my tragic lovestory:

I love autumn.
I LOVE it.
The leaves, the crisp-weather, the impending scarves and boots and sweaters (and cardigans!)...
The pumpkin-flavored breads and muffins and lattes...

I love it.

Unfortunately, I think that this lovestory may have a tragic ending...because it seems that I am allergic to fall.

{fall+me=not so good}

I woke up on saturday morning, and couldn't really see out of my right eye. I looked in the mirror, and discovered that I looked something like this:

(just add about two decades to this little kid...and maybe swap out her overalls for a pair of pj's and THAT is what I looked like. No exaggeration.)

PUFFY

very,
very,
very puffy.



The weirdest part? (the SAME THING happened to me last fall!) I woke up one morning, and SHABANG! (one eye was out of commission. Huge, puffy, and definitely out of commission...)

I blame fall.




And below is the picture I texted to Karen (who was away for the weekend) in an attempt to gain sisterly sympathy for my puffy-plight. Do I look pathetic?...because I felt it.



(*oh, and this is about 3 hours after I woke up...and after I convinced my eyeball to de-puff enough to open...after lots of ice, and benadryl, and other de-puffing activites.)

however, as I look at this picture now...I'm beginning to think that my whole HEAD was a little puffy.
oh dear.

And no worries, I wore my glasses for two days in order to disguise the cyclops-ness of my head, and this morning I woke up and it's almost all normal-looking again! (hurray!) It's just a little puffy...and every once in a while I can see part of my puffy-under-eye in my peripheral vision.

(awkward)


and so goes my unhappy tragic lovestory of Fall.....


*disclaimer: this was NOT pinkeye. It didn't hurt. Didn't itch. Didn't do ANYTHING except PUFF.

LOOOOOST!?!?

what: string cheese
where: somewhere in my house
why: ....it's saturday? and I obviously become forgetful when it comes to my snack-food-placement.


oooooh dear.....I'm having awful visions of finding stinky cheese months from now....(or maybe I accidentally added it to the load of laundry I just did?) yikes.

telephone poles.

So, I was driving to work this morning- and suddenly was just really weirded out by the thought of telephone poles. (I know, random...but, it's Wednesday morning? What do you expect?)

I think it all started when I passed a big tractor-trailer, who was carring (one) very very very long wooden pole. (You know how people carry extraordinarily-long pieces of plywood? or hardware? or Lowes/HomeDepot-esque supplies in their trunk or truckbed, and tie little orange flags to the end?...so you won't run into them?) Well, just imagine that, but on a much larger scale. (a very very very long wooden pole hanging off the end of a tractor-trailer truckbed, with a HUGE orange flag attached to the end.)

And I thought to myself...(in normal Wednesday-morning fashion)...What in the world is this huge wooden pole for? Wouldn't it be easier to just chop it up? And it seems like a bit of a waste to have a HUGE tractor-trailer transporting just one pole.

And then I had my Wednesday-morning epiphany. (it was a telephone pole)

But, then I started thinking about it...and telephone poles are really just odd. And archaic. (archaic would be the right word, right?) I mean, the world is full of so much ridiculously-unbelievable technology. And we STILL stick big wooden poles in the ground?

And where do you find trees for telephone poles? I mean, they're huge. and perfectly straight.
Do they have special telephone-pole-breeding-forests? Where only ridiculously tall&straight trees grow? I mean, have you ever really looked at a telephone pole? And really thought about how many hundreds of thousands of billions of those things there are around the word?

(where are all these tall skinny trees coming from?)





anyways. those are my mid-week ponderings.
(and bless you all for reading this much about telephone poles)

ooooh, it happened.

technically, i'm not a puppy-mama. (since this is karen's dog) ...buuut, I would like to say I'm at least one step above just an "aunt"...right?

and the belly says: HELP!!!

I love it when we get little freebies here at the office! (and since I work at a branding/design firm, usually our freebies consist of paper samples, or print samples, etc)...

BUT TODAY!?

(COOKIES! and FRENCH-PAPER-COMPANY SAMPLES!)

*it's like two jackpots!? in one day?! (maybe I am lucky....)



so, I've already embezzled some paper-co. postcards to help add flair to my little corner



And check out these Halloween cookies we got from one of our Printers! (creepy sugar-cookie-hands?)
*but look at that icing job? wow. detail: warts, creepy black nails, spiders, webs,....uh?? gross.


(the bad news it that I think these cookies were poisonous, or else I should have known better than to try to eat the whole thing. EVERYONE in the office agreed that after finishing theirs they felt like a bomb had exploded in their bellies. a sugar-cookie-green-creepy-hand-bomb.)

unpleasant.




DISCLAIMERS:
I did not finish the cookie. I only ate off all the fingers. (and then discovered the bomb-effect)
Also, the menacing photobooth-picture is in honor of the creepy hand..I'm not in a bad mood today or anything.
(just felt the need to clarify)

so, does this mean I'm lucky...?

So, while eating my lunch-salad...I found a clover? in my spinach-leaves?

I realize that lucky-clovers need to have four-leaves (and my clover only has three). BUT- doesn't the fact that there was a clover in my salad just make it intrinsically lucky? (by some sort of luck-default?)




oooooh, also-
does anyone have thoughts about morkies?
(and for those of you who have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about- don't feel bad. Up until this past saturday, I too had no clue what a morkie was.) Buuuut, in the world of small-dog-ness, a morkie is a mix between a yorkie and a maltese (and little sis is currently OBSESSED).

We were walking downtown when she spotted a (very cute) little dog, being walked by a (not quite as adorable?) little old man...and we literally CHASED him down the street, so we could ask what kind of dog it was...
(*and when I say "we" chased him so that "we" could ask him---what I really mean is "karen" chased him (while I was chasing after her, yelling: "really? Karen! this is so embarrassing?!")

and ever since then?
she's been on the Morkie-hunt.

but, I'm not gonna lie: if she brought home a little pumpkin that looked like this? I would love it.

I wish I had thought of it first...

Seeking Girl Who Bit Me TWICE Last Night While We Were Dancing

Saturday, June 6, 2009
- m4w - 27 (42nd St and 5th Ave)
So yea...um, looking for the girl who I was dancing with last night, she bit me twice. I forget her name.



Sophie Blackwall is the most ingenious illustrator....ever.
She has illustrated a collection of random "missed connections" from Craigslist....and this is what she has to say about her work says:

"Messages in bottles, smoke signals, letters written in the sand; the modern equivalents are the funny, sad, beautiful, hopeful, hopeless, poetic posts on Missed Connections websites. Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I'm trying to pin a few of them down."

I have a secret fettish with Craigslist's Missed Connections.
At work, we went through a very short stint where we created MCs...and had contests to see which ad would elicit the most return emails. (believe it or not- Whole Foods seems to be the haven for love....even more so than Kennywood....or the dance clubs...) And please don't think we're evil for creating fictional MCs. They were very specific, and ridiculous, and anyone who replied to them...well...I won't cast judgements--but, lets just say: a wee bit desperate(?)

Anyways, Sophie is my new hero. (and honestly, you really should look at some of her brilliant illustrations here.)