cindy's world

This thing always happens to me when I peruse other people’s blogs. I look at their photos and I think, “Wow, that’s a really nice photo. I wonder if it’s really a photo of the blogger.” And I’d admire the composition of the portrait, and the clever poses and outfits, the beautiful figures and skin, and I’d think, “I wanna post a photo of me like that.” But I don’t have any. I wish I just had a recent nice pretty photo of myself. Something I’d look at and feel good about. Where some huge flaw wouldn’t wave at me, like maybe my thighs look huge, or I look midgety, or my face is pudgy, or my skin is horrid, or my upper arms look obese, or I look pregnant. It’s been awhile since I’d been pleasantly surprised by a photo of myself. Just now, I looked in the China photo collection, and what kind of photos did I take? Crap like this:

Times like this, I’m inspired to draw the way I wish I looked. Beautiful, slim, dreamily gazing into the distance of some beautiful horizon, hair long and floating around me, tall with slender (but toned) limbs, nice perky butt and boobs. Sigh…

Like, what happened to THESE days?…



These photos are from LAST YEAR!

We’re in the midst of jury selection for a criminal murder trial. About 15 minutes ago at the end of a break, the judge directed me to let our prospective jurors in from the outside hallway; breaktime’s over, and we’re going to dive back into jury selection. I opened the door, announced, “Okay jurors, you know the drill!” and they chuckled and filed into the courtroom. After I entered, the bailiff and I kept counting the jurors over and over and we kept coming up one juror short. So I took roll and discovered the name of the missing juror. One juror sitting in the jury box raised his hand. “Excuse me,” he said, “He might be outside in the hallway sleeping.” What?! I started walking back out toward the courtroom front doors again, passing by a DA who was visiting. The DA said discreetly to me, “Yeah, there’s a dude out there who’s asleep on a bench.”

I walked out, looked down the hall, and sure enough, there’s a youngish guy sitting upright on the bench, leaning his back and head against the wall behind him, eyes closed. All by himself. I walked up to him, my heels clicking loudly on the marble floors and echoing down the hall. He didn’t wake up. I stood over him, touched him lightly on the shoulder, saying, “Sir?” No response. I shook him again, harder. “Sir?” No response. I looked up in bewilderment. Oh crap. What if he had a heart attack or a stroke? Do I take his pulse? Should I shake him harder? Looking around, I saw a coworker who happened to pass through an adjoining hallway. He’d seen me talking to the guy, and I threw up my hands in a shrug with my eyes wide, like, “I don’t know what to do!” I walked up to the coworker and pleaded, “He’s not responding! I’m freaking out. Can you come with me just as a witness?” He kindly walked with me over to the guy, and as I approached again, the juror (thank GOD) groggily opened his eyes. “Are you a juror in our case?” I asked him.
He sat up suddenly. “Oh yes. Oh! I’m SO sorry,” he said.
“That’s okay, come on back in,” I said lightly leading him back down the hallway, thanking my coworker, who left us.
“I’m sooo sorry,” the juror said again, and we came back into the courtroom, he took a seat in the audience, and the judge resumed jury selection as usual.

Nobody knew that I practically wet myself out in the hall earlier, which would not have been a good thing, cuz I was wearing a skirt.

Despite my insistence that I don’t want to celebrate my birthday this year, and that all I want as a gift is a new pair of workout gloves, Mr. W booked a 3-day cruise yesterday as his gift to me. It leaves Long Beach port Friday evening, July 20th (easiest day for me to take off because my judge will be on vacation anyway), and returns the following Monday morning. Because Mr. W made these arrangements over the phone, I don’t know the information or itinerary for the trip, except that it’s supposed to go to Ensenada, Mexico and dock there all of Saturday. Yay, I get to have cheap Mexican lobster! (*watching Jordan wipe drool off her chin*)

I am feeling guilty that Mr. W is doing something so big for li’l ol’ me. But maybe it just goes to show, if you’ve been very very good, and you wish and pray very very hard, life will take care of you very very well. 😀

P.S. Does this mean I’ll have to get my own pair of workout gloves?

Months ago, Vanessa signed up for the Marine Corps Boot Camp Challenge which is to take place Saturday, October 6 at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, and extended an invitation to me to do the same, which I’d declined. The event is described as such on the event website:

EVENT FEATURES
The first and best! A fun and furious 3-mile course featuring obstacles used only by Marine Recruits at the Marine Recruit Depot. Get “encouragement” along the way at each obstacle by MCRD Drill Instructors. Compete as an individual or a member of a 3-person or 5-person team.
Great post-race party with plenty of music, food, drinks and beer, awards to the top 3 finishers in each category/age group, official race T-Shirts to all entrants. A very memorable day!

