Recently in daily life Category

I just got back from another trip to Austin for work.  I always seem to have really strange dreams when I'm out of my normal sleeping element.  And I'm pretty good about documenting these dreams.  Not so much for any psychological analysis...moreso just for my own entertainment.  I keep them all in a Ponyboy Curtis-style composition book.  I just spent a few minutes scanning through this book, and I'm going to share some of my favorite dreams with you...

• 10 MAY 2007 - I was a member of the Royal Court of Sweden, and the two red-headed twins from America's Next Top Model were my chambermaids.  Our reign was called the Malmsteen Dynasty.
  
  
• 16 SEP 2001 - With all the possibilities of computer animation, Hollywood decided to get rid of all human actors.  Except two, and they held a vote to choose which two actors those would be.  They chose Sharon Stone and Haley Joel Osment.
  
  
• 14 AUG 2000 - (note: this was in my most intense wrestling-watching days) ...then Ken Shamrock and Tazz started feuding.  Somehow I got pulled into this.  Ken was making Tazz sign a document promising not to put him in the Tazzmission.  They wanted me to sign as a witness, and Shane McMahon was there, too, since he was a notary...
  
  
• 17 OCT 1999 - I was in junior high and I was riding my bike back to the house because I had forgotten my homework.  When I got back, KISS had taken over the school.  I was very excited by this prospect until I got closer, and realized they were making everyone run laps.
  

My friend Christina is funny.  I work with her, she sits about 10 feet behind me and to the left, and sometimes we pass notes. 

1. The other day I gave her some tiny clementine oranges with a sticky note with an arrow pointing at the oranges, saying something like: "the cutest cuties ever!!"
   
   
2. Today she put an apple on my desk with a sticky note that said: "smallest cutest apple (sorry, I'm not giving it to you)" with an arrow pointing at the apple...and she waited just long enough for me to read the note, then she took the apple away.
   
   
3. Later I put that sticky note on my boobie so the arrow was pointing at my other boobie, calling it the "smallest cutest apple."
   
   
4. Then Christina came back to my desk with a sticky note that said: "make a t-shirt!"
   
   
5. Then when Christina left for a while, I put a sticky note on her monitor that said: ""I like analog instant messages"
   
   
6. When she came back, she was quiet for a while, and then walked over and stuck this on my monitor:
   

I attended a lovely housewarming BBQ last weekend, and enjoyed lots of meat and corn on the cob.  It was about 8 hours of drinking, and 4 hours of Ultimate Banzake.  Everyone was a little tipsy.  Matt was busy playing host/barbeque master, and at one point I had been dying to talk to him for about an hour because I simply had to ask him a question about one of the attendees.  This attendee was a tall broad-shouldered guy with broad shoulder-length wavy hair and a baseball cap.

I had convinced myself he was Thor from "Adventures in Babysitting" because he looked exactly like this:



I finally managed to pull Matt aside long enough to whisper my suspicions to him.  Matt's face had zero reaction.  He just kinda looked into space and walked away.  To my horror/delight, he marched straight over to Thor and pointed at me and said: "SHE thinks you look like Vincent D'onofrio as Thor in Adventures in Babysitting."

Then Thor and I met and he told me tales, such as Metallica Drummer. We agreed we loved the internet and the digital age, although we do hold onto nostalgic for the days gone by when weird videos like this were difficult to come by and you just knew that one guy who had a bad VHS copy.  Now it's readily available, indexable, searchable, and instantly shareable.  Yay and boo.

Dear Citizens of Seattle (mostly to the boys, but sadly, to some of the girls, too),

Would you please quit spitting on the sidewalk so much?  When walking around downtown, I literally can't walk more than three steps without having to maneuver around your little mounds of saliva and mucus.  It's fucking disgusting.  If you must expectorate, perhaps you could try spitting into a trash can?  Or a grassy area?  Or onto the street and not the sidewalk?

(Special exemption: I once saw a guy spit on a pigeon.  It was still gross, but at least it made me laugh.  Sorry, pigeon.  Karma.)

But seriously people, stop it.  You're sicking me out.  I saw a homeless guy pissing against a building last week and that did not bother me 1/8th as much as your phlegm.

Sincerely,

halee

I am currently on a conference call with the Detroit office.  These calls are often very flavorful, and you get gems like this that get shouted out:

"I have two uncles who got shot throwing dice."

