SHUT UPPP

My awesome, talented cousin Stewart Gray saw my crappy Paint-Brush (Pro!) artwork on that guy's "Jack Ass" plate and sent me this:
It's truly a thing of beauty! :-) From now on all Eevil drivers who need to learn how to drive/behave in public shall receive the Dreaded Jack Ass Plate Of Shame!

Thanks, Stewart, you rock!

If you've known me for a while, then you are probably aware that I used to be MUCH more confrontational and much more likely to fly off the handle at any given second with so much as one misstep from another person. Friend, family member, total stranger, it doesn't matter. Through a huge amount of work, I now either let it go or scream silently in my head and then blog about you later on when you annoy me. It takes a lot to push me to the point of hating you in the first twenty seconds that I've known you, is my point.

Enter yesterday's trip to the pharmacy. D and I were on our way home from work and school, respectively, and stopped to pick up a prescription at our Walgreens, which has a two-lane drive through. Now, I don't know if you've heard this before, I've probably blogged about it but I'm waaaay too lazy to go back and find it among the rest of the blather that I've inundated the interwebz with in the last year, but I have the freaking worst luck with lines. If you ever see me standing in a line, don't get behind me. The guy in front of me will inevitably have 6,000 questions, pay in pennies, or confuse the person working there. It never doesn't happen. So when we got to the drive through and there was one car in each lane, D kind of hung back, obviously in line but waiting so that when one of the cars got done he could get into that lane. HOWEVER, some people TOTALLY SUCK and this D-BAG comes driving the wrong way, very clearly sees that we're waiting in line, turns his car around and pulls in front of us behind the car in the outside lane. And if you already know how much I hate line cutters then you probably know what happened next.

I nearly hit the roof. I started screaming at the guy but my window was rolled up, and since I was getting "a little worked up" D just pulled the car into the other lane, hoping the "out of sight, out of mind" approach would work. But no, I was pretty livid. I threatened to throw my iced tea at the guy's car but D reminded me that I would want that eventually, so I didn't. But still - for the second day in a row I will ask you - WHO FREAKING DOES THAT?! That's some crazy-person behavior right there. Clearly, whatever he was doing was more important than obeying the long-established social and cultural norm of waiting in a friggin' line. And then the guy in the other line ended up taking for-freakin-ever because the tech had to update his insurance, so the line jumping d-bag was gone before we even got to the window in the other line, as is the custom. So, of course, I snapped a pic before D calmed me down. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you- Line Jumping D-Bag:


I may or may not have added the vanity plate. Ok I did. But only b/c it's true!

Yeah that's right, for those of you who read the title of this post: I went there. My brain's too overloaded right now to come up w/something that's NOT a cliche. Anyway:

I love San Marcos. I was born there, and I go to school there, and if I had it my way D and I would be moving there tomorrow. I love everything about it - the university, the river, the people, unicycle football, the "Just For Fun" parade (which, bring it back!), Ralph the Swimming Pig (who bit my sister when she was little, BTW), drive-through alcoholic beverages, all of it. I love that you can go to class in a swimsuit and then wander over to the river without walking more than a quarter of a mile. And yes, I'm all for the hippies, which I realized around the age of three, when I was in the Just For Fun parade with my Montessori school and the lady walking with the float behind us was dressed as the Statue of Liberty, her costume completed by her "torch," which was actually a glass of very red wine. Someone else carried the bottle for her. San Marcos kicks so much ass.

However. I get that it's super fun to go to the river before class, and maybe not to shower for a while, and that you're going to the river again after class because your life is more fun than mine, but you absolutely have to leave your shoes on while you're in class. Especially if you're sitting three chairs away from me. I will die and it will be your fault, and I get that you might not mind if that happens but I do. Seriously, who does that? Who finds it appropriate to remove his shoes in the middle of a class, thus allowing the lovely and unmistakable aroma of FOOT to waft around the classroom for your classmates to enjoy? Some people eat in that class! Not me, and definitely not after Foot Guy graced us with his smelly-footed presence for two days in a row (thankfully, he was absent today and we're not meeting tomorrow, but I hope he goes there anyway because HA HA!), but the class starts at noon so a few people bring their lunches. Foodies are always saying how scented candles ruin a meal, I can't imagine how they'd feel if they were eating their pasta salad and suddenly smelled FOOT. Fracking nasty, y'all.

