I can smell the ocean salt in the air

Off to California tomorrow morning. We are boarding Scully for the week that we’re gone and my heart is breaking for her, although she’ll be in a nice, air conditioned space during what’s supposed to be a very, very hot week, so she might actually be better off than the other two cats. Still, I feel like a terrible cat mom for leaving her somewhere that isn’t home.

Craziness—at this time tomorrow, we’ll be having lunch at Poquito Mas with Vance and his chica. I wonder if I’ll get there and feel like I never left. Will I remember how to get around? Will I hate it? Will it be extremely weird? No matter what it’s like, I can’t wait to share it with the man.

Lunchboy is bringing his laptop so I’ll try and post at least a few pictures during the trip. I guarantee we’ll be swilling wine in at least a few of them :)

At the same time...

The interviews from the other week? Well, they panned out. The company made an offer on Tuesday and I gave notice at my job today. I start at the new place on or around August 16th. My head is spinning a bit from all the (positive) change. The new job is downtown, so I have to come up with a completely new workday routine. I'm scared and nervous but it feels like that time between high school and college, when you hate leaving what's safe and known, but you know it's time to move on.

C-love just laughed at me because she said I wrote more about cat pee than about getting engaged or taking a new job. Bear with me :) Once my feet are back on the ground, I’ll write more.

Promoted

Lunchboy, from boyfriend to fiance.

QT

Big things afoot on both the personal and professional fronts. I can't talk about them quite yet, but it's all good. More soon.

Attack of the glove snatcher

This is funny because Griffin is also an unapologetic glove thief. During the winter, she waits for me to take my gloves off and then she steals them—out of my purse, off the table, from the laundry—to chew on and mangle. If I try to take them away from her, she stands on her hind legs and tries to snag them with her claws. What’s up with the gloves?? Were she an outdoor cat, I’m sure she’d been burgling garden gloves from the neighbors, too.

Got to get us to the shore

I keep dreaming about our trip to California. The dreams are mostly about us driving around LA and being unable to do all the things we want to do because we’re too busy doing what other people want us to do. All I want to do is see the ocean, take some pictures (because I have none), do the stairs and do some yoga. We’ll see friends and explore a bit, but I don’t want to try and fit a week-long trip into three days before we head up the coast. Maybe the anxiety over wanting to do too much is what’s causing the dreams. Ativan, you are my savior.

Overthinking

The interview went really well. I was there for 3 hours, so I think they liked me. By the end, I was brain fried and starving, and wandering around Back Bay in the heat trying to get my car out of the parking garage left me spaced out and shaky. They want me back next week and I have no idea how I’m going to swing another 3-hour interview during work hours. There are only so many bogus doctor’s appointments I can manufacture, especially when I have actual doctor’s appointments coming up. My boss is probably wondering how a healthy person such as myself has so many medical issues, and I feel like I’m calling down bad karma on myself by lying about my health.

Now I’m grappling with the concept of leaving my job and whether it’s really a good idea. I’ve never been one of those people who can stay at one job for more than a few years. My resume reflects this and I’m sensitive about having moved around so much. Maybe I should suck it up and stay where I am so I can BE at a job for more than 2 years. My job isn’t perfect but I’m in a groove here and I feel like I know what I’m doing. Do I really want to make a change for the sake of change? Am I a commitmentphobe when it comes to jobs? Part of me thinks I should stick it out—through the weeks when I have nothing to do and the times when the office politics are lethal—just to challenge the part of myself that always wants a change.

Really, if they make me an offer, the salary would be the deciding factor. The job would be very similar to what I’m doing now, except it has an actual career path and the possibility of travel. And it’s in the Hancock building, so I’d be downtown instead of in the burbs. Everything has pros and cons.

Act of contrition

You know that tired old saying, “The way to a man’s heart is through his XXX(stomach, head, chest)?” Well, I don’t know about the heart but last night I learned that the way to a man’s libido is through his Nintendo Gamecube. How? Well, if you happen to, say, accidentally trip over the controller cord and pull the whole game system away from the power source right after he finishes a really hard section in Resident Evil 4 but before he has a chance to save, you can pretty much guarantee that you’re not getting any that night.

Not a pretty sight

There are tiny, black spiders dropping down onto my desk from the lighting fixture above my cube. I saw two of them out of the corner of my eye and now I’m wondering how many I didn’t see. Suddenly my head is very, very itchy.

I feel like this is the first scene in a bad horror movie. Any moment now, the mack daddy spider is going to fall down on my head and suck me dry. It is Monday after all.

Brought to you by Haagen Dazs

Today we went to the mall to escape the heat and also to look for some "professional" clothing for me to wear to a job interview on Tuesday. It's predictable, really. Every time I decide to look for a new job, I realize that I need a suit to wear to interviews and so I go on a frantic, stressed out shopping trip that inevitably ends with me throwing up my hands in defeat, going home and picking a non-suit outfit from my closet. I'm terrible with clothes, just like I'm terrible with decorating. In high school, my friends used to quote that line from Heathers where Shannen Doherty says to Winona Ryder, "You can't accessorize for shit." They weren't being mean, they were laughing with me because it's completely true.

After I decided against buying a beautiful black skirt suit from BR (because I honestly can't afford the $300 right now, even though I can hear that evil Shopaholic girl in my head saying, "It's an investment in your career!" I NEVER should have read those books), I went home and tried on my old standby, a lovely pants suit that I always forget about. I love that suit because it's always a surprise and it's always flattering. Except this time it didn't fit. The pants were too tight everywhere.

Horror. Shame. Self loathing.

Overwhelmed with mortification, I fled to the basement with the half pint of Haagen-Dazs light cookies n' cream that's been hiding in the freezer for the past two weeks, intending to drown my sorrows. What is it with ice cream and self pity? It never makes anything better, especially if the issue is weight-related. Lunchboy sat with me, patiently listening to me moan about the fact that I'm 31 and I don't have any decent clothing, and the clothing I do have doesn't fit, and I don't own any pumps and really I should just be shot for being a failure as a modern woman. Alas, alack, woe is me. Then he told me I was beautiful, brought me back upstairs, fed me Haagen Dazs and helped me pick an outfit. It's not a suit but hopefully the company won't toss me out on my behind for dressing too casually. Really, who needs suits for writing positions anyway? Aren't we supposed to be all arty and creative and shit?

It's too hot. I need a drink and then it will all be better.

It's a compliment, really

This made me laugh. It also reminded me of why I read this yesterday and realized how lucky I am to have Lunchboy.

One of the joys of dating a management consultant is that I rest easy at night knowing that Lunchboy is happily optimizing our weekend errands to ensure maximum performance and efficiency. He’d deny it if I asked him, but I’m convinced he has the day broken down into one-hour increments. I think his addiction to Excel and Powerpoint would drive some people nuts but it makes me smile. I know that if and when children enter the picture, he will consult the hell out of fatherhood until it’s no longer an unknown quantity. He’ll analyze the nuts and bolts of parenting until he’s successfully created a value proposition outlining best practices, systems and processes for raising kids. There will be spreadsheets calculating the increments of sleep training, Powerpoint presentations outlining the benefits of cotton versus disposable diapers, and Outlook reminders listing the proper contents of a well-packed diaper bag. When I’m not looking, he’ll duct tape a roles and responsibilities document to the stroller, the fridge and in the car underneath the driver’s side visor. And inevitably, I'll find spelling and grammatical errors in his content, and shriek about his misuse of "myriad" in a slide.

When I shared this with him, he laughed--because he knows it's true.

Jody Sawyer had it good

The downside of having watched Center Stage about 50 times is that now, every time I read an article about ABT, I automatically scan for Ethan Stiefel and Gillian Murphy’s names. Their story makes my heart melt.

A few years ago, ABT performed Giselle at the Wang Theater in Boston. Both Ethan and Sascha Radetsky were performing. MeanG and I seriously considered dropping $75 a pop for good seats but in the end we opted not to mess up our Center Stage crushes with reality. That and the fact that we were broke.

Aim for the flat top!

The apocalypse is truly nigh. It’s 3:30pm and it’s pitch black outside. The thunderstorms will break the humidity, I hope, but right now it looks like there’s a strong probability that the Eastern seaboard is alive with incidents of paranormal activity. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria. From my office window, I can see lines of cars with their headlights on. I love bad, strong weather but this is a little freaky. The rain is so loud that it sounds as if there’s highway traffic on the roof of my building. Lightning is coming down all over the place. I'm seriously waiting for the power to go out.

