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My Work BFF™ and I went to lunch today. We specifically timed it, so we’d see the first few innings of the Twins game. Franciso Liriano, the most awesome rookie pitchers of the league, was going to be starting. While he was going to be on a limited pitch count to begin with, we were overly excited to see the F-Bomb do some damage back on the mound, regardless of how few pitches he might throw.

Everyone else in Bloomington had the same idea, because we had to wait 20 minutes for a table. By the time we were finally seated, it was the top of the 3rd inning. No sooner than we had ordered our drinks did the entire sports bar grow quite a bit quieter.

We watched Liriano as he throw a horrible pitch Bobby Kielty that Twins catcher Mike Redmond had to dig out of the dirt. Liriano doesn’t through bad pitches like that. And he especially doesn’t walk off the mound after a pitch and follow it by bending down with his hands on his knees. We knew it wasn’t pretty; we just hoped it wasn’t as bad as it is.

There’s no doubt that every Twins fan out there wants to see this kid back in the lineup as soon as possible. Even he wants to be back in the lineup as soon as possible.

The rumor around the sports sites everywhere is that the next step is Tommy John surgery. Tommy John surgery is where they replace the ligament in your elbow with one from another place on your body. Then, you rehabilitate. For an entire year.

Liriano is one of my favorite Twins players, so to see him in the kind of pain that won’t even let him throw more than 30 pitches, it’s sad. I hope the off-season is all it takes to get this phenom back in the lineup. With Liriano and Santana forming one of the most tenacious 1-2 pitching combinations in the league, there’s no telling what could happen.

I don’t really know that my life can regularly continue until I find out what Britney Spears and K-Fed named their new offspring. Becuase, seriously. This shit effects me.

This long. But it’s worth the read, if you haven’t heard about it already. It may be a chapter in my upcoming memoir, “My Secret Life in Santiago”.

Yesterday morning, Jenni sent me a link to an ad on craigslist, which just happened to be listed under the “Missed Connections” part of the site. I’ve looked at those ads before, and usually it’s the patient who loves her doctor:

Dave G. - ER Doctor at Fairview - w4m
Doc, what a shame we didn’t talk longer. I would love to be your patient any day.

or the girl in the black sweater who may have possibly found her soul mate in a Barnes & Noble over lunch today:

Minnetonka Barnes & Noble -lunch today. - w4m - 38
To the gorgeous guy that I saw at Barnes & Noble in Mtka. today. Are you single?
Girl in black sweater..

Can you see how they’re not really something I really become interested in for too long at a time?

The ad that Jenni sent, though, was even better:

you were cute with your ‘boot’ - m4w - 28
hobbling along in downtown minneapolis, hope you find this

Guess who was hobbling along in downtown Minneapolis Friday night with a ‘boot’? Yours truly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another book I finished this summer? Marley & Me.

A first-time dog owner with a dog whose owner called him the World’s Worst Dog - does anyone see a resemblance here?

The cover of the book alone wouldn’t let me leave the book sitting there on the shelf of my local Barnes & Noble. For a fleeting moment, I thought about taking them all home, so each book would have a home. Yes, that’s how obsessed with dogs I’ve become since The Riley Arrival.

While scaring the shit out of a litter of puppies isn’t exactly how I came to pick my goofy dog as mine, it seemed to have work for author John Grogan. Besides, mine was the only one left - if I would have tried to scare him, he would have just sat and stared at me just as long as I wasn’t carrying the new floor lamp I bought that scaries the living hell out of him when I touch it to power it on and off.

With each chapter I read, the similiarities I found between Marley and Riley were… well, scary. The jumping, the chewing, the destruction, and the fierce loyalty - yeah, I had no problem visualizing and connecting with every experience mentioned. Any dog owner that hasn’t experienced at least one thing in this book must have a dog that was put together mechcanically. Separation anxiety, barrier frustration — been there, done that, if you’ll recall. Now, i’m beginning to think those were just fancy words for ‘desperately seeking every ounce of your attention’.

I started this book as I boarded a flight a couple of weeks ago and finished it up before landing in Newark, NJ. Except for the last chapter. I needed a break from the book before finishing the book, as I would imagine any dog-owner/dog-lover would.

When I found out John Grogan had a blog, I had to add it to my RSS reader. I was in hysterics today when I read about his new Golden Retriever’s run-in with Cesar Milan.

Read the blog and read the book; they’re both more than worth your time.

Guess who’s been reading this summer? Yeah, me! Don’t worry, because I’m surprised, too! It must have started with the David Sedaris books my cousin suggested, and from there, it took off. I’ve read more books this summer than I have in the past three years.

Reading, since probably high school, has been really hard for me. Obviously, I know the words and I know what they mean, but it’s just hard for me to sit with a book for more than a chapter or two and really comprehend what I’m reading. I’d rather read the sports page of the newspaper and memorize stats or a bunch of entertainment websites to find out which celebrity is sleeping with their best friend’s ex-boyfriend/girlfriend. I don’t know why it’s that way, but it explains a lot - school, college, training materials, etc.

Not only do I want to start reading, but I need to start reading. The true-crime books I used to swap back and forth with my grandma kept my interest really well, so I knew I had to find something to start with that would really draw me into the book.

Find Me by Rosie O’Donnell is one of the first books I read this summer. I’d been reading Rosie’s blog for a while now, so when she casually mentioned her book in a post she’d made, I figured I’d give it a shot.
I finished the book in less than a week. I read every word in every chapter and even used a bookmark. To me? That’s huge progress.

