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Archives from 2002-2006

March 20, 2007

Let me just take a moment to give a shout-out to Mucinex, the disgustingly advertised product whose mascot is a giant anthropomorphic glob of snot. If like me you often find yourself clogged and stuffed and generally a blocked-up mess of sinus misery, Mucinex will clear you right out. And not by acting as a decongestant and drying out your mouth and giving you little rubber-cement boogers, either. No, Mucinex essentially allows you to blow your nose in the most, er, productive way possible. Twenty minutes after taking a Mucinex, you will blow three-quarters of the contents of your entire head out your nose, including the little piece of your brain that remembers where the car keys are. Sure, it’s slightly disconcerting the first time you feel your hippocampus dislodge, but I figure losing just a few mental faculties is a small price to pay for the ability to breathe through my nose without sounding like a mating walrus.

Say, thanks for the movie suggestions, you guys. We should have no excuse for a crap-laden Netflix queue now, although I see JB has already added “The Devil Wears Prada” which he insists is not supposed to be a chick flick—my theory is that he’s got it confused with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” which was on the soundtrack to “Coyote Ugly”. Boy, won’t he be surprised when Meryl Streep appears onscreen instead of Piper Perabo.

I was glad to see so many zombie movie recommendations, I’ve seen them all but I’m happy to know I’m in good company with my fellow Shaun of the Dead fans. I love that one, only slightly more than the deliciously creepy 28 Days Later (definitely not to be confused with 28 Days). You know what makes 28 Days Later so goddamn scary, is that the infected humans are fast. They don’t come ambling toward you with arms outstretched—they run like hell and come bursting through windows and shit. The Dawn of the Dead remake is a good one, too, although it was much scarier for me in the theater than on DVD.

Zombies! I seriously can’t stop thinking about them. I finished World War Z and I feel woefully unprepared for the zombie onslaught that I am now CERTAIN will be occurring soon. I live in a one-story house! We don’t have a boat! We’re fucked!

JB said in the event of zombie attack we could simply drive down to the remote section of Oregon where his family has property but the man is a FOOL. Then we’d just be in bum-fuck nowhere fighting off redneck zombies. The key is getting out in the middle of the ocean in a vessel that has provisions for at least a couple years, or traveling above the snowline so the zombies freeze—although take note that freezing does not kill them, it merely keeps them immobile until the thaw.

GRAH. ZOMBIES.

Well, hopefully I will soon be in better physical condition to run screaming from the undead, which I can only pray are the slow-moving, staggering-and-moaning variety, because let me tell you I have been doing that Turbo Jam workout again and again and again. I even bought a new video, which boasts the slightly humiliating name of “Fat Blaster”, and when I started it up I found myself ridiculously pleased that it’s not only the same instructor—the unusually likeable Chalene Johnson who JB piggishly declared a “milf”—it’s the same group of people doing the workout. There’s the always-smiling girl who looks like Sandra Bullock, Mindy the low impact girl, the lone dorky guy in the back. Ah, sweet familiarity. I can almost pretend I’m going to a class at the gym and seeing my fellow 9 AM classmates. Except I have the invaluable benefit of being in my own home where no one can observe me blowing my nose after each “Turbo” interval.

I’m leery of thinking that I can maintain this exercise commitment long-term, given my propensity for slacking in the past, but I’m really enjoying it right now. I actually look forward to the morning workouts when I can squeeze them in, and I do weights and stretching each night. Could this be a new leaf, a life change for the better? Or simply another flash-in-the-pan obsession (see also: zombies)? Only time will tell. I feel more motivated this time, so I am hopeful.

In other news, here is our current choice for kitchen remodel materials:

The granite is Giallo Veneziano, which we’re planning to use for countertops. We have such a small kitchen it won’t be much in the way of square footage. The cabinet color we’re liking is the darker sample on the upper right, kind of a cherry. The cabinet style will be “Oslo”, which looks like this:

We also picked out some stone floor tiles (by the way, if you’re in the market for new flooring, I highly recommend visiting a ProSource shop if you can)—neutral, cream-colored—and now we have to settle on a wall color. Sage? Warm brown? Light tan? Pink with purple polka dots? Illustrated silhouette of oncoming zombie attack, just to keep me on my toes?

March 18, 2007

There is a large Goodwill store in our neighborhood and visiting it with debit card in hand has become one of my favorite weekend activities. Sure, you could say it’s lacking in the sort of tastefully-Botox’d, tinkling-piano atmosphere that Nordstrom strives to offer, but where else could I buy an entire wardrobe of shirts for twenty bucks?

This particular Goodwill is awesome, in that you can always find barely-worn non-crappy clothes and shoes—a benefit of its relatively affluent zip code, I’m sure—as well as decent housewares. Riley has some super-cute clothes from there, including a swooningly macho little North Face type vest. They even have a maternity section, which is a fantastic alternative to spending hojillions of dollars at Motherhood Maternity for outfits with a 6-month shelf life.

One of the reasons I like going there so much is that you never know what you’ll find. A pair of Seven jeans for $5.99? Some oxblood Nine West mary jane square-toe flats for $3.99? A $2.99 toddler-sized sweater in green and blue stripes, far cuter and better made than Old Navy’s offerings? A pretty rectangular glass vase that’s perfect for holding daffodils, priced at $1.99? SCORE.

Of course, there are times when all you leave with is the pervasive smell of musty attics clinging to your hair, because that’s the day when the clothes are all ugly or stained and the toy aisle is depressingly full of broken plastic crap that kids are throwing at each other and every two minutes a heavily accented man haltingly announces into the crackling P.A. system that all towels are 40% off, thank you and have a nice day.

That’s what makes it so much fun, the fact that it’s a total crapshoot. Will there be an 8-piece collection of beautiful ceramic bowls today? Or will there only be a chipped plastic tumbler with faint Kool-aid stains in the bottom? Ahh, eet ees a mystery!

If I were more creative and brave—like, say, Seattle’s own Ariel Meadow Stallings, my personal fashion hero and woman of many talents—I’d be buying up those vintage oddball clothing items that magically transform into a smoking hot outfit once you pair them together correctly, but man, I just don’t have the eye for that stuff. I want a stylist, and not some horrifying Hollywood praying mantis who always dresses her carb-phobic clients in oversized sunglasses and leggings, I want a funky chick with a tongue piercing and an ample ass who knows exactly what clothes flatter the size 10 body, who incorporates Threadless t-shirts and Cruel Girl jeans into her wardrobe recommendations.

Also, I would like a pony. A pink-winged flying pony whose ass burbles out a steady stream of zero-point Starbucks vanilla lattes.

In other news, our Netflix queue has been woefully clogged with unsatisfying movies lately. The most recent travesty being Fast Food Nation—spare yourself the pain of watching it (and finding yourself thinking, hey, what happened to Greg Kinnear’s character, did he just randomly disappear never to return to the storyline [answer: yes]? and what the fuck, is that Avril Lavigne? and why the hell wasn’t this a DOCUMENTARY?) and read the book instead, friends. There was Casino Royale, which had some nice moments of chasey chasey pow-pow-pow, but was annoyingly long and featured a 43947521 hour poker game (although it does earn points for including a brilliant line of dialogue from Bond: “Skewered. One sympathizes.” —I realize that makes no sense if you haven’t seen it, but if you have, did you also mentally file under Bitchin’ Rejoinders with the fervent hope of being able to use it someday?). And Babel, the movie that didn’t have the stones to be as utterly depressing as it could have been.

I need some recommendations! What have you rented lately that didn’t suck?

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