Here's your sign

It is a sad day when someone in the world needs a sign like this:

I mean, really, you had a question on where your used toilet paper should go?

How to travel with big furniture and tiny cars

Today on the freeway I passed a mustang convertible, top down, with about 6 patio chairs crammed in the backseat at odd angles. The driver who, for some reason in all his 50+ years of living did not have a better solution, must’ve figured that his wife holding on to the legs of one of the chairs counted adequately in place of a tie-down strap.

I will say that one thing I’ve taken for granted since meeting Chris is the convenience of a pickup truck. Between him and his friends, there is always someone with some way to move lots of stuff from point A to point B.

Back in my single days, this wasn’t always the case. I did have a hatchback car which I took full advantage of, but a hatchback car is still a car, and therefore has its limitations. Like the time I decided I needed a new TV.

I had just graduated college, packed up all my things, and moved to Los Angeles. No job, no prospects for a job, no plan, and only a tiny savings to keep me fed, clothed, and housed until I found employment. Because the old TV was one of the sacrifices I made in the move, I decided a new TV was in order.

I found one at Wal-Mart for about $300. Keep in mind, this was before the flat-screen era, so this baby was 42” of cathode ray tube-style fun:

(This is not the actual TV)

Seeing as how I had just moved, I had no friends or contacts in the city. I happily let the nice Wal-mart salespeople load up the TV on to my cart, paid for my purchase (hello credit card), and sauntered out to my Mitsubishi Eclipse GS and popped open the hatchback. I realized at once I had a problem:

I couldn’t lift the TV out of the cart to place it in my vehicle. 

I managed to overcome this problem by standing there for a bit, looking sad and lost and confused, until finally one of the skinny teenaged boys that are forever running around collecting the shopping carts came over and the two of us heaved it into the back of my car. I realized that I now had another problem:

The TV was so big that I couldn’t shut my hatchback closed. 

The pimply-faced teenager was looking around, like some bungee cords were going to magically appear. They didn’t. I took pity on him and explained that I wasn’t going very far, so “I would just drive slow” and the kid left to go corral more shopping carts. I managed to sort of keep the hatchback closed by tying it down with a contraption made of elastic hair bands and a plastic shopping bag. I figured it would do for the 8 or so blocks that I had to travel.

I made it to my new apartment without incident, but was again faced with another problem:

How to get the TV out of my car and into my apartment.  By myself, now.

I couldn’t carry it – it was far too heavy. Thankfully I was on the ground floor, so I didn't have to manage any stairs, I just had to navigate from my parking space in the back of the building around to the front door.  In the back alley, there was still a stack of empty boxes that I had recently set out there after unpacking my things. I grabbed a box, broke it down to a flat piece of cardboard, and set it behind my car. I very carefully (re: a lot of grunting and heaving) rolled the TV out of the back of my car and on to the cardboard. Somehow managing not to have it come crashing down on to the pavement.  The cardboard then became a “sled” upon which I dragged the TV all the way around the building and into the front door of my apartment.

It was a successful move. Idiotic, but successful.

Although I must say that story pales in comparison to the time we moved a whole bed – mattress, boxspring and all – using only my friend’s Honda Civic and some ingenuity. But we’ll save that story for another day.

Incidentally, here is a photo of the actual TV, in that very apartment.  We won't comment on the VCR or cassette-tape player stereo system or the Nintendo DS, all of which were already on the verge of being outdated when the photo was taken.

Nor will we make mention of the fact that I owned an actual candelabra and a cat-shaped fan-pull.  The beer mirror that I picked up on a sidewalk sale in downtown Seattle should at least earn me back some coolness points.

O Californians, how you drive... me insane

An Open Letter to my west coast friends on the open road:

Dear California Drivers,

I know this is going to be a hard, but you are going to have to break yourself away from your unhealthy obsession with the left-hand lane.  When driving down a freeway with more than one lane in any direction, it is common courtesy that the left lane is for passing.  Yes, I said it, PASSING.  As in, NOT MEANDERING DOWN INDEFINITELY.

You see, common driving courtesy says that you should drive in the right-hand lane, even if you are going the speed limit.  And then, when you come upon another vehicle that is travelling at a slower speed than yourself, you move over into the left-hand lane.  You pass the slower vehicle.  You then get back in the right-hand lane.

