Two things happened today that haven't happened since the 80's.

1 - I ate food from McDonalds.
2 - I heard a new U2 song and I didn't like it.

The McDonalds thing is hard to explain. Not the part about how I *never* eat there. The part how I managed to eat there this morning. I was starving and forgot all of my breakfast foods. I had 2 sips of a fruit smoothy and a peach at the office which I inhaled with no noticiable effect on my hunger. Slummy food sounded good. WKB was on his way in from the airport from a business trip so I called his cellphone and enthusiastically suggested that he stop at McD's and get me an egg mcmuffin. First he asked me specifically what mouth-watering entree I wanted, and being unfamiliar with the menu, he had to run me through it. I stuck with my original choice and he arrived at the office a short time later with a piping hot mcmuffin and hash browns.

"You're a prince," I said. It was so yummy I could suddenly understand why America loves this food.

About 15 minutes later I felt sick. I had a watery mouth and lurching digestive system for the rest of the day. I tasted that stuff FOR HOURS. I could feel it work it's way through every step of the digestive cycle. My innards groaned unhappily while processing the greasy, salty sludge. I couldn't eat my lunch. I did not feel normal until after 4pm. Why does America love this food? I told WKB if I ever ask for McD's again, not to bring it to me.

The U2 thing may be an anomaly. I sometimes hate a radio single the first time I hear it, and later I hear the whole album and it grows on me and I love it. So this may not be the end of this story. But the last time I hated a new U2 song was something from that dreadful Hum and Drum album that was also a movie. I think I might have owned it at one point but it's gone now. U2 did a couple of things in the 90's that I didn't bother buying but I don't remember disliking singles. This new thing was ... I don't know why I didn't like it. I want to say it sounded too derivative -- can a band be too derivative of itself? But also it sounded a little manic carnival Sgt. Pepper that wasn't working for me. Like I said, maybe after I hear it again or hear the entire album, I'll feel differently.

I'm ready for sleep so I'm going to make this quick.

1 - you should be watching LOST. It's a great new show. ABC is rebroadcasting the first two episodes on Saturday so set your VCR. (For those who might doubt my taste: there are no vampires. that we know of. so far.)

2 - the federal government is completely incompetent. It's scary to think they are out there trying to help other countries organize their governments. On September 16 I ordered some Code of Federal Regulations books ("25 CFRs") for the office. I haven't heard anything so I called so follow up on my order. "Ma'am, that's not in the system. It takes 4 weeks to process an order." I said, "That's really lame." I mean come on. What, do they have only one guy with index cards running around the warehouse -- when he's not on vacation or on break or training? Kind of ironic that the government can manage to clear your check to the IRS the same day you mail it.

3 - sleeping. Falling asleep. Staying asleep. Remaining not asleep during the afternoon after lunch. All challenging at the moment.

4 - I finished Marc's book last night: How I Paid for College: A Tale of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater. It is HILARIOUS. I'm serious, laugh outloud, gasp 'omigod' hysterically funny. You should seek out this book.

Cascading Chores
I have all kinds of blogger notes sitting here and I've been intending to so some sort of organized update but screw it. I'm just going to type it all out and not worry about it. Title is explained later in this post.

Last week my stupid show Big Brother finally ended. Next year I'm not even going to pretend not to watch the show. I'm just going to watch it and enjoy it and maybe even subscribe to the 24/7 live feeds in the house since I hopefully will have more time to kill since I won't be writing a worthless screenplay. Actually, that's not true, I'm going to write another worthless screenplay, but it's not going to be worthless and it's not going to interfere with me wasting time on Big Brother. I was relieved that Drew won -- although I would have been happier with Jennifer or Diane. But Cowboy's strategy was based entirely on low braincell count and needing the money wasn't a good enough reason to win. Making it to the final two was fairly stunning. For a final comment: nice eyebrows, Jace.

Also last week Star Wars came out on DVD and I went to the DVD store to buy it on the first day. The same day a boxed set of John Cassavetes films came out which Bob had his eye on so while in the store I asked about that set as well. Four, no joke, FOUR employees there, all male under the age of 30 had NO IDEA what I was talking about. Zero. How lame is that? I'm not wildly familiar with Cassavetes and admit, I identified him as Nick Cassavetes who is his son although I correctly idenified his wife, super fantastic actress Gena Rowlands. But still, you'd think since they work in the business of selling DVDs that one of them would at least have a crumb of a clue what I was talking about. Back to Star Wars -- we had that dead DVD problem so I have not even broken open the box yet. But the first crap weather weekend ... I'm a sofa surfing bunny with the entire set.

