Can I go outside and play instead?

I don't always like to go to the gym but I go; when I have to. And when I go I try to make the best of it. The gym is one of the two places I do most of my reading. I've read many a book on the elliptical machine there. In case you're wondering, the second place I do my reading is the bathtub. The bathtub is strictly for magazine reading though. No book reading in there. Lucky for me, Ann subscribes to Newsweek and although she was in San Diego the last year and is now in Hawaii, they still come here to Sunnyvale. And lucky for Ann, when I'm done reading her Newsweeks in the tub, I mail them off to her and she has the joy of receiving a parcel of crunchy magazines. Another way I make the best of my gym visits is to people watch. Not in a gawking kind of, I'm looking to try and pick someone up kind of way, but in a curious way. I look at the man with the tube socks pulled up past his knees and wonder if there's a medical reason for his socks being pulled up so high. I look at the older woman who's wearing shorts and pantyhose and wonder, "Are those therapeutic hose?" I look at the man on the elliptical machine next to me and wonder if that smell I keep smelling are his sneakers asking to be retired, or if he's gassy. I'm leaning towards gassy because I did see him one day with different sneakers on and yet the same smell seemed to periodically surround him, and unfortunately, me as well. I felt bad for him, thinking it must be tough having so much gas. I imagine he's pretty self conscious about it. I ponder the woman working out with an obscene amount of freshly applied makeup and wonder how much of a workout the gal on the stationary bike is getting while she's talking on her cell phone non-stop. Then there's the person who's gender I've been unable to discern. I do know I will never be as fast as s/he on the stairmaster but what I really want to know is if s/he's a man or a woman. I know it's really none of my business and it's of course not politically correct. Nonetheless, I fluctuate back and forth in my attempt to guess her/his gender. When I noticed a 5 o'clock shadow, I thought, man, but when I looked at her/his thighs, I thought, woman. When s/he was laying on the stretching mat next me, sweating through her/his white t-shirt and I saw breasts, I thought, woman. But when s/he was at the front counter talking to the attendant, the voice told me, man. I also wonder why there's a sign by the stretching mats that says, "Stretching and ab work not recommended here due to flying balls", and yet that is exactly where the gym owner has placed the stretching mats. They are located no other place in the gym. I will say I have never been hit by a flying racquetball ball while on the mats by the warning sign, but I have been hit in the head while on the elliptical machine and there are no warning signs there. In addition to the sights at the gym, there are the sounds. In particular, the sounds of grunting. I, in general, don't like to hear grunting in public, and especially at the gym. I think grunts are private sounds and they should be kept at home either in the bedroom or in the bathroom.

When is old enough?

I was talking to a friend, whose identity will remain anonymous, this morning just after she stepped out of the shower. She expressed great concern to me over the fact she thought she was losing her hair and had the beginning a little bald spot on the back of her head. Although more uncommon in women than men, I guess female pattern baldness is not unheard of. Although I think she may have been exaggerating and having what I call a premature stessulation, we began discussing various options for her 'problem'. We first discussed combing over. That's always a good option but we decided that would be a 2 person job. She would meticulously arrange her surrounding hair to either subtlety fill in her thin spot, or I thought she could do it in a more decorative manner, while her partner whips out a fresh bottle of Final Net from her handy hairspray holster and proceeds to spray the comb over in place. We thought this first option would take too much time in the morning and take away from her precious REM sleep. On to option two. We both liked the thought of that hair in a can stuff that you spray on but neither of us could think of the name to order it. Option three, ratting. It seems every older woman eventually starts ratting their hair. My aunt does, my grandmother does, and my mom does. I imagine part of the reason older women do this is to make it appear that they have more hair than they actually do. Maybe it's also to make their faces look smaller? If you've got big, ratted hair, in comparison, your face will look smaller. Also, if the focus and attention is on the marvelous job you did ratting that morning, people won't notice your new wrinkles. Sounds to me like a win, win, win situation. Now my question though is, at what age does one start ratting? Ann is 44. Is that old enough? Should she get her hair cut short and a perm first? It seems it's much easier to rat when you have short hair and a perm. Am I old enough now? I'm 36 but I will be 37 in 17 days. By the time I'm supposedly 'old enough', will I miss out because ratting has gone out of style or will ratting remain forever the classic, distinguished, older woman hairstyle of choice?

