cindy's world

Jordan’s been hinting, then recommending, then strongly suggesting, then demanding that I photoshop her in my vacation photos so that she can be close to us from afar (Florida). I always kinda laughed it off, and then she brought it up again earlier today (on her comment on the Blogger Faces, Interfaceless post)…

Jordan: although I’ve met Cindy in real life and haven’t seen her in months, I’ve asked her to photoshop me into other photos (like her bday pics at Disney) and she wouldn’t do it!!!
🙁
Cindy: OH ALL RIGHT!!!

Stay tuned…
(You guys better post some comments on this entry so I know you’ve read it and are ready for The Unveiling.)

You know how sometimes you’re reading a blog, and that blog refers to another blog, and you think, “Oh, that’s cool, they’re supporting each other’s blogs.” But then sometimes one blogger talks about another blogger as if they actually know each other, and then they talk about meeting each other and lifting the blogger interaction from the pixelated pages of the internet onto a real live 3-dimensional face to face interface. I know what you guys all think — “Pssh, they don’t actually know each other! It’s all just an act, a scam, shenanigans to hype their blogs. Everyone knows bloggers don’t have lives, and are too socially inept to deal with real human interaction.”

…

Well, here’s photographic evidence.

Mr. W had no plans for lunch, so after hearing all the commotion about my tires being overinflated, he offered to come find my car and deflate my tires to the proper PSI for me. (What a great guy!) Meanwhile I hitched a ride with my gym trainee to go work out at the gym for lunch, laughing about how people would see him letting air out of my tires and go, “Dude, did you guys break up?”. That’s when I checked out her tires and saw that her maximum PSI was 44, which made me wonder what makes my tires so different to have a maximum of 51.

We just took a break in our trial, and I was able to touch base with Mr. W. He said he did indeed let out the air in all 4 tires to between 34 and 35 PSI, BUT that the tire said the maximum PSI is 40 and not 51.

=O !!!

Not only am I going blind and can’t read numbers anymore, but I almost killed myself! Mr. W quickly said that it was dark in the parking structure so maybe he saw the numbers wrong, or maybe it was a recommended PSI and not a maximum PSI.

Can I leave right now and go look again?!

Oh, and he also said his tire pressure gauge read that I had 40 PSI in each tire, not almost 50. Did I spring a leak in all 4 tires? I did drive thru broken glass the other day! Waaaaah!!!

Oh my gosh, lemme tell you guys what happened to me this morning before work! To squeeze all that drama in (which happened in a half-hour), I’ll have to write this Jordan-style. What happens when you’re too tired to go to jujitsu, and too tired to get up for work at your normal time? You have a tire problem.

Last nite, I skipped jujitsu (in reality, I still didn’t go to jujitsu) and went to Mr. W’s house after work. Usually when I stay over, I leave when he leaves for work, and I go home to shower and get ready. This morning, however, I could not get out of bed. I was just sleepy and cold. So with a kiss, he left me in bed and warned me not to stay too long or I’d be late for work. (stop laughing, people who know me) I probably only left 10 mins after he did. As soon as I turned on the ignition, the car went thru its usual systems checks, and then flashed a warning on the dashboard: “TIRE LOW!” There were two or three more warning lights in red and yellow. I realize this is not a big deal for most men, who’d interpret the warning and act accordingly. But for me, I just stared at it. “Tire low? What’s that mean? Maybe my tire pressure is low. What do I do? WHICH tire? And how low is it? Is it DANGEROUSLY low, or can I drive the 20 freeway miles home, and the 7 miles to work until I can have some male coworker look at it for me? It’s a new car; how can it have problems?!” I got out of the car and examined all 4 tires. A minute later, I shrugged and sat back in the car. The warning bells and whistles were all still dancing like sugarplum fairies. I looked to the left, where I saw Mr. W’s truck parked. He’d driven my Accord to work today. If we’d left at the same time, I could’ve left my Lexus there to deal with later, and he could’ve taken his truck and I could’ve taken the Accord. Maybe he’s not too far out yet. Maybe he can at least give me advice on whether he thinks I can make it all the way home. My cell was dead, but luckily I had a car charger, which I plugged in and called his cell phone.
1.5 rings later:
Phone: Hi, this is [Mr. W]. Can’t get your call right now so just leave a message.
Me: Hey, it’s Cindy. I’m in my car right now, and there’s a warning light on saying my tire’s low. I don’t know whether I should risk driving all the way back home and explode into a big ball of flames on the freeway. *click*

