Dear… People,

I am here to tell you something and pay attention because this is important.  If you are going to go visit someone who lives in an urban area it is neither cheaper nor more convenient to bring your own towable portable housing:

A) Most urban areas do not have readily available portable housing accommodations.  They have hotels.  And motels.  And narrow streets that are not tow-your-portable-housing-with-you friendly.

B) In the event that you do manage to find portable housing accommodations within the city limits, it will be just as much if not more expensive than getting a hotel room for the same amount of time.  Added point? You are not in charge of cleaning your own hotel room and it comes with hot water, electricity and a working toilet.

C) Most portable-housing-friendly grounds are located well outside the city as that is where most portable housing enthusiasts prefer to stay.  This means that you have to find a place to park your portable housing and then you have to drive (sometimes for miles and miles and miles) to go see the people you came to see.  (Though in my case it is far more likely that we will be doing all the driving to and from.)

In short….people who are bringing towable housing to the wedding…perhaps you should consider a hotel room instead because trying to find an acceptable towable-portable-housing park that is close by, affordable and with all of the necessary amenities is stressing me out.  Of course, some of that stress could be from the fact that it is not MY person for whom I am spending all of this time doing all of this research and making all of these phone calls but we won’t go into that.

In other news, I have been eyeball deep in work stuff and wedding stuff.  It is good because working helps me earn money to pay for the wedding stuff and I like checking wedding stuff off of our to-do list but at the same time it sucks for my blogging energy.  How ironic is it that blogging and this type of writing is what I really want to do with my life but I still put everything else first because this is still my “hobby”?  Note to self: To turn something from a hobby to an occupation perhaps it should be the first thing on your list of priorities and not an “I can’t do my fun stuff until my work stuff is done” item. Yeah, like I’m going to listen to myself.

People, we are down to the nitty gritty.  The wedding is in 49 days.  FORTY NINE DAYS.  We still need a cake.  Will and my Mom both love the cupcake idea but I am not so smitten.  Sure it would be easier, but at the same time, I kind of want the pretty pretty cake.  I don’t so much care about the eating of the cake (as I will likely flip my cake upside down anyway since I am not a fan of most frostings) but I kind of want it to be pretty and displayable and cuttable for traditions’ sake.  We also need to order our rings (though I think our jeweler has the kind of rings we want already in stock, I talked to them earlier today) and figure out what Will is going to wear.  He keeps going back and forth between traditional tuxedo and just a nice suit.  At this point, as long as he isn’t in his pajama pants or in ratty jeans and his Vans shoes I really do not care.

After that, the decisions are more like “how intricate do we want the decorations to be?” and “should we have wedding favors for people to take home and if so, what should we do for those?”

And, of course, finding accommodations for the towable portable housing that is close to the church and reception site.

Oh I’m sorry, did my hair hit you in the face as my head spun around?

Last night Will and I decided to have dinner at the Sweet Tomatoes here in town (for the record I have decided to call pretty much everything on this side of downtown Portland “here in town”).  Yes–Will ate salad for dinner.  On purpose.  And it was his idea.  For those of you who live in areas where the salad bar restaurants are in good supply count your blessings.  Sure there are plenty of vegetarian eateries here in Portland but Will and I? we are omnivores and Will patently refuses to eat a meal that does not contain meat (thankfully he consideres bacon bits meat).  But anyway, I digress.  We went to Sweet Tomatoes.

The last time we drove out to Sweet Tomatoes we couldn’t find a parking spot (which is why those of you who live in an area where Sweet Tomatoes-esque restaurants are in plentiful supply should count your blessings) so we ended up going to Sonic instead.  Last night we managed to find a parking spot so we went in and? It turns out an entire pee-wee soccer league had decided to have dinner there too.  Yeah.  It was crowded.  And kids were running everywhere.  If there had been an animatronic mouse it could have been a Veggie Chuck E’ Cheese.  But the food was okay and we left feeling full and happy and not gross.

Today we walked (walked!) over to Olive Garden to partake of their unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks.   And, once again, we left feeling full and happy and not gross.

I feel a little bit like tomorrow I should take us to McDonalds to make up for it.  Or just have three meals of nothing but greasy bacon. Mmmm.  Bacon.

Oh my god I only got ninety minutes of sleep last night.  And, in spite of that I still managed to get more done today than I did yesterday even though I felt like at any moment my head would start spinning around and fly off.

