cindy's world

Vday dinner was very cool. I’d wanted to stay in to avoid paying 3x regular prices for overcrowded restaurants, so Mr. W made New York strip steak, rosemary potatoes, steamed broccoli, ciabatta bread, and for dessert was a Valentine’s cookie (heavy on the frosting) and chocolate cherry ice cream. We had dessert while watching a few episodes of Friends on DVD. It was the perfect evening.

I was all excited to give him his present, two Category 1 tickets to Cirque du Soleil’s “Quidam.” I said, “It was so hard to keep quiet about your gift for so long!” as I handed him the card with the tickets hidden inside a flap. (Miami seaport was doing Cirque’s “Varekai” show and he’d wanted to squeeze a show in either before the cruise or upon our return. He kept saying how much he liked Cirque du Soleil. Finally, upon our return, he passed on it, saying that he would not be able maintain consciousness in a 3-hour darkened show right now.) He claimed to know what I got him because he said I didn’t keep very quiet, especially not during the cruise. I was surprised. And then I bopped his arm for being a spoiler. But lo and behold, when he opened the card, he said, “Well. I didn’t know you were gonna get me this. I love Cirque du Soleil!” HA.

For my present, aside from the nice dinner and chocolate covered strawberries and cookies left for me yesterday morning, was a whole bunch of our cruise photos printed out and framed. I’d been saying I want to print out digital photos to put them up, but I never got around to printing them because I didn’t know what size to print them, because I hadn’t bought frames, which I will probably never get around to doing. The wood he chose match the wood frame around my huge Kinkaid painting in the staircase, and it also matches the wood on my bannister. Yay, I have home decor now!

I brought the extra prints of our photos to work today and everyone I showed them to remarked on how happy I looked.

Oh yeah. Mr. W’s daughter had bought us two tiny ceramic fish chopstick holders, a green one and a blue one, which she brought to me all proud, and then in her excitement in talking about how she found them, she waved her right arm into the air, knocked the green fish out of my hand, it flew over both our heads, and landed on the floor and half its tail broke off. She was aggravated. It was the cutest thing and I couldn’t help laughing at her.

Diana and I stumbled by default on a GREAT restaurant called The Daily Grill in Irvine last nite. We shared a filet medallion entree and still couldn’t finish the plate. I was also proud that we left a considerable chunk of the chocolate brownie that was sitting underneath a gob of ice cream, which I also left. The dinner was good because it was the first time I’ve seen her in person since she entered her really trying time in her family life, health, career and love life. It breaks my heart when she calls me crying and I can’t be there. But I was really happy to see that she was actually doing pretty well last nite. We were able to laugh and kid, altho of course she was still dealing with lingering sadness. I hope she remembers that to feel down and depressed is normal, and considering all the stuff going on, the fact that she was only at her lowest point for a week or less and is now pulling out slowly, is really great progress. She has her chin up and her faith in that everything has happened for a reason — a good reason — and even tho it hurts and seems fruitless now, everything will fall into place later and she will understand why she had to go thru all this.

I’d brought my laptop and we went thru my cruise photos, and then just for kicks, ended the night with, at her request, a slideshow of our 260 or so Cancun photos. We remarked, as we reminisced on our September vacation, how different things are between now and then, and what we didn’t know then was just around the bend.

*sigh* Hey Diana, remember back in the day when we were really well adjusted and we were bored with our lives and envied the excitement of other girls’ romantic drama? HA.

Since I was on the cruise last week during SuperBowl and wasn’t able to post (actually, the ship charges per minute to use the internet, and their internet’s SLOOOOOW), here’s a little post-post, or postscript.

A man had 50 yard line tickets for the Super Bowl. As he sat down, another man walked down and asked if anyone was sitting in the seat next to him.
“No,” the first man says, “The seat is empty.”
“This is incredible,” said the second man. “Who in their right mind would have a seat like this right on the 50 yard line for the Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the world, and not use it?”
The first man says, “Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. I was supposed to come with my wife, but she passed away. This is the first Super Bowl we haven’t been to together since we got married in 1987.”
“Oh…I’m so sorry to hear that. That’s terrible. But couldn’t you find someone else, a friend or relative, or even a neighbor to take the seat?”
The man shook his head. “Nope, they’re all at the funeral.”

