Only in California

A few weekends ago we set out on an adventure to see 5,000 friends.  Our first stop is Sonoma county for a 30th birthday party.  We leave after work around 6pm and arrive at our first destination half past midnight.  Besides the time in the car, it is a fairly simple drive: after two blocks turn right on Hollister, go 200 feet then turn left on Turnpike, after 0.25 mile make a left on 101 North.   Drive 300 miles and you're there.  Perfect.  But instead of going straight up the 101 we decide to take a twenty minute shortcut.

We do not yet realize that the short cut includes a toll road.  But once we do realize it was a toll road, we do not yet realize that we have no money.  

How much is the toll?

Five bucks.

Dang, do you have five bucks?

No, do you have five bucks? Let me check....no.

Proceed to search the car for five bucks.  We usually keep the car stocked with secret stashes of cash for instances just like this.  And neither one of us can remember using up the last stash that we kept tucked away in the sun visor on the passenger side.  Although now that I mention it, I can remember driving around with a certain friend who was very excited and surprised to find a few dollars while meddling through the car. "Hey I just found money! Is this your guys' money? Did you even know you had this money?"...I wouldn't doubt that he secretly put the  money in his pocket.   It was the same friend who gave us a really nice knife once, and then a couple years later came to visit and found the knife and said "Hey nice knife, Is that the knife I got you?"  Yes, yes it it.  "Do you guys ever even use it? " Yes, yes we do.   We have never seen that knife again.

So here we are, passed the last exit on the freeway before the toll booths.  No turning back now.  All we have is about 25 pennies and a couple of credit cards.  What are the chances California toll booths have wised up and started accepting Visa?  

There are three cash lanes open.  Only one of them currently has a car in it.  So I pull up behind the car at the collector to try to buy us a few extra seconds of Trevor searching through his brief case for spare cash.  Nothing.  Oh well, nothing we can do about it now, but wait....and wait.....and wait...... Jeez what are theses people talking about?!  The car in front of us is talking forever having a 15 minute conversation with the toll booth collector.   California Julie resists the New Jersey Julie's temptations to honk and curse and reverse to get in the the next lane over.  Eventually the car moves on though and it's our turn to have a chat with the tollbooth collector....

Collector:  Sorry about that, guys! How's your night going?!

Uhhh, it's good... Do you, um, take credit card by any chance?

Collector:  No..eeeh we don't, sorry about that.  BUT I did have a gentleman today who gave me an extra $5 and told me to use it on someone nice.  And you seem nice enough! Sooooo..... Have a good night!

Are you freaking kidding me!?  Oh my god, thank you.  

Who gives a tollbooth collector an extra five bucks?!

And what tollbooth collector doesn't just pocket that?!

A Good ol' Wake 'n' Quake

The other day was  my sister's birthday.   The day started off like any other. My alarm went off around 6:45am, and like usual I was way too tired to move.  I pressed snooze about 15 times, until the alarm no longer responded to the snooze button and continued to go off constantly, getting louder and louder.  I eventually shut it off.  I dozed back off to sleep.  Then about five minutes later I awoke to my second, back up alarm.  I pressed snooze another two or three times, until Trevor started moving... Dang it, I better quit snoozing before I wake him up.  

I roll myself down to the bottom of the bed and silently stare at my dresser.  Yawn.  Stretch.  What to wear? What to wear? Pants? Skirt? Dress? Pants? Skirt? Dress?  I quietly ponder my options for the next 8 minutes or so.  I could wear my purple dress...but I only wear my purple dress with my black leggings.... and I wore my black legging yesterday.  Heck I'm still wearing my black leggings now.  What am I wearing now? Back leggings and a black sports bra.  I kinda look like some sort of ninja jazzercise instructor.

Then the garage door opens.  Trevor and I live in an apartment above a two car garage.  We have a theory that the woman who helps take care of our blind neighbors lives in the garage below us.  We think she pulls the car in at night to sleep and takes it out and parks it back in the driveway in the morning.    So for the garage door to open at this moment is not out of the ordinary.  Only something sounds wrong with the garage door opener.  It's super loud and noisy and it's not stopping.  Hmm, why's the whole house shaking? It could not be a train, we are not close to the tracks.   Hmm, is there an airplane about to crash into the house?  

Nope.  As Trevor chimes in and leaps out of bed "It's an earthquake!!!"  We huddle under the door frame and the shaking ceases relatively quickly.  Uh what to do next? 

 Trevor: "should we go outside?"

Me:  "yea, run!!"

