Update... Apr 21, 2008

Friends, Romans, and even specimens… lend me your time!

It has been a LONG time since I have put out an “update…” and there is so much to tell! So much to impart and so little time. So, in order to get this all out… let’s do it all in order. It is strange to relive a section of your life… generally mine is flashing before my eyes… but right now, let’s recap the last nearly three months. I will be breaking a hard and fast rule of mine in order to do this. As many of you know I generally do NOT disclose my dating life… I don’t mind disclosing my friend’s dating lives, but generally I do not disclose mine, and trust me… there has been looney-ness to disclose, but I always have thought better of it, and never wanted someone to be on a date with me and wonder whether or not something they said, or did, or ate, or burped, or blundered would end up on the internet…. However, I do have clearance to post all of the following. So let’s take the Nestea Plunge into the beginning of my 2008…

I have been doing a lot of work out of the country… in a suburb of the USA, Canada. It is a little weird to go across the boarder and (on a clear day) be able to see Detroit, or at least the smog cloud the envelopes Detroit. I think on one magical day, I was able to smell Detriot. You may have noticed that during this time period that my yearly rant on Valentine’s Day was completely absent! I didn’t get to do it! I didn’t have time, work had become my one and only path to tread… but I will go ahead and tell you what this year’s little day brought for me. I have a boyfriend, his name is Chris… one little note, he is simply spectacular, but enough of all of that, I do think V-day is a crock, that hasn’t changed. I think it is simply a day filled with chores. We haven’t added a holiday to the calendar, a holiday in which you can rest and relax and eat and watch football… we added a holiday filled with chores, and you don’t get the day off of work to do them! So this year, I did the unthinkable… the unimaginable… I dove into V-day without my usual hatred and resentment of this day… I dove into V-day with a red bikini on, ready to swim for the roses! So, a couple of weeks before V-day hit I told Chris that we weren’t going to celebrate, I think my exact words were “What for?” and that we were going to a play on February 16th and we would call that Valentine’s Day and be done. Lucky for me, Chris is sweet, kind, and relentlessly gullible. So, over the next two weeks I plot and I plan. I elicited aide from two of his co-workers… the team was now in place. This was a full scale mission and we had to jump through several hoops to pull it off… including me “borrowing” his car for a day of shopping with Ann! The morning comes and I call his house at 6am, and the phone rings and rings… no answer. Now I am a little panicked b/c my plot starts here… if he already went out for a run or something that would throw the schedule off!!! Where is this man?!?! I call again… ring… ring… ring… no answer. Now, I am more panicked and I try the cell phone… ring… ring… “sh-heeelllo” Whoa! He sounds dead tired… good sign. “Happy Valentine’s Day!” I squeal, “Happy Valentine’s Day, are you going to work?”… “Yes, I am, can you go out and check the glove box of your car?” Wouldn’t you think if someone asked you to go check the glove box of your car, that you would do that… pretty readily without much to say. Not Chris, “Why? What’s in there?” Now I try to be playful, “Just go check.” I am smiling on the other end of the phone trying to sound coy and playful… when I really just want to say, “Look buster, get out of bed and check your car”. He asks again, “What’s in there”. This time I go for the slam dunk, “It’s a snake, you need to go let him out”. There was a red envelope in the car asking him to go to his nearby Chic-Fil-A for breakfast… which had already been paid for and was waiting for him. There was a gift card left for him too, lovingly wrapped in a little blue box. He is off to work, where at his 11am at the beginning of meeting another red envelope appeared and he had to read the contents to the others in the meeting… needless to say there were people at the office calling him “Sweet Pea” for a few days. The card told him to head out for lunch, where it was paid for and another gift card was there… lovingly wrapped in a little blue box. Now, I wish I could say all of this was pleasant… I mean my phone rang a few times asking “Is there anything else?!?!?! Singing clowns!?!?!? Anything coming my way?” But I would always deny it saying nothing else was coming. He got a cookie bouquet delivered to him, and finally he met me for dinner where he got his actual gift. It was a pretty fabulous little v-day. If I do say so myself. Now, I am not advocating V-day… and for the record the only reason I did this, the only reason I decided to follow the lemmings off of the cliff was, well, because I really wanted him to have a great V-day.

