So yeah, earlier when the cat was doing that kneading thing on my back because the smell of the vaporub was…enticing her? Apparently if you don’t discourage the cat from such activities, they will later come to you and try to eat you.  EAT. YOU.

Which is how Will found himself running for the camera a little while ago to take a picture of Poppy standing with her back feet on the back of the couch and her front feet on my shoulder while she bit at the t-shirt I was wearing.  If it weren’t for some lens cap issues I’d have a very embarrassing photo to post here.

Another weekend is coming to a close but you know, I’m kind of looking forward to tomorrow.  Our heatwave is due to be over and this next week is supposed to be cool and rainy.  Yeah, this is the same weather I bemoaned in February…and March…And April, May and June…but after a heatwave, nothing is more welcome than a thirty degree drop in temperature and some cooling off rain.

This weekend has been spent lying around and, um, getting stuck.  My particular muscle pull/sprain/ouchiness is right at the crossroads of a few muscle groups–the muscles that help me move my head, roll over and reach up over my head.  I’ve been downing Advil and doing the ice and heat thing and it seems to be healing slowly but surely.  And using frozen cubed potatoes for an ice bag? Is so not as good as using frozen peas. Take it from me.  Another important lesson learned: to get the cat to give you an impromptu backrup, slather your shoulder area with Vaporub, throw on a shirt and then lie down on the couch on your stomach.  If it weren’t for the feline drool soaking through the shirt it wouldn’t have been an unpleasant experience at all.

Tomorrow is supposed to be chock full of activity.  I need to do some grocery shopping and return roughly fifteen pounds of books to the library.  I think I’ll carry them in using my other arm.

You know how you know when its time to suck it up and join a gym to really get in shape?  When you try to stretch out your lower back and end up straining a muscle in your shoulder. No joke.  This morning I tried to do that thing where you roll onto your back and stretch your legs over your head and, um…. ow.  As soon as I can reach up to brush my hair I am so printing out a couple of free passes to the gyms in my neighborhood and going to check them out.  Good thing the only plan I had for the weekend was to lie around watching movies!

Other lessons learned today: leaving liquid gel caps in the glove compartment of a car during a heatwave is not a good idea unless you want to have a single lumpy gel cap of pain relief.  Will thinks sticking the bottle in the freezer will unmelt them back into their original shapes.  We’ll see how that turns out.

I think it is safe to say that Will and I have become addicted to Hollywood Video.  We didn’t plan on renting any movies this weekend but somehow we came home with three of them.  I think the plan is to watch movies in the bedroom (the room with the air conditioner) all weekend and just ride out the heat wave that’s taken over Portland.

Can I just take a minute to say that our PDX apartment is so completely superior to our Roseburg apartment.  Our apartment in Roseburg was a great little starter place (with holy crap I can’t believe we gave that up rent/utility costs) in most respects.  Sure only having one closet was kind of annoying and led to my development of a “I don’t want to keep anything! Anymore! So help me, my closets will never be stuffed to the gills again!” complex and the neighbors liked to smoke so much pot that we’d get contact highs just from being home at the same time as them, but really it wasn’t a bad little place.  What’s more, it had one of the best views of downtown Roseburg that you could get.

The view could be seen through our ginormous kitchen and bedroom windows (the only windows in the place).  I think, when added together, we had 64 square feet of windows in our apartment.  This posed a little bit of a problem because all 64 of those square feet? Faced west. And, because we were on the top floor of the building, the trees didn’t provide the windows with any shade.  So from one minute after noon until the sun finally set below the hills (usually a good nine and a half hours later in the summer) the sun beat into our apartment through the windows, raising the temperature of our apartment a good thirty degrees higher than the temperature outside.  This was fantastic in the winter and heinous in the summer.

Our PDX apartment is larger, has more closets and is twice as much as the Roseburg apartment, but this apartment almost never gets direct sunlight.  We are on the bottom floor and while the bedroom windows face west, they are shaded by very tall trees, so they only see an hour or so tops of direct sunlight.  The windows in the living room and dining room face North.  No direct sunlight there! Happy!  Our PDX apartment is a good ten to twenty degrees cooler than the outside temperatures and let me tell you, it is a welcome change.  Yesterday when the temperatures got up to 105, I had the fans on and sure, I felt hot but not “oh my god I’m roasting alive” hot.

Still though, a weekend lounging on our bed in front of the air conditioner and watching movies?  Sounds pretty good to me!

The scene:  Our bedroom, 3:46 AM.

The sound: The cat, horking up what sounded like a body-sized hairball (but what turned out to be a small, easily cleaned up hairball).

The sound: Me sighing as I rolled out of bed to clean up the hairball.

Will (pulling me to him as I climbed back into bed after cleaning up the hairball and saying in a half asleep voice): You deserve extra snuggles for having to clean up cat barf in the middle of the night….zzzzzz….

The scene: Our kitchen, 2:45 this afternoon, as Will is getting ready to go back to work (he has a late lunch)

Me: I really liked the extra snuggles reward last night.

Will: The what?

Me: The extra snuggles you gave me for cleaning up the cat’s hairball at almost four in the morning.

Will: I did that?

Me: You don’t remember?

Will: Wow, I do funny stuff in my sleep! What other weird things did I do?

Thing the first:

A few weeks ago, in desperation for something new to read, I checked Altared out from the library. It’s a collection of essays on marriage and being a bride and planning weddings and it looked like it might have some funny stuff in its pages. I was lying in bed last night and reading a particularly poignant passage about how most of the people who cry at weddings are people who are already married. The writer was positing that they cry because they start to think about their own marriages and what an immense thing it is to commit yourself so fully to another person. To be honest, I was getting a little overwhelmed just reading the passage when, from the bathroom came a noise that sounded roughly like this:

“FAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

EAAAAAAAARRRRR…BLURGHGBGBGBGBGBGBGBG”

Is there a way to spell phonetically the sound one makes when a sphincter becomes so active that you can hear each movement it makes from another room?