Here is a list of things you really should not do in the left-hand lane:
* Drive slower than the speed limit
* Drive the speed limit and refuse to move over to the right-hand lane when a car comes up behind you who is obviously going much faster than you are
* Continue to drive in the left-hand lane while travelling at roughly the same speed as the semi-truck in the lane next to you, effectively blocking all faster traffic from passing you
* Drive in the left-hand lane when there is no one on the roadway except you.  Because eventually some car will come up behind you and you will refuse to get over or remain in blissful ignorance of common driving courtesy and they will be forced to pass you on the right.

I do a lot of driving in a lot of other states and I must say, although there are the occasional offenders in other states, in California it is an epidemic.  It's bad enough that they drive in the left lane just for kicks, and it's worse when they refuse to move over for the cars behind them.  Most other drivers look in their mirrors and think, gee, this driver is travelling at a faster speed than me.  Let me just pop on over to the right-hand lane for a bit so he can go about his business and drive on past me.  Not in California, oh no.  They think,  well, I am travelling the speed limit so I have every right to be in the left-hand lane, who cares about common courtesy.


And while I'm at it, can I just add one thing?  When it rains, or snows, or is foggy, or does something other than be sunny and 70 degrees, DRIVING SLOWLY WITH YOUR HAZARD LIGHTS ON IS NOT A SOLUTION.  Unless you are announcing to everyone on the road that you, in fact, and not the weather, are the real hazard on the road.

Driving slowly in inclement weather?  OK, fine.  Driving slowly with your hazard lights on?  Not OK.  Driving slowly with your hazard lights on in the left hand lane?  DEFINITELY NOT OK.  And yet you, California drivers, have been observed by yours truly doing all of the above on numerous different occasions.


Thank you for your time.

Very Sincerely,

K GLAM

** Side note: the fact that I just signed up for my online defensive driving course to defer a speeding ticket has absolutely NO BEARING whatsoever on this letter.**

EDIT:  Actually, it does have some bearing - in my favor.  Below is an excerpt from my class:


Driving slowly in the left lane: If you are in the left lane and someone wants to pass, move over and let them by. You may be "in the right" because you are traveling at the speed limit, but you may also be putting yourself in danger by making drivers behind you angry. In many states and provinces the law requires you to travel in the right lane and use the far left lane only for passing. Besides, it is simple courtesy to move over and let other drivers by.

An early Christmas gift, for the dog

This is what the dog got for Christmas.

It's 250 Vitamin K pills.  Because she helped herself to a tasty treat that was supposed to be locked up in the garage, where she couldn't get to it:

So what else did Chloe get for Christmas?  She got to vomit and go on a car ride to the emergency vet.  Oh, and of course the $300 worth of pills.  Merry Christmas dog, it looks like that's about all you're getting for Christmas.  Except maybe a lump of activated charcoal in your stocking.

Oh, yeah, and this is the same dog that eats one teeny tiny blade of grass and then five minutes later pukes it up all over the house.  But when you're trying to get her to vomit?  Feed her 8 tablespoons of hydrogen peroxide and she may foam at the mouth but she will manage to resist vomiting with a strength of will you didn't know she had.

Until you get in the car, that is, where she will vomit so silently on the car seat that you don't even know she did, and end up paying the vet $100 to use their fancy vomit-inducing medicine only to come back to the car later and find out she did vomit after all.

But it really was a pretty cool gift as far as she was concerned.  She had no idea what was going on.  This was her night:

1) Yummy green square!  Nom Nom Nom!

2)  Nasty drink.

3) CAR RIDE CAR RIDE! (vomit) CAR RIDE CAR RIDE!

4) NEW PEOPLE NEW PEOPLE!

5) Vomit.

6) MOM AND DAD!  

7) CAR RIDE CAR RIDE!

8) Playing with my bone!  

But the good news is she'll be fine.  Lessons learned?  Dogs are dumb, but we are probably even dumber for assuming she wouldn't eat rat poison if given half a chance.  We'll stick to the non-poison methods from now on, thankyouverymuch.