This past week we also got our last Freaks and Geeks DVD (replacement after the tragic ruin of the last one) and watched the final two episodes. Can you believe in the final episode, Lindsay turns into a Dead Head? Bob practically had tears in his eyes as he said again, "This is the best show ever."

Also on Friday I started my first of 3 classes of Photoshop bookcamp with Kristl Honda. This is my first class at Clark College after living in Vancouver for ... how long? I've been married 8 years so at least that long. The class is continuing ed and EXACTLY what I've been looking for. We have 3 4 hour sessions and Kristl just grinds us through all the basics with an emphasis on things the class is interested in. I've had Photoshop on my machine and I've played with it a little but I've never been able to figure out how to do much. Ken also sent me a tutorial and I've been playing with this stuff all weekend.

So, the cascading chores. Have you ever started to do one simple chore and found that in order to do it, you need to do this other chore, and if you're going to be doing that you might as well do this other thing at the same times -- so that you originally start out to empty the trash in the bathroom and end up tiling the ceiling by the end of the day? Yes? Then you know what my day was like. I've been desperate to vacuum out my car and while I was doing that I decided that I might as well sweep out the garage but in order to do that I needed to move those bags of bark dust and why not just put them in the garden, but first I had to whack back an ugly plant and use a shovel in the planting bed. It was about 4:30pm before I was done with all those things. On the bright side, these are all immediate gratification chores. I can enjoy the improved plant area and nice clean garage and I LOVE when my car is freshly vacuumed. I can't believe I am mocked for having a nice clean car. As if having a car like a trashcan that smells like week old coffee is the way the world should be.

Today is the greatest day ever and I will hit Sam Goody's on my lunch hour so no need to buy it for me.

Perfect Pass
I've been doing morning writing projects where I pick a random topic and write until I seize on a memory and then scribble about it in as much detail as I can remember. For example, a couple days ago my topic was swimming pools and I wrote about swimming in RB's pool with the yellow fish on the bottom way back when I was in about 2nd grade.

Today's topic was boyfriends and I wrote about my first boyfriend FR. A lot of details were fuzzy which is probably a good thing. I vaguely recall meeting him around that elementary school in Oak Park I think AZ and I did gymnastics on the lawn over there. I don't remember how we (me and FR) ever ended up going together.

This was when I was 16 and for our first major "date" we went to the beach. I think a large part of my appeal to him was that fact that I had a car. I guess he must have been used to going to the beach with the guys because the first thing we did was play catch with a football. This is what I get for dating a jock, the one and only jock of my dating career. Look at my wee girl hands. I can barely hold a football, much less throw it. He'd drive a hard pass at me which I'd catch (sometimes, if I kept my eyes open) with a THWUMP that knocked the wind out of me and painfully smashed my boobs. I'd dutifully lob it back. He must have gotten tired of it landing about 6 feet in front of him because we switched to Frisbee.

How do you aim a Frisbee? I'm sure it's possible since there are Frisbee games that require a certain level of precision and other people seem to enjoy throwing and catching them. Even dogs can catch them. Not me. I am bad at throwing and catching things. Again, like a sport, I'd give it a whirl and it would float off on a course of its own, yards away from my target. Or else it would flop straight down in a spray of sand. He'd run after it, pick it up and spin it back and it would float gently straight for me, bounce off my forehead and into the sand in front of me.

You can see why we ended up eating grapes and mashing on the blanket.

As I wrote this I grew a tad embarrassed, thinking that if I had such a date now, I would probably apologize for being "so lame" but at the time I was so stressed out about how to act on a first date it didn't occur to me that I was anything less than a perfectly fun time. Then I thought, WTF -- do you think he felt apologetic for clobbering me with a football? What kind of guy plays football with a date, anyway? Shouldn't he have been apologizing for not wanting to hang out in the beach chairs reading Great Expectations (me, junior honors English) and Tom Sawyer Cliff Notes (him, sophomore remedial)?

I spent this afternoon updating my other pages for bio, and stories and I'm putting the books page back on the side menu rather than just tacking it on the end of the stories page. What can I say? My readers demand it. (That was a smartass remark in case you couldn't tell.) Please check out the updates b/c I put a bunch of new photos up and as I explain below, it was a large pain in the rectum. I'm starting to suspect that updating my webpage is the new crack. It keeps me totally absorbed and distracted and once I start, it's hard to tear myself away. I always want to try one more thing.

