Daily

When I first purchased Louise, my pre-Android-lifestyle Blackberry, I briefly entertained the idea of changing my phone number to something that would spell a word.  Choosing my phone number was not an option online - I could only choose the prefix.  I decided that whatever my phone number ended up being, I'd call and customize it after the phone arrived.

This next part of the story makes more sense if you know that my real name is Beth, not Jane.  (Don't worry, this multiple names thing only gets more confusing from this point on.) 

When the Verizon package arrived and Louise was unboxed, I learned that her phone number was 555-PETH.  Close enough, I said.  I passed out my new phone number.  I told people it was PETH, as if it was intentional, and met their puzzled looks with a blank face.  It worked.  I know of 3 separate instances where somebody with a fried phone or misbehaving contact list remembered the 555-PETH story and didn't lose touch with me.

I've been using my local Starbucks as a frequent satellite office since May or so, spending a lot of time here (I say here because I really am here right now) on my netbook, writing and whatnot, away from home and the distractions contained therein (lately: DOGS EVERYWHERE).  Because I was spending so much time here, I whipped out an old gift card somebody gave me for Christmas of 2008, reloaded it, and registered on the Starbucks site so that I could rack up points and earn free beverages and officially welcome our new soy overlords.

I received the email announcing that I had achieved Gold Card status, and at the bottom, it showed a picture of the Gold Card with my name on it, followed by a link telling me to CLICK HERE if my name was not correct.

So of course I clicked.

That's when Starbucks came to know me as P. Consuela Bananahammock.  I hoped that my name change took effect in time to get printed on the card, which would arrive in 4-6 weeks.  A week later, I received a free drink card addressed to P. Consuela Bananahamm, which was bittersweet.  Because even though I'd already sacrificed the Princess, my name still didn't fit Starbucks system, apparently, but the new version was kind of awesome in its own way.  I resigned myself to being P. Consuela Bananahamm forever, noting that at least there were two M's.  Like Jon Hamm, really.  Mrs. P. Consuela Banana Hamm.

Well.  The Gold Card arrived. 

Apparently the punctuation in the first name REALLY messed up the Starbucks arbitrary name-shortener system.  WAY TO JUDGE MY NAME, STARBUCKS.

I showed it to Dano, who knew how much I was looking forward to baristas addressing me by P. Consuela Bananahammock, and he laughed and said "That's perfect!"  I asked why. 

"P for Peth!  Won't they feel awkward about calling you Beth all this time?"

Today is the first day of a mini-vacation for me, a 5 day weekend.  I started it off by waking up to the overpowering stench of skunk, courtesy of my roommate's dogs.  Wrecks was, of course, cuddling up to the other dogs, so now he smells like skunk as well.  Awesome.

Wrecks had an adventure yesterday afternoon, when he gave his security detail the slip and escaped from the walls of the compound.  He was on the loose for 30-40 minutes, during which I was driving home from work in a panic and DuMom was designing his MISSING PRESHUS BABEEEE WE HAZ REWARD flyer.

But he was found.  And now that he's gotten a taste of the world outside that really solid fence, he spends most of his outdoor time sitting next to the gate, staring up.

------

Earl is a great name for a hurricane.  That said, be safe, eastern friends.

------

More soon.  I promise.

------

This week, years past:

2009:   A big jump.

2008:  11 Hooters passport stamps in one day, Chicago by Motorcycle

2007:  Awkward cohabitation moment

2006:  I accepted red velvet cake as a bribe for Reader of the Month/Millennium

This website seems to have become an entire summer of Weekend Updates followed by Take No Prisoners, with nothing in between.  Wait no, not nothing.  Just a lot of living, and some of it can't be spoken of here for awhile.  I'll come back to it.  I promise.

-----

Last night, Jim said to me "Your weekends . . ." and then just shook his head.  He'd made that mistake, the one where you ask me what my plans are.  Silly kids.  There are 9 different plans, with 12 different possible wrenches in those plans.  This weekend is more of the same.  There is one plan that I'm hoping to make work, and that's the one where I get to feast with BLC and Amy.

-----

Despite contrary rumors you may have read on Twitter, I did not cause any of Jack Roush's plane crashes.  To the best of my knowledge, I haven't caused ANY plane crashes.  Yet.

-----

I will be in East Lansing and Ann Arbor, MI near the end of September.  Frenemies in those areas, please let me know if you'd like to hook up.  And I mean that in the "you bring me Blenheim's Ginger Ale and I put your picture on the internet" sort of way, not the Biblical sense.

My October is going to be wild and will involve a LOT of travel.  If you are in the Indianapolis IN, Grand Rapids MI, or Duluth MN areas and want to meet up, please let me know and I'll give you more details about the dates and reasons that I'll be in/near your fine cities.

-----

I can't stop watching this.  I've tried.  It just keeps playing and playing and playing.

I ganked that from somebody's Facebook wall.  I'd give credit but I think it was posted to every one of my classmates' walls at some point in the last week. 

-----

This week, years past:

2009:  I addressed some issues the internet was creating in my offline life.  A year later, I'm happy to report that I've solved those problems, with a combination of expecting better of people (giving more and getting more back, because that's how love works in the Church of Wags), Clowns In My Coffee and blissful ignorance.  I've never been more surrounded by love and peace.

2008:  Hope.  It got audacious there for awhile.

2007:  I cleared out some bookmarks and waxed poetic about Super Dave.

2006:  I became the Rockefeller of pessimism and found a sock monkey dress.

2005:  Installed some software and officially converted this space to a blog, after years of posting one essay at a time, old school HTML style, and taking it down when the next one went up.  SinginInTheRain contributed some Accidental Haiku via email.

