For another, I have learned that it takes me only two days to epically fail at updating this blog every day for 30 days.  However, having received both an Amazon Kindle (the bestest gift EVER!) and Rock Band for Christmas, I would consider the fact that I am writing a blog at all to show a considerable amount of dedication and resolve.  (Or it might indicate that I played so much Rock Band that I got a blister on my right ring finger and had to pack in my drum sticks for the night.)

Speaking of which, I haven’t petted my Kindle in the last few hours…I wouldn’t want it to feel lonely, so lonely. . .

In less neurotic news, I almost fell out of my chair in court today.  While I am always anxious to make a lasting impression on the judges, methinks the graceless splat of my large frame hitting the floor is not the kind of message I’d like to be sending to the local judiciary.  This is why slouching is really bad, kids – not because it could lead to looking like you have Captain Hook’s appendage up your arse later in life, but because it could cause random acts of utter embarassment.  This has been a Public Service Announcement.

So, Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah kids, for the next 30 days it’s going to be all Snarky, all the time.  Perhaps I shall become more pithy in short, controlled bursts.  Or, instead, daily sound bytes from yours truly could be a disaster of John Kerry-like proportions.  Only time and experimentation will tell.

Today, I would also like to note that I am grateful for the awesomeness that is Chipotle.  Fast, cheap, delicious, and requiring absolutely no work from me whatsoever.  And as a bonus, my inner tree hugger (really, there is one, she’s just very, very tiny) can feel good about the humanely-raised meat (until, of course, the eventual lawsuit that proves that Chipotle engages in false advertising to hide the fact that its cows and chickens are the victims of child-labor and illicit barnyard trafficking).  Nom nom.

Some may view this as psychosis, but I find it no more psychotic than people who pay mad money for NFL Sunday Ticket and show up to Green Bay Packers games semi-nude in the Winter (it should be cruel and unusual punishment to expose nipples to those kind of temperatures).  At least I’m supporting a sport that (a) is actually a WORLD sport in that it is actually played in virtually every county in the world (as opposed to American football, where the Super Bowl champion claims to be the World Champion every year despite the fact that much of the planetary population couldn’t care less); (b) values true physical fitness (as opposed to a sport where you play for, say, a minute and a half and then get a huff-and-puff break and man boobies are acceptable); (c) is almost impossible to play well on any sort of body-enhancing drug (Barry Bonds and his ever-expanding neck wouldn’t last ten minutes on the footy field); and (d) where the resident players may not be the brightest bears in the bunch, but are generally not knife-wielding street thugs (hello, Ray Lewis). 

Besides, I think it shows an incredible amount of restraint on my part that I haven’t yet purchased either FCBTV or ArsenalTV (which tend to air those few pesky Carling Cup and Deutscher Pokal games that all the money in the world can’t buy on broadcast TV).  On the other hand, Sassyfras and I make sure that we purchase each year’s edition of FIFA Soccer for the PS3 on the day of its release, so we probably aren’t saving too much money by foregoing online soccer porn for PS3 interactive soccer porn.  (But, at least the PS3′s dual shock controller vibrates.  Neither FCBTV nor ArsenalTV can deliver that kind of action.)

And so it has been that I have found myself in the past few weeks, slack-jawed in front of my television, cursing a variety of deities, players, and passerby, for the horrendously poor performance of my beloved soccer team, FC Bayern Munich (aka FC Hollywood).  My team - a once mighty force that comfortably acquired championship hardware with nary an exertion of the pinky toe on their left foot – is but 8th in their league and probably won’t even make it to the next round of Champions League, having pretty much raised their hindquarters in the air and begged the lads of Bordeauxto stick it to them over the past four weeks (for those of you who spent the last few sentences believing that I am speaking some sort of strange, foreign language, NY Giants and AZ Cardinals fans will currently appreciate how I feel).  We have a new coach who is about as effective as the rhythm method and looks sort of like someone who is accused of doing inappropriate things with young boys.  We have a $35 million euro striker who has splinters up his nuggets from riding the pine and a $60 million euro midfielder who seems to be made of highly breakable glass.  In sum, Saturday has become a holy day of grimacing and hand-wringing for me and drinking before 8 am is not out of the question (as German Bundesliga games tend to air at about 6:30 a.m. local time). 

