The most beautiful dog in the world

With her squeaky in her mouth.

Four memes about me

I totally stole this meme idea from someone else's blog. But that's what you get on Sunday night.

Four Jobs I've Had: fern wholesaler (with my sis - our boss Kim was a huuuuuge manic-depressive psycho but we had so much fun together it didn't matter), movie theater candy girl (like Mrs. Kennedy over at Fussy.com - I looked fabulous in polyester and met Marius, the wack-job Love of My Life), cook in a terrible restaurant (can you say "too much margarine?", newspaper reporter (which if greedy bastard newspaper companies would pay a decent wage, I would still be).

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over: "Babette's Feast," "Tampopo," "Winged Migration," and "Repo Man."

Four Places I've Lived: Gaviota, California, Buellton, California (seen "Sideways"? that's where the Hitching Post is), Joliet, Illinois, and San Luis Obispo, California (where the biting black flies are just horrible).

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch: I don't have a TV and I am PROUD of it. But "Wife Swap" used to make me roll on the floor laughing, and I love me some Oprah.

Four Places I've Been on Vacation: Kauai (don't skip snorkeling. If you go, you MUST snorkel. It is a spiritual experience), Phoenix, (Baseball Spring Training, duh) Oaxaca, Mexico (heaven for food lovers. Especially if you like grasshoppers! Chapulines!) and Baja California (not really Mexico, but cheap and plentiful beer).

Four Websites I Visit Daily: Go Fug Yourself, Google at least 20x, Chowhound.com and the California Highway Patrol incident site to see how long it is going to take me to get home.

Four of My Favorite Foods: Raspberries, Artichokes, Lemon Curd and Blue-cheese stuffed green olives.

Four Places I'd Rather Be: Spain, the Canary Islands, Southern Mexico, Kauai. Basically anywhere. I love to wake up anywhere but here. And I like it here, too.

Four Albums I Can't Live Without: The Bach Cello variations with Yoyo Ma, or maybe Jacqueline DuPre. Kiko and the Lavender Moon by Los Lobos. And any 2 Israel Kamakawiwa'ole albums.

Four Famous People I've Seen in the Flesh: I interviewed Rosalynn Carter (I'm not worthy - she is a Goddess), interviewed Dave Barry (he was much more reserved than you might think. I was desperately nervous because I knew he had been a newspaper reporter forever) ushered and was backstage (onstage, really) with Bill Cosby, to whom we were not allowed to speak, Will Smith at my gym and President Josiah Bartlett I mean Martin Sheen at lunch, but the thrill of thrills was interviewing Anthony Bourdain of "Kitchen Confidential." He is a total sexy rockstar chef. That is six but who cares? Oh and I got a hug from George Foreman, whose hugeness cannot be overstated. I never thought about boxing much til he hugged me. Then it struck me how brave Ali must have been to get into a boxing ring and ASK to have George Foreman hit him. It made my blood run cold to think of it. Ejole! Oh, he really loves that grill thing, too. He isn't faking it.

Deep cleansing breaths

I was going to clean house tonight. My house does, after all, look somewhat like a cross between a college dorm room and a crack house.

I got it partially tidied and then made a huuuge mistake - I decided to Turbo Tax my taxes. That wasn't a big deal until I decided to calculate my mileage from freelance writing last year - which involved pulling out every one of my articles and strewing them about. Now it looks like the Crazy Newspaper Saving Lady lives here, too.

The best part of that is, after an hour of figuring out mileage, I still don't qualify for the standard per-mile deduction. Brilliant!

There is good news though. I thought I might owe as much as $5k in taxes. Oh me, with my delusions of financial adequacy. I actually only owe a more manageable $1600. So I am taking deep cleansing breaths and trying to look at that as a GOOD thing.

Then why don't I feel the security?

The new security guy is freaking me out. He has those intense, starey-blue kind of eyes that fix on me, and he is sort of overly aggressively nice to me, stopped me to ask my name yesterday and now calls out to me every time I pass, which is about 6 times a day due to my penchant for not being at my desk where I belong.

As a Woman of a Certain Age who has been A Certain Age for quite a while now, I am just not used to the attention. You become generally invisible to most people, which is relaxing in a way, once you get used to it. It can also be infuriating, like when you are at Best Buy and KNOW you want to lay down about $500 on a new digital camera, but you can't get any help because five of the the 18-year-old sales dudes are hanging on every word of a gum-chewing 110 pound blonde girl in Daisy Dukes and Ugg Boots.

Most of our security guys are pretty laid back. Many of them don’t speak English very well (or Spanish, either - they tend to be Tagalog speakers except for the Russian guy). That is not a criticism.

I figure that actually puts them up there in the Rocket Scientist of Security Guys realm - I mean, they come to a new country, don’t speak the language and still land a job where you are inside and can relax a lot instead of dealing with hot dishwater or dirty bathrooms...Nice work if you can get it.

But this guy speaks English perfectly well, seems to be in his early 50’s, fairly fit...and here he is, with no visible skills other than staring intently at me from behind his desk and clipboards.

I don’t pause when he speaks to me. I just say hi. I am old enough to know that interacting with crazy people is seldom profitable in any way.

I just scamper on by. After the nutty postal lady in Goleta just, well, went postal, I don’t want to take my chances and find out what the Man with the Plastic Badge has up his poly-blend sleeve.