I brought back a photo album from Orleans so I could scan some old photos. When I was working on the page updates I decided it was a great time to start that project and I haven't used the scanner since I switched to the eMac and OSX. First I couldn't find the USB cable for the scanner. I tore apart my room trying to figure out where it could be and meanwhile found cables for firewire and for the camera and for my digital voice recorder and the zip drive. Jeez, does the world really need so many cables? Can we just have one cable for everything? (Isn't that what "USB" is all about?) After pulling my hair out for awhile, I figured out that I could use the cable that's currently on the printer which I guess sort of answers my question.) I'm not sure if the scanner cable IS the cable on the printer or if it's just "lucky" that I can use it for both but I got my cables set up and then, I needed a driver.

I went to the Astra Umax page and entered my info into their handy driver menu and guess what? They don't have a compatible driver for my OS. Then I dug around to find the cd that came with the scanner and I started Mac Classic and installed the driver and luckily I have an old version of Photoshop on this machine so I could import the photos in old Photoshop using the old operating system. Sure, it worked, but what a huge detour in my little project to update my page with a few more photos. Be sure to check the bio and books to see some of the new scanned shots.

Meanwhile, I'm going to tear myself away and use the next couple of hours to work in the yard while the rain has stopped.

I spent this afternoon remodeling the newsletter pages. I'm sure this will delight my 3 regular readers. BTW - does anyone know how I can center the pics?

We had a big tragedy with our last Freaks and Geeks disc. Only 3 shows left. We watched the first one without incident and the second one was when we discovered the DVD player died. We took the disc downstairs (because we are a two person family with two TVs and two DVD players and two VCRs and two cable boxes) and it made some unhappy grinding sounds and refused to play the 2nd episode. (Which leads me to suspect that the DVD dying and the damage to the disc are related but no hard evidence.) Bob called me and said he was getting the final epsode on the disc and as we started I said, "What if it biffs in the middle?" but we soon were involved in the show. It's the one with the geeks doing A/V.(For my loyal readers who don't know what that is, when I was a girl, we had things called films and film strips in school and geeks somehow took "a class" where they had to bring the film projector to class and set it up and run it for the teacher: audio visual= A/V.)

We got about 10 minutes into it and the DVD froze. We both flung our hands towards the TV and hollered, "NOOOOOOOO!" just like they do in the movies when someone tragically dies. The DVD is ready for mailing and we checked the "DVD doesn't work, Send us a new one" box. At least we can still look forward to two more episodes.

It seems like there are two types of emailers. The type who return your email seemingly moments after you send it and the type who rarely return email. Both irritate me. Often during the week I don't want to devote a lot of time to email so often I'll spend Friday morning reading whatever newsletters or updates I subscribe to and answering the email that's accumulated and send it all off and enjoy the sight of an empty email box and moments later a half dozen replies will come to me. What, is everyone just sitting at their computers waiting for email to come in and dropping everything to answer right away?

And the never answerers I don't get either. How long does it take to respond to the note, say "Hi, how's it going?" and punch send. They probably don't do it because their afraid I'll immediately write back -- you know, moments later. The ball will always be in their court.

Also our DVD player seems to have died. Remember the olden days when things were more expensive but lasted longer? The first VCR player my parents bought me lasted for about 11 years. This is now the 4th machine we've had in the last 2 or 3 years. One was fried by a power surge. The rest seem to crap out about 2 weeks after the year warranty expires.

Bob showed me the Wayback Machine where you can look up old versions of the PamPage. You can check my current URL:
http://www.pamrentz.com
OR you can check my old URL:
http://www.teleport.com/~prentz/index.html.

Last night we went to the Candlelight Tour at Fort Vancouver. It's only about 7 minutes from our house but I've never seen it. (I've seen the Fort, but only during the day.) The whole place is lit only in candlelight and there are tons of volunteers dressed in period costumes who act like it's late 1800's and you can watch them in the carpentry shop or at the blacksmith's or baling up the furs and counting them for sale. You don't interact with them but there are other volunteers around to offer more details and you can ask them questions. The night was clear and a little bit cool - it was the first time I've had my sweatshirt out since Spring. I was impressed that they had so many people who wanted to spend their weekend evenings dressed in those costumes talking about the British and fur traders in the low light. Didn't see any Indians though. Where were they?