Auf wiedersehen

Why pretty much no one I know will be accepting phone calls between 9pm and 10pm on Wednesday night.

Tactical extraction

Target is a wondrous place in that it makes me wonder how I’m so incapable of entering a Target store and spending less than $80. Usually that amount is closer to $150, so really $80 is a step in the right direction. Target may be an evil corporation, but it’s still the closest and most convenient place to buy things that Scully will eventually pee on.

This weekend's Target mission? Clean up the downstairs bathroom enough so that it’s usable when J and K come to town tomorrow night. The imminent arrival of houseguests has made the cat pee eradication situation more urgent, but of course Scully is not cooperating. The bathmats in the upstairs bathroom are now her favorite places to misbehave. So we bought new bathmats and put the old ones downstairs under her box. Then we bought gallons of Nature’s Miracle enzyme cleanser and poured it on the bathroom floor to let it soak into the grout. The idea of forcing guests to live in a space that smells like cat just makes me cringe. I’m not that mean of a host.

Lunchboy turned 30 on Friday. We took him to Ginza and force fed him sushi. I tell him every day how old he is because he’s spent the past year and a half harping on the fact that I’m no longer in my 20s and payback, it’s a bitch. I’m not too worried, though. Work is sending him to India next week for 6 days and he has to take malaria pills. And worry about cobras. Ha. When the trip first came up, we tried to see if I could go along. I mean, it's India! But then we found out that he’ll be spending roughly 3 of those 6 days traveling to and from Hyderabad. Since tickets are about $3,000, it wasn’t worth it. We’ll go back sometime and do a proper visit, hopefully once they’ve eliminated malaria from the planet.

Bits

*I am in love with peonies. Most. Beautiful. Flower. Ever. I want to plant them everywhere and look at them for hours. Love them.

*If I hear that "Hips Don't Lie" song one more time, I will reach into my head and yank out my eardrums as a form of preventative medicine.

*Since it's the summer and my attention span is nil unless I'm reading something fluffy, I picked up "The Devil Wears Prada" at the airport last week. Surprise--it was actually good. Then I borrowed the first two installments of the Shopaholic series from ElleCharlie. I wanted to throttle the main character after the first chapter. Lunchboy almost took the book away from me because I came very close to hurling it off the porch while screaming, "Get your life together, you twit!"

*There is nothing better than retreating to the nice, cool basement after hosting what felt like a never-ending BBQ for people who either didn't RSVP or showed up 4 hours late. I left the boys upstairs doing battle in Resident Evil 4 and fled to the the guest room, a frosty beverage in hand. Cats, book, Nilla wafers, first season of Veronica Mars on DVD---ah, blessed retreat.

Don't Cha

New York was GREAT. I loved every minute of it, up to and including the torrential downpour on Thursday night that stranded us in an endless cab line and left us hunting for umbrellas in order to make a dinner reservation for which we were already late. I loved every thing that made NYC different from Boston. My first morning there, I woke up to an overwhelming anxiety attack over being in a city that big. But then I forced myself to remember that I’ve lived in cities that were bigger and lived to tell the tale, so I got myself out of the hotel room and realized that all I wanted to do was walk. I wanted to get lost and discover all the wacky things that pop up when you round a corner, to lose myself in the crowds and remember that there is an enormous power in anonymity. I tried to count the number of Starbucks and Ann Taylors in Midtown but got too distracted to keep an accurate list.

Gimp came into town on Friday and we spent most of the day lounging around a table in Bryant Park, soaking up the sun and people watching. If you ever find yourself near Bryant Park and you have to pee, they have gorgeous, $20 million public bathrooms there that are actually pleasant AND clean. Megan suggested I go stalk Tim at the Parsons School, but after having way too much wine the night before, Bryant Park was all I could muster the energy for.

Friday morning we went for a walk up Madison and found….the Pussycat Dolls. No, they weren’t hooking in Central Park—they were performing in front of the Apple store, surrounded by a very small crowd of people who had to be persuaded to scream, even when the Dolls gyrated so hard that I thought their hair extensions were going to fly off their heads.