Indeed, it has been so bad lately that not even my virtual PS3 Bayern team can escape the clutches of the Bayern implosion – yesterday, I was virtually fired as the virtual manager of the virtual Bayern team on FIFA10 (for losing fewer games than the current manager of Bayern Munich, I might add) and had to sink my head in shame, put my virtual tail between my virtual legs and accept a managerial job at lowly Exeter City, the only virtual team that would take me!  (This, I suppose, is my just desserts for thinking myself a far more capable PS3 soccer maven than I evidently am…the “Professional” level on FIFA10 is evidently far beyond my thumb-clicking skillz).

And yet, you could not pull me away from my weekly Bayern game with a crowbar and dental floss (unless your name was Sassyfras and Arsenal had a match at the same time – thank goodness for that beautiful invention, the DVR).  Despair as I might (and pull my hair out as I may – I have plenty left), they are still my team and I were I not to stick with them through the rough patches, I would not be much of a fan, now would I?.  I’ve even decided to spend a virtual year as the virtual manager of Exeter City on FIFA10 in hopes that Bayern will see the beauty of my virtual management style and will, once again, come calling.  Until then, FC Hollywood, until then. . .

For all of you out there who are even beginning to contemplate a move of some distance, I have sage words of wisdom for you: either suck it up and pay through the nose and ass to have one company move you, from alpha to omega, loading/unloading/driving/and everything in between OR sell everything that won’t fit in your vehicle and embrace the beauty of being free from material objects. Do NOT under any circumstances hire a local unloading/loading company by the hour to load your stuff onto a freight vehicle that has only a pre-set amount of linear feet available to you based on a faulty computer program, especially, and this is important kids, when you live a mile off the grid off a dirt road that cannot support the weight of a 16-wheel rig. If you do not heed my advice, the following events MAY occur:

(1) Your seemingly friendly local movers, who quoted you a price of $400 for the job (but are paid by the hour), may end up costing almost $900 based on the fact that you have stairs, own more heavy shit than you thought you did, have a foreperson from Romania who does not communicate well with the other two Spanish-speaking movers, and are secretly charged for rolls of tape and "specialized" boxes that the movers used (at $6 per roll and $15 per box) without your permission and despite the fact that you had rolls of tape available for their use and abuse. Screaming matches with moving company management in which fraud allegations and litigation are threatened may follow.

(2) You will run out of your allotted space on the freight moving truck, because although you allowed for two linear feet over what their computer program told you that you needed (because you’re Type-A that way), well, you were a cotton-headed ninnymugins for trusting a computer program (e.g., see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator oevure, and TRON). You will then either be forced to have a sidewalk fire sale on whatever doesn’t fit on the freight truck or beg and barter with the freight moving company to load and unload a SECOND truck with your extra stuffs, so that now your move is not in one fail swoop, but two rather inefficient swaps.

(3) Your stuff will be broken, damaged, chipped, and dirty on account of the fact that linear space moving trucks require one to follow the "pile high, my son" theory of packing. You may wonder if removing the dining room chair that is sticking precariously out of the morass of furniture about 3/4ths of the way to the diaphanous ceiling of the freight truck will be the "Jenga" piece-de-resistance.

(4) You will have to hire a THIRD moving company (in addition to the loaders and the freight company) to unload the freight truck and shuttle your worldly goods along the one mile of oh-so-scenic-and-yet-oh-such-a-pain-in-your-ass dirt road leading up to your new three acre tarantula-bearing estate. This will inevitably cause the unloading process to last five to six hours, when it should have only lasted two hours under normal operating conditions. However, if you’re smart, at this stage, you will have figured out to hoodwink the unloading moving company into a flat rate job estimate, thereby avoiding problem #1 (because lord knows they won’t anticipate that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would possibly attempt to move in the manner described above).