We sprint through the other side of our garage-sized apartment and scurry down the stairs like we are Indian Jones and the temple of doom is collapsing behind us.  Huffing and puffing we make it to the outside world.  We are alive!  Outdoors!  Fresh air! We survived! Phew!  ....and now we are standing outside....alone....alive.... me in my ninja apparel....and Trev in his boxer shorts...Ok we can probably go back inside.

We assess the damage.  Two broken picture frames.  Looking around I am absolutely amazed what with all the junk that we have hoarded in this apartment, that two picture frames were the only things to fall over.  I mean look at this hallway of hell we've got going on here:

Well we got away with it unscathed this time, and hopefully there won't be a next time, but just in case, I went on a massive anti-hoarding campaign in the attic, the closet, the bookcase, and the stairwell (which also seconds as a master closet).

I went through so much junk and made big piles of things for the upcoming garage sale. But there are just too many precious memorabilia that I'm not ready to let go of.  I mean what if one day I have a daughter... She'll eventually be a teenager... And of course she'll be the coolest, weirdest teenager around, and will love all the things I love and will want to dress just like me.  She would be so mad at me for giving away all these cool things!

My Lord of the Rings Legolas shirt:

My sweet ripped jeans which I bought without a single hole or stain on them

earned every one of them

This kinda lame shirt:

BUT it's signed by the whole band, American Hi Fi

"She's just the flavor of the weeeeeek"

My Raritan High School Powder Puff football game jersey:

I was so hard core

Of course, the shirt I made for Trevor on our first Valentine's day:

....memories...

 

 

 

These really awesome Tommy Hilfiger striped pants:

 My super-stylin' "New Kids on the Block" hat:

My bear wrestling team shirt:

How could I get rid of my Saved by the Bell teen hearthrob shirt:

This is a vintage gem!

This one is just funny:

This one's just too cute:

 

 Cause I've had these guys since 7th grade:

and even though the elastic is so stretched out that they're too big... it's not too say that I won't grow back into them someday...

This ones always fun to wear:

and was a present from Trevor

Annnnd  some other random crap I also cannot let go of.....

A seat belt belt that I have NEVER worn but have ALWAYS wanted:

 My "Happy Feel Good" tape from March 1998, that I found only after the cassette player in the car broke.

But I know when I get around to buying a new cassette player, this tape is going to make me feel so happy and good....or old and awful.

 A DISCMAN!!!!!  Holy crap I didn't even know we had one of these we cannot get rid of this!!!!!

 

Macho Man Randy Savage:

I'll never let you go

And... a life size Yao Ming:

too good not to have

Hoarders for life!!!  Watch me have some sort of straight-laced angel child whose favorite color is white...

Pay Less for the Dress or More for the Stress

I bought a wedding dress.  I went shopping with my mother and tried on a few gowns and barf, barf, barf, I am not all that excited to be a bride.  I do not like white.  I do not like being fancy, pancy.  I found one dress I thought was surprisingly tolerable, although awfully quinceanera-ish, but the price was too high for me to like it all that much (I am cheap).

I went online and found it on amazon.com for a bit cheaper.  Regardless of how much I actually even liked the dress, I bought it (because I can appreciate a good deal).

The next few weeks were filled with intense paranoia as I recall a friend who had bought her wedding dress online and it came out cheap and awful (I like cheap prices, but not cheap looks).  In the end she had to buy a new one and was not able to return the busted one.  

The dress I ordered is not returnable.  Crap.  I email the dress maker with a few questions  and the response is in slightly broken English and poor grammar. I get more worried.  I look up where the dress coming from and it is some place in China.  I start having pangs of guilt that I am contributing to some Chinese sweat shop with awful carcinogens floating around in the air while ten year old children are half naked and starving and beaten and made to sew cheap wedding dresses for five cents a day. 

I look up reviews on the seller...something I probably should have done before financially committing to this whole transaction (need to get one of those bracelets: "what would Trevor do?").  Some reviews are positive.  Some are negative.  The positive ones are again in broken English which makes me think they are staged and written by the person who is running this scam.  Damn, I hate being scammed.  

And what's worse, I realize the seller is called George Bridal....like a cheap knock off of David's Bridal.  I hate David's Bridal.  And this is even a step down from that...his cheap imitation brother, George.  And there's no apostrophe..... more grammatical inaccuracies!

The dress finally arrives in a one foot by two foot duck taped garbage bag.  I do not even want to open it, just throw it in the trash!  I lock myself in the bedroom and anxiously peel back the tape.  Holding onto the 1% hope that this dress might be wearable, I tear open the plastic...and my worst fears are confirmed.  This is not the dress I ordered...

