Burnin' Rubber

Nemo's got this whole exercise thing worked out. 

Birthday Week: Day 4 and 5 and a Computer Virus

Birthday week has come to a close.  It breezed right by me, in a sugar rush haze of chocolate, cupcakes and Girl Scout Cookies.

On Thursday morning, the day of my actual birthday, my dear friend Charlie brought me a box of chocolates from the world's best chocolate shop, The Chocolate Delicacy.  The label on the box said "Calorie Consuming Anti Matter Chocolate," and then the other label had the atomic symbol on it.  Of course, the box had all my favorites in it, because Chocolate Dave knows what I like after having been diving with me and eating post dive chocolates with him.

Then I met Todd for Mexican for dinner.  He presented me with a group of papers stapled together with a riddle on it.  He'd bought me tickets to see Willy Porter again (swoon) in April.  But he won't be around to see the show with me.  So he hooked up my friend Dennis from work and his girlfriend Nikki to go with me. 

Then on day 5 he baked me a chocolate cake, and got me a device from Amazon that will measure how much electricity (and money) the lights and devices in our house use.  Which I think will be fascinating to play with.  And maybe it will help me to bitch less about our electric bill every month.   So, it'll bring peace to him as well. 

Also on day 5 I caught a computer virus, which was both good and bad.  It was bad because I didn't get the chance to work on the book, or the freelance project I'm working on.  But it was also good because it forced me to unplug for a weekend.  Todd just finished fixing it a bit ago.

Thank you, love, for an amazing birthday week, and for spoiling the hell out of me once again. 

Birthday Week: Day 3

On the third day of birthday week
My true love gave to me
A red velvet cuh-uh-up-cake.

And then this morning I ran 5 miles on the treadmill to keep up with the excess consumption of goodies.

Birthday Week: Day 2

Birthday week, day 2 brought two boxes of Caramel Delites.  My favorite.

And they're great with Twisted Tea.

Birthday Week: Day 1

It happens the same way, and pretty frequently too.  The doorbell at work rings.  One of my co-workers who sit near it answer it.  They groan and say, "Beej?  Really?  Again?"

Todd likes to send me things at work.  He sent me flowers last year on the first day of spring.  He sent me flowers this year on the first day of February.  I've gotten them for Groundhog's Day.  I've gotten them just because.

Yesterday an Edible Arrangement arrived--chocolate covered pears and apples.  The card read "Happy Birthday Week!"

The women rushed in to share, because I ALWAYS share in my bounty.  And then they rolled their eyes, because it's my birthday week.  I get presents when it's not even my birthday.  (Hell, he's gotten me presents on HIS birthday.  Figure that one out.)

Is it wrong that I was pushing for a birthday month?  Not necessarily for gifts, more for chores.  For example, "I shouldn't have to chase the dog to the neighbor's again.  It's my birthday month."  Eventhough I often call Todd "Excellent Husband," he's not buyin' into the whole birthday month thing.

Mistaken Identity, Again

It happened again on Friday. I walked into Subway to get lunch. I rarely go there for lunch, and normally pack a lunch to eat at my desk. Then I spend my lunch hour huddled over my laptop in my car to work on whatever I am writing.

“Hi Debbie,” the woman behind the counter said to me. The first time she said that to me, 4-5 times ago, I looked at her puzzled. This time I ignored her and placed my order.

“You’re not Debbie, are you?” she asked me, while she laid out my turkey and provolone on a 6” piece of wheat bread.

“No, I’m not.”

“I’ve asked you that before, haven’t I?”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “It’s OK.”

“You look just like this woman Debbie I know,” she told me, again. Debbie has some long and complicated Italian last name. (Yeah, because Polish last names are so much easier.) She told me the Italian name, again.

“Is she Italian?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Hmm… I am Polish,” I explained, hoping that it would help her to not think I look like Debbie.


But then, it must be that Polish Mediterranean skin of mine throwing her off

It Must Be my Mediterranean Skin

It was a slow day at Jacques Penney. That’s what I called JC Penney when I worked there when I was a teenager. I said it with a heavy faux French accent. We were all standing around, me and a few women I worked with who were also bored. These were older women. They had husbands and kids. They worked for Jacques on nights and weekends for extra money.

“Ugh, my skin is peeling from this sunburn,” one of them women scratched her shoulder blades against a display. I joked about taking one of the hands off a mannequin so scratching would be easier.

She looked me up and down. It was summer. I was 17 and tan. “You don’t burn, do you?”

“Nope,” I smiled back at her. “I think about the sun and I get tan.” Then I paused, looked up and to the right, as if deep in thought. Then I showed her my arm, “See, it’s already more tan.”

“Well, you’re Polish. You have that Mediterranean skin,” she replied, thoughtfully.

I conjured a map of Europe in my head. The summer before I had vacationed in Germany, Poland and Italy with my family. It took a long time to drive to Rome from Krakow, Poland.

Pop quiz, Internet! Do you know why it took a long time to drive from Krakow to Poland?

It’s because Poland is nowhere damn near the Mediterranean Sea, my friends.

Hijacking Greta

The other day I read in the Providence Journal about an old lady who received a phone call from her grandson. The grandson lived in Florida, and she hadn’t talked to him in awhile. He calls her up and said “Grandma, I’m in Canada and I got arrested. I need $2,000 to post bail.” The grandma told him that she’d call his parents, and he was all like “NO! They can’t ever find out, they’ll be so mad at me. Can we please keep this between us?” She wired the grandson some money to some location in Canada and then called him back on his cell to tell him that she’d wired the money.

Then her worst nightmare came true. The grandson said “What are you talking about? I’m not in Canada. I’m having lunch with my co-workers in Florida…” She’d been taken for a $2,000 ride, and of course that money’s gone.

Then just yesterday I got an email from my friend Greta. Apparently she was in the UK, been mugged at gunpoint, and needed some money so she could settle up with the hotel and fly home that night. She promised to pay me back when she got home.

The problem? Greta was not in the UK. Greta lives in Florida. Even though I don’t talk to Greta every day, I knew that she was not on a “last minute vacation to London.” Luckily I knew enough not to wire Greta the $2,500 she’d asked for. (Where the hell did she stay that she needs $2,500 to “settle the hotel bill” and how much caviar did she get from room service??)

Greta’s email account had been hacked. Her facebook page had been hacked too. The hacker posed as her and chatted to her friends online trying to get them to send money. Her friends knew that Greta was not in the UK. One even said “I am texting with Greta right now. You are not Greta. I just saw her this morning.” The hacker then disconnected from the chat and retreated. Greta’s friends know better, and have not given the hacker a dime.

Internet, if you get an email or a phone call about a friend of yours that is in trouble please verify it before you act. One little phone call to the grandson’s cell phone would have saved the grandma $2,000.

The Boobie Dry Cleaner

The way she leaned against the counter, it pushed her boobs into display even more. That’s the thing I never liked about going into that dry cleaner, was this young woman behind the counter. She was pretty enough, but she shoved her big ol hooters up and out of her shirt on display. I wonder if she ever had the chance to know what eye contact looked like.


I went to that dry cleaner every other week while I had the dive shop. It was on the way, and was the last one nearby that I hadn’t yet boycotted for some ridiculous reason. I did that a lot back then. I had a mental list of the dry cleaners I didn’t want to ever set foot in again, and now I cannot remember the reason for any of them. Over the time I’d been going to the “Boobie Dry Cleaner,” as I’d begun calling it, I became friendly with Kayla, the one with the boobs.

I went in one night on my way home from the shop. Kayla didn’t smile. Her boobs stood at attention, but she didn’t smile like she usually did.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked.

“My boyfriend and I just broke up,” she sighed.

“Oh no! How long have you been together?” I asked. She told me it had been a few weeks. I tried to smile sympathetically, but couldn’t seem to muster one up for a 20 year old girl who had broken up with her weeks-long boyfriend.

