My secret weakness: really not very secret at all. *shakes fist*
Oh man, catching up on like two and a half days of LJ in about three hours is HARD. *is so not even close* It is made more difficult when Asshole Neighbours (who had shouting matches with visitors at 3am, and started a loud party with cranking bass at 5am - yes, at FIVE AM, what the ACTUAL FUCK. I have had weird hours myself! I respect being out of kilter with the 9-5 working world, and all that jazz, but you don't start a seriously fucking loud noise when MOST PEOPLE ARE ACTIVELY SLEEPING. GAH.) were STILL making noise when I got home at 6pm, and took a brief dinner break, apparently, but started up with the shouty-shouty and the pool cue noises and the bass and loud stereo again at 8pm. And so everyone in my house is grumpy and tense again because we're all sick of the constant NOISE and broken sleep. I know noise control's number pretty much off by heart, now. :/ I am at least mostly getting sleep by going out to the garage, but the thing is- my room is pretty much uninhabitable when this shit is going on, and it's MY ROOM. I should be able to USE IT. And I got to bed at like 1.30 this morning - having spent an hour READING, quietly, because I am SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE - and they'd been quiet then so I went to sleep in my room. And thus the broken sleep. I am just really fucking sick of all of this. It's making me a tense, angry and INCREDIBLY BORING person and I hate that. DDDDDDDD:
ETA: Aww, though, the lady at noise control just now used "shan't" correctly. <3 Aaaaand has informed me they are apparently on the "hot list of problem properties". Huh.
Failing that, though, I have actually had a pretty excellent weekend.
I got up semi-early on Saturday to hit the Moontide shop again (I wanted to see if I could find a matching top for one thing), and it turned out they actually open at 10am, not 9am, so I sat in the cafe nearby nursing a coffee for half an hour and watched more and more women turn up and start lurking around the doors, it was sort of hilarious. There was totally this mini GA-line type RUSH when they opened the doors. I managed to find the top I was after and also figured for $20 I could actually do the thing of buying a second swimsuit exactly the same as one I already have and like a lot, and got out of there (and the changing rooms, omg line) in quite short order.
I wandered into Real Groovy briefly after that, on a mission for Rob, and was not entirely successful, unfortunately. (Neither I nor the guy working there could find something their website still lists as instock - so someone's clearly misfiled it - although I basically searched the entire section anyway, I still have my book-and-video store search-fu in good order - or has hidden it for later. Damnit. Quest continues!) And curse Fall Out Boy for knowing my secret weakness for coloured vinyl, because I kind of tripped and fell on the Folie a Deux vinyl. It's so PRETTY, though. OMG. *pets it and essentially sounds like Gollum*
And then I was just about out of there when I happened to wander past the $10 clothing bin. Mostly it was teeny tiny Bonds t-shirts and belts, but they also had one pair of yoga pants with a silver skull and crossbones buckle applique thingy on the front. Which, of course, I was immediately attracted to. And it was in the size I generally wind up wearing, and passed the "hold up to my waist and see if I need to laugh hysterically while saying 'yeah, NO'" test, so I figured, what the hell, they're Paul Frank; if they don't fit I can make back the ten bucks on TradeMe. So I bought those too. I later had cause to be EXCEPTIONALLY GRATEFUL for this lapse in budgetary responsibility. /foreshadowing
I hauled ass after that to hang out with blademistress and stickmarionette, as we were planning to go strawberry-picking out west with Jo, her brother, and her brother's fiance. We maybe got to Jo's place a tad late. We maybe left Jo's a tad late, after her brother was also late, and also we had to admire the vege garden and the kitty-cat and the rabbit and wax eloquent on the evils of Cadbury for discontinuing most of the good Roses chocolates and relabelling the rest in a vile betrayal of the learnings of our youth. So I think we actually got to the strawberry place just before half past three.
