Last night Matt, Judd, and I celebrated our team’s Trivia win at the Lowertown Bulldog. We are walking back to my car when I announce my plans to drop out of law school:
Last night Matt, Judd, and I celebrated our team’s Trivia win at the Lowertown Bulldog. We are walking back to my car when I announce my plans to drop out of law school:
What a busy, hilarious week. There is too much to write about, so I am settling for pictures and captions. This is choppy, but appropriate given the state of things…
This week featured a massive iced-tea spill at the office. Amber is cackling as I run to fetch napkins:
Judd and I took the dogs on a walk around Lake of the Isles this morning. He now realizes that I do not exaggerate the craziness I run into on these walks.
There were vicious mini-dogs, creepers that went out of their way to talk to us, and a lot of awkward “why is the dog doing that?” moments. We survived with a lot of lysol, some silly string, and a taser.
There were also mansions. The Lake of the Isles is cluttered with them.
This is my favorite:
Bam! I know there are grander mansions directly on the lake, but this is my favorite. I will live here someday. I will wear a long, flowy bath robe and saunter out to the front steps to fetch the morning edition of the New York Times. The dogs are dead at this point, the bad-ass kids are away at boarding school and Juddson is off on business.
It is just me, my mansion, my coffee, and the lemurs…
The mansion straddles a hill slightly off the lake and is surrounded by dramatic old churches. Living directly on the lake seems inconvenient. The constant stream of cars, dogs, and gawkers is not worth the status boost. Then again, maybe my opinions will change when I’m fabulously wealthy and in need of a prestigious address…
Last week I decided to stop wasting my time.
I quit a clerkship, dropped a pair of toxic “friends” and told the boyfriend that I not getting any younger, these ankles are swelling, and it is time to finalize our adoption and mortgage plans…
Well, maybe not that last part, (That is for this week!) but I have realized that this blog is one of the things that is wasting my time.
This blog is supposed to be a journal and a time saver. It is neither.
Spring break was exhausting.
The week was strewn with awkward middle-of-the-day appointments and my entire salary went to the vet.
I come home from work on Saturday night to find my apartment covered in scat and blood.
Apparently stress caused the Rottweiler to have a bacterial imbalance, and erm, yeah. Blood. Everywhere. It was disgusting.
I was on the phone with Madre Jansen while scrubbing the blood from the floor:
Me: “Ugh.”
Madre Jansen: “What’s wrong grasshopper?”
Me: “I’m scrubbing blood from the floor. The Rottweiler is having issues again. I’m going to vet.”
Madre Jansen: “This is getting expensive. Maybe you should give the dog back to the humane society.”
Me: “Ugh. We’ll see. I still want to make her into a handbag.”
Madre Jansen: “Maybe she’s on her period and – excuse my language – just a sloppy bitch.”
I laughed so hard that I almost dropped my phone in the blood.
Mom cursing = hilarity every time.
It was my third vet trip within a week. Harley did a good impression of my face when I saw the bill:
The birthday boy decided to do his best Jay Sean pose:
Jake brought a random pair of tacky douchebag glasses to trivia and made everyone pose with them. Behold:
Everyone has a syrupy facebook friend: the one whose status updates constantly mention their significant other in a cheesy, overly-sentimental way,
Syrupie Smith: “Off to lunch with my amazing boyfriend!”
Syrupton Bergsteiner: “Going to see my beau! Love you babe! Xoxo!”
Syrupy ~LOLZ~ Adams: “So excited for tonight! I get to see my sweety! Tee hee hee!”
Etc.
These are also the people with the preggers pictures and baby-profiles, or the gay guys who upload dozens of nearly-identical shots of themselves posing with their not-so-cute boyfriends. Hay!
We all know these tacky people, and I am trying desperately not to become one. But it’s hard. The new relationship is more Beyonce than Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Today the temperature was well into the 50’s and everyone was waltzed around without coats, and most of us had shorts on.
I had time for the multiple dog walks because I left work early.
My coworkers and I are probably going to start boycotting most of the food options at work. Amber got food poisoning from a cafeteria salmonella salad, and I became deathly ill after eating a pack of sugar-free gummi bears from the company store.