She went on to tell me that she had such a great time with him. He was older; I gathered that he was at least in his thirties or maybe forties. He took her to all the “right” clubs. He bought her jewelry. And now she’d need to find another guy to do all those things for her. It was catastrophic.

I couldn’t resist. I asked her why she needed all that in her life. What was so great about going to the “right” clubs if she couldn’t get along with the guy who brought her there? She looked at me with a puzzled look on her face.

“The way I see it,” I paused to choose my words carefully. “If you really like a guy then it doesn’t matter where you guys go together. No matter where you go, it will always be fun.”

She considered for a moment while I told her about the dates that Todd and I had been on when we were first together. He was 20, I was 23. We were flat broke and our idea of a date was cooking dinner together in my apartment. There was a supermarket a few blocks away. We’d walk there and spend Saturday afternoon wandering the aisles, picking out the ingredients and laughing. He really knew how to make me laugh, too. I have a very vivid memory of him speaking French to a cantaloupe. I have no idea what he said to it, but it was funny as hell as he tapped the top of it and held it to his ear. It’s those memories that make me smile still, 13 years later.

Kayla raised her eyebrows at me incredulously. “And you married him after that?”

Maybe I Did Have a Weird Childhood

Even though I have four siblings, I spent a lot of time on my own as a child. My brothers are 4 and 8 years older than me, and my sisters are 5 and 14 years older than me. While the age difference is nothing right now, when we were kids, it was a great divide that screamed “You and I have nothing in common!” There were no kids my age in the neighborhood, which contributed to my not-really-an-only-child-but-kinda-an-only-child life back then.

When I was 4 years old, my oldest sister was graduating high school and heading off to college, while my brother Kaz—4 years older than me—was entering the 3rd grade and playing on the “Major League” little league team. I was barely hitting the ball off the tee. (See above, great divide.)

Throughout my childhood we played endless hours of wiffle ball in the summer, and of course Kaz and the boy next door could hit the ball way further than I could. They would round the bases while I scrambled to field the ball and try to tag them out. The games that my siblings played were all too old for me, and I constantly lacked the skill to compete. I was the little sister that tagged along, yipping at the heels of my older siblings. My choices were yipping or staying home. Staying home meant helping Mom with the cleaning or ironing, and who wants to do that?

Then someone, I don’t know who, took pity on me and bought me a set of jacks. I remember the plastic molded jacks were in a plastic-y drawstring bag with a rubber ball. There were no instructions with the game, and I had no idea how to play jacks. I studied the contents of the set with a scientific fascination. The jacks certainly looked interesting. Why were some prongs rounded while the others were pointy? I didn’t know. I twisted them around in my fingertips, and then tried to spin one of the jacks on its end on the surface of the coffee table. I was disappointed that they wouldn’t spin the way a coin would spin. It would have been cool to see how many I could get spinning at the same time. No dice. I couldn’t stack them on top of each other like blocks, or lean them against each other like I would when building a house of cards.

I lined up the jacks end to end on the length of the coffee table and examined them. They didn’t look like they would be that much fun to play with as they uselessly tilted on their axis; I couldn’t get them to balance so that they looked like plus signs. I left them on the table and bounced the rubber ball against the picture window. I left a perfect round smudge on the glass. I wiped it off with the curtain, so Mom wouldn’t see it and then turned my attention back to the jacks in formation on the coffee table.

“What the heck am I supposed to do with these things?” I puzzled. There was no Internet, so it’s not like I could anonymously look it up and learn. I didn’t want to ask anyone how to play for fear of looking stupid. Even I knew that everyone knew how to play jacks. Well, everyone except for me. Was it some sort of childhood instinct that I lacked?

And now it’s an adult instinct I lack. If I understand it correctly, you’re supposed to bounce the ball and see how many jacks you can pick up before the ball hits the table again, right? Where’s the fun in that?? Who thought of that? I’ll bet it was someone who wanted to make cleaning up the toys a game, so the kids would tidy up after themselves. I can picture some misguided and frazzled mom, “OK, kids, I am going to bounce this ball. Let’s see how many things you can pick up before it lands…. Ready??? GO!!!”