because Kelly said I had to update

Also, I really needed to update. Don't go getting a complex, Kelly. Hee.

Tops on my list of miscellaneous things to blog about was the suddenly annoying presence of the bed in my spare bedroom/office type room. It really wasn't annoying until I got the file cabinet and realized it wasn't going to fit where I had wanted it to (behind the desk).

There' s just not enough room in this room anymore. And the bed gets used maybe five times a year. That seems like an awful lot of real estate to give to something that isn't used very often. Plus the bed is like a zillion years old. It's sort of swaybacked, actually.

So I've been giving a lot of thought to just ditching it. Like, literally sticking it by the dumpster out back. Because, two words, people: dust mites. I probably should ditch it, just for allergies' sake. Unless there's somewhere I can donate a used old bed. Anyone know of anywhere?

And now the reason I really want to get rid of the bed: The Gatsby chair. Was there ever a better chair for a library ever made? Because dude, if I got rid of the bed, I could totally have a little library in here. A couple more shelves in a box (yes, yes, I know), the chair, maybe the ottoman, and the file cabinet near the desk, where it should go. It would ROCK.

So this is the current debate 'o Carrie. Fortunately, it can wait until the end of summer, as a library is more of a autumn/winter place, especially with a leather chair. It also must wait until my parents would come down with their SUV, unless World Market delivers.

I should research such things.

shocker

Latest piece of furniture in a box: mission-style file cabinet, from Target, to replace second piece of old desk and give me something in which to put files and on which to put my lava lamp, currently on the floor.

I pulled it out of the box and the cellophane completely covered the top of the cabinet, so I thought I might, perhaps, be set. Surely I was due some good karma after the three-tops desk.

Clearly not. After I cut all the ties, the whole thing sort of sighed and it became clear that the top was split down the middle.

Ha ha ha.

ETA: Apparently it wasn't just the top. Other bits are split, too. This thing looks like it's been through a war.

drum roll, please

Bottles of wine completely drank last night at Sideways party: 4.

Approximate total wine consumption: 8.25 bottles.

This discrepancy is due to the fact that there are 6 partially drank bottles still in my apartment. How did we do that? I think it was mostly the taste test and the checker shots.

So....anybody want to come over and drink MORE wine? Hee.

I am actually, amazingly, not really hung over. What I have, I think, is more along the lines of my stomach protesting the Roquefort. "What? You ate that green cheese shit? The hell you doing, girl?"

And now let me tell, for those of you who didn't hear it at the party, my Trader Joe's Burgundy story...

Awhile back I bought a Blason de Bourgogne (a Burgundy pinot noir) at Trader Joe's and put it in my wine rack. It's a slanted one, which is good for keeping corks wet, but in this particular case I went to drink it and some wine had oozed out of the cork (luckily it didn't ooze on down to the carpet).

So I took it back to Trader Joe's yesterday and the guy was all like, do you want another bottle? I asked if they'd had a lot come back with bad corks and he said no, so I said I'd give it a try. Round about this time the French Trader Joe's wine tasting guy comes up and is like, "Zee wine would 'ave been okay! I will take you and ve vill get another bottle and then ve vill open this one up to taste!"

So we did go get another bottle and then he opened the bad-cork bottle up, and it was in fact good ("Ahhhh, zat is good!"). Although, I would like to state for the record that it did taste slightly different than the new one, which we drank last night.

vnv + bubbles

I am too tired to post much but I wanted to post something on the VNV Nation concert last night, which was awesome.

I've heard live bootlegs of them before and was a little concerned about how they were going to translate live, but the sound in the Madison was great. They played a good, long set. Several encores, including one which featured Bubbles, the oldest clown in town. Which was, yes, bizarre. It was someone's birthday - not sure who, I returned from the bathroom and there was a clown onstage handing out balloon animals - and the group's manager apparently told the Madison to surprise them.

So yes, picture a couple hundred goth kids, VNV after a set of largely apocalyptic music and visuals, then on comes Bubbles throwing balloons into the audience. It was quite surreal.

