Friday, March 28, 2008

Friday Round Up

I would like to start by mentioning that I am so ready for it to be warm outside! I am over the chilly weather and cumbersome clothes. I need a sundress, some flip flops, sunglasses, a smoothie, and a car ride with my windows down and music up, ASAP!

I have a big time problem with taking the time to scrape off my windows in the morning. It is too damn cold for me to be standing outside dealing with that crap. Usually I just run the windshield wiper fluid until everything melts off and role down each of my windows to clear the side views… that usually gets me to the highway and by then the car is warmed up enough to be able to see. I will admit that due to this process I have to stop for windshield wiper fluid about every week and a half; but it is cheap, so who cares.

Today, though, my wipers must have frozen in some weird way, so they wouldn’t actually make contact with the window… thus not clearing it. I actually had to get out and scrape it. I was too lazy to clean the sides though, and they wouldn’t even budge when I tried to roll them down….

So, every single time I had to turn or change lanes, I had to stick my head out the window for about the first fifteen minutes of my drive…. Oh yeah, I am cool!

A few weeks ago, my friends and I put together a list of stuff that we wanted to do in 2008. Kind of like a Bucket List, only none of us intend to die by December 31... Some of them were normal things, like go to an ICubs game or take a tour of the Capitol Building… some were a little bit more exciting, like the “free weekend” (this is where we go to free happy hours for dinner, open houses, who knows… maybe even a wedding or two)… Tonight we are going to mark one of the items off our list by going to a Des Moines Buccaneers game. Even more exciting, is it is Buc Beer Night!!! This should be fun.

Then, while it wasn’t on our list because we didn’t know about it, tomorrow we are going to an “Experience Africa” exhibit to walk in the shoes of a child in the midst of the Aids Crisis. That should be very interesting.

Hopefully that little walk through Africa doesn’t completely dampen our spirits though, because tomorrow night we are celebrating Ape’s birthday (again… God love her), by doing something totally out of the norm…. Going to dinner and “out” downtown. *gasp*

Finally, there is an incredibly small chance that we may not have to come to work on Monday because there is a problem with our plumbing (I didn’t know this until after I flushed the toilet… apparently I need to check my email more frequently). But, if it doesn’t get fixed over the weekend (which it will) we can’t be expected to hold it all day, right?!?

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Apartment Woes #... what, are we at 27 now?

Sunday night I was doing laundry while watching a movie that I rented. I heard the water drain out and it sounded a little louder than normal… but I assumed I had left the door open and didn’t think much of it. So, later I went to exchange the loads and I got within 10 feet of the washer and my feet squished in the carpet… there was water everywhere!!!!!

I called the emergency maintenance line, because I wasn’t quite sure what to do… it was a pager, so I left my number. Thankfully, it was my very last load… so it didn’t completely piss me off. (Although water covering 1/3 of my apartment didn’t make me feel like a million bucks either…. But whatever). I waited and waited and waited. No call back. So I tried again, thinking if this truly was an emergency situation, I would be screwed. Again, I waited and never received a call back. So, I called my good buddy who is a pretty handy guy and asked if I had to stay up and worry about my water situation, or if I could just go to bed. It seemed like by going to bed, I was turning my back to a potentially huge smelly mess. He assured me, that since they didn’t call me back, that I should just go to bed (the water will be there in the morning, after all) and to have them come in first thing and make sure to do a mildew and mold treatment. So, to bed I went.

Sure enough, the next morning, the water was still there and had even seeped out into the main hallway. There was about a six foot half circle of water surrounding my door!! I am sure my neighbors were impressed.

On my way to the office I called the apartment office and of course, they don’t get there until 8:30, so I left a message (not a nice one…) and told them to call me back ASAP.

Take a step back in time with me for a sec, to remember all the other issues I had with my apartment… my shower leaking, my dishwasher didn’t work, my garbage disposal didn’t work, when water drained from my sink it came out from underneath of my refrigerator (this one totally grossed me out), my bathroom sink leaked… I could name a few more, but you get the point. They did fix my dishwasher and garbage disposal… but beyond that, they come to my apartment when I bitch, “look into my claims”, say that things really don’t leak (even though my carpet was wet from the shower), and even though they are supposed to follow up, I never hear from them about the issue again. Further, the last time they were in my apartment, every light was on when I came home and the door was unlocked… both of those things pissed me off more than you can imagine…..

For the most part, I have just become fed up with trying to call and explain things, and certainly fed up with having them come in to my apartment, dirty stuff up with their muddy shoes and handyman waste, while nothing is getting taken care of. So, I don’t continue to stay on them until things are completely fixed. Actually, why should that me my job, though??? Shouldn’t I report something and it should just get fixed?!?!?

With this issue though, I wasn’t nice and I definitely didn’t let things just drop. Additionally, while I had those bitches on the phone, I told them about everything else that hadn’t been fixed.

