Awkwardly Social

Besides the weird cervix pain that has me in bed now because walking around seems too dangerous, I’ve been feeling fantastic.  The cervix pain was horribly reminiscent of the pain of passing giant blood clots after my D&C, so I’m a little rattled, but after a cursory search of the internet, the illiterates out there have me assured that it’s just the baby moving to the pelvic floor.  I love a good panicky forum!

Yesterday, in the spirit of getting out of the house, we took the dog up the coast to Santa Barbara for the day.  I really love it up there and on a foggy day in April the tourists seemed to stay away from the beach.

I have a hankering for beach front property! I wish there was a booming reality television business in Arch Cape, Oregon, or at least 6 months of the year I could afford to be unemployed and beach bound.  I have nothing much against the Los Angeles beaches except almost every single person who lives on that side of town seems completely insufferable (except for the people I know and love who live out there. I do have real life friends who are beach people.  I don’t know how they do it.).  I’m sure they feel the same about those of us in the land locked ‘hoods.

I’m gaining weight like a champ! I am choosing to think of this as a positive thing because if I let myself go down the wallowing well and compare myself to the ladies who struggled to gain more than 20 pounds during their pregnancy, I will quite possibly eat all of the cookies.  And I’m at the point now where if I eat all of the cookies I will be in a lot of pain.  Let it be forever known that I am a champion weight gainer!  Ring it from the mountain tops!  If you need a person to gain weight for a role, call me!  I will coach them in the cookie eating!

Well… that was enthusiastic.

Seth leaves in a couple of days.  But don’t worry he has arranged for every possible person we know in Los Angeles to be able to jump at a moment’s notice if something emergent occurs.  I hope his Hancock Park friend knows how to make a cheese omelet, because that’s the only emergency I can reasonably assume is going to happen.  Cheese omelet emergency!

My sister invited me to come up to stay with her during the long holiday weekend to go baby shopping and movie watching. We were joined by my sister’s best friend Cassie who is like our sister from another mother. I spent a lot of time in the back seat of my sister’s Subaru station wagon as a kid listening to them sing songs from Edie Brickell’s first album and the Little Mermaid soundtrack.  They were pretty much my idols. Cassie lives in Arizona with her husband and two (hilarious) daughters, and I haven’t seen her since my sister’s wedding.  WHICH WAS 12 YEARS AGO.

(Her daughters picked the onesie.  They are my people, for sure.)

Obviously I’ve kept up with her through Facebook and e-mail here and there, but having her and my sister together here giving me their baby advice was exactly what I needed. I sat in the back seat and soaked it in. I wish we all lived closer.

And while I’m feeling a little sad about that, I’ll also say that being in Seattle for the first time since my mom died has been kind of emotionally fraught.  We visited the graveyard yesterday and I got to see the stone in person and leave some flowers.  This weekend would have been so fun for her, and she would have NEVER let us see the movies we’ve been going to. My Oscar viewing card would have been filled instead.  I miss her.

So, yesterday, I hit the halfway mark and I’m definitely feeling heavy these days.  I do not recognize this belly in the mirror.  And the baby moves like crazy.

I have a hot date with a couple of kids to see a couple movies today.  We must indoctrinate them in the Blaich movie marathon technique or they will forever be single movie viewers like everyone else.

I boarded the flight for Berlin on the eve of leaving my first trimester.  We’d just had an excellent First Trimester Screening and a first appointment with the OB I call Dr. Callie.  But a few things were flipping me out, because pregnancy for me has been and most likely will continue to be a long journey of minor flip outs.

