More hilarities from the gym.

So, Wednesday night I decided to go to the gym after taking Murphy on a walk. I was on the last treadmill near a tiny little area where people can stretch, use free weights, etc. I must explain the physical settings so you can properly understand this. You walk up a tiny ramp towards the locker rooms, and it is on the left at the top of the ramp. It's a raised floor, so it has 2 bars that are about waist high around the perimeter of the space.

I'm running running running and out of the corner of my eye I see a gentleman in khaki pants, a nice pair of shoes, a belt, and a black shirt walk into the area. I immediately assume that he works there as he's dressed professionally, that is, until he started doing martial arts right there in the middle of the room. In particular he was doing tai chi with some kicks and karate chops mixed in. I started audibly laughing, because it caught me so off guard. The guy next to me then started laughing at me laughing and told me I had to go home and you tube the following clip. I kid you NOT this is almost exactly what the man looked like, except instead of shirtless and in linen pants he had on khakis and dress clothes.

I thought he was done making me laugh, until he went to leave the area. Now, mind you, it's literally 2 steps to get out of the area and onto the ramp, but instead this fella decided to walk almost to the exit and then JUMP the bars to the ground. I've never laughed so hard at a middle aged man in all my life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju_Ph1-A6Q8

Sigh. What a week.

Last night at the dog park I got bit, peed on, and spilled water on my cell phone and a book I'm borrowing from my sister. Seriously.

The dog that peed on me last night was a pug. I had the urge to punch him in his tiny scrunched up face. The only thing I hate more than a little dog is a little dogs owner.

Blue and yellow purple, poo?

My dog (also named Murphy, just to confuse you more) ate a box of crayons the other night. That's right, a whole entire box of crayons. He even colored on the ground a little bit for me. I like to think he was trying to draw me a picture.

Anyways, there is of course more to this story. A backround note that will be important to this story before I start: I am making an effort to give up alcohol this month to see if I can do it. Also, because I could use the diet and so could my wallet, but mostly to see if I can.

My mom and I had a conversation that day about how she thinks it's mean that I leave Murphy in a crate while I'm gone. I'd been leaving him out for short stretches (read: an hour) lately to start getting him used to freedom, and see if he could handle it. He'd been doing super (read: tricking me) so after she laid on the catholic guilt quite thickly, I decided to leave him out while I went to check out my friends new apartment. I was only planning on being gone about 2 hours, so it was not that much more time than usual. I let him out to potty, and then went on my merry way.

I got to my friends new place, and they (the catalyst and ones who convinced me to join them in the alcohol ban) had purchased a bottle of wine. I didn't want to do it because I knew only bad things could come of breaking my rule this early in the game, but I did because we were celebrating them moving into their first place together. So, I had a glass of wine. And that glass hit my hard. And then we decided to buy another bottle (because that's always a good idea). And I had another glass. And before I knew it, I'd been gone about 3.5 hours. It was definitely time to get home.

I returned home to an empty house (my roommate came home first and took the dog out), one eaten rug, one single lone crayon left, a drawing on the floor, and a puddle of pee by the back door. When Murphy really needs to go out and can't he gets destructive. I can only surmise that his anger towards his inability to get out to pee was only stronger because he knew peeing on my floor was different than peeing in his crate. Bet the little bastard wouldn't have even wanted to pee so bad if he had been locked in his crate. Who wants to pee in their own home? Anyways, I'm imagining two scenarios here. The first was he peed, felt guilty, and decided to draw me a picture but really really wanted it to be by the door so I would see it as soon as I came home. But then the crayons were too yummy, and lets face it, they break easy, so he just ate them instead. The more likely scenario is that my vindictive pup walked up the stairs, stretched tall to get the box of crayons off of my dresser, came downstairs, scribbled all over the floor, and then ate the crayons to hide the evidence. Afterwords, he decided he might as well pee everywhere just to prove his point.

He pooped rainbows for 3 days. I couldn't even be mad, it was too funny. I'm sure there was a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow somehow, right?



