Archive for September, 2008

Playing with Blocks

Author: Erika

Sep 29

I think America needs a good, stiff drink after today. Not only is the world (meaning our economy) falling apart, it all had to come crashing down on a Monday. A Monday.

Is there no decency anymore?

While our prosperity goes down in flames, I’m just going to do what I do best until I either a) run out of ways to blog about being poor or b) cease to have a reliable connection to the Internet (I imagine that the day my local library {where I’d go to blog if my home connection were shut off} shuts its doors is the day that too few people in the world will have access to the Internet to make writing a blog worthwhile.

Seeing as how most of the people I know still happily have access to the Internet…TALLY HO!

It seems to me that, if you’re going to go to the trouble of putting proof of who you plan to vote for on your car, you might as well make sure you’re not driving like a jerk. Here’s why:

I was driving on the freeway yesterday morning when I noticed a car trying to merge onto the freeway. Merger guy found himself a nice little gap between two cars and was moving in with his blinker a-blinking when the driver of the car he would have merged in front of decided that no way was he going to let that guy in. The merger-blocking driver sped up to within two feet of the car in front of him, essentially blocking merger guy from freeway access.

In order to avoid driving onto the shoulder, merger guy had to slow way down to merge behind merger-blocking guy. As merger-blocking guy sped away, I noticed a sign in his back window that endorsed a presidential candidate in HUGE LETTERS.

I understand that the point of campaign posters is to get people familiar with the candidate’s name because familiarity breeds…support? If this is the point, and the merger-blocking driver really wants people to vote for his candidate, wouldn’t it make more sense to drive nicely in the hopes of associating his candidate’s name with a considerate act?

Maybe he’s just hoping for massive exposure and is diligently trying to drive in front of as many people as possible in the hopes of disseminating his candidate’s name all over Washington state. Somehow, though, I doubt this.

Perhaps his candidate would be best served by having merger-blocking guy remove the poster from his back window. They say that there’s no such thing as bad press, but I’d be willing to bet that the guy who was just trying to get onto the freeway took one look at that poster and decided then and there not to vote for merger-blocker’s candidate.

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Filed under: Opinionated much?

A Rave Review…For Someone Else

Author: Erika

Sep 27

Something odd happened to me yesterday. I finished my work at around 5:30pm-ish and was all set to write a new blog post when I decided to throw caution to the wind and read a book instead. I’ve been reading a new book since last Saturday and it’s so enjoyable that I’ve found it hard to be motivated to do anything but read it. I’ve had a lot of late nights this week because of this book.

It’s called Such a Pretty Fat by Jennifer Lancaster and it’s amazing. She’s one of my favorite authors and this is her third memoir. I randomly picked up her first book at an airport on my way home from California and fell in love with it. She’s hilarious, bitingly sarcastic, and forthcoming enough to make reading her memoirs poignant and sincere.

She’s been one of my role models ever since I read her book because she is now a hugely successful novelist but she started off as a blogger. I’m not saying I want to follow in her footsteps exactly but I have definitely taken some notes from her.

Anyway, the odd thing that happened to me was that when I finished reading Such a Pretty Fat I was hugely disappointed…because it was over.

That’s never happened to me before. I normally feel a sense of accomplishment and closure when I turn the last page of a book but this time I was just sad that it was over. I hollered down to Wes that I was so sad to get to the end and he recommended that I send her an email to alert her to this fact.

I may have been fortified by a cosmo martini at this point so I went upstairs and did just that. In the bright, harsh light of morning I feel I may have been a bit brash. I just emailed one of my writing role models while tipsy and I’m not entirely clear on what I wrote to her.

Here’s to hoping it wasn’t too flowery and fan-girl gushy, shall we?

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Filed under: Reviews

My Well-Calibrated Blow-Back

Author: Erika

Sep 25

Surprisingly, a lot of good things have come about in the aftermath of what I’m calling The Great Crash of Yesterday. I’m reading and hearing about a ton of other people’s car accident stories, which makes me feel infinitely better, and I’m coming to terms with the idea that crashing my car does not make me stupid, it just makes me human.

One of my favorite phone calls was from my Dad, who called last night to make sure I was OK (it occurred to me that a good daughter would probably have called her parents to tell them about what happened and not just blogged about and assumed they’d read, but I digress.) To be honest, once he ascertained that I was OK he did spend an inordinate amount of time laughing with me. That was really the turn-around moment for me. It’s hard to beat yourself up for crashing your car when your Dad is laughing about it with you.

The rental company has supplied me with a 2008 Dodge Caliber to drive around for awhile and I’m doing my best not to get confused by all the features (there are buttons on my steering wheel that I’m hoping won’t eject me the moment I press them.) The car is fine but it’s huge compared to Kermit and I’m having a really hard time pulling it into the garage. Wes had to re-park it for me because I can’t quite figure out where I am in the car and I’m terrified of running the brand-new rental car into the side of my garage.

