Why I am not a mother...in case anyone was curious

Happy belated Independence Day!

I hope everyone had a lovely 4th and woke up today not having blown any of their fingers off in an ill fated fire works extravaganza.

Personally all of my fingers and toes are accounted for as I did not not so much as hold a sparkler. But around 9:30 pm I did watch some really annoying people set off fireworks for about 30 seconds until I lost my temper and left the area squealing my tires for dramatic affect. I am so the Grinch that stole the 4th of July. But in my defense the jerks were setting off their fireworks no less than 3 feet from the bumper of my car. When they could have moved 10 feet to the left to a completely bare section of street and proceeded to blow shit up. Yeah, yeah I know California has some kind of law rendering all fireworks sold in the state to be practically...um...fireless. Literally. Still, with all the problems that my car has given me lately I was not going to leave my car in that spot risking some sort of firework induced damage.

I was also privy to an earlier fireworks display while the sun was still out (cause that makes sense people, but whatever) I was out on my balcony and looking down into this courtyard/pathway that is directly below me and there were some neighborhood children setting off fireworks in rather unsafe manners. Launching them off of the retaining wall, throwing them directly into the bushes (I am pretty sure the children drank some lead based paint prior to this activity), or waiting until people were walking past and lighting the fuse. I had a couple of options upon observing this.
1) I could have shaken my fist in the air while yelling about "darn kids" and "getting off my lawn" or 2) Knocked on their mother's door and made her a wear that while she was watching Oprah her children were playing with fire and possibly committing arson what with throwing lit fireworks in the landscaping. But I did neither of those things because a) I do not have a lawn nor am I ready to sound like the cranky old cat lady that terrorizes children. b) I'm not a snitch. The only action I took was going back in the house (damn it was hot outside) and figured that if they blew off an extremity they would learn not to play with explosives. I am all about life lessons people, especially the kind that leave permanent marks.

Do I really need my teeth?

In the long run I probably do need my teeth. However I seriously debated their importance this morning.

You guessed it, I just got back from a dental appointment. And I received some fairly bad news.


But first a little back story:

I have bad teeth I was born with bad teeth. I was actually born with some sort of defect that kept me from forming some of my adult teeth. Years of dental work later I am the proud owner of no less than two rather large bridges cemented into my lower jaw. I hate them with a passion. I have had them for about 7 years and they really have been nothing but a giant pain in my ass.

Fast forward to today:

One of the two bridges needs to be replaced. Mentally I am kissing my Christmas Bonus good bye. But also some of the cosmetic dentistry that are on my front teeth need to be redone plus I have a cavity and one tooth that will probably need a root canal down the road. As the dentist was pointing all this stuff out on the new fangled digital x-ray voo-doo magic thing they have I asked if he could just rip all my lower teeth out and fit me for dentures. I think he suppressed the urge to knock me up side the head and replied that unless I was a hockey player that he would not fit anyone under the age of 30 for prosthetic teeth.

Anyone know of a good hockey training facility (a.k.a ice rink (ring?)) in the greater Sacramento area? But more importantly do they make pink ice skates? Cause nothing says serious ass kicking girl hockey player like pretty pink skates.

Wal-Mart, Bars, and Photos....Oh My

So its back to business as usual today. I am looking forward to Wednesday. Not just because we get to celebrate our great Nation's Independence Day by grilling assorted meats and setting off fire works but because I get a paid day off in the middle of the week.

I do not currently have plans for the 4th but I am fairly sure it will not involve a bar-b-que. I foresee sleeping in and lots of Home and Garden Television.

Now for my weekend recap....

Friday after work I put in my time on the tread mill. Then Alicia begged me to keep her company while she drove out to call on one of her accounts. It just so happened that this account was an Indian Casino about 45 minutes out of Sacramento. I agreed and off we went. I figured while she was doing her work thing that I would park myself in front of a slot machine and maybe score a free cocktail or two. BUT! And this is a big BUT, they do not serve alcohol in the casino. So plan A went out the window. Yeah right, like I am going to sit there and pump money into that machine while no one serves me well drinks for the lovely price of free. I think not. I chose to enact plan B, I hovered while Alicia talked to official looking people and typed things into her computer. We ended up having dinner while we were there. Apparently this place is supposed to have a wonderful seafood buffet and it is a "must" if you are anywhere in the vicinity of this casino. Well I contend that it is a "must avoid". I was not impressed. Basically I had $25 single piece of sushi and garden salad dinner.