PS, I know your one question from this was "Why did you have crayons in the first place?". I like to color, okay?

Golden Showers at the Park?

Last night, I was really really exhausted. I've been getting up and going to the gym at 6:30 in the morning (I am NOT a morning person, so this is big) and as a result crashed on the couch when I got home from work. When I woke up, I was feeling really guilty about not taking the dogs on a walk. (I have a dog, and I'm dog sitting). So, I got my butt off the couch and took them on their merry way to the park.

We got there, I unhooked their leashes and settled into my usual spot on the steps to watch them play. I had a thing of water next to me for them, and lots of dogs were coming over to drink from it. At one point in time, I was particularly surrounded by 3 or 4 dogs, and I felt something weird. I turned around, and there, behind me, was a strangers dog, leg lifted and PEEING ON MY BACK. And by back, I mean pretty much my neck.

You've got to be kidding me. Ugh. So far everyone's number one question when I've told this story was "What did the owner do?". Well of course, I didn't know who the owner was, and whoever it was obviously didn't notice, or avoided claiming the dog to apologize. So, I called my dogs back over, put them on their leashes and headed home to change out of my now pee soaked work clothes.

Sigh.

Keys and Locks are not my friend.

I can’t handle keys.

Let me preface this with a bit of an explanation & background. I used to work as a “conference coordinator” at a private university. This involved living in the on campus housing as the only person in the building unless a camp is using the rooms, and being in possession of all of the master keys for the all of the on campus housing facilities. That’s a pretty big task for someone with my luck, but most of the time I pulled it off without a hitch. There were, however, some hiccups in that ability. This is one such case.

This work also allowed me the ability to sleep late hours and work late hours. It wasn’t uncommon to get phone calls at 2 am every night the weeks I was “on call”, and when I became the official head person, to get 2 am calls the entire summer. This particular story is from a time in which I was on call all summer. I’d been up late the night before helping to sort some things out, and after a few busy weeks had a pretty messy apartment considering I’m a Type A Clean Freak. About a week earlier the maintenance men had been in the building cleaning out the air filters, and for some reason when they removed my old filters instead of taking them out of the apartment they left them in my living room. This caused random dust balls from God knows how long to occasionally blow across the floor like tumbleweed. In addition, they’d shut and locked all of the apartment doors in the building during this run through. I’d kept forgetting to take the dirty filter outside and one morning upon exiting the shower, saw it lying on the floor. In just a towel, I decided to put it outside the door so that I would remember to take it to the trash with me when I left my apartment.

I carried it over, opened up my door and leaned out the door to place it outside. I had my butt just far back enough to keep the door (which automatically locked) from closing. Or so, I thought. With great surprise and to my dismay, I suddenly heard a loud slamming noise from behind me. Apparently my butt was at that time smaller than I thought. Did I mention that I was the only person living in the entire apartment complex, and that this particular apartment complex was the furthest away from campus? Did I also mention that the exterior doors to all of the buildings locked and without that handy dandy keycard which was safely inside my apartment I couldn’t get back in? And the trifecta of this terrible situation, rounding this out from bad to worse was the phone situation. All week long I had walked past the phone in the lobby thinking to myself ‘I really need to replace the cord on that phone in case something happens and someone needs to use it” but as a result of my busyness, exhaustion, and laziness hadn’t yet.

Lets take a moment to recap, shall we? I’m now locked out of my apartment, in nothing but a towel, with all of the master keys and my keycard in my apartment. I can’t run to the closest building over because I don’t have said keycard, and I can’t bust into any of the rooms to use the phones because I don’t have the master keys. I also can’t use the phone in the lobby because I’m a jackass and put off getting the cord.