The first thing flipping me out was my new ear drum.  I had it surgically grafted in February and by all accounts it was totally healed, but three days before our flight I was getting congested and worrying about the fact that most (all?) decongestants are Class C drugs, which depending on your OB can either kill your baby or be totally fine.  My OB was out of the office for the rest of the week so her nurse called me back and said I could use Tylenol Cold & Sinus.  After 3 terrible drug store visits, I googled Tylenol Cold & Sinus and um, THEY DON’T MAKE IT ANYMORE. By this time, I’d seen my acupuncturist who tried to free my sinuses of whatever gunk had taken hold in there with a steam/herbal remedy.  It sort of helped, but my anxiety about not having something to protect my shiny new ear drum on the plane was still weighing heavily on my un-medicated mind.  Pregnant women, I believe, are this crazy because we cannot just take the good drugs.  The xanax and the sudafed and the opiates (*ahem*).

The second thing flipping me out was that I had planned this trip to concur with my late mother’s birthday.  The small amount of money she left me, I knew she would want to be spent on things like travel or experience.  She was big on experience.  In fact, she and my father set up a trust fund for my sister and me as babies for college or “educational experience” which included pretty much anything we could convince them would enrich our lives. (Horse camp!) So, I booked our tickets over Christmas and her birthday because she would have LOVED to visit Germany on her birthday and because it really was the only time my husband and I are guaranteed to not be expected in a cutting room.  But my grief began to take hold the week before Christmas and I wished I had opted to spend mom’s birthday with my sister.  Seth told me to change the tickets, but my mom would have been appalled at the $400 per ticket change fee, so I forged ahead.  Tears and pregnancy hormones streaming.  These tears came back full force when things started to take a shit-sky-dive with Seth’s son and I sobbed that I couldn’t DO THIS! I should be with my SISTER. And maybe I should have been, but my mom taught me many things, and one of them was how important it is to do new things.  That was not very comforting when I was wishing she were still alive and could be there with me at the symphony.

The third thing flipping me out was the slightly ominous warning about International cheese given to me by my pretty laid back OB.  The ONE thing she told me to watch out for was unpasteurized cheeses that are more common in Europe than in the U.S.  So, every single meal I ate in Germany, from our first meal at the in-laws with potato gratin, I wondered if I was engaging with the enemy.  I had no idea how much cheese would be in German food until I tried to order from a German menu.  Turns out, A LOT.

The final thing that flipped me out were the fireworks and the smoking.  We could not escape either.  The fireworks, as I mentioned in the Travel Diaries, were so loud and nerve-shattering that I was filled with adrenaline for many, many hours, and I was pretty sure all the gun powder smoke was going to have an adverse effect.  Not to mention soaking the fetus in all that nerve calming gin.  (Just kidding about the gin.) The cigarette smoke was insidious.  Our hotel room was at the end of the hall near the stairwell, and every night cigarette smoke would waft in under the door.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if my jet lag hadn’t kept me awake most nights from 2am to 6am, but yeah, I began shoving a blanket under our door every night and still it wafted in.  Poor fetus, I hope it enjoys it’s childhood asthma.  That is, if it survived the adrenaline bath.

My biggest win was splurging on Business Class seats.  Being able to lay down, have real meals and not have to touch another human on the plane saved what little sanity I still have.  I know this kind of travel is probably not feasible for me the next time I visit Europe, but goddamnit, I might just start saving now, because wow, what a difference.

Christmas Eve

We exchange gifts, drop Lula off at her kennel and finish packing. We get to the airport really early and hang out in the business class lounge where I lament that I cannot partake in all the free booze. Our flight to Zurich is hot and a little crazy making.  The business class steward spoke to me in German the first half of the flight, then, at breakfast said, “Oh! You’re American! You have a German last name!” I guess he thought I was mildly retarded before when I never understood a word he said?

Christmas Day

We land in Zurich and are creeped out and fascinated by the bird/cow/horn playing sound effects and the projected slutty Heidi on the wall of the airport train.  Get taken by bus out to the tarmac to load what looks like a ramshackle jet from the pre-war era.  Our view of the Alps as we ascended is breathtaking.  I suddenly want to become a slutty Heidi.  We landed in Berlin and immediately exited our gate, which was a grave error. Baggage claim at Tegel is at your gate.  We spent a good 20 minutes talking to hilarious “information” people who were very confused that we could have possibly missed our very obvious baggage claim and finally were directed to a tiny little shack outside of the main airport terminal to wait for our bags with a grumpy Swiss (Spanish? accent of unknown origin) woman who made the same mistake we did. Then we went to my husband’s son’s in-laws for Christmas dinner.  Lamb and potato gratin. The Christmas tree had real candles for lights. I’ve never seen a more beautiful tree.  My hives have returned in full and epic force and will torture me for the rest of the trip.  We went back to the hotel and slept for more than 12 hours.

The 26th

My mom’s birthday.  We walked around the city at dusk.  We lit a candle for my mother at a Catholic church (may she forgive me for the weird choice of religious remembrance) and had dinner at Milagro - spaetzle and pizza and minestrone.  It was eclectic.  We headed to the center (ish?) part of town to have drinks at the former Nazi and Stalin headquarters (now the Adlon Hotel) seeing the Brandenburg Gate, the old symphony hall, and embassy row, then to the symphony to hear Beethoven’s 5th, Bach’s Tocata in Fugue (as soon as the Tocata started I began to cry.  My mom would have loved it so much), Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, something by Liszt that I didn’t like, and 2 other pieces with a Ravel’s Bolero finale wherein the trombone player totally fucked up his solo.  So much so that after he was finished he put down his trombone and lifted his hands up like, “What can you do?” I was starving after the concert (PREGNANCY!) so we got pizza and pasta at a weird restaurant in the Sony Center that required ordering and sitting and using a card and being paged.  Then we went and had coffee at the Ritz and went to bed at 2am. Again sleeping more than 12 hours, but waking in the middle of the night because where the fuck are we?

The 27th

We got up at about 2pm again and headed to the famous mall KaDaWe.  It is basically like Europe’s classy (and small) answer to the Mall of America.  We ate in the Whole Foods-esque food court and Seth’s son got pissed about something and left for a while to get a handle on himself (he is 30… and this was a sign of things to come). We headed out with Seth’s son’s wife to a beautiful Christmas market where we bought a traditional German Christmas decoration.  It’s made of out what looks like Balsa wood, you light candles underneath a fan and the heat makes them and the scene below turn.  Then, 1 hour later, I was starving again so we met up with Seth’s son who seemed like he “had a handle on himself” and went to a Vietnamese restaurant where I had a delicious vegetarian Pho.  Almost everything is tasting like heaven and pregnancy doesn’t seem so bad except for the insane hives that are making me crazy.  After that we went to an awesome German bar where beers take 3 minutes to pull and they serve pretzels with something that looks like a Slim Jim.  A man at the table behind us fell asleep in his chair and he friends jovially laughed and chatted as this were a normal thing, which it probably was. As we were about to leave, I went to the bathroom and was trapped in there by a drunken woman, who needed advice about sleeping with her married (and her words “kind of gay”) male friend because she just had sex on a date and didn’t have an orgasm, and that, my friends, did not stand with her!  She would not let me leave until I told her what to do and finally I said, “Have sex with whoever you want, but don’t forget ‘he’s married!’  We took the U Bahn back to our hotel’s neighborhood and I was starving again so we had falafel at a little fast food Lebanese place and finally headed to bed.

The 28th

We meet Seth’s son and his wife for a trip out to the Prenzlerburg neighborhood for breakfast.  I’m feeling crappy and pukey and every smell on the subway makes me want to barf. I begin to resent being pregnant as I cannot partake in the spread of deli meats and cheeses but settle for an awesome croissant and fruit that, quite frankly, is better than anything I’ve ever tasted in Los Angeles.  Something is clearly up with Seth’s son who says about 10 words then never speaks again, this is a problem and I begin to hate Berlin and Seth’s family, why can’t people just fucking ACT RIGHT.  Seth’s son’s wife and I window shop and we wind through the pretty neighborhood, but finally after being giving the silent treatment for 2 hours, we head back to the hotel and eat dinner at the fantastic restaurant there. I end up being hungry again 2.5 hours later, but eat the roll I shoved in my pocket at breakfast.

The 29th

Our hotel’s breakfast is over right as we arrive and my hunger MUST be fed, so we go to another hotel and have THEIR breakfast.  We return to the hotel where I begin to feel a grump coming on that I assume will pass if I take a nap.  After my nap, I have a mental breakdown and cannot leave the hotel to do anything, jet lag, the family situation, the fact that I’ve given up Christmas and my mom’s birthday to be in Berlin with Seth’s family who is clearly having severe issues has started to wear on me.  Finally we venture out to Osteria No. 1, and have an amazing Italian meal.  Then we go window shopping, and have a grocery store adventure. I love foreign grocery stores.

The 30th

After breakfast in our room, (this discovery changes our LIVES), I head out shopping on my own, while Seth tries to figure out if his kid actually needs to be committed or if he’s just being his usually charming self.  I buy a teddy bear for the creature I assume is still growing inside of me (paranoia, will I ever feel like this baby is going to just STAY ALIVE), a pair of boots and a handbag.  Then  Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, aborted attempt at Hamburger Banhoff, Brandenburg gate, I refuse to have dinner with Seth’s son and we take a cab ride that took us the LONG way back to Kreuzburg then ate at Milagro again, cried into my supper. Revelers in the street to rival Mardi Gras.

New Year’s Eve (Silvester!)

The fireworks begin at dawn and do not stop for more than 24 hours.  We have breakfast in the room and head out to Potsdam to see Frederick’s “castle” that I refuse to call a castle because it’s a palace.  The Sanssouci Park is gorgeous and we walk and walk.  His new “castle” (ALSO A PALACE) was never lived in by him, which is a damned shame because it is an impressively large piece of real estate. We catch a bus into the Dutch district in town (Frederick brought in the Dutch to dike the city, the Dutch know how to dike!) and had a fantastic German meal that I will dream about forever. We catch the S Bahn back to Berlin and I take a nap while Seth and his son go to Victoria Park to warm up their bottle rocket arms.  At around 8:30PM we all reconvene in Kreuzberg and try to find a restaurant that will seat us.  We end up in the bar of a tiny Austrian restaurant with a crazy Spanish waiter and eat another meal that I will dream about for the rest of this pregnancy. (I had this beef soup with “pancake” in it, and I’m telling you, my stomach is growling for that masterpiece.) Before we can leave the waiter has everyone do a shot of “schnapps” and I abstain.  We head back to Victoria Park to join the madness.  Fireworks are going off all around us, and we set off a few of our own.  The controlled chaos sets my adrenaline so high I’m positive I have killed the baby and do not sleep all night.

New Year’s Day

I finally nod off for a couple of hours, and we get breakfast in the room again before meeting up with Seth’s son to head out for a major day of walking. We start with the East Side Gallery - a remaining piece of wall painted by artists.  Then to Treptower Park to the Russian soldiers’ memorial, which actually is called The Soviet War Memorial.  I find that a little odd seeing as it commemorates the soldiers that died in WWII during the taking of Berlin, but you know the Soviets! It’s all about them.  Then we head to Gorlitzer Park to see where Seth’s son performed (and adapted) a huge Shakespeare play.  We eat at another German restaurant and my bratwurst and sauerkraut dreams are dashed and I eat lentil soup and French fries instead (Pregnancy!).  Then we head to the high end “red light district” but all the prostitutes aren’t on duty yet. Then we walk for what I contend was 300 miles and finally have a mini breakdown and force everyone to get in a cab, which promptly gets a flat tire and FINALLY we get back to the hotel where I fall asleep for a good 2 hours ensuring I won’t be able to sleep for the rest of the night.  At 4am my hives have gotten so bad that I start sobbing and telling Seth that I need to go home right now.  I finally fall asleep and don’t wake up until 2pm.

Jan. 2nd

Our final day in Berlin and we head to Seth’s son’s apartment and eat cake and drink espresso and talk.  Then we walk to a restaurant and have a fantastic French? German? Fusion? dinner.  Then we walk to a cafe for hot cocoa and more conversation.  We walk back to their apartment and say goodbye.  I got more sad than I expected, probably because of the underlying sadness we witnessed transforming a couple into something else.  Tomorrow we leave and I am so glad to be going home, but I will say Berlin did finally grow on me.  I will not miss the cigarette smoking, God, they smoke a lot here, and the split bed and the terrible sheets, but there is a lot to love here.

So, if I’m doing my math correctly, and honestly, I think I am and my doctor is wrong, I am officially 10 weeks today.

This week I was rarely queasy, but some food sounded utterly repellent.  Today I’ve been on and off queasy. The hives are still around, but I basically only get them when I’m trying to fall asleep.  Which is pleasant.

Today also marks 2 weeks until we leave for Berlin and um… I don’t have anything to wear.  Living in Los Angeles does not afford me the wardrobe options one needs for frigid cold weather.  So I’m trying to stock up on sweaters and ordering wool tights, etc. But I’m sort of resigned to the fact that I’m going to be cold a lot there.  Like all the time.

I’m also stocking up on kindle reads for the long flight and I picked up a couple of embarrassing guilty pleasure books from the library (Murder in Italy - the Amanda Knox story… for starters).  But I’m kind of stumped on what I should wear on the plane.  We have business class seats, so we get to lay flat.  And I am pretty uncomfortable laying flat in jeans.  Especially now that I’m becoming more rotund.  Do I change into pajama pants? That seems… hard. But I don’t know, maybe it’s not? Do I wear leggings? I need European travel help! The last time I flew to Europe I was 18 and I believe wearing something like jorts.  So, things have changed, yes? I think we can all agree wearing jorts to Europe in the dead of winter is not only the opposite of fashion forward, but begging for frost bite.

And finally on the other end of things I’ve been having dreams with mom in them. I’m thinking about her a lot these days and wishing she were around to give me vague advice about my hives and how to cure them.  What would have been her 66 birthday is coming up and it’s putting kind of a crushing weight on my chest.

So, anyway, I’m thinking of all you who have lost loved ones and are missing them this holiday season.

It’s been a big week of travel, Christmas day we flew to Seattle to spend time with my family, and we managed to see the Picasso exhibit at the SAM.  My niece, Fiona, is anti-nudity so she had a lot frowns as we perused his paintings.  She’s also not a fan of the cubist period.  It was fun to go with her and hear her critiques.

Then on Tuesday we flew home to LA for a few hours, and headed back to the airport for a routinely bad red-eye to DC.  I always think the red-eye will be fine, and I am always wrong.  Let me mark for the record here in this diary that if I ever fly red-eye again, it will have to be first class.  So, that pretty much seals that I’ll never fly red-eye again, phew!

We tromped all over DC yesterday and today. (I just mapped it and today we did 3.62 miles… Uphill!  Both ways! Yesterday I’d imagine it was about 2 miles.)  My big “to see” items were the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials, Seth wanted to see the Rothkos and Lichtensteins, and yesterday we saw the dinosaur bones and ate hipster soul food.  It’s a lot for people like us (who like to remain cozy in bed with room service and bad movies) to cram into two days, but we managed.

I loved the National Gallery, last time I was here (15 years ago!) I didn’t see much I liked, but this time we saw the Chester Dale collection and there was a Matisse there (Lorette with a turban and yellow jacket) that I fell in love with (Christmas?  Next year?  Thanks, Santa!) and I really liked the Toulouse-Lautrecs he had.  I’m glad Seth is into art, it makes my world bigger.

We got back to the hotel and were upgraded to a White House view suite.  I’m a very lucky girl.

