This has been a week of daytime unmotivated slack assedness accompanied by late afternoon/early evening “oh crap, I really need to get this work done!”ness.  Evenings are typically when I write my blog posts so…there you go.  A handy excuse for not having posted since Tuesday.  Tuesday! I am a blog SLACKER!

Really quickly, for those of you who don’t read Jen’s blog, you should head over there right now.  She has exciting news!  Jen writes one of my favorite blogs and I’ve been reading her for a few years now.  I am so incredibly excited for her, so I want all of you to go over there right now!

For those of you who were around before I re-launched the blog and who remember the ongoing saga of “whether or not to leave the window open at night,” Will and I have finally reached a compromise and what’s more, Will is the one who came up with it!

For those of you who weren’t around or who just like to hear the same things over and over again, Will and I have been going around and around this one argument over whether or not we should leave the bedroom window open at night.  It got pretty hairy during the impromptu heat wave in May and then went away when the temperature dropped back down into the 50s.  For the last week or so, though, with the heat being in the “normal summer” range, the argument has come back–only this time it has been as a “no you can have your way” “no you can have your way!” “no, you should win,” “no you should” competition which I blame solely on the residual schmoopyness from getting engaged (and if you don’t think I’m going to ride that train until it just won’t go anymore, you are sadly mistaken).

The basic argument is this:  Will wanted to keep the window open and the fans on at night because it was hot.  He says that it is perfectly safe to keep the windows open at night because, in the event that someone tries to break in, well–Will is a big believer in the second amendment. I, on the other hand, say that we live in a ground floor apartment and why invite trouble?  What’s more, in order to be prepared to confront someone who might want to break in through our GROUND FLOOR APARTMENT’S OPEN WINDOW, you need to sort of, you know, hear them coming and even though we have some great big shrubs right under our window that they would have to push through, when you have three fans blowing, the noise is unbelievable and there is no way we would hear anything especially since Will does not wake up to the smallest sound like I do and he’s the one that is comfortable with…the second amendment.

We’ve tried compromises.  We’ve tried a dowel in the window while leaving the window open and the fans on.  Me? No sleepy.  We’ve tried leaving the window open and the fans off.  Neither of us slept much.  We’ve tried closing the window and bringing in a fourth fan.  I slept okay but Will swears that he was overheated all night (we’ll ignore the fact that he woke me up at 2AM by yanking the blanket up around his ears).  We’ve tried leaving the window open and the fans on right up until the minute we go to bed and then closing the window and letting the fans circulate the colder air.  No dice.

Then, the other day, Will comes home and annouces “I have figured out a compromise to the window issue” and I thought “oh crap” and immediately envisioned booby traps and spring loaded thingies in the bushes outside the window or Will deciding to sleep in the living room until the winter time.  I was visibly cringing until Will pointed into the corner of our “dining room” and said “Bert!”

Bert is the portable air conditioner we bought last summer when we were living in our hellishly hot Roseburg apartment.  Since we moved up here, however, he’s sat in the corner collecting dust because, for the most part, our apartment stays a good 10 degrees cooler than the outside world (bottom floor, almost no direct sunlight.  It’s beautiful).  The other day I actually patted Bert and said “poor Bert, sitting there with nothing to do.”

Now he has something to do!

Bert is currently sitting in the corner of our bedroom pointed directly at the bed.  He is only turned on at night while we are sleeping because we don’t want to jack up our electricity bill and, because we keep the door to the bedroom closed at night he keeps everything lovely and cool.

It feels a little bit counter intuitive to turn on the air conditioner and then use a blanket, but I’ve decided to let that go.

In other news, for the 4th we are pulling out the counter top deep fryer and having deep fried hot dogs! It sounds incredibly disgusting but oh my god they are gooooooooooooooooooooood.  I think I will have three.  Happy Holiday Weekend!

Today at the library I TOTALLY scored when I found the first season of Lost (which I’ve been meaning to put on my Netflix queue) and the fourth season of Felicity (which I am ashamed to admit I do not yet own) on the shelf.

