I Still Can't Believe It

I just lost my post about the trip to Vienna. Am typing this so I don't continue with my preparations to commit Harry Caray on this mutha fucking computer. I'm buying a Mac and that is final. FUCK WINDOWS XP. I hate you with the burning hot hate of a million rivers of lava. LAVA!!!!! Carry on. Will have to update later on the trip. Once my brain can muster up something other than this string of invective currently overtaking all other thought.

At least, I'm hoping to get lost today during my walking tour of what is a stunning city. Across the street from my hotel is park where a famous Mozart statue and a famous Goethe (pronounced gerta, thanks JoySoy) statue live. The weather is ideal with mostly sunny skies and cool, but not cold. Magnolia trees, forsythia and any number of other early spring blooms pop out against the architecture. I can definitely see why Vienna is considered a romantic city. On the other hand, this keyboard has caused that last paragraph to take me about 10 minutes and now I must run to catch up with my sightseeing companions. Why must they put the z where the y is supposed to be? And none of the punctuation marks are in the right place. I guess they had to get creative in order to have these: Ä Ö ß § µ € °.

...you get a new phone? I am bursting with pride over my new little friend. It sings to me and she retrieves my email...I love it so. The only downside is that I'm bound to become one of those people pretending to pay attention in a conversation but am actually checking my emails on my phone. But, I'm breaking it in with the firm assertion that I WON'T become one of those people addicted to their email. I'm not that important and I don't ever want to be that important. ...you have a party and the cops are called because people are having too much fun for stodgy suburbia? The third (or was it fourth) annual Jamexican party had probably it's largest turnout ever (thanks in large part to Anna and her party coordination skills) and I think everyone had a jolly good time. By the time the cops showed up to let us know there had been "several" noise complaints from neighbors (which maybe? I have a hard time believing since two of our five neighbors wer...

Chicken feet salad. Yum!

Which means I'll just have to tell the rest of the story via pictures. The lake outside the Summer Palace. Just a short drive from Beijing city, it was raining proper by the time we arrived. The lake was pretty much invisible. But I really like how this picture turned out. It's not shot in B/W either. These are candied sweet potato fries. They were piping hot when they were served. You grabbed a few with the chopsticks and pulled them straight up off the pile. The little strings are like molten hard candy and once you have a lot of longevity (as evidenced by how high you could pull the fries up and still have candied webs), you dipped the fries in that little bowl of water next to Plate of Fiery Love in order to cool them off to just under the temperature of the sun and eat them. De-fucking-lish. A path outside the Temple of Heaven. I really love this picture. I wonder what those two were talking about. I wondered that a lot on this trip. Not being able to communicate makes me ...

On Friday, we went to the blah blah blah Jade "factory", then the Ming tombs, then the enamel "factory" then the Great Wall, and then finished off with blah blah blah Peking Duck. I think I peaked too soon with that ginormous post yesterday. It's true that the first day was a fucking whirlwind and I was cream crackered at 9:30 when we finally got back to the hotel. And day two was another day of Dead Emporer Sites galore. Can you believe I've only been back for three days and I'm already this jaded? Standby while I slap myself and then climb out of my Hole O' Pity. Right then. Where was I? Yes, day two in Beijing. The "factories" were government-owned shops where a girl (always a girl, lower to mid-20's) would rattle off a brief history of the intricacies of whichever factory we were at. At various points during the guided tour, we went to the jade factory, the enamel factory (where they make cloisonne trinkets and vases and jewe...

I'm going to start out by saying that I think everyone should try to travel internationally at least once in their lives. One of the things I really noticed on this trip was how much being in a foreign place makes you question your assumptions. Everyone knows assumptions are bad mmmkay, but that doesn't stop us from making them. But when you're someplace so far from home and so far from the culture you were raised in, the obvious doesn't seem so obvious. And questioning things keeps us alert and young and...I don't know...alive in a way? We (my boss, her husband and another co-worker) had a guide/translator and a driver. We paid $340 plus about $100 in tips for six days worth of driving and sight-seeing, as well as our lunch and dinner meals. Beijing is working on adding a lot of English signage at tourist sites and in common areas for the impending Olympics in 2008, but it's pretty much impossible to get around if you don't speak Mandarin. So, this was a go...

