friday is cat day

Going in for the kill.

copycat

So someone started up a blog as bluegirlredstate at typepad. Not that I was intending to move my blog there, but still. Doesn't it seem like a little bit of a coincidence, given that prior to starting this blog I googled bluegirlredstate and got ZERO results? It just seems that stumbling on a blog name you like, whether at blogspot, typepad, or a domain, and then taking that blog name as your own on a different service is oh, incredibly lame. Just as I certainly would never dream of starting up dooce.blogspot.com or dailykos.typad.com (for example), it makes someone seem pretty uncreative when they do it with a non-famous blog.

week in review

So, all the houseguests are departed, and we did all have a very nice time together. I may have thought a few silent "arrrgh"s, but none of them came out and I wasn't too cranky, overall, due to the total lack of 6am showers - which let me get enough sleep. Hallelujah. Highlights of the week included: Dinner at Zia's on The Hill (the Italian neighborhood of St. Louis). Zia's has a reputation for being one of the best restaurants there, and it was DELICIOUS. Meeting one of D.'s best friends from elementary school - she's really nice and has a great sense of humor and we had a fun time hanging out with her. Spending an afternoon at the Missouri Botanical Garden - tons of plants and bushes were flowering and we just strolled around enjoying a beautiful day. Everyone else would vote for a Cardinals game where one pitcher pitched 10 innings, but not me. I was too cold. Where'd that 80 degree weather go again? Spending an afternoon scenic driving through the rolling hills west of the city out to Hermann, MO. Settled entirely by German immigrants in 1800something, it's the center of Missouri's wine producing region. I didn't know they made wine in MO until we moved here, but we did wine tasting and tours at a couple wineries there and now have about 10 bottles of wine in our liquor cabinet. Again, DELICIOUS. P.S., D. got drunk, because his dad doesn't like wine very much and kept giving his samples to D. So in effect, D. had a double wine tasting, which he very much enjoyed in an inebriated fashion. Yep, those were the highlights. And I am feeling so kindly towards the past week that I won't even bother with lowlights. Actually, I can't really think of any lowlights, unlike when my family was here. Oh yeah. It rained a lot. And it was unseasonably cold. There could be far worse things.

just leave me alone and i'll be happy

D.'s parents are coming to visit and I'm feeling eh about it. His parents are very nice people, we all get along well. It's just that they're coming for a WEEK, and staying with us. In our apartment with only one bathroom that shares a wall with our bedroom and wakes me up when someone takes a shower at 6am. Gah. In general, I am a person who needs a lot of alone time. I can stand, and even enjoy, being around D. for days straight, but he's the only person I've ever been able to tolerate like that. With most people, after a day or two I just want them to leave me by myself to think my thoughts and do what I want without having to socialize with them or be entertaining. It's not so much that D.'s parents expect entertainment, but that I have to constantly be "on": friendly, smiling, enthusiastic about the activities they want to do, participating in lots of conversations, etc. That just wipes me out, and with the 6am shower wakeup I become frustrated and grouchy and then even more so because I am still pretending to be "on" (see above). I don't know what to do about this, and it's not constrained to D.'s parents, it's my family too. However, my family only visits for 2 or 3 days at a time, which more or less stays within my limit of tolerance. I never had a chance to suggest that D.'s family come for a shorter time, because they just went ahead and bought plane tickets. I don't think I can suggest (in future) that they stay in a hotel, because D. will be hurt that I don't want his parents around and his parents will no doubt be insulted in some manner. Thinking about it further, I don't really feel eh, it's more along the lines of actively dreading the coming week. Sometimes I really regret getting an apartment with a second bedroom.

love, Britney and K Fed

So, Britney got knocked up. That is almost unavoidably going to be one messed up kid, and who wants to make bets on how long it takes Britney to become a single mom? I took an informal poll of friends on whether it would be worse to be Britney or Madonna's child and it was nearly unanimous that Britney would be way worse. Why? Because while they both have the weird, Britney also has the trailer trash and (probably) the desire to be overinvolved. Madonna seems like she leaves everything to a couple of expensive British nannies, who would probably manage to raise a fairly normal kid. The best take I've seem on it is here and here. I have a suspicion this is exactly how these two converse. Enjoy.

what big EYES you have

The "Please feed me, I'm trying to look cute" face.