One more thing too, the reason why the water drained into the apartment in the first place, is because the hose for the washing machine was the wrong hose… so the maintenance man told me to go to Lowe’s to pick the right one up. As you can probably imagine, this set me off. THAT IS WHY I RENT, YA JACKASS. I don’t stop at Lowes. I stop at the mall or at the tanning salon or at the gym…. I stop at places like that because I don’t have the added financial responsibility of owning a damn home. YOU STOP AT LOWE’S YOUR DAMN SELF!!!!

So, the current status is that my carpet is dry now (thanks to a huge blower that kept me up most of Monday night) and apparently they put a mildew/mold treatment down before they re-glued my carpet. I am not sure if the washer is fixed yet or not, because once again the follow up call didn’t happen. I did get two other calls though on Tuesday night at about 7 and another on Wednesday at about 4 in the afternoon… asking me if I had just paged the emergency line. I let them know that I did… on SUNDAY. I also had to move a bookshelf (that they moved out of the way) all by myself, because apparently they don’t know how to put things back where they found them. I moved the book shelf, right after I picked up all the carpet cuttings and scrubbed their muddy shoe prints off my bathroom floor.

Good times. My lease is up in September; I will be sending hate mail until then.

On an unassociated home front note… my TV in my bedroom stopped working back in the beginning of February. I was really upset by this, because I sleep with the TV on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t upset enough to take my cheap ass to Best Buy to get a new TV… Well like three weeks after it stopped working, I think I lost power in my apartment for a minute, and it started working again… (this is not an old TV, there are no problems with the picture or anything… so why it stops working, I have no idea). So, it worked for about two weeks, and then stopped worked again. Knowing that power helps it “reboot”, if you will… I reset all of my fuses to jump start it. No luck. So, I unplugged it and moved on with my life. Last night, as I was deep cleaning the mess from the maintenance crew, I plugged it in to give it a test. Sure enough, it works again! So, for approximately the next two weeks, I will be back to my normal sleep and news watching routine… and then it will die again. At least I can prepare myself for it!

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Interesting

Here are some fun facts about me…

I am 26 years old, born on March 9, 1982. This was a Tuesday. In order for me to have been born on that day, I would have had to have been conceived on or about June 6, 1981. Did the summer heat get to my parents?!?

Don’t worry… I am not sitting at my computer randomly thinking about when I was conceived… I was forwarded a website with a program that generates information related to birthdays! Generally speaking, I try to keep thoughts of that nature regarding my parents, far from my mind! Just saying!!!

Reflectively speaking, in 312 months, 1,359 weeks, 9,514 days, and 228,349 hours I have done a lot of living! Am I completely happy with everything decision I have made? Absolutely not! Am I happy with who I am and knowing that because of the decisions (some of them worse than others) I have made, I am the person I am? Definitely.

I also learned that I share my birthday with Lil’ Bow Wow and Chingy…. that clearly explains why I am such a good rapper. Ok, well maybe that fact doesn’t explain anything, but for the record I can spit some rhymes…..

**Thinking in my head, “Spit some rhymes, white girl, really????”**

I am going with it. Moving right along……

One of the top songs of the year I was born was Maneater by Daryl Hall and John Oates…. Twenty six years later that song has been recreated by Nelly Furtado and is also popular now!!! Crazy!

Lastly, and if I do say so, my favorite part of this generator, my birth tree is a Weeping Willow. This is what the Weeping Willow says about me:

Beautiful but full of melancholy, attractive, very empathetic, loves anything beautiful and tasteful, loves to travel, dreamer, restless, capricious, honest, can be influenced, but is not easy to live with, demanding, good intuition, suffers in love but finds sometimes an anchoring partner.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Opening Up the Dirty Window

….It is from a song. My friends and I sing it, no I am sorry, we jam out to it when we head out on the weekends. Did you know that if you are not a very good singer, than you should probably sing louder… that helps. Really.

I digress.

Last night we all got together to celebrate Ape’s birthday, she is on the downward slope to thirty, just like me!!! Once you get to 26, thirty is just a round up away, so we should probably just get used to the idea. It also happened to be the much anticipated premier of the new season of The Hills!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So there we gathered, some of my favorite people in world Linds, Danny, Ryan, Ape and I. We watched, critiqued, laughed, and cried with our besties from the west LC and Whitney as they made London their beeotch… all while eating a Disney princess ice cream birthday cake in honor of Apes

Sunday, March 23, 2008

I am blessed.

This Easter weekend I was planning on going home... but due to scheduling conflicts, it didn't quite work out. I wasn't completely bummed because Easter isn't as big of a deal as a holiday like Christmas... but I still wasn't completely thrilled with the thought of spending the day alone.

Fortunately that didn't happen at all, though. In the grand tradition of my amazing friends, my friend Lindsay invited me to go to church and have Easter dinner with her family. My friend, Danny, who's family is also not local joined us as well.

So we went to church this morning and it was great, then we headed to Lindsay's mom's house for Easter dinner. The group consisted of Lindsay's mom, her brother that is in the Military that drove 10 hours yesterday to be here with the family, his friend from Omaha Tawnia, Danny, Lindsay, Lindsay's mom's friend, and myself. Not that you needed to get an exact breakdown... but I found it so interesting that other than Lindsay, her brother, and her mom, none of us knew each other or have known each other for really any significant length of time and yet here we all were converged at this Easter dinner sharing stories, sharing our lives, and truly enjoying each other and the time we were spending together.

