Reecie, damn her freckles and dimples, tagged me with this meme. Which I only do when she tags me. Because I like her, that's why. And when you read her answers, and my answers, then you'll see that we were clearly separated at birth, or at least share a part of a brain. So, when Reecie plays meme tag, I play along. Ready? Let's go.
7 things I plan to do before I die:
1) Take in a game in every major league baseball park.
2) Spend Bastille Day in France
3) Have a buckskin mare
4) Have a family reunion in Newport, Rhode Island
5) Eat my way across India
6) Publish my book
7) Make my living as a real artist*

7 things I can do:
1) Drive a stick shift, and actually, damn near anything with an engine and wheels
2) Curse fluently. Like a longshoreman. Or a sailor.
3) Drink you under the table.
4) Remember huge chunks of Firesign Theatre dialogue.
5) Bake. Pie crusts that float. Cakes that are moist. Bread that is crusty.
6) Swim like a fish.
7) Handwork. **

7 things I cannot do:
1) Vote Republican
2) Snow ski***
3) Suffer fools lightly.
4) Watch talk show television.
5) Speak French so that French people can understand me.
6) Stick to the speed limit
7) Forgive my first husband.

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex:
1) A big, wrinkly brain
2) A dark/twisted sense of humor
3) Height (the taller, the better)
4) A slender build (the skinnier, the better)
5) Long legs
6) Musical/artistic talent
7) Big hands

7 things that I say most often:
1) What the fuck are YOU lookin' at?
2) Fuck me blue.
3) There is just not enough alcohol in the world.
4) What the fuck is WRONG with you people.
5) Hmmph. Darwin in action.
6) What a good dog.
7) I love you

7 celebrity crushes:
1) Bob Dylan (give it a rest. I don't care what you think.)
2) Tony Bourdain (he and I were in New York in the same years, hanging out in the same places. How I missed him --tall, skinny, bad attitude, junkie -- I'll never know.)
3) Little Steven
4) Crash Davis (the character that Kevin Costner played in Bull Durham)
5) Jeff Conine (the real-life version of Crash Davis)
6) Bruce Springsteen (what, you thought I'd leave him off this list? Huh. As fucking if.)
7) Johnny Depp.

7 people I want to do this (Dorothy's disclaimer applies here as well; anyone not on the list who'd like to play is invited, and no one I've tagged should feel obligated):
1) Jodi, even though she will never do a meme
2) Jules
3) The Manolo
4) Jennifer
5) Miss Bliss
6) Wrapped Up Like a Douche
7) Allie

* as opposed to a corporate hack

** Shut up. You have a dirty mind. Embroidery. Beading. Sewing. Knitting. THAT kind of handwork.

*** Nor do I want to: it's fucking cold, wet and hard work for little payoff.

The last tv I saw was about seven oclock on Thursday evening. It was the local news channel, and they were showing the latest radar on Hurricane Katrina. It was a large green blob. To the southwest quadrant of the screen, was a big orange blob. The talking head announced to the watching audience that that big orange blob represented the worst part of the storm, and that, sadly, it seemed to be stationary. Over southern Dade County. The Kendall area, in particular.
My house to be exact. Or at least that's the way I feel about it. The power went off right about then, and it just came back on less than half an hour ago.

Good thing, because the refrigerator was beginning to get funky, we were down to the last bag of ice in the chest, the koi were looking a little green around the gills, the Noble Dog Nails decided to take a bite of bufo toad today and we sluiced his mouth out with water, and tried to find an open doggie emergency room. Couldn't find one, as it happened, but we did find an open Mexican restaurant with cold beer and hot tacos (not a Taco Bell, either). And the Noble Dog Nails, who has taken on the evil bufo before seems to have recovered 100% and with no additional treatment other than a mouth wash and ride in the car.

The RLA and I spent yesterday cleaning up the yard. Photos of the hurricane can be found here.

It was exactly as a hurricane should be: wet, devastating, underestimated by the newbies in the state, exciting like a thrill ride while it happens, boring, hot and hard work when it's over. The power outage was a mere 50 hours more or less. Just enough to be annoying, not enough to cause real personal problems.

But here I am, back in the saddle again.

And, please could someone tell me why "Forever Amber" is considered a classic? I want to slap this main character into a coma. She is all of Scarlett O'Hara with none of the class. Argggh. But I won't put it down. I love the historical part of the hysterical fiction. Restoration England. Yum. Anyway, when you are stuck in a house with no power, and you need something to do other than cut up fallen trees, this sort of trash is great. One thousand pages long, it's good for a forced march of reading. It was even fun to read it by candle light. With a good supply of red wine. And hard cheese.

Before.



The tail.



The cut.

I think that the person I replaced had multiple personalities. One of them filed obsessively, cross-referencing, color-coding, duplicating entries, creating mind-boggling obscure abbreviations, and on and on. The other one tossed all of her files into one big manilla pocket.
I'm serious about this. I have a spreadsheet that I supposed to be working with that has thirty-one fields. Color coded. I tried to duplicate it, but the most fields I can conceivably use for this project is ten, and that's only if I pad it.