To those who haven't yet said "to hell with that blog and that bitch that never updates" you will be rewarded with photos (with titles and explanations! it's the time-consuming part) and posts about my recent trip to Beijing. Veddy, veddy soon. I even took notes while there so I would remember all the stuff I saw in order to share it here. I have officially become my grandmother. As for the mobile blogging experiment, well, I think you can tell how that went. The test worked and then my subsequent attempts at posting from the phone failed. I probably spent $16 in text messaging fees for posts that never showed up. I think I may have figured out the problem though and thank god too - I can't wait to see how the picture of the chicken feet salad turned out. Seriously. A salad with chicken feet as the main ingredient. I also tried to post from an Internet kiosk at the Hong Kong airport. The site was blocked though and the nice little pop-up said CDB was bloc...

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Happy Year of the Boar from Macau. I arrived last night at about 7:30 pm, which was about 9:30 am Friday at home. I left my house at 4:15 am on Thursday, so for any mathematically challenged out there, that means I was en route for 29 hours. Which, let me tell you, was about as much fun as I can take. It really wasn't that bad of a journey, although the leg from St. Louis to Chicago for some reason really had me anxious. Maybe it was the part where we started doing circles in the sky about 30 minutes into a 45 minute flight. Just flying around in circles over Illinois. The long haul part was uneventful, for which I'm eternally grateful. We took the same route as we did last year when I made this trip, which is to say, straight north from Chicago, over the North Pole and then straight south over Russia, Mongolia, China and then finally landed in Hong Kong. Things I saw during the flight (amongst other things I won't share out of love for you, my dear reader...things ...

And it's been happening under my nose. Literally. I made an appointment to get regular maintenance on my car. After arriving at the shop, I was cleaning up some loose papers, mostly receipts that were around in the car and there was a folded newspaper. As I pulled the newspaper out from between the seats, a newspaper that hadn't been there more than a week, a fluttering of newspaper bits went all over the floor. Hmm . Weird. So I unfold the newspaper and that's when I see the first knock-me-on-the-head-I'm-an-oblivious-bastard clue that something is terribly wrong - not with my car, but with it's inhabitants. A few months ago, I spilled some coffee on the little in-between the seats console. I grabbed some napkins out of the glove box and in the midst of sopping up the spill, I notice that the napkins are all frayed on the edge. I figure they got caught in the latch. A few weeks after that, I was on the street outside my house, where SB usually parks and noticed thi...

I'm conflicted. Should I post about my love for spuds or how burned out I am on work? Such a toss up, I'm sure you can see how this dilemma is not easily solved. See, on the one hand, my love for potatoes is deeper and more meaningful than any mundane work-related issue and I could speak poetically about the tuber at length. But on the other hand, the very real and almost tangible drain on my psyche that's occurring in large part because of job-related blahblah is a contributing factor in why I haven't been able to muster up the energy to write much of late. Mmmmmm. Taters. I kind of feel like Bubba from Forrest Gump about le pomme de terres. I can eat them fried, stewed, skewered, boiled, broiled or baked. Add them to any dish and I'll pretty much guarantee I'll eat it. Starchy little nuggets of love, that's what I call potatoes. I love me some fucking po-tay-toes. These are the thoughts that get me through the day. These and thoughts of the reveng...

When did I become such a cold-weather wuss? My brain is numbed just thinking about going outside. My fingers, they are so wretchedly frozen that it has taken me 8.2 minutes just to type the word wretchedly. Even the back of my arms are cold. It could very well be the first time I've noticed my arms have back sides. My arm's arse is cold, if you will. I tell you, the windows behind my desk might as well be made out of cellophane. It would come in really handy to have the super power to start engines from afar right now. I'd be everyone in Missouri's best friend. And now my brain is numbed by this fatuous post. And yours probably is too. You can thank me some other time - right now I'm otherwise engaged in a game of wits with a dust bunny.

