Author: sweettems

The Horror – My First Car was Not a Jeep

I’m a Jeep girl. I always wanted a Jeep or a convertible, even when I was little. My plan was to start working part-time once I turned 16 and use what I earned to buy a Sebring convertible. I would paint it a metal-flake blue that was more green in some lighting and more purple in others. But despite my pie-in-the-sky dreams, I was still practical; I planned to keep a pair of tennis shoes in the car to wear while driving instead of heels. Because of course I would be wearing heels. As a smart, independent, employed young woman, I would certainly be wearing heels.

But my plans were all for naught when I turned the big 16 and my father refused to let me obtain after-school employment. He insisted that school was my job and working elsewhere would affect my grades. I couldn’t work while in high school and that was final. My hopes of becoming a self-made career woman who drives a beautiful car were crushed.

I didn’t get my first car until my second year of college. I’d held jobs by then, of course, but I was able to use my parents’ Ford Escort when needed (until my brother [who was allowed to have a job at 16!!] crashed it into a ditch), and I lived on campus my first year at university. But by my second year I really needed a vehicle to get to and from my night job, my apartment, school, home, and anywhere else I needed to go. My mom said she would buy me one, and because of this, Dad said he would.

I wanted a Jeep Cherokee. I read about them, researched them (they are safe!), and looked around for used Cherokees in the area. But alas, my first car was a Ford, not a Jeep.

As I said, I am a practical person, and I looked around for a suitable used vehicle out of all those available, not just Jeeps. Giant Husband (then Giant Boyfriend) and I found a nice Buick Regal that fit the bill, and test-drove it home to show my dad. He said it idled hard. Dad brought home a little Geo hatchback of some sort to show me. I hated it. A four-banger? No way. That wouldn’t even make it up the hill to my university! Dad thought I would like the lace an apparently-cutesy past owner had glued to the dashboard cover. I was not amused.

In the end, Dad said he was sick of looking (after two cars? when he looked for the perfect truck for years??), and suggested a 1993 Ford Thunderbird. Powder blue. I was interested in the Cherokee that happened to be on the same lot, but no dice. So my dad laid down money and we brought the T-bird home.

Thunderbirds can be pretty cool cars. The old ones are gorgeous, the newer ones with the little round windows are fun, but the years in between… well, let’s just say the 90s were a little bland sedan-wise. I lucked out on the pretty paint job at least, though the boa constrictor seatbelt in the door took some getting used to. And there was definitely a learning curve to parking the blue behemoth compared to the little Escort I had driven in the past.

However, I gained an enormous amount of independence by having my own car. I could go places. Do things. I didn’t have to wait to borrow the Escort or ask Giant Boyfriend to escort me around. No more escorts! It was great. I celebrated by independently taking my own damn self into town where I took my sweet time staring at TVs at the mall, actually listening to the salesperson’s spiel, and buying the extended warranty along with my little TV/DVD combo purchase. I had wanted a car. I had wanted a television. This was awesome.

My mom was coming out of the house when I arrived home and saw me pulling the TV box out of the car’s backseat. She asked me if the TV was for Dad. For Dad? We had several televisions in the house, including one just like the set I had bought in my parents’ bedroom, right next to Dad’s side of the bed. Mum told me that this TV had recently stopped working, and pointed out that Dad had just bought me a car…

So I walked right in and handed my happy-box-of-extended-warranty-television to my father. Because I’m nice like that. And appreciative. And as easily guilted as shit.

And that is my first car story. Highlights of my Ford T-bird ownership of ~3 years include:

  • Naming the car Moonshine but having to change it to Starlight as the other could refer to booze. Tsk tsk.
  • Enjoying the rollercoaster ride of driving between home and university on the freeway as the struts wore out.
  • Racing Giant Boyfriend along the way.
  • I swear that car drove best at 90 MPH.
  • Winning a chance to win a bullet bike from a local radio station and having to drive back to uni-town after working overnight and subsequently falling asleep at the wheel for a second and waking up to driving over 100 MPH ~ luckily during an empty road and still on it.
  • Finding out that the oxygen sensor that needed to be replaced was relatively cheap. Then discovering it needed two of them.
  • Gaining a stripe of black paint across the door trim piece when someone decided he/she wanted to be in my lane. Right where I was driving in it.
  • Trying to get the incredibly heavy, back-wheel drive vehicle up the slanted apartment parking lot to the road in two feet of snow.
  • My dad always teasing me about the vehicle because my university’s mascot was also a Thunderbird. Did he by it for me on purpose?
  • Tapping the bumper of my rich roommate’s ginormous Escalade she had decided to leave behind my T-bird in a blizzard.
  • Giant Boyfriend fixing my alternator when it went out and subsequently dropping the part before getting it back in.
  • Having the car die in the middle of the lot at work, Giant Boyfriend (may have been Giant Fiancé then) and a good friend struggle to figure out why it wouldn’t start, and later finding out that it had an anti-theft device that had gone awry. The vehicle had originated from Vegas. Go figure.
  • Struggling to get out of the car after parking in regular-sized parking spots at school because of the dang obnoxious doors. That car had an impressive wingspan.
  • And having to wish it a sad farewell when I sold it. To buy a Jeep.

