I just lost my stain of thought

Mom: Hey, you really should bring a couple lemons back with you to your apartment.
Me: Okay.
Mom: Yeah, lemons are really good for you. Make lemon tea with ginger and honey…
Me: Okay.
Mom: …It’ll help you lose weight so you’re not so fat.
Me: Sigh.

She finds a way to work that into the conversation no matter what and with anyone who will listen.

I just put toothpaste on a stubborn rust stain in our bathtub and it totally came out! I also read on Lifehacker that it (baking soda toothpaste) works on Sharpie marks on your walls. Oh, the wonders of toothpaste!

My love for ze public library has been renewed today. But let me start from the beginning and tell you why I needed to go to the library.

My friends back home and I have formed a book club called the Twenty Somethings and Unemployed (TS&UE) Book Club. We meet once a month to discuss a book and just to catch up and such. We successfully completed our first assignment which was the Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom earlier this month. I had already read it but I love to re-read books I enjoy and I always catch things I either forgot or did not get the first time anyway. Our exercise after reading the book was to come up with a list of five people we would like to meet in heaven. Most of us had some trouble thinking of people, but basically everyone agreed that they would want to meet their soulmate and/or a past lover up there. I find that meeting your soulmate is only ideal since your soul is up there meeting these five people. Why wouldn’t your soulmate be waiting for you? Anyway, this is a great book. It totally pulls on the heart strings and never ceases to make me bawl like a baby even though I know what’s going to happen.

So onto the library part… My friendlies from home had checked out the Five People You Meet in Heaven from the local library and that made me remember that the library is a wonderful place. Luckily I had my own copy of the book (which I lent to a friend over a year ago who refused to give it back so I had to storm over to said friend’s house and take it by force. To my dismay, it was covered in stains and bent all over the place. I cried a little.) but I kept a mental note that I should visit a library for the next book.

It has been so long since I read for fun that I forgot all about libraries that aren’t attached to a school. I mean, I have read some books for fun since being out of school but they were books I already owned for classes because I always fell behind and didn’t get to finish them during school. Thus, I read the interesting ones afterward to make myself feel slightly more accomplished.

I wanted to go to the library sooner but I had to find my library card at home, which, I found out this past weekend, is lost. I made time to go today so I could check out our next book (Chocolat by Joanne Harris) but first, I needed a card. Since my card was lost and I did not want to pay the $3.00 fine for lost cards (Yes, I am that stingy!), I signed up for a new one. I was scared they would find out I was already a cardholder because of the address on my license so I found a way around it and hoped they would not suspect a thing. It turns out, the public library, where they lend out books, DVDs and CDs for FREE and allow you FREE internet access is not that big on background checks. They took my pay stub with my apartment address and student ID with no questions asked. $3.00 charge averted. The new cards are quite snazzy, by the way. They even give you a keytag! Though I would still prefer the old green one with the word “Library” going across the front.

So long has it been since I really hung out in a library where the people around me weren’t frustrated students studying for tests and the books surrounding me weren’t research books that I had some trouble figuring out how to find my book. Maybe the library’s high techness is far beyond me…or MAYBE they have taken it too far. The last time I looked up a book at a public library, they were still using those computers with green and black screens (Don’t be alarmed, they had other computers for intrawebz that had more than two colors). This method worked fine! I tried to use the computers they have now to find my book but it came back without call numbers or anything. Maybe I am too old school.. It didn’t even give me the result for the book I wanted, so I had to go the old fashioned way and just look for it myself by genre and then last name. It took me three tries to find it because the names weren’t alphabetized right. Sigh.

Of course, when I go to a library I can’t just go and get one book (if this is a school library it’s because I have no choice but to leave with several). I came back with two others that were on that shelf near the registers that go along with some kind of theme of the month or something. One was Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts (because Martha Stewart can make something useful and artful out of a pile of poo if she had too) and the other was No Impact Man by Colin Beavan (because I have been reading all this press stuff about his movie and it never came up that he also wrote a book). I am so excited to read them! Snort.