A couple weekends ago while hanging out at Mr. W’s male best friend’s (both men are former Marines, btw) house, we watched a new reality show called “The Academy” that depicts Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recruits go through their “boot camp” training at a training academy local to us. I watched these people struggle on obstacle courses and wondered aloud whether I could pull off that training course. Mr. W had replied, “Pssh. You could do that entire obstacle course blindfolded.” Really. Hmm.

And then while hanging out with Dwaine last weekend, he was so enthusiastic about the obstacle course Mud Run he’d done that day that I thought about Vanessa’s prior invitation to this event. This morning, I finalized the talking-Dwaine-into-Boot-Camp-Challenge and registered myself. Yay!! Just to keep Mr. W in the loop, I put him on the email mailing list to confirm my registration, and I just spoke to him, and HE registered!!! DOUBLE YAY!!! He’s familiar with the training grounds from his own Marine Corp training days, and said the obstacles “are a blast.” Anyone else out there wanna join?

I’m in desperate need of some levity after that last post, so here it is.

While cleaning out my closet with my gym trainee this past weekend, I uncovered two T-shirts so tiny I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought them in New York in 2002. It was after September 11, 2001, so they were patriotic cute white Ts, one depicting a colorful US Air Force seal with a flag and an eagle, and the other showed the New York skyline with an enlarged Twin Towers with “9-11-01” over the picture, and “We Will Never Forget” under it. I brought those two shirts to work with me yesterday and gave them to my coworker, thinking one of her many young children could fit into them.

Today, I had this email exchange with that coworker:

Me: Did the t-shirts fit?
Her: Yes, as a matter of fact, Jack LOVED them and is wearing 1 today and has plans to wear the other either later today or tomorrow!!!!
Me: Yay! I’m so glad to hear that! How old is Jack?
Her: Jack is 4 years old and Loves anything Flag related-even if it just has red,white, and blue on it!!
Me: Wow, that’s quite a fortunate coincidence!
Her: He was undecided this morning and driving me crazy because I was trying to leave for work but I remember your shirts and he snatched them right up and pull the “Air Force” themed one over his head and said, “These are my favorite kinds of shirts.”
I told him that my friend had brought them all the way from New York and he said “WOOOOOOOOW!!! Tell her thanks for the Flag shirts!! I LOVE THEM!!!!!!”
I had lunch with them today and he was still telling us all about his favorite shirts and he was very careful not to get it dirty!!!

HOW cute is that?!

I had an awful night’s sleep last nite. I awoke at like 3:30 a.m. from a sickening dream that made me afraid to go back to sleep.

I dreamt that I woke up in the middle of the night next to Mr. W, but that I’d lost all attraction for him and desire to be with him, so I got out of bed and despite his protests, left.
Somehow I ended up in bed, in a hotel room, lying on the dark-haired chest of someone else, filled with the cozy ease that only being secure about our future could bring. I looked up and it was the cheating ex I was lying with. I sat up in confusion. Was I back together with him? Why would I do that? Slowly, my senses came back to me and I “realized” that I was in a Vegas hotel room suite that somehow he and I had arranged to meet at. I told him that I’m too conflicted and confused right now to be there or to pursue anything with him and that I was leaving. He angrily packed up his stuff as well, even tho I thought it was his room and he was there for his own reasons. I picked up my things, came back to the bedroom area to get other things, and saw that he’d passive-aggressively put a photo of me on the coffee table that he was apparently leaving behind, as well as a piece of paper that he’d scrawled some lines of poetry on. The poetry was to the effect of how happy he was, how unbelievable it was, that the time for our reconciliation had arrived. He’d apparently written that when we made our plans to meet up, which event was not in my dream. Anyway, I left the room, he left behind me, and I exited into a parking garage. An Asian girl, one of his optometry school friends, I assumed, was coming up to meet up with him to hang out. I said hello and apologized for not being able to hang out with them as planned and bolted. I ran down three flights of spiral parking garage stairs but the ex and his friend, coming down a more direct side stair that I hadn’t noticed was there, ended up right next to me on the ground floor. I kept trying to run from them, to create a larger distance (even tho they were not chasing me), but I moved so slowly, as if I was chest-deep in a swimming pool. I realized the most effective way to move faster was to kick off against the ground at a diagonal, just like in water. So I did that and struggled my way into what appeared to be a restaurant.
Now I was attending a dinner party in a casual bar-type restaurant with long cafeteria-style tables. Our party took up three tables one in front of the other; I was in the front table. Childhood friend Vicky was across from me, her sister Karen was a few people away to my right. I wondered whether I was even invited to this thing as, looking around, I didn’t see any of my regular hang-out friends altho I did recognize some people from James’ BBS from back in ’93 and some of Vicky’s pharmacy school friends. The guys around me were dorky geeky fobby types that I would not consider dating. All of a sudden, as if agreed upon and on cue, three such dorky guys sitting behind me turned at the same time and started trying to chat us up. Instantly, Vicky, Karen and I got up to leave. We refused to be picked up on by these guys. And then I woke up.