I felt that this procurement, along with the fact that I managed to only check out those two things and two books (one of which I had requested) and not half of the fiction section like I first thought about doing, warranted its own blog post.

A decision has been made about the wedding.  Like a real, honest to god almost tangible not wavering decision.  And that decision? is this:

We aren’t getting married until my bangs grow out.

I’ve had bangs since I was thirteen and to be honest I will most likely have bangs on my wedding day because hello, I have the five-finger forehead thing happening but um, my bangs… they just need help.

About a month and a half ago I was pulling my hair back into a pony tail and as I ran my hand along the top of my head I noticed that the hair on the top of my head toward the crown is kind of thin.  I would like to tell you that I thought “huh.  Oh well.” and went about my day but I think you know me better than that.  I freaked out.  My hair was thinning! Oh my god! I’m too young to have old lady pattern baldness! I can’t afford Rogaine for women!  I’m going to have to tell people that Diane Keaton is my idol because I’ll have to wear a hat for the rest of my life!  (Not that Diane Keaton isn’t cool and all but…well, you know)  I was going bald! BALLLDDDDD!

And then I noticed something.

You see, for the last…since college years, I have been mostly cutting my own bangs.  I won’t pretend that I am any good at it and even now they get a little slanty until I make myself just. stop. trimming already!  If you have ever cut your bangs yourself, you know that it can be kind of hard to determine the point at which your bangs should start and creating a distinct line can be kind of difficult especially if, once in a while, some stray hair falls forward and you cut it before you think to check and see where it fell from.

Yeah.  So my bangs?  Begin really far back.  Way too far back.  Which, thankfully, means that I’m not actually going bald, I just really suck at cutting my own hair.  But I already knew that I am not good at cutting my own hair and have come to terms with it.

To remedy my unfortunate bang-rest of hair-ratio, I am going to let my bangs grow out and when they get long enough that I can pull them back into the ponytail and not have that old paintbrush look, I’ll go to a professional and have them cut new bangs for me.

And all will be right with the world.

There is some sort of poetic justice/funny joke about the fact that the people who sat next to us at Wall-E were both so huge that they spilled over the edges of their theater seats.  I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t put the cupholder down to act as a barrier between me and the guy sitting next to me I would have had his intestinal girth resting on my lap.  Again, if you’ve seen the movie you’ll understand just why this is funny.

If you haven’t gone to see Wall-E yet, you must. You must go right now.  No, don’t finish my blog post first.

The movie is everything that we loved about Pixar before it got oozed on by Disney.  How else could an hour and forty minute movie in which 90% of the dialogue consists of “Wall-E!” and “Eeeeve-uh!” be so entertaining and fun?

I now desperately want my own little Wall-E figure.  He can sit next to Stitch.

Also, I am horrified that they are making a sequel to The Little Mermaid. When the preview for it started Will and I both thought that maybe the movie was coming back for a limited theatrical release and we were both getting kind of jazzed about the idea of seeing it in the theater again and then….no. It’s a fracking sequel.

Dear Disney,

Have a new idea please.  Thanks.

Sincerely,

I used to really really like you.

There isn’t much else to report from the weekend as it was mostly a working weekend for me.  The heat spiked (oh how it spiked) but it is supposed to drop from the high nineties back down to the mid seventies by the end of the week.  I have to say, though, that after spending most of the weekend in this non-air conditioned apartment while it was super hot outside has left me optimistic about the rest of the summer.  Unlike our last apartment, this apartment gets almost no direct sunlight and can be kept at a pleasant temperature with fans.  Poor Bert (the portable air conditioner) might not get much use this year.