now i want a flaming tail pipe too

We bought a new car a week ago. Technically, a used car, but new to us. D. had been driving a bright teal colored 1993 honda civic coupe since his junior year of high school. As of last week that car had 264,893 miles on it. The transmission sounded like it was struggling, it needed about $500 in exhaust repairs, and the speedometer had stopped working. For example, when driving 60 mph the speedometer spasmed between about 45 and 80, which made highway driving especially exciting. Conclusion: time for a new car. Since that one held up so well, we bought another civic. I make fun of D. for continuing the string of girly cars, since the official color name of this one is "Metallic Wild Plum". However, it has tinted windows and one of those little muffler pipe add-ons with flaming cut-outs, which makes it more bad-ass. For a civic anyway. Ahem. Plus, only 40k miles! And if we drive 15,000 miles a year, it should last until I'm 36. How could you get a better deal than that in the car department? Plus, it has AIR CONDITIONING. Now that's what I'm talking about.

blogging the cat on fridays

Sometimes the cat gets really interested in the flashing lights and clicking buttons on the camera.

the thing about highways

Driving in the left lane of a 4-lane road today, I was doing 40mph in a 30 zone. A cop going at least 10 mph faster than me passed me in the right lane, and then proceeded to swerve into my lane without using a turn signal. Instead of staying in that lane, he edged back to the right until he was straddling the white line. He drove this way for at least a couple blocks before he ran a red light and I lost track of him. This is why people hate cops. Driving in St. Louis was a little bit of a big deal to me when we first moved. Around here, to get most anywhere outside of your immediate neighborhood you have to take the highway. I had never lived in a city where one had to drive on more than a 4 (ok, maybe 6) lane road to get anywhere useful in town. No onramps, speed limit 45, traffic lights every 1/4 mile, etc. Definitely no highways with 3-5 lanes in each direction and a posted speed limit of 55 but a (busy) traffic flow going 70. Even in North Carolina, the local highways had traffic lights here and there and very little traffic in general. D., having driven in Boston on a semi-regular basis, thought the highways around here were great. I thought trucks were going to merge into me and I was going to die. Don't get me wrong, I have done quite a bit of highway driving in my life, but it was all of the variety where I got on the uncrowded highway at point A and proceeded calmly to destination B and exited. Around here, there is so much traffic - you merge on to one highway; change lanes to avoid the swerving guy; change lanes some more to avoid garbage trucks; merge off the highway onto a ramp while avoiding the cars that have just exited the highway you want to get onto and are sharing your ramp except they're trying to go right while you want to go left; merge on to the highway; merge onto another highway, and so forth. And this is just to get to Target. Having been here 8 months now, I think I've finally come to terms with the highways. I don't clutch the wheel with a death grip anymore, I don't get all freaked out when I encounter the merge on/merge off ramp situation, I keep one eye on the rearview mirror in an attempt to make sure i have an out when the swerving guy decides to merge into me. I appreciate how the highway makes Target a 10 instead of 20 minute drive in the middle of the day. Regardless, I still let D. drive every time we go somewhere together.

summer is here! (and bringing the potheads out to play)

Just to note: it's EIGHTY ONE degrees here. It seems that summer directly followed winter, without bothering with any of that spring nonsense. Tying in with the nice weather, last week D. and I walked 8 blocks down to the local Qdoba, ate dinner, and walked back just as it was getting dark. Maybe 7:15pm. On the way back we passed through a neighborhood park, and just at the entrance were 4 or 5 teenage boys, smoking the reefer. D. and I laughed at their audaciousness, but I thought about it in a more sober light later. I used to have a lot of sympathy for the people in jail for marajuana related offenses. After all, the goverment is hysterical about drugs, and it's a victimless crime, right? But seeing these kids made me think that maybe those people in jail only have their own stupidity to blame. How easy is it to smoke your dope in your basement, away from prying eyes and noses, and never get in trouble for it? How much trouble are you asking for when you smoke weed at 7pm, right next to a neighborhood full of yuppies and their young children? No doubt there are people in that neighborhood who are super paranoid about how drugs will ruin their kids' lives and who would not hesitate to call the cops upon getting a whiff of weed. The smell drifted after us for a good two blocks, so there were certainly other people in their yards or with open windows who could smell it. It just seemed so stupid.

blogging the girth of the cat

The cat has become more and more rotund as of late, so we put her on a diet. I'm not sure it's working.