Those of you who actually live in Auckland are more than likely laughing your asses off by now, because, yeah. We'd been all super prepared after last year's effort (when the_antichris got a wicked sunburn, which she possibly still has the lines from, and all of us were expiring delicately from the heat) with hats and extra sunscreen, and it was muggy but cloudy so we figured it would maybe be a bit warm, but not too bad. I looked at my spare workboots in the boot and figured, no, it shouldn't be too muddy, I'll just leave my chucks on. MISTAKE. OBVIOUSLY.
We got set up with our buckets and duly set off to the 'best picking', which was five fields down, and started in. It got darker. We kept picking, and making nerdy jokes and yelling stuff back and forth about how "something is fermenting in this part and if I knelt down here I'd be DRUNK in five minutes!" and "that didn't taste as good as it looked." "that's what she said!", and then it started spitting with rain. We bravely soldiered on, because, damnit, if I go strawberry picking I thoroughly intend to eat as many free strawberries as I possibly can before I give up. "We can totally get through this!" we decided, while more timid souls packed up and hauled ass back to the shop. We started yelling abuse at the weather, at the strawberries for being so afraid of being eaten that they'd activated god-mode, and how it was not going to stop us, damnit.
It started raining harder. Most of us were maybe halfway through our rows. It was probably about this point that I found myself standing in the middle of a strawberry field with my arms out-stretched, raised to the heavens, while I yelled "Seriously! THAT WAS NOT A CHALLENGE!" Approximately two minutes after that, it started raining so hard that we couldn't really see. At this point we decided discretion was the better part of valour, sloshed our way through slippery ankle-deep mud and straw to take shelter against the conifers at the end of the field and laugh hysterically about how we were so fucking wet oh my god, and oh nooooooo sideways rain seriously quit it! The rain slackened off a little bit but didn't actually stop, but since the 'staying dry', 'appearing sane' and 'able to get wetter in any way possible' ships had all sailed, rounded the Horn and made port on the other side, we figured we might as well just finish getting our strawberries.
So we're basically stooping over, shuffling uphill through the river of muddy straw, slip-sliding and trying not to faceplant into the strawberry plants because our shoes were non-functional and the ground was not entirely stable (my cons are still in the hot water cupboard; they got utterly trashed and soaked), giggling about how badly our clothes are sticking to us and how we've run out of dry areas of clothing to try and wipe our glasses off on, and how clearly we were only wearing hats to try and redirect some of the water away from our faces. And then I realised that my jeans had done the fun thing where when they get wet they get a bit bigger and start sliding down. So I tried to pull them back up so that it wasn't potentially indecent, or at any rate just uncomfortable. And the fabric was stuck to me so badly that when I grabbed the waistband and pulled up... the waistband tore. Which necessitated more hilarity, because, hi, we went strawberry picking and I ripped a hole in my own pants.
The guys working there came out on a ride-on tractor to check if we were done, and we cheerfully told them we'd be a bit longer. We hit saturation point about half a row each later and squelched back up to the shop to get our well-earned bounty weighed, and got the people in the shop to take an 'after' photo of the bedraggled horde. I gather from their expressions and the fact they kind of gave us free icecream (normally $5!) out of what I can only really describe as pity that we looked hilarious. (Probably it's also a good thing that jocondite couldn't make it, in the end, as I would've hated to be responsible for another relapse into illness vile.)
Then we sloshed back to the car where we took advantage of its Tardis-like tendencies (I am a giant over-preparing packrat, and my car is like an extension of my shoulder bag, only it holds more and goes faster) to towel off a little bit, and then sit everyone on ponchos (me; the Vertigo San Diego 1 show poncho, actually. I still have it!), rugs (the two in the back) and a towel (Jo). There were more rugs and also the spare sleeping bag in the boot still, too. \o/ (Yeah, my car is outfitted for a Midwest winter, idek, you guys.) Our intense state of DRENCHED meant we didn't hang about Jo's long, and just headed back to Blade's, whereupon we all scrambled into dry clothes. Since I am by no stretch of the imagination of similiar dimensions to the other two, this meant I had started the day in 3/4 denim cargo pants, my Frames t-shirt and regular underthings. By 5pm I was wearing a bikini top as a bra, the other half of a different bathing suit as underwear, the almost fifteen years old tank top I'd thrown into my bag in case it got really stuffy in the afternoon when I wasn't in public so I could change into it, and the brand new Paul Frank yoga pants.
