Happy Halloween!

Mr X and I foolishly carved our pumpkins too far in advance....6 days. Apparently the moist and warm San Diego climate encourages pumpkins to rot. Mr X's pumpkin had really thin walls so it just kind of collapsed over on it's side and gushed into the patio.

My pumpkin was a bit sturdier so rather than falling over, it just simply caved in onto itself...

...oh, and it seems my pumpkin had a little trouble with incontinence in it's old age.

A belated tag response...

Whoops, I'm a little late in getting this tagging post done...I didn't realize I was tagged. Oh well, better late than never, right?

8 Favorite TV shows:
The Office
House
Heroes (well, the 1st season I was a big fan....not so much anymore)
The Shield
I Love Lucy
The Amazing Race
Bizarre Foods
SATC

8 Things I did yesterday:
Ran 3 miles
Worked
Watched a documentary about northern Italy
Went for a stroll by the beach with Mr X
Folded laundry
Daydreamed about winning the lottery
Trained Hailey

8 things to look forward to:
My next trip (don't know when or where yet)
Halloween
Thanksgiving
Christmas
The weekend
My training clients achieving their fitness goals
Seeing Ross the Boss next weekend
Sleeping in on Saturday

8 Favorite restaurants:
Chipotle (chain restaurant but yummy)
Siamese Basil (Thai, Encinitas)
Adrianne's House of Gourmet Cooking (La Jolla)
Ke'alani's (Hawaiian, Encinitas)
Bubby's Gelato (not a restaurant, I know but I don't care)
El Nopalito (Mexican, Encinitas)
American Greek (Greek obviously, Encinitas)
The Lester House (Meat, Cardiff)

8 Things on my wish list:
Lottery winnings
A house in Europe
More time during the day
Energy
15 less pounds on my frame
Superior intellect
A shopping spree
An appointment with my beloved Rudy Carroll

I'd tag 8 other people like I'm supposed to, but I feel that since I'm so tardy with my tag response that I can pass on that. But if you'd like to consider yourself tagged, then go ahead and post your responses to all of these on your blogs. I know I'm always curious to learn a little more about all of you.

Signatures

Email is widely regarded as a necessity in business throughout the world. And as such, millions of people all over add "signatures" to the bottom of their emails. These signatures typically contain pertinent information such as name, title, company, addresses and phone numbers. However, since personality is harder to achieve through corporate email, sometimes people will include some sort of inspirational or comedic quote at the end of their "signatures." These same people also will usually, if they can get away with it, go crazy changing fonts and colors within their "signatures" all as part of their attempt to make your daily requirement of reading emails a much more meaningful experience. I could be wrong on the reasoning here, but why else would one bother to do this unless it was purely to waste time? Oh wait....to waste time....I get it now. Kidding.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up? A woman with whom I work has the following saying added to the end of her signature: "Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." Every time I read this I get annoyed. It's such a naive statement. In theory it's the key to happiness but in reality...oh please! I'm working off the assumption that even if you love your job, you love spending time with your friends and family and spouse and kids even more. So unless your job is actually to [insert your favorite thing to do here] then that statement is just plain silly. For example, if I were to fill in the previous statement with my favorite things to do then my job would be one (or preferably a combination) of the following:

Traveling the world with Mr X
Sleeping
Eating

How can I possibly get someone to pay me for doing those things? The only people I've heard of that get to do something similar are Andrew Zimmerman, Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves. Damn them. (I apologize - my jealousy got the best of me there.)

The Men's Room

The other day at work I accidentally walked into the men's room. The ladies and men's are right next to each other and therefore easily confused if one is deep in thought and full in bladder. Luckily for me nobody appears to be in the men's room at the time. Unlucky for me, a group of men were about 20 feet away from me, walking up the hallway and looking right at me. I am unsure of whether or not these men were paying enough attention to detail to notice that I had walked through the door with the little male stick figure on it rather than the adjacent door with dress-wearing stick figure. Maybe next time I won't be so lucky (it is inevitable that it will happen again) and a man will actually be doing his business at one of the urinals. I'll go home early that day.