We went to Berkeley last weekend for a little wedding getaway.  I spent two years thinking I went to a wedding on the Berkeley campus, so I was very confused when we drove by the campus and didn’t recognize it.  Which is when I remembered the wedding was at Stanford.  I get all of my California schools mixed up.

I do not do well with air travel.  I get to the airport too early.  I scrutinize the pilots and flight crew too harshly.  I pack too much.  I wear the wrong outfit.  I am a total mess. When I discovered xanax, my world changed.  Then a nice commenter told me xanax is not good for ladies trying to get pregnant, so I talked to my doctor and she told me it was fine if I was in the first two weeks of my cycle.  I bet you can guess which part of my cycle I was on when we went to Berkeley.  Not the first two weeks.  I think Seth contemplated divorce, and/or a seat assignment change.  After a complete post flight air train clusterfuck of meltdown proportions, wherein I wondered if Seth was trying to drive us off the Bay Bridge because he’d had enough of my whining, we arrived at our hotel.

We stayed at the Claremont, which is a Northern California dead ringer for the hotel in The Shining.  I wouldn’t say we went to bed mad, but uh, sometimes my moods are not easy to get over.  For the person on the receiving end of them.  My whole entire family is nodding their heads and saying a little prayer for Seth.

The next morning things were looking up as we ate an enormous breakfast at Rick and Ann’s, browsed books at a little bookshop, and walked around the town all amped up for the Colorado v. Cal game.  College towns are magical to me.  I think in my next life I’d like a little house, a tenured position at a small liberal arts college and many sordid trysts with students half my age.

I had the best deep tissue massage I’ve ever had at the spa.  But the spa itself… It was of another time.  Kind of janky and weirdly decorated, no dry sauna, a scary looking jacuzzi and some kind of waterfall shower that freaked me out.   But that massage made up for it.  If you are in Berkeley and want to drop a little dough and you don’t mind a weird doctor’s office type waiting room, see Michael at the Claremont.

We had dinner that night at Chez Panisse - Alice Waters is a genius.  We eat out a lot in Los Angeles, and Campanile is probably our favorite restaurant, but man, sorry Mark Peel, Ms. Waters has you beat.  I’ll be dreaming about that meal for a long time.

The next morning we had plans to get up early and play tennis.  The courts looked so pretty, and we actually woke up in time for our reservation, but we canceled our court because we decided to drive up the coast and see Stinson Beach and some Redwoods.

The drive to the beach was very Highway 1.  Windy roads, steep drop offs, beautiful views and hundreds of tourists.  We got to the beach and I spent a good thirty minutes in the bathroom, um, doing stuff a person usually likes to do in their own bathroom.  It wouldn’t be a vacation if I didn’t get sick!  After a scan of the beach we thought would be deserted,  we decided to head to less touristy pastures.  The redwoods.  Which is when we got caught behind a tour bus.  And we realized the vision of deserted redwoods and lonely beaches was something we would only see in our fantasies (maybe ones that included tenured professors and half my age students!) and we headed back to San Francisco.

A trip over the Golden Gate Bridge brought us back into the city and we motored up steep streets with pretty Victorian row houses, ate French fries and chicken pot pie at an old hotel bar, shivered at the fog rolling in and headed back to the airport.

We’ve been back five days and it wasn’t until yesterday on my drive from the valley back into Hollywood when I looked over the sprawling city cloaked in smog, concrete overpasses and iconic buildings surrounded by the bad architecture of the 80s that I was reminded why I love Los Angeles so much.  It’s a real big mix-up of good and bad, right and wrong, pretty and ugly.   Kind of like me.

And as I screamed an obscenity at an idiot cunt in Audi who cut me off at my exit, I thought to myself, “It’s good to be home.”

