June 2009

She don't like, she don't like, she don't like....cocaine!

You know that Christmas song “Let it Snow”? Good song. Anyway, it opens with a line that is not really fitting for the holiday season in my book. It goes “oh, the weather outside is frightful.” The weather outside is not frightful at Christmastime. The weather outside has been frightful in June! Although it has cooled off considerably (thanks be to God), for a good couple of weeks it was Zimbabwe outside. It was the damn Gobi desert. It’s not hot. It’s friggin Zimbabwe. It was so hot and humid in Chicago last week that the heat index here was higher than it was in Baghdad. When I got off the train at night and headed to my car, it was so hot in the damn thing that you could’ve literally roasted a turkey. You could’ve laid a raw turkey on the dashboard, seasoned it up, and roasted it in about 10 minutes…and it would’ve been juicy and delicious. It was the type of weather that gave rise to Ten Happy Things. So, while I sit here trying to think cold thoughts, here we go…

10. It’s been kind of irking me for the longest time that my boy Sergio seems to be so far out of the 21st century. He doesn’t have a MySpace. He doesn’t have a Facebook. He doesn’t Twitter. He doesn’t even have his own website. Well, he didn’t anyway. He does now. It’s totally new. I found it on accident while looking up something about the US Open. Sergio has a website chock full of Sergioness. Pictures of Sergio and little Sergio videos and all kinds of random Sergio information. It’s Sergiotopia. www.sergiogarcia.com. This pleases me immensely.

10a. Just as an addendum Happy Thing, I’m really pleased with the word “Sergiotopia.” I just made it up and, frankly, I think it’s a damn fine word. So there.

9. I’m just now getting my brain into baseball. I know it’s been going since April but I can’t usually get into baseball until hockey is over and hockey just ended. The Mets are doing alright. Not super great but not horrible. I think they’re three games out of first or something. No big thing. What is a big thing, though, is that the Red Sox are totally owning the Yankees. Not only are the Sox in first place, they’ve also won every single game they’ve played against the Yankees so far this season. I think they’re 7-0 against the Yankees. They beat the Yankees in Fenway and they beat them in Yankee Stadium. They beat them in a box with a fox. They eat their green eggs and ham and then spit them all over the Yankees’ collective face. Hell yeah. Stupid Yankees.

8. Okay, you all need to brace yourself for this one because it may shock you. Roger Federer won the French Open…and I’m glad of it. I know, I know, I know. Normally Fed winning really bites my ass. Normally, I hate the man. I’ve already explained why I don’t really hate him that much anymore. I don’t need to get into it again. Fed winning the French Open makes me happy in a few ways. For starters, Fed winning means that Nadal did not win. Fed didn’t beat Nadal (Robin Soderling of Sweden took care of that) but that doesn’t matter. Nadal lost and I got to spend the last few matches of the French Open Nadal free. Nadal just irks the hell out of me. Secondly, Fed’s win means that he’s now tied with Pete Sampras at 14 for total number of career slams won. This means that every damn tennis commentator on the planet can stop asking the “who’s better, Federer or Sampras” question. I’m sick of that question. Sampras may be the best American male player of all time but he’s a complete jerk. He’s just not a nice dude. Federer, at least, has some class. Now that Fed’s won the French, no one has to ask if he’s the best ever or if Sampras is because Fed will have more slam titles than Sampras and Sampras never won a French Open. Federer is the best player of all time, case closed…unless, of course, you ask Mary Carillo who is holding out to see if Nadal will be the best of all time (not likely), but she’s an idiot so who cares? Thirdly, Fed’s win hopefully means that he’ll retire soon. He has to win one more slam to set the record…then there’s nothing else for him to do. He can stop playing and go off and have babies with Mirka and leave the rest of us alone. I like diversity in my champions. Fed throws the curve all off.

7. A couple weeks ago, my mom and my sister and I went up to Lake Geneva for a spa getaway vacation type thing. That’s what my sister wanted for her graduation present – a spa day. Why we had to go all the way to Wisconsin for a spa day, I don’t know. Nevertheless, we went. My mom and my sister argued pretty much the entire trip but I got to get away for three days, I got spa services, I ate the best salmon linguine EVER, and I found a new pocketbook that I love so, all in all, good trip.

6. Speaking of the spa day in Lake Geneva, there was a short comedy routine that went on between my mother and my sister that made me laugh so hard, I nearly died. My sister was getting her hair done while my mother and I sat and chatted with her. Mary made the mistake of telling my mother that she thinks Sarah Palin is an idiot. Being that my mom is a Palin fan, this of course started a debate. My mom started to defend Sarah Palin very vehemently, giving her reasons as to why Sarah Palin is not an idiot. I was tuning most of it out…until my mother said with gusto “Sarah Palin can’t possibly be an idiot! She’s the governor of a country!” That was it. DONE. I was rolling around the salon laughing. Governor of a country. Right. It was funny on so many levels. I mean, how can you defend someone’s intelligence by saying something entirely stupid, for starters. Aside from that, we live in .Illinois. If anyone should know that being a governor doesn’t keep you from being an idiot, it’s the people of Illinois. Have you seen our governors? I mean, seriously. Aside from that still is the fact that my mother is a pretty dedicated Democrat….but there she was making an idiot out of herself defending a conservative Republican. It was great stuff. “She’s the governor of a country!” I wish I could get this stuff on camera.

5. I share my house with four pets – two dogs and two cats. With the exception of Riley the Stupid Dog, all my pets are old. Samwise the Beagle will be 11 years old in July and both cats turned 12 in April. Needless to say, there’s not a whole lot of running around taking place. I mean, the dogs will run around but the time span varies. Like, Sammy will run around for about 27 seconds and then he’ll lay down on the deck and watch Riley run all over the yard like a retard. Riley is a maniac. He runs around the yard like it’s his sole purpose in life. Usually, he’s chasing things. Squirrels, birds, rabbits, random plant life, figments of his imagination…whatever. Every once in a blue moon, the cats will run around. Jimmy likes to chase bugs but other than that, he’s a sloth. Even when the two cats wrestle, Jimmy lays down for the whole process. Simba, however, will break into random sprints now and then for no apparent reason. Out of all the senior pet citizens, Simba is the most lively. She won’t go bonkers for hours on end like a young cat would but she gets her freak flag on here and there. Last week, though, she outdid herself. Simba finds treasures around the house. Little things that she decides belong to her and are, therefore, her booty. Things like hair ties, cotton swabs, random bits of string, pieces of dog food…you get the idea. I don’t know where she got it from but last week she found the discarded top to a prescription bottle. I can only assume that she fished it out of the little trash can in my bedroom being that I take about three million different medications. Unbeknownst to me, white plastic tops to prescription medication bottles are cat cocaine. Simba absolutely lost her mind playing with this cap. I don’t mean she batted it around the house. I mean she totally lost her mind. She was booking all over the house, smacking the cap around like she was trying to win the Stanley Cup. She’d take little breaks here and there where she’d spontaneously stop running around and lay down on top of the cap but after a short while, she’d realize the cap was there and go bananas again. She was running and smacking and then she’d pick it up in her mouth and take off with it. She’d come booking into the room with it, see me, stop dead in her tracks, give me this crazy cat look (those of you who have cats know what I mean…that look they give you with their ears kind of back so they look more like horns than ears and their eyes bugging out of their heads), and then take off running with the cap again. This whole fiasco began about four minutes after I got into bed. It continued until after I went to sleep and then reconvened after I woke up the next morning. When the alarm clock went off, Simba was lounging at the foot of my bed with the cap under her right paw. By the time I got out of the shower, though, she was at full tilt again, streaking all over the place like a squirrel on crack. In the time it took me to get out of the shower and towel off, Simba ran into the bathroom with the cap in her mouth, stopped and spit it out like “ptoohey!”, ran out of the bathroom like the place was on fire, ran down the hall and did a u-turn at the end, sprinted back into the bathroom, pounced on top of the cap, and then took off again smacking it around the whole way. It was like watching the kitty version of Wayne Gretzky on 17 Red Bulls and an eight ball of cocaine. It was friggin’ hilarious. I never laughed so hard at her in all the years I’ve had her. It was GREAT! The best part, though, was that once she’d tired herself out completely, she’d have nothing whatsoever to do with the cap. She just utterly discarded it and no matter how many times I rolled it across the room or tossed it at her, she completely ignored it. I’d throw it over at her and she’d look at it and then look at me like “and what, exactly, am I supposed to do with this thing, you sad, simple woman?” Pure hilarity.