(5) You will end up paying equal to or more than the estimates you received for total moving solution companies, and will now simply have more headaches and a harder time getting all the bills together for the moving tax deduction for next year. On the upside, if you’re a believer in whatever doesn’t kill you make you stronger, well then, you just paid for an injection of titanium rods into your ego. Congratulations.

Oh, and one last word of advice – never, ever, ever, if you can avoid it, plan a cross-country trip with yours truly. While my laissez-faire, last-minute packing ethos works perfectly fine for in-city moves (where I can slink back to my old place after my friends have helped me move and clear up the detritus littering my floor and closets), it is wholly incompatible with an organized launch across the nation. Sassyfras should be given a medal, or at least a year’s worth of slave labor.

Speaking of Sassyfras – the FUN part of our trip was the part where we arranged our five cats (see above reference to freak circus sideshow of pets that perform no special tricks whatsoever) into five kitty carriers and five sets of kitty-sized leashes and harnesses), ourselves plus luggage, and my 70-80-bottle wine collection into a BMW 335i two-door coupe for our own temperature-controlled cross-country voyage. Along the way, I learned some valuable lessons – (a) I am not allergic to cats unless you place five of them within close proximity to me for four days in an enclosed space less than 14 cubic feet; (b) the Meox Mix "meow meow meow meow" song is NOT entertaining if it persists longer than an hour; (c) organic pet sedatives are da bomb; (d) attempting to walk five cats on leashes at rest stops and restaurants is inefficient, unruly, and would cause a diaper-clad walrus with an alien growing out of its head to look at you funny; (e) Best Westerns allow pets in pretty much every state of the union; (f) Arkansas has six dry counties and a roadside billboard that gives you the number for Satan (which we failed to write down in enough time to call it and see if it rang either of our cell phones); (g) the birth places of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Andrew Jackson are more or less off the same highway; (h) the United States would get much prettier if we allowed the Western part of Texas to secede from the union; and (i) if your relationship can survive all of the above, you’re probably pretty set for a life of peace and happiness.

Needless to say, we finished the trip with less wine than we started (although, in no event did we drink in any of the six dry states in Arklansas; indeed, we neglected to even stop in any of them), and we are not moving our boot-ays out of this house for a good, looooooooooong while.

Example #1 – New and Amusing Ways To Hurt Yourself – despite the fact that I've been playing sports since I was 5 years old, it wasn't until around about the ripe old age of 30 that the body started saying "fuck you" to me when I attempted to throw it around as if it were a lithe, teenage incarnation of itself.  There was the broken forearm playing rec league soccer, followed by the torn shoulder tendons playing rec league softball, followed by bursitis in the knee playing rec league flag football.  Notice that I have never really injured myself playing COMPETITIVE sports…just the "I'm Way Too Old To Be Playing Sports, But I Just Can't Help Myself and my Beer Belly" leagues.  Well, now I've decided to say "fuck you" to my body right back by enrolling in an exercise regimen known as "Crossfit."  For those of you who are unaware of this modern day panacea of pain, Crossfit is a combination of Olympic weightlifting (wherein the weights are heavy and fall down and go boom on the ground often), gymnastics (and you thought that rings were just for short men wearing leotards!), cardio (mostly rowing with a dash of running thrown in), plyometrics (burpee is NOT a carbonated slurpee), and more traditional forms of torture (such as the push-up, pull-up, sit-up – why is it always an "up" instead of a "down?").  Thus far, I've managed to pull my trap muscle twice (oh, the joys of jerk presses), bruise the heck out of my knees (when you start doing 50-70 burpees, they get a wee bit out of control), and make steam rise from the top of my head in 55 degree weather (that would be during THIS workout), but on the positive side, I can now do a double-under (take that, Rocky Balboa!), my vertical in basketball has shot above traditional white-girl status, and I can actually do a pull-up or two (though far less than the former competitive gymnast who is in my class and smokes the rest of us mere mortals on a regular basis).  Here's to hoping my body starts liking the benefits and gives up its pursuit of making me replace every freakin' joint in my body before the age of 50, shall we?