I met the ex-wife this weekend.  It was fine.  I was overly smiley and gracious and felt like an idiot every time I talked to her like I was talking to a small child or a distant aging relative.Then I got sick during the graduation ceremony (nerves, morning sickness?) and threw up in my mouth almost not making it to the bathroom.  I had to buy a ginger ale and a bag of pretzels to settle my stomach.  It was kind of gauche to be walking around a test kitchen of amazingly beautiful pastries made by the graduating class, munching on Snyder’s of Hanover mini-twists.

We are staying in an insanely huge room overlooking Lake Michigan, Hermes and Michigan Avenue.  It’s lovely. But the view I’m most interested in is here.  Yeah.  That’s the webcam overlooking my stupid dog.  She’s the big dog in the small dog area.  Poor ol’ Lu, couldn’t handle the large dog area.  She seems fine.  I miss that stupid rat.

We’re off to the art institute, and then some shopping.  I like Chicago.  It’s snowing.

I’m overwhelmed at the thought of the two things that need to be updated over here.  I have two things to tell you, and I’m overwhelmed.  This is probably a problem.  Do you other bloggers ever look back at your archives and go, “Wow, I used to be funny.  What the fuck happened?  Maybe I should just kill myself.”  No?  Just me then…

If you don’t read my twitter updates, (which, seriously, I am almost completely over twitter) you probably don’t know that they found my car.  It’s all in one piece, missing its plates and smelling slightly of unwashed cigarette smoking man, with only a busted door lock.  I’ll have it back either Friday or Monday, and I am really happy about it.  Although, a little sad about not getting the BMW 7 series Seth scoped out for me.  Honda Civics suit me better.  I’m way too blue collar for a BMW, right?  (*sob*)

We had a weekend away in Palm Springs over Easter at Two Bunch Palms.  And to say the vibe was “fat swingers looking for lovely ladies” is not exactly right but it was leaning in that direction.  Seth and I walked down to the hot springs pools after having a cup of coffee in the wack-a-do restaurant they call “The Casino” for no reason at all, and every person turned and stared.  I felt like a piece of meat.  And not in the good way where you’re like, yeah, I AM hot, in the way where you think your flesh might actually be cut from your bones and consumed.  Aside from the cannibal swinger thing, it was a great weekend.  My relationship with Seth basically started in a hotel room, so there’s something decidedly comfortable and familiar and perfect about us when we’re staying in a room that doesn’t belong to us.  And for those of you who are considering staying at Two Bunch after my cautionary tale, I will say one more thing to deter you, THERE IS NO ROOM SERVICE.  WTF?

So, now that you’re all caught up, I’ll disappear for a few days and come back with the story of how I am now unable to drink more than one drink (wine included) without getting floppy and weepy.  Because I assure you, in the next couple of days I will once again face down a second margarita or glass of wine with the fortitude I learned from my German grandfather and once again be unable to make it to the door without trying to lay down on the floor of whatever fine drinking establishment I’ve been forced upon. Where-for-art-thou, tolerance?

Last week will for ever go on record as the week I got my car stolen and served with a lawsuit. *

This week has to be better.

I was smugly telling a co-worker about my upcoming trip to Palm Springs, how I was so excited about the resort we were going to and she walked back into her office calling over her shoulder, “Make sure you get a room away from the Easter Egg Hunt.”

I grabbed her and hissed, “What FUCKING EASTER EGG HUNT?!”

After a few frantic phone calls and some verification from a bored operator at the hotel that I was totally fucked, I cancelled my reservation for my awesome Palm Springs vacation and booked for an awesome Palm Desert vacation instead.

Thank god for bougie resorts who don’t allow children and ask their patrons to speak in hushed towns, is all I have to say.

Also, this only reinforces my smugness. Because if I hadn’t been smugly chatting it up about my vacation, I would have be really irritated when my relaxing vacation to Palm Springs turned into some kind of “Hell House” for people who think they want children.

*Remember the car accident I got into a year and a half ago… Yeah.  That.  I’m not going to talk about it until it’s over but wow, last week could have been better is all.