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Newest thing?  I bought a car.  Yep.  A copper color 2011 Honda Fit with only 13,200 miles on it.

I had been looking at the Fiat (for about 3 years, actually, ever since I saw one in Lake Como, Italy when I was there with Dad), but I was definitely soured on the idea by effing JLo.  Not the only reason, of course.  Chris indulged my love of that wee beauty, but urged me to get a reliable vehicle with a good track record.  And the “back seat” of the Fiat truly is a joke.  My niece was able to sit comfortably even when I pushed the driver’s seat all the way back, but she’s about as wide as a gymnastic balance bar, so a normal human-sized person might hurt themselves.

Then someone at work said she had a friend who was a salesman at Honda in Natick, MA.  I was in the market for a new car so that was great news.  I’d already done the “build your own” on the Honda website at least a dozen times so I pretty much knew what I wanted.  So I got the information from my friend regarding her salesman’s hours and such.  It’s always better to go in with a recommendation.

So Saturday, March 10th I got back from a lovely two-day trip to Philly with Tony and Sean for Mel and Jules’ birthday feast, called the dude and made an appointment for Sunday at 12:30.  Called a few different friends hoping someone would be able to come with me, but that part didn’t come together.  I debated rescheduling for when Chris would be in town, but as much as I wanted him to be with me, his male presence as well as his opinion, I felt impatient.  And since I feel like I always reschedule things, I went.

Mel was the first person I knew to get a Honda Fit.  She bought hers the first year they were available in the US (2007) and when she drove it up for Thanksgiving she let me try it out.  Hers is orange, too, but it’s a different orange.  Mine is copper and shiny metallic and hers is more of a muted rosy orange.

I tried 3 different Honda Fits (including a brand new 2012 with only 4 measly miles on it) but the copper one really spoke to me.  In fact, I was more interested in a the dark purple 2010 model on the lot (they don’t make that color this year), but it had more than 26K miles on it.  *AND* it was priced at $1,000 more than the copper. Eff that.  But it was really the feel, the price, the mileage and THEN the color that made me say yes to the deal.

Since I couldn’t drive myself back to pick it up alone and I didn’t want to burden anyone with hauling my ass all the way out to Natick, I asked if someone at the dealership could pick me up at the commuter rail station 5 minutes away.  They could and I came back the next day and picked up my new car.

Because I hadn’t told anyone about my purchase (including my husband - he knew I was maybe going to test drive it) I felt like I was doing something naughty.  Fun naughty.  Then in my excitement I got on the Mass Pike going the wrong direction - GAAAH!!! - and added 15 minutes to my drive home.  Silly me.

I love love LOVE the new Fiat 500!  I loved it when I saw it in Italy in 2009 before I found out it would be manufactured in the US.  From the outside it’s my ideal car, I swear!  I’ve been fawning over it for two years and telling anyone who will listen that I want one.  Then I saw a commercial for one on TV and I wanted to thumb my eyes back in their sockets.

J Lo?!?!  In MY Fiat?!?!  Granted she’s driving a convertible in the commercial and I’ve never understood the appeal of a convertible car of any kind.  AND it’s white, which is not a color I would ever choose for a vehicle.   I’ve gone to the Fiat website twelve hundred times and created and re-created my very own 500 in various colors with varying stripes and accoutrements, never white, never convertible.  But J Lo?!?!  Who the F decided she should be the spokes-celeb for Fiat?!?!   I do NOT want to associate the Fiat with J Lo.

These ads are KILLING me and making me want my car less and less.  I don’t hate J Lo, but I guess I think I might hate J Lo.

I was in bed last night reading when Chris yelled out, “Rooooooth, there’s a BAT in the living room!!  A baaaaaat!!”

“WHAT!?!?!!  A bat?!?!”  I went running out to see Chris in the kitchen looking in the living room at a bat flying around in wide circles.  Suddenly it was headed towards us so we ran back into the bedroom and shut the door.

“What do we do?  What should we do?!?!” Chris was really freaked out.  He’d been relaxing after his exhausting weekend and long Monday of teaching just zoning out watching TV when the bat flew into his line of sight.  He first thought, wow, what a big moth, but soon realized what it was.