Sprint Car Racing

The husband and I went to lunch with our boss last week.  The restaurant had those TVs that are mounted to the ceiling, and at one point my husband and my boss were distracted by a NASCAR-type race.  Only instead of NASCAR cars racing around the track, it looked more like matchbox cars with trays mounted to the top of them.

We watched them for a bit, as they took a series of continual left turns, until I decided to ask a question.

"There aren't actually people in those cars, are there?"

I could tell immediately from the look on my husband and my boss's face, that this wasn't the most astute question I could have asked.

"What was the question?" my husband asked me.

Alarm bells were going off in my head, and I knew it was a bad idea to repeat the question, but I was already committed at this point.

"There aren't any people in those cars?" I asked again, trying to make it sound like I knew the question was ridiculous and was just testing them to see if they knew.

They weren't buying it.  Chris's eyebrows went up.  "Yes, there's people in them."

"Can you actually fit a person in those cars?  They look so tiny."

"How do you think they get around the track?"

"Um, remote control?"

Monsoon Season, Part 2

It may have looked ridiculous when our shade awning was secured to the patio with ratchet straps, but it worked. 

As evidenced by what happened when we took them off and another storm blew through...

Dishwasher FAIL

So, we recently moved from Rental House A to Rental House B in San Diego, because House B was a bit nicer and also had a fence for the dog and our lease was up at the old place.

Anyway, some of the last items we moved from House A to House B were the cleaning supplies, because we needed them to clean up after all our stuff was moved out.

So here we are, one of our first nights in the new house, and the dishes were dirty and I wanted to wash the dishes.  We had no dishwasher soap because it was still at House A with the rest of the cleaning supplies.

We did, however, have some dish soap.

Now, I haven't been around for 30 years and not learned that dish soap and dishwasher soap aren't the same thing.  But I thought -- yes I DID think this through - that if I just put A FEW DROPS (okay, it was more like a teaspoon) of dish soap in the dishwasher, it would be okay.  I thought that it would get the dishes clean and not explode great sudsy bubbles all over the kitchen floor.

I thought wrong.

So I guess it goes to prove you're never to old to learn that even a few drops of dish soap are a few too many.

The Hidden Staircase

Some highlights from my 4th of July weekend.  And also, a bit of making fun of myself.

We played tourist with some of our good friends.  This included, basically, visting the four corners of the San Diego region.  It was awesome fun, with a few minor inconveniences.  As in, no one in their right mind should expect to find a parking spot for less than $50 on a holiday weekend in Mission Beach.  We drove around for a very stressful hour before we looked at eachother and said, "does it mean we're old if we give up now and just go back to the house?"  We decided that did mean we were getting old and lame and so we stuck it out long enough to find a parking spot that might cost us under $20.  Then we ducked into a bar on the beach and looked around us at the crowd of drunken, young, twentysomethings doing beer shooters out of a cut off whiffle ball bat and felt old anyway.

However, Karma came back to us when an impromptu drive to La Jolla resulted in a parking space within 0.2 seconds of arriving at our destination.


A vist to La Jolla's "shell beach."  Don't be fooled by the name, there aren't any shells.  Just a lot of rocks.  But it's still cool, and there's tidepools and such.

And we snagged a seat at one of the only rooftop bars in La Jolla (trust me, we looked... I mean, what is life if you can't sit on the beach and completely ignore the beautiful view while you scrunch your face at your smart phone and search through online reviews for a good dinner venue with a rooftop view?)



We had to wait a bit, but when we did get seated it was perfectly timed to watch the sunset

On the day of the 4th, we opted for the more laid-back Ocean Beach neighborhood.  Now we have arrived to the part of this blog where I have to admit to certain things that I am a bit embarassed to admit.

Exhibit #1: The Hanging Lantern

We ate breakfast at this cute little cafe on the end of the Ocean Beach Pier.  Although I use the term "cute" a bit loosely, as it has somewhat of a sea-crusty atmosphere and I am a bit dubious of the "A" rating that was displayed.  However the breakfast burrito was very delicious.  And there was no waiting for a table.  All bonus points in my book.

So as we're sitting at our table, admiring the ocean view and maritime decor, and Chris is staring aimlessly at some point behind my head. 