Men and their priorities. I’m glad mine put his priority on me during the Superbowl and we were having the formal Captain’s Dinner in the dining room on the cruise during the Bowl. Not that the maitre’d didn’t keep announcing the scores over the loudspeaker through the dining room anyway. Heh.

Dodo woke me up this morning at 6:15a with all the noise he was making batting a plastic bag on my desk in my bedroom. I chased him out, looked at the clock, and went back to sleep with some difficulty, determined not to get my day started until my alarm clock made me do so at 7am.

I woke up from a dream and looked at all the sunlight around me. I looked over my head at my clock. 9am! Holy crap! What happened?! I clamored out of bed and my leg collapsed underneath me and I fell to the floor. I shakily got up again and wobbled weakly to the bathroom, where I washed my face, skipped the hair brushing, makeup AND the contact lenses, put on my glasses, grabbed the pile of skirt and sweater in my bedroom that I’d taken off last nite before going to bed (I only wore the outfit a few hours at dinner with college roommie Diana, who’d flown in for a 2-day work-related thing yesterday), and ran out the house and drove to work. 5 minutes after falling (literally) out of bed. It wasn’t until I was on the way that I realized I wanted to wear a cute red outfit, not my baggy brown and black one. I’m returning to work from vacation looking more haggard than when I left.

Oh well. Happy Valentine’s Day, people.

Here are some photos that I’ve uploaded. There’ll be more to come later. Unless I get lazy. Which is a high likelihood. Rest your mouse pointer over the photos for a caption.

JAMAICA, MON!
Rivertubing at White River.


I never knew that in Jamaica, people drove on the left side of the street and the driver of a vehicle sits on the right side of the car. Our excursion guide said, “In Jamaica, the left side is the right side. And the right side…is suicide.”
Here, snorkeling at a reef off of a beach in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.

ON THE SHIP!
As many of you know, a signature of major ocean cruiseships is the different animals your cabin steward makes out of your bath towels and hides in your room daily. Here’s a bunny we found after coming back from a formal dinner.


Remember how I tried to give you women out there a nice shot of a hot guy across the bar from me when I was in San Francisco but couldn’t get a good enough picture? Well, here he is again, at the ship’s center Atrium, completely unaware that I was taking this picture. I think he should be flattered.

This is one of those ship portraits that I was talking about. We walked by after our formal dinner and they waved us over and posed us.

Someone with whom I can speak candidly who will try to understand me, even if he doesn’t agree.
Someone who, when he says communication is so important in a relationship, actually does his part to keep the communication open.
Someone who hears what I say instead of injects his own presumptions.
Someone I can lean on when I feel bad, who will embrace me instead of push back at me.
Someone to make me feel special.
Someone who doesn’t walk away from me when I’m crumpled.
Someone who cares for me as genuinely as he laughs with me.
Someone who gives me the benefit of the doubt because he believes in me as a person.
Someone who wants me near not only for the ways I can enrich his life, but also for the ways he wants to enrich mine.
Someone I can reach out to who doesn’t look at my outstretched hands then slash my exposed wrists.

I’m tired of being sick. Each day of ailment drags on, exponentially longer than a day of happiness or even a day of blissful nothingness. Each tick of the sad man’s clock thunders and its echos continue to claw at and weigh on his chest and mind, cumulatively, draining him. Unable to eat, sleep, or enjoy the passing of time, he finally drops in exhaustion, overtaken by a fitful and restless sleep, in which demons personified of life’s turmoils continue to threaten his very sanity. Crying is sometimes a relief, but less because of its healing catharsis than because of its distraction. Having sat in this state for an extended period of time — extended not because of its chronological duration but for its toll — I fall too familiarly into this again and again. What does it take for the shell to reharden, for the callouses to form?

I’m gonna go stand in the shower for a bit.

I tried to post some photos of vacation, but the image hosting site is again having issues. It seems to upload just fine, but then instead of bringing me to the page with the photos, the page says that the site can’t be found. Going to the site manually doesn’t show the pictures I’d just uploaded. I’ve done the entire process twice. Oh well. I’ll give it some time to fix itself and try again tomorrow.

