I have been busy with working, at the real workplace and also on a fall fashion project I took on to allow myself to indulge in fall fashion. (Actually, that’s a lie; the freelance cash is all going toward a cleaning service, which will improve my life exponentially.)

Other things that have been happening, which may or may not have been Twittered about already, I can’t remember:

–Scott did his final presentation of his thesis, which went well — now it’s just a matter of collecting his diploma, but he’s done with his masters. The same day, I got an unexpected promotion at work. We went out to a fancy restaurant to celebrate, and aside from the wine list and skanky Tila-Tequila lookalike sitting next to us, it was awful. The only food I enjoyed the whole night was the cheese plate … and that was “dessert.”

–I planned a whole big surprise for Scott, involving secret instructions and a mysterious 5:30 p.m. “appointment” … it was really tickets to see ‘The Dark Knight’ in iMax, but I made it seem like a much bigger deal. At the prescribed time when he was supposed to leave work and meet me, he discovered his car had been broken into (which was not, as BetheBoy suggested and Scott momentarily thought, actually the surprise). Stereo was gone, cell phone was gone. We filed a police report, bought him a new cell phone, and missed the movie. Of course making the insurance claim is more costly than replacing everything outright. We might be getting ahead, but it’s in fits and starts.

–I didn’t really think Christian Bale was hot until I read that he roughed up his mom. Now that is what I call hot.

–I caught a sinus infection. Am now on antibiotics.

–My Dad’s birthday is on Thursday. It’s pretty much a guarantee around any holiday or celebration that when I ask him what he’d like, he’ll say nothing, and then I get him movie passes. This time, I suggested that maybe I’d make him a mix CD, and either I’d pick songs for him (I was thinking hits from ‘74 and ‘77, the years his kids were born), but he asked if he could send me a list of songs. He listens to the radio at work and writes down the song title and artist of anything he hears that he likes, so of course I said yes, and this list, it seriously makes me want to squeeze him so hard — it’s adorable. Actually, let’s put it this way: I now know that my love of Fergie, Pink, Liz Phair and Fontella Bass is at least partially genetic.

I think that’s all. More regular updates to resume once freelance gig is put to bed. But, in the meantime, if you’re bored, here are some other articles I’ve written recently: some advice about having sex after you have kids, some advice about being a good stepmom, and some really cheap ways to give gifts.

Oh, and one more thing … where does this little corner of the Internet come down on current Wired cover-girl Julia Allison? I, for one, am very pro, for no other reason than I have a soft spot for the media savvy, those people who take magazines and the internet and even wee little bloggers like me and wrap them around their pinkies (I also have a secret love for Heidi and Spencer, having never seen an episode of ‘The Hills’ — those photos of them with guns were straight out of ‘Glamorama’). Anyway. Love? Hate? Never heard of her?

Setting: Weekday Morning, Creative Review Meeting, 10:38 a.m.

Boss: So, Darth Vader isn’t the No. 1 movie villian of all time?
Co-Worker: No, No. 1 is Voldemort.
Me: Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
Co-workers Who Are Harry Potter Nerds: Laughter.
Co-Workers Who Are Not Potter Nerds: Confused looks.

But I finally just got this photo scanned into digital format — while in Mexico, we went horseback riding on the beach, and you were also allowed to unsaddle your horse and take it into the ocean for a swim. It was my first experience both riding bareback and swimming with a horse. Apparently horses love to swim, but they make really weird grunting noises while doing it. Anyway — there is Scott (isn’t his farmer tan so adorable?!)! On a horse! (A horse whose name was either Wizard or Weezer!) And, while it appears that the horse is smiling, he’s actually grunting.

Scott had joked the whole ride that once we got to the beach, he wasn’t just going to swim with the horse, he was going to drown it. And, well, unfortunately for Wizard/Weezer, Scott succeeded.

(Just kidding.)

People. This show is ridiculous. It centers around a faux team of hockey players and the many, many ladies who bonk them. It’s airing on SoapNet at 11 p.m. Thursday nights; that net picked it up from Canadian channel CBC.

The most ridiculous part is that CBC canceled the show after its first season, but yet that season is still airing in the US.

Let me make sure I’m being clear: A show about HOCKEY got CANCELED in CANADA, but yet is being broadcast in the US. I would love to meet the brainiac exec who thought this was a killer decision.

Oh, wait — I forgot the MOST ridiculous part: CBC canceled it because of high production costs. Which might seem easy enough to swallow, but four episodes have aired and there hasn’t been a single scene of hockey being played, like, on ice. What the hell are they spending all that money on? Hair gel?

Now that I have effectively bashed it, I also must admit this: I freaking love MVP. The team captain is all kinds of conflicted about love, and his daddy the drunk is the team’s coach; the has-been star player killed his wife and daughter in an accident and now compulsively sleeps around; the rookie has a white-trash girlfriend who takes care of her invalid grandmother (the only storyline that has any emotional truth to it). The players all go out to bars after games and mack on hockey groupies. The New York Times is right in calling it misogynistic. It totally is. (Although, it’s gotten more equal in its humiliation of the sexes after a scene involving the rookie and a bucket tied to his manjunk.)

The thing is, the premise has so much potential, 90% of the time I’m watching I’m running over how I would have written it in my head. First things first, the bar hopping and sleeping around would stop, and I’d marry off two of the main characters, one to a high school sweetheart (they’d have a two-year-old son on the brink of being diagnosed as autistic) and the other to a female professional athlete (let them spar over whose sport is more important and difficult). The rookie storyline can stay. Oh, and hello — clearly one of the three main characters should be the team’s goalie. Mix in some actual sequences of hockey being played, some trade rumors, some sharp criticism from the press, some rivalries with other teams, and — for the love of God — a few road trips, and I really honestly think it has potential.

I expect chiming in from the husband about how wrong I am in 3… 2… 1…

More (ridiculous) photos (of the full cast! with a horse!) here.

There are two playlists on my iPod right now — the latest CD by The Kills, and The Ting-Tings, and they are right next to other thanks to the wild coincidence of having ‘the’ in their names — and I think it’s weird that both albums have bizarre songs with similar themes.

The Kills, ‘Sour Cherry’: I’m the only sour cherry on the fruit stand …

The Ting-Tings,’ ‘Fruit Machine’: You keep playing me like a fruit machine …

Maybe it’s not that weird, but it makes me think of this Lisa Nova video, which I adored when it first came out, and cracks me up to this day. Also, The Kills song is great, while The Ting-Tings one sucks. A lot.

My point here: It does not exist.

On a somewhat related note, is the new Beck CD any good? Should I buy it? And should I stop scouring every interview with him about it to see if he mentions Scientology and Jeremy Blake and Teresa Duncan? Yeah, I probably should.

I probably shouldn’t admit this in such a public forum (oh, hi, my full real name), but I have misbehaved this past week, and I must confess.

I have been picking and choosing which stop signs and traffic signals I will obey.

There are two atrociously wasteful stop signs near our place, and one near work, and I treat both with a quick glance and a nice little roll.

There is also a stoplight outside our building that I hate — it cycles only every four minutes, so I’m fucked if I miss it, and it’s the only route out — I have run that one twice this week. There’s another one near the office that I’ve run once.

Yes, I feel guilty, but yet, all of these light-runnings have happened before 6:30 a.m., and there was not a single car on the road in any direction. (Actually, that’s a lie; one time there was a commuter van behind me, but, WHATEVER commuter van — you’re just too CHICKEN to run a light. [Quick, everyone do a Bluth chicken impersonation! Cock-a-cock-a-cock-a-cock!]) And, also, I don’t feel bad about the stop signs. I look. I have good reflexes. Plus, I am trying to hypermile (30.1 MPG! Up from 29.7! Woo!). And, there should be some kind of forum where regular people can point out how fucking idiotic it is to have a stop sign on a one-lane road with no intersections.

OK, I know. I’m a self-important asshole. And I know I’m going to get caught. I will tell you when I do and it will make a nice story, and I won’t fight it in traffic court, as long as I’m really guilty. And I will tell you when I start robbing banks and bilking the Vatican out of millions, because I know traffic light disobediance is a just gateway crime.

Before I go into this long-ass recap of the late-night fire alarm, know this: The fire alarm seems to go off frequently in our building. It’s not unusual for me to find the big heavy fire doors locked shut in our wing when I leave for work early in the morning. It’s not unusual for firetrucks to roll up to the lobby in the evenings.

I will also say this: Each unit in our building is equipped with a security announcement system so that, I guess, if a tornado or Godzilla or something is imminent, everyone in the building can be notified to take cover.

I have never heard the in-condo announcement system used, ever.

(Before 1 a.m. on Sunday night, that is.)

We had spent the night playing Rock Band (shocker), and I went to bed a little bit after 10 p.m. I have no idea what time Scott came to bed, because I immediately fell asleep, and the next thing I knew, all I could hear was THERE IS A FIRE IN THE BUILDING PLEASE EVACUATE IMMEDATELY WOOOOOP WOOOOOOOP WOOP WOOP THERE IS A FIRE IN THE BUILDING PLEASE EVACUATE IMMEDATELY WOOOOOP WOOOOOOOP WOOP WOOP THERE IS A FIRE IN THE BUILDING PLEASE EVACUATE IMMEDATELY WOOOOOP WOOOOOOOP WOOP WOOP. And repeat non-stop, for the next four paragraphs.

