These are my top ten UNDER achievements of 2010. (and this, my dear friends, is how I start the new year off blogging -- 9 days late)
10. Never Ending Laundry Load: I just never caught up to that one load that didn’t need immediate attention. In fact, I realized that at some point I stopped sorting laundry by color and started sorting by priority. I have priorities 1, 2, and 3 that get done regularly, but 4 and 5 have been sitting there for quite possibly three months or more. Perhaps someday I will have the money to pay some sweet little old lady named Agnes to not only sort the laundry by color, but also by cycle (i.e. delicate, permanent press, fluff air). Until then… priority loads will most likely be the method of choice until my child leaves for college and I retire and change my name to Agnes at some point.
9. Maintenance Staff Neglect: A friend of mine recently lectured me on the only true value of apartment living – the maintenance staff repairing the problem upon request. I have lived in this apartment for nearly three years and there are three lamps in the vaulted ceiling of the kitchen. Two of the three lamps have now burned out and it’s only a matter of time before lamp three leaves me too, but have I bothered to ask maintenance come and replace the bulbs? No. One time I went two weeks without a functioning dishwasher because I neglected to call maintenance (and anyone that knows me and my loath for dish detail can imagine how much I enjoyed washing dishes by hand, particularly after I let the piles grow to enormous size). And the clothes dryer stopped drying clothes sometime in October, but instead of remembering to call maintenance I’ve just been hanging the clothes to dry for the past three months (which is partly what prompted the lecture from my friend, along with the backed up shower drain that I won’t talk about, and it may also explain why laundry priority piles 4 and 5 never get done).
8. Stalker Elusion: I can’t take responsibility for eluding the stalkers on my own. It just so happened that at four different points within the past year I was stalked for a week or two by some random men that work at my company (this is a very large company so… you apparently never know who’s watching you). Just as I was starting to feel uncomfortable at each time, it just so happened that, due to the economic downturn, each of those individuals was let go in one of the four waves of company layoffs we had here. Awesome… I was saved by recession and the unemployed stalkers had no additional income to help fund and improve their spying techniques.
7. Automobile Goo: Last year my daughter had some crazy science project she had to put together for the Spring Science fair. We had done all of the research and gathered all of the materials to build the project, and I enlisted the help of one of my engineer friends in the actual construction of the project. We had a small window of opportunity in which to meet this fellow and get the construction of the project completed. On our way to his home out on the far east side of town, we stopped at Jamba Juice and got ourselves a couple smoothies. Hope, with her propensity for accidents, reached for her smoothie and somehow squeezed the Styrofoam cup just a little too hard and the top came flying off and the entire smoothie came flying out with it all over the car. Obviously, in the midst of driving, I had neither the tools nor the ability to clean up the mess. And even when we got to the fellow’s house we were so busy working on the project, I had to let the small smoothie mishap stay put. Several months later, I am proud to tell you that goo still sits in the car. Not only that, it has changed from it’s beautiful shade of Peach Passion Orange to some Toxic Brown Broohaha that is sure to frighten you with the threat of disease (if you’re not one of the inner circle, that is). At this point I’m not even sure if there’s a point to trying to wash it off. It seems to be going through its own decomposition process of some kind. I swear… the stain has gotten smaller. I’m no scientist, but I think there may be little microbes of some kind eating itself up over there. If I wait long enough, no ooze or goo or any hint of such a thing will be anywhere in that spot. I believe it was March of 2010 when that happened, so I’ll have to wait until March of 2011 (just a little more than two months away now) to see if my “self-eating” theory is correct. If not, I’ll break down and get the car detailed or something.
6. Going Postal: Despite my sweet little blog post about the lady I know that was kind enough to send me a nice letter and some pictures in the mail (which she did recently as well, thank you very much), I am still terrible about getting the mail from my mail box. In fact, given all of the holiday hoopla, I’m pretty sure November and December were my worst months for mail gathering. I have this feeling that aside from the last week of December, my mail was sent back to the post off and ultimately returned to every sender at least four different times. Yeah… I really hate the mail. Sorry all… it’s truly a waste of trees, if you ask me (aside from my one friend and the good juju she sends on paper).
