cindy's world

I’m trying to do damage control on a rumor situation at work. Tuesday morning, a coworker was taken to the hospital. Another coworker who was with the sick coworker that morning, who accompanied the coworker and the paramedics to the hospital, has been telling people that the sick coworker was “drunk” that morning. Since then, people have been talking about the sick coworker and her “drinking problem.” When I first heard this, I disputed the “drinking problem,” saying that I’ve hung out with her or had dinner with her before and she could barely finish a glass of wine. I also don’t know her to be drunk. Nevertheless, new allegations came out of the woodwork about how “people” (vague, I know) have “smelled” alcohol on her in the elevator or in interactions with her. I personally have never had this experience, and I work on the same floor with her, and I have for years. Another coworker hypothesized that the sick coworker’s current hallucinations and disorientation are due to her detoxing at the hospital from her drinking. I said I didn’t know people hallucinated when detoxing from alcohol.

The only first-hand information I got was from another coworker who actually spent the past few days in the hospital with sick coworker. Sick coworker seems normal in her speech, except that what she says doesn’t make sense in our reality. For example, she’d claim that this judge or the other is taking care of something right then for her, or that she gave some papers to another clerk, but all of that isn’t true and these people haven’t been in the hospital with her. She’d also pet her shoulder saying that her kitten is there, and point at the floor and express how cute her other kitten is, and of course the kittens aren’t at the hospital with her, either. Things like that. The hospital so far doesn’t have a diagnosis for her condition. She also suffered a seizure the first night she was in the hospital.

Because I live very close to her house, I took her keys and stopped by last nite after work to feed her kittens. I hung out with them for an hour, turned the TV on for some normalcy for them, and after an initial period of shyness, the kittens played, frolicked, chased each other, jumped on my lap, batted my purse strap, and they did eat. I cleaned and refilled the litter box, went thru her fridge and threw out anything that seemed about to rot, such as a leftover salad and some greens. I went through all her cabinets looking for the trash can, trash bags, food for the kitties, etc. The only alcohol in her house is a half-finished glass bottle of wine cooler in her fridge. In her sink, she had some cereal bowls and glasses, but not wine glasses, they were water glasses that may have held milk. In her fridge was skim milk, orange juice, diet Coke, and water. On her TV coffee table was a half-drunk plastic bottle of still water and a smaller bottle of flavored seltzer water. All her wine glasses were put away in her cabinets, seemingly untouched. I’ve never seen a house this dry. My own house has a mini bar/wine rack table that’s holding 12 bottles of wine on the rack, with open bottles of tequila, Bailey’s, whiskey, cognac and sherry sitting on top, plus a bottle of white chilling in the fridge, and heck, I’M not a drinker. So knowing how little I drink and how much variety is in my house — I just remembered I also have at least 15 miniature assorted bottles of alcohol that my flight attendant cousin gave me from her plane — I can imagine what people, if they think sick coworker is a drunk (when she apparently can’t even finish a bottle of wine cooler and has to refrigerate the leftover portion), would think about me if they chanced upon my house as I fell into a strange ailment.

As for drugs, the only drug I saw there was a bottle of potassium vitamin supplements. And yes, I looked in her trash. I had to as I was throwing out stuff and cleaning the litter box. No empty alcohol containers. Some paper and cat food cans.

Maybe this post will reach the coworkers I can’t speak to in person.

Belly dancing got sexy tonite! She started the class with the usual technique-intensive, fast-paced stuff, but ended the class with a routine of lots of slow gyrations, sweeping arm movements, “snake arms,” “tulip hands,” body undulations, “alligator jaws.” I’m gonna try to remember the routine and do it right now in front of my wall mirrors. There are no mirrors in class, and I wonder if I look as good as the instructor did doing these movements. BRB…

Okay. Why do I look like Tai Chi when I’m doing this?! I gotta do this sometime in a tight tanktop and an Indian skirt instead of in the fitted black T and black dance pants that I’m in right now.

…or opened a can of worms, whatever your favorite expression is.

Remember that Motorola Razr I bought Mr. W as part of his bday present? What happens when you give such a phone to a gamer/techie freak is that he subsequently spends weeks downloading games, music, programs, code cracks, program hacks, etc. for a freaking CELL PHONE. And our conversations dwindle down to stuff like this online just now:

Cindy: Hey, you never called me back.
W: Give me a minute i will
W: involved in very dangerous and delicate phone/computer mod
Cindy: at least you’re not DRAMATIC about it.
W: ssssshhhh!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

I bet I don’t hear from him.

