You’re fired.

Sincerely,

The Residents of Minnesota

New Eyelashes, originally uploaded by smooth_d.

So, here are the new eyelashes. Please ignore the fact that I need an eyebrow wax. I know. I’ve been meaning to blog about them for a week now but I’ve just been so busy. Between transferring Overheard to WordPress, which was only mildly successful and still in progress, finding the perfect base template and redesigning it, trying hard to squeeze in MetroMix stuff into every free moment, random side projects, dealing with my Condo Association B.S., sleeping, eating and pooping, I’ve barely had time to do anything else. Oh, except go out drinking and catch a couple good movies.

Coco and Jen are happy to be drinking, originally uploaded by smooth_d.
The highlights of past, present and future:

-I think I got a drink named after me down at The Strip Club. Originally suggested Angie Bee, because it’s based off the Honey Bee, I may go back and suggest Smooth Dee. That was Jeremy’s idea. It’s a delicious, delicious drink.

-The Association stuff seems to be turning around and I may not actually have to commit myself into the loony bin. I don’t want to get into too much detail because it’s boring, confusing and always gets me worked up to talk about the crappy parts. I also don’t want to jinx it all by talking about it.

-The eyelashes, of course. They’re fabulous. Thanks, jeNC17!

-Martini Tour at LoTo tomorrow with Lesley who has moved to St Paul recently to class up the joint.

-The Wicker Man at Bunny and Coco’s last night. It was amazing and hilarious and crazy and stupid. I loved it. Almost as much as I loved the pretzel and marshmallow wicker man center piece, which I didn’t eat because marshmallow? Mm-Mm. No.

-It hit 41 degrees earlier this week.

Some lowlights of past, present and future:

-It hit -4 this morning. Hey, winter, we get it but we’re over you now. At least lend some consistency to your madness. Teasing us with 41 before slapping us with -4 is what drives people to do crazy, crazy things. Like, defiantly wear a skirt sans tights this morning. WTF was I thinking?

-The Association stuff. What’s the good if there isn’t a bad? I don’t like being underestimated because I’m female, being conned (or attempted, anyway) or not being listened to. If I tell you not to call me during my work day, I don’t really see why that’s so hard to follow. Not before 5pm on weekdays does not mean at 9:30 every morning. 8:15 on Sundays is also listed under Unacceptable.

-Speaking of… Association meeting tomorrow afternoon. It’s going to be a rough one, followed by dinner at TSC and aforementioned martini tour.

-Had drinks with the big brother the other night. Learned interesting news. I know this is probably along the lines of “tattling” (oh boo hoo) but perhaps my father should brace himself for that phone call. It involves a Uhaul. Who knows though, perhaps my lecture, berating and disappointment changed his mind. Doubtful though, because I tend to not know what the hell I’m talking about.

-We’re preparing to have the rows of cubicles moved closer to each other to make room for more rows. Our comfortable 10 feet or so will be reduced to about 4. Holy moly. Four feet? I can smell your socks from that distance, and listen to your phone conversations, and now there will be no buffer between me and the baby with the smelly diaper you’ll probably bring in.

-My dishwasher is not draining. This is probably the worst of all, because I’m handwashing my dishes and now I’ll have to waste an entire afternoon waiting on a repairman to show up in the 8 hour time frame I know they’ll give me only to tell me they can’t fix it that day, or something. And then charge me my left leg for it.

So, there’s that.

On the plus side, it’s totally Friday today and I’ll have a three day weekend next week. Woo.

This is the greeting at the gas pump at Mike’s Downtown on the corner of Robert and 11th in St. Paul. The $50 I spent at the pump and the below zero wind chill I endured while completing this transaction are testimony to the contrary. But thanks anyway. Perhaps they should follow that up with “…SOMEWHERE ELSE.”

And yeah, I know, that’s a lot of money for gas! That’s a big car! I’m terrible for the environment! Oh, boo hoo.

Excuse the humorless rant, I’m just feeling very humorless and ranty right now. Ever since I quit smoking I spend a lot more time at my desk. I only get away from it to grab lunch, which is usually a 5 minute trip downstairs, or to run to the bathroom. Neither of those takes my mind off work for a long enough period of time to feel relaxed enough to return. Unfortunately, the “community” areas where you can just sit and stare out the window seem to have an unwritten “I’m sitting here so it’s a total open invite for you to come to talk to me” rule that I didn’t get a vote on. Incidentally, I spend a lot of time thinking about smoking while I’m at my desk, as well as dramatically throwing the contents of my cubicle around while screaming and then storming out the door. It doesn’t help that the people out there in the provider community that I talk to on a daily basis astound me, hourly, with their, well, everything. I don’t ask you for something because I lost a bet or the words I chose are fun to say. So stop arguing with me!

Something in my job needs to seriously start changing, and soon.

OH AND THERE’S ANOTHER BABY IN THE OFFICE. LET’S ALL HEAR IT FOR BABIES! (we made it all the way to Tuesday.) (oh yeah, almost forgot… the last two babies in the office haven’t even been offspring of people that work here.)

It must be “Bring Your Kid To Work” week, because I’m sitting across from the 4th child under the age of 10 this week to be spending an entire day in the office. I certainly cannot think of any better way to spend a day of summer vacation when the weather is beautiful than to hang out with Aunt/Mom/Grandma in the gray on gray cube farm that is the state government office environment. If I were a 9 year old, I would stare longingly out my window, hoping that I’d be so lucky enough to eavesdrop on conversations about health care while occupying one of the most uncomfortable chairs that man ever dared to create, all the while playing Solitaire repeatedly.

The young lady across the way has made her billionth phone call ($$) from the cube of a vacationing co-worker. Listening to, “Hi mommy, how are you?” every twenty minutes is almost as rad as hearing, “Hey Grandma!” twice a day from the grown man who sits behind me.

