Two things bring out the worst in people.  Weddings, and buying/selling homes. 

I am trying so hard not to be angry right now, because really, we are almost through this house thing - but it’s so aggravating to have given a house away and still be asked for more and more and more.  With the exception of the first house we purchased, none of the others have gone well.  Bickering and griping over tiny little things is just par for the course. 

That is all. 

I spent some time last night at Refresh Richmond.  You can read all about what RR is by clicking the link.  I’ve wanted to go to the meetings for a while, but now that I am trying to get some freelance writing/marketing work, I have to get out and network again.  It was good to see some nerds I haven’t seen in a while, like Phil.  I met my new BFF Carrie Fleck, talked writing (and how blogs can get you fired) with @leashal, made obnoxious jokes with Bradley Robb and tried to listen to Wren and Mr. Sterling’s snarky commentary afterward at Legends. 

My favorite tweet of the night was my own. Sorry but it was.  Here it is:  Fav phrase from #refreshrva: minify. In a sentence: “I’d like to minify my ass.” I still don’t know if “minify” is a word, but it’s now going to be used in my daily vocabulary.  My second favorite tweet came from Bradley:  “I am waiting for someone to yell “You lie!” at #RefreshRVA”

Aside from all the techno-speak, I realized that had I grown up now, I would have been cool.  Sometime in the 2000s, being nerdy became cool. I missed my window of opportunity to be cool, apparently, and now I’m not geeky enough to really be cool anyway.  I’m a geek wannabe. 

Becoming more focused on work is important right now, but I realized how out of practice I was when I was driving Carrie back to her office and I literally felt like I was going to fall asleep at the wheel.  Even though the economy is terrible, I feel more positive today about my ability to get back into some paying gigs.  Lots of my friends are freelancing - some of them are even making money writing *gasp* creatively.  I’ve always wanted to write - in fact, I’ve been writing - I just rarely get paid for it. 

Some pictures from last night, and also from Laura’s very cool house:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdelbueno/sets/72157622236670657/

And since I can’t really talk about anything else in my life right now, here’s the rainbow and unicon picture of the day:

On the days when I think my kids are really badly behaved, all I need to do is go to our neighborhood pool for a little dose of reality.  Inevitably at least one child (normally barely able to swim, I might add) is left unattended in the pool.  That same child is usually ill-behaved.

Today, I took Lily and Arden to the pool around 3.30.  It wasn’t very crowded.  We all got into the pool and started splashing around.  Lily decided to get one of the pool toys out of our beach bag - it’s something that looks like a bat (the winged kind, not the baseball kind).  You put it under the water with your foot, release it, and it “swims” away from you.  As soon as she started playing, a boy about 5 years old came over and started grabbing at it. I didn’t interfere - I like to let the girls fight their own battles, and imagine my pleasure when I heard Lily say, “You can share it with me!”  They began to play with it, but then I saw the boy push her head underwater when it was Lily’s turn.  I moved closer.  He was demanding to take the toy and not give her a turn.  Arden of course wanted into the fray (she probably wanted to scrap with him), and asked for her turn.  I sat in the middle of them and handed the toy out to each of them in turn, but the boy kept getting louder and more obnoxious. He started yelling at me:  “YOU CAN’T HAVE A TURN!!! GIVE IT TO ME!  NOW!”  complete with grabby hands in my direction. I had had enough, so I handed the toy to Lily and asked her to put it away because it was causing “problems”.  As I swam away from him, he swam after me screaming, “NO FAIR!!! It’s MY TURN!  GIMME MY TURN!!! WHY??? GIVE IT BACK!”  I answered, “I took it away because you were fighting over it and not sharing.  It’s our toy, and it’s time for it to go away.”  I think I was pretty mean when I said it, but it didn’t settle him down.  He just yelled more loudly.

Where, pray tell, were his parents?  No idea. I never saw anyone talking to him, but I did see him attacking random children in the pool, ripping their water toys away, dunking their heads underwater, and generally being obnoxious. 

A few weeks back, Mike was in the pool with Arden and Lily, and a small girl, maybe about 2-3 years old, was clinging to the ladder like her life depended on it.  Turns out, it did. She couldn’t swim - at all.  She had to be helped out of the pool, after her sister got her mom’s attention.  She was busily stuffing her face while texting.  She took her daughter out of the pool, but immediately resumed the texting and her non-aquatic daughter was back in the pool within seconds.  Drowning, anyone?  Apparently they assume the lifeguards are there to rescue kids who can’t swim Why bother with swim lessons when you have lifeguards? 

Ugh.  Just, ugh. 

Driving through Carytown yesterday, I saw a huge “Closing Sale” sign on one of my favorite stores, Lane Sanson.  I was hoping they were just moving - No such luck. 

