Good Grief!

Had a great holiday weekend. Good times were had. A BBQ at Jess's, yummy lunch at Good Earth, drag show at the 90s, saw Indiana Jones with friends, avoided tornadoes (other parts of MN weren't so lucky), dinner and dessert with Kelsey and Leaf and spent some quality time with Pfunk and our new rat babies!

We even took some time to give the apartment a thorough scrubbing. I tackled the bathroom while Pfunk did the kitchen, living room and bedroom. I know it doesn't seem fair, but I was really going to town on that bathroom (I mopped the ceiling for crying out loud). It took me as long to do the bathroom as it did for her to do the rest of the apartment.

After a great weekend, it was difficult to want to go back to work this morning. This feeling was reinforced by the fact that I really didn't sleep well last night. I woke up almost every hour all night. I hit snooze as many times as I could possibly justify and the first thing I did upon waking up was prepare a pot of coffee. Left the kitchen to get ready. Came back into the kitchen with dreams of relaxing with a cup of coffee and the internet for ten minutes before I had to leave for work.

When I saw it.

A river of coffee cascading down the countertop, the side of a cabinet and onto the floor where it was centimeters from making its way under the fridge. Fuck! Pfunk's pristine kitchen tainted and my relaxing ten minutes gone! I have a coffee maker that can either fill 2 travel mugs or a regular pot with coffee. So it has this double spout where the coffee drips from. Only one of the spouts was actually making it into the pot. Fuck!

Half a roll of paper towels later, I had mopped up the coffee off the floor before it reached the abyss under the fridge and thought my coffee catastrophe was remedied. That's when I realized that coffee had not only been running over the top of the cabinet door, but also under the cabinet door into the cabinet itself. What do I keep in said cabinet? Dishes that are easily rinsed off? Of course not. No, it is where I keep my art supplies. Fuck!

At first I thought the coffee was only on the very edge of the top shelf. Realized pretty quickly it was soaking a bunch of materials, including paper and books, on both shelves. Everything on both shelves had to be taken out (getting coffee on the floor I had just finished cleaning). At which point I ran out of paper towels and discovered my girlfriend had moved the extra paper towels when she was cleaning and I had no idea where they were. I think it was at this point that I actually threw a temper tantrum. I literally clenched my fists and jumped up and down while screaming "Fuck. Are you fucking kidding me?!?".

After my little pity party, I got my wits about me. I remembered there were more paper towels in the linen closet. I threw away the really soggy stuff and tossed the rest in the sink to sort through later. Everything else was strewn about the floor and kitchen table while I left the cabinets open to air out. I kissed Pfunk goodbye, who had wisely stayed in bed despite waking up from the sound of my curses. I implored her to ignore the state of the kitchen with promises that I'd take care of it after work, and left for the office.

Not a great start to what is essentially a Monday morning given that yesterday was Memorial Day.

One bonus to this whole fiasco: In the midst of hurling my art supplies willy nilly across the kitchen, I uncovered some 21 Jumpstreet trading cards mixed with with some paper. As it turns out, Pfunk just ordered Season One of 21 Jumpstreet off of Netflix. So I stuck the trading cards on the inside of her locker as a surprise.

I don't claim to be a great writer...

...but I think I could do better than CNN.com's Mallory Simon managed to do with this sentence:

"Personal trainer and fitness expert Robert Dothard said making exercise available and enjoyable in your home means reaching an audience of people who often feel embarrassed walking in to a traditional gym for fear of being embarrassed." (italics added) Jigga what?

Entire article here.

Update: The sentence has been corrected to read "who often feel embarrassed walking into a traditional gym."

I'm so tired of working with this ignoramus, I can't even tell you.

Monday afternoon, when someone in my office brought up the rising death toll in the aftermath of the earthquake in China, not only had one of my coworkers heard nothing about it, her response upon hearing some details of the tragedy was, "Well, that country is overpopulated anyways."

This is coming from someone who majored in International Studies and hopes to start a grad program in International Leadership.

If you are interested in hearing a story about the China Earthquake that actually exhibits some fucking compassion and understanding of the scope of the devastation, might I suggest listening to this report from NPR's Melissa Block.

