Isle of Remote

So, I’m heating up my frozen California Pizza Kitchen luncheon…Garlic chicken, mmmm….and I notice a short sentence above the cooking directions. I’m peeling the plastic off my frozen pizza, which is rock hard, by the way and crusted over with ice crystals when I read “do not eat pizza without cooking.” Imagine my surprise! So that’s why the pizza didn’t taste the same as it does in the restaurant!

Um, my opinion is that if you’re prone to buying $5 mini pizzas and eating them frozen, you are probably better off staying away from the oven, ya know what I mean?

Which brings me to another issue. Do the advertising moguls of the world think we, the buying public, go around saying things like, “kitchen fresh chicken” and counseling random strangers about their regularity? Are we really so stupid that we can’t peel a hard-boiled egg or drain pasta without some sort of manufactured contraption? That, after nicking ourselves 17 times with the razor on one leg, that we would use the same blade on the other leg? Or that after using dental floss for some twenty years we would get tangled up in it day after day after day? Sheesh! It’s a wonder we can make to the store to buy these products without guidance.

I gotta run. Have to get back to the DMV with my proof of insurance. I sure hope it’s in my file box!

Alzheimer moment of today: the house stinks and I couldn’t figure out why. All the trash has been dumped and there’s nothing I forgot to put away from the grocery store, so I couldn’t figure out what happened. Well, I put one piece of trash in the recycle bin that is only half full. D’oh! Hmm, maybe I am that stupid….

Here it is Thursday already. I can’t believe the week can go by so slowly and yet so quickly at the same time. I just want the academic year to be over - I’m ready for the students to just go away.

I finally got my mailbox key yesterday. After all that todo about not being able to leave my key with anyone else because they needed to see my ID, they just asked for my name, had me sign something and gave me the key. I’m going to file a complaint with the BBB because apparently they’re gouging the landlords in HOA fees, and while they’re getting cosmetic things done to the outside of the building, they’re not responding to the tenants/owners regarding other concerns. My thinking is the building got cited and they have to repair certain things before they get fined.

Anyway, I spent the last two evenings reading a book - The Store on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber. I picked it up because it’s about knitting and I thought that would be fun to read. There are four main characters, one who opens a yarn shop and the first three women who sign up for her beginning knitting class. Of course their lives are all jacked up but by opening up to each other and seeing one another through crisis (schmaltzy violin music goes here) they persevere and come out stronger in the end. Yeah.

I’m not sure what I did or didn’t like about it - I guess it was very predictable and a couple of the characters were just out and out stereotypes: the angry girl, the socialite…. But it did keep me entertained and make me cry. Is that the mark of a good book? Or a good writer?

Which brings me to this….I wonder about people who say they don’t read. I don’t understand that at all. I mean there is all this knowledge out there, right at your fingertips - how can you not itch to get at it?

I read blogs, magazines, cookbooks, novels, textbooks websites - you name it. In fact, the other day I decided to try to break into my mailbox, so I google’d “how to pick a lock” and within minutes I found some good resources. I learned how to make a pick and a wedge and in an hour I had managed to pick one pin of my pin tumbler lock. (Nothing like terminology to make you feel like an expert, eh?)

Okay, so maybe that’s not a good example of material that’s out there to be accessed by just anyone. Use your power for good, right? But still, just about anything you want to learn to do you can by reading. I think that’s fascinating.

Of course a love of reading should come from the parents and we’re so busy today going in 90 different directions we feel guilty when we take that time to do just one little thing for ourselves.

One of the things I remember most when I was a kid of about 10 or 11 were Sundays spent in bed reading. I would come home after church and curl up in bed and read until dinner. My mom would be in her room in bed reading. Every once in a while we would go into the other room and say hello. I would take a little break and climb into her bed to read the funnies and we would talk about things like how she also read Dick Tracy and Dondi and Nancy and Sluggo when she was a kid.

Quality time doesn’t have to be organized up the wazoo to the last second.

I’ve got five minutes left before I can leave work. I have already straightened my desk and taken care of any messages. Now I am just biding time.

I am so very tired. It’s the dreams. I’ve been feeling very much like Jospeh lately with my dreams. On the one hand I’m glad that my vivid, technicolor, odd dreams have come back. One can only dream about getting up, taking a shower, coming to work, filing and answering the phone before it makes you wary of sleep altogether.

So, here are four of my dreams from the past month.

1) The car - Had a dream that somehow I got my perfect car. I walked into the dealership with my list of must-haves, including color and interior and they handed me the key and told me to enjoy.

2) The perfect job - I was talking to someone at a newspaper or magazine, leaning over their cubicle and talking about what I’ve written so far, when the guy just got really excited and told me he wanted to hire me on the spot.

