Day 14,985: *yawn*

My X is stopping by to crash on the couch this weekend at some point. This means I should probably be making an effort to clean up. I am feeling really super lazy instead. It is my X and not someone I'm trying to you know, be an awesome hostess to. (ha ha) I guess I should at least clean the bathroom, vacuum up some pet hair and run a comb through my hair. At least. Right?

It's just so overcast outside. And damp and chilly. And you see that book I'm reading in the tool bar over there? Between the Assassinations? It's so good. It's totally got me sucked in and I would much rather curl up on the couch with a cup of spiked medicinal hot chocolate and the book with some furry beasts draped across my feet and lap for warmth than pull out that heavy vacuum cleaner and idly push it around the apartment some. Then all of the bending to like, clean out the tub and stuff. Who wants to do that when you can be swept away by a buzz from the alcohol really good book?

That's all I'm saying. He was married to me, he already knows about my occasional slack attitude to housecleaning. It'll be like old times. A walk down memory lane, if you will. Ohhh, I can totally make him feel at home! I'll just nag him to clean it up! This is the best idea I've had in a few days! I'll let you know how it works! I'm off to drink read!

Day 14,984: pumpkin for my punkin'....

Smashed pumpkins on the sidewalk always make me feel kind of sad for two reasons:

1) I always think of some little kid being so excited about their carved pumpkin masterpiece and how sad they would feel the next morning to see that some asshat smashed it.

2) I see the pieces and I think about how someone took a hour to carve, a minute to smash when they could have taken an hour to harvest the pumpkin meat and turn it into something yummy like pie, quick bread, roasted pumpkin seeds, waffles or soup, a minute to eat something home made. A sidewalk smashed pumpkin is wasted food.

That's the end of my soap box. Carry on.

Day 14,983: synapses on shuffle

1. Ida know what's going on with the weather. Take one dying hurricane and add to it one nor'easter and you have a long two day bout with rain that isn't going to end (allegedly) until tomorrow night. I don't mind storms so much. The nor'easter would actually be cool if it were snow instead of this cold rain. Then there is the thing with my leaking wall. Sitting here waiting (not so) patiently for the emergency maintenance people to call me back. Which they never do no matter when I call. I've got hand towels in the windowsill catching water. When the drips sound different, I go and wring the towels out in my bathtub and put them back. That's how I'm living. Don't be too envious now.

2. I was fortunate enough to work for a company that let us leave a bit early since the city is flooding. Even more fortunate that a coworker offered to give me a ride home so I wouldn't have to catch the bus. I'm so grateful to her because this cycle of bus drivers has my evening bus driver being a total slacker and unpredictable. One never knows if he will be on time, 3 minutes late, or a half hour late. No rhyme or reason, it just is what it is.

3. I get to have a minor surgery again soon on another delicious spot of basal cell carcinoma. Yep, Basal Bob is back. I try not to let it get to me too much, but the reality is that the more of these tame ones that appear the higher my risk of developing melanoma. Thank you tanning beds. Thank you genetics. I should just move somewhere where there isn't much sun so I don't aggravate my delicate skin...like a cave or under a rock somewhere. Or maybe someplace where it rains all the time like Lloro in Colombia (524 inches per year).

4. I was going hiking this weekend. When I took the dog outside the ground felt as though I was walking on sponges. I can just imagine the rest of the leaves coming down in this wind, covering the trails. The trails themselves washed out or muddy. Not fun. I'm a prissy hiker. Pristine conditions and nicely maintained trails please. Thanks.

5. The x hubby is using my apt as a pit stop this weekend on his move from up north to the southwest. It's about time he showed up. His furkid probably isn't even going to remember him. And he's way behind on his dog support too. I probably shouldn't even let him see him. It's so hard for the dog when you have someone pop up every few years to say hi and scratch your head, bring you a few treats. Walk you around the block a few times, only to disappear again for a few more years not to be heard from. Not even a fucking phone call or a birthday present. Do you know who has to pick up those pieces? Who has to hug him when he's looking at the door and whining for the man who has left him once again?

Me. That's who.