There are circle domes sewed into the bust, with under wires of the torso exposed.  The seams around the waist and down the sides are haggard and exposed.  The material looks like it is made out of a screen window for a tent.  There is no jazzy belt like in the picture.  I want to cry.  I curse myself for being the hasty, cheap decision maker that I am.

Then I realize it's inside out.

In actuality, when it is right side in, the dress is not that bad.  So I will reluctantly pat myself on the back for finding a nice relatively inexpensive dress,  although I still feel slightly guilty about the poor child laborers in China that I might have made up.    I am still talking myself into really liking the dress.  I just cannot get all that excited about a plain white dress.... B-o-r-i-n-g!  I have already taken a scissor to it once for some minor alterations, but I am seriously tempted to slice up some major modifications.  The fact that it was cheap, only eggs me on....  I've done it before...

The Midnight Baby Tamer

I recently played on a community soccer team with some of my co-workers who are married with a one year old baby boy.  Our games are every Friday night and one particular night we had a late game at 9pm.  My friends didn't want to bring their baby to the game because it would have been past the baby's bed time and they were having a hard time finding a baby sitter.  So I go ahead and volunteer my services.... I'll just have Trevor watch the baby for you!

Trevor and I head over to our friends' house before the game.  The baby has just gone to sleep for the night.  Easy peasy lemon cheesey.  Trevor gets the run down of instructions for the night:

Baby is asleep in his bed with a fresh diaper.

Baby will not wake up till we get back

Just sit in the living room and watch tv.

In the off chance the baby does wake up and starts fussing, just hold off and maybe he'll go back to sleep.  

If the baby starts crying for a while you can take him out of the crib and let him hang out.

If you can't get him to calm down he can watch tv.

My friends and I are off to our soccer game and leave Trevor alone to his baby-sitting duties.  Twenty minutes into his first infant baby sitting gig, the baby wakes up.  Baby starts fussing but not really crying.  Trevor lets him be.  Go back to sleeeeeep. Baby does not go back to sleep.  Baby starts crying....five minutes go by.  Baby starts crying louder.  Ten minutes go by... Time to get baby.

Trevor hesitantly slides open the bedroom door, sensitive to the fact that this baby who he has only met maybe three or four times in his life, probably has no idea who Trevor is, and is definitely not going to expect him to open the door when every other time that baby has cried in the night he was always greeted by the loving, beardless faces of his mommy and dada.

As Trevor opens the door the outside light shines on the poor disheveled baby's  face who is standing in his crib holding onto the rail with a face full of tears.  Trevor tries to sweetly console him from the doorway, "heeeeey baaaaaby, it's oooook. It's ok....."  The baby takes one look at Trevor, covers his sad eyes with his short toddler arms and drops to the mattress, throws his arms over his heads and ears, face down in his bed and doesn't make another peep.

So Trevor closes the door, and goes back to the couch with the Tv and a beer.  And within another fifteen minutes or so, the heavy breathing of baby snores is ringing through the baby monitor once again.

My Spidey Senses are Tingling

I've recently had a hard time falling asleep at night.  It probably started around the time they caught that creep in Cleveland. I should stop watching the news before bedtime.....  When not sleeping, I lay in bed and attempt to tire myself out by looking endlessly for new apartments, a new job, bridesmaids dresses, ceremony templates, wedding hotels, cheap substitutions for flower bouquets, shuttles, DJs, photographers.  You name it.  I may never sleep again until September 22. 

Three nights in a row I was up past 2am and then up for work at 7am.  On the fourth night, there is no way I am not sleeping.  I go to bed early around 10pm.  This is going to be a good night's sleep.  Trevor goes to bed an hour or so later and I slightly wake up for a second when he stirs but I am definitely going to go right back into deep dark sleep, no problems here.  That is until I feel a breeze of a tickle scurry down my arm hairs.  I halfway open my eyes thinking it was just the wind or just Trevor pulling a blanket off my arm.  But to my absolute horror I can barely make out a shadowy dark object moving across the blanket.....SPIDER!!!

I spastically flail to my feet, abruptly  knocking a sleepy unconscious Trevor in the head and torso and strip the bed (and a now wildly awake and fearful Trevor) of all the blankets, as I dash for the light switch and proceed to blind my shocked and exposed poor friend who could really use a good night's rest himself.

Trevor: What!? What the heck is going on?!?!?!!

Me: Ahhhhhh, there was slider crawling on me!!