3) The perfect man - All I really remember is that he was wearing a white football jersey, was gorgeous and had a great smile. The minute our eyes met I knew he was mine.

4) The perfect apartment - I moved to this great place and it had everything nearby. There was a great gym on the property, a grocery store, and yet it still looked like a smalltown village. My apartment was huge and airy and the rent was ridiculously low.

After each dream I had trouble finding reality for about 10-20 minutes.

Hmm. Still a couple more minutes - here’s the dream from last night. I was having heart surgery because the veins that lay on my heart had somehow fallen off (yeah, I know they’re arteries, but in my dream they were veins, okay?). The docs led me to believe this was a common occurence so I wasn’t worried, but they had to laporyscopically insert this paddle thing into my chest and flip the veins back where they were supposed to be. I was semi-conscious during the operation and the doc said, “well since I’m already here, I can remove those bags from under your eyes. (I don’t have bags under my eyes, BTW). So I go home and my mother is there and I don’t want her to worry so I don’t tell her I had surgery, but I was really tired so I went to bed and in the middle of the night I had to go to bathroom (NEVER a good thing to dream about, but all was okay this time) . She woke up and I was all doubled over but trying to play it off. My face was all swollen and sore. I made it back to bed but she was hounding me the whole way. I woke up with incredible pressure in my sinuses.

Make of those dreams what you will…..

So last night didn’t end in spontaneous combustion on my part. It was close though - I was mad enough to spit nails.

Luckily I got to spend the evening with R and we had fun at Dave & Busters playing the cheapest games we could find. I found $40 in my paypal account so I took out half of that and then I found $20 in various pockets and purses - I wasn’t even looking, it was just there! To me this indicates I may be a speck careless with my money. So we got to have dinner and play $10 worth of games.

Then we went to see Shrek. R’s brother works at AMC and she called him to see if she could get a free ticket. Turns out we got TWO free tickets! I still have $20 bucks left!

The more time I spend with R the more time I want to spend with her. I feel like she’s my own daughter, but then I don’t have to do the parenting. Well, in a way, I do because her own parents aren’t exactly on the ball. Sometimes I wish I were her parent so then she could have some stability. I hate that she’s always feeling like her grandmother is going to kick her out for the slightest infraction and that her parents home is so….crazy. Her parents are…um, what do they call them….hoarders. Like the city sends a dumpster to their house for cleanup when the neighbors complain. That kind of hoarding. That’s why I hope she can get a scholarship to go away to school when she graduates.

Shrek 2 was funny by the way. I think I may have liked it more than the first! BTW, Meadow - audible sighing all over the audience every time Antonio Banderas spoke…my friend S and I were practically swooning. The animation was just beyond fantastic - I can’t believe the art has progessed so much since the first movie. Poor P had to go spend the evening with swooning, giggly girls!

Today I had to teach a class - we did origami boxes and I made $60. Doesn’t seem like much, but it’ll get me through the end of the month without touching savings. Yay! And then I attended what I thought was going to be an art show. Well, I guess it was, only there was a lot of performance pieces. Nothing against them, but I was expecting more visual art and conversation about visual art.

I have to make sure I contact the gallery about one of the pieces I saw 2 weeks ago. The only way I can describe it is it has sort of a spyglass perspective of Seussian inspired village buildings.

This evening was the D & T show. Very weird vibe. T is either attaching himself to me because he doesn’t know anyone else very well, or because he’s interested. Or because he just likes to hang around me. I get that a lot. When you’re a basically happy, funny, silver lining kind of person (except in regards to mailboxes) people naturally like to be around you. No bragging on my part, just forty years experience. BUT whenever I was talking to D, T would show up by my side. Geez Louise, what is he - 26? D was with some friends and I was hoping that a group of us would head for coffee tonight, but twas not to be so. Just as well, I need to get some writing done.

…and that loser is me. I admit. I embrace it. I consider it my duty to spread my loser-ness about to make others feel better about themselves.

Here’s how my day went.

First I’m sitting here readin’ some email when someone knocks at my door. I didn’t get an answer when I asked who it was, so I figured it was someone door to door. After a few seconds I get up and check to make sure and I have a notice of disconnect cuz I forgot to pay the electric. I run down to the parking lot and meet him and he’s already shut off the power and there’s nothing I can do but go down and pay at the office.

I call the elec co., figuring I can play for more time because I have $68 dollars to last until the end of the month. I over spent this month and I overpaid two bills. And I turned my tax refund in it’s entirety over for my loan payment, because I want that to be paid off by the end of the year. I realized two days after I paid those bills off that I only had about $180 to live off for the month. yikes!