Of course, that’s not exactly hard since I didn’t exactly get anything done yesterday.  Yep.  Yesterday’s blog post was the only thing I got written all damn day.  And today I managed to eke out 900 words before my brain said “hey! too tired! why are you making me work!”  So I did some transcribing work instead.  You don’t have to think as much with that!

And with that I am signing off of the internet today and doing some knitting.  Or maybe some sleeping.

Dear….Someone,

Please hire me to write witty witticisms about my daily life for large sums of money.  ‘Cuz I? Kind of rock and I can be funny and…you know.  So…yeah! Hire me! Woo!

In other news: have you seen my focus? I seem to have misplaced it.

Today is the day of the self imploding spiral.  I have a project that I want to work on (thankfully it is not due any time soon otherwise I would not be able to be blogging right now) but can’t get my brain to focus on it.  I’ll write for a while and decide that I hate the approach I’m taking and erase everything I’ve just written.  Then I’ll get irritated with myself for not being able to get anything written.  Then, because I’m irritated with myself for not getting anything written I have a harder time concentrating on the project.  And then, because I’m having a harder time concentrating on the project I have a harder time pushing aside the frustration, which just makes me madder at myself.  So I take a minute or two to stare out the window, take a few deep breaths and relax.  Then I will write something, decide I hate it, erase it all and the process starts all over again. Thank goodness this is all done on computer now because otherwise I’d have the EPA all over me for single-handedly deforesting half the continent (but while I’m thinking about it,  note to self: buy printer paper because we are out).

I have been doing this since 9:30 this morning.  It is almost three in the afternoon. My brain is reaching is max capacity for self loathing and frustration.

Everybody has days like this at work no matter what kind of job they have.  We all have the “I just want to put my head down” days.  And, as I mentioned, my project is not due any time soon so I don’t have the added looming deadline pressure.  I am also lucky enough to not have a boss who peers over my shoulder or give me grief about not meeting a quota (thank God because I’m really good at doing that to myself so no outside assistance is necessary).

It is days like this that I wish I had the time/income to really just concentrate on blogging and writing funny essays and things that I like.  That is what I really want to do (watching Sex and the City does not help with this whole “being a columnist would so rock” dream) but paying the bills has to come first and right now paying the bills means ghostwriting and content producing for others.  So far nobody has said “Erin, we want to pay you a giant sum of cash just to write about your life.  Go to it!” so, my little plea for wealth and fortune to be narcissistic on paper stands.

Check it out! I just brought this blog post full circle!

Also? up there? just now? I spelled “said” as “sayd.”  I think that is a sure sign that I should chalk today up to a no go. I mean really.  I give up on today.

For the first time in a long time this was a weekend of doing abso-freakin’-lutely nothing.  Will was in Bend (he’s home now, yay!) and after UPS delivered my Sex and the City and the Closer DVDs on Friday evening I pulled our comfiest blanket onto the couch, curled up and did nothing but watch television until… right now.  I watched the third and fourth seasons of Sex and the City and almost the full third season of the Closer.  It? was awesome.  It has been a long time since I have had a couple days of doing nothing but lying on the couch, watching my own stuff on TV without having to deal with a bunch of other noise or activities.  I didn’t leave the house at all–not even to get the mail–and the most taxing activity I did was nuke left over fried rice and taco meat in the microwave (though not at the same time).

I feel rested.  And ready to get back to work tomorrow.

For months, heck years, I would bemoan the fact that I never seemed to get out of the house–at least not for any longer than it took to go grocery shopping.  Lately it seems like I’m always going somewhere.  Just this week I have three meetings.  Monday was my dentist appointment to get my crown put on (seriously? It feels like I have a big ol’ gob of corn up there, but the dentist said to give it a few days before I called to say it felt funny).  Tomorrow I am meeting with a potential wedding officiant in the morning and a mortgage broker in the afternoon.

Wait, what?

No, we are not yet buying a house.  Will and I agreed that June would be our deadline to get into a new place.  A house would be ideal but, at the very least, we’ll be moving into a new apartment.  I made the appointment with a mortgage broker to go over our credit reports and to figure out what I need to do (Will’s credit is, of course, perfect) to get our ducks in a row so that we can hopefully dive eyeballs first into the drowning pool of home ownership next year.

So.  That’s where I’ve been: setting up appointments, going to appointments, trying to get work done in between appointments…  What have you all been up to?

