cindy's world

I’ve resolved not to consume anything with calories after 6:30p, based on going to bed around 10p, so that I wouldn’t have unused food in my stomach turning to fat as I sleep. At 9:30p tonite, however, I had just finished a bowl of Breyers cherry ice cream (w/chocolate chunks), so I needed to stay awake for a bit longer to burn off the food. I figured I’d get online and do what I’d been meaning for awhile to do — add a new category to the sidebar of this blog to cross-reference all posts with original personal photos. Just short of 2 hours later, I’ve gone thru all 568 posts and completed the “photos” designation.

I think I can go to bed now. I was really sleepy about half an hour ago and now I’m not so much, so I hope I didn’t outlast my body’s desire to sleep.

Since I didn’t post on Saturday, I’ll post some photos from Christmas in Vegas, 2005 to make up for it. (See December posts for event details.)

Incidentally, this is also why I’m no longer allowed to work for Santa.

Today, I received at work a letter from the check company that screwed up my checks. It was addressed to Danielle Rudd again. Despite their NOT calling me the next day like they said they would, I thought it was the SASE they said they’d send me to return the erroneous checks, so I eagerly opened the envelope. It was a bill. Yes, a BILL. Something to the effect of Dear Danielle Rudd, your payment for your recent check order did not sufficiently cover the cost owed, but instead of delaying your order, we processed it anyway and delivered it to you and anticipate an additional payment of $6.90 soon. Like they’re doing me a favor!

Argh, if I was on the fence about completing my order with them, I’ve changed my mind now. I’m so gonna order checks from my bank directly and pay three times the amount.

Are hickies in style now? Do they replace jewelry as neck decoration? Or are they to be worn proudly, like red badges of wantonness? I’ve seen more hickies on the necks of 20-somethings this week than I have in all of 2005 combined. I guess peeing directly on the person doesn’t have quite the lasting power of broken capillaries.

My goal tonite after returning from jujitsu was to sort out and categorize the bag of paid bills and statements I have sitting by my desk. In completing that task, I pulled out some old thank-you and Christmas cards and started reminiscing (this is why it takes me so long to clean any clutter around my house). I realized I haven’t been keeping up with a lot of my friends very well. There’d be the occasional phone call or email forward and response, but I haven’t called to check up on them cuz I’m always running off to somewhere. I just took for granted that all my friends are self-sufficient and alive and I’ll just pick up with them some other time and meanwhile things will not change. Funny thing is, with IMing and blogging, I haven’t felt the NEED to see what’s up with them.

I suck.

I hope you’re all all right out there! You’d all better be! Don’t make me go down there!

Vanessa brought in a photo album of her in gothic attire. Wow. She really is a trampy goth, but she looks really good. I got to see a photo of her in those famous holey boots. It’s a fitted black boot ending just under the knees and the “holes” on the side were large round cut-outs so that the remaining patent leather looks like horizontal straps across her calf. Her goth makeup is awesome, very sexy. I especially liked what appeared to be Halloween photos in which she was wearing a white string bikini with black chaps over her legs, and a blonde wig. It was during her Navy days, so the girl had abs to die for. I guess it’s too much to hope that I could pull off that look (she’s also like 5’9″) in goth garb.

When I got home, I walked around the house putting up the framed photos of me and Mr. W from the cruise. I’m so lazy; instead of looking for a perfect spot for each photo, I instead look for empty nails on the walls. The nails were left there by the previous owner of the house, and I’d just been putting my stuff over their nails, so my stuff’s totally not lined up. There’s actually a framed photo of me and Mr. W that overlaps a section of another wall hanging I have up, because that’s how close the nails are together and that’s how it worked out. I need to take a vacation just to rid my house of clutter and really set it up nice.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about real estate property and investment property between me and various people, and today I see this article about rent. Rent is rising again due to increasing demand (I’m speculating that the housing market has priced out of the average person’s ability to purchase). The most expensive 3 cities to rent according to the stats from the last quarter of 2005? I’m sure it’s predictable.