Being away from home, being independent and realizing that I am really a grown up isn't always the easiest thing to do... but in the last six months it has been reiterated time and time again that I am truly blessed.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Made You Look

I loooove things that smell good. I can never have enough lotions, perfumes, body sprays, body washes, etc. I have six crates of such items in my closet organized by the categories I just listed. Go ahead and add that to my list of other addictions: lip glosses, tanning, and coffee.

When falling in love with a new scent, I do not discriminate against its “gender”. Curve for men, for example, is one of my all time favorite scents. The “hot guy” smell is incredible… who wouldn’t want to smell that all day?!?

I feel sorry for other girls when I wear this scent though….

As you are standing in line at the grocery store, you hear someone walk up behind you and you smell that incredible smell…. Instantly you picture a beautiful man standing behind you. You turn around, slowly, as to not be too obvious.

And, what do you see??? ME! Haha!

Thursday, March 20, 2008

And so it begins


I am 26 years old. I have a job, I pay bills, I am capable and competent. I am independent. I can go to dinner and a movie by myself and feel sexy about it.......... and I have a pit in my stomach the size of Texas.


This pit of stress and anxiety is because the time has come and tonight is supposed to be the first......



Storm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


I moved into my apartment in September of last year, so living alone was no problem at all; storm season had passed. Now what am I going to do? Try to make friends with my weird neighbors that have a mat in front of their door that says, "Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit... look who's here!!!!".... I don't think so. I have had some offers from some skanky guys that "will come over and keep me safe"... but that doesn't sound appealing either...... frankly, that might even scare me more...



Do you think that I might just have to *gasp* be an adult and get over my fear?!?!?! I am biting my finger nails just thinking about it..... Today is the first official day of spring, which means that I have to make it though approximately 6 months of this.


I am screwed.



Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Not the typical "Girl" reaction


My new office has a spectacular view of a retention pond... or as I like to call it, a river. Well, it melted this week and is the new hot spot for millions (maybe a hundred or so) ducks and geese.



I walked in yesterday and say them all out there, and for some reason, I just wanted to shoot at them.......



Perhaps I have some aggression issues that need to be addressed............

Just Getting Stuff Done!

I had a super stressful and crazy week last week, so all I wanted to do this weekend was sleep in. Apparently that is impossible for me to do. I have no idea why, but it sure does piss me off sometimes!

It seems like no matter what time I go to bed, I am still up no later than 8 or 8:30 each day.

This does nothing for my “Me/Relax” time, but wonders for my To Do list. Sunday I popped right out of bed did laundry, vacuumed my floors (that had been vacuumed the day before), dusted everything (that I am pretty sure had just been dusted the day or two before), went and washed and vacuumed my car, came home and detailed the inside of my car, more laundry, ironed, went to the gym, etc. etc. etc.

So much for all of my daydreams of lying on the couch and doing absolutely nothing all weekend!

I am sooo ready for summer so I can get out of my apartment and use my energy on other things… you know, like laying out!

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Sexy Sassy Saturday

A little visual treat to help get us in the mood for summer. Have a good weekend!

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Reason # 57

Why I shouldn't be a mother...

A girl in my office and I were just talking about how hard it would be to leave your child after maternity leave, day care, etc.

At one point I said, "Why don't you just kennel them...".

The problem is not as much what as I said, as how it didn't register right away in my head that that really wasn't an option.....

Not a good sign.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Land of the Living

Ok... perhaps that is a little dramatic of a title, but I for sure thought I was going to die last week. I felt worse than I have felt in years. I was all types of feeling sorry for myself too! It is hard being sick, but when you are sick four hours from anyone that would lay in bed with your sick ass and rub your head... it is even harder! When I finally went to the doctor, he was being so gentle and nice, I just wanted to lay my head on his chest and have him hold me. For obvious reasons I refrained. But I was not happy about it!

So now, other than I have a snot truck parked in my nose, I am feeling much better!!! (I am sure you wanted to hear that!!)


Yesterday I was working really hard to get caught up with work stuff. I was working on one particular problem for a long time and I never left my computer... well, when I got up, I noticed that my black marker was under my butt, opened!!! It is just a little sharpie one, so I guess I didn't notice it. Anyway, so I had two huge black ink stains on the ass of my pants!!! And it was only like 2:00! Luckily, I had enough going on in my office to keep me planted for most of the day, and when I got up to leave most of the others had gone... My favVictoria Secret Khaki work pants are ruined though!

(My Microsoft Paint version!!!)

So, I went to the mall and a casino (I have an explanation!) with Apes last night, so I ran home changed into jeans really fast and we took off. Well later that night I got home, did what everybody does when they get home... ditched my clothes... and was doing some stuff around my apartment. Well, I passed a mirror and freaked the hell out! I was like, "What is on my ass!!!"... the ink had apparently spread to my skin, but I had forgotten about it.... So for a second I thought I had two giant new black moles on my ass!



Luckily that is not the case!