A few belated moments from my time in Texas.

A few belated moments from my time in Texas.

I had a plain salad.


Beauty at a 107 degree heat index.


It was hot.


Luckily, the pedal-boat's pedals didn't really do anything, so we were forced to break out the oars and make beautiful patterns in the water.


Tex-Mex.


I'm halfway ashamed, halfway proud to admit there was a Coke Challenge. Choice #5 was mostly bourbon, however.


So much bourbon, in fact, that nobody could identify the coke-like mixer.


And that's where the rest of the memory card turned into various angles of my (many) glasses of bourbon and sprite, close-ups of ice cubes or other things that don't really need close-ups, or complete darkness from the porch after midnight.

And with that, I'm going out of town again, to the beautiful, stuck-in-the-past island of Catalina.

Waxing dramatic.

Waxing dramatic.
Last night, my aesthetician made the "ta-da" noise as she whisked away the towel to get started on the bikini wax. No, there's nothing amusing about spreading piping hot wax dangerously close to my delicates and then ripping it off. And I'd rather keep it that way.

Read today's list.

Honey and Lemon

Honey and Lemon
Last night, I was struck suddenly with a vicious sore throat, that has since gotten worse, and as I lay in bed, barely able to swallow, I wanted to ask Erik to boil some hot water and make me a yummy nostalgic mix of hot honey and lemon juice, and then I realized that Erik wasn't home and I was all alone and if I wanted some honey and lemon I'd have to drag my lazy, sick, sorry ass out of bed and get it myself so I just stayed in bed and went to sleep.

My husband moved out last night.

My husband moved out last night.
How's that for a catchy title?

Actually, there's really good news behind this. ERIK GOT A JOB. A fucking job! He'll be working for the U.S. Forestry Service far far away. Actually, only 3 and a half hours away. It's a contract through the end of September, and will be working 4 days a week, 10 hours a day. Out in the beautiful Los Padres National Forest, working in the sunshine, using his hands, surrounded by nature's majesty. He'll probably have to camp out on the more remote areas of trail everyonce in a while, too. Rather than feeling lonely or sad about this, I'm mostly just completely jealous.

Because he has 3 day weekends, I'll still be seeing him every weekend. We can do this. Also, there's money involved.

As for how I'll spend my evenings now, sans-husband, I've so far booked the entire week with facials and free babysitting for friends. And it's a good thing Jeopardy is over for the summer, because otherwise, I'd have to hire a stand-in to come over and cook dinner with me and kick JeopardyKen's ass.

I haven't really lived alone before. Even though I did live alone for over a year after college, I was shacking up with my future husband the whole time. This is going to be interesting.

A-oooow

A-ooow.
This week, I've been borrowing a dear friend's car. It just happens to be the most fabulous car you've ever laid eyes upon, a bright yellow VW Karmann Ghia convertible. Before getting behind the wheel of this car, there was no way of comprehending the amazing fabulousness super powers it possesses and transfers to it's driver. Even earlier in the week, I've been carpooling and I guess people leave you alone when there's a man in the car. My carpool buddy totally cramps my style, it seems. But this morning, I was on my own. The ghia was on.

Two moments of note from my drive to work:

The moderately overweight man on the motorcycle passed me, and did a full turn of the head to stare. At least I think he stared... All I could see was massive quantities of back flab hanging down over his waistline as the air picked up the bottom of his t-shirt. Tuck that shit in, please.

The white early-model boat car occupants actually WHISTLING at me as I passed. I really don't remember the last time I was whistled at, but it may have been when I was a bus driver in college. Rather than take upon the battles of hundreds of generations of women to de-objectify themselves, this totally made me feel good. As I exited the freeway, they made that "aow" whoopy noise.

Good times, I say.

Our Endless Numbered Days

Our Endless Numbered Days

This is my favorite CD today:


Iron and Wine, "Our Endless Numbered Days."

So beautiful: "Kings of Convenience"-y but slightly more Americana-indierock and lilty, slightly less rumba, and a lot less scandinavian.

If you peel away the endlessly beautiful brooding and wistful layers of lyric and sound, you're left with a bittersweet folk-record-at-heart.

Also, the album cover totally matches my blog.

Me Sleep Pretty One Day

Me sleep pretty one day.
Last night, sitting at gate E-18 in George Bush International Airport in Houston, I decided to get my things in order and get the books out of my carry on so that it was ready to stow in the overhead compartment. I had about 25 pages left to go in my two-day old copy of David Sedaris' howlingly funny Me Talk Pretty One Day. I bought the book Friday morning in the San Diego airport, even though I had brought plenty of reading material of my own. I plowed through it, much to the fright of the two young polite children sitting next to me on the flight to Houston. No kids, I really can't explain to you why this is funny.

Sunday night in Houston, I realized that the scant 25 pages would probably take me about 10 minutes to read and that just wouldn't cut it. Again ignoring the poor, old, novelty-less book I brought from home, I decided to duck into the airport Borders and get something shiny. This time, I went with Chuck Palahniuk. He was in San Diego on Thursday night, and I didn't find out until very late in the evening, too late to make it over to meet him and profess my undying literary-crush. But he was on Thursday night's local NPR program, The Lounge, where he discussed at great lengths his friendship with Marilyn Manson and the very good news that four more of his books are currently being made into films.

It was a toss up between Invisible Monsters and Survivor, but I wasn't about to take a book on a plane that had the words "plane crash" on the back cover description. So I went with the more optimistic choice of a hideously disfigured beauty queen who tries to kill everyone, slowly.

Back at the gate, brandishing my books for my fellow travellers to get a glimpse into my mind, the books I read and the music spewing from the open car windows being catalysts for imaginary conversations carried out in my head with people who don't exist, I was just spilling a little soy latte on my pants when a girl across from me asked which Chuck Palahniuk book I had. She even pronounced his name correctly. I asked her if she had heard he was in town, and felt a little better that I wasn't the only fan who missed her chance to tell the strange genius that he was, well, just that. We then moved onto Sedaris, also lying in my latte-speckled lap, which quickly turned into a back-and-forth banter of soundbytes and punchlines from various stories. "Two morsels...of...lumber...". Her travelling companions, perhaps her mother and another couple my age, joined in with nostalgic This American Life moments. The Palahniuk-pronouncing girl mentioned how to this day, she and her brother pepper their conversations with lines from "The Rooster," a cuss-filled account of his younger brother's vocabulary and lifestyle. Her friends hadn't read it, so I handed them the book saying, "it's quick, read it." They didn't quite make it through the whole story before rows 20-29 had to board, so they handed me my conversation-piece and I made my way onto the plane.

As I sat down, I saw that the guy from the gate was sitting a few rows in front of me. He waved, smiled, and said, "Can I borrow that book?" Sure, he knew I had two books with me, but maybe I should have told them about the 25 pages I was saving for the trip home. About how I sort candy and save the best flavors until the end, usually scheduling each one as a reward for writing a paragraph or getting something else done. Those last 25 pages, two stories, were the lined up candy I had been salivating for for the last 48 hours. "Sure," I said cheerily, as I handed him my book.

Invisible Monsters turned out to be quite the page-turner. Had I not had to seriously concentrate to balance my baggage on my boating- and bourbon-weary, sunscreen- and bugspray-irritated body, I might have walked through the San Diego terminal with my nose still in the book.

No less than a half hour into the flight, I glanced a few rows ahead to see that my new book-borrower friend had turned off his overhead light and was fast asleep. I imagined my 25 pages of candy tucked away in the seat pocket in front of him, or resting open, pages-down on his tray table.

Did you know the average human has 20-odd feet of intestines?

Did you know the average human has 20-odd feet of intestines?
Instead of spending the evening at Extraordinary Desserts with my favorite coworkers and their lovers and mothers and the most amazing vegan fruit scone and some organic fruity green tea from a gorgeous little teapot, I spent the evening writhing in pain.  Fucking fuck fuck.  I even felt the onset of girly pain coming on early enough, so I stopped what I was doing (nothing, really), and scheduled my recovery process.  Seriously.  This is why I can never relieve pain: I watch the freaking pot boil.  I laid down on the bed and calculated how long it would take the for drugs to kick in.  I even gave myself a small buffer period to lie still and rub my tummy some more for good measure.  Sadly, I didn't start to feel better until somewhere around 10pm when the sweet husband brought up a hot water bottle.   10pm!  That's two hours behind schedule!  That is unacceptable!  Pain, you're totally fired!
 
I didn't mention my other teapot experience this week.  Monday, while Erik was out of town visiting his grandmother, I joined my sweet coworker and her beautiful, crazy, holistic friend for tea at a place called Bamboo Tea in Hillcrest.  I have to say that downing two pots of white tea on my own while discussing colonics is not something I have experienced before.  I am a changed woman.  The very Hillcrest-y waiter overheard some of our colon-friendly food nonesense and chimed in about being allergic to nuts.  He quickly remarked with a mischievous little grin, "well, not all nuts," and Jackie and I swooned for the witty gay man.
 
I was looking forward to another night of teapots and maybe even colonics, but no such look.  Pain set in.  Maybe this is just God's way of saying "keep the water blaster the hell away from your ass. "

Something like dread.

Something like dread.
As I lay awake last night, fingertips on autopilot scraping uniformly around my three ridiculously huge and burning bug bites, mind useless to contemplate anything but the itching, the heat, the unusual-for-San Diego humidity, the most minute fold and crumple in the bedsheets beneath me in that horrible, skin-crawling zone between sweating and not-sweating, I wonder if it could get any worse.

And then it dawned on me. Tomorrow, I'm going to Texas.