Phobias
Yesterday I went to talk to a guy about my dog phobia. I can't remember how much I've blogged about this. I do remember writing about the inciting incident. The gist of it is, in December 02 I was walking by myself in my neighorhood and this dog ran out of nowhere and bit me. It didn't happen all at once but gradually I grew afraid to walk around my neighborhood, you know, part of my exercise routine, because I was afraid a dog would run out and bite me. I know this sounds funny, it's funny to me too, but it's also real and sort of a pain in the ass. I'm not afraid of dogs that I know or dogs on a leash or really small dogs although if they run out and surprise me barking, it does make me feel like I'm having a cardiac episode. Usually I'm not too afraid if Bob is with me. I'm a tiny bit uneasy around dogs that I know but I don't have to leave the room or anything.

Here's the thing. My rational mind totally gets it. I realize dogs haven't changed, just the way I think about them. I see all kinds of people including elderly ladies looking like a strong breeze would wipe them out, all walking alone in my neighborhood, not being knocked over or bitten by dogs. But that hasn't changed my anxiety about walking around my neighborhood.

I finally called this guy who deals with phobias and I honestly didn't expect much but was willing to try anything. I'm thinking what can this guy do? It's not like he has a magic wand or some sort of magic voodoo and I'm going to miraculously be cured of my dog fear. So I met with him yesterday and you know what? It was exactly like magic voodoo.

I'm having a hard time believing it myself. We visited a short time about the origin of the fear. He helped me realize that I'm not really afraid of dogs, I'm afraid of walking around my neighborhood by myself because a dog might come out and bite me. Then we went through a series of visualizations where I pictured exactly what happened, then I pictured it happening backwards really fast. Then I pictured it like a movie of myself, slightly in the future walking around my neighborhood totally relaxed and worry-free and then I pictured it as if I was in the movie, as this person in the future, walking around the neighborhood totally relaxed and worry-free. This is a simplified version but by the time we went through all this (about 1/2 hour), I didn't feel so anxious when I thought about it.

When I got home I walked around the neighborhood by myself -- and not the short easy walk, I went on the long scary walk and I wasn't scared at all. I kept checking in, thinking, "come on, aren't you still scared?" and I totally wasn't.

Magic voodoo.

JAILHOUSE
Today I finally went to pick up the police report I had to make for the fraudulent charges on my VISA. I originally went there on Tuesday but I didn't have my case # with me so that didn't work. I would be tempted to complain except these are all new buildings and I've never been down there (I never saw the old one either). When I made the report she told me I could pick it up, "next to the Courthouse," and I don't know why I was too embarassed to ask for a more detailed explanation ... I assumed I'd figure it out when I was down there. I did have to walk around a bit. I saw the Clark County Public Services building and the Clark County Juvenile Court building and then I saw the Law Enforcement building and that looked promising so I went over there.

I entered on an upper level that had a lot of signs talking about visiting hours and what visitors needed to do which didn't seem right but I figured someone there could tell me where to go. I found a sort-of information desk and eventually a guy in uniform, who was probably born after I graduated from high school, wearing plastic gloves, pointed me down the stairs and there I found a huge sign that said "Police Reports" so I figured I was in the right place. I was supposed to take a number, (which reminded me of going to Baskin Robbins in the Valley on the way home from Zuma beach 100 years ago when I was a small child - my favorite flavor was bubble gum) which I didn't do because I saw the form I was supposed to fill out and there was only 1 other guy there so I grabbed one of those and used a small desk with a computer terminal that said something about sex offender check in. ("What an adventure," I thought.)

I filled out my sheet and by this time another guy with a handle bar mustache and wearing a suit had arrived and taken a number so I had to wait until after him. Apparently he was picking up someone to be released that way because he was informed that it probably wouldn't happen until after 6pm (It was about Noon). He took it like a man. Oh, and the man before him, also with handlebar mustache and Harley-Davidson shirt had to talk about getting his papers for his parole officer and there was some snafu and he was trying to do the right thing and it looked like it was not going well.

When it was finally my turn the lady said, "Oh good, you have your case number," and quickly found what I needed. She was very nice and suggested I keep copies as credit card fraud things can come back to haunt you. (Hopefully worst case scenario.) I told her I was having quite the adventure and at first she thought I meant the credit card fraud but I said, "I've never been down here before," and she announced very professionally: "You're in the basement of the jail."

