Happy Halloween

I parted my hair differently.  Do my ears stick out too much?

"I'll never drink again."   oh, pumpkin, we've all said that.

Prompt Tuesday: Top Five

Deb asked for a Top Five and I hate to disappoint.

Top Five Grammatical Pet Peeves (not in any order):

1. Improper use of the pronoun myself
2. Unnecessary quotation marks
3. Your vs You're
4. Using Loose when you mean Lose, which is really a spelling error, but still pisses me off.
5. Using weary, when you mean leery or wary. Combining the two words doesn't make you extra cautious. It just makes you dumb...and apparently tired.  Again, not really grammatical but still gets my panties in a bunch.

Oh Hi. Remember me?

Well, the fall fundraiser is done, over, finite. I can relax and return to my normal work schedule and normal work duties, which remain abnormal, but less frantic.  What a day it was, too!  It was held at the Annenberg Community Beach House, which is lovely. However, a thick fog bank rolled in and cast an eerie glow over the parking and beach.  No matter, we were there to party and spend money, not look at the scenery.  

The staff was to wear black cocktail attire. Well, Laurie Ann loves color.  Laurie Ann cannot do all black without a pop of something something.  So, I blinged it up a bit with some teal accessories and lots of sparkly bits. [Pardon the bad cell phone photos, and self portrait of the back of my head]

Hey, there's supposed to be a faux diamond in the middle.  I found it later on the floor and fixed it.

The sangria was delicious.  I had three...or four. I can't math.

The food, by Patina catering, was unbelievable, especially the dessert, a flan concoction that was out of this world.  Our MC was a hoot, and the salsa lessons, a highlight of the evening, were a success.  Even our auction items fetched some top dollar bids.  Too bad I won four of those bids and now owe my soul to the company.  (So worth it! I got all the Pamper Me packages)  It always seems so anticlimactic, though.  All the build up and then...sigh.  It's all over but for the Thank You letters. 

PS.  All the accessories? Under $25 at Forever 21.  I love that store.

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Scare D. Kat

This post is for Deb over at San Diego Momma for Prompt Tuesday, but also because it's October and I recently talked to a friend about me being a scaredy cat.  

Regular blog readers know that I live in an apartment equipped with strange little doors, which I like to call Gnome Doors, because "Doors to some unforeseen evil" is just too scary.  They are kind of creepy, those doors, but this story is not about them.  This story takes place a long, long time ago (cue wavy flashback lines)....

I lived in an old farmhouse in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, with my friend Bruce, one of the funniest guys I knew and an aspiring filmmaker.  Bruce was adapting a Goosebumps-type book onto film, starring our landlord's daughter and several of our co-workers.  The plot, in brief:  Girl cheats on boyfriend, boyfriend drowns while the two are out on a lake late at night, girl is consumed with guilt and haunted by dead boyfriend.  I won't tell you the surprise ending as it doesn't come into play here.  Because the girl feels her dead boyfriend (played by our friend Matt) is haunting her, she consults her aunt, who happens to be a psychic.  I was the aunt. We were going to try to connect with the dead boy's spirit and tell him to move on.  

Okay, so we'd been filming all night long trying to get as many night shots in as possible.  We'd filmed the drowning scene on the pond next to our house using every one's car headlights to light the scene Ala Ed Wood.  We filmed a crucial climactic scene, and now at midnight/1ish, we were in the dining room of our old farmhouse filming the scene where the aunt tries to connect with the spirit. Everyone was tired.  John was asleep on a window bench.  Matt was heating up spaghetti in the kitchen.  Aaron was doing something to help  Bruce (microphone maybe) and Robin and I sat across from one another with a candle between us and a copy of the Necronomicon.  Not the real one, of course, since it doesn't exist, but a book of spells purported to be the Necronomicon.  

Bruce started filming and I started reading, in Latin, with surprisingly good inflection.  We were going for one take, two if necessary.  I continued to read; the house was deadly quiet, except for the sound of my voice in a rhythmic cadence and a slight hum from the microwave in the kitchen which we hoped wouldn't be picked up on the microphone ("we'll fix it in post").  Every one's breath was held as they listened.  Suddenly, as I was about to read the very last line of some random spell Bruce had chosen because it sounded good, all of the following happened at the exact same moment:

• Bruce shouted "Noooooo" while slamming his hand on the book to stop me from reading.
• the candle blew out
• John violently fell off the window bench
• The plate in the microwave exploded
• the electricity went out
• a loud crash came from the basement

Ah, the basement. Dank dens of no good--I hate basements.  This one--did I mention it was an old farmhouse?--had several rooms, including an old coal room from back in the day.  The lights didn't reach all the corners. And quite frankly, after we re-lit the candle and our heartbeats returned to normal, no one wanted to go down there to check the breaker.  We were sure that I had somehow conjured a demon while reading the spell, which is why Bruce stopped me from completely it.  So, we ALL went down to check the breaker, creeping down the stairs with every available flashlight and candle we could find like the Scooby gang.  And of course, we reset the breaker and everything was fine.  But the rest of the shoot was plagued with mishaps and for years we talked about "the day Laurie Ann conjured that demon."

