It’s that last part that’s killing me slowly.  I am married to the world’s biggest planner.  This is often a really good thing- on vacations, for example, I know that in The Dossier he brings with us will be a copy of every reservation, every confirmation email, every flight number, and every emergency phone number- it’s great.  When it comes to the house, though, I’m growing a little weary.

“What color tile do you think we should use to redo the first floor bathroom?”

“What?  When we do what?”

“When we redo the first floor bathroom!  What color tile do you want?”

“When exactly are we redoing the first floor bathroom?”

“You know, 3 or 4 years from now, when we’ve saved up some money.”

*headdesk*

The movers aren’t actually coming for a few more weeks, so the next several weeks are going to be a rich stew of packing, living amongst chaos, and trying to convince Mr. Plansahead that maybe, just maybe, we can hold off on choosing what kind of bushes we want to plant in our eventual one-day dream garden makeover.  End of September.  That’s the goal.  I just have to make it to the end of September.  Then things will calm down.  Wish me luck.

(Did you hear that?  That’s the sound of me throwing salt over my shoulder while rubbing a rabbit’s foot and picking up an abandoned penny in an effort to ward off the jinx that we surely have brought upon ourselves by daring to start planning decor before everything is fully squared away.)

Anyway, the current (soon-to-be previous) owners of our new house had…aggressive taste in paint.  They have two children, and boy and a girl.  The girl’s room is PINK! Like the color of Strawberry Shortcake toys or Disney Princess costumes or something else that is some horrible, saturated shade of pink. PINK.  The boy’s room, not surprisingly, is blue.  Deep, rich, color-of-the-ocean blue.  Now, normally I wouldn’t have such strong objections to the blue, but immediately adjacent to the PINK! room, it’s too much.  Add to these the weird yellow wallpaper covered with random Italian words (”pizza!” “Opera!” “grazie!”) and the bathroom that’s painted in candy cane stripes and we’ve got some work to do, is what I’m saying.

So we went to Home Depot to look at paint colors.

News flash: we are really boring.

We left Home Depot with every single shade of celery green, greenish-gray, and khaki that they had, I swear to god.  We probably selected 20 paint chips, from which you could randomly select 3 and they would all match because they are all a mere shade or two apart from one another.  I know that having choices in life is good, but I can safely say that when it comes to paint?  TOO MANY CHOICES.

Currently spread out on our dining room are three paint chips: palest sage, hazy sage, and gentle sage.  John and I are currently locked in a battle of wills over the correct shade of sage. I wish I were kidding.  We’re going to be lucky if we select paint colors by the time winter rolls around.  Can you imagine if we had to actually do any real work to the house?  We’d be those people who had a hole in the side of the house for years where the addition was supposed to go.

The interview was scheduled for 9am.  I left the house at 7:15, in plenty of time to get to my office, do some last minute reading up on the company, have a good luck orange juice, put on the suit-appropriate pumps I leave in my desk drawer, and make my way to the interview location.

And then the red line exploded.  I waited 15 minutes for the red line to come, and when it did, there was absolutely NO ROOM.  So I waited 5 minutes for another one.  No room.  Finally, determined to wedge myself on the next train no matter what, I squooshed onto an incredibly crowded train.  It was now 7:45.  It takes at least 20 minutes to get downtown.  A little rushed, but still enough time for me to buy my good luck oj, swoop by the office to pick up my shoes and cram a little, and make my way over there.

My phone started ringing with an unknown number as I was climbing the stairs up from the train at 8:05.

“Hello?”  I said.

“Hi, pseudo?  This is hiring attorney from place you’re interviewing, I -”

and then the line went dead.

THANKS FOR NOTHING, AT&T.

A few seconds later, as I was in Walgreens for the all-important oj purchase, the phone rang again.

“Hi, pseudo?  This is hiring attorney again.”

“Ah, this is a much better connection.  Sorry about before, I was just coming up from the el.”

“Oh, good, so are you on your way here?”

“Well, no, I was thinking I’d swing by my office first and then head over there.”

*long, ominous pause*

“Did you not get the email?”

“I’m sorry?”

“We sent you an email yesterday saying the interview had been rescheduled to 8.”

“Oh! No! I did not get an email!”

“Well, please get here as soon as you can.”