Saturday I spent a small fortune at the new 24 hour Super Wal-Mart. Word of advice if you have never been to a Super Wal-Mart...block off an entire afternoon if you plan to set foot through the sliding doors. The place is huge and they literally have everything that you could want. I was there for two hours but I do not feel like I utilized the superness of the Super Wal-Mart to its potential. Next time I go I plan to have my tires rotated, hair cut, taxes done, and grocery shop while I wait for my prescription to be filled.

Saturday night was a lot of fun. Alicia and I went to Crawdads Cantina. They advertise live music on Friday and Saturday nights. We got there a little early so that we had time to grab some dinner before the drinking and dancing officially started. Crawdads is a cool little place. It is located right on the river (I have no idea which one) and people with boats pull and dock to join the festivities. It was an interesting mix of people. Groups that you could tell had been on their boat all day in their flip flops and board shorts, people like Alicia and I eating and waiting to here some music, and there were two bachelorette parties.



The evening was filled with much dancing and much drinking, leading us to believe that it is not a little weird to take pictures like this:



Also we met a man with the largest hands I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, can you imagine how hard it is for him to find gloves?



Sunday I spent on my couch moaning and groaning about how I will never drink again.

It was a pimp grabbing, tank top wearing, rip roaring good time. Lets see if I can do it again this year...

WARNING! This is long. I ramble on for a while so perhaps you would like to take this time to grab a snack or use the bathroom before you begin. I'll wait.

And now, on with the show (blog? story?).

I am generally a non confrontational person. I try my hardest to avoid conflict. I have never been in a physical fight. But apparently the mixture of a biker rally, booze, and one camera toting pimp brings out my hostile side. Thank God that combination rarely occurs in nature.

Last year I went to Street Vibrations in Reno, Nevada. Once a year for a week or so every single biker in North America makes a stop in Reno for a little bit of partying. Naturally I was itching to throw myself directly in the middle of that. I went with a group of girlfriends, Shellee, Rose, and Alicia.

We made matching tank tops for the occasion (Yes, you read that correctly. Matching. Tank. Tops.). It was an inside joke amongst the group of us. They were teal with silver glitter letters directly across our boobs that read "Grand Gals" with rhinestone martini glasses on the lower left side and a rhinestone high heel on the back directly between our shoulder blades.

We're Grand and we're Gals, don't hate.

Basically the meaning of the shirts was a combination of slang we all use. Allow me to clarify......

"Gal" because:
We do not refer to each other by name, girl, friend, lady, or hey you, we call each other Gal. Like "Hey Gal, check this out:... or "Gal, I'm serious, you need to open the bottle of wine.".

"Grand" because:

Nothing is simply great, wonderful, fantastic, awesome, tubular...you get the point. It is "Grand". If used correctly a phrase using "grand" would look like this...."Gal, look at the guy over there, he is grand." (notice the use of "grand" and "gal" in the same breath) or " This wine is grand. Pour another glass."

We wore the shirts all day and night. The first half of the day several people stopped us asking what "Grand Gals" were. At first we told the truth. We explained that it was an inside joke. But as the day progressed and our alcohol intake increased we started making up stories. Eventually the standard story we gave people was that we are all patients of a plastic surgeon by the name of Doctor Grand. We all met in the waiting room of his office. We had the act down. People either belived us completely or they were too polite to point out that none of us looked like plastic surgery after photos. It was a lot of fun and it was a great conversation starter. Again I feel the need to clarify: Normally I would not wear a shirt that matched my group of friends however given the event, it was appropriate. Venders come from all over and set up shop promoting whatever it is they are selling. All the while wearing identical tops advertising their product, or bike shop, or tattoo parlor, yada yada. Essentially we looked like a group of girls promoting one of those things or our boobs as the shirts would suggest.