Trevor tries his tired best to assure me it was not a spider.  That I was dreaming and he must have twitched.  I made it all up in my sleep.

After scouring the bed, the floor, the surrounding walls and coming up with nothing, I shut the lights back off.  He is snoring in less than 10 seconds.  I shake off the blankets and tuck myself into the tightest cocoon of sheets so that no spider or puff of air will be able to come in contact with my skin.   I lie awake again.  No use in even trying to get back to sleep with a spider on the loose in your bedroom.  No better time to start looking at bridesmaid dresses again, I suppose....

Wedding Panicking...I Mean Planning!

Some days I am smug with pride about how well I am handling all the anxieties that come along with planning a wedding, and hunting for a new apartment, and figuring out my next career move, all from across the country and all at the same time.  And then there are mornings like today when I awake from the wonderful dream that all my lovely white teeth are crumbling to bits and I'm crunching them, choking on them, spitting out blood and tooth bits, manically feeling my tender bloody gums with my tongue...  But then I wake up.  And although frazzled, I am relieved that I still have my teeth.  And now it's time to block off hotel rooms, figure out some more  people's addresses, pick out invitations, put together a script for the ceremony, contemplate cutting my wedding dress to above the knee, and convince my sisters that we all shouldn't wear high heels...  Is it too early for a beer?

Welcome to the Ool

A childhood friend of mine was lucky enough to have a pool in her backyard growing up.  Her family used to have a sign that said "Welcome to Our Ool.  Please notice there is no "P" in it.  We would like to keep it that way."  I thought this was hysterical.

Last night I went with a friend to her kids' swim lessons.  My friend gets in the pool first with her one year old for a mommy and baby group session while I sit by the side of the pool and watch her 4-year old in the shallow end.  All children must be supervised at all times, so I diligently keep my eyes on the girl while I quickly drift off to day-dreaming  about the good all days when I used to life guard at the Hazlet pool club....

I hated it.  Constantly scouring the deep end for sinking bodies and always either blowing the whistle or thinking that I should blow the whistle, but ya know I just blew the whistle like 5 minutes ago and I don't want to be that no-fun lifeguard that's constantly yelling at kids, and maybe I'd blow it if my boss was around, but these kids aren't really doing anything that unsafe. But I did just blow my whistle at that bratty kid for doing that, so I should also blow it at the good kid who did the same thing, just to be fair.  I hate blowing whistles!   Some kids were just bastards though.  You'd whistle at them for jumping in where they weren't supposed to and they'd think it's funny.  Then every time you're in that stand they'd come back and jump in in the exact same spot, just to see it you'd blow your whistle again.  Jerks.

Stop running.  Don't jump in the pool.  Don't hang on the lane lines.  Don't swing on the railing.  Don't dunk your friend.  Don't push your friend in.  Stop splashing.  No toys.  Gosh, the pool was no fun...

The pool still is no fun.  All these negative, bossy, "safety" commands are all I can think of as I sit by the edge of this pool with no responsibility for anyone besides this well behaved 4 year old.   Speaking of which, where is my 4-year old?  Phew. there.  Fine.

If I did have a whistle though, there is definitely one kid who would get it. He is running up and down the handicap ramp, knocking over toddlers, splashing babies, throwing toys.  One well-behaved little girl is sitting on the steps playing nicely to herself with a little doll.  This terror goes up behind her with a watering can and just slowly, and steadily empties it on her head.  She nudges and dodges the water stream like she is trying to brush a fly away, but she is so into her doll that she is completely oblivious that this boy is being a brat behind her. I am appalled.  Where are this boy's parents?!  Then he fills up the watering can and does it again.  Are you serious? Where are the little girl's parents?!  Should I stop this?

I look around and notice that all the parents are sitting in groups, chatting it up, laughing, totally oblivious as to what their children are up to.   This is happy hour for them.   They're not worried about their kids. This is their weekly social meet-up.  Sure enough, the kid who could not get any worse, suddenly requires his mother's assistance.  The bratty boy starts screaming at the top of his lungs "MOM, I GOTTA GO POOOOOOOOP!!!!!!   MOOOOOOOOOM, I GOTTA GO POOP!!!"

No one is responding.  No adult even seems to notice at all that this boy exists.  He screams this same lovely phrase 3 or 4 more times and I'm thinking 'would it be completely inappropriate for me to just drag this kid to the bathroom myself?!'  Should I just start walking around to these chatty parent groups and start asking "Hey so is that your kid over there?  I think you might want to take him to the restroom."?!