In completely unrelated news, last night I had a dream that one of my blog buddies decided to change herself in to a boyself and while I’m all for the “be who you are” thing, it left me a little creeped out.  Then after that I dreamed that Will and I went to a concert in downtown Portland and this other chick totally started hitting on Will which caused Geraldo Rivera to stop the entire concert (he wasn’t performing, he was just a concert go-er. I’m not sure why it is important that I tell you that except that the idea of Geraldo Rivera singing would probably throw the creepy dream into more of a horrible nightmare category) and yell at the woman to stop being a skank.  I still can’t figure out which is more disturbing–that Will was perfectly okay with this woman hitting on him and did nothing to discourage her, or that Geraldo Rivera was totally in my dream.   So yeah, I had two creepy dreams. In a row.

I am afraid of what my subconcious will feed me tonight.

And on that note, have a happy Monday!

Today it got up to over a hundred degrees!

It’s supposed to sink back down into the seventies later in the week but today it was over a hundred!

I’m kind of excited and at the same time I’m kind of hoping it stays cool because this whole “the North Pole could melt completely this summer” thing is freaking me out.

How the hell did that happen?!?

Today is Will’s and my (hang on, I have to do math) 42nd monthiversary.  To celebrate we are going to go see Wall-E tomorrow.  Will is trying to convince me that we should do a double feature and see that Angelina Jolie make the guy shoot the curvy bullet paths thing and I keep trying to remind him that the last time we did a double feature our asses ended up so sore we slept on our stomachs for weeks.

I love movies.  Love. Movies.  Love them so much that someday when I make my fortune I want to have a fully functional movie theater in my house (somebody! go buy me a lottery ticket!) but every time I think of watching two movies in one day, my butt cheeks do that weird phantom pain vibratey thing.  As I do not own a hemorrhoid doughnut pillow, and am too young to carry one around with me in public, I am reluctant to commit to another double feature.

Of course it has been 42 months.  That’s kind of a lot.

In related news, we’ve been trying to figure out a date for the wedding… but whenever we think of a date we follow it up with “of course it’s still too soon to pick a date.”  This is partly because I want our new anniversary to be right (and not anywhere near our birthdays or in Winter) and partly because Will turns an “oh my god I agreed to make a commitment” shade of green whenever we start to talk about when the wedding should be.

I’m fairly certain we will have it in the PDX area… but that could change.  Right now everyone is still very “do what you guys want!” and I’m fairly certain that will only hold until actual plans start being announced and then it will be “really? you want….that? okay-ay but do you know what would be so much better?  You should totally do this instead.”

And how did I miss that this was an Olympics year?  I know, I know, sports are important! Physical coordination should be celebrated! Blah blah.  Can the Olympics please stay on the Sports channels this year?  There are only a gazillion different ESPN’s, why do the Olympics have to pre-empt prime time television?  They haven’t actually done it yet, but I am building up a good reserve of indignation because you know…look at the glorification of sports.  When was the last time you saw “Monday Night Broadway?”

And with that picture in your head I’m off to clean up the dinner dishes.

There comes a point in every day where your brain just says “okay. that’s it.  No. More. Thinkey.”

If you are anything like me, you try to push through that feeling even if it’s ten o’clock at night because there are things that you have to do, dammit! And the more you try to push through it, the more your brain resists and finally you give up, fling yourself down upon the couch and declare that you are going to watch episodes of The Closer from now until you die (appropriate, given the subject matter of the show) because you just can’t think anymore!

Now, this being the time for certain, um, hormonal fluctuations, I’m fairly sure that I am blowing things slightly out of proportion.

And this has nothing to do with anything but I finally found a way to use guns and the people who love them as an argument for the continuation of publicly funded welfare programs. Now all I need to do is pick a fight with an ultra conservative pro-gun/anti-welfare person so that I can say the following:

“you know, it’s funny how you think it is perfectly all right to eviscerate programs that are desperately needed by millions of people because ‘all it takes is a few bad apples to ruin the whole bunch,’ but whenever some nut job shoots a bunch of people and the ’should we have more gun control’ debate gets hot, you all start shouting ‘don’t judge the rest of us based on the actions of the few!’  Besides which, did you think that the AFT was a privately funded organization? And how do you suppose the public defender hired to represent the crazy gun person in court is paid?”

Yeah, when I had this zinger of inspiration earlier today (as I was taking out the trash of all things…obvious jokes aside) it was a far more eloquent argument…but my brain, it has hit the wall.

And you thought I couldn’t bring this post full circle!

Who knew that a post about Birth Control would be almost as popular as a post about getting engaged? That’s kind of awesome.

Yesterday my friend Wendy, her daughter Fiona and I went for a picnic up on Mt. Tabor.  For those of you who don’t know the area, Mt. Tabor is a mountain. In the middle of the city. No joke.  It’s in the middle of South East Portland and after visiting it yesterday, I have to say that New York can suck it because New York? Might have central park, but it doesn’t have a mountain right in the middle of Manhattan!

If you haven’t ever been to Mt. Tabor, it’s a really great part of the city.  We didn’t get up to the top because Fiona was in love with the playground, but the parts of the park that I saw were very pretty and I am antsy to get back up there with the new fancy schmancy camera.  Maybe after the first of the month–after the rent and bills are paid and I’ve finally bought a camera bag.

In other news, Will is taking Auto Cad classes at the community college and the first few classes are on how to use a computer.  Maybe I’m being a jerk but I thought that people who would be interested in Auto Cad classes would already know how to use a computer.  Will came home indignant about having to spend forty five minutes learning how a mouse works.  I feel bad for him because I know he is going out of his mind with boredom but his text messages (particularly the one he sent about halfway through tonight’s class: “this must be what hell is like!”) are pretty funny.

In other, other news I am having a hard time deciding if my PMS is showing up right on schedule or if someone (not you, don’t worry) really is that annoying.  Maybe it’s a combination of the two.  I thought I was doing a pretty good job of channelling my PMS energy into staying productive (this being a “gotta make the rent” week) but there is one person online who I would very much like to…well, to be honest I kind of want to roll up a newspaper and just bash him about the head with it for a few minutes.  Seriously.  Just the idea of whacking the dude with a rolled up newspaper is really satisfying…so maybe it is PMS, which reminds me…

When Will finally got home from class he found me sitting on the couch, laptop on lap, watching the first season of Scrubs on DVD (Netflix won’t get here until tomorrow) and there was a particularly funny/awesome exchange between Jordan and Dr. Cox and I looked at Will and said “Don’t you wish you knew people who talked like that in real life?” and he looked at me for a minute and then said “What are you talking about?  You are like that!”  And, um, is it wrong that I’m taking it as a compliment?

When my Mom was up for my birthday I found myself saying “you know you’re a grown up when you can take birth control pills in front of your Mother.”

I am a little bit in love with being on birth control.  Which makes me sound like some kind of total whore.  But, honestly, for the threeish years I’ve been taking the daily pill, I’ve found that it is kind of…cool.

Not for most of the bodily function reasons that most people like it for (nooooo babies. yet.)  but for the scheduling.

Oh yes.  I know exactly when the PMS should hit, when things will start, when things will stop, when to haul out the fat pants and move the granny panties to the front of the drawer (though, honestly I’m going to get married one of these months, can’t I just leave them there now?) and when to stock up on foods that are rich in chocolate and salt (hello perfect combination of the two known as Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!).  I know when I will be cranky, when I will be whiny and when I will be, um, in other moods.

I also know when those two and a half days of “what? what was I doing? Am I awake? Oh man, I just want to put my head down”-ness will hit and plan for them.

I had those days over the weekend and while I am happy to say that I managed to push through them and get some work done, I have to ask: do other women have a monthly space cadet cycle?  And if you do, is it anything like mine?  I am spacey for about two or three days right before the raging PMS hits.  It’s a fun little mood swing and Will says that even if I didn’t call out “I’m starting my last week of green pills in a few days” he’d know what was coming because I start saying “what?” a lot.

It’s kind of nice to have a fiance who knows that after three days of “what?” it’s time to duck cover and start throwing chocolate at me from very very far away.

I just tried to use the television remote to try to turn down the volume on my laptop’s iTunes.  No kidding.