At which point it became clear that Paul Frank deserve some props for actually having sizes which are different in size as well as on the label. And that actually mostly reflect a better grasp of the range of human body shapes/sizes. Unfortunately, what this also meant in practice is that probably I should be wearing a size smaller in their stuff than I would have ever expected from a "label", and the yoga pants? Require that I take about two steps without having both hands clamped on the waistband to be making a determined effort to meet my ankles. Also, they're about a foot too long, so I had to roll them up to my knees, basically.This is all... unhelpful.
It becomes especially unhelpful when your entire plan for dinner was "get pizza", and so in the still-pouring rain, you go up to the pizza shop, park as close as possible, and then plan to have two of you dash in to pay and carry it all while the third stays in the car (meaning no messing around with locking/unlocking. Are we geniuses of planning or what?). In theory this was an excellent plan. In practice, I got out of the car and ran barefoot across the carpark, having to stop and haul my pants back up pretty much every five seconds. I get under the awning, doing that totally classy hopping move to try and NOT flash half the eastern suburbs, just in time to see stickmarionette, similarly barefoot and in clothes that were not entirely fitting right, cannonball out of the passenger's seat with the poncho over her head to try and protect Clothing Change #2 from the epic downpour, shut the door behind her-- and then stop dead as the end of the poncho got caught inside the door and arrested her progress. I swear to god, at this point, all we needed was the clown car. I think the other guy waiting for his pizza inside thought we were the most ridiculous spectacle he'd seen all day. (We did manage to be much more coordinated and graceful racing back to the car WITH foods, though: Blade opened the passenger door from inside to Stick, who opened the driver's door for me just as I got to it, and took the pizza as I threw myself into the seat. Teamwork ftw!)
And then there was a lot of Wii and trash-talking and my failure to swear in a coherent fashion and also really a lot of "fuck you RIGHT IN THE EAR!" "...eww, nose porn!", and How I Met Your Mother, all of which was moast excellent. And I toddled off home after midnight, read for a bit, and then, well, neighbours, blah, as mentioned above.
This morning I road-tripped down to see blue_raven, whereupon we wandered in to town to have brunch (I got this very stacked cheese-potato-kumara-sweet-chilli-on-pizza-bread thing which was glooooooooorious) and coffee, and then we wandered the mean streets of the Tron, and looked in second-hand bookstores (I got a random school story I hadn't seen before, it was like $4 and looks delightful; no Chalet School though, sadly) and I also found two Jill books I didn't have already, so much yay. And we went into the Rock Shop where there was a charming and enthusiastic guy on the counter who was all smiley and asked me what concerts I was going to next, and I finally replaced the good earplugs I lost in Chicago back in 2005. YAAAAAAAAY earplugs that work and don't suck a lot! \o/ ...I possibly also drooled a little bit over this gorgeous Fender precision bass they had on special, but that's just between me and my god. :D
And then there was more coffee and me feeling like a tool for not realising the girl had screwed up my order till after they made it (she charged me the wrong amount of money but I thought she just hadn't heard the size right and didn't say anything; she'd somehow got "iced" into the order which I definitely didn't say anything remotely like, and... look, even in summer I like hot coffee too okay? So I asked them to redo it, but I felt kind of assholey. D:) The rest of my day involved strawberries (eating this time, not picking! much cleaner!), and failing to find stuff on the external HD, and then driving home.