Watch what you say, or maybe how you say it

I have a yard. Actually, I have 2 yards; a front one and a back one. If you want to count my side yard where the scary, 'alien pod' mushrooms grow, you could say I have 3 yards. Having 3 yards has re-emphasized 2 things about me I suspected were true. One is, I'm a weed magnet. Now there's animal magnetism, there are magnetic personalities, and chick magnets. I call cute little dogs chick magnets. None of those are bad things and one might be envious to have, or be, any of those. But being a weed magnet? What's to envy? The weeds apparently, based on their actions, love me and desire to be as close to me and in as large of numbers as possible. The only reason they don't live in the house with me is because they like soil and I only on the rare occasion have garden soil in the house. While in my esteemed status as 'weed magnet', I have come to realize I am also 'queen of procrastinating'. I hope no one embarrassed themselves by going too fast and misreading that. Which reminds me of something else. While working in the photo department at Longs I interacted with many different customers. One of our regulars was Mr Didlo. I hope you didn't mispronounce his name in your head. As I said, he was a regular customer and dropped off photos fairly frequently. For some reason, whenever he handed me his claim ticket to retrieve his photos, he would write his name on the claim ticket as opposed to saying it out loud as most customers did. I never got used to his name. EVERY TIME I read it either on his claim ticket or photo envelope, I pronounced it wrong in my head. I had to stop myself from saying, "Thank you Mr. Didlo" because I was absolutely petrified I would mispronounce his name. "Sir" became a more acceptable substitution. Why did I remember that story again? Must have been something I saw at the Pride Festival today that reminded me. Ok. I've digressed, but it's my blog so I can do that. Back to my yard story. As I told a friend of mine, my personal recipe for doing yardwork consists of 90% procrastinating and thinking about, talking about, and telling my friends I'm doing yardwork, and 10% actually doing it. And throw in a little beer to that mix for good measure. I consider this my slow, kind of crock-potty way, which takes longer, but in the end is worth it. It's not that I'm lazy. It's just that I'll find anything else to do before I start what I really need to be doing. For example, yesterday, I really needed to finish my landscape plan for the backyard and move some plants around in preparation for my sprinkler and sod installation. Since I really needed to work in the backyard, I ended up going to Summer Winds Nursery to purchase new plants for the planting beds next to my front walkway. In my mind, I justified this front yard work by telling myself I would transplant the walkway border plants I was replacing, to the backyard. This also ended up not happening because in my 'out with the old, in with the new' excitement, I wasn't as gentle as I could have been removing 'the old'. The nice man at the nursery who helped me recommended a pretty blue ground cover who's name he said he couldn't remember. His co-worker either couldn't remember either or didn't want to say because he just pointed and said, "They're over there". The nice nursery man led me to the pretty blue ground cover, pointing, and saying, "This is the one I was talking about". I immediately misread the tag, mispronouncing the name of the groundcover in my head and thought that maybe both nursery men were also unsure of how to pronounce it's name or were afraid they would mispronounce it as well. My new ground cover is Lobelia.

Hello, I'm an ovary

It's about 9ish Friday morning when I stroll into work and walk down the hall to say good morning to my co-workers. I like to use the "ish" in an attempt to somewhat mask the actual time I saunter in. Technically, 9ish could be 9:59 since there is still a "9" on the hour hand. I did however arrive much earlier than 9:59 though. So I walk down the hall to find one co-worker in a meeting, another on the phone, and the final two that live at the end of the hall in a deep, meaningful, obviously work-related discussion. I chose to not interrupt their intense dialogue and proceeded to turn around to walk back to my desk. As I'm about a third of the way there, I hear one of my colleagues who was in the deep discussion, say in a voice several decibels louder than her library voice, "Hello, I'm an ovary". Sometimes you stop and pause and maybe ask for clarification, sometimes you just keep walking. I kept walking.

Tomorrow, I'm going to be an acorn.

