AdrienneCrezo.com

Is it weird to wake up with an Outkast song in your head? My third thought this morning (following “Leelee’s voice is so tiny,” and “COFFEE, NOW.”) was ah ha, hush that fuss / everybody move to the back of the bus.

Really? So of course, you all get to live that with me.

You’re welcome.

On a related note, I feel like Ellen DeGeneres doing “Shoop” every time I sing along. Anyone else get that feeling? Maybe it’s more obvious in person.

The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it.

This morning, I chose three winners of what I’m calling The D.B. Grady Give-a-thon. These winners will be notified via email at the time this post is published, but just for fun, I will of course be announcing them here. There would have been more winners, but I couldn’t bear to part with my copy (autographed and smelling of hookers and Taco Bell [*swoon*]; I drew a Napoleon Dynamite-like picture of Grady as a centaur inside the front cover and sleep with it under my pillow).

I’m going to take a second here to be serious: Grady is eating newspaper and sleeping in alleys. He has a very small child and a wife who is probably tired of him spending the utility money on scratch-off lotto tickets and mouthwash to drink. If you didn’t win, please purchase a copy. If you live in the same house as a winner (you know who you are), read the book after your significant other collapses in exhaustion. You may need the help of a shoe horn and/or vice grips, but it will be worth it.

OK, the process. I used the numbers from the entry comments (excluding mine and Grady’s) and entered them into a random integer generator, told it to choose three (randomly, of course), thereby choosing three commenters as winners. See?

6, 2 and 9

Haley J., Casey, and SpaceMonkeyX have each won a copy of Red Planet Noir and will now have to compete for Most Badass AdrienneCrezo.com Reader Ever. Congratulations!

If, for whatever reason, these three people can’t be bothered to accept the free prize they entered to win, I will replace them with other random winners as necessary.

At Christmastime, I helped organize a massive donation to our local battered women’s shelter, a food drive for the food bank, and our company donated personal care items to all the nursing homes in the city. Helping deliver a few thousand dollars worth of shampoo and food and an immeasurable amount of relief helped remind me that my life, while boring and fairly ordinary, is extremely comfortable. As a way to remind myself more often (and, of course, to teach Malia what it means to be kind and thoughtful), I’ve decided to make monthly donations of paper goods to the women’s, homeless, and children’s shelters in town–items that each organization tells me they run consistently low on (or out of). Will a few dollars worth of toilet paper change my life? Probably not. Will it help someone else find life more bearable? I can only hope so.

"The greatest book of all time," according to one biased reviewer.

I strenuously urge you all to find a way to be more charitable this year, even if it’s just by refraining from being a jerk a few hours a day. Hopefully, you guys choose to do more than just the bare minimum (insert “pieces of flair” joke) and do something meaningful with your time and available resources. Unless you’re really a jerk, in which case I urge you to stay away from me.

In keeping with the year of giving theme, and somewhat in keeping with the gift of paper theme, as well, I’m giving away three copies of my friend D. B. Grady’s book, Red Planet Noir. It’s the exact opposite of toilet paper–you’ll never want to get rid of it, even after it’s obviously been used. I read it over this weekend* and I have to tell you that, in my completely unbiased opinion, this book kicks ass. In my very biased, my-friend-wrote-the-book opinion, this is the greatest book of all time.

You don’t have to do much to win, either. After all, giving isn’t really about getting, so I can’t ask you for much. First, I want you to click this link. Then, I want you to tell me what you’d give for a free copy. This is hypothetical, of course–if you actually had to give something, you would just buy one, right? It’s kinda like the “what would you do for a Klondike bar?” campaign, only smaller and less catchy, but equally open to crude humor and “your mom” jokes.

Aaaaand, GO!

(I’ll moderate at some future time–please don’t leave the same comment repeatedly. [I'm looking at you, Cin.])

Today, I wrote formulas for warming masks and detailed lab reports from my desk, just like any other Thursday. Except today, I was in my pajamas, and I couldn’t hear in my left ear or make noise when I tried to talk. And I ate ice cream for lunch and got poker chips in the mail. And even though it sounds like a bizarre dream, I actually just have a monster of a cold and was politely asked not to spend eight hours coughing at my desk, which apparently annoys the hell out of my coworkers. Who knew?! I could’ve had tons of free days if I had only known. What a wasted life I’ve led!