I, of course, ate an entire pack of the jelly beans AND the gummi bears. And yes, the warnings are there for a reason. My goodness.
This coming week is Spring Break for my school. I will work a lot, but I have grand fitness plans. We’ll see if I can force myself into a Jillian Michaels workout routine, or if I will have Har Mar’s curves for another season.
Kenneling Gertrude, my Rottweiler, has been a problem recently because she paws and flings herself against the kennel door until it opens.
I like to keep the rottweiler kenneled when I’m away because of her propensity to eat cellphones, and after a week of successful rottweiler escapes, I get the brilliant idea to secure the kennel door with my U-bike lock.
This, of course, is a disaster: 1/3 of the time the bike keeps her in the kennel, 1/3 of the time she escapes and the other 1/3 of the the time I come home to this:
Fail.
A few days ago, I find my Rottweiler half-hung with a pool of dog drool and hair on the carpet in front of the kennel:
Turns out that she really hurt herself when she got her head/collar stuck that day. I noticed puss and bleeding and skipped Friday morning’s bail hearing to take her to the vet.
I’m standing in the vet’s office with both dogs, thoroughly convinced that they are going to call the police. Gertrude had three wounds around her neck from rubbing her skin raw, but the worst part was when the vet tech looks down and says, “And she’s also missing a canine tooth.”
I am mortified. She ripped a tooth out while trying to escape from the kennel?! What the hell?
A hospital stay, sedation, antibiotics, and $509 later, she’s back home, looking decrepit:
She destroyed the plastic kennel, but Judd gave me a metal crate that he had from his prior dog.
The metal crate works and Gertrude doesn’t even try to escape anymore…probably because she doesn’t have that many teeth to spare.
Dog time comes at a terrible price:
Luckily, Judd wore two shirts, and took the button-down off before letting the dogs use the other one as a kleenex. He’s a smart cookie.
It’s 5pm and I’m sitting in a Mexican-operated Italian restaurant on Lake Street.
A Spanish announcer rattles over the soccer game on the restaurant’s TV. The announcer’s voice isn’t as loud as the restaurant’s music: Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits. The front part of the restaurant was empty, but snickers came from the pool room.
So it was just me, Tina Turner, and the soccer commentator. Perfectly random.
The place was cute enough:
And a diet fail:
The waiter told me the special was the seafood-something-or-other. I figured that the burger wouldn’t make me sick. I was wrong, but it was delicious.
I was at the Mexican-Italian restaurant because I was waiting on TiresPlus to fix my flat tire.
This is the week of waiting. It took my Family Law professor 40 minutes to figure out how to work the VCR to show us a documentary. The school clinic had staffing issues so my 20 minute appointment took 2 hours, and getting a new tire took close to 3 hours.
These unexpected pauses are made much better by the crackberry, and I’m glad to have it. I have never been so caught up on email and tweets. I figure if I can do something mildly productive during my waiting time, even if it’s responding to emails or tweets, then it’s not time lost…or at least I can get a new high score on Brick Breaker.
We went to see “The Crazies” in Roseville because gory, apocalyptic zombies movies are totally appropriate for dates.
There was a pack of girls behind us in the theater, so we got the stereotypical commentary – “OH GIRL! HE CRAZY!”
Word.
After the sheer terror movie, we went to Dinkytown to Pagoda. Pagoda is a pan-Asian restaurant and an old haunt from 1L year.
I usually loathe dinner dates. I fear being stuck at a table with awkward silence or even more awkward conversation. There is also the possibility that the guy will drop a deal breaker early on and make the rest of the dinner uncomfortable.
On our first date, we ate at the bar area of a Granite City, and the only awkward part was that one of my friends1 just so happened to be at that very restaurant, at the bar, snickering.
There were no cameos last night and the conversation wasn’t forced or awkward. We lingered. At one point, I wanted to look someone up on google images and noticed that I didn’t have my blackberry. It was probably in my car…
There was also a wild bachelorette party going on in the back room of the restaurant, so our conversation had brief pauses for the random cheering, laughing, and singing coming from the walls.
I left Judd in the car and went back to the restaurant. The blackberry wasn’t there. It wasn’t on the sidewalk…or in the car… this was strange, and a giant date-swagger fail.
