Post Thanksgiving

It's the day after Thanksgiving and I can't write anything because I am too full.

It's Thanksgiving

In case you didn't know. 

I can't write any more because my mouth is full of turkey. And pie. At the same time. It's not polite to write with your mouth full. 

Happy Thanksgiving to those who read my blog*. 

*To those who don't - while I don't want to wish you an unhappy thanksgiving, I will stick with "have yourself an average kind of a day". Maybe next year you'll think twice before not reading. Hmm?

It's The Day Before Thanksgiving

Are you brining your turkey, trying to decide whether to make that weird jello dish (don't), baking all manner of pumpkin things, planning your thanksgiving table decorations or are you at work like me? The end*

*This year I'm going to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner so that someone else can cook for me and serve me. I plan on eating too much pie (as a first course...because I can), drinking too much and behaving badly.

2014 Thanksgiving - Things I Am Thankful For

1. Someone else making Thanksgiving dinner
2. My Math ability
3. Some other things that I can't think of right now but am clearly very thankful for
4. My family. You have to put that one in otherwise you look mean.
5. That I can still fit into my jeans. No, not those ones. The post-Thanksgiving ones.
6. My breasts. They stop people looking at my thighs. What? Just trying a little turkey body part humor...don't make me whip out the wattle waddle.
7. My enormous brain. What? The title is not "Things I am thankful for and humble about."
8. My extreme beauty. Well, I may as well go for gold. Thanksgiving comes but once a year
9. My amazing goodness and kind heart. Ok, fine, That's pushing it.
10. The roof over my head. But not the bloody people that live on my roof. They need to stay very still inside their house and not move. Until I leave.
11. Yoga. And people that teach yoga. And my yoga pants. But mostly my yoga pants. There is a lot of room for error in yoga pants.
12. Not my hair. It's not what I wanted. Where is the long mermaid like locks that I'm owed? More than 30 years of growing it and where is my carefree weekend messy yoga bun? What I have is the size of a walnut shell on the top of my head. Nothing about that says carefree.*
13. Albert. Well, duh.
14. My Mazda - you just hang in there a little bit longer. Hey, how about we get your oil changed next week? Would you like that?
15. Sunshine. While the rest of the country freezes, we don't. Hahahahahaha.

*You have to put something in that you're not thankful for. It's like writing a performance review, you can't just talk about how great you are, you have to add something that you plan on working on. And you can't  call it a weakness or a lack of skills or even more bluntly "something you're a bit shit at". It's an "area of opportunity". I wrote this after I wrote my annual performance review. For which, by the way, I have given myself 14 gold stars, 11 silver ones, 203 brownie points and a big round of applause. There was no mention of the ratings system so I added my own...

What Did You Do Last Saturday?

I had a bottle of wine, some bread and cheese on my rooftop with the homeless guy that lives on my street. Technically he's not homeless since he lives in his van on the street. He's quite an institution in the neighborhood, walks a lot of people's dogs, moves their cars to avoid street cleaner fines and can more or less do most handyman jobs.  Put great big hole in my last place when hanging a mirror but took full responsibility with the landlady when I moved out. He's been extremely helpful to me, even feeding Albert when I'm on vacation and won't take a penny for it.

Facts:

1. His only request was to share some wine and have some good company. I managed the wine.
2. His name is Wolfgang. Wolfie to the ladies. I stick with Wolfgang.Also, I am not a lady.
3. He is from Frankfurt, Germany, close to 70 and apparently invented a similar version to the Microsoft suite of products but didn't manage to get them out on the market before Bill Gates. It's possible that the slight language barrier means I got that story wrong or it's possible he was taking some liberties. I told him it was a damn shame. He agreed.
4. He used to be very wealthy with a house in the Hollywood Hills. Then he got married. And now he has fallen on hard times. Marriage will do that to you.
5. He has all kinds of deals going with people in the neighborhood to help him live a comfortable life despite his circumstances - his van is always parked outside the same place where he pays $25 a month to one of the tenants for the use of his internet and cable. How else do you watch TV in your van? $5 a week goes towards the guy that cleans the bathrooms in the nearby park so that he can be first in and have a clean bathroom to use.
6. He's extremely well presented and buys socks in bulk so he can have a new pair at any time.
7. He has a crush on his acupuncturist. Yes, you read that right. My local homeless friend has an acupuncturist. Only in Hollywood.
8. He also has a pretty sweet cell phone and according to him, an excellent plan. Just because you're homeless doesn't mean you can't stay in touch.
9. For someone in circumstances that would be catastrophic to me, he is certainly making the best of his situation and taking care of himself without relying on handouts. When I tried to hand him some money, he took it only on the condition that we use it for brunch some time.I love brunch.
10. He likes red wine. Who doesn't? 
11. Albert tolerates him.  In fact he traitorously sat on his lap and flipped me the middle claw.  Sort of.

We all need a Wolfgang in our lives.

More Basic Stuff That I Missed

I thought of something else that should not have taken years to figure out. Although since I was 5, I'll cut myself some slack. I was probably busy trying to be a Math genius and being thwarted by people teaching me all wrong.

Did you ever wonder how songs on radio stations were played? Well, it's obvious - the band would show up at the radio station, play their song and leave and the next band would then come in and play theirs. Band after band coming and going, playing their hits. That's why radio stations played different genres - otherwise bands wouldn't have enough time to drive to all the stations. Later on I realized that was ridiculous - there was no way each band had time to unpack all their equipment and then pack it up again in time for the next band to ensure continuity of songs and no "dead-air". Clearly there was an easier way.

Obviously, the radio station had two rooms set up with musical instruments and equipment for the bands to use.  That way, one band could get ready while the other played.  Simple really once you think it through...

Laundry and Math

Are you one of those people, like me, that thinks you're relatively intelligent but some simple things just seem to pass you by? Like Math. I am convinced Math is very easy - all forms of Math - I think I just had bad teachers. One of these days, I'll find the button that releases Math and will become an expert. I'll have a business card that just says "I am a Math Expert? Try Me. 1+1=2. See."

The other day I had another one of those encounters that reminds me that even though I am a Math expert*, there are some basic things that don't occur to me immediately. Or even several weeks later. But when they do, it's like all of a sudden, things got a whole lot easier and I can free up my mind from the mundane to work on my Math problems.

So, now that I've moved house and am saving a lot of money in rent, I am dealing with one of those things that comes with saving money in rent. Not my own laundry. I have always had my own laundry, starting with when I lived at home. I threw it down to the bottom of the stairs, it got washed and thrown back up at me. Brilliant. Every house, apartment I've ever lived in has always had the convenience of a washer and dryer, even if I had to share with room mates. But now I have to share one washer and one dryer with 11 other apartments. And I have to pay for the privilege. $1.25 to wash and $1.00 to dry as long as you don't need to dry anything for longer than 44 minutes. Would it have killed them to give us 45?

So far, I've been lucky - no one has ever been using either appliance when I've gone up there and I've chosen pretty random times. So, I've come to the following conclusions - no one else lives here and if they do, they are all a bunch of dirty f*&%ers. It stresses me out quite a lot to do laundry - first I have to go up 2 sets of stairs which means facing the fact at the top that, I am unfit. Since I was doing an excellent job of ignoring that, this is a bit of a slap in the face. I throw my stuff in the machine, ignore the instructions, put the money in, set the timer on my phone for 30 minutes since that appears to be how long it takes. Go back downstairs and anxiously await the beep on my phone. I have a fear of forgetting I have laundry in there and someone taking my clothes out and seeing my knickers. I'm sure they'd be wondering why I'm still washing a pair that looks like there's not much left to them, but let me tell you, they are my favorites and they still have a good couple of quality years in them.

After the first time when I separated my lights and darks (thanks, Mum), I decided to hell with this, it's every man/item for himself and if colors run, then that item clearly was never meant to be. Survival of the fittest - laundry-style. I try and stick to a laundry run, once a week which works well for my clothes. However, I resent paying $1.25 to do my towels. They barely fill up the barrel of the machine and it seems like a waste of time. 

And that's when the penny dropped.  Or the $1.25. Why not throw the dirty towels in the laundry basket and get fresh ones from the pile that took a game of Tetris to try and figure out how to get ALL the towels I own into the cupboard. Then at the end of two weeks...or even more should I feel the need...I can wash all of them. I have enough towels, bathmats, face clothes and hand towels to last through a zombie apocalypse. 

I think this might just work. How did I not see this sooner? Do you see what I mean about basic stuff?  Is it because my head is so full of smart, intelligent stuff? That's probably it. Now all I have to do is figure out the dryer issue...if I wash a bunch of towels in one go, will 44 minutes be long enough to dry them? But wait, I'll use my Math expertise to calculate the weight to heat ratio**...

*Almost. Still looking for the button. Looking for a lot of buttons actually.
**That doesn't sound quite right, possibly I need to take into account the cosine pythagoreal sum value.