And also...
There's a Queer Eye marathon on Bravo tonight. Guess I know what I'll be doing the rest of the evening.

And, at long last, my husband updated his blog. He made me LOL with a reference to Russell Crowe.

Famewhore sighting
First things first: the trip was tons o' fun. My friend and I drove down to Athens, Ohio, site of our alma mater, Ohio University. We decided that finally this year, there's no way we could pass for students. They're way too young looking now and it shows. Or, we're way too old looking now, and it shows. Depending on how you want to look at it.

As luck would have it, Saturday happened to be the day that the Reality Bar Crawl came through Athens. They were hosting open casting calls for Real World, Road Rules, and something called "American Bar Girls" which I think is something along the lines of "Girls Gone Wild."

While my friend and I were sitting in our favorite restaurant in town, I spotted a couple of Road Rulers. Dave and Cara from South Pacific for sure, and they were with one other person who had long, curly hair, may have been Rachel from Road Rules Campus Crawl, since she's listed on the web site as being on the tour.

But since it was a split second spotting, and I had no camera with me, all I can do is report the sighting. Sorry, folks.

And no, I didn't try out for any shows. Not even "American Bar Girls."

That didn't take long
Molly (aka Peepers) absolutely lurrrrrrrves the new rug (see illustration below). It's been on the floor, maybe an hour. I got it with her in mind. She loves the upstairs room; she usually sleeps in the computer chair in which I now sit. And we have hardwood floors up here and it's sparsely furnished, so I always feel bad when I come up to use the computer because she has nowhere to chill out.

Well she is happy as a clam now, she's all stretched out on the rug, fat belly swooshed out, and rolling 180 degrees with her legs in the air. Frankly, I've never seen anything like it. This is a cat whose idea of letting loose is sitting on top of a catnip-filled mouse as if to smush it. She doesn't play with toys, doesn't get into treats. About the only thing she is known to lurrrve is my husband. She's afraid of her own shadow, keeps a low profile, and would never, ever in a million years, allow herself to be picked up, held or cuddled. We're almost positive that Molly was abused by her prior owner, or at the very least was deprived of human contact.

We've had her for about a year and a half now, and the first six-to-nine months were rough going. She spent the first few months living under the frame of our futon, and then migrated to living underneath our bed. Very rarely would she come out, and would cower if we tried to reach under the furniture to pet her. So the first few months with us, she was lacking in further positive human contact.

Once she felt a little more comfortable, she was able to spend minimal amounts of time out from underneath the futon or bed, letting us pet her. But she had a threshold, and once it was crossed, back she would go.

Baby steps, though.

Along the way, we decided that maybe a second cat would help her come out of her shell, and that's where Dom came along. Of course Dom ended up being completely awesome, but not much of a help with Molly. He quickly assumed the role of alpha male and would chase her back into hiding whenever she came out. Even when he was only 1/3 of her size.

Finally, when she was slightly more sociable, I was able to take her to the vet, where it was discovered that she had some teeth that needed to come out. Once those teeth came out, I swear, that was what finally broke the spell. She would come out of hiding for long periods of time, didn't seem to be too afraid of us, and woud crave our affection. I guess after not being petted for so long, she has an insatiable need for it.

But she is still skittish, and probably always will be. So when I see her enjoying herself like she is now, it really brings a smile to my face.

Molly, you go, girl.

Charge it!

Someone was supposed to stop me.

That was what I thought, anyway. I had thought I had made myself clear on that.

I was not supposed to be within a 50 foot radius of a Bath and Body Works until at least March 2004, upon penalty of dry skin. I thought that was universally understood by all vigilant citizens. Should they see me attempt to even walk past Bath and Body Works, I was to be tackled into submission, no matter what.

Well, the good shoppers this evening dropped the ball. Not only did they let me near Bath and Body Works, I got all the way through the door, and proceeded to spend money on Things I Really Didn't Need but Damn, They Smell So Good! I will not go into full details on what was purchased, because my husband reads this blog. I will say, however, that they have a new hand cream, that I purchased in the "Cucumber and Green Tea" scent, and it may be my new favorite thing. Let's just say that I had to use one of those wicker baskets they give you, and justified one purchase because if I spent a certain amount of money I would get a free gift. And you know how I feel about that.

