two dolla

i like link roundups

1. I keep reading stories (like this one) about a new outfielder the Cubs are signing named Fukudome. It will come as no surprise that I keep pronouncing it FUCK-U-DOME.
2. Cindi told me about ApartmentRatings.com tonight, so I looked up my current dwelling. It’s funny. And I didn’t even write one yet.
3. ESPN is listing the Twins as one of the five most horribly shitty lineups in the league for the 2008 season. Hey, that’s great news! Sigh.
4. WikiHow always gives me great ideas – like how to break a beer bottle with your bare hands. It also makes me want to go to bartending school, so I’ll have a reason to make layered shots on a regular basis.
5. One month from today, I’ll be a bebida on a crucero de lujo with my amigos. (I need to learn Spanish somewhere other than Babel Fish.)
6. Best prank in the world? Right here. Or at least for the time being.

w-zero-zero-t

w00t – expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

That’s the 2007 Word of the Year, and I’m sure you noticed that if you read anything on the internet at all today.

Merriam-Webster’s president, John Morse, said "w00t" was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology. (via)

Whimsy and new technology? How about it blends stupid with even more stupid.

ABCNews goes for the stretch, though. They try to compare this lame ass, alphanumerical word with a line from Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman:

For technophobes, the word also is familiar from the 1990 movie "Pretty Woman," in which Julia Roberts startles her date’s upper-crust friends with a hearty "Woot, woot, woot!" at a polo match.

No, dumbasses. That was around the same time as Arsenio Hall did close to the same thing during his late night talk show, and so help me if the Internet says Arsenio Hall invented the word w00t, I will never use it again.

Word #7 on the list? Apathetic. Which is exactly how this whole thing makes me feel.

teet

I was resting today. And by resting, I mean curled up in my bed with my puppy right next to me, both ofus on the verge of nearly falling asleep. My TV was on the animal channel, because it’s Riley’s favorite… and because there’s nothing else on at 4pm that I want to subject myself to watching.

It may have been The Jeff Corwin Experience that was on, but Fatso the Dog and I were bouncing in and out of consciousness, so I don’t remember anything that was going on. I only remember waking up to hear this:

"It smells like milk."

Pause.

"Is that her teet?"

And that’s when I learned black bears smell like dried milk.

I don’t like being woken up by the word teet.

mounting and drilling

I decided last night that I wanted to hang up a shelf. Yes, I’m moving in less than 3 months, but dammit, I wanted to hang a shelf. I have several wall-mounting shelves just hanging around my apartment, never have been mounted.

Due to unforeseen circumstances (couldn’t find the right drill bit, didn’t have screws, it was way too late to be drilling on a wall I share with my neighbors), I didn’t get it finished until just a few minutes ago. And now I want to hang all of them. This is why I don’t fire up the old power tools very often.

If it were up to me, I’d seriously have a workshop somewhere, so I could build things. Lots of things. But probably things that didn’t require a lot of sanding or any use of a router (the wood kind, not the internet-involved kind), mainly because I don’t have the patience for that kind of shit. I just like to bang and cut. And clearly drill, since that’s all I can think about doing today.

In 8th grade, I took Industrial Arts 2, which isn’t something girls take. It just another girl and I among a sea of 24 boys. Keep in mind these were 14 year old boys, which meant they’d much rather take us out back behind the PE equipment shed and touch our boobies than watch us make ice scrapers, metal tool boxes, and wooden clocks (mine was shaped like a backboard, complete with a nerf hoop, thank you very much).

I should have taken industrial arts in high school. I couldn’t, though, because it interfered with marching band. And the marching band teacher was way too hot. (I want to link to his current website, showing his amazing realty skills in Arizona, but that would be wrong. Also, I’m not sure why we all thought he was that hot.)

Okay, I need to go mount some things.

To my wall, dirty.

no more trading without my approval

I want to move out of Minnesota. It’s really just for sports-related reasons, but still. I think it’s a valid excuse.

The Timberwolves trade everyone to Boston.