Pfunk and I's latest crafty project: Wall Mounted Friends

Inspired by a project we saw at a recent craft show, Pfunk and I set out to create trophy-style wall mount "animals" for the entryway to our apartment. The end result is similar to what we saw at the show, but not the same. It was fun, cheap and easy project.

Materials:
Plastic/Rubber Toys (Thrift Store) - 29-69 cents/ea
Wooden plaques (Craft store) - $1-2/ea
Acrylic Paints (Craft store) - 50 cents/bottle
Cutting implements (kitchen scissors, serrated saw or knife)
Hot Glue Gun & Glue
Hangers (for back of wooden wall mount)
Nails for hanging!
Crown shaped bead for "Frog Prince" (optional)


Steps:
1) Attach wall hangers to the back of each plaque.
2) Paint each plaque with several coats of paint.
3) Cut each toy where you want to mount it, careful to keep surface as flat as possible
4) Apply hot glue to back of toy - you may need to get creative because toys tend to be hollow, so not much surface to work with. 5) Hold toy in place while glue dries (we then let ours set overnight before hanging)
6) Hang!

Easy come, easy go!

My $600 stimulus money was posted to my checking account Tuesday. Wednesday, my landlord finally got around to cashing my May rent check of $575. Whatta joke! I know the $600 is still extra money, but seeing those two transactions side by side can't help but make me feel like I only made out with 25 bucks. Maybe I'll use the $25 on a couple bottles of gin and hole up in my apartment in a drunken stupor until we have a new President. This whole stimulus thing is a freaking joke anyways. There is a great blog, How I Spent my Stimulus, that is worth checking out. I'll probably post to it once I figure out how I want to spend the money. Current contenders: credit card bill, plane ticket to Detroit, pet rodent adoption fee, MPR membership, Obama campaign donation, private purchase of some kind, medical bills or some combination thereof.

Guinea Pig wearing excellent kitty disguise!

Found this on the MN Animal Humane Society website today:

Testing

Blogger is really pissing me off at the moment (see effed up formatting and font size below) so I'm posting this test entry to see what happens. Talk amongst yourselves.

Graphic courtesy of CoryQ.

I's a huje nrd.

After spending WAY too much time looking at LOLcats the past couple of days, I suddenly broke out in lolspeak last night, much to Pfunk's initial amusement (but ultimate chagrin). Here's a sample of the types of things I was saying as we ran errands and hit the DQ.

On the way to Petsmart:

At Petsmart:

In DQ Drive-thru:

With DQ in hand:

You'd be surprised the overlap between purple, maroon and brown.

I was on the designsponge blog last Friday, reading about a DIY bookshelf project. I wasn't interested in making the shelves, but was intrigued by how the books in the example photo were arranged by color. I decided, with the help of Pfunk, to try it at home.

Before: arranged by subject.

After: Arranged by color



We decided it was best not to put them on the shelf in ROYGBIV order, given that we're gay. This recategorization was already scoring high on the dork scale and having a gay pride bookshelf would've put it over the top. It's a little hard for my brain to get used the idea that the photo albums are mixed in with actual books, that all the arts and crafts books aren't together, the books I bought while on study abroad aren't together, etc. It's a good thing that my book sets like Lord of the Rings and Little House on the Prairie are all the same color, so they could at least stay together. It would've been hard to split up the Harry Potter books since each one is a different color. Luckily, I have the Potter box set and I keep it somewhere else (and even if I did keep it on the bookshelf, its in a brown box and could've been kept in the "brown" section). Overall, I found the effect pleasing. This way, Stephen Colbert and Margaret Atwood get to be neighbors. That wouldn't have happened before.

Pfunk to the rescue

Pfunk and I were on our way to pick up Chinesetwine for the HOTB MayDay Parade when Pfunk yelled, "PULL OVER NOW! PUPPY!". There was a teacup Yorkie sprinting down Excelsior Blvd in St. Louis Park (a busy street). I pulled over and followed the little one down an alley into a parking lot behind a shop. Pfunk leapt out of the car and called the Yorkie over. She approached Pfunk, but when she tried to pick her up, she started to run away. Pfunk was on her knees and lunged for the puppy rather than let her get away. The dog was wearing a pink jacket and rhinestone collar, but no tags. While I was finding a better place to park the car, Pfunk took her back to Excelsior Blvd, where she found the owner quickly. 

