I seem to always want to do more than is humanly possible to do.

If you asked me, and I didn’t think about it, I would tell you that I spent a very quiet weekend.

But then, If I think about it, I did a LOT!

On friday night, I was exHAUSTEd. I had been up since 3:30 am dealing with the blackout on the east coast. I staggered home from the bus stop at 4:30ish, I think…and FELL into bed.

But I didn’t want to stay in bed. I wanted to be up and about. So I woke up, tireder than when I fell asleep, about an hour later, and slapped myself awake.

Oh yes! My friend had sent me a really good book, “Arranged Marriages”. I had an Amazon box waiting for me at the door. In my dazed state, I was trying to remember if I had ordered something lately. Then I thought, “I bet Bonnie sent me a present!”

She did, and that was a wonderful thing. I will write about the book later. Suffice it to say for now, that I really like it.

But I woke up all groggy, and forced myself out of the house. I needed to buy a microwave. It’s hard to make food for one person when you don’t have a microwave. I had priced a good one at Walmart. Barely 50 bucks, and the right color and wattage.

But I live in a walmart desert. It was 13 miles to the nearest walmart.

I have to say, 13 miles means something different here. There is SO MUCH in between one mile and the next, it’s an ordeal to get through it. 13 miles should only take 15-20 minutes, right?

WRONG!

Man I don’t undestand it, maybe I never will, but with this many people and THINGS in the way, miles are farther. It is like an obstacle course. In big cities, cars are not always the advantage you think they should be.

In any case, the great deal on the microwave had sold out by the time I got to Friday. I shopped again (thanks, mysimon.com) and found one at Kmart. Kmart is closer.

So I shoved myself out the door, in pursuit of a microwave. I woke up pretty fast when I started driving. And I went down the main drag which is right my my new place, and saw the Salvation Army thrift store. I peeled to a stop. Well, not really. But I was very excited to stop and look at this place. I’d known it was there, but I’d never had a chance to look inside.

Oh! Thrift bliss! I bought two pretty shirts and two pretty dresses for 12 dollars! I’m so pleased. I love thrift shopping. All the stores near my old place were RAGGEDY. ew. This one was perfect. You can bet I’ll be visiting it at least every week. I love clothes, but I need to save money now that I have a mortgage.

Then I ran off to the Kmart, and found my micowave. It is a GOOD microwave. Amazing what proper wattage can do. My old place had a LOW power microwave. It took 4 MINUTES to make popcorn, and the corn always came out stale and half unpopped. This one takes less than two minutes. It’s beautiful.

All that was just friday.
Saturday, I went to a invitation only designer clothing sale with a friend, bought and read a whole book for my book club, had dinner with Chris, went grocery shopping, and in between put more boxes away. Sunday, I went to church, took a nap, read more, went hiking in a beautiful park with Chris, had ice creams afterwards, watched a Gene Kelly Marathon ( i LOVE musicals!), made dinner FOR chris, ironed and fell BAM into bed.

It was wonderful. I am starting to feel more like myself.

The whole east coast practically is DARK!

This is a problem for my time-zone striding profession. I have a feeling that we won’t be doing video conferences tomorow.

I’m worried about New York City. I just had a very pleasant blackout at my home in Glendale on Tuesday. I am afraid that NYC is not having such a nice time of it.

NYC has had two other big ol’ blackouts before, one in 1965 and one in 1977. The one in ’65 was a widespread one like the one right now.

“At 5:27 p.m., November 9, 1965, the entire Northeast area of the United States and large parts of Canada went dark. From Buffalo to the eastern border of New Hampshire and from New York City to Ontario, a massive power outage struck without warning. Trains were stuck between subway stops. People were trapped in elevators. Failed traffic signals stopped traffic dead. And, at the height of the Cold War, many thought Armageddon had arrived. One pilot flying over a darkened New York City stated, “I thought, ‘another Pearl Harbor!'” By 5:40 p.m. that evening, 80,000 square miles of the Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada, were without power, leaving 30 million people in the dark.
…
Despite the confusion and disarray, New Yorkers spent the night in peace. There were no riots or widespread looting. Instead, New Yorkers helped each other. Some directed traffic. Others assisted the New York fire department as they rescued stranded subway passengers. In many cases, New Yorkers just shared extra candles and flashlights with neighbors, reveling in the opportunity to get to know the people who lived across the hall.

By 11 o’clock, the power was restored in 75 percent of Brooklyn, and by 2 a.m., the borough was fully equipped with electric power. By midnight, much if the Bronx and Queens were lit. And, at 6:58 a.m., almost fourteen hours after the massive blackout struck New York, power was restored citywide. “

The one in 1977 was just the city:
“On a hot July night in 1977, the lights went out in New York City. The purr of air conditioners, cooling millions of New Yorkers, was replaced by stultifying silence-and then the sound of breaking glass. Faced with the second blackout in twelve years, New Yorkers responded with resilience as well as violence. Many stories emerged from the night of July 13th that revealed New Yorkers’ divergent feelings about the city in which they lived. In some places, neighbors helped neighbors, and strangers helped strangers. Yet, at the same time, neighborhoods throughout New York exploded into violence. Stores were ransacked, looted and destroyed. Buildings were set ablaze. And the police, for the most part, stood helpless. In these stark contradictions, an unusual yet definitive moment left its mark on New York history-the night the lights went out.
…
In other parts of the city the experience was starkly different. News broadcasts reported outbreaks of violence, looting, and fires. Areas of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx experienced the most damage, where thousands of people took to the streets and smashed store windows looking for TVs, furniture, or clothing. In one report, 50 cars were stolen from a car dealership in the Bronx. The police made 3,776 arrests, although from all accounts, many thousands escaped before being caught. 1,037 fires burned throughout the City, six times the average rate, while the fire department also responded to 1,700 false alarms. Regardless of where you where when the lights went out, New York’s streets teemed-and sometimes burned-with life.
…
While the lights would not be turned on in some neighborhoods for another twenty-five hours, the blackout led many to question the reliability of New York’s power system. Ironically, this attitude was partly the result of unusually high expectations for power reliability on the part of metro area consumers; Con Edison had (and still has) the least interrupted electrical service of all utilities in the nation. “

So, from my new house, I take a new bus. My old bus stop was directly in front of my apartment complex, and it dropped me off almost exactly in front of my office building. My new bus is 5 blocks from my house, and five long blocks from my office.

Well, 5 blocks is not exactly a marathon. I am still willing to walk that far. It takes about 10 minutes to walk it. Well, 15 to the office. Not that long, not that far.

Except when you add it up, I’m walking 40 minutes every day.

I’m gonna quit my gym! This is serious exercise!

I don’t know how I will feel about it when it is raining, but right now, that is not a problem.

The real problem is that there is MAJOR construction on the downtown end of my walk. Two very long blocks of dust paths and broken concrete, tall gravel piles and pipes and ditches. That is when I think of the song “NObody walks in LA.”

But i’m walking in LA. Downtown LA, where the courthouse and my big tall office building is. Guess who else is walking in LA?

Suited men with expensive neckties. A single-file ant column of them, walking purposefully and swinging their briefcases through the dust and ditches.

It is so surreal it makes me smile.

So, I spent time unpacking all my things yesterday. As I was getting things put away, a “click” sounded, and everything went quiet.

And dark.

The power went out. It was about 6:30. uh oh. It was still light enough to see. I thought I remembered a little flashlight in one of my boxes. Oh good, here it is! While I was there, I unpacked some more of that box.

I remembered a candle too. But I didn’t remember where the matches where. I wondered for a little bit whether my car would be locked in the garage if the opener didn’t have power. Hmm…

But then I thought I had better put together my bed before it got dark. I didn’t want to sleep on the floor. I put the bed together…Where is that dust ruffle? Oh well, I’ll find it later. It was nice to lay down on the bed for a moment.

Chris came by later with his dinner. By that time the power was back on. He and I worked to get my home stereo/theater system set up. We used my old shoe rack, a piece that is essentially narrow shelving made of nice red wood. It matches the rest of my furniture, so why waste it in the closet? That garage sale I bought it from has been good.

We racked everything on the shoe rack. Then came wiring. Bless Chris’s heart! He sat down on the couch and said, “I’m glad my girlfriend is a video conferencing expert. You know what to do.”

How many guys would step aside and let their girlfriends wire the stereo? Wiring this stuff is my JOB, but still, most guys would shove me out of the way. He is very secure, thank heavens.

When I was almost done, he pointed to the window. “Look!” he said. A beautiful flaming pink sunset was all across the sky.

That was MY view.

Chris and I sat on my couch for a moment and looked at the beautiful sky. It faded quickly, I was glad we stopped to see it.

Man, there are a million crazy things for sale on TV. We are crazy crazy shoppers. And we watch a lot of TV. What a better marriage of ideas in American culture:
shopping while watching TV

I personally have a rule:
Never buy anything on TV while watching the infomercial.

Hence, I have never bought anything I’ve seen on TV. Sometimes I think about the stuff I have seen, though. Because that’s another rule I have:
If I see something I think I want, walk away. If I think about it later, maybe then I really did want it and I will go back and get it.

But a lot of the time, there are things that you may be very excited about while under the spell of the infomercial, that you really have no earthly need for.

There are some things I still would like to try. That Epil stop ‘n’ spray stuff…Does it really work? Or does it peel the skin off the sprayed area right after the camera stopps rolling?

And that REVO hair styler…It looks so cool. But there is NO WAY that would actually work. I mean, the mechanics of it probably would take the curl out of my hair. But then I would be left with highly staticked fly-away hair.

Maybe straight-hair people don’t realize that most curly-hair people are blessed with very fine hair. They associate curly hair with pubic hair, which is usually coarse. But curly HEAD hair is usually very fine.

Anyway, the seductive REVO hair styler is doomed to fail. The hair-dos would be destroyed with the first breath of air that hit them.

Those Minwax commercials make me start eyeing my furniture. Hmm…Does that need to be refinished? It’s SO EASY!

And there is a commercial for a STEAM BUGGY. Wow, what a great device! Not only does it clean all your entire house without harmful chemicals, it can iron your clothes. That one really had me fascinated. I am against harmful chemicals. First, because they kill us and make babies come out funny. AND because they cost so darn much! The power of STEAM can revolutionize the world.

Man, that was hard to resist. But the almost $200 price tag helped me out.

What else?

Oh yeah! The FOOD SAVER! This is really the coolest thing. I may eventually buy this, really. Really!

Of course, this is the last infomercial I saw.

It VACCUUM SEALS the food in your whole house, keeping it safe from all kinds of buggies, and worse from going stale. You can make up a plate of food, stick it in a FOOD SAVER baggie, suck all the air out of it, and then freeze it for a whole year. Homemade TV dinners!

All the money I could SAVE with this $120 device.

I don’t know. I’m gonna wait a little while longer. We’ll see if I’m still excited about it after I see the next infomercial.

It’s been too long since I’ve written. My hours at work have been too long, too.

Doing too much packing, trying to do too much that keeps me from being creative.

But soon it will be over. I think. I hope. I don’t have to work such long hours for the rest of the week.

Thank God! Sheesh. Twelve hours is just too long–packing breakfast lunch and dinner for work. What’s wrong with eight or nine hours? I can do that. I don’t mind that. But no. Not this past week.

I am getting ready to move next week. My life is in boxes. Yuk. That’s not so pleasant. I will be glad when the boxes are in the new place.

My sweet boyfriend is making all this hard stuff much easier though. I love having him nearby. It amazing how much you appreciate little things when you don’t get to have them. We had nearly a year of NOT getting to see each other more than one day a week.

Now that i can see him almost any and every day, its like I am getting handfuls of gold dust.

So…things are so busy, but things are good. I’ll get back to being creative after I move.

Really though, not even being able to write for my blog is a low ebb. I don’t like that. So I won’t neglect is anymore if I can help it.

This is a new show on Bravo. 5 gay guys get together to spiff up a clueless straight guy, and give him a makeover.

It is hilarious! I love this show. I tell you what, the sarcastic over-the-top gay culture is really MADE for TV. I mean it! These guys learned their moves from imitating the imitations of female glamour from Hollywood, so they are practically cartoon-like in their ability to quip and move things along.

Yes, they are extremely catty sometimes. But they aren’t actually mean, they don’t want to make anybody feel bad. They are there to make their straight guy’s life better.

I would have thought that some of the straight guys would have gotten the willies, what with the gay guys pawing them and making little flirty comments, but they all seemed very comfortable and having a good time.

I have to say, I look at my house differently. What would Carson say?

ThisisLondon

“Far from making you go blind or your palms go hairy, self-abuse can protect against prostate cancer, scientists claim.
In fact, the more you do it, the better it is for you. Men who pleasure themselves regularly between the ages of 20 and 50 have a far lower chance of developing the disease, a study found. “

Men have felt this intrinsically for a while. But this study shows that benefits of choking the chicken are not for the casual salami slapper. 5 times a week is the threshold they cite.

I think though, men could slip it often enough. Make it a priority, I say!

Blogcritics.org: ‘E-mail’ banned

From the “The French are bored again” file, France has voted to ban the use of the word “e-mail” because, well, they just don’t like it anymore. In its place they’ve chosen to use the term “courriel,” a combination of “courrier electronique” in an effort to apparently sound even snottier than they already do. Yes, that’s right, the government, specifically the “Culture Ministry,” actually put forth an initiative to remove the filthy, foul, and, most importantly, foreign-tongue derived “e-mail” from the entire French language.

I am THRILLED! I think it’s fabulous that the French have a whole division of their government devoted to snootisms.

I was getting tired of the word e-mail too. Now i have an official french word for it! I can throw it around and be FABULOUS.

but how does one conjugate it?