Interesting side note:  Just now, as I was finishing up this blog post, a girl knocked on my door and offered to sell me movies out of her suitcase.  Seriously.  Apparently bootleggers are the new vacuum cleaner salesmen.  Her sales pitch left much to be desired.  I don’t know about you but “hey, you guys wanna buy movies? I got the new Transformers” is just not going to convince me to buy from you–not even if I were passing you on a sidewalk.

Internet, I fear that I am getting sucked into the deep dark hole that is wedding planning.  And having friends.  And, okay, having to get work done.  So really I guess I fear that I am getting sucked into the deep dark hole that is known as life.  Apparently I am perfectly ordinary.  Who knew?

Each of these bloglets really deserves its own fully thought out blog post but who has the time?  Not me!  Instead I will simply arrange these things chronologically.

The Wedding Invitations, response cards, maps, directions and registry information have all been printed and assembled.  Stamps have been purchased and I have a stack of wedding invitations sitting on the table waiting to get mailed.  The part of making our own wedding invitations that took the most time? Choosing a font.  Seriously.  We went through THIRTY EIGHT font choices before finding the “perfect” one.  The deciding factor? Will’s deciding that this font’s W’s were neither too pointy nor too round.  I wish I was kidding.  We are using “Cotillion” for the font nerds out there.  Once the font was chosen it took from Thursday afternoon (yep, I printed out the invitations while I watched the Michael Jackson coverage on MSNBC) until midnight of last night/this morning to get the invitations ready to be mailed.    The second hardest part of putting together the invitations?  Finding one of these.  I had to go to six stores before I found one.   The invitations will be mailed later today–after UPS delivers the second season of the Closer from Amazon.  I want to get the mailed today but at the same time I’m hoping the UPS guy takes a while because I would like Will to be there with me when we put the invites in the mailbox and he probably won’t be home until seven or eight.

On Saturday night we went to see Rent at the Keller Auditorium.  Will bought the tickets for me as a birthday present knowing that Rent is one of my favorite shows ever.  An added bonus?  Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal are reprising their roles as Mark and Roger (roles that they created as parts of the show’s original cast) for this tour and on Saturday I got to watch them.  Yep.  It probably sounds cheesy but watching Anthony Rapp play Mark is something that I have wanted to do since I first heard the soundtrack to Rent.  I had chalked it up to a “never gonna happen” (especially since Rent is no longer playing on Broadway) and I am not ashamed to admit that I geeked right out when he walked out on stage in full Mark costume.  I might have hooted and hollered a little bit. Adam Pascal was also excellent but I’ve always found Mark’s story more compelling than Roger’s.  And getting to see the original Mark in La Vie Boheme? Shoot me now because, theater wise, it does not get much better than that.  There is more theater geekery that needs to be written but the time! I do not haz it!

Sunday we went out to the coast with our friends Jen and Steve.  It was a beautiful day.  We all got sunburned and I got to sit through four hours of male machismo penis comparison as Steve drove like a maniac to see if Will would keep up with him and Will kept up with him to prove that he could.  Two hours there and two hours back my mantra was “Be a winner Steve! Just because you can pass someone does not mean you should!”  I am not ashamed to admit that there were a few moments when I was absolutely terrified. TERRIFIED.  I’m talking pushing myself back in my seat, grabbing the “oh shit” handle, trying not to throw up and almost bursting into tears TERRIFIED. After we got back I made Will promise that from now on we’ll just meet them wherever we go.  Will was a little “I’m a good driver! I know my limits! I can keep up!” until I pointed out that if he gets a ticket for reckless driving it could prevent him from getting a job after he graduates if the company does a background check because “I had to prove that I could keep up with the guy I was traveling with” won’t fly during an interview.  Other than the scary scary driving though, the trip was fun. Even with the sunburns.

Yesterday was spent working in the morning and then spending the afternoon and evening finishing up the wedding invites.  I also tried out the Wii’s All Star Cheer Squad and it? Is way boring.  It is nowhere near as much fun as We Cheer.  Today I will spend sitting on the couch, waiting for my DVDs to show up and catching up on work.

Who knew so much could get packed into so short a time?

In the last couple of days we have lost three legends: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.

