March 2010 Archive

18Mar
2

Alligator

This is how my knuckles were described last night.

They’re SUPER dry. Like cracking. I’ve been feeling the need to lotion them constantly, but of course forgot to bring lotion with me to work(s) on Tuesday and Wednesday. Today I finally remembered the lotion and am on my third application. Is it helping? Yes.

For about 20 minutes.

Then they want to crack again.

They’re scaly. I see hard flakes trying to peel off. Alligator-like truly fits the feel of my knuckles.

How do I make this better? Cuz it’s really starting to be painful, in addition of course to the horrible aesthetics of it.

Posted by Caro in Health, Life, Things to do
18Mar
0

Croutons

So lunch time rolls around yesterday at work. Of course I decided that sleeping an extra 3 minutes that morning was infinitely more valuable than bringing my lunch to work. I rolled down to the cafeteria and hit up the salad bar.

Pretty basic stuff there. Piled on a bed of lettuce, a bunch of spinach, a sprinkle of cheese. I’m about halfway through the line at this point, and for some reason someone put the croutons here, in the middle of the assembly line. Oh well, I can have croutons in the middle of my salad instead of on top.

So I grab the spoon, the very flat spoon I might add, and fill it with mini croutons. As I’m bringing it to my plate, many of them fall off.

An older gentleman approaches from the wrong side of the line. He was looking for the croutons, since they weren’t at the end. (“Can’t forget the croutons!!”) He sees my crouton fail and says, “Well here look you’re spilling them all over the place!” Sorry sir! So after I put about half a spoonful onto my plate I hand him the spoon. He looks at me and he’s like, “That’s not enough croutons. You need more than that!”

Seeing as how croutons contain yeast, I’m not supposed to have ANY croutons so I politely declined. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He scooped up a bunch of mini croutons and put them on my plate. “Here you go. Now that’s much better. Everyone needs croutons!”

Thank you?

Posted by Caro in Food, Life, Random, weird, Work
17Mar
1

St. Patty’s Day

If you’re at all like me, you view March 17 as a day of celebration. Why? Because there aren’t enough days of celebration each month, and this is the only “holiday” in March. It’s basically a given that you will find me wearing green and drinking an Irish beer or other drink at some point on 3/17. Also, I’m Irish. It would go against my culture to not participate! lol

Up until today, I have blindly followed this tradition. I can proudly say I now know why certain things are the way they are. Like why wear green? Or aside from the fact that it’s fun, why do we get to pinch people on this particular day of the year? Apparently this is the reason:

It’s an entirely American tradition that probably started in the early 1700s. St. Patrick’s revelers thought wearing green made one invisible to leprechauns, fairy creatures who would pinch anyone they could see (anyone not wearing green). People began pinching those who didn’t wear green as a reminder that leprechauns would sneak up and pinch green-abstainers.

Who knew?

For the rest of the scoop on St. Patty’s Day, check out this article from Yahoo News: Why do we wear green?

Posted by Caro in Discoveries, interesting, Life, Random
15Mar
2

Trial and Error

I got my annual vision check up earlier this year, and was pretty surprised when they told me my horrendous prescription hadn’t changed. Really? Cuz I was certain you were gonna up the size of the coke-bottle lenses I wear. I don’t see that well!!

I finally decided this wasn’t right and I needed to get my full money’s worth. I went back to the “low vision specialist” and told her I can’t see. I’m sure that’s not a new thing for her! I was able to get in that same day even. Amazing! Rather than just rushing me out the door or telling me I’m fine (or worse yet, “good enough” – I hate when people say that!), she actually took quite a long time trying to fix the problem. Everything from giving me a fresh pair of lenses, to examining the fit in my eye, and even re-doing the assessment (“which is better – 1 or 2? ok how about 3 or 4? lol).

Down side: my left eye isn’t cooperating and at the present moment cannot be fixed to better than 20/30. OK I cried about this at home, but that’s a different issue altogether. The right eye has issues too. Specifically, I have an astigmatism. I have one in both eyes, and they correct the other one. They’ve never corrected the right one before. Here’s the deal: the astigmatism is slight. The lowest amount of correction is too much. But if they give me no astigmatism correction, it’s not enough. So which is the worse evil: contacts that are too powerful or contacts that are not quite powerful enough?