Did I buy him the best present or what? This is how you know you got something someone really likes — the object replaces you.

I worked late yesterday, left at about 6:30p. Since I would’ve missed half of jujitsu by then, I went to Mr. W’s and coerced him to take a 3-mile run with me. It felt really good for me, altho he was in pain. What a trooper. For me, it was a nice, comfortable run and I could’ve gone farther. That makes me feel a bit more comfortable about the upcoming half-marathon. I need to get a good MP3 player that’ll play for 2.5 hours straight.

Probably because of that run, I was happy and inspired and was wired even today. At lunch today, I worked the gym hard with my trainee. She’d been expressing some discontent about having plateaued in her weight loss, so we did a 4-exercise freeweight circuit with no rest in between sets (diagonal bicep curls to tricep extensions to lunges to shoulder presses, X3) and finished off with some assisted pull-ups.

Tonight: belly dancing! After I run over to a coworker’s house to feed her kittens. She was suddenly hospitalized yesterday morning and she lives a few blocks from me, and how can I let kitties go hungry?!

Yesterday I was engaged in a long conversation with an old friend (who JUST emailed me right now, how weird!) on the drive home from work, and the conversation continued as I plopped sideways onto my chenille La-Z-Boy recliner, which ended all hopes of making it to jujitsu last nite for me. I decided to at least go for a run and try to prepare somewhat for the Disneyland half-marathon coming up in a couple of months, and I changed into my running clothes. Before I even got off the phone with the first friend, Dwaine called me. Turned out he had a hard month at work and was looking for a drinking buddy. So off came the workout clothes, on came the casual going-out clothes, Dwaine stopped by to pick me up in his new ’68 restored Camaro, and we were off.

Actually, it didn’t work like that. After first showing off his car, Dwaine came inside where I showed off my chair. He’d heard about it, but never seen it. True to its reputation, the La-Z-Boy sucked in the bachelor and it took some time and convincing to get Dwaine out of that chair so we could go out. He really enjoyed the motors.

Anyway, Dwaine felt like Italian food so we attempted to go to Market City Caffe in Brea, but it was just closing at 9pm. So we skidaddled over to the Cheesecake Factory near the Brea Mall. The food was wonderful, Dwaine introduced me to a refreshing drink made with Absolut Citron, tonic water, and a slice of lemon, but I ordered a yummy mojito. When the bread came, we found that the foil-wrapped pats of butter were cold, which made them unspreadable. We lamented on this simultaneously and each warmed a pat of butter in our hands. Here’s where Dwaine gets mega brownie points… We were just sitting there, laughing and munching, and I reached for another piece of bread. I scooped up the sliver of butter I had left on my foil and spread it on the bread, which wasn’t nearly enough, but before I could reach for another packet of butter, Dwaine tossed a pre-warmed pat in front of me on the table. He had stopped eating bread long ago. I looked up at him in surprise. “I saw that you were running out of butter and I thought, ‘She’s gonna need more butter!’, so I already warmed this up for you.” How considerate, observant, and gentlemanly! We joked about how a slick a guy would be if he carried around foil packs of butter in his wallet, how one day when it’d come in handy, it’d be more effective than condoms stored in a wallet on winning a girl’s affection, and if you get stuck in a doorway, you can grease yourself out of the situation. I dunno, it made sense when we were drinking. BTW, Dwaine titled this blog post.

He also took the following shot with my camera WHILE driving, with his arm out the window pointing the camera at us. “One of the few benefits to having long arms,” he demonstrated. I was just relieved he didn’t drop my camera on the street, or have a passing car take his arm out.

Of course on the way back on Sunday we had to stop by Solvang.