How to Take Pictures of a Chair

So back for Giant Husband’s birthday I reupholstered his favorite office chair. I could have bought a new one, but chairs that fit giant people comfortably can be hard to find. So I fixed it, and I think I did a pretty good job. So well in fact, that I thought I should take a picture of my handywork. But that led me to a bit of a conundrum – how does one take a good picture of a chair?

It would only make sense to take a picture of an office chair in an office, of course. But to even show that the chair was in our office would be to place it behind the desk, as per usual, but then it wouldn’t be seen. At least not all the well. So I thought in front of the fireplace might be nice.

 

But an office chair by a fireplace didn’t seem all that… Logical? Impressive? So I thought taking dragging the chair outside might be a better option.

 

Aw. Nice chair, pretty trees, some early autumn leaves. This was better. But not to be outdone (not that I know anyone who spends his time taking pictures of reupholstered office chairs, but you never know), I thought it could be a little more “artsy.”

 

Now we’re talking! But what about other chairs? I wouldn’t want my pal here to be lonely.

 

“Well hello there, deck chair. How are you this fine afternoon?”

 

“Oh.”

The Secret Lives of Chairs

 

Poor office chair. Three is a crowd.

Forever Alone Chair

 

And then I learned office chair’s true nature.

 

Never disagree with Mr. Chair. And yes, that is a PewDiePie reference.

They Found Me

This is how I feel right now, but instead of Libyans, it’s drag queens believe it or not.

Now, I don’t have a problem with drag queens. Live and let live. They’re not hurting anybody. I just have a problem with being lied to.

You see, I’m not that terrible of a seamstress, and I work on bridal gowns when I have the time. I love working in bridal. Despite the common consensus that all soon-to-be-married girls are total bridezillas, I seldom have a problem with them. And I love contributing to someone’s very special day. But on the other hand, I’ve had several men contact me about working on drag outfits. And this would be fine, too – if they actually said that. But instead they’ve lied to me, spam called me, randomly shown up at my home, and generally harassed me. And that just isn’t cool.

Of course I know not all drag queens are lying, harassing dill-holes, and I’m guessing their behavior is related to how they are treated in this oh so opened-minded state of Utah. I get it – one has to be careful here. But after my past experiences, I’m a little wary. So when I woke up today to find several emails through my website from “women with male friends,” I was a little wary. The Drag Queen Siege of 2009 is not something I’d like to go through again. Just saying.

Sock Mating

Just like any other piece of clothing, socks have to be washed unless you wish to be ostracized by all those around you. It’s a simple process:

1) You take off said dirty socks and toss them in the clothes hamper or some other random place, preferably where they can be found easily – like right in the middle of the living room floor.

2) When you’ve nothing clean left to wear besides old swimsuits and ugly Christmas sweaters, you, or the person who does your laundry for you if you’re a lucky bastard like Giant Husband, do the laundry.

3) Once the clothes are clean and dry (I’m not going to explain to you how to wash laundry) you mate the socks into pairs. These can be either matched or mismatched pairs, whichever is your preference. *Note: If you have more or less than two feet, or wear a different number of socks at a time for any other reason, please disregard this step.

4) You put the socks away in your drawer or wherever else it is that you keep clean socks.

See? It’s pretty damn easy. Unless, that is, the socks are inside-out.

Now on occasion I understand if a sock or two get turned wrong-side-out by the wearer in the action of pulling them off the feet. A couple socks to right per load of laundry = no harm done. But nearly every sock? Almost every stinking, disgusting, filthy sock?

I guess if you don’t mind whether your socks are wrong-side-out or right-side-in there really isn’t a problem. But around here we wear them the old-fashioned way. And if they don’t come out of the wash like that, then someone has to turn them so – and that someone is me. And I don’t like it.