Sometimes traveling can be relatively pain-free and smooth. Other times, well, not so much. I probably shouldn't complain too much as I did eventually make it everywhere I needed to go, including back home last night. So, I'll put more in "The Good" section than "The Bad" section and that will qualify as not complaining. The Good (as in Hindsight is My Friend): On both long haul flights between Chicago and London I managed to have a row of three seats to myself. If you've ever experienced this, you know that it's a million times more comfortable than being on a packed flight, but is still far from what anyone would consider "comfortable", unless you're lucky enough to have no nerve endings. Or need for blood circulation. My luggage was with me for the most important leg of the trip. I know it's just STUFF, but I can honestly say I wanted that stuff badly. Travel Cassady and Travel Corn Dog were in there! I got to spend three days...

So, I wrote a list of all the weird shit that happened in the last few days. Aside from the weather, which coincidentally is the root cause of the craziness. We got hit with another lovely ice storm that coated everything with about three-quarters of an inch of ice. I haven't uploaded the pictures yet, but will soon. Soonish, how 'bout? Here's the list I hand-wrote because we had no power from Friday around 10:30 pm until Monday around 5:00 pm. I showered by candlelight with the last of the hot water we'd have for a few days. That was Friday night. The next shower was Sunday night . Not quite as bad as camping, thankfully. Just a few short weeks ago for Christmas, we got a hand-crank radio, an LED flashlight on a tripod, and a battery-powered reading light for the bedroom. All of these items proved vital to our sanity and safety. The radio also had TV station reception so we could listen to FOX. I wasn't complaining. Surfer Boy came less than three feet away from h...

You win four soccer games in a row? Hell yeah. Of course, we're now jinxed and won't win again until Mars is in retrograde. And you KNOW that's a long time from now. You listen to music that makes you feel like you're in high school again? That's right...Justin Timberlake makes me want to put on my Catholic school uniform, ifyaknowwhatImean. Tease me, berate me, do what you must, but I do love that music. You're excited and nervous at the same time? Upcoming journeys have me all a-twitter. And by "a-twitter" I mean finding it hard to concentrate and constantly thinking about it. A business event (party) invitation says the dress is "Smart Casual". What does that mean??? All the stoplights turn green from one destination to another? It only happens when don't have anywhere to be by a certain time, granted, but it's still nice when it happens. You finally find a pair of jeans that fit the way you want them to? Can I just say that I ha...

I have a ginormous digital camera. See, I bought it because of floppy disk storage feature (because I'm a total idiot and knew less than nothing about digital cameras) and this feature requires the size of the camera to be ludicrous. So, I'm looking at random Flickr pictures one day and I come across this Camera Toss group. It's just what it sounds like - people throw their camera into the air while taking a picture and hopefully catch it to retrieve the images. This is one from my first camera tossing excursion. It's a picture of some Christmas lights in my parents yard. The camera only ended up on the ground twice, so I consider this a success. The Ginormous Sony lives to toss again!

When Surfer Boy and I were in California a couple of months ago, we spent time with one of his old high school friends. This mate is now a working artist and I think his portfolio is amazing and the piece pictured was one of my favorites. I also saw this piece up-close-and-personal in his kitchen - the picture of this one just doesn't do the wood justice as the grain and finish are so elegant and the lighting on the trilobyte things is perfect. And then, out of nowhere, he GAVE us a piece! It is in the same series as this piece , but no two pieces of his are exactly the same, so ours is a one-of-a-kind. Also? It's the "Dreamer" series and that is so bloody perfect for Surfer Boy - that's exactly what he is.

Here's hoping we all have someone to play ball with in 2007.

I was reading my paternal grandmother's Life Story on Christmas. I didn't have time to read the whole thing without being labeled anti-social, which vexed me because I really wanted to keep reading once I started. I could get away with hiding from the family festivities when I was "at that age" of being an angst-riddled teenager, but apparently, I'm supposed to have grown out of that age. I'm a cranky DINK now, shouldn't that count? (And yes, I do see the irony of wanting to learn more about my grandma from a book than say, sitting down with her and having a conversation. I think my granddaughter of the year award just went to my cousin with the big hair.) Out of many many interesting parts, I keep going back to the part where she is talking about her first job after finishing beauty school and how she had two outfits - "One on my back and one that was probably in the laundry". I imagine my closet and how empty it would look with one outfit on a ...