Forming a new religion around the internet...

Why would I do this? Because the internet is my SAVIOR!!! I've had rusty looking gunge leaking out of my fridge periodically for close to2 months. I figured it was the drip pan overflowing or something? This morning I found 1/2 inch of water in the bottom of the fridge under the veggie drawer.... Issues! So I googled "water leaking into bottom of refridgerator" and foudn a lot of answers to that question stating that there's a drain from the freezer to the drip pan & that it gets clogged & probably needs to be cleaned out. YAY! I disconnected a bunch of sh!# and lo-and-behold, after getting brown/greyfridge splooge all over my arm, I found that my drain part was clogged. I've since openned it up, cleaned it out & confrimed that water is now flowing just fine through the drain. let's hope that does it. : ) I'm also builing a religion around headlamps because I cannot think of a more useful device invented by man.

Unfortunately, I started fixing my fridge be taking apart the freezer compartment (which turned out to be completely unnecessary). On the upside, I got to see what the cooling mechanism of a freezer looks like & it's pretty darn cool...

So that happened.

Well, on to more happy things... Last night was the Glen Echo Evening with Strauss (Viennese Ball). As always, it was fabulous! We got dressed to the nines & had a nice evening, though we were constantly mistaken for Prom-goers over dinner.

I had so much fun & even got to get someone on my dance card for the Polka!!! Even better, he bore a striking resemblance to Steve Martin. Too bad I didn't get a picture... The best pic of the night though, was one I got of J on the carousel...

I don't know about anyone else, but with that profile and the tux and the hair the way it is, he totally looks like a romantic lead from a Jane Austin movie, don't you think??? : ) Maybe it's the side-burns...

Samhain Resolutions & Halloween 2008 Wrap-up

Last year, I accidentally made Samhain resolutions. By accidentally, I mean that I made a plan and it came like a shot out of the dark via random coincidence and it all happened right around the beginning of November (right after Samhain). As a result, I decided retroactively that I had Samhain resolutions. Now, the one really nice thing about using the Celtic New Year, as I've mentioned before, is that you can make a plan to eat healthier BEFORE all the opportunities to gorge... hence you can realize "hey, I should have at least a glimmer of self-restraint" and thereby you do not have as much "making up for it" to do later.



I think this is a grand idea. I spent a lot of time the past two weeks trying to THINK of new resolutions and I wasn't having any luck. Luckily, the shot out of the dark came again this year. So here we goooooooooooo.......!!!!

1. Start a small side business making custom clothing - market to the local DC metro area, tap Etsy, and diversify. You want it? I'll make it. Costumes, period-inspired everydaywear, steampunk. You got it!


2. Cook more and eat more veggies. I miss cooking. I say my excuse is we don't have enough time. BS! I am a culinary wizard and need to get off my lazy ass & just hit the grocery every day. Expect to see more random concoctions like the Salmon Salad appear - if I really liked it, I'll share.


3. Train up for the Boo! Run 10K in October.


4. Do more work on trying to figure out how to balance work, play, relaxation, and social. I still suck at it.


5. Find a dentist


6. Work on those last 10 lbs and maybe toning more.



7. Wear more hats.

Now as far as Halloween goes... we had fun as always, but the much-anticipated DC101 Party, which always has awesome costumes because they offer a several thousand dollar grand prize, was a total bust. I think I'm done with it. Maybe all the people who make the normally fantastic costumes have caught on that they weren't going to get anywhere because it's always something pop-culture that wins. Maybe they realized this and went elsewhere. Maybe they were all in a Halloween funky like I was this year and didn't decide to do much. All I know is that they weren't really there. J & I were Sweeney Todd & Mrs. Lovett as planned. Lori reappeared as her sshett-ghost. Our friend Adi came out and made himself Charlie Brown using black duct tape on a yellow shirt & Jenn was an asian masseuse and Wilson pulled out his mad-1-hour costume skillz and came as Toadstool from Super Mario Brothers. It was fun hanging with friends, but the party sucked and a guy in a white button down shirt and a brown vest who called his costume "McLovin'" (from the movie Superbad) won the $3K. I am peeved. For $3K the giant Dildo that someone MADE should have gotten the prize at least (Rabbit dildo was 2nd runner up). So anyway, the verdict is that I should have made plans to just stay at Greg & Jessie's because it was more fun eventhough I Greg didn't make it home before I had to leave. Stupid work.