Example #2 – The Shortcomings of One's Wardrobe – as it so happens, a wardrobe full of Brooks Brothers shirts and sweaters is absolutely useless unless you work at a law firm every day.  While my 30-50 shirt collection of Brooks Brothers' famous non-iron hits (pointed-collar dress shirts in every stripe-y color of the rainbow) appeared to make sense when I was wearing them on a daily basis and didn't want to show up at work dressed in the same shirt on any two given weeks (because that would be, like, unfashionable and stuff), now they just sit in my closet like a furloughed army, voluminous and yet impotent.

Example #3 – The Myth of the Perfect Household – when you work full-time, you fantasize that, if you could only take a day, or a week, or a month off from your job, then you could turn to all those nittering details in life that you cannot accomplish when locked inside a glass cage for 8-10 hours a day.  WIth enough time, you muse, the DMV and post office would be a snap, you would always make it to the gym, your e-mail Inbox would be well-organized, your bills would all be paid, your house would be tidy, and dag nabit, you might just have extra time to volunteer at a local charity.  Lies, lies, and more lies, I say!  Perhaps this would happen if you had ALL your shit together BEFORE you stopped working full-time (which seems about as likely as my five cats breaking out in a rendition of "Bibbidy-Bobbidy-Boo" and cleaning my house), but work, or no work, errands and tasks create a mountain faster than you can swing a pickaxe.  While my 3,500 new and unopened e-mail Inbox messages have been whittled down to a mere 1,500, there are always fresh shills, updates, and correspondence to take their place.  While I no longer slave 8-10 hours a day for money, I am now forced to think of more creative ways to fund my Brooks-Brothers-and-BMW-buying lifestyle (recent innovations include paying WAY more attention to my tax deductions this year and pondering the relative profitability of "The Lesbian Cat Lady" webcam).  And while running errands mid-day is far easier due to less traffic and less unwashed humanity in the aisles, the errands seem to take about as long, either because I am less efficient due to the fact that I do not have the allure/guilt of work hanging over my head or because the soccer moms and retirees with whom I am now competing with for my place in the Target Shopping Hall of Fame are WAY slower than their corporate-ladder climbing counterparts.

Now, creative writing is something that I have loved ever since I started my very first blog post in 2003 (back when Blogger was king and I lived in Brooklyn, New York the summer after law school and saw gay go-go dancers in the store window of the local Borders).  It is rather unfortunate that I didn't actually have a yen for creative writing in college, when I actually could have taken, oh I don't know, a creative writing class or two, but it's not like being absolutely unqualified has ever stopped me from doing anything before (I mean, hey, I made the varsity badminton team in high school without ever knowing what the hell a "shuttlecock" was – pretending you know what the hell you're doing goes a long way!).  However, it appears I will have to get over my own inner editor in order to actually commit an entire book (or even a damn page) to Microsoft Word.  I couldn't write two sentences down this morning without attempting to rework those sentences to make more sense, more fun, more snark.  This may be a long, slow, tortuous process, but hey, so is the FBI background check, so it should work out.

In other news, I have added the title of "Handy Woman" to my list of personal accomplishments . . . since moving into Sassyfras's place in the country, I have installed an under-the-counter coffee mug holder, assembled a Container Store baker's rack, and most recently, installed a new door handle and lock.  I don't think it takes away from my accomplishments at all to admit that in the midst of replacing aforementioned door handle and lock, I momentarily (okay, maybe for about 10 minutes) locked both myself and Sassyfras inside the spare bedroom (a by-product of assembling the lock portion and then closing the door without assembling the door handle portion).  Alas, the cats were of absolutely no use in freeing us from our temporary prison (though one of them did seem to try by manuevering his paws through the hole in the door; I tried to pass him a credit card to pick the lock, but he just started eating it).  I did finally manage to pick my newly installed lock with a delicate combination of banging it with a hammer and jiggling it with a long, flat drill bit just as Sassyfras was contemplating how to escape the third-story room through the window.  Something tells me THAT would not have been pretty.

