Cowboy

My friend Joelle and I met an interesting gentleman the other day
named cowboy. He's 66 and has been living in California since he was
18. He's a poet, but other than that I'm not sure what he did to
support himself for real. He's a regular at the dive bar we went to,
and I think he likes meeting the people who wander in there randomly.

Anyway, he started telling the story of how he ended up in California
at 18. The Air Force stationed him here and he called his sister and
said, "if there's a god he made a huge mistake. I was never meant to
be born and raised in Detroit. I was always meant to be in Californ-i-
a."

That's how I feel everytime I dye my hair. I was never meant to have
mouse brown hair. I was always meant to be a redhead. There's a
personality that goes along with being a redhead. I blame it on
childhood exposure to Anne of Green Gables.

Thank goodness for dyes in a box and the fact that the hair color I
love looks natural on me. Later today I'm going to have to return my
hair to it's intended color.

The Core

It's my favorite disaster movie. The first time I saw it it
immediately kicked The Day After Tomorrow out of the top slot. (Side
note- disaster movies are one of my favorite genres.)

Recently I went on a disaster movie kick and watched every single
disaster movie I could think of, and I keep coming back to The Core.
The plus side of this is it's an instant view movie on Netflix, so I
can watch it whenever I want, as often as I want, for free.

Well, I'm in santa monica for the next two weeks, so my computer
access is going to be a little limited, and I'm lying in bed with a
migraine. (first bad one in 3 weeks. I've had little ones, but nothing
real, so that's pretty good.)

Anyway, I'm lying in bed, and all I want to do is watch The Core, but
I can't. So I start flipping through the channels and lo and behold,
it's showing on FX. And I've only missed the first 10 minutes.

I love cable.

LOL

The most recent "Facebook" addition to www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com
might be my favorite one ever.

And my next blog will be about why hating the DMV is absolutely
ustifiable.

It's finally caught up with me.

When I moved here I was too broke to register my car in California so
I was waiting until the registration expired and I figured I'd do it
then.

Then I got hit by the drunk driver right as it expired, and I was out
of pocket some money and I didn't have the money then either.

Then, I kind of had the money, but didn't want to spend it on
something like car registration. Nor did I want to deal with the DMV.

Today I got to the airport and parked at 5:30am and caught my flight.
I was dead tired. So when I got back and my car was missing, I figured
I must have forgotten where I parked it. I spent a full hour walking
through the garage looking for it before giving up and going to the
booth to ask if they could help me find it.

They inform me that it's probably been towed, and I need to call the
airport police. They tell me that yes, it has been towed and I can get
it back when I register my car. I have to take an airport shuttle to
the police station to get proof of insurance out of my glove box. I am
sitting in the airport police station lobby right now, where I am
waiting for a friend to come and pick me up so I don't have to pay for
a 40 mile cab ride in rush hour traffic.

Tomorrow morning I will have to take a cab to the nearest DMV, pray I
have everything I need to get my car registered and then take a cab
here and give them paper work proving my car is registered. Then pay
the impound fee, the ticket, the tow charge, etc.

All by an 11am meeting. I should just cancel that right now.

Frankly, it would be easier to rent a car tomorrow and deal with this
on the weekend, but I can't rent a car because I don't have a credit
card. The only way I can rent a car is if I have plane tickets proving
I've got a return flight.

This is all my own fault. Every last bit of it. But that doesn't mean
it doesn't suck. Hopefully I have the money to cover all of this
tomorrow.

Holy cow

I just experienced my first earthquake and I have to admit I'm a
little shaken up.

The ground still feels like it's moving, and the earthquake was about
an hour ago.

I was walking a construction site, and one of the guys goes,
"earthquake." and I was kind of sad I missed it and then I felt the
ground start rumbling.

A construction site is probably not where one wants to be during an
earthquake. But luckily my site is awaiting it's first inspection, and
everything is fairly well secured. And the base building is really
solid, brand new construction, concrete.

The head guy tells everyone to start heading for the doors, which is
of course an order I was happy to follow. I got outside, and was
shaking and said, "I feel like the ground is still moving." my
contactor said, "that's because it is." you could see the power lines
swaying. The construction guys were sooo non-chalant. One was on the
third floor balcony and yelled, "come up here. You can feel it
better." No thank you.

I think I can go a good long while without going through that again.

Karma

I feel like I'm owed something good sometime soon. I've had my laundry
stolen. I've had my iPod stolen. And I don't think I'm ever going to
see my jumper cables again.

Last week I was running late for work, got halfway down my street and
realized I'd forgotten my work cellphone. I turned around and came
back to get it. As I'm leaving the house for a second time, even later
for work, one of my neighbors approaches me asking if I have jumper
cables. I said yes and he asked if I could also take a minute to help
jump start his car.

He lives a little further down the road from me and I drove down there
and let him handle the jump start process. His girlfriend said, "thank
you so much. We're running late for work already." I told them to hang
on to the jumper cables for the rest of the day in case the car didn't
start again later and the girlfriend said, "thank you so much. We'll
get these back to you. You have such good karma coming your way."

Well, so far I've seen neither the jumper cables nor the good karma.

PS- I know karma doesn't really work like that. But life would be a
little nicer if everyone behaved as if it did.

Day 9

I've been without fast food for 9 days now. I've been limiting myself
to 3 cokes a day for 9 days now.

I skipped lent this year due to poor timing. Buy the good thing about
not being religious is that you can do lent any time. I'm definitely
going to do the whole 40 days 40 nights plus Sundays thing. But I may
extend it to see just how long I can go.

The fast food thing is harder than the coke thing. I tend to open a
lot of cokes, but I never finish them. So I'm just more careful about
how many I open.

The fast food thing though... That's hard. It's just so easy with how
my life works to eat fast food. If I'm going from one meeting to the
next with only 20 minutes to spare, what else am I going to do?
Answer- maybe carry cereal bars around? I don't know.

So far I haven't craved it yet though. That's good. I've only wanted
it becuase it's easy. When I start craving it, that's when it gets
hard.