30 is the New 13

I like to think I have a pretty good sense of humor.

Everyone laughs at my jokes with the exception of my husband, who, after seven years laughs at me for all the wrong reasons. Not in a mean way, he just doesn’t think I’m funny of an intentional sort. Recently a coworker left the company and sent me a kind, handwritten card thanking me for my friendship and I found myself saving it to show my husband because there was a mention of how funny he thought I was. I felt ridiculous doing it, like a child seeking validation for her good grades. All the same, I did it. That’s just how I roll.

Being able to laugh at yourself is a pretty important skill in life. Luckily I picked it up early on and it has gotten me through more than a few ridiculous situations that otherwise would have simply been embarrassing. Right now it’s about all that’s keeping me sane. Although I’m only turning thirty all these strange things keep happening to me that I thought waited until the big four-oh. Like spider veins, red moles and a ridiculously revved up sex drive that I assume is my body screaming, “Reproduce!”

No, body, no.

I’ve had laser surgery, I’ve gone to dermatologists and I’ve started reading – I can’t believe this – romance novels. While all of these things are embarrassing, some are definitely more painful than others. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that spider vein treatments are painless; they’re far from it. So far from it that when I was done I asked the woman if people often told her they hate her. Still, it beat the needle option which required wearing compression stockings for weeks afterwards. No, they are not all gone but I’ve decided that rather than plunk down another $250 for thirty minutes of pure hell I would spend my money on weekly spray tan sessions. I do not resemble Snooki and things are working out nicely.

There is some good news. I finally have the right hair style and my fashion sense is a lot better than it used to be. I seem to be regressing to a rabid teenager state but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Reading 12 books in seven days by Charlaine Harris and watching four seasons of True Blood in one month is acceptable, right?

Sookie Stackhouse Fan Fiction: Alternate Ending for Deadlocked

This is how I think Deadlocked  should have ended. I know Charlaine Harris would never write this so I did. I don’t usually write fiction so go easy on me. This takes place right after Eric implies that she should use the cluviel dor to save him and leaves her house.

“Tell me what to do! Eric! Tell me!”

I sat there in the dark of my back porch, my mind racing to figure out what he had meant. After a few panic stricken moments I understood. The cluviel dor. Eric wanted me to use it to save him from the queen and keep us together.

I went back inside and sat on the couch. If I did, if I used it for that, what would I say? Is it like a genie lamp where you have to be real careful about how you say what you want? What should I say? And what if I got it wrong?

I sat for hours thinking about this. A hundred times I pulled it out of my pocket only to hesitate and put it back. We had been through so much together, so many attacks. I should have been dead at least twenty times by now. I thought of Gran and tried to figure out what she would have told me to. I couldn’t imagine but I knew she’d want me to live. She’d want me to be happy.

I couldn’t see any way that Eric and I could both come out of this alive. Even if he went to the queen she would probably have me killed. If she didn’t something else would kill me when I lost my protection. I had pissed off so many people and I had been fighting for so long.

By the time the sun came up I knew what I would do. I went out to the front yard as the darkness began to fade and lay down on the grass. I listened to the world come alive as the sun rose high in the sky and such peace came over me that I drifted into sleep.

When I woke up it was nearly 5:00. I went inside, took a shower and got dressed. I pulled the velvet bag out of my lingerie drawer and carefully put the cluviel dor back inside. I packed a change of clothes and made sure all the windows were closed. Then I locked the door and got in my car for the drive to Shreveport.

When I got to Eric’s the sun was going down. I let myself in through the garage with my key and went to his bedroom door. Then I sat down in the floor to wait. I hoped he was in there.

Eric opened the door and looked down at me in the surprise.

“Sookie. Why are you sitting in the floor?”

“I thought about what you said last night. I’m not going to use the cluviel dor to solve this problem,” I said and his face fell. “As soon as we solve this problem another one will just pop right up; it always does.”

“She will not give up, my lover,” he said as he slid down the wall and rested beside me.

“I know. When you lost your memories you said you wanted to be with me forever. I know you meant it then. Do you mean it now? Do you really want to be with me always?”