So I SPRINTED to my office to get interview appropriate shoes, jumped in a taxi, ran into the building as I pulled on my suit jacket, and spent the next three hours of interviews trying to tamp down the residual adrenaline coursing through my veins and answer questions in a semi-coherent fashion.  I’m not sure I succeeded.

On the way over, though?  I checked my email- no message telling me we were rescheduled.  I mentioned that to the hiring attorney and she sort of sighed and said “oh, yeah, we’ve had some trouble with our email.”

!!?!

Don’t you think that if you’d been having trouble with your email, and you were making a last-minute change that required someone to be at an interview an hour earlier than planned, you’d, I don’t know, PICK UP THE PHONE?

Needless to say, I ate cookies for lunch.  I felt I’d earned them.

I have this disease, which I affectionately call “age,” which causes me to forget things, and so rather than compile what I think is an exhaustive list of the delightful people I saw and met, which would certainly result in inadvertent forgetting of one or more followed by feelings of guilt and remorse, I will just say: BlogHer was, for me, even better than last year.  And I had the parties-only pass, so did not go to any sessions.  That should tell you something about my priorities, right there.

But OH MY STARS am I tired now.  Steve Ross and I were doing some yoga this morning and Steve said “my don’t we have a lot of energy this morning!” and I said “fuck you, Steve,” out loud, just like that, and then I realized that I was inverted in a downward dog talking to a man on the teevee, and concluded that maybe I should go to bed earlier today.  Does 7pm seem too early?  Because it sounds positively blissful to me.

A variant on this theme is watching how people interact in certain common situations, and how that varies place to place.  Waiter and customer, for example, is a dynamic that can be really different overseas.  For example, the following actually happened:

Me:  Senor, la cuenta por favor

Waiter:  [In Spanish, which I was able to understand but because my Spanish ain't great, I am unable to replicate]: But there are still potatoes on your plate.

Me: [Again, in Spanish, which I feel compelled to point out because did you know I studied French? And John studied Spanish? And yet I did 90% of the talking on this trip? This is what it's like being married to a perfectionist, folks]:  Yes, but there are too many, we can’t finish.  Just the check, please.

Waiter: No. Finish your potatoes.

Me: * surprised silence, wishing I had zippy Spanish comebacks *

Can you IMAGINE that happening in a U.S. restaurant?

My favorite, though, was what happened on the plane on the way home.  For long and boring reasons, we ended up flying Alitalia through Rome on our flight home (let’s take a really long trip and make it Even! Longer!  Genius!)  So the plane from Rome was filled largely with people returning from Italian vacations, including one huge blended family sitting across the aisle from us and taking up about half the plane.  Seriously, there were like twenty of them, with children ranging in age from 2 to 20, several parents, some grandparents, a few aunts, some cousins… it was a big crowd.  And they were LOUD.  For the entire trip, they shouted across the aisles at each other, laughed uproariously at things that weren’t funny, and played their souvenir tambourines from Sicily.  (Oh, how I wish I were kidding.  Who gives a 2 year old a tambourine on a plane?  Seriously, who?)

A the plane was preparing to depart, the flight attendant walked through the aisles to confirm all the people who had ordered special meals.  After rhapsodizing for no fewer than 5 minutes about how wonderful the buffalo mozzerella was in Italy, I was somewhat surprised when the mother of the large family stopped him and said “I’m supposed to have a lactose-free meal, and my daughter is supposed to have a gluten-free meal.”

The flight attendant consulted his list.  “We have a vegetarian meal for you, ma’am, but I have no record of a gluten-free meal.”

“VEGETARIAN?” she practically shrieked.  “I have never seen a vegetarian meal that wasn’t just covered in cheese!  I need LACTOSE FREE.”

“Well, madam, we have a vegetarian meal for you,” he said.  “Also, the only gluten-free meal we have on board was for a woman in 15-F, and she’s already confirmed that it’s hers.”

“But I spent an hour on the phone arranging these meals,” said the woman.

“Did you confirm them when you checked in?” he asked.

“No,” she said.  “No one told me I needed to do that.”  And that’s when she really pitched a fit.  “This is outrageous.  I spent time and money arranaging this, I was assured that our special dietary needs would be met, this is a ten-hour flight and now my daughter is going to be starving, this is totally unacceptable.  I mean, why did I even bother if you were just going to ignore my requests?  We need a lactose-free meal and a gluten-free meal.  We need you to get them. This is ridiculous!”

And this is where it got awesome.

“No, madam, it is NOT ridiculous,” said the flight attendant.  “There are twenty-five special meals on this plane, and yours is the only one where there has been a mistake.  Someone has made a mistake- it might have been the ground crew, but it might have been you.  You did not confirm the meals.  That is not ridiculous.”

I couldn’t help it.  I laughed.  Because he was so RIGHT, you know?  She was being unreasonable- the door of the plane is closed, what is he going to do now about the fact that your special meal didn’t make it aboard?  And she is SCREAMING at the man, like that’s somehow going to solve it.  But in the U.S., customer service culture dictates that the flight attendant would have been falling all over himself to apologize, to assure her they’d bring them as many extra snacks as they had, to try to cobble together a gluten-free meal, whatever.  And to hear a customer service agent call out a customer on the fact that it might have been their fault that things got screwed up?  It was just so ITALIAN.  It was hilarious.

So yeah.  Some people love travel for the museums and culture.  Apparently I love travel for grocery stores and customer service battles.  To each their own, you know?

Title: My summer vacation in Spain

I.  Food

.            A.  Ham

.            B.  Cheese

.                        i.   manchego

.                        ii.  queso de cabra

.             C.  Ham

.            D.  Patatas Bravas

.            E.  Tortilla Espanola

.            F.  Ham

II.  Drink

.            A.  Tinto de verano

.            B.  Beer

.            C.  Fanta Limon  (see also “torrid love affair with”)

.            D. Clara (beer MIXED with fanta limon.  See also “summer’s perfect beverage”)

.            E.  Bottled water (lots)

III.  Weather

.            A.  Hot (see “bottled water,” supra)

.            B.  Hot

.            C.  Also, hot

IV.  Sights

.            A.  Churches

.            B.  Museums

.            C.  Purveyors of patatas bravas

.            D.  Purveyors of clara

.            E.  Purveyors of World Cup paraphenalia, in search of the perfect Espana onesie for my friend Mason’s brand-new son (never found)

.            F.  The beach

V.  Language

.           A.  Catalan

.            B.  Basque

.            C.  Iberian Spanish

.            D.  That pidgin blend of high school French and learned-while-teaching Mexican Spanish that I used to try to communicate.

.            E.  English, when (D) invariably failed

Conclusion: Summer vacations are the best.

Seriously, I saw a girl walking around yesterday with her friend on their lunch break in a skirt so short I seriously feared that everyone at the corner of Adams and Dearborn was going to learn whether she favors thongs or bikinis.  Another girl was wearing a dress that looked very professional on top- nice silk button-up blouse, attached to a pencil skirt- except the pencil skirt ended approximately 2 inches below her crotch.

But the worst was yesterday at lunch- I was having felafel with my wonderful friend Sara.  Next to us, two girls were sitting and chatting.  They finished, and as they got up to leave, one girl’s skirt became kind of…um…stuck.  In her ass.  Like, the material was all bunched up in there, resulting in a kind of… skirt wedgie?  With her thighs totally exposed?  She was moving too fast for me to stop her and discreetly tell her that she might want to, perhaps, pick her dress out of her butt before heading back out to the street.  Fortunately, the situation resolved itself as she walked through the restaurant- but not before the table of six stockbroker-looking guys all noticed and blatantly stared at her as she walked out of the restaurant, then burst into laughter.

Don’t you see, college-aged ladies of Chicago?  This is the risk! You wear these adorable dresses that look fine when you’re standing still in front of a mirror-  but you’re going to have to sit down eventually!  And when you do, your thighs are going to stick to the faux-leather of your office chair, leaving unattractive red marks, and your skirt is going to get stuck up your ass, and douchey banker boys are going to point and laugh.  Eventually, you’ll have to walk outside, and you’ll be yanking your dress down awkwardly and living in mortal fear of a stiff breeze.

I don’t know when I turned this corner and became the kind of person who wants to pull these nice young girls aside and tell them, kindly, that young ladies are better served by leaving a little to the imagination.  I mean, who AM I?  Nineteen year old me is mortified at the boring conservative meddlesome bitch I have become.  But COME ON.  This is just getting ridiculous.  I know times are tough, but I’ve got to think that clothing designers could afford to throw a few more inches of fabric our way.  Right?  RIGHT?

“So if you and John could just sign that and fax it right back to us…”

“John is out of town, but I’ll sign it to get things rolling.”

“Oh, well if you’ll just fax it to him where he is, have him sign, and then fax it back to us….”

“He’s in remote Turkey.  He doesn’t even have email.  I’m reasonably certain he’s not going to be able to print it, sign it, and return it.  Why don’t we have him sign when he gets back on August 1, as we have previously discussed approximately 43 times?”

“I’m sure his hotel has a fax machine.  If you’ll just call him and check…”

“RURAL. TURKEY.  I cannot even get him on the phone, let alone confirm that whatever tiny guest house he’s staying in has a fax machine.”

(Related: what’s with all the faxing?  I’m convinced the mortgage application industry is single-handedly keeping faxing technology alive.)

“Oh.  Well, ok then, I guess we could just have him sign when he gets back.  When will that be again?”

“August 1″

“Okay, then.  August 1.”

“Yeah, I thought you might say that.”

“Now, on this next form, if you and John could just sign it and fax it back….”

/ scene

• Went to the City Clerk’s office to get a replacement sticker since I was issued one without adhesive.  (Smooth move, city sticker makers)
• Went to state vehicle emission testing center to get a smog check (shouldn’t Priuses be exempt?  I mean, seriously.)
• Went to the post office to mail packages, where the line stretched out the door
• (For those keeping track, yes, that is one city, one state, and one federal agency visited in a single Saturday morning.)
• Took knives to get sharpened (the “fun” errand)
• Filled out property purchase contract
• Dropped off earnest money check at broker’s
• Fought with broker over his attempts to add conditions to the contract after it was fully executed.  (Lawyered!)
• Applied for mortgage
• Wept with frustration

So, yeah, it appears we are buying a house.  This was not my idea, though I’ll admit that it feels pretty exciting, and also terrifying.  Did I mention that we saw this house for the first time on Thursday morning and decided to put an offer in that afternoon?  And that the seller accepted what we thought was a lowball offer, without countering?  And that my husband then left for a two-week vacation on Friday morning? Because he did.  That was good timing.

So yeah.  Busy, stressed, gnashing teeth, rending garments, etc. etc.  How YOU doin’?

I love having people in for the weekend, and I love weekends that are full to bursting with fun and activities, but they sure have a way of throwing the following week off-kilter.  Right now the only food in the house is leftover potato salad and some pickles, I’m down to one pair of clean underpants, and I accomplished exactly zero on a work project I’d hoped to address at least a tiny bit over the weekend.  Oh well.  Such is life.

The highlight of the weekend, comedy-wise, came during a rousing family game of Apples to Apples.  For those not familiar with the game, the basic idea is that one person reads a green adjective card that says something like “happy” or “outrageous” or “timeless” and the rest of the players choose a red noun card from their hand that they feel best aligns with that adjective (like for “timeless,” some submissions included “Romeo and Juliet,” “Niagara Falls,” and “Frank Sinatra.”)

We were playing last night with my mother and father-in-law and my sister-in-law and her partner.  My father-in-law, a rather buttoned up ex cop, draws “playful” as his adjective.  The rest of us look to our hands, select the cards we feel best align with “playful,” and turn them in.  One by one he reads out the submissions, and it’s immediately clear that none of us had anything good for “playful,” and we’ve all decided to just use this round to dump cards.    “The Godfather!” “New York!” “Rust!” (That was mine.  I mean, who hasn’t had some good times with rust, am I right?)

Then he gets to the last card.  He pauses, as the word kind of catches in this throat:   “Whips!”

Sister-in-law, her partner, John and I all totally lose it. Mother-in-law turns bright red, says “no!  oh dear!”  which only makes us laugh harder. And my father-in-law, bless him, considers each card carefully, thinks for a minute, and finally says “you know, I think the most playful thing in this group would have to be the whips!”

And that’s how my sister-in-law’s partner got her first green card of the evening.  Welcome to the family, kid.