Finally the mom sees him screaming, and at this point he is wailing and crying uncontrollably.  She runs him out of the pool to the bathroom.  No one else stirs.   

Once the unconscientious couple are out of the pool area, I get up and look over the edge of the pool where the little boy was screaming about needing to poop.  And yes, there it was, breaking apart in the tumultuous current of the kiddie pool area surrounded by curious little children was this boy's freshly laid turd, a historically welcomed sign in the life guard world that it's time to get some chicken rings (yes, we had chicken nuggets shaped like rings) and hang out in the first aid office for a whistle-free 60 minute break while the maintenance team went scooping and chlorine shocking.... Pool closed. 

Perhaps it's time this pool club gets their own sign:  Welcome to the "L"...

Irony or Coincidence?

After over 2 years since our beloved, stray cat, Butterscrotch, went missing, just yesterday Trevor encouraged me to finally throw out the stash of cat food that I left by the front door in the case our poor, scabbed feline friend ever returned....

Today I came home to this new little fur ball sun-bathing on my stoop:

hello new kitty!

So would you say that is ironic or coincidental?

I'd say it's neither.  When you try to stuff a large bag of cat food into an over flowing garbage can, the strays will come... it's science.

Blue-Eyed Beard-os

 Favorite NCAA basketball star:

true story

Favorite NFL quarterback:

true story

Favorite actor:

(ok, this one's a stretch)

What can I say? I suppose I have a thing for blue-eyed boys....

...and beards

Not So Social Science

One year for Christmas or a birthday, I received a leopard print coffee mug with a big pink "J" on it.  I brought it to work and now I drink my daily dose of coffee out of it religiously.  One day, I walked into the breakroom at work carrying the abovementioned pink leopard print cup, and a co-worker says to me, "I really like your coffee cup.....it reminds me of my wife's underpants."...Yikes.

You see, people who work in a lab aren't often judged by their interactions with others.  They don't always have the charisma and social awareness that others  might possess, say in a sales or marketing position where others' decisions are based on their impression of you.  

They don't always think "Hey, maybe it's inappropriate if I talk about my wife's underpants to anyone other than my wife."  

They don't always think "Maybe I shouldn't bring the communal work breakroom newspaper into the bathroom with me and put it back on the table for everyone else to touch afterwards.... why would that be weird, or disgusting, or unacceptable?"

Today at work I heard the line "Costco is to celebrities, like what birth control is to the pap smear."

Think about it.  Trying to relate it?  Can't?  Wonder why?   You most likely cannot make sense of it because lab people, failing in their social connections, are very good at making seemingly irrelatable connections everywhere else.

What was meant in the line above is that birth control was the driving force for women to start getting pap smears, just like how Costco is the driving force for celebrities to shop out in public.  The pap smear was invented by Dr. Papanicolaou as a test to detect cervical cancer in women and when it was first becoming a standard of practice, many women were very hesitant to go and get it done. Understandably so.  It's awkward.  It's uncomfortable. No one else is really doing it yet.  Regardless of it being the single most successful early detection method and preventing up to 80% of cervical cancer deaths, many women still avoided it.   That is until birth control started gaining popularity.  In order the get the highly sought after birth control pills, women had to go to the gynecologist and get a prescription.  And to complete their visit, and according to protocol, women had to get a pap smear. Pap smear rates boomed as women went in for the pills.  

Shortly after that conversation happened, while looking through the microscope at a lung cancer biopsy, the discussion turned to how to tell if the cells we were looking at were from a living person or a sample from an autopsy (aka a dead person).  Then we talked about autopsies.  Then I brought up how I could not eat red meat after doing autopsies   Then my friend goes on to talk about "You know who has the best meat?... Costco! USDA certified meat....Best meat you can get.  Best wines you can get, too. You go to Costco on a Sunday morning, you'll see all the Santa Barbara celebrities.   Costco is to celebrities, what birth control is to the pap smear."

Now you get it?  Well, don't think about it too much.

Another "good" analogy that recently came up at work related the rate of prostate cancer to the treatment of Julius Cesar's army after a war.  You may not know this, but according to this story, after Cesar's army lost a battle they would all regroup at home and line up in front of Cesar.  Cesar would load his gun and go down the line of soldiers shooting every 10th man.  In the statistical world, this rate of death after a battle can be equated to 10%...which is close to 9%... which is the rate of prostate cancer in males over 50 (don't quote me, I don't remember the exact stat).    Prostate cancer is just like Julius Cesar... after a long "battle" (or life) it'll just "kill" (or show up in)  about every 10th man.