Two wonderful years ago today I married my best friend, biggest fan, and love of my life. It was the easiest and best decision I've ever made and I honestly feel so ridiculously, undeservingly blessed that this beautiful man chose to share his life with me! I don't usually get sappy on this blog but I figure it's my blog so what the hell. :-)

We got married in a beautiful, simple celebration at a home on the San Gabriel River in Liberty Hill with everyone we love there to share it with us. It was a perfect day - beautiful weather, smiling faces, more love and joy than I've ever seen or felt in one place before or since, and no major disasters. Not even really any minor disasters. Our dear friend Rachael wrote and performed the ceremony (including one of my favorite poems of all time, see below) and then we moved the party up the hill for barbecue, dancing, and lots and lots of cupcakes. Best. Day. Ever!!

"You are joined together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.

You shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

From The Prophet by Khalil Gilbran

Happy anniversary, babe! Love you.

I have a verrry friendly group of friends. We have our enemies, sure (I'm looking at you, GTYO), but for the most part we're pretty easy to get along with. This includes when we go out as a group. For every three people we piss off, there's usually at least one who thinks we're cool. Sometimes, they even want to be friends. And occasionally, they provide us with WAY too much information.

So today was Mary's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY MISS MARY!) so we went to Trudy's to celebrate, but it turned out to be kind of a rip off because you can't get your free birthday drink on Top Shelf Tuesday. So pretty much every seven-ish years your birthday will fall on a Tuesday, and you will get the shaft from Trudy's. WTF is that all about? At least make that common knowledge so that if you're gonna go get tanked on a birthday that falls on a Tuesday you'll wander into one of the other bajillion awesome places in Austin and drink for free because let's face it, I can pay for a Mexican Martini any night of the year. But we were nice about it because they were nice when our "table for eight" turned in to "we're gonna push these two GIANT tables together because Mary is so awesome that a thousand people want to celebrate her birthday with us!" so whatever.

No, the real WTF moment came when the host seated a girl in the table behind us. She had a margarita and chips and queso, and was just hanging out by herself, talking to the waitress occasionally. It was a pretty big table and she was all alone so I just assumed that she was waiting on people, until suddenly she jumped up with her phone in her hand and walked out of the restaurant. Of course I'm gossipy so I had to point it out to Katie, who then suggested we steal her abandoned margarita. To be fair, none of us were thinking particularly straight at that point because it was the verrry end of Happy Hour, and stealing a stranger's lonely, melting strawberry 'rita and delicious queso didn't sound like a bad idea. Then for reasons totally unrelated, Katie mentioned the odd behavior to our waitress, who replied, and I quote:

"Oh yeah, that's my friend. She'll be back, she got a phone call that said her grandpa was on his way to her house and she realized she'd left her bong on top of the refrigerator."

HUH? I get that we're cool and we should be friends and all that, but this is a lot of information to dispel to a giant table of strangers, three of whom are currently employed as drug and alcohol counselors. Plus on top of your 'fridge seems to be a really weird place to put your bong, but what would I know about it? And would your grandpa even know what a bong was? IDK - it was just a totally random and hilarious and weird thing to say to people. Weirdos.

I might have great hand-to-hand skills and could probably beat you up with my baby finger (ooook, I've had a lot of Red Bull today y'all, and I am entertaining but NOT sane) but there's one thing I don't have that makes me very dangerous: knife skills. That's right - I suck at doing stuff with knives. I suck at chopping stuff, it takes me forever to make a stupid veggie tray or pico (hence the need for a chopper, see below!) and I'm pretty sure that when I was little I sliced my hand open with a butter knife. Me + blades = not a happy fit. So my latest fail came on Thursday night when Dale and I decided to make pizza and watch So You Think You Can Dance, which, YAY!! And what goes better with pizza and SYTYCD than VINO?

I've been spoiled lately by my plethora of bottles with silly/provocative names ("Menage a Tois," "Joe Blow," "Promis-Q-is," etc.) but I've been opening bottles and then never finishing them so I decided I'd get a box (shut up) and just sip off of that so I don't feel obligated to down an entire bottle in less than three days just because I wanted a glass of wine with dinner. The wine gods hate this, apparently, and thus engineered my greatest FAIL of the week. This is where the knife skillz come in. BRILLIANTLY, I decided that I was going to open the box with a knife because - IDK - apparently my nails are too weak to break the perforated lines in the cardboard box, when suddenly I noticed that there was wine dripping from the box. Not through the nozzle, though, through the neat little hole that I'd just cut in the plastic bag. Because duh. You don't open a box containing delicate plastic with a kitchen knife. Everyone knows that. You especially know it if your full time job not that long ago involved opening large shipments of boxes tightly packed with wedding gowns. Blerg.

