Remember several years ago when there was all this talk about the tobacco companies adding extra nicotine to cigarettes, causing smokers to become even more addicted?  Well, I’m convinced the snack food industry is up to the same thing.  I’m not sure exactly what they’re adding to the food that is stocked in vending machines but whatever it is it’s got to be addicting.  I know this because I’ve developed a serious problem with cheetos ho-hos and I need to quit before I get too far and one day find myself free-balling red vines and diet coke. 

For those of you who are lucky enough to avoid this trap, please heed my warning: STAY AWAY FROM CHEETOS!  They are clearly a gateway drug. 

I never considered myself a to be prone to such things.  Sure, I dabbled in the occasional fiddle-faddle and beer when I was in college but that’s not really junk food.  And besides, I never really tasted it. 

When I finally discovered the joy and comfort of the afternoon cheeto snack a few months ago I was foolish enough to think I could handle it.  Dear god, was I wrong. 

It started as a Friday afternoon treat.  I’d hit the 3pm low and rather than try to struggle with focusing on work for another few hours I started treating myself to a bag of cheetos from the vending machine to celebrate the upcoming weekend.  Gradually I started including Mondays as well, to help get out of the rest of the week blues.  Before I knew it I was having a bag everyday.  But at that point I still thought I could handle it.  I mean, we all need an afternoon snack right? 

The major denial began when I started grabbing a bag at lunchtime as well.  I knew lunchtime cheetos were trouble but wouldn’t let myself see the truth.  Instead I lost myself in their salty, cheesy goodness and pushed the guilt aside, twice a day. 

I kept this up for about a month before I added ho-hos to the mix.  It started one morning when I saw the pack staring at me from behind the vending machine glass.  I could practically hear that thing telling me how good the chocolatey, creamy cake could taste with my coffee.  I knew it was wrong but I went for it anyway.  I didn’t care.  And man did that ho-ho deliver!  It was indecent how that ho-ho tasted in my mouth.  I obsessed about it for the next 24 hours and before the week was up I was adding a ho-ho chaser to my afternoon cheetos. 

That’s when I got scared and decided to stop.  And I have to say a double cheeto/ho-ho habit is not that hard to break.  V-8 juice seems to satisfy my taste for savory stuff and fage fat free yogurt with fresh blueberries gives me my creamy-sweet.  And when I absolutely must I pull out a bag of baby carrots.  The sure don’t look like cheetos but for a brief moment their bright orange color fools me into thinking I’m reuniting with my old friend.  

One of the problems I have with blogging, and the reason why I don’t do it more often, is the fact that I have a lot of ideas about things I want to say and get across, I just don’t know how to say it.  Too many times I will start out with a post and end up deleting it because I end up with long rambly mess.  Let’s see if this one makes it.

It actually seems like a simple and easy to fix problem when you think about it.  Why not get the whole long rambly mess out and then pick out the good stuff? 

I guess that’s one of the things about the discipline of writing (yes, I totally think that writing should be treated as a discipline) that I need to practice.  Picking things out of the messy stuff.  It’s hard because I don’t like messy stuff.  I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t.  Dogs maybe and probably weird crazy people.  And I guess there are also some people who don’t like messy stuff but they can tolerate OK and are good at cleaning it up. 

But the rest of us, ie: me, can’t even tolerate messy stuff.  I hate it and try to avoid it at all costs.  I have to pay someone to clean my own toilets for god’s sake!  I tip toe through messy stuff when I do have to deal with it.  God forbid I actually have to create it when I try to write and then try to pick good stuff out of it.

Like this whole freaking post I’m stuck with now.  What’s good about any of this?  The tiny bit about the dogs and weird crazy people maybe, and the fact that I have to pay someone to clean my own toilets.  And I like the phrase “long rambly mess.”  But according to my spell check, “rambly” isn’t even a word.

See? 

