It’s Raining Gifts – Alajuela

My friend recently received an invite to a restaurant lunch for her friend’s bridal shower and of course it included where she was registered. Why is it you are supposed to give a gift for someone who is getting married anyway? I can picture back in the day when a couple got married they were young and it was probably their first time living on their own. A nice toaster or dish set probably went a long way to help the couple get established and have a happy relationship. In my friend’s recent case the ‘blushing bride’ is on her third marriage and she is in her 50’s. She has plenty of money and to me it just seems rude to ask for gifts especially when all you did was meet at a public restaurant. I’m no Miss Manners and I’m sure there’s some protocol here but I’m just glad she wasn’t my friend so I didn’t have to make the call as to whether or not to attend and provide a gift. I am of course always happy when my friends have good things in their lives but I sorta feel like this girl was more using her friends than being a good friend.

I’m not cheap but I’m also not materialistic. My celebrations are about spending time with my friends not what they can buy for me. Normally when I throw a party food and drink is included and I use the phrase ‘your presence is my present’. I just like their company and want to do something nice for them since they are important to me. Not use them to buy me gifts. So what do you think? What’s the rule for second, third and 100th marriages? If gifts are mandatory then I need to start having some weddings!

Cat “Cloudy With a Chance of Gifts” Cathy

Urban Crit

I’m not a big fan of competing in sports. My job is stressful enough so the last thing I need to do on the weekend is stress more. But still on occasion I’m convinced to compete. The most recent example was the urban criterium mountain bike race in Lakeland Florida.

The race involves riding up a parking garage, down said parking garage, down stairs, around part of a lake with a hill, down more stairs, some tight turns and then you do it all again for several laps for a total-hard core-pushing it workout of close to 50 minutes. I’ve actually wanted to do this race for a while since it sounded so cool being able to bike down steps in the middle of town and not be kicked out by the security guards.

So I carbed up with the largest pasta meal ever and headed out on the short road trip with ‘Super Estonia Girl’ and my biking and utility buddy ‘Knobber’. Both of them decided not to race so essentially they were my pit crew. They helped tune up my bike, take pictures, cheer me on and more as you will read later. I felt like I was at Tour De France with all their support.

I was nervous. I always get that way before a race and hence the reason I don’t like to race often. My friend ‘Goldi’ was also nervous and we seemed to feed off each other and make it worse. Thankfully the nervousness goes away the moment the race starts and my competitive nature kicks in. I took off fast and was in first place for women the first lap. I couldn’t believe this as I hadn’t trained and I thought I would do much worse. Then I was passed going up the parking garage and figured she would disappear and that I’d definitely gone out too fast and furious. But she didn’t sprint off and I was able to stay close behind.

Between huffing and puffing my engineering mind kicked in and I realized she had more endurance but possibly less technical skills. So my plan was to make time on the downhill and try to find a good place to pass on the last lap. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite as I hoped and going as fast as I could on skinny and high pressure race tires turned out to be a bad idea. I skidded out on the lowest level of the parking garage. I quickly got up and jumped on my bike to continue my race. My brakes were rubbing so my dreams of first were gone and I was just hoping I could hold on to second or third.

Luckily the breaks stopped rubbing when I used my mad engineering skills (I kicked them) and I managed to hold on for second place. The adrenaline was still pumping and I didn’t really feel any pain even though my whole right side was dirty, bruised and battered including a huge strawberry on my hip/butt. Goldi was nice enough to shout out “cute girl needs help with her butt”. Sadly there were no takers on this tidbit of information but my awesome pit crew was there for me with peroxide and bandages for my injuries. I did somehow manage to make it fun by asking if the huge welt made my butt look big. When we put the peroxide on and it turned white everyone went “oooohhhh”. So I said it sounded just like Fourth of July fireworks again.

In the end there were four women on the podium ranging in age from around 15 to 50 something. I thought it was way cool to have such a wide age range which included us ‘established’ women and the next generation too.

Even though I’m currently still nursing my wounds, I still had fun and hope to do it again next year. I’m not a big fan of competition but I guess doing it from time to time can be exciting and gives me something to look forward to. But next year I will just train harder so I can do better on the up hills instead of trying to make up time in the down hills and leaving half my skin on the parking garage first floor.

Cat “I’m All Right Now” Cathy

Why Pay More?