On another note, Mr X's foot is healing quite nicely. He'll probably even be able to start surfing again this weekend...or rather re-learning how to surf again since it's been so long. I think he actually dies a little bit inside each time he looks out at the ocean from our patio and realizes he's still too unfit to play in it.

Playing catchup, Part 2: Fontana

Last weekend Mr X and I traveled up to Fontana, CA to visit his brother and his family. It's really nice to be able to see family so easily now that we are back in CA. You don't realize how much you miss out on until you see your nieces looking all grown up and you wonder how that happened.

Mr X's brother has 3 girls: A1, A2 & A3. On Friday night we headed up to a high school football game where A2 was a cheerleader-in-training. She was excited because she got to cheer at an actual game with the big girls. She was a little timid at first, but she warmed up to the crowd after a while and she did a great job.

The next morning we watched A1's soccer game. A1 was on a team called the Killer Penguins. I pretty much thought the name was a stellar choice - way better than some of the other names, like Poison Ivy. Blech. A1 did a good job, but I did bad job getting good photos of her so this is all you get:

Following A1's game, we attended A3's game. A3 started out as goalie, something that impresses me. I think that would be a very stressful position because everybody is looking to you and only you to prevent the other team from scoring. That's too much pressure for me. But apparently it's of no concern to my niece. She spent her time guarding her goal dancing, doing cartwheels, posing (for what or who, I have no idea), and even getting tangled up in her own jersey. My favorite part was when, during a particularly enthusiastic dance move, she got one of her feet stuck in the goal net for a while. Luckily for her, her teammates were doing a great job on offense, keeping the ball on the other end of the field during this time. A3 was able to free her foot before the ball made it's way back to her end of the field.

About halfway through the game, A3's coach put her in as a forward. She was really on top of her game in that position and she even scored a goal. Oh, and just so you know, the opposing team never scored a goal while A3 was the goalie despite all the dancing and gymnastics going on. She's just that good.

Happy Birthday Ralph Poindexter!

Today is my Pop's birthday and even though he doesn't read my blog, I'm wishing him the best anyway. (My mom occasionally peruses my blog and I'm sure she'll pass along my well wishing...) Anyway, I'm not going to say too much because my dad wouldn't want it that way, but I will say that he's the best dad a kid could hope to have.

I have many fond memories of him including fishing trips, road trips (I desperately wanted to be 'shotgun' on some of our road trips when he was driving and the few times I was granted that pleasure I thought I was the most special girl in the world.), eating kippered snacks with him, having 'pretend' picnics on my kid dishes (I used to lovingly serve him saltine crackers, frozen peas and broken dry spaghetti on my kid dishes.), etc..the list goes on and on.

But one of the most famous stories is the one where he taught his young, trusting and impressionable daughter that his name was Ralph Poindexter. He'd been telling me this for years as a toddler so when I finally started Kindergarten and the teacher asked me my father's name I replied very naturally, "Ralph Poindexter." My teacher knew my parents and thought I must be kidding with her but when I became very adamant in my assurances that my dad was indeed Ralph, she was concerned and she backed off as there was clearly no convincing me otherwise. Then she confronted my mom and cautiously asked if maybe I had a different dad than my brothers because I was so insistent that my dad was named Ralph Poindexter. Naturally my dad got in trouble by my when she got home that day but rumor has it that it was a very proud/humorous moment in my dad's life.

Anyway, Dad, my point to all of this is that you're the best and I love ya! Here's hoping this is a wonderful year for you.

Playing catchup, Part 1: Miramar Airshow

Every fall here in SD the Miramar Air Force Base holds its annual air show. We've gone before and it's always been really entertaining so this year when my SIL (Mr X's sister) invited us to go with her family, we were more than happy to attend. There are always plenty of planes out on display for exploring:

(This is my niece, Hannah. She was so excited to sit in there but once she got in she was too timid to really touch anything.)

