Afternoon Announcements

When I was in 8th grade, I was selected to be the student who read the day's announcements over the PA system at the end of each day of junior high. I have no idea why I was selected for this dubious privilege but I embraced it with gusto.

The way I opened it, every day for the entire 8th grade year, was by saying "Afternoon Announcements" with an upward lilt at the end of 'announcements' so that it sounded either like a question or like I was British royalty. After that, everything was read normally. I can't tell you why this made sense to me but at the time it did. And it became my signature, and my legacy.

To this day, people I went to junior high with will mimic it back to me and then, once again, wonder aloud about why it sounded like a question when it was clearly a statement. That's when I sock them in the gut and run away.

Today's Announcement, of the morning variety, is that Eric asked me to marry him and I said yes.

The Bees Knees

For anyone who was curious, this is what it would look like if Eric were a beekeeper and also a game show host.

At the core

I went to pilates last night. It was with a teacher who is known to be a nasty person but she teaches a halfway decent pilates class after 6pm so I sometimes go to it.

We were all setting up our mats and she seemed to be having trouble counting the number of people because everyone was scattered willy nilly around the room. She's probably in her mid-forties and I think she used to be a ballerina, which might explain why the experience of her is so severe. She has her bright red hair cropped into a pageboy haircut that I would believe was a wig if you told me and I might believe it anyway.

For some reason, counting us was extremely important to her yesterday. So she proceeds to have a hissy fit about getting people lined up just so - one person behind another in a very precise way (ballerina heritage?). I had the nerve to suggest that we set up in a staggered formation so that people could actually see something other than the back of the person in front of them.

This subversive suggestion got me moved to the front row. Not the front row with other people in it, where I tried to move when she told me to move up. No - the front row with the teacher. She was apparently so irritated by my desire to see that she decided to make everyone watch me do pilates for an hour.

"No one ever said they couldn't see before. I think it's because everyone comes so regularly that they all know the exercises and don't need to see," she snapped at me while getting ready to start class.

She begins class (it's about ten minutes late now). Then, after the first set of exercises, she pulls a fast one: stands up, picks up her mat, collects her other belongings, walks to the back of the room, has everyone turn around, and proceeds to teach the rest of the class from the back of the room, meaning I am now at the very back of the room. In a row all by myself.

I shared the story with Eric over dinner in an effort to determine whether I should take this personally.

"No, for her to have done that intentionally requires her to be thinking two or three moves ahead," figured Eric. "That seems unlikely."

Yeah. But still. Weird, no?

French butterfly yoga

In spite of, or perhaps because of, teaching two yoga classes Monday and one this morning, I decided that I would also go to a yoga class at the Y last night. Eric decided to join as well.

I had taken a class from this particular teacher before and had found her to be pretty good but not very tough, so I went for a 20 minute swim beforehand.

Walking into class a few minutes late (and reeking of chlorine in spite of having rinsed off) I discovered that it was a different teacher. I never got her name but she was French so I bet it was something like Amelie or Marie Antoinette.

This was a different sort of yoga class than any I have been to before. I'm open to yoga taking many forms and try to just go along for the ride when I find myself in unfamiliar territory.

This was quite a ride.

She tended to pick a short sequence and repeat it many, many, many times in a row. For example, we rolled up and down from standing to a forward fold and back again probably 35 times, no joke. Then after that we stepped into and out of Warrior 1, alternating sides, probably 20 times. It was fast-paced and even people who hadn't just swum 500m seemed to be finding it challenging.

Her voice gave the class a particular mood as well: strict, not quite shrill but very demanding and punctuated. Her thick French accent exaggerated this almost critical tone, as she barked commands about our left and "wight" legs and arms.

Then we went into holding high and low planks for extended lengths of time. At this point, one woman gathered up her things and made an unapologetic exit.

"This is not when you leave," chastised Joan of Arc. "When it gets hard is when you stay, not when you go."

After class, I asked Eric what he thought of the class.

"What was that? Some sort of French butterfly yoga?"

We may never know.

Greener than thou

I used the word "meamble" in a rhyming contest with Eric yesterday. These happen a lot, especially when we're hiking for a really long time and have completely run out of things to say to each other. We'll be trotting along and one of us will say something inane, you know, just making conversation. When the other person has no intelligent response, this can unintentionally spark a rhyming contest where that person just says a word that rhymes with whatever was just said. This then continues, the loser being the person who can no longer come up with a rhyming word.