Carytown is one of my favorite places in Richmond.  On a personal level, it reminds me of those glorious years of pre- and post-marital bliss, wandering the streets looking at clothing I couldn’t afford and buying crap I didn’t need for the house.  If you want something unusual, Carytown is the place to get it.  It was a nice break from the miles of suburban wasteland and strip malls.  In the back of my mind, I always dreamed I’d open a store there, except I hated working retail, so I kind of knew that was never going to happen. 

Lane Sanson, along with Mongrel, are two of my favorite places to shop for wedding and Christmas presents.  About 80% of my cool ornaments come from LS, and all of my great magnets come from Mongrel.  Most of my friends and family received wedding presents from LS.  Let’s hope Mongrel can hold on - otherwise Carytown will have nothing for me except Nacho Mama’s, and Nacho Mama’s is not Weight Watchers approved.  Mmmm, margarita.  But I digress. 

I talked to one of the manufacturers we carry at Sassy Monsters yesterday.  One of her shirts was featured in People Magazine recently, and she was hoping more stores would pick up her line.  Instead, she got a bunch of individual orders - which is great, yes, but it’s a sign of the times.  Some of the stores that carry her have gone out out of business.  In a nice way, she was asking me about our future.  For now, I’m okay.  Thankfully I never did go to Carytown, or one of the big malls.  Overhead can be managed, and as long as I’m making enough to pay down the credit line (paying myself right now is out of the question), Gloria Gaynor and I will survive. 

Still, the sadness I feel as I roam Cary Street and see all the “For Lease” signs break my heart.  These are small business owners, just like me.  These are places I’ve frequented, supported, and loved since I’ve been in Richmond.  I know that this is cyclical and eventually things will turn around, but it doesn’t make the “Closing” signs any easier to stomach. 

Dear Middle-Aged Poofy-Haired Man at the YMCA:

Hello.  My name is Cristina.  Not sure if you noticed me, but I was the one impaled on the Expresso bike sweating torrents and glaring at you through the glass pane.  You probably didn’t, but I sure noticed you.  I noticed you in your really tight work out pants (by the way, next time please do us all a favor and wear UNDERWEAR - cuz that was NASTY), your $1M dollar sales t-shirt, your extra-poofy hair, your weight lifting gloves and your cell phone.  Yeah, I saw you. I saw more of you than I ever wanted to see.

It would have been hard to miss you.  Generally when people go to the Y, they don’t spend their entire time in the hallway between the weight lifting room and the gym shouting into their cell phone, talking with their hands, and making lots of silly hand gestures (if you did the two thumbs up sign one more time while balancing the phone on your shoulder, I was going to whip a courtesy copy of Cosmo at your head.  Are you aware that the person on the other end of the phone CAN’T SEE YOU?).  I guess I don’t get it.  Did you need the weight lifting gloves to get better traction on your cell phone?  Are you that important that you must spend the entire 48 minutes I was on the bike chatting with 6, count ‘em, 6 different people?  (I counted, buddy.)

And because you bugged me THAT much, I actually timed how many minutes you were actually lifting weights.  I hate to break it to you: it was 4 1/2.  Seriously.  4 1/2 minutes of weight lifting and 43 1/2 minutes of verbal diarrhea on the cell phone while strutting in front of me with your tight pants and little soldier at half mast.  Are you aware how difficult the Expresso bikes are, and how irritating it is to see your big poofy head bobbing around on your neck right outside the glass that separated us?  Every time I focused on the monitor, another phone call came in, and you were there - sometimes not even noticing my hairy eyeball as you stared vacantly through the glass, less than 2 feet from me.  I know your momma taught you not to adjust yourself publicly. 

Mr. Cell Phone guy, working out does not come naturally to all of us.  And while you followed Y protocol by not taking calls while actually on the weight machines, you irritated the living crap out of me.  I was trying to stay focused on my course and my heart rate, and your stupid strutting walk was only missing the chest pounding.  Having a cell phone was cool in, like, 1993.  Everyone has them now - not sure if you’ve noticed, but no one gives a crap if you closed a big deal this week or how important you are that you must take calls during your “workout”. 

As a fellow fatty, I also might suggest you would get more mileage out of your membership if you spent less time exercising your jaws and strutting and more time actually working on that gut of yours.  Do us all a favor next time and sit in your car on your phone feeling important.  Perhaps you are even the guy who had a personalized license plate that said “Shlong” (those on Facebook have seen it, so they know I’m not lying), because that’s exactly the type of guy I think you are.  Leave the rest of us to sweat and grunt and have near-death experiences trying to beat our prior time in peace.

Best of luck in your future workout endeavors.

Yours truly,

Cristina

An illustration of how close this guy was to me:

And proof that someone at the Y actually drives a car with “Shlong” on the license plate: