Wednesday, April 30, 2008

ARgh

So I racked my stupid knee against my stupid desk yesterday afternoon and today the knee is !@#%#!@#! up. I remember hitting it and saying "ow!" loudly but it's not like it bothered me after that. I went on with my day, no problem. Forgot I'd even done it at all.

Until I woke up this morning and tried to, you know, walk on the damn thing.

ARgh! I have to lose five million pounds in four weeks! This ain't helpin' matters! NO! It's not!

In other news, the UPS man in his cute little brown suit has been fetching Mother of the Bride dresses to my door regularly but I've yet to find anything remotely suitable. How in the world do what looks like perfectly respectable looking "Mother of the Bride" dresses in the online ads translate into "Skanky Ho For Sale" dresses when I put them on?

The dress that was the front runner arrived yesterday but when I put it on and looked in the mirror, I couldn't help but burst out laughing. When I went down the hall to show Daws, his eyes bugged out.

"How much?" he quipped.

And he didn't mean the dress.

*sighs*

And going out to the stores has not proven fruitful either. I think today's dress designers are all on crack; that's how messed up dress designs and patterns are today, I swear! I keep bumping into other Mothers of the Bride/Groom; we recognize one another immediately by our hollow eyes and sickly expressions.

One woman held up a revolting looking dress and hastily dropped it again, as if she'd touched a snake.

Horrible out there. Just...awful.

We're all thinking, "I spent four thousand dollars in gas to drive the 20 minutes out here and for this crap?"

Oh well. More dresses on the way. Keep your fingers crossed.

The UPS guy has a workout coming.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Ah, the Mind and Its Wonders

Last Sunday, Daws and I tackled an honest to god hike in Jack London Park. I packed a healthy meal to eat at the Wolf House, with organic peanut butter sandwiches, fresh fruit and raw almonds. And of course, water. Lots and lots of water was needed. Especially since it was mostly downhill on the way there but you know what that means, right?

Yeah, it was uphill allll the way back.

While resting at the Wolf House and munching on our food, I climbed up into a tree (if you check the Picasa pic, this was SO NOT a big climb, ahahah!) and Daws took my picture. As I was getting back down, I saw something shiny and silver on the ground. Leaning over to pick it up, I could see it was a coin. Rubbing at the surface, I could just make out a buffalo on it.

"Daws, I just found a buffalo nickel!"

"Are you kidding?"

"No, I found it on the ground, I can't see how old it is..."

"Let me see it." Dawson also rubbed at the surface and held it up but he couldn't tell either.

"Maybe it's worth a lot of money," he mused.

"Maybe...how cool would that be?"

Now, we know nothing about coins, zero. All we know is that some people are nutty about them and collect them. I know about collectors from having been a sales rep selling collectibles like worthless beanie-type toys so I knew that sometimes people pay outrageous amounts of money for the most mundane things; like antiques or stamps or...yes, even old coins.

Excitedly, I stuck the little coin in my pack and off we started for the climb back to the parking lot. As we toiled our way up the trail, gasping a lot and stopping to rest often, my mind whirled.

It's probably really old...going back to Jack London's day...maybe Jack London even HELD IT! Maybe it's worth a hundred dollars!, I thought to myself. Or two hundred...what if it's two hundred dollars!

As we neared the end of the trail, it became even steeper. Sweat poured down my face and the amount of money we'd get from that coin increased along with my efforts. I could see Daws huffing and puffing in front of me, almost sprinting up the trail in an effort to reach the end.

Maybe...just maybe it will be $1,000! I mean, it's possible! I had to stop and pant, a bit dizzy and my dizziness caused the coin's value to expand into $10,000, $50,000 and finally an astronomical amount that I'm too embarrassed to even post here.

Finally we reached the top and, gulping reflexively for breath like goldfish outside their tank, sprawled on the benches thoughtfully placed there for out of shape sluggos like us. As we recovered, I thought about all the things we could do with the money this coin would bring us. Thumb our noses at the IRS. Buy an outrageously expensive Mother of the Bride dress. Take a real vacation to somewhere warm with a beach.

Buy a new car!

My GOD, maybe A NEW HOUSE!

The possibilites seemed endless.

The way to our car was thankfully downhill and in no time we were on our way home.

The moment I got in the door, I ran to my computer and took the coin out. Using a magnifying glass, I peered at both sides looking for a date and rubbing at the dirt. There! I spotted it:

2005

Wha?? Two thousand...WAH!?

Who the !@#@%$#!@ made buffalo head nickels in 2005????

Tossing the now valueless coin onto my desk in disgust, I sighed deeply as all my grandiose schemes vanished in a mist of avarice and too much imagination.

Don't you hate it when fantasy money just bleeds away like that?

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

The Great Dress Hunt

Yesterday Laura, Heidi and I drove down to Petaluma for Laura's wedding dress fitting. Afterwards the plan was to continue driving South 101 to the Corte Madera mall. Where potentially all things are possible:

Cure for cancer.
A form of cheap, non-oil based fuel for our cars.
Maybe even finding a Matron of Honor and Mother of the Bride dress less than two months before my daughter's wedding.

The wedding dress fitting went beautifully; yes there are some corrections to be made but the bustling and the hemline looked gorgeous. I even teared up a bit at the sight of my little girl in her fabulous dress. She's so beautiful; I cannot WAIT until everyone gets to see her on the Big Day!

Then it was off to the Corte Madera mall. One of those malls where Shopping is a Religion. A Way of Life. Fountains and flowers and expensive looking shops. Obviously you're there to have a good time. Money? Pah! It's only plastic, spend it! A plethora of fashionably thin women were browsing the shops or sitting on cute little benches chatting with their friends, all wearing fashionably bug-eyed sunglasses paired with requisite overly large purses worth hundreds of dollars slung fashionably yet casually over one bony shoulder.