So anyway - can’t get the elec back on until I pay $189. Not negotiable.

A side note. I had signed up for automatic payment through my bank - the elec bill was paid off every month directly from my checking. When I closed that bank account, I first forgot to cancel that account and set up with the new one. Totally my fault. Especially since I’ve gotten in the bad habit of not even looking at the bill, knowing it was paid in full every month. So after 2 months, I called and let them know that the old acct was closed. And I would be sending a check. Fine. Swell. I was waiting for my checks to come in and I forgot about the elec again. (I’m not good with accepting change!) I called the elec and they said the bill had been paid. Oh! Maybe I did set up the new account….I’m so completely forgetful that those kinds of details will completely elude me most times. Well, what really happened is that the cancellation order needed to be submitted in writing, so when I called, they had just submitted the bill for pymt and so it listed as paid. The next week it came back NSF because the account was closed, but by then I was in la-la land over this issue. (Cause it had been paid…right?) Holy Moly there’s more. So anyway, the lady today said that the original order for the auto-debit program states that the cancellation needed to be submitted in writing. Um, I signed up in 1998. Does anyone refer back to 6 year old documents for something that seems this trivial?

Anyway, I get the bill paid. The guy comes to turn the lights back on only I didn’t know I was supposed to be here. So he left a notice that the main breaker still needed to be switched on.

Thought I knew where the main breaker was, but I was wrong. Called EC again so they could tell me where the breaker was. Oh, it’s a condo complex? Usually the breaker is behind a locked door. Um, yeah, well then why did your stupid employee indicate, in his own handwriting, that I, mere mortal, could flip the switch? he knew it was behind locked doors! Yeah, whatever.

That was not even the stressful part of my day - cuz it was the result of my own stupidity…I can deal with that.

The other issue is I can’t get my mail. Why? Because our property management company is run by a bunch of people that had to ride the special bus to school, if you know what I mean.

They issued a notice that new mailboxes were to be installed on 5/25. We could pick up a new key on 5/15 between the hours of something like 1-2pm. Only owners could pick up keys, not renters. My landlord called me to let me know that she had sent the required paperwork on 5/13 and that she would be on vacation for a couple of weeks. Fine. Swell. I get home late last night to find new mailboxes. Five days early.

Here’s a lively transcript of the convo I had with the management dweebs:

Abbie: Yes, I’m a renter of ABC Complex and I need to get a new mailbox key because the owner is on vacation and I have no access to my mail. I’m waiting for some important documents I need by Monday.

The Dimwit: Oh yes, you can come pick them up at the office.

A: I’m not the owner. The flyer says that only the owner can pick them up and she lives 3000 miles away and is on vacation.

TD: Oh. Okay. Well, she can send us a fax authorizing you to come pick up the key.

A: Yes, I understand that. (this is the 2nd conversation I had with them) However, she’s on vacation and I’m unable to reach her. I need to get my mail because I’m expecting something really important that’s time sensitive between now and Monday.

TD: So, can she fax or send us a letter?

A: I’m sure she can when she returns from vacation, but I don’t know when that will be and I need to get my mail before that.

TD: Oh, well you can just tell the mail carrier to give you your mail.

A: Well, that is a plan. Only I have a job and am unable to be here at 2pm everyday to accost the mail carrier who won’t give me the mail anyway, just for asking for it.

TD: Why won’t she give you the mail? That doesn’t make any sense.

A: I don’t know exactly the reason why as I am not an employee of the US postal service. However having tried before to get my mail I was told that she was not allowed to give me my mail nor was she able to let me get the mail out of the open box - I HAD to have the key.

TD: That doesn’t make any sense.

A: Neither does withholding my mail until the landlord returns from vacation - especially when the boxes were installed 5 days early.

TD: We had no control over that because the company we contracted just went and installed them. So there’s nothing we can do until the owner contacts us.

A: So what you’re saying is that you are willfully withholding my mail.

TD: I’d suggest going to the post office and asking them to stop mail service and then you can go there to pick it up.

A: The PO here closes at 3 something. I can’t make it here from work to pick up my mail every day.

TD: Well, then why don’t you put a note on the mailbox. Maybe she can put the mail on your door.

A: Um, if she won’t put it in my hand while I’m standing there with my ID, why would she put it on my door?

TD: Does the owner have a cell phone? Could you call her to send a fax to us?

A: Well that is an idea, however I don’t think she’s come back from vacation in the eight minutes since I mentioned her being incommunicado.

TD: I don’t know what you want me to do.