So, what’s a girl to do? I thought about biting the bullet and walking up to the main part of campus, but there was also construction going on and that would require walking past construction workers in a towel. Come on. Instead, I began walking through the halls hoping upon every shred of hope to find a door unlocked and a phone inside that worked to call my coworkers to come let me in. After circling the whole first floor and not finding one, I decided to regroup and move to plan b. This particular complex had in it an elevator. Inside that elevator was an emergency call button. I’d never had to use it before, but I felt this constituted an emergency. I wasn’t positive who would be on the other end, but I bit the bullet and pushed the button anyways. Suddenly an alarm started in with a robotic voice shouting “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. ATTENTION. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.” Seconds later a voice came across the line announcing campus security. I calmly explained it was not an emergency, that I was simply locked out in nothing but a towel and could you please send someone over to let me in. They told me to call the Conference Coordinator, so I had to (with my tail between my legs) explain that was, in fact, me. They said they’d send someone over. Oh good, I thought, my personal hell is over.

Of course that wasn’t true, and as I headed back towards my room I heard voices. This was actually a good sign, as I realized it was probably the maintenance workers who would also have a master key. I ran up to the third floor (again, in just a towel) to see if I could find someone to let me in since I needed to get into work to get some things done ASAP. The first person I spotted was a woman I’m familiar with. I explained my situation and she started walking me down the hallway to find the person with the master key. Normally there are only about 2 maintenance people in the hall at a time, but for some reason in this day there were about 12. All males. All stuck their heads outside the apartments they were in to see what the ruckus was about. Mortifying. Absolutely mortifying.

We finally found the person with the master key, and they let me into the door. I also managed to let security know I made it in before they arrived (they’re pretty quick, obviously). All in all, I made it out with little damage done, but I definitely left my dignity in that room with the keys, and I’m not sure I ever got that back.

Murphy versus Squirrels: A bloodbath ensues.

I have a garden. A beautiful, wonderful little garden that's already producing little roma tomatoes and lettuce, and has peppers and tomatoes and beets and onion and squash. It's wonderful, and I worked very hard on it. I also have a dog, and chuckled to myself watching the neighbors put up chicken wire around their garden to keep the squirrels out. I had a holier than thou attitude and thought "Ha, my dog ensures squirrels stay out of my yard."

Wrong. My dog's a lazy butthead and couldn't care less if squirrels are on our property? Birds he would tear to pieces, going first for the neck, but squirrels he looks at with indifference. In fact, the other day I let him out in our backyard and a squirrel ran across our fence, down into the yard, across the yard and up the other side of the fence to get into the neighbors yard. All the while Murphy just watched with disinterested curiosity as he laid on the cement patio and let that little bastard onto our property.

I woke up the other morning to discover the squirrels had finally discovered we too had a garden. They ate my lettuce and the lone roma on the plant, and dug lots of little holes everywhere in the dirt. I knew a bloodbath was going to ensue as I waged war against these tricky little bastards. I have learned from watching my neighbors garden that chicken wire isn't sufficient, so I set out to find a new way to get rid of these thieving rats with bushy tails.

I racked my brain on my options. Traps might work for one or two, but these guys are plentiful in a city, and I'm not really a fan of letting them loose when they're angry at me. Poison's just not okay, especially because I had a dog. A BB gun might work, but my uncle once tried shooting a squirrel with a BB gun and ended up lodging a BB in his finger, had to go to the hospital and file a gunshot wound report, and ended up getting fined for shooting a gun in city limits. I'd heard about cayenne pepper or crushed red peppers in the soil as being a deterrent, but wasn't fully convinced. My housemate had mentioned once that dried blood is the route to go.

So, I trekked on over to my local garden supply store, dog in tow. If he wasn't going to get rid of them, he at least had to come with me to get the stuff that would work. I was quite excited carrying my bag o' blood back to my house, thinking about how I was going to win this war against the squirrels. I had wondered how this stuff would work, but wasn't too concerned. I'd read up on a bit, and it was said that the dried blood smells like dead animals to the squirrels which keeps them out. Great, I thought. Maybe it will keep my dog out of the garden too. I opened up the bag with some vigor and started pouring it onto the soil, when the wall of scent smacked me un-apologetically in the face.

