Spiders

Mike and I have an ongoing debate about the presence or absence of spiders in his apartment. I say that the basement to his place is so creepy that it's got to be home to hundreds of arachnids, but he maintains that he's never seen anything but cobwebs.

This morning I woke up before Mike did, as I ususally do, and got out of bed to let him sleep some more. I wandered into the bathroom to brush my teeth and grab the copy of Entertainment Weekly with the "Snakes on a Plane" article and saw a daddy longlegs.

One of the big ones.

It had made a web by the shower curtain and was just sitting there, being sinister. I backed out of the bathroom hurriedly. Now not only do I have to adjust to the absolute knowledge that Mike's apartment contains spiders, I also have to go to the bathroom. And Mike won't be up for two hours! Damn. Maybe I'll walk to the gas station or something.

So, in the debate about spiders, I know I definitely win. Well, if you call having your fiance's apartment infested with arachnids "winning."

Damn. I hate spiders.

Damn hippies!

Has anyone been clothes shopping lately? I have. It seems like everything out there was designed by hippies who have a grudge against me personally. Damn! Never have I been surrounded by so much unflattering clothing. Well, never since high school.

Seriously, lately I've been shopping around for some warm-weather professional clothes, and what do I find mixed in with the career clothing? Crocheted lace. Gauze. Peasant skirts. Wooden beads. What the hell, people? I don't need that shit at work. I'm trying to look older than my students here! Help a girl out!

So, I decide to flow with it. Rock the peasant look. Embrace my inner hippie. So I run through Old Navy and grab a couple of summer-of-love essentials, and realize that I don't have sandals to go with it. So I walk over to the sandal aisle, and what do I find?

Gold lame'. Oh yeah. Thong sandals that are as shiny and tacky as Vegas itself.

Two styles that don't look good on me, but also don't look good with each other.

That's it. Screw it. I'm making all my own clothes.

He's a cat...it's a sink...it could work!

Is it bad that I'm making elaborate plans to entice Rusty into a sink just so I can submit the picture to this site?

I wonder if I could persuade him in using cheese bits...

Gmail

Last weekend I had to do the most difficult, nostalgia-inducing, heart-wrenching thing a woman can do when preparing to change her name for marriage.

I tried to get a new Gmail account.

For the purposes of this story, rather than use my real name (you stalkers) I'm going to use my old blogging moniker, Indigo Jones, and Mike's current one, Josef Blind. It took me a long time to make the decision on what name to use. Should I remain Indigo Jones? Could I be Indigo Jones-Blind? Or should I just go with Indigo Blind? After a lot of thinking I decided it would be best to just go with Indigo Blind because it would mean a lot to Josef. After the decision was made I immediately hopped online to reserve my Gmail account.

I always use my name as my email account because it looks more professional that way. My current account is ihjones@gmail.com*. It's better than putting something like sparklestarz999@gmail.com on my resume. Anyway, I didn't realize what a common last name Blind was, or how many people would already have Gmail accounts with that surname. So many user names were already taken!

ihblind was taken.

indigoblind was taken.

indigo.blind was taken.

ih_blind wasn't allowed because they don't allow underscores.

But that didn't matter because ih.blind and i.h.blind were both taken too.

Gmail kept suggesting screenames that were all incredibly lame, such as blindind, inblind, and blindster. Who would take blindster? Well, aside from my brother, who already uses jonester. Really.

I was on the verge of informing Josef that I'd be hyphenating my name, but I figured that just wanting ihjones.blind@gmail.com was a pretty poor reason for choosing your name. I mean, you should consider more important factors than your email account when choosing your name. Like how cool it would sound with "Dr." in front just in case you ever go for that PhD.

I eventually settled on ihblindslp. It's not perfect, but it works.

I wonder if sparklestarz is taken yet...







* Not really. I'm using a fake name, remember? Stalkers.

Snack Foods and Cats

Today I wanted to try some Puffcorn to compare it with reports of Popcorn Twists, but I left the bag at Mike's apartment.

Alas!

I suppose it'll have to wait until next weekend. That's okay though, because this weekend I've been totally preoccupied by Chex Mix. Chex Mix is something that I keep forgetting I like. I eat it at parties, adore it, and then develop some kind of grocery-store-induced amnesia so that I never buy it again. This weekend, though, I bought a bag to munch on while I was at Mike's. It turned out that he likes the mix too, so I left him my half-bag to finish up and bought two more bags this afternoon to use for my lunch this week.

Well, my lunch this week and dinner tonight, at the rate I'm eating.

The only issue is that I bought the Bold Party Blend. I noticed that the bold seasoning powder seems to have settled to the bottom of the bag so that the mix gets progressively bolder as I make my way through it. I can only take so much bold in with my Chex, people. I'll have to figure out how to remedy this.

In other news, issues with the blending of Mike's and my households have already come up. For those of you who don't know or just haven't done the math, after I move in with Mike we'll have four cats. My two, Rusty and Cider, and his two, Lucky and Edison. That's a whole lotta cats.

Not only does it pretty much prevent us from moving into a new apartment until my cats die - where else can you keep four cats? - it presents a whole host of other problems. I've already thought of several difficulties pertaining to food. Lucky and Edison eat Fancy Feast and dry adult Science Diet. Rusty eats Friskies and senior Science Diet, while Cider eats her kidney diet wet food and the senior Science Diet. While I'm sure I can get all the boys eating one brand of wet food, the fact remains that Cider will be eating a different and less desirable brand than everyone else. Right now I solve this problem by making Rusty eat on a countertop she can't jump to - relax, I never prepare food there - but what will we do when there's four cats to contend with? And what will we do about the dry food? Normally I'd be in favor of switching all the cats to senior, but Edison is still kittenish and probably needs the extra calories the adut variety has.

Mike raised another issue today. His cat Edison has a chronic case of the sniffles. I guess it comes and goes. This is problematic since Rusty has FIV and the smallest infection could eventually kill him. I suppose we'll have to consult our respective vets about how to handle it.

Blending families is so hard.