I was 12 when I first read Forever by Judy Blume.  I didn’t sneak read it either.   Well not really.  I got my grandmother to buy me a copy during my annual summer visit.  It was horrible of me I know, taking advantage of my grandmother’s implicit trust in my literature selections.  She would have been horrified if she knew.  The thing is, any disapproval the adults in my life would have had about my reading such a book is unfettered.  I was still a virgin when I graduated high school and Judy Blume gets at least 75% of the credit.  The remaining 25% goes to my desire to avoid the guilt efficiently instilled by my mother and the Catholic Church. 

If you are a woman who spent her teenage years locked in a closet (or you are simply a man) and you haven’t already figured it out yet, Forever was a book containing graphic sexual material.  And while it was the story of a teenaged couple who falls in love it was not something I would describe as a romance novel.  To me it was a story about life and its consequences.  And the key to teaching teenagers about the seriousness of sex is to hammer home (tee hee!) the consequences. 

Unlike it’s poor excuse for a counter-part, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, where we learned nothing about sex other than it is guaranteed to get you pregnant the first time, the consequence in Forever is a broken heart.  For some reason, that hit home for me at age 12 way more than the threat of pregnancy.  Like any other 12 year old I was fascinated with the graphic descriptions of Katherine’s first experiences with sex but that graphic nature also helped me understand the seriousness of the act.  Why do something like that with a boy, I reasoned by the end of the book, if there are no guarantees that you will be together forever?  It was a pretty good lesson, I think, and far better than anything I would have gotten out of a book about a girl who would do anything for a teenaged vampire. 

My original copy of Forever is long gone. Seeing as how it was one of the few obtainable copies available to the 7th and 8th grade girls of Mendenhall Junior High, I lost track of it the summer before my freshman year of high school.  My hope is it made it through at least another 3-4 years of being passed around before pages 73, 100 and 125 fell out. 

P.S.  Through the wonders of Google I just learned that in 1978 there was a made for TV movie made based on this book staring Dean Butler of Little House on the Prairie fame as Michael and Stephanie Zimbalist (never heard of her) as Katherine?  As it does not appear to be available via Netflix I will be releasing the dogs in search of this little treasure immediately! 

Here’s a little known fact about me and Jerry:  we skate.  Twice a week we head down to Cal Skate in Milpitas and skate.  It’s good exercise and we enjoy it.  Jerry especially.  He’s like a completely different person when he’s spinning around that smooth pine floor.  He’s relaxed, he smiles…it’s like he gets in some special Zen Zone. 

We’ve been skating for about two years and last night we celebrated by attending a late night party at Cal Skate.  No, seriously it was late.  Like 11:30pm to 3:30am late.  So it’s with bloodshot eyes and weary fingers that I type this today. 

All the people we know from the normal sessions were there so it was like any other skate night.  Except it was past midnight.  And they had food.  OK, they normally have food at the rink but it’s just popcorn and hotdogs from the snack bar.  This was real food like ribs and mac and cheese.  And they also said grace before serving the food which they never do when we purchase something from the snack bar. 

The music was a little peppier too.  And people were skating with more energy than usual.  The rink was completely full of people skating a they were  going strong when we left at 2:30. 

It was a good skate night.  Except the grace part was a little weird.

I had an unexpectedly pleasant experience with AT&T Customer Service last week.  Unexpectedly because overall my experience as an AT&T Wireless customer has been most undesirable, what with those dropped calls and pathetically slow 3G service (fastest 3G network my ass!). 

But after all this I’m here to say KUDOS to AT&T for connecting me to a call center that is actually located in the U.S.A!  Not only that but KUDOS to the customer service representative Debbie, who not only spoke very clear English but also giggled at my mocking remark about how I was hoping I’d be able to explain my problem before the call dropped. 

Unfortunately the kudos stop there.  Because as helpful as poor Debbie was, the tip she gave me to fix the voice mail problem I was having did not help.  She’ll never know though.  As far as Debbie is concerned my problem with AT&T has been solved.  I even told her that a few days later when she called back to check on me.  I’m not lying either.  As the proud new owner of an EVO with an unlimited data plan from Sprint, all my problems with AT&T are OVER! 

