Category: Daily Life

This is one of those trips where I can already tell I’m going to forget something vital. I have the packing checklist in front of me, so let’s hope that carries me through.

I hope I don’t have a repeat of my Jamaica experience, where I managed to hide my sunglasses and contact lens case in my luggage so thoroughly that I ended up buying both items at a premium when I got there.

Speaking of losing things, yesterday I had to go to Nordstrom to re-buy my favorite bra, which I have somehow lost. It vanished around the time of the great clean-out, and my fear is that it may have made its way into one of the clothing donation bags. However, now that I’ve spent $75 buying another one, I suspect the original one will turn up promptly.

I printed all my cards yesterday. 150 of them are recipe cards with my contact information on the reverse. The other 200 are regular business cards. I have company business cards, too. Since I doubt I’ll manage to meet more than 400 people, I imagine I have plenty.

Amazon keeps bringing me goodies, so I’ll have stuff to read on the plane. I’m pretty sure I’ll even have my copies of "Sleep is for the Weak" before I leave, so I can spent the weekend stalkerishly pursuing the contributors for autographs. Also on my autograph stalking list, Suzanne Reisman, who’s debuting "Off the Beaten (Subway) Track" at the conference.

I’m not thrilled with the breadth of my clothing options for the conference, but I think I’m going to keep things casual. I’d considered dressing up for Saturday evening’s cocktail party, but I don’t have anything decent to wear and I really don’t feel like exposing my fish-belly-white legs in a dress. Perhaps I’ll wear jeans and sandals instead of jeans and sneakers. That’s dressy, right?

Okay, enough thinking out loud. This will be my last post here until Monday, but I’ll be on Twitter all weekend. Later, folks!

Update: 7:50 p.m. I found the damned bra under a comforter on the folding table in my laundry room. D’ya think I could have looked there before I spent $80? Heavy sigh.

Yes, my car did turn 100,000 miles recently, but I’m talking about my personal odometer. Today is my birthday!

I have the day off from work, but I don’t have a lot of festivities planned today, except for dinner with my husband. He won’t even wake up up for four or five more hours, so I have plenty of time to run errands this morning.

Right now I’m in the waiting room of my car dealer’s service center waiting for an oil change and miscellaneous maintenance. I love them for having wi-fi for their customers.

Yesterday I went to a mall with my sister and started buying clothes to take to BlogHer. Yes, I actually now own two tops that did not come from an online t-shirt shop.

I got this hoodie, but in green. It was on sale for $7.50! Maybe I should have gotten some other colors, too.

I actually picked out this top on my own. I spotted it in the store window and went in looking for it.

My sister also twisted my arm and made me get a tankini/board shorts swimsuit that fits and
is age- and physique-appropriate. It was expensive, but considering
that I haven’t bought a swimsuit in the past eight or nine years, I
think I had some budget stored up. Now I’m poised and ready to go swimming as soon as someone invites me.

Buoyed by my shopping success, I’m planning on shopping for jeans today, and maybe some shoes. I wish I could kidnap my sister and make her come with me again, but unfortunately she has to work all day.

I’m looking forward to my birthday party on Friday. We’ll be watching Spiderman 3 with Rifftrax and, of course, drinking exotic martinis.

Thank you to everyone who has sent me a "happy birthday" greeting via e-mail, Twitter and Facebook. I feel so popular! Now I’m off to enjoy the rest of my birthday doing whatever I feel like doing for the rest of the day.

The thing I like least about summertime is how difficult it is to find a comfortable room temperature.

My office is miserably cold. I sit at my desk wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt with a short-sleeved t-shirt over it and a hoodie over that. I also wrap a fleece blanket around my jeans-clad waist and legs. Even so, I have to stop working periodically to tuck my frozen hands into my armpits for warmth. It’s a horrible environment for trying to concentrate and work.

I try to keep the temperature at home around 75 degrees Fahrenheit. That was working out fine until we had our annual air conditioner breakdown. You may recall the previous installments in 2006 and 2007.

I noticed last night that it seemed rather warm in the house. A few moments of observation revealed that the unit outside was running but the fan was not. I guess I can take some consolation from the knowledge that it’s a new problem.

Just for the record, I’m completely sure the A/C problems aren’t my fault this time. I’ve been changing the filters like clockwork.

I slept with the windows open and the attic fan on, but it was awfully muggy and warm anyway. That made for a short sleep, especially combined with the fact that the cats always get all riled up when the windows are open.

It’s too early to call our repair guy, so I guess I’ll go down into the sauna and get all bundled up for work. I think I need to move somewhere temperate…

For once, I didn’t have anything planned last night, so my husband arranged for us to go to dinner and a free movie premiere with a couple we know.

They’d received the movie passes while attending a performance of what they described as "the most awful Journey tribute band ever." Oddly, the name of the film wasn’t printed on the passes, but I could tell what it was once I saw the artwork.

The movie was The Rocker, starring Rainn Wilson, a.k.a. Dwight from "The Office." My husband and I had seen the trailer, so we were already looking forward to it.

We noticed a bunch of drumsticks next to the theater door as we walked in, and the PR rep said they were for the movie’s MySpace friends. Before the movie started, it was announced that there would be additional free premiere viewing opportunities between now and the opening date of July 30th for MySpace friends and Facebook fans. I thought that was a pretty impressive commitment to social media promotion.

