So I haven't felt like being an exhibitionist lately...

....well? I haven't. At work, I started to write again on my lunch break...a couple entries here and there. I haven't gotten around to posting them though. Here's the first one (and the most important since it basically recaps the events that have taken place since my little blog sabbatical):

Ok, every once in a while I get sick of my blog and move on for a while. Obviously this was one of those times. It just so happened that I moved on during a PARTICULARLY eventful time in my life, so it makes me sad to look at my blog now and see that the latest update about my life is about the Kitty Half Time.

In March I got laid off. It’s ok, I didn’t like the bathrooms at the firm anyway, and I hated making nametags. HATED IT. Here’s how it went down:

1. The Firm calls a mass meeting to tell us we’re laid off.
2. Here is what I was thinking during the meeting: “SHIT.”
3. They tell me my lay off is effective the next day and I tell them there is no way in hell I’m going back to my desk…now…or EVER.
4. …so, I get in my car and punch my steering wheel and cry for like ten minutes on the phone to my mom…
5. …and for ten more minutes at the mall on Colin’s shoulder.
6. I go home and apply for grad school…
7. …but then get freaked out about student loans, so I apply for jobs as well.
8. I sit around for about a month (in hindsight, this was awesome)
9. …and then get hired by a new, better company.

Yep, that’s right, I got another job. Within a month. MIRACLE. The only downsides to this job are:

1. My cubicle has no window L. I know, boo hoo, poor kate.
2. It is one (1)(uno)(un) HOUR from where I live. That’s two (2)(dos)(deux) hours in the car EVERY DAY. I never in a million years thought I would listen to as much morning radio as I do now. I even have thought about calling in a couple times because why SHOULDN’T I be part of the discussion? I mean, I’m listening every damn day, I feel like sometimes the morning show should hire me.
3. They do not provide me with free plastic dishes and silverware. Or subsidized snacks and sodas.
4. Stupid handles on the bathroom doors. I will attempt to take a picture later, surreptitiously, with my phone.

They do, however, provide me with the following:

1. The opportunity not to blow my diet on 25c snacks and sodas.
2. A better salary
3. Cooler people who do not talk about their children ALL DAY.
4. ‘Cause some of them don’t even HAVE children, which is nice.
5. More work and more responsibility, so I only have time to update my blog during my lunch hour.
6. A reason to move to the outskirts of St. Louis
7. Way nicer building
8. No window IN my cubicle, but the window BY my cubicle looks onto a lake, and not a brick wall.
9. If there is a terrorist attack on downtown St. Louis, I will not be the first to go.
10. Way better parking situation
11. Way better boss/delegation
12. More jeans days
13. A coat hook that came WITH MY CUBICLE.

Things the Firm gave me:

1. a month off
2. severance pay

Ok, lots of other things. It’s a way better situation.

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My other big news is that I finally got my engagement ring!!!!!! I know, this happened like three months ago, but in thinking about it, I decided that maybe the only thing my future children will want to read about on my blog (future daughters, anyway) is my engagement and wedding. Probably about their births and the trials and tribulations of our early marriage before they came along, as well.

For now, all I have to really talk about is wedding planning. It is probably a good thing that I did not update my blog when I was in the initial phase of wedding planning.

Let’s discuss how my wedding is still ten months away, and I have already made it through the “initial phase of wedding planning”. Some normally adjusted women might not have even started planning at ten months out, or at the very least would have JUST started planning. NOT ME. I am finished planning, save for the cake. Yep, that’s right, the cake is the only thing I have left to plan in my wedding, which is in March of next year.

So, that’s why I think it’s probably best that I didn’t update when I was furiously planning every detail of my wedding in a single two-month span. At that time, the only thing interesting about me was how crazy I was. Anyway, I can sum up the whole wedding planning experience in one post, instead of the two months worth of daily posts it would have required back then:

1. I booked a reception hall (which subsequently required me to book a caterer) and a ceremony location.
2. I asked my grandfather to officiate.
3. I bought a dress. This experience is still resonating “crazy” in the world of Kate because I have a picture of said dress on my cubicle wall. Mostly to remind me to STOP EATING.
4. I made mock invitations. OK, heres the thing. I would love to just ORDER invitations. However, I feel like if I do not make them myselves I will be judged. Still, my mock invitation took about three milliseconds of design skill, so perhaps I will be judged anyway.
5. I picked out bridesmaid dresses
6. In a particularly intense wave of crazy, I made a playlist for my wedding reception. Which resulted in a minor discussion between C and I over whether or not it was appropriate to play Tupac.
7. My mother and I booked a florist. I’m not entirely convinced my mother didn’t book him more because he was a fabulous gay man and less because he is also a fabulous flower designer.
8. We booked a photographer who is the BOMB DIGGITY.