So today, after working on photos for most of the morning/afternoon, I got to drag Mr. W to my old high school for his first non-cruise Bingo session. He got close to a win a few times, but didn’t win anything major. We both won raffle door prizes. He got a free admission and free sets of Bingo cards for our next visit, and I won some huge wooden jewelry chest thing that I have no use for. But hey, it’s about the experience. Altho it would’ve been nice to win a few hundred bucks. The guy a few seats down from us won Bingo on the powerball, so he got his $250 for the Bingo and $1199 for the powerball. The lady next to Mr. W explained that if the win is over $1200 it’s taxable so they let it peak out at $1199. Pretty thoughtful.

I’m back! Mr. W is, as I type, scanning in the cruise photographers’ photos of us so that we can order multi-sized copies from Costco.com and pick them up in an hour. Much smarter than paying $20 per 8×10 and $7 per 5×7 from the ship. Despite buying only 15% of the professional photos of us, we still spent over $150 on ship photos alone. But I figure, professional photo sessions don’t have you go thru that many changes of clothing, and just the sitting fee alone would be almost $50 w/o any pictures, so it’s still cheaper to buy one copy of poses we like on a cruiseship and have them serve as souvenirs. (The ship has photo ops set up all over the place daily and when you walk by one, they wave you over to take some photos. The photos are printed out the next day and put on display, and you buy what you want, if not they get recycled.)

The cruise was fun, altho I felt like I started running out of things to do after the 2nd or 3rd day at sea. This is mainly because, “due to the port authorities closing the ports, it is not our fault” (captain over the loudspeaker early Monday morning), we did not stop at the Cayman Islands at all. The night’s storm, wind and choppy water conditions made it unsafe for us to stop there. We had prepaid shipwreck snorkeling excursions there, which was refunded, along with port fees of $25 each. Nevertheless, Mr. W was extremely disappointed, as he made sure everyone we came across knew every day thereafter. I personally didn’t care that much because to me, quality time with him is quality time anywhere. But I’m not a big snorkeling fanatic the way he is. We did get our snorkeling in at Ocho Rios, Jamaica, the next day. We paid a private boat to bring us out to a reef and we plopped in and took a bunch of underwater pictures with my camera in a waterproof camera bag. The camera bag came in handy also during our 3-mile innertube ride down the White River rapids in Jamaica. Photos to follow. My favorite thing about the cruise, however, is not the midnight standup comedy, nor the food (altho it was gourmet and delicious, I even had escargot as an appetizer the last nite), nor the excursions, nor the photos (altho the photos are a close 2nd). It was something we totally lucked out on. The ship makes assigned seating for the nightly formal dinners, and the people we were assigned to the same table with are awesome. We had things in common, we laughed, we goofed off, and we had a lot of differences which made for really interesting dinner conversation. Jordan (a Floridian nurse), myself, Nadia (a kindergarten schoolteacher), Nadia’s boyfriend Terry (I’m not sure I ever got what he did) were talking about Nadia’s bout with alcoholism, and at the time of the cruise, she was 5 1/2 years sober, and attended some of the stealthily named “Friends of Bill W” AA meetings onboard with Terry, who chose to stop his recreational alcohol consumption when he met her and decided to be with her a year ago. Jordan, of course, had seen a lot of substance abuse addicts go thru detox in her hospital over the years, and seen some of her coworkers get addicted to the readily accessible painkillers at their workplace. It was an intense, very real, very candid conversation. A very serious conversation during which I turned my attention briefly to Mr. W and Jordan’s boyfriend Jeff’s conversation, as they were not part of our conversation. Jeff’s eyes were blazing with interest and Mr. W was saying excitedly, “And the last Harry Potter movie’s coming out in March, can you believe it?!” Two movie fanatics. And “fanatic” is a euphemism for movie-obsessed geekazoids who own twelve gazillion times more movies than they can possibly watch. I love how everyone has these threads of common interest. Jordan and I bonded over bitching about how the average American man hitting on us over the internet, as my childhood friend Vicky had once put it, “can’t speel to save his lif.” For morning breakfasts in the formal dining room, we are just randomly seated with people who have space on their table, as directed by the dining staff as we walk in. There are a lot of holier-than-thou, snooty, judgmental, whiny, queasy-ab0ut-food people on the ship. I missed our regular dinner group whenever we attend one of these breakfasts. So of course I made sure to exchange email addresses with everyone.

