Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Friday, August 17, 2007

Yay! LA!

Lest you think I sit around sobbing about my impending move all the time, here's a list of all the good LA stuff I've been thinking about (in no particular order):
1. The weather
2. The beach. Matador, specifically
3. In N Out Burger (protein style!)
4. Palm trees
5. My brother
6. Jack in the Box commercials
7. Being able to buy liquor (not just beer and wine) in the grocery store
8. Being able to buy any alcohol on Sunday
9. The preponderance of dive bars
10. My friends
11. The sausage platter at the Red Lion
12. Every movie I ever want to see is actually available for viewing in a theater somewhere
13. AMAZING MEXICAN FOOD
14. Much less segregation
15. Latin people
16. The possibility that I may be able to make some furniture at my friend Mel's carpentry studio
17. Downtown
18. A real job
19. LA Times Sunday crossword
20. The occasional celebrity sighting (not the ones you read about in the blogs)
21. Real news and good music on NPR
22. The sunsets

There are a lot more that I've thought about that aren't coming to me at the moment. I'll keep adding on.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

How to Unpuff Your Eyes

Last night I cried (well, sobbed, to be honest) for a while about leaving. About leaving my boyfriend, specifically. I don't like how that sounds, but I can't think of another way of putting it. Anyway, my point is that I woke up today looking more terrible than I ever have in my life. And having most, if not all, of my crazy years behind me, I've woken up looking pretty rough before. This was much, much worse. I was going to take a picture, but it was too awful. Both of my upper eyelids were incredibly swollen, and my left lower lid was doing something crazy too. Honest to God, it looked like I had been punched.

I'd been planning on going to yoga, but that was now not an option, so I set about figuring out how to bring down the swelling. I started with cold spoons. This was a technique that my ex taught me; apparently he was a big cryer, though I rarely saw him cry. I've never been that jazzed about the cold spoon thing though, I guess because I grew up in Michigan and am well acquainted with the wet skin frozen to metal phenomenon. And eye skin is so delicate!

But, I started with that because that's all I knew.

The spoons don't stay cold for very long, so I googled away and learned a few more tricks.

Next step: wrap ice cubes in paper towels, hold them your eyes. That one seemed like it worked pretty well, but got a little too cold and I felt like I was freezing my eyeballs.

My final treatment was getting a bowl of ice water and dipping a washcloth in it and resting that on my eyes. That was the most comfortable and I felt it was the most effective, but it was also the last thing I did, so who knows.

Now you know.

By the way, the whole time I was doing this, I was watching the Today show which ran segments about Graceland and the PCH. I'm going to Graceland on my way out west and I've always wanted to do a PCH trip, so I kept cheating and taking the ice cubes off of my eyes to see the tv. I walked the dog and then went shopping and no one asked me what was wrong, so I think all the eye treatments did a passable job.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

It is Insanely Hot

Hotlanta has really been living up to its name recently. The other night I came home from work at 11:30 p.m. and it was 89 degrees outside! No sun, but still 89! It's 5:30 p.m. now, but "feels like 104." Tomorrow's forecast says it's going to be 102. Went to a friend's pool to cool off yesterday to no avail because the pool was hot. Not warm, hot. Almost body temperature I would say. It's pretty overwhelming and entirely unpleasant.

The good news is that I am moving. I have mixed feelings about the move because I will miss a lot of people dearly and dear people a lot, but Atlanta will be dead to me climate-wise. Good riddance! I'm headed back to Los Angeles.

You know you live somewhere ridiculously hot when moving to the desert is a huge relief.