But the carnage didn't stop there, my friends. Oh no. In this same shopping center is the one and only Target, also known as Tar-jay, also known to my husband and I as simply, "Targs." (We like to shorten words sometimes because we're too lazy to say the entire word. More examples: "dinns" for dinner, "launds" for laundry, etc.)

I actually needed to go to Target to get a few simple things, but of course, there were a few things that ended up in my cart that weren't on my list. Here's a brief rundown of what was purchased:

Cd tower (needed that for a long time and finally bought it -- only $17.99!)
Accent rug for upstairs, that looks something like this (artist's rendering):



2-pack of Lever 2000 soap
4-pack of O-Cello sponges
Ziploc storage bags
Opti-One contact solution
Glade candles in "Spa fresh" and "Waterfall" scents

And maybe one or two other things that shall remain secret.

So, the damage has been done. Someone should have stopped me.

Here's a job some of us would enjoy.

Paid a visit to engrish.com and found this gem, as well as others, that has been posted since my last visit.

Blahs
Seriously? So. Bored.
Nothing or nobody even to rip on here at work.
Except status quo with Bad Lady and SWF. Although I'm getting along a lot better with Bad Lady now that we are united in our opposition to SWF.
Which in itself is scary.
Checked all the blogs I read. Checked Hamster Time. Fooled around on Amazon. (Sorry lifeonhold)
I ate another chocolate pretzel crunch bar. That was exciting I guess. Me and treadmill have a hot date tonight.
Still bored.
Two more hours to go. Somebody shoot me!

On a lighter note... boss has been gone since noon. *does cabbage patch*

No comment
I changed my comment system because, well, the other one sucked.
I'm tinkering with the idea of going with a different color/format, just because I have time on my hands, and also because I'm trying to create some kind of funky banner.
Stay tuned.

Gah. I'm not smart enough in HTML to do what I want without scrapping this whole thing and starting over. And I'll be damned if I'm going to do that.

The split pea stays! For now.

My old school
I'm all geared up for a little trip this weekend. The first stop is Columbus, where I will meet up with one of my best friends and former college roommate. We will continue along to our ultimate destination, which is the little college campus in southern Ohio which we call our alma mater.

We do this about once a year, just to feel like we're that age again, to see how much the city has changed, to visit our old dorms and dining hall, to drive past the house where we used to live and to chicken out before we get up the courage to knock on the door.

We also go to eat at our favorite restaurant. That's what I'm looking forward to most.

Wait for my go (aka Survivor Thoughts)
Ryno. I shall miss thy sagging waistband. I hope that your first move as a voted-off tribesperson was to put on some pants. And shave. I don't know if I will recognize you when you come next week as a sullen-faced jury member.

Rupert. Your days are numbered. But here's a piece of advice. If you can help it, don't win reward. Win immunity, because you'll need it, but this whole "invincible" thing is pissing people off.

Jon. Looks like you are going to be around for a while yet. I couldn't be more agitated. Although your annoyingness was toned down a bit on last night's episode. It was still there, lurking behind the scenes though.

Burton. I hope you and Lill can make something of the second chance you've been given. More so you than Lill.

Sandra. You're still poised to make it to at least the final four. Unless a coup is planned, which seems unlikely at this point.

Christa. Your nostril flared uncontrollably when you used the slingshot. Just thought you should know.

Darrah. You'd best be pickin' your lazy ass up and doin' some work if you want a chance to stay longer.

Tijuana. I kind of like you, and I'm not sure why, but you, too, could stand to prove your worth to the tribe if you have a prayer of making it farther.

Lill. You are not a good liar. Don't even try. It's best left to Burton to do the lying. This will also make you look better in the end.

That is all.

Grr
SWF has been missing from her desk since at least 1, which was when I got back from lunch. Time now? 3:01. Her purse is here so I know she's not gone for the day. And she's not in a meeting. The situation has annoyed me so much that I bitched about it to Bad Lady. Who wholeheartedly agreed with me. Then added, "must be nice to be paid to socialize for half the day."

Not wanting to point out the irony in that it was she, the queen socializer (but on the phone so it's different somehow) who uttered that sentence, I merely agreed. "Yeah. Must be."

Avoidant.