After another fruitless search of the car, I went into the Jimmy John’s near the car:
Me: “Hi, I lost my blackberry outside. Did someone happen to turn it in?”
JJ Deliveryman: “Pfft. A blackberry? I would have pawned that shit already.”
Me: “Heh. Lovely. Have a good night.”
I drove Judd to his house, and he helped me to search the car one last time.
So of course the phone had fallen in between the seat and the center console, and it was still plugged into the charger. Epic fail. Judd is dating a bald blonde. You can call me Amber Rose.
1Aka, the only law student with whom I discussed my upcoming date. He swears this was a coincidence. Right. And Alesha Dixon coincidentally looks like Beyonce.
Note: Best Week Ever posts are a summary of the previous week(s).
My weeks are too unusual and packed to cover two weeks in a “best week ever” summary post, so here are five snippets of the chaos…
I am in court observing a bail hearing. A scraggly woman approaches the stand and the judge sentences her to four years in prison. She was the getaway driver for her godson’s bank robbing spree and could have been sentenced to 20 years. She thanks the judge for the 4-year sentence, and gets hauled to the next county for sentencing on another robbery.
It is hard to complain about much after volunteering at the public defender’s office. My time in court is always a nice reminder that some people have real problems.
1 a.m. on Saturday. A group of us are near the dance floor at Lush Bar in Northeast Minneapolis. Adam Lambert’s queeny little brother, Glambert, is on the floor. Glambert points dramatically, flips his hair, and challenges a sassy, break-dancing lesbian to a dance-off.
Hot messitude ensues.
Glambert flails around, points, and flips his hair like Jeffree Star without the tattoos, or personality. Glambert goes on for a long time until his friend grabs him and tells him to stop being ignorant.
That is when the sassy lesbian leaves her group of annoyed-looking butch girls. Sassy slides onto the dance floor and launches into into a dramatic, stunt-filled break dance routine.
Glambert got served, but instead of clapping and going on with his life, Glambert proceeds to drop to the floor, open his legs…and… well, my friend Pechman described the scene the best: “That’s just embarrassing.”
Fail.
I was sick. It felt like someone filled my sinuses with bleach, but I was going to finish this moot court brief, headache and bleach be-damned.
I camped out at Wilde Roast and worked for close to five hours on revisions. Randy made a cameo and gave me a study break, but I eventually finished my brief and then raced to a copy shop for a blue brief cover.
I felt ridiculous paying for parking and trudging through the snow for a single colored copy of the cover of a pretend legal brief.
But whatever. If the Moot Rules of Appellate Procedure say blue cover, then they’ll get a blue cover. I’ve stop trying to make sense of my school’s requirements.
These past two weeks were full of trips to the Spyhouse, Starbucks, and Caffetto. I blame moot court and the tax code.
I had a vogue battle with a Somali in St. Paul. Hilarity. That story is here.
Most guys simply drop equivocal hints that they want to go out on a date:
Pussyfooter: “I might want to get coffee. Someplace…somewhere…over the rainbow perhaps? You like coffee right? I like coffee…possibly, maybe…sometime…”
Pussyfooter: “I might be at this bar tonight. Possibly. Maybe. With friends. I’m not sure yet. Haven’t decided. Are you going out tonight? I might be…”
Pussyfooter: “I’m so bored. Thinking about doing something! Going out, maybe? Something. I mean, I may leave the house tonight… not having any plans or a life or anything makes this easy... So I might be up for something! With someone! Possibly! Maybe! What are you up to?”
They want me to ask them out. I have to make the plans because their fear of rejection limits them to pestering guys online.
And I refuse to go out with these guys beacuse I cannot be bothered to waste my time on self-conscious, timid guys. I’m not Dr. Phil, and don’t have the time to build a would-be suitor’s self esteem.
So how shocked was I when someone finally asked me out on a date? I had at least a dozen pussyfooters bothering me at the time, and this guy bowled them over and got the point.
He wasn’t quite my type based on his pictures, so of course he was attractive and interesting in person (seems to be a rule.) The date went well, and I am impressed.
I think Minnesota men might have redeemed themselves. Possibly, maybe.