I stopped in at work on my way back home, because I was passing by at the literal tail end of the window where I could start something that we can work on tomorrow and save us a day's work later by having done so - if I'd been two minutes later I wouldn't have been able to, so fortuitiousness ftw! - and so I got off the motorway, pulled into the drive, and... noticed a gigantic goat or a very small cow or SOMETHING black and white and four-legged wandering in the middle of the road right near the motorway off-ramp. Where it was perfectly placed to get hit by something coming around the corner at high speed, or to wander further and get onto the state highway. Awesome. Escaping livestock is my FAVOURITE! *headdesk*
I waved madly at the only vehicle I saw coming, no idea if they actually noticed or not, although I did see them brake hard, so... I don't know. I am still not sure who you're meant to call in that situation - the police? the SPCA? Anyone know? - so I was about to try *555 when I saw a cop had pulled someone over just past the on-ramp, so I got back onto the motorway, pulled over, sat there going "oh fuck oh fuck oh FUCK" a lot because post-holiday traffic sucks and it was about five minutes before I felt safe in actually getting out of the car, and then went back and told the nice policeman. So I trust he got someone to do something about it, at least.
Aaaaaaand, now we've caught up with the present. Hi, LJ! How was your weekend? :D
ETA: Aww, though, the lady at noise control just now used "shan't" correctly. <3 Aaaaand has informed me they are apparently on the "hot list of problem properties". Huh.
Failing that, though, I have actually had a pretty excellent weekend.
I got up semi-early on Saturday to hit the Moontide shop again (I wanted to see if I could find a matching top for one thing), and it turned out they actually open at 10am, not 9am, so I sat in the cafe nearby nursing a coffee for half an hour and watched more and more women turn up and start lurking around the doors, it was sort of hilarious. There was totally this mini GA-line type RUSH when they opened the doors. I managed to find the top I was after and also figured for $20 I could actually do the thing of buying a second swimsuit exactly the same as one I already have and like a lot, and got out of there (and the changing rooms, omg line) in quite short order.
I wandered into Real Groovy briefly after that, on a mission for Rob, and was not entirely successful, unfortunately. (Neither I nor the guy working there could find something their website still lists as instock - so someone's clearly misfiled it - although I basically searched the entire section anyway, I still have my book-and-video store search-fu in good order - or has hidden it for later. Damnit. Quest continues!) And curse Fall Out Boy for knowing my secret weakness for coloured vinyl, because I kind of tripped and fell on the Folie a Deux vinyl. It's so PRETTY, though. OMG. *pets it and essentially sounds like Gollum*
And then I was just about out of there when I happened to wander past the $10 clothing bin. Mostly it was teeny tiny Bonds t-shirts and belts, but they also had one pair of yoga pants with a silver skull and crossbones buckle applique thingy on the front. Which, of course, I was immediately attracted to. And it was in the size I generally wind up wearing, and passed the "hold up to my waist and see if I need to laugh hysterically while saying 'yeah, NO'" test, so I figured, what the hell, they're Paul Frank; if they don't fit I can make back the ten bucks on TradeMe. So I bought those too. I later had cause to be EXCEPTIONALLY GRATEFUL for this lapse in budgetary responsibility. /foreshadowing
I hauled ass after that to hang out with blademistress and stickmarionette, as we were planning to go strawberry-picking out west with Jo, her brother, and her brother's fiance. We maybe got to Jo's place a tad late. We maybe left Jo's a tad late, after her brother was also late, and also we had to admire the vege garden and the kitty-cat and the rabbit and wax eloquent on the evils of Cadbury for discontinuing most of the good Roses chocolates and relabelling the rest in a vile betrayal of the learnings of our youth. So I think we actually got to the strawberry place just before half past three.
Those of you who actually live in Auckland are more than likely laughing your asses off by now, because, yeah. We'd been all super prepared after last year's effort (when the_antichris got a wicked sunburn, which she possibly still has the lines from, and all of us were expiring delicately from the heat) with hats and extra sunscreen, and it was muggy but cloudy so we figured it would maybe be a bit warm, but not too bad. I looked at my spare workboots in the boot and figured, no, it shouldn't be too muddy, I'll just leave my chucks on. MISTAKE. OBVIOUSLY.
We got set up with our buckets and duly set off to the 'best picking', which was five fields down, and started in. It got darker. We kept picking, and making nerdy jokes and yelling stuff back and forth about how "something is fermenting in this part and if I knelt down here I'd be DRUNK in five minutes!" and "that didn't taste as good as it looked." "that's what she said!", and then it started spitting with rain. We bravely soldiered on, because, damnit, if I go strawberry picking I thoroughly intend to eat as many free strawberries as I possibly can before I give up. "We can totally get through this!" we decided, while more timid souls packed up and hauled ass back to the shop. We started yelling abuse at the weather, at the strawberries for being so afraid of being eaten that they'd activated god-mode, and how it was not going to stop us, damnit.