Yeah, I don't know what was wrong, but I was in some weird halloween funk this year. Never got my decorations out. Never even put fall leaves on the door.... weird. Huh.... Maybe I'll dig out the ceramic fruit for T-giving and make some effort. Dunno.

My little bit o' Karma-seeding or something...

Alrighty, here's the deal. I love, absolutely love, living here. I can handle the traffic, I can handle the lines, I can handle the uppity-ness, but there's one thing that I hate around here: the "I'm more important than you" thing that people do around here. I don't know if it's because people are busier here than other places or if it's because we have a high number of foreign-born people or if it's because there's too much money, but it doesn't seem to be limited to rich people. Here's the perfect example of the DC more-important-than-thou thing: you start to pull out of a parking spot. No one's coming. you are about half way out of your parking spot when someone beeps and drives past without slowing down. This is the DC "I'm coming through and you'd best get out of my way" signal.

I'm not quite sure why people do this. It makes me mad. I'm sure there are times when a person has just gotten a call that someone's in the hospital and they need to get there right away, but with the frequency that this happens, either it's just selfishness or there are a lot of people rushing to hospitals.

There are so many ills in the world. There are pointless wars, rampant hate, homelessness, poorness, starvation, addictions, deadly diseases, murders, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum. You know, I can't do a damn thing about any of it. I can donate money and time to worthy causes in my community, but really, it makes me ill when I think about the fact that I can't do anything substantial to stop it all.

One day, a number of years ago, I was thinking... about world religions, commonalities between people, and physics and thought... there's so much talk about energy being neither created nor destroyed and people discussing the power of prayer or spiritual energy or etc... and maybe that's all it's really about. Maybe it's all energy. And then there's the butterfly effect. The one thing I can do is try every moment to put as much "good energy" or karma or whatever back into the world as possible.

[anecdotal aside: I was walking through the K-mart parking lot one day in my purple striped wellies because, duh, it was supposed to rain. Two girls, must have been late high-school, drove past, rolled down the window, and made a comment about what's up with my ugly-ass boots. I was in a pretty good funk for the next 4 hours. The funk was due to the mind-numbing effects of someone finding it necessary to instigate a drive-by-insulting over rain boots, not the insult itself. When I left work later, I passed another woman on the street who stopped momentarily and complimented me on my boots. This made me feel so much better, that I wanted to skip and thought "there is some good in the world."]

Now, if a 30 second exchange can make me feel horrible for 4 hours and a 30 second exchange can also do the exact opposite, one thing I can do to improve the lives of all these little people who live in the big city is to be nice. People don't seem to expect nice here, so it seems like it makes more of a difference. And maybe if it makes a difference, that person will also be nice and who knows but it could have a butterfly effect of varying scales. It's a nice thought anyway. Maybe it'll put some good in the world to counteract all the bad.

My challenge to myself and you all... hold the door for people, it'll only cost you 10 seconds. Hold the elevator for people, let someone merge in front of you, stop to let a pedestrian cross the road, smile at someone, compliment their shoes or hair, wave the other person through the intersection first even if you were there one second before them. Be nice to your servers, learn a piece of dollar-origami. If you get a nice server who seems to be having a shitty day, leave something fun as well as the tip. Everything that you do has a chance of making 30 seconds of someone else's shitty day nice or funny, which helps in the long-run I think.

Halloween-is-coming giddiness

Thanks to BoingBoing I got a new idea for MORE halloween decorations and will be stopping by the Dollar Tree store on my way home after work today so I can make my own "specimens", which, I think, should be better recieved than trying to mimic the Thai baker who makes human body parts from bread. It also appears to be A) cheaper and B) easier. Yay!