cindy's world

One of the girls in belly dancing class blurted out, “If you guys want [Indian] skirts you can get ’em at Susie’s Deals for five bucks! They have a whole rack of ’em!” So that’s where Vanessa and I went after class and caught the place 20 minutes before it closed.

I went NUTS. 5 Indian skirts, beautiful fabric and colors, some with bells on them, some with metallic weave; 3 ribbed cotton tanktops; 1 satin beaded spaghetti-strap tanktop, $40.95 out the door.

Good thing those skirts are in style now, too. I get double use out of ’em.

My court reporter came in today all weirded out and told us that something really strange happened yesterday.

Her teenage kids were all out for the evening doing their various activities, so she cleaned up the kitchen, did all the dishes, took a look around the empty countertops and sinks and thought, “Now THIS is how I like my kitchen,” then took her dog out for a walk. She’d left a back side-door to her office open for air, as she is accustomed to doing.

She returned with the dog 45 minutes later, walked into the kitchen, and there was a cup sitting on the counter by itself. She looked into it and there was some residual liquid in it. “That’s strange, it looks like milk,” she thought, tilting it into the sink. Some drops of milk trickled out.

But there’s still no one home.

Freaked, she looked in all the closets, under beds, behind doors and in showers in case someone were inside robbing the place. Not another thing appears to have been moved or taken. When her kids came home at night, she questioned them and none had come home in the early evening before going out again. Her youngest daughter looked in the fridge and saw that the new gallon of milk had been opened with the screw cap only lightly screwed back on.

She’s not friendly enough with her neighbors that they’d come by to visit, she doesn’t have friends just drop by, adults usually don’t drink milk anyway given all the other beverages in her fridge they could’ve chosen. She herself doesn’t drink milk by itself. Who’d drink milk and leave the cup on her counter for her to find and wash, but not do/take anything else around the house? Is this perhaps a ghostly encounter?

For reasons I can’t yet get into on this blog, I was forced to miss last nite’s jujitsu class. I wasn’t happy about that. But at least I was productive while at home, i.e. I brushed my cat and then vacuumed downstairs wearing just my bra and underwear and a tiara that was given to me on my birthday.

What?! It held my hair up and out of my face, okay?

Look at me all bloggy today. Okay, okay, a lot of it has to do with writing enough posts to push down that hideous photo of my bruised flab.

5 minutes ago, seeing Mr. W online, I initiated an IM conversation:

Cindy: Guess who I love!
W: Whooo?
Cindy: Um….I’ll give you THREE guesses. =)
W: Are you my one and only Ultra Beautiful All Time Bestess Girlfriend?
Cindy: Okay, here’s a hint. He sometimes sounds like an owl.
Cindy: Yes, yes I am. Especially the All Time Bestest part. I really strive for that.
W: Yeah, I Love you too!
Cindy: I have to blog this and make people throw up.

Oh, come on! “He sometimes sound like an owl”! It’s a hoot! Why aren’t you guys laughing?

Videogaming Goes the 12-Step Route

TUESDAY JULY 18 2006 8:00 PM
Submitted by PopMonger. Edited By PopMonger.

What hath you wrought, Super Mario Brothers? The latest scourge threatening today’s youth isn’t marijuana or careless driving (according to those PSAs). No, it’s videogame addiction.

Europe’s first rehab facility for compulsive gamers has opened in the Netherlands… because there’s no better place to treat addiction than in Amsterdam.

Addicted gamers display many symptoms, including obsessive thinking and health problems. Others may use stimulants to keep awake during gaming marathons.

Last year a man in South Korea died after spending 50 hours playing an online game.

The Amsterdam clinic offers an eight-week treatment program, complete with staff psychologists and group therapy. About a dozen such clinics already exist in the U.S. and Canada.

Cindy’s Comment: Oh, there’s so much I can but won’t say. I only want to say that it nearly brings me to tears how sad it is that these gaming addicts feel more guilt causing their online cohorts’ characters to die if they log off, than they feel for neglecting their living breathing hurting significant others and children.

Due to a comment I recently received from a stranger who inadvertently got a hit on this blog while doing a Google search for a different topic, I think I need to state this for people like this woman who apparently turned something I wrote about my experience and my opinion about that experience into a knife, turned the knife on herself and stabbed her heart with it, then decided to write a scathing comment about how I figuratively stabbed her with my post.

1) my opinion’s not WRONG like this woman suggests, it’s how I feel and I explain the logic behind it on the posts
2) I’m not selling anything and no one’s paying me to write so I think I can write whatever I damn well want to, especially if it’s honest
3) it’s a FREE access site so if you don’t like it, don’t read it!

What the hell. If it weren’t for my super spy brain tuning, shit would’ve gone down. I’m so irked. If you can’t handle something, don’t even do it. Doing something half-ass and then screwing it up, thereby screwing other people up, is worse than just sitting on your hands.

