Sweets for the sweet?

It is ironic, I think, that our company's Walk for Diabetes Cure team is having a bake sale to raise money.

Boing-a-boing-a-boing...

Okay, so I know everyone says, "My cat is the best" or "My cat is so smart" or whatever, but seriously y'all? My cat is the most fun. No really! I was in one of those 98-cent stores over the weekend and couldn't resist buying a six-pack of ping-pong balls. "But you don't have a ping-pong table" you say, and you are correct, but I do have a Vinny! And sure enough, I bounced one of those balls in the kitchen tonight, and off he went! Bouncing around the kitchen after the ball, he goes sailing across the room! both forelegs outstretched! paws swatting furiously! and then WHACK!! He gives the ball the kitty smackdown and it goes careening off in another direction, the cat hot on its tail! Holy shit, this cat is hilarious!

Okay, enough squeeing about my cat.

I haven't been getting enough sleep lately. I'm a total night-owl so it's hard for me to do the "right" thing by going to bed early. Every night, I aim for an 11 p.m. bedtime, and it hasn't happened since the first day of work. I used to be able to cruise all week on six hours a night and make it up on the weekend, but that plan doesn't seem to be working anymore. Sadly, I think I'm just too old for that.

Speaking of old, HAPPY 28th BIRTHDAY, CHRIS!!

Happiness is...

sitting on the couch, laptop in my lap, feet up on the coffee table, Chris snuggled against my right shoulder and Vinny curled up against my left leg, trying to take a nap. His tail is curled around my left arm and he's twitching as he dreams of tasty mousies and birds.

Amazing Race, amazing donut, amazing glue

So, um, if you eat a donut, but it's for a good cause, it doesn't count, right? Does it help that I bought a raffle ticket, too? And that the proceeds from both go to a local middle school in need?

Maybe I’m the last person on the block to know about this, but I'm going to risk looking like a fool to tell you about today's great discovery. You know those cardboard sleeves that you slip around to-go coffee cups? The ones that keep your fingers from burning to cinders as you wait for the bus with your coffee? Good. So my beef with those has been that they slip and slide and fall off the cup. Well, this morning, after I finished my coffee, I tried to take the sleeve off (because I'm the girl who peels the labels off beer bottles and obsessively shreds cardboard coasters) and it wouldn’t come off! I poked, I prodded, I wrestled (all this during a staff meeting, so I was trying to be discreet), when finally, with a weird *pop* it came off (though not very discreetly). Curious, I (discreetly) checked out the inside of the sleeve, and lo and behold! The brilliance of humankind. Someone had thought to put two little strips of glue (like the stuff that comes out of glue guns) inside the sleeve. The stuff dries, yes, but then you put it around a scalding hot cup of coffee….and it melts! And sticks to the coffee cup!! And gone are the days of slippy slidy coffee cups! Brilliant! Technology *does* make life better.

And oh schnikey! I pity the fools who don't watch the Amazing Race and missed Tuesday's finale. I taped it because ERIN wanted to watch the worst episode of any show ever: the season premier of One Tree Hill (I wanted to hang myself from the one tree, the dialogue was so bad) and I couldn't just jump right into the second hour of the two-hour AR finale (because then the build-up of the first hour would be lost if I already knew the winner while watching—duh!). So I puttered around the apartment doing other stuff while Erin watched, averting my eyes and covering my ears when necessary. So last night, I watched with Mae and Erin, and OH MY GOD am I glad I waited. Because it was SO. FUCKING. GOOD. AND EXCITING. I'm pretty sure my heart actually stopped a few times. I went from being squished into a tiny ball on the couch, rocking and muttering, "nononononono" to perching on the edge of couch, hollering, "GODDAMNYOURUN! IT'S A FUCKING RAAAACE!!!!" to cackling when the Most Intense (and Clearly Insane) Team EVER lost to cheering when Chip and "Booby Cooper" finished first (and no, I was not crying, there was dust in the air). And while it would've been a great episode even if Colin and Christie (inTENSE!) had won, I'm glad they didn't, because they are just crazy-bad and I would have had to put on my angry face, that folks, that's just no fun. The only downside is that I have to wait…again…for the next season. Sigh.

Boring post (sorry)

Goddamn cat! He ate my flowers! I brought home three cheerful Gerbera daisies yesterday, and this morning, I found floral carnage in the kitchen. He had dragged one of them out of the bud vase, and when I found it, it was gasping for water. Another was missing about half its petals, and the third had telltale bite marks. Gah! He's such a little bastard!

People keep asking me how work is going and I feel kind of lame saying, "It's okay." It's just that I'm so accustomed to the rhythms of print publishing: putting in hard work and extra time until the print deadline and then enjoying the few days of post-deadline downtime. With online publishing, you can always be pushing something live. We're expected to post two reviews and one feature every week, so at any given time, I've got a review in the final proofing process, another two or three at various other stages of the edit process, yet another two or three in the photo studio, and I'm constantly fielding calls and e-mails from PR people and requesting products. And in the meantime, I'm trying to come up with features and/or wrap-ups. Plus, the nature of online publishing is such that anything can change, whenever: design, focus, procedures. It's a state of constant flux. I can't tell if I started during a particularly crazy period, or if this is just the way things go around here. On the upside, it's nice to really feel ownership of the things I'm publishing. At my old job, I was editing for grammar and usage, but not really understanding the material. Now I'm covering consumer electronic products, so I can conceivably use everything I'm talking about. It's nice to be able to edit text and really understand it. I still feel like an imposter as a tech editor. It's not my love or passion, but I can understand it. I think a lot of the people I work with are really into their beats: security, networking, etc. I'm just not.