Early Saturday morning were our tours at Hearst Castle. The weekend was in the 60s, overcast, misty, foggy. It made the tours very comfortable and it was a nice escape from the recent heat wave, but it didn’t do much for our photos. The indoor shots also didn’t come out, as we weren’t allowed to use flash. Here are a few salvageable photos; you can read the captions by resting the mouse pointer on the photos. Hearst Castle in the mist…

The Buildings on the Property (I’d identify them, but I wasn’t listening to the tour guide. Again. Some villa, a main house, I guess.):

Statues were scattered in abundance around the property:

Fruit trees and lush vegetation can also be found on the property:

And of course, the famed outdoor Neptune Pool:

In case that’s not enough water for swimmers, there’s the 22 karat gold plated indoor Roman Pool:

Mr. W and I drove up to San Simeon with no hotel accomodations made ahead of time. This is the first time I’ve traveled like that, but we got lucky. The San Simeon Pines Resort, which happens to be a place my judge recommended, had one room left, but for that night only. The front desk lady said because it’s a resort with its private beach, woods, golf course, pool, clubhouse, shuffleboard, etc., people book the place up months in advance for their vacations. Minutes after we snatched that room up (for less than $100! lodge-style rooms with private fireplaces were like $104. What a steal.), the front desk had to reject room requests over the phone and she lit up the “no” on the “vacancy” sign.

I was recently informed by 2 friends who don’t use Internet Explorer as their web browser that my captions don’t pop up when they rest their mouse pointer over my photos. If you’re running Netscape or Foxfire, you can right-click on the photo and drag down to “see alternate text” or something like that.

The Golf Course:

On the Private Beach:

I need a little time to process my photos to blog about Hearst Castle this past weekend. In a nutshell, we drove up Friday afternoon, stayed on the edge of Cambria and San Simeon that night, went to the Hearst tours in the morning, took lots of pictures (that turned out a bit hazy cuz it was SO foggy and overcast, but it felt really good after the heat wave back at home), hung out in Cambria for dinner, stayed in San Simeon beachside Saturday night, and on Sunday, we drove back making detours through Santa Barbara and of course, Solvang for its Danish pastries.

I’d also like to say, my bailiff’s on vacation in Yosemite with his fiance these couple of weeks, and I’ve had a new bailiff in here whom I *love*. =) She is wonderful. So I’m happy to be back at work today, too.

There are few things in my routine life grosser than having to man-handle sweaty men. There’s a relatively new guy in my jujitsu class who a blackbelt I was next to in line speculated led “mostly a sedentary life” and therefore has no stamina, coordination or core strength (stability). This guy was so wet that he left puddles on the mat after he landed during take-downs. Some take-downs tonight required my having to put my open hand on his cheek and hair to push his head around and down. I’d be wiping and wiping my hands on my gi afterwards and still be unsuccessful in drying them off.

The instructor again approached me about competing. After my refusal for this summer’s competition, he’d passed the torch to another girl. Now he walked over and put some slight pressure in getting me to compete for next year. “You look good, you fall well, I think you could do really well out there,” he said. I was still hesitant, but really, it’s been a long time since I brought home a medal or trophy of any sort. I really oughta do it.

In bellydancing last night, our instructor put in a DVD of professional dancers, so that we could see what we’re working toward. Murmurs arose from the students recognizing certain moves, such as the famed Figure Eight and what our instructor calls a hip M&M. Apparently shimmying — very important in bellydancing. I guess I gotta figure that one out, then. Some of the girls were excited at seeing the DVD. What I primarily got out of it is, Gawd, I need liposuction.

I’ve been down about my body these last few days. I’d like to think I’m just bloated from the 4 slices of Domino’s Pizza I had Tuesday night after having cut excess sodium and all fast food out of my diet for almost a year. But what it really is, is probably age-related weight gain. *Sigh* When people talk of regrets they have in life, I tend to think I don’t really have any. Sure, there were some horrid, evil things that have happened to me, but some good always came out of having to live through those experiences. Now, however, I find I do have a regret. I wish I’d known more about the human body and nutrition in high school to have not been anorexic. Starving myself didn’t make me skinny. I was average-sized. And now, due to the metabolism I screwed up in my teens, my body stores fat as easily as others pee, and burns fat as reluctantly as gas station CEOs are willing to give up their current $10 billion profit margin. (Did you guys hear about that? They’re gouging us for gas claiming oil costs are higher so they have to raise their prices; in the last quarter they’ve raised prices 12%, and their profits went up 12%, which means their costs have stayed the same. Their profit this last quarter was over $10 billion dollars. I was upset watching this on the news this morning.) I basically have no control over my fat rolls. They come and go completely on their own volition. In the past I’ve woken up to find that a lot of fat seemingly dissolved, but most of the time they’ve come back without a change in my eating or exercise patterns. Working out like mad brings no response from my body. It is so frustrating to have no control over my fat and I can only imagine that people look at me, tsk, and speculate why and how I’ve let myself go.