I laid there in the dark, trying to interpret the dream. Okay, so my impression of Mr. W and the ex in the dream was that Mr. W was lightness, and the ex was darkness. So they must be flip sides of a coin, two polar opposite men that I was going back and forth between. So that conflict represented light: a relationship I was in most ways absolutely happy and carefree about, except that it doesn’t offer me a future I’d originally expected of myself; and dark: a problematic painful relationship that did offer me the traditional future. Neither is ideal and the conflict comes from my internal current conflict regarding what kind of future I can live with and what I’m willing to sacrifice. The dinner party is my fear that if I leave the current relationship, there will be no good guys on the market that I’d want to date, which is also a very real fear in my head.

I eventually fell back asleep after 5am and dreamt that I was being sent off with some friends to boot camp, apparently having enlisted and been accepted into some branch of the armed forces. My parents gave me a warm send-off. My mother, to my surprise, wasn’t heart-broken and was rather jovial about it. As I stepped onto the bus, I was very aware that I really didn’t want to go, and I asked a friend behind me in the bus line whether it’s possible to drop out after boot camp. She was dubious about that. And then I woke up again. I wonder what THAT dream meant. That I should do what I want and not worry about my parents, they’ll be fine? But I hadn’t WANTED to enlist.

This is the latest installment in the ongoing saga that is Mr. W’s life with his kids. They gave him a folded-up piece of scratch paper yesterday with this written on it:

HAPPY FATHERS DAY!
Since we were in Vegas we didn’t really have time to get you anything, but when we come back we are going to spend some time together and give you our gift. We love you. Thank you for this weekend.

And then there’s a heart and the son and daughter’s names under that.

I said, “Aww, they THANKED you for the WEEKEND in Vegas!”

I think I may have been more excited about this than Mr. W was.

I had an amazing weekend! Because my gym trainee was coming over to my house (for the first time) to help me clean out my closets, I was embarrassed to have her see my house as the mess it was, so I spent all Saturday morning before she got there cleaning, scrubbing, vacuuming (never could spell that word), Windexing, disinfecting, sorting, disposing, decluttering. My house is SO spic and span right now that I loved being in it all weekend. We spent 3 hours digging through four closets, and I’m donating 3 large trash bags full of clothes, plus one packing box full of undergarments. Man. I can’t believe what an ugly fashion period the 80s and early 90s were. There were some things I had no problems parting with, but there were many more that I had to look to her. “This still fits. What do you think?”
“That is OUT. I don’t see you wearing that now.”
“Really? Is it the box cut [with drawsting on the bottom], or is it the flannel plaid pattern?”
“It’s BOTH!!”
“Oh.”
All the oversized t-shirts, sweatshirts and sweaters caused her to exclaim over and over again, “I don’t understand. Who were you buying clothes FOR back then?! Some fat…man? If a guy today fit in that shirt, I wouldn’t date him!”
This made me examine my old wardrobe thoughtfully. “I wonder why my parents let me buy all this masculine, oversized stuff when I was in high school. They’re all really unflattering.”
“They were probably just happy cuz the less feminine you looked, the less they had to worry about.”
Funny thing is that I told my parents today about all the closet cleaning, and they even brought up that my clothes back 10 years ago were big and menswear, and my dad reminded me accusingly of the flannel shirts and sweatshirts I’d taken from him. Oops.

(as usual, rest mouse pointer over photos for captions)

After my gym trainee left, I took off to Dwaine’s house. We went to buy lasagne ingredients at the grocery store, and then went back to his place to cook it. He was an avid student, very hands-on, wanting to do a bit of most things himself so that he’d know how to do it again later on without me. The lasagne turned out very well, except that he was so exhausted by then from the earlier San Diego mud run catching up with him that I had a really hard time getting him to slunk from the couch over to the kitchen to take out and cut the lasagne. (The reason why he had to do this instead of me, was because he wanted photos of him doing the impossible — cooking and pulling homemade food that he’d made out of the oven.) As we ate dinner we watched puppet sex on a Comedy Central show “Team America: World Police”, by the creators of “South Park.” Its antics were laugh-out-loud funny in their ludicrousness. And lewdness. It was a fun night. I even got a surprise phone call from Mr. W in Vegas, at a bar with his brothers while waiting to see the topless show “Bite.” It was a surprise cuz Mr. W doesn’t typically think to call me when he’s on a trip. He called me once the entire 2 weeks he was in Alaska last year. I was so glad to hear they were getting some good quality brother time in, and also that they were seeing “Bite”, as I know Mr. W had been wanting to see it every time we’d gone to Vegas recently, but the timing never worked out. Plus, I wasn’t particularly interested in the show so in a selfish way, it worked out for me. Hee hee. Altho I don’t think one of the brother’s wives was too pleased that they had gone to a topless revue when she found out about it afterwards.