A: Find some sort of reasonable alternative to my getting my mail. I think there has to be some sort of legal recourse in extenuating circumstances such as these. I need to get my mail and you’re telling me I can’t until the owner returns from vacation in June.

TD: I’m sorry, I can’t give you the key. If you can just have the owner fax us..

A: Yes! I completely understand! She needs to fax you authorization for you to get me the key. I’m completely clear on that fact. Look, if you’re not willing to even try to see my side of things or pay attention to the fact that I need to get into my mailbox BEFORE Monday, the day BEFORE the new mailboxes were supposed to be installed, I guess I have no other recourse than to pursue legal advice. Click.

Anyone know a locksmith?

I didn’t think I was one of those people who got freaked out by feet. One of my friends doesn’t like to see other people’s feet, be touched by feet or see those foot/toenail fungus commercials on TV. None of that really ever bothered me. Until I saw the nastiest, nastiest feet ever.

I saw this guy with - ugh! The only way to describe them is they looked like he used them as brakes for his car (hence the Barney Rubble reference). The bottoms were all grey and white with flecks of black stuck to ‘em. The heels had fissure cracks. Looked like elephant skin! Ugh!

A homeless man, you ask? No, not quite. This is a man who makes 7 times my salary and was left a sizeable inheritance from his father. He just doesn’t like to wear shoes.

I can even understand the shoe thing, this being southern California and all, but really - you should keep your feet clean, at least! Right? I mean, if you’re walking around with no shoes on, and your feet are so dry and crusty that they’re cracked, don’t you run the risk of infection? You’re walking through old bird poo, dried saliva, cigarette ash, old gum, food….it’s just too nasty to think about.

And what do your bedsheets look like? I wonder what his wife is like. I mean I go crazy if my feet are a little dry and rough - it’s got to feel like being abraded with sandpaper for her! Eeuuuwww!

So my advice/plea for today is stop Barney Rubble feet! You can do it yourself, or you can get a pedicure. I do mine myself because I can do it anytime I want. I use products from The Body Shop - I especially love their peppermint foot lotion because it’s very dense, but not heavy and it sinks in well and leaves your clean, exfoliated feet feeling a little tingly.

Be good to your feet!

I’ve done none of the things I was supposed to do tonight. I came home and pissed around. I need to be more diligent and not put things off.

I’m embarking on another writing project this week. I should be able to say more about it by mid June, I hope. I think it will be exciting. It’s another fiction piece so I have some characters to build before I spill the beans.

I’m too sleepy from all the nothing I’ve been doing to think. I’m going to bed.

Back to work after four days off. Whatta drag! I don’t seem to be having much luck finding a new line of work. Perhaps it is because I don’t know what I want to do.

Well, that’s not completely true…I want something creative, where I can use my talents. I want a flexible schedule. I want something that allows for more social interaction than my current job. I would prefer that those people NOT be academics. I would like to be appreciated for what unique talents I bring to the table.I do not want to do any accounting.

I know there is something like that out there. I don’t want to limit myself to any particular industry. I think it’s going to come from someplace unexpected.

I should be filling in the details of my meeting with MOMD. Truly there’s not much to tell - the meeting was brief and among a crowd, so we’ll have to wait and see if anything comes of it.

What is really on my mind today is how God answers prayer. I had prayed a really simple prayer for a friend who is in what could be a harmful relationship. If it was not in God’s plan for her life, I prayed that it would so readily apparent to her very quickly. Today I found out that she has seen the warning signs and knows she has to break up with him. Three weeks in and she knows this is a dead end. Her heart is not invested and she is nervous about doing it, but she knows it’s the right thing.

Thank you God for answering small, simple prayers. It reinforces that you are in control and you have a plan for my life as well.

So….MOMD. Yes. Met him. Gorgeous. Nice. Met Mom too. He’s either not very talkative or uncomfortable in crowds. Anyway, I was my usual scintillating, charming self and I did catch him watching me a couple of times, but there were other things to attend to and it was not a situation where we could conceivably talk one-on-one. But I figure he knows how to get in touch with me, and the ball is officially in his court now. I also let the powers that be know that I was not adverse to making another trip. We’ll see, won’t we?

So here I sit all primped and powdered, curled and twirled ready to make the trek to meet MOMD. It is what it is, what happens, happens.

I’ve got good friends praying for me and if it’s meant to be, God will make it happen despite myself.

So I leave you with a bit of Psalm 30 (The Message translation):

You did it: you changed wild lament into whirling dance;
You ripped off my black morning band and decked me with wildflowers.
I’m about to burst with song;
I can’t keep quiet about you.
God, my God,
I can’t thank you enough.

I’ll be back tomorrow morn!