I never really followed Farrah Fawcett’s career, but I had a big ol’ childhood soft spot for Ed McMahon and, obviously, I was a fan of Michael Jackson.  I watched his concert specials on HBO.  I danced to his music in my bedroom.  His videos were some of the first I ever saw.  I have vivid memories of sitting in my room and watching the Billy Jean video on my tiny black and white television set.  I own the DVD of his #1 videos.  Okay, I do not know where it is right now, but I know that I own it.

I will admit that this afternoon, after the Coroner confirmed his death that I sat on my couch and shed quite a few tears.  It wasn’t a sob fest or anything but it was definitely more than a sniffle.

Some of my tears come from the staggering amount of cruel and crude remarks being made about him.  Yeah, okay, he earned his “Wacko Jacko” nickname.   And yeah, the last decade and a half or so of his life was surrounded with gross and sludgy controversy.  But that does not mean that his entire life was a joke.  The sum of a man’s life should not be based solely upon a fraction of his years on this planet. For God’s sake, look at all of the good he did while he was alive.  Have you forgotten We Are the World and all that it inspired?  Show some effing respect for Chrissake.

I hope that, wherever he is right now, he is at peace.  If there is a Heaven, I truly hope that he is in it.

And Farrah and Ed too.

Heyyo!

To be honest, I have no idea how this I first became inspired with it, but sometime around the age of seven or eight I fell in love (love) with the idea of cheerleading.  My love ran so deep that I even checked out books about it from the library at school and, when I was nine, I saved up my allowance and bought some toy pom poms from KayBee Toys at the mall in Hilo.  I would spend hours playing around in my room doing the step-touch step-touch “Ready? Okay!” thing.  At one point I declared with absolute authority that my life goal was to become a professional cheerleader.

I’m sure my Mother was thrilled.

Then, when I turned ten I discovered reruns of the Monkees’ show on Nickelodeon and decided that my true calling was…wait for it…to be a professional tambourine player and yes, I saved up my allowance to purchase a kid sized tambourine from KayBee Toys.

I think it was at this point that my Mom gave up hope of my ever choosing anything resembling a “normal” career when I eventually grew up.

So, yeah, the love for cheerleading went the way of most childhood obsessions (I also wanted to be on Kids Incorporated and may or may not have once declared New Kids on the Block “better than the Beatles”…though to be fair, I was still a couple of months away from really discovering the Beatles) and then, in the seventh grade I went to a football game at the high school.  And there were cheerleaders there.  Real high school cheerleaders! With the cute skirts and sweaters! Shouting and cheering!  And I decided that I would be one of those cheerleaders.

I might have done it too if the school hadn’t cut cheerleading my sophomore year.  And, you know, if I hadn’t been the school freakazoid…not that being the school freakazoid kept me from joining the hastily assembled Dance Team my Senior Year.

So…yeah.  I have a soft spot for cheerleading (the kind of soft spot that sent me to watch Bring it On in theaters).  It’s one of those things that I have always wanted to do (it? is right up there with Play Annie on Broadway on my list of dreams that I am officially too old to accomplish).

And yes, it is kind of embarrassing, thanks for asking!

So…do I even have to tell you how hard I started drooling when I was sent a link to information about the We Cheer and All Star Cheer Squad games for the Wii?  Dudes!  I could pretend to be a cheerleader! In the safety of my living room! With the blinds drawn! And away from the prying eyes of all of the people who would, undoubtedly, laugh their asses off at me.

Look.  You may have your “always wanted to be the next non-batshit crazy-Van Gogh” or “always wanted to be a real life James Bond.”  or “I could have totally invented the world’s awesomest computer system if Steve Jobs and Bill Gates hadn’t gotten in the way” or “I can write just as well as Shakespeare.”  I? Have my “I always wanted to put on the tiny skirt and go jump around like an idiot in front of everybody I knew while I cheered on boys who were playing a sport I totally do not understand.”

So.  We rented Wii’s We Cheer last night.  Because the characters look cuter (Will says they look like Bratz dolls but whatever) than the characters on All Star Cheer Squad.  And I pushed it into the Wii this morning (wow, that sounds way to dirty).  And?

We Cheer for Wii is EFFING HARD.  (Huh.  Also horrendously dirty.) Oh. My. Effing. Gawd. It’s like Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution but…HARD.  Really horribly oh my god it hurts and why can’t I do this?!? hard.

But that didn’t stop me for playing it for approximately two and a half hours today (until my arms begged me to quit because wow. Ouch)!  By the way, two and a half hours is how long it took for me to pass ONE level.  Of all of the songs I tried and all of the times I tried them, I got ONE pass.  I iz not good at this game.