The origin of 'boycott velcro' part 1

"I'll have one of those and two of those and one more of those". "This one?" "No, that one". "Oh, okay, this one?" "No! The one next to it". This is an example of the daily back and forth dialogue I would have with customers at the local mall cookie shop I worked at many, many years ago when I thought I liked serving the public. The problem I encountered on a daily basis consisted of the rather oblivious customer erroneously believing they could stand 7 feet away from the cookie counter and I would be able to tell which cookie they were pointing to. From that distance, it just didn't work. From that distance, it looked like they were pointing to all the varieties of cookies, not just one. Granted, it would be glorious to have one of each of the nine varieties, but most people didn't want that. They wanted their favorite, and perhaps another lucky person's favorite. The luck of that other person would of course would be dependent upon whether or not their favorite cookie survived the trip without accidently falling into the mouth of the person who bought it for them. I've never done that. I just imagine it could possibly happen. Anyway, back to the finger pointing. The problem was, from that distance, I couldn't tell what 'favorite' cookie they were pointing to. I had to teach many a customer that, yes, they could stand closer to the counter and they could even, without harm or admonishment, touch the glass when pointing the finger at their desired cookie(s). "Would you like anything to drink with that?" "Give me a soda". Or sometimes, depending on where they were from, soda would be pronounced, "sodie", or "sodor", which sounded like odor with an 's' at the beginning of it. Neither of those were really words but that was far from the only issue. First of all, what's the deal with, "give me"? Am I the only one that thinks that just sounds rude? Please, please, please, to all who may read this, when someone is waiting on you and asking what you would like, don't say, "give me", or "gimmee". We should have dropped that phrase when we learned those essential things without which we're never fully dressed. I call them manners. "I'll take", or "Can I have?" sound sooo much better. So aside from the 'gimmee' irritation, there was even more irritation to be found in that phrase. Do you know how many types of soda, sodie, or sodor, however you wish to pronounce it, there are? Invariably, I'd have to ask, "What kind of sodie would you like? We have......" And I'm thinking, "You can see the types of sodor we have right behind me and you probably have a favorite. Why the #*%~ (I do try to refrain from using gutter talk, but you know those symbols imply a naughty word. I don't have to spell it.) don't you just ask for a root beer if you always eat sugar cookies with root beer or a Sprite if that's the only beverage you'll drink? Why make my day that much more agonizing by making me say for the 20th time, "What kind of sodie?""

To be continued......
I do have a point. I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Do not try this at work

Anyone that knows me fairly well, knows that my all time favorite song is, "You're a Grand Old Flag". I'm sure I'm not alone in my fondness for this song. Anyway, yesterday at work, one of my co-workers was asking my opinion of new ringtones for her cell phone. She was torn between the Pink Panther theme song and the Looney Tunes song. I asked if they had "....Grand Old Flag" available as a ring tone. Now I've been considering upgrading my cell phone for some time but if I knew my phone could play "You're a Grand Old Flag" the one or two times a week my phone rings, well that would be enough to tip the balance from me contemplating upgrading to actually doing it. With the encouragement of my co-worker Denise, who was talking to me at my desk, I decided to do a Google search for my favorite song ringtone. I typed into the Google searchbar, "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "ringtones" After clicking on two of the search results with no success, I clicked on the third result. Third times a charm, right? Well after scrolling down an entire page of what appeared to be kiddie songs I finally find what I'm looking for. A link for a "You're a Grand Old Flag" ringtone. Or so I think. I click on the link, with Denise still standing behind me, I start to get that happy, excited feeling in anticipation of hearing my favorite song when I see on my computer many images of naked, bouncing women. I think they were bouncing. It could have been the waves of panic washing over me that made them appear to be bouncing. Now understand my desk, and thus my computer, are out in the open and my boss quite frequently sneaks up behind me. Not intentionally of course, he just walks quietly. In my panic of having naked bouncing women images on my computer screen, I immediately forgot how to operate my computer. Denise watched as my fingers frantically travelled back and forth in the air just above my keyboard at a total loss as to what key or keys to press to close this naughty window. I finally remembered what keystrokes closed the window and my fingers slid over those now wet keys from the sweat that dripped from my forehead on to them. Phew..Window closed. I'm safe. But I am wondering what happened. How in the world did clicking a link for "You're a Grand Old Flag" take me to a naughty web site. I'll have to try the Google search again tonight when I get home. For educational purposes only. Not so I can bookmark the site.

Faux denim polyester leisure suit with red stitching around the pockets

More about this later