Happy Birthday To ME!

Today is my birthday.

Whoo hoo!!

I'm not big on the birthday thing because of the presents but I am big on the whole "special day for me" thing. In fact, I generally make it into a "birthweek" so that I can treat myself for days and days. Actually, you might call it a necessity because of my birthday occuring around Thanksgiving, having multiple sets of parents and other friends and family scattered about the world. You could even say that it is really quite considerate of me to have a birthweek as it gives others so much more flexibility in when to call or get together "for my birthday."

Common birthweek activities may include indulging in hot tubs, saunas, champagne and chocolate, getting manicures (though not anymore as massage school has banished the existence of nails) and massages, going out to lunch or breakfast or dinner or all three on numerous occasions, skiing, ice skating, movie-going, hiking and other adventures. Of course, not all of these things at the same time or in the same birthweek.

This birthweek, in case anyone wants to stalk me, will include a birthday romp in the park with the World's Best Dog (aka Porky the Poochy, aka the Black Pearl, aka Pearl the Wonder Dog), lunch with my aunt, going to the gym, sweatin' in the sauna, champagne at the Benson and dinner at the Bombay Cricket Club. And that is just today. The rest of the week is a little murky but I know will include hours and hours and hours of driving (from Portland to Palm Desert, with a stop off in Penn Valley) - not the highlight - and then, hopefully, lounging at the pool, playing tennis and eating delictable yummies in the desert with my mammita and franko. I'm also hoping to work in a massage and possibly a hair cut. We shall see!

Happy Birthday to ME!

Bed slugs and more

As many of you may remember, I've been doing a massage school thing recently. I did one intensive session this summer (two months) and have another coming up this winter (three months) and in between the two I'm supposed to practice. In particular I need to do a series of four massages on strangers. Finding strangers who will let you rub their bodies is actually a bit of a challenge - particularly when you spend the majority of your fall house sitting in places where you don't know very many people. Thankfully my step-brother, Keith, was willing to offer up his girlfriend, Megan, and they came over Wednesday so I could give her a massage. Now, the room (my bedroom) in which I did the massage is somewhat cramped and required rearrangement of furniture, plants and so on to make enough space. In the process of moving around the plants I disrupted a slumbering beast. Hours later, when I was about to go to sleep, I discovered this beast slithering around boxes piled at the foot of my bed, with a shimmering slime trail leading back to one of the plants. Yes, my friends, I discovered a slug in my bedroom. Never a fan of slugs to start with I was moderately disgusted - one doesn't think of slugs as a household pest like mice, spiders or roaches - but I kept my wits about me and dispatched the creature into the depths of the toilet promptly. I then proceeded to have dreams about slugs crawling up through the pipes and emerging in great numbers from this same toilet, but that was probably just guilt at killing an innocent creature. Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed slugs bite.

In other random news -

* I saw Harry Potter and definitely thought it was great but was still disappointed because it wasn't as great as the book.

* I'm still working on my new year's resolution and doing fairly well. My resolution was to be able to do pull-ups. I've never been able to do pull-ups and that has always been frustrating because I like the idea of being able to do pull-ups. So I've been systematically working on the assisted-pull-up machine. When I started I needed 70 or 80 pounds of "assistance" (i.e. I was lifting my weight minus the 70 or 80 pounds) in order to do 3 sets of 10 or 12. I took a good six months off in the middle of the year (moving, India, massage school, scampering about the country) but what with a one-month membership to the club up here I've been working on it again. Now I'm doing 3 sets of 10 with only 40 pounds of assistance, which means I'm lifting about 70% of me weight. I realize I still have quite a ways to go but am optimistic that I'll be able to do at least a few pull-ups by February or so. I am going to try and see how many I can do with only 10 or 20 pounds of assistance at the end of December.

* I stuffed myself last night at our family's Thanksgiving gathering. Though I'm a vegetarian, there was no fear of me going hungry. There were yams, a yummy squash thing, salad, potatoes, pie, cornbread, and more.

* A week or so of unrelenting rain was followed by very gorgeous weather for almost two weeks. This has been replaced, in turn, by more icky rainy stuff. This time with a colder bite to it. Still my mantra remains: At Least It Isn't Snow. At Least It Isn't Snow. And besides, in a week or so I will be heading toward the desert of South East California.

There's other stuff that has been going on since my last post (nearly two weeks ago or something?) but I grow tired of the laptop that is hot and radiating my lap so that will be all for now.

Bushels of Bargain Booby Traps

(*I am definitely on some sort of alliteration kick - it might have something to do with some children's poetry I've been thinking about lately, but whatever the cause, if you find it too much... well... ummm... you're just gonna have to deal with it. Or not, bye bye.)

More frightening world of growned-uped-ness... I bought a bunch of booby traps today. In recent years I've started to lose patience with "foundation garments." They are expensive, often uncomfortable and I'm not exactly falling over with a massive bosom so they often seem a bit unneccessary. I also don't like to spend my time (or money) going to stores and dealing with the whole process of procuring the durn things. So, its been a while since I've bought a new brassiere. Like years. And years. I've gotten to the point where the bras I used to own have disappeared, fallen apart or no longer fit so I generally just go sans-booby trap or resort to one of many tank tops with those little built-in bra-lets. Actually those are my only two options. And it has been such a long time that despite knowing I need new booby traps, it is very easy to put it off until another day. That is sort of my method with most stuff like that. Its been 15 months since my last hair cut and I'm pretty busy this weekend (or I'd just rather go ride my bike or something), what's another 4 months??

