Lisbeth is faced with decisions

I started a new project.  You can read all about it here.

That whole freezer paper thing?  Didn’t happen.  Neither of us got home from work until 8, and the menu I had planned called for quiche for supper.  Quiche?  Pfft.  Not happening.

So we hied our butts to the store for some quick fixin’s.  Once on our way, we realized a big storm was coming in, so we made the trip even faster.  Once home, I set some water boiling for the noodles, and we went out and sat on our front porch to enjoy the show.

Growing up, I’ve always enjoyed watching thunderstorms from the porch.  We had a big porch with a swing and a nice overhang, so we could sit comfortable and dry while all around us, trees flopped back and forth, toussled by the wind, and gutters filled past overflowing, and lightening cracked every so often, giving us just a split-second image of a strangely illuminated neighborhood.

We have a front porch now, too (it was one of my few requirements when we were looking for our house).  It isn’t quite as big, and it doesn’t have a porch swing (yet), but we have set up a few camp chairs out there.  We sat there, smelling the rain and watching the headlights of passing cars swoop by.  At one point, Seth turned to me and said that he really wished he could let our dogs out to run free in the rain.  They would have loved it, too - I could hear Frejya whining at the screen door.  Midge was less interested, but she loves to follow wherever Frejya leads.

We didn’t let them out, though.  I was tempted, but Seth was worried about their safety.  He’s right, of course.

Not too long after that conversation, I had to go back inside.  Our porch is nice, but the eaves to overhang so far out, and you inevitably end up getting spattered with raindrops.  As the storm got stronger, the spattering got worse, and we were gettting cold.

Besides, we had some noodles and alfredo sauce to eat.

Tomorrow is my birthday.  I’ll be 25 years old.
Huh.  I don’t feel 25 years old.  Maybe that’ll come tomorrow.

- - -

Yesterday, Seth went shopping for my birthday presents.  When I got home from work, they were sitting there on the couch, in all their wrapped glory.  Right away, he was after me to open them up right away.  I told him no, since my birthday isn’t until Saturday.  Well, he wasn’t too thrilled with the idea (he’s not so good with the anticipation bit - I suspect he’s one of those men who do all their Christmas shopping on the 24th, only not because he’s lazy but because if he bought them any earlier, he’d kill himself trying to keep them a secret), and he continued hounding me.  Then, he started talking about how he almost got me this one other big thing instead of the 4 things he did get me, and if I really wanted to, we could take all the others back and get that one big thing instead?  I teased him about trying to make me pick door number three instead of door number one - and, besides, he’d just told me it was a good thing he hadn’t gotten me the big thing because I would have loved it but I would have been mad at him for spending too much money.  (Are you still with me so far?  Okay, good.)

Anyway, I finally pointed out that there were three packages (he’d wrapped two together), and it two days until my birthday, so I could open one then, one the next day (today), and the last on on Saturday.  This was seen as a good plan (I agree, really - we should all stretch out our birthdays as long as we can!), and he went and got me one of the packages.  He figured I already knew what it was, but, no.  See, I sort of wanted to be surprised, so I wasn’t thinking too hard about what was inside all the wrapping paper.

I opened it up, and it was two CDs - The Original Broadway Cast recording of Avenue Q (which I’ve wanted for ages) and the latest Barenaked Ladies album (actually sort of a double, as it includes a DVD with the whole album in 5.1 Surround Sound (!) and video clips of 11 of the songs in the Acoustic Studio Session).  Fun stuff, eh? 

He also ended up convincing me to open up one more present, as he wasn’t sure if I would like it, and that way, he explained, if I didn’t like it, we could take it back to Joplin then, since we were already going to Joplin for dinner.  It was a beautiful round decorative mirror, and all around the mirror was a black glassy mosaic frame thingie.  Maybe I’ll figure out a way to take a good picture of it.  Clearly, we didn’t take it back.

Interestingly enough, he went ahead and told me what the big thing was, since it was no longer an option - Target had had one Nano left in stock (white, 2GB), and he was thisclose to getting it.  He was right though - I probably would have been mad at him for spending the money (especially considering how close we are to closing on the house!) despite the ultra cool factor of the Nano.  Anyway, back to the story at hand.

After all the present opening, we headed to Joplin for dinner at the newly-opened Johnny Carino’s.  He had the Chicken Picatta, while I chose the Cheese Ravioli.  It was good, although our waitress was pretty obviously new to the job - it’s not that she forgot stuff, but that she just didn’t quite know when to shut up and leave us alone.  Either way, it was yummy stuff.