"What are you looking at?"  I asked, innocently.  To which I think he responds, "The lake."

I look at him in confusion and reply, "No, honey, that's the ocean." 

Chris gives me that it's-a-good-thing-you're-pretty look and points at an object anchored to the wall behind me.  "No," he says, "I'm looking at the light. I'm well aware that we're at the ocean." 



The light

And, finally, I saved the best for last...

Exhibit #2, The Hidden Staircase

We had a date to watch the fireworks from the bluffs on the south end of Ocean Beach.  The streets here are elevated above the water, and you walk to a staircase which leads you down on to the bluffs.  There's a section of the bluffs about halfway between the street and the water that, during low tide, have room for walking, sitting, laying down, etc.  They also have a great view of the fireworks on the Ocean Beach Pier:

Getting ready to watch the fireworks show on the bluffs

To get to our spot on the bluffs, we walked down the starcase and then across on the bluffs for a ways.  To exit, we had to take the same staircase back up, which involved walking away from our car and all the way back to the stairs.  We were hoping to find a closer staircase so we wouldn't have to backtrack so much.


So anyway, we watched the fireworks, they were super.

Upon leaving, we made the treck back towards the staircase.  As we were ascending the staircase, I happened to look back over to where we had come from.  And there, clearly illuminated on the cliff face, was a staircase full of people walking up it.

"Chris," I said, "how did we walk right past that staircase and not notice it?"

There is a very pregnant pause while Chris and my friends digest this comment.

"Um, Krista," my husband said gently, "that's not an actual staircase.  That's our shadow outlined on the cliff walls."

Interwebs FAIL

Warrior Dash-ed

So at the beginning of May, Chris and I participated in the Warrior Dash, along with some good friends of ours. To put it mildly, none of us had really spent much time on those things that people typically do before running a race, like "training" and "eating healthy" or even "stretching."  Except Payson's wife, who happened to do all three.  We had a friendly bet amongst the four of us.  It was girls against boys, and whoever lost had to cook a fancy dinner for the other two.  The winners got to dictate the menu.  Now, who won the bet?  Read on...

But first note that I learned a valuable lesson that race day, and it was this:

When jumping off the hood of an old rusty car onto a pile of tires, be careful to land properly so that you don't blow out your knee.

Here's the breakdown of how the race went.

You check in, get assigned your numbers and your tracking button, and prepare.

Costumes are encouraged, as you can see from Frack and Payson's outfits.  Although someone probably should have warned the guy on the far left in the background there -- kilts are acceptable, as a type of Braveheart-esque warrior gear.  But if you don't have a kilt in your closet, and you are a dude, then don't think that just any skirt will do.  You will look like you should be featured on the People of Walmart website, not wielding an ax on the battlefield with blue warpaint on.

Next, you stand at the starting line and pretend that you don't know the crazy looking guy with the afro wig and painted-on mustache who claims to be married to you.

After the starting gun goes off, you race for about 1.2 miles before you hit the first obstacle.  After a while, the boys fall a bit behind the girls.  You take a moment to photograph the racers behind you, so that later you can go nah-nah-nah-bo-bo.  If you look really, really, closely at this photo, you can just see a faint red blob at the very back of the photo.  That is the boys.

You approach Obstacle #1.  You are feeling cocky and self-assured.  You are master of the junkyard cars.

Epic FAIL.  You find yourself suddenly with a lot of time on your hands to take pictures, because in your haste to jump off the cars you landed funny on an old tire and hyperextended your knee.  You wave off the EMT and try to look brave.

The boys have now caught up.

After a while, your knee feels better enough that you can walk.  You can't run or jog or climb things, but you can walk - slowly and carefully.  And gosh darn it YOU ARE GOING TO FINISH THE RACE!  Because you can walk without limping (right now), you get lots of funny looks like people think you are just being a wimp.  When really the slightest wrong movement makes it feel like your kneecap wants to slide off your leg and you would go down like a lead balloon.  (That picture, by the way, is as close as Phoenix gets to a "river run").

And then comes the second-to-last obstacle, the part where you are supposed to leap over a burning flame.  Twice.

You take a moment to contemplate how you are going to leap over the flames when you can't get a running start and you only have one workable leg with which to push off and land.  In the meantime, the people on the sidelines are cheering you on, not understanding the reason behind your hesitation.

