i'm all about cocktails

(photo from today's San Francisco Chronicle)


This well may be the best quote I've ever had in a newspaper (and this year, I've had a lot!)...CLICK HERE

helmet? check.

I am turning into a motorcycle/scooter geek. First-class. I find myself turning my head at any passing bike or scooter, checking out the brand, guessing the year/model/engine size. Oh God, what have I become?

Today I received one of Dad's helmets (Dave says helmets really only have a lifespan of 4 or 5 years; let's hope that's in active years of use, not shelf life) which will probably end up being too big for me but it's better than nothing. Mom contributed an old pair of leather riding gloves. New boots, borrowed helmet, old gloves -- now all I need is something blue and I'm ready to, uh, commit myself to a new vehicular relationship.

Song of the day: turned out to be Debbie Gibson's "Foolish Beat". I repeat: Oh God, what have I become!

revving up on the road to infamy

No, no piercings or tattoos yet, but today I signed up for the Motorcycle Safety Training Program down at the South San Francisco Adult Education school. I've been assured that the program is designed for don't-even-count-as-a-virgin-type fledgling motorcycle riders, so I'm gonna give it a go. When I signed up, a young man (ok, pimply teenager) was also signing up, so I have a feeling this won't be a new heretofore untapped venue for Making New Friends/Meeting People in the Yahoo Personals-sense. Sorry, girls. Thursday I'll sit for the classroom portion of the course, and then on Saturday and Sunday I'll be on the bike. Gulp.

On Friday I went to check out the school and then visited Mission Motorcycles to check out another dealership and get a third opinion. Mainly, I had a few questions about engine capacity and power; but the secondary reason was to see if I'd get too psyched out by the whole thing. When the man helping me showed me the bike I'd likely learn to ride on, I felt a little intimidated but also a little excited, so I suppose that's a good place to start.

Today I received the boots from Zeppos. Pretty fantastic site, I might add, for wasting oodles of time. However, they arrived today (Monday), I placed the order on late Wednesday night, AND they ordinarily send via express but didn't in my case because I had put a "box" in my address (which their system interprets as a PO Box and thus automatically diverts to USPS). Quite speedy, considering. The black boots from my previous post are a "go" -- the others are far far too large, and won't support my ankles as well. They'd be awfully cute for other purposes, though...(sigh)....

Tomorrow, I'll pick up a helmet from Mom somewhere off of I-80 (wherever we meet will likely involve sustenance - yay!). I could borrow a helmet from the motorcycle course folks but as my father said, "It's probably nicer to keep the germs in the family". Well said.

Next stop on the path to earning the title "Motorcycle Momma" (dubbed thus by Peter and Fred): Paper test at the DMV!

daughter underestimated

He should never have said it. I'm not so childish or rebellious as to do it to spite him, or prove him wrong, but I can't help but admit to a little voice inside crying, "I'll show you!!", fist in air, pouty lower lip....

He told my mother that I'd never attempt the motorcycle safety course. Ha.

P.S. The boots I ordered come tomorrow. If all things were equal, which would you prefer? There can be only one.

out of it

Why do I feel so out of it today? I'm totally out of touch. Out of whack. Out of energy. Out of my mind. Must be the crazy weather we're having today.

Sunday I spent blissfully lounging at home; I changed from pajamas to sweats and back to pajamas again. I had a lovely long talk with my friend Heather, whom I've not spoken to in ages. It was really wonderful to catch up with her, and to hear about her New York life. Not that she was high strung before, but she sounds more at peace with her life, more comfortable and happy, than I've ever heard from her previously. How comforting it is to know your friends are content! And to top off the day, I ate a Lean Cuisine and watched the Emmys. Yum!

Last night I went to Foster City to watch Deb (mentioned in a previous post) take part of her black belt exam. Her school is VERY different from what I was used to back in my days of practicing Tang Soo Do. To my eyes, it was a chaotic, unfocused process ("When are they going to do forms?") but by the end I could see some inner logic -- the tests, some the same, some different for each candidate, were tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of the red belts. Unlike my experience, the test seemed to incorporate more mental/logic challenges than just the physical challenges of strength and stamina and technical finesse. Actually, the finesse bit seemed to be lost in favor of the mental games, but it was still there (as evidenced by some technically difficult board/brick breaks and accuracy tests). Clearly, this school emphasizes mental development over other forms of self-improvement, and it was fascinating to watch. After the test was over, Deb generously invited me to dinner so she could decompress after the long test, and it was nice to catch her up on all the UCSA news and to hear about her latest professional challenges as a organizational strategist and conflict mediator. We ended up talking until quite late, so that I didn't get home until nearly one o'clock!

Hence today I've been in a strange mental state myself. Quite tired, a bit befuddled, frustrated with little progress in lab, and still achy from my inelegant slide down Jones Street in my $19.95 Payless vinyl hooker boots on Saturday night. Who would've thought that my mega-lunge would cause such a quadriceps catastrophe. Ouch. So much for a jog tonight.

