I use my federally-mandated fifteen minute break to take a shower.
C is for Cement Horizon’s birthday, and Cement Horizon’s birthday is for you!
“So, you’re inviting a bunch of strangers into your house?” a friend recently asked me.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Aren’t you worried people will steal things?” she asked. We both looked around for a minute. “No,” we agreed. In fact, there are certain things I’m sort of hoping people will steal, like the pheasant-print loveseat the Lad refuses to get rid of.
“Well, aren’t you worried people will take your underwear and a lock of your hair and bring it back to their Carthage shrines?” she asked. Friends, I’ll tell you what I told her: that would be awesome. I’ve never had a stalker before, and if you want to be the first I will be nothing but flattered.
So, for you proto-stalkers out there, and you regular folks too, here once again is the 411 on the website birthday party of the century:
Q: WHEN IS IT?
A: Saturday, February 24, starting at 8 pm.
Q: WHERE IS IT?
A: Our apartment in San Francisco. Send an email to rsvp@cementhorizon.com for the complete address, if you don’t already know it.
Q: WHAT SHOULD I BRING?
A: Your own drinks, because man cannot live on Cement Horizon-themed jello shots alone.
Q: WILL THERE BE PUPPETS?
A: If puppets are desired, BYO Puppet.
Q: WILL IT BE MORE OR LESS FUN THAN THE NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY?
A: The photo booth will be better, there will be a chocolate fountain, and this time the go-go dancers will perform naked. I predict this will be even better than New Year’s.
Categories: General
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Happy birthday, Michele!
Here’s to one foxy lady. Happy birthday from me and the entire animal kingdom!
Categories: General
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An inconvenient, embarrassingly small truth
Apparently, San Francisco is part of a global trend of shrinking cities now being studied at Cal. “The shrinkage forces at play include swift economic change, declining birth rates and smaller households,” the Chron explains.
Imagine what kind of shrinkage we’re going to have when global warming covers half the city in cold, cold water.
Categories: General
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Birthday Party
When we were living in Seattle in 1999, I came home from work one day to find the Lad bent over several pieces of paper covered in elaborate charts. It looked sort of like a giant family tree, but he explained that he was actually designing a webpage. The design was finished three years later, and became the site we know as Cementhorizon.
Cementhorizon will be five years old this month, and we’re going to party like it’s 1999. You’re all invited: the people I know, the people I don’t, the people who read this regularly, and the people who stumbled across me while looking for stories about hot librarians. Ex-boyfriends, sworn enemies, people from high school who don’t really remember me…if you read my site I want to meet you. And if I’ve already met you I want to hang out with you. And if I’ve already met you and slept with you…that will be awkward. But fun!
PARTY TALK:
BYOB. We’ll be providing NOTHING to drink, not even mixers. You’ve been warned.
WHEN: Saturday, February 24, starting at 8 pm.
WHERE: San Francisco. Send an email to rsvp@cementhorizon.com for the complete address.
WHAT CAN I EXPECT?
-Photo booth: get a picture taken with your favorite blogger
-Cementhorizon-themed jello shots provided by Michele
-Spontaneous rhyming toasts by Sean
Stay tuned for more highlights as the party approaches.
Categories: General
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Odontologists study teeth
I’m reading a book I bought at the library sale this weekend. The book is translated from Danish, and one part reads: “He was bitter that it was the forensic odontologists and not him who were the big stars…” In pencil, a previous owner has neatly crossed out that “him” and in a spidery cursive written “he.” I love this unseen person.
I change the dictionary
Words that should not exist anymore:
aggregate
optimize
premium
Words that should exist from now on:
struggly
pinkle
twile
Watching Beauty and the Beast with the Lad, who was forced into it despite manly objections
“Be Our Guest” Number
Me: You know, if I had an entire cast of singing, dancing flatware to charm and impress people with, I could make beautiful young girls fall in love with me too.
Beast shows Belle the library
Lad: [in falsetto] Oh, the books are so beautiful! Can I start organizing them right away?