Day 14,982: Carytown Cupcakes

Nestled next to the Tokyo Market in Carytown lies a little pink shop by the name Carytown Cupcakes. I thought it would be a great place for my friend and me to pick up dessert.

This is the part where I tell you about my love of the Buttercup Bakeshop in NYC. After I was fortunate enough to have coworkers buy me a birthday cake from there years ago, I was converted and baptized at the altar of amazingly good cupcakes. From there it was a cupcake frenzy having me shop everywhere from Magnolia Bakery to Crumbs. Buttercup was my favorite then, and now.

My friend and I brave busy Carytown to go check the place out. We walk in the pink painted store and head right for the display case. To your left are a few chairs with tiny tables. It’s a clean shop that appears larger than it really is thanks to sparse décor and the high ceilings. There was one gentleman in the corner pecking away on a laptop. The lady behind the counter seemed a bit annoyed when we started asking about her affiliation with Magnolia as loosely implied by their website (there is none, she is just a fan). We left that touchy subject alone and asked about the cakes. We ended up getting six so we could do a proper taste test. Our first impression was how cute they were. Cute meaning tiny. Itty bitty cupcakes. Granted we do live in an age where the ginormous breakfast muffins sold at local coffee shops are the standard, but these were two to three biter cupcakes at best. We thought that it was ok to be a small cupcake as long as you were an amazing cupcake.

We ordered a vanilla (with buttercream icing), carrot (with raisins, pecans and a cream cheese icing), red velvet (with cream cheese icing), german chocolate (with caramel, coconut, and pecan icing), mocha (with coffee flavored icing) and a hoo-yah (dark chocolate and peanut butter with peanut butter icing).

The six cupcakes go into a huge white pastry box emblazoned with a pink sticker and we check out. $16.00 for six cupcakes. That’s an entire 50 cents off the $2.75 per cupcake rate. Wait, ATG, did you say $2.75? Why yes, Gentle Reader, I did. Isn’t that more than…

Why yes it is. Way up in the big city where everything is bigger and overpriced, Buttercup Bake Shop charges $2.25 for a cupcake…and those are The Best Cupcakes on The Planet. Magnolia Bakery, the grandmother of cupcake shops, charges $2.50 for regulars and $3.00 for your fancy breeds. Both shops’ cakes are larger than Carytown Cupcakes.

Now at this point we are optimistically thinking that these must be The New Best Cupcakes on the Planet in order to charge so much for something so small in a city much smaller than, well, you know.

We open the box to find our six wee cupcakes held in place with a cardboard cutout with holes. I’m sure this is meant to keep the cakes from sliding around, but all it seemed to do was emphasize how small they were. The cardboard looks as though the cupcakes should nestle in the cutout like an egg in an egg cup, but they just sat on the bottom of the box with the cardboard around the tiny crown of the cupcake.

Nonetheless we're excited and we’re cutting up samples and putting them on plates for everyone to get a bite and rank our favorites. We taste and, well, they are not the best cupcakes on the planet. They were just your average cupcake. Moist, not too sweet, something you could probably whip up in your own kitchen. The only one that tasted bad was the Hoo-ha, I mean the Hoo-yah (we started calling it a hoo-ha after none of us could finish it). I’m a peanut butter chocolate combo lover and even I found these terrible. Such an odd thing to say about a cupcake, because even average dessert is still dessert.

The favorite among all participants was the red velvet. The decoration was lovely with iridescent sprinkles in the cream cheese icing with a wee sprinkle of red velvet cake on top. (The cake itself was just a standard red velvet cake.) The cream cheese icing was the best thing out of the lot, making appearances on the red velvet cake and the carrot cake.



Would we purchase them again? The consensus was no. $2.75 is just way too expensive for a tiny, average cupcake. With the time it took to find parking in Carytown and then hoof it to the shop and back home we could have been holed up in our kitchen making a dozen cupcakes for a lot less than $29.00.


Carytown Cupcakes
2820-C W Cary Street
(804) 355-CAKE
Hours 11am to 6pm Tues – Fri
11am – 4pm Sat
or until cupcakes are sold out

Day 14,981: The Day She Died...