On the plus side, I think the squirrels are going to stay out of the garden. On the negative side, apparently dried blood smells like dead animals to humans too. On the even worse side, dried blood smells like a dog bone to my dog.

I can't decide who won this war, but I somehow think we've all lost except the dog.

Updates!

I'm sorry I haven't updated in a while. I know, I'm a terrible person. Anyways, I have lots of stories to update my 2 loyal readers with, and I promise I will write a few posts soon enough. Don't worry - I'm keeping track of the stories. Soon to come!

An eye for an eye.

So. Last night, I went on the date I agreed to with the locksmith. It was fine. We had a nice time. Until Murphy struck again, that is.

Early on in the evening he admitted to me that some of his tools had been stolen from his car, and one of the tools he needed to get me into my house was included in that. Which is why he had to drill open my door, and why he had to replace my lock, and why I had to pay more than I should have had to pay. Anyways, I wasn't mad, no big deal, it's done and over with so no need to get upset. It was more funny than anything.

To make the evening a bit uncomfortable though, I had eaten lentils that day and my stomach was notttttttt happy with me. Whoa, gas city.

Flashforward to the end of the night. We leave the restaurant and his car is gone. Oh shit. I just know his car has been towed. Immediately. So, I call the numbers on the parking meter, and find out it had in fact been towed due to a snow emergency. It didn't even snow yesterday, but because they PREDICTED snow, they had declared it a snow emergency. Bullshit if you ask me, but whatever.

THREE HOURS LATER we finally rescued his rental vehicle. It was now 2 am, and I was exhausted, and all I really wanted to do was leave him there and go home, but I couldn't because the guilt would set in about him not knowing English that well.

...$250 ticket, $100 tow bill, and $100 dinner, I think we're even on the missing tool.

TWO posts in one night? The universe hates me.

Okay. So, have I mentioned I hate snow? Because I do.

I went outside tonight to shovel. I didn't put on a coat, or gloves, but had on two pairs of pants and a sweatshirt. I also didn't put on a bra. Trust me, I'm not the kind of girl who can go without a bra and have it not be noticed, but I hadn't had one on all day and I figured it was only gonna take a minute, so why not. Even turned on the oven to make dinner when I came back in, figured it'd be that short.

WRONG. I locked myself out. I had no phone, and no wallet. I thought about begging for money to metro to my old neighborhood and sleep at my old house, but decided to give begging for phone usage a try first. So, I went down to the liquor store. They didn't have a phone book, of course. But they let me use their phone. Normally my mom has my landlords phone number. I don't know why, she's crazy. But, of course, since I just moved, I haven't given her my new landlords number. Of course, I couldn't remember a single freaking number except the guy I'd been seeing up until yesterday, so I had to call him and grovel for help. (after a big blow up fight yesterday in which I yelled "FUCK YOU MAN, don't ever call or text me AGAIN") He somehow got over it enough to look up a locksmith for me, and I gave the 24 hour locksmith a call. They wanted a number, and when I went to ask the liquor store owner, they said "No, we can't let you have this number, we're closing." So, I said "I don't have one, I'll just have to wait at my house" and moseyed back on out into the blizzard. Again, sans coat, gloves, and bra. FOR AN HOUR. I sang 99 bottles of beer on the wall, in english AND in french, I counted, I talked to myself. It was great.

After I could no longer feel my anything below my ankles, or elbows, and especially not my buttcheeks, I sucked up my pride and knocked on my neighbors door. You know, the one that's been playing gospel music all week. Turns out he's a super hot dude, with no pants on. Which goes great with my NO BRA look I've got going on. He lets me in to use his phone, and I end up watching tv for over an hour with him (American Idol). Of course, he was way hot, and super nice, and I looked like an idiot.

Finally, after several more calls to the locksmith, as now some 2.5 hours have gone by, they called me back (on Joshua's phone, of course). "I'll be there in 5-10 minutes." So, I finished watching that particular contestant and went back outside. Another half hour or so later, the locksmith (a very cute fella from Israel) had to drill open the lock, and then replace it. $400 bucks later, I was in my house, thank god no fire, mortified that two very attractive men had now seen my in sweatpants, sweatshirt, and no bra.

All that being said, I got a date out of it. The locksmith asked me out by the end of it, and since I tend to lock myself out a lot, I obviously agreed.

facebook for dummies.

Alright, I'm probably going to give away enough details that if you think you know me, you'll know for sure after this post, but if I don't give details it won't be nearly as funny.

Let me just start by saying this. Facebook is a PUBLIC domain. All of your friends, and maybe even people who aren't your friends if you aren't smart enough to set your privacy settings right, can see what you say / post / do. I am TIRED of reading things about your breast milk production, your kids poopy diapers, childbirth, or how your kids balls never dropped so the doctor has to do a search and rescue mission to find them, seeing your stupid tattoos, and hearing your not so smart opinions, or looking at pictures of you with your clothes off. Yes, these are all thing I have ACTUALLY seen on facebook. I know, that just means I should probably take you off of my friends list, but that would mean I wouldn't be able to bitch about said things, or make nasty comments on them.

Flashforward to yesterday. An ex of a dear dear friend posted a picture of a new tattoo. On his stomach. Of a hot dog. And a fountain drink. While, I personally think this is one of those things he's later going to regret, I think it's great if he thinks it's great. But, I couldn't resist the urge to post a snarky comment. So I wrote "I really wish this hot dog had legs and arms, like the hot dog in the 'lets all go the lobby' theme song.". I was quite pleased with myself, and as I was chuckling to myself, I began to choke. On my own laugh. To the point of tears, and coughing and that awful 'what the hell am I even choking on' feeling came over me.

Oh Universe. You won that round.

Public Transportation

Tonight on the train I'm fairly certain the man next to me had on a wet suit.

Not damp business attire. I mean, for scuba diving.

Maybe he didn't get the memo that we're in a "cold snap" in my city right now.


.....Or maybe he did get the memo and he was using it as insulation.

"You just wait until you have children. I hope they're just like you!"

...or roommates.

Dear Mom,

I'm sorry about all of those times I would come into the kitchen and put my dishes into the sink instead of the dishwasher. You're right, it IS just as easy.

Dear roommates,

Please stop making me realize how much more I am like my mom than I'm ready or willing to admit just yet.

Love,
Murphy

Tales from The Office.

Sometimes I truthfully feel as though I work on the set of the Office. Today all of our phones and e-mail went down (as regularly happens) and the world has ended. As you can tell, I found something to entertain myself in the mean time, by updating my loyal readers (all, what, 3 of you?) on what happened.

Anyways - so the internet/phones go down pretty regularly for all of us. But, for some reason, this time, they went out for almost everyone. Except for one person. (at least, one person in my hallway). The girl whose office neighbors with mine. For this girl, the world has in fact not ended. Of course, the loudest person in the office, the one whose conversations I can hear with her door closed would have her phone still up and running, right?

ShamWOW!

On new years eve I watched an ad for the ShamWow. I have to admit, I became infatuated with the idea of it. So, my roommate and I just ordered 8, and a mop! I'm currently listening to her talk to an automated voice trying to sell us more things, like the Slap Chop! No thank you. She's a tiny little thing, but hearing her yell "NO!" at my phone is a great entertainment moment. Really, I just want the ShamWow, please.

On another note, I'm so tired of going on first dates it's not even funny. My latest fella told me last night "I'm not shallow, but last week I went on a date with this girl who was OBESE". Really, pal? Sounds like you're pretty shallow to me. So, at 11:30 when I finally ended the date (at a karaoke drag bar, where he talked about all his gay friends the whole time... I felt like it was that 'i can't be racist, i have black friends' sort of discussion) he got MAD and pouted. He wouldn't talk to me for a few minutes, and then, finally said "I can't believe you're ending the date this early". DUDE?! This was a 4 hour first date!! Get off my nuts, already.

I think I'll just stay single.