This time it worked to my advantage. Fred Meyer (a local department store, supermarket, electronics, and more sorta store) is having a Veterans' Day Weekend sale. Buy two booby traps, get two booby traps for free! Now, who actually ever needs to buy four booby traps?? Im guessing more people are more along the lines of "I could use a new bra, why not get two and then get two more for free?" But me, I really did need multiple. Coulda gotten by with two or three, but four is probably about right. How many booby traps does the average woman have anyway?

So here I am, about to embark upon a new existence in which I am no longer a loose woman. Actually, I can't say I'll wear 'em every day, so maybe I'll still get to be an occasionally loose woman.

He he he.

Bogger Back in Business

Alliteration aside, blogger is back to working for me. It was doing this really great trick where I would write up an entire post and then as I hit "publish" the text would delete in that second before the post was published. I even tried to trick it by "editing" a post or "previewing" a post, but it still kept coming up empty.

But it is back and I forgive it for letting me down. I am too easy to placate... it didn't even say how beautiful I was or bring me flowers.

And boy has it been a busy little while since I was in the blogging realm.

I think I might now be a grown-up. Frightening, I know. Sure I've had a full-time permanent job (benefits and all), I've had apartments, I even have friends getting married - so many friends getting married - but I have crossed the line in the last few days. I have bought a car. Yes, friends, I am now the proud owner of a cute, shinny black 2-door Honda Civic. ("Very practical" is what most people say.) I did all the research into buying a car, called sellers, examined cars, took cars to mechanics to have them checked out, learned what one must do legally when buying a car (title, registration, insurance and so forth), negotiated prices and finally wrote a great big check and I did it pretty much on my own. In a lot of ways it seemed a bit like a new game with all sorts of rules and strategies to learn. And I won!! I won I won I won!!! I won a car, whoo hoo! Okay, I actually PAID for a car, but it sorta feels like I played this great big game and won this great big prize. Let's just hope the car works all right. So now I'm one step closer to being an official adult. Hmm... maybe I should go and do something irresponsible and juvenile to bring things back into balance??

I don't quite feel that it is real yet. This could be because I've not yet gotten straight with car insurance (so many choices!) and so can't drive it, but I also haven't gotten to tell people or mark the occasion really. All of my parents are in Mexico (the two sets didn't go together, they just happen to be in the country at the same time) so they know nothing of it and I don't have many friends out here in Oregon, so there isn't anyone to mark the event that way either. I'm hoping to get the insurance thing settled in the next day or two though and a good friend is driving down from Seattle tomorrow, so maybe it will feel real after that. Maybe I'll drive it to Monday Night Football with my step-brother next week as well.

I did take a beer out to the hot-tub that evening after the car was delivered. I sat relaxing and watched while the stars came out and the moon rose over the river. I was feeling so blessed to be in that moment when a shooting star dashed across the sky. It was downright portentous. It is so lovely, and incomparable, to be naked in water outside, particularly with moonshine (not THAT kind of moonshine!) around you. Each time it makes me realize that I don't get the chance to skinny dip nearly enough. Nice evening in the tub though it was, it wasn't exactly a, "Yeah, I just bought a car and I'm celebrating" sort of thing.

But right now I have a tuckered pooch snoring and dreaming (she is twitching all around) on my feet – she likes to be right up on you – so I think maybe I’ll shower her with some affection and worry about celebrations later. I think Brooke’s Boot Camp is too much for her!

Porky the Poochy

My parents doggie is a darling little black lab. More widely she is known as "Pearl" (aka "Pearl the Wonderdog" or "The Black Pearl") but I've taken to calling her "Porky the Poochy." She has tended in the past toward a stature more portly than lean and it seems that, as she was the primary walker, my step-mom Marsha's spill on the bicycle has had its affect upon Pearl as well. I arrived a little more than a week ago to find the cutie to have porked up quite a bit in the five or six weeks since I saw her last.

Thus we have begun a doggie boot camp. Unfortunately it has been raining constantly since I arrived - and not just a passing sprinkle, buckets and buckets of it - but I just tell myself, "It's better than snow, it's better than snow." And once you've resigned yourself to getting wet and brought along the proper supplies (hat, rain jacket, towels for the dog) it is really quite pleasant. The first day I took Pearl for a walk she was seriously lagging after only 10 or 15 minutes and promptly passed out when we got home. She started improving almost immediately though so I've been extending the walks, making them faster and sometimes even walking her twice a day.

I may have pushed her a bit too much when I tried to introduce running on Saturday. We went down to the track at my old middle school and after walking a lap or two tried a little bit of jogging. At first she thought it was great fun, but a lap into it she was panting quite heavily and dragging behind me on the leash. So I thought maybe we would do a little bit of walking, then running, then walking and so on. Unfortunately the intervals of running quickly got shorter and shorter while the walking got farther and farther. After we'd done a mere six laps in all and she was dragging behind me as far back as the retractable leash would allow I dried her off and put her in the car while I ran a little bit more. Hours later, a warm and dry day inside behind us, Pearl kept looking at me with this terribly sad face as if to say, "Why were you punishing me? Whatever did I do to deserve such torture??" Poor thing.

I'm not giving up though. I've developed this game with her where we run around outside. First I run off in one direction and she promptly dashes ahead of me a good 20 yards or so. Then I call to her and change directions so she runs full speed at me and then tears off in the new direction. We do this over and over and she thinks it is great fun and I hardly have to work at all. I may be creating a monster though. This morning we went on a three mile walk and then romped around for a good half hour this evening and still she is all riled up and tearing around the house. I'm going to try running again on Thursday though - let's see how she handles that!