There was a lot of sleepy fumbling around (I remember thinking that I needed to put on a sweatshirt, because I wasn’t wearing a bra, and wondering ‘Where are my pants?’). I stopped to pee. (I know.) I’m not really sure what Scott was doing (peeing? [we pee A LOT, ok?]), but after peeing I started to wake up a little bit, and it’s important here for me to express how shocking it was to be woken up like that, given the amount of previous data we had on fire alarms: This kind of thing didn’t happen. This was unusual. This must be serious.

This realization led me to the office, where we keep the cat carriers. I pulled both down off the shelf and went searching for the animals. They were hiding under the bed; Scott and I tag-teamed to get them out and into the carriers, which was surprisingly easy, and then we bolted. I paused for a split second in the living room and wondered if I should grab photo albums (which is ridiculous because we don’t really have photo albums), and then we left.

We walked down eight floors to get outside, and somewhere around the seventh floor I started losing my shit. The stairwell was all loud evacuation announcement and flashing lights and angry mewing cats, and it suddenly hit me that I was terrified. I hadn’t grabbed my wallet. I had surprisingly not grabbed anything except for husband, keys, phone and cats (those are the important things, yes, I know, but once out I started thinking about my new Marc Jacobs blouse and the Wii — I am an evil person, I know). Plus, I was barefoot. I was completely discombobulated.

I wasn’t the only one.

The scene outside in the south parking lot was a lot of people just like me — freaked out, teary, holding kids and leashes. We were only out there for maybe two minutes when we heard sirens; we took the cats to Scott’s car and settled them in the backseat with the AC on (it was about 90 degrees and humid — the sweatshirt I put on was a bad idea). He went to check out what was going on in the front of building. I couldn’t see anything odd about the building, except that almost every light was on in our wing, the east wing, while the south and west wings seemed darker. Scott came back after 15 minutes or so with nothing to report; firemen were still milling about but no one seemed overly frenetic. We sat in the car for another 10 minutes (it’s worth noting how GOOD the cats were; they aren’t fans of being in their carriers, or the car, but they both immediately sprawled out and rolled around goofily once we had them settled), and then I volunteered to walk around to the front. I only got about halfway there when our next-door neighbor stopped me and said we had been cleared to go back inside.

And so we went back inside, where we wandered around the place for about two hours, wondering if it was OK to go to sleep. When I finally did go to bed, I tossed and turned, and, at one point, I had a dream that the in-condo alarm clicked on again, but there was no announcement playing — we could just hear that static hum — so that we went to the lobby and screamed at the security guard. (I’m pretty sure it was a dream.) I think I slept, maybe, a nervous 20 minutes all night.

This was a pretty long story, eh? I’m still not sure at this point whether or not there even was a fire — I sent building management a note asking about it, but they didn’t explain (though they did tell me that the in-unit announcement is a zone alarm that turns on in all common areas as well as the affected floor, and above and below the affected floor, anytime there’s an overall alarm). I do know this — when I got home from work on Monday night, there was a firetruck outside, but all was quiet inside.

I feel like this story needs a bow of some sort, so here goes: Things I learned in the fire/non-fire:

Lesson No. 1: Calamities make Scott and I silent. We don’t remember speaking to each other at all until we got outside the condo. We just grabbed cats and left like robots. (Though maybe that was because we were half asleep.)
Lesson No. 2: I am a crier. Although Scott nicely pointed out that at least I didn’t collapse or anything like some dumb chick in an action movie.
Lesson No. 3: Update Twitter after emergency (and/or leave cell phone behind). I needlessly freaked people out because I was freaked out.
Lesson No. 4: We live in a big building. Even if it’s a zone alarm, if we hear the announcement again, we could probably look in the hallway, look for smoke, etc. before rushing outside.
Lesson No. 5: Keep pack of cigarettes and flask of Maker’s in car. They would’ve come in handy.

The Husband and I have a number of games we play, some on a daily basis, some weekly, some very rarely. These are not board games (though we do play those) or video games (Jesus Christ the Lord Almighty knows how much we play those), these are made-up games that exist, most likely, between the two of us. Both of our mothers taught us the importance of sharing, so, to that end, we are sharing rules and instructions of our four favorite made-up games. (Although I am doing this without Husband’s express written permission; I assume he will understand.)

