Scarlett Pages

Now with New Avatar

I've been reading the website Dooce.com for the last month or so. Yeah, I know. Could I be a bit more behind the times? Heather Armstrong started her site years ago and it's so successful that her husband was able to quit his job and now runs the business end of things (hee hee, business end!) full time. 

I'm slowly working my way through the archives. I think I'm in 2005 now. Heather is really funny and sarcastic and weird in the best possible way. 

Anyway, one of the links on her Flickr feed was an avatar she created with Face Your Manga. It was a lot cuter and more realistic than most avatars I've seen, so I decided to try it out. Here's the new Scarlett avatar:

I'm proud to say that the boobage is 100% accurate. But unfortunately I haven't been this well-groomed or put together since September 2006, when I last held a paying job. The gesture options were the bird or the peace sign and considering my overall personality, combined with my recent raging crankiness due to exhaustion, stress, and frustration, I thought the bird was the appropriate option. 

An Open Letter to Mother Nature

First Draft 

(approx. 07:38, following a night troubled by neck pain and a trip in the rain to take my husband to the train station)

What the hell bitch? Are you retarded or something? Have you looked at an effin' calendar? It's effin' August. AUGUST. You know, SUN. WARMTH. I know this is England, but come the f--- on! Stop f---ing raining, you stupid whore! F--- you!

Second Draft

(following nap)

Dear Mother Nature--

I'm hoping we can discuss the weather here in England. While I understand that this is England, and England is by definition rainy, I have nevertheless noted that it is August and we've had precious little sun. 

Don't get me wrong, I think you're doing a fantastic job. Since we moved here in April I've been very pleased overall with the climate. I love a temperate climate, it was one of the things I enjoyed about living in the Netherlands. And since I have lived in the Netherlands, the rainiest country in the world, I know from rain. I have no problem with it. It makes things grow--and boy do things grow here in England. The fields are a lovely patchwork of bright greens and golden grains, the wildflowers are abundant, the trees are sturdy old friends.

However the month of August is generally dominated by sun and high temperatures and the need to wear shorts. Are you familiar with shorts? They are a type of pants, though much shorter (hence the name), that reveal the wearer's legs. They are very handy in months like August, when the temperatures are generally high and the wearer needs a lighter item of clothing to cope with the heat. 

Unfortunately, I have not had any need to wear shorts during August thus far. And this troubles me. There's been far more rain and cool temperatures than is strictly necessary, don't you think? I do not wish to question your wisdom, but is this part of some larger plan? Are you working up to a fantastically warm fall season? Are you trying to make sure that we will appreciate it?

Or are you just feeling unloved and overlooked? If that is the case, please accept my personal apologies. We love you, Mother Nature, we really do. We don't wish to question your eternal wisdom. It's just... well... we're human. And rain tends to make us not only wet, but cranky. And depressed. And it's then a short journey to the type of anger that makes one howl a hearty "f--- you" in your direction.

We don't mean it. Really. We just miss the sun. So maybe you could do something about that? 

Thank you in advance for your time and attention. And keep up the good work!

Kind Regards,

Scarlett

Cranky

Today was the man's first day at his new job, which meant that I got up at 7 a.m. 

Those who know me understand that I am absolutely not a morning person. I really don't function well before 10 a.m. And since neither of us has been working for a couple months, I've been getting a good 12 hours of sleep and generally missing the morning hours completely. 

Needless to say, when I am driving my husband to the station at 7 o'clock in the effin' morning, I am not to be f---ed with. I am tired. I am driving a cranky old truck with gears. Which I did not learn to do until two years ago. I'm driving on the opposite side of the road for heaven's sake. I'm working gears with my left hand. There are freakin' roundabouts. And ridiculously narrow roads. 

So to all those assholes riding my bumper this morning: f--- you. Maybe I'm a little bit slow, but I believe the speed limit isn't much above 40 mph anyway. Don't act like your life depends on those few precious seconds you'll save by going 50 mph on the few straight-aways. 

And a special f--- you to the guy who gestured while I was parked at the side of the road waiting for the man to close the front gate. Yeah, OK, I pulled up in a slightly awkward place considering there was a car parked on the opposite side of the road. You could still get through and you barely had to alter your speed. And you shouldn't be driving over 30 mph in a village anyway, especially when there's a school right up ahead. So f--- you. 

Sainsbury's is open at 7:30 in the morning, which is when I did my grocery shopping. How sick is that?