Maybe the Emmys will be re-broadcast. Hm.

lazy goodfernothin'

Lately it's been awfully hard to get up in the morning. Charlie has now had about a good week and a half of sleeping through the night, and now is back in the habit of sleeping plastered to my side (and using his internal GPS to position himself as precisely at the middle of my narrow twin mattress as possible, near my pillow). So I am back to sleeping in odd positions, sometimes with a leg creeping up the wall, most often with Charlie's chin on my arm, so that when I wake up any bare skin is covered in dried kitty drool and little imprints from his fangs. In the mornings, when I stir in waking, he stretches an arm out at my face, toes spread wide, claws retracted, as if to say, "Don't even think of getting up yet" as he starts to purr. I swear he must emit some sleepiness-inducing brain-control at these times, because I often submit to his superior will....

It doesn't help that my morning routine is hardly exhilarating. Perhaps if someone were there to make me some Folgers at the crack of dawn, I'd be more inclined to jump out of bed. And I actually do consider myself a morning person. Or at least I used to (hard to imagine that I used to voluntarily show up at high school at 7:00 a.m. to sing in Madrigals). But now showering, putting my face on, getting dressed is all spent in dreadful contemplation of my first challenge of the day: finding parking in the Inner Sunset. Now that school is back in session it has been a waking nightmare to find parking around here. If I were willing to park around 16th or 17th Avenues, it might be a cinch; I could go straight there and merrily march seventeen blocks up the hill to work (at least the wind would be at my back in the mornings). Yet somehow I am not so willing, and insist upon the masochism of winding my way through the neighborhoods surrounding the Parnassus campus and searching for the elusive, non-two hour restricted, street already-cleaned parking spot.

Hence the comment in my last post, re: scooter. I could park for $23/month at the UCSF employee garage. It would be safe, easy to access, and I would be blissfully released from the misery of hunting for parking. Additionally, the wear-and-tear on my car (let alone savings on gas purchases) would be abated. And I wouldn't be condemned to the headaches and other physical hazards of MUNI, which now charges fifty cents more for each ride, if you manage to catch the bus you need after a fourty-five minute wait. However, when this idea was presented to my father, I could almost hear over the telephone his blood pressure skyrocket, so now I may have to abandon the notion for I'll not be the one to push him over the edge into strokeville. There are plenty of other people poised to do that. I suppose he wouldn't appreciate my other commuting option: hitchiking, either.

For Your Information and Reading Pleasure: Dani, whose pleasure it is to sit at my back for hours every day, has a new blog: findmydspot.blogspot.com.
Also check out the blog devoted to the arrival of Janet and Fred's Little Sunshine, Angela: littlebabysunshine.blogspot.com.

random thoughts: finances

What I would do if I won $20,000:
1. Pay my parents what I owe them (eek)
2. Get Charlie's "little" surgery over with (eek eek)
3. Paint the apartment/update bathroom fixtures
4. Buy a scooter for commuting
5. Go to NYC to visit friends and see The King of France live
And if I had anything left over...
6. Buy a new mattress. Definitely.

curses

How in the hell did I miss the bike race that took place in San Francisco yesterday?!?! It was just a few blocks from my house! Aaargh.

the trouble with charlie

Now, I promise you all that I am NOT a cat-obsessed thirty year-old spinster, and this blog is NOT and never will be a shrine to cutie-pootiness ("Oh, Charlie did the CUTEST thing the other day!!") However, as my profile declares, I do own a cat. Up until the weekend of the 4th of July, he was an extremely low-maintenance animal, affectionate yet as independent as an indoor-only cat can be. I write about him now, specifically, because he has been quite a consumer of my mental, physical, and financial resources for the last couple of months.

Charlie supposedly has FLUTD (Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease). He developed the symptoms overnight; one day he was fine, and the next, he was crying and visiting the litter box every ten minutes, straining to pee. Long story short, after a half-dozen vet visits, a couple of diet changes, five different drug prescriptions, and a deobstruction procedure, he's still not right. His appetite fluctuates, he doesn't sleep well (therefore, I don't either) at night, and he still has crystals in his urine. If he doesn't improve significantly soon, I suspect we'll be signing up for a perineal urethrostomy. Yes, it's as bad as it sounds. I'm currently giving him (or trying to) 200 cc of subcutaneous fluids at home every day to see if that carries him through this. Yesterday I did it on my own, with some success (this involved wrapping him in a towel, sitting on the floor and poking his back with an 18-gauge needle, then keeping him as steady as possible while the fluid is administered. At least this resulted in some decent urine output yesterday (way to go, Charlie!) and a very much improved night's sleep for the both of us. But he's still not eating or drinking well, and I am dreading poking him again today....

Well, I should go off to the battlefield again, then head to the laboratory...again....