Sunday (today), guilt from having eaten like a pig but not worked out at the gym since Wednesday roused me from slumber, and I got up and hit the gym for 2.5 hours. I did about 1.5 hrs of warmups and weight-training, and a full hour of cardio. I would’ve done less on cardio because the boredom always kills me, but “American Pie” was playing on one of the TVs. That easily killed the hour. I’d forgotten how funny the first movie in the series was. Strangely, it turned out my weight’s lower than it had been in a long time, at 125 (rattlesnakes be damned!) and my fat percentage dropped 2% as well. After the gym, I showered up and went to my parents’ house, picked them up, and we went to get fitted for shoes at A Snail’s Pace. I got reconfirmed that I overpronate, my dad was diagnosed as an overpronator as well, and my mom’s gait was neutral. “HAHA!” she laughed at us. “I’m neutral!”
“That doesn’t mean anything!” I told her.
“I’m normal,” she insisted.
My mom got nice Asics, my dad got a newly engineered pair of Sauconys, and I got a brand I’d never heard of until now, Brooks. My parents were excited to go on their hilly neighborhood walk tonight to try out their new shoes. It’s so cute, they never acknowledged the importance of really good shoes so my dad was stunned walking around in his corrective, supportive stability shoes. “It’s like walking on air! So light!” he exclaimed. My mom was a bit perturbed at the orange-colored accents on her shoes because she’s the fashion queen, and kept migrating toward the “cute” or sale shoes that aren’t even neutral and being disappointed that they felt funny on her feet. I left them with their new birthday (mom) and Father’s Day presents after dinner.

After spending more quality time with the DodoCat, I took Mr. W up on his invitation to hang out with him at his house. And that’s where I am right now! Blogging to my readers instead of catching up with the newly returned Mr. W. Oh well. 😀

Happy Friday! All’s quiet on the Western Front. I came back today to find that our trial is over; the jurors returned their verdict yesterday while I was at graduation. Unfortunately, the floater court reporter took the original verdict home with her. Who does that?! But according to the floater clerk, he’d already tracked her down and she’s going to mail it back to us.

I may join my coworkers for happy hour tonite at Outback Steakhouse. Tomorrow, my gym trainee volunteered to come to my house for a much-needed closet cleaning. After that, if Dwaine doesn’t poop out after his San Diego 10K Mud Run on Saturday, we’re gonna hang out and cook. “You can come over and prod what’s left of me with a stick after the mud run,” was how he put it.

Mr. W is already in Vegas with his kidlets. They’ll be back Sunday. I’d planned to give his son this cool gadget as his graduation gift, but it turned out you can only get this online, so I ordered it today. Now it’s gonna end up being more of a birthday present than a graduation present, his birthday being only 2 days before my own. Oh yeah. Mr. W, if you’re reading this before I give your son his graduation gadget, don’t tell him what it is! I figure this’ll come in really handy when he’s deciding whether to drive from school all the way to his mom’s house after class, or to wait out traffic at Mr. W’s house or in school. Or to take an alternate route. Here’s a review on the product.

Kids are great, aren’t they? Here’re some anecdotes my dad email-forwarded me:
WHEN MY THREE-YEAR-OLD SON OPENED THE BIRTHDAY GIFT FROM HIS GRANDMOTHER, HE DISCOVERED A WATER PISTOL.. HE SQUEALED WITH DELIGHT AND HEADED FOR THE NEAREST SINK. I WAS NOT SO PLEASED. I TURNED TO MOM AND SAID, “I’M SURPRISED AT YOU. DON’T YOU REMEMBER HOW WE USED TO DRIVE YOU CRAZY WITH WATER GUNS?”
MOM SMILED AND THEN REPLIED….. “I REMEMBER!!”

A new teacher was trying to make use of her psychology courses. She started
her class by saying, “Everyone who thinks they’re stupid, stand up!”
After a few seconds, Little Davie stood up. The teacher said, “Do you think
you’re stupid, Little Davie?”
“No, ma’am, but I hate to see you standing there all by yourself!”

I got today off (yeah, it was a huge shocker to me, too) so that I could attend Mr. W’s son’s graduation. It was a historical moment — Mr. W’s kids attend a new school, only 3 years old, and this graduating class is the school’s first ever, as the school opened up accepting only freshmen and sophomores.

To the graduation, I wore this outfit that had an unusual back, as so:

The graduation being outdoors from 3p-4p, I ended up this interesting tanline despite the sunblock I’d slathered on (you can also see my bikini string tanline toward the bottom of the photo; I got that when I hung out with Vanessa):

Speaking of Vanessa, thanks to her Boot Camp workout, I still have these mosquito bite war wounds: