BS Talks

Google is taking over the world, one doodad at a time.

After my first Blogger post yesterday, I played around with it a bit and I noticed the ‘Next Blog’ tab at the top of the page.  Always being down for a readingventure, I clicked the button, hoping to add a few good blogs to my daily addiction reader.  I can’t figure out how they determine the ‘next’ blog.  It definitely isn’t alphabetical, oldest, newest, most recent post or any other easily desernible measure.  I’m sure I could google it but I was too busy being mesmerized by all of the blogs by mommies, women trying to be mommies and infertile mommy wannabes. 

I must have flipped through 30 blogs last night and I didn’t find any by a man or a single, childless by choice, female blogger.

For a minute or two, I thought my spinster nightmares had come true and I was the last single woman on Earth or perhaps the blogosphere.  I was on the verge of throwing myself down for the temper tantrum of the decade, (yes, that would have helped -help ensure my spinsterhood at the very least) but I decided to wait and ‘Next Blog’ today and see where that takes me. 

Fortunately for all (especially me, I’m not as young as I used to be and temper tantrums take stamina) I did not have the same results.  Instead of the various states of mommyhood, today, I found a variety of crafters, bloggers for Christ, blogs in other languages so I have no idea what the hell they're about, literary agents and editors, poets and children’s book authors. 

Very interesting collection of stuff on these here interwebs.  Very interesting.  Blogger obviously has more of a blogging community than Typepad but the main reason I decided to test it as an alternative, besides allowing custom designs (for FREE!), is all of the really cool blog doodads Google has like Feedburner, Analytics, and Reader.  Google is a one stop blogity shop. 

Soon, it will be a one stop life shop.  I think the next update to the Dashboard will allow you to turn on the coffee maker and start the car.     

I'm 50/50

I guess it’s good that not being a lazy ass wasn’t one of my resolutions because I would have failed miserably by Sunday. 

Seriously. 

On Sunday, I woke up somewhere around 10am, managed to haul myself out of bed in the neighborhood of noon, found my way to the couch with my blanket and pillow in tow and stayed there until I went back to bed somewhere around 2. 

AM. 

I didn’t even bother with opening my computer.  I either watched tv or my eye lids the entire day.  I imagine I ate at some point but they day went by in such a hectic blur that I can’t even remember.

I redeemed myself a bit by being far more productive on Monday.  I showered, dressed and left the house all because my roommate plied me with the tastiness of Sonny’s!  I grocery shopped, made a barrel of chili, and knocked my dvr recordings down from 95% full to 83%.  

I know there are some dissenters, people who may not find watching an entire season of Numbers in one day as particularly productive.  To those people, I say you do not know the kind of dedication and willpower it takes to devote that much time to dvring.  Not to mention skill.  Oh yeah, there is much skill involved in prolonged tv watching.  You have to stay on high alert to ensure that you change your position BEFORE the tingly feeling sets into one of your ass cheeks.  If you aren’t vigilant in switching between laying and sitting and your butt falls asleep, you run the risk of slipping to the floor and possibly pulling something. 

And how would you explain that injury to your coworkers and maintain your dignity? 

You can’t.

So, you spend your Mondays going to work, going to school, shoveling your sidewalk, getting a perm, serving someone in the mall with your sweet dance moves, etc. and I will be at home not working or schooling or shoveling or perming or serving someone (ok, this one I am a little disappointed about – if you need an extra for your dance crew, call me up and I am so there – I love serving chumps in the mall – I got a boom box we can totally use) and I'll spend mine staying in dvr shape.

In actual resolution news, so far, I’m about 50/50. 

I have not met the any men of my 2010 dreams, I have not managed to run 3 feet never mind 3 miles and the only work I’ve done on my room was a few loads of laundry. 

I have written a shit ton for work but I haven’t written anything for pleasure and that was really the intent of the resolution so I don’t think I deserve credit for that.   

However, I have been very good at taking everything out of my car and I have been high maintenance and girly every day for work.  Actually, people at work have noticed my efforts and have been giving me such nice compliments, it’s a great boost to the ego!  Everyone should wear earrings and perfume. 