I think I'm gonna go take a nap. 

Watch Who You're Bumping into Buddy

Earlier today my man posted on his blog about a new safety item out of Germany: an inflatable airbag vest for horseback riders worried about falling off their horses. The line drawing that explains how the vest works is priceless. 

Personally I prefer the No Contact Jacket featured today on Jezebel. You can give anyone who tries to touch you without your consent a nice 80,000 volt jolt. Excellent!

When I lived in New York I used to get so annoyed by the number of people who simply made no effort to avoid bumping into you as they walked past. Particularly if you were a woman. And in my experience it was the men in business suits who were "too busy and important" to slow down who were the biggest offenders. This wasn't about crowded conditions, just a basic lack of courtesy to your fellow pedestrian and an inflated sense of your own importance, because it would happen even when the streets weren't terribly crowded. 

On my grumpier days I would fantasize about having a power similar to Wolverine of the X-Men. When touched without my consent by one of these jerks spikes would come out of my skin, giving the rude person a nasty surprise (or at the very least tearing his or her clothing). That would teach them a lesson!

But 80,000 volts? That might just do the trick. 

B is for...

Burglar? Well, not really.

Take one Van wacked-out on medication for his bad back and one Scarlett with a hovering migraine-wanna-be, add the Romanian Commercial Bank (BCR) and their ever-present incompetence and ineptitude (more on this later), and you have one very bad day in Bistrita.

So we're on our way home and stop to fuel up the car. I go be a lady in the ladies room and buy myself a soda while Van takes care of said fueling up. We head off on our merry way. Right as we are leaving the town limits, it hits me. "You paid, right?"

"No, you paid."

"No, I didn't."

"But I saw you at the cashier."

"Buying a soda. How was I supposed to know how much the fuel was anyway?"

"Shit, they'll have already called the police about us." Minor Van freak-out ensues as I turn the car around.

And yes, they had already called the police, but they also said it isn't the first time it's happened. How have we already become that oblivious, bickering couple? Clearly, we were highly distracted.

It all started when we, good little responsible adults that we are, went into BCR (Blithering Cretins of Revulsion) to pay the monthly mortgage payment. In any proper bank you could make this payment online or at worst, you'd have a book of payment slips to mail with a check. But we're talking about BCR, which has barely moved beyond the communist period, if at all. Although they've been bought by an Austrian bank, the only change so far is that the commissions have increased, while the customer service continues to be the worst of any bank in Romania.

Paying the mortgage payment, which is in euros, requires withdrawing the money in Romanian lei and then handing it back to the cashier to re-exchange it into euros, at a different exchange rate than what you received when you originally exchanged the euros into lei, and then making the payment. Seriously, it that not stupidity itself? Why oh why can't a simple transfer be made between accounts?

So we were originally told that there was enough money in our mortgage account to pay the October payment and our first payment would be in November. We dutifully went to the bank in November and made the payment, which was less than we thought because there was still some money in the account. Great! Today we once again dutifully go to the bank to make the December payment and when we do, we're told that we have penalties to pay because the payment is late. Hello?

To make a long story short, there was not enough money in the mortgage account to cover the October payment after all (and no one has an explanation for this), so when we made what we thought was the November payment, it was credited to October and November went unpaid. So basically, we had to pay November and December today and penalties. Bear in mind that neither time we made a payment did either cashier indicate that we were behind on the payments. Why? Oh because the BCR system isn't sophisticated enough to show the cashiers that information. No, it only shows information once you've incurred penalties and even then doesn't show the current payment due, just the penalties.

We ended up speaking to the bank director, who gave us what I have come to understand is a typically (pathetic) Romanian response. First, the cashiers can't see the payments until they are in debt, so they can't tell us. It's our responsibility to know. How? a reasonable person might ask. When the payment is five days late a letter is sent. Well, we never received any correspondence, a phone call, nothing. Well apparently BCR outsources the correspondence for loans to another company so it's not BCR's responsibility if we didn't receive any correspondence.

Have you ever heard anything so absurd? Outsourced or not, the loan is with you mothers, so it is your bloody responsibility to ensure that we receive necessary information. And not even an apology about this. In fact, when Van explained that we were sick of never being given proper information and that we would be moving our business accounts to another bank (we do put a not-insignificant sum of money in EUROS [aka, REAL MONEY] through those accounts each year), her response was that we should be grateful (that was the word she used; I know that one in Romanian) that BCR was here to give us the loan.

Oh right, I forgot, we're here for YOUR convenience and not the other way around. Just a completely Communist attitude that we should be happy for what they have deigned to give us. Thanks.

And yet Romania's government so desperately wants the country to be seen as "modern". They have no idea how far they have to go.

Peace

Remember when I wrote about never being able to achieve "Done"? Well, another thing I can't seem to get is peace.

I'm used to living alone in a big city, having my own space, and being fairly anonymous. No neighbors dropping by to sell hay or ask for the milk money. No postman knocking on the door. No staff coming in every half hour to get keys. No man stomping around slamming every single door after him.

I'm used to having the option of doing absolutely nothing all weekend and never having to speak to another human being unless it's to order pizza.

I just need one day of peace, one day to do nothing, one day of quiet with no one bothering me. Or I'm going to go absolutely out of my mind.

Allow me to share a few select moments just from the last three days, just to show what my day-to-day life is like now and why I'm close to the breaking point:

Tuesday morning, approx. 8:30, the shower
We're supposed to go to Bistrita today to do a slew of errands and bank business for which I spent most of Monday meticulously preparing. I am in the shower getting ready for our estimated departure at 09:00.

Now, first, let me explain our shower. There is no tile wall, no bathtub, no shower curtain. It is the base of a shower stall set into the corner of the floor with a shower head attached to the wall above.

Let me explain our bathroom. Because our real bathroom off our bedroom was never finished by the contractors, we are using the bathroom on our main floor that is off of my office. Now that the weather has changed, the door, which already didn't close well, is even more precarious.

Returning to our story, at around 8:30 a.m. I am wet, cold, and covered in soap when Van slams the front door so hard the bathroom door comes open, letting in even more cold air. Next thing Van is standing in the doorway yelling about an e-mail sent from one of our business partners that we have to deal with now and we're not going to Bistrita.

[Note that the person with whom we needed to speak is in a time zone nine hours behind us, so there is nothing to be done until the evening. The smart thing would be NOT to waste the day and still go to Bistrita. But drama queen is "too stressed" to drive.]

Wednesday, my birthday
Because we did not go to Bistrita yesterday--and the mortgage payment is due today--we have to make the trip on my birthday. Yeah. It's not bad enough that money is a bit tight and I gallantly said "no, don't get me a gift; we don't need to go anywhere or do anything that costs money." Now I have to run around doing f-in' errands and such. Van does take me for a nice lunch though.

Thursday, approx. 12:30
I alert the man the night before that as I did not get to sleep in on my birthday, I would be sleeping in today. And I do. Until 12:30. Of course, though I would like to sit on my ass and do nothing all day--can't I even just do that for my birthday?--we have a British writer arriving on the 12:30 train. So I get up, dress, and before even eating, go to feed my dogs and cats. Because it wouldn't occur to anyone else to do it. While I'm out there, Van and said writer show up and I start to take the guy to his room. There are only two that I've managed to clean since the big group we had a couple weeks ago, but of course, Van has put the heat on in the room with the double bed, which I haven't made, or put towels in. O-kaaaay. He did it for perfectly valid reasons--to heat the other room, he has to heat a whole section of the house that is otherwise unoccupied. It's just that it's another thing to do when I haven't even had time to have a cup of tea. Plus it's lunch time, so of course I need to prepare something for them to eat. But first, the vet just shows up saying it's time for the annual rabies vaccinations for the dogs and cats. So I have to take each cat to the vet one by one to get stuck with a needle. Fun!

I don't eat anything until 4 p.m. And I have a writer camped out in my living room. He talks. A lot. I announce I will watch my one hour of television, "ER", before making dinner. He manages to talk through a good percentage of that too.

I may have to kill someone.

I have a mini-breakdown about needing ONE SINGLE DAY OF PEACE and Van points out that he and the writer will be leaving tomorrow morning and he won't be back until Saturday night.

"Tell the staff not to bother me unless something is on fire," I say.

"OK, I will let them know."

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I may lock the doors and not answer anyone!

I know I'm being selfish. I know that none of the things I deal with on a day-to-day basis are huge hardships. Many people do the same things or even more every day. Many have it far worse than I do. But it is the confluence of everything at once, the stress of dealing with new issues that seem to pop up daily, the complete lack of any sort of scheduling appointments by the Romanians (and a lot of foreign "visitors"). Sometimes it's just all too much for me. And I need a break. What can I say? My mental health is a precarious thing. But I've learned that I have to take care of myself. No one else is going to do it.

The Worst Thing a Date Ever Said to Me

Judy McGuire, who writes the Dategirl column for the Seattle Weekly, as well as the Bad Advice blog, recently posted a request for stories about the worst thing a date or crush ever said to you.

I was going to respond in the comments section, but then I thought I'd actually post my story here and send Judy the link. So here it is, in all it's glory. May it bring a cringe to your face!

I had recently graduated from college and was living for the summer in a sublet apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, while I completed an internship. I was 22, employed in a paid internship, and paying my own rent and expenses.

He was this total guido named Ralph I had met at a club one Saturday night. Don't know what I was thinking, but I went out with the guy four times, which was three more dates than he should have got. He was "28" -- although I later found out from a former co-worker who had graduated with him that he had lied about his age and was actually 30. He hadn't gone to college. He had supposedly "bought," rather than inherited, his father's vacuum cleaner repair business. And here's the best part: he still lived in his parents' basement.

So on date number four he comes over to my place and immediately starts acting like a jackass--making a big deal about how the security guard in the lobby had to call up to announce him and had him sign in, but didn't bother to search the grocery bag he had with him. WTF? Have you NOT heard of a doorman building? I'm sure your potato chips are very dangerous... to my arteries.

We take a walk to get some beverages and, as I am living near my college campus at the time, I attempt to show him around a bit. He's completely uninterested and generally making stupid comments. We return to my apartment, where I offer him something to drink and he literally says "can I have it in a disposable cup?" He thinks that my apartment is dirty. Now, it might not have been ready to do surgery on the floor, but what kind of guy comes to your apartment for a date and insults your housekeeping?

But the best comment of all is when, after telling him something about my day / life / college experience--I can't remember what exactly--he says "I can't wait until you grow up." Excuse me? Did you, thirty-year-old, basement-dwelling momma's boy, actually just say that?

After that he is shown the door. And calls about 45 minutes later from mommy and daddy's house because he can't understand what he did wrong.

That flashing neon "L" over your head Ralphie? That stands for "loser."

You Know What I Want?

Admittedly, I'm a bit stressed and annoyed today and this is a bit of a rant. But you know what I want?

I want to NOT have to deal with home repairs and construction... in a language I do not understand. Call me sexist, but I want Van to deal with this stuff. This is man's work. When I see him doing a load of laundry or washing a plate, I may consider taking on home repair.

I want the people who come to make the repairs to do their work and go home at night. Not stay for several days and expect me to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is one of those Romanian things. The two guys doing our tiling and other repairs--and don't get me wrong, they are doing a great job--come from miles and miles away, so they show up late at night and stay a couple days. And guess who gets to cook for them? You know, I can barely work up the enthusiasm or energy to cook for me, Van, Laura, and Diane. Hell, half the time I don't even have time to make a bloody sandwich for myself. Now I have to cook for workmen? Holy f---. Thank goodness Laura helps out with the cooking when I'm overwhelmed.

I want the people making the repairs to only ask me NECESSARY questions, preferably NOT about building materials. I barely know what they're called in English, understand? Using the Romanian word will get you nowhere. We have three young men employed who will know exactly what you're looking for and probably know where Van has put it.

I want said repair people to not engage me in chit-chat. It's painful enough trying to get the basics across the rather wide language barrier. I really don't care about how some Polish guy reacted to your work and how his "mentality" is different than the Romanian one.

I want a certain repair person to drop the false modesty. He really is a nice enough guy, but he's always insisting on showing me his work (OK, fine, he's proud of it), and pointing out how it's better than someone else's work, how much he gets done in a day, blah, blah, blah. He's right. But then when you thank him for something, he always says, "For what? It's my work." OK, then why don't you just do your work and spare me the guided tour? And by the way, I'm saying thank you because it's polite.

I want people to just stop bothering me. When it's 10 o'clock at night and I am finally out of the office and sitting down to unwind with a little television, stop and think: Does Scarlett really need to know that the Jacuzzi isn't hooked up correctly and is leaking water? Does she really need to walk downstairs and see you standing in said Jacuzzi in your underwear? Or can this information wait until the morning? At this point in the whole construction adventure if its not on fire or causing major structural damage, rule of thumb: it can wait until morning.

Really, is this so much to ask?

Now I'm Mad

A lot has happened in the past few days. Allow me to take you back to last Friday...

Van and I drove to Cluj, via Bistrita to run errands and Beclean to stop at the harness maker, to pick up our new intern, Laura, who in a "small world" coincidence lives about an hour away from where I grew up. On the way, we had plenty of time to discuss the progress--or lack thereof--of the guesthouse construction. I have been fed up with the behavior of the builders for months now and had it been up to me, I would have kicked them out long ago. When Van told me that they had taken a brand new double mattress we had bought for the guesthouse and stored in one of the rooms, removed the plastic covering, and slept on it in their dirty clothes (there's also paint on it), that was pretty much the last straw.

We agreed that when we returned home, we would e-mail Mr. Bota, the owner of the construction company to inform him that his builders were to clear out all of their personal items on Saturday when they left because they would no longer be allowed to stay on site. As it was, we got home at 2 a.m. and were up until 3 a.m. dealing with this and other business. On Saturday, the mood between us and the builders was chilly to say the least. Bota typically thought that our eviction of his staff was negotiable and therefore did not tell them to clear out by the noon deadline we had specified. They were on site until at least 5 p.m. And when I got tired of waiting for the last group to leave--because they were all helping themselves to showers in our new guest bathrooms--I went and told them to get out. And one of them started screaming at me. Which was the wrong thing to do as that pretty much sealed their fate as far as Van was concerned.

They left, idling their car in the road in front of our house for at least 15 minutes while they all called Bota. We were pleased to see the back of them and enjoyed the peace and quiet until that evening when the electrical power to our apartment started going off every 30-40 minutes. By the next morning, it was off for good and Van was NOT PLEASED. After calling Bota, threatening to find someone else to work with if he didn't do something in the next two hours, he managed to rig up a couple power cables from the stable to run necessities. The interesting thing was that only our apartment and certain other sections of the house didn't have power. The upper floor of the guesthouse did. Sabotage anyone?

In the midst of this, I had to attempt to prepare the upper floors of the guesthouse, which are nearly finished, for a visit on Monday afternoon by one of our British agents. You can check out the extensive photo galleries I've posted to see the amount of crap the builders have spilled on the brand new parquet floors, as well as the dirt and filth they have created. I cleaned until it got too dark. And then I spent the evening preparing the website we will launch (Bota Suck--Our Romanian Construction Nightmare) if the construction company doesn't finish the building to our satisfaction in the next week.

Up at 5 a.m. on Monday (couldn't sleep for some reason) and back to work trying to pull the place together by 3 p.m. And I managed it. It's actually starting to look decent, but there are still a million and one details to address.

And we met with Bota on Monday and went through all the problems (he commented "my god" several times), gave him a list of the new rules the builders must abide by, and had the pleasure of watching as the first crew cleaned out the rooms they have been staying in and the others who arrived later had to pick through the pile of items on the front lawn to find their belongings. Some of them are now staying with neighbors across the road and some at a guesthouse we used to use. I had a good chuckle knowing they'll basically get no hot water and barely any heat there.

But it worked. They have kicked it into high gear, cleaning up the whole lawn yesterday, getting the kitchen done, finishing trim and paint work, and generally behaving themselves. And they're obviously afraid of me. Mr. Bota left his father here for the week to supervise them, which is really helping, and this morning when I started to wrap up an extension cord on the porch, he was quick to send one of his men to do it.

You know, I've spent most of my life worrying about being nice, being liked, respecting others, not making waves, but I think I'm done with that. People just take advantage. Clearly, being a bitch and running this place like a police state is the way to go. Why did it take me 35 years to learn this?

Celebrity Look-Alikes

I was reading Judy McGuire's blog, Bad Advice, where I found this nifty tool from the My Heritage website.

While I suspect that the match has a lot to do with the angle of the photo and the lip color, hey, any day I'm compared to Scarlett Johanson is a good day as far as I'm concerned. Scarlett. Scarlett. See? It's destiny.

And never in my life have I been compared to such a bevy of Hollywood beauties. Although I do hate Michelle Rodriguez. Maybe if she had an expression besides the "I wanna punch you in the face" one she perpetually wears she might be pretty. Might. They seriously must have Photoshopped a smile on her to get this photo. I was so happy to see her character get shot to death on Lost.

But the rest of these ladies are pretty cool in my book--even if I don't know why Yamila Diaz is famous.