They played a set that was largely from their new one, Matter + Form, with a lot of old stuff. Only "Epicentre" and "Beloved" (the omission of either of which would have caused SEETHING RAGE by me and probably all of the goth kids, too) from Futureperfect, which was the major disappointment. I haven't been the biggest fan of the new album, and thought Futureperfect was clearly their best effort, but perhaps they got sick of playing it (still, though, no "Genesis"???). The traditional instead of Motion version of "Standing," too - it's always a great song but Motion is so much better for dancing.

I am nitpicking, though. All in all it was a great night and really nice to have a break from work.

screwy

I am now in possession of a nice, hopefully nothing-wrong-with-it desktop from Target. The parts people said there were no more tops there (I think they just wanted to be rid of me) so I would need to go to Target and have them pull another one off the shelf and get me that one.

Which is what they did and it seems to have worked out. Watch this new top be from after the "redesign" in which they put all the screw holes and shit in different places.

Most amusing part was when the very helpful Target guy gave me the special-little-organized-thingy of hardware from the soon-to-be-scrap other box. He was all, here, even if you don't need it, your husband will like all the hardware.

Which begs the question...

IF I had a husband and IF said husband was the type to get excited over desk hardware, wouldn't I have made HIM take the desktop back?

Maybe he wanted me to say, "Oh, I don't have a husband! Why don't we go out to dinner and then you can come back to my place and....assemble my desk."

Riiiight.

psa

The Ridge Road Golden Corral has catfish all day Tuesdays and Fridays. I thought you all might like to know.

Also, today I told the Target representative that called me back this:

"You guys might want to, like, invest in some cellophane or something."

And I bought tons of wine at World Market. Fun times, people, fun times.

breaking (furniture) news

New desktop arrived.

New desktop was wrapped with all of one piece of paper.

New desktop damaged worse than old desktop.

What were they thinking? FedEx would gingerly nurse my desktop?

Yeesh.

durh?

Today during break I went over to Express to see if they had any more crop pants I liked. As I walked in, the salesguy said something along the lines of, "And what are you looking for today?"

Um, I was in the market for a pet leopard and I thought you guys might have one.

Or, clothes.

fromage a la Hyde Park

I went to the new biggs Hyde Park today. I was eager to see what they'd done to take biggs and make it Hyde Park. Clearly, the cheap-prices-scummy-atmosphere would not be the same as other biggs. But would it be like a cleaner, newer biggs, or truly grab for Hyde Park Kroger's throat and rip out its trachea?

(I would like to note that both biggs Hyde Park and Hyde Park Kroger are in OAKLEY. Oakley in the house!)

So I needed groceries, and they gave me a coupon for free salad (organic salad...at biggs! holy crap!), so I went. First impression...definitely more stylish than a typical biggs. There's a little cute Awakenings coffee shop in the front. The fruits and veggies section was typically biggs-sized (which is to say five times larger than Kroger's and half as big as Giant Eagle's...ah, Giant Eagle, how I miss thee).

Then I got to the first clear difference. Rather than do, like, market research or something, I think the biggs people sat around and said:

"CHEESE! People in Hyde Park like CHEESE! Lots and lots of CHEESE! We will have cheese and people will come from miles around and buy the cheese and eat the cheese and it will be grand!"

Seriously, I think they have more cheese in this store than Jungle Jim's. And that takes some doing.

However, while there was some you-bake-it bread, there wasn't the good kind that made it worth the occasional venture to the Ridge biggs. Someone needs to tell them that bread goes well with CHEESE. And despite a whole freezer aisle of ice cream, I didn't see any Healthy Choice. The cashier assured me that they must be out, but no Healthy Choice could be a deal-breaker if this continues.

The prices are definitely better than Kroger, and the sushi looked good, although I wasn't hungry so I didn't repeat last week's "I should get sushi...but I'm not hungry....but I'm at Kroger, I might as well........uuuuuugh, I should not have gotten sushi" debacle. The wine section is larger than the regular biggs selection (although it's not hard to beat a couple dozen bottles of Sutter Home White Zinfandel and the odd merlot). And clearly, they have robbed the French of their entire supply of cheese.

So biggs definitely merits a return trip. It's still no Trader Joe's, though. Which reminds me, I still must post my ode to Trader Joe's. Some other day.