The Poop Game: This is the easiest and most infantile of our games, and involves simply incorporating the word ‘poop’ into any song lyric or movie line possible. For example, riding in the car recently listening to George Michael’s ‘Faith,’ the chorus quickly, easily becomes “Because I gotta go poop a poop a poop.” The most immature person in the room generally enjoys this game the most; therefore, I am generally the one who never tires of this game.

The Jackpot Game: This one is relatively new, and it got its esteemed start thanks to the purchase of one white MINI Cooper, and then the sudden recent appearance of more and more MINI Coopers. The way to play is to look for three of something in one place; when you do, scream JACKPOT as loud as possible, especially if you are in public. Specific to MINI Coopers, there are different levels of Jackpot; so, for example, if you spot three MINIs of different colors and types, that’s just a plain jackpot. Three MINIs of the same color is a $100 jackpot; three MINIs of the same color and the same type (i.e., all Ss) is a $1,000,000 jackpot. You can play this game with anything; for example, last night we went out to dinner at a restaurant filled with a decidedly over 50 crowd, so I immediately whispered “Old people” and Husband shouted “JACKPOT” (it’s OK, they couldn’t hear). I have also started to play this game at work, during creative reviews; one day last week I had the word good in a piece of writing three times; I immediately jackpotted myself.

The Heist Game: This is our Ocean’s 11-inspired game, and involves pretending that you are in the planning stages of knocking something over — the bar at which you’re having drinks, the bank at which you’re opening an account, etc., etc. It requires a lot of confident sass-talking and on-the-spot making-shit-up, so it’s probably our most advanced game (and it’s also the game in which I am most likely to become annoyed with Husband, because I approach it with an extremely high level of seriousness, and he does not). Sample things you might say to each other are “Don’t make this about them” and “I’ve been looking at blueprints all Goddamn day” and “How do we steal the diamonds?” and “We don’t use guns!” and “We could try a Gilroy.” The last time we played this game, our bartender glanced at us briefly and fearfully when she overheard me say, “Let’s torture them for six hours, then see who wants to eat cake.” Remember, you must make accidental interlopers slightly intrigued … but not frightened so much that they phone the police.

The Coma Game: This is probably our most controversial game, and the only one in which there is truly a winner and a loser. It requires one person to lay in bed, very still, pretending to be in a coma; the other must play the hospital visitor, and their goal is to make the comatose player come out of the catatonic state. This is easier said than done, mostly because I am awesome at it, and Husband is not. There are several ways to approach your turn — straight (i.e., the sad spouse), movie-level (i.e., the distraught detective), sheer ridiculous (i.e. Pussycat Doll-style dancing on the bed). One of you will undoubtedly be better than the other, but bear this advice in mind: Even the most awesome player can be awoken by the threat of teabagging.

Me: I had a dream last night that Barnes and Noble was having a huge sale — buy nine books, get 11 free.
Him: That would be a crazy sale.
Me: It was awesome. It was all books — new releases, hardcovers, paperbacks. Any book. It was a great dream.
Him: It was also an incredibly nerdy dream.

As if that’s not nerdy enough, the night after we had this conversation, I fell asleep while reading the new issue of Wired and had a night full of dreams about Google Android.

The House held a special session on June 19 to address “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Horseracing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred Racehorse” in response to Eight Belles’ death at the Kentucky Derby. The hearings focused on exactly what they should have: doping and breeding. I can’t really figure out what action — if any — Congress has decided to take as a result of the hearings, but it’s heartening that they’re happening.

Rick Dutrow, asshole trainer of burnout (or loose-shoe wearer) Big Brown, is under fire for a positive drug test on one of the horses in his stable, Salute the Count. Luckily, he thinks ““It is just not as big a deal as everyone is trying to make it out to be.” OK, Rick. Sure.

ESPN’s Bill Finley thinks that in order to redeem himself, Big Brown has to beat Curlin. Thing is that Curlin is headed for a hoity-toity race in Paris and not the Breeders Cup. Finley thinks Big Brown should follow him to France. I think IEAH should save the airfare: Big Brown can’t beat Curlin, who is hands down the most dominant horse of our generation.

Nicanor, Barbaro’s full brother, continues to train at Fair Hill — it seems he’s been working most often with a Smarty Jones colt named Rockland. (It’s hard to believe we’ll get to see the first crop of Smarty Jones foals this year … it doesn’t seem like three years have passed.) All the press Nicanor’s received since the beginning of May — by all the press I suppose I mean this NYTimes article — makes me nervous — that’s a lot of pressure on one horse. And it’s not like I’m helping; should we go to Vegas sometime this year, I’ll be putting a futures bet on him for the Derby. You never know.