cindy's world

On the drive to work this morning, I struggled with a drink and ended up splashing some of it on my lap, staining my skirt. Drat! I mulled over the event, and it occurred to me that what’s amusing about this, is what the drink is.
Some might think, “A drink. That means alcohol.” I don’t drink and drive!
“She’s an American, driving to work in the morning. Her drink is Starbucks coffee.” Nope, not coffee!
“She’s Chinese. Maybe it’s a box of Vitasoy or other soy milk.” Nope.
“Tea?” In the morning? Ew.
“Water.” Well, then, it wouldn’t stain.
“Soda?” Quit that years ago, haven’t caved yet.
“Duh. It’s obviously fruit juice, like OJ or something.” That would mean I’d have to go grocery shopping to have fresh juice.
Nope, what I spilled, struggling with the pull-tab opening while driving this morning, was a boxed drink of Premiere Protein shake. In chocolate. Cuz I’m feminine like that.

This little gem is on Reuters:
~ * ~
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? — MAN ASKS WIFE AT BROTHEL
Wed Jan 9, 2008 12:29pm EST
WARSAW (Reuters) – A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment’s employees. Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

“I was dumfounded. I thought I was dreaming,” the husband told the newspaper Wednesday.

The couple, married for 14 years, are now divorcing, the newspaper reported.

(Writing by Chris Borowski, Editing by Matthew Jones)
~ * ~
To quote an episode of Friends:
Phoebe [pretending to pick up phone and putting it to her ear]: “Hello, kettle? This is Monica. You’re black.”

I’m still dealing with my roofing nightmare at home (turns out to be a bigger problem than I thought — the entire roof may have to be replaced, and probably the entire indoors ceiling, too; my association and I are going back and forth about what’s whose liability and who should pay for what), so here’s a funny for the blog.

I was telling commenter ‘a’ about my wedding progress, and about how my invitations are done and on order. My mom wasn’t thrilled with the appearance of the paper cardstock, since it’s white and white is the Chinese funeral color. Despite the fact that there are pretty red cherry blossoms down the length of the paper on one end, the white paper paired with black lettering made her appear very unimpressed when I showed her the proof online. “Is it maybe ivory, and not really white? Or does the white paper have silver or a metallic highlight?” she asked hopefully. I informed her that not only is the paper white, the color is called ‘bright white.’ I had to hand it to her; she dropped it.

I know my bridesmaid Vicky had a similar invitation argument with her mother, except she had to order a second set of invitations to patch things with her mom. Commenter ‘a’ apparently had the same thing happen to her. Invitations…BIG DEAL with Asian moms! Who knew? ‘a’ ‘s hilarious story, in her own words (with some light editing to make it blog-friendly), posted with her permission:
~ * ~
“Oh gosh, they [the wedding invitations] were just white w/ black print, so we decided to spruce it by adding a light gray silk bow. Took me 3 stores to find the gray I liked. [I] finally get home, start doing them and she’s [mom’s] helping me halfway thru; then she says, ‘I think pink would be better. Pink is more good luck.’
HERE WE GO.
So I’m like ‘No, we’re almost halfway done, we’re not doing pink now.’
‘No pink, good luck. No pink, good luck. No pink, good luck.’
You get the picture. She would not SHUT IT! So then I’m reduced to screaming, ‘Be quiet!!!’
Then my dad comes out and asks wut all the noise is about. And he tells me I need to calm down.
So I’m like, ‘We’re almost halfway done and she’s nagging me about pink bows!!! And she won’t be quiet!!!’
So dad turns to her and tells her to stop bothering me.
And all the while [fiance] Mark is like silent, cuz he’s scared. The end.
…No the best part is at the end! Where after my dad scolds her, she turns to Mark and says, ‘I’m sorry.’ And I’m like WTF, wut about ME??!?!??!
OH NOOOOOOOOOOO, I forgot, THIS IS THE BEST PART…
So weeks later we’re finally sending out the invites cuz we have them addressed and ready. So we hand them [parents] their stack for their guests, so they can mail it themselves to avoid any accusations that we didnt mail theirs, right? So one day I find their stack on their desk and I pull one that’s still unsealed out.
EFFING PINK BOW!! She replaced my bow w/ her own effing pink bow! So for all time, to all of her guests, I have like Little Bo Peep taste. So w/ all the courage I could muster, I silently inhaled and placed it back into the envelope w/o comment. Cuz I didn’t want her to have the satisfaction of upsetting me again. But the look on Mark’s face when he saw it was like ‘oh shiet, here comes wwIII.’
Oh wait. As I’m telling this story I’m remembering more. hahahaha, I think I repressed it all until now!!! I remember wut I did!!!!
I took out her pink bow ones and put in my extra gray bow ones, then I sealed it so it couldn’t be changed.”
~ * ~
‘a’ explained that her parents couldn’t address the envelopes to their own satisfaction, so ‘a’ and her fiance had pre-printed envelopes with her parents’ guests’ addresses. No way they were going to tear open the envelopes to change the bows because they wouldn’t want to re-address everything themselves and find new envelopes. Therefore, all the ones ‘a’ caught were sent out with the gray ribbons.