So if this economy has got you down and you are a big fan of the written word… you have probably already been going to the library and think I am the last person on earth to figure this whole “free books” thing out. But seriously, stop buying books and filling up space in your house! Unless you constantly need to refer to these books then go buy them pre-loved! Otherwise, go to your local library. They even have wifi there nowadays so go ahead and make it an event!

Yes, I am fully aware that my post has made going to the library just a little bit less cool.

So I have a Blackberry Pearl but it has failed on me and I am now trading it in for the older generation Curve which came out at the same time as my Pearl. I love all the features that the Pearl had to offer and having wifi! But alas, something was wrong with the phone’s mic and it could not do what it was conceived to do, which is to make phone calls. Well, I was able to make them but not calls in which the other party could hear me at all. It was very frustrating and involved some shouting and a little crying in my heart. I looked it up on the Crackberry forums, a very good resource for Blackberry users and those in the market for a Blackberry, and apparently the mic being shoddy is not an uncommon occurrence, but it is not like it happens to every other person who gets one either. I figured something would go wrong with the phone I received because nothing I ever get is completely technologically sound. Let us just say I have a little thing called a curse when it comes to electronics. I am especially sad to let go because I already started adding apps. Wah.

So, instead of risking another bad microphone, I am going to try the Curve, also because I went to the Sprint store with my friend last week and held the Curve and the Pearl in my hands and the Curve just felt so nice. It’s like a size that is harder for you to drop, if that makes sense. I always feel like the Pearl is going to slip out of my hands and plunge to its death/injury.

The Suretype keys of the Pearl take some getting used to but it is actually not that hard once you get the hang of it. The QWERTY keyboard on the Curve is pretty cool because the keys are separate and not cramped together, making it easier to not press the wrong key, but overall this didn’t make a big difference when I was deciding between them because I don’t imagine it being much easier to type on a QWERTY keyboard with my thumbs when I normally type with all my fingers. What I keep wondering, though, with all these new phones, is how you are supposed to dial those numbers that make out a word like 1-800-GOOG-411 or when you need to text Google or ChaCha. I suppose you just have to do it by memory.

Well, if you are in the market for a Blackberry but you want something a little smaller that does all the same things as the bigger guys, I think this phone would be a good idea.

Anywho, goodbye dear Pearl. You are being shipped off to Hong Kong today. Don’t think I didn’t care for you during the week that you were in my hands. I hope they repair you and send you off to another who will give you a good home. I am sorry you were involved in my co-workers’ teasing because I chose not to buy you a data plan.

Do not be concerned, my friend(s). I am still alive! I have just been trying to brainstorm new ideas for this bloggo.

I have had my fair share of reusable bottles. I just can’t justify buying disposable bottles of water when you can fill up for free or almost free. Just think of how much energy is being saved just by filling up with a reusable bottle instead of drinking from a plastic bottle that gets thrown away and then more energy goes into making the next one you’re going to drink from. So I used to use these cheapie plastic ones I got from China just because I could just refill and be all eco friendly and such and then the whole leaching problem arose. I was probably especially affected because I used my bottles to drink tea because they had this cool little strainer thing in the top part of it. It was said that a huge indicator was if you could smell the plastic of your bottle, it probably was not very safe to drink from. Sure enough, my bottles smelled heavily of plastic when there was hot tea in it. Sigh.

Last summer, while gallavanting through Lucerne, I decided it would be awesome to get a Sigg bottle from Switzerland. I bought a one-liter bottle and carried it the rest of our trip, refilling wherever it was safe to and saving my Euros while doing so. Just now, I found out the sad truth about said bottle, that its lining contains BPA. Cry. They have been working their way around this for a very long time by not denying that their lining has BPA in it but stating that it does not leach BPA. Very fishy. Any brand new bottles that don’t have that brassy look on the inside but are lined with a beige color are safe but mine unfortunately was purchased just before they started producing those (August of 2008). But I have no idea when they even actually started selling them. I just feel so very lied to right now. Sure, maybe it doesn’t leach BPA and my babies won’t be growing extra limbs but all the denial just makes me sad. On top of that, I have learned that apparently cheaper aluminum bottles do leach BPA, though still not as much as plastic. Wahhh!