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That's as far as I got on my lunch break. Today I haven't been feeling very upbeat so reading my upbeat journal entry makes me a little more disphoric than I already was, and less inclined to write more.

I intended to post pictures of all the wedding stuff, but I'm feeling a little burnt out on weddings lately. I dunno why...maybe because it just seems like it's so far away. I think that's a good sign to put it on the back burner for a while, anyway.

Ok, gonna go cook dinner. I promise I'll update more, blog. I'm sure my future children will thank me not to write only about my cubicle, skipping the important, exciting moments.

Only something with as great a magnitude of ridiculousness as the Kitty Half Time Show could shock me out of my blog-coma this time.

Here it is:

http://animal.discovery.com/tv/puppy-bowl/video/video.html?playerId=1369813243&titleId=9812760001

Every single one of those cats is like WT-BLOODY-F IS GOING ON.

It just reminds me of why I love cats. The puppies that participated in the Animal Planet Puppy bowl were so oblivious to the fact that they were being poked fun at. Whats this you say? You want us to romp around on a fake football field for an hour? There are toys involved? The kitties however...they had the right idea. In the first place, there is no way Animal Planet could get kitties to stand for this nonsense for any longer than they did, hence the kitty HALFTIME. Second, look at all these kittehs. They all look shell s hocked. Every once in a while the camera zooms in on a kitty in the midst of a plaintive cry for help. Of course you can't hear it because of the krazy kitty music they're playing in the background.

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In other news: I'M ENGAGED!!@#. I would post a picture of the ring but I can't find my camera card for my big camera. I would take one with the camera at work but my ring is being sized. Wedding plans are already progressing nicely, but I don't feel like typing about it. Theres nothing funny or really interesting about planning a wedding unless you're in it.

SORRY.

You know what I think? If you don't have anything to write about, take half a month off. Now that I've sufficiently restocked the number of life experiences that I don't mention on my blog, I can write again.

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Where to start, wheeerrre to start...oh yes, Christmas. Christmas was....christmas-y. That's about all there is to it. I baked 5 dozen cookies and ate a lot of pork. This year my little cousin had his muslim friend stay over for Christmas and New Years. Poor kid, he must think we eat nothing but pork, all day long. Sausage in the breakfast casserole, ham sandwiches for lunch, christmas ham for dinner, leftover ham for snacks, ham candy, ham popsicles, ham cookies, ham in our stockings...you get the point. There was even pork in the delicious meatloaf that my mother made especially for him on Christmas eve. Being the heathens that we are we debated even telling him, but being the questioning agnostics that we are, we considered the possibility that maybe pork IS sinful, and didn't want to risk his soul for a little meatloaf.

I got good presents:

a super nice camera lens
a kindle so I don't have to haul books around when I travel
a bike from C
a gorgeous pie plate from poland from Callie
other odds n ends that I don't feel like typing out

I gave good presents:

ex libris stamps for my dad and sammie pie that i designed myself
a $100 mood gift certificate for my mom and a cool quilt pattern
a box from poland for callie for her earrings*
a blender, some cologne and something else that i cant remember for C
a wallet and $20 bucks for john vernon**
something for jessica that i cant put on here because i havent given it to her
a GPS for C's parents***
a diamond necklace for C's sister****
some beer steins for C's other sister

*no, we did not consult with each other beforehand on the topic of whether or not to both purchase gifts for each other from Poland. We're just cool like that.
**I thought long and hard before buying this potentially lame gift and then I thought...he's fifteen, what could be better than $20 bucks?
***went in with his sister and her fiance and C. C'mon, I'm not THAT rich nice.
****it was on deep dark "please take this from us" clearance. also, not that nice.

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Then for New Years we went to the godforsaken frozen north Wisconsin to visit C's family. It was...cold. C thought it would be a great idea to bring Olibur Finwik, even though there was two feet of snow and he is only 1.9 feet tall. Not so much. The first thing he did when we got to my probably future in laws house is run around to every room like a maniac for about five minutes, finishing his romp off by pooping in the house while running.