TELL ME that’s not funny!!! Are your parents like this?

Yesterday, a printed quote by Ulysses S. Grant appeared on my desk in my absence.

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.

I chuckled. And then I realized how true it is. Then I felt a little sad. Cuz it’s not just bad things that get taken away when people use them a lot…

I haven’t been home all weekend. This morning, opening my bedroom door revealed all sorts of white stuff all over my bedroom floor. I first thought it was Dodo playing with something and tearing it up, and then I thought the pieces looked like styrofoam. Uh-oh. Dreadfully, I looked up. A large portion of my popcorn ceiling has become popcorn flooring.

It’s been pouring rain all weekend and I’ve naively enjoyed it, thinking it great for our current California water crisis. Even despite an association member and neighbor’s phone call to me early Sunday morning asking if I had any leaks (and my explaining I wasn’t home to check but that I didn’t think so), it really did not occur to me that I’d have a problem. I ran around upstairs checking other ceilings, looking in closets. I found another leak, a milder one, in the spare bedroom. I padded down the damp areas on the carpet and set up a bucket to catch the rhythmic drippage in my bedroom, drops falling off the ceiling fan. On the drive to work, I called the neighbor who’d called me about his ceiling leak and left a voice mail explaining mine. He was going to call the roofers, he’d told me on Sunday morning.

Despite the small wet disasters going on at home, I see the silver linings around the rainy clouds:
* the leaks did not occur over electronics, paintings, other valuables that would be irreparably damaged.
* I had pre-sorted my laundry before washing, leaving piles on the floor in my bedroom, and the drips occurred over these piles. Two piles of clothes were completely drenched. But this is a fortunate thing, because the two piles were tough workout clothes and not my delicates, AND the fact that they were there kept the water from soaking into my carpet, going through the floor/ceiling and creating another water problem/leak downstairs, possibly onto my big screen TV or something. One ceiling is easier to repair than two. No wonder I hadn’t had the urge to actually DO my laundry after presorting them for the past week. (I’d taken the two waterlogged piles and thrown them in the washing machine and started the cycle before I left for work.)
* As is typical of our schizophrenic California weather, today and the remainder of the week is projected to be dry and ultra-sunny, probably in the low 70s. That’ll give my roof some time to dry off and be repaired.

Mr. W just called and I just told him. He went through a bout of cussing and Chicken Little-esque “the sky is falling” proclamations, about how the space between my roof and my bedroom ceiling is damaged now and how my association better do something and get my roof repaired and reminding me how I had to pay last year for other peoples’ leaks when I didn’t have leaks and about how I’d better keep calling the guy and getting on him (even though I think he’s not answering his home phone because he’s at work), and suddenly I’m feeling a lot more gloomy about the whole situation.

I hope it’s not going to cost me a bundle. I don’t have a bundle of money I can spare right now…

I have been faithful to my workouts this entire year! (har) Remember that new amped up workout gym trainee and I are trying? It’s working miracles. We’ve increased all our weights by 35%-50%, dropped our reps from 15 to 10, and we’ve decreased our cardio for the time being.

Today is upper body day, and since we’re still sore from Wednesday’s upper body workout, we did sets of 8 (but 8 was all we were able to push out at these new weights).
Machine chest press: 50 lbs.
Supine barbell bench: 60 lb barbell
Lateral shoulder lift (gym trainee calls this “flying”): 8 lb dumbbells
Dumbbell bicep curls: 15 lb dumbbells
Lat pull-down: 85 lbs
Mid-level rows: 70 lbs
Cable tricep press-down: 45 lbs (or maybe 60; the numbers were rubbed off)
5 minute elliptical warmup in the beginning, with 5 minute elliptical cool-down at the end.

