I live under a satellite - in a Jar.
Austin is kind of known for its characters. Take Leslie Cochran, the homeless cross-dresser who likes to run for mayor. Then there are the ubiquitous "drag rats," the surly, annoying homeless kids that hang out on the Drag near UT. Not to mention the protesters outside of the capital building - some of them have very interesting signs. Yep, it's all part of what keeps Austin weird.

When I moved to Dallas, I figured I wouldn't see these types of people anymore. I'm not talking about homeless people - there are plenty of them - I'm talking about unique street characters. I guess I just thought Dallas was too, well, boring for that kind of thing. But yesterday, the city proved me wrong.

I was sitting at the stoplight on Ross and Henderson when I saw a lady waiting to cross the street. She was intently talking into a mini tape recorder and was wearing a fanny pack (or two). She had some sort of pushcart with a crazy handmade sign, something that looked like pamphlets, and an American flag. I inched forward until I could read the sign. It said WWW.DEBBIEWINS.COM, but she had run out of room so the "WWW.DEBBIEWI" was large while the rest of the URL was scrunched up in the corner. She looked a little crazy. Well, maybe a lot crazy.

And she is. Can anyone make sense of this website? It's really hard to pick a favorite sentence, but mine may be I'm white" He was not a hooker" Threats, bribes, extortion and a billionaire with the UN, hatemongers and perverts took my virgin in 1997 to replace his spirit with evil. Maybe that's supposed to be two or three sentences? Debbie obviously didn't pay attention to National Punctuation Day earlier this week. Come on now, Debbie, a few English classes could have you looking a lot less crazy.

In the memetime...
So, Cynthia meme-tagged me right after launching a powerful diatribe against memes, bloggers, whistlers, and screaming babies. Well, I can see how this meme could possible make one rant. Nevertheless, I cannot resist the power of the tag, so here goes:

List 3 things that bug you - things that others may find trivial.
If you have an idea on how to fix it, be sure to put that down too.
Then tag 6 of your friends. Only list 3 things because you may/can be tagged again.


My responses will be car/driving themed:

1. Inconsiderate drivers. Wait, wait - this is not just any old "inconsiderate drivers" rant. This one is very specific. My place of work is on the access road of Central Expressway (heading north), and the access road is three lanes wide. About 1/8 of a mile past my work, there is a stoplight. To get home, I go almost to the stoplight and then use the U-turn lane to cross Central Expressway and head south. I have to cross the three lanes to get to this U-turn lane. So, when traffic is backed up, why in God's name can't people let me over? This doesn't happen too often, so I don't get to get mad about this every day, but it happened yesterday, and I thought my head would explode! After I finally made my way to the far lane (the one that feeds into the U-turn lane), I calmly and politely cursed at every single person waiting at the stoplight. Bastards. Yes, this is trivial because it happens like once every two months (traffic rarely backs up that much), but it bugs the crap out of me. Solution: Stop being such a bastard, Plano Driver, and pay attention to my turn signal.

2. Our parking lot. The parking lot at my new place is weirdly shaped. There are four apartments. Every apartment has two cars. Everyone except us gets to park side-by-side. Victor and I park tandem, meaning one of us parks behind the other. Our schedules are such that I leave before him and get home before him. So we are always having to rearrange our cars. Solution: I think there is room for all eight cars to park side-by-side, if we squeeze a bit, so I'm considering asking the other residents to give it a try. Otherwise, I may pop a vein the next time my car is blocked.

3. The temperature in my car after work. Yes, trivial since I've been living in Texas for three and a half years now and should expect it. But damn! Does it have to be seven thousand degrees inside my car when I get in it after work? Solution: Yeah, I'm pretty much going to have to move north to fix this one.

Honorable Mention: This one isn't about cars. It's about memes in general. I don't have that many friends who blog, so I never can come up with enough people to fulfull the tag requirement. So I'm just gonna tag three. Take that, meme! I hereby tag Kris, Ryan, and Kat.

