I decided to stop by the tattoo place tonight before they closed! I’m so freakin’ excited because I booked an appointment with Jet (the artist who did my friend Lauren’s awesome sleeve). I’m officially having my crappy old tattoo covered up with a traditional style Japanese koi fish on August 29th. I know I originally said Mike and I might get matching tattoos, but I gave it a little more thought and decided to fix the old one first. I’ve been talking about it for a long time, and now that the appointment is booked, I’m finally starting to feel liberated about the whole thing.

About the old tattoo: It’s not that I don’t like it. I just think it could have been a lot cooler. I designed it myself in college and went to the tattoo parlor with the “boyfriend of the week.” The artist really didn’t do my design justice; when I asked if the line could be thinner, he told me no. I had originally intended to get the line-work first and later get it filled in with color, but the lines ended up so thick that they mooshed into each other. I truly believe it could have been cooler if only he hadn’t botched it up. But I digress.

Mike asked me why I’ve decided not to do something more unique and the truth is I think there’s some stability in things that are more traditional—even tattoos! Fifteen years from now, it’s still going to be relevant. Plus the koi has significance for me in several ways. 1. I’m a pisces, water sign. 2. My dad has a spectacular pond with many beautiful koi with varying colors and markings. 3. Before she passed away, my grandmother received great joy from the pond—giving names to several of the fish she took favor to.

So there you have it. I’ve gotta wait two months but it will be totally worth it! I want it now!

Posted: June 25th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: 1

Maybe it’s because I’m feeling a little angst-y and rebellious these days, but I’ve been itching to get a new tattoo lately. I’ve wanted to get the old one re-done for the longest time, and I probably still will eventually. But now I’m thinking Mike and I might get matching ones. When we were in Jamaica last year, we saw a couple with the cutest matching tats I’ve ever seen. They both had two his & hers robots—one boy, one girl—each with a little heart on their robot chests symbolizing the two of them. Not to mention, that she had a stylized Super Mario half-sleeve. It sounds corny, but it was completely awesome! I wish I had a picture.

So, that’s where my head is at today. I think we might head out to Love Hate this weekend to check them out and maybe get something cool. Who knows, we’ll probably be super-busy or just chicken out. :) Any thoughts on the matching tattoos?

Posted: June 25th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: 1

The temps this weekend reached blazing inferno proportions, and the only decent retreat in the house was the basement. I’d been working upstairs on repairing a hole in the wall, so I decided to take a break and cool off by laying on the couch down there. I was only reclining a few minutes when the Carbon Monoxide detector on the wall started screaming; the LCD on it blinked GAS, GAS… Mike quickly came to my aid as we tried to get it to turn off.

“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know; I was just laying here and it started going off! I don’t smell gas. Do you?”
“No.” He fumbled with the thing for a minute. It stopped beeping and the GAS reading returned to zero.

“Well, I think I farted, but it was just a little toot. Do you think that triggered the alarm?”
He shook his head in irritation, “YES! You CAN’T fart when you’re sitting here! OK?”

Posted: June 12th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: none

The phone rang yesterday evening around 5:30. Mike answered and it was my dad. Normally my mother does the dialing, so I had a feeling it wasn’t just a chit-chat call. Dad told me that Grandpa had just passed away that afternoon, some time before 5. Mom was at church and didn’t even know yet. It’s too bad; he was only days away from seeing his 90th birthday.

It didn’t come as much of a surprise, although everyone assumed he’d hang on a lot longer. I suppose it is much better this way, but it doesn’t make the loss any less painful. By now, the tumor he’s had since 2005 had grown considerably, but luckily it didn’t cause him too much distress—all things considered. In the end, I’m glad it was his heart that gave out; rather than him suffering too much on account of his cancer.

When I went down to visit in March, I knew it would probably be the last time I saw him. Even then he seemed in decent physical shape, but it was his mind that was seriously deteriorating. He repeated himself incessantly—talking about the bygone days when he was active with the Masons and the Shriners, irritating my dad when he might utter some secret words—none of which I understood, asking me when I would join the Eastern Star (essentially masonry for women), bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t hear or see anymore, etc. Although for as much as he complained about his lack of vision, he still made mention of the rotund waitress’s ass at Carraba’s. Most memorably, though, there was the unabashed weeping because he had emotions that he couldn’t control or understand. It really broke your heart.

They’re not really doing a funeral service for him, since he didn’t really want a big to-do. They might do a simple memorial service, but there aren’t any ironed-out details yet. I guess I might not get to say my final good-byes, so I’ll say them now. Grandpa, you were a tough cookie with a gooey-soft inside. You always had this way of making me smile with your backwards nursery rhymes and silly songs. I promise to teach all of them that I remember to my children. I will miss you, but I know you’re in a better place. Love, me.

Posted: June 8th, 2008 under Photos.
Comments: 1

So as you know, I was none too happy to learn that Thrillz went out of business last month. The prospect of having to file a claim and no doubt wait forever for my refund on an unredeemed gift card did not appeal to me. To my great surprise, I received a message from a co-worker informing me that Beau Monde Spa would be honoring Thrillz gift cards for a limited time. I figured I would rather try out a new salon than have to wait. So I booked an appointment for Friday evening after work—perfect timing because work has been a total cluster all week and the well deserved relaxation would launch me into the weekend. 

It was about a thousand degrees outside after work and I walked into the place dripping with sweat. I filled out the new guest questionnaire and waited. I overheard the receptionist say, “Brittany, your next appointment is here.” The name burned in my ears. How many Brittany-masseuses could there be?? I decided not to get too excited because the likelihood of it being THE Brittany seemed slim.

Moments later she came out, and I recognized her right away. Halleluia! There is a God, and he led me right to her. She recognized me and I tried not to sound like a stalker/weirdo when I told her how excited I was to have found her. The massage lasted an hour—sixty glorious minutes. She really focused on my problem areas: the painful stress knots on my back and shoulders. And they must have been huge, given the hectic week I’ve had. I gave her a $20 tip because I was so happy and it was that great. From now on, I think I’m going to make it a ritual, maybe every other month.

Posted: June 6th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: none

With the coming of spring, Mike and I have initiated a number of projects on the house. Some of which we desperately need—like the roof—and others are merely desired—like the fence. Among the smaller projects we’re tackling, we’re turning the mini bathroom attached to our bedroom into a walk-in closet. While it might seem stupid to remove a perfectly good half-bath, it’s actually far from functional. First, we rarely EVER use it, and if we do it’s only to wash our hands—mostly because the toilet doesn’t flush properly, and I don’t clean it very often. Hypothetically, if everything functioned perfectly in there, you would only want to do a Number One because anything else would stink up the bedroom. Hence the walk-in closet idea. Besides, I don’t have enough room in my closet for my stuff. And Mike begs me not to wash all his dirty clothes at once because there’s just not enough room in his tiny closet for all his clothes at one time.

So we’re shuffling our closets around; Mike is going to take mine, and I’m taking the walk-in. But in order to do all this, we had to purchase a couple of organizers this weekend. The guy at Lowes told us it was a snap to install—that it wouldn’t take us more than an hour because it’s THAT EASY. “Even if you’re totally inept?” I asked, recalling several installation projects gone awry. He fiddled with the floor model trying to convince us of its miraculous ease-of-use. It did seem pretty simple and for the time being we were convinced.

Last night we decided to start Mike’s closet and spent the first 20 minutes arguing about who was doing what, how to find the studs, where to hang the support rail, blah, blah, blah. It was a simple case of miscommunication, but I got frustrated, left the room and told him he had to finish his closet alone. He got pretty far on his own, but after a while I came in to check his progress and ended up showing him how to use the drywall butterfly anchors. With a sheepish look, he admitted he wanted me to stay and help him for the rest of the installation. When it was all said and done, the project took over two hours. Let’s hope the next one won’t take as long.

Posted: May 13th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: none

OMG! I was doing my hair this morning, trying to get ready for work, and over the scream of my hairdryer I thought I heard the DJ say that Thrillz Salon closed its doors after 7 years of business. I shut the dryer off and ran to the radio, but they had moved on to another news story. I thought for a minute that I could have heard the name wrong so when I got to work I did a little research and found this article on 13Wham news. I heard it correctly: it’s sad, but true!!

This may not be the end of the world, but I was planning on setting up an appointment for a massage this week! To make matters worse, I have $125 credit from Mike for my birthday! If the article is right, I’ll be able to get my money back for the gift card, but I’m sure that will take time. Plus, I love my masseuse, Brittany, and I ask for her every time I go there. She’s the only one who’s ever worked out the stress knots I get on my shoulder blades. Everyone else just seems to go through the massage motions without locating and working on the problem areas. So now I have another issue; I don’t know her last name and have no way of getting in touch with her. Brittany, where are you!?

Posted: May 9th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: 1

There are whisperings around the office about a potential* stricter dress code. A quick mental evaluation of my current wardrobe reveals the jean-to-trouser-ratio is way too high. I guess I’ve just amassed so many pairs of jeans because that’s what I’m most comfortable in. Anyhoo, I went to Marshall’s last night in an attempt to find some more suitable pants at good prices. With an armful of pants in hand, I went to task trying them all on.

One of the prospective pairs was the new retro high-waist style in a really nice black fabric with pleats and a cuffed hem. I pulled them on, zipped them up and checked myself in the mirror. Not too bad. That’s when I realized that the zipper had split open at the bottom! They weren’t too small; the zipper was just defective. And there I was: stuck in these pants—trapped by clothing! I yanked on the zipper to no avail. There was a woman next to me who must have heard me struggling… but when I knocked on her door, she wouldn’t help me. She was probably in some state of undress and refused to come out.

Returning to my dressing room, I started to panic. How was I supposed to get the damn things off without breaking them? Sweat formed on my brow and my face reddened with exasperation, so I removed my shirt to keep from staining the pits. As I wrestled a little more, I decided there was no alternative—with a sharp tug, the zipper broke off, thus freeing me. Relieved, I hung them up, gave them to the attendant and got the hell out of there.

*No confirmations have been made to support this. It’s only a rumor right now.

Posted: May 2nd, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: none

On Sunday night I got a mysterious message from PayPal notifying me that my hosting service had canceled the monthly subscription to my website. No warnings, no friendly email, nothing. Naturally, I went into a little bit of a panic. Monday morning I was able to get an answer from the billing department that they were moving their monthly subscription customers to a partner host and, by the way, an email was sent out regarding this. Well, I checked my entire inbox including the junk mail folder and found no correspondence of the sort! So nice of them to notify me!!

At that point, I was more than a little cheesed off about the whole thing, but Mike looked up the new host, Apto Hosting, and we were both pleasantly surprised with their services as well as their attentive online support—Thanks Tom! So we decided that we would go through with the migration of our site to Apto, and take the opportunity to start afresh.

I’ve been considering switching to WordPress for a while because my old MT install was a mess—think 5 years of upgrades and a slew of screwed up folders and duplicated archives—and I really love the idea of a free, open-source app for our blogs. Now the downside is that I only JUST redesigned my MT blog and have to learn a whole new application for blog customization. Oy! I think it will be worth it though since I’m already loving the admin side of WP.

So, that’s the story in a nutshell of what’s going on around here. Now I’ve gotta hit the drawing board and get this site back up to designer snuff. :) Thanks for reading.

Posted: April 30th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: 2

Hey! If you hadn’t noticed, the entire design of this site (and the rest of Oxygenvalve for that matter) disappeared. As usual, there’s a decent story attached to the whole thing—which I’m too tired to tell right now, but I will; I promise. So pardon the dust for now. :) 

Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Daily.
Comments: 1