Four Years Ago Today...

Ah yes, it is our fourth wedding anniversary. The traditional 4th anniversary gifts are "fruit and flowers". I think Jac is pleased that we've gone more in the direction of the modern suggestion "appliances" and that means we now have matching MacBooks which are cute as can be.

We are going to celebrate a bit next weekend when we'll head to a resort in Maryland for pure R&R. The knitting will be eXtreme.

We're ready for Labor Day weekend at the river. Tomorrow's the big Farmer's Market and Christmas Countdown so that sounds like a mighty fine time.

I'm so glad that Jac asked Appi about her "red-haired girl friend" and that resulted in drunken complaining about tax morons which led to August 31, 2003 right here in the Northern Neck.

Part of Speech

You know where we stand on this by now. Carry a tape recorder around for the next 48 hours and see if you have committed any linguistic atrocities. The penalty will be doubled if you work as a politician, weathercaster, or radio voice talent and you commit atrocities in your own milieu.

foe ward, you ni nid, dep uh tee, en te pen ur, ek shtraw done airy, tempatur, contaversy

This has been a public service of the American Linguistics Agency.

Ted Turner Thinks You Are Weird

According to not one, but two authorities on Ted's Montana Grill's Unusual Service Policy: most people (lotta people) don't use butter with bread. This is why Ted's brings bare nekkid bread to your table if you ask for it.

And don't all you (2) vegans start getting all uppity on me now, we are talking about Ted's Frigging Montana Grill where the grilling that is happening is happening to bison. (What is the difference between bison and buffalo?) (p.p.s. A friggin animal brought back from the verge of extinction only to be brought to Ted's, grilled and served in a butter-free environment.) So there is hardly a horde of hungry animal friends beating a path to Ted's door. So, okay, perhaps Ted is right and Americans will shun butter brought uninvited to their tables. Clearly, Americans are picky eaters. Maybe they all prefer EVOO?? Well then Ted, I ask you, where the hell is the EVOO?

People: 1, Ditech: 0

Maybe Ditech is Dutch or something. Perhaps Ditech hails from a quaint little region in the Alps. Ditech clearly lives in a different world than I do.

Ditech: People are Smart.

That's very interesting Ditech, come along with me, the Ghost of Lifetime Present and I will show you all the marvels of smartness.

Fade in: Target
A surprisingly brilliant and attractive woman is in line behind another woman who has apparently purchased less than she thought she would. The woman unloads her items from her cart on to the conveyor and walks to the far end of the check out, leaving her cart behind. "Um, miss? You forgot your cart." She finally returns and retrieves it, though it was clear to cashier and shopper #2 that she planned to abandon it at the register. "People do that all the time," the cashier confirmed. So we live in a world that is so smart that people feel comfortable not only requiring someone else to drag their cart back to the front of the store for them, but also making it an immediate impediment to the next shopper being able to physically get through the line.

Fade in: CVS
Dear Lord. CVS. 832 people line up at one open register. The line winds through a row of Space Invaders-style barriers. The cashier calls for backup. One lone woman emerges from the back of the store and wanders up to a closed register. The line tenses. The second cashier emerges and goes right up to help Woman From the Back of the Store. 832 people plot the cutting customer's death.

Fade in: Best Buy - Hi, I'm Jill, Remember Me??
A fine, bright man is in line buying alarmingly drivelous music from a bygone era. The cashier hits "Pay by Check" instead of Credit. The correction requires the intervention of the Attorney General, six state Lieutenant Governors, and Conchita Alanzo. Since they all have to fly in going through TSA security, the resolution takes quite some time.

I am Your Jill: Listen to Me

A couple years ago, I remember hearing quite a bit about Best Buy's marketing efforts toward women. They even gave their target audience a name: Jill. Jill was a "busy suburban mom" who makes key buying decisions for the home, but who might feel intimidated by the big bad blue box store. So they tried to make nice with Jill.

Over the past few years, I've bought, sold, and built a few homes which has meant shopping for everything from countertops to sheets and I'm still astonished how little the market seems to get Jill, or me for that matter. I generally like the look of furniture at Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, West Elm, what have you, but $2800 for a loveseat? Seriously people.

So I branch out, I look for reasonably priced and attractive furniture elsewhere. Can we talk about overstuffed sofas with giant rolled arms here? Why does every piece of furniture in your average shop look like it came from the set of Roseanne or from the back lot of a studio unloading all of their falsely predictive "vision of the future in the year 1985" shows shot in 1970? Every few years, I'll see a big thing about Marlo (one of DC's largest furniture chains) doing a complete re-design and I'll drag myself and whoever is with me into that monstrosity. Once through those doors though, I am transported back in time and taste to a place where garish is grand and puffy is primo. And the damn puffy rolled-arm grainy black leather loveseat is still twice what I'd ever pay for it with a gun to my head.

