In which if it weren’t so boring, it’d be shocking how boring it is.
Today I accomplished the following:
- Slept in.
- Made lunch.
- Made coffee.
- Ate.
- Dipped Bindu (because fleas are evil and deserve to die).
- Took a nap.
- Walked to the Dead Cock for a veggie burger and some drinks.
- Walked home.
- Read several chapters of a good book.
- Started a sleeve on the big brown sweater I’ve been knitting since last winter.
- Wrote this post.
It’s true. I really am this bland sometimes. I know you all think of me as a rock star and all, but honestly it’s hard to rock out when you’re broke and have no car.
Don’t look at me! It makes me shy!
In which I’m sad. And inconvenienced.
On the way to work yesterday, the jeep started coughing and huffing as if it were running out of gas but I’d just put gas in it. I pulled off onto 6th street. The jeep died. I put it in neutral and tried to get it into a parking slot but it was too heavy.
I called Truck and he got a ride over with a neighbor (thanks, P!) and they helped me park it in front of Norm’s storage place. Then I walked to work.
Last night, bghead drove me around. First to the gas station to get more gas, then to the jeep, then to buy injector cleaner… Truck and AmmZon joined us. Our whole household hung out in front of Norm’s storage while Truck looked at my jeep.
Today I walked to work. I was sticky when I arrived because Iowa’s all about the humidity.
Truck just called. He went over and looked at the jeep a little more. It turns out that the problem is not any of the relays or fuses we’d hoped it would be. So it’s probably the fuel pump, which is inside the gas tank, which means it’ll be at least a few hundred bucks to fix because the tank will have to come out. Which means that I will have to save all of my income for the next month in order to get the jeep fixed, and be car-less in the meanwhile.
Tonight I have to figure out who I can ask to trailer it for me (rope-towing is illegal, which SUCKS), because it can’t stay where it is much longer. Maybe I can park it here at work, because this location is between two car shops and I wouldn’t have to tow it a second time when I’m ready to have it worked on.
Sometimes, poverty is not so fun.
In which there’s really nothing worth reporting and you shouldn’t even be reading this because you’re far too cool a person to waste time on an entry like this.
Friday evening I went over to hang out with Raybo and Tsunami, but after visiting with them for only a bit The Curse arrived, and I had to run home before I bled on any of their innocent furniture. In bed by eleven thirty on a Friday!
The rest of the weekend involved finishing a book, starting another, and doing two loads of laundry. I did not do anything more exciting than eat two chocolate candy bars and sleep a lot.
Monday, I thought uncharitable thoughts about my uterus. Uncharitable because it’s really not my uterus’s fault; it’s the glands that produce – or don’t produce – various hormones in unreliable quantities that are causing my uterus to behave the way it does. It’s just following orders.
Yeah, following orders like those Nuremburg dudes.
Today at work, I edited 119 invoices individually before sending them out because the accounting software used by my employer is, to coin a phrase, totally stupid omgwtfbbq!!1!1!!.
However, I did meet a cute girl (with dimples!) today who offered to take me for a ride on the back of her motorcycle sometime, and she’s a massage therapist. So I guess getting up this morning wasn’t a total wash. Did I mention the dimples? *swoon*
In which it’s not where I thought it was.
When I went to The Ex’s earlier this week, I got my external USB HD and pulled my other drive right out of my old computer. Today I settled down with Truck’s laptop, my enclosure, the hard drives, and a screwdriver to reunite myself with my long-lost data.
Well, most of what I thought was on those drives isn’t there. The partitioned drive that usually lives in the USB enclosure has files from Indianapolis on it, mainly – all stuff I absolutely do not need ever again – and the drive out of my tower seems to be conspicuously lacking all of the graphics files I was hoping were there.
Which means most of the data I was hoping for was on my work machine when I got laid off last year. I thought I’d backed up the important stuff, but I can’t find it now.
In other news, The Curse is here so I went to Walmart and bought chocolate and a nightgown, and I will be in my room for the rest of the weekend.
In which there’s an example but no rules, really.
Okay, so last night Truck said Carne Estrada to me. I laughed my arse off.
Today, I said Angelina Joie de vivre to him. Which didn’t really impress him, but amused the hell out of me. (Morning isn’t my sharpest time of day.)
So it’s the household’s new word game, and will probably last all the way through Sunday. There’s really no structure, other than mixing a celebrity name with something else.
Your turn! (I depend on you, Internet, to be funnier than whatever it is in Truck’s pants that he won’t shut up about.)
In which I ramble.
NLW, when she came to pick me up to go on our vacation, brought me a box of hair dye (I now have three boxes!) and a set of iPod headphones, so I now can hear both channels. Which is so awesome I can’t even deal.
My bro-there was going to send me his 5th gen video iPod (since he’s more in love with his PSP), but his roommate’s rent check bounced and now he probably has to hock it instead. Which is sad. Dumb roommate.
My maternal grandmother’s birthday party will be held at her home in Walla Walla on September 15th. My aunt Pedgy said she’d buy me a ticket so I could attend. (I haven’t been to the Hall house since my grandfather died, before I was married. It’s my favorite house in the whole wide world, and the only one that’s been in the family my entire life. It’s more home than any place else and I miss being there. Plus it has The Greatest Porch in the Known Universe, and a patch of catnip where the neighborhood cats get stoned, and novelties in the freezer in the basement, and it’s home, damn it, and it sounds like the whole fam damily will be there, and shit I’m feeling nostalgic.)
