As Seen On TV

I am a sucker for infomercials. I watch them when I can't sleep, or when I am bored, or when I am channel surfing.

That in itself is bad enough. But I get sucked in to the claims made and start thinking that I need whatever it is that is being advertised. Which is why yesterday morning, two of these suckers were delivered to my house (you can't get only one).



I tried one of them out last night. I wasn't blown away. I won't tell you how much I paid for the privilege of burning a one-inch patch of my forehead. I will say that, although my flat-iron straightens a bit better, the InStyler is much faster. I straightened half of my hair in about seven minutes. I would have done the rest but as I said, I burned myself, and because I was hormonal and had sort of an emotional day, I ended up crying after that and sort of gave up.

So if you've been sucked in by one of the amazing infomercials for the InStyler, and you thought to yourself that it looked simply too good to be true, don't bother ordering. Because it is too good to be true, and because I have an extra one I can give you.

Paint

This color is called Rain Washed (Behr Premium Plus Ultra). I got a tester from Home Depot because, since I've watched so much HGTV these past few months I am dying to paint something.

My mother has agreed to "help" me paint the living room/dining room. I say "help" because she does not like painting and will mostly contribute by buying paint and rollers. I don't mind.

I had fun painting a patch with the tester. I wanted to keep going, but the whole wall isn't washed off, I had only a tiny brush, nothing was covered or out of the way, I was wearing normal clothing, and I have decided to go with semi-gloss instead of matte.

I painted my name because I was bored.

I think that's it for now.

Cleaning house

I haven't updated this blog in months. I could say that I haven't had time, but that would be a lie. I've had chances. I just haven't felt that I had anything I want to say. That's the problem with having nearly a dozen blogs. I run out of material.

I've updated Up To No Good plenty. That's my whining-things suck-snarky sort of blog. It's not terribly personal, except when I talk about my grief at my father's death. This blog was supposed to be the traditional, story-of-my-life sort of blog. The problem was that nothing was really happening in my life for a while. I was pregnant, unemployed, and bored. What was I supposed to write about? Playing video games? Feeding the birds in my backyard? My swollen feet?

But I've had a number of things happen lately and I feel like I need to write about them - or rather, the result of them.

I am cleaning house. Physically, mentally, digitally. I un-followed people on Twitter who aren't important to me. I went through my Facebook profile and deleted friend requests I was never going to approve, applications I no longer use, groups I don't care about, things I am a fan of that aren't important. I streamlined my profile. I changed my profile picture.

Box by box, book by book, I am cleaning up. Going through every single item I own. I intend to get rid of at least half of my belongings. I feel tied down by them. I have so many things I don't want, that I don't use, that I don't even remember that I have.

I think it's going to be terribly therapeutic. I've been watching HGTV a lot lately, and I want a pretty, simple home like the ones I've seen. And when a house is being staged or designed on HGTV, the first thing they do is clean out clutter. That will be me.

I am going to free myself of the physical, in the hopes that it will free me up mentally and emotionally and spiritually. I don't know how long it is going to take, but I'm not going to quit until I'm done.

I hear you knocking, but you can't come in

I was home alone all day yesterday because it was election day in Gilbert and my mother works the polls. I don't have a problem being alone usually. But yesterday something odd happened that made me glad I've got my daddy's old Ruger under the bed.

I voted in the afternoon and went to IKEA to check out some furniture in person that I'd looked at on-line. I didn't stay too long because I was hungry, and because I detest rush-hour traffic. I got myself a cinnamon bun on the way out and battled the traffic home. I don't know where so many people were going before 5 o'clock on a Tuesday, but there you are.

I got home a few minutes before 5:00, but I DVR Jeopardy! every day so I can watch it at my leisure. I'd settled on the couch with some cold water and it was a few questions into single Jeopardy when the doorbell rang. I hit pause.