Man, all my uncle ever did was lie to a nurse about being a veterinarian!

Oops, I have been majorly out of pocket.  I went to Texas for a week, then returned to Seattle and had company arrive the very next day.  Therefore my internet time has been scarce so I haven't written for a while.  I had lots of good stories, but most of them would be best with pictures so I'll hang on to them a bit longer until I can get myself organized.

Until then, I will share this little memory nugget from my sister:

"Remember that time at my apartment when you came over to watch Slamball and the cats were on the patio and you got up, filled your glass w/ water and poured it directly on black kitty and black kitty was so freaked out and he jumped up and started running and ran into your leg.  Remember that?"

No, I had quite forgotten about that.  Thanks, Staci!

I'm off to Vancouver tomorrow with my friend Jenni, then expect a full report on Texas, New Year's, my new shoes, and Canada when I return!

So the lion said I had to go to the holiday party at work.  (Not that it took much arm twisting.)  Parties at my company sound fairly legendary, and all sorts of mysterious clues had been dropped over the past few weeks.  "Wear your coat."  "If you need to be back by a certain time because of sitters, let us know so we can arrange for it."  "We're meeting in the lobby here, and do NOT be later than 7:30!"

Theories abounded.  "Booze cruise!!"  "We're totally going to the zoo to drink with lions."  "We're walking to the Space Needle and bungee jumping off of it into a vat of champagne!"  "I think they're going to just let us ride back and forth all night on the newly inaugurated S.L.U.T." 

Not so.  The office party was actually...at the office.  Which wasn't so bad, because they actually did a pretty rad (and fast) job of morphing the place into something fantastical.  Every conference room had a theme: hookah lounge, hot chocolate corner, karaoke zone, sno-cone palace, face paint central, etc.  It was kind of like going to the fair.  Only you're at work.  And everything is free.  Especially drinks.

I'll skip most of the stories, because they're no different than most drunken work party stories.  But I will tell you about my shoes.  On Saturday morning after the party I noticed I tracked mud into my house.  Monday someone reminisced about the cake that was brought in towards the end of the party (cake that I did not remember).  Tuesday (today) I was straightening shoes in my closet and saw that I must have stepped in a swamp of wet toilet paper on the night of the party, because the shoes I had worn that night had white crusty shit around the heels.

Then it all dawned on me:

I suddenly remembered the cake fight that broke out!

That was not dried toilet paper mache on my shoes, it was FROSTING!!!

That was not mud that I tracked in, it was CHOCOLATE!!

So there I was.  Innocently and hard-workingly sitting at my desk.  In the distance, the pug that works around the corner from me began to bark.  Not the usual cute innocent barks of a spastic friendly doggie, but barks of terror.  Barks that would not stop.  The kind of barks that were engineered to alert their owners to certain danger.

I looked up in time to see a lion slowing rounding the corner, surveying the scene on our floor.

This lion casually walked over to an empty desk in our area and picked up the phone, apparently to check some voicemail messages.  He sat down at the computer and propped his back paws on the desk as he listened to the phone, then put his legs down and sat up to take note of something on a post-it.  Then he stood up, stretched, and reached in his pocket for a stack of index cards.  






He then proceeded to walk around to each and every person, and handed us all one of these cards inviting us to the Christmas party.  Please carefully note the the reason "why":



Apparently similar incidents happened in our offices in other cities.  A bulldog delivered the invitations in Detroit.  Portland was visited by a penguin.

TO:        Eco-Elements
FROM:   Concerned Citizen
SUBJ:    humble request for the public good

Hello,

I take the #15 bus every evening to get home from work, and I wait for my bus at the 1st and Pine stop right outside your storefront.  The smell of incense even a few doors down from your store is extremely overwhelming, and on some days, flat-out nauseating.  Do you think maybe you could tone it down a bit?

If not, maybe you should consider selling dust masks at a kiosk outside your front door to the other bus commuters who aren't as interested in the odor of patchouli as you are.

Thank you,

h.k.

I wasn't as hungover as I thought I would be after Video Game Vomit Day, but apparently I was hungover enough that I never checked the text messages on my phone.  So this morning at work I was very pleased to find this message from Jackie:

Sent: 04-Nov-07 3:31AM
"I threw up.  Your party was a success!"

Hooray!!