But by golly YOU ARE GOING TO LEAP OVER THE BURNING FLAME.  TWICE.

Although the second time doesn't go so well and your knee buckles as you land and you almost fall down (but don't!) although the organizers offer you EMT assistance and you can hear someone in the crowd wonder, "what is wrong with her?"

However, now your knee is really smarting and you are supposed to get down on all fours (yes, that's right -- your hands and knees) and crawl through the mud.

You crawl through the mud.  Some what awkwardly, of course.

THANK GOD.  It's the finish line.

Then it's time for the "warrior showers."

After which you get to redeem your race button for a nice cold beer and relax and listen to some music.  Assuming, of course, that you brought a change of clothes so you aren't completely muddy and/or soaked.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the Warrior Dash.

A special thanks goes to:

Payson's wife, for being an encouraging team mate even though I crapped out less than halfway through the race;

Frack, for being a good husband and staying by my side for the remainder of the race;

and Payson, for agreeing with Frack that the boys would pay up on our friendly bet even though there was no clear winner due to my injury.

Next year, however, I'm going to train beforehand.  And be a little more careful on the obstacles.

 (Note: this is not the size of the free beer.  This right here is a $20 beer.  Although you get to keep the mug.)

Sometimes you don't even need the Sniff Test

Chris makes fun of me often for my very lax perception of food that can still be considered "edible."  Maybe had I ever had food poisoning I would be a lot more cautious, but the fact of the matter is, if it looks okay and smells good, I'll probably still eat it.   We call this the "Sniff Test."

Today, however, I met a food for which I did not even need to employ my superior deductive powers of smell.

I dug the bottle lime juice out of the back of the fridge for a recipe that I was trying to follow.  I poured the required ounces into a shot glass (hey, I didn't have anything else to measure by!).  (And also, I may have been making myself a margarita.)

The lime juice sat in the shot glass, a sickly brown color.

"Hmmm," I thought to myself, "is lime juice supposed to be this color when it comes out of the bottle?"

I asked my dad.

"I don't know," he replied, "why don't you taste it?"

(Good idea, dad!  Rancid lime juice smells the same as good lime juice, so why don't I taste it?!  I can see we are both geniuses when it comes to the analytical methods in which we can determine the consumptive value of food.)

I stuck my pinkie finger in the glass and tasted a tiny bit.

It tasted funny.

I looked at the bottom of the bottle:

Oh, yeah, that's a definite FAIL.

No sniff test required.  Although, in retrospect, a taste test probably wasn't required, either.

I'd like to file a complaint...

Things have been a little quiet around here lately, I'll be the first to admit it.  Work has been absolutely insane, 12 hour work days six days a week.  There are days when the weather is beautiful and I've accomplished so much and I love my job, and then there are days when I have to go home and cry for an hour on my lunch break.  You know, the usual highs and lows.

And not that there isn't a lot to talk about.  But it's all work.  In fact, a co-worker and I were just commenting on how we could write a book about all the crazy stuff that happens in our jobs.

But I don't talk about work on here, namely because there are a lot of very sensitive issues that we deal with that involve lawyers and the government and blah blah blah.

In other words, you know your job might be a bit high profile if a bomb scare means that Homeland Security comes out to pay you a visit.  In fact, your job might be high profile if it gets a bomb scare.  (Don't worry, it wasn't a bomb.)

But this one thing is almost too funny to be real.  And since I don't have much else to talk about...

In the course of what we do, we sometimes have to employ road flaggers to divert traffic around our operations.  This can cause some delays to the normal traffic flow, which of course we minimize as much as possible, but still it results in some unavoidable traffic stops.  We occasionally get complaints from members of the public who are affected by our work.  

This is an actual complaint.

A gentlemen called to tell us that he had eaten at one of the local restaurants that day.  Unfortunately, his meal didn't sit too well with him.  He was driving back to his house, but it took him longer than usual because of the traffic delays from our flaggers.  And, well, he didn't make it home in time.  And he had an accident.... in his pants.

Oh  yes, you read that right.  He called to complain that we made him crap his pants.

P.S. Apparently I need to retrain myself on how to use a staple gun

So to make a long story short, I was attempting to staple some things to some stuff and in the middle of attaching a laminated piece of paper to some corrugated plastic I hear, "pffffft".

I paused, perplexed for a minute.  Then....

Ohcrapohcrapohcrap.

I just stapled into a can of spray paint.

I lift up the corrugated plastic and underneath is a can of spray paint, rapidly exploding paint out of its side.  It's spraying everywhere and I panic and I don't know what to do so I throw the spray paint in the tool box but then it is still leaking paint everywhere and I scramble to put it in a plastic bag and finally get it in the bag but now I've got paint all over my hands.

Bonus: I managed not to get black spray paint all over my clothes.

Bummer:  I did get black spray paint all over my hands.  So much for having a pretty manicure at my fancy dinner tonight.

And so ends Part I.  Stay tuned for Part II...

TYSE #3: Pillowmints

Since I have been sort of unfairly picking on Chris these lasts few posts, I suppose it's time to make fun of myself.  I haven't done a "Things You Shouldn't Eat" in a while so it seems fitting to share this bit of advice with you all.

Last Christmas, Chris and I were invited to a Christmas Party to be hosted at one of the restaurants downtown.  Specifically, at Dick's Last Resort.  If you haven't heard of it, the basic operating premise is that the waitstaff are total a-holes, and people do crazy things like wad up napkins and throw them at each other.  And sometimes at complete strangers.  Most of the servers are just pretend a-holes, as in, "I'll be a dick to you only so long as you still think it's funny because after all I do still work on tips."  Our server was one of those totally awesome pretend a-holes, and I'm guessing the fact that she was going to make more money off of us in one night than she usually pulled in a month had something to do with that.  The bartender, on the other hand, was a complete jerk.  Like, no pretending, he was just a dick.  As for the rest of it?  The food wasn't spectacular and they forgot to bring my dinner out all together but we were a big party and there were always tons of appetizers around and the drinks were free so nobody really cared as long as they were having fun.

Now, as I may have just mentioned, the drinks were free.  So the hubby and I decided early on that it would be a wise course of action to reserve a hotel room within walking distance from the restaurant.  Upon checking in, we went up to the room and noticed that housekeeping had already been by to turn down the bed and leave little packets of mints on our pillows.  We didn't spend much time there, however, just dropped off our suitcases and headed out to the party.

After a fun time at Dick's, Chris and I called it a night and headed back to the hotel.  We got up to the room and I saw the pillowmints and I got really excited.  I like minty things and usually the ones that they leave on the pillows are especially delicious.  There is often some form of chocolate involved with pillowmints.

I grabbed the packet and popped one in my mouth.  I bit down and immediately realized something was very, very wrong.

This mint was completely tasteless!  And the texture was all wrong, kind of foamy.  I spit it out and looked at the package more closely.

These were not mints.

They were earplugs.

For your ears, so you can have a peaceful night's sleep despite being in the city.  Not for eating.

In conclusion, TYSE #3 is: Earplugs.  In case you haven't figured it out, they are not very tasty and definitely not minty.

Super Frack

This story is about the birth of "SuperFrack." (And if you need a reminder as to why my husband is called Frack, click here.)

Flashback to 4 years ago. Chris and I had just started dating. I was in San Francisco for the weekend, attending my cousin's wedding. Chris was hanging out with "the boys" at a friend's house.  The friend's wife and kids were also home, and the teenage boys were practicing their skillz on bicycles.

Apparently, one of the teenagers told my husband and his friends that they were "old."  And that these "old guys" couldn't possibly compete with the superior biking skillz of the teenagers.


So, of course, the "old guys" had to prove themselves:




I tell you what, this video never gets old.

Stage Fright, of a sort

Between Phoenix and San Diego, there are two border patrol checkpoints.  For some inexplicable reason, I get nervous every time I drive through them.  I don’t know why.  I’m not doing anything illegal.  I don’t look suspicious.  They don’t have any reason to pull me over and, if they did, they wouldn’t find anything anyway. 

Sometimes they just wave you through and sometimes they ask a few simple questions.  They are usually along the lines of “are you a US citizen?” and “where are you headed to?”