I haven’t worked on any design stuff but I did set up a Blogger account because they let you do custom html and they don’t even charge you (Typepad is such douche bags)!  You can find me at bstalksdotcom.blogspot.com!  I plan to put all new posts on both blogs while I play with designs and what not so feel free to visit me at either or both!  I also now have a gmail account, bstalks.com[at]gmail[dot]com, email me or chat me up at Google Talk [bstalks] or both. 

I like both.  

I'm a girl...in training

You know that scene in Mall Rats where Rene is all “I’m a girl damnit! I want to do girly things! Like fix up someone’s hair and get phone calls expressing romantic sentiments!”?  If you recast Rene as the more high maintenance version of myself I would like to become and Brodie as the lazy maintenance me I am currently then you could pretty much sum up my first days of twenty-ten.

As I promised myself, I started the new year with a haircut and color, a manicure and pedicure and an eyebrow waxing.  I am not sure which hurt more: having wax the temperature of molten lava rubbed on my face, allowed to dry and then ripped off along with errant eyebrow hairs or the major hit to my bank account to pay for this torture pampering. 

Who knew it was so damn expensive to be high maintenance?  Usually I go to a $13 haircut place but to start the year off properly in high maintenance mode, I went to the mall where I paid $39 to sit in a chair for over an hour and have my hair cut into a shorter version of the exact same style it currently is by a girl that did not speak to me except to clarify what I wanted her to do to my mop.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good haircut but it’s the same haircut I have gotten for the past year or so and it’s usually a third the price! 

As this was my first step into High Maintenance Hell Heaven I felt very insecure and for good reason.  I just know the 3 employees in the hair place took one look at me and knew my previous haircut was only $13 without a coupon.  From the looks on their faces I could tell that they knew my dye job was from a $3 diy kit and even it badly needed to be redone (3 months ago).  I heard one of them sniff the air and then she scowled at me.  Her discriminating nose knows I wash my hair with $1.50 White Rain or VO5, depending on the scent (I like Coconut).  I was going to try to make amends for assaulting their space with my complete lack of hair care by purchasing fancy, salon shampoo and conditioner but then I realized I would have to prostitute myself to pay for them.  Looking back, that might have been a good way to work on the Men in Twenty-Ten bit. 

Ah well, there’s always next month’s maintenance fees!

A year of learning

A new year has begun.  Yeah, I know you know, I’m just stating the obvious as a means to start a post about my Twenty-Ten plans.  No, I wasn’t trying to imply you’ve been under a rock for the past year and didn’t realize 2009 has come to an end.  Yes, I think you are very smart, you read my blog after all and that has to count for a fair amount of intelligence not to mention good taste. 

Geez la wheez. Bickering with you wasn’t exactly the way I envisioned starting the new year.  Think we could move on now.  Great.  Thanks.

Call me a lemming if you want (with the attitude you have today, you are probably calling me far worse already) but I like making New Year’s Resolutions.  I also really like to make Birthday Resolutions, I’m a year older, hopefully a year wiser and I can make a plan to be a better me starting with a few easy changes.  Some resolutions stick and I actually change behaviors and other fail miserably before January 7^th and I’m ok with these results because I learn something for each experience.  Sure, sometimes the lesson is I can’t stop drinking Mr. Pibb because it is my happy sauce and I need happy sauce to get through the day sometimes.  And sometimes the lesson is not wearing a Gator t-shirt and jeans every day of your life is a good thing.

So this year, I plan to learn from a variety experiences, namely these:

          I am single and quickly approaching the age of spinsterhood/crazy cat lady so I plan find men in twenty-ten.  I will settle for A man but ‘men’ sounds better since it rhymes and all.  I really want to get married on 11/11/11 so I need to get a move on the whole dating - falling in love - engagement thing.