It started raining harder. Most of us were maybe halfway through our rows. It was probably about this point that I found myself standing in the middle of a strawberry field with my arms out-stretched, raised to the heavens, while I yelled "Seriously! THAT WAS NOT A CHALLENGE!" Approximately two minutes after that, it started raining so hard that we couldn't really see. At this point we decided discretion was the better part of valour, sloshed our way through slippery ankle-deep mud and straw to take shelter against the conifers at the end of the field and laugh hysterically about how we were so fucking wet oh my god, and oh nooooooo sideways rain seriously quit it! The rain slackened off a little bit but didn't actually stop, but since the 'staying dry', 'appearing sane' and 'able to get wetter in any way possible' ships had all sailed, rounded the Horn and made port on the other side, we figured we might as well just finish getting our strawberries.
So we're basically stooping over, shuffling uphill through the river of muddy straw, slip-sliding and trying not to faceplant into the strawberry plants because our shoes were non-functional and the ground was not entirely stable (my cons are still in the hot water cupboard; they got utterly trashed and soaked), giggling about how badly our clothes are sticking to us and how we've run out of dry areas of clothing to try and wipe our glasses off on, and how clearly we were only wearing hats to try and redirect some of the water away from our faces. And then I realised that my jeans had done the fun thing where when they get wet they get a bit bigger and start sliding down. So I tried to pull them back up so that it wasn't potentially indecent, or at any rate just uncomfortable. And the fabric was stuck to me so badly that when I grabbed the waistband and pulled up... the waistband tore. Which necessitated more hilarity, because, hi, we went strawberry picking and I ripped a hole in my own pants.
The guys working there came out on a ride-on tractor to check if we were done, and we cheerfully told them we'd be a bit longer. We hit saturation point about half a row each later and squelched back up to the shop to get our well-earned bounty weighed, and got the people in the shop to take an 'after' photo of the bedraggled horde. I gather from their expressions and the fact they kind of gave us free icecream (normally $5!) out of what I can only really describe as pity that we looked hilarious. (Probably it's also a good thing that jocondite couldn't make it, in the end, as I would've hated to be responsible for another relapse into illness vile.)
Then we sloshed back to the car where we took advantage of its Tardis-like tendencies (I am a giant over-preparing packrat, and my car is like an extension of my shoulder bag, only it holds more and goes faster) to towel off a little bit, and then sit everyone on ponchos (me; the Vertigo San Diego 1 show poncho, actually. I still have it!), rugs (the two in the back) and a towel (Jo). There were more rugs and also the spare sleeping bag in the boot still, too. \o/ (Yeah, my car is outfitted for a Midwest winter, idek, you guys.) Our intense state of DRENCHED meant we didn't hang about Jo's long, and just headed back to Blade's, whereupon we all scrambled into dry clothes. Since I am by no stretch of the imagination of similiar dimensions to the other two, this meant I had started the day in 3/4 denim cargo pants, my Frames t-shirt and regular underthings. By 5pm I was wearing a bikini top as a bra, the other half of a different bathing suit as underwear, the almost fifteen years old tank top I'd thrown into my bag in case it got really stuffy in the afternoon when I wasn't in public so I could change into it, and the brand new Paul Frank yoga pants.
At which point it became clear that Paul Frank deserve some props for actually having sizes which are different in size as well as on the label. And that actually mostly reflect a better grasp of the range of human body shapes/sizes. Unfortunately, what this also meant in practice is that probably I should be wearing a size smaller in their stuff than I would have ever expected from a "label", and the yoga pants? Require that I take about two steps without having both hands clamped on the waistband to be making a determined effort to meet my ankles. Also, they're about a foot too long, so I had to roll them up to my knees, basically.This is all... unhelpful.
