I can explain!
Here's what happened first: (this is the unnecessarily verbose/whiney I Gotta Vent portion, so you've been forewarned)
I get home from work a couple weeks ago to find my internet out. No matter how many times I jiggled the cable and reset, unplugged, and sweet-talked the modem, that shit wasn't recovering for anything, save one little gasping green light on the end of the panel. Gave it a couple of days to reconfigure, to no avail, and then I resigned myself to being on the phone with Time Warner for a very long time. That part actually wasn't so bad. Mozart's
Turkish March is part of their hold repertoire, and hearing that piano piece always reminds me of my brother practicing in our old house and delivers the warm fuzzies (but I can't front, Deej, I totally spent the last half hour on Youtube figuring out what it was called. I had a vague idea that it was a Mozart piece, but that's it. I was this close to calling you up and pulling a, "here, I'll sing the tune in "doot doots' and you tell me what it is, okay?" Aren't you and your sleep proud of my resourcefulness?)
I had to take a half day off of work for the repair dude to come out, and of course OF COURSE the morning he was slated to arrive, I glanced down at the modem, and the little pisser had decided to fully light up again for the first time in a week. However, it was too late to cancel the appointment or get to work on time, so I chose to just wait for his arrival. Repair Dude was very nice about everything and replaced my modem anyway; the only thing he wasn't able to ascertain was whether or not anything was wonky with the actual cable outside of the house, which runs through my back patio door and up through my landlord's deck to the side of the house. Reason being? The Damn Dogs, who were supposed to be in the house. I had warned Landlord that Time Warner would need to get back there, but like many things I tell him, in one ear...I was unable to hunt down either him or his wife to force them inside, and of course I couldn't blame Repair Dude for not wanting to risk being around the animals--I can only imagine the war wounds from over-excitable/malicious dogs in their line of work. But the connection now seemed to be okay, so I felt okay about him leaving.
You probably know where this one's headed: A storm woke me up around 3 AM the following night, and I decided to putz around the web for a bit until I was sleepy again...only to find the connection once again out. Grrrrr! Argggh! Repair Dude had checked everything inside the house, so the problem obviously had to lie with the exterior length of cable he couldn't reach. When I got home from work later that night, I opened the door to my patio to go out and investigate and promptly stepped in a huge pile of shit.
Oh, that?
Yeah, did I forget to mention that Landlord lets both dogs freely crap wherever they want out there and picks up after them maybe once a month, at best? Two dogs + multiple poops a day = you get the unsavory visual. The fragrance has been enough to keep my windows firmly shut all summer. I know, it's completely unacceptable, and I should have voiced my discontent about this right off the bat--I hate that I am spineless around him when it's been evident for awhile that he'll only take advantage of my good nature and use it to perpetuate his own laziness. I guess on the one hand I feel like he already has a nagging wife (though startlingly, not quite nagging enough), and on the other, I am so close to being out of there that I figure I can just grin and bear most of the unpleasantness for another month and a half. The icing, though? When I finished cursing and wiping most of the shit off of my shoe and finally located where the cable snaked up the deck, it was clear that the dogs were responsible for that problem as well--the cord was almost completely chewed through and hanging by the thinnest of threads. Livid doesn't even begin to describe me at that point.
The cable is one thing, but the surrogate dog owner in me is actually more riled up. The dogs' makeshift bathroom is an enclosed area with no grass or toys for them to chew or expanse for them to run. In other parts of the country, they would call the property in back of a house a "yard," but everyone in NYC knows these concrete, postage-stamp sized things are not yards by a long shot. It's therefore not enough to just let the dogs out back several times a day in place of taking them on actual walks around the neighborhood. Yes, it is sometimes annoying, and I get it, I do: plentiful has the walk been with Mama where my eyes are crusted over with sleep, my hair a messy paintbrush, or even though I know very well that Cory just took her last night and it's technically my turn for the morning shift, I will slink further under the covers until he sighs and pulls on his shoes, (thank you, honey!) but it has to be done. And if Landlord's dogs are bored and toyless, of course they're going to act out and go for the most accessible objects to chew. It's up to him to discipline them and move unsafe items out of their reach or accept that his cables, fencing, and spare wood (yes, they've even been gnawing on freaking firewood) are going to be destroyed. I know that Landlord's dogs are fed and kept from the cold in the winter, but by my estimation, that's about all that's he's doing for them. It makes me incredibly pissed off and sad, but what can I really do?