Being a student saved me three bucks at the movies recently. The only odd thing about it is I haven’t actually been a student in over 5 years. And that was just a few grad classes that I took before I decided I’d had enough school for this lifetime. Still I had my dusty old ID and even though I’m sure the current IDs look different, I still showed it and got my discount.

Do I feel bad or wrong about doing this? No, I actually enjoy it. I feel like I’m sticking it to the man. I seriously doubt my three greenbacks will keep all the actors and producers from eating at night. Plus I just don’t get the whole concept of student or senior or any other kind of discount based solely on your status in life. I know plenty of students who are receiving full scholarships and parents’ support so they have as much disposable income as I do. Plus there are plenty of seniors who have homes paid for and lots of savings so again they have as much or more disposable income.

My personal opinion is if the business can afford to charge a lower price to a select group than I want that price. My plan is to go right from student discounts to AARP discounts. Call me cheap if you must be I prefer to think of it as getting good value for my money.

The best part was the door man who took our tickets said “one student and one adult”. I made a point to pick on my friend who is 10 years younger than me that she was the ‘adult’.

Cat “Never Grow Up” Cathy

Never Fear, Balloon Girl is Here!

Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to be in a comic book. Ok, not really but the band Beebs and her Money Makers was having a contest for their album release to dress as your own superhero and the winner would be put in their comic book. Of course I couldn’t resist and I came up with the new superhero Balloon Girl…notice the echo when you say that?

Her powers consist of making people happy since most people smile when they see balloons, being able to fly since she has a cape full of helium, balloon missiles that are surprisingly more powerful than they appear and finally when all else fails she makes a loud popping sonic boom sound to scare off the villains.

Of course her weaknesses are running with scissors, static cling and no pockets in her super hero suit.

The album release was the House of Blues in Downtown Disney. A lot of people were around for other Downtown Disney venues and were not dressed up. This made Balloon Girl a wee bit nervous at first and thankful for her mask disguise. But then she arrived at the HOB and met Pink Girl, BBQ Man and a plethora of other super heroes. There was no doubt that the HOB would be safe this night with so many powerful superheroes on hand.

Tourists were even stopping her to ask for pictures as if she worked for Disney. Balloon Girl didn’t mind and posed with the kids and even let them hold her ‘deadly’ balloon missiles.

Suddenly Balloon Girl’s balloon senses started tingling (yet another balloon girl power…sounds familiar though doesn’t it) and she was recognized by a group of friends that also happened to be attending the event. But said friends were very supportive and happy to see her and support her cause. (Note to balloon self – need a bigger mask).

Balloon Girl received a lot of compliments and won the contest! She was so happy you would have thought she had just won Miss America. But in her humble opinion being in a comic book is even better than that!

At the end of the night Balloon Girl, Super Estonia Girl and Electro Man scoured the parking lot for Balloon Girl’s invisible jet and headed out in search of more adventure.

Overall I….I mean Balloon Girl… had a blast and she can’t wait to see her comic book character!

Cat “Never in the same place as Balloon Girl” Cathy

Philadelphia Freedom

Philadelphia has never been on my ‘must see’ list. In fact, I can’t even spell the name without using my spellchecker. The only thing I know about Philly (spelled that on my own) is they have some sort of damaged bell and a song by Elton John that doesn’t really seem to say much about the city at all. But the Philly Skate Club was having their annual Philly Free Skate weekend and I couldn’t think of anything more adventurous than a weekend of skating a new city. Plus I always like the word ‘free’.

The organized skates all started at the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art stairs. These are the same stairs that Rocky runs up in his famous movie scene. So every skate I re-enacted this famous movie scene. The only difference was I ran up on skates which was way cooler than plain old sneakers in my humble opinion.

The first skate on Friday afternoon we were honked at in a not so friendly manner more times than I could count. I started calling Philly ‘The City of Brotherly Beeeeep’.

The second Friday skate was like one giant flash mob. There were well over 100 skaters and we would sprint a distance while taking up traffic lanes and then abruptly stop in a public area. After a few minutes we would quickly sprint off again in various directions. It really was like a city wide skating flash mob and very entertaining.

The organized skates were fun but my favorite part of the trip was when the small Orlando contingent decided to venture out on our own. We were in search of Tony Luke’s which is supposed to be the best cheese steaks in town…or cheese cakes as I kept calling them for some dumb reason. There was a long line but the cheese steaks definitely lived up to their reputation. And the sautéed spinach side was also yummy and made me feel less guilty about my huge hoagie steak sandwich and cola.

From there we continued our adventure and exploring on skates and saw a plethora of unusual things including a kid in a Panda costume in the 90 degree heat, an anatomically correct Chinese guardian lion in Chinatown and superheroes from a convention that was in town.

We also skated over the Ben Franklin Bridge to beautiful Camden NJ so we could call our day a two state skate. The view from the top of the bridge was invigorating as was the fast skate down the bridge. Camden was deserted but seemed nice enough until a few drugged out looking locals approached us. The looks we got later when we told the local skaters we went to Camden made me realize we were lucky to get out of there incident free.

During our trip we all acquired vacation names. These were well earned nicknames based on things that occurred on vacation. Our Orlando group consisted of Chainsaw Joe, Backstreet Bruce and Cruisin and Bruisin Cathy. I won’t explain where these names came from since it’s probably more of an inside joke but I highly recommend trying your own vacation names as an entertaining addition to any trip.

I totaled 95 skating miles over the weekend. My shins were bruised so bad that the skates have been put on a ‘time out’ while I heal. Overall I met some nice people and had a good time in the city of brotherly beeeep but I don’t think I’ll be visiting again any time soon.

Cat “Cruzin Chainsaw Backstreet” Cathy

Coloring on the Sidewalk…What Fun!

I’ve seen sidewalk chalk art for years and always admired the artists’ skills and their medium. At a festival recently I noticed that the sidewalk artists used a gridded picture as a guide and then outlined the drawing on the sidewalk before coloring it in with chalk. Somehow this made it seem much easier and appealed to my engineering brain so I decided I wanted to give it a try.

So I bought the supplies and contacted my Estonian neighbor (my sister from another mister as I blogged about recently) and convinced her that it would be fun and/or exciting to do this. We decided the sidewalk just outside our building would be the best place. While we were working on our masterpieces other neighbors came by and wondered what we were doing. I decided to make up a story that my Estonia friend showed much promise in sidewalk art so she was taken from her family at the age of 5 and trained for this task her entire life. I actually think some of my neighbors believed me until they saw just how simple our artwork was.

Since then, our art has been the topic of much conversation at our apartment building (I guess we really need to get more excitement in our lives). One neighbor was extremely impressed with our art until she found out it was done by two adults. Naturally she assumed it was done by the one child living in our building. Perhaps my Estonian friend and I are just not understood in our time and our art will flourish once we’ve passed on…nah!

They’ve lasted two weeks and counting including two heavy rain storms. I’m sure most of this is due to the hairspray coating I did since I saw that at the aforementioned festival also. Every time I walk by they make me smile as I remember the fun we had. I hope you take some time out for fun, art and new challenges too!

Cat “Watch Where you Walk ‘Cause the Sidewalks Talk” Cathy

Ten Lashes for Email Spammers and Computer Hackers!

I’m can’t stand spam emails. If I want my penis enlarged I’ll…wait I don’t have one of those last I checked. Thankfully I don’t get nearly as many spam emails lately thanks to an awesome spam filter that automatically sends this junk to a spam folder which keeps me happy and stress free.

But recently one of my email accounts was hacked and all my friends in my address book received pharmaceutical emails from me. Thankfully my friends were smart enough to realize all those impersonal emails with just a Viagra link weren’t actually from me. But it still felt like a big invasion of my privacy.

I think we need a spam investigation unit at the police department. I can envision a Spam Criminal Investigators TV show already. Seriously, I do think there needs to be more severe punishment like having to send personalized apology letters to everyone involved or maybe the ten lashes mentioned in my title really would be appropriate.

The lengths these spammers go to just amazes me. I now get emails that look like they are forwarded text messages from my phone. Just imagine if these people used their skills for ‘good’ instead of ‘evil’ what a better world we would have. Making money is nice and necessary but having a job you can take pride in should mean a lot as well. I’m amazed and disappointed that many people just look for ways to screw others out of their money instead of earning an honest and rewarding living.

So let’s get this anti spam campaign started…I’ll administer the lashes.

Cat “Cheap Pharmaceuticals” Cathy