It becomes especially unhelpful when your entire plan for dinner was "get pizza", and so in the still-pouring rain, you go up to the pizza shop, park as close as possible, and then plan to have two of you dash in to pay and carry it all while the third stays in the car (meaning no messing around with locking/unlocking. Are we geniuses of planning or what?). In theory this was an excellent plan. In practice, I got out of the car and ran barefoot across the carpark, having to stop and haul my pants back up pretty much every five seconds. I get under the awning, doing that totally classy hopping move to try and NOT flash half the eastern suburbs, just in time to see stickmarionette, similarly barefoot and in clothes that were not entirely fitting right, cannonball out of the passenger's seat with the poncho over her head to try and protect Clothing Change #2 from the epic downpour, shut the door behind her-- and then stop dead as the end of the poncho got caught inside the door and arrested her progress. I swear to god, at this point, all we needed was the clown car. I think the other guy waiting for his pizza inside thought we were the most ridiculous spectacle he'd seen all day. (We did manage to be much more coordinated and graceful racing back to the car WITH foods, though: Blade opened the passenger door from inside to Stick, who opened the driver's door for me just as I got to it, and took the pizza as I threw myself into the seat. Teamwork ftw!)
And then there was a lot of Wii and trash-talking and my failure to swear in a coherent fashion and also really a lot of "fuck you RIGHT IN THE EAR!" "...eww, nose porn!", and How I Met Your Mother, all of which was moast excellent. And I toddled off home after midnight, read for a bit, and then, well, neighbours, blah, as mentioned above.
This morning I road-tripped down to see blue_raven, whereupon we wandered in to town to have brunch (I got this very stacked cheese-potato-kumara-sweet-chilli-on-pizza-bread thing which was glooooooooorious) and coffee, and then we wandered the mean streets of the Tron, and looked in second-hand bookstores (I got a random school story I hadn't seen before, it was like $4 and looks delightful; no Chalet School though, sadly) and I also found two Jill books I didn't have already, so much yay. And we went into the Rock Shop where there was a charming and enthusiastic guy on the counter who was all smiley and asked me what concerts I was going to next, and I finally replaced the good earplugs I lost in Chicago back in 2005. YAAAAAAAAY earplugs that work and don't suck a lot! \o/ ...I possibly also drooled a little bit over this gorgeous Fender precision bass they had on special, but that's just between me and my god. :D
And then there was more coffee and me feeling like a tool for not realising the girl had screwed up my order till after they made it (she charged me the wrong amount of money but I thought she just hadn't heard the size right and didn't say anything; she'd somehow got "iced" into the order which I definitely didn't say anything remotely like, and... look, even in summer I like hot coffee too okay? So I asked them to redo it, but I felt kind of assholey. D:) The rest of my day involved strawberries (eating this time, not picking! much cleaner!), and failing to find stuff on the external HD, and then driving home.
I stopped in at work on my way back home, because I was passing by at the literal tail end of the window where I could start something that we can work on tomorrow and save us a day's work later by having done so - if I'd been two minutes later I wouldn't have been able to, so fortuitiousness ftw! - and so I got off the motorway, pulled into the drive, and... noticed a gigantic goat or a very small cow or SOMETHING black and white and four-legged wandering in the middle of the road right near the motorway off-ramp. Where it was perfectly placed to get hit by something coming around the corner at high speed, or to wander further and get onto the state highway. Awesome. Escaping livestock is my FAVOURITE! *headdesk*
I waved madly at the only vehicle I saw coming, no idea if they actually noticed or not, although I did see them brake hard, so... I don't know. I am still not sure who you're meant to call in that situation - the police? the SPCA? Anyone know? - so I was about to try *555 when I saw a cop had pulled someone over just past the on-ramp, so I got back onto the motorway, pulled over, sat there going "oh fuck oh fuck oh FUCK" a lot because post-holiday traffic sucks and it was about five minutes before I felt safe in actually getting out of the car, and then went back and told the nice policeman. So I trust he got someone to do something about it, at least.
Aaaaaaand, now we've caught up with the present. Hi, LJ! How was your weekend? :D