The owner of the Yorkie was also the owner of a shop on the street and was really nonchalant about the whole thing. I think he thought the dog had just wandered out of the shop and Paige happened to scoop him up right outside his door as she strolled by. In reality, two other people had also stopped because they were worried about the dog. Another guy pulled his car over and a woman came over from her yard. 

The best part of the whole event, other than the rescue itself, was what the woman from the yard had to say about what was going through her mind when she saw this tiny dog running down the street: "At first I thought it was a bunny, but then I realized that bunnies don't wear pink sweaters."

Quotes of the Day

"A monkey threw up on my head."

"I'm glad we live inland because Seattle's fucked."

First, the monkey. I remember parts of two dreams from this morning. In the first, I was home in Ann Arbor (I think for the holidays) when I ended up at a get-together at someone's home. A guy I haven't seen since high school was there. I took him to a Sadie Hawkins dance my junior year. A creepy counselor from my high school church youth group was also there. Someone asked if I had a boyfriend. My mom appeared out of nowhere and volunteered that I didn't have a boyfriend, "at the moment," effectively putting me in the closet. Not something she would normally do in real life, but it was a dream. Who knows what that was all about. The details of the second dream are a lot fuzzier (no pun intended). All I know is that there were a bunch of monkeys. I was laying on my back when a monkey climbed on me and vomited on my face and neck. It was warm and wet. The first thing I told Pfunk this morning is that I dreamt a monkey threw up on my head. She was like, "Okay," rolled over, and went back to sleep.

The second quote comes from Pfunk. For random reasons not worth going into here, she had a day off of work today. Which was probably a good thing in that she is still not feeling well. Plus we are dog-sitting her parents' dachshunds, so she could chill at home with the pups. The only drawback is she watched way too much TV and was all hyped up about the Tsunami that will drown the West Coast when there's a major earthquake in the Pacific Ocean. I told her she is no longer allowed to watch the Discovery Channel unsupervised.

Update! Awesome image courtesy of CoryQ.

Make your own "motivational" poster here.

Where my "227" viewers at?

So we had a training in another building today and on the way out the door, one of my co-workers asked if anyone knew the room number where the training was.

"227, like the TV show," I said.

None of them knew what I was talking about! Please tell me there are some people out there that remember 227. It was show about the residents of an apartment building. The address number was 227.

I used to call my college roommate "Pearl," after the feisty and nosey old lady on 227 who was always at her window talking to passersby. We lived on the ground floor of a dorm my roommate would lean out the window and talk to people as they walked by.

Perhaps an "I love my lesbian aunt" t-shirt as a birthday gift to combine the two celebrations? :-)

I informed my mom yesterday that the birth of my nephew may have inadvertently created a lifelong conflict of interest. Well, not so much a conflict in interest as competing interests. His due date was July 27th (his mom - my sister's b-day), but came almost a month early on June 29th. So it always going to make sense to have his birthday parties the last weekend in June, especially given that waiting longer will invariably bump up against 4th of July travels and festivities. Problem is, Twin Cities Gay Pride is always the last weekend in June. So when I'm in Chicago on June 28th for his 2nd birthday party, I'll be missing Pride for, you guessed it, the second year in a row! It's not like I think Jackson showed up early just to spite his lesbian auntie, but Auntie Paige and I were joking that we wished he'd baked just a little longer. My sister getting pregnant and giving birth and the resulting birthday parties is just another example of heterosexual privilege winning out over gay rights! That last statement was a sarcastic, by the way. I freaking love my nephew. But I do enjoy parts of Pride and wish I didn't have to choose. But now grandma is aware of the conflict and says we can plan around it in the future. Yay for loving open-minded grammies and my nephew growing up in a family that supports a straight mom and a gay aunt and both their partners.