And yes, thank God there is IKEA. But getting IKEA involves going to IKEA which is such an experience of colliding with humanity from which it takes so long to physically recover that the furniture will be out of date before I'm able to get out of bed and sit on it. And of course durability is a bit hit-or-miss at IKEA. And there is the fact that my house will be cordoned off by the EPA like Elliot's house in E.T. if I bring one more piece of laminate furniture into it.

So how about not hideous, durable and not requiring a lien on my molars? Anything? Good luck lady.

You may think I have already complained about everything - but I have not yet even touched the kitchen sink.

When we built our house in the country, the daughter of the builder was the one to walk us through the "optional upgrades" session. I walked in prepared to fend off outrageous upselling and stick my ground for "reasonable" choices. The daughter, who may have actually been a Jill, except for the whole living in the middle of nowhere thing - could not have wanted to get us out of the teensy upgrade room faster. Upgrade? That would mean she would have to do math. We'd say, "Oh how much would...?" and she'd interrupt, "Very expensive." So I left with pink cabinets and no flooring and figured we'd make up the difference in the future.

Welcome to the future. My house has gotten distinctly lived in this summer. Where bowls go has taken second fiddle to actual things that matter in the grand scheme, but the house is begging for a little something to help it along. I've never lived in a house with a two-bowl kitchen sink before, so I said go for it when it was offered in the building process. Put when you spend your Saturdays leafing through home magazines with enormous farmhouse kitchen sinks that the article claims the homeowners found for $20 at their local flea market, your paltry 8 inch deep dual basin baby doesn't seem so shiny. Also, I must be the queen of crusty cooking because I would like to soak everything and nothing fits because one big bowl has been split into two.

And yes, another thing. The homebuilder and his daughter were adamant that houses on a septic system should not have garbage disposals. Okay, I thought, I'll put one in when they're gone. But they installed a sink with a built in drain that eliminates the possibility of retro-fitting a disposal. Disposals are completely trivial and irrelevant in life until you do not have one. But when you are fishing shards of lettuce out of the drain for the seventh time that day, it might as well be morphine. I just want a disposal, is that so wrong?

So I have been on the quest for the perfect sink for an inordinately long time. The first thing you should know is that you should get the hell over this crazy notion you have that you can have any sink you want. It's not gonna happen. There. I said it. The truth is you pretty well stuck yourself with whatever sink you're gonna end up with when you took the tour of the house with the realtor and agreed to buy a house that had a kitchen that had a sink cabinet that was a mere 32 inches wide. And you thought closet space was important! Ha!

Let's say you want to be able to have some crap in one side of the sink and leave the other all nice and clean so you can wash your veggies and drain your pasta. Well, they can help you, sure. How does plastic sound? Oh, I mean acrylic. I haven't had a plastic sink since our Barbie Townhouse and I don't plan to start again now, thank you very very much. Let's say you want to be able to get the burnt brownie carcass off your standard 9x13 baking dish - I ask you: What the hell are you an effing giant? Who uses pans that large? Who do you think you are, friggin' Emeril???

But we have waited six weeks for a date with the plumber dammit and we are going to have a suitable replacement sink (and oh by the way faucet because you silly fool they go together) here, in this house, by Thursday morning. The clock is ticking, what am I doing spending precious online research time writing this Iliad blog entry for when there are sinks out there waiting to be rejected and scoffed at? Three bowls? Ha! What is this the Taj Mahal? One big sink - I am not a dishwashing Terminator. Sinks with coatings - yes, but for how long? Sinks that are hard - hard enough to fry an egg (or something like that dammit). Sinks that are stainless steel - yeah you and your brother Darryl and your other brother Darryl.

I think I might be coming unhinged.

Hinges: Aisle 18.

Jac and the Kubota

I need to reiterate, because I really cannot be too expressive or emphatic about this point that I hate hot. I do not enjoy it. Give me a 77 degree afternoon anytime. A crisp autumn 64 morning and I am in heaven. I can even handle quite a few 40 degree winter nights. But 96 with 80% humidity - FUFUFUFUFUFUFU. Why the hell do I live in Washington which is a swamp. It is so dreadful that theoretically the government shuts down but what actually happens is that the politicians leave and all the bureaucrats and contractors stuck here in August to figure out who will do what work in the next year.

This means that this is my Black Friday, my Tent Sale, my BOGO half off event. It's time for me to figure out how to creatively brand an artistic agency of the government one day and decide how to reform an IT process the next. It's sexy stuff people, I mean when you think Washington, you think sexy, don't you?

Anyway, we are thankfully at the river for a rest and when we arrived yesterday the parents were awaiting the delivery of their brand spankin' new tractor. But like your little brother with your Christmas morning train set, the moment that thing came off the trailer, Jac ran off to play with it first.

