cindy's world

Today, I wish for…

easy longevity…

…restfulness and peace…

…enlightenment…

…and a beautiful journey.

As always, captions are obtained by resting your mouse pointer on the photo. And yes, these are more photos from Lake Shrine.

I got pulled into the periphery of some drama with some friends today. I wasn’t physically around the drama, and I wasn’t a part of it. So in the detached place I was, the whole thing looked almost laughable. But having been inside of the murk, too, I know how hard it is to be clear-headed and calm when you’re confused as to what’s going on with someone you’re emotionally tied to. I’m glad I never carried my paranoia as far as this person did, and the fact that the drama is in the rare position of not being mine, made me feel really good. And then I felt bad for feeling glad it’s not me. The fact is, it still sucks and others go thru it all the time.

It’s really nice to wake up, look at the person sleeping with a small unconscious smile next to you with his arm around your waist and his leg draped over your knee, and know that your life is better than the dream you just had. It’s really nice to take a nap on a hammock together in the middle of the workday. It’s really nice to leave someone with a smile on your lips and calm contentment in your heart.

Yesterday was a very pleasant day. Mr. W and I strolled to Ralph’s and got some ingredients, and he made breakfast (hash browns, pork steak & eggs, apricots, guava juice) which we ate while watching “Friends.” It’s nice to watch “Friends” from the beginning through so my brain can piece together the progression of events. Then we went to Lowe’s and I bought my parents a new kitchen faucet, and we drove over to my parents’ house where Mr. W got down and dirty under the kitchen sink to remove and replace their current leaky faucet. After he scored those major brownie points, my parents treated us to Japanese food. Then Mr. W and I came back to his place (after scrapping plans to run a few miles and/or to wash both our dirt clods that we race around in), watched a couple more episodes of “Friends,” and hit the hay. I slept very soundly.

I was only slightly guilty that as I was having my leisurely day, Vicky was in San Diego running her limbs off at the Rock n Roll Marathon. Props to her for finishing! I called her on my drive to work this morning and asked, “Do you still have feet?” There was a pause, during which I assume she was checking, and then she said, “I can see them, but I can’t feel them.”

Today Mr. W and I are gonna meet up for lunch cuz my mom gave us some Chinese dzong zi she’d special-ordered from Dragon Boat Festival day. Yum! Man, tonight, I definitely have to work out. Jujitsu or running or both.

Mr. W got Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon DVDs which are in Chinese, so he suggested we watch them with my parents after he changes the faucet. I went online and read some reviews and plot synopses, and saw that China banned Concubine for the depiction of sex and use of opium. I don’t know…I’m just not comfortable sitting in an open area within sight of my parents while sex scenes are playing on TV. Blech.

Today, Mr. W and I brought 3 kids with us to visit UCLA. All 3 (not all his) want to attend my alma mater, so they were excited at the prospect of a tour. It was sweltering hot (in the 90s Fahrenheit), there was lots of walking involved both on campus and around the neighboring Westwood, but they had each other so they didn’t complain much. The two boys tossed a baseball back and forth to each other throughout their walk, but they did ask a few times whether we were close to the car. The answer was usually “HAHA, no.” Kids are so not used to physical exertion these days, not because their bodies can’t handle it (we had one cheerleader, 2 baseball players), but because they’re spoiled by technology. There’s a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin is bugging his mom to drive him to his friend’s house to play. His mom tells him to walk there, since it’s only a couple of blocks away. Calvin refuses to walk. His mom starts yelling, and ends with, “What do you think people have FEET for?!” Calvin yells back equally irrately, “To work the gas pedals!”

We got to show them much of the beautiful North campus and Sculpture Garden (where they played toss-the-tennis-ball with a huge yellow labrador retriever that was wading in the Sculpture Garden fountain and took photos hanging off a bossy looking fat woman statue), they bought souvenirs at the Student Store, walked through Powell Library and got to peek in a lecture hall doing a video presentation in Dodd Hall. They admired the state-of-the-art athletic facilities inside Pauley Pavilion and the Wooden Center. At one point, the five of us were studying an unusual looking sculpture, and I was in the front with my back turned to the kids. I heard a “wap!” and then the girl’s voice, “Ow!” I turned and the boys were grinning so I thought they threw the baseball at her and hit her. She turned around and gave the younger boy a dirty look, then looked around and realized it was a pine cone that fell from a tree overhead and hit her. She said, “I thought you threw the baseball at me! I was gonna shove you!” Her older brother said, “Man! I heard that, too! It made a sound as it dropped, like whoosh, BAM!” The girl, whom her dad always calls a drama queen, said, “If that had hit my head, I would have a CONCUSSION! Lookit, my hand’s all red! Ow!” I thought it was hilarious. On our way out of that area, we once again walked by that area, and she ran up to me and showed me the offending pine cone. “Lookit how hard it is! It totally hurt!” I said, “How do you know that’s the same pine cone?” “Because,” her brother said, “That’s the only one over there.” “Only you,” I told her. “Only you can stand in a big broad grassy area, and there would be just ONE pine cone falling, and it’d hit you.” She laughed and said, “I know, really.” I told her she should go buy a lottery ticket, cuz what are the chances? “But she has bad luck,” her brother pointed out.