Edited to add that I attempted to google image search Giant Eagle to see if I could find a picture of the produce section of, say, the Stow Giant Eagle (Grand Poobah of Giant Eagles...it would CRUSH Hyde Park Kroger like a little bug). And I found myself asking myself, "why are all these freaking birds showing up?" Uh.....

should have seen this coming

I believe many folks out there are well familiar with my ongoing saga of furniture in a box. The cliff notes version:

Approximately 86.7 percent of the furniture in a box I buy (and that's a lot, as most of my furniture came from a box) has some damaged part. The best examples have been the shelves (top shelf completely split down the middle) and dining table (giant crack in the tabletop) I bought from World Market. Bed, Bath & Beyond has also put forth its share of damaged bits.

It is to the point where now if I'm planning to buy furniture in a box, I make sure I have enough time to get the furniture, bring it home, figure out the damaged part, and then take it back for a new one. If there's a stack of folding shelves at Bed, Bath & Beyond, I know without a doubt that I will grab the box with the damaged ones (I have four sets of shelves from there...they rock, if you can find a non-nicked set).

So cut to last week, when I asked my parents to help me get the new desk and hutch I'd been eyeing at Target while they were there, thusly saving me much struggling up the stairs with my dolly.

My dad, in total dad awesomeness, carried both things up the stairs and set them up against the wall in my living room, since, minor detail, I had not yet gotten rid of the old desk. I'd had it up on craigslist for a couple weeks and a couple people seemed interested, so I figured it would sell. Come Saturday, the interested people had not gotten back to me, so I posted signs around my apartment complex. I got a call back within 3 hours (Paper 1, Internet 0) and they took the desk out today (not without its own drama...when they pulled the desk out, they also basically pulled it apart, and took it to their apartment in peices to be reassembled).

Now, I believe there are two pieces of furniture I've ever bought that did not have a damaged part. One was from, oddly, Value City, and the other was my entertainment center from Target. One of those four sets of shelves from Bed, Bath & Beyond might have also been okay...can't remember. So I figured perhaps my broken furniture in a box jinx would be broken. Surely the Great And Powerful Target knows how to package furniture such that it doesn't get busted. Awhile back I had vowed not to buy any more furniture from a box, but I don't like and really can't afford furniture store furniture, and come on, this was Target.

So you can see where this is going. I took the desk box into the room, pulled out all the peices, and the TOP OF THE FREAKING DESK is nicked. It was pretty obvious it was going to be, too, since the protective wrapping had shifted off of it in that spot.

So this is why I am blogging and not assembling a desk. The only good thing is that Target has a replacement parts program thingy, so I emailed that and asked for a new desk top, and with any luck will not have to lug the whole desk back to the store.

But here's my question. Why on earth can't they wrap this shit up better? Like, two layers of cellophane might have done it. One layer, well taped, might have even done it. This isn't like the World Market shelves or table, which had clearly been punted by something large somewhere between Thailand and here. So now, instead, Target is going to have to ship me a new desktop.

At least now I guess I can spend my afternoon by the pool as I originally planned. Heh.

everybody wang chung tonight, or hollaback girl part 2

Okay, so today on 97.7, as I was doing my usual "Cincinnati radio sucks" pass through the dial, they were playing "Kung Fu Fighting."

Yes. On the former future of rock and roll.

That's not even the past of rock and roll. That's bad bad '80s pop. They could have at least played good bad '80s pop and busted out, like "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" or something.

Also, speaking of bad pop, Sarah C. reminded me that I did not even broach the worst part of "Hollaback Girl." This was a horrible oversight. So here it is:

Just when you think the song could not possibly get any worse, and just when you're really totally sick of it, Gwen busts in with a chanted spelling of a word I'm sure everyone was totally waiting to hear.

Bananas. B-a-n-a-n-a-s.

Whuh? Surely that must be because the room full of monkeys they had write that song was getting hungry. It must be.

Also, I have realized that despite Gwen Stefani's best efforts, I still find the word bananas hard to spell. Clearly, the song is an utter failure.

P.S. - I got Wang Chung in your head, didn't I? Didn't I? Muahahahahaha. My work here is done.