          Have Orin certified to be a hospital therapy dog.  Lots of people say they have the best dog ever, but I really do have the best dog ever.  Seriously.  Ever.  About a month ago, I read about dogs being certified to visit hospitals to cheer up the patients  Orin would be perfect in this role and all I have to do to certify her is have the vet sign a form that says Orin is completely vaccinated and a well behaved.  The downside of this is the vet appointment for the certification is $150 and I ain’t made of money.  I will find the money and hopefully Orin will be cheering up the infirm by February!

Write every day.  Even if I only a write a mean text message to KJ on Tormented Tina Tuesdays because I know she is demented enough that a mean text would cheer up her up immediately.  I like to write and it’s pretty cathartic so this one should really be a no brainer but I also have a deep appreciation for napping and usually napping takes precendence over writing.   

          I am trying to be more fit and so I have started running.  I plan to run the Gasparilla 5k in February and I would like to run 2 other 5k races and at least one 10k.  In a perfect world, I will do a half marathon before the year is out. 

          Clean my fucking room.  This one bests me every year but this is my year.  I can feel it!  I have already done a fair amount of work getting rid of stuff and with my hoarder like tendencies this is no small feat.  I plan to do a bit of cleaning, organizing and purging daily.  I’m shooting for an hour a day, probably while watching some sweet tween dramas I have dvred.

          Keep my car clean!  I bought a brand spanking new car last December and I freaking love it but I regularly leave stuff in the car for prolonged periods of time.  For instance, I put all of my Fall cubical decorations in a storage bin on December 1^st and I left that bin in my car until 12/23 when I was packing the car with presents for my family.  There is no reason to leave that sort of crap in the car.  

          Learn more design stuff.  I have CS4 and I play with it every now and then and I am definitely learning a lot.  I would like to create more awesome graphics stuff and perhaps design my own website.  That would mean I would need to upgrade my Typepad account or find a different service because my current level doesn’t allow me to create custom HTML.  Bitches.  

          Become more high matenence.  This one is probably opposite most other people but I am so laid back with personal upkeep and what not I think it would help my ‘Men in 2010’ plan if I paid a little more attention to myself.  Last year, I vowed to stop wearing a t-shirt and jeans all the time and I have done a pretty good job sticking to it.  This year, I would like to commit to doing things like regularly shaving even though I really hate it, getting frequent manicures and pedicures, waxing my eye brows, doing my hair, wearing jewelry, wearing makeup and upgrading my wardrobe another step above jeans and t-shirts.

I think that’s a pretty daunting list of stuff I want to do this year so I better get off this thing and get cracking.  Wish me luck, daily, please, I’m gonna need it!

twenty-ten

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

BS Lightastic Awards, finally

It took longer than anticipated to post the winners of the fist ever BS Lightastic Awards, but better late than never right?  Right?  Yes, damn it, I am right. 

This sweet ass gif is what the certificates I made for the winners look like.  Sadly, once printed, the lights do not flash.  Stupid low tech paper.  Perhaps next year I will beat up a teacher and steal buy those battery operated Christmas light necklaces and hot glue it to the paper.  Or maybe technology will stop being an ass and it will catch up to my creative genius and there will be paper that lights up where I tell it to.

Before you are too overcome with admiration for my mad graphics skills, I must confess I downloaded a font that already had the Christmas lights.  But I am still a bad ass because I colored each and every open space and did the work to make the lights blink.  So, admire away.

By now, you are screaming ‘Stop stalling and make with the winners already’.  It’s true, I have been trying to distract you with blinky lights but you are no tiny, yappy dog or Sorority Girl with ADD (is that like saying ATM Machine?) and you saw right through my tricks.  The truth is, I never did manage to get good pictures of my favorite houses and I am embarrassed to show you the ones I did take.  I guess I will meet in the middle and post the best picture.  So, without further ado, here is the very first winner in the very first, BS Lightastic Awards! 

I promise, in person, this house is worth of the $15 first prize!

To deter the neighbors from calling the cops on the crazy lady that keeps taking pictures of their house and subsequently putting things in their mailbox, I made this little award poem to accompany the certificate!

I think the BS Lightastic Awards took more time and energy than decorating my own yard.

And an Optima to put it all in.

