Electrolicious

33rd Birthday: Awesome! I got bangs and went to Olympus Spa and had lots of walks with the dog and a great dinner with dear friends. Thanks for all the well-wishings, everyone!

Montana weekend: Intense! There was a fresh baby and a wedding and lots of tears. Dre’s stepmother made it to the wedding, which was the most important thing. The terrifying “two weeks left” prognosis seems to have been extended, which makes me happy for everyone, but especially Dre’s half-sis. She needs all the time she can get with her mom, now that she’s a new mom herself.

As a diversion from the intenseness, I spent some time with an enormous light-up shoe sculpture that a woman commissioned for her front yard:

I took 500 pictures this weekend, and they’re slowly going up here.

Today is my 33rd birthday and I have the day off. It’s going to be 90 degrees out and I have Special Plans with myself for the day, which include a long breezy walk with my dog in the afternoon, and then dinner with a few friends. It is a very happy day.

33 birthday prezzies for which I am deeply appreciative:
1. My health
2. My husband Andreas
3. My parents, individually and collectively
4. Chateau Fetzllings, our home
5. Seattle, the city that I keep leaving and always return to
6. Extended family of aunts, cousins, outlaw mothers, sisters of various sorts, etc.
7. My job (unexpectedly awesome)
8. A community of friends that’s in constant shift, but always solid
9. Dance & stretching
10. Platforms & soapboxes
11. Sassafras & warm sleepy puppy smell
12. Seasonal shifts
13. Afternoon delight/naps
14. Temperate rainforests
15. Deep bass
16. Generosity that comes back around in unexpected ways
17. Enthusiasm
18. Hustle
19. Skin
20. Sweet black tea in bed in the mornings
21. Olympic coastline
22. Smoke
23. Social psychology
24. Emotional articulation
25. The Internet and other connective technologies
26. Waking up without an alarm
27. Gossip/storytelling
28. Particularities
29. Hitachi Magic Wand
30. Crisis competence
31. Learning internal lessons from external triggers
32. Snuggling
33. A voice that projects

Our old subaru is dying a slow and expensive death, and I figured I’d try Zipcar as a stop-gap. Heck. Maybe we’d even like it so much that we wouldn’t need to replace the Subaru at all! We could be all progressive and awesome with our car sharing program.

I filled out the application Saturday. Tuesday, I got a sad email informing me that my membership had been rejected due to a “MAJOR INCIDENT” in the last three years of my driving record. For legal reasons, they couldn’t tell me what the INCIDENT was, but after checking their rules I figure it was that speeding ticket from July of 2005 where I was going 52 in a 30. Speeding tickets where you’re going more than 20mph over the speed limit count as MAJOR by Zipcar standards.

Aww. Sad. Very sad. There went that idea. So … oh well.

In the mail today, I got a nice thick envelope from Zipcar.
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A couple Salon of Shame regulars joked with me last night that they were starting a new website called arielpointing.com, which would be nothing but photos of me pointing while MCing the Salon of Shame. Evidently, I do a lot of this:

Today, my sister-in-law Gillian gave birth to a son — little Oliver!

Andreas is in Missoula to meet his new nephew, and I’ll be there this weekend to say my own hellos.

For now, I get this photo of uncle and nephew meeting for the first time.

Friday night I was on ABC’s World News with Charlie Gibson, talking about 52 Nights Unplugged in the context of a segment about multi-tasking and time management.

TV is a weird beast, and one I’ve learned a lot about in the last year. For the curious, here’s what this particular experience was like.
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