Having nothing else to do, I got behind the wheel and backed out slowly. The car’s moving all right. I called James. He has an expensive foreign car, he should know what to do. But of course at 7:15a, he wouldn’t be awake yet, something about rolling into work at 10:30a daily. (Why do techies have such late work hours?!) I drove carefully out of the neighborhood and down the block before paranoia took over and I pulled into the nearest Chevron. After parking in front of the air/water machine thingie, I squatted and looked at my left front tire. Shouldn’t it say on the tire what the pressure ought to be? I read the entire tire, turning my head upside-down. “Max. 51 PSI” I read. I unscrewed the air cap on the tire, grabbed the air nozzle on the machine and shoved the two ends together. The instructions on the nozzle said to release lever for pressure reading. My tire was only a few lines past 30, so I must only be at 32 PSI! That’s really far from 51! The machine said 50 cents to use the air/water, so I went thru my coin purse. I had one quarter. How could I only have one quarter? I ALWAYS have coins! I checked my little travel wallet in the glove compartment; I usually leave coins in there. It was EMPTY! What the hell. The only money I had on me was a dollar bill. So I locked my car and trudged into the station’s mini mart.
Me: Hi, can I get change for this dollar? I just need to put air in my tires.
Girl attendant: Oh, that’s free!
Me: Really?!
Girl attendant: Yeah, just push the button to the side of the machine and hold for 3 seconds. *she pushes a button behind the counter*
Me: Thank you so much!

Back at the car, I pushed the button and the machine hummed to life. I squatted in front of my front left tire again and put the nozzle into the tire. A sticker on the nozzle handle said to check tire pressure often. Thanks for the late advice, that’s how I got into this mess, I thought. And then I realized that it meant “As you’re filling your tires, check pressure often so you don’t overinflate,” not “Haha you should’ve checked your tires more regularly so they didn’t go flat, ya moron.” I hit the trigger. Fffft. 34 PSI. Fffft. 36 PSI. Fffffffffffffffffffffffffft. 44 PSI. Fffffffffft. 49 PSI. Ffft. Ffft. Fft. 50 PSI. That should be good, right below the maximum.

I checked the left back tire. It said 32 PSI, too! So I filled that one to 47PSI. I had second thoughts about overinflating the first tire, so I let some air out to 47 PSI, too. I got back behind the wheel and started the ignition. “TIRE LOW!” I didn’t hit the correct tire!! I was able to drag the hose over to the right front tire, but the machine had stopped humming. I checked the tire pressure. It, too, was at 32 or so PSI. I turned my car around and then ran back into the mini mart to beg the nice lady attendant to turn the air back on. Then I ran out and filled the other 2 tires to about 48 PSI. Now the car did its check and everything showed fine. Driving out of the gas station, my phone rang with Mr. W’s special ring tone.
W: My phone’s doing this weird thing again with a SIM card problem and keeps shutting off and not letting me make a call! So I had to take the battery out, take the SIM card out, and then put it all back in and turn everything back on again.
Me: Yeah, when I called you, your phone only rang like one and a half times before it went to voice mail.
W: You must’ve called when it had turned itself off. I didn’t even know you called. I only checked my phone because while I was driving, I had the overwhelming urge to call you and tell you I love you, so I took out the phone and saw that it turned itself off again.
Me: You had the overwhelming urge to call me and tell me you love me because I was gonna die in a big ball of flames on the freeway.
W: Well where are you now?
Me: I’m driving to the freeway. I just filled up all my tires. They were all only at 32 PSI!
W: That’s pretty normal. What’d you fill them up to?
Me: Just under 50.
W: 50!! That’s WAY too HIGH! You don’t want to fill it that high because when your car’s driving for awhile, the tires heat up anyway and the pressure will go up again. You might blow a tire!
Me: *blink blink* …But the TIRE says the maximum is 51! That should be the maximum to drive it safely, not “Your car will explode at 51 PSI”!
W: It says 51? …Well, I don’t know, every car’s tires are different.
Me: The car’s warning lights all turned off now.
There was some further discussion about high-performance vehicles and under-inflating high-performance tires which I will not bore you with, presuming perhaps audaciously that you’re not bored already and are still reading this.

I suppose your average manly man would’ve gotten the car warning, and simply pulled a tire pressure gauge out of his front shirt pocket, or from the back of his pants, and tested the tires, humming all the while. And he would’ve said, “Oh, this car’s warning is pretty conservative. The pressure’s still fine. I’ll fill it up to 36.7512 PSI after work today,” then he would’ve put the tire gauge back up his ass and then hummed his way back into the car and driven uneventfully to work. But for ME, I imagine this exchange took place above my panic:
Cindy’s Spirit Guide: Dude, she’s freaking out. She can’t be freaking out. Call Mr. W, he’ll tell you everything’s all right.
Mr. W’s Spirit Guide: She can’t call him, his phone’s going wacky again!
Cindy’s Spirit Guide: Well, get him to fix it!
Mr. W’s Spirit Guide: How?! He doesn’t even realize it’s off!
Cindy’s Spirit Guide: I don’t know, she’s about to drive home! Make him call HER or something.
Mr. W’s Spirit Guide: He doesn’t even normally call her. What reason could I possibly give him to make him contact her?
Cindy’s Spirit Guide: I don’t know, make him call to check if she got up for work or something. Or just to call and tell her he loves her.
Mr. W’s Spirit Guide: Oh right, like that’s gonna work.