I took today off from work for an extra long weekend. Then it turned out Bob had to work and I thought about bagging and going to work and saving the day off for later but by then I already had "day off" in my head and it's not like I didn't have stuff to do so I went ahead and stayed home. I did a long yoga practice, two loads of laundry and threw the chicken carcass into the slow cooker and covered with water so I can make soup in the next day or so. I also watched a VH1 special on Big Brother and then called Kimberlee to see if she was up for a visit and after I talked to her I ran over to Zupans to get some stuff for her for dinner. Kimberlee is my massage therapist and she had twins in June and I never know what kind of baby things to get -- how many adorable little outfits can a Mom use? (I know that's not the point, the point is adorable little outfits but I'm too practical for my own good). So I decided to bring her dinner - some Italian casserole type things, salads, a big loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and some fancy brownies. I went to see Garden State (Bilbo is the Dad!!) and then I had to go to the police station to pick up my police report from my stupid fraudulent Visa problem and of course I brought a giant sheaf of paper with everything except the case number so that didn't work. But I stopped at K's on the way home and dropped off dinner and got to play with two very cute little babies. So a very good day.

Another great thing about today is Angel season 4 came out on DVD. Yesterday I asked Bob to guess what was coming out on DVD that would make me really excited and he said he couldn't think of anything. So then I mimed fangs and then angel wings and he got this horrified look on his face and really couldn't guess. I told him, "Angel" and he said, "omigod, I had no idea what you were doing." Just today I put Angel in the queue and I had already added another season of Buffy and the first season of Roswell (am I the biggest geek or what? It's all Billy's fault. He got me into these shows and then quit watching them, bastard.) Bob had added about 20 foreign films no one has ever heard of so now our queue is totally out of control with like 60 movies. At three a week, we won't be running out anytime soon.

The weekend went fantastic. The Neuners arrived on Sunday afternoon and Bob took Sophie and Lena to Last Chance Summer Dance (I'd provide a link but radio stations have stupid slow-loading hard to navigate pages that aren't worthy of my link) with Avril Lavigne. Flori took Annie and Luis to Omsi and Lisa and I hit Ann Taylor and tried on everything in the store. Excellent time. On Monday Lisa and I went to Trader Joes and everyone else went to Fort Vancouver and learned to make nails and we had a yummy lunch then they hit the road for Orleans to see Captain Curt (and everyone else.) It was fantastic and for the second time this summer I was able to say, "[insert name of young person] please don't hit Yoda on the head with the light saber." And I was asked for the second time why I have so many Star Wars toys. (I thought I had another post on this but I can't find it right now.) As we were packing them out the door they were asking about the playground and Spinart and R2D2 so I think we may get another visit someday.

I updated the recent photos again to include a picture of the broken apple tree branch, one of my pumpkins, and some dahlias. I'm not completely happy with the way it looks, but I don't want to mess with it any more today.

It's only Sept 3 and already Sinead, Maria De and Brian have had a birthday and I haven't sent a note to any of them. I'm getting ready for an extra long weekend, including company for a couple of days, and trying to figure out what exactly I want to accomplish. The garden is a must. Criminally neglected. A branch on the apple tree broke -- too many apples and then lots of rain and then a big crack and now I've got a major project out there. I've also got house cleaning, grocery shopping and cooking/baking type things to do. Ideally I'd like to sweep out the garage and clean out the shop. Also vacuum my car. Then a bunch of fun project type things like reading through articles I've collected and finishing books in my pile, and maybe doing some ink painting and story writing and working with those Photoshop books. This is the story of my life -- coming up with some impossible list of things to accomplish and creating an agitated mental state when they don't all get done. So I'm trying to go at this reasonably. I forgot to mention also going to the movies: Harry Potter is still at the Kiggins and there are several films in the downtown theater (Hero, Bourne Supremacy) that I wouldn't mind seeing.

Also we've lost a Pyrex. How do you lose something like that? It's the big one too. The first idea was that we'd made something for a get together and forgotten the pan. Except I can't think of a get together I went to where I brought that pan. I can't think of the last thing I made in that pan although I suspect brownies and those were consumed under our roof (didn't take long either.) The second idea is that it was put in the wrong place. But I've looked in every single cupboard in the kitchen and didn't see it. I'm going to buy another one. Not like it's a big ticket item and if the other shows up I'm sure we can use it. But where did that pan go?