The documents that come about from the work requested in those spreadsheets, which are the things that I would file by State, Location, Year and Month, are dumped higgledy-piggledy into a single lump.

Of course, all filing by my predecessor stopped some time around the beginning of this year, so that means I have plenty of filing to do. And no file folders to do it in. I don't know which of the personalities ordered office supplies, but she must have been on vacation.

Now that I have my digital camera working again, I'll post the view from the 18th floor outdoor lunch room. And the hair cut.

Did I mention that here? It's been such a brutal summer that despite my desire to become an old lady with a long grey braid down my back, I whacked off all my hair. It's going to Locks of Love, where some poor kid will be happy to have my curls.

My hairdresser kept telling me that she was afraid to cut it as short as I was telling her to cut it, because my hair had been sooo long and she didn't want me going into hair shock. I told her that having spent the first seventeen years or so of my life as the only person with curly hair in my small town, any potential traumas and hangups I may have had about haircuts, I had gotten over by the age of ten.

You can't do anything to my hair that I didn't suffer through early on. Pixie cuts? Check. Pageboys and bobs? Check. A side part? A middle part? Check and check.

I think the last time I cried over a haircut, I was about 20 and it was the first time I got a GOOD haircut. But I digress. It's short, and as far as I'm concerned, it could be shorter still. It is just too hot this summer to have hair longer than an inch.

Anyway. It's hot. It's late. I'm going to the cool end of the house, and so to bed.

One of the things I learned at the mall was that, among the great unwashed, the plural form of the computer mouse is "mouses". Where are the mouses? Do you have wireless mouses? Like that. Don't ask me why, because I haven't a clue.
One of the last customers I had was adamant about finding a new Mighty Mouse.

Lame Ass Customer: "Do you have any of the new Mighty Mouses?"

Me: "Well, we have a couple on display that you can play with, but I'm afraid that we're out of stock."

LAC: "You don't have any?"

Me: "Uh, no... we are out of stock."

LAC: "I was here yesterday and you didn't have any. They told me that you were getting more in today."

Me: "Be that as it may, we are out of stock."

LAC: "I know what that means.* When do you expect another shipment?"

Me: "Well, every time a box comes in the back we all crowd around to see if there are any inside."

LAC: "Look, did you get any more today or not?"

Me (giving up): "Yes. We did. But we sold them all. We are out of stock."

* Thinking to self, if you DID know what that meant, this conversation would have been over two questions ago.


On a related note, when I was on the train yesterday, the guy in front of me had the telltale white cord of an i-pod trailing out of his ear. I poked him in the shoulder, held up the plug of my own headphones, reached over, unplugged his headset and swapped his for mine. Then I plugged him into my i-pod. We listened to each other's music for about ten seconds, showed each other our screens, and then swapped back. It was very cool. He was a khaki-clad, serious glasses-wearing sort of guy, and he was listening to Sting. I was dressed in a sensible work dress, in olive drab, and wearing scary-pointed toed shoes. I was listening to Tom Petty. I'm going to have to do that (swap i-pod jacks) more often with even more random folks.

Finally, here's a scary, scary photo for you.



Little Steven, baby, what happened to your neck? Please tell me that all that weight is for your role on the Sopranos. Eek.

The only good thing about this photo is that it accompanied a story that said that a judge in New York stayed the eviction of CBGB's saying that the landlord was just as culpable in not noticing for four years that the club was underpaying its rent as the club was for not noticing that the rent had increased. She even went on about what a landmark and historical site CBGB's is, which leads me to believe that she might have been walking around in the late seventies with purple hair, too, just like me.

In my newest job, I am a glorified secretary. The official title for what I do is "Executive Assistant". But since the Skipper books his own travel, and can touch type faster than most secretaries, and keeps his own calendar, the secretarial portion of the job is minimal.
In fact, the majority of my work is low-level, designing-in-Word kind of stuff, and I'm down with that, y'all. The only problem I have is that I've inherited the work of an anal-compulsive. Things are cross referenced, abbreviated, listed multiple times, high-lighted, boxed, color coded (even though things are printed in black and white), available in multiple sizes, and in general, balloxed beyond all recognition.

It is so bad that even using a search field I can't find all the iterations of a person's name or phone number.

This just brings to mind what I used to tell the nurses at Jackson. Just because you can use seventeen different type faces in a document, it doesn't mean that you should.

Or, look. You went to school to learn certain things, and so did I. I mean, I could, theoretically, start an IV, but it would be messy and painful and you wouldn't want me to do it to you. Likewise, you could, theoretically, design a newsletter, but...

They never got it.

I'm getting it now. This is an unusable document, and I get to re-engineer it. But without stepping on the toes of the actual art director and her junior designer.

Yippee.

On the up tick, they have an espresso/latte maker in the break room. Do you people know how much coffee I can consume in the average day? Whee!