After that life calmed down and it was back to the grind until the end of the month, and on leap day… I left for an 18 day vacation. Now, my vacation starts by meeting my Mom and my Auntie in Miami, South Beach to be exact. I get to the hotel, which took me forever… you need to catch a shuttle that only comes once every two hours to the airport and then it takes the shuttle another 45mins to get to South Beach and then ultimately your hotel. I finally get to the hotel, nearly three hours after getting into Florida (this is after one of my bags didn’t make it on the plane), and I have to take the stairs to my room there are no elevators. Now, my mother tells me that all of the hotels and buildings in South Beach are all original art deco designs from the 1930’s. She is completely pleased with herself to know such trivia. Let me write that one down for the next time I am on Jeopardy. No wonder these people are thin, this is a do-it-yourself kind of place. You don’t need the South Beach Diet, just stay in a South Beach Hotel… you drag your 50+ pound suitcase up and down those stairs… you will be Jane Fonda by the end of the week. I get into the room, with my enormous suitcase, I enter the room and before taking a step or two I am already at the back of the room. This room is small, it made the state room on the ship look big. Thank God they invented those TV’s that hang on the wall… b/c if there had been a TV on the floor there wouldn’t have been enough room for the bed to fit. I am exhausted, so I immediately grab my toothbrush and toothpaste and head through a tiny door in the wall, into the most ENORMOUS bathroom I have been in at that point. The bathroom was the same size as the room itself without having furniture in it to crowd it up. I could have done jumping jacks in this bathroom without fear of hitting anything. It had a HUGE mirror on the wall, that ran the length and width of the wall… I guess to make the room look bigger. At one point I contemplated moving my bed in there so that I would have a little more room and privacy, but it would be awkward in the middle of the night to hear the toilet flush that close to me. So, I left well enough alone. The walls are paper thin, which makes me feel sorry for the people sleeping next to us. My mother and my auntie do not snore, they just breathe REALLY, REALLY loudly when they sleep. It was like having Darth Vader in the room… my hair would be sucked toward them on inhale and violently blown behind me on exhale, if only they had been able to off-set each other… one breathing in while the other was breathing out… they would have counter acted the wind tunnel effects that they were producing in the room! There were teenagers trying to party next door and they couldn’t hear themselves count their keg stands the breathing was so loud!!! We got through the night and the next morning, after my bag showed up in the nick-of-time we got on the ship… bound for Europe.