Ellie: We'll have to see about traffic. I think it is kind of a gamble.

Eric: Bramble.

Ellie: Scramble.

Eric: Preamble.

Ellie: [silence]

Eric: Ha!

Ellie: No wait! Uhh...meamble.

Eric: No way.

Ellie: Yes! It is a combination of meander and amble. It's one of those new energy efficient hybrid words.

Eric: Does it run on corn?

Ellie: No. It lowers my carbon emissions from speaking because I get more meaning into each exhale.

Eric: Does that make the deaf the biggest environmentalists?

Ellie: Hmm.

Eric: And people who use a lot of contractions and acronyms. And innuendo. They're the lowest carbon emitters.

Ellie: Yes. OMG. They're the real heroes.

Eric: So does exercising increase our carbon footprint?

Ellie: Yeah, I guess it would have to.

Eric: I'm being green by sitting on the couch instead of going to the gym.

Ellie: Nice. Does that mean we should fine people who spend too much time at the gym? Should there be a cap and trade system for professional athletes' carbon exhalations?

Eric: Now you're just being ridiculous.

Sign me up

I, along with the rest of the world, have been amazed and moved by the plane crash on the Hudson. It is so extraordinary when disaster is averted and a situation brings out the best in everyone.

Eric's response has been slightly different: he is now jealous of all the people who were in the plane crash.

"Man, I would love to be in a plane crash like that. Where you have an amazing experience and everyone survives? Heck yeah. Sign me up."

Is Eric a market of one or is this potentially a new business opportunity?

Exhibit I of my argument for why I should be the primary driver of our motorcycle*

*To be fair, the surfing scrape might be because I surfed my board right into his wrist, so might not actually be his fault.

This is when I remind you that I am 30 years old and extremely sophisticated

Strolling along Market Street with Eric's parents this past Friday night, I showed a little too much excitement about a large pile of finger puppets that a small Peruvian woman was selling on the sidewalk. Eric's father insisted on buying me a couple, which I proceeded to keep in my purse all weekend and secretly play with during quiet moments.
This may have significantly influenced their impression of me: for the rest of the weekend, every time we passed a toy store - in Palo Alto, Sonoma, Berkeley and San Francisco - Eric's mother would say "Oh look Ellie! A toy store!" pretty much in the voice you would use to address a five year old.

Capades

We went ice skating last night in Union Square. It was uncharacteristically warm out for San Francisco but somehow, blowers going full blast, they kept the ice frozen and the wee tiny ice rink was packed with people skating in t-shirts.

Pretty much everyone out there, except for us and a handful of ponytailed perverts, was probably procrastinating studying for their 10th grade geometry test. When skating around the rink one had to maintain peripheral awareness of the writhing amoebic mass of shrieking, giggling tweens, to avoid accidentally checking them into the boards or slicing off one or more fingers, especially given that several of them spent much more time on their buns on the ice and laying on each other on the ice than actually skating.

Eric hadn't been on skates since childhood but took to it with the grace and ease of a newborn baby deer learning to ice skate on a planet with an unpredictably oscillating gravitational pull. Impressively, in spite of many nervous wobbly flailing moments, Eric stayed on his feet and even got to a place of steady competence going around and around the ice.

I was just settling into my mellow skating groove when Eric came up to me, poked me in the arm, yelled "You're it!" and then took off like a wild banshee, his long legs and arms flying everywhere*, somehow managing to pick up significant speed. I had only barely begun to give chase when Eric took what was by far the most dramatic spill of the evening, wowing tweens and pervs alike.

It was one of those falls where it's almost more entertaining to watch everyone else watching it happen - horrified wincing, almost closing the eyes but keeping them open just enough to see, slightly turning their heads away, but then peeking back to not miss anything. It was an absolute train wreck.

"Dude! Are you OK!??" exclaimed about a hundred people as they rushed over. Somehow, in spite of the thunderous, sickening sound of bone striking ice, Eric had sustained only minor scrapes and bruises. And, being a tough guy, he rejected proffered bandaids for his bleeding hands and elbow, preferring instead to bleed on my shirt while we walked home to watch 30 Rock like the rest of the people our age in this town.


*The most apropos though seasonally inappropriate comparison I can think of is Willy Willy Waterbug, that little guy you’d plug into the hose in the yard on a hot summer day and all his little hair-shaped hoses would squirt water at you while they whirled all over. Loved that guy.

