MAN i love rent week. that week where you're about to give the landlady just about all the money you have, and then remember important things like aw crap my car needed an oil change like a thousand miles ago i have to do that this weekend, and so you try to figure out if you can kind of time things out so by the time the rent check gets cashed you've been paid again and it'll cover the money you put into your car...

i'm sure you're familiar with it, but the math goes something like this. today i will get an oil change. this will make my bank account like 20 bucks short for rent. rent is due feb 1st. if i give the landlady my rent check at the end of the day on feb 1st, after the post office closes, there's no way it's getting in the mail that day. if they mail it to the property managers the next day, it'll get to pasedena on the third. so at the earliest, they'll cash it on feb 4th. which is friday, which is payday. and everyone will be none the wiser.

unless they read my blog, of course.

in other news, i am so rad it hurts sometimes. with the help of jenn norwood, internet god, a big fattie chunk of website was completed yesterday and i'm taking the rest of the weekend off for good behavior, cha cha cha!

i'm a woman with goals, dammit. today i will sit here for most of the day and work on my website!!!

i do have to run out when the post office opens to send a wilson phillips day gift, and also i have to go to the grocery store and get some juice for my cold-infested ass... but if i don't have at least ONE section of the website up and running by the end of this weekend you can come to my house and punch me in the face. i might not even hit you back.

also, i got a barnes and noble giftcard for xmas, which rocks because i was able to pick up a couple of books i've been wanting for a while. namely the new stitch and bitch, that grouphug.us book, and they call me mad dog, which is the sequel to my favoritest book ever, flaming iguanas!

but i pledge to you that i will not even crack 'em open until tomorrow, when at least one section of this website thing will be operational!!!

i'm so full of crap, i just got home and paged through stitch n bitch and found a sweet new scarf i'm gonna make for trav. but starting now i will not slack off any more today. except for those couple of mandatory leave-my-house errands i told you about a while ago.

damn i do not want to be chained to my computer today. there's like a bazillion promising-sounding estate sales going on in long beach this weekend.

NO! i'm working! i swear.

then steph, why are you still typing and making links to everywhere, you lying, theiving whore?

wait, what are you talking about, i didn't steal anything!!!

aw huney you stole my heart

aaaaaaaaaaand scene!

i swear the other morning, when i was driving to work, i saw a billboard.

which isn't the interesting part of the story...

the chick whose face took up the entire billboard, i think we maybe went to saint bonaventure elementary together. maybe my brain was just playing tricks on me, but the rocio on the billboard looks strangely familiar - on tap for this weekend is to see if telemundo billboard chick is indeed the rocio from days of yore.

we promise to follow this gripping story 24-7 as it develops!!! so suck it!

i'm just gonna rant for a quick second about that train derailment in glendale yesterday.

it really cheezes me off about the dude that caused it. i mean, i know he was out of his mind and suicidal and stuff. but it's pretty lame that he drove his car onto the train tracks to kill himself, and then decided against it but couldn't get the car off the tracks in time, killing 11 people.

he was ready to check out, then decided he wasn't, so 11 other people had to involuntarily.

that is so not cool.

sometimes in between all the jackassery and stoopid emails i send to major corporations i find reasons to actually write something nice... the following is an email i just sent to toyota.

**********************

I just wanted to take a second to thank you guys for building such a great car.

Five years ago while living in Westminster, California, I bought a '92 Toyota Corolla which I named Chuckles. For the first two years I owned the car it endured 40 mile commutes morning and night, including countless other adventures... Then I got a job in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and you know, Chuckles was such a trooper about driving two thousand miles and THEN trekking through the snow for two winters. This May when I was laid off, the car could've crapped out somewhere in the middle of Nebraska, but no -- Chuckles stuck with me and made the trip all the way back home to California, this time towing a UHaul trailer full of my worldy and not-so-worldly possessions. Which brings me to my whole reason for writing in the first place.

Today, Chuckles the Happy Clown Car of Doom rolled over to 250,000 miles.

A quarter of a million miles on one little thirteen year old car. A hundred thousand miles of that is mine. Of course I would love to get a new car, who wouldn't? Chuckles is having some old car problems: the headliner on the roof of the car sags all over the place, the keyholes constantly try to break my keys, the clutch really should probably be replaced, there's some cracks and missing chunks from a break-in six months ago, there's more dents and dimples in it than you can find in a golf ball... but the fact that I can't afford a new car, and this one just keeps going... I really appreciate that. And chances are when I'm in the market for a brand new car (years and years from now:) I'll be shopping with you all over again.

If you care to see pictures, I had my camera phone out and snappin photos as the odometer rolled over.

Thanks again,
steph

******************

and here's the pics... they're very hard to see cuz i was driving when i took them. i tried to take the next exit so i could get something good and clear but by the time i was on the ramp it rolled over to plus one. shitcakes!

here's just before the rollover - feel the suspense!!!



aaaaaaand here's what 250,000 miles looks like:



i know it looks like somewhere between 249,999 and 250,000 i got really wasted, but traffic picked up, i swear! it's like god knew i was trying to take a picture, and he went ahead and sped up traffic right as it rolled over. and that's fine, because he also decided that my car should not blow up at 250k. cheers!

people of earth!!!

cats should not wear skirts!!!

thank you, that is all.

people of earth, after all the hype i was severely disappointed in the container store. ann and i popped in this weekend after seeing the life aquatic and i dunno exactly what i was expecting, but i'd heard so many wonderful things from lots of different people, and all we found was meh, meh, meh everywhere. do you like ikea, but you wanna spend five times as much on stuff that's exactly the same quality and made from the same materials? then probably the container store's for you. ick.

the life aquatic, however, was really cool.

on to more important things. namely, National Wilson Phillips day. it's time to get on the stick people, there's only 14 shopping days left. here's how it works: go to your local thrift store's music section. look for a used copy of any title by wilson phillips. wrap it up, give it to a friend on january 31. it's that simple!

lovely assistant: "it sounds like a good plan steph, but how does it work?"

well i'm glad you asked - here's how it works: go to your local thrift store's music section. look for a used copy of any title by wilson phillips. wrap it up, give it to a friend on january 31. it's that simple!

further rules go as such:
* buying new is out of the question!