And what better environment for it, really, than my current location in lovely Fairfax, Virginia.   For those of you lucky enough not to be subjected to my entreaties for people to help me lift my 1,000 pound dining room hutch, I recently relocated to the suburban wilds of Fairfax – the site of Sassafras’ abode (aka the Country House) – in order to save up money for my upcoming move back to the desert (that would be Arizona, not Northern Africa).  That move shall occur sometime between the months of April and July, depending on when my security clearance is approved, because we all know that a dorky white girl who has two certificates for perfect attendance at public high school could be a serious threat to national security. 

In the meantime, I am a Fairfax housewife charged with the responsibility of cleaning, packing, and getting everything ready for the big move.  I was just getting used to this label when I ventured out the door for a lunch-time Baja Fresh run and saw the REAL housewives of Fairfax County.  Oi!  While I am happily scarfing down a Burrito Ultimo and reading about China’s economic woes in The Economist magazine with zeal, I look around and notice women in pastel-striped sweaters (horizontally striped pastels at that), scrunchies, and hair that has never met a bottle of mousse or de-frizz lotion either cooing at their newborn suburban babies or getting all googly-eyed over the two tables of Fairfax County Firefighters present (all of whom were a fair bit shorter than me and not likely to be featured in any firefighter calendars without their shirts off anytime soon).  I scurried out of the Baja Fresh as quickly as possible just in case Suburbopastelitis is spread through airborne toxin and now firmly claim that I am a “Very Important Independent Contractor Who Happens To Be Stationed in Fairfax While Awaiting Redeployment” rather than a “Fairfax Housewife.”  A mouthful to say, to be sure, but a far less scary prospect.

Speaking of scary prospects, I almost got into a fight last night on the basketball court with a lovely gentleman by the name of “Trip” from the University of Texas.  This particular Texan was such a charming example of Southern manhood that at the end of the first period of play, he rebounded a ball and held it over my head while I tried to smack it out of his hands (an event not likely to occur under the law of physics, given he was easily 6’4″ or above and I’m a respectable, but far shorter, 5’11″).  When the buzzer sounded, he smiled and firmly smacked my ass.  Now, I’m well aware of the common nature of ass-smacking that goes occurs on the field of play, but it is generally reserved for teammates who are each of the same gender.  I, myself, have never been much of an ass-smacker on the field of play . . . it strikes me as a thoroughly ludicrous show of emotional support compared to, say, the fist bump, the hand slap, the head butt, or the chest bump, but I digress . . .

When I informed Sassafras of Mr. Gallant’s slap-happy nature, she kindly informed him that the next time he slapped my ass, she would be sure to hit him hard.  You would think that such protection of a little lady (that would be me, and not 5’2″ Sassafras) would be understood by a good ‘ol Texas boy, but instead, on one occasion on the court when she did, indeed, hit him hard, he remarked within my earshot, “Take it easy.  I mean, I know you’re gay and all, but calm down.”  Now, I don’t suppose I can really expect more from a Texas neandrathal named Trip, but no one, and I mean no one, insults my Sassafras.  You can insult me and slap my ass all day long, but you do not mess with my girl.

Hence, I politely turned around, shoved Mr. My Last Girlfriend Was Probably a Longhorn as hard as I could and said, “What the fuck did you say?”  Not much more happened, as a gathering of referees and teammates ensued.  Indeed, the whole affair ended without me even getting a foul (the ref simply said, “I don’t know what he said, but let’s just play basketball.”).  Regardless, the moral adrenaline was enough to help me score 14 points (and Sassfras nabbed a number of key steals) to beat the the UT (and homophobia) in overtime.  Here’s to Trip, who at the end of the day, went home a loser in all senses of the word (though, on the positive side, with his name, he could be long-lost child #6 of Sarah Palin).

I awoke this morning to the most dulcet tones…no, not the quiet "brring-brring" of Sassafras' cell phone alarm (I already had a great respect for schoolteachers, but it increased about a hundred-fold when I learned she awoke at 5am Monday through Friday to be at school and grading her students' papers on time), but the rather pleasing tone of someone slamming a car door, saying "it's a stick" in a guttural, urban growl, and then another slammed door along with the rip of tires against pavement outside my bedroom window.  In other words, I think I have the fact that I have an unyielding (and rather unfortunate, at least for DC driving purposes) fascination with stick shift sports cars to thank for the fact that I am not currently the owner of a stolen BMW.  Why they weren't more drawn to Sassafras' super sexy Audi TT than my aged (though spunky) BMW, I'll never know . . . but the experience doesconfirm a theory that I have had since getting burglarized three times over the course of two years in Tucson . . . thieves are irredeemably, irretrievably lazy. 

I mean, why burn the calories of shifting from 2nd to 3rd gear if you don't have to?  Just pass the "it's a stick" and go find a lovely little automatic BMW of which to deprive its owner.  Why walk up two flights of stairs to jack electronics, when there are a bevy of first-floor condos and apartments just waiting to open up their treasure trove of yuppie wealth spent at Best Buy?  And indeed, why get a job that permits one to save the money necessary to buy such things in the first place, when the streets are full of cars and yuppie electronics just waiting to be liberated from their unsuspecting owners?  I mean, after all, morals, much like the color pink, are so very last year.  The only way to defend ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, from this onslaught of self-service citizenry is to drive stick shifts and possess as many flights of stairs as possible in our house.  Sticks and stairs may cause repetitive knee injuries and tv-movie-of-the-week violence, but they are the key to keeping a hold of your valuable possessions.

Another example would be her decision to make my mother right-handed as a young child, despite her dominant hand being her left, because, as they say, being a leftie is a sign ‘o Satan.  My mother now writes with her right-hand, but does pretty much every other thing with her left hand, and is perennially mis-directed because she thinks east is west and vice versa.  Evidently, you can make the hand do the work, but you can’t rejigger the pathways in the brain.  Pity.  For years, I have thought this a few close steps away from child abuse, but as I have aged, I have decided that my grandmother was right.  No, not about Harry Potter, but about the evil of the left-handed side of the body.  For instance, the left side of MY body is definitely inhabited by an evil force that I like to refer to as “Gimpy Satan.”

Gimpy Satan started his possession of the left side of my body rather slowly – just a few sprains of the left ankle here and there…nothing unusual for a klutzy girl who insists on playing contact sports.  But, the first time I knew something was amiss in the left side of my body was the night I sprained my ankle AND broke off a piece of my ankle bone playing a particularly hard-fought game of Pictionary on my birthday.  Seriously…who does that UNLESS they are possessed by an evil force from beyond this world?

Of course, I wrote off such shenanigans as merely the byproduct of an unusually weak ankle and an unusually potent ½ glass of wine.  That is, until the left hand side of my body has gone completely postal on me in the last few years.  Let’s see, (a) I broke my left forearm so badly a couple of years ago that my wrist was S-shaped, it healed wrong in the cast, had to be surgically re-broken and then fixed with a piece of my hip bone (if you shake my left hand, you just might hear a Shakira song) and a titanium plate; then the wrist heals just in time for me to (b) tear my left rotator cuff and labrum (i.e. shoulder), which I’m going to physical therapy for at the same time I’m (c) rehabbing my left ankle, which locked on me a few months ago as I was laying supine in my bed with some work (see above story about missing piece of ankle bone), and now, to add insult to injury, I have (d) lost the toenail on my left foot to a bottle of garbanzo beans in the kitchen.  That’s right…GARBANZO BEANS.  Little.  Yellow.  Lethal.

I am now utterly convinced that I need Father Karras stat, before I manage to contract the world’s only known case of gangrene from a paper cut from a deck of poker cards.  Seriously.