We listened to the Avenue Q soundtrack on the way there and back, and wow, it is such a good one!  We laughed our butts of at so many of the songs - Seth was laughing so hard during "Schadenfreude" that he almost had to pull over!  My favorites, though, are "Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist" and "The Internet is for Porn."  I think that I’ll post these here for you as my own grown-up version of bringing treats to school for my birthday.  Enjoy!

Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist

The Internet is for Porn

I just got back from my trip to Mr. Goodcents for lunch.  I think they’ve replaced all the people who worked there (college students, mostly) with pod people who lack the ability to think for themselves and not annoy the customers (older people - mostly women -  who for whatever reason are working the lunch shift at an hourly sandwich shop).  All I wanted was the child-sized pasta (the only size that’s not an insanely large portion).  Just the pasta, since I don’t want/need the bread stick or cookie, and I  can stop at a gas station to get a diet Coke afterward. 

The women who took my order looked at me for just a moment, told me to wait just a second, and then hightailed it to the back - presumable to ask how to go about implementing my crazy, crazy order.  And then she came back, and said she could only sell the child-sized pasta as part of the child’s pasta meal - they didn’t have any way to sell just the pasta.

Um…no.  I call BS here.

Really, the child’s meal is just a small pasta value meal, albeit one with a substantially smaller drink.  So, she could have simply subtracted the cost of the value-meal parts (the drink, the bread stick, the cookie - I think it’s about $1.59) and sold me just the pasta.  Those cash registers, in addition to featuring fancy keys for specific items, also feature number keys for inputting specific prices.

But remember - these are pod people with no ability to think for themselves.  Never mind that I probably won’t be back (except to perhaps redeem the two punch cards I have that are good for a free pasta - it’s free, after all).  Never mind that it’s completely ridiculous to have a POS system that is incapable of selling a basic element of Mr. Goodcents’ product line (Subs and Pasta) independent of the sides.  That’s just the way it is.

It’s too bad the old employees aren’t there anymore.  I liked them.  I guess they may have graduated and left (which is understandable, I guess - the woman who appears to be the manager doesn’t look like she’d be much fun to work for), but really - pod people?  Are they really the best choice to staff a sandwich shop?

I have a post of Mighty Girl’s in Bloglines that I’ve been saving since January - I don’t want to forget the things it said.  I thought I’d share it today (well, really I’m doing some housecleaning in my Bloglines account, and I’m trying to get rid of saved posts).

• I read somewhere that when you catch yourself in a behavior you’re trying to break, you should ask yourself, "Am I helping myself right now, or hurting myself?"  I’ve found it increasingly easy to change course once I’ve agreed that what I’m doing is destructive.  It makes me feel protective.  Like, How could I do that to me?
• "We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." –Aristotle
  I tend to spend hours watching back-to-back reruns of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Repeatedly.  You?
• "Winners have simply formed the habit of doing things losers don’t like to do." –Albert Gray
  (Things like taking the underwear out of the pants you wore yesterday before you put them on again.)

I really liked the idea inherent in the first point - analyzing the things you do using a simple binary system.  "Am I helping myself or am I hurting myself?"  One or the other is usually true (or at least prevalent).  Like, when I had those two packs of ramen for lunch last week - if I had bothered to analyze, I’d have to have said I was hurting myself.  Duh.

But I’ve decided to help myself lately.  I’ve decided that I’ve indulged in a few too many packs of ramen lately, so I’m working now to counter that.  Really, who doesn’t love a diet?  I’ve got two diet buddies, so that’s good.  One of them is a friend and coworker who wants to lose weight too - she’ll be great.  The other is Seth.  He’s wonderful, and he wants to lose a little too, but I’m not completely sure his desire to lose weight trumps his desire to, well, eat ramen (the ramen has become placeholder for food that isn’t so good for you.  Ya’ll get that, right?  I mean, yes, we do eat ramen, and probably more than we should, but we don’t subsist on it or anything.  He eats pizza rolls, too).  But still, he’s supportive of all this, and that’s what counts.  He probably doesn’t realize just how weird my eating habits get when I diet.  Like, one dinner can include a salad, some noodles and gravy, PB on a Wasa cracker, popcorn, applesauce, and a fudge pop for good measure.  Sort of weird, but it works for me.

Did I mention I found a Splenda-sweetened fudge pop that only has 0.1 points?  Mmm…