* if you received a wilson phillips present last National Wilson Phillips Day, it's completely legal to wrap up and pass on that tape/cd to someone other than the person who gave it to you. what i'm sayin here is no tagbacks, people!

* making a burned copy of a wilson phillips cd is wildly unacceptable - the point is to go out and hunt down the thrift store copies!

now get to it!

now here's a cooking tip for you:

when you're making brownies with redhots in them, and the recipe says to put parchment paper on the bottom of the pan, substituting that with newsprint drawing paper is not the same thing - the effect is the same, which is luscious, luscious brownies, but explaining to people when the paper kind of sticks to the bottom of the brownie (because it's not a waxy consistency like parchment paper) that NO, there's no ink printed on the paper, it's not a newspaper it's newsprint drawing paper, no it will not make you sick, yes it's archival quality, no eating paper will not kill you, yes the brownies are delishious so shut up and eat them... it's not worth it. so get off your ass, go to the store, and buy some parchment paper.

my squishy walls are fixed. i love how my slumlord apartment managers pointed out a very tiny area on my kitchen and bathroom walls that were going to be replaced because they don't really want to pay to do any work, right? i came home after the handyman had been there and huh, i wasn't full of shit, the damage WAS pretty extensive, and the entire bottom half of both walls had been replaced with new drywall.

i love it when i raise hell about something and the other party tells me basically i'm wrong and that turns out not to be the case at all, in reality i'm quite awesome. so they can suck it, i'm gonna paint the walls fun crazy colors and they're gonna deal with it because i officially don't like them anymore.

and maybe if i feel like it when i move out i'll paint it back. or black.

or black with big fat hellflames. that's a nice motif for a former nunnery, i think.

today i'm making a comforter for my bed. ohhhhh, yeah, we be classin' up the joint. now my place won't look like a squatter lives there, it'll look like a squatter with a comforter lives there.

and it's supposed to be 75 degrees outside on monday. no sir i do not miss wisconsin weather at all.

it's one of those days, you know? where you're invited to go somewhere, you really should go, it'd probably be pretty cool, you kinda wanna go, but you really just don't feel like getting off your big lazy ass and going.

so there's that.

here's what i did today:

- worked on a bootleg tshirt for a birthday
- took a shower
- went grocery shopping
- ran through the pouring rain to savon to try and get some quarters
- made tasty sammiches a la maria for lunch this week
- bought a plain tshirt for to iron on the bootleg design
- actually got some quarters at a grocery store
- drooled over new cds at tower in long beach
- drove to best buy in westminster to see if they had the one i wanted for cheaper
- drove back to tower in long beach because best buy was sold out
- made a pot of chili
- did laundree
- vaccuumed
- danced like an idiot to the new gwen stefani
- worked on the website

what i wanna know, is which of these activities caused the weird pain in the middle third of my right ring finger? any and all theories would be appreciated.

yesterday i found out there's only two degrees of separation between me and napoleon dynamite - check out this excerpt from an email i got from my old animation teacher tom beatty:

Also, sorry to hear about your love of Napoleon Dynamite although I have not seen it...I'm not sure I could stomach it. You see, Jon Heder (the star of the movie) and his twin brother were both students of mine at BYU. They took Character Design and Life Drawing for Animation from me during the year I was there. This was of course before the movie. He and his brother are animation students...not acting students (did it show). The personality you see in the movie isn't as funny when it is the personality of one of your students. So, I suppose...if you wanted bragging rights....you could say your Animation Professor taught the star of Napoleon Dynamite.

bragging rights, indeed! i expect this will only make me more in demand and conceited than i already am.

looking back, my building really does look pretty churchy.

of course it was a convent.

what i wanna know is at what point did it close down, and why? and did the v room being right next door have anything to do with it?

i'm picturing the scenario thusly:

everything was fine and dandy at the nunnery until the v room opened. soon after, mother superior started having problems with nuns going and tippin' back a few after a long hard day of nunning. alcoholism started to run rampant, shenanigans occured, good habits went bad. and possibly the final straw was the sudden spike in reported immaculate conceptions.

that's just my theory. i'm thinkin' about lookin into the actual history of the place to find out how close i am to right.

of special interest to everyone, especially you, is that i just found out the building i live in is at least a hundred years old and probably more, and that it used to be a convent back in the day.

i think that's pretty cool. i'm gonna start wearing a flying nun costume around town.

okay why do humans do the new years resolutions?

i don't like em but i do em anyways. for more on this go read jenn's blog, cuz she's sayin what we're all thinkin. except for the part where i'm thinkin about going on a killing spree, she forgot to put that in there.

so this year here's what i'm gonna do:

i'm actually gonna work out instead of talking about it intermittently

i'm actually gonna finish my website before summer instead of talking about it intermittently

i'm actually gonna continue to hold to the i'm not talking to certain people instead of talking about it intermittently

i'm actually gonna learn how to cook better instead of talking about it intermittenly

basically, folks, my new year's resolution is to be less full of shit than i was last year. the end.

people of earth!!!

send me some money and a self addressed stamped envelope and i will maybe send you nothing in return!!!

thank you, that is all.