Blackberry with the bathwater

The Meet-The-Parents Dinner was to take place at a Mexican restaurant in a mall in the outer East Bay burbs. I drove us all the way out to there and needed a few minutes to check my makeup and hair before going in, so when we arrived I cruised past Guadalajara Grill and parked two lots away out of view to primp privately.

Applying makeup in the rearview mirror with the feeble glow of the overhead light is awkward to begin with, and it is made significantly more awkward when you realize that you have an audience: Eric’s mother, father, aunt and uncle had suddenly appeared about 20 feet in front of us and were all looking at us sitting there in the parked car as they dropped several postcards into the mailbox which we had unwittingly parked in front of.

Rather than wave, smile or behave like a normal person, I snapped off the light, slunk down in my seat and tried to be really really still, because that was clearly how to make the best of this situation.

They hesitated for a moment by the mailbox, and then drifted slowly back towards the restaurant.

“Do you think they saw us?” I whispered needlessly.

“They were looking right at us in a lit car at night.”

“No fair!” I whimpered. “That’s not supposed to happen!”

We joined them in the restaurant a few minutes later. No one said a word about it.

Once we’d gotten past the handshake/hug fake-out greeting, dinner was actually as close to fun as I think it could have been. Dinner conversation never made it around to unicorns but we did spend an inordinate amount of time discussing mice. Eric works with mice, his dad has had some hilarious run-ins with mice, his aunt is afraid of mice and told no fewer than 17 consecutive and uniformly boring stories about her experiences with mice, and then Eric’s mother, expertly facilitating the conversation, turned to me and said “Everyone seems to have a mouse story. Do you?”

I do. It’s a story I usually tell as a whodunit thriller set in my Philadelphia apartment that starts with my discovery that, mysteriously, there are large holes in the crotches of all of my panties in my laundry basket. The story explores possible roommate passive aggression and fabric-dissolving diseases before revealing that the culprit is a mouse, and the little pervert has eaten his way through my dirty underwear.

Better judgment prevails. I choose not to upstage Eric’s aunt: I follow suit and tell another boring mouse story that goes nowhere. Eric, familiar with the Philly mouse mystery, looks visibly relieved.

And so we made it through dinner without any major gaffes.

The Denouement
It may provide some insight into my overall state of mind that then the next morning I accidentally threw my Blackberry out of our fourth story window.
I was hurriedly doing a last straightening of the apartment before heading off to work for an early meeting and I noticed that the dining room tablecloth had a few crumbs on it. I figured I would shake it out the window a bit to get it cleaned up, as we always do, and so I gathered it up into a bundle, extended my arms out the window and shook it out. I immediately knew something had gone wrong when I heard the crack of something significantly more substantial than a crumb hitting the window below ours. My Blackberry, shattered, lay strewn not just around the street below but several key chunks had ended up in the open trash cans waiting to be collected, it being Friday trash morning. I opted against dumpster-diving and, in a stroke of extraordinary luck, the Verizon woman was able to treat the accidental death and dismemberment of my phone as a warranty claim and handed me a brand new phone on the spot. This may yet be a good weekend after all, I thought.

There's only one thing to do

There's only one thing to do when your boyfriend is growing increasingly irritated that he's been wearing his coat, hat and scarf in the house for 15 minutes while you keep insisting you are ready to walk out the door but just need another 30 seconds.

And that thing is to put a dog pillow on the chair with him and take his picture.

Happy hour

Eric and I drank a beer on our roof deck last night and watched the sunset. It was a lovely way to enjoy the last inhabitable moments out of doors on the roofdeck before the temperature plummets and the chill winds start howling. Remember in The Day After Tomorrow how the temperature suddenly dropped severely forcing an unlikely romance and a touching story of family loyalty? Well, that happens every night on our roof deck just after sunset.

A few weird things happened during the brief time we were up there. First, the airplane equivalent of a hunchback on a circus bicycle went put-putting by in the sky, closely flanked by two other unusual looking aircraft. You could almost hear a distant cartoony theme as we tracked them across the sky. I have no idea what that was all about.

Then, like suddenly remembering a word that has lingered elusively on the tip of your tongue, I had a revelation: I realized that this building I have been looking at all these weeks we've lived here isn't actually a building at all. It is a giant Ionic Breeze for the city of San Francisco. Check it out:

Seriously. Check it out!