If you came here today looking for the  BS Lightastic Awards, I am afraid I have to disappoint you.  As evidenced in this photo, I am a bit of a ruhtard when it comes to taking pictures of houses with Christmas lights so I will have to put off announcing the winners of the first ever BS Lightastic Awards.  I know, I know, I am an asshole.  I am going to try to get my friend L³ (seriously, she named herself that), who actually has photo skills, to come and shoot my top 4 houses so I can share them with all of you.  I am sure you are starting to chew your finger tips off with anticipation because I can feel your excitement to have the winners revealed all the way through the interwebs (I kinda like it).  Settle down kids, I promise to post  pictures tomorrow, even if I have to find pictures on other websites and pretend those are the winners.  How the hell would you know anyway?

Since I have no BS Lightastic Award winners to give you hours of Christmas-spirit-happiness, I will regale you with a tale of how I spent the better part of this evening.  It’s not Christmas lights but it does end with a fucking awesome Christmas song so it’s not a total heathen take over.

After work, I met up with a few friends for what I am now calling Tormented Tina Tuesdays.  My friend KJ (she has a thing for wine sold in odd vessels like Capri Sun style* so the name fits) is rather neurotic and to keep the rest of us from developing a similar neuroses from listening to her daily, I decided she should collect all that ails her over the week in a basket and then entertain the rest of us unburden herself on us on Tuesdays.  Today didn’t go exactly as planned, it was mostly me imitating what I think future TTTs will be like as KJ pulls a slip of paper from the basket and acts out the situation.  It’s sorta like charades meets train wreck; it’s painful to look at, yet you can’t help but stare and maybe laugh a little bit too. 

Yeah, we’re assholes. 

After the TTT show, we went to grab a ‘quick’ dinner at Backyard Burger.  We ended up being there for nearly 2 hours and only left when we did because the closing crew asked us to lift our feet so they could sweep and mop under our table.  Do we know how to have a good time or what? We couldn’t decide if we wanted to continue the TTT party or call it a night so we spent the next hour sitting in my car in the parking lot of Wig’s apartment complex.  I dubbed Wig that name because she has the most amazing curly red hair and I have said on more than one occasion if she should ever decide to go all Britney Spears and shave her head, I call dibs on her hair because I want to make a wig that I would totally wear every day. 

And no, I don’t think that’s creepy.  Thanks for checking though.

So in the car, we gossiped and chatted and car seat danced.  I am quite a car seat dancer if I do say so myself.  KJ seems to think that my cubicle mate Bell is better than me but I call bullshit on that and I think a chair dance off needs to happen ASAP.

While we were in the car, we heard the most UHMAZING Christmas song ever but none of us knew what it was so I whipped out my iPhone and Shazamed that mother.  According to my phone the song is Quad City DJs What You Want for Christmas.  I looked for it on YouTube and to my dismay it’s not there.  I did find a similar version from The 69 Boyz for you listening pleasure though.  No need to thank me, consider it my early Christmas gift to you.  See, I’m not really an asshole.

        

*The Capri Sun style wine photo is not mine, I did a Google Image search, found it and linked to it.

BS Lightastic Awards and other stuff

I am not big on being naked in private, never mind public, so it always shocks a bit me when others are all about nakedness.  Especially when I learn this by seeing them in their birthday suit.  In public.  Granted, it was the locker room at the gym so a bit of nudity is to be expected.  However, I was not prepared to round the corner from the changing stalls (where I disrobe and rerobe in the privacy of a cramped closet) and get a front row seat to the show being put on at the automatic hand dryer.  A lady (I use that term very loosely. Trust me.) was using the hand dryer to dry her entire body and I had the misfortune to come upon her as she was drying her feet, one foot at a time.  I am sure you have seen an automatic hand dryer mounted in restrooms before.  Typically, they are about stomach level and this one is no different.  The bush-woman (again, trust me) was facing me, holding her right foot up to the blower while the left foot remained on the floor.  Are you getting the picture? 

I have to give her credit for her obvious lack of a towel and inventiveness but the points deducted for providing a locker room full of women a view of her birth canal puts her in the negative.

Thankfully, I was leaving the gym and not just arriving.