Next best thing to making it to the NYT bestseller's list myself?  Oh, probably THIS:

-----

It is a week of highs and lows for us.  I spent Tuesday afternoon at the doctor's office again and I'm pretty bummed about my brain right now.  It's there, don't worry.  It didn't go missing.  It's just not working right again, but I'm working on it.

Wrecks is also bummed.  He got to spend a week with some other dogs and now life is back to normal, but he far preferred being the little guy in the big pack.  I've never seen him quite as heartbroken as last night, when he realized what was going on, and ran from room to room searching for his pals, howl-sobbing, before finally collapsing into my lap with a sigh filled with longing and confusion.

That paragraph broke your heart, didn't it?  If yes, please consider donating to my Buy Wrecks a Pet Monkey fund.  I'm not sure I have the energy to deal with another dog full-time, but if I had a tiny monkey and a saddle, I'm pretty sure this blog would turn a profit in no time, and then I can afford to put Wrecks in therapy.

-----

I was watching a movie last night that had a boat in it, and as has been happening often lately, I got hit with a long-dormant memory.  This one was a series of books that I read as a tween, about a group of children abandoned by their mother who strike out to find their grandmother.  The oldest is a girl who ends up restoring and building boats to support them.  There is a boy with a reading issue.  A stranger they trust who robs them.  Eventually they find the grandmother, who is slow to warm to them.  The mother dies and is cremated and the boatbuilder builds a box to hold her ashes. 

No matter what I google, I can't come up with a title or author.  It's killing me.

-----

Late last night, I got an email from Google that I've been granted access to the Android App Inventor beta.  I will soon be building my own Android apps in their WYSIWYG environment, limited to no coding.  Hello world.

-----

Wrecks and I will be at Slinger Super Speedway in Slinger, WI on Saturday night for the winged sprint car race there.  Dad and David are taking the pavement sprint car, Dano is going to be slinging wrenches and splashing fuel (and probably dropping hints about the 9th car on Mom's 2011 Chili Bowl team, I'm guessing), and it's going to be a blast.  Looking forward to catching up with Scott there and seeing what I believe is my first winged pavement sprint car race.  Dad will have to correct me if I'm wrong on that.

-----

This week, years past:

2009:  Beer started following me on Twitter

2008:  Mo and I ask some hypothetical rhetorical questions

2007:  Lydia came to visit!

2006:  The most popular post in the history of this website - Where Have You Gone, Doug Wolfgang? - was published.  It has a dead image and some dead links now and definitely needs to be updated, seeing how I still get dozens of google hits daily on that post.

I am going to apologize for the language in this post ahead of time.  I wish I could tell this story without so many of the curses, but I just can't.

So a couple of weekends ago, I got a message on the online dating site OKcupid at around noon, from a guy who was offended that I had not responded to his message from 7 o'clock that morning.  He told me that I'm 29 years-old, OKcupid is a place to talk to people, not a place to ignore people, and that I should start acting my age.  He wrapped it up by calling me an "ugly muff-diving cunt" and telling me to change my profile from "bisexual" to "gay" because obviously I don't really want a man, seeing as how I didn't respond to him, a man.

Obviously, this was not something I took badly - I laughed, blocked him, and "ugly muff-diving cunt" became a bit of a term of endearment amongst my friends to whom I told this story.  Because nothing really better exemplifies the absurdities that one can run across in dating, on the internet or not, than somebody flipping their lid over a four hour delay in responding to a message.

On Monday of this week, I stumbled across a car that fit almost every single requirement I had of a car, which is pretty hard to do.  I made an appointment for a test drive on Tuesday night, and minutes before I walked out the door on Tuesday, I got an OKcupid instant message from a different guy.  I told him that I didn't have time to chat as I was going to test drive my potential new car.  He responded with "Oh!  I'm a car salesman!  Let me sell you a car." 

I groaned in my head, but said, okay, see what you can come up with for X, Y, and Z models (all of the same make, the ONLY brand I was shopping for), with L, M, N, O, and P features.  He responded back with, "You don't really want any of those.  You need a Jetta."  I responded with "Dude, if I just walked onto your lot and told you what I wanted, and you said ANYTHING pertaining to ANY other kind of car, I would turn around and walk away."  He again continued to extol the virtues of the Jetta, and I finally said "Have you ever lost a car sale and a date at the same time?  Big day for you."

Some of you may be familiar with my history of naming my vehicles, my trucks Butch and Gina (long i), my love of lady parts euphemisms, and my friends and coworkers who love to comment on the stereotypes associated with a girl who drives a full size truck.  Well, I tell all of these fun stories as a means of introducing you to the new love of my life, which I purchased without the assistance or opinions of boys, and which is most definitely not a Jetta. 

I present Muffy:

Muffy, the only car on the planet more stereotyped than my trucks.

Muffy is a Subaru Forester 2.5XT, so that cute little hood scoop there is signifying the presence of a turbocharger.  Muffy will take me from 0 to 60 in 5.3 and will eat up a quarter mile in 13.8 seconds.  At high speeds and sharp accelerations, her engine sings a sweet little melody to me, and the AWD cornering is a new and truly beautiful experience.  There are other wonderful traits in her corner, her leather interior, premium sound, massive amounts of space, and ridiculously low odometer.  But every time I start thinking about those things, the light turns green, and I remember what the XT stands for all over again. 

And no, she didn't come with a pride sticker.  I'll have to buy that myself.

------

A note on the title of this post.  Pleiades is the constellation in the Subaru logo.  Pleiades were the "Seven Sisters" of Greek mythology.  From Wikipedia:  "After Atlas was forced to carry the heavens on his shoulders, Orion began to pursue all of the Pleiades, and Zeus transformed them first into doves, and then into stars to comfort their father. The constellation of Orion is said to still pursue them across the night sky."