I’m finding out this week. I picked up new lenses this morning. She gave me two lenses to try. So now I have choice A) the old lens; choice B) Toric lens 1; and choice C) Toric lens 2.

I’m wearing option B today and it’s kinda strange. (more…)

Posted by Caro in Discoveries, Fears, Health, Life, Things to do
15Mar
0

3-11 Day

It’s long been established that I’m a huge fan of 311. HUGE. I go basically anywhere within a days drive to see them when they tour. Yep, they are awesome enough for me to spend an entire day driving to see them.

3-11 day this year fell on a Thursday. It has previously been held in New Orleans, which sadly is NOT within a days drive. This year it was in Vegas. Hallelujah! Oh wait, let’s go back to 3-11 day fell on a Thursday. All of my vacation/PTO days are earmarked for weddings and Itay, so I have 0 left. Like I have calculated down to the hour how much time I will have away and have used every last second speaking my pretend Italian and eating glorous Italian food. This means I can’t even take part of a day off for fun things like 311.

Whatever, they’re doing a mini-tour at the moment and I went. It was seriuosly awesome, as always. But yesterday I talked to a friend who ventured out to 311 day and wouldn’t you know it – this thing was EPIC. So apparently they played for 6 HOURS. SIX! While I have no doubt I would have been exhausted beyond belief after this, I also have no doubt this would have been the single most amazing experience of my lifetime.

SO SAD I MISSED IT!

Here’s the deal kids. 3/11/11 falls on a Friday. I’ll be damned if I don’t go. In fact, I’ll even expand the concert perimiter. Forget 1 day drive, I’ll go anywhere in the United States. Is it too early to put in a request for a day off?? lol

Posted by Caro in Discoveries, Life, Music, Things to do
11Mar
1

OK I’m Awake!

Because I work such long hours, I’m forced to schedule my physical therapy sessions at like the crack of dawn. It minimizes the amount of time I have to take off from work. The main problem with this, aside from the fact that my sessions sometimes start a full HOUR before I’m used to starting work, is that I have to drive about 20  miles to get there. 20 miles + rush hour traffic = about a 45 minute drive. So I leave my house anywhere from an hour to almost 2 hours earlier than I “should” on physical therapy mornings. Needless to say, I’m pretty tired – tired like I was during the Olympics. Exhausted really.

After waking up at the crack of dawn yesterday and sort of zombie-ing through my morning, I decided that I MUST get to bed early last night. Yet despite my best efforts, I didn’t make it to my bed until around 11. Alarm starts chirping just a few short hours later, and I’m NOT a happy camper. I think I snoozed for like 35 minutes before finally giving in to the little voice in my head telling me I need to get up, leave my warm bed, and face the day. Ugh. Fine.

Again, eyes don’t wanna open. It’s cold. I don’t wanna leave my house. So I throw on some jeans (and not exactly my nicest pair either lol), running shoes (the physical therapist wants to check them out), a shirt, and a sweatshirt. It’s not the nicest of outfits, but it works OK for work, and it’s comfy. I then quickly throw my hair up in a pile on top of my head, and really it’s not too polished looking, but I simply couldn’t care less at this point. Obviously I’m also wearing my glasses. Let’s be honest – if my eyes don’t even want to open, jamming contacts into them just isn’t a choice. I figured I’ll just clean up a bit after physical therapy when I’m more awake.

Thankfully I made a pot of coffee this morning. A strong pot of coffee. Started chugging that before I even got into my car lol. It was kinda sorta maybe kicking in a little bit the more I drank. I’m about halfway to PT at this point, and starting to feel a little better. Got some good music playing…it might end up being a good morning after all.

Then the morning gets interesting.