It's quite a site to see Jac out there bouncing around the front field. He loves new toys. He's out there right now whipping through the foot-tall brush. Why do I feel like the line "Thank God I'm a country boy!" is running through his head?

Posh & Becks

So I went to Posh DC last night at the invite of a friend and met her friends for Girls' Night. That brings me to traffic in Washington, but that is a whole other story. Anyway, we settled in, it turns out the place used to be BET on Jazz the very place where Jac and I had our second date and he pulled the John Cusack from Grosse Point Blank routine on me which I found oddly irresistible though I did not yet know that he had swiped his suaveness directly from that movie and that he had seen said movie with Luschnaya or whatever chick he was seeing at the time besides me. He was practice dating! Put if you are going to put moves on me, being John Cusack is an excellent place to start. But again, the digression.

We settled in for bottles of wine, a three course fixed price menu, some mini massages, some manicures and did I mention the wine. After dinner we had our faces read and apparently my face is an open book. Good times were had by all, the only thing that screwed up my night was the fact that I was crazy busy at work and had to dash home to change between work and dinner, then have dinner, then come home and work... until 3am. Luscious.

Lunching at Buenos Nachos

Ah, it's a weekend at the river. We've already hit the farmer's market and had our local celeb sighting of the day... We're short on celebs down here so the local land baron will have to do.

Moronblogging: the Restaurant File

Jac and I decided to get dinner at The Front Page in Ballston. We always like going there because we had our first date at TFP in DC. But this lonely lady walked in yelling into her phone and kept it up through the meal. Luscious.

Mobloggin' Fool

Mobloggin' Fool
Originally uploaded by lakat18

This is my first attempt to blog by phone. Cowabunga.

Really Not a Slacker

Coolest woman at Portland's Saturday Market

Jac says that a blog that is updated twice a month is no blog at all. I agree but oh so busy, soooo busy! In late June my mother was hospitalized, had emergency surgery, went through recovery-- which brings us to yesterday when they went back in to see if everything is okay - and we got the best possible prognosis. Now she just has to go back for another surgery and recover from that and she should be fit for duty. Whewwwwwww!

But that was a big part of the busy, and probably will be again before it's all over. And thankfully work has taken off, we are the belle of the fiscal year ball and so I've been dashing to client meetings, speaking at conferences and writing proposals 'til my eyes bleed.

And then, holy cow, my sister got MARRIED. Okay, well I do have five sisters. But this was a cool affair on the whole other coast. So I got to visit Portland, Oregon. Portland is beautiful. It is a great size city - not to big, not too small. The people were lovely. The architecture and culture are lovely. It's a bit difficult not to chuck it all and go live there. Fortunately our real estate history grounds me well enough at the two houses I already have. But hey, we can visit.

Um, and the yarn there? Wow! We made it to Knit Purl and Yarn Garden and were delighted by both. I could really just buy yarn all day long - except for that small budget issue. I have been knitting a strawberry and lime feather and fan wrap. It is luscious. It should be, I have frogged it twice and reknit significant portions several more times. If I get to the end of another row and discover I have 77 stitches instead of 80 one more time they may have to put me in a rubber room.

Rubber rooms are Drama #5, but that is a whole other story best recounted when the whole thing is over and we can just have a glass, er bottle of wine and laugh about the whole ah... ordeal.

Now I'm in the process of booking our trip to Savannah/Tybee. We went First Class to Portland and I gotta say, it can really ruin a girl for all other modes of travel. Don't get me wrong, aviation as an industry is still effed in the head, but it's more bearable when you have 3 extra inches of seat and a glass of wine in hand. I found that to be the case when we rolled out onto the tarmac and they immediately announced that we would be there for "at least" an hour. And we were, two in fact. Still, why the hell is it $822 a person to fly First Class to Savannah. It's not THAT far. So I am all about strategies for cheaper First Class flights - ever heard of Y-Ups? Maybe we'll try for a standby upgrade. Maybe we'll sell the cats and pillows. Who knows.

Marble Mouths

It's been entirely too long since I acted in my role as international designate of pronunciation of the language and arbiter of logic in the universe so here goes.

ST - sssst

THR - thrrrr

Can you see the Electric Company shadow head profile popping out and telling you how to pronounce these syllables? Really? Good. Because far too many people seem to think that ST is pronounced ShhhhhT and THR is just TH. I'm all for Army Strong, but the ads say Army SHHHTRONG. I'm watching the news and they're SHT this and SHT that. This is not German people.

And don't get me started about THR. The smartest, most wonderful man in the world, Jac, is just as Bubba as the president when he busts out with a "let's go thew the city". The president loves to "thow the ball" and "thow out the insurgents". I just hope he never goes noocyalar.