First off, I’d like to apologize for your stumbling on such a grotesque photo. I’m sorry. But I had to post this. Sorry, also, for the stupid elastic band line around my waist, and the underwear line on my lower hip.

Those of you who shop at Asian merchandise stores may be aware of metal hula hoops covered with a light layer of colorful foam — hoops that are so large and so heavy that the claim is loss of inches from your waist as you revolve it around your body. My mother fell victim to such a lame purchase.

So you already know I visited my parents over the weekend. While there, I saw the bright colors peeking out from behind the loveseat in the living room and could not resist hula-ing. My mother showed up after a few minutes of my “ow, ow, ow”ing spinning this heavy hoop around my waist. “That’s too easy for you,” she noted, “You should turn around in a circle or stand on one foot or jump.” I did all three. With the hoop still revolving painfully around me, I made the poor decision to listen to the last suggestion made by my mom to move the hoop up and down on my body. I let it drop to my hips and instead of rolling easily, it instead skipped over the part of my lower abdomen where there’s a slight concave before the protrusion of my hip bone, and it banged straight into my hip bone, twice. “OW!” I said and stopped the hula hoop. My hip hurt the rest of the evening. This morning, I noted it was still tender to the touch, and could see a slight pink discoloration. At the gym at lunchtime, the bruise had become visibly light purplish in some areas. Just now, I looked again and here’s what it’s become in a period of 24 hours:

The blood had to seep through a layer of rippling lower abdominal muscles (HAHAHA) and an even thicker layer of fat to show up underneath the skin as this blotch. That’s a lot of blood. As I was complaining about feeling like my left ovary is falling out, my bailiff said that people are gonna think Mr. W beat me. I told him, “Who’d beat someone on their freakin’ HIP BONE?” Mr. W, when I told him about my bailiff’s comment this evening, said, “Who’d believe your lame story about getting that bruise from a HULA HOOP? Of course they’re gonna think I beat you.”

Maybe we should re-evaluate all those presumed victims of domestic violence and their presumed phony stories of getting a black eye from running into the wall, or falling down stairs, or from hitting their face against a door knob.

I gave Mr. W a Motorola Razr V3 for his bday, which led to much of the weekend spent with him playing with his phone via his laptop via the Bluetooth connection. He transferred address book entries, downloaded and cropped MP3s to transfer to his cell via Bluetooth to use as ring tones, transferred photos he took while in Alaska and some from Disneyland to use as caller ID tags or phone wallpapers. Such is the life when one dates a techie. I’m happy he’s enjoying the features on his new phone, even tho it did bring about a slew of cussing about the defects of networking. Well, that was bday present #1. Bday present #2 is a 2-day pass to Sea World. We’re going this Saturday. Luckily, the 2 days don’t have to be used consecutively, so we have until the end of May next year to go again. I’m really looking forward to Shipwreck Rapids floating river ride, R.L. Stine’s Haunted Lighthouse 4-D show, and the Journey to Atlantis water coaster ride. I’m only slightly concerned with getting my stuff wet. My bailiff, who went to Sea World this past Saturday and brought me back a map and schedule, suggested I just bring a plastic Ziploc bag to hide the camera and electronics in when necessary. Mr. W gets to play with his new camera and maybe, just maybe, we’ll have photos as impressive as Jordan’s (who recently went to the Sea World in Florida).

For the life of me, I can’t remember what we did on Saturday, but on Sunday, we went to an amazing champagne brunch at the Anaheim White House with the very generous gift certificate that Navy Girl Vanessa gave me when she moved out of my house. We’d never been there before, but the food and presentation were so impressive that he said, “How do I get rich so I can eat like this all the time?”

And then after brunch, Mr. W and I went to visit my parents, where we hung out for like 7 hours before going out to a Taiwanese dinner with them. Yummy greasy “street” food! Ah, childhood memories…

I was requested to employ my “Mata Hari wiles” to get some information about something yesterday. I didn’t know the reference then, but now I do:

Mata Hari. Behind the patina of the pseudonym Mata Hari (“Eye of the Dawn”) is a rather prosaic Dutch name. Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (1876-1917) used Mata Hari as both her stage name and nom de guerre when she chose to become a spy for the Germans before World War I. Acclaimed throughout Europe for her interpretations of naked Indonesian dances, she met many men in high places, including German officials in Berlin who recruited her as a spy in 1907. During World War I, her dancing was the rage of Paris and she became intimate with top Allied officers, who confided military secrets to her. Mata Hari, who slept with literally hundreds, thrived on the deceit of espionage, but she was eventually betrayed to the French secret service by another German agent, Captain Walther Wilhelm Canaris, later to become head of the German secret service in World War II. Her trial was the most publicized of the many espionage trials held during the war, and her name became synonymous with a glamorous female spy and femme fatale. She was convicted by a French court-martial ane executed by a firing squad.
– The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Third Edition, Robert Hendrickson

That’s kinda cool for this esoteric belly dancing German-speaking wiley fraulein.