Archive for the 'Who are the People in Your Neighborhood?' Category
As many of you know, I am going to leaving for BlogHer next Thursday. I am really excited about it. I am expecting my fancy new business cards and my giveaways to arrive early next week.
(I am SO worked up about my Sarah and the Goon Squad key chain bottle openers that I could just scream. Every time I think about them I want to jump up and down like a little kid. If they get here and they look stupid I will be devastated. Wait - what the hell was I just talking about. Oh, right.)
So I am really excited to go to Chicago next week and see all of the people I met last year and meet a bunch of new people who are going this year.
If you are a blogger you are probably either 1) going too, 2) wish you were going, or 3) think the whole thing is stupid, but at least you know what I am talking about.
Anyway, I was at the pool this afternoon with my neighbor. Not one of the crazy ones, but one I really like. We were talking about ding something with the kids next week and I said Well, I leave for Chicago on Thursday.
So she said: Oh you guys are going to Chicago?
Me: No just me. I’m going to a conference.
This is where things get sketchy. She knows I don’t have a job. I know I have mentioned writing on the internet before, but I’m not sure she knows about my blog. If she does, I’m guessing she has a real life and doesn’t read blogs all day long.
This is the part where I stammer.
It’s a blogging conference. For women. Um. One of the websites I write for hosts a big conference each year for women bloggers. It is called BlogHer.
And I know every word that comes out of my mouth makes me sound more like one of those Star Trek convention people. (Hi Melissa! - My friend Melissa, who is having a birthday today is in the credits of Trekkies II
. She is the one that says Gabriel, I hope you are having sex. Happy birthday Melissa. )
(It it just me or am I out of control with all of the italics and parentheses on this post. What the hell?)
I guess what I want to know is this. How do you deal with real life, regular people. Do you tell them you blog? Do you tell them you go to blogging conventions. Do you tell them you met some of your closest friends on the internet? Or do you just shut up, say you are going to Chicago to hang out with some of your girlfriends, and leave it at that?
Posted by Sarah @
4:38 pm |
I love my commentors. Commenters? Commenteurs? (Commentators can’t be right, can it?) Whatever. What I am trying to say is that you people are hilarious.
I don’t know most of you, but I do know a lot of you in real life. Some of you I have known for a very long time, take my Mom for example. But really, I have known Alison from AliBlog and her brother Beau since I was in first grade. AliBlog was the first blog I ever read. I remember one time she called some of us out. She thought we should have our own blogs. She called out Gabe and Mich. Neither of them started their own blog, but then there was me.
She created a monster.
Back to what I was saying before. I have known Mich since I was in girl scouts. She doesn’t comment all of the time, but when she does it is always worth reading. Read her comment from this post:
Mich Says:
My favorite neighbor is an alcoholic dead beat dad with party plates and a breathalizer ignition. When he gets home from drinking on hot summer nights, he pees in the driveway. We live in one of those rustbelt city neighborhoods where the houses are separated only by the driveways. The screen in our bedroom window is the only thing to buffer the sound. It’s like he’s pissing in the same room with us. (Oh — and by the way — we mow his lawn sometimes. But that’s because it would NEVER get mowed otherwise.) And he’s our favorite!
The neighbor on the other side told us he is sick. My husband asked what was wrong, and the dude just pointed at his head. He constantly asks if he can use our ladder. I don’t know what for. We keep saying no.
The sick-in-the-head-ladder-craving guy lives in a two-family house and the people who live upstairs from him are Middle Eastern. We saw them the day they moved in. We see the husband all the time, but the wife has never come out of the house — in two years!!
We have another neighbor who noticed a small leafy twig growing out of our chimney. He begged us to call the authorities right away so that we wouldn’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Before the Middle Eastern couple moved in, there was a chain-smoking 60-something-year-old woman living up there. We called her Leather Face. Once, we were driving through town and saw her lying on the ground propped up against the storefront of the corner bar. We said, “Hey! That was Leather Face passed out on the curb!”
Abbreviated version of the rest of the neighborhood:
Cat Lady (our second favorite)
Screaming Derrick
Bearded Man
The Stripper
If Mich doesn’t need her own blog, I don’t know who does. Either that or a sitcom based on her neighborhood. I already told her that if she does get a tv show, I want to play Derrick the Screamer.
Posted by Sarah @
11:24 am |
There is this lady in my neighborhood. She isn’t anybody I know. I’m not even sure which street she lives on, but I see her walking around the neighborhood a lot.
There isn’t anything inherently strange about a lady taking a walk in a neighborhood, but this lady is usually carrying a little cage around with her.
Yesterday I saw what she had in the cage.
I always kind of wondered what was in that little cage. Looking back, I think at first I thought she had a very small, very high maintenance dog. Maybe she was the dog sitter and she was taking it back and forth to wherever it lives. Then later I realized that this particular cage was probably a little bit small for any breed of dog that I could think of.
At some point a couple of months ago I decided that it was probably a guinea pig.
I have no idea why I thought she was carrying a guinea pig around my neighborhood, but it doesn’t really matter because the truth is almost as strange.
I hit the timing perfectly yesterday and I was turning the corner just as this lady was coming the other way and I saw what was in the cage.
It was a bird.
Some lady carries a bird around in a cage in my neighborhood.
Does that strike anyone else as odd?