I never know who's going to be on the other side of the door - solicitors, Jehovah's Witnesses, kids raising funds, etc - so I'm careful to sneak up on the door quietly so that if I don't want to answer the door, the person on the other side won't have heard me galumphing up to the door. I checked the peephole. I didn't see anyone at first so I thought that the UPS man had probably left a package and gone back to his truck. I was reaching up to undo the latch at the top of the door when I felt a little funny. Neither my mother or I had anything coming in the mail. I looked out the peephole again and there was a strange-looking, dirt-covered older man outside. He looked a little like William H Macy in the face, only this man was sunbaked like the homeless around here usually are. He had stringy grayish hair to his shoulders and a scraggly gray beard. I've seen a lot of "Law & Order" so I made note of his height and build, his gray pocket t-shirt and the tattoo on his left arm.

He seemed agitated. He was muttering under his breath and sort of swaying nervously. I was frozen at the peephole. He lunged forward suddenly and banged loudly, almost angrily on the door. I didn't breathe. I stood there a moment. So did the man. Then he shouted something unintelligible at the door and left.

I didn't see which way he went. I was too afraid to check the side window to see in case he could see me moving through the curtains.

The first thing I did was run upstairs and grab the Ruger. I keep it in the plastic case it came in. I took the lock off but kept it in the case and set it on the table. I sat down in front of the paused TV for a few moments, then called my mother. She suggested I call the police, which I did. I told them what had happened, and described the man in detail. The dispatcher said a car was on its way.

A while later (I kept looking out the peephole), a police car stopped across the street. I could only see the back of it so I don't know if the officers got out or anything. They never came to my door to talk to me so I have no idea what happened.

When my mother got home later that night, I told her all about it again. She asked if I'd ever seen our neighbor's ex-husband (who sometimes hangs around), a man my father once described as Joe Dirt. I haven't ever seen him so I don't know what he looks like. My mother wondered if maybe that's who the stranger was.

And now I wonder, too, because a few minutes ago the doorbell rang. "Wouldn't it be funny," I thought to myself, "if it was the same guy as yesterday evening?"

And it was. His hair was in a ponytail today and his t-shirt was dark blue. Again, I froze at the peephole. The man said something I couldn't make out as he stood there, again swaying. Then he exhaled sharply and said something like, "Must be snoozing" and turned and walked away.

So I'm left to wonder. Was it Joe Dirt from next door? What on earth does he want? My mother has talked to our neighbor (Jana) and said that the woman has our phone number if she needs anything, so there's no reason to open the door.

I wonder if it was Joe Dirt. If it was I feel a little foolish for calling the police. But I'm a single woman, at home alone, and I was frightened. A strange man shouted at my door. Why shouldn't I have called the police?

I wonder about something else, though. He came by two days in a row. Will he come by tomorrow as well? The next day? What on earth does this man want? Whatever it is, he's not getting it, unless it's a bar of soap. If he comes by tomorrow, maybe I'll answer the door. But I'm going it with my Ruger on the table, and I'm going to ask him politely to leave me alone. Even if it is just Joe Dirt, I'm a little too freaked out to just leave the house right now. If I do, he'll know someone was home.

Honestly, I felt better yesterday when I thought it was just a drifter or someone like that, and I knew the police had an eye out. The thought that this creepy man is next door isn't a very reassuring one.

Star Trek exhibit

I went to the Star Trek exhibit today - the one at the AZ Science Center. I'd never been to the Science Center before. It's neat because it's very hands-on. The place was crawling with kids there on field trips. They seemed to be having fun. I know I would have loved it as a kid. My dad hated taking me places because I always had to touch everything.

The Star Trek exhibit was amazing. They had costumes from the movies and shows, and props, and busts of alien species so you could see the makeup details. There were little models of all the starships, too, and they had the actual bridge from the Enterprise in TNG. I got to sit in the captain's chair. My inner nerd went crazy.

The props were really cheesy up close, but a sign on the wall explained that the camera only captures so many details, so they only made really nice looking props if there needed to be a close-up. That way the nice phasers and tricorders didn't break or anything.

I'd never really thought about Star Trek from a costume design perspective, but the outfits really were amazing. All of Deanna Troi's outfits are very well made, tailored perfectly with these teeny-tiny stitches on all the seams. That actress has to be a toothpick, because her clothes are TINY. I liked seeing Captain Kirk's outfits from the original series - there were four or five of them and the details are amazing.

There were a few odd pieces, too - like the Robin Hood costume Captain Picard wore in one of the Q episodes. Either Patrick Stewart has thin legs, or the costumes were a lot tighter on him than on the mannequin. There were a few of Data's costumes as well, and it looks like Brent Spiner must have bulked up a little between seasons because one of the jackets had much wider shoulders than the other.

