I hope I wasn’t too harsh on my mom in the last entry. I mean, I love the woman and everything. I’m here lugging around dusty quasi junk for a garage sale instead of doing yoga, hiking in Red Rocks and hanging out with zombie couchsurfers. Actions speak louder than words right? She’s just a hard woman to eulogize, especially when she’s in your face asking for the thousandth time, “Are you sure you’re okay with not having a job? I mean what to you do with your day?”.

I could say she was very involved with people’s lives.

Alright, so I’ve got:

Helene: She was a different kind of lady. She had moxie. Some say her kids were pretty cool. She liked to be involved in people’s lives and give advice that she thought would be helpful.

She is pretty funny, but I don’t know if she means to be all the time. One small thing that makes me giggle to this day is when she and Bob visited us in Las Vegas a few years ago. We were at Quarks bar at the Hilton Casino. It’s a replica, or at least a faxcimilie of the real one in I think Deep Space Nine. The menu had all kinds of regular food renamed as “Star Trek” food. Isolenear chips and dip, Ferengie fries and so forth.

My mom straight faced asked the waitress for a ham-Borg-er, knowing absolutely nothing about Borgs or anything about Star Trek at all. I crack up. Andy cracks up. My mom looks at us in confusion and says, “what’s so funny? It says hamborger. Right there, ham-borg-er”.

Maybe that one was only funny if you were there. But trust me, it was funny.

Today we came across a small woven basket of nail clippers. I remember compiling this basket when we were cleaning out her and Bob’s house after he died. There’s like 40 clippers in there. Apparently Bob could never find clippers, so he just went out and bought more. My mom wanted to put the basket of clippers next to the guest book at the funeral with a sign that read, “please take one in remembrance of Bob”. Sick and wrong, but funny. Also showing restraint because she didn’t actually do it.

Seriously, any eulogizing bones you guys want to throw me are welcome here.

How does the Chicago font come across? From this end, it looks really cold. Like damp, chill you to the bone cold. It also looks a little crazy reminiscent of my childhood. This f-ing weather is giving me flashbacks of standing outside, on the corner, freezing my ass off in what seemed like pre dawn waiting for the obnoxious, yellow school bus to drive me to what felt like a prison sentence every day.

This is a short conversation I had with my mom ten minutes ago before I took a shower.

C: What’s the big soup pot full of scummy water doing in your shower.
M: Well the toilet is doing a weird thing and (leaks? flushes? I can’t remember what she said) every two hours. So instead of flushing it, I just pour that water in it.

Here’s another while we were in the garage organizing things for the garage sale.

C: Do you want me to bring the big box of greeting cards out?
M: No, they won’t sell.
C: Should we throw them out?
M: No, save them for the next garage sale in August. (The neighbor lady has epic garage sales that my mom likes to piggy back onto)

I know, from years of experience, that in that last conversation my mom was overwhelmed and didn’t want to deal with what I was saying at the moment. She just said some random thing to try to get me off her back. But this is the way she communicates. This is the opposite way I try to communicate. I have a very strong feeling that words mean things. You don’t just throw them around. I think I have such a strong opinion on this because of being raised dealing with this kind of communication, among other wordly slaughter.

A few weeks ago she sent out cards to all of her close family and asked in lieu of mother’s day presents that we all write some nice things to put in her obituary. No need for me to comment of the request, she’s a kooky lady, we all know it. I started writing some stuff, but I’m having a really hard time. I asked her what she wanted to be remembered for and she said, “her kids”. If she really meant it, phew, that gets me off the hook. I’m really good at writing about myself.

Alright, I’m working on it. But, if any of you have some good stuff that you want to write about your mom and then send to me so I can plagiarize, ummmm, I mean, study for style, let me know, I’d appreciate it. Unless, “Helene: She was a different kind of lady. She had moxie. Some say her kids were pretty cool” would cut it.

I’m sure by now you can tell by the font that I’m back in Las Vegas. It’s subtle, but if you look hard enough you can detect more moisture in the San Diego font.

The upstairs prostitute/drug addled neighbors flooded our bathroom for the third time in three weeks. The second time was a few days ago. Water was dripping through the actual ceiling in the living room, not just through the bathroom vent in the ceiling. That was two days ago.

Today I was out and Andy didn’t even bother going upstairs. When the water started pouring in, he called maintenance directly. When the maintenance guy and a girl from the office came down to talk to Andy after seeing the upstairs disaster, they said that there was inches of standing water in the bathroom and girls just laying around on the couch ignoring it.

I’m not even going to start telling you about the roaches that are coming out of everywhere and dying. I mean good job for fumigating and all, but, yuck.

Call me a masochist but, even after all this, I still like our living arrangements here more than the swanky Signature of last baseball season. Yes, I know, I guess I’m just ghetto like that. It’s way cheaper, I can get to my car and escape any time I want (no 20 mile trek to a parking garage or tipping a valet) and I don’t have to deal with throngs of tourists every time I want to go anywhere. I think few roaches, some toilet water pouring into our apartment is worth it. Although I’m a hobo and most might not agree with me.

Also, I’ve been assured that it’s clean toilet water. If it wasn’t, you might be hearing me sing a different tune. It helps too that Andy deals with the “clean” toilet water. If it were the case that I would have to deal with said “clean” water, you for sure would be hearing a different tune. To say I don’t like dealing with toilets and their water is an understatement.

In other non toilet related news, my mom has almost completed the transaction to sell her house, my childhood home. She should be moving to San Diego in August or sooner. I’m flying to Chicago Thursday to help with the mammoth garage sale, visit with relatives and help clean anything that needs to be cleaned.

We’ll have to see what the Chicago font looks like.

I’m in San Diego. I bet you couldn’t tell by the font, could you? I decided to give Andy some space to program and watch sports and eat Taco Bell all day and night and not have him worrying about what his wife was thinking. I’m staying with Nova Bella as usual and spending my time sitting out in her new back yard and throwing a slobbery ball to Cooper the yellow lab.

We are leaving for yoga in six minutes and then going to a friend’s house for champaign drinking celebration. They are celebrating the sale of their family company. I’m telling myself that I’m just going to drink club soda with lime, but we all know that I’m lying.

programmer or serial killer test?

I really dislike any artificial sweeteners and don’t understand how they are at all popular. They give me crushing headaches and I don’t think they resemble sugar in the slightest.

I am a pack rat that doesn’t own alot of stuff. I enjoy picking through the trash. It’s a trait that I inherited from my mother and she inherited from her’s. I don’t act on my impulses often. My favorite thing to find is chairs. Some of my fondest memories of my grandmother is being put in a dumpster in the back of the Piggley-Wiggley so I could hand her cabbages, boxes of crackers and other items that had been tossed. We officially picked this stuff for the birds that lived in the aviary in their expansive backyard, but we all knew that much of the stuff ended up on the dinner table.

Although I had a tough time going against my vegetarianism to buy myself a pair of Ugg boots, after three months of ownership, they are by far my favorite most comfortable shoes that I have ever owned. I thank that sheep every time I put them on.

I do not like using air hand driers in public restrooms. If there is no other option I usually just wipe my wet hands on my shirt. It’s the hobo way.

America’s Funniest Videos make me laugh until I can’t breath. It’s an embarrassing secret, so don’t let that one get around too much.

I like to give people makeovers in my head and have actually come close to giving complete strangers advice on their clothes or hair. Especially guys at the gym obviously working out to try and look good for the ladies but completely negating all that hard work with a hideous haircut.

I have never shot a gun but would like to.

We are thinking about building a small cabin in the mountains of Colorado depending on what happens this baseball season. We are also considering spending a chunk of the winter being snowboarding bums.

We have a little over a month left to house sit at our friend Tim’s house. Right before he left for Europe, some crazy women moved in above him and now us. I don’t know what they’re doing up there but it sounds like elephants stampeding and moving furniture at all hours.

Tonight, I was eating dinner with Vlad, our friend from Colorado, when I got a phone call from Andy. He was at the apartment. He wanted to know if there was an emergency number for the complex. Noises from the guest bathroom led him to discover there was water pouring down from the ceiling vent all over the toilet and floor. He ran upstairs to ask if the girls were having some sort of water problems. They said, “no” didn’t check and closed the door. Andy said they were acting “weird”.

He got a hold of maintenance, the guy went upstairs and said that the girl’s toilet was overflowing, there was two inches of water on the floor and they were laying on the couch oblivious. I’ve heard from maintenance and security that there’s a bunch of people living up there. A couchsurfer staying here last week said that they were speaking Hebrew. We’re thinking some sort of international heroin/prostitution ring.

We put a deposit down on our new place. We’ll be there from May 15th to August 15th.

http://tours4.vht.com/Viewer/PhotoGallery.aspx?ListingID=1146170&Style=PAN

three room mates, an ice cream truck, two cats, sparky the chihuahua, a pool and three months of new adventures that hopefully will not involve toilet water pouring from the ceiling.

I am eating pop rocks. I don’t think that they are sanctioned food on my allergy diet.

We’ve moved into Tim’s house. Tim is a true blue bachelor and doesn’t have much in the way of furniture. I’m taking these six weeks to indulge my pack rat nature and get stuff for the house. I found a chair in a dumpster behind the Paris Casino for the patio and I scored a beautiful, Pier One, free, flawless couch. The guy was moving and didn’t want to lug it downstairs. I’m waiting on some cactus that a lady says I can have if the first woman who emailed doesn’t show up.

While scouring the free section all day to jump on “the good stuff” right away, I came across this:

Awesome Babies Capuchin for Rehoming (Las Vegas)

Is this some baby product that I don’t know about? Some sort of fancy toddler cappuccino machine? I’m intrigued.