Great. 20 years from now they will still be talking about when my dog came and left a trail of poop in their house for Christmas.

Then we tossed him outside where he proceeded to pee on the screen door and poop on the welcome mat, refusing to touch his porcelain ass to the snow. Finally, on our last day there he peed on the carpeted stairs.

Anyway, aside from that New Years was great.

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When I came back to work, the first thing I did was check my email, and then I entered fifty or so sweepstakes. That can be my new years resolution: Win Sweepstakes.

Heres a (partially) comprehensive list of what I could win!

• A trip for two to the North Pole!
• A trip to Montana
• A trip to Branson
• Eight Vera Wang Bridesmaids dresses
• A trip to Ancestral Scotland
• A West Virginia getaway!
• Some super expensive baseball bats for C
• A couple diamond rings.
• combined approximately 2 million dollars
• trip to disney world
• a fifty thousand dollar wedding
• a wood cutting machine
• two sweeps with Hasbro and hellmans mayonnaise that i don't remember the prize for
• a new set of pots and pans
• a nice casserole pan
• a motocross bike.
• a fifty thousand dollar car.
• some other stuff i can't remember.

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I started this post right after Christmas and now it's like a month later and I'm going to finish it by god.

Is it sad that when I added the "people I'm related to" application on facebook, it showed about ten people that I have never even HEARD of in the "possible relatives" section? Possible relatives meaning I have at least one relative in common with them. Maybe I should get home more...OR maybe my second and third cousins should stop marrying and having babies at such an alarming rate.

I think thats a good place to end things....

C and I will be spending part of this Christmas at our family farm at my father's behest. For those who don't know my father, let me tell you about how he is arguably the smartest person I have ever met. Eloquent, thoughtful, educated, well-read, cultured etc etc etc. My dad is the person I call when I need a mini-lecture about quantum physics or string theory or when I need to know what the scientific name of the sea cucumber is (all three of these things are actual bonafide questions that I have posed to my father and he has had the answer to.) 

HOWEVER...put my father within about fifty miles of our family farm and he...changes. I think my father wishes sometimes that he could trade in the civic for a john deere and call it a day. He wishes that he preferred labs and sheep dogs to tiny, nervous greyhounds. Most of the time he's ok with it. He likes his iPhone and routers and his hybrid civic...none of which are functional in the country. But being around our farm really hits him hard. 

SCENE:

Dad (drives up in light blue hybrid honda civic with my sister and I. Callie is a French major, I am a graphic designer. We have a tiny greyhound in the car. Our relatives are leaning up against a tractor wheel discussing the harvest (I think.) Dad waves and gets out): Well fellas, I reckon the soybeans are about as high as an elephants eye!!!

(Our relatives sheep dog tries to come after Oliver and he is mortally offended and makes a scene)

Our Relatives (collectively): Yep. 

Dad: Billy, I saw you got 'bout fi'ty head o' steers on the back forty!!

Billy: Sure do!  

I'm paraphrasing of course, because who wants to hear about breeding heifers? Well, some people do, but I'm not sure they're reading this blog. The point is, when we got back in the car Dad was right back to waxing poetic about our ancestors and popping in Ani DiFranco.

 

It's ok, Dad. I get it. Sometimes I too wish that my life were uncluttered and simple and free of the city. I long for it most when I look out my office window and see the tops of buildings and only slivers of sunlight. 

hurray, it's the holidays.

Today the mac went into a little tiny coma. Needless to say I immediately went into OMG mode and hauled its little computer butt out to the counties to the Apple Genius Bar to have it "diagnosed", the problem being that it refused to boot up past a certain point. 

All its troubles were miles away, however, after I hauled it into the store in the freezing cold and braved the mall the Saturday before Christmas. The nice, hip/harassed-looking apple genius (his shirt proclaiming: "If I were a reindeer, I'd be fixen") plugged it in and turned it on and it made a joyful little noise and booted up faster than I'd ever seen it boot in it's life. 

So...thats great. It's back at home now after it's car ride and journey to the mall. 

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I though I had all my Christmas shopping done but people keep giving me presents at the last minute, leaving me having to lie about where THEIR present is. 

"Oh, your present is coming in the mail. It's very exciting! I ordered it from Poland." 

