Famous among dozens
Lance’s new site gives his take on San Francisco’s real summer:
“Thing is, in December? It’s totally lovely here. In December it’s 70 degrees, the skies are blue, the dogs are running around like chickens, the chickens are running around like chickens and all is right with the world of dogs and chickens. Me, I moved here in December, 1999 from Boston and in Boston in December the chickens are frozen solid and they hurt when people throw them at you…”
Every month, Martha Stewart publishes her daily schedule in the front of her magazine. Last month, she noted that she’d be “dusting all taxidermy.” (All taxidermy?) Curiously, her court date was missing.
Jen posted a movie of us storming the castle. I’m in the middle.
While in Tuscany, Jeff successfully taught baby Evan to say “poop.” Evan learned other stuff too:
Bryan: I taught the boy not to touch cigarette butts when we were out walking yesterday, and now he’s shaking his finger at them and saying, “Dirty! Dirty! No! No!”
Janice: Yeah. He does the same thing to the bidet.
Hey, I missed it! Mighty Girl turned three last week. I feel accomplished.
You finished that project two days early, and you climb in your big blue jeep to drive home on County Road 120. The house is spotless, and there’s leftover pizza in the fridge. You kick off your shoes and take your pizza out back to check the garden. The seeds you planted have just started to send up shoots, and when you look down at the dirt pushing up between your toes, you remember that you painted your toenails red last night. You go inside for a bath, get dressed up, and head out dancing. You wake up sore the next morning.
Please go read Leslie Harpold’s, “Possible Scenarios for Heaven”. She’s got a pretty brain, that girl.
My girlfriend is looking for a book about marriage, and we find it in the bookstore’s relationship section. It’s nestled amongst several other titles that make us uncomfortable to be seen browsing:
Me: I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me!
L: The Stop Walking on Eggshells Workbook: Practical Strategies for Living With Someone Who Has Borderline Personality Disorder.
Me: How awesome would it be to buy Why Men Don’t Listen for the plane ride, and then just bust it out after we’ve buckled up?
L: That’s perfect. He looks over and you’re reading The Angry Heart and, like, wiping a single tear from your cheek.
Me: It’s almost worth the twenty bucks just to see the look on his face.
Later, in a Barnes and Noble in Delaware, I hone in on the perfect shock-inducing travel reading in the wedding section, There Goes the Bride: Making up your mind, calling it off, and moving on. I find this endlessly amusing. Bryan does not concur.
I’ve abandoned you, my pals. Over the last month, life has kept me incredibly busy, but I’ve had little access to the Internet. Now–for the first time in years–I have no record of my foibles and triumphs, which bites. And so, to recap, in the last month we:
We’re jet setters, baby. I’ll post the juicy details as we go along. Thanks, as always, for checking back in with me and for your emails while we were on the road. I missed you guys.
A 54-year-old woman who works four jobs, recently won $76 million in the lottery. She didn’t tell her bosses at first, because she’d just requested more hours and felt obligated to work them for awhile.
A gardener found $1,700 under a bush while he was working and actually turned it in to the police. It belonged to a woman who had been saving a dollar a day for a trip to Universal Studios with her son, and had also been holding on to her father’s savings from his Social Security so he could afford a car.
A Bellevue couple chopped up twenty-six trees on a public trail in an attempt to improve the view from their “hillside home.” They were caught in the act, and now they’ll be paying the city $150,000, publicly apologizing, and doing some community service time.
( All via Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room.)
We flew to Italy out of New York a few days ago. The approximately 135-mile drive from Wilmington, Delaware to NYC took two hours. The last ten miles of New York traffic lasted three.
Half-an-hour worth of NYC traffic was within olfactory range of a truckload of spilled chicken that had obviously been rotting in the street for awhile. As Bryan said, only in New York does a pile of raw meat remain in the road long enough to make you dry heave as you pass.
The rental car, oddly, was infested with spiders. I realize this sounds like a detail from a drug-induced haze, but I have the bites to prove it. What’s more, my attempts to procure drugs in Keller, Virginia were surprisingly fruitless.
We’re in Milan now for the Adaptive Path Workshop. According to my guidebook, Italian men should have leapt at me as I got off the plane and refused to stop grabbing at my ass until I batted at them with rolled newspapers. I dutifully learned the suggested phrases to ward off unwanted advances:
At the cafe, where I’d like to read as I sip my wine, “Mi lasci en pace, per favore.” (Please leave me alone, in peace.)
On the train, where someone is bound to grope me, a loud, “Que schifo!” (How disgusting!)
And the charmingly all-purpose, “Adesso, basta!” (Enough already, buck-o.)
Sadly, I’ve yet to have a single Milanese man make an inappropriate advance. What’s more, all of them dress better than me. Italy is doing nothing for my self-esteem.
Mighty Girl 