Her Ladyship

Notes from the gutter.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Irony

For the past two years, I've been working nights at a second job. I am leaving this institution in January due to scheduling problems. So imagine my surprise when I checked my mailbox the other day and found a sparkling name tag with my moniker on it. Bear in mind I never had one before this showed up. Um, souvenir of the past 24 months? Thanks?

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Tales from the air

Just the one. I know I'm getting in the habit of flying and then immediately coming back to vent on this site, but OH MY GOD there's always something new and irritating about air travel these days. To whit: We were scheduled to fly on Wednesday out of San Antonio and have a 90-minute layover in Dallas on our way to LA. We pulled out of the SA terminal on time...and then sat. And sat. And sat some more.

Then the pilot made the following announcement that still pisses me off - that they didn't have enough fuel to fly from SA to Dallas, and that they'd have to pull back in and refuel before air traffic control would let them take off, "so don't blame us, blame air traffic control." ER NO. YOU guys are the ones who were trying to cheap out and not put fuel in the plane when you didn't have to. I mean, come on, it's a frigging 45-minute flight. If you don't have fuel for that, then you *really* don't have any fuel.

As it stood, guess how long we sat on the ground in San Antonio? Why yes, 90 minutes exactly. We ended up missing our connection in Dallas, but only had to wait an hour for another flight. But still, I was livid.

Um, other than that, great Thanksgiving. Got to see the family, and went down to San Diego to hang out with J-Ditty and her husband, then went to Grits' wedding. It was held in the courtyard of a Mexican restaurant in Old Town San Diego and was a wonderful wedding. The bride walked down the aisle to a mariachi band playing "Here Comes the Bride" and all concerned were very happy.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Turkey travels

I haven't been posting lately what with the monstrous amount of TV shows building up on my DVR. Yes, sure, I don't *have* to watch every episode of the Gilmore Girls' first season, but they're so good! How can I resist?

And now we're heading out to southern California for Thanksgiving, where hopefully it didn't all burn down last month. Family Ladyship is having a Thanksgiving dinner in LA, then we drive down to San Diego to go visit J-Ditty and attend Grits' wedding. I'm putting money that there are going to be mariachis at the latter - I sure hope so, at least.

Other than getting ready for our trip, we're trying to wrap up work on the house. Our bathroom used to be covered with not one but two layers of wallpaper. My plan to take it off myself dissolved about three seconds into the job. So we're having our general contractor do it, and paint while he's at it, but I'm afraid that he may not finish in time for me to take a shower before heading out to the airport. And while the San Antonio airport is getting a little better, it still isn't on par with Hong Kong's where you can shower and shampoo while waiting for your flight. This may be a long and pungent day.

At least the bathroom is now a lovely shade of pink - almost as pretty as the one in my old condo in DC. I told The Texan that we can buy some really masculine towels to butch up the place.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Friday, November 16, 2007

Watchful waiting

Is it the weekend yet? How about now? Now? What about now?

This has been a long week, and the most frustrating part is that I've spent most of it kicking my ass trying to get a paper done for a conference that I may not end up getting to go to, due to bureaucratic snafus (NOT ON MY END). Talk about feeling futile... I'm hoping I'll get some good news today.

The Texan's birthday is this weekend, so of course I have a whale of a pimple coming. This is going to be huge, people. I tweezed a hair on my chin (what? I'm of Mediterranean heritage, I've come to terms with it) on Monday and my chin did not like that one bit. The follicle got inflamed but it's taking its sweet time to come to fruition. I figure it'll crest right in the midst of The Texan's birthday party on Saturday. In the meantime, the damn thing throbs off and on, making life that much more interesting.

On that note, allow me to wrap this up with a short vignette of rental car humor. Yesterday, I was taking an out-of-town visitor to a car rental place near my house to pick up her rental car. They didn't have a car in the size she'd reserved, so they upgraded her for free. The guy behind the counter assured her she wouldn't have to pay any more than she'd planned, as "This isn't National! Ho ho ho." The he proceeded to add an extra insurance that she hadn't asked for onto her ticket and had the temerity to be miffed when she had him take it off.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Furniture follies

1) Today, while the delivery guys were bringing in our brand! new! mattress!!!, I tried to help out by opening the screen door for them. Shrapnel had just woken up from his nap and was looking like he was going to make a run for it, so I picked him up and held him as the mattress passed us by. One of the guys making the delivery saw him and asked, "Is that a cat or a raccoon?" Jeez, he's only 16.5 pounds - tough room, I tell you.