We had six days at sea, and five of those were great! I got to workout two times a day, I got to read, I got to relax, I got what I was looking for… but there was one day I got more than I bargained for. I woke up one day to find that the gentle rocking that we had been accustomed to was now replaced by an angry, unforgiving, unrelenting, swelling mess of a sea. The waves were 18 feet… that was what was reported anyway, I think they were 20 footers. People were on the sixth deck playing cards and had the waves splash against the window!!! And where was I you might ask? Was I up at the helm, like Gilligan trying to grab hold wheel? trying to right the ship? trying to make sure that Minnow wouldn’t be lost? Nope! I was down in my stateroom, on my bunk bed, fighting to keep my breakfast down… it took all day and most of that night to keep my breakfast down and a couple of diet cokes. It was not a fun day. We finally made it to land… we hit Europe with a bang in the Azores. The Azores are beautiful, but if you want real action… get your butt to Gibraltar! Gibraltar is steeped in WWII history, and for a WWII nut… it is the place to be. I am such a nut. I loved it, there were complete caves dug out of the rock of Gibraltar, entire highway systems, four hospitals were inside the rock, along with enough housing to maintain 3000 of the allied forces for over 2 years! We were up on the rock when we came across one of the five packs of monkeys that live on the rock. This pack was big… it was called “The Queen’s Pack” and each one of these packs has an alpha male… and this pack was no exception… the alpha male of this pack looked like a beached walrus. He was big! And he didn’t seem to have the most pleasant disposition. We get off of the bus to have a look at these free roaming vertebrates, as we are leaving the bus our tour guides says, “Do NOT feed the monkeys… they do not know when you are done and can get aggressive” What is the first thing… the first thing that people do? You got it, feed the monkeys. It is like all of these people turned into my nieces and nephews. My nieces and nephews hear what you say, but it doesn’t sink in… they can repeat verbatim what you said, recite it word for word, but for the life of them they cannot act upon what you have said. It is weird. These adults go out and feed these monkeys, and the monkeys are loving it! They are all over these people, they are taking pictures and smiling happily as they devour Bugles, Nuts, and some guy had a Snickers on him… he was popular! I have to admit I really did keep my distance from the monkeys… I was a little apprehensive, and I was not carrying any bananas or a stun gun to protect myself. So, my mom and I wonder over to a little railing to look over the cliffs at the sea, the airport, etc. I am happily standing next to my mother, when my peripheral vision starts picking up some sort of odd movement, by the time it registers and I slightly turn my head to see this HUGE monkey head coming straight for me!!! All of the sudden with a heavy thud, this animal lands on my shoulder!!! He is all over me, and I immediately respond. They say that you have a “fight or flight” tendency… mine is FLIGHT! I started screaming like a banshee and start running as fast as a could… it worked! The monkey bounded off of my shoulder and was heading straight for my mother!!! My mother weaves like Mohammad Ali and the monkey misses her and hits the guy behind her, she is spry for 72… she moved like a 60 year old!!! That was a harrowing experience, and I immediately get back on the bus to collect myself.

The rest of the ports flew by after that… I mean once you been to “Planet of the Apes” everything else is just another gift shop. We finally make it Barcelona, and get into a cab at the port to go to our hotel room that my sister had booked for us. We show the reservation to the cab driver who doesn’t speak English… which is OK, because very few people spoke English… in fact the main language in Barcelona is not even Spanish… its Catalan, and that is very different from Spanish. So, the guy gets the reservation and seems to know where he is going… which is a good thing. We drive into downtown and we are gaping at the different buildings and all of the architecture. We keep driving, and I am noticing the meter going up and up and up, and we see the buildings are slowly getting less grand and shorter, finally I notice there are no more buildings and only homes, and then suddenly there are no homes and only cows… we are out in the country… I see a windmill go by… the meter is still going up… I start thinking, there is a possibly that I have handed over my life and my mom to what could be a Spanish, sorry Catalan, version of “Deliverance”. We keep driving, and finally he starts to exit the highway we are on, I am a little nervous, and then I see a sign pointing a “hotel”. It is our hotel!! We get out of the cab… and the tab was 50 euros ($80 US) that was a healthy cab ride. We go to check in and our bags wont make it into the narrow elevator all at once, we have to get them up there one at a time. We get out of the elevator and go down the hallway, which is also the balcony, to get into our room. You have to put the key card into the light slot in order to turn on the light and to keep it on… classy! My mom looks at me and says, “this is like a motel”… I am about to laugh, and say, “This IS a motel!!” The room consists of a queen size bed, two nightstands, a television with stand, and a cot that stands three inches off the ground… lovingly laid out for me, complete with burlap bed spread. Joy. The bathroom is yet again… ENORMOUS. Needless to say the price was good… not great but good… but any money we saved on hotel, was eaten up in cab rides, which generally ranged from 50 to 70 euros a day… to get to the airport was 70 Euros. It was hilarious! If time is money… you can tack on another 300 euros! Word to the wise, don’t let other people book your hotels.

Since I have gotten back to Dallas, things have been good… even great… I have had a boob job and gotten engaged… but those will be on the next “update…” stay tuned.

Peace, love, and killer monkeys,
Martha