Other than rental-car paranoia and the suspicious lack of Kia in our garage, life is dandy. I’m feeling no ill effects from my 2mph collision and am optimistic that the future will be less smash-y. I do worry that I haven’t heard an estimate from the auto-body place. I wonder if they took a look at my car, totalled up how much it would cost to repair it, and decided the repairs would cost more than the car is worth and just decided to push it into a lake and claim it was stolen.

I promise I won’t blog about The Great Crash of Yesterday tomorrow, mainly because the name of the crash will be different and I’m pretty sure I’ve milked this life event to the last drops. If you’re unfulfilled and aching for hilarity, I highly encourage you to watch this video and join me in cruel, delightful laughter.

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Filed under: Kermit

Lemonade From Idiocy

Author: Erika

Sep 24

In what is the ultimate turning lemons into blog lemonade, I now present to you my newest work: A Tale of Two Bumpers…

It was a cloudy Seattle day. I was stopped at a red light. I thought the traffic was moving (but was distracted because I was putting my hands-free headset on. According to state law, it’s safer to drive with this stupid thing in my ear. They fail to mention that in order to abide by this law and inhabit the 21st century you either need to drive with it in your ear constantly, which makes my ear hurt, or learn how to put it in while driving, which as you can see, is neither safe nor possible. In so many words, this law sucks) but it actually wasn’t and I drove right into a stopped pick-up truck.

The end.

Today I was involved in my very first it-was-my-fault car accident. Somewhere, my mother is pulling out her baby album and writing all these details down under the section, “Baby’s very first moving vehicle violation.”

I am so fortunate because not only was the guy whose truck I hit an absolute nice guy, his truck was not damaged. As for my car, it’s not pretty. Here’s the money shot:

Kermit, my trusty Kia car, will not be winning any beauty contests any time soon.

I was able to safely drive him home only to discover, upon asking Wes why our garage smelled like celery, that the radiator is cracked and is leaking antifreeze like it’s going out of style.
Can you believe that damage? I was going less than 5mph (because I only had 2feet to travel between me and the other car) and my car looks like it was rammed into the side of a tractor by The Hulk.

Of all the accidents to have, though, this was a good one to have. No one is injured (thank goodness!), the other guy’s car is fine, and we have excellent car insurance coverage thanks to my brother in law so we’re only going to have to pay our deductible out of pocket in order to get this whole mess cleaned up.

I only wish I weren’t such a moron. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. I mean, seriously, who in the blue blazes drives straight into the back of an unmoving vehicle because they thought traffic was moving and it wasn’t and they weren’t paying attention because they were trying to put in a headset?!

Of course, Wes has been amazing throughout this whole ordeal, as has my brother in law. Honestly, everyone in this whole situation has been angelic. The only person who hasn’t been very nice to me is me. I’m mad as heck at myself. In fact, I’m not even speaking to myself.

Oh, and you know what the almost worst part of it was? Right after the accident, when we were all pulled over and I reached into my purse to grab a pen, do you know what happened? This:

My purse decided it absolutely had had enough with this nonsense and broke. The strap just flopped right off. It couldn’t have given me one moment of peace in that situation, it just needed to bust the heck out.

So, while Wes is off at the autobody place to get Kermit some reconstructive surgery, I’m going to bust out some thread and a needle. After my expensive little foray into real-life bumper car-ing I don’t think Wes will be down with the idea of letting me go shopping for a new purse anytime soon.

If you, or someone you know, has ever been involved in a car accident, injury-causing or otherwise, please share your horror story in the comments section. It’ll make me feel like a lot less of an absolute imbecile and anything that helps in that endeavor is greatly appreciated at this time.

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Filed under: Kermit | Tagged as:

Thank YOU, Public Education System!

Author: Erika

Sep 23

I know what you’re thinking: it must be a Red Letter Day to merit two posts and I can assure you that it most certainly is not. This second, tiniest little scrap of a post is less a post and more a cry for solidarity:

I was listening to a radio broadcast today and some gaspy-sounding chicklet (who honestly sounded a mere last-minute-dash-to-the-bathroom away from being late for homeroom) was attempting to read the traffic report. She was announcing heavy traffic on the freeway due to an obstruction when she stumbled on a word. She then told her co-host that she didn’t know how to pronounce that word and tried to say it phoenetically. She said Faykade, and I promptly wondered why a Faykade was in the middle of a freeway.

People, the word she was stumbling over was facade. Her co-host made fun of her, she tried to cover for herself by saying she was having an off day, and I died a little on the inside.

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Filed under: Just plain nonsense
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