About 3 cars in front of me I see this truck kinda sway/drift over to the right. He compensates my cutting to the left. Only he over compensates. Big time over compensates – dude spins out. So I see a spinning truck, hella cars slamming on brakes, people swerving in all kinds of directions (think parting of the red sea but with vehicles), the car in front of me (also slamming on brakes, clearly) is quickly approaching. FOOT ON BRAKE ON FLOOR…PLEASE LET ME STOP! Check the rearview mirror, yep car behind me is quickly approaching, fuck I’m about to get sandwiched here. FUCK PLEASE STOP CAR.FUCK FUCK FUCK. I’m gonna hit this SUV. Goddamnit I was JUST in a sandwich accident, please don’t let this happen AGAIN.

(more…)

Posted by Caro in Fears, Health, Life, Random
09Mar
1

BRUTAL-ly Honest

I had physical therapy today. My usual physical therapist was sick so I got a substitute today. A brutally honest one. I guess I should talk about physical therapy in general since I haven’t done that yet.

About a week and a half ago I went in for my consult and evaluation. It was kinda odd, but based on past physical therapy sessions for other problems, I was expecting odd. She needed to observe and measure all kinds of things related to my foot, so I took off both shoes and socks. She looked at my feet while I just stood there. She had me raise up to my toes while standing on both feet. She had me stand on one foot at a time so she could look at something else. Then she made me walk up and back the room so she could see stuff when I walked. Then I laid down.

Here’s where it got really sad: she measured my calf/Achilles flexibility. When you’re laying back and you pull your toes up to a 90 degree angle (toes to the sky), that 90 degree angle is considered “0″. Pull your toes in toward your shin more, and every degree beyond 90 is +1. So you want the 80 degree angle: +10 on their scale. Ok so when I first got measured a week and a half ago, I was at -5. MINUS 5. So that’s 15 degrees of flexibility that I’m lacking. OK people, it turns out this isn’t bad; it’s ABYSMAL. Apparently the average elderly person has more flexibility in their calf/Achilles. Heck even my “good” foot is only at a +5. OK fine, my ankle and calf aren’t flexible. Whatever — fix me!!

(more…)

Posted by Caro in Fears, Health, Life, Rants and raves, Things to do
09Mar
0

Kitteh Om Nom Nom

SO CUTE. I can’t stand how cute it is. Thanks Meli for introducing me to this!!

(must have sound)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnagRjxp7v4[/youtube]

Posted by Caro in Animals, Discoveries, Videos
08Mar
0

New Cypress Hill

Only heard this song once and am already in love with it: Rise Up by Cypress Hill, featuring Tom Morello on guitar. Their new album comes out on April 20 (of course it does – it is Cypress Hill after all!), and I might have to download it.

In the meantime, enjoy this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwAA6fXuh94[/youtube]

Posted by Caro in Music, Things to do, Videos
08Mar
3

A Bookcase (Finally!)

J and I have had this gaping hole in our living room. Just empty space that doesn’t look quite right. Coincidentally, we also have an overflow of stuff that won’t fit into our (large) bookcase. So for the time-being we were stacking DVDs, keeping the Wii games on the floor, and just dealing with the disarray. Well I was dealing with the disarray. I’m sure J didn’t even notice lol.

We’ve been looking at bookcases and talking about getting one for quite some time now, but haven’t gotten around to it. One issue is that if we’re going to get another standard bookcase, it needs to perfectly match the one we already have. It’s really big and bulky, and I don’t know that we have enough stuff to fill an entire second one. So we decided to get something that was less traditional.

We originally fell in love with the Brosna Bookcase at Scandinavian Designs. The picture they have on their website is actually 3 of these items put right next to each other; the bookcase by itself is actually pretty narrow, with shelves coming off either side of a center stand. We liked it cuz it was different, but would fit our needs well.

Of course this weekend when we went to Scandinavian Designs we had to look at ALL of the bookcases before choosing one. Yep, we are indecisive like that! After about half an hour wandering around the store, checking out bookcases, couches, bedroom sets, etc., we finally decided on our bookcase: (more…)

Posted by Caro in cool, Discoveries, Life, Shopping, Things to do
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