So damage control ensued, D tried to patch it up with some tape but we didn't have anything stronger than good ol' Scotch tape, so we crossed our fingers and...it worked! I got my glass, watched my (awesome) show, and then when I went back to the kitchen: MORE FAIL! Apparently Scotch tape doesn't work well as a dam, and there was now Franzia "Chillable Red" leaking out of the (disintegrating) bag, across the counter, down the front of the dishwasher, onto the floor, and steadily forging a path from the dishwasher to the oven. Crap! At this point there's nothing to do but drink five liters of wine before the entire bag goes bad. Oh fine, I'm kidding, five liters of marginally ok wine is WAY too much, even for me. No, I somehow ghetto rigged it in the sink to where the corner with the hole was up in the air and it wasn't leaking anymore. Then Friday we took it over to Ben's house (cleverly double-wrapped in a ginormous Ziploc bag and carried in a Corningware dish) and told our friends to have at it. Unfortunately, marginally ok wine is made much worse when unrefrigerated so our valiant attempt to consume the entire remnants of the box was unsuccessful (it's hard to drink that crap when there's good wine plus really good beer around), so among all of TToA we still ended up throwing away a good two liters of boxed wine. Maybe that is the most epic fail of them all.

So the moral of the story is don't give Mere a knife. I suck at knives. But I'm pretty good with a bow staff.

It's rare that I have two of my arch enemies unite against me in an epic battle of wills, wits, and patience. My enemies are generally also each other's enemies and have very little interest in ganging up on me to cause me grief. This week, though, two of them have decided to work together to be obnoxious and horrible together. The culprits? Freaking FedEx and my apartment complex office.

Let me start by saying that I've been conditioned since birth to loathe FedEx. We're UPS people. We'll die UPS people. So when I ordered the AMAAAAAZING Pampered Chef chopper (highly recommended by Mary!) from Eng's church fund raiser I was a little annoyed to find out that it would arrive via FedEx. Whatever, though, I can handle it. No big deal. And after patiently waiting a couple of weeks I came home last Thursday to a tag clipped outside my door. Yay! My chopper had arrived! The tag said that the package had been left at the apartment office. Ugh. Now we've lived here for more than two years now and I avoid that place like the plague. I purposely pay rent through the drop slot after hours just so I don't have to walk in there and deal with them, they're that bad. They have the kind of leasing staff that make it obvious to you that they have something they'd rather be dealing with instead of whatever problem or question you have for them. They're pretty much the only thing wrong with this complex, though - everything else about it is awesome, so we've decided to hang around until the end of '09. Anyway-

So now in order to get my chopper I have to deal with both of them, and I should have known this would be ridiculous. Sure enough, I wander in to the office to find our manager there all by herself, trying to do about six things at once. I hand her my post card and she comes back with a big flat box. WTF? Not a chopper. No big deal, though, I decided, my chopper will come in later. Except upon further inspection the label clearly reads "USPS" as in "United States Postal Service" as in "NOT FedEx". So Fail #1. I calmly turned back to the manager lady and said "Oh, wait, this isn't it. I need a FedEx box."

Manager: That's your package.
Me: Yes, it's mine, but I should have another one. One that was dropped off from FedEx.
Manager: There wasn't anything else back there.
Me: Still reading the label This one came from the postal service...in April. I should have a FedEx package from Thursday.
Manager: Clearly done with me That's the only one I could find. Maybe they didn't leave it.
FAIL #2

Ok, I suppose that's possible, but WTF? Why would FedEx do that? But I had to get the dog to my parents' house so I took my other flat box, which was an Amazon order that had been missing for almost a month, and got in the car and called the FedEx number and tried to explain my situation.

FedEx Lady: Oooohhhh...that doesn't sound good.
Me: Right, so I need to figure out where this package is.
FedEx Lady: Ok it's showing that it was delivered, let me call the office there and see if I can talk to somebody.
Mere gets stuck on hold
FAIL #3

Let me interrupt this story to tell you all that as annoying as "hold" music is, TOTAL SILENCE is worse. Blar.

After constantly checking to make sure I hadn't been disconnected for five whole minutes, I heard clicking. Oh yay! She either found my package or we're going to figure out what to do next. NOPE.

FAIL #4:
FedEx Recording: In order to help us locate or deliver your package, please leave the following information after the beep: your full name, a daytime phone number where you can be reached during business hours, your full and correct address, the tracking number or tag number associated with your package, directions to your location from the nearest well-known landmark...

At this point I stopped listening. I'm just going to wait, check back at my apt office, figure out whose fault this is, and then chop some heads. Because really, people, it's your JOB, you should suck way less at this.