More recently, like last night, I painted my nails with glow-in-the-dark polish and scared myself when I woke to pee and saw my hand on the pillow.

Innocuous in the daylight

What about the Knitters Code? Or is it really more of a guideline.

I played hooky for half a day yesterday and went to the Central Library downtown.  I perused the knitting books, gathered an armload, and then went to the Annenberg Gallery.  I paused briefly to get this picture of my absolute favorite part of the downtown library.

The rotunda!

I love the rotunda. I love that chandelier.  I love the marble floor.  Every time I'm there, I just want to stand beneath that globe, arms stretched wide, and spin until I'm too dizzy to stand.  I resist the urge, but one of these days...

Anywho, I checked out my books, then spent an inordinate amount of time in the library store because they have so many fun things to see.  I got some food and sat outside in the muggy weather to read and enjoy being out of the office.  One of the books I got had a little note attached to the front "missing pages 79-80."  I looked at the pattern picture for those pages and decided it wasn't missing much.  Well, when I started really looking at the book, I found it was missing more than those two pages.  It was missing about four full patterns. Some asshole (oh, yeah, I'm going there) ripped out the pages for the patterns they liked (leaving the pictures to tease future book borrowers) and returned the book that way.  

Isn't there some kind of Knitters Code?  Who does that?  Why wouldn't a person just photo copy (I know, copyright issues) rather than destroy a book, and inconveniencing fellow knitters?  I added an addendum to the note on the front of the book, but I hope the library doesn't think I did it.  And I really wanted to make two of the missing patterns.  Boo! Bad Knitter!!

That's the 1970's

Yesterday at work, several new employees were waiting in the lobby for the training to start when one gal said to another, "I love your boots. They're so cute."  

"Oh, thanks," she replied. "They were my grandmothers."  I stood up from my seat at the reception desk to take a look at the cute boots, expecting to see something like this. What I saw was more like this. The booted young lady went on, "yeah, I was wearing a pair of Uggs, but my grandma said 'oh, wait, I have a better pair of boots for you,' and pulled out these."  

"They're real nice," said the first girl.  "They're in good condition."

"Yeah, They're from, like, the 70's too," said the second girl.  

The 70's!!!  Her GRANDMOTHER wore them in the 70's.  I had to ask--"How old is your Grandmother?  How old is your Mother??"

"My mom is 41, and my grandma is 62."  And then I felt super old and cried in my Metamucil.

A nod's as good as a wink to a blind man, eh?

Trivia night at Barney's Beanery in Westwood is always packed.  Well, I imagine Barney's is packed every day of the week, but on trivia night, seating is at capacity and we always have to scramble to find a seat.  Last night, we sat at the bar.  The bar seats are old car bucket seats, which while comfortable, made me feel incredibly short as my feet did not touch the step.  Also, the mid-level bar (walk in, up the stairs to your left) is served by the downstairs bartender who CLIMBS A LADDER TO SERVE THE DRINKS!!  I kid you not. She has one of those sliding ladders like you find in the library (or as our bartender pointed out, Beauty and the Beast) and she climbs the ladder then leans down to pick up the beer and then reaches up to serve it.  How is that even remotely safe?  To make it worse, the mid-level bar patrons are provided a variety of tools to summon the bartender, such as bicycle bells, hotel bells, and the super-annoying old car horn.  That poor girl.  We tipped her well.

But this post is not about the bartender or the crazy mid-level bar.  Christina and I (there were only two of us) sat at the bar and chatted with a lovely young Brit before trivia started.  She was Asian and the accent kind of threw me (yes, I know that's incredibly racist), kind of like the first time Cho Chang spoke in the Harry Potter films.  She was sweet and we broke the sad news to her that she could not use her old iPhone from England on her new T-mobile plan.  Anywho, trivia started, her friends arrived, so our conversation stopped.  

A round or two later, a British accent on my right said, "So, 'ow you doing so far?"  I turned, expecting the sweet girl from before, and was faced with an extremely inebriated Camilla Parker-Bowles the early years.  I recovered quickly and said, "well, we're sucking right now, but there's time to catch up."  To which Camilla replied, "Sometimes sucking is a good thing, eh? Know what I mean?" with an elbow to the ribs.  "These questions are too American, but if anything British comes up, you come to me (wink)." Suddenly she became Eric Idle and I was in the middle of a Monty Python skit--as the straight man! I'm never the straight man.  I smiled, nodded, and turned away giving Christina the "save me" eyes. 

Drunkmilla turned to some hapless man on her right and I was safe.  Although, we still sucked royally for the night.  I won't tell you the score; it was humiliating.  So much so that we considered leaving before the last round because it wasn't going to help our score any, but stayed because the last round was a music round and we always do well with those. It didn't help.