When my friend Ninalei contacted me the other day and asked if I wanted to meet her and our other friend, Kirsten at the 7:15 showing of Sex and the City 2 I was really excited.  It wasn’t the movie I wanted but rather, I just wanted the whole girlfriend experience.  And seeing Sex and the City 2 with your girlfriends is the only way I would recommend seeing this movie. 

Knowing the movie had received bad reviews I was prepared to be disappointed.  As such I was able to tolerate the complete lack of plot, tension and conflict. What I wasn’t prepared for was the sense of fantasy incited by all the glamour and fashion and over the top luxury.  And while the two sex scenes were pretty raunchy, the thing that really turned me on was the depiction of that first class flight to Abu Dhabi, whoa baby! 

In addition to giving me an evening of escape and time to visit with two friends I have not seen in a while, Sex and the City 2 also helped raise my self-esteem a bit.  Due to the last minute nature of the outing I was completely unprepared for it.  In addition to spending the majority of the day feeling like I was carrying around a 10 pound bloat baby I was also in dire need of a gray root touch-up and was in my extra special dowdy-wear.  I walked in the movie theater feeling fat, old and unattractive, but after 2 1/2 hours of seeing Sarah Jessica Parker on the big screen I walked out of there just feeling fat. 

I’ve got a major case of the post-vacation blues and the fact that I still have that weird vertigo thing where I feel like I’m still on a moving ship (What is that anyway? Is there an official term for that syndrome?) does not help.  Maybe this little memoir of our 2 days in South Florida, followed by 7 days on Carnival’s Glory cruising the Western Caribbean will help.

We spent the first few days before the cruise in South Florida.  Our first day we went to the Everglades and then Jerry satisfied my long awaited dream to see the Florida Keys.  Here’s the first thing I saw when we arrived on Key Largo: 

The next day we went to Miami Beach.  Not my favorite place in Florida, especially after it became the site of an unfortunate Mojito incident henceforth deemed Miami Beach’s Mojito Mayhem of 2010.  I am now well aware of the fact that 2 1/2 mojitos + hot Florida sun do not make for a pleasant afternoon:

Needless to say my taste for rum, and all hard alcohol in fact, was ruined for the rest of the week….which actually turned out to be a good thing because I now know what all the hoopla about ice cold beer on a hot day is about. 

We actually made it to the ship the next day and spent the next 36 hours at sea.  Unfortunately I have no photos of this.  Even more unfortunate is the lack of video footage documenting a nasty, but entertaining incident involving one mean old lady, her husband and a rascal.  

Our first port of call was Cozumel.  Here’s Jerry in Cozumel: 

*Note: video footage of Jerry listening to Mariachi will be available at a later date when Jerry finally maps my computer to the Jessopland data server (I’m sure I said that all wrong). 

Our next port of call was Belize.  Here’s Jerry in Belize:

Here’s Jerry in Roatan:

No pictures available for Grand Cayman.  It was pouring rain. 

If you are now thinking, “Gee, it looks like they didn’t do much of anything” you would be correct.  While Jerry obsessively checked work email on his crackberri I had plenty of time to sit on deck chairs and read.  In fact, I went on a Meg Cabot bender and within a week’s time read the last two installments of The Princess Diaries series as well as The Boy Next Door.  All in all a fun and very relaxing time. 

I spent a good portion of my life assuming I would one day get married and have children.  I used to think about it all the time.  I’d picture myself as a happy cheerful mom, standing in a spotless kitchen, holding out a plate of fresh baked cookies for two adoring perfect children.  I never thought I would be one of those women who’d say “I never had a desire to have children.”   Oddly, it turns out I am. 

