AI @ 8pm

Watch for my friend Eric on tonight's ep of American Idol on Fox. He'll be the one with the light brown flippity-do hair and thick rimmed glasses.

Eric is otherworldly-talented (and stylish as hell). He'll go far. Definitely.

#teameric

The Other Foot

I saw Ride Along yesterday. It was really funny. Great chemistry between Ice Cube & Kevin Hart. I don't care for KHart generally, but his Napoleonism stuff worked well here.  Think "Rush Hour" with a higher budget. A turned up Chris Tucker.

So the theater assigns your seats. A couple were in our seats, so they moved two seats down. They moved four more times because the real ticketholders kept showing up. That last time was a close one. I don't think the real ticket holders appreciated her attitude.  Alas, no pre-movie fight for entertainment.

At that point, I reclined my chair and realized my boots were on the wrong foot.

Seriously. I'm like 80.

I saw Jack Ryan on Saturday (which was okay).

Later, I logged in to SL to kill 30 minutes before a Skype call.

I just found out that the ex who ignored my calls while I was in Japan - "Mr. Yellow Fever" - 's girlfriend is one and the same person as another SL friend's undercover girlfriend.

Two shady deals, same girl involved. 

Litereally stumbled upon it.

Like a damn soap opera...one which I'm so glad I'm not a part of. But privately makes me smh with a smirk. Which is bad. And I should be ashamed. But I would've been right in the middle of that mess, and probably none the wiser.  There's a real world just outside of your doors, people.  You don't have to be crazy glued to your chairs.

So, I'm watching The Bachelor, and a contestant explained my thoughts on SL perfectly. She said: "Here, you have to make a spectacle of yourself to be noticed. It's just not in me to be different a different person because I'm here. In the real world, I can just be me."  She's haafu. The smartest one on the show. Go figure. Pffh.
 

Second Life should enhance your first life; not replace it.

National holiday today. MLK. Been working in the bathroom this morning and washing sheets. I'm dying to bleach the bathtub, but I'm told the bleaching product is very strong, and lasts for 3 days. So it needs to be warmer so I can keep the bathroom window open.

Feels like time for a change. I'm trying L'Oreal's Ombre.  "Ombre" is meant to look like a gradual progression in color along the length of your hair. Like your color is settled/fading from the root. So more natural, less GAH!

I used this tutorial:

 

Kara-YO-ke

The guy at my table keeps laying his head on my shoulder. 

The girl on the other side of me just whispered that she's working on her temper. But just in case, she's got a gat in her purse. 

Note where she's resting her purse...

...

...sweet geezus. 

Also, Karaoke in the hood apparently includes random outbursts of the wobble hustle. 

More Drama than Trauma

Black ice + crazy drivers = AccidentFest

Took three hours longer to get almost home than normal after work last night.  I'll go back to the "almost" in a moment.  With the whole span of I96 closed, rush hour has become a fiasco. Couple the fact that everyone is cramming into the remaining eastbound/westbound expressways with the recent snow and ice extravaganza, and arriving anywhere on time...let alone in one piece...is completely a matter of chance.

 

I've been really fortunate. I've never had snow tires, so the simple act of stopping at a red light and starting again turns my car into a carnival ride.

 

What's the name of that one old skool circular roller coaster one that goes on the continuous loop?

 

Okay, I just spent 25 minutes looking for the ride. The closest I found was this one. It was sort of like this one, but it was two to a car, and the back part was inside a tunnel. And it didn't look this nice. It was rickety and the safety was questionable. And there were wall speakers at the entrance to the tunnel part that almost hit your head.

Dangit. What was the name of the ride?? Ice-something. Snow-something. OMG.

 

Well, that analogy's ruined. Anyway, its bad out. I'm a careful driver, but I still slid into a bank or two.

 

Back to the "almost" part.  I got sideswiped by a guy who ran a red light.  It wasn't the snow. He was going too fast the way people do in perfect weather, and assumed everyone else was as awesome a driver as he is, and could stop mid-intersection and politely wait for him to speed through. He assumed everyone has snow tires. I don't. So I can't do the polite stop and yell. I was at about 5 mph. He hit me at about 32mph. He knocked my car onto the corner/curb of a gas station. He got out and ran off. That's happening a lot more these days. Same thing happened to my coworker.

 

Anyway, I took pictures, caught a cold, got a few indecent offers from drivers, gave the police my information, went home, took a bath. Today, I found out that the driver was drunk and had a small amount of meth in the car.  I felt bad that the accident made an unbearable drive home even worse for most of the drivers.  I wonder if it would've been better to move my car, since I already had pictures.

 

I'm not injured. The car has a small ding. No big deal. All drama. No trauma.

 

I nabbed a ticket to the NAIAS Charity Preview tonight. It was fantastic. I had planned to take my grandmother to this one. We use watch the live show. We drooled over the beautiful gowns and watched the rich people drink champagne. I wanted to splurge on the tickets just to see her be one of those people for a change.

Wore my sister's birthday gift, but the boots weren't far away!

Last year's post: NAI-YES!
 

Sooo ...earlier today at lunch.  What kind of chicken IS this?? I don't even know what PART of the chicken this is. The lunch room sign said "grilled chicken". The other side LOOKS like a small thigh. I think it's a pigeon. I'm so confused!!