My gym trainee loves her new muscle tone and noticed the inches are leaving. I dropped some weight, not sure how much as my home scale is out of battery, but I definitely dropped inches. I’m comfortably back in my size 2 pants. So for all those people out there who say women should do light weight with high reps to keep from looking like a man and bulking up, and for my mom who told me to stop weight-lifting so my arms don’t look big and ugly in a strapless dress…

PTTTHHHHH!@#$

I met up with commenter ‘a’ yesterday after work at Mochilato in Irvine. Turns out she lives a few miles from Mr. W’s house. Mochilato is a new dessert restaurant that serves a variety of Japanese mochis with a contemporary twist; instead of just the sweetened red bean paste inside the chewy sweet glutinous ball, they have peanut butter (which I had), white bean (which ‘a’ had), no filling and a variety of other fillings I’d forgotten. The best filling is the ice cream mochis. Not just the traditional green tea or red bean fillings in these ice cream mochis that you’d get in a sushi restaurant; this place had tiramisu, hazelnut, chocolate hazelnut, an entire counter of colorful ice cream filled mochis of many different flavors. The restaurant also serves gelato and Asian-style shaved ice with Asian-style toppings. The best thing about the location aside from its easy-on-the-eye and tasty-in-the-tummy bite-size desserts, is that it’s very large for a snack shop. The front half of the restaurant is all well-lit, leather-bound seating area with large tables that seat 8 and little tables that seat 4, and then deeper into the restaurant is the food area that resembles Haagen-Dazs meets Starbucks. (Yes, they serve coffee, too.)

‘a’ ordered a white bean filled pink mochi that she said was surprisingly good so after we hung out and chatted, I ordered one, along with 2 other mochis, to bring back for Mr. W. I’d wanted to try a bite of the white bean mochi, but by the time I turned around, Mr. W had stuffed the ENTIRE THING into his mouth. =( Who eats mochis like that? Guess I’ll have to go back to buy my own.

Anyone wanna come with?

Mr. W and I had a very low-key New Year’s. For the first time since we’d been together, he wanted to stay up (and did stay up) till midnite to toast the new year in. I asked why he’s bothering for this year instead of sticking to his 9pm bedtime like all the previous years. He said because the year we’re toasting in would be “our” year, the year we get married. =) I do not like champagne. I’ve decided.

New Year’s Day, we mostly stayed in and watched “Angel” and “Buffy” on DVD. As we finished Season 5 of “Buffy,” Mr. W’s daughter stopped by to give us Christmas presents. We hadn’t seen her for weeks. She gave Mr. W a big Jack Skellington coffee mug (he’s a huuuuuge fan of Nightmare Before Christmas). Before she gave me my present, she hid it behind her back and explained that it comes from the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch, one of my two favorite Disney movies, and said, “You know how that movie’s all about ‘ohana’ and family?” She handed me an adorable small figurine of Stitch playing a ukelele, which is dangling from a curved wire attached to a clear suction cup. “You’re gonna be family and he’s blue and your car’s blue,” she said.
I was touched. “Oh, now I love it even more!” I said and gave her a big hug. Starting this morning, Stitch hangs from a corner of my windshield, bobbing and twirling and playing the uke.

My mom made out really well this holiday season, too. It all started when one of the prongs on her engagement ring broke. She and my dad took the ring into a jewelry store and asked if they’re able to affix another prong. The jeweler examined the ring and said, “You know this isn’t real gold, right?”
My mom was shocked. “What? It’s 18K white gold! It’s even stamped so inside the band!”
The jeweler said he’s pretty sure it’s not real gold, the weight isn’t right, but they’ll test it in the store’s lab to make sure. My parents were shown samples of silver and gold, and what happens when a particular chemical solution is dropped on them. Then they watched my mom’s ring get tested. Yup. My mom’s ring is silver, with gold plating. They tested their wedding bands, too, which were purchased at the same place as the engagement band. Same shit. My parents had been swindled for the past 32 years.
Luckily, the diamond tested to be real, and of a pretty good quality. (They’d gotten the stone separately at a place recommended by some friends.) My dad had my mother select a new ring setting at the store, and the lab immediately switched the diamond onto a new very chic white gold band covered with small accent diamonds. Feeling bad for my parents, the salesperson took out a tray of good-quality Russian cubic zirconias, and had my mother select one to put into her old (fake) engagement ring, so that she could still wear it for sentimental value. For free. And then while my mom watched the diamond setting process going on at the lab, my dad wandered around the store and bought her an amazing 1.27 carat diamond solitaire which he had mounted onto a white gold pendant that looked to be a set with her new engagement ring. Money was earned to be spent, he said, and they’d been frugal and saved for so long that they can afford to spend some of it on themselves now that their child is independent and they aren’t saving for the next big thing. Besides, he reasoned, he didn’t waste the money; he simply changed it from cash into a different form. The diamond will hold value and can be resold later if need be. It’s not like he blew it all gambling or traded it for junk. True, true.

My mom got to pick up her new pendant this last weekend after she got recent liver tests back from her doctor. The cirrhosis is still there, but they have it under control now with the medication they’d put her on the past 6 weeks. The drugs did their job and they can now drop one of the prescriptions. So it’s a good start to the new year all around.