(Hannah and her dad)

(The rest of these are of the Blue Angels...always a good show.)

The only thing I was kind of disappointed in was last time I went to the airshow they were adventurous enough to break the sound barrier and in so doing they provided us with a crowd pleasing sonic boom. This go around I waited and waited for that moment but alas, the boom was not to be heard. *sigh* Oh well. At least I got to experience it once.

I found this picture, from National Geographic, of what it looks like when a plane breaks the sound barrier:

Poor Mr X!

Over a week ago, last Thursday to be exact, Mr X sprained his ankle while jumping over a curb during a morning run. The picture here is of his ankle about 2 days after the incident. I don't think the picture quite captures the damage adequately enough, but it'll have to do.

Normally Mr X has these very slender and shapely little ankles (and I mean that in the most manly way possible). His ankles are smaller than mine even though he's almost 4 inches taller and about 40 pounds heavier. I'm not sure if that has any bearing on the issue anywhere else but in my mind, but anyway...

His ankle is taking waaaaay too long to heal. You see, when Mr X can't go outside and run around and play to his heart's content, he turns into a rather crotchety old grump. To his credit, so far he's been doing pretty well on that front, but sooner or later he'll cross his patience/boredom threshold and then there'll hell to pay...

Things from work

I overheard a conversation today between 3 ladies. One of them was watching 2 finches for her best friend,who was out of town for a couple weeks. The bird-sitting lady has 3 dogs. Apparently one of her dogs ate one of the birds yesterday. When telling the story to her 2 friends she said, "And so I beat that damn dog to death." What?!?! She beat her dog to death because it ate her friend's bird? Geez, she shouldn't be allowed to have dogs. I guess the ladies to whom she was telling this story were alarmed when she said that as well because they cautiously asked her if her dog was indeed dead. Turns out the Bird-Sitter is a bit of a fibber - her canines are all alive and well. But she did call her friend to let her know her bird was dead. Miss Bird-Sitter told her friend that she was able to get most of the bird out of the dog's mouth and then she threw what she'd salvaged into the trash. The friend then asked her to fish out the remains from the rubbish so she would be able give her dearly departed bird a proper burial upon her return. So now Miss Bird-Sitter has a half eaten trash-rescued finch stored in her freezer.

On other work-related news: The woman who resides on the other side of my cubicle partition may very well be drowning in her own lung fluid, I think. Every day she coughs these weak soggy hacks which I assume are a pathetic attempt to clear her throat but from the sound of it her lungs are filling up faster than she'll ever be able to manage to keep them clear. It sounds so incredibly disgusting. The second I hear it I find myself suppressing my own sympathy coughs. I don't think she's sick....maybe she used to be a smoker or something. It's like she's got perma-pneumonia or something. (PS - I have no idea what she looks like as I've never bothered to walk around to her side of the partition. I just can't bring myself to put a face or a name to the wet gurgles that drift my way.)

My new job

I started my new job last Monday. To sum it up - so far so good. If you want the long version, here it is:

I like the company and my boss a lot. The job itself is much less stressful than my last, and that's great. The only negatives are the fact that we aren't allowed to use the Internet for much at all, it's locked down so severely. They have 'Internet stations' in the employee lounge (which is very nice - complete with couches and a pool table) where we can log in to do personal things. That makes blogging from work difficult, but we'll see how that all works out. They aren't generous with vacation time, however, they do have many other perks of which I fully intend on taking advantage (like $5 movie tickets, etc).

Anyway, that's a quick update on me. I'll try to do a better update later. I need to fill you in on my adventures from this past weekend, complete with pictures. Meanwhile, this will have to do - now you don't have to see that awful title from my last post front and center whenever you check my blog.