Perforation Problems

This is the only picture I took today -- of my lunch. I call this my France meal, cause it's almost identical to what I subsided on my entire summer in Chambéry: baguettes, cheese, and Pringles. Okay, so it's a Kraft cheese single, French bread from Kroger, and Baked Lays, but close enough. It's delicious. Also I read the latest David Sedaris book on Saturday, which I really enjoyed -- I'm going to see him with a friend in November. Super excited. Cheese, bread, chips, and a good book. I don't know what else to ask for. That's not true. Cookies. I ask for cookies. 

My grandma has these tin Campbell's Soup signs in the bathroom at the lake. I don't know if they're real antiques or just replicas (my great-grandma had an antique store that was just sold a month or two ago, so they could be from there), but they creep me the eff out. "It takes a bright and sparkling flavor to attract children?" Ew. Also those children are scary. I would not tarry with them anywhere. 

I'm in the middle of a war with the cleaning lady at work. When I set up my old desk, way on the other side of the room,  I made a conscious decision to put my trash can to the left.  This felt like the best location for everyone involved...i.e. mostly for me. Towards the end of the first week, I came in to find my trash can on the opposite side of the desk. "Well, this is not right," I said to myself. "She must have forgotten where the trash can was when she picked it up." So I put it back in the correct location. Next week, same thing. Once again I moved the trash can back. By the fourth week, I was ready to give in. All right, maybe it's just really inconvenient for her to put the trash can on the left. Maybe I'm wrong and it's a stupid location for a trash can. I'll not make a big deal out of it. What do I know about trash cans? Life went on. A year or so passed. I got used to the trash can on the right. Then we decided to move my...

The little seed packet I got at the state fair has turned into tiny green seedlings :) Planting seeds mades me feel like that little girl in preschool who planted a geranium in a tiny pot for her mommy. 

This is going to be a silly post because it's all about how much I love this water bottle. Please ignore how dusty my bedside table is.  I know, it's a water bottle. What's to love? I got it for free because there were leftovers after an event at work. It's not even the water that's great, though the label tries to make you think it's scientifically perfect. I don't care -- I've refilled it a couple times already with normal tap water. It's the bottle itself that I love. It's the perfect size -- you can't drink it too fast. It's also the perfect thickness -- it's easy to squeeze to get the water to come out. Basically I'm in love with a water bottle. And I might or might not have five of them hidden in the pantry. 

I love the idea of running. There are even days where I say, "Yes, going on a run seems like a good idea. I want to do that." I can picture my legs propelling my body forward, feel the satisfaction from making my muscles work together in machine-like synchronism. "I am a RUNNER," I say. "I ENJOY THIS." The problem is that it's all a lie. This is not what running feels like. Running makes you hot, and you're tired, and you've already had a long day, so with every step all you really want to do is JUST FREAKIN' STOP AND LAY DOWN. You get stitches in your side, your face burns like an oven, it's hard to breathe, and every second is just so ridiculously boring. But...then you're done. You think, "Oh, that wasn't so bad." You even feel good about yourself. Look how healthy you are. YOU'RE A RUNNER. "I'll do it again in a couple days," you say. I've been on the edge of quitting ever since finishin...

I've jumped on this whole use-a-ladder-as-decoration train. I can't really think of anything else to say about that. It's a ladder. It was a birthday present from my grandma. It's in my bathroom. It's got towels on it. Maybe sometime I'll climb it?

Not a lot to say today -- I'm exhausted. We had a busy day giving Clyde a bath, going on a run, making cupcakes, and attending a party at a friend's house. Clyde got to go the party with us, and though he wowed everyone with his newly-clean self, he's exhausted, too. Here he is, post-bath but pre-party:

FLOWER DEATH. I went over to look at my new flower today, and it was GONE. Not just gone, like it withered and died or fell off, but BEHEADED. I'm guessing the deer decided this kind of flower was particularly delicious? Either that or my neighbors are jealous. 

Way back in early spring, when the Mother Nature in me was all aflutter with the need to bring forth life from the newly-woken dirt, I bought a flower mat from Fab.com or Joss & Main or one of those other sites that try to make you think you can do things like plant flowers or be fashionable or make your living room look like a refurbished barn. It took a good six weeks to arrive, and by that point, as you know, I was already preeeetty busy with my burgeoning strawberry crop. It's just a lot of work to dig up a plot for six feet of flower mats, you know? And the package said you had to water them EVERY day for 4 weeks. What am I, a stay-at-home gardner? So the package sat in the garage for a month or two. At some point in July I decided I should make some use of it, but I wanted to do so in the laziest way possible. This translated to me ripping off a 1 sq ft section of the mat (I say that like I measured...I didn't. I just ripped a piece off) and sticking some dirt on ...

My friend Stephanie has been leaving Clyde drawings on weekends when she dog sits. They have a certain Le Petit Prince quality to them. I like them. I like picturing Clyde as a dapper French gent who rides his bicycle to pick up baguettes. In honor of that and my French nostalgia, I'm going to write this post in French. Do not expect it to make much sense (even if you speak French), do not expect the right conjugations, and do not expect me to actually put the effort into figuring out how to do the right accents or other symbols in Blogger. J'ai commencé a écrire en français, mais c'est évident que j'ai oublié toute (tous? tout?) les petite choses q'on doit connais quand on écrire en français. Mais Blogger est plus intelligent que j'ai pensé, et il comprend que je utilise une autre langue. Je pense que Mme Campos, Mlle Tynes, et Monsieur Gilman seront triste si ils liraient ça. Le conditionnel? Le futur? J'ai oublié tout. Mlle Tynes était ma prof...

You know what really sucks? When you freeze your free cookies from the Cookie Council because you want to keep yourself from eating them all at once, but then you want a cookie, and you have to wait for it to thaw out. That really sucks. P.S. This is a cookie with a bat on it.

Can I tell you how much I hate conference calls? I hate them. But the sad thing is that I'm getting used to them. And secretly maybe I don't mind them much anymore. It's kinda like how I became a marketer without really realizing it was happening. Life, man. In fact, I might dare to say I'm becoming quite adept at conference calls. You'd better watch out. I'll conference ya.  Not really. I'd rather not. 

We spent the day at Ft. Harrison today, hiking some of the trails. Somewhere around mile 6 I lost quite a bit of my motivation. It's hard to keep up with these guys sometimes. And honestly, sometimes I just want to look around a bit and enjoy myself and not have to worry so much about watching the ground so I don't trip.  Here the guys are getting ahead of me.  And here they are getting even more ahead of me.  Whatever. But then we went to dinner at the Loft at Trader's Point Creamery. It was delicious, but I think I was more in love with the location, and the fact that we went there just as the sunlight was starting to slant sideways over the fields. It was beautiful. But the ice cream didn't hurt anything, either. 

Busy day today. Lots of goats. And some cockroach races.  And some silk worms.  Here are some facts about silk worms for you:  They are one of the world's most genetically modified creatures.  The kids do all the eating. Once they spin their silk cocoons and become adults, they don't really have mouth parts, so they die in two weeks.  Manufacturing silk usually means you have to kill the silkworm inside the cocoon. Otherwise, when they break free, they release an enzyme that destroys the silk. So basically when you're wearing silk, you're wearing the product of death.  Silk moths cannot fly. Anyway. I also met this sad bunny. And some crazy dancing musicians.  Then the day ended with some Ryne-sitting.  We ate bananas and sang Les Mis songs. Kinda tired now. Sorry for the sentence fragments. 

Today was my boss's last day. That's his head over by the skull on the wall. I thought he'd left already, but then I heard the tell-tale thwack, thwack, thwack of the tennis ball that, to be honest, has made me want to slam my head into the wall more than once in the past. Now I'm going to miss it. But he's on to greener pastures. Don't mind the crazy eyeballs -- that's a remnant of a day when my team was excessively tired and burnt out, and I couldn't do much about it.  I decided this week to track my happiness level every day. There's a side to me that gets some kind of strange joy out of putting charts and stats to stuff -- the more ridiculous, the better. That's why when I used to have an analyst on my team we ended up keeping a spreadsheet of M&M data and asking ourselves questions like, "How many Nilla Wafers would it take to fill up my office?"(Answer: 459,526 cookies at a cost of $25,469, if you're buying 2,02...

It's been a long, busy, and stressful week, and today was a long day. My team held their first Fall Fashion blogger event, and they did an awesome job -- with very little help from me, besides my saying, "Sure, you can spend that money!" and "That's a good idea! Go for it!" With a pretty small budget, they turned our boring, concrete-floored fitness room into some kind of stylish girl-club, complete with DIY'd chandeliers and scarf-wrapped pillows. We had fancy snacks... products for people to buy at a special discount... and lots of sunglasses.  There were stations set up around the room where guests could DIY a pair of sunglasses to take home, get their makeup done, do a video interview for our blogs, or do a photo shoot with our photographer.  If I were a blogger, I would have been pretty excited. I was pretty excited anyway, but that was mostly because it's nice to see my team's hard work pay off, and they...

What is it about people wanting to celebrate holidays early? Christmas lights up in October, Valentines' candy a week after New Year's, pumpkins in August? I know stores are just trying to take advantage of buying patterns, but we must be egging them on. We must be buying. And I gotta admit, I kinda wanted to buy a pumpkin. I definitely wanted to buy the pumpkin pie I saw when I walked inside.  Maybe it's that we love the holidays. Maybe it's that we're so desperate for fall air and harvest smells after the hot days of summer that we just can't wait. I was just saying last week that I was excited for it to get a bit cooler, which I know I'll regret saying once Indiana does it's typical quick dive to frigid temps and stays there FOREVER. I think really we just get bored and like a change. It's a fresh start. It's something new. Who doesn't like breaking out of the everyday doldrums? But I didn't buy a pumpkin. 

Before... And after.  Surprise birthday party for a friend. The Melting Pot probably hates us now. 

It's my boss's last week at our company, so we had a goodbye lunch for him today. I had to say a few things to the group, which always makes me nervous, even though it was short and pretty simple. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but if I have any time to think about how I have to talk to a group, I get nervous. Doesn't matter what it is. But it went well, and everybody laughed, and then we ate cake. What more can you ask for? 

One baby picture today... And one picture of a gigantic daddy long legs. This guy I didn't mind, but otherwise it's been a bad week for me and the insect/arachnid world. The mosquito bites I mentioned earlier this week continued to accumulate, and now I have some spider bites to complement the collection. And today I seriously angered some ants and some bees. I didn't think these were the kind of ants that bit, but apparently I was wrong. Listen, ants, my grandma gave me some plants and told me to plant them around the mailbox. I'm sorry you apparently had an ant colony there, but now you get to have an ant colony around some day lilies. It'll be fine. Calm down. Then I was trying to wash out the coolers when I saw a bee about to crawl into a hole between two landscaping bricks. Since I had a hose in my hand, of course I thought, "I'm going to kill that bee with this hose. Take that, bee!" So I pulverize the bee. Then another bee lands on...

The official pic of the day is the one at the very end of this post, but I took so many today that I couldn't help adding a bunch. We were up at the lake this weekend for family pictures, and there were three babies around, which led everyone to act like a bunch of goobers. Including me. But they're all pretty cute. So I'm sorry for the explosion of baby pictures about to come. This is about 1/10th of what I actually took. My cousin's baby Everett (3 months old), my grandma, Ryne (almost 6 months now), and my mom.  Everett looks a lot like his dad. Silly kid didn't want to go to sleep. Later in the afternoon, Grandpa decided to take the babies on a golf cart ride, so they each got to sit in Grandma's lap and go up the street. Sunday I went on my own golf cart ride, since apparently when you're thirty your Grandpa doesn't think it's necessary to take you on golf cart rides, too.  I was afraid pictures were going to be ...