The only other weird thing that happened was that Eric found a pit in one of the olives that were allegedly pit-free. I mean, man! That is so freaky!

You can't handle the funny

Eric and I are big risk-takers. We took several big risks this past weekend, chief among them: going to a BYOBooze/BYOFood $12 stand-up comedy showcase. We were hoping (against the odds) that it was not also BYOFunny.

We found the building but then hit an apparent dead end in the information- and sign-less lobby. As we were standing there looking confused, a woman came in, pressed the elevator UP button and then turned to us and said the comedy show was on the 5th floor, which was very helpful and compelled me to continue talking to her all the way up in the remarkably slow elevator.

"So you've seen this show before?" I ask. I'm so friendly.

"Yeah, my husband is one of the comics," she responds with a shy smile.

"That's neat!" I offer. "Is he any good?"

She kind of shrugs.

The comic who turned out to be her husband was one of those people who appears to have been put together from spare parts of other people. His face seemed inaccurately placed on his head and he had these freakishly long skinny fingers that could get a stemless maraschino cherry out of the bottom of a tall drink without even wetting the second knuckle.

He was awful. The whole show was awful. Horrendous. It made me want to weep for humanity. Let me put it in perspective: the absolute highlight of the show was a small squat black woman wearing a mini-backpack shouting the Jack Nicholson "You can't handle the truth" speech from A Few Good Men, but adapted for comics instead of soldiers. I'm dead serious.

After the show, they had a special offer where you get a free ticket to a future show if you tell a joke on camera. Since we had enjoyed the show so much Eric and I eagerly lined up to tell jokes and get free tickets.

Eric went first: "What's the best part about sex with 29 year olds?"
Pause.
"There's 20 of them."

"Whoa, you are one creepy dude," the host of the show, who was video-taping, concluded.

I followed: "Did you hear about the new pirate movie that's coming out? It's rated Arrrrgh!"

The host comic wearily handed us free tickets.

After that we went to a lesbian bar because the live band sounded pretty good.

Nesting week

Eric and I met at the airport this past Sunday evening to share a cab home. He was coming from a week in Paris for work, I from 5 days in Olympic National Park. Arriving home, we took in the card table, air mattress and two borrowed plates that constituted the whole of our material lives, noted that the pod would be arriving from DC on Thursday, and wondered what life might feel like if we really, you know, lived somewhere.

"I declare this week Nesting Week," declared Eric.

Nesting week had three phases:

Phase I: Talking about Nesting Week but not actually tackling any Nesting To-Dos such as taking items we know we don't want in the apartment down to the storage, making extra copies of keys or deciding where things might go.

Phase II: Whirlwind of Nesting Activities! Air mattress is deflated, pod is delivered, pod is unloaded, DMV is visited and licenses and registration are switched to CA, enormous mess is created. Passive voice is overused.

Phase III : Getting a little drunk and eating a whole pizza.*

The apartment is such a disaster scene right now that when the power went out in my office for 3 hours today I sat here in the dark and worked off my laptop battery rather than go home and work there.

They say it is always darkest before dawn. Well, I can't wait to see what the apartment looks like in the morning light!


*According to Eric, this is in fact required by law following any sort of household move.

And down the stretch they come!

This past Saturday we celebated my 30th birthday some more by going to the racetrack and betting on the ponies.

Shark tattoos and pony stickers firmly affixed to our persons, Yana, Eric and I headed down to the San Mateo County Fair noonish on Saturday to check out the racing, the music and the carnival. Included in the fair admission was entry to the hallowed Bay Meadows racetrack, which is co-located with the fairgrounds. Or was: Saturday was the second to last ("penultimate" as fancy people say) day of racing there and they closed it down yesterday after over 75 years of wild-eyed gamblers yelling and desperately slapping their hands with their programs willing their horse to come across the line first.

I can now personally speak to one day of the racetrack's storied existence and one of those wild-eyed gamblers: Eric picked the winner every time, but may have caused permanent damage to his vocal chords and hands in the process.

The fact that he has an addiction-prone personality is not good news.*

We each won at least one bet and had a great time at the track in spite of the range of human and animal smells that we discovered there. It was especially fun "expertly" commentating the pre-race and race events, like we do when watching the Olympics. (What's more fun than haughtily criticizing near perfection?) Anyone who overheard our authoritative discussion of the horses' muscle tone, disposition, post position, and jockeys' abilities would surely have thought we were experts, unless they had any idea about horseracing whatsoever in which case they probably just had a good laugh.