The Twins let one of my top three favorite players go to another team, and try to trade another one of my top three favorite players to any other team that will offer them something.

The Vikings. Well, whatever. They’re the Vikings.

And now the Lynx are rumored to be trading Lindsey Harding. This is where I draw the line.

Harding was the first pick overall in the WNBA draft last season and has been trying to engineer a trade to the Comets ever since.

She went to high school in Houston (where the Comets play), so I can kinda understand that. I don’t like it, but I understand the logic behind it.

Harding for one of the Comets’ centers and their 5th pick in this year’s draft sounds like a good deal, but it’s Lindsey Harding. LINDSEY HARDING.  Our options, if this should go past just a rumor, would be Sancho Lyttle or Michelle Snow. Sancho has an awesome name; Michelle DUNKS.

When we hung out she gave me her autograph during a post-game fan appreciation type thing, she was super nice. She wasn’t one of those scribble-scribble-next type of autograph-signing players (no, my most favorite player had to pull that shit!); she was all, "hey, thanks for coming. Here you go. Thanks again. You’re awesome." (maybe not the last part, but still.) Stuff like that really resonates with fans in a terrific way. ESPECIALLY ME. Now that I know she’s wanted to play in Houston since she was drafted, I may be a little less of a gigantic fan, though.

Sports make me all emo nowadays. I need to go back to work, so I can have real grown up things to want to slit my wrists about and not who’s going to be playing point guard for the Lynx during the first year I have season tickets.

this got longer than it should have

I just got a call that I’d been waiting for ever since I turned in my notice to Get the Fuck Out vacate my current apartment. It was from the girl I’d originally rented the apartment from, and ironically, she’d quit just a few months after renting my apartment to me. One of her big "selling points" in the sales pitch of the century to get me to sign my lease was that the former management company (Equity Apartments) was not only a great place to live, but potential renters could see that by the fact that the employees were so loyal and stayed around for so long. She was a nice girl, and I desperately needed an apartment, so SOLD.  This was in February 2006. Turns out, she’s recently come back to work, because A) she hated the old management company and B) the things the new management company would be doing were going to be so great. Right.

About nine months ago, the new management company got the balls rolling with pissing me off at least once a month. I could go back and link to posts, but it’d just piss me off even more. So, you can have a brief list:

• They don’t enforce any type of quiet time.
• They often can’t find packages that are delivered to the office.
• The guy that works in the office is an asshole.
• The customer service is shitty.
• They take forever to fix things in common areas.
• The "security system" doesn’t actually record anything in the building.
• My locks were changed and they didn’t tell me until I came home one day.
• The appearance has gone downhill (half painted walls, trash everywhere, etc.)
• I was going to have to pay another deposit if I wanted to move into a 1BR in my current building.
• Remember the shit that backed up onto my bathroom floor and took days to fix?
• How about the time the bathroom above was leaking into my shower?
• The laundry facilities only work every now and then.
• Nobody picks up their dog shit.
• A blended family of hippos, rhinos, and buffalo live upstairs.
• A family of 6540 meerkats live next door.

More »

last call for boob cookies

Or actually boob-related cookies, although I wonder if we’d have a better response if we sold cookies actually shaped like boobs.

In any case, tomorrow’s the last day to put your order in for Team Boobylicious’ very own homemade holiday cookies. You can read more information on our team’s blog (I will forever hate that word!) and place an order online, too.

I’m going to follow Jumi’s lead on this one, too. For those of you not in my local delivery area (which includes the greater Twin Cities metro area and the mid-Missouri area), I’ll pay the shipping for you. It’ll be my little $6 Christmas gift to you. Just be sure to put my name – Wendy Timberlake-Pitt-Mauer-Mann-Bartender-at-the-90s (while I don’t believe in marriage much anymore, I believe in making sure I have all their last names, so I can seem prestigious and fancy) – in the "heard about" field. You can also just put Wendy or two dolla or anything that’ll make sense, really.

