optometrists are optimists.

i wore my fake (but quite cute) glasses to a training seminar this past thursday evening.

here's where it gets weird. i pre-decided that i was going to be far-sighted and faithfully pulled my glasses on to read the handouts and to take notes. sometimes i decide to be near-sighted. other times i decided that i am a typical glasses wearer and keep them on at all times.

seriously. who does that?!

20% more free

why is it that the conditioner bottle i have has 20% more product than my shampoo?

i've come to a conclusion - it's for people who were hardwired as i am. observe the dilemma:
i am coming to the end of my shampoo bottle but still have about 30% more conditioner left. i don't want to be wasteful, but i also have a really hard time using one brand or even specific kind of shampoo without it's nicely matching conditioner counterpart. what they want you to do is to then go out and buy shampoo thus making you a customer for life.

but i have fooled them.

i just keep the 30% left of conditioner and use it as shaving cream. either that or they just sit in my shower cluttering the sides ridiculously.

dancing in the park.

so my boyfriend planned out an amazing 3 days in chicago for us before we went up to wisconsin for a wedding  i was to be in.

one of the oh-so-fun plans he had for us was to spend an evening taking a dance lesson in the park.

my interpretation: waltzing under the stars with other couples wearing 50s style outfits.
reality: the funniest belly dancing lesson i've ever witnessed. the only one, too, incidentally!

what a  wonderful evening!

salinger's wikipedia trail

from franny & zooey to salinger to his 18 year old mistress' writings in 17 magazine (j.d. was 53 at the time). how interesting it is to have such information at our fingertips. this is just the conclusion of the article, but it's quite interesting if you have a bit of free time (http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/maynard-mag.html)

"Now my goal is simpler. I want to be happy. And I want comfort--nice clothes, a nice house, good music and good food, and the feeling that I'm doing some little thing that matters. I'll vote and I'll give to charity, but I won't give myself. I feel a sudden desire to buy land--not a lot, not as a business investment, but just a small plot of earth so that whatever they do to the country I'll have a place where I can go--a kind of fallout shelter, I guess. As some people prepare for their old age, so I prepare for my 20's. A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet--retirement sounds tempting" - Joyce Maynard 

the m's.

i was aghast.
i had just finished our book club book of 500+ pages in 2 sittings.
i rushed to half price books to pick the second & third in the trilogy.
i had in mind that the author's last name was myers.
as i arrived slightly out of breath at the "m's" in the young adult fiction section, the only book series i saw were a little series called twilight.
oh! the agony. what to do?
since i didn't see the hunger games anyways, i slowly walked out. dejected. ashamed of myself.
then i accidentally drove straight to book people.
i found myself walking expectantly towards the "m's" but still couldn't find what i knew i shouldn't have.

twist:
an employee at book people asked if he could help me with anything. i sheepishly said i was looking for the hunger games by stephanie myers. he relieved my agony and said that the series was actually written by suzanne collins and that it was quite popular among more well read patrons of the store.

then i paid $19.95 for a book for the first time in my life.
i justified it by buying the third in the trilogy online with an amazon.com gift card.

the end.

coldplay songs.

from where i'm sitting on my fantastic orange chair i can see 4 clocks. 

of the 4, 2 don't work. 

is that weird?

IKEA. the store.

so jonathan and i decided to head up to IKEA to get some stuff to organize his room and to get me a $4 lamp to take better pictures for my other blog. it went a little something like this...

fabulous soup.

in junior high, i used to babysit a girl down the street, leigha. while i can't seem to remember what games we played, what pictures we drew, or what cartoons we watched, i do vividly remember coming home and telling my mom about this amazing soup leigha's mom had waiting for us on the stove for dinner.

my mom, being the kind mother she is, asked leigha's mom the recipe so she could make this fabulous soup.

turns out it was beef & veggie soup from a can.

here's to classy taste.
here's to being really, really tired of eating soup all week.
here's to a quick recovery!

ideas?

i started a new blog. it won't replace this one by any means, but it will give me a bit of a creativity boost.(http://thatolthing.blogspot.com) 

so here's the question: how do i better link the two? or should i not? ideas?

oops.

one of my favorite people gave me the cutest christmas present. it was beautifully wrapped and contained some fabulous lotion and a mysterious foil wrapped ball. it smelled heavenly.

wait.

let me preface something first. i've started working out which means that i've been considerably more hungry as of late. okay. proceed.

well i unwrapped the sweetly smelling treat only to find out the hard way that it was sweetly smelling bath salt. and not so sweetly tasting.

now i'm in the mood for white chocolate...and a bath...

just a few...

finishing a book and immediately grabbing another

rearranging as i clean

cooking with veggies i've grown

jean-pierre jeune

mint pea soup

taking a very full box to the dumpster

very round balloons

santigold

going to bed ahead of schedule

broad stripes

national aids awareness day.