2) Over the weekend, The Texan and I went out sofa shopping. It's been a while since I've been on the look-out for a new sofa, and apparently there have been all sorts of sofa advances. Did you know, for example, that many sectionals come these days with a hidden compartment for your chips/remote/porn stash/what have you, as well as CUP HOLDERS for your beer? The sad thing is that the furniture makers clearly do not know their audience, as the size of the cup holders is too small for most alcoholic beverages. Or I would wager. Ahem.

3) While shopping for said sofa, we got to travel back in time at one store, where the salesguy refused to address any comments to me and spent the whole time making his pitch to The Texan. I guess us little ladies don't have any emotional ties to or interest in our sofas.

We did not buy anything, which is fine as I am still too jazzed about our new mattress to really care about anything else right now. Pillow-top-induced rest and relaxation, here I come!

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Winter is here

We had our two weeks of fall and I guess it's time to hunker down for winter. Hee. I love winter in Texas. Maybe you'll have to button up your coat once or twice. Maybe.

***********

It's a good thing that the show we went to was on Sunday, before the weather changed. I'd heard Shiny Toy Guns on the local college radio station* and kinda liked them, so when it turned out that they were playing at Sunset Station, a venue I'd never been to but wanted to check out, it was like all the stars were in alignment.

I was a bit concerned as to what sort of show they were going to put on when we drove up to the venue and a radio station van was there for a crappy top-40 radio station. I told The Texan that while I liked Shiny Toy Guns, I couldn't vouche for the other three bands on the docket.

It, however, turned out to be a great show. I think that STG was the most alive and rocked the house the best - especially when their chick singer was at the mike. Plus it was a balmy warm evening, we had great seats up on a planter (Sunset Station is a SRO, open-air venue), and the drinks, they kept on coming. And afterwards, we went to our favorite bar where the bartender offered, nay, INSISTED that we borrow his new complete fifth season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." It just doesn't get much better than that.

* Before you think I'm all indier than thou, we have ourselves a situation in our car radio. Someone (cough*TheTexan*cough) was messing with the buttons so now until we dig out the manual, the only two stations we can get are NPR and the local college radio station, KSYM. Don't get me wrong, I like both of those stations, but sometimes it would be nice to have a radio choice.

Friday, November 02, 2007

Every day is Arbor Day around here

In an attempt to purtify our place, we went down to the local nursey a few weeks back and ordered a whole slew of trees and climbing plants. After multiple phone calls to clear up the fuckwittery of our bank (which decided unilaterally to screw with the check that we'd given them), I feel very close to the manager, who couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing. What got me the most stressed was the thought that SOMEONE COULD BUY OUR PLANTS OUT FROM UNDER US. See, we'd bought them but lacking a forklift had to arrange for them to be delivered. The first date that would work was Halloween, which at that point was several weeks off. I was certain that someone would yank the "sold" sign off of our carefully-picked red oak and steal off into the night with it.

Then, I started stressing (notice a trend?) that because the trees were going in the ground on Halloween, some neighborhood trick-or-treaters would use the opportunity to commit a trick and carry off the trees. HA HA HA. The ten kids who came by our house (after four hours of waiting, poised at the door, ready to give out candy) could barely walk, much less haul off a partially-grown tree.

Anyways, the tree guys came and planted them for us. We had thought briefly about doing it ourselves but then sanity kicked in. You know how those women's magazines always list "plant a tree" as one way to get calmness in your life in only 10 minutes? How exactly do they figure that? Tree-planting is a lot of hard work - I could tell that, even standing by and overseeing the job. Gosh, do you mean to say that Glamour isn't right about everything?

This weekend The Texan and I do get the chance to get our hands dirty as we bought some wisteria that needs to go into the ground, ASAP. I'm hoping that my help will be more of the moral support kind. I don't mind working but the ground has bugs in it.

Oh, and that reminds me of a story one of my friends in the military told me. When she expressed a concern about the dirt she'd be exposed to during training, the recruiter told her that they sift out the dirt ahead of time so that there aren't any bugs in the ground. Hee.
 
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