Look Ma! No hands!

For the most part the evening went really well. Drinking, laughing, talking. Just generally having a good time. Alicia pushed her limits on alcohol consumption and it was starting to affect her so we stepped out of the bar that we were currently gracing with out presence. Rose and Shellee decided to stay inside. While Alicia and I were taking a breather her stomach decided to protest and she ran to a neighboring doorway and proceeded to get sick. I was holding her hair back when I see a guy with a video camera cross the street and walk directly up to Alicia and begins to roll tape. Alicia is otherwise engaged at the moment and unable to express her distaste at being captured on video at this exact moment, so I step up. This is when "the guy" who is wearing a faux fur jacket in the middle of the summer, opens his mouth to narrate what he is filming.

::caution, explicit language.::

Me: Hey asshole. Turn the mother fucking camera off. (as I grab his arm and turn him the other direction)
Guy: Fuck you, keep your hands off me
Me: Well turn the camera off and I would not have to touch you.
Guy: Don't ever put your hands on me.
Me: Move it along fuck face. And turn the mother fucking camera off.
Guy: Bitch, don't touch me.

There are a few more rounds of conversation that sounds a lot like that...but then he busts out with this gem:

Guy: Do you like dick?

I pause not sure what to say. As I do not have any objection to the part of the male anatomy he is refering to, but somehow I didn't think it would work in my favor to express that.

Guy: There is a bowl of dick right there bitch, eat it.

I'm silent because at that point I honestly have nothing to say to that. Words have escaped me. Insult me, curse at me, shove me a little. But A. Bowl. Of. Dicks. How the hell do you follow that? At this point is when some haggard looking girl walks up and starts also yelling about a bowl of dicks. She even goes so far as to point to the ground where I guess she believes there to be a "blow of dicks". Still I am quiet and turn back to Alicia to make sure she is still okay.

He turns and walks the other way. Girl follows in tow. It was then that the group of scary looking biker guys walk up (mucho thanks for standing there watching this sweet looking "Grand Gal" confront the scary looking Reno local) and say that the guy was a pimp and that was one of his "hoes". To which I respond "Whatever, but why fake fur. If you own women you should own real fur."

The rest of the night was met with more fun, a KISS cover band and an obvious lack of faux fur wearing pimps. Good times.

My jugular is dangerously close to being ripped out by this guy, but notice that my drink is well out of harms way. Eminent death is no excuse for spillage.

I would like to say that I'm sorry for the profuse cursing in this entry but really I am not sure I could have made my point using a bunch of "screw yous" and "butt heads".

Was I that annoying?

Yesterday I was very good. I jumped on the tread mil after work and increased my speed from 3.0 to 3.1. That sounded like a small increase however at an incline of 6 I could really feel the burn.

To burn a few more calories I went to Alicia's to swim. We walk down to her pool and there were already people in it. We were more then slightly perturbed. But seeing as it is a community pool people from the community are technically allowed to be there. It does not matter how many times we call dibs.

Normally I would turn right around and wait until the occupants leave. But it was already after 9pm and I wanted to get to bed at a decent hour. So in we walk. The people in the pool consisted of a group of kids. But not kids like in the 6 to 10 year range. They were probably about 14. It was three girls and two boys. It took about two seconds of marinating in the hot tub to know that swimming was going to be an exercise in futility.

Tell me if this is a phenomenon that that you experienced as an adolescent girl, before you mastered the art of flirting? 80 percent of the time you were a normal human being scouring the latest issue of Big Bopper for pictures of your most recent heart throb and subsequently erecting a shrine to him in your bedroom. But as soon as you were faced with an actual real boy, a boy that you were to have social interaction with you lost your damn mind. All of a sudden you felt the urge to prance around, be as loud as you possibly could, and laugh at EVERYTHING. But I digress....

Well the three girls that were swimming last night were exactly like that only they cursed a lot more. And by "a lot" I literally mean every other word was the F bomb peppered with the N word every few seconds. I guess the saying is true you do in fact "learn something new everyday". I learned last night that you can have an entire conversation using only racial epithets.

