You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2009.
my birthday celebrations were fantastic.
great friends; scrumptious food; merriment.
perfection, really.
here’s a sample of the goodness.
thanks to susan for making the coolest cake i have EVER had made just for me (caveat included because we did have a pretty cool wedding cake); and to andrea, the perfect hostess and friend, who was also the brainchild behind the veggie themed cake and all vegetarian menu. (complete with gluten and nut free options!)
the veggie feast was sunday, and monday we got together with more friends for drinks (where we brought the remainder of the cake, and took turns eating it outside of the restaurant on a bench to avoid the $2/plate fee. yeah! take that MAN! consider yourself stuck it to!).
both days were such great fun; they totally lived up to my “golden day” expectations!
thanks friends!
28 years ago on the 28th day of september, these fine folks put me on this earth.
thanks mom and dad.
i’m obsessed with birthdays. i LOVE birthdays. especially my own.
and although i know you can’t say anything with 100% certainty, i am fairly certain that i will love my birthdays, no matter what age i am. BIRTHDAYS ARE THE BEST.
it’s funny really that i brought this up, actually, because mine just happens to be coming up on monday.
coinkydink.
and the thing about me is that i insist that my birthday is not just a one day event every year. oh no. it’s a week long event. sometimes longer. mike loves this about me.
so the point of this post is not to get early happy birthdays from the crowd. really.
it’s really to fawn over the world’s birthday present to me: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, the movie
seriously, someone reached into one of the most fantastic memories of my childhood and plopped it down, directly coinciding with my birthday month this year. yeah, that’s right. i said month.
if you haven’t seen the previews, i suggest you view them immediately (go here). watch them now! and then come back! i’ll wait….
glorious, right? every time i watch the previews, i cry.
i am so thrilled that this movie will be entering my life in the next couple of weeks.
and the SOUNDTRACK. oh my goodness.
it’s all so delicious, i just want to eat it up RIGHT NOW.
mmmm. yummy.
so i just got finished doing something rather unpleasant.
on january 16, 2008, at 4:41am (if you were wondering), our township issued me a parking ticket.
which i never received.
but that’s apparently beyond the point.
now, we’re no saints in the parking department. there have been several occasions where we have parked too close to a stop sign (there’s no indicator WHERE “too close” to the stop sign is, but WHATEVER), or we haven’t moved the car before 9am every other wednesday for street cleaning. STREET CLEANING. in the middle of the suburbs. twice a month.
but when we get these tickets, despite questioning the premise of the ticket, as soon as we RECEIVE the ticket, we pay them right away. because we’re good citizens.
the process for paying tickets in jersey is electronic. so when you go on-line you can see ALL of the tickets that you are up against. but for us, like i said, we pay our tickets off right away. RIGHT AWAY. so there really is no queue to speak of, just the ticket we’ve just received that we’re paying RIGHT AWAY.
then, last week, i get something in the mail with big bold letters on the front which reads, “OFFICIAL LEGAL NOTICE.”
hmmm.
i open it, peruse the letter, and see that there was a VIOLATION, and that i FAILED TO APPEAR IN COURT, and A WARRANT MAY BE ISSUED FOR YOUR ARREST, or YOUR DRIVING PRIVILEGES MAY BE SUSPENDED, and i would be SUBJECT TO CONTEMPT OF COURT.
whaaa???
but i pay my tickets.
i did not get this ticket, folks. i promise you. THE TICKET WAS NOT ON OUR CAR. or i would have paid it. right away. (good citizens and whatnot…you get the point.) and even if something happened to the ticket, like it fell off of the car, or the bunny who eats our zucchini flowers got the munchies and needed some additional fiber in his diet, it would have shown up on-line when i was paying the other tickets at some point over the last year and eight months since it was issued, right? RIGHT?
ok, so there’s got to be a good explanation for this.
for instance, a couple of months ago i was on the ticket payment website, paying a ticket we had received a week beforehand (RIGHT AWAY), and noticed that there was another ticket on our record. the ticket was for a violation (a hit and run. small matter, right?) that had been made in a county we had never been to, in a car i’ve never seen that was owned by somebody else. my heart starts to race immediately. WHO DID I HIT? WHO DRUGGED ME TO DRIVE ANOTHER CAR? IN A FOREIGN COUNTY? wait. what? no. we didn’t do that.
so i immediately called the court attached to the ticket, and explained the situation. 5 minutes later, with a new jersey apology given from that county’s court office, “<grunt> ok. i took care of it. <grunt>” justice was served. i felt extremely proud of my accomplishment.
which brings us back to the new small little dilemma of: WARRANT MAY BE ISSUED FOR YOUR ARREST. mike and i both decided that some similar error was going on with this ticket. so i decided that i would call our town’s court office and get it taken care of. once again.
so this morning i call the court’s office, and i talk to the woman in charge, explaining the entire situation.
she responds, “gosh, gee. that doesn’t really happen, so i don’t really know what to say.”
i’ve got something i could say.
i compose myself, and say, “well, this sort of thing has happened to us before, where a ticket has wrongly been placed in our ‘ticket queue’. could this have happened?”
her: “no.”
me: “but it has never shown up in my ‘ticket queue’ and i never physically saw the ticket. i’m fairly skeptical about this ticket since the system has messed up before.”
her: “yeah….hmmm. that’s too bad. i don’t know what to say.”
TELL ME IT’S YOUR ERROR.
me: “so what should i do about this?”
her: “i guess you should pay the ticket, because it would show up on our end if it had been entered in incorrectly. thank you, have a good day.”
GGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
my only other option at this point is to go into court, object and plead not guilty.
and while i know i’m incredibly witty and smooth (ha), i don’t feel confident that those qualities would translate while pleading ‘not guilty’ in court. i’m just not going to go if i don’t have to go.
so i pay the eff-ing ticket. i am 45 bucks poorer this morning because of some stupid non-existent ticket. and now i’m whining to you.
it appears that september 1 was the pre-destined day for the change of seasons here in new jersey. there was no gentle transition, just august 31, 90 degree heat, and then september 1, BOOM, arctic temperatures.
this means that i have officially been unemployed for three seasons…well weather-wise at least. but who’s counting?
accompanying this turn of seasons is a changing of the guard for “problem children” in our household. the ants have moved out, and the mice have moved in. (again.) (well actually, again, again, again.) we’re doing what we can to fight these giants, but i think in some ways we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that with this house, comes these problems.
i’ve never thought of myself as a vengeful person, but these house-guests have brought out a person that i might have never gotten to know, a person who takes pleasure in pain.
and for this, i believe that i’m honestly a bit thankful for the intruders.
as a farewell to summer, please enjoy a little something i like to call, “payback.”
