Also, must find one more present for Amelia, who is the last person on my Christmas list that needs to be bought for. Feel free to comment with whatever you think a college freshman might like, bearing in mind that she has a lot of stuff. I could just get a gift card, I suppose, but because I got Sage two gifts (and no gift cards), that feels like a cop-out. Seriously, any ideas are welcome.

Finally, since I was completely panicked last night about my paper, I did the logical thing and watched Jeopardy with Rick (I have always been a procrastinator. You can ask my mom.) During that, this conversation happened, and I have no idea why.

Rick: What is a porcupine!

Me: What?

Rick: A porcupine! You would like a porcupine.

Me: Why would I like a porcupine?

Rick: Because you like all animals.

Me: So I would like a porcupine?

Rick: You would feel sorry for a porcupine out there in this cold.

Me: Well, yeah, actually I wou…wait a minute, why does this mean I would like a porcupine?

I seriously have no idea where this came from, and he never did answer me. It’s like the night before when I sat straight up and said “You know what would be a good Christmas present? E.L.O.!!!” Stuff like this happens all the time at our house. We must be at the vortex of random.

Now I go back to worrying about the paper and what to get Amelia. Perhaps a porcupine. She likes animals, after all.

Last night they were talking about Prince William’s engagement on the news (big surprise) and one of the op-ed guys that Rick and I hate was wondering why so much media attention for this event. There are two reasons for this, Larry Mendte, the first being that we got rid of monarchy in this country over 200 years ago and have been the tiniest bit sorry ever since. The other is that since things turned out so tragically for Princess Diana, we’re hoping that her sons get the happy endings she was denied, and William is taking the first steps to that.

I told Rick that last night, and this followed.

Rick: “Yeah, we all want him to be happy. But he’s getting married, the poor sap.” (Rick has a jaded view about marriage, as you might imagine.)

Julie: “Well, they’ve been together eight years.”

Rick: “Yep.”

Julie: “We’ve been together eight years.”

Rick: “Yep.”

Julie: “You could get me a diamond and sapphire ring. You know, no marriage involved. Just as a gesture.”

Rick: “I could.” (he couldn’t keep a straight face after he got this out and started laughing hysterically)

And this is why I will never be married.

Me: What are these??

Rick: What?

Me: Where did these Dorito crumbs come from?

Rick: Oh. Probably from my mouth when I was back there.

Me: Did you eat the Doritos that were sitting on the counter?

Rick: Um…

Me: I was saving them for lunch tomorrow.

Rick: Oh. Well, they just looked so good, sitting there. I didn’t know you were saving them. I was hungry!

(I point out the entire fridge full of food we have as a result of my two shopping trips, including cheese, pickles, olives, and other snack type foods.)

Rick: I’m sorry?

Other things making the kickoff of my birthday week awesome: a winning Steelers game, a haircut, a spa pedicure, and a small yarn expedition. My life is good. Now I just need to catch up on the homework – I’ve got a 600 page book due on Thursday (halfway through right now), 100 pages for Wednesday, and a bunch of articles to read for my first paper in the Vietnam class.

• Scrub PC hard drive – In progress as we speak. Or, as I type, because you and I aren’t really speaking in the physical sense, are we? It’s more…yeah, it’s too early for philosophical ramblings. Let’s just say that I’m wiping the drive. At least, I think I am. I have downloaded KillDisk, I have made a CD of it, I have booted my computer up from said CD, told it I want to kill this drive, and now there’s a progress bar happening. It is going faster than I was told it would, so I have some doubts, but at this point I’m going with the flow.

• Have Jordana get the bookshelf – She did last night! Which would explain why last night not a whole hell of a lot got done except drinking wine and making some sort of vegetarian curry that we improvised using the curry sauce I bought at Super H Mart in Atlanta this summer with Regan. Riiight, that happened when I wasn’t blogging. Hi! I went to Atlanta and saw Regan while I was there. Surprise! Anyway, bookshelf is out of the hall, now I just need to vacuum it and redistribute the stuff that’s out there. Which reminds me, anyone want a Roomba? I bought one from Woot and it just doesn’t seem to like life in my house. I only used it once, and it had a run in with a radiator, so it looks a little worse for wear, but it works! And I would let it go for mad cheap. Make me an offer, kids.

• Clean the apartment – I actually vacuumed, swept, and mopped the entire place last night before J came over. Today I just need to clean the kitchen table and the counters, which got a little the worse for wear during last night’s curry improv, and put away last weekend’s laundry so I can go and do laundry today.

• Homework – yeah…I need to get on this. Instead of blogging. I think I’ll take it with me when I do laundry. There’s a reason why it’s last on this list and was first on the original list, because I’ve made absolutely no progress on it.

Over all, not doing too bad for this early in the weekend. Maybe I can talk Rick into doing the counters and the table, since he was out golfing last night while I cleaned. Or not, because he’s Rick, and he will tell me I already did the part he “likes,” the vacuuming. Which is why he stuck around to help with that part last night. See a trend?

Other reasons why this is a precious gift, other than the fact that I won’t have to run through an entire box of Kleenex in two days:

• I will be around to do things. Like homework. Because even when I take my homework to Pittsfield, I end up ignoring it, which is bad.
• I can clean my apartment, which gets covered in fur when we’re gone. Just because we’re taking some time off doesn’t mean the cats are, apparently.
• Also, maybe Jordana can come over and get the bookshelf that has been sitting in our hall for Samang all summer. Our schedules have not meshed enough to do that in the past three months. My hallway looks like the garbage dump right now as a result, because stuff in our house tends to migrate to the designated messy spot, and right now that’s the hall. (Does this happen in anyone else’s house, or is it just me?)
• I can also scrub my hard drive and put the damned PC that hasn’t worked right since it caught a virus that time and I had to reinstall everything out on the curb. I have a MacBook Pro that I use all the time, I don’t need the PC gathering dust in the corner and setting off my allergies more.