1. New York City, average rent $2400/mo
2. San Francisco, avg rent $1573/mo
3. Los Angeles, avg rent $1421/mo

Orange County (where I live) ranks #4 with rent at $1384 a month. Miami, where I just was on vacation, ranks #17 at $971/mo, Las Vegas ranks #24 at $795, and on the lowest end of the study is Oklahoma City at $543. I’m glad I bought my property before this crazy spike, and it’s comforting (and selfish of me) to see that as rental property, my place will do well. I think I need to seriously consider buying investment property in the still-affordable-for-me places and catch them before their own spikes, and then sell high or rent it out and let it pay for itself.

I placed an order for checks thru the mail last month. You guys know what I’m talking about. You get those colorful ads with your coupons and advertisements thru the mail. The order form says that the check order will be mailed to the address on the checks unless I specify otherwise. So I stuck a post-it onto the order form saying please mail my order to my work address, and wrote out the work address. Last week, I got an email (information given on the order form) saying that the checks are on their way to my work address, thanks for the order, and here’s an opportunity to double my order at a discounted price. The email has the wrong name on it, it’s addressed to a Danielle Rudd. I disregard it, but then start wondering if the check people screwed up my order. A couple of days later, I get a letter in the mail from the check company saying “we were unable to process your order for the following reason(s): NO ORDER FORM WAS ENCLOSED WITH YOUR ORDER. PLEASE COMPLETE AND RETURN THE ENCLOSED ORDER FORM.” Huh? Then where’d they get my email address from, the dorks? They also returned my payment check, check reorder form that came with my original checks (for use as their sample) and check deposit form (for use as their sample). I’m annoyed, cuz I’m out of checks, and they HAD my order form, they just screwed up!

And then today, at work, I get a box of checks. It’s the design I ordered and specified on the order form. It begins with the sequence number I specified on the order form. But it’s Danielle Rudd’s personal address and phone number on the corner, and HER bank information and routing number. This instantly brings to mind: Who has mine?! These are legitimate checks! Anyone can forge a signature and get money out of my account!

I called Danielle Rudd and left her a voice mail. She called me back, told me to go ahead and discard the erroneous checks in my possession, and that she’d call the check company. She said she didn’t get any check order returned so she assumes her order is being processed correctly. I think some idiot typed her information into their computer off her order form, then did the other half of the specifications off my order form. It really worries me where my name/address/bank account info got printed up and sent to. I can’t expect good samaritans to call me like I called Danielle (who, by the way, was very appreciative). I’ve called the checks people and got transferred to their department that specially handles checks they printed with mixed-up information. THEY HAVE A DEPARTMENT FOR THIS. How often does this happen?! But the person I spoke to seemed very efficient and concerned and she said she’d mail me an SASE to return the erroneous checks to them so they can destroy them, and then they’d straighten out my order for me. She also said that Danielle had already called them.

And after lunch, I returned from the gym to find a second box of checks, also erroneous in the exact same way, on my chair.

Geesh!

I’m not at liberty to tell you HOW, but I saw my first gay porn this morning. I was so excited! (Not in the sexual sense, in the 6-year-old-going-to-Disneyland sense.) I’d been wanting to watch a gay porno ever since I watched Grace (of “Will & Grace”) yell out while watching TV with Jack, “Gay porn is SO HOT!!!”

At first I was like, “This isn’t that different from straight porn.” And then the camera panned out beyond just the point of penetration. And now I know how gay porn is so hot. The men are FKING HOT!! We’re talking hard bodies, cut-up pectorals, biceps, triceps, deltoids, six-pack, gluteous maximus, hamstrings, quads. Caressing each other. These guys put WORK into their bodies. And their faces are better to look at than the men in straight porn. Definitely prettier eyebrows. The straight porn guys are pale, lanky, greasy, long-haired men that you wouldn’t touch in a bar with somebody else’s ten-foot pole.

All the good men ARE gay. Damn it.

Uh, with utter exception to Mr. W. He’s thus far denied being gay.

Not much in my life to complain about. Not much to brag about, either. Not much progress in my workouts to report. (In fact I only worked out 3x this week; a 3-mile run on Monday, lunchtime gym sesh on Tuesday, jujitsu on Wednesday, and that was it.) So I guess I’ll tell you a gross cruise story.