We spent one night at Fort Lauderdale after the cruise returned to Miami so that we could have free time to rent a car, explore Florida and visit the Everglades. It was coincidentally a cold weekend in Florida this past weekend, and the Everglades, which is just wide swampland covered in reeds and overgrown grass, was cold and uncomfortable as we were blasted around up to 70mph by a loud airboat. By loud, I mean they handed out toilet paper as we got seated so that we could wad them up and stuff them in our ears. It didn’t make much of a difference, tho. It was also too cold to see any alligators or crocodiles, who were apparently all hiding out in bushes to stay warm. The Everglades tour did end in a ‘gator farm, and we saw some gators in captivity there. Mr. W later had alligator meat at the local cafe. Take that, stupid alligators, for making us go all the way out and freeze our tails off for nothing.

The flight back from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles the next day was scheduled to depart at 3:46p. We got to the airport early, checked our baggage, and found out that the plane that was scheduled to come had technical problems and never left the previous airport. So they assigned another plane to get us, and that wasn’t expected to arrive until 8:10p. We made the most of it, hailed a taxi out to a beach, goofed off, Mr. W made a sand angel (photos to follow), hailed another taxi back to the airport around 6:45p, only to discover that the 2nd American Airlines plane also had technical problems shortly after departure and turned around. They were now sending a third flight to get us, and that one’s due at 11:20p. This time we stayed at the airport and I was actually really proud of Mr. W for maintaining his cool and rolling with the punches. We were supposed to arrive in LA yesterday evening at about 5:50p, but didn’t end up getting in until 5:30a this morning. Of course we weren’t going to call someone to get us a ride, so we rented a car and drove it back to his place.

Wow. We got done early. The judge let the jury go home early so that he and the attorneys can work on jury instructions and the verdict form. So on Monday, they’ll do closing arguments, jury instructions and the jury will commence their deliberation.

I guess I WON’T miss the flight. Yay! I told Mr. W things will work out! I’m jumping ship now.

Have a great week, guys! I hear that major cruiseships now have computer rooms, so if they do, maybe I’ll toss an entry your way here and there. In either case, I’m gonna be collecting photos of Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and Florida (hopefully the Everglades) for posting when I get back. I should do a photo of me before and after the tan.

Got this from my cousin Jennifer. Too funny not to post. Besides, I spent yesterday evening vacuuming up cat hairs, cleaning cat vomit up from the living room (he’d gotten into some Christmas ribbon which is of course indigestible, so he had to puke it up, along with his dinner, in 4 or 5 separate piles that I found later), cleaning the cat area, changing the cat litter, so I’m in an animal frame of mind. Happy Friday!

Excerpts From a Dog’s Daily Diary:

8:00 a.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!
9:30 a.m. Wow! A car ride! This is a blast!
9:40 a.m. A walk in the park! Ate some crap… Delicious!
10:30 a.m. Getting rubbed and petted! I’m in love!
12:00 p.m. Lunch! Yummy!
1:00 p.m. Playing in the yard! I just love it!
3:00 p.m. Staring adoringly at my masters…they’re the best! I’ll wag my tail in joy.
4:00 p.m. Hooray! The kids are home! I’m bouncing off the walls!
5:00 p.m. Milkbones! Great!
7:00 p.m. Get to play ball! This is too good to be true!
8:00 p.m. Wow! Watching TV with my master! Heavenly!
11:00 p.m. Sleeping at the bottom of my master’s bed! Life is soooooooo great!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Excerpts From a Cat’s Daily Diary:

Day 683 of My Captivity:

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomited on the floor.

Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. It demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a ”good little hunter” I am. The audacity!!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to my power of “allergies.” I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow– but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released–and he seems more than willing to return! He is obviously retarded. The bird has got to be an informant– I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. The captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe — for now.

But I can wait.