cindy's world

Hi, um, my name is Cindy and for show-and-tell I brought my boyfriend’s favorite pictures. *shuffling around with photos* These pictures are from our trip to San Francisco last weekend. He took them himself. With his camera.

He calls this one “I heart SF.” That’s me sitting on one of the last San Francisco Heart Project pieces. I’m wearing a UCLA shirt. *giggle*

He calls this one “Go Straight to Jail, Do Not Pass Go.” It’s me in the jail hall at Alcatraz. All puffy in Mr. W’s big jacket in the cold.

This is “Boat Framed on Alcatraz.” This building was burned down by the Indians in the early 1900s during their protest. Mr. W had to climb on a railing to take this picture. I think it’s pretty.

“SF City View.” I dunno where he got that name from.

He calls this “Sailing the Golden Gate.”

“Merry X-mas from Pier 39.” I like this picture because it looks like a Pier 39 postcard. Lotsa pictures he takes look like postcards.

This is “Daytime Christmas Moon.” That’s the American Indian name for this photo.

He named this “Eerie Night.” I like the lights on the bottom.

Even tho he called this “Haunted Hotel,” I don’t know that’s really a hotel.

You guys did all remember to pass the mouse over the photos, right? 😀

Yesterday, I went to Petco after work to buy cat litter. While in line, I saw little packages of Greenies for cats. My friend Vicky feeds Greenies to her dogs, which is a long green toothbrush-shaped chew-treat that cleans the dog’s teeth as the dog gnaws on the treat. I’d always said they should make Greenies for cats so I don’t need to keep spending dough getting my cat’s teeth cleaned and scraped by the vet. So when I saw this, I was really excited and forked out the big bucks for a teeny salmon-flavored package. I then went home, vacuumed downstairs, cleaned the cat’s room, replaced the litter.

Turns out Greenies for cats is like a miniature Greenie for dogs, toothbrush-shaped but about the size of a large vitamin. Dodo showed some interest when I first presented the Greenie to him on my fingertip. Then he walked away from it. There was no way I was gonna let this fly, so I brought him back, shoved the Greenie in his face again. He tried to walk around my hand to get behind me to the cat food. I then thought I’d put a few Greenies in his cat bowl so he knows it’s cat food (Dodo won’t touch human food). I thought I heard a crunch, so I was really excited. And then I stopped hearing crunching. I looked in the bowl and the Greenies were gone. Confused, I put a couple of Greenies on the ground. The cat put his head down and opened his mouth and then…I distinctly heard a couple of GULPS. He was just swallowing the suckers whole after he bit into the first one and found out they were hard to chew! Argh. What a waste of money.

There were lots of lions on our trip to SF last weekend. It started with the National Geographic magazine that Mr. W bought at the airport, which features the magazine’s 100 favorite or best photos they’d ever had in print. There was a beautiful photo of a male lion walking, and the photographer had written that the lion was majestic, powerful and completely indifferent to him. Typical cat. Looking at that photo, I wanted to sink my hand into the dense lion mane, touch a fingertip to the flame-shaped tuft of fur at the tip of his tail. Of course there were stone lions all over Chinatown, guarding front doors, keeping the evil spirits out. We had also seen a framed closeup painting or photo of a lion’s face somewhere, and I remember saying I wanted a lion. Riding to work on a lion would ensure that nobody messed with me. Talk crap behind my back? My lion will eat you. Or at least bat you around. It’s funny to imagine some catty chick giving me the once-over and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this huge paw smacks her upside the head.

One morning last weekend I woke up from a dream that I was hanging out with lions, playing with one’s gigantic paw, curling up against another one in a vast plain. When I opened my eyes I was in the San Francisco hotel room with an already-awake Mr. W. “I dreamt I had a lion,” I said sleepily, still disoriented and rather disappointed that there was no lion next to me. He smiled his boyish dimpled smile and said, “Well, how about a Leo?” I’ll take it.