One of my co-workers died this morning.

I didn't know her too well as she worked in another department. She also wasn't with the company too long before she got sick. Long story short she had some internal cancer which they tried to fix by basically cutting her open, taking out all of her organs, bathing them in chemo stuff, then putting her back together again.

After a long time of healing, she came back to work. Then she went back for a checkup only to find it was back, and more aggressive. Another surgery and this time they just opened her, then closed her back up.

That was about six weeks ago.

She has a son who she wanted to see graduate. She was younger than me. It's so crazy that she was like a little spitfire around the office so full of life. And then wham, her time was up.

Her death affected me even though she was basically someone I may have rode an elevator with once or twice.

Life is such a fleeting thing and you just never know when your number is going to be called. You don't know how much you can accomplish by then, or how much stuff will still be on your to do list, or how many rites of passage you would miss of your friends and family. Life is so random and chaotic. And well, dammit, just love each other.

Day 14,980: Things that make me go hmmm.

I've had to jump through some hoops on two occasions this past week.

The first situation had to do with health insurance. Without getting into too much detail I had to call the insurance company about an e.o.b. they sent. They said I needed to call the lab to fix it. I call the lab and explain everything again. The lab said I had to call my doctor to fix it. I call the doctor and explain everything again to the receptionist. She says I need to call their billing service. I call the billing service and they refer me back to the doctors office. She said I had to talk to the lab tech to fix it. The lab tech wasn't in but I could leave the details on her voice mail. Get the picture?

Today I had to call my bank to respond to a letter they sent me. After fifteen minutes on the phone with a customer service rep I had to ask for a supervisor. I got tired of listening to the non-responsive breathing person on the other end of the phone. I then had to explain everything again. Most importantly I had to explain why their method of handling said situation defies all logic and reasoning on their part. Only to have him call me back later to tell me how to fix it (which like in the first situation I didn't cause) which involved me going to the company financial guru to change some code I don't know about to some other code I don't know about.

I could sit here and gripe about the sheer annoyance of companies making ME fix their mess ups. Really, I could go on about it for hours. If you screw up, you should fix it, not me.

But these situations made me think of elderly people in particular. Or some one with impaired mental ability. Who fixes their stuff? Especially when companies apparently think the customer is supposed to fix their goof ups? Who is the advocate for those folks?

Day 14,979: of black mold and women

This afternoon I was working on putting the plastic up in my bedroom window. I take the curtains down only to discover some water damage from the recent rains. A lot of water damage. I pull on the blind cords to lift the blinds to the very top so I can remove them to assess the situation. Only when I pull on them, the piece where the cord goes in snaps in half. The blinds come tumbling down and I let out a chorus of cuss words that would make a sailor blush. The last thing I feel like doing is buying replacement blinds today. I then start pulling away at some of the water soaked wall only to have huge chunks come off in my hand, eyes, nose, hair and floor. There are rumors of black mold in these apartments and I start thinking of my dying moments from black lung respiratory disease. Not that I know anything like that exists, just because this is my life and stuff like that is the kind of stuff that typically happens to me. Not death, mind you. The other stuff.

At this point you would have placed a call to your landlord, right? Well, your landlord is probably responsive and cares about his property too. Mine, not so much. I've called them to fix stuff, like the drippy sink for instance, only to have them never call me back. Ever. So I end up trying to fix the stuff I can myself.

Enter the spackle.

The hole goes so deep that I'm going to have to do it in layers and hope there won't be any more hard rains while I occupy this place. Meanwhile the plastic is going to have to wait. Totally unfortunate because today was an unusually warm day, perfect for getting that double sided sticky tape to actually stick to the window jambs. But hey, what can ya do? Stuff happens.

Besides that little speed bump, I had a super fantastic weekend. Lots of birthday meals, ice cream and cake. Also lots of long walks (5 miles each day) with one of my friends to a) catch up and b) offset the sweet stuff.

I also drank lots of adult beverages and watched The Hangover. Cute movie with a couple of laugh out loud moments. Thank goodness I've never been so drunk I've lost other people...just myself.