People also keep asking me about wedding planning, and I have to refrain from talking nonstop about it (which is one of the many reasons I'm glad Rita and I are back in touch). Chris and I had a discussion the other night because I was fretting about the cost of photographers. It's one of the main items that I'm willing to really splurge on, but the figure is such a huge chunk of the remainder of our budget. I've been getting headaches and stomachaches every time I go over the numbers, trying to figure out how to make budget. Chris wisely pointed out that we effectively killed our initial budget when we booked the venues, so we need to approach the subject differently, i.e. adjust our overall budget. Ah-ha! Presto, magic, headaches begone. When you plan a party that involves feeding 200+ people, you'll incur some big expenses. Just sayin'. And y'all, don't get your hopes up for an all-night open bar--it ain't happening. That alone would cost us upwards of $10K, and while I love you all, I ain't spending $10K on the bar tab. You've been warned. And please, be discreet about your flasks.

Oh, there should be a rudimentary wedding site up soonish. With details about local hotels, airports, and fun things to do in the area.

Cheese and ants

I just came back from getting a sandwich for lunch. I was much amused by the sign that advertised today's special: Barbeque Chicken Pizza (no sauce). It includes "cheddar sliced red onions, barbeque chicken, grumbled blue cheese." Do you think the blue cheese is grumbling because it failed to slice the red onions? Is it mad that the cheddar took over its slicing duties? I worry that the cheddar will be grumbled next week, because cheddar is only a medium-hard cheese, which won't cut it (haha) when it comes to onions.

And in the lobby on my floor at work, I found a coffee table book about healing and medicine around the world. The coolest part (aside from the b&w picture of two med students peeling the skin off a cadaver's face to study the musculature underneath—so ew! And yet I couldn't stop staring at it!) was that in central Africa, some healers still use soldier ants to stitch cuts. They hold the edges of the cut together and place soldier ants (are these the same as army ants, the ones that will eat anything that doesn't run away from them?) on the cut. The ants instinctively chomp down and lock their jaws, thereby clamping the two sides of the cut together. The healer then pinches off the ants' thoraxes and tails, leaving a tidy-looking line of ant heads holding the cut closed.

Haha, you thought this entry was going to be about a picnic, didn't you?

Notes from La-la-land

Chris and I are in L.A. right now for my grandma's 80th birthday party. Being the crazy multitaskers that we are, we're also meeting with four wedding photographers and tasting four varieties of cake from one bakery. I think cake-tasting may well end up being my favorite part of wedding planning. I mean, free cake! Even if it's bad cake, it's free!

It's been an eventful day. My first two reviews went live on BIC's website today. I feel like I've birthed two babies and set them out in the world. Fly free and far, my loves! This feeling will pass quickly, I think, for I have another 10+ reviews trying to shoulder their way out. Then, while waiting at the airport, I was a little snappish to my dad on the phone, which spawned the Call of Death from my mom, who proceeded to bitch me out for a good 20 minutes for everything that has gone wrong in the world. Energy crisis? My fault. Bad economy? My doing. Starving children in Africa? That was me. Mimes? My bad. Yes, folks, I birthed evil from my loins, and now that evil is running rampant over this poor, innocent world of ours, making babies and my mom cry. Boo hoo. All because I asked my dad to be on time, for once, picking us up from the airport. Rita, I see your mom, and raise you mine.

Okay, that's it for tonight. I'm finally going to get a decent night's sleep, and hope that when I wake up tomorrow, I'm not still stumbling around in the scary funhouse of my mom's psyche.

Crazy lady coming through!

I just visited Big Internet Company's first-aid cabinet because I've been getting these rockin' headaches in the middle of the afternoon. As I perused my options (generic forms of Advil, Tylenol, and Excedrin), I discovered something called "Menstrual Relief," which is obviously just generic Midol. But upon closer inspection, I noticed that in smaller letters, above the name, was the word calming. Huh. Now I can't stop thinking of old white men in a boardroom, trying to come up with non-trademarked names for their generic drugs, and thinking, "Well, clearly women get hysterical when menstruating, so yeah…we'll put 'calming' in the name."

Splish-splash, laptop's takin' a bath!

Chris's foray into peace negotiations between water and the laptop today broke down when the water got a little too excited about the proposed détente. It leapt from behind its wall of glass and threw itself at the computer, which clearly wasn't ready for a relationship of this magnitude, at least not so quickly. The computer went on to have a little breakdown, and Chris rushed it to urgent care so it could get its head back in order. Until it comes home, updates will be rare(r), as I don't feel comfortable enough at Big Internet Company to blog from work (which, actually, I am doing right now, so…yeah).

So quickly: had a good Labor Day weekend. Family, lots of old friends, matrimony (not mine), delicioso rum cake, new friends, lots of driving/parking in downtown SF, funny cats, puking cats, carrier-swapping cats, heat heat heat (oh my god, the heat!), good food, tea garden, barbeque, and highly intellectual Buffy discussions. It was a most excellent weekend, and yet, I'm kind of glad it's over. I'm exhausted.

Happy belated birthday, Keanu Reeves! I'm looking forward to raising a glass to you and my grandma this Saturday.