Update on Tsunami Aid Benefit Concert

In my previous post about the Tsunami Aid Concert of Hope, I mentioned that you could download the performances from Connect.com. At the time however I lamented that the Madonna performance and the Stevie Wonder/India Arie performances were not available for download. I'm happy to see that the Madonna performance IS now in the dowload list. Unfortunately, the Wonder/Arie duet is still missing, the best performance of the show in my opinion. Maybe if I wait a little longer, that one will be available as well.

Uglydress.com

This website was pointed out to me by alert internet explorer and good friend, Ms. X. It is really too good to keep just to ourselves. It must be shared. The girl who maintains this site appears to be exactly my age (information I have inferred from a couple of different references she has made) and her commentary is hysterical. I wish she was my friend.

Anyway, the girl in the Patriotic Prom dress looks exactly like my friend Suzanne, but she swears it is not her. I have my doubts.

Tsunami Aid: A Concert of Hope

Did you happen to catch the Tsunami Aid Concert on Saturday night? It was actually quite good considering it had to be thrown together without much time to prepare. I also found the commentary and film footage between performances to be quite moving. I cried several times, but then I'm a giant sap about that kind of stuff. You can download individual songs or the entire album at the Sony music store Connect.com. This concert included a really great duet with Stevie Wonder and India Arie, and another one with Eric Clapton and Roger Waters. Actually, I thought all of the performances are worth downloading (with the exception of one country singer – I’m just not a fan of country music). I am quite disappointed though that the Stevie Wonder/ India Arie duet is not included in the download list. Nor is the Madonna performance (yes, I am a fan, much to the dismay of some of my Music Snob friends).

Rub-a-dub-dub

I have another question about men that I hope someone can give some insight to. It has to do with their bathtubs. My friend, who happened to be my roommate in college, and I were talking about this today and recalling that another of our roommates had a boyfriend who would leave the tub black. She always thought he was just disgusting (and truth be told, he was), but I think that it might have been attributable to this strange phenomenon that I have noted about many men. I have noticed that some men, no matter how well their normal personal hygiene is, turn their tubs black. And some men don’t. I have pondered over this for years. It has long been my hypothesis that the blackness is coming from the bottoms of their feet, but WHY I cannot fathom. My friend recalls one year when her 18-year-old nephew was staying at her parents’ house. He showered every day so he was not excessively dirty, but yet he would turn the tub black in less than a week. In his case, the blackness was also accompanied by grit or sand! She says it was as if he had gone off-roading without a vehicle. And the answer cannot be that it is because they don’t scrub their tubs often enough. My friend scrubbed hers at least once a week, but the guy would make it black again in a matter of days. Also, I personally have let two months go by without scrubbing my tub, but yet it never showed any black smudges. So what is the answer? Any thoughts?

Note to Self

Note to Self - Do not wipe self to excessiveness. (9/13/04)

Note to Others about this Note to Self: This is not MY Note to Self. It was a lesson learned (and written) by someone else and that is all I'm going to say about that.

Wet was I thinking??

Mom always told me to NEVER ever use hand dishwashing soap in the dishwasher. EVER. I should only use automatic dishwasher detergent. Well, one day, not long after the The Great Waterbed Incident, I discovered that I was out of dishwasher detergent. Remembering Mom’s advice about not using regular dishwashing soap, I knew better than to fill the little soap cups in the dishwasher with Dawn or Pamolive. Instead, I put one teeny tiny drop of Pamolive in there. Just one. And it was teeny. I started up the dishwasher and then went about my business. After a reasonable amount of time for the dishwasher cycle to be finished, I came back to check on the dishes. The sight the greeted me in the kitchen continues to haunt me to this day. The entire kitchen (eat-in size) was filled with frothy suds about two feet deep. This was before the Foam Dancing craze, or my roommates and I would have just invited some friends over and had a party. I don’t even remember what it took to get that mess cleaned up. But I do remember that afterward the kitchen floor sparkled like a fine-cut diamond.

Posting Images

I wish to post a gif or bmp image but have only found instructions on how to use Picasa/BloggerBot, which appears to only allow jpg images. Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Thanks!

The Great Waterbed Incident, Epilogue

The aftermath.

Well, the last we heard, the water leaks had made their way all the way down to the fourth floor. Also, the next day when we drove by outside the building we could see a large wet spot on the side of the building running down from our apartment. The apartment itself was in a shambles for close to a month. When the carpet (which had previously been brand-new and a beautiful, pristine off-white) finally dried, there were brown stains all over it. Also, it had been installed on top of parquet flooring that had been there since the building was built in the 50’s or 60’s. The water damage caused the wood parquet to buckle up so that there were humongous bulges in the floor, raising the carpet up. And we could do nothing about it because we were waiting for our renters’ insurance company to decide whether the damage was covered or not. Finally about a MONTH later they finally told me that nothing was covered. Fine. At least now I could hire the carpet cleaners myself. I was shocked that every stain came up and the carpet was pristine off-white again. Also, I was lucky that within a month or so after that the buckled parquet flooring underneath the carpet had gradually fallen back down into shape. Within 3 months you couldn’t tell that anything horrible had ever happened there. Except for the fact that my bed frame was still on the floor with just a blow-up air mattress in it.