 

 

 

 

Hypotherically

A guy in this meeting just said, "Well, hypotherically speaking..."

Love it. Gonna use it for the rest of the day.

Nightmare on Roslyn Street

 

So I took out the old medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom (the one I've been remodeling for 300 years now), and can I just say that "DIY projects" do NOT go as smoothly as they do in YouTube videos???

 

Okay, so the cabinet had 30 years of paint coating it, so I exacto'd it out. After I realized there were actual screws holding it into place. Then I found a giant pile of rusty razors behind the cabinet. Then I remembered that my father use to dump his old razors back there. I can't remember why.

 

And THEN the drywall I measured was maybe 1/8" short of the left mark, which wasn't my fault! My father had built a space into the original wall to hold the old medicine cabinet, so the stud/anchor/wood thingy was in the way. I didn't want to move it, so I added skinny wood blocks to the original wood to make a drywall anchor.

 

Then I mixed the putty stuff to fill in the gap on the left, then added the mesh tape over it. But when I started going over the entire thing, the stuff got too hard to handle.  So I went back into the kitchen to add more water, which just the crumbly rocks slipperier. Sigh!

 

Then I tossed that batch and mixed a new one, which got too hard to use with the spatula thingy, so I smeared some on with my damn fingers.

 

But the stuff became too hard for even that, so I cursed at the box and dumped it all in the trash.  I'll try again tomorrow with the premixed stuff.

 

I used this tutorial for drywall repair:

 

 

 

Once I'm done, I'm putting up this mirror. Which is a story in itself. Like the sink, it was advertised but no longer available, I harassed Lowe's into helping me find it, they found it at a Lowe's about 25 miles away, I paid for it over the phone (last one, so it was on sale for $9..woot!), then drove the 25 miles to pick up the mirror, my engine light was on the whole way home, but hasn't come on since...

 

OMG.

 

 

 

SL is bleh. And my friends list is all weird. Zombies! Any takers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

I'll take "Sh!t Men don't Care About" for 100, Alex.

 

So shellac is a new-ish nail polish method that basically singes the coats of specially-formulated color onto your nails. Shellac is great because the color never comes off. The nail tech has to soak each nail in hot acetone for a few minutes, and then scrape it off with that painful metal scalpel thing. It hurts SO much, but it's worth not having to watch your polish chip for weeks at a time.

http://www.komonews.com/news/consumer/
122994693.html?tab=video&c=y

The problem with shellac is that it doesn't do much to protect the nail. Mine always breaks in the same area - where the skin meets the tip - about a week in.

 

Anyway, I switched back to gel. Which is basically an acrylic layer (at least, it looks and smells like acrylic?), followed by a clear coat of something, then they stick your hands under this UV (?) light for a few minutes, and your fingertips feel like they're burning off, then presto! No need for polish.  If you have even a little bit of fingernails like I do, you won't need the falsies. The tech will just lay the acrylic/gel/whatever it is right over the nail beddo.

Typical gel nails

The problems with gel nails are that (1) they can look really bad/fake if the nail tech lays it on too thick (watch your tech closely as he/she starts on the first nail, in case "I want a very thin coat" doesn't translate), and (2), your fingertips will burn for the first night. It feels like I held them over a fire for a second too long. It doesn't diminish as the night goes on, or get worse as I'm typing.  My nails don't feel sore to the touch. The insides of the tips literally feel on fire.  And this won't go away until morning.

The stuff we do for beauty, dammit.

My brother may finally be moving to Sydney with his family, so I now have an excuse to visit.  I have a friend in Brisbane (reads like "bris-BAYNE", but Aussies pronounce it "BRIHS-bun"...why? Because, although they so desperately want to be Amurrkan, they'll never get the enunciations right...unless they're an actor on The Walking Dead...then it's spot-on.) and Geelong (again, it looks like "GEEE[zus]-long", but the crazy Aussies say "jlong". They're crazy!). It'd be great to see you guys.

 

It also means I may be moving back to Toshima (or, kill me now, Koriyama).  And relearn kanji. Sigh to that. It's a family obligation thing, so I'm opting to not post my opinion on the matter.
 

I just joined the YMCA near my workplace. It's like it's own little city. Child care services, a giant indoor court, an indoor pool (a rarity!), a juice bar and rock climbing? Crikey. I'm just looking to get rid of my gut. 

Parking's ridiculous, so I go with my boss and/or coworkers.

 

I asked a guy at Lowe's today to directly me to the "50 shades of gray" aisle. I thought it was funny.  I even snort-laughed at my own joke. But he turned red and I felt kinda bad.  But he did direct me to the drill bits!

I dropped my work i.d. at a CVS Pharmacy one day last week. I called to check on it and the employee said that someone from my workplace found it and that was going to bring it to me the next day.  Well, I haven't seen it, but where I work, you can be fired if you don't report your id stolen.  Its a whole state regulations thing. So I gotta face the music and get a new one.

Random FaceTime mayhem.

 

Housework's done. Bills done, sorta. Let's shoot some zombies! Don't forget, I'm on kik @Mia-LiA (which is way more reliable than google).

Goofy vine for the win.