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually looking forward to it. There'll be excellent people there who I sadly only see a few times a year, and then on sunday, I'm meeting up with a sweet and lovely friend who is going to show me the vegan side of Houston. Oh, and she's baking me a pie and hopefully we'll do a healthy bout of geography trivia. But really, I could do without a few more bug bites and a few more degrees of heat and a few more percentages (?) of humidity. (Okay, okay, a lot more percentages of humidity.)

And while we're here, I'm telling you: the "but it's a dry heat" excuse is a bunch of bull. Worst rationalization ever.

Sad. Weirdness.

Sad. Weirdness.
Erik's grandma passed away yesterday morning.

Erik and his sister flew out to Nevada to see her on Monday, meeting up with much of the rest of the family. His grandma had been checked into a hospice center over the weekend, and time was running out. They had known this trip was going to happen for quite a while, the goodbye trip, the trip that I wasn't supposed to be a part of.

He's so peaceful about it, so glad to have spent those last few moments with her, and so amazed to know that she effectively stuck around to see as many of her children and grandchildren as she could.

I won't be able to go to the funeral, because I'll be knee-deep in an international church organization meeting in Houston - one of my last in my term. Erik's family pushed the funeral out until Saturday morning to make sure as many people as possible could fly in. There's still a chance I could cancel my flight, but I doubt I will. It was assumed that I wouldn't be coming to the funeral.

I can't really put how I feel into words. I just want to go with Erik and hold his hand. I feel like I'm letting him down.


Read today's list.

Sure Flo, Sure Flo...

Sure Flo, Sure Flo...
I really can't write anything of substance, because this weekend, Erik and I watched A Mighty Wind over and over again (I love you, Netflix!) and basically memorized all the songs. I can't get the "buttocks drape and penis clamp" line out of my head, and it's not something one would usually hum around the office. Therefore, it's stuck, and polluting every single other thought trying to materialize in the vast depths of my usually-unplagued-by-catheter-songs brain.

And God help the search hits now that I've written words like "buttocks drape and penis clamp." Twice.

Debatably interesting facts about my week so far.

Debatably interesting facts about my week so far.

I'm eating chocolate chips for breakfast. Really. I decided to forgo the filler space/time-wasting nuts and berries of trail mix and just cut to the chase with a tupperware of dark chocolate chips. I also forgot breakfast, so it's just me and my tub of chocolate.

There are apparently rumors going around the workplace about me and Joel. You know, my ex-work-boyfriend. We don't even hang out in the office by ourselves, so I'm not really sure where these rumors come from. Well, there was the secret, hilarious-but-understandably-hushed plotting in the engineering break room as we devised a work-week number based timeline (and bet) on when two other coworkers would hook up and reveal their secret love. Maybe the cracking up and whispering about "so, what counts as a quote/unquote hook up, kissing? shacking up?", etc., was a bad idea.

Last night we finally saw Amelie. I am so in love with that movie. So in love.

My lettuce died. In fact, it was murdered by a smug bitch of a neon-green caterpillar. Sad times.

Our little vacation to Cambria was only one thing short of perfect: it was too short. And also the in-laws were there, but that turned out to be fun anyway. Not to mention cost-effective. I also baked a (vegan) pie with Erik's mother, and it turns out that she had never made a pie in her life. This gave me an instant "I can too take care of your son" ego.

In San Simeon, just a few miles north of Cambria and home to the lovely and extravagant Hearst Castle, we hiked along a little peninsula and discovered several private boat-access-only coves. We vowed to come back later in the summer and kayak into one of those and camp out on the beach for a weekend. (Step one: learn to kayak.) No tent, just a tarp and mummy-bags. The picture below is Erik and I standing right above our cove of choice. Notice you can't really see it from the trail right there. Perfect.

Central Coast: Independence Day '04

Central Coast: Independence Day '04

Sunshine, wind chill
Seaweed and fish and pine trees dancing circles under our noses
Normal-looking carnies selling strawberries and tacos
Pebbles not quite ready to be sand
Silent, private boat-access coves

I fell in love again, not with a place but a tempo

The lens of my stress and unhappiness and overstimulation a tributary
to an ocean of peacefulness and sleeping in and long walks and tiny pebbles slipping through lazy fingers and toes

Fingers and toes that have seen sweetness and sourness and now know the difference

For that which we are about to receive

For that which we are about to receive,
I am truly fucking thankful.

Free trips in Julia's near future:

July 2-5, Cambria, CA

July 16-18, Houston, TX

July 30-Aug 1, Catalina, CA

I could really use a vacation or three. Especially when they're on someone else's dime.

On a slightly different note, Erik and I say something similar to the above grace (minus the cuss word) every night at dinner, which recently has occured while sitting on the couch with one eye open watching Ken The Mormon school everyone on muted-Jeopardy. I totally gave him a run for his $600,000 the other night, what with the Pete Yorn trivia and all.

Read today's list.