this has nothing at all to do with Front 242: random industrial/techno/ electronica reference aside, what would you have done differently?



[via MeFi]

european vacation, take two: since our original plans got flushed by TPTB, i've research and studied and waited and strategized the best rate possible, $90 less than the best rate i'd seen posted prior and over $200 less than yesterday's rate for the very same flight. now i just have to wrestle our hotel into giving us a lower rate and we'll be good to go!

just hold still... this won't hurt a bit. ;)



[via SireMoire]

towel not included: after having read about the application at individual and community weblogs alike, i've finally gotten around to installing Trillian. i think i'm gonna like this time waster... ;)

funny for more reasons than i can count:

There's no doubt about it: you're eccentric. You wear your heart on your sleeve. You don't hesistate one bit when it comes to talking about squeamish topics. Although you like to have peace and quiet, you often find excitement in a random crisis or two.

Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.



see, when i wear a stud, he's usually... oh, nevermind. ;)

got ink? something tells me that if you have to ask MSN's WomenCentral whether or not you're ready for a tattoo, you probably aren't.



speaking of which, i kinda want to get another one but have no idea what or where. maybe i'll get one on my 30^th birthday. that should give me enough brainstorming time.

Have yourself a terrier little Christmas... i know i'm getting ahead of myself, especially considering how behind i am on other projects and plans, but tell me the truth—are these Christmas cards mockery worthy? i suppose i could always send the more tradidional cards depicting ice skating nuns falling on their @$$es.

e-mail from my bosses' boss:

We should not be using company email for non-business use, someone could be watching.

eew.

Account expiration notice from Match.com:

brigita, your Match.com account is set to expire on November 20, 2002. Want to keep your Match.com membership? Just log in! Otherwise, your account information will be permanently removed.

considering i haven't logged into that account in over three years, yes, for the love of all things holy, let the account lapse.



and while you're at it, will you turn the spam stream off as well?

magnanimous or just can't be bothered? after scheduling a pick-up a few weeks ago, the thrift store mover guys arrived promptly at 1pm to remove our crappy old couch. little did i know that my act of goodwill would be two-fold—i didn't pitch a fit when they gouged the hell out of our hardwood floors in the process of wrestling the uncomfortable monstrosity out of the study.



i will readily admit that my personal investment in the condition of the floors isn't all that high since we rent...but i did manage to mention twice that i was able to move the couch into the den without too much trouble by myself.



hmm...i guess i just opted for pride as opposed to wrath, huh? i'll stop patting myself on the back now.

woaaaaaaaaah! we're half-way there! three months down, three to go.



trip delay silver lining: i've got one more month to get my bod back into running shape for The Mister. hell, it's something.

no good, just bad: guess who might not be going overseas to see her husband two weeks from tomorrow?



i'm going to start drinking now.

but in the meantime...



What fast food condiment are you? brought to you by Quizilla

what goes up must come down: i'm experiencing yet another one of those productivity lulls, expecting to ramp things up mañana. in the meantime, go be a good citizen and pledge some $$ to your local (or not so local) public radio station.

"When we label people, we close our eyes, we close our heart. If we take a minute, we find out that everyone belongs to someone."



proof that, while this world of ours may very well be in a handbasket, we have a long, long way to go before we actually get to Hell.



[via harrumph!]

ignorance is bliss: apparently, Guinness isn't vegan. good thing i'm not, either.

let's get caught up, shall we? i had gotten it into my head to paint the main non-cabinet or window wall in our kitchen a while ago but finally did something about it this past weekend. Cleo and i walked up to our local Benjamin Moore store to pick up some paint chips. after much deliberation, i decided that Chili Pepper—a deep red with hints of orange, brown and pink in it—would best match both the lettering in the oft-mentioned monkey poster and the fabric on the chairs.



so after rushing (i probably started too late in the afternoon...) through a half-assed paint job (...and was thoroughly distracted by the football game), the wall actually came out pretty damn good! of course i cropped the pic so you can't see how uneven my edges are. ;)



the color kinda changes throughout the day, what with the pink showing up in the natural light and the more earthy tones coming through in the evening. now all i have to do is assemble a sock monkey and figure out how to best display a beautiful set of french-themed cheese plates we recently received as a wedding gift and we'll be all set!



we wives met at the Botanical Gardens this past sunday afternoon for a tour, lunch, debrief, and chat. despite the majority of the park not being in bloom the rose garden was in full swing, my chicken quesidilla special sans chicken was extra yummy, and it was good to hear what was going on with our respective mens.