I’m pretty good at the first one.  And given the frequency that I travel through these checkpoints headed to the same place every time, you would think I’d be good at the second one.

You would think.

We pull up to the checkpoint this morning.  The Border Patrol agent looks in our car and glances at us.

“Are you a US Citizen?”

“Yes.”  I reply, easily.

“Where are you headed to?”

And for some reason, at this moment, my mind goes blank.

“Uhh…California.” I stutter.  Given as we are already in Califorina, this isn’t exactly the answer he is looking for.

“Specifically,” he says slowly, “where in California are you headed.”

My mind is still a blank slate.  I glance helplessly at Chris while in my mind I am cheeping at him, “helphelphelp.”  There is an awkward pause and then Chris and I answer at the same time, “San Diego.”

He nods and waves us on.

Chris turns to me.  “Really?  I mean, really?  You do realize that we are already in California.”

“I got nervous!”

“Of the Border Patrol Agent?  He looks about twenty and he couldn’t weigh more than 130 pounds soaking wet.”

“Not of him, I just get nervous in general.  It’s like taking a quiz.  I worry about giving the wrong answer.”

“It’s not like they’re hard questions.  And they ask the same ones every time.”

I guess I better practice up, seeing as how I’ll be driving through these checkpoints often in the next year or so.

Instructions FAIL

It really should say, "Read this BEFORE adjusting your Equa 2 chair."

I mean, wouldn't it be a bit awkward to try and read something attached to the bottom of the chair while sitting on the top of it?

Who knew pools were so complicated?

Today, we discovered why our pool has been so cloudy-looking lately:

And in case anyone is confused about what they are seeing, this is what our pool filter is SUPPOSED to look like:

We contemplated buying a new one, and then we discovered how much they cost.

If anyone ever tells you owning a pool is cheap and/or easy, they are lying.  Just FYI.

Making a Cake

Reason #1,293 why I will probably not be able to make a career out of cake-baking:



My decorating skills lack finesse.

The Hat! The Hat! The Hat is on Fire!

In order to properly understand the reference here, you must be familiar with both a) the 2004 movie Eurotrip and b) the Bloodhound Gang's 1996 remake to "The Roof is on Fire," in which the lyrics read, "the roof! the roof! the roof is on fire!"

My roommate and I watched the movie Eurotrip shortly after it came out to video.  For some reason that is unknown to me now, we thought that scene where the guy's hat was on fire and he mistook his friend's warning for a fiesty rendition of "The Roof is on Fire" was the funniest thing EVER.  It was a running joke between us for well over a year, and each time it brought us to tears, we laughed so hard.  Again, I don't know why.  It's not really that funny.

Now on to what I was really going to say.

Chris and I flew into Phoenix this evening, and after a short ride home from the airport, arrived at the house.  The first thing I noticed was that our house smelled... well, kind of odd.  Specifically, it smelled like new tires.  Yeah, I know.  Weird.  So I lit a couple of scented candles to dispel the mysterious odor.

Chris and I proceeded to flop on the couch, turn on the television, and relax after a long day of work and travel.  This went on for about twenty minutes, until...

*sniff* *sniff* "Um, Chris?  Do you smell something burning?" I ask.  He didn't.  Perplexed, I check on the candles, which all seem to be doing okay.  I blow one of them out, thinking maybe the wick was running low and causing a little smoke.  A few minutes go by.  The burning smell returns.  Even Chris can smell it this time.  But I chalk it up to the lingering smoke from the candle I had just snuffed, and we settle back into our television show.

The cat jumps up on the couch to snuggle up with us.  I can see she's got a funky bit on her tail, but I figure she just got in to something.  Then I notice that "burnt" smell has returned.  A few seconds go by, and something clicks.  I look at the cat's tail a little closer.

Oh. My. God.  The burning smell was coming from the cat.  That funky bit on her tail?  Charred fur.  The cat has burned her tail on the candle.  A large patch of fur on her tail was signed and/or gone.  Which explained the mysterious burning smell.  The best part?  It didn't burn enough to actually get to the flesh, so SHE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW.  She snuggled up with us, purring away, completely oblivious to the fact that she had been waving her tail too close to the candle and burnt down her tail fur.

The cat! the cat! the cat is on fire!