The Great Waterbed Incident, Part II

So, as I said, I was anxious to sleep in my own bed instead of on the floor so I decided to go ahead and fill the bed right then. But I also had to go to work quite early in the morning and it was already very late and I was exhausted. So I decided to hook up the hose to the bed and take a nap for an hour or so on the couch, then get up and check on the bed. I figured it would take the bed two hours to fill. So I went to sleep and then woke up an hour later, as planned. I immediately sensed that something was wrong. Very very wrong. My bedroom was at the end of a very long hallway in the apartment. As I approached the hallway in the darkness, I saw it. A large dark semi-circle shaped area on the floor, spreading out from the beginning of the hallway. “That’s not…” I thought as I stepped on it. “Gasp! It is! It’s water!!” I quickened my pace down the hall toward my room, each step creating a splash larger than the one before it as the water became deeper and deeper. I entered the room, the water depth now well over my ankles. The simultaneously noted several things. The mattress of the bed was completely deflated and laying useless in the frame, and half of the bed had collapsed onto the floor. My alarm clock was floating on the water, but still plugged into the wall. Fearing electrocution I quickly unplugged it and ran from the room. I was now in panic mode. I paced around the living room for a while going “ohmygod whatdoido, ohmygod whatdoido.” Finally I gathered enough wits about me to call the building management emergency number to report what had happened. A woman at an answering service answered and I guess she didn’t really listen to what I was telling her because she said “Yes, some other residents have reported a leak as well. We’ll have maintenance look into it.” I said “No, I’m telling you that my waterbed exploded and the “leak” originated from MY apartment and there is about 8 inches of water flooded in my bedroom right now!!” Finally she grasped the urgency of the situation and said she would have someone come up right away. A maintenance man finally showed up, assessed the seriousness of the situation and brought in a wet-vac. By this time, the water had spread all the way into the living room so that now the entire apartment was sopping wet. It took the man a couple hours to suck up all the water. I went back into the bedroom and noticed that the force of the water had moved several heavy things all the way across the room. Such as a steel toolbox filled with tools and a small wooden nightstand. I also noticed that the windows (which went from floor to ceiling) were cranked wide open, with no screens in place. I was so grateful that the cat wasn’t in the room when the bed exploded because he surely would have been washed right out the window, which I remind you was on the 10th floor.

The Great Waterbed Incident, Part I

This story is one of the highlights of the many episodes of my life that over time I will chronicle in this blog. This is a long story and so I am going to break it into chapters. Probably it will be in two parts, but possibly three. Here is Part I:

Back in the 80’s waterbeds were pretty popular. In the early 90’s the fad was waning but some people still had them. I was one of those people. I had just moved into a 10th floor apartment in a high-rise and was faced with the task of reassembling my beloved waterbed. When I purchased it a couple of years prior, the men who delivered it assembled it for me and then filled it. I could have called them again but, being a student at the time I was always broke and I didn’t want to pay for the service. Instead, I entreated my roommate’s boyfriend (who claimed to have previously worked for a waterbed delivery company and therefore had experience assembling them) to put it together for me. He came over on a Sunday afternoon and set to work. Several hours later he was still working on it. I noted to myself that it only took the guys who put it together the first time about and hour and a half to finish, but I said nothing since he was doing me a huge favor. Finally, around two in the morning he finished and the bed was ready to be filled with water. In hindsight, I should have waited until the next day to fill the bed, but I had been sleeping on the floor for days and was anxious to finally sleep in my beloved waterbed.

Stay tuned for Part II...

"Doctor says it wouldn't bleed so much if I could just keep my finger outa there!"

Have you ever seen someone in their car, sitting in traffic, picking their nose? Have you ever noticed that these nose pickers are ALWAYS middle-aged men? I’ve never seen a member of any other demographic engaged in this activity. What is it with these men? Do they think that they are invisible? Do they think because they are alone in their car that they are truly “alone”, forgetting about the thousands of other motorists who are sharing the highway with them? Or maybe once a man reaches a certain age, he just no longer cares what people know about his personal habits. Actually, this may well be the answer because something else just occurred to me. It is always these same people who are seen around the office, walking toward the bathroom with a newspaper tucked under their arm, without a care in the world that by doing so everyone knows that they plan to be in there for a while.

Does anyone have any other theories? Maybe there are some middle aged men out there who could lend some very valuable insight to this burning question.

October 1998

Note to Self: Do not mace (or pepper-spray) self.

Note to Self: Never trust Mapquest directions. (Maps are ok, though.)

Note to Self

In the hopes of making this more constructive and less of a whiney rant, I have just decided to add another recurrent feature to this blog. I call it “Note to Self”. This is a list that I and some friends have been keeping in our heads for a few years. It consists of the valuable lessons we have learned, either through our own experiences or the experiences of our friends and loved ones. In most cases, the story behind each Note to Self will not be revealed because they are much more interesting standing on their own.

One Damned Thing After Another

I have always said that I should write a book about the many adventures and misadventures of my life and that it shall be entitled One Damned Thing After Another. There always seems to be something going on to cause my life to be turned upside down, or at least sideways. While it is true that most of the things that happen to me are my own damn fault and usually direct results of my own carelessness or neglect, I think you will agree that there are definitely other forces at work here. Just plain old rotten luck. In any situation, if something bad can happen…it will. That is not to say that I never have strokes of good fortune. Usually, even my most horrible episodes turn out alright in the end. In fact, I find my life overall to be quite blessed. But jeez! Sometimes I wish fate would just give me a break! Anyway, I am way too lazy to actually write a book so I will log them here. These historic events will not be listed in any particular order, but randomly as I am reminded of them. Also, new events will be published as they occur.

Anyhoo - Here's me: