heather

Hey, Heather, I added some pages that you may miss because they were backdated to when I wrote them on my computer, not when I posted them. Here they are:

Different world
Stuart Foreman
We roll twenty strong

Hope the tournament was fun. Welcome home, roomie.

Kitt and I have been discussing trading cars for weeks so that Kitt can be the fourth best roomie ever and get me new rockin' tires on my car. So far as a roomie she's slightly behind Kris who catapulted me into backflips in the pool on Tuesday (but to be fair Kitt has never tried that - who knows maybe she could catapult me higher!)

So far, one or both of us has forgotten the plan and I keep ending up at work with my own car. It's starting to be a little unnerving as the gods keep sending me signals in the form of ripped rubber on the freeway (once even in my lane!). So this morning I took the bull by the horns and stole Kitt's car.

Ridiculously early I stepped out of the house with the excitement of being able to be a convertable owner for a day - too bad my perfect sexy red dress has yet to be found.

I awkwardly slipped into the driver's seat in my heels and carefully backed out of the driveway experiencing for the first time what it was like to drive before the wonderful invention of the rearview mirror.

Completely yuppied-up after a quick stop at Starbucks, I pulled into the gas station to uphold my end of the bargain for the car switch - filling up Kitt's tank. Finding the gas tank opener button was a new puzzle and not the fun kind like sudoku or LSAT logic games. Very difficult. Hmmm....good thing I had a sports car today because by this point I was running late.

So boo - Honda decided the best place to hide a gas tank button is on the doorframe, which of course is only visible if the door's open! But...yay - Honda decided it was a good idea to put a label on the inside of the gas tank with instructions on which kind of gas needs to go in the car. So I was off to work and getting very good at the km/hr to mi/hr mental conversion.

Now I've decided that the reason white collar men in their midlife crises don't get convertables to compensate, they get convertables because the only thing that keeps a person who works in an office for at least eight hours a day in a cubicle without windows somewhat sane is to put the top down and fly during a lunch break. But so much for my sanity anyway, since I'm headed to law school in a month!

The only thing that saved my rotten full-time, rut of a day was the thought of being able to put the top down and speed down the freeway, which is exactly what I did. I was falling asleep at my desk after an awesome four-day weekend but as soon as I hit 120 km/hr I was wide awake!

And then the ice cream on the cake was Kitt waiting at the end of my temporary forget-about-everything-but-the-wind fix to help me with a more permanent fix. Okay maybe Kitt could be second best roomie ever. Obviously my day in Kitt's car was infinitely better than her day in my car. Thanks roomie!!!!

A couple days ago, yeah, the one where I was home all day sick, so that would be Wednesday, Heather came home early from work. Thus far, when she's come home from work having not eaten, if there aren't known leftovers in the fridge, she'll stop by some place and pick up lunch. As she did on Wednesday.

So, she arrived home, said hello, puttered in the kitchen, then came out to the living room, where I sat with migraine fairies sprinkling headache dust all over me, the dogs lying on the couch next to me. She jumped on her computer and started typing away. After a few minutes, we heard a little bang!

Hmph. The fairies moved to the kitchen.

Heather looked up, then around. I thought little of the sound.

Twenty seconds later, we heard a louder, most insistent bang!. "What was that?" Heather asked.

"It's the toaster oven. Something's just settling in the oven."

"The toaster oven?" she asked, dubiously. She stood up, eyeing me carefully, possibly seeing me pull one of the fairies out of my hair and throw it against the window, and walked into the kitchen.

"Oh my gosh."

I turned to look at Heather, who was standing in the kitchen door.

She rushed forward. "Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!"

The fairy I was in the process of crushing momentarily forgotten, I stood up and hurried into the kitchen. Heather was near the toaster oven, trying to figure out what to do. The dogs ran in behind me, howling. "You're supposed to howl before it catches on fire!" she yelled to the dogs, the room a dark yellow glow from the smoke billowing from the toaster oven.

I hurried over and looked over her shoulder. By opening the toaster oven door, Heather had put out most of the flames. Enough for me to see the source of the flames was the paper wrapping around a burger she was heating up in the toaster oven. "How are we going to get it out?" she asked, looking at the smoldering lump of her lunch.

"Eh, tongs," I answered, pulling a set out from the door next to me, and reaching in and pulling the burning ember out.

I set it down and hurried away, as she picked up the burger with the tongs. Three seconds later, I was hovering over her shoulder, camera in hand.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Documenting the best roomie ever. Today was a crappy day. This is making the blog."

Heather mentioned to me today that she was heading to the grocery store. I asked to go with her, as I needed to pick up items for Kris to make his world famous curry dinner (where world is defined in this case as the 6000 square foot lot known as Krikitt Downs, of course). That, and honey. Didn't have any honey for this morning's English muffins. Few things will make me grumpier than honeyless muffins.

Come to think of it, no toliet paper would make me grumpier. And we needed toliet paper.

After wandering back from the grocery store, Heather started putting the cold groceries into the refridgerator. After a few moments, she commented, "You have a lot of rotten fruit in your fridge."

Um, yeah.

She continued, "And what's this?"

I peered into the fridge to see the glop of something that had spilled on the second shelf maybe two, three years before. "Um... condensed milk? Maybe?"

A look of surprised horror came over her face as she looked back at me. She then lifted up the knife she had in her hand and started scraping it off. One! Two! Three jabs of the knife and the blob was gone. The nearly three year old, hardened white something that I had no idea what it was any longer was gone.

Heather wasn't done yet, oh, no. Pffft! Out came the shelf, lickety split cleaned. Zip! Out came the crisper drawer. Shwoosh! Clean.

As she began putting things back into the refridgerator, she commented to me, "I've found putting leftovers on the top shelf means they'll be seen. And eaten." New rule number 4 in the house, to follow the current rules of:

1. The noise maker can be on by default at night, unless Kitt specifically requests it be off. Then it's off, and there are no arguments. (This one replaced the rule the first one in the bed decides, which resulted in one of us going to bed fully clothed, without any teeth brushing, on numerous occasions, just to be first in the bed.)

2. Dirty dishes go into the dishwasher, if they aren't hand-wash only dishes.

   An extension of this rule is, if the dishwasher is full, and you can't put your dirty dish into the dishwasher, unload the dishwasher and put all the dishes away.

3. No balancing more trash on the top of the trashcan. If the trash is full, take it out.

   An extension of this rule is, the trash isn't fully taken out until there's a new bag in the trashcan. Kris made me put that one in.

There are a few other house rules, like no farting around guests unless they fart first, or blame the dog when you do said fart, but they're usually unwritten and unspoken rules.

But now we have number four, to put leftovers on the top shelf, so that they'll be eaten.

When Heather was done with the bottom half of the fridge, she moved to the top. Out went the frozen tomatoes from the harvest three years ago. Out went the veggie dumplings that we bought by accident two years ago, along with the frozen creme brulee that had more freezer burn than brulee. We also pulled out steaks and, what do you know, frozen potatoes I had purchased a while ago. They'll make a tasty dinner tomorrow.

So, in the span of less than an hour, the fridge was cleaned out. Heather is the best roomie EVAR.