linda took this picture last night in walgreens. i didn't know dwight yoakam was into packaged food items but then i don't know much about him.

i read sharon stone said that kissing him was like eating a dirt sandwich which is a pretty nasty thing to say, i think; but i've never kissed him.

and i don't think i will be eating his chicken lickins anytime soon. sorry deewight.


my food du jour is pumpkin muffins. i'm growing little ones on my hips.

linda and i had two drinks apiece last night which wasn't smart. one drink is good. two is like trying to enhance heaven. we watched the tour of cali when we got home. somehow the whole crash thing in santa rosa and giving everyone the same time never really sunk in before.

last night i wouldn't shut up. i was annoying myself. "that's just so pathetic," I kept saying. that's reeediculous.

i'm slow to catch on. i sometimes see it in peoples eyes. they look at me like, "ooh you're not as bright as you look," because i've worked very hard on my bright look.

i'm working on it right now.

i had this task at work to add photos of people's mugs to our staff site. click on a link, you see a different mug. i was dreading the part about going up to strangers and asking them if i could take a picture of their mug. i think the fact that i refer to co-works as strangers says a lot about my not so rapid ascent up the corporate ladder.

hey, has anyone seen a ladder around here?



so i made myself do it. i hung my camera around my neck and set out. i avoided bigwigs and people who i generally avoid in general...which is about 75% of staff.

i have a few problems.



they got very serious about which mug they wanted me to shoot. they explained the history of their mugs, decided on one mug then swapped it for another, dug around in drawers for better looking mugs.




i went up to this one guy and asked if he had a coffee mug that i could take a picture of. "nope" he said and turned away.

asshole i thought and strode off. ( increasing my percentage to 76%). then near the end of the photoshoot, he appears in the hallway walking toward me, four mugs hanging off his fingers. apparently, he'd been confused by my request ( been working very, very hard on his bright look too). and he wants me to shoot them all.


his mugs are all pretty boring. this was the best.








this is my favorite.

they've moved people around at my job. purchasing has been moved to banway. the service desk is down on shattuck.

the business and finance team has been moved to my floor.

and, lordy, lordy, they're really smelling up the place. i don't mean a subtle touch of perfume on the neck, a delicate dab on the wrist. no, what i'm smelling wafting from the breakroom to the distribution center appears to have been applied with a leaf blower.

i passed by business and finance the other day and couldn't believe my eyes. a woman spritzed herself in her cube creating a mushroom cloud of perfume rising upward and onward, moving off to rain its smelly fallout across the floor.

isn't this kind of behavior illegal in Berkeley?

later, i walked into the bathroom and caught a whiff. a horrid floral sweet odor like gardenias dipped in caramel then sprinkled with chocolate morsels. a tooth hurting odor. i suspected the heavy applicator from business and finance. so i peeked under the stall. muddy tennis shoes with mis-matched laces -- Bernie from Application Services. not really a perfume sort -- perhaps a little Brut aftershave under the pits, but not this.

When she left, I went about my business, leaving my own devastating bouquet behind, washed my hands, and then saw the source of the stink sitting above the paper towel dispenser (which is always stocked so tightly and you have to tug so hard that the paper towel gets torn into tiny bite-sized pieces -- which is whole 'nother blog.)

there it stood. a tiny glass vase, no bigger than my hand, filled with a honey colored oil with long thin tooth-pick like things soaking in the stuff. I removed one toothpick thingy and ran it under my nose. the scent was as delicate as a sledgehammer and brought back memories of every Motel Six room between here and Fresno trying to pass itself off as non-smoking.

how foul, i said to myself which i am certain is not the response Susie (or any of the other business and finance natural odor haters) probably expected.

my hand twitched to chuck that stinky thing into the waste along with the mounds of damp and shredded paper towels, but i thought no. that would be wrong. people's feelings will get hurt. and the stench will surely soak into the paper towel and spread more easily. best to leave it where it is.

that night while linda was tapping on her new iPhone (the cause of our near breakup, but that too can wait) i said, "business and finance is stinking up the place".

"hmmm," she said which is her standard non-response. she didn't look up. continued tapping with her fingertip. tap. tap.

"really stinks"

tap. tap. tap.

tap.

i have paranoid tendencies, but ever since the iPhone came into the house, i've been feeling a little less interesting. i mean, who can compete with all that?

anyhow, i went on about the stink and such. i may have touched upon my issues with the jammed paper-towel dispenser. and still nothing. tap. tap. tap.

finally, i just said "i'm gonna fucking chuck that thing in the garbage."

of course meaning the perfume dispenser in the 2nd floor toilet. not the iPhone

"do it," she said.

tap. tap. tap.