Things always have a funny way of lining up for me on a theme. The theme this week for me was “character.” I’d said a few times to a few people in the last couple days that someone may look good on paper, but his character almost killed me. And then there may be someone whose “dating resume” doesn’t look good on paper, but I’d never been so comfortable or happy. And then out of nowhere, the plaintiff’s attorney throws this into his closing argument right now on a car accident case:

“I don’t have time to talk about character very long but I will just mention a book that I read about ten years ago. There is a book on who to marry. What kind of person should you marry, should you marry somebody beautiful? Should you marry somebody tall, dark and handsome? Whom should you marry, somebody rich? Should you marry somebody who has all the hobbies you have? The book says don’t look after any of those issues, those are false. The issues you need to look at in the person you’re going to marry are honesty, if they treat you well, if they are hardworking, if they are religious. And if they’re loyal. Because the person you want to marry is the woman that you want who will stay you for 30 years if you become disabled. Or if you’re a girl you want a man that will stay with you for 30 years if you become disabled. All these other issues are not good. You can get a guy that’s tall dark and handsome and he can cheat on you every day and lie to you and be a drunkard and go gambling every day and leave you for another woman at the first chance he gets.
So character is very important in life.”

My court reporter turned to me and winked.

Our email system still doesn’t receive/send outside the court system. Today marks the 3rd day of this dysfunction. I’m gonna be inundated with emails when they fix the server. Kinda like how I missed 9 calls when I finally checked my cell phone this morning, which was on my bed charging (I slept downstairs with the cat again).

And Wilco, what’s up with Cingular? Ever since this past weekend, the phone doesn’t pick up a signal well, I have to keep turning it off and on, sometimes a couple of times, to toggle the reception, and 8 times straight between 2 days I have tried to access my voice mail and the message is “Sorry, the service you have requested is not available at this time. Please try again later.” and then it hangs up on me.

I don’t get it. I got up an hour earlier today than I have the rest of the week, and I’m later than I had been all week. What happens with the time in between getting ready and getting into my car? Do I step thru some warp zone? [Super Mario Bros. theme song plays]

I was re-reading my last post and I realized, I so can’t show my parents my blog! The way that entry reads, it seems just taken for granted that dating these days involve sexual intimacy before emotional intimacy. Can I make a louder announcement of “Hi, I’ll be in bed with you before I’m in love with you, if I ever fall in love with you at all, that is.” ?!

I thought that last entry was all rosy and shimmery, too. Maybe it’s just time to go home from work. Have a good evening, peoples. I LOVE YOU ALL!

A DA friend and I were conversing on the topic of the ease (or difficulty) with which our separate genders fall in love. (It was also a work-related phone call, I swear! Something about the 7-defendant murder and attempted-murder case he continued in my courtroom this morning.) I originally said without much thought that girls, the emotional creatures that we are, fall in and out of love all the time; we always think we’re in love. He said he feels it’s a rather rare thing because he’s not referring to the druggy intoxicated infatuation you have in the beginning with a new person, he’s talking actual deep love love. Which got me thinking…

How do you know when you’re in love? Is there some gradient scale your emotions can be measured against, like when you hear people say, “Well, I like him a lot, but it’s not quite there yet.” Or, “Just when I was starting to fall in love, he messed up and I’m back down to just liking him now.” Can you then say, “Whew, that was a close call! I almost fell in love but then I caught myself and now I’m cool!” ? I think I’ve said things like that.

Or do you know you’re in love when you pass that one test question, the litmus paper that defines you the way a pregnancy test does? “I love him so much I’d give up smoking for him.” “I love him so much that if someone shot a gun in his direction, I’d push him away and take the bullet myself.” An ex once said that to me (swapping out the “him”s for “you”s, of course). I found out soon thereafter that he was a compulsive liar by nature. Do you love him? Do you see yourself marrying him? Would you have kids with him? When you imagine a permanent future with him, are you happy or scared? If a magical dragon were to come out of the ground and grab him in one claw and all the chocolate in the world in the other and make you choose, would you choose him? What if it were him versus your pet? Him versus your figure? Him versus all your current assets and your money? What if he put on 60 pounds, went bald but everything else was the same?

The pressure! Good Lord, I’m stressed. *pant, pant*

But maybe it’s just like this. You open your eyes one morning, you see him peacefully sleeping next to you, you smile, your heart smiles, and the words just form in your head. “God, I love you.“

All Network Users:

ISTB Deputy Director for Infrastructure

I (along with the rest of courthouse employees county-wide) have no outside email, I’d left my cell phone at home due to my mad dash to work this morning, and our desk phones won’t let us call out of LA County except for a few geographically closer cities of Orange County.

I must say, it’s kinda nice. Kinda like a technological Walden’s Pond.

WARNING: Do not read this if you are in your 40s or 50s and sensitive about that fact.
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