SHUT UPPP

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.

Between the brewery tour and Cinco de Luau last weekend we stopped at Chick-Fil-A for some mid-afternoon beer munchies. Mark got a kid's meal, and the toys they're putting those things this year are...interesting. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do, but Katie picked it up and after studying it for a while said "Hmm, it's got a magnifying glass. For frying ants." WTF? But true!! Upon closer examination, we decided that the toy is kind of a murderer-in-training tool:


It's got the magnifying glass to roast ants on the sidewalk, then tweezers to move the hot little suckers to a secure location without leaving fingerprints or burning your hands, and a shovel with which to bury your evidence. WTF, Chick-Fil-A!? That's not right, not at all.

Yeah apparently I'm in my 20s but I act like I'm about 85, all "Ted Mosby and the Murtaugh List" style eating dinner at 4:00 pm and chasing kids off my porch and complaining about my bad hip. Ok so that's maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but we've got this flipping crazy gang of neighbor kids who just run around right outside our front door and patio screaming at the top of their lungs (no words, just a high-pitched and sustained "AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!" for no reason other than their parents got sick of them doing it inside). Today they were in the breezeway between our front door and the front door of the apt across from us, which happens to be the lair of at least three of the banshees, and they were playing with these little stilts which were kind of awesome but caused frequent falling ("AAAAAHHHH!!!!") and regular smacking into our front door/door handle, which was driving the dog crazy. Finally, I looked at the dog and excitedly asked "Rygel, what was that?!" which automatically sends him into an excited barking fury.

An excited barking fit and an angry barking fit sound the same to kids outside your front door, though, which was what I was counting on, because the second Rygel started barking I heard the "AAAAAHHHHH!!!!" from outside the door. Rygel scared 'em but good. The "AAAAAHHHHH!!!!" started in the breezeway, migrated around the corner to the porch, and then faded off into the distance in the direction of the pool. That's right, you noisy whippersnappers, GET OFF MY LAWN!

Reason #134 that D and I are not parents yet: We think our dog is so much cooler than most people's kids.

No, but really, they're super sweet kids and even when they're at their loudest I suck up to them because I'm pretty sure they're starting a small army that is going to revolt with their Nerf darts and cap guns. And, like a real old person, I'm actually afraid of youths. And Rygel's cooler.

All this Earth Day talk got me to thinking: We have an "Earth Day" and a "Sunday," but we have no "Moon Day." This makes me a little bit sad, as I have always been a nighttime person and the moon and I are great buds. I get that the earth is all big and important and stuff because we live there or whatever but come on!! Up until not that long ago without the moon we couldn't even see after the sun went down, and then we played mind games with the moon in the '60s and '70s by visiting a few times and then deciding it was too far so we'd just put our own space junk in orbit and now we visit that instead. The moon totally wonders what it did wrong. Plus think about all the fun stuff you could do on Moon Day. Drink moonshine, eat moonpies, even moon your friends! That's a great way to meet your neighbors. So friends, family, and haters, I implore you: celebrate Moon Day. I think I'll declare it should fall on the next full moon, which is...yeah I don't know when I don't really pay attention. It's only fair!

Also, when you write while you're high on coffee, the word "moon" becomes incredibly amusing.

WTF, how has so much time gone by without an update?? That's hardly like me at all. I definitely didn't run out of stuff to say (or complain about), I just stopped pretty much everything in my life, but after a pretty sweet and amazing weekend I'm back and better than ever. Which, blog-wise, might have never been very good but whatevah, you're reading this aren't you? Anyway.

So, lucky you, today you're getting another gym blog!! Really, I would just like to comment on kickboxing etiquette. Kickboxing classes a) are always really full, b) are difficult if you're out of shape or not coordinated, and c) involve a lot of horizontal movement and (duh) kicking, which makes them d) a little bit dangerous. Here's what NOT to do:

- Come in 20 minutes late.
- Stand in the very small space between me and the girl to my right.
- Kick me.

All three of those things will make me wish you would go away forever, and one super genius managed to achieve all three in about five minutes' time today. Luckily I didn't get kicked hard, but I was like "WTF?" and she just giggled and acted like she wasn't sure exactly what happened. To be fair, she might not have been. Plus that class is always weird and hilarious anyway because the instructor is just like this teeny tiny little ball of crazy that is so cute you could puke and she turns the music up WAY loud and gets really into encouraging everybody and her voice goes from about an octave above normal to just high pitched squealing and yapping and "WOOOO!!!!!" It kind of sounds like someone dumped a bucket of catnip and jingle balls into a room full of cats.

So anyway - really it's just etiquette on life in general: don't kick me. It's pretty bottom-line, I think.