the meeting started to drag a bit when the topics of conversation were centered on the roles of parent and homeowner, of which i am neither. hopefully my eyes didn't glaze over too much, tho i think i had fully recovered from my earlier hangover by that point.



mom rolled into town that evening and chatted up E. and her out-of-town [and accomplished author] friend J. during a stitch 'n bitch session. the next day we struck out to check on a buffet/sideboard thingy i had seen at a thrift store the week prior.



now, The Mister loves my thrifty ways and buys except when it comes to furniture, so i wanted to get mom's seal of approval before investing in some furniture that isn't worth a whole lot.



the buffet passed muster, so we hauled it home in mom's pick-up truck and managed to wrestle it up the stairs without any damage to us or the buffet. mom pulled another household hint from her bag of tricks and showed me how one can clean the gunk off of wood (and even out some of the scratches and dings in the process) with some super fine (#0000) steel wool and GoJo Orange, a hand cleaner that can be found in any hardware store—just make sure you get the stuff without the pumice.



after about an hour or two of moderate cleaning and a thin coat of butcher's wax (aka bowling alley wax) that we also picked up at a hardware store, voilà!



this is where i should mention that the picture hanging above the buffet is a seattlized version of diVinci's Last Supper that was made by none other than our very own Renaissance man, psorr. i'll have to take a better pic one of these days to show you all just how much work he put into that, but i'll just leave it right now saying that i'm [in St. Matthew's place] third from the right with the blue robe and Jeff is second from the right. i don't know why i bothered mentioning that since you can't see our faces, but anyhow...



but back to matters at hand. mom then went above and beyond the call of being crafty and helpful when she installed a writable drive into the computer yesterday. is there nothing she can't do? ;)



thanks for everything, mom! i hope you had a good visit and found some good buys on the drive home. call me later so i know you got home safe!

I had tried singing once and they threw tomatoes so after the show. I had a nice salad. while watching one of my all-time favorite movies on DVD with mom last night (definitely in the Desert Island Top 5), i realized that Hedwig (rather the actor who portrays her) reminded me of someone i'd seen in film or TV very very recently.



fortunately this thought didn't torture me for the rest of the night as i quickly figured out that the person i had been thinking of is none other than one of the leads from one of my all-time favorite TV shows. what do you think—were John Cameron Mitchell and Rachel Griffiths separated at birth or is it just me?

whatta weekend: ND is 6-0 for the first time in almost a decade, i painted the kitchen (just a wall, but still), attended the first wives meeting since The Mister deployed, mom is in town for a visit and we just returned from purchasing a buffet/sideboard thingy for the dining room! details and pics later. :)

what's wrong with this picture: while checking out my plastic bucket, chip clips, and gum at the dollar store today, i saw pregnancy tests on display in the impulse section of the check stand.

but they don't fight crime:



i am a postage stamp that tracks infra-red and automatically updates your weblog when used, while the mister is like a normal football, but it can bring down an elephant.



using our real names, i am a hearing aid that tells you when people are lying, while he's a pudding that's voice-activated.



mmm...voice activated pudding.

[MeFi]

i caved: a tomato/mozarella/basil sandwich just sounded too good to pass up. consider my dairy experiment concluded.



i'm not sure exactly what i was trying to discover (or prove, for that matter) by abstaining from dairy, but the frustration caused by the process was more than i could handle. i started the whole thing intending to do it 100%—reading labels, not cutting corners, and sacrificing a little flavor in the name of science. or something.



i didn't realize just how prevalent dairy—milk, cream, yogurt, whey protein—is in [processed] foods. i still think that the consumption of milk is kinda funky, but i'm not willing to be inconvenienced (or to inconvenience those around me) three times a day. so bring on the ice cream!

wanna know what else is [not so much] funny? starting the day planning on going to bed before 11p but then actually hitting the hay after 1a. now that's funny.

NSM-IM: it's funny how you send the love of your life a long and drawn out mush-mail expecting to receive an immediate response, only to sit around until a way-too-late hour to realize that he's probably checking in on his missiles or some such thing.



an yet, it's so not funny. at all.



we're standing at 78 days, folks. i don't know which is more pathetic: the fact that i'm all kinds of broke up long before the half-way or that i had to use a calculator to figure that out. i'll be glad to take your pity either way.