I visited my parents last nite and had dinner with them. My mom packed all this food for Mr. W that he could have for lunch today, because he wasn’t able to go with me to their house this weekend.

Mom: [wrapping up food for Mr. W] So you stayed at his parents’ house in Las Vegas?
Me: Yes.
Mom: Did his mom prepare 2 bedrooms for you?
Me: No, just one.
Mom: *pause* Just one? She was okay with you two being in the same room?
Me: That’s how she did it the last time we went over there, too.
Mom: I think if his parents are letting you two stay together like that, you two should start some serious discussions about getting married.
Me: What? WHY?!
Mom: Because his parents already accepted you as someone in that situation, it’s just weird if you’re not headed there.
Me: They’re white! It’s not a big deal to them! If it were some Asian household, sure that’d be weird and it’d be a big deal, but they’re white, so it’s totally normal!
Mom: You’re Asian.
Me: …

And I didn’t even tell her that his parents had requested couples photos of me with their son, as well as an individual photo of me so that they could frame them and put them up on their family photo wall, and that Mr. W and his dad had selected from some photos that were already in W’s computer and had them printed into 8x10s at Costco, AND the two picked them up already on Saturday morning.

I was waiting for the laundry to churn, and of course I was watching TV as this is happening, and TV rarely fails to lull me to sleep. My last load was removed from the dryer at 11:30 p.m., but I couldn’t bring myself to lug the hamper upstairs to fold and put away clothes; I only got as far as the chenille La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room. I woke up sideways on the recliner at 3am and dragged myself with now-cold clothes into my bedroom to the soundtrack of some infomercial about land auctions. I almost called the auction info line, but stopped myself by reminding myself that there’s a reason these things play on TV at 3am — the head is heavy, the will is low and the common sense is null. I’ve bought many a useless item and joined some shameful programs while being awake in the wee hours of the morning. I almost even joined the Navy once. (Why does the Navy advertise at this time? Are they that short on low-judgment insomniacs? Or maybe being awake at this hour somehow makes you an ideal armed forces candidate, i.e. it shows you have high stamina and unusual strength and wisdom. Yeah.)

So of course I’d fallen asleep with my contacts and makeup on, and now that I’ve made it upstairs, I brushed my teeth, took out my eyeballs and washed off my face, then put away laundry, putting aside clothes I would bring with me to Vegas. And now I’m wide awake.

“How’d you sleep?”
“Like a donut.”
“How does a donut sleep?”
“With a hole in the middle.”

Now that I’m in bed, I’m gonna try to go back to sleep. Experience tells me that because it’s past 4am, I’m gonna be in the middle of some REM cycle and will not hear my alarm at 7a. Someone call my house and wake me up if you read this in the morning!! (You like how this post has a hole in the middle?)

My horoscope for today reads:

“Don’t allow yourself to become discouraged, even if it feels like everything has come to a standstill. Whether or not you know it, you are on the edge of something big; however, you will have to take initiative to make it happen. Perhaps something exciting is about to open up on the romantic front or maybe a current relationship is being revitalized. Either way, give it time; it won’t happen overnight.”

Diana, who was in downtown LA for a hearing yesterday, wanted to come down to our courthouse to catch part of our jury trial. She didn’t actually make it until the courts closed down and besides, we got an early verdict (both counts not guilty) so she would’ve missed everything anyway. Instead, she had the cab drop her off across the quad at City Hall and walked over to the courthouse to meet me. I happened to see her across the wide square grass lawn and as we walked toward each other, the first thing she said to me in person was a yell: “YOUR HAIR’S SO SHORT!!!”

With 3 hours until I had to get her to the airport, she opted to not spend precious hang time stuck in traffic, so we went to happy hour at Outback Steakhouse across the street from the courthouse. I think the yummy factor of the new menu surprised us both. The seared ahi and its two sauces were delish, and we filled up on the meaty chicken wings. I think for the first time ever, I drank more alcohol than her. (Pick up your jaws, Diana friends — I only had 2 drinks. She just drank very little.)