Wedding anxiety
Today is the official “two months before the wedding” day. I still have a big list of crap to do. The list includes, but is not limited to:
1. Hire a florist.
2. Sort out music junk.
3. Print, address, and send invitations. (Dan, I'm calling you tonight)
4. Lose 20 pounds.
5. Get my dress fitted/altered
6. Buy undergarments, petticoat, and shoes for wedding day
7. Figure out what I'm doing with my hair.
8. Get the bridesmaids dresses ordered (still waiting on some measurements to come in)
9. Get Catholic paperwork finished and sent off.
10. Pick Bible verses for the ceremony.
11. Make the pocket squares for the groomsmen.
12. Find gifts for bridesmaids, Victor, and folks throwing my shower.
13. Send thank you cards for the family shower held earlier this month.

Well, let's stop with lucky #13. There is a lot more to do. I have to seriously get organized this week. A lot of crap derailed my plan to have everything finished by now (car dying, moving house, work stuff, whatever), so I have to play catch-up now.

On the losing weight front, I joined a gym today. Our new place has no fitness center (it's an old four-plex, so it's not like I expected one), so I have to pony up the cash for a membership to 24 Hour Fitness. They have a location pretty close to my house, and I can stop there on the way to or from work. Let's just pray that I actually go. It's prepaid, so there's no excuse if I skip.

A day for the rest of us
Holy smokes, everybody, it's National Punctuation Day today! Hug your copy of "The Elements of Style" (or, in my case, your copies).

Go Kat!
While I recover from pre-wedding counseling delivered by the Catholic church, check out this article from the Austin American-Statesman about my friend Kat! She's so awesome.

If any of you loyal readers were around during my recent(ish) trips to India for work (my old job), you may remember me talking about watching a lot of TV. There were lots of American shows on cable there, including Friends, Will and Grace, Dharma and Greg, The Hogan Family, Caroline in the City, etc. A lot of the shows were sitcoms, although there were a couple of dramas thrown in there as well. There were also American movies in the cinema and on TV. I always wondered how this was affecting Indians, who generally lead quite different lives than Americans, especially the ones you see on TV. Well, this article mentions that it's affecting women a lot.

I always thought it strange that most of the women I knew there were still fairly conservative, yet women's magazines like Cosmopolitan India were telling girls to sleep around, buy cars, and get good jobs. Other women's magazines, like Femina, seemed to be geared more toward mothers and housewives, kind of like Good Housekeeping or Ladies Home Journal.

Side note: I purchased a US Cosmo to read on the plane going over for one of my trips. I'm usually not a Cosmo reader, but I wanted something light and fluffy for the plane. A month or two later, I bought an Indian Cosmo out of curiosity. In one of their articles where they get guys' opinions on how girls should dress, or have sex, or whatever, some of the responses sounded familiar. Turns out they were taken from the American magazine, but the guys' names were changed to Satish, Srinivas, Jaideep, or whatever. So much for getting honest opinions from your countrymen! I wonder how this misleads girls there - then they get into a relationship and the guys' views are much more conservative or whatever.

Anyway, I found the article an interesting read. Ah, America, spreading your influence like a giant slab of butter.

Finally, she speaks.
Wow, I finally have a little time to breathe! Here's what made my week so crazy...

My new account at work, FamousDesigner, is going live next Wednesday. We are creating FamousDesigner's online shopping boutique for their skincare, makeup, and fragrance. We are also creating a web tool for the call center agents to use for order placement. The web tool wasn't finished until Monday. Most of the other business rules (you know, the stuff I have to train) weren't finalized until late last week. This kind of stuff usually happens with a new client, but this time it was particularly painful - we had to create everything from scratch. So I was scrambling to get my training manual finished last week. It didn't happen.

On Monday and Tuesday, the five agents, the supervisor, and I went to FamousDesigner's fragrance/makeup/skincare school. We were joined by other new folks who would be working at FamousDesigner's department store counters. The training was at a fancy hotel out in Irving. That part was lots of fun, and we got great free gifts.

My portion of the training started Wednesday. Now, remember, the web tool wasn't finished until Monday, and so I didn't have any training created for it. Also remember that we don't have internet access at home yet. So Tuesday evening, I went to Starbucks with Victor's computer and grabbed a bunch of screen shots from the web tool (luckily, I could access it from there). I stayed up till 12:30am putting together training for it. Then I got up at 5am to go to work so that I could finish up more of the training manual. Turns out the account was set up wrong in our system, so I couldn't access anything I needed to. Training began at 9. I had to pick up our client at a nearby hotel, since she was presenting the history and clientele of FamousDesigner to the agents all morning. IT fixed the account later that day, so I still had to put together that portion of the training.