Now, Laura and Heidi are naturally beautiful young women and looked lovely in this beautiful setting. However, I couldn't help but compare myself to the other women I saw in my age group. Immediately I felt frumpy. I don't have a fashionably sculpted body, whether through surgery or pilates, so I cannot wear fashionably sculpted clothes made for such uber-perfect bodies. Plus, what had seemed to be okay attire for a Santa Rosa mall shopping spree; my black skirt, low-heeled black pumps and long-sleeved green top with the Neru collar, seemed dreadfully out of place in this rarefied setting.

I felt like a dinosaur. Dressed in clothes from (*gasp*) a year ago. Maybe more. Frumpy McFrumperson.

Trying to stop comparing myself with the women who clearly are in a completely different zip code than I am financially speaking and in every other way, I concentrated on why we were there and it wasn't to compare myself to other people. As we pushed through the doors to Nordstrom's, Laura announced, "Today we are finding you a dress!"

Damn straight we are, I thought to myself. Surely, in this Shopping Center for the Gods, this heavenly store equipped with a baby grand piano and a live piano player playing it rather than subject their sensitive customers to icky canned music, surely in a place like this, they will have oodles of dresses, dresses galore! It's spring, for god's sake; they'll have dresses on the floor, on the ceiling, dresses scattered EVERYWHERE and in all the colors of the rainbow!

Right?

Spring!
Wheee!
DRESSES!

To our dismay this wasn't the case. Nordstrom's, what I've always thought of as a veritable women's Mecca of fashion, had approximately three whole dresses that came anywhere close to the styles we needed stuck way in the back. Heidi found a beautiful dress out of the three in yellow and tried it on while Laura and I browsed the paltry collection of dresses left that might possibly fit me.

Laura thought perhaps a pink/rose chiffon dress we saw might look good and, on the hangar at least, I thought it might work out well too.

So I tried it on.

Mistake. Big, big mistake. See, I have decided that my stomach, which has begun to stick out most alarmingly these last few years, is really a giant fibroid. I have dubbed my fibroid friend "Ami", after that chick from Survivor I cannot stand.

Ami makes finding clothes that fit me rather difficult.

Ami actually makes me look pregnant. Rather incongruous at 52 years of age.

I hate Ami.

Pulling the dress over my head, I looked in the mirror and found to my horror that I'd morphed into a disheveled, rose-colored lump with pasty white arms and legs. My skin washed out so much that the dark circles under my eyes made me look like Frankenstein. And Ami, the little snot, made her presence known by bulging out in that rude, pushy way she has.

"Hi, I'm AMI! Remember me? Mwha-ha-ha-ha!"

Hurriedly ripping off the dress before the mirror shattered itself in seppuku-like protest, I scrambled back into my black skirt and green top which, if not fashionable, at least erased the image of that Pink Easter Egg Monstrosity I had just witnessed.

"Come out and let me see," Laura called through the door.

Oh no; no no no. Not on your life, not ever. shudder, shudder.

Putting the now-hideous dress back on the rack, we left Nordstrom's and thought we'd peruse through the rest of the mall, making our way down to Macy's on the other end. Right away I realized my shoe selection that morning had not been the best decision I'd ever made because my feet, unused to heels these days, began howling with pain. As I painfully limped ambled along with Laura and Heidi, checking out the stores and customers in them, I kept catching brief glimpses of myself reflected in the store windows. As always, I was shocked at how different I look in store windows than I think I look in my mind. Who was that chunky looking woman? Surely not me! Alas, it was me because there was Laura and Heidi also reflected walking next to me, albeit slender and not roly-poly.

As we continued down the beautiful mall with all the beautiful people and the even more beautiful sales clerks, I could feel myself expanding wider and wider as we passed an endless stream of slinky, stylish, skinny women; all wearing outrageously large sunglasses and enormous purses.

My sunglasses shrank to microscopic size in comparison and my purse, which I used to think was large enough and stylish enough by today's standards, turned into a tiny clutch-bag. By the time we reached Macy's, my body had ballooned up into a Giant Weeble Woman. Instead of walking, I was now waddling back and forth in my Weebleness, careening past terrified customers who plastered themselves against the walls lest they get trampled, tottering pathetically on my low-heeled shoes which now felt like knives stabbing into my bleeding stumps feet.

In fact, I had become so massively bloated by this point that I had to stand sideways just so I could fit on the escalator.

I had become a freak of nature; a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloon on the loose. Right there in Macy's.

The Macy's dress collection was no better than Nordstrom's so, finally getting the hint that our Great Dress Hunt in the super-duper, richy-mc-rich-rich mall had turned into a bust, we trudged back to Heidi's car and came back home again.

The closer we got to Santa Rosa, the more my Weeble body shrunk until by the time we reached Monti's Restaurant, I felt myself again and not the Fat Woman at the Circus I had been in Marin County. Ami had once again been banished to the back recesses of my ego where she usually resides, my sunglasses worked just fine, my purse was cute again and things didn't seem so bad anymore.

Taking a table outside in the sun, we ordered and devoured salads and fries.

We relaxed, we chatted and fussed over Bella, Heidi's sweet little pug-dogger. The shopping trip may have not been the best experience ever but the socialization afterwards was just awesome and I basked in the presence of two of my favorite people in the world.

Good to be home again.

Although I still need a dress.

If only I could leave Ami at home. For good.

But I'm afraid she won't go for that.

The bitch.