Crazy cactussy tree thing at the UC Botanical Gardens
Menu of the street pie vendor. I bought slices of every flavor!
Street protest, downtown SF
Colorful wall
Month: August 2011
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shimmer glimmer
This is the BART station at the San Francisco Airport. I love these Sparkletts-style, shimmery shiny pailettes almost to the point of feeling a little crazy. Why I don’t have a wall like this In my home, I don’t know. The way I feel when see this wall is the way champagne should taste. Oh! Sparkly!
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consider this popsicle stand blown
I have about fourteen thousand things to do between now and when my lovely man gives me a ride to the airport, so I can get out of town for a couple days.
Most annoying task on the list: driving 40 minutes round trip just to retrieve my forgotten cell phone. I fantasize about whistling for it, and it sprouting wings and (somehow escaping my locked office) and flying its way into my hands. Although then the phone would be more like a pet than a phone, which is weird. Oh my god! Remember Tamagotchi? That is so totally going to be the hipster retro accessory, when we start revisiting the late 90s as fashion cue.
None of this is getting my chores done. I think I’m going to go back to bed for a minute.
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wistful
I often take the surface streets to work, and often take a road that goes parallel with the beach in Ventura, and then goes past the fairgrounds.
Yesterday I got stuck on this road, behind a convoy of trucks waiting to get on the freeway.
Looking closer at the trucks, I realized they were the rides from the fair, all broken down and ready to move on. This is on the first sunny day we’ve had in weeks.
Nothing like a moment like that to kickstart the mourning of the end of summer, a few weeks early.
Sigh.
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rich looks to peaches to be by his side
I still can’t really look at the 80s without getting a headache. This clip, however, is mesmerizing.
For the record, I would like to state that: although this was the era of my youth, I had absolutely nothing in common with these morons. I was an entirely different breed of moron with a lot more black lipstick.
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love the one you’re with, kinda
Yesterday’s morose post brought up an interesting comment from my dear friend Jefffro:
We create our own families sometimes. I know that having living relatives does not always equal having the support of those people.
He goes on to say some lovely things about me and about the friendship between us, which I value as much as he.
The post itself was a little half-baked; it was started a couple weeks ago when I was feeling overwhelmed by all the minutiae and majoriae seeming to dominate my life. I rolled it out yesterday without really editing it or going into the detail I liked.
The reason I invoked my “traditional” family (some of whom I actually love and would seek out even without the blood link), is that a lot of stuff on my mind involved family issues. The care of, and decisions about, my Elderly Relative is the huge one. The home in which I live is owned by my family, so anything wrong with the house feels like a family issue, too. I also suffer when my sister Ann is out of cell range and gallivanting around on a fantastic six-week summer road trip, ahem.
The rest? Garden-variety mental-aches and pains. the crap that comes with the adulthood thing.
Not that I don’t feel like an Orphan in the Storm sometimes; but I also fully, firmly, totally believe that one is capable of (and should) create a network of non-traditional family. I don’t know what I would’ve done without my (caution: 1990s alert!) tribe. I love my tribe!
By the way, run don’t walk to Jefffro’s blog and check out his project, in which he is reminiscing about his entire life, year by year!
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fine lines between “free” and “alone” and “lonely”
I have no parents and only sporadic contact with the rest of my family. Exceptions: my Elderly Relative, my locally-living nephew, and my sister Ann.
This makes me feel very free, and very lonely, in equal measure. Sometimes, when responsibilities pile up (as they are doing now) that family-free-falling-feeling makes me feel a tiny touch burdened.
I am tired of caregiving, and don’t know what to do about that. I miss my stuff that is now 14 months in storage, and a place of my own to put it. I need to hire a handyman and a carpet cleaner and need to go to a dentist and need to buy health insurance. And what about preparing for retirement?
Not that, if I had family, that any of this would necessarily be easier/solved, but at least there’d be more people to whine to.
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juvenile and surreal fair moments
That sticker on my t-shirt says “squeeze me.”
Troy, Turquoise, Jeff.
Myopic avocado.
And it only gets stupider here.
Thanks, Ventura County Fair. You know how much I love you.
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sweet-ass ride
Yikes! I bought a car! One of the many to-dos on my bulky to-do list was removed today, thank you very much.
My elderly Saturn was quietly but firmly telling me that its life was coming to an end, what with every indicator light flashing every time I turned the key in the ignition. Not to mention the horn honking randomly by itself. Not to mention the cracked and crumbling windshield.
This one, a Toyota Camry, is even more old than the Saturn, chronologically, but is in much better shape. It also has one of those power V-whatever engines. I found myself driving 80 in a 45-mph zone at one point.
It’s amazing how quickly and efficiently people will take your money when you say “I’ll take it.” I reckon it was less than 1.5 hours between the Boyfriend idly saying “hey howsabout we browse some used cars” and me driving triumphantly homeward, playing with the A/C and electric windows and, yeah, driving 80 in a 45 zone.
I was very close to test driving a 1985 Jaguar XJ6 (also in the poor person’s low-four-digit price range), it was so cute and interesting and I have never owned a cute and interesting car, and, oh my, what fun it could’ve been. But no, Sensible Brain won, again, and so it is. Plain and sturdy. Except for the speedometer going all the way to 150. There is that.
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things that confuse me
- fantasy football
- where those pants went
- the multi-decade trend of absurdly baggy/lowriding pants on men
- math
- toddlers
- burning man
- why julie thought that one thing was funny
- the phrase “pulling one’s punches”
- most plotlines of “mission impossible”
- these times