Tonight I’m going to NLW’s, not only to see her and the Ever Gorgeous Mr. J, but to have her clean all my blackened, tarnished jewelry. She makes jewelry for a living, don’t you know, and so she’s got this device that vibrates that she fills with jewelry shot and fills with jewelry and plugs in for an hour and it makes things all shiny and new. My farm-basement tarnished jewelry will look new again! And if that weren’t excellent enough, she’s making pizza for dinner. It’ll be awesome.
Since I saw Amma, I’ve been waking up at five every morning and meditating. If that’s not divine intervention, I really don’t know what is. (No worries: I’m still a heathen because I go back to bed after I meditate, yo.)
In other news, Vuboq reminds us all that they’re still doing it wrong [and that link is totally NSFW, btw] in our nation’s capital:
Because everyone knows watermelon is usually sold by the pound, and I did the exhaustive research to prove it.
Update: Bro-there sez I may still get the iPod after all! *snoopy dance*
Update the second: I’m going to Walla Walla! YAY! *snoopy dance*
In which I feel a little stupid.
On my wedding day, my mother said, “He’ll make a good first husband.” I scowled at her before I laughed, but she was, of course, totally right. He did make a good first husband. Our breakup has been so smooth, really, considering how terribly it could have gone.
Last night after dinner, I drove out to the farm and got a load of stuff out of The Ex’s house. He helped me pack and load, and further offered to drive a truckload of my furniture into town and help me get it up the stairs into my room. And after we got the jeep loaded, we sat and had a nice chat.
I was driving homeward an hour later, the jeep redolent with the smell of incense, the sun setting fantastically in pinks, oranges, and purples, the humid air blowing.
I brought only one box inside the house with me when I got home – my puja stuff – because my shit is so utterly filthy that AmmZon would absolutely have kittens if I brought it inside the way it is. It’s been stored in an empty room for a year, but in order for you to visualize how utterly dirty, dusty, and cobwebby it is you’d do better to understand that it had been stored, unboxed, in a barn for a year. Everything is covered in dust, cobwebs, and pet hair (and when I say ‘covered,’ I mean there’s an eighth of an inch of dust on every single surface). Everything has to be at the very least wiped off, if not actually washed before it can be used again.
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In which I talk about seeing Amma this year.
One of the swamis said in an evening satsang that various scriptures describe and define the state of being experienced by people such as Amma. A phrase used often, he said, was that these incarnations or avatars are ‘drunk on the Self.’
I tried to imagine what that feels like. Drunk on the Self. Like being in love, only without the duality of needing an external object to be in love with? What do I have inside that I find more engaging than the world outside?
Not meditation, certainly. I enjoy it, but not above the relative. Not even in Amma’s presence (where meditation is extraordinarily easy and deep) do I not want to come out. I sometimes feel extraordinarily content within myself, but it isn’t more intoxicatingly interesting than the world outside me, and it certainly isn’t permanent.
Later, when Amma was singing bhajans, I thought, “She’s singing to Devi, which is an iconic representation of the qualities within Her own Self. She’s singing to herself.” As I was sitting so close to the stage I had my elbow propped up on it, I was very close to Mother. As I thought these thoughts, She turned her gaze to me for a moment.
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In which it’s good to be home.
(First of all, let me just get it out of the way: I love my blue dog soooo much! K thx.)
Saying “I had such a good time at Amma!” is so silly I’m not even going to say it. I didn’t have ‘a good time,’ I was led back to myself – as I am every year when I go to see Her – and I feel several orders of magnitude better than I have in a long while. (And yes, I’ve started the Amma post but it isn’t finished yet.)
When NLW dropped me off yesterday, Truck was on the porch. He told me he was going to have a few people over later; I said that would be fine ’cause I didn’t think anything short of a full-on rave in my room was gonna keep me up past seven or eight because I’d slept from 5 to 11 that morning and was a wee bit behind on my sleep.
All sorts of groovy folk showed up, and I had a BBQed veggie burger and some lovely carbonized carrots and sweet onions, too. I played with kids a lot ’cause they were sort of right there and couldn’t be ignored.
Then I went to bed and slept for 12 hours. Yay!
This afternoon I called The Ex and he said I could swing out to the house tomorrow evening. I’m going to take some boxes out and try to organize my shit; I also want to grab some summer clothes (IT IS SO FUCKING HOT IN JULY OMGWTFBBQ) and some books and my altar and crap like that.
In other news, I may have an interview this week in Cedar Rapids, IA for a support job of some kind. I don’t even really know what the job description is yet, but if it turns out to sound way cool I’ll want your good vibes.
I quite possibly should be getting off my arse here soon, and using my life for something more profound than trying to do as much sleeping and avoidance of stress as I can. There’s a lot to be said for a nice decompression period, but part of the battle I fought in my marriage was about being trapped too far away from the things I wanted for myself. Now I’m nearing the one-year mark (I left The Ex last August) and I think I’m about to rejoin the land of the living. The booze and drugs and laziness and sleep-a-thons were great, but hardly the best use of my life. Or if I’m going to continue to live like that, I should at least do it in sexier shoes, which means I need to make some money.
I’ve been considering and shelving a variety of ideas about what I want to do now – I hadn’t moved out of Fairfield before because it seemed impossibly hard while I was recovering from depression – but now it seems like something I could actually manage. I am rather a city girl at heart, and I enjoy things like being able to eat at restaurants on Sundays, public transportation, culture, and fewer flying insects. Maybe I’ll live in Iowa City for awhile; who knows.
Today I ate leftover broccoli and potatoes from brunch and have spent much of the rest of the day in my room. Truck’s started making electric guitar noise in a different key than the song I’m listening to, though, so it might be time to turn off the iTunes and head outside for a bit.
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4 random books from my Library!