Random thoughts I had while eating Wendy's chicken strips in my car
-- Honey mustard never tasted so good.
-- It really does hurt when you get salt in a wound.
-- Beyonce: nice voice, crap music.
-- Lip gloss works well on a windy day when you want to go for the "hair plastered to your face" look.

I have a death wish
To add to my massive caloric intake this afternoon, I stopped in our office kitchen, (where the Diet Club was, as usual, looking everyone up and down and assessing how many carbs that person had consumed and passing moral judgement upon them based on their assessment) and saw that someone was selling Malley's candy bars (I think only found in Cleveland area) for a kid's school fundraiser. So I picked one up -- a chocolate pretzel crunch bar. And it was awesome.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets
In this corner, weighing in at approximately 120 pounds and standing 5 feet 4 inches, she's the coworker everyone loves to hate... Bad Lady!
And in this corner, wearing the red trunks, tipping the scales at around 125 pounds, with a stature of 5 feet and three inches, it's Evil Realtor!

Who will win in this unprecedented battle of evil vs. evil? It's anyone's guess at this point.

Right now, Bad Lady has entered a meeting with perhaps the nastiest, most difficult, crotchetiest (sp?) realtor I have ever known. I pride myself on making sure that I give the people that I work with, what they're looking for. I might not get it right on the first try, but I always make it right.

A few years ago, I encountered Evil Realtor. I was still relatively new at my position at that point, but I still felt that I had a good grasp on the whole design concept and was relatively confident in my people-pleasing abilities. Well, Evil Realtor was not about to be pleased by anything I did. She, in fact, hated, despised, spat upon my work. Was insulted that I would present her with such crap. So I redid her entire campaign from scratch, using the colors and fonts she liked, the picture of herself that she liked, etc. That, too, was a no-go. In fact, she cried to my boss about it because she hated it so much. Allright, we'll give it one more try. But alas, Evil Realtor had already decided she hated me, and hated my boss, and hated our department, so she took herself to an ad agency and paid out the nose to probably have the same work done that I'm on salary to do for her for free.

So she's back. And knowing Bad Lady like I do, I know that Evil Realtor will probably eat her alive. Maybe they'll get along famously, since they're both distant relatives of Satan and probably share some of the same DNA. Maybe Evil Realtor will love the three-font extravaganza of crap that Bad Lady calls design.

I will be quite excited to see how this one turns out.

Idol Sighting
By chance, I happened to look on Dave Barry's web site only to find out that he is coming to Cleveland next month to lecture! Do I dish out $35 per ticket and go? Yeah, probably.

Earth, wind and fire
Yikes! Them are sure some powerful gusts. Damage at the house was limited to the garbage can being tipped over and displaying a long parade of its contents all the way down the driveway, ending at the bottom, where the lid was ready to make a run for the road. And my hair was the second disaster of the day. I tried to do damage control before I got into my building, but as I walked past the mirror behind the reception desk, I noticed that a big piece of my pseudo-bangs was sticking straight up, a la Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary.

My Love Affair
My treadmill and I were broken up, kaput, history. It had been living a lonely life, standing upright in its folded state, for several months. But over the weekend, with the prospects of the Cheesecake Factory looming, as well as several months of not venturing outdoors, I decided that our on-again, off-again relationship had to become on-again, pronto. And so right now, it's like the beginning of a relationship where you just can't get enough of that special someone. Me and Treadmill are inseparable. I daydream about Treadmill and how wonderful he is going to make me feel.

I'll probably dump him in a week though.

Exhibit K
I work in the corporate headquarters of a real estate company, and in this building, we conduct training for the newbie real estate agents. Today they instituted a tour for the newbies and they brought 25 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed people into our little bat cave. All of us in the department exchanged a flurry of e-mails, warning each other to maintain a low profile. So we're all staying below the horizon line of our cubes, until the boisterous training manager yells out my name. "Are you here? Come on out!!!!" So I have to pop my head up and say hello to everyone as she tells them all about my job, which, she got totally wrong, but I didn't feel like correcting her in front of her pupils (avoidant!!! The test was right!). So, not about to go down in flames by myself, I call out Bad Lady's name and have her come out and also introduce herself.

I'm so e-vil.
(Raises pinky finger to lip)

A big LOL for us all
I found this on dooce.com, and must properly give credit where credit is due.
This is some laugh out loud stuff for all of us who are Blog-Obsessed.

Read it, you know you want to.

A la AOL Journal style...
Feeling: calm, for the moment
Hearing: what else ... the 55th playing in a row of the Ryan Adams CD, with a soft background of B.L. shifting voraciously through papers on her desk
Eating: a mighty tasty apple

Anyhoo, today is coming along quite nicely. We had a nice group bonding experience as we all had to stuff cover sheets into a pocket of a folder (see "Major fuckup", 11-7-03) because the original cover sheet had a typo on it. So, totally my fault. We managed, with 8 people, to stuff 2000 folders in under an hour. And much to my surprise, everyone, including Bad Lady, participated. I was sure she wouldn't stoop to doing manual labor and being away from her desk, and hence her phone, and hence hence her myriad of personal calls. But she was a trooper.

During said group bonding, I was forced to work closely with SWF, who I am convinced should probably be on Ritalin or some kind of sedative. She must have constant conversation or she starts bouncing up and down in her chair. The tell-tale sign was when, after about 30 seconds of no one saying anything, she told me to "tell her a story." I wanted to tell her the story of "Bite Me, Bitch", but I decided not to.

After returning from my desk I did a quick blog-sweep to see if anyone had updated, and found a link on one of them to this "Personality Disorder Test." I can't remember where this was, so I'm sorry if you're reading this and I stole it from you. Don't take this test unless you are ready for it to tell you you're messed up. My highest score was in "avoidant." I also had some high scores in "paranoid" and "obsessive-compulsive."

That was the cherry on top of my day.

I would ordinarily sulk about this but I'm pretty sure it's a correct assessment. Maybe not the paranoid. But I'm definitely a conflict-avoider, if that's what the whole "avoidant" thing is about.


But on a more positive note, I'm getting a lot done, including an ad for Incompetent But Likeable, Computer-Illiterate Guy that's not due until the end of next week, buying myself a few days' worth of time that he won't be bugging me about the Next Upcoming Project.

And we received a message from Sprocket that our new computers will be installed this weekend. Ok, but I'm not holding my breath ...

Crisis
Warning: this entry includes some font geek ranting by yours truly.
This morning's huge crisis is that Bad Lady, who got her new computer because she killed hers last week, lost one of her fonts and no one else has it. The reason this is a crisis is because she only uses three fonts and this is one of the trifecta. The display fonts that she uses, no matter if it's a postcard, a flyer, a notecard, a poster, the side of a bus, or a yard sign, are Bank Gothic and Serpentine. Then for any copy, she uses Gill Sans in all its varieties. That's it. That's the formula. Well, Serpentine is the one that is no longer residing in her arsenal.

Here's the thing.

Sprocket the Techie installed over 3000 new fonts on her system when he replaced it.

You'd think that with that much variety, she could go a little nuts and *maybe* try a different font. But no, instead of accepting her loss and moving on, she is bitching about it for like, the third day in a row.

Starting the day off with a little Arnold and Michael Knight



My friend sent me an e-mail this morning with this photo attached and said somehow, she knew I'd appreciate it.

And, I do.

Side note: look how skinny Hasselhoff's legs are!

Tidbit #1
Still no plan of action re: Bad Lady's birthday. Bagels was a brief blip on the radar screen but talk has died down. My boss suggested an idea he had seen at a leadership conference of where a sheet of paper is passed around and everyone writes down something that they like about the birthday person. Until my friend said to him, "Are you sure you want to start that with [Bad Lady]?"

Because, we're a creative group, but we're not that creative.

Tidbit #2
The shit that went down. Basically, we've all known for a long time, that one of my friends in the department is finishing up law school and is going to be leaving us. Well, the timetable had been May, her graduation date. However, she may be offered a clerking position and may take that opportunity and leave us earlier than planned. As she is essentially the glue that holds this department together, this caused the sirens to go off inside my boss' head and he called an emergency meeting to tell us all we needed to "roll up our sleeves" to get "up to speed" on the things that she does, and we would all need to "work together," blah blah "in the loop" blah "transition."

Not a big deal I guess. Except the world will come crashing down around me and one other person when she leaves because we will have to become the venting wall, the security blanket, the one who gets called at home on Saturday morning, the one who gets shit on. All rolled up into a neat little package.