When I was a senior in high school I was already on the “get married and have kids” track.  I was dating a good Catholic boy who was diligently working on a business degree from UC Berkley so he could begin his climb on some corporate ladder, marry me and have children.  He was completely devastated when I hit age 21 and broke up with him because I decided I wasn’t ready to settle down.  Looking back I’m impressed at how mature I was to know I was too young to get married.  At the time I just thought it was because I wanted to hang out in bars more.

A few years later my friends started getting married.  The getting married part seemed like a great idea, but then they started having babies and I thought they were crazy.  (The ones who started having babies on their own  were outright ludicrous.)  Sure, I was in a relationship at the time as well, and I talked a lot about getting married and having babies, but not right now.  Marriage and babies were still far off in the future and certainly not with that guy.  Turns out that guy was…well that’s another blog post. 

Then I hit my 30s.  That guy was out of the picture and my friends were still having babies.  Some of them were kind of smug about it and I started getting wistful.  The babies were so cute and I started to panic that I may never have one.  I was meeting plenty of men who wanted to get married and have babies but yuck none of them appealed to me.  The only guys I seemed to like were…well that’s another blog post.  

The panic lasted for a few years and then started to fade away, right about when the babies started growing into children.  My friends weren’t smug anymore.  Now they were tired and stressed out all the time.  Turns out that having children is a lot of work and there is not much time to be baking plates of cookies in spotless kitchens.  The children are far from adoring and perfect too.  Turns out that children are individual people with their own personalities and problems that parents have to deal with on a constant basis. 

Now I started to be the smug one and my friends began to look wistfully at my life.  I got to take long baths whenever I wanted in a bathroom, which was attached to an entire apartment that I got to myself.  I got to spend Sunday mornings drinking coffee and reading for hours on my couch.  I still thought about the possibility of having children, but now the assumption was gone.  Apparently there were other ways of living and I was currently doing it.

By the time I got married I was 37 years old.  I’d realized by then that maybe I too, never had a desire to be a mom or have children because whenever the opportunity presented itself I rejected it.  Turns out that having children was just a fantasy that I enjoyed daydreaming about.  The truth is, I never wanted that to be part of my reality. 

Oh. My. God.  Exactly two weeks from today Jerry and I will be  boarding a Carnival Cruise ship (the Glory I think) destined for the Western Caribbean.  I’m so excited I can hardly stand it. 

All attempts to direct my excited energy to productive things like getting work done have failed.  I have made some good progress on shopping for evening gowns and bathing suits though. 

This cruise is a Valentine’s Day gift from Jerry.  Jerry isn’t big on Valentine’s Day gifts (or any formal gift giving for that matter) but when he does give, he gives big. 

This particular gift, similar to the Vancouver repositioning cruise of ’05, was announced late Saturday night, February 13, 2010.  It was after a week of late work nights that had worn my patience about as thin as the brakes in the Acura get before Jerry finally gets them replaced.  And similar to Jessopland cruise booking tradition, Jerry told me about it by asking my favorite question, “Honey, what’s your passport number?” 

We are going to be very busy in the next several days getting ready to leave.  (Jerry even gets to spend the next week on a business trip in beautiful Laredo.)  It will likely result in extra trips to our friend, The Liquor King which will surely help out because without us for 10 whole days his sales revenue for the month of May will likely be low. 

Last weekend Jerry upgraded my MSI Wind with Windows 7.  He also did a bunch of other technical stuff to it which for me means my sweet little netbook is not only faster but I can now also play Restaurant City while watching DVRd episodes of The Ghost Whisperer.  But even before the upgrade, when the rigors of Facebook games were too much for my MSI to handle, I loved this thing.  It’s as good as any laptop as far as I’m concerned.

So this post is actually a test run to make sure I properly set up Windows Live Writer.  If I did screw something up I’ll know I’m more technically inept than I realized because Windows Live Writer is a very simple desktop blogging application that makes even me feel smart.

Here’s a very blurry picture of Mrs. B supervising my activities:

OK, here goes!