I DID order some of my christmas presents from an online store called "POLStore" which sells polish souvenirs to people who are too broke to actually visit. Best believe I've been letting the people who got Polstore gifts know that THEIR gift did actually come from Poland, even though the postmark is Poughkeepsie, NY. Some people I lie to, however, which leaves me in a position of having to find something to give them that looks like it might have actually come from eastern europe and not from the mall. 

You never want to tell people that they weren't on your gift list to begin with. This happened to C and I a week or two ago, when we got a present for someone we hadn't even CONSIDERED buying one for. Early in the season we vowed to seek out people we didn't want to spend money on and have The Conversation with them. You know The Conversation, it goes like this: 

"Hey, times are tough, why don't we just go out for drinks or something in lieu of presents." 

But, we got lazy. The weeks just flew by and we never had The Conversation and then one day a present arrived in the mail. C found it and called me at work to tell me. He sounded about as bummed as any human being can get after receiving a gift in the mail. "You'll never guess who just sent us a present." he said. I already knew...our list of People We Don't Love Enough To Buy Presents For is pretty small, all things considered. "Awww dammit! What are we going to do now?" 

I think this puts us pretty squarely in the scrooge category for 2008. To make up for it we spent a lot of money on everyone who DID make the list. I guess in hindsight we could have spread the wealth but ah well. 

Well, ya'll, I have done absolutely nothing of any significance today and I think I'm going to cap it off by reading my new book in the bathtub for a while. Cheers!

Jury Duty.

This week I had jury duty for the first time in my life. I expected it to be a lot worse than it actually was; all my relatives recounted waiting for eight hours while the judge deliberated over traffic tickets gone wrong and the like. In truth I waited about two hours to be called (aka: curled up in a corner of the waiting room and read a book) and spent the rest of the day being questioned for a rape case. Yep, that's right. My first jury duty could have been anything but it turned out to be rape. Two counts of forcible rape AND burglary. And I was selected for the jury.
It's an odd thing to sit in front of the accused and know that it is your job to judge them, that your vote will decide the path of their life from this courtroom forward. The defense was nineteen years old; a child. His mother was in the back row as we filed in but they did not look at each other. He vacillated between looking at each of our faces and hanging his head in his hands. Interrogation was done group style, questions were posed to the whole group and those who had an affirmative answer stood up and announced it. Eventually it came to the "have you or anyone close to you ever been a victim of violent crime?" question and literally every other woman stood up. " I was raped, 15 years ago" "My sister was raped" "My daughter was raped" "My mother was a victim of domestic abuse and she was raped".

I am cynical enough to recognize the possibility that some of these women were telling a terrible lie to get out of judging this kid. Some of them weren't. Some of them stood up and their hands shook. Their faces told the story for them. Even from across a crowded courtroom there were shadows on them. Some of them would not look at him because he had added another to their ranks. He, on the other hand, looked at each one. He looked devastated. I would like to think he was devastated because he had become the object of each of these women's nightmares but I suspect otherwise. He was nineteen, and most likely he was devastated because he was facing two life sentences.

I have my own experiences with questionable sexual activities that could have gotten me out of jury duty, but they don't haunt me like what these women went through. I could look at the accused and feel an appropriate mix of pity and objectivity.

On the second day after spending hours with our eyes on him he plead guilty rather than endure another day of listening to us recount our grievances.

PS: Lately, I'm so irritated by this one blog that I used to read and love. At first I thought she was just a smart, snarky MomBlogger. Sure she was desperate for attention, what blogger isn't really desperate for attention deep down? Lately she's been putting together this book filled with funny entries from blogs and she actually posted an entry where she asked her friends to tell her what her funniest post was. The desperate for attention part is ok until you actually straight up are acting desperate on your blog.

I guess I just expect more than "Here, read this post that I think is hilarious AGAIN. Haha aren't I the funniest person ever?!" from a blog that has thousands of readers. Isn't tooting your own horn against the Bible or something. I think I remember this verse:

1 Jes. 2-4:
"Verily I say unto you, thou shalt not tooteth thyne owne horne.
Nor the horne of thyne neighbor.
Nor the horne of thyne wyfe.
Nor the horne of thyne childryn."

OR SOMETHING.

Gah. It's time for the office holiday party. GET EXCITED, KATE. No really, try to get excited.