OKnLA

recently we crashed a party at Universal Studios CityWalk. i felt completely touristy and took a handful of pictures, which is new for me. i'm very bad at taking pictures. i'm working on that. probably the picture that was the most fun was the King Kong picture. there is a spot you can stand on and lift your hand to make it appear like King Kong is lifting you off the ground. it came out a little blurry but it was still fun. the party was fun, but it was a glaring reminder of how old i'm getting. the whole time i was thinking i'd rather be sitting somewhere at a nice bar rather than standing in the middle of a 'club-like' atmosphere surrounded by loud drunk desperate young women. i was also reminded that i'm horrible at flirting. and i'm not too sure what to do about that.

before checking out a free screening of 'American Reunion' at the ArcLight theatre in Hollywood, i took a walk over to the greatest record store on earth: Amoeba Music. okay, it may not be the greatest on earth but it's the greatest i've been to so far. mountains of music: CDs, LPs, DVDs, you name it. i almost passed out from the excitement. it fueled my desire to own a record player. i've always wanted one but wondered where i would ever actually buy records. but now that i'm in LA, albums are easy to come by and i wish more than ever i had a record player. maybe a Christmas present to myself? Amoeba doesn't just have new releases. they have extremely old releases, obscure releases, anything-you'd-ever-want-to-hear-and-more releases. the prices, especially for used items, are really great. and yes, i did peep prices on those record players. Christmas gift: totally possible. they have a number of events at the store, including an event this past we

so yesterday is what i would like to call a real bad day. i woke up, turned on the shower and heard a pumping noise. the noise had been happening for a few weeks, but i thought nothing of it. in this case i'm sort of a 'girl'. when i hear a tinkering sound under the hood of my car, i ignore it until the car no longer performs its duties. when it comes to my personal life and belongings, if i don't know how to fix something i let it go until it prevents me from doing what i need to do. the pumping sound stops, as it always did. so then i flushed the toilet. all hell broke loose. the toilet started fill up and leak. my first thought was to begin using the plunger. it worked initially, but then the shower started to back up. so, being the keen thinker i am, i flushed the toilet again (plumbing is not my calling). the toilet water rose even higher and it began to leak from the back pipes more and more. i used the plunger again and this time, from the bowels of hell came

there is really no way to make this sound less dramatic than it is. the reason i stopped writing in july is because i started to feel very sick and then i almost died. that's not an exaggeration. sometimes i wish it were. in early august i went to by lady doctor. i was having a lot of problems and she chalked it up to needing a stronger dosage of my no-baby meds. i wanted a second opinion and she suggested a general practitioner. days went by and things got worse. i wasn't keeping any food down. i felt weak and tired all of the time. it took all the energy i had just to get out of bed and get to work each day. and, once there, i rarely left my desk. it took too much to move. that led me to work a lot of late nights because there was too much work and staying was easier than exerting myself to leave. one particularly busy day i had an appointment scheduled with my new doctor. i wasn't going to go, a trip over the hill just seemed too hard. my new coworker, brandi, conv