To say that it took something away from the effect the books words were having on me is something of an understatement.

Thing the second:

Later, after said sphincter had apparently recovered…

“ARRRGGHHH! You did this on purpose!”

“I did what on purpose?”

“You left the IKEA catalog in the bathroom!”

“………that’s a bad thing?”

“Yes! Because you knew I’d open it out of curiosity and now I can’t stop looking through it!“

Nothing super important has happened today, but I am getting itchy at leaving the blog un-updated.  So, do I pull a Seinfeld and post about nothing?  Or do I just let it go and wait until something worth posting about happens?  I know I’ll have material to write about tomorrow since we’re being forced to go to have been invited to Will’s company’s annual picnic.  Apparently there will be Volleyball.  I’m fine with volleyball…as long as they don’t ask me to play it.  Here’s what I sound like when I play volleyball:

“Yours! Yours! Yours! Yours yours! Ow!”

Oh my God! I suck! Here is some important information that I forgot to blog about:

Today is my neice’s 16th birthday.  Seriously.  This whole her growing up thing? Should not be allowed.

So Will and I have finally set a date for the wedding.  It is looking like September 12 of next year.  I was thinking about putting up one of those big glittery countdown things that you see all the time on Myspace, but in the end I decided not to.  I’m still not sure if I decided not to because those things are gaudy or because having one on my blog would FREAK ME OUT. So yep.  With any luck, in 397 days I’ll be married!

And my neice? Is 16. 16! It’s Outrageous!

I have something of a bandwagon aversion.  Maybe its my contrary nature, but something in me is naturally suspicious when something becomes instantly popular by a lot.  I tend to stay far far away from things that are overnight sensations, which is how I managed to last this long without seeing the Lord of the Rings movies…

Until last night when I watched the first one with Will. I promised him, when we first started dating, that I would watch the movies with him in return for watching something of mine (I do not think I will ever get him to watch West Wing, but I’m gaining some ground on Veronica Mars).  Last night we finally sat down with the first LoTR movies.

The movie was fine.  I liked it enough.  I kind of wish that Will had told me beforehand that we would be watching the “how am I retired? I was only 30 when we sat down to watch this thing” version of the movie because seriously? it was the movie that would. not. die.  The Postman felt shorter.  The third Matrix movie felt shorter.

And I think it’s a sign of my television-ness that after the movie I turned to Will and said “if they kill Charlie I will kick some dark horseman ass!” when the credits finally started rolling.  Also? It was kind of hard to watch Viggo and listen to his thin thin voice without saying “why the hell does the baseball player from 28 days sound so goddamn much like Kristin Chenoweth?”

Next Sunday we’ll watch the next movie.  I can’t wait to see what my reaction to that one is going to be.  Also? I got a great big kick out of the end of the movie, as the credits were rolling and Will exclaimed, “Cate Blanchett is in this movie?? I didn’t see her! Where was she?” Will is not so good with names.  Or faces.

I think that I am going to have to start posting in the mornings, before I start working.  This whole “I’ll leave blogging for last because I enjoy it the most thing” has led to a total slow down of my posting because you know what?  After spending all day trying to be creative for other peoples’ purposes? I am tapped.  I sit down with the computer and go “ummmm………nah.  Maybe tomorrow.” Which, yes, makes me sucktastic.

In great news but also related to my lack of posting time is Will deciding to hang out with me in the evenings instead of holing up with WoW.  This is a phenomenal development and I do not want to take it for granted because he could get sucked back into the WoWverse at any moment.  I love hanging out with Will–and the last few days have been movie madness in our house.  We have watched: Secretary (guess who chose this one), Juno, Hellboy, The Bucket List, Charlie Bartlett, Shoot ‘Em Up, Gone Baby Gone and Catch and Release.  Our movie consumption rate is starting to rival those evenings in college when nobody had to work or had rehearsals or study groups and my roommates and I would go to Blockbuster and load up and watch movies until we all passed out.  Good times.  For these eight movies (I’d seen Hellboy before, but wanted to watch it again because Will hasn’t seen it), I have to say that my two favorites are Juno and Gone Baby Gone.  Gone Baby Gone kind of reminded me of The Life of David Gale.  It could end a few times and been okay but it sucks you back in for a little while longer and then when it does end, you have a total moral delimma to solve for yourself!  As Will put it “Hello, gray area, nice to see you again!”  If Will doesn’t get sucked back into WoW we might actually go hiking.  Hiking! On purpose! With Will! I could faint!

It has also been fun to slowly convert Will into my movie genre list.  There is no “funny” in my world.  There’s “stupid funny” “wry funny” “pee your pants funny” “sweet funny” “chick funny” “smart funny” and “man humor.”  I have similar breakdowns for the Drama and Action genres as well.  Why only have three categories when you can have thirty? (plus, it makes choosing movies easier)

In completely unrelated news, today I made my very first loaf of homemade bread! When I woke up today I didn’t plan to make bread, but I was looking through these recipe cards that showed up in the mail and one had a recipe for “easy” bread so I went for it.  The hardest part was getting enough flour into the dough that it didn’t stick to the cutting board I was using as my “lightly floured surface.”  I have decided that, in the cooking world, a “lightly floured surface” actually means “heavily coated with flour.”  At any rate the bread turned out well and I am kind of proud of it.  Now I want to experiment and see what kinds of bread I can make with this recipe.  Also? kneading? totally awesome arm workout.

So.  How did your weekends go?