The typical sock has a ribbed knit leg portion and a fuzzy inside foot portion. I don’t like the fuzzy portion, inside or outside. It gets… weird, and I don’t like to touch it. But in order to turn a sock right-side-in I have to touch it. I can handle one or two socks. Maybe even three. But ask me to stick my hand into more than that and I’m not going to be pleased. It’s a gross, fuzzy-yet-somehow-kind-of-stiff-and-not-at-all-enjoyable-like-other-fuzzy-things-feeling.

I don’t know why most of Giant Husband’s dirty socks have been wrong-side-out lately. I don’t think he’s changed the way he takes them off, and I don’t believe he’d purposely turn them that way just to annoy me. But I’ve told him I will not, cannot, mate his socks any more if he continues to leave them in such a horrifying state. A basket of clean, giant-sized inside-out socks has been sitting in the bedroom for over a week.

Vindictive Vomiting

I was making myself a sandwich when my cat started retching on the floor. I don’t like cat vomit. I mean – does anyone? And I really don’t like cleaning it up off of the carpet. Yetch. So I started chasing the darn animal around the house with a paper plate for which to catch the offending was-food-a-second-ago that my cat wanted out of his system. He stopped at the front door, and two things happened: 1) The cat simply decided not to hurl as he wasn’t over carpet anymore, and 2) I heard someone on the other side of the door. Apparently the FedEx guy had come by to drop off a package right at the moment I was loudly informing my cat that he was a little asshole, and if he puked on my floor I wasn’t going to give him tuna ever again.

I wonder if FedEx Dude realized I was talking to a cat, or if he assumed it was a mother yelling at her kid or something.

Now some would tell me not to get mad at my cat for upchucking in the house because no one likes to vomit and it’s not his fault. In general, I think that’s right. Well, except for bulimic humans, of course, and that’s a different issue (please seek help if you need it). But I’m not talking generally; I’m speaking about my cat. And this cat would vomit on purpose. He really would.

You see, my cat is a vindictive little jerk. Oh, cats can’t be vindictive or vengeful, you say? They don’t understand, you say? Catty Whampuss does.

Case in point:

Someone accidently trips Catty as he or she is walking by. Or, even yet, Catty, not being the smartest of the litter (at least I assume so – I didn’t really get to know any of his littermates), runs himself into a wall. This annoys him. And whether or not someone actually slighted him in any way, he accidently injured himself, or the universe decided to send gusts of air-conditioning right at his face just to piss him off because the universe it like that, Catty has to get revenge.

Now usually Catty will determine in his runaway little mind that it was one of the humans that contributed to his hurt or undoing. But at times he seems to know that it was his own fault, or he decides that he doesn’t want to bother with the two-leggers at the moment. When this is the case, Catty takes to one of his scratching posts, and feverishly tears it up. He has an angry, and he must get it out. When, however, he believes the humans are at fault, he has to take out his anger on them.

When this is the case, whether we’ve done anything to annoy him or not (and especially in the instances where he gets caught doing something he knows he shouldn’t and gets yelled at), Catty feels the need to maim us to teach us a lesson for questioning his cat-authority. This is usually in the form of trying to run past us soon after he has been provoked, and reaching out a claw (or four) to slash across our ankles as he rushes by. If the offending human happens to be sitting at the time, Catty will often scratch the person’s back through the slats in the chair, and even cling to him or her with his claws for a moment while giving a most satisfied meowl. (A meowl is a cross between a meow and a yowl. I just made it up. I should patent it.)

So yes, I do believe a cat can be vindictive – that he can feel put-off by someone or something and feel the need to seek revenge. I think animals have feelings too, and will act upon them. And I also believe that my cat can puke at will.

banister troll

Here is a picture of said cat trying to attack me through the stair banisters. I hope you like it. I got my finger ripped open for this.

Onions

Every day holds an opportunity to learn something new. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what work you do, your position in life – you have the ability to learn, grow, and adapt. You CAN teach an old dog new tricks, you CAN overcome great odds, and you CAN learn from your mistakes. Every single day is what you make of it.

And today I learned that putting chopped onion in the microwave will start a fire.

Uh Oh Nintendo

I just came across the International Geek Girl Pen Pals Club, and I totally had to sign up. I’m actually surprised I didn’t hear about the site sooner. But then, I’m not your typical geeky girl. I’m more of an 80s-cartoons, The Sims, and Fallout kind of geek. I likely would have been more of a gaming geek, had my mom not taken the Nintendo…

When I was maybe 10 or so, some of our cousins gave us their old NES and a couple games. My sibs and I had never had a gaming console, so even though it was pretty old by that time, it was quite a big deal to us. We LOVED it. If we weren’t jumping up and down with the Super Mario Bros, we were likely running in place with World Class Track Meet (that is, until my brothers figured out they could just sit on the floor and use their hands), or expressing our utter frustrations with the stupid whirlpools in Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival. Yeah. Those were our games. We also had good ol’ Duck Hunt, but Mum didn’t like that game much. I think you could also shoot skeets instead of ducks, but that didn’t matter.