As Eric and Yana will wearily tell you, I invoked my birthday privilege to the fullest at the fair: we rode the rickety roller coaster against their better judgment, ate ice cream and caramel apples and popcorn, and played rigged carnival game after rigged carnival game until someone finally won.

It's good to be 30!

*Unless his newfound conviction that he simply cannot lose is in fact true, in which case I'm looking forward to an early retirement.

Idiots take flight

Eric and I flew to Portland, OR this weekend for my friend Elizabeth's wedding. We went up Saturday morning and wanted to take advantage of the time before the 3:30pm wedding to see a little bit of Portland, so we got dressed for the wedding and went out to have a wander around.

On the bridge driving across the river to get to downtown we noticed what appeared to be 80,000 people in the waterfront park. We soon learned that there was a Red Bull-sponsored event underway called Flugtag, in which teams of people with just the right mix of creativity, lack of engineering knowledge and alcohol construct "flying" machines that they - with great fanfare - run off a platform into the river.

It was all good, clean, taurine-induced fun except when Team "Pink Viking" did a gutteral ritualistic-sounding chant that made me wonder if I had just inadvertently worshipped the devil.

My main takeaway: street festivals really should be attended in formal attire.

Barbie, you let us down.

Yay baseball!

We're taking advantage of living a block from the baseball stadium by going to games on evenings when you don't need arctic gear to survive more than a few innings. Last night was a perfect night for baseball so about 45 min into the game we wandered out our front door, scalped some $40 tickets for $10 each and headed into the land of $12 plastic bottles of Miller lite.

The game was fun but it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to leave happy without having gotten a foul ball, so I asked the universe to send one our way. I asked kinda quietly at first, but Eric said he didn't think the universe heard me - I had to shout it. So I did. (I guarantee you it was no more obnoxious or disruptive to the people around us than the women who were shouting an inane conversation behind us. "I was at this yoga class in Santa Monica and the guy from Six Feet Under walked in and I thought oh my god I can't believe this...")

So then I decided to take a picture:



As Eric was posing, we heard the crack of bat on ball and a guy behind us say "That's us!" And sure enough everyone around us was tracking the foul coming right at us, trying to position themselves to get it. Eric, typically quite agile, was unfortunately still posing for the photo and so did not dive for the ball with 8 other dudes, and as such did not get entangled in the ball of arms, legs and maybe even a few tails that grunted and bumped its way down the aisle until the guy with the sharpest teeth emerged victorious.

Thanks anyway universe!

Eat me when I'm fatter

While I was in Canada, Eric fed himself by doing what we call "billy-goating" out of the fridge. This leads to classic meals like "cream cheese spread on flour tortillas and rolled up" or "cottage cheese mixed with salsa and scooped up with wheat thins." Suffice it to say one is not likely to find billy-goated meal menus on epicurious.com.

With billy goats on the brain this morning, I looked up the tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff and learned that it is an "eat-me-when-I'm-fatter" tale. As the story goes, the billy goats have run out of food and gotten thin, and to get to the lush fields to get fat again they need to cross a troll-guarded bridge by outwitting the troll.

This raises the obvious question: could fridge trolls be the breakthrough we've been looking for to turn the tide on the childhood obesity epidemic in the US?

And I'd bet that with the educational system being what it is, the ability of American children to outwit trolls is probably pretty low.

Just saying.

Corn corn everywhere but not a kernel* to eat

On Eric's drive across our united states, he stopped in Yosemite and got us a very thoughtful housewarming gift: two mugs made entirely of...corn.

That's right: corn mugs. Have a look:


It's amazing what all corn is being used for these days. Consider just a few of the ways we are using corn other than as food for people:

• Adhesives
• Batteries
• Cosmetics
• Crayons and chalk
• Disposable Diapers
• Fuel ethanol
• Livestock feed (indirectly food for people, but only meat-eaters)
• Paper plates and cups
• Pharmaceuticals
• Rugs, Carpets
• Shaving creams and lotions
• Toothpaste
• Wallpaper

With corn now being used for everything from gas to makeup, and with corn supply threatened due to midwestern floods and other agricultural iffiness, the price of corn is expected to increase. Who knows what these corn mugs could end up being worth!

*Does this word look funny to anyone else?