(i'm only 53% kidding.)

glad i forgot to pack my jinx: the past weekend can be best illustrated by the state of my nose [of all things]: raw on the inside from my cold and burnt on the outside from the game. while my cold only got worse over the course of the trip, it fortunately didn't hinder me from having a great time. the crew was thankfully feeling pretty mellow themselves, so we didn't bother with the smoke and crowds of the local bar scene. we were already with the people we wanted to see, anyhow.



the weather was absolutely perfect on saturday, sunny and clear with a slight breeze blowing every so often. after a pleasant morning of tailgating, we trucked off to the stadium where we weathered a pretty rough first quarter to ultimately cheer the Irish on to a 31-7 victory. i don't even want to think about what our record would be if it weren't for our defense.



as for my dairy diary, i tried my best to be lactose-free for the weekend—first eschewing all dairy, then just the stuff apparent to the naked eye (cheese, milk, etc.), then chucked it all together. because when a thoughtful friend goes to the trouble of making a separate soy sausage lasagna for you—the only vegetarian in a group of almost twenty—you don't want to be ungracious...especially when it was so frickin' delicious you go back for seconds. ;)



i'm pretty sure that my cold is on the wane, although i'm hoping that the new chill in the air will stick around for some time.

bitter? check:





Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?

brought to you by Quizilla

ah-CHOO! i'm home but sicker than ever. more about the weekend when my head clears.

mmm...shopping: all of kris' shoe talk has made me want to get a pair of novelty mary janes for myself.



i know—they're leather. believe me, you wouldn't want to spend more than five minutes in a closed room with me after i've been wearing a pair of shoes made from "man made materials." my piggies gotsta breathe.

how much do i love my husband? i figured out how to program his (ok, our) VCR so i can tape the Alabama vs. Georgia game this weekend. now, if that isn't love, i don't know what is. ;)



ok, truth be told, it really wasn't all that hard.



still, it's a good thing i got that all squared away as it looks like there's a lot on the line with this game, even though 'Bama can't go to a bowl game as a result of its probation. funny thing is, The Mister's dad—who works for the SEC—may have had something to do with that.



both funny strange and haha but not so much jackass.



speaking of NCAA football, i'm heading back for a game myself this weekend. wish us luck!

it doesn't count as cheating if you didn't really know, right? and while the calorie count isn't all that bad, the fact that half of the calories come from fat is. i guess it's a case of "if you have to ask..."

that tickle? yeah, it always turns into a cold. :(

first travel wrinkle: LHR --> LGW. no check-through luggage and i have to pay £14 for a shuttle both ways? what a load of horse crap.



on the bright side, i have an excuse to buy a brand-spaking new carry-on.

ice ice baby: i know Valentine's Day¹ is a long way off, but i'm putting my holiday request in early, despite the fact that The Mister is not one to visit my little corner of the 'net and his internet access at work is, shall we say, severely limited at the moment.



unfortunately, he's more the type of guy to take direction when buying gifts as opposed to using creative inspiration, so let me just say straight out that i want ice for V-Day 2003, and lots of it.



but i'm not about the "MTV Cribs, bling-bling, conspicuous consumption, yeah-your-house-is-big-but-you-RENT" variety of ice, i want it by the acre. glistening, sparkling, pure ice for as far as the eye can see.



afterall, a trip to Québec is much cheaper and easier than a flight to Lapland.



previously mentioned here.

hot off the [work] presses:

TIVO INCREASES REBATES



TiVo kicked off some good old-fashioned discounting today. The company announced it will increase a rebate plan and offer more capacity. Its latest unit will offer 80 hours of storage and a $50 rebate.



The DVR specialist is running out of time to prove that it can capitalize on the hype of the technology with a standalone unit, and discounting is the most direct route to increased sales. Their pricing is as follows:



  Size   Retail   W/Rebate

40 Hour   $299     $249

60 Hour   $399     $349

80 Hour   $399     $349

is this a sign that it's time for me to surrender to the TiVo borg?

glad to know i wasn't the only one who heard it like that:

Dude, forget the fan fic. I want to be punished, and if raising a evil, phallic temple is all it takes to get that sort of attention from Giles, I'm so there. -- Ace



The line starts behind me, sister. -- Sars

God bless TWoP.

damn the torpedoes! full speed ahead to European Vacation [and Sailor Smooch-a-Thon] 2002!



the Nav had better be kind and refrain from pulling a fast one on me as i bit the bullet yesterday and bought my tickets to go see The Mister this fall.



exact locations and dates are confidential (loose lips and all that stuff) but i can tell you that it's going to be quite the Mediterranean adventure!

not that there's anything wrong with that:



I'm Diana, which ambiguous dyke are you? quiz by Turi



i guess Carmex could count as a lipstick, yeah?