Rub-a-dub-dub

So I was watching the Tyra Banks show last night (hey, don’t judge! I know the kind of crap you watch)(and besides, all the shows I watch have already aired their season/series finales, so I don't have a lot to choose from)(not that I'm defensive)(anyway), and they were covering fact/fiction about germs and how to deal with germiness. One of the things that the bathroom health expert mentioned is that you should spend about 20 seconds washing your hands after using the bathroom. I just tried that and god, 20 seconds is a really long time! I was standing there counting "one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi" (silently) to myself and I started to feel a little self-conscious, because women were coming in, peeing, washing their hands, and leaving—all in the time I spent just rubbing my hands together. So now, I'm not only worried about picking up icky germs in the bathroom, but I also have to worry about the other women at work making Howard Hughes references about me!

Smelling the bus funktastic

My sense of smell is all wonky today. I didn't realize it until I was on the bus going home. Granted, the bus often stinks, but there was an extra-special stink on the bus today--not your standard booze-oozing-out-the-pores body odor, but a funky, almost earthy stink. The really weird part is that it kind of smelled like food, like someone on the bus had spent the day leaning over an industrial Fry Daddy, dunking basket after basket of fries into the hot oil, and then rolled in a pile of dirty laundry before boarding the bus. But when I looked around, no one looked particularly grungy, so then I got all worried that it was me. Which is totally unlikely, because, you know, I shower and stuff (and unless I had a walking blackout, I didn't deep fry anything or roll in dirty laundry).

When I finally escaped the bus at my stop, I was surprised to find that the open-air bus stop smelled funky, too. Like mushrooms and musty soil. That's when I realized that I thought my floor at work smelledvaguely like Chinese food all day, but when I mentioned it to a coworker, she just looked at me quizzically.

What the hell?! If I have to smell odd things all day, I wish it could be something I like, such as lemons or fresh latex paint or even gasoline. Yeah, I'm one of those people: I can't really walk into a Lush store, because I find the smell overwhelming and noxious, but we pull into a gas station, and I roll down the window to take a deep breath.

(And don't bother suggesting that I might be pregnant, because I am totally not.)

Bouncing

As in: back
The car, that is. We have it back. Chris got a call from SFPD on Thursday morning--they'd found the car just a couple of miles from our house, parked in a metered spot, and adorned with three parking tickets. For some stupid reason, DPT isn't hooked into SFPD's hot sheet, so they just kept issuing tickets on this car that had clearly been abandoned there. Stupid. But we have Rudy (the car) back, again without a stereo. We're debating whether to replace the stereo at all at this point, since it's the most appealing feature of the car now.

As in: off the walls
Some friends of ours just announced that they're pregnant, which is incredibly exciting news. It sparked another installment of an ongoing conversation Chris and I have been having for years: when should we have kids, where should we raise our kids, and wait! should we have kids?! Last Saturday, we went to a matinee at the ballet and I got stuck sitting next to a bored four-year-old for part of the performance. He was literally turning somersaults in his chair, kicking the railing in front of us, and headbutting my hip under the armrest between us. His mom finally noticed his antsiness during the intermission and swept him away while muttering profuse apologies. After they left, and in response to my eyerolling, Chris said, "That was me as a kid." I slowly turned to him and said, "If you actually want me to bear your children, you should never say that to me."

Thing is, Chris was a hyperactive child and to some extent, he's a hyperactive adult. When he's not being ground down by his job and actually gets to sleep 8 hours a night, he's like a superbouncyball. His mom tells stories about him as a child that have taken on nightmare-ish proportions in my mind. (For example? His grandpa, in an effort to keep Chris occupied and out from underfoot, told Chris he'd give him a penny for every lap he ran around a pair of trees in the front yard. Five-year-old Chris earned himself a sweet $2 in a few short hours.) I'm exactly the opposite. I am governed by the law of inertia and always have been. My mom says that I was pretty much a dream child: quiet, cheerful,and happy to entertain myself. As long as I had a stack of books, I was content. So you can understand why I'd be more than a little nervous to have kids with Chris--it's a total crapshoot. What if we have a Chris 2.0? I'm not sure how I feel about chasing a tiny dervish around the house all the damn time. I can only hope that the "you'll feel different when it's your kid" rule kicks in. In the meantime, I will keep my fingers crossed and practice saying, "Your child...."

For the last time

Shut UP, David Blaine!

I've got good news...

and I've got bad news. Which would you like first? Good news? Okay, then.

The shiny.
It's gadget-central around here these days. My birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and Chris got me this pretty new toy. It's so cute and shiny, I can't decide whether to snuggle it or lick it. I'm still in the process of ripping hundreds of CDs, so I haven't put anything on my as-yet unnamed player, but soon, I will be rocking out on the bus and/or pretending not to hear the people trying to talk to me. We started the process of ripping CDs back in September when I got Chris an iPod for his birthday, but we didn't get very far because our ghetto laptop is so damn slow. So! We also got a new laptop over the weekend! Okay, so we didn't get it just to rip CDs faster. I wasn't kidding when I called it ghetto. Carlo has popped off a good four or five keys, it shuts down for no apparent reason sometimes (hello scary blue screen!), and the track pad driver is all wonky so the cursor sometimes just floats around the screen, regardless of my threats. Oh, and there was also that incident, on the eve of our wedding, when I tripped over its power cord and knocked it to the ground--face down. It hasn't been the same since. (My sister is good in bad situations though: seeing the look of impending insanity on my face, she quickly scooped up the computer and whisked it away to fix it, while shooing me off to bed.) In short, we've been needing a new computer for awhile now and yay for CompUSA sales.

(Pictures of shiny, lickable electronics to come. The new laptop has a 6-in-1 digital media reader, but naturally, it doesn't take compact flash cards. Naturally.)

Okay, ready for the bad?

The shitty.
Our car was stolen, some time between 2:30 p.m. on Sunday and 7:45 a.m. today. Wait, you say, wasn't it stolen just last Thanksgiving? Why yes! It was! Making that twice in six months. Motherfuckers! Hopefully, we'll get it back again this time, preferably sans used hypodermic needles, please. The upside is that we didn't have anything of value in the car, aside from the new stereo we had installed after we got it back the last time. Oh, and a 25-lb. bag of the World's Best Cat Litter. Come to think of it, I am a little pissed about the kitty litter. That shit's not cheap!

This part may seem totally stupid (frankly, because it is), but I feel like this keeps happening to me. Both times the car was nicked, I was the last person to drive it. Both times, I parked it in seemingly safe spots (within a block from our house in our family-friendly neighborhood) and locked the doors. Chris, on the other hand, can lock his keys in the car--in the freakin' ignition, no less!--walk away from the car blissfully unaware, leave it sitting there ALL DAMN DAY, blocks away from his office, and come back to it in the evening to find it sitting there unmolested. The worst he suffered was having to meekly call me to say, "Hi, I'm stupid," and my eye-rolling derision. Why??

Drive by blogging

Let's see...

I'm 31 now.
Carlo is still half-naked.
I'm out there looking and keeping my fingers and toes crossed.
I'm ridiculously excited about "Stick It."
We're going to London and Barcelona in July!
(Anyone want to cat-sit for two weeks?)

Uh...that's it.

More later.