He took my face in his hands and stared into my eyes. “Yes. I love you, my wife. Yes.”

“Then I know what to do. Turn me. We’ll kill everyone that stands in our way and watch the world burn.”

The light had started coming back into his eyes as I spoke and I saw now that they were blazing. The Viking was still in there after all.

“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” he said. He looked hopeful and cautious like he couldn’t quite believe me.

“Eric, I am your wife. I’m yours and nothing will keep us apart.” I pulled out the pouch and placed it in his hands, closing his fingers over it. “If one of us doesn’t make it through this, the other will use this to bring them back.”

He grabbed me and hugged me as though he hadn’t seen me in years. Eventually he carried me back into his room and we made love for the last time that I would have a pulse.

“You’ve already had so much of my blood that I don’t think it will take much. I’m fairly certain you won’t need to die for any period of time though it usually takes three days. I will take half of your blood and replace it with mine. If that’s not enough I’ll have to take more. Are you ready?”

I nodded and tilted my head. He sank his fangs into my neck.

Deadlocked Indeed: What the Hell is Sookie Thinking and How Will it All End?

***SPOILER ALERT***

IF YOU HAVEN’T READ DEADLOCKED YET, YOU MAY NOT WANT TO READ THIS POST!

After watching all 5 seasons of True Blood in about a month I turned to the books to quench my new found obsession. The Southern Vampire Mysteries or Sookie Stackhouse Novels by Charlaine Harris turned out to be far batter than I’d hoped. I was worried that it would ruin the plot of the TV show for me but they diverge so much that luckily that is not the case.

Tonight I finished Deadlocked after a seven day marathon of reading all 12 books. Here are my thoughts.

I have so many complaints about this book. First and foremost, Sookie was a royal b**ch to Eric for 90% of the book. The poor man didn’t have a chance to communicate with her most of the time because of this. She should have been outright with him up front and said that she wanted to be with him and that the marriage had to be stopped. Given that she broke their bond without warning and kicks him out/hangs up on him/refuses to see him all the time, Eric has every reason to be confused about where they stand and what she really wants.

As for the low Eric quotient in this book, that was really annoying too. Why did we see so little of him and learn just tiny bits of the plot surrounding him? You can’t make a main character that important and then barely see them, getting information from afar.

Also, has Sookie never heard of texting? A quick, “I miss you,” could have solved a lot of their disagreements. Maybe just once being at the top of the stairs when he woke up would have been nice. Her refusal to call him for days, waiting to see if he’ll call was incredibly childish and happened far too often. Instead of throwing a perpetual fit and solving everyone else’s problems, she should have been plotting with her big Viking “honeybun” to eliminate the Freyda threat and live happily ever after. Eric and Sookie against the world.

She absolutely should have used the CD to save Eric. For someone who’s always opposed to death her decision not to makes no sense at all. By leaving Eric to “prove himself” to fight for her (yet again) she is causing lots of deaths that didn’t have to happen. Deadlocked showed us a hypocritical and selfish side of Sookie that tarnished her character. It was certainly reasonable that her character would change and become a bit hardened after all she’d been through, but to misguidedly direct it all at Eric was silly and inexplicable – even if he was being hounded by the Queen of Oklahoma.

There were a few silly plot holes too; for example, why didn’t the vampires just glamour the detectives that showed up at Eric’s house about the body on the front lawn? Sure, they needed to find out who killed Kym to set Eric up but there was no reason to let the police be involved. Another example, while we’re talking about Kym, why was were blood suddenly more attractive to vampires? That wasn’t mentioned in the previous 11 books at all. It still doesn’t really make sense why Claude was after Sookie all that time either. I could go on forever but I’ll stop there.

It’s almost like someone else wrote the last two books. All that being said, I still can’t wait to see how it all ends and it’s going to kill me to wait almost a year for the (gulp!) final installment. Given some of the clues, like making her will and her discussion of Bill’s fantasy where she reacts negatively to his desire to turn her, I almost think the series might end with her death. If she doesn’t end up with Eric, I kind of hope that’s how it ends. I would much rather that she allow him to turn her though and that CH would start a new series about Sookie Vampire.

I think I may die waiting for the next and final book to come out in May. What do you think of the latest Sookie installation? What are your predictions for how it all ends?

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a big shout out to Eric Northman Lovers United for providing me with a daily dose of the sexy Viking/Swedish beauty (Alexander Skarsgard). Sunday can never come soon enough!

I Hate Dieting

Photo borrowed from http://bit.ly/JfC9BL

It’s day two of my diet and two things have happened: a strange calm has started to come over me and cardboard looks delicious. Like seriously, I imagine that it would taste like an oatmeal raisin cookie right now. Whoever said “nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels” is mostly right – for 99% of the time. The other 1% I would gnaw someone’s arm off if they got between me and a bag of Oreos.

On second thought, there are things that taste exactly as good as being skinny feels; those are the things that end up making me not-skinny. Sheet cake, eggplant rollotini, fried fish sandwich with a side of hushpuppies, I’m looking at you.

Either there’s something really wrong with my body or it’s time for a new scale. As much as I would like to believe that I’m capable of losing three pounds in one day I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened seeing as how I didn’t run any marathons (or even step foot on a treadmill). On the bright side, I’m able to pretend that it was right and feel a little less panicky today… whew!

Before you go thinking I’m all shallow and narcissistic (I’m no worse than the next girl) I have a proven track record of putting on 20 pounds like it’s nothing. Therefore I’ve developed a habit of making sure that I stay within a two pound comfort zone and sound the emergency alarm if I stray. That’s where I am right now and it sucks.

I always forget about this calmness until I go through the dieting process again and then I feel somewhat enlightened all over again. Among the many religious practices that I don’t get involved in, I can start to see how the whole fasting thing came about and gained traction. If someone with no religion can feel calm from drastically cutting calories then imagine the effects of a true believer on a fast. Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, and Judaism all use fasting.  Now if I could just shut up long enough to meditate.

I Heart Jen Lancaster’s Jeneration X

Although I’m really writing to talk about the amazing new book by Jen Lancaster, I should probably start with a quick update on the furniture debacle. Have I mentioned that I’m hyperbolic? You should probably know that about me or you’ll think that something really extreme is happening constantly. The reality is that I just have a slew of “first world problems” that I tend to make into a big deal.

Now that that’s out of the way, the onions seem to have worked because my loft doesn’t smell like an auto repair shop anymore. That, by the way, was not an exaggeration. It really did smell exactly like the mechanic’s bays at Auto Zone for a few days and was giving me headaches and nausea. I thought I was going to have to try and make the guy I bought the console table from take it back. Everything’s okay now though. Whew!

On to Jeneration X! I think I may be the first person in Suffolk County to have been happy about getting a jury duty summons. It wasn’t really the jury duty part that got me excited, rather it was coming home the night before I had to serve and being greeted by my Amazon shipment of Jen Lancaster’s new book. Since I work full-time and attend college full-time (no, I’m not college-aged) I feel guilty about making time for pleasure reading. This was the perfect opportunity to read guilt free though and provided me with free time to do it! (Editor’s note: buy the hardcopy; the electronic version makes it hard to enjoy the footnotes)

I read the whole book cover to cover in the six hours that I sat there waiting to see if we would be needed for any cases. I couldn’t help laughing out loud on several occasions but I doubt it was the big deal it would have been if the guy one row over hadn’t been snoring loudly since the moment he sat down. As always Jen is right on the mark, hilarious and oh-so-relatable. Finishing a good book always feels like losing a friend but even more so with her books.

I wanted so badly to make a comment on her Facebook page when I was reading the part about the jailhouse letter she found in the construction site next door which was all the more hilarious given that I was sitting in a court house, potentially judging a case like the one that must have gotten him “spinning” in jail. Add to this the ridiculously entertaining conversation that I overheard while we got to go outside for a lunch truck break.

Lady #1: I’s jus thinkin’ we gots to get Trina out before her birfday.

