Pick Your Poison

Since I know I have a rather varied readership, I thought I'd give everybody some options for laughing at me today:

1. Gee, apparently I wasn't imagining things when I though I heard the sound of ripping fabric this morning as I sat down in my office. Thankfully, it was only the lining of my pants that ripped completely down the back. Might I add "one of only two pair of nice, expensive pants that I own, which probably match the value of the rest of my wardrobe combined." I can only hope the outer seam holds up for the rest of the day. Unfortuantely, this is not my first ride in this rodeo.

2. As a follow up to yesterday's anniversary post, where I suggested a relationship bewteen the night Greg and I met and this post. You see, we had started out with a plan for a group outing to see a midnight movie release but in the end there were only 3 of us dorky enough to actually go to a midnight release on a Thursday night: me, Greg, and our mutual friend Mel. Mel and I had seen several midnight releases together over the years, so this wasn't unusual for us.

We left the movie at approximately 3 AM and were walking across the dark parking lot when I suddenly disappeared into the night. Greg, who had known me for all of like 3 minutes and didn't yet realize that I'm freaking magical, became concerned and expressed his barely pre-panic concern to Mel, who had known me for years and was actually the person who pushed me to get my ADD medicated. Mel's response was, "Eh, she went looking for her car. She'll find it eventually." Sure enough, I'd suddenly realized that I had no idea where I'd parked and had gone in search of my car. I just forgot to tell them I was going. Rumor had it Greg was a little freaked out by this until he actually got to know me. Thus, the car locators, which we refer to as Hidden Mickeys, since they're usually some form of Mickey Mouse antenna toppers.*

3. Greg's family will appreciate this one: Last night I was munching on a can of mixed nuts when I made the mistake of reading the label and noticed the ingredients included peanuts, cashews, Brazil nuts, filberts, and pecans.

Me: What's filbert?
Greg: (Googling "filbert") It's the cousin of the hazelnut, only smaller.
Me: (digging through nuts to pull out a filbert) I thought those were hazelnuts.
Greg: They mostly the same thing. They're cousins.
Me: That'd be like me being married to Benji...
(Silence)
Me: I was going to go to bed, but now I'm afraid I just gave myself nightmares.

I'd just like to point out that one definition of "filbert" from Wikipedia is:

Slang: a lunatic; an individual wholly unhinged; predominant neurotic tendencies (e.g., "a nut").

I will let you draw your own conclusions.


* I also later found out that the day before we actually met he had told someone else that he had found the woman he was going to marry. This was due to a comment in an email we were circulating while making plans for the movie, in which I called the man, who I had never met, a crack monkey. I would like to point out that my original assessment was correct. He has since repeatedly told people, "She had me at crack monkey."

The Random Things I Remember

First off, happy anniversary to BFF Jen and BFF-in-law Rob! Oh, the wonderful memories I have of their wedding. The ever-so-pleasant wedding planner, the near catastrophe with the live butterflies (are they still alive? I dunno, shake it...), but most of all the fact that at the end of the day they were happily married and now I'm under 100 days away from my very own local Figment. Good job, guys.

That said, when I realized that today was Jen's anniversary I also realized that I missed another important anniversary yesterday. It was 3 years since Greg and I met. Sorta. There's still a little debate about the actual date, since we were going to see a midnight movie and technically we met at like 11:30PM but the movie actually started at 12:01 and blah blah blah. I still contend that it was the 17th. Perhaps later, if my brain goes to complete mush, I will recount the best part of that story for you, and how it relates to this post.

As Greg has repeated said, I had him at "crack monkey."

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This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but I don't function well when my work day starts at 6:30 AM. Today is the second time in the past four work days that I have had the disgruntlement of an awesome parking place in exchange for seeing my desk before the sun was past the horizon. The next couple of weeks won't be quite so terrible, as my meetings will start at 7:30 instead of 7. Why doesn't that give me comfort?

The worst part this morning was walking across the street, cold and shivering, thinking about how much worse it will be for our December faculty meeting, also scheduled for 7 AM, toward the end of the month. I'm pre-miserable in anticipation.

Disappointment

Our new Kroger opened this weekend. I knew better than to try to go on Saturday because the massive swarm of people would ruin the experience, and I was pretty hyped about the new store. So I waited until about 6pm on Sunday to go.

I should have waited longer.

There was still a massive swarm of people there, but they weren't shopping so much as socializing. With their buggies parked in the aisles. No amount of staring and foot tapping could get them to move. And some of them were employees. Now that set me off. Granted, that wasn't Kroger's fault, but it put in a very grumpy mood from the start.

I was pretty excited that I would finally get to use some of my good coupon deals on stuff that hadn't been stocked at the old store for the past few weeks. Except most of the things I had good coupons for were still missing. Seriously. They'd been open less than 48 hours and were completely out of the hot chocolate we like to buy. And the sugar. And the taco kits. Plenty of other things to buy, just not the things I could get with my good coupons matchups! At least I did get my tomato sauce before those coupons expired this week, but I'm afraid the three cans I bought wiped them out. Sorry.

And finally, just because I'm a nerd I happen to be familiar with the normal price of my regular purchases. I know how much the ground beef I buy costs. Or at least I used to. Apparently it costs an additional 20 cents per pound to ship it across Hwy 80. I haven't decided if the randomly more expensive items are a result of the move or a result of the general price increases we've been seeing, but I had noticed that most of the prices had finally leveled off over the past few months.

Yes, it's a nicer store. Yes, it has a much broader selection of products overall. And yes, I know that after a few more trips the crowds will thin out some and hopefully they'll actually have stuff in stock. And I'll get the new layout figured out so that I can find things without making four trips across the entire store while playing dodge-the-buggies. And the parking situation will hopefully improve. But in the meantime I'm going to miss the old store.

Talent

I was standing the hallway talking to a coworker a few minutes ago when she pointed out that I had spilled hot chocolate on my shirt.

On the back of my shirt.

I always wondered what my talent was. Now I know.