I don’t really know what I was expecting when I opened the book. It wasn’t humor and a laugh a minute like Ellen’s book, because I knew it wasn’t a book that was meant to generate laughs. Like the title says, it was a book about the author trying to find herself.

The book does skip around - from her childhood, to being a mother, and from being extremely involved in her own charities, to wondering how the success and failures of her life look to her mother that died at an early age. It’s all there in not that many pages at all.

By reading this book, you see more than the former talk-show host obsessing about Tom Cruise and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. You see what she’s escaping when she was filming the highly successful show for the few years it was still running.

I learned a lot from this book. I learned you can’t hide how you’re feeling or who you are from your true friends; they just know. I learned it’s okay to be yourself and not model your life and actions after what you think other people want; it’s not there life, is it? I learned other things that I’ll keep private, because it’s just as important for me to understand and learn things internally as it is externally.

I also learned that I like reading again, and this book was the first of many that I cracked up this summer. And yes, I left them on the bathroom sink, because that’s where I do most of my reading, okay?

We got an email at work today letting us know that we would be having some special guests in the building on Wednesday and Thursday, so we should try to make our workspaces look presentable. In other words, I had to clean my desk today. Anyone that’s known me for any amount of time can tell you, without hesitation, that I am not the neatest person in the world.  Cleanliness may be meant to be next to Godliness, but for me it’s probably closer to as enjoyable as scratching my eyeballs with a yard rake.

I just spent the last hour sorting through the mounds of crap that filled my L-shaped desk. Two boxes of instant oatmeal went into my bottom righthand drawer, joining an unopened bottle of Diet Pepsi Jazz, my headphones, and my work softball jersey. My Excederin Migraine and orange-flavored Tums got pitched into my top righthand drawer, which was still housing my winter supplies from last year - stocking cap with ear flaps, cough syrup, and zinc lozenges. I’m keeping the generic Vicodin out just for dramatic effect.

I threw eight Sharpies, four blue pens, and six blue and orange highlighters into a wicker basket I have on my desk for some reason. Right now, that sole reason is to hold my collection of unuses post-it notes, my Steve Bedrosian and Chris Bosio baseball cards, and a copy of Mr. & Mrs. Smith on DVD.

The four empty water bottles that were on my desk found their way into the trash. I’m not sure why it was so hard to part with them, but I keep looking longingly into my wastebasket to make sure they’re alright.

For about two seconds I thought about trying to combine the two steno notebooks and the legal pad I use to take various notes into one, but I thought better of it. My scatterbrain needs things scattered - that’s just how it works.

To most people, my desk/workspace probably still seems unpresentable. I know for a fact, though, that if I try to put my whiteout, stapler, calculator, tape dispenser, and book of checks into a drawer, I may not be able to properly function.

I wish someone would send a letter to my house, saying importnat people were coming by and I would need my apartment to look presentable. I’m not sure what other reason I have to remove the three loads of laundry that are sitting on my dining room table.

Aside from going to the Twins game Friday night and seeing Invincible, eating some chicken wings, and a very quick trip to the Mall of America yesterday, my entire weekend has resembled much of what Riley demonstrates here:

It may be hard to adjust to work tomorrow.

You all know I have a penchant for white rappers. Vanilla Ice, of course, is my favorite, with Eminem trailing closely behind. I’m going to run the risk of total embarassment here and say I was honestly hoping I could add Kevin Federline to my list of Awesome White Rappers.

He was on The Ellen Degeneres Show this past week. I was overly entertained by his interview with Ellen and was excited. I mean, this could be the next Vanilla Ice for me!

Long story short? No.

The video says it all.

If you were to say to me, “Hey, Wendy! How’s your foot?”, I would reply with one of the following:

• What foot? (This is my reply after taking my generic Vicodin.)
• Let me hack it off with a dull, rusty paper cutter. Then I can hand you the foot and you can look at it your own damn self. (This is my response right now, before my first generic Vicodin of the day has kicked in.)
• Oh, it must be healed! (This is my response after I wake up from my generic Vicodin overnight sleep.)

As you can see, the healing of the foot is not going well. This picture was taken yesterday, and I’m fully aware (and proud) that I was wearing white shoes after Labor Day!

I’ve been in the cast consistently, except for sleeping and showering, since I got it just over two weeks ago. Things were feeling good, so I decided I’d remove it for a quick trip to the Lane Bryant in Rockaway, NJ, where they freebase off the shelves. I didn’t experience any pain at all, so I was excited!

Then, I woke up Wednesday morning and since then, have experienced a constant uncomfortable feeling ever since. If it was uncomfortable enough to make me fill my generic Vicodin prescription, trust me - it was pretty bad.

I have an appointment scheduled for Thursday, which was what the urgent care doctor suggested when I went in the first time. I’ve picked the brain of three of my favorite medical expert friends, and with their persuasion, have decided it’s probably not a great idea to wait that long.

I never realized how limited the cast made me feel, and also how much of a freaking inconvenience it is. Not being completely mobile and able to move about freely is certainly not my idea of a good time.

“Oh, Randy. I can feel your heart beating. Don’t be nervous. I love you. Let’s get through this game together.”

“Jorge, I can’t do this anymore. When we’re not together, I always watch Ice Age, just so I can be reminded of you. We have to end this now. I don’t care what inning we’re in.”