To rid my eyes of the image from the gym, I decided to treat myself to a drive around a few neighborhoods to check out Christmas lights.  Obliviously, some of these people heard we were not putting up lights so they went crazy with their decorations to make up for our slackassedness and it gave me an idea!    

Since we are Grinches and aren’t going to put up lights, I decided to create The BS Lightastic Awards.  My plan is to pick the three best decorated houses on my normal driving route and award them 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd place and maybe an honorable mention.  I plan to give 1^st place a $15 gift card to Publix, 2^nd place a $10 gift card to Publix and 3^rd  Honorable Mention gets nothing but my appreciation.  If I get around to it, I will also make some sort of ribbon or certificate letting them know why a stranger is putting a gift card to Publix in their mail box.  I’ll post pictures tomorrow or Wednesday of the winners. 
place gets a $5 gift card to, you guessed it, Publix!

Perhaps, next year I'll be more on the ball with the BS Lightastic Awards and I will post pictures early and let you help choose the winners. 

That would mean I would need more regular readers than just my mom.  Who am I kidding?  Even my mom doesn’t read this.

Speaking of competitions and awards, I rarely watch primetime competition shows because I hate all of the extraneous bullshit, all the dramatics, the voting, the blah, blah, blah, gag.  However, I did happen to catch the last half of The Sing-Off last week and I didn’t completely hate it.  I did hate that in 30 minutes of tv time, I only saw 2 groups sing a 3 minute song each but I DVRed so I could fast forward all that nonsense.   I YouTubed (is that a verb yet?) a few of the other groups and NOTA is ridiculously good.  The LIVE FINALE is on tonight, I may watch some of it.  I bet NOTA wins.

On a related note, I love it when a boy wears a shirt with a tie and a sweater!  I’m looking at you Nick Lachey.

Elf You(rself).

I feel bad that I have been so busy playing on the internet and napping working, shopping, gift wrapping and going to holiday parties that I haven't been able write much lately.  To make up for it, Orin and made this video as a way of saying I'm sorry I've been living it up in the real world and not here with you in eFriend land.  I do plan to tell you all about my adventures to 7 potlucks, a white elephant gift exchange, Fishmas and a Redneck Christmas party but not today.  I've got sleeping wrapping to do.

You too can ElfYourself for all of your loved ones (that includes me in case you were wondering!). 

 

Screw the halls, deck the cubicle

As Christmas is in 4 days and I have been too lazy busy to put up a tree, decorate the house or hang lights outside, I have decided to forgo the whole damn process.  The house is a bit sad and depressing and we look like a bunch of Scrooges but if it saves me the trauma of going into the shed and the hassle of untangling lights, nagging the roommates to help, realizing they won’t help no matter how much, long or loud I bitch so I have to do it all myself and then repeating the whole process in reverse in mid-March when we I put everything away, then, frankly, I am all for it.

 

To keep from being a total holiday douche bag, I did decorate my cubicle at work.  My cubicle mate, Bell, started a bit of a decorating war back in September when she pimped out her side with every single Halloween decoration she owns (3 or 4 huge storage boxes full, give or take a shit-ton or two), leaving my bland grey workspace looking that much lamer.  I had no chance in hell of beating her decorations but I had to do something.  Bell immediately went from Halloween straight into Christmas (yes, it was

November 1^st) complete with a 6 foot Christmas tree decked out with every ornament she has ever been given in her ENTIRE life.  Did I mention, we have cubicles, like 6 feet by 6 feet cubicles?  I, on the other hand, segued with Fall/Thanksgiving motif for November and then I put up a winter theme in lieu of Christmas for December.  Again, I had no chance in hell of beating Bell’s decorations so I figured if I did something different it at the least wouldn’t pale in comparison.

 

The cubicle is fun and festive but I do miss coming home and seeing the pretty lights in the front yard and the house all decorated.  All of the yard lights are red and white and we have like 35 big candy cane lights to line the walkway from the driveway to the door.  And I have an amazing angel for the tree topper and her wings flap.  Maybe I will put out some of the decorations.