I didn’t look up directions to John Wayne Airport in Orange County; I figured that’s why I paid the extra few grand for the navigation system, right? I blame the drinks for my failure to program the airport into the nav system before we took off, and while driving, the nav system disables most programming buttons presumably so I won’t stare at the screen, push a bunch of buttons, and instantly crash. So I pulled off the freeway at what turned out to be the most complicated exit/entrance ever, Diana said to do a list search for SNA, the airport code, and I did, and we went in circles trying to get back onto the freeway. We ended up having to hit the freeway from a few miles down, as the no u-turn signs and lack of side streets made going back on where I got off impossible. While on the freeway, Diana and I laughed about the time she came down earlier in the year when I hadn’t gotten this new car yet and were horribly lost going to a restaurant without a navigation system. We laughed about all the traveling gone wrong on that trip and how those days are over since I’ve now stepped into the wonderful world of GPS technology. And then my nav piped up and told me to exit. So I did. “Hmm, I don’t recognize anything around here,” Diana noted, “I’ve never gone to the airport this way before.” “It must be a major shortcut, cuz it says we’re only 4 minutes away,” I said. We drove into the heart of Santa Ana, commenting all the way about how we don’t see any planes and we don’t recognize anything. Finally, surrounded by Vietnamese and Spanish signs in some plazas, the nav system said, “Your destination is straight ahead to the right.” “It IS?” Diana asked dubiously, looking out the window. What the hell. The map on the nav showed a grid full of streets, and no big space for an airport. Where the hell were we? I pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s and this time did a search for “travel,” then “airport,” then “John Wayne.” The guide pointed back onto the freeway to a location about 5 miles away that looked like a big open field with circular runways on the lit map screen. Driving there, things finally started looking familiar. Geez.

That’s not where the nav adventure ends. After I dropped Diana off, I followed its directions to go to Mr. W’s house, 6 miles away according to the nav system. It led me into a secured parking lot where I had to push the automated machine for a ticket to get the wooden arm to lift, then follow nav directions to drive out the other side of the parking lot, where I had to hand the ticket to the guy manning the tollbooth and tell him apologetically, “My navigation system actually directed me through here. I really didn’t park.” He took the ticket, pushed the lever to raise the arm and kindly waved me through without charging me. “Thank you so much,” I said helplessly.

What is it with me and Diana trying to get anywhere when I drive?! Altho, getting lost with a nav is slightly more comforting than getting lost without one, as with the time I was lost in Long Beach in the middle of the night about to drive into the water.

On the drive in to work this morning, radio personality (and American Idol host) Ryan Seacrest kept throwing out teasers, saying that after the commercial break, he and his co-host Ellen K. will tell us about something you can do that’d get you out of any relationship dog house, it’s something so ingenius that even if you were on massive negative points, this one thing alone would put you back in the positive.

So I waited through many commercials. They returned. Ryan again said that this great idea is coming up to put you way ahead in the relationship game. They played a song. I waited. And then finally, the promised idea when I was already in the parking structure…

Ryan told us about a guy (presumably friend) who’s just tired of seeing his boyfriend’s car all dirty. The boyfriend wouldn’t clean out or wash the car. So one day when the boyfriend was out without his car, Ryan’s friend, at Ellen’s advice, took the car keys, drove the car out and had it washed, he filled the car up with gas, and then drove it back home. When the boyfriend came home and saw the sparkling car on the driveway, he was in enraptured joyous shock for 24 hours. “You cleaned my car? You took the keys, drove it out and had it washed? AND you put gas in it?” Impliedly Ryan’s friend got real lucky that day and night. “It’s so simple! It’ll solve all your relationship problems and put you way ahead in the positive! All the chocolates and flowers you can get don’t compare to this,” Ryan said. Ellen said, “See, and it’s something relatively effortless but it’s something that most people wouldn’t even think of. There’s just something about people and their cars.”

My reaction: :/

I imagined coming home and seeing that my car’s been suddenly washed. After the initial shock of disbelief, I’d freak out like so: “You washed my car? You TOOK my friggen keys, you DROVE my car out someplace, and HAD IT WASHED?! Where the HELL did you take it, some freaking automated carwash where they scratched my car to death with spinning sandpaper??? GIMME THE DAMN FLUORESCENT LIGHT! I wanna see how badly it’s scratched! DAMN this! Now I have to Zaino it with Z5 Scratch Remover! You better PRAY this sh!t comes out with 3 layers of Z5 polish! I’m probably gonna end up spending my entire freaking weekend claybar-ing it, too! Don’t look at me! Just…go away!!!”

But then I’m not your usual girl.

Having just found out why the photo captions pop up for some but not for other readers of this blog, after Wilco finally explained his “pet peeve” of miscoding to me in his comment a couple posts ago, I fixed every photo’s coding back through September of 2006. That includes the Disneyland Half-Marathon Run photos. I could go back farther, but I’m lazy, and I don’t know that readers even go back into archives to know the difference. Besides, this pop-up caption problem only seems to affect Firefox users.

I had been using alternative text because when I post a photo, I get prompted for alternative text content. From now on, my photos will have pop-up captioning, but no alternative text. I just don’t see me doing both due to above-stated laziness issue.

You really do learn something new every day. Thanks, Wilco and James.