10:27 p.m. - 2008-01-04
friday
Friday Night is Stay-at-home Movie and Pizza Date Night in the Marsh household. Although tonight we went with high end Chinese food. The movie The Heartbreak Kid is not bad. Rather graphic in some scenes, but kind of funny. It's not fabulous but it's pretty ok in that slightly Something About Mary and Along Came Polly not quite romantic comedy way.
Today there was a black Jetta in front of me with an Obama 08 bumper sticker. It was driven by a woman about my age with similar glasses. (I also drive a black jetta.) I wanted to zoom up beside her and give her my business card and yell "Let's hang out!" But I couldn't figure out how that would work without it seeming creepy especially since I don't have a bumper sticker, or perhaps miscommunicate my gender preference, marital status and overall intentions.
There is this bridge in Pittsburgh that I take to work every day. Of course it is the bridge that they decided to start dismantling yesterday. Pittsburgh is one of those towns that is complicated to navigate but if you understand the geography like what is east or west of where you are trying to go and have a decent memory, you can figure out nine different ways to get anywhere. my dad is a master of this and I think I have inherited that kind of sense. Unfortunately, this is one of those rare cases where there are just NO good options. My commute time has increased by over 50% and I don't even travel during rush hour. So that sucks. What is going to suck even more is during those 8 wretched weeks of summer that I will be traveling during rush hour to get there by 8am. Ew. Six months from now - I feel like it is tomorrow though.
Today for some oddly unexplained reason these very nice people who said things like "God bless" a lot showed up at my building to donate about 25 large boxes of.....cleaning supplies. Like 15 large containers of detergent. We do have a small washer and dryer and we do occasionally have to wash something - once a week for the kitchen dish towels and the odd bloody nose staining some kid's jacket. But what the hell are we going to do with 15 economy sized bottles of Tide? And similar quantities of Lysol, Spray N' Wash and Oven Cleaner. Hmmm. The strangest part was that the people donating it - from a local university office - seemed really pleased with themselves like they had singlehandedly solved a major major problem for us. But I had never talked to any of them and had no idea how they decided to do this. Now, granted, I will acknowledge that I personally included "cleaning supplies" on our web-published needs list. But so are a bunch of other things. And cleaning supplies is pretty far down on the list. We could really use some, like, pencils.
Don't get me wrong - it was super nice of them and it's great that we won't ever have to buy any of that stuff ever again or at least until the current students have graduated college. But the supply closet is only so big. Maybe I could build a desk out of the 64 individually packaged bottles of anti-microbial hand soap.
There are few things more frustrating than renting a DVD only have it freeze and do that weird thing where every person on screen looks like they are being taken over by a black pixel shaped virus. Such was the situation with Ghost Rider tonight. Maybe it was fate telling us we shouldn't have rented a Nicholas Cage movie. Hmmm, well Kevin the Wonder-Tech seems to have it working now, so we'll give it a shot.