Of course, now that I’ve posted all of this? I’ve pretty much guaranteed that none of it will get done. Except the homework, that has to be done. I have class next week, after all.

In reality, it was a very lazy day. Rick hit golf balls in the morning, I…didn’t do homework. (Spring Break mentality is killing me, people. I am so behind on the homework, but there I sat watching Project Runway.) In the afternoon, he came home and cooked us beef tenderloin for dinner, and then we flipped back and forth between the Sox game and The Sound of Music. He’s a good boy, letting me not only watch musicals but sing along with them. Although I wonder how much of it he was actually paying attention to and how much he was making up scenes in his head. Like this one, which flew out of his mouth because he has no internal censor:

Maria (on TV): “Which brings me to another transgression, Reverend Mother. I was singing out there today.”

Reverend Mother (on TV): “Only in the abbey do we have rules about postulants singing.”

Maria (on TV): “I can’t stop wherever I am.” (Rick cuts in, as Maria) “In fact, I made up a new song today! Would you like to hear it? ‘Dominique-nique-nique….’”

Rick as Reverend Mother (severely annoyed): Maria! That’s enough!”

I almost pissed myself because I was laughing so hard.

Other than that, we had a very lazy day, as shown in this photo montage.

“Dude, what? I’m sleepin’ here.”

“See? I has a tired.”

“What the hell is the other one up to? Is he going to jump on me again?”

“No, I’m just stretchin’!”

“But I could kick your ass. I have thumbs, you know.”

“I hate my life.”

Actually, that shows that three of us had a lazy afternoon. Freddie looks harassed. Somewhere in cat heaven, Joe is looking down and laughing because now Freddie knows what it’s like. Karma exists, even on the feline level.

Ad Woman: “After the birth of my first child, I put on 150 pounds. And I was looking at my friend one day, and I said “Girl, you are so slim. How do you stay so slim?” And she told me about [said diet program] and said she lost the weight with them. I’ve been on it for six months, and I’ve lost 100 pounds. And when I look at myself in the mirror…”

Rick interrupts: “I think, “Damn, Latisha, you still fat, but you ain’t as fat as you used to be, girl!”

Me (gasping for air because I’m laughing so hard): “Oh my god. How do you think of shit like that?”

Rick: “Really? Because I think of stuff like that all the time. I often wonder how other people don’t think of things like that.”

I can blame it on many things: Facebook. Twitter. Ravelry. Classes. Work. Laziness. But in the end I think I wasn’t sure I was a blogger anymore. The urge to blog just hasn’t been as overpowering as it was in the early days. In fact, I have had only one urge to blog in the past two months, and that was a post on why Ice Dancing and Curling are not sports and should not be in the Olympics. But instead I just bitched it out on Twitter.

Blog, on my second attempt at snowboarding I managed to bruise my tailbone. Instead of coming here with this comedic gold, I went to Twitter and Facebook and told thousands of people that I had bruised my ass. Which was awesome, but it could have been a great post. I let you down, blog.

Some of my two months of radio silence was trying to decide if I wanted to keep blogging. If I don’t blog as often, is it worth paying for the domain name and the hosting? On Monday, I decided to re-up for another two years, and my goal is to blog more so I am putting that $190 to good use. Little Blog, I resolve to not leave you in the corner gathering dust. So let’s get started with a stupid story!

Yesterday, my second visit to the doctor in two weeks (the first, where she diagnosed me with a bruised butt by putting on latex gloves and sticking her finger down my ass-crack to tell me that yes, my tailbone was “protruding more than usual,” apparently left an impression on her–can we blame her?–because she asked if my thumb injury was also due to snowboarding) resulted in a diagnosis of tenosynovitis in my thumb. (Side note: Why, hello, Google Health, and where have you been all my life?) She prescribed a gel NSAID for it. This gel shall now be known as $30 Copay Gel, because that’s what it cost with my copay, which makes me shudder to think of how much it costs without insurance.

Anyway, $30 Copay Gel is apparently often used for arthritis according to the Rite-Aid instructions that came with it. “Awesome,” I thought, “so I’m putting Ben-Gay on my snowboarding injury.” I read further. In order to accurately measure the dosage of the gel before you put it on, you need to squirt it onto a dosing card. The instructions clearly say “Put the card down on a flat surface so you can read it.” I relayed this info to Rick and said “It’s really for old people! Because their hands shake when they’re holding it so they can’t read it!” (Yes, I realize this is an extremely age-ist comment, but that’s okay, because Rick, an older person, laid the smackdown on me two seconds later.)

“No, it’s telling you to do that so you can read it. You know, as opposed to putting the card down upside-down so the writing is backwards and you can’t read it.”

Apparently $30 Copay Gel is for idiots like me in addition to old people.

Happy belated 6th birthday, Blog! Your writer is an age-ist moron!

Rick: So I think Amelia had a date the other night. She told me she went out to dinner, and when I asked her who she went with, she said “Um…a friend.”

Me: Good for her, going out with an English boy.

Rick: Well, she does love that accent.

Me: Honey, let me tell you something about women. We all love that accent.

Rick: Really?

Me: Yes. How else do you explain Hugh Grant’s box office success?

Rick: I always wondered about that. I mean, he’s not like that other one. The other one can at least act.

Me: You mean Colin Firth?

Rick: Yeah, him.

Me: He’s got the accent and he’s Mr. Darcy. That’s why women like him. He changed for Elizabeth.

Rick: And that’s why that story is total fiction.

Me: I know. Elizabeth got results in a few months. I’ve been working at it for seven years and what have I got to show for it?

Rick: Exactly.