When we arrived in Florida for the cruise, they had just had their first rain in a long time, and it was supposed to have been a pretty bad storm. Unfortunately, our cruiseship followed the storm’s path out to sea. The first nite at sea, we actually caught up to and navigated thru the storm. The waters were rocky and choppy, and early the next morning (day 2 onboard), the ship was swinging to and fro and a lot of people got seasick.

I tell you guys this not because I believe I got seasick, but there is an existing debate as to whether I got seasick. See, we had yoga scheduled for 7am that morning, and the exercise/spa section of the ship is at nearly the very top level of the ship, so we get the bulk of the rocking. This is also the peak time, as I found out later, that people were seasick because this was the time we were in the most unsteady waters. I had told Mr. W before and also that morning that I shouldn’t eat before yoga because I’d done yoga on a semi-full stomach before and it made me very nauseated. Nevertheless, he insisted on grabbing a small bite before yoga class. So, factor 1: 6:30a breakfast off Florida means 3:30a breakfast in Los Angeles time. WAY too early for my body to function. Factor 2: food in my stomach, even tho it’s just a little (plain yogurt, half a muffin, half a cup of juice), makes me sick in yoga. Factor 3: the exercise room in which we were doing yoga was rocking so hard that people couldn’t hold their poses; they kept falling over. I could do the downward dog position just fine, everytime I was inverted I was okay, but the moment I got up I was sick. I got sicker and sicker until my forehead felt cold and clammy, so to keep from passing out, I just excused myself from yoga and sat out at the side of the room on a bench. An older lady got up from her yoga mat and sat by me, saying she was sick too and she was going to take a break from yoga. Then she asked me where the bathroom was, and I pointed her in the direction of the women’s locker room. She left and came back in about 10 minutes, during which time I continued to get sick until I decided that to play it safe, I should go into the women’s locker room and be near a restroom.

When I got into the women’s locker room, my throat was reaching back into itself to access my stomach. You guys know the pre-upchuck feeling. I quickly walked to the towels, grabbed one, and walked into the only available stall, which was a large handicap stall, with about 2 seconds to spare as my diaphragm was already pulling itself in to start the first wave of regurgitation. I popped into the stall, locked it, then swirled around to lurch toward the toilet. With that little time, there was nothing I could do about the fact that someone had already vomited all over the toilet seat, on the floor in front of the toilet, and on the back of the toilet. I barely made it around the side of the toilet away from the farthest-reaching pool of brown and peach puke on the floor, and did my best with projectile vomiting, aiming for the toilet. I hadn’t thrown up in a long time, and vomiting then was surprisingly painless and easy. I wasn’t even grossed out by the pre-existing vomit there. Even tho I was barefoot from the yoga class. I know what you’re wondering. Yes, yes I did. A little. But what bothered me the most was that I didn’t want people to think that *I* had such bad aim with my vomit and just left it there like irresponsible decor that announces my breakfast choices. But I wasn’t gonna clean up someone else’s bug juice. I did a great job vomiting, not a drop outside the toilet.

After puking I felt much better but went back to the cabin to take a nap. It really was still just too early in the morning. Mr. W went to have lunch on his own, and when he came back, he offered me a white folded-up paper bag. “I was just at the infirmary,” he announced. “It’s full of sick people. People are all green walking around the ship. But here’s a barf bag for your seasickness.” “I am NOT seasick,” I announced. After I threw up, I wasn’t sick again for the remainder of the voyage, even tho I heard people who were actually seasick were sick for most of the day. For the next few days, every time we saw the bag on the windowsill in our cabin, I’d say, “What’s that? Oh, that’s your barf bag.” “No, it’s YOUR barf bag,” he’d say. “It’s YOUR barf bag cuz you went and got it, and I’m not seasick.” “Yes you were, it’s YOUR barf bag.”

Mr. W didn’t know about my barfing experience until yesterday. He heard me tell the story to someone else (sans the barefoot detail) and he asked, “Is that where you disappeared off to? Were you upset that I wasn’t there to hold your hair up for you?” Ew, no. I wouldn’t have wanted him there. He would’ve blamed the poorly aimed upchuck on ME, and used it to say that I was seasick.

Yay, I have internet access at home again! My man’s my hero. =)