Alicia and I did try to swim a few laps however that lasted all of about 5 minutes. Alicia was almost landed on when a cannon ball went a little hay-wire and I am fairly positive I was called "white bitch". Yes, I could have taken offense to that however the girl who said it was also white (not that it should make a difference, but I honestly did not know how to respond). I chose to take my "white bitch" ass out of the pool area before I was forced to drown a 6th grader.

I have plans to swim tonight and I am not afraid to pull the "I will tell your mother" card.

Monday again?

I was sick this weekend. I hate it when that happens. I am fairly certain that I had a summer cold. I am feeling better today, just in time for Monday, whatever stupid cold.

Recap for the weekend:

Friday night I went swimming with Alicia an Rose. Was drained of all energy by 9pm.

Saturday my parents brought me the entertainment center that had been sitting in their garage for two weeks. I was exhausted by the time they left and had to take a two hour nap. Rose woke me up and invited me to diner and a movie with a group of her friends. We saw 1408. It was a good movie, at least the little bit I actually saw. I'm not good with scary movies and spent the majority of the time with my fingers jammed in my ears and my eyes closed. So yes I paid $10 to sit in a theatre with a bunch of strangers to not watch a movie. But hey this accomplished two things 1) I got out of the house on a Saturday night and 2) I tried the TGIFridays Mint Mojito. It was hard to resist having more than one. But my sense of responsibility got the better of me.::sigh:: After the movie I was drained and went home to bed and slept until almost noon on Sunday.

That never happens. I feel like I've wasted half the day if I wake up at 9. I made it through most of the day but had to take a two hour nap at 4. I forced myself out of bed into the living room where I watched John Tucker Must Die and then went back to bed after taking two shots of Nyquil.

Goals for the week:

Work and swim all 5 days.

and

Not to watch The Simple Life Goes to Camp. I cannot help myself. I have watched every single episode this season. All it does is serve to piss me the hell off. Nicole is the only mildly entertaining thing on the show. And that is only because she taught 6 year old girls to throw up the middle finger.

Graduation

Awww look at the happy graduate posing with the Mayor of San Ramon (town her high school is located). And yes I do wish she would have trimmed her bangs a little, or removed her lip piercing or not stretched her ear lobes, BUT at least she has a high school diploma and no visible tattoos

I made it back folks....but I guess more importantly I made it out of the office on Wednesday without hurling a paperweight or a stapler. I did not even pelt anyone with paperclips as I bobbed and weaved towards the front door. (anticlimactic...I know)

My sister's graduation went off without a hitch. The drive down to my parents was a little perilous as I was petrified that one of my tires would blow out. However that did not keep me from doing 80 the whole way. I lost the battle with fast food and stopped for crispy chicken something or other that I ate while driving way too fast on very nearly bald tires.

Yesterday my father woke me up asking where my car keys were. This is not abnormal as my dad usually checks my oil and tops off my gas tank when I visit. My dad so rocks! But when he came home there was a brand new set of shiny black tires on my car! They are so pretty and will go with absolutely everything. Apparently my father and mother do not think that its acceptable to drive on tires without tread. They do not know the thrill a girl gets from the not knowing if one or all of her tires will blow out in the fast lane on I-5. My parents bought me the tires as an early birthday gift. I can honestly say that they could not have picked out a more perfect present.

After the unveiling of my tires my mother and I decided to take a little jog on the trail that is behind their house. My mother apparently has been training for some marathon and not told me about it. Because seriously she kicked my ass. My mother ran for miles and had to circle back around to make sure that her out of shape daughter had not collapsed. Realizing that my mother was in better shape than me brought up some mixed emotions. I was happy for my mother who, in her..um..er...well I won't reveal her age, has the endurance to run like that. I was sad for myself that I could not keep up. I just had to remind myself that I am working on it and getting in better shape. The tread mill and the swimming is paying off. I am losing weight and toning up. So eventually I'll be able to hold my own.