The movie has a great cast that includes Christina Applegate, Jeff Garlin, Howard Hesseman, Jane Lynch and a bunch of young ‘uns who are probably very popular with people a couple of generations behind me. There’s also a scene with Demetri Martin as a video director that makes me laugh to myself just thinking of it.

If you like rock comedies, you should enjoy this one. It contains some nice homages to This Is Spinal Tap, Almost Famous, That Thing You Do and other notable rock band movies that preceded it.

The only annoying thing about the premiere experience was being required to surrender my cell phone before I entered the theater. I’ve had that happen at premieres before, but usually there’s some kind of claim ticket involved. This time around, I felt lucky to get my phone back at all afterward as members of the audience basically had to pick through the bagged phones and find their own. Bad, bad planning.

Still, I enjoyed the movie and I’d even see it again once it comes out. Or maybe I’ll catch another free premiere first, seeing as I’m now connected to it on MySpace and Facebook…

Can you believe we do this every few years?

I think we could have filled it to the top if we’d persisted for another week, but there’s a limit to how long I’m willing to have an unsightly dumpster blocking half of our driveway.

It really made me think about the unnecessary things we buy. I hope it’ll make me pause the next time I start to reach for something stupid on a store shelf.

We also have five trash bags stuffed with clothes and housewares that will be going out for a charity pickup on Friday. After that, all I need to do is file some stuff in my home office and I’ll be done. Done, I say!

The feng shui is so improved in this place, I could swear there are dragons doing cartwheels in every room. We like that – it entertains the cats.

I need to spend the morning re-dyeing the blue highlights in my hair, so I don’t have time for a full post. Thus, here’s a photo from Saturday of my nephew looking at calves.

It was a day filled with delicious snacks and fun activities. For a three-year-old, my nephew did very well with all the waiting in lines.

Here he is goofing around with his big sister while we waited for ice cream:

Thanks for a great day, kids!

Where did I hear that George Carlin had died? Twitter. How did I find out that the Phoenix lander had found ice on Mars? Twitter again.

Twitter is where I hear about all kinds of interesting things these days. I also use it to follow my local weather and get wind of online PR debacles as they’re happening.

What’s the trade-off? Television.

I first started cutting back on TV watching during the writers’ strike. Then our ancient TiVo died. By the time it was replaced with a notably inferior Time-Warner DVR, I was having trouble coming up with more than a handful of shows I wanted to program in.

Last week, the new DVR stopped working and I haven’t turned on the TV again since I noticed. Did we try to fix it? Nah, not yet. We’ve been too busy making music, hanging out with friends and cleaning the house. In that time, I also caught up on all my RSS feeds, read two books, spent an afternoon on a dairy farm with my niece and nephew, and went out boating and swimming in a lake.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m certainly not giving up television. In fact, I want to be sure we have a working DVR by the time Burn Notice comes back on, and I also need to catch up on episodes of Kathy Griffin. Still, TV plays much less of a role in my life now than it ever has. I spend most of my free time online or, you know, actually doing things.

I have a strong feeling that this trend is going to continue. I can envision eventually watching all my favorite shows online and dropping our cable TV subscription altogether.

How about you?

I’m sitting in my office with all the windows open and it’s so wonderful that I’d be tempted to stay here all day if I didn’t have so much fun stuff planned.

First on today’s agenda, after a quick meetup at Panera so XO‘s daughter can buy my old phone, is a trip to my sister’s house to pick up my niece and nephew. We’re taking a road trip to Shatto Dairy for their Family Day at the Farm. I’ll be taking lots of photos.

After that, there was talk of going out to Longview Lake on my brother-in-law’s boat. I’m not a fan of exposing my pallid flesh to UV rays, but I’ll bring a swimsuit and sunscreen just in case I decide to go. Lake water is much friendlier than pool water on the hard-to-maintain midnight blue highlights in my hair, so I kind of hate to pass up an opportunity to swim that isn’t going to ruin my color.

On Sunday, the cover band has its first practice in several weeks. We have yet another lead guitarist coming with 10+ songs prepared, so we’re hoping to stay on track. I’m going to grill hot dogs and hamburgers to feed everyone in the hope of making it as long a practice and meeting as possible.

In between scheduled activities, the Great House Cleanout continues. I decided to keep the dumpster for another week so as not to miss the opportunity to clean out down to the level of the junk drawers in the kitchen. We’ve lined up our usual construction guy to start the guest room remodel soon, so that room is up for merciless de-junking as well.

So that’s my weekend, to the best of my foreknowledge. What are you planning?

I’m spared the necessity of writing something new this morning because you can find me elsewhere in the blogosphere today.

For starters, one of my flea market photos made it onto The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

Then there’s my new gig at MidLifeBloggers, writing about continuing my rock and roll hobby despite the fact that I certainly ain’t getting any younger.

In case you’re questioning the "midlife" part (and if you are, thank you so very much!), it’s probably because I’ve never been particularly forthcoming about my age here. When I started the blog, I described myself as "thirty-something" on my About page. Then I turned forty and quietly removed the inaccurate copy. Denial? Oh, a tad.

However, I’ll be turning 41 in a few weeks and I’m tired of being evasive about it. I never plan on actually growing up, so what difference does the number make?

Therefore, check out all of the great midlife bloggers that my friend ByJane has brought together and I’ll get back to writing new stuff next week.