In Westwood, we dropped by Diddy Rease’s, where they’ve been selling 2 freshly made cookies of your choice and a gob of ice cream of your choice to make an ice cream sandwich for $1, for as long as I’ve known of them. There’s always a line, which goes by fast because the people behind the counter spit out orders like nobody’s business. (I have no idea what that cliche means, but it seems appropriate here.) We’ve always marveled at the low price. Obviously, they make money off volume, but to have that price for over 12 years was impressive. (They sell a dozen cookies of your choice for $3.75, which the older boy bought.) However, we saw a posted sign that says they will be increasing their prices for the ice cream sandwiches to $1.25 starting June 5, so the 5 ice cream sandwiches we got today for $1 each would be our last time. 🙁 But heck, even at $1.25, I’d buy. You can’t get just a scoop of ice cream at any ice cream shop for that price.

I can’t believe it’s been 8 years since I went to school there. Time flies so quickly by when you don’t have midterms, finals and quarters to mark its passing.

A couple of attorneys who came in for a hearing this morning complimented the flowers. People always assume Mr. W gave me the flowers, but don’t worry, Vanessa, I set them straight.

My reporter can be seen walking by and sniffing the roses and eucalyptus.

(sorry for the bad photo quality and glare; I only have my cameraphone)

“Hi, remember me? I’m the avocado seed. People said I wouldn’t make it, but how you like me now?! They used to call me ‘weed,’ but now they call me ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ I’m real popular at Cindy’s work. People stop by and marvel at me. I’m gonna be worth hundreds of bucks when I grow up a little bit more and move into my own pot.”

“Here’s a view of my root system:”

(sorry for the bad photo quality and glare; Cindy only has a cameraphone)

Yeah, I suppose now that it’s June, I can start the countdown.

28 more days left to enjoy being in my 20s. *sob*

(Warning: boring post alert.)

As I was leaving to go to work this morning, I walked by the bouquet of flowers and thought, “There’s yoga class tonight, so I won’t be around to enjoy these until tomorrow morning for a few minutes, and then I’m gone for the weekend again.” So I decided to bring them to work with me so I can have a full 2 workdays with them. The ceramic vase I’d put the flowers in has a vertical crack down the side, so water was slowly leaking. I planned to change them into one of a few glass vases I had in the courtroom. I put the flowers to the side on my file cabinet as we did a hearing on a criminal case that was returning today for sentencing. The defendant, who was in custody, decided his attorney was “railroading” him and had a fit, cussing and trying to stand to leave the courtroom, not shutting up or settling down so that we could resume sentencing. 15 sheriffs in our courtroom (2 with stun guns) later, this defendant was escorted out of the courtroom and we sentenced him without his being present. It was downhill from there for the rest of the morning. I selected the beautiful cylindrical frosted glass vase that Vicky had sent me flowers in for my bday last year, and looked around for the packet of flower food I’d brought. I could not find it; it’d vaporized sometime during the morning struggle. I ignored that BIG HINT from fate. I had a spare packet from a previous bouquet, so I took the vase to fill with room temperature water (as directed on the printed instructions on the packet) in the bathroom sink. The sink was too small for the vase and it was not gonna fill sideways, so after making a slight mess in the hallway restroom, I took the vase into the jury room restroom to fill. The vase fit in the sink albeit at an angle, but after I filled as much as I could, the vase would not come out of the sink. I pulled, rolled, manipulated as best I could, and called my court reporter to help. She put soap on the rim where it was making contact with the sink edge, couldn’t get it out. We called our bailiff. He couldn’t do it, either. “I can’t just leave it here for now,” I said, “They just sent us another trial. We’re gonna have jurors using this restroom!” Finally, with a clink, my bailiff broke the vase, and we took the pieces out. =( I got another less exotic vase and rinsed that over the water fountain at the back of the courtroom. Water spilled out of the shallow metal fountain bowl and spilled all over the ground. I sighed and got a bunch of napkins to put on the floor. I adjusted the angle of the vase, and the new angle made water trickle out the side and onto my skirt. Another puddle on the floor. I cleaned that up. The angle wasn’t vertical enough to fill the vase and neither was another water fountain I tried after that, so I finally got smart and filled my water bottle with sink water and poured that into the vase. The flowers beautifully displayed in a clear vase, I went to rinse out the cracked vase in the hallway bathroom sink, and in pouring out the brown-green water in the vase, a wave of it skipped over the sink water’s surface, flew out of the sink and landed right on my skirt. I sighed. What next? Was I gonna slip on a puddle or get hit by a car on the way home? What a bad plant day.

And then, lunch came and everything started getting great! We worked into lunch because our new trial defendant decided to take a plea bargain instead of going to trial, so that freed up our afternoon. I spent some time with Mr. W at lunch, then came back to work to make some phone calls to my retirement program people. I received a check in the mail from them yesterday with a letter stating they’d erroneously deducted this money from my pay to switch my retirement plan, which scared me because I’d been trying to call them for months to say the retirement plan that show me on in the annual statements is wrong and that I’d paid money for the switch. The fact that they returned money may mean that they kicked me out of the plan I want to be in and refunded my money, which is going to cost me thousands more to get back into the right plan. I got thru finally on the phone, and the representative I spoke to said that nope, it was their error for not putting me in the right plan years ago, and that I’m fully paid for the correct plan, and that the check I received was a refund for the money they’d pulled out monthly to switch plans without realizing that I should already be switched. He apologized, and said to just go ahead and cash the check, they’ll mail me confirmation of the plan I’m in soon. Happy birthday, me! How often do we get a check for thousands of bucks from the County that we didn’t have to kill ourselves to get?

Oh, and Victoria’s Secret also sent me a giftcard for my birthday. And Mr. W didn’t feel like going to yoga so instead of seeing crazy yoga lady, we’re gonna have a nice dinner and watch “Friends” and eat green tea ice cream. Karma’s being so nice to me right now. 🙂