Thank you in advance, from both me and my boobs.

fishing for lunch in 1988

I scanned over 100 pictures from various photo albums when I was home over my extended Thanksgiving break and the only thing that I’ve actually done with them is look at them just about every day. While I’m very excited to have copies of a lot of my favorite pictures, I also wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t share. Lucky you.

There was never any doubt when I was growing up that I was lucky enough to have the most amazing grandparents in all the land. I’m not exaggerating at all. They took us camping, fishing, out to lunch, shopping, to church, and let us spend the night on a regular basis. Pretty much the best childhood ever for a kid, and this particular picture shows just how much they’d do for us when we were kids.

It’s 1988 and I’m 10 years old. My parents, my brother, and both sets of my grandparents were headed out onto Truman Lake in Warsaw, Missouri, to do some crappie fishing. I can’t remember why, but my parents and maternal grandparents hopped on their pontoon boat, while my paternal grandparents, brother, and I jumped into their bass boat.

As we always did when we went out fishing, we packed lunches and around noontime, the grandmas started making sandwiches for everyone. This is where I realize I was more than spoiled. The tuna fish was on the pontoon boat; I was on the other boat and that’s what I wanted for lunch. Instead of saying, "No, Wendy, you’re going to have to have peanut butter/ham and cheese/whatever the other option was", my grandparents and parents devised a plan to get a tuna sandwich across the water from boat to boat.

What you see in this picture (and can see in more detail if you click on it) is my Granny Viv reeling in a cooler lid with a tuna sandwich on top. My Grandma Jean made the tuna sandwich just the way I love it (tuna and mayo, no lettuce!) and set it on a napkin in the cooler lid. Granny Viv cast her line into the pontoon boat, where I’m sure my dad used his ridiculous I-can-make-anything-work abilities to secure the line to the cooler lid. He put it back into the water, and several minutes later, I was one happy 10 year old, complete with tuna sandwich.

now this is the christmas spirit

I just wrapped fifteen Christmas gifts with $1 worth of wrapping paper, thanks to the Dollar Spot at Target. I finished doing my shopping this afternoon, and needed to get the five thousand bags off my floor, so I decided I might as well start wrapping. Since I was feeling so accomplished, I decided I’d take a break and do some nice quiet time things, but it appears that is not an option on a Saturday night in this building I call home.

There have been approximately forty-seven shopping cart collisions right outside my door, and I’m pretty sure I missed some sort of a parade featuring large stampeding animals on the floor above me. Now I’m angry and irritated, and have no desire to stay in my apartment and continue to hear ridiculous random noises that are loud enough to shake the things on my walls. What kind of a parent lets their 48 children play soccer and/or hide-and-seek and/or shopping cart smash up derby in a public hallway? The easy answer? The people in the apartment next to mine.

#113 if you want to come kick their door in. I have a sick fantasy of doing it every time I let Riley out in the middle of the night. I’d put on my fake-Timberlands and just kick the shit out of that door. Granted, with my awesome luck, I would dislocate a hip or only get my foot halfway through before it got stuck. So, instead, I just bitch about it because I’m a passive aggressive asshole and everything makes me angry lately.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Later that night… I just took naps. Two of them. And now I feel amazingly better. And will probably be awake until sunrise.

forgotten friday shuffle

1. Can You Feel It Now? – Tremolo
2. You’re So Vain – Carly Simon
3. How to Avoid an Assassination – the Stnnnnnnnnnnng
4. Home – Sheryl Crow
5. Come Back to Bed – John Mayer
6. One More Cup of Coffee – White Stripes
7. Bring ‘Em In – 50 Cent
8. It’s All About the Pentiums – Weird Al
9. In The Club – 50 Cent
10. Rollover D.J. – Jet

A fantastic selection indeed for this week’s Friday Shuffle.

It’s ass cold in my apartment and even more than ass cold outside. You know when there’s a frozen thermometer, that means you’re not supposed to go outside or you could quite possibly freeze to death in less than two seconds, right?

Also, today’s my mom’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Ma.