June 30, 2010 by kim.

Can you believe it has been FOUR years since I started blogging?

How about some of the highlights (and low-lights)?

Kimmi’s Blog (very first post – 06/30/06)

Possum (August 2006)

Kim breaks a wrist (October 2006)

Beautiful Danger (July 2007)

The show is a HIT! (September 2008)

R.I.P. Farrah, Michael, and Suzi Suzuki (June 2009)

The Beast (February 2010)

How about some stats? Let’s see how well I’m doing. Here are the page views for each year (the number of times each page was clicked on):

2006: 9799 (started 6/30/06)
2007: 42706
2008: 98443
2009: 96651
2010: 73211 (as of 6/30/10)

Now, this doesn’t mean that thousands of people are actually looking at my blog, necessarily. 75% could be spam hits, 15% could be me checking each page umpteen times to make sure everything is spelled correctly, and 10% (I hope) of the hits could be coming from loyal blog readers, like you (yes, I’m talking to YOU!). Either way, I like those numbers.

Now, if I just had a dollar for every view …

Posted in Celebrate, Happy | No Comments »

June 27, 2010 by kim.

Who are they kidding? Putting a maple leaf on a plastic cup of corn syrup does not magically turn it into maple syrup. It just makes it into a pretty package of corn syrup (which is fine in moderation, if you believe the T.V. commercials).

Yep. You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to pull one over on ol’ Kim here, and I reckon they just didn’t get up early enough.

No sir, they did not.

Posted in Food | 1 Comment »

June 23, 2010 by kim.

Anyone else out there have an aversion to having their hair cut? Anyone over the age of five? I hate having my hair cut. Hate, hate, hate it. It is almost as bad as shopping for me. It’s so bad, I would rather go to the dentist. At least I know what to expect when I walk in.

My hair drives me crazy. I can never get it to do what I want and neither can anyone else, so I don’t get it cut for months at a time. I think it has to do with some bad experiences I’ve had at salons and budget-cut shops. Actually, the experience for anyone else probably wouldn’t be that bad, but I am just extremely fussy when it comes to my hair. Ask anyone who knew me in high school. When I started styling my hair with curling irons and hairspray instead of the wash-and-go perm, a monster was born. I would spend hours trying to perfect the ‘womb’ as we called it in WI.

Here is a picture of the ‘womb’:

My friend’s locker was covered in hairspray from me trying to keep it from moving throughout the day. Note that it curls back, as opposed to the ‘claw’ which curves forward like … anyone? … like a claw. Right.

Anyway. Let me tell you about a couple of my salon experiences. One time I went to a salon in Chicago. This was back when my hair was short:

I asked for a pixie cut (it had grown out). He asked me if I even knew what a pixie cut was. I said I did. Did I get what I wanted? No.

Then, some years later, I went to a salon in NYC. I asked the stylist to style my hair so it flipped up, like this:

I had it cut like that for a couple of years prior but couldn’t remember who I went to so I went to this guy. He refused to cut it the way I wanted. He said that was out of style and I should have it curl down toward my face. I didn’t want that. I wanted it to flip up. Did I get my way? No.

Somewhere along the way, I got the cut I wanted, pretty much. Then, back in Chicago, I went to a salon. I had a consultation with the male stylist and he cut my hair. Then, he proceeded to straighten it. I thought it looked good after he was done, but when I got home, I wasn’t so sure:

What is that? Did he really think that look worked with my face? Not only that, but he charged extra for straightening it and didn’t bother to mention that extra charge. Why, I oughta …

Fast forward to Jersey. Enough said. I didn’t have a guy cut my hair this time (bad luck with me, I guess), but the woman who cut it at the budget-shop butchered it. Seriously. I had two different women cut my hair at the same place months before and they understood what I was talking about when I said I wanted to feather it back – away from my face – like this:

Easy, right? I brought the picture for an example. I ended up with this:

How is that feathering away from my face? It isn’t. I guess maybe half of it is, but I tried to get it to work three different times and it still looked chunky and mullet-ish. I finally went back to get it fixed. I should have gone a different day, because even though I sat down with a different woman, the original hack (woman) came over and said she’d fix it. Really? I didn’t trust that she would, based on the way she cut it the first time (she took a handful in her fist and tried to cut layers that way), but I let her do it. First she tried to tell me that I didn’t blow-dry it correctly. Come on. She blew it dry and curled it toward my face. What part of “feather away from my face” did she not grasp? She then proceeded to cut it more and now here I am, almost three months later, waiting for it to grow out properly so I can get it cut again.

Jiminey Cricket. Maybe I should just let it grow out so I can wear it as a scarf.

Posted in Annoyance | 1 Comment »

June 20, 2010 by kim.

Today is our seventh wedding anniversary AND Father’s Day!

Happy Anniversary to us!

Kim & Chris

Happy Father’s Day, dads!

Kim’s Dad Dana

Chris’s Stepdad Wally

Chris’s Dad Mario who passed away 12/31/1998

Moms – sorry I missed creating a special post for you this year, but I’ll catch you next year on Mother’s Day!

Posted in Celebrate | No Comments »

June 17, 2010 by kim.

While walking in Edgewater one weekend, we happened upon these goslings:

Aren’t they adorable little baby geese?

This week while in Central Park in Manhattan, I saw these geese swim by in a pond:

I doubt they are the same geese I saw a month ago, but wouldn’t that be something?

Ah … life!

Posted in Animals | No Comments »

June 12, 2010 by kim.

Is it really too much to ask for quiet at 3, 4, and 5am? Huh? IS IT?

Every day – EVERY DAY – some garbage truck makes it’s way up the one-way street outside our apartment. It wouldn’t be so bad if they just drove on by, (or would it?) but they stop to pick up the garbage from one of the businesses near the apartment, so they idle there until they’re done. I could deal with one pick-up a week like NORMAL towns or states do, but that’s not what they do here. Oh no – every business must use their very own garbage service and they each come on a different day. WHY? Let’s get it together, people, and have everyone’s garbage picked up the same day so I CAN GET SOME SLEEP!

It’s not like they come at the same time every day, either. Each place must have the garbage dumped at least twice a week. This morning, for instance, the truck was here at 3:15am. Then, when I had finally gotten back to sleep, Matilda started meowing for me to get up (that is neither here nor there – I’m talking about trucks), and then ANOTHER garbage truck came by at 5:20am. COME ON! Give a girl a break! That time, I decided to get up and take a picture. Of course, I didn’t do it right away because I was trying to fall asleep again, but my curiosity got the better of me. I jumped out of bed, got the camera (I’m surprised Chris didn’t wake up and wonder what the hell I was doing), and tried to take a picture of the obnoxious truck, but I just missed it. I did see it hiding behind a building, though:

Do you see the top of the green truck?

It must have sensed my seething anger.

I know one can’t expect total quiet until one is living in a bunker somewhere (Chris – can we build one?), but it would be nice if the whole garbage truck thing could be reduced to once, maybe twice a week, preferably after 8:00am. Does that really seem so unreasonable?

Not to me.

Sure, you’re probably wondering why I don’t move into the country or someplace where no one is around to bother me (it’s all about me, isn’t it?), but that wouldn’t work, either. First of all, I’d be terrified being so isolated (I actually feel safer living in Manhattan – hopefully we can move back there soon), and second – I’m sure creatures that I love (like birds and insects) would eventually drive me insane! I could complain to the city about the truck noise and maybe the construction noise that has been going on for two months (the city would just laugh at me and send me on my way, I’m sure), but who would I complain to about birds and crickets? Smokey the bear? He only deals with fire issues – not noise complaints.

Sigh. I guess I’ll just have to deal with this problem my own way.

Wait – that sounded a little harsh. What I mean, is, I should work on myself to deal with this noise issue that has been plaguing me for the last nine years. Not that I should ‘take care’ of all the things that irritate me. Geez – do I look like someone who would do something destructive?

Don’t answer that, if you know what’s good for ya …

Posted in Annoyance | 1 Comment »

June 9, 2010 by kim.

That’s what I should do. If you’ve ever seen the movie Mean Girls, you know what I’m referring to. Gretchen (one of the Mean Girls) is trying to introduce some new slang (fetch = cool) into the girls’ vocabulary. Regina, the queen beotch (bitch), smacks her down:

Gretchen: “That is so fetch.”

Regina: (glaring, as she’s heard this from her multiple times) “Gretchen, stop trying to make “fetch” happen. It’s not going to happen.”

Then, the scene switches to Gretchen in class ranting about Caesar in a report she is reading, but she is really (between the lines) referring to Regina:

Gretchen: “Why should Caesar get to stomp around like a giant while the rest of us try not to get smushed under his big feet? What’s so great about Caesar? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. OK, Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar. And when did it become OK for one person to be the boss of everybody? Because that’s not what Rome is about! We should totally just stab Caesar!”

It’s an entertaining movie. We like it.

So, I guess what I am trying to say, is that I should really stop trying to make the impossible happen. This post, for instance. Do you know how long I’ve been working on this one? Months. I have another post about my hair and how I hate to get it cut that I have been working on since last year. LAST YEAR. If it’s going to take me that long to write a post, I should probably just shelve it and stop trying to make fetch happen!

Or not …

Posted in Observation | No Comments »

June 5, 2010 by kim.

I didn’t know you could train chickens to lay eggs like this:

Posted in Food, Observation | No Comments »

June 2, 2010 by kim.

Well, DE-construction, really. We had a building that used to be across from our apartment which housed a dry-cleaner’s as well as a really nice place to get a great egg sandwich:

Deli with the great egg sandwich

Sigh.

Anyway, we could tell that the place was in disrepair and was bound to come down sooner or later, so when the heavy equipment came in and started tearing everything apart, I decided to document it.

The dry-cleaner’s was located on the right side where the blue awning is (you can barely see it), and the deli with the great egg sandwich (did I tell you how great it was, AND how it was right across from our apartment?) was located in the back with a green roof (again, you can barely see it).

Okay. Here we go:

There it is (was)! Now, I can hear bulldozers and jackhammers working to level the remaining pavement to prepare the site for building. If I thought tearing down was noisy, imagine what I can look forward to in the coming months.

Hooray …

Posted in Observation | No Comments »