today i threw away my peeling black hobo purse i bought while i lived in honduras.
today i threw away my peeling brown pointy shoes i bought at target 5 years ago.
today i threw away my peeling brown vintage purse i got at 2 gals junk.
today i threw away my holey black shoes i bought at target for working at the cafe on broadway.

today was a sad day.

today i bought a replacement pair of black shoes from target.
today i ordered a vintage black purse from etsy that was on sale.

today i tried to determine what these two sets of actions i did said i valued.
today i failed to reach any real determinations.

jeans.

some days jeans just feel oppressive.
today is one of those days.

i want to ride my bicycle.

i decided to go on a bike ride this evening in my new neighborhood. what an amazing series of moments it turned out to be. observe:

two adorable hispanic women in long skirts running down the street the opposite way as me at a pretty hefty pace from the smallest kitten i've ever seen.

one man in a dark blue sedan swerving in the street. calls out "sorry pretty lady." and then again once i'm a good ways down the street "my name's herb by the way..." thus crossing that street off any future bike routes.

i greet creeper chris with the obligatory yet stoic, "hey." he proceeds to ask me where my car is. i say it's neither here nor there. thus crossing that street off any future bike routes as well.

i then proceed to ride by a hoard of small children. one whispers to another all too loudly "flaca" which is enough to make any 26 year old woman feel wonderful despite the dinner of french fries she inhaled just moments before.

the next street over and i pass by the adorable hispanic women again. i ask them if they've managed to get free from the cat. we chuckle together while one translates to the other cheerfully.  next time i'll speak in spanish.

on my final lap (read: no more non-creepy men streets left) i see a small boy trying desperately to push is bike with training wheels over the enormous mountains they call speed bumps. i insert a witty comment as to their size and the difficulty of riding a bike in this neighborhood. the boy runs to his mother terrified of the tall white girl on the multi-colored tie-dyed speckled bike.

then i return home.
and thus my world is a better, brighter place.

fragile? i think not.

as a society, i now believe that we are simply too careful with cartons of eggs.

observe: austin traffic at 4:30 this afternoon on 71 heading east from target proved to be a bit stop and go. in true intramural champion ('02-'06, '07-'09) style, i managed to catch the grocery bag of bread and eggs no less than seven times successfully. so i really only missed once. i soundly reasoned that i should leave them on the floorboard of the passenger side of the car since they didn't really have any place to fall from there.

fast forward: i'm at home. i'm imagining the worst. i was planning on making fried eggs on toast for dinner. i currently have no back up besides the black eyes peas in the garden i keep forgetting to water. i open the carton. only one egg is damaged. 1/12 which roughly translates to 8.3% of the carton. not bad by my calculation.

from now on, i won't be so darn careful.

dominating at dominos.

yesterday i joined some of my new neighbors for a bbq quickly turned domino tournament. i won.

the ever sharp 95 year old miss rosa trash talked 19 year old dwight and i incessantly. i made snarky comments about my undisputed winning streak. avon watched with the occasional chuckle. mississippi stopped by to grab some food and take it back to his place to watch the rest of some really important ufc fight.

dwight and i ran into gorde as we walked back and was upset that we had domino's pizza and didn't invite him. (a hard thing to explain away to a man with a severe mental handicap and a severe love of pizza!)

it felt like a family gathering. i feel like i'm home here. and i like that.

i don't think it matters which came first.

in an attempt to eat something different for dinner than the ever-prolific squash that can't seem to stop growing in our gardens and inspired by a mistake the chef made from dinner last night, i piled my plate high with couscous, topped it with baked chicken, and completed the stack with a sunny side up egg. about 3/4 of the way through my meal, i realized how sick it is to eat chicken topped with an egg.

needless to say i didn't finish my meal.

needless to say i'm still hungry.

a run on sentence for you.

for as long as i can remember i've had this gripping fear that if i ever used the handicap stall in the bathroom when all the other stalls weren't in use, that when i opened the stall door to leave i would see a very, very sad lady in a wheelchair shifting uncomfortably and shaking her head at me as she gestures at the other open stalls that i could have used that she can't with a confused look in her eye.

the end.

blurry lines of vision.

so my friend rikki send me this fabulous pair of glasses that i'm tempted to wear daily. they're what she likes to call invisible glasses. i'll let you figure out what she means by that.

lately when i wear them to the office and take them off to clean them, i have this almost un-ignorable urge to continue in my fantasy world and pretend like i'm wearing glasses to correct my lazy eye.

somehow this seem to cross the line between hipster fashion and living a lie.

but oh! what a blurry line it has become.

accidental liar.

i would like to recant my last blog post. i need the caffeine to get rid of this headache.