We went back to the living room to see it still flying in circles.  Chris had grabbed a towel thinking we could either throw it over the little dude or coax him down the door to the basement.  He managed a couple more flights down the hall towards me which freaked me right out, but he always returned to the living room.  I had a towel, too, but Chris was studying the bat’s moves and once he got a handle on the pattern he managed to thwap it through the doorway.  Then he ran over and shut the door.

We waited a few minutes, but I was too curious and had to look.  I opened the door to see if he’d flown down and saw his little figure on the third step down the first flight.  My first thought was to get the dustpan and brush to get him outside, but Chris needed to throw a balled up piece of paper at the fella first to make sure he wouldn’t move.  He didn’t, but Chris didn’t want me going near him.  Hmph.

Eventually I calm down from all the excitement and am able to get to sleep.  Four am and Chris crawls in bed and tells me “he’s not on the step!”  “What?  Who?”  “The bat.  He was playing possum, that little shit!”  Interesting.  And funny.  My guess is poor batty was knocked unconscious and once he came to did got moving.  But now he’s gotta be somewhere in the basement.  And I have to do my laundry!

Too bad I didn’t have the presence of mind to record batty flying around the room - would’ve been awesome.

I have such intense disinterest in some shows and movies that you’d have to pay me to watch them.  I’m talking about movies that “everyone” seems to love or that won a lot of awards.  For instance, Avatar.  Didn’t want to see that one from the get-go, then I caught about four minutes of it when Chris had it on HBO and hearing the dialog I demanded he turn the channel.  Maybe I have something against blue creatures because I’m skirting disgust with the new Smurfs movie, too.

Many people tried (still try) to convince me to see Avatar, but my preference is to die never having seen it.

Marlee & Me is near the top of the list, definitely.  Brokeback Mountain.  hmmm….

Actually, there are so many terrible TV shows out there that it really isn’t worth a complete list, but there are some that cause me physical pain when I think about watching them or run across them.  Two and a Half Men, According to Jim, Glee, horse racing, Desperate Housewives, the George Lopez show, and ANYthing on Fox News, to name a few.

Are there any shows or movies you’d have to get paid to sit through?

I’ve had the same earring in my right ear since high school.  It’s the stud from when they pierced it, actually.  Why, you ask?  Because I haven’t been able to remove it.  No, it’s not stuck in my skin or anything; it spins around and all, but it’s just so tightly clamped that I can’t pull the ends apart.

Recently I thought hey, why don’t I go to one of the many piercing salons around town and have it cut off or something?  Today was the day.  My friend Anais’ daughter just turned 18 a few weeks ago and wanted her nose pierced.  Anais, true to her awesomely skewed sense of humor invited me and Melissa to come along to the “blessed event.”

I got there first so I asked Chris, the piercer (do they have titles?  Hole Maker?  Skin Breaker?),  what he’d charge me to cut my earring off.  He said he’d take care of it gratis.  Really?!  Coooool.  So we get to his table and after examining my ear and using a number of different tools to pull it apart he asks where I got it done because, evidently, it’s a beast.  Well,… frankly I’ve almost zero recollection of having my ears pierced initially.  I imagine it was at the Green Hills Mall in Nashville, but I don’t know for sure.  In any case, I told him, “it was approximately 22 years ago.”

Yeah, so apparently the stud in my ear was some medieval alloy for which no cutting tools he had were sufficient.  I had to completely lie down on his table with my head over the edge so he could get a handle on it.  Two minutes later he says “got it.”

I didn’t expect to be so overjoyed, but I was!  “Yay!!!!” I squealed like a teenager.  “You’ve changed my life!!”  In a way, it’s true.  To me, having that earring securely and stubbornly stuck in my ear these past twenty years has been akin to having a piece of shrapnel in there.  It was a foreign object in my body.  Every time I went to the hospital they’d ask me to remove it and I’d say, “Sorry, can’t.  But if you can, please do.”  When I got my latest passport picture taken the dude asked me to remove it and I had to tell him no-can-do. Annoying!!! Unnecessary!  And having to explain every time that no, it wasn’t adhered to my skin or anything supergross like that, it’s just locked in, blah blah blah.

I can finally put this story and that earring to bed.  Look at that beast!

Last night I went to 6:30pm Bosu Bootcamp (they’ve changed it to Bosu Challenge, but you know I prefer alliteration, so to me it’ll always be Bootcamp).  Afterward I crossed the street to Toad to hear Todd playing guitar with the band Qwill.  Had some chicken fingers and two PBRs for dinner and walked home in the middle of the second set.

It was only 9:30/10pm when I got home, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t do anything.  Tried to read, but knew no matter what page I got to I’d need to reread next time so I turned off the light.

Suddenly my eye was crazy itchy, so I rubbed the hell out of it.  (Yes, I wear contacts and yes, I always do that kind of thing.  Sometimes there is absolutely nothing more physically satisfying than literally scratching an itch.)  As I did this I remembered petting Lucy a little earlier and wondering if I should wash my hands.  Then I remembered deciding against it.  Besides when I’m doing heavy duty clean up or pet her and rub my face or my lips, I often forget that I’m allergic to cats.  I got Lucy as a kitten to immunize myself.  I knew it’d work because I grew up with cats.

But then…

I could immediately feel my left eye might be swelling.  Normally I’d get up, take out my contacts and take a chlortrymeton, but man, did I tell you I was tired?  Drugged tired.  So I lay there thinking “I’ll deal with it in the morning.  Maybe it’ll be fine by then.”  I guess I consider sleep at bit of a panacea.

No such luck, McGruck.  Here’s what I saw in the mirror when I got up.

Nice.  At least I wasn’t about to get married!  Phew.

There is just far too much good TV on right now.  Too much content in general.  Striking a balance is a constant struggle, everything is vying for my attention and I always question myself and wonder if I’m making a mistake, choosing the wrong thing.

Not that it matters in the end, duh, but my life is a continuing process of judging myself and my choices.  HA!  And who has the time to watch everything?  So, considering how much I love lists, herewith are my current can’t miss TV shows.

• Breaking Bad (Jesus H. Christmas this is one killer show. So dark, so complicated.  So unexpected.)
• Drop Dead Diva  (Appeals to my happy cheesy side.  Quite the opposite of BB.)
• Nurse Jackie  (One of the most complex and real characters ever on TV.)
• Hoarders (not Hoarding, Buried Alive, Hoarders was first and it’s better)
• Masterpiece Mystery (Rufus Sewell as Aurelio Zen in this short series of 90 minute mysteries.  You had me at Rufus.  LOVE.)
• Louie (Louis C.K. is my favorite comedian right now and has been for the past 3 years followed closely by Eddie Izzard.  Everything he says is right on.  If Anita didn’t already have dibs and she and I weren’t both married (!!!) I’d find him and bring him home to momma.  We saw him live at the Orpheum Theater a couple years ago and it was magical.
• Project Runway (Beside myself with excitement that the new season has finally begun.  I was a late bloomer with this one, but I’m full-on sold now.)
• Modern Family (Very excited for the next season. One of the best-written comedies EVER.  And still manages to pull goosebumps up my arm with its heartfelt codas.)
• The Ricky Gervais Show.  (His and Stephen Merchant’s obsession with Karl Pilkington and his seemingly feeble-minded and always over-thought observations make for stomach grabbing laughs.  Kills me.)

And here are a few not quite must-see/can’t-miss, but gee, I sure do enjoy them.  And maybe I dvr them.

• American Pickers (What an amazing job to drive around the back roads of America and go through the stuff people have collected or let rot in their barns for years?  Helps to know what you’re looking at when you find it all rusted, but reparable and utterly engrossing.)
• Real Housewives of New Jersey  (Dad would not be proud.  Ran across this by accident, I swear!, and thought it was fascinating.  To use a tired cliche it’s like driving by a car crash and you can’t look away.  These people are so far removed from anyone I’d ever run into in my daily life let alone get to know, it’s like watching aliens.  How great is it when the show is over I can turn off the TV and not be living their bizarre shallow gaudy lives.)
• Man Vs. Food  (Dude canNOT continue in this vein without exploding in some way.)
• Chelsea Lately  (She’s funny and she gets great comedians on her panel every night.  Usually stop before the interview portion unless it’s someone I reaaaally care about.  Saw her stand-up live a couple years ago and she was great.  Unexpected.)

That’s all I can think of at the moment.

When you’re following a new diet plan, it’s a regimen, not a regime.  OK?!

My annoyance with the misuse of this word is not new, but I’ve been looking at a number of diet books recently and I can’t stop running into that word.  Did anyone assign these writers an editor?  Diet books sell more than any books besides the bible (my observation) so I’d hoped they’d be a little more careful.

Why am I reading diet books?  Because I’ve gotten fat.  I’m not happy about it.

Since I broke my foot (in 2009!!!) I can’t seem to get back to my fighting weight.  I still work out a lot so you might not call me fat.  I seem to be able to carry it without looking obese, but it SUCKS.  I need to reduce big time.  The last time I was this miserable about my body I was 15 and living in Leeds, hence my use of the term”reduce.”

What I hate most, besides just being uncomfortable and jiggly, is that I can’t wear 70% of my clothes.  I have some awesome (and expensive) jeans and I used to rock the shit out of them.  Fortunately I can still wear my pretty dresses - I do so love them.

And frankly, I’m embarrassed.  Maybe that’s stupid, but it’s how I feel.

Just had to get that off my chest.

Wow.  Writing that title just hit home; it’s been FOUR YEARS since I had surgery to remove my tumor.  It feels like a lifetime ago.  My life has changed so much since then that this one feels like a new life.

Valentine’s Day, 2007.  It was a Wednesday, if I recall correctly.  My friend Steve kindly drove me to the gynecological surgeon in the morning and … I won’t rehash it all again.  If you want to know what happened you can go back to the first few entries.

What’s strange is that now it all feels like it was a dream.  A bad dream, granted, but as with so much of the past, the clarity of my memories is fading.  (That, coupled with the chemo which affected my short-term memory, natch.)  On the rare occasions I go back and read this blog I can’t believe that the things I wrote actually happened to me.  I’m continuing my maintenance (I have my yearly colonoscopy next week and I will soon schedule another mammogram), but these are the only tangible things that remind me I had cancer.

Right now things are good.  Really good.

Chris and I are engaged.  I’ve just bought the tickets for our honeymoon in Italy (early May- so excited!!!).  Now we just need to figure out a date to do the deed with a Justice of the Peace.  Yes, we have our priorities straight.

The band had a great residency at Toad in January and we’re going to do it again in April.  Because it’s Toad we’ve been playing a stripped down acoustic set with mandolin and violin and tambourine and shaker - it’s been great and feels like a rebirth, of sorts.  We’re also finally getting to work finishing up the recording we started before I got sick.  RIGHT?!?  Crazy.  We’re just thrilled to get our songs on CD and let the world hear it.

I’ve never cared much for New Year’s Resolutions, but I figured one out for myself this year that I dig.  Discipline.  Work on being more disciplined.  This applies to everything, from writing back to people promptly to reading more in general, from getting to work on time (a problem for me) to working out daily.  Everything takes time, of course, so the blog-writing portion of my discipline is only slowly coming together, but I won’t give up.  Baby steps.

Happy Valentine’s Day.  <3

Strange, but I feel like I had cancer lite, or maybe The Little C.  Yes, I was in serious pain.  Yes, I had emergency surgery and had a cancerous tumor removed from my colon.   Yes, the tumor was so bad it involved my left ovary and left fallopian tube so they were removed as well.   Yes, they took out 19 lymph nodes, all of which were cancerous.  Yes, I had six months of chemotherapy.  Cancer lite, why would I feel that way?

I blame pop culture in general.  I’ve read (or heard, I can’t remember which.  It was either The Week or NPR) that romantic comedies are ruining people’s expectations about love and finding a soul mate.  I’m finding something similar with cancer and realize I didn’t follow the script.

In fiction, people with cancer or some life-threatening disease usually have an epiphany of some kind.  Something in their behavior then changes radically and they live a richer life because their illness, whether they “conquer” it or not.  I had no such epiphanies.  I had no “awakening.”  I didn’t seek out alternative treatment methods. I barely got nauseous.  I did lose my appetite and considered marijuana, but never did it.

I didn’t have the hair loss associated with most chemo.  Granted my hair didn’t grow during those 6 months, but it didn’t fall out.  That coupled with little weight loss made me appear not sick.  And I didn’t act like I was sick, mostly.  Did I not take it all seriously enough? As far as I know it never metastasized, so it was under Stage 4 (no one referred to my cancer in terms of stages, or if they did, I don’t remember it, thank you chemo-related short-term memory loss).   I mean, I know it could come back at any time considering it was like a bolt out of the blue to begin with, but … but so what.  Is it just me?