In fact, Mum didn’t seem to like the Nintendo much at all. She had several rules about it, including not playing on Sunday WHATSOEVER. It sucked. A bunch of kids. At home most of the day except for the few (painful) hours of church. Too hot to go outside. And we couldn’t play our games. What else were we supposed to do on a Sunday? Get three-degree burns outside? Take turns mailing each other to India? Volunteer at a soup kitchen? (To this day, I don’t think there even is a soup kitchen within 40 miles of my hometown.) Since there really wasn’t much to do, we tended to just sleep, or fight. I hated Sundays.

And then the worst possible thing happened – our Mom got rid of the Nintendo. She didn’t put it aside for a while, or say we had to earn it back by being the perfectest of children. No. She simply just threw it out. I’m sure gamers everywhere are cringing and face-palming right now. If she hadn’t trashed it, it would probably still work today – those things were the Toyotas of the gaming world. But she did. And why?? She said we fought about it too much.

Now if that were the case, I could probably understand why she’d want to be rid of it. No one wants to deal with a horde of warmongering children. But that wasn’t true at all. We fought when we couldn’t play Nintendo (such as on Sunday, bloody Sunday), not when we were playing it. In fact, some of my best getting-along-with-the-sibs time involved that old NES. It was a family game. Even Dad tried to play it once or twice. (He didn’t get far – the whirlpools got him.) We actively played and watched the fun, (or relatively stupid) games as a team, and cheered each other on. Not one of us ever got to finish Super Mario Bros. Not a single one.

Sometime later, the same cousins offered us their old Sega Genesis, this time with SEVERAL games. Mum threw it out before we even got to attempt setting it up. The Genesis apparently involved fighting.

So that’s why I’m not much of a gaming geek. Not that I didn’t have the potential – I didn’t have the consol.

Butt Hurt

I’m not completely sure what “butt-hurt” means figuratively, but I’m speaking literally anyway. So my neighbor apparently didn’t like bicycling much, because he put a stationary bike out on the sidewalk with a big “free” sign taped to it. I’d kind of been wanting such a torture device (I have a little pedal cycle, but you have to sit on just the right chair to be able to use it, the tension constantly loosens, and the metal gets so hot I’m surprised the plastic parts haven’t melted yet), so I got my husband to snarf it.

I used it yesterday after attempting to douse the squeaky parts with sewing machine oil because I couldn’t find the WD40 in the garage and kept running into spider webs, which was really creeping me out (spider webs = there’s got to be a spider or two somewhere). In hindsight, it might have been the piecing screech the bike makes that prompted the neighbor to dispose of it. Maybe said neighbor wanted me to take the bike. Touché, neighbor.

So I cycled on the bike through two episodes of American Dad!, sweating like a pig and feeling pretty self-congratulatory for doing so. I also did some arm exercises with free-weights until it became too difficult to balance on the bike whenever the pedals got stuck, the wheel screeched to a halt, and my arms were out to my sides like I was trying to imitate a freaking bird. A very uncoordinated bird with heavy wings. Maybe an ostrich, or something like that.

I figured I had done pretty well for a first try. And though I knew my arms would probably hurt the next day, I was quite satisfied with my effort and told my passive aggressive body to go ahead, bring on the pain. But then I got to work this morning, sat down at my desk, and discovered that, although my arms were still just fine, sitting there in my not-too-bad-but-definitely-not-that-great office chair, my butt hurt.

No joke, it really hurt. And the worst part was that I didn’t know why. A mysterious ass-pain is no laughing matter. I searched my brain for a reason for such pain in such a strange place, and the only explanation that really came to mind suggested alien abductions and anal probes. I didn’t like that theory much. I really don’t care for aliens at all except for old Marvin. You know, the funny little Martian with the Romanesque helmet?

Anyway, I eventually (to my relief) figured out that it was the ear-splitting stationary bike that had caused my buttocks to protest every time I sat down. And though it’s not nearly as satisfying as the lovely pain in my arms that has since settled in, I figure my ass could probably use a workout too. So thanks, neighbor and little, blue bike, I now know what butt-hurt truly feels like.