I am not complaining, though. The cafe downstairs has delicious oatmeal.

The coverage of yesterday’s bridge collapse has really been something to see. Newspapers from everywhere have dedicated their front pages to this tragedy, but the best stuff has come from the locals. There is a massive amount of information in that thread, from picture/video links to pointing out the newly updated bridge Wikipedia page to countless personal blogs where you can read first hand accounts to extremely insightful perspectives (via the suberb job Erica did on liveblogging at Metblogs). That doesn’t even include the local news sites, who did fantastic jobs covering the event, some staying up into the wee hours of the morning. It was particularly interesting to see how close the local online/blogging community is here.

My thoughts are with the people injured or deceased and their family members.

Don’t worry, I won’t be blogging every day about smoking, just on the days it’s especially hard. It helps me because I can bitch about it. It helps you because I’m not bitching directly at you. Yesterday was something special because of everything else my body was putting me through. Today is extra, extra special because I forgot to slap on a patch before heading for work. Yeah. Dumb.

I quit a couple years ago, completely cold turkey. There were very little withdrawals, no major cravings and I didn’t use any type of substitute. I just quit. It worked, for over a year, until I moved down to the 5th floor among my smoking co-workers and I decided that if I stepped out occasionally with them it’d be no big deal, despite knowing that history would inevitably repeat itself. I got too confident in my ability to stay mostly a non-smoker. But, up until that lapse in judgment everything was fine. Why is it different now? Why is today so flipping hard? I really need to eat something.

Lemon-lime Alka-Seltzer tastes like a Mt Dew that’s been left open on the counter for six days.

Several months back I was interviewed by a freelance writer for some thoughts on OIM; how it’s doing, plans for the future, etc. During the conversation I casually mentioned an interaction I had with the folks over at Overheard in New York that consisted of me emailing them, somewhat out of naivety but totally harmless, for advice on a few topics, including advertising. I was politely advised they did not mind my starting an Overheard site, but that they would not assist in developing a competing business. While I thought it was a tad on the ridiculous side at the time (my thought process at the time: their city population is more than our entire state, so competing I thought was a stretch), I completely side with their response and I hold no hard feelings at all. I mean, hello, if it weren’t for them, I never would have come up with this.

Fast forward a couple months to a follow up email stating she was not able to sell the story then, but now she’s working for City Pages and would like to put something in their Blotter, especially with the 1st Year Annivesary party approaching. I answered a few additional questions and hoped to see it show up in a few days. She also wanted to know more about that above story and even though I was trying to stress that there was no story, that it was not a big deal, she went ahead and contacted the people at Overheard in New York.

They basically told her the same thing and pointed out their newer addition, Overheard Everywhere where they not only accept submissions from, well, everywhere, but they also accumlate some of what they consider the best of the other Overheards across the world, give them their own headlines and link back to our sites. This is something I have been aware of for some time, and OIM has appeared on there quite a few times. I very much appreciate this part of their site. Who wouldn’t?

So, now I’m embarrassed. Actually, this calls for something stronger. I am fucking embarrassed. Something that occured over a year ago that probably wasn’t even a blip on their radar anymore, and it’s brought back to their attention in a way that definitely suggests I’m sitting over here bitter to the point that it’s being picked up by a journalist. Perhaps I am making a mountain out of a molehill here. One could argue they probably don’t give a rat’s ass about me or that exchange back then, but maybe they do. I quickly respond to her to clarify that if she intends to go with that angle for the story that it must include the fact that I agree with them on their response, hold no bad feelings, and that I am grateful for the spotlights they put on my little website. She agrees and acknowledges that it’s “not quite as tight of an angle” as she thought it was.

Fast forward a couple more weeks, and not a single word has been uttered, that I can tell, anywhere in their Blotter or elsewhere, and the party was a week ago. So I’m wondering why a scandal has to be what gets covered about OIM. Is it because of CP or because of the reporter? Either way, it made me feel pretty lousy, and nothing even ran!

Thank you.

PS, If I’m wrong and just missed it, someone please point it out and I will replace above post with an apology. I am not completely unapologetic. But until then, you’ve lost a reader and a supporter.

My friend Nikki is a self proclaimed “moron magnet.” To prove it, she copy/pasted a “poem” she received from a man on MySpace who claims he has been a “peot [sic] for many years.”

UR SMILE IS SO BEAUTIFUL IT MAKE ME SMILE FOR JOY UR BEAUTY IS SO WONDERFUL IT BEYOND BELIEF

Luckily for you, it gets so much better. To get the full on experience of this romantic guy with a poetic soul, please check out his MySpace Page. It starts with how good his personalized URL is: YukonDan71. Excellent. Then the assault of the busiest Dallas Cowboys wallpaper known to man accompanied with a completely illegible font color. You may have to highlight to read. That is, if it doesn’t induce a seizure first. Scanning the page you quickly realize he seems to prefer every spelling of the words poet, poetry and poem except for the correct ones.

The spelling errors make it really difficult to read, but not as difficult as the concrete wall of code that he has completely jacked his profile with. I’m not sure how he hasn’t noticed this.

And since most of you are probably cooler than I am and do not have a MySpace page, here is the big version of his picture. In case you’re not sure what you’re looking at, he is cautious to caption it with “this is my beer hat.” I added the period for punctuation correctness.

If that guy does not have the soul of a “peot” I don’t know who does.

It’s also important to mention that she was recently told by another guy that his chest hair was shaved into the shape of a crow, in honor of his favorite movie. Can you guess what that was? Attempts to obtain pictures for posting failed, so you will have to use your imagination.

I thank Nikki for taking one many for the team for my amusement. I look forward to chronicalling her adventures more often.