also – he’s my neighbor. Or, he used to be anyway, and I feel like he is still supposed to be. So I feel like by the end of summer, my neighbor will be my neighbor again, and another part of life will have clicked.

I need people I like close by because my desire to leave Ballard wanes by the second. I barely want to leave the house. I feel like I’m circling my wagons. It’s a good feeling.

There is a grocery store a few blocks from our house which is convenient mostly because of its proximity. I walk past it on the way home from work, so I often stop in and grab things we need for dinner. Or if we are out of milk, it only takes a few minutes to get more. Sage likes to walk there and get little somethings for himself, or he walk and get things for me. They have great wine and cheese sections, and its about the only grocery store around where I will just stop in to buy a filet mignon. And that, my friends is where its usefulness ends. It’s a full size grocery, but nowhere near a new one, so it is full-sized by 1986 standards. Which is fine, but there’s no deli, no bakery, and it is small enough that they just can’t stock in enough bulk to be inexpensive. So unfortunately, I don’t do my major, full on shopping there.

Instead, I drive over to Safeway once a week, or once a month and load up on lots of cheap stuff. Tons of yogurt on sale, cases of soda, bags of canned goods and pasta and rice, enough frozen goods to fill a full size freezer so that I don’t have to go out and shop all the time and we always have something to eat. If I were a single person, I’m sure I’d only shop at the market on the corner. On my own, I rarely cook, and can barely be bothered to eat at all. Even if I were to stop to get something for just myself every day, it would only take a few minutes, and it wouldn’t take any time to prep at home.

When you are feeding other people, you come home from work and you cook. It is the sane, responsible thing to do. I don’t want to take the extra time to stop at the store for all the things needed for a full meal, I want it to just be there, so I can just get started and get it over with. Hence the monthly shopping, which even at a lower priced grocery, can be $200. That’s why I won’t do that monthly shop at the store on the corner, I’m sure the exact same things would be more like $300.

There is a plan in place right now to redevelop the site, and rebuild the neighboring Fred Meyer to include groceries. The smaller grocery is losing its lease and would no longer be present. I would welcome this change, as I used to close to a full sized Fred meyer with groceries, and it was great. I won’t drive over there just to go grocery shopping now, but would it be awesome to have one a few blocks from my house, rather than the crappy, run down FM that has been there for 20+ years? HELLS YES IT WOULD.

So I have been pretty excited about this, even though it won’t be done for 4 years. IF, that is, my neighbors don’t whine and cry so much that it never gets done, that is. For whatever reason, a bunch of people are so attached to the corner market (and I like it too, for certain things, but practically will always win with me) that their lives will be RUINED if that store is no longer there.

They are super pissed at FM for “driving them out”, and have been battling the developers plans left and right. I am not a big proponent of development, as it often involves tearing down perfectly good houses and buildings for no other reason than to cram more shit into one space to make more money. In this case though, you’ve got one little grocery store that badly needs upgrading, and one crappy old department store parked on about 5 acres of unecessary parking lot that never gets used. All of it is ugly.

My neighborhood is also an environmentally sensitive area. I live on a bog. Development in the area in the past has diverted groundwater, as have large amounts of pavement, causing the peat layer in our bog to dry up and shrink, and in some cases, our houses to “settle”, mostly unevenly. We have too much pavement at our house, and plan to remove close to half of our extra large driveway, as we do not need it and pavement in our area is bad news. Our neighbors plan to do the same. Another recent development close to the Fred Meyer site was required to use pervious surfaces and take measures to not divert groundwater and further fuck up the bog. The current FM site was built long before anyone realized that there could be problems of this nature, and I’m sure the acres of pavement that have been there for however long are not helping the area. I can’t imagine that the developers will be allowed to not follow the same kind of rules that were put in place for the other new development, so I can only see redeveloping this spot as being good for our local environment.

But no one is thinking about that. Everyone just wants to whine about big corporations, and how they won’t give their grocery money to Kroger. I’ll bet they already do though, every time their kids need school clothes or they need something for the garden. They just don’t want to give them their grocery dollars.

No one will answer the question of what will happen to this site if the redevelopment is blocked. I don’t think anyone cares. They just want to whine about it. I’d just ignore it, but I am interested in how the project is going. Every time I read about it, there is accompanying whining.

On Saturday, I found out that a friend of mine recently lost her husband in a freak accident. They are young, it wasn’t an illness, I think she probably just got a random “Hey, so sorry, but your husband is dead” call one day. Can you imagine?
THAT is the kind of shit that ruins your life, not whether or not you will get to shop at your local corner grocery anymore.

People really need to get a grip.

Last night, while we ate a magnificent dinner at Ray’s Boathouse, this past week’s heat wave broke in what seemed like a matter of minutes. When we left the house, it was pretty miserably hot, and I joked that because I was wearing a skimpy tank top, skirt with bare legs and sandals, by the time we left it would be cold and windy and I would freeze. I had read that it was supposed to cloud over and maybe even shower, but that was really unbelievable as we walked up to the restaurant, where the cooling breezes off the Sound made the temperature there perfectly bearable. As we sat at the table, bright sunlight beamed across the table, even through the protective shades on the outsides of the enormous windows. Within about a half an hour though, we noticed a cloud out there, as the sun slipped behind it, and we attempted to get the candles on the table lit. The sun slipped back out from behind that cloud, but by that time, we had noticed that a good portion of the sky was covered in heavy greyness, and that it appeared to be raining to the South. The broken clouds made for a magnificent sunset. I’ve seen thousands of sunsets over the Sound in my life, but they never fail to amaze.

Sure enough, by the time we had finished dinner, it was cool and breezy out. Not quite what I had predicted, but I sure was glad we didn’t have to wait for the valet to fetch the car as we ran across the street to where we had parked it ourselves.