5. Speaking Of Trees: I’m rarely one to go off on paper and waste and recycling and saving trees and the Earth. I don’t really rant about things like that much. The way I see it, why should I? Every nimrod in Hollywood is doing it for me so… what does the Earth need me for, right? I will say this though – why the heck is the phone company STILL updating phone books and leaving new ones on my doorstep every three to six months? Seriously… this is so annoying! I can’t remember the last time I used a phone book. And I got so tired of the stupid phone company leaving these Tree Death Tomes under the guise of phone books on my door step, I just finally stopped bringing them into the house. “What?” you say. “What do you mean you just stopped bringing them into your house?” you say. “What good would that do?” you say. I say, it did a lot of fricking good! It’s like leaving the faux Hoot Owl on the telephone wire so the mice don’t come and chew the line the death. I swear to you! I had two phone books left on my doorstep and I NEVER picked them up and for two whole years I NEVER saw a new phone book get left on my doorstep. Why? Because they took one look at the dead disheveled weather beaten book of phone numbers that no one had even bothered to throw in the garbage and they walked away in horror and disgust. Who would do that? Who would just leave the pile of book covered trees just lying there to suffer? I would! ME! Pandora! I would so you could see all the lovely rain forests you’ve destroyed in black and white on my patio! (not that the poor soul delivering the things at minimum wage had anything to do with rainforest destruction, and not that I really had that much of a purpose behind my choice to leave them there, but still…) Anyway, the point is, I left those things there until they really were a bit of an eyesore but they seemed to keep the new phone books away so I continued to leave them there for over a year. Unfortunately for me, someone got wise to me and left a new phone book for me right at the end of November 2010. “Really?!?!?” I yelled, and then I picked up the new book and the two phone books of the dead and threw them in the dumpster.
4. Stress Queen: Did you realize that if you don’t find a healthy way to handle your stress it can actually break down your immune system so badly that these happy little proteins inside your body called Heat Shock Proteins (HSPs) will start to work overtime every time you have a stressful moment of some kind and you will break out in a rash all over? I didn’t either until I spent the last year breaking out into some crazy rash every time I tried to stay calm cool and collected on the outside while knowing I was screaming on the inside. How ‘bout that? I can’t hide it too well anymore. Come to my cubicle to tell me something and I’ll break out in a stress rash while I do my best to pretend your halitosis isn’t driving me up the wall. Awesome… Padded cell, take me away!
3. Massage Envy: I think that’s an interesting name for a company. I guess it means that since I have a monthly membership there, you should all envy me as I take advantage of stress relieving massages and the health benefits they present to me as I embrace a healthy approach to coping with stress. I’m starting to think, however, that the name actually mocks me as it stares me in the face and reminds me that I’m paying $50 a month to get a massage to help me cope with the stress in my life and I’m so busy and consumed with the stupid minute details of life I never take the time to use what I’m regularly paying for. I drive past the place and become envious because inside there are people that have taken the time to treat themselves to a mere sixty minutes of relaxing silence and release of tension in the muscles that push and pull at the bones that will soon be aching from the muscle’s inability to relax. Yes, I am envious. I'm pretty sure I've paid for an entire year supply of monthly massages and I've never used one. (...bet those people aren’t breaking out in stress rashes...) Guess I need to see myself as a never ending pile of laundry and make the stress load priority one before it kills me.
2. Christmas Past: I always put the Christmas tree and Christmas decorations up the Friday after Thanksgiving and I always take everything down on New Year’s Day. I don’t know what happened to me in 2010, but I left the Christmas tree and all of the decorations up until Easter, which I think was sometime in April 2010. Now I know for a fact there is someone out there that’s got me beat on this one, but still… that was way overdue (even by my lackadaisical standards) and I have no idea why I let that one ride for so long. Christmas is only fun during that November – December stint, after that it’s just annoying clutter and has no business sitting in your living room reminding you that life isn’t as cheery as all those lights and sugar plums would lead you to believe (although I’m pretty sure some dudes could possibly make the case for why The Nutcracker might be a mainstay in their daily life year round, but I suggest they go see a marriage counselor for that one). Anyway, as of right now, it’s 10:50 p.m. on January 9, 2011 and I still have not taken down the Christmas décor in here. I fully intend to get to it sometime this week, as I will not be convincing myself that this year’s Easter Celebration consists of the symbolic disassembling of the Christmas tree.
1. Slack Ass Blogger: And finally… Not that you don’t already know this, but 2010 was actually the worst year for me, blog wise. I was going to give myself some extra points for content, but then I went back and skimmed through the entire last year and well… August was apparently my best month due to the Salad Bad Ass and my lemonade detox diet attempt, but … the rest of the year was a lot of whining about work and my inability to think creatively in the cubicle (which is pretty apparent from what I see here). And I counted everything up -- from the time I started this blog in 2008 to now, 2010 was the most inconsistent writing year I had, topping out at 27 posts which I even beat in my “novice” year by one with 28 posts.
…sigh…
I guess I owe those of you who still subscribe some serious thanks. I don’t have many of you, but for some reason you keep hanging in there with me and you keep hounding me and encouraging me because you actually believe I have something entertaining and perhaps even valuable (at least at times) to say. I would like to promise that I will do better, for myself as much as for you, but promises are a guaranteed deal breaker so… how about we just leave it at that, take a gamble and see what happens, eh? I know what I’m dreaming up in my head, it’s just a matter of making it happen.
PEACE!!!!!
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