Who takes birds for a walk? It doesn’t look like any parrot or cockatoo or some other fancy bird either. It just looks like a small regular bird. Maybe a love bird? Maybe a parakeet.
Whatever. I am just looking for a reason - any reason that some person would be walking around with a bird in a small plastic cage on a regular basis.
Any ideas?
Posted by Sarah @
4:08 pm |
Guess what I did first thing this morning?
You’ll never guess in a bazillion years. Well, maybe in a bazillion, but I doubt if you would guess any time soon so I will just tell you.
I was standing in front of my closet perplexed. I went shopping on Sunday and I could have sworn I bought a red shirt at Ann Taylor. (Don’t get me started, Ann Taylor pisses me off but I like their clothes. I wish I didn’t. I hate stores that have petite sections and not tall sections. I think it is heightist.) I looked through my closet five times before I realized that I didn’t remember putting it away.
I knew what I had done. Son of a bitch. I threw it away with the bag. Today is trash day.
At 7:40 this morning I was out at the end of my driveway retrieving a $40 shirt with tags still on it out of my garbage can.*
I wonder what my neighbors will have to say about this one?
* No, I didn’t wear it.
Posted by Sarah @
3:34 pm |
I almost bought this doormat.
I don’t know if my neighbors would think it is as funny as I do.
Posted by Sarah @
2:12 pm |
Since I started Sarah and the Goon Squad a year and a half ago I have met several friends through blogging. On Monday I went to a meeting where I had the pleasure of meeting Aviva, Elisa, Heather B., and Mary.
Not even including all of the people I met in San Jose at BlogHer ‘06, I have had the pleasure of meeting this guy, and her, and her, and her, and her. When I was in Florida I went out drinking with these people and I’ve become such good friends with these two that sometimes I forget I knew their blogs before I knew them.
I don’t even know WHAT to say about her, excpet that she has become not only a good friend, but also my IT person.
Tomorrow is going to take the cake. Nancy, who I only met briefly at BlogHer is taking me to a hockey game. Woo Hoo! We are going to go see the Caps play the Flyers. (As Erin said “You get to see Ovenchicken live in person!”, yes she calls him Ovenchicken and it cracks me up every single time.)
So anyway, if you happen to be watching the game tomorrow night and see something that looks kind of like this (but replace Izzy with Nancy) it is probably us.
I’m telling you I love this interweb. It has been a really great way to meet friends, even if it is kind of embarrassing to admit to non-bloggers that you met on the internet.
(No Devra, I am not forgetting you. Remember I met you through Becky first.)
(And yes, it took me an hour to add all those links. I love you people.)
Posted by Sarah @
1:56 pm |
I took the kids with me to vote this morning. (See crappy cell phone picture. Our regular camera is broken). As we were trying to leave the house Ian kept saying that something was going to “get him”.
In my super tactful fashion I said “Let’s go! If anything is going to get you it will be Mommy, or possibly the rhythm.” Then I began to sing a la Gloria Estefan.
On the way to the polling place (in between singing the same four measures of “The Rhythm is Gonna Get You” to an unusually appreciative audience who kept yelling “Again! Again!”) I bet the kids $50 each that we would see the neighbor who raked our yard yesterday when we went to vote.
This was my first time voting since I moved to Virginia, but luckily I was able to find the right place with no problem. There were a lot of cars on the parking lot, but there weren’t any lines outside. It didn’t look too bad. Then as I was putting the kids into the double stroller a bus pulled right up to the door.
It was a bus from a nursing home.
I am not making this up. I wish I were.
So 15 minutes later (we all needed the same ramp, me with the double stroller and they with the walkers and wheelchairs and canes) I walk into the temple. I’m not just saying that. I vote in an actual temple. I sign in without incident unless you count 45 really old people fawning over the twins, which was okay because even Claudia was being sweet and I get into the second line and BAM! There she is. The raking neighbor. I had no choice but to be gracious and thank her, and she was very sweet about it and said that she was raking her yard and she saw the leaf truck coming and said that before we bought the house she used to rake our lawn all the time anyway because it was a rental property (Hello. Run on sentence.). Blah blah everything is okay. I feel much better.
But the kids owe me fifty bucks each. I told them we would see her there.
On the way out (again, I swear this really happened) the high school chamber orchestra was playing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead”.
Maybe they were practicing for November 2008.
Thank you. I’ll be here all night.
Anyway, we leave and Ian says “Sing the song!” so I start singing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” and he says “No! The rhythm is gonna get me.”
*And yes, he did wear that ridiculous hat to vote. He’s worn it everywhere since Halloween. They were both wearing cowboy boots too. The pacifier was a last ditch effort. They were being really patient, but right at the end we let three elderly people with walkers cut in line in front of us. It was the right thing to do, but the kids were losing it.
Posted by Sarah @
4:00 pm |
I was downstairs changing over the laundry when I heard something outside. It really sounded like someone was raking in my front yard. I looked outside and yes indeed, my neighbor was raking my yard.
Why was she raking our yard? Yes, there were a lot of leaves there, but we have big trees and it is fall. We just did the whole thing on Friday and it’s only Monday.
Do your neighbors rake your yard? Should I be grateful? offended? scared? Do I tip her? What the hell?
Posted by Sarah @
1:50 pm |