Instead of actually taking the day off, though, I just worked from home, which is an advantage not many jobs in our company have. It was awesome, except for the 9:30 hissy fit over pajama pants Malia staged in honor of my presence. All that aside, I could totally do my job from home every day.

Other cool things that happened:

I watched Jeopardy! and would have won if I had been a contestant.

I got a reviewer’s copy of Red Planet Noir and a note from D. B. Grady, telling me to get my ass to work.

I can now hear things on the left side of the room.

I read almost every single post on this blog, which is one of my new favorites.

And that’s it. How much fun am I? Please, cancel the stripper. I’m going to bed now.

So, check this out:

I did it. Or something. Woot!

It’s terrible, terrible, terrible. I don’t mean in an “Oh, don’t read that garbage!”-modest kind of way, or a campy kind of way, or a Chuck Palahniuk kind of way. I mean it’s awful, in an awful kind of way. The first twelve pages are reworkable and the following couple chapters are editable, but after that? If I let it escape the folder on my desktop (the one with the sad hobo clown on it), people would think I’d hired a (blind, untrained, drunk) monkey to hammer out the last 30,000 words. And they would be partially right. I mean, I wasn’t always drunk and I’m not entirely blind, but it is the first time I’ve tried to extend a story into more than twenty pages, and you know I’m a beauty school drop-out, so you could say I’m as untrained as anyone else. Anyway, it was hard, and a lot of times it was unfun in the hardest, unfunnest way, and there were times in November when I was very intoxicated and wished I’d never announced that I had tried to do it. I’m glad I did, but man, this “book” sucks. I’ll start over from chapter two and make it work, starting sometime in… I don’t know.

I’ve been working pretty much non-stop since I told I would be, which was a few weeks ago. All of my projects (of which there are always too many) have hit a wall in my efforts to sleep, feed the kid, and shower between 11-hour stretches at my desk. I’d like to be bitchy about it, but to be honest it’s way easier to get work done after hours and there’s plenty that still needs doing. Also, I like being able to pay my bills and buy the kid shoes without weeping over my terminally-ill bank account. So, I leave work in the dark and my mom who does too much already makes sure no vagrant wanderers steal my kiddo before we can haggle a good price out of them. You’d think a sack of rice and a mattress spring was a decent price, but damn if they didn’t turn me down. [insert joke about the economy here]

Oh! And before I forget: There’s a giveaway coming up, as soon as the prizes get here. I’ll talk to you guys about that then.

Have a decent week. And please, hold your applause. This is embarrassing. No, really. Gosh.

I love Kris Allen, even though it’s not age appropriate and it’s lame regardless of demographic. His CD is out as of last week, which I had immediately because I’m such a losery old cougar that I bought the iTunes pass like four minutes after he won. Yeah, yeah. I don’t care.

… and I do mean Dallas, and I don’t listen to country music so I’ll probably get maimed in a honky-tonk parking lot by a herd of angry [whoever sings that]’s fans. I’m hoping my friends at least try to save me, but I know Texans. I’ll understand if we don’t make it back, guys.

With any luck, they’ll let me go to the Justin Nozuka concert tonight first. I know, I know. You don’t know who he is. Yeah, I know.

He’s two degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon*, if that means anything at all.

* or three, depending on how you count. I don’t really know how that game works. Whatever.

I missed #musicmonday this week, so you get a Feel-good Friday. Just as nice, I think.

When I was a kid, Jim Morrison was long gone and Val Kilmer had stepped right into his dirty leather pants and resurrected him for me. Questions like, “Hey, Mom, what’s a Quaalude?” and, “So, is the Indian guy there or not?” and gems like, “Can you explain the symbolism of the Lizard King?” probably freaked my Mom out. That’s what she gets for taking her prenatal vitamins with ’shroom tea. Yeah, Mom. This is all your fault.