Anywho, if you are a Sigg owner, supposedly you can e-mail them your info and they will send you a new one for trading in your old bottle. There are also stores, such as this one that will give you a big discount when you exchange your old Sigg for something BPA-free like Klean Kanteen, which seems to be the bottle of choice as a Sigg alternative.

So, I’m driving around the block looking for parking after having had a very enlightening car ride back (about people being in cages we call cars) from work when I see an unmarked news van on my street. I turn the corner and then there’s two more local news vans. I look at my front door and there are people in suits blocking the entrance. Then there are cop cars. This was all very alarming but what made me even more nervous was the fact that news vans seem to be above the law and are allowed to park in the middle of the road causing me to drive around it into the opposite side of the road. I circled the block and walked up, expecting the worst. As I trekked up the ramp, I asked a man walking his dog if he knew what was going on. What he told me almost made me piss my pants. You can read the story here but basically a woman in my building went missing this past weekend and this morning her body was found in a dumpster in Buena Park. WHAT THE HECK?!?!? Her husband, who was the one who had reported her missing, is the main suspect and coincidentally is nowhere to be found.

I realized I really don’t do a whole lot online but it’s one of those things that is nice to have, especially when someone tells you to check something out and you say you will and then you realize you can’t. Then said person thinks you’re a pathological liar and never makes another suggestion to you again and is ashamed to even look your way. It isn’t totally tragic because I do have internet a couple times a week like when I go to school and when I come back to the parentals.

By the way, 500 Days of Summer totally rocked my face off. The trailer is very up front about what it is and even though it makes me sad that it isn’t a love story, it’s a very cute movie. Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, I heart. The clothes they wore were so cute. I especially loved her purses. If only I could pull off her look! I also love that it took place in L.A. because I totally recognized places. Wee!

I have always been a somewhat paranoid person. Any stare that lasts uncomfortably long, any car that slows down behind me, any footsteps I hear coming up from behind, any movement of shadow on the ground, is met by my suspicion and me glancing around erratically. BUT, my sister is even worse. Being frequenters of the MTA bus and rail system, we have every reason to be this way. There are always crazies on public transportation. I am not as paranoid as her and have ridden the system with a little bit of fearlessness because I figure no one would try anything when there’s so many people around, but my sister remains skeptical. It’s getting off and on the buses and rails that freak me out, especially at night. I have made many a trip to her work via the 720/920 Rapid bus at night and as soon as I get off, I speedwalk on over. I get off near the Vermont Red Line station, which is a hustling and bustling place but once you start heading east of there, the streets are pretty empty. Luckily there is a security guard on site at the entrance I go through but for those couple of blocks that I walk, my heart is racing. I have made this trip so many times and been okay, but due to the kidnapping/murder that has recently happened, I am pretty scared, especially for my sis. She is especially afraid because she walks over to the post office right around where this kidnapping took place so often AND it happened in broad daylight. If we can’t even feel safe in broad daylight, then when can we?

So, what transpired next was a step toward our safety. My sister and I went to Big 5 yesterday and bought pepper spray. There was a sheriff that came to her work this past week to talk about safety measures. The best thing to do is out-crazy them and make a scene so as to get people’s attention around you. Not only will I be doing that but I will be pepperspraying the crap out of them! The brand he recommended was Sabre (which is what we bought because Big 5 doesn’t carry anything else anyway) and according to the packaging, NYPD carries the same. What I thought was great was that there were color choices. I bought the pink one because I think it would be most surprising for my attacker. “Hey what’s that pink thing in your hand? AHHHH MY EYES!” We also chose the one that not only is a pepper spray but also includes tear gas and invisible UV marking dye because I fully intend to make any attackers cry and have them be shamefully marked to be easily identified later on. I don’t suggest that you spray anyone you are suspicious of (especially because it is illegal to use it for anything other than self defense and defending yourself from awkward stares isn’t really self defense, I feel), but it would be nice to keep it on hand when walking alone anywhere.

The last of my July trips concluded today and the adventure now is surviving moving and living with my new roomies! In one week alone, I was in Philly, New York, back in LA, at Blogger Prom ‘09, off to San Diego and once again back in LA. Phew.

I really hope to catch up with myself after the apartment is in manageable shape and maybe do some kind of layout design because my domain’s looking a little sorry.