Anyway, I eventually did--quite civilly--let him know how frustrated I was a couple nights ago after I made yet another appointment with Time Warner for this Saturday, and he apologized and accepted most of the responsibility (though he couldn't resist interjecting with a comment about the "laziness" of the cable company for not "running the wires right"---sure, dude, they're lazy). In the meantime, the connection has fizzled in and out with more "out," relegating me to my web stuff during work hours. I know, I know, life is hard--I can also check my email on my phone or go over and use Cor's wireless anytime I want, but the whole point of this here entry was partially to vent and partially to justify why I haven't rapped at ya for some time.
But guess what? There are also fun reasons keeping me at bay! Namely,
Travel: my ten year high school reunion two weekends ago far exceeded my expectations, and not at all because I got to pull the Elaine Hendrix moment I told myself I wanted for so many years. For those who haven't seen Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Elaine Hendrix plays a reformed cliquey girl who has since Made It Big in NYC and comes back for the reunion as a sleek, above the fray fashion editor for Vogue, quickly cutting her adversaries down to size.
God, I wanted to be her soo badly, unflattering haircut and all. While I wasn't Miss Popular, it wasn't like I had any tormentors in high school either, yet I still had this relentless need to impress my classmates. Never mind that my town is the type where you could come back with an Emmy in one hand and a Pulitzer in the other and 75 percent of the population would still yawn or ask if I was married and had any kids yet (though I suspect this is true no matter where you are)--I had something to prove, dammit! Thank God that urge disintegrated. I love living in Brooklyn, and I love my totally low-profile but fun job. Most of all, I love knowing that my successes and happiness in life can be tantamount to my classmates' for completely different reasons, and that's okay. I went back and did a lot of laughing, drinking (duh), and managed to reconnect with both friends and people I hadn't seen since graduation day, talking with some classmates for even the first time--and it was awesome. Bonus points for getting a ride home with the high school crush (who was a complete gentleman) and getting treated to late night mozzarella sticks at Denny's by another long lost friend. Dear Livonia, bless her name indeed.
Last weekend found me in Vermont for the very first time, equally fun. Colleen and I took the train to Bennington to meet up with Meghan, in town for her own ten year, and we spent the weekend tubing, trying not to barf on the Gravitron, petting animals, and clogging our arteries with fried Oreos at the Vermont State Fair. A pefect, lax way to usher out summer, especially considering all that is upcoming.
As mentioned, the lease on my new apartment was signed and the deposit check written (I only had to pay one month's rent in the form of security, thankfully) and I now have a little over a month to pack up my stuff and head westward one block. This shouldn't be terribly daunting, however, a few days ago I found out that along with subtracting a few days of packing for my already planned trip to San Francisco in a couple of weeks, I'll also be going...
Back to Germany!!!!!
Attending the fair this go-around was a complete surprise that I'll have to elaborate on later, but I'm really excited and once again thankful for the opportunity. I'll be gone October 12th through the 18th, which gives me just enough time to get back home and get my business in check. All of this, by the way, continuously revolves around dear broomball, birthdays, a wedding, and other crazy work stuff. I've never been a member of the "I'll sleep when I'm dead" camp, but what happens when you don't have much of a choice? All the predicaments of a lucky girl, to be sure (well, minus the internet crap, but you can't win them all).
Hi!
We're off to upstate New York for the remainder of the week. Thursday I'll be going to the Six Flags at Darien Lake for the first time in probably a decade, followed by my very first Phish show at the next door amphitheater. I'm a decade behind the times on that front too, not by accident. Cor was smart to promise roller coasters as incentive to attend this show, because aside from a slight curiosity about what it's like to attend a Phish concert purely from a sociological, "fly on the wall" perspective, I can't stand Phish's music. Hell to the NO would I otherwise be stuck there faux jamming and getting a contact high in hippieville (maybe that's the real problem--a lot of people have told me that you kind of have to be high to love a Phish show, but unlike my commendable alcohol tolerance, my threshold for The Pot has always been nonexistent. I get really paranoid and introspective and ultimately jut find a corner to fall asleep in; not a great scenario for a concert, especially one where endless anti cathartic jam music is featured.) But roller coasters! Roller coasters make everything better!
We finally took a team picture! Hurrah! Seeing us warms my heart like so much cheap, sticky bourbon. What an attractive bunch of adults! And believe it or not, we are first in the standings right now. Go, Pornies!
Snapped this in bed the other morning right after Mama gently reminded me, by way of licking my eyeball, that it was time to go to the park. The pandas seem to be a big hit with everyone we meet, most recently a dog named Duchess we sometimes see during off-leash hours whom Mama and I privately refer to as the "stage five clinger." Duchess is a one blue eyed, one brown eyed Border Collie with dark brown and white coloring who arbitrarily decided one day that Mama is the bee's knees.