Lady #2: Uh-huhhhh. You know that right. She been crying. You could see it in her eyes.

Lady #3: All over her face.

Lady #1: (something indecipherable) baby daddy! He be gettin’ all twisted and #%^.

Lady #3: You know that right. How we gonna get her out? It $900 dolla!

I started to feel bad and went back inside at this point but it was pretty funny at first. Like Jen, I’ve been doing some growing up lately as I face the big three-oh and getting into other people’s business is a lot less appealing than it used to be. Like Jen’s metaphor with the oatmeal cookies, I don’t want to eat them long past the point of enjoyment until I’m sick and curse them (although I’ve definitely done this with actual cookies and can relate).

Every time I finish a Jen Lancaster book I feel inspired to write my own memoir but it never happens. This time around I had that same feeling but also came away with a warm, fuzzy feeling from Jen’s triumphs (like luring the Thundercats back home) and her intense love for Fletch. Our memoir darling is growing up but will never lose that special panache that makes her dear to out hearts. Here’s hoping for many more books to come.

More Whimpering and a Partial Tour of My Loft

It still smells like I’m living in an auto body shop which is really unpleasant. After basically freaking out on every social media channel I’ve gotten some advice to follow. Several people told me to place sliced onion in small bowls of water inside and on top of the locker. Reluctantly and a bit quizzically I’ve just finished doing that and crossing my fingers that it will absorb the smell rather than adding to it.

I figured I’d post some pictures to show the final placement that I fought for as well as a few shots of my loft to explain why I thought this particular piece of furniture was a good idea. I’d love to get your feedback and see if you agree. Sorry the photos are a little dark. We have a million windows in here with southern exposure (okay, 8) and they make it really hard to get a good shot.

This was where I thought the console table was going all along (and where it finally ended up). Note the little dachshund prince who is bored with this whole thing. He’d like me to sit down or throw a baby.

UPDATE:

Slightly improved version of this picture:

 

The rest of the living room area. We’re planning to start a slate tile installation floor to ceiling on the wall with the TV soon. I’m nervous about it though because what if it doesn’t look like we thought it would?

We have a lot of wood components and the dining table isn’t quite as modern as I wanted it to be so I thought a modern industrial console table would help even that out. Also, I thought introducing a new medium (more metal) would keep things interesting and play off of the metal accents on other pieces.

Our kitchen, which isn’t really relevant, but I thought I may as well post it since it’s all visible at the same time with the open layout.

Not With a Bang But a Whimper

Oh my god. And I don’t mean that like, OH MY GOD or even, oh my god! I mean that like ohhhhh myyyyy godddd. Picture the words falling out of me or sliding out at the end of a very long string and accompanied by a deep sigh of resignation.

The console finally showed up tonight after a silly day-long adventure that basically entailed the guy who made it sending me weird text messages and showing up six hours late. When it did, we got in the elevator, hauled it into the loft and the guy put the legs on for us. Cool. But then they go to put it in place behind the couch and they’re doing it BACKWARDS. When I point this out I discover that my sweet, sweet husband has been picturing something quite different than I have this whole time.

I never mentioned that the console should be facing out so that the front was visible. Mainly because I thought this was obvious and went without saying. Apparently not. Apparently my idea was amateur and stupid and made no fucking sense. This went on for maybe 15 minutes until I convinced him that I would turn the damn thing around by myself every week when he left for work, wrecking both the floor and my back until he gave up. Finally we tried it my way, then we moved it to another place (which I thought was the best option) and eventually it ended up where I thought it was going all along. The photo above is location #3, by the way.

Did I mention that every time we moved it horrible little corkscrews made of sharp ass metal fell out? And a lot of dirt? And nuts and bolts? Well, that happened and I finally drug out the vacuum to clean it all out of the lockers. This of course upset the dog who began barking non-stop which added to the symphony of frayed nerves. Exhausted, I went to take a nap – but couldn’t fall asleep – so here I am. All is well now, sort of. I mean we aren’t arguing or disagreeing or whatever but there’s this other problem… my living room smells like an auto shop.

Oh my god.