Belle teaches Beast to feed the birds
Lad: It would be awesome if, while her back was turned, the beast ate that blue bird.
Me: And then to make him feel comfortable, she grabbed another bird and ate it herself.
Angela Landsbury is a singing teapot
Me: She’s come a long way since The Manchurian Candidate.
Aftermath
Our house after New Year’s Eve, as viewed by:
Prince Humperdink and Count Rugen
Prince: Someone has been beaten by a bottle of rum. The loser ran off alone and the winner was put in the pantry without a lid.
Rugen: Shall we track them both?
Prince: The hangover is nothing. Only the bottle matters.
Sherlock Holmes
Following the trail of chips beside the prints of the stocking feet, we can see that the hostess was trying to eat but kept missing her face. I think we’ll find the missing alcohol in her bloodstream, Watson.
Shel Silverstein
The floor was encrusted with bootprints and grime,
And magnets, champagne corks and bottles of wine,
Sequins, some glitter, a hip flask of Schnapps,
And satiny underpants someone forgot,
Tiaras, gum wrappers, your young cousin Fred,
The stockings you thought you had left on the bed,
The place where that guy managed not to throw up,
A list of the people you thought would show up,
Spinach dip, cups, and mysterious stains,
The waistband ripped out of some random guy’s Hanes.
Your guests all seemed happy — they left with a smile.
You’re pleased that they showed up to boogie a while.
The party was awesome! A shindig! A scream!
Six hours to rock out — and three days to clean.
Hemingway
The floor had a lot of dirt on it.
Please enjoy the photos here and here, if you haven’t already. Note that the Photobooth album contains not ten photos but ten albums of photos.
Bring me the head of Harry Potter, and other Christmas stories
I love this holiday.
For one thing I love the decorating. Like the most of families, my family will cheerfully hang on to ornaments that are cracked, ugly, or created by a five year old, purely for their sentimental value. For example, we’ve got a broken Harry Potter ornament, tragically decapitated in a fall last year, whose disembodied head we now hang on the tree and claim he is wearing his invisibility cloak. (We also like to hide the body somewhere around the house to be found in March or April, or just wait until a guest has his head turned and drop it in his wine.)
We’ve also got holiday embarrassment covered, in the form of felt reindeer antlers which the Moms insists we all wear whenever we are in the house, and which she likes to force on our guests, like a test to see how much humiliation they can endure before they stop coming over.
I love the surprise element: watching the Moms slyly slip presents into the dog’s stocking when the dog is out of the room, so that she won’t know what’s in there. Because she drools a little less when chowing down on her pig ear* if she knows beforehand that it’s coming.
I love being woken up on Christmas morning by both my parents dancing outside my room. “Aren’t you awake yet? It’s SIX A.M. It’s CHRISTMAS MORNING. We’ve been up for hours! Let’s get the lead out!” For the record, they’ve been waking me up on Christmas morning since I was eight. Because while it is exciting to get out and open that new Lord of the Rings DVD, it’s more exciting not to fall asleep with my face in my breakfast an hour later.
I love the new annual tradition since we got Molly the dog, of Molly stealing one Christmas treat from under our very noses. One year it was a breakfast pastry, this year twenty of the thirty Christmas cookies my dad and I spent four hours making and decorating. It’s always exciting to see what she’ll steal next, and whether it will contain enough chocolate to kill her.***
Most of all I love spending three or four days at the parental estate, where laundry is free, floors are sparkling, food is cooked by someone else, and the plates are cleaned by a magical robot called a “dishwasher.”
I hope you, too, my readers, have a holiday filled with cleanliness and stupid pet tricks and the disembodied head of Harry Potter. Merry Christmas!
*Those who do not have dogs will be interested to know that yes, it really is the ear from a pig, now dried. Sometimes it comes with the little bristles still attached to parts.**
**Sorry, Dianna.
***I love Molly and do not want her dead. But those cookies did take a hell of a long time to make.