Which is exactly why I will play it more tomorrow.  And every day until it has to go back (Sunday) and I rent the All Star Cheer Squad so I can compare the two.  Because dammit, I will own one of these games because I WILL be a homebound only when nobody is watching because I am pathetically uncoordinated cheerleader.

Ready? Oh-Kay!

Last Friday I decided to make fried rice.  I found a pretty good fried rice recipe in the Taste of Home Cookbook a few months ago and I think I have the process pretty much down.  But first I forgot to pay attention to the rice and, um, oops.  Not so much with the able to use it.  So we went to the store to buy more rice.  When we got home I got busy preparing everything and discovered that I had also forgotten about the fact that I had thrown away our peas and carrotts mixed vegetables because of all of the times I let them thaw out completely by accident during the Dental Week of Hellishness.  Um.  Whoops again because I was not about to ask to go back to the store.  But! Guess what I discovered and you probably already knew?  Fried rice when made with frozen corn and broccoli is just as yummy as it is with peas and carrots! In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Friday’s batch was my best batch yet!  I have decided to name it Summer Rice because the colors (yellow and green) were all pretty and summery.

On Saturday I learned that my vacuum cleaner is falling apart.  I learned this when it somehow melted through one of its “make the brush turn” knobby things which then became dislodged and got sucked part way up into the mechanism before the vacuum cleaner went all “hey! what the hell is that thing?!?” and decided to spit out incredibly hot chunks of plastic all over my freshly vacuumed carpet.  Thankfully I was almost done with the first round of vacuuming.  Sadly, this was the day I decided to use some carpet deodorizer and discovered that the vacuum cleaner, before it tried to melt through and eat itself, had barely sucked any of it up.  I later learned that Will knows how to replace melted through knobby things with extra finagled wire hangers.  Even though I was mostly terrified of my new Frankenvacuum, I ran it over the floor another time in an attempt to get up the rest of the Glade.  It mostly worked.  And it felt like I was trying to push a car that was out of gas and chugging along on gas fumes across my floor.  Also? Poppy now REEKS of blackberry Glade smell even though we gave her a thorough wipe down and made sure that her fur was Glade free.

On Sunday we went downtown so Will could get some work done and I could…hang out while he got some work done and then we went to see the Proposal.  The Proposal is a pretty cute movie that does exactly what you want it to do: it makes you laugh and gives you a good excuse to chow down on overpriced popcorn for a couple of hours.  During the movie Will and I leanrned something awesome:  we can both use straws again without accidentally injuring ourselves (we were both prohibited from using straws for a few days after having our wisdom teeth removed)! This is an amazing development! We spent the rest of the afternoon drinking things through straws and, eventually, giving ourselves jaw aches…just because we could!

Yesterday we went to dinner at a friend’s house where we learned…that it is fun to have dinner with our friends (okay, technically we already knew that)!  We met some other friends of theirs and I bonded instantly one of them as he is a fellow Idaho escapee.  Sure we moved when I was four but it still counts!  I also learned that I am kind of in love with my Costco membership.  We went in last night to get beverages because Will offered to bring drinks to our friends’ house and I very nearly purchased a forty ounce bottle of Pantene Conditioner and a ginormous bag of ginormouser baking potatoes.  If only we hadn’t been trying to hurry.

Today I did not learned that it is worth it to buy the more expensive trash bags because the box that was only eighty nine cents at WinCo last week? Was eighty nine cents for a reason. Never again will I be sucked in by the lure of crazy cheap trash bags. Because hauling out the entire trash can and having to hoist it up over my head to dump its contents into the dumpster while trying to keep the lid of said dumpster from crashing down upon me? Was not an adventure I ever wanted to have.  This? Helped me to learn that I really need to spend some more time with the Wii Fit.

Tomorrow I hope to learn whether or not Wii Cheer is worth buying as I may or may not have rented it from Hollywood Video.  It may or may not be up against All Star Cheer Squad as a fun new game for the Snarke House (for me anyway–I bet there aren’t enough fancy sports cars in the world to get Will to try it).  I am kind of afraid that the lack of moving space in our living room will cause me to accidentally put out my own eye…which, if we’re being honest here is something that I could do perfectly well in a completely empty room.   Also? It is expensive as hell to rent Wii games from Hollywood Video if you do not have a Power Play membership. Holy cats!