4. As I’ve said before about a million times, I have Direct TV and I LOVE having Direct TV. If you’re a sports nerd like I am, no cable television provider spoils you more than Direct TV. The US Open (the golf Open, not the tennis) was played in June and just like they do with all the golf (and tennis) majors, Direct TV gave me six channels of coverage. I had mix channels and interactive menus and trivia games and all kinds of crap designed to entice us golf nerds. While the US Open was more an exercise in watching rain fall than it was an exercise in watching golf being played and while the finish was completely and utterly anti-climactic after an edge-of-your-seat run to the end (Lucas Glover? I mean, seriously? All that drama and we get Lucas Glover?), it was still a complete and utter golfgasm. It was golf overload. I live for golf overload.

3. Wimbledon is well into its second week. Dudes, it is easily one of the best Wimbledons in YEARS. First of all, that idiot Nadal is not playing. That’s a jackpot in and of itself. Like I foretold years ago, Nadal is having bad issues with his knees. I knew it would happen. I didn’t think it would come around this quickly but I knew it would come. It’s the primary reason why I think he’s such an idiot. You can’t have that much natural talent and just toss it all away by not taking care of your body and expect me to think you’re anything above an idiot. All that aside, Nadal pulled out two days before the start of the tournament, leaving his section of the draw deliciously open. Secondly, like with golf, Direct TV is giving me Wimbledon overload with something like eight channels of coverage. It’s so great. I don’t have to be a slave to whatever match ESPN feels like showing. I can watch any match I want. Thirdly, all my boys are still in it. The final is Sunday and all my boys are playing well. Djokovic is still hanging on, Andy is winning matches decidedly over players most people think he’d lose to, and Lleyton Hewitt is just, well, there’s no words for Lleyton Hewitt. Odds are that Federer is going to win, but Andy and Lleyton both have a REALLY good shot at it, especially if they keep playing the way they’ve been playing. This is what I mean when I say I like variety in my champions. This is why people like Tiger Woods, and Federer, and the Yankees, and Nadal bother me…sports are so much more exciting when the winner isn’t a foregone conclusion!

2. The Penguins won the Stanley Cup. They won it in game seven in Detroit. They totally won. They won and my boy Evgeni Malkin won the Playoffs MVP (he didn’t win the NHL MVP, which is totally bogus but he’s got a Stanley Cup so it’s okay). They won and I cried and I screamed and I ran all over my house. I yelled and screamed and cheered until I lost my voice and I ran all over the house until I fell down. It’s so rare that a team I root for actually wins. I mean, the Red Sox do well but my Mets and my Jets and my Pens don’t usually win. This year, the Pens won…and I ran around the house until I fell down, screaming with glee the whole way.

1. I may have mentioned this before, but my Gram is totally coming to Chicago to live. It’s been in the works for some time but it’s recently become more of a reality. Her house is sold, her stuff is packed, her movers are on call. For more than 20 years, seeing my Gram has always required an airplane ride. Now she’ll be less than 20 minutes away at my mom’s. I can’t really wrap my whole brain around that yet. It’s so different for me. I mean, for almost my entire life, I’ve been here and most of my family has been elsewhere. It’s going to be sweet having her around. Plus, she’ll be living with my mother. That’s going to be a regular comedy routine. I think I’m going to sell tickets. Joy joy!

So, there’s June. Hopefully July will be free of Zimbabwe weather. Jeez, I can’t believe it’s the end of June already. Where is this year going? The older you get, the faster time flies. Ho hum.

I've been thinking about getting an actual blog site. You know, like, tenhappythings.com or something. An actual blog as opposed to a MySpace thing. What do you think?

Be well, my little pretties!