I got two pictures - one of me and my mom being beamed down onto the ship, and one of me on the captain's chair. They weren't cheap but it was all so freaking cool!

Baseball and grief

I went to a Spring Training game today with my big brother, Scooter. Dodgers - Giants. It was a good game - the score was tied for a lot of the time and the Giants made loads of errors. Scott and I were sitting near a few very vocal Dodger fans, too, so that was fun. It was a beautiful day for baseball, if a bit on the windy side. We had seats in the shade. It was nice.

It felt good to get up at a decent hour and get out of the house for a few hours. I hadn't been to a game since last year. My dad took me to an Angels game at Diablo stadium. We'd talked for years about going to a Spring Training game and finally I told him, look, you've got brain cancer, it's now or never. I was joking at the time but I'm so glad he got tickets because that was the last game we went to together. Scott got my dad D-backs tickets for his birthday but they were for a game on September 1st and on that day my father was unconscious in the hospital. He died eight days later.

I've been thinking about my dad a lot lately. I've heard that it's common for a fresh wave of grief to hit about six months after the fact and it's been true for me, and for my mother. It's terribly frustrating. I feel like I'm making progress in my grief and then something will happen that sets me off again and I feel like I did when my dad was in the hospital and we didn't know what had happened to him.

I am so tired of grieving. I'm tired of everything reminding me of my dad. At the same time though I don't want it to stop because I need to be reminded of him. I need those memories. They're all I have.

I'm having trouble coming up with clever and/or relevant titles

I still haven't had the patience to sit down and figure out why my serger isn't working properly, so I've abandoned sewing in favor of cross-stitching for a while. I found a fairly simple (I thought) kit at Jo-Ann last week and I've gotten a huge part of it done already. I hit a snag, though, because the chart tells me that this symbol is that color, but it gives me the color *number* instead of the color name. Nowhere does it say that 716 is turquoise or anything like that. So I've spent a lot of time scrutinizing the picture on the front and trying to figure out which parts are lavender and which parts are lilac, and why anyone would do such a crappy job at making a symbol key.

This is what I get for buying things marked down.

I had a coupon for the store, too, but I didn't use it. I had this idea in my head that I was going to go back on Friday or Saturday to get some more fabric and I wanted the coupon for that. Naturally, this did not happen. Last week's expired coupon is still in my purse.

On Saturday I went to the theater with Mum to see "Knowing," that new movie starring Nicolas Cage.

I'm not sure yet if I liked it or not. I strongly suspect that they switched screenwriters halfway through the movie. Or that one man, somewhere, said, "Look, I've got this great idea - there'll be these numbers that represent every major disaster for the past 50 years, and the number of casualties and the location, and this guy will find them, and there will be a few that haven't happened yet, and he'll try to stop them ... and, that's all I've got. See what you guys can do with it." Because the second half, the sort of turns the plot took, felt very incongruous.

The boy who played Nicolas Cage's son was cute, though. Cute kids make even the most convoluted plots more bearable.

I have an appointment with the eye doctor tomorrow. I'm considering new glasses. I've had trouble tolerating my contact lenses lately. I wonder if I could find cat-eye glasses.

I considered them a number of years ago when I tired of my Buddy Holly-style frames.

"Cat-eye glasses, Jill?" my father asked. "I don't know. Those make a rather strong statement."

"Yes," I said, "and that statement is that I'm in a fashion time warp. I'm okay with that." And I am. I own an alarming number of vintage dresses. Cute ones, though. Although I've committed a number of egregious fashion sins. I have, for example, worn a puffy vest every winter for the past thirteen years or so, and my sense of style stopped evolving when I was about fifteen. So I don't think cat-eye glasses would be a huge blow to my image or anything.

The problem, I imagine, would be finding them. That sort of dated style went out with the sixties. So I'll probably end up just ordering new contacts and toughing it out during allergy season. I do like the glasses I have now. They match my hair.

I wonder at times if this little bonus blog was such a good idea. It seems to serve mainly as a reminder of how dull my life really is. I need a hobby. Or a life. Either way.