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Nadarine
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Name: D
Country: United States
State: Ohio
Metro: Cincinnati
Gender: Female
Interests: theatre, cooking, drinking, shoes, Liquor Lyle's
Expertise: well, I can spout off on Beckett like nobody's business... which I find endlessly fascinating, but somehow very few people stick around long enough to agree.
Occupation: grad student, future arbiter o
Industry: arts
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
7/30/2002
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| announcement!I'm moving (and am almost all finished with the transferring!) to my very own domain.
Henceforth, www.nadarine.com. Come up and see me sometimes.
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| Finally. I'm allowed back online to rejoin humanity.
Actually, I did get wifi back on Friday night, but coupled with working late, dinner plans, and the imminent arrival of my parents for a three-day weekend in Chicago, I wasn't able to devote myself properly to caressing the internet upon my return. I'm sorry, internets. Will you forgive my negligence of our relationship? I can change, I promise!
Ahem. Anyway.
My parents, being good midwestern types like myself, are practical. However, as they live in a town where walking to the grocery store, or to Target, or to anywhere further than one's mailbox is seen as something that only eccentric hippies without cars do, they generally consider any occasion to walk about an Exercise Occasion. They prepare for such an excursion with sturdy tennis shoes and sunscreen. I'm completely supportive of the sunscreen (I'm slathered in SPF 55+ over all my limbs from April-October if I'm stepping outside the house, and SPF 15 on my face daily is nonnegotiable), but I tend to differ with them on the tennis shoes. Unless I am running at a clip of more than 6 mph, I leave tennis shoes alone. My mother, bless her practical heart, commented on my lovely low-heeled vintage Mary Janes by saying that I was "so dressed up". Well, those Mary Janes stood up through a leisurely walk around Hyde Park and hours of museum meandering with nary a blister or rub on my foot.
On Monday, I thought "oh, the hell with it- sneakers it is!" and put on a pair of well-broken-in trainers. Those shoes managed to make my right heel bleed from 5 pm onward, and my arches hurt like hell at the end of the day.
I'll stick with my magical heels of fashion and function, Mom, thanks.
Those Mary Janes sustained a casualty prior to our Sunday jaunt around Hyde Park, unfortunately. While sitting in their hotel lobby with my mother, she noticed that a big gash had mauled the back of my right shoe. I left them alone for a few days, and then decided that Walgreen's would probably be able to provide a solution in the form of true brown nail polish.
Do you know how damn hard it is to find a true brown nail polish? They're all either shimmery ("Chocolate Twirl") or burgundy ("Darkest Wine") or flecked through with gold ("Precious Ore"). I finally settled on a bottle that seemed neither opalescent nor red, and gritted my teeth to try out this solution on my shoes.
Before:
After:
For $3.99, I think I can declare: SUCCESS!
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| What does a nice, polite Midwestern girl do when you infuriate her? That’s right, she blogs about it. Take that, Comcast.
Last week, when our appointed day for Comcast installation arrived, I said to Noah: “There’s no way I’ll simply come home from work today and have internet access. Something will go wrong, and then I will be angry.”
Indeed. First, the Comcast guy shows up 3 hours late. Second, he informs Noah (who has patiently stayed in the apartment all day to wait for this appointment in lieu of getting any work done) that he must drill a hole through the second-floor siding to install the cable line. Hmm, he thinks. I’d better run this by the landlord, as it is her house and all, and I’d hate to ok this if she’d be upset to find a wire snaking out of her siding. Our landlord, of course, is at work, and cannot be reached via phone to give her blessing. So Noah, being considerate and also aware that I may not want to lose my deposit on the apartment, tells the Comcast guy to come back this week for an appointment to install once we’ve obtained the landlord’s permission.
That future appointment was today. And when leaving for work this morning, I again expressed my disbelief that I’d come home to internet service.
Nice to meet you- you can call me Cassandra.
I get a call at work from a very angry Noah who tells me that Comcast is in our apartment, but will not install anything until they get a signed permission letter from our landlord. I wasn’t aware that this installation was a third-grade field trip to the art museum requiring permission slips, and considering that last week’s Comcast installer made no mention of such a permission slip being required, I was stunned.
Now, the landlord had left me a post-it on my door saying “go ahead and have them install the line”. I exhort Noah to dig through the trash, through the layers of fruit peel and meat wrappers and bags of used cat litter, to procure this post-it. “Not good enough”, says the Comcast guy. “It has to have her full signature on it.”
And that, friends, is when I lost it at work and forgot my professional demeanor entirely. All my new co-workers, who have known me a whole seven days, now know me as that girl who got on the phone and started yelling obscene, filthy, irate curses down upon Comcast Corporation and threatened to go to their office and beat the living hell out of every single employee.
Thus: I am now scheduled for a THIRD appointment with Comcast for this Friday afternoon. Once again, Noah will have to sit at home all day, waiting for the installer. And once again, I very highly doubt that I will be able to come home and bask in the sweet, loving glow of the internet. However, I do not doubt that I may be spending Saturday morning attacking Comcast employees with my modem and router tied together in an ad-hoc nunchuck, and that I may then be spending Saturday afternoon in a holding cell for the insane.
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| Things I love thus far:
my neighborhood has streets named Mozart, Shakespeare, and Dickens.
Chicago is extremely flat, so the 5-mile bike to work is a smooth, lovely cruise of 30 minutes, not the panting uphill trek that was inevitable in Cincinnati. (When they call Cincinnati "The City of Seven Hills", I'm pretty sure they meant to say "Seventy-Seven Goddamn Hills That Are All In My Way".)
I am slowly, slowly learning new bits of Spanish by translating signage in the neighborhood. I now can recite McDonald's slogans in two languages.
Thing I hate thus far:
still no internet. But, I swear, as soon as I can get permission from the landlord to drill a hole in the side of her house, I will hover over the Comcast guy and his magical delivery of internet service, and then I will finally be able to function without the constant shakes and paranoia that accompany internet withdrawal. The DSL dt's are not pretty, friends.
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| now with Central Standard TimeA) I'm all moved to Chicago for the summer, if by "all moved" you count having zero dressers and dressing myself out of suitcases on the floor. Thankfully, I also have a large closet, so anything that can be hung up is now vertical.
B) There is no internet for me at home or work, and I am dying of withdrawal.
C) I need a haircut. I tried to get my hair cut before leaving Cincinnati last week, but I walked into the barber shop and was informed that the barber had BROKEN BOTH HIS ARMS and would not be able to work for several weeks. Oh, hell.
D) I have been catcalled seven times today while biking to/from work. What, you've never seen a girl bike in a dress before?
... I'll come back to life within the next week, assuming I can get internet service at home post-haste. If that's not possible, you'll find my shriveled corpse clutching my Macbook in the living room. Cause of death: being forced to live in a world without wifi.
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