103 and muggy, with occasional thunderstorms in the area

right, so.

having landed in the city that care forgot, gotten myself some overalls and other street-urchin gear (next up: these) and fully dedicated myself to the idea of not working at my job for an ENTIRE MONTH, i find myself with - no surprise - a lot of time on my hands.

that is, when i'm (we're) not sleeping through the hot part of the day, which seems to last between approximately 9:30am and 8:00pm, eating delicious snack plates such as this one -



- and trying to convince the dog to stop eating bones people have tossed on the street. with this wealth of time, i have already begun many projects, including one where i allow people to look at some photos i have taken. unfortunately this particular venture has stalled in its infancy because i am easily overwhelmed by photo software.

on the advice of some asshat on the internet, relatively long ago (in a digital age, a month is a lifetime) i downloaded gimp. i do not regret this decision, even though it confuses me quite frequently. i turned off the little tips it gives at start-up (example: when the somethingsomething doesn't appear in bold, it doesn't have an alpha channel, somethingsomething, etc.) because they were making me feel panicky. but when i muddle through, and occasionally i do, i am generally pleased with the results.

that snack plate is another example. hardly sham-gallery material, but still quite a nice effort for someone who has yet actually to decide what to do with her life.

i also, like everyone with these white boxes, and i presume also the people with the silver and gray and black boxes with fruit silhouettes on them, have iphoto. to my novice but decidedly utilitarian eye it seems to suck bigtime. mostly because it appears to create extra files where none are needed. i thought this was a folly reserved solely for PCs and their affiliate manufacturers.

it's not as though i want to really do much with my pictures. so far i like the crop option, the resize option, and the brightness/contrast adjuster thingy, because working together they sometimes pull off the impression that i know more than i do about taking pictures.

maybe i should have stuck with my original plan to write the great american novel.

possibly mentally related to the british term for "sweater"

here is something i want to know: does anyone actually wear rompers? just the fact that it's called a "romper" makes me think of small british children several generations ago. romping isn't something we do in the modern world. or is it? am i missing out? kim kardashian, famous only for being kim kardashian (and, to a lesser degree, for admitting she has cellulite - gosh how brave! she's such a role model!), wore one recently while rollerblading. i know this because she was pictured doing so in two different tabloids, both of which i purchased at walgreen's on separate occasions this week. but then again, nobody seems to go rollerblading anymore either. so is it just kim kardashian, lone wolf? or do real people also sport tiny jumpsuits?

this is the sort of question i think only a resident of los angeles is qualified to answer, because everywhere else in the country people are too chickenshit or too limited by their climate to take truly bizarre fashion risks.

the new scion xBs are even stranger looking than the original model

after a three-hour carshare bonanza this morning, during which i made an appearance at not one but two safeways, i acquired a second litterbox. this is because the internet told me that the reason there are "accidents" (although as a potty-training professional i can tell you, cat shit in the bathtub is not an accident, it is a statement) is that the three fuzzy residents of this shoebox i call an apartment don't care to share. i myself don't particularly care for sharing a bathroom either but my social standards are somewhat different from theirs. so now there is a litterbox in the living room as well. it sounds distasteful until you remember two very important facts: 1) no carpet and 2) they hang out in there way more than i do.

i spent a good ten minutes in petco's cat treat and cat toy aisle before i began to get the sinking feeling that i was becoming a crazy cat lady about 50 years too early. so i just hauled the box and a giant bucket of refillable litter to the counter without buying 3 roll-a-treats. which they didn't have anyway. more neon feathers and mouse-shaped objects than you can shake a stick at, but if you did shake a stick at them your cat would probably care more about the stick than the $5.99 wad of fleece dusted with catnip that will end up behind your couch in 48 hours or less.

now that facebook basically = twitter, writing actual paragraphs just seems so time-consuming

gosh, and you know i actually don't really care for bullet lists these days but our whole lives just changed and there's only so many ways to properly convey that. so anyway:

* cleaning service: told thanks but no thanks
* my SFL (holla atcha california supreme court! what's it gonna be?): living in new orleans
* said SFL: now the proud parent of a dog and a wee kitten, bringing our grand total of animals to five. no, you read that right, five.
* apartment: basically clean because now i live here alone. unlike the last time i lived alone, i no longer have cable. consequently i sleep more.
* work: okay. largely due to my affinity for designing better forms for paperwork, i may become some kind of big deal to the powers-that-be.
* new orleans: dream town. hot though. going there for the entire month of july.
* money: tight.
* morale: teetering.
* semester at sucka free city college: over.
* weekend plans: SLEEP.

allow me to be the last to announce my entrance into the bourgeoisie

we have hired a cleaning service. in characteristic defensiveness-despite-nobody-batting-an-eyelash, i would like to explain this decision. my sainted grandmother - no, really, except for making me feel fat for eating more than one cookie the woman really ought to be canonized - worked as a housecleaner for, oh, pretty much her entire life. and by that i mean until she retired at eighty because she believed no one of that age should drive a car and thus could not commute because buses in seattle rarely go to fancy neighborhoods. now, there are two categories of professional housecleaners: those whose own homes are actually kind of a wreck, and those who could showcase their living rooms for better homes & gardens given five minutes notice.

my sainted grandmother was of the latter category. i always found it extremely soothing. when i lived by myself i made every effort - and occasionally failed miserably - at keeping house in this fashion. of course, when i lived by myself i could also subsist only on hummus and fuji apples, watch seven hours of law&order a day, and generally do whatever, whenever. it should come as a surprise to no one that married legal-partnership-via-a-legislative-loophole life is different. i mean, holy shit, there's another person here in the apartment! who was not raised on fascist standards of cleanliness! who has her own possessions, some of which are so foreign to me (witness: bike accessories, cooking gizmos, a thousand library books) that i would not know where to begin with organization!

oh, man, and then there's entropy. that shit's the devil. if an object is left alone, not only will it remain in the same spot while a person does things (like work full-time and take two classes at sucka-free city college or teach undergraduates while studying for an immense oral exam) it will begin to gather accessorial grime! horrifying.

i have said for years - and people who have known me that long can attest - that i would never have someone else clean my house. but recently, with the lunatic wisdom of the actually quite young, i have realized that there is very little i would not do to maintain my grip on sanity.

enter sarah pfingsten of in its place, a woman who claims to fall into the former category of housecleaner illustrated above, a fact which already makes me feel less like an utter domestic failure. plus i have never met her - my SFL handles the normal-working-hours business of household maintenance - and am unlikely ever to actually be at home while someone is cleaning my house for me, a situation i believe i would find intolerable. so maybe now i can be at home when not at work or class and do something other than flagellate myself for resting when there are dust bunnies to exterminate. gosh, that'd be great. self-punishment, despite appearances, is not really my jam.