I was at work from 6:45am till 5pm Wednesday. Thursday I was there from 7am until 5pm. Friday 7am until 5pm. I'm about to go back into work today to finish the online training I'm creating for our two days of class next week. I'm exhausted. Training totally wears me out, and I'm not used to working 50+ hour weeks. Every night I come home to a still-mostly-unpacked apartment and work on getting things unpacked. Yuck. But I'll finish up the training material this weekend, and there are only two more days of training left.

Now, enough griping about work. Two pretty cool things happened recently! The first was last weekend... Victor's mom and sister threw me a bridal shower, and I made a ton of cash! The way the bridal shower worked was that everyone who came had to give at least $25 to me. Apparently this is the way a Mexican bridal shower works. We played wedding bingo, ate really good catered dinner, and I tried to smile while not understanding most of what people were saying. Luckily for me there were some English speakers there, so that was good. I'm supposed to use to buy something nice for myself... I'm thinking a nice wedding photographer for myself or a nice wedding florist for myself. It's not supposed to go to the wedding, but that's where I'm going to use it. Also, I got some gifts, even though gifts were not required, since everyone had to pay to get in.

The other great thing is that we finally went to the new IKEA in Frisco. Many of you may be familiar with my love for IKEA, and it's nice to have one close by instead of driving to Houston two or three times a year. We picked up a coffee table, a small table for the herb garden, some curtains, shelves for our cocktail glasses, and various other small things. We're going back to get a wardrobe for Victor's extensive clothing collection. We weren't sure the wardrobe would fit in the car (but it will).

By the way, we are able to get a really crappy internet connection some of the time now, by leaching on to someone else's wireless network. So that's how I'm able to write this from home.

Resurfacing for a quick gulp of air.

If this week from hell ever ends, I'll be so happy.

Another "somebody done somebody wrong" song...
Oh, Tacos y Mas, why must you taste so good yet be so bad for my tummy? Last night's dinner was good, but this morning I thought I was going to die.

We have a whole host of restaurants to try in our new neighborhood. We started with the Tipperary Inn a couple of weeks ago, and last night we tried Tacos y Mas, which is really just a taco stand. Victor enjoyed using his Spanish and really enjoyed his torta. As you can probably tell from the paragraph above, the "y mas" part was, for me at least, an upset stomach.

Some of the other nearby restaurants we'd like to try are:

• Angelo's, which I hear is amazing Italian food


• Hector's on Henderson - apparently has the best meat loaf in town


• Hibiscus - supposed to have wonderful mac 'n cheese


• La Calle Doce - can never have too many good Mexican restaurants, especially when they serve seafood


• York Street, just around the corner from us

Victor, which ones am I forgetting?

Information Superhighway, where are you now?
Turns out, I did have a scratch on my cornea after all. I didn’t go to work yesterday and instead went to the doctor. He gave me some really nasty eye drops to put in every three hours (oops, better put some in right now – there, that’s better). I went home afterwards and just relaxed my eye.

It’s scary how much we depend on the internet nowadays. All of my health insurance information is either in my desk at work or online. We don’t have a phone book, and internet access won’t be turned on at our house for another two weeks. So yesterday morning I had to guide Victor (while he was working, mind you) through my HMO’s website to find out who my primary care physician is, and I also made him look up local eye clinics. I discovered that I had to get a referral from my regular doctor in order to see a specialist. But wait – I haven’t been to see the doctor since I got the HMO, so I had to see him first. Victor had to get me directions to the clinic since we don’t have a map of Dallas. Even though my doctor has an office downtown (which I could easily find), for some reason they sent me to the office in Oak Cliff, where I never set foot.

All of this was highly annoying to me. I’m used to doing everything like that for myself, so it killed me to have to ask someone to do it for me. Also, we are so used to getting information at the click of a button that it’s hard to figure out how to do it without a computer. I wanted to scream at Victor over the phone because everything took too long, even though I know it’s just because his computer at work is slow.

I can’t wait until the Comcast dude shows up to get us connected.