SupaCoo

Apparently, someone neglected to tell me that a diet of bread, beer, cheese and potatoes (sometimes all in one dish) is not a guaranteed weight-loss plan because during the two years in Germany I’ve actually packed on a solid 10 pounds.

(Maybe 15.)

That same someone apparently ALSO forgot to mention that sitting on my butt playing Facebook Poker all weekend is not good exercise. Clearly this person hates me.

So I’ve been trying to be “good” lately. Things like writing down what I eat, less junk food, more water. And for the past week or so, I’ve taken the long route to the water cooler, down two flights of stairs and back up. (And with all the water I’ve been drinking for my condition, this has been quite a bit of stairs, let me tell you.)

But today, a serious and major chocolate craving hit me like a box of rocks. I decided that I would placate myself by going to the vending machine and getting a Diet Coke, and if the feeling was still there after that, I could share some chocolate with someone.

I mean, that’s fair, right?

Did I mention that when I went to the vending machine I went up and down three flights TWICE for a total of 196 steps? So I’ve practically worked off this chocolate already, and I haven’t even bought it yet! In fact, I’m worried that now I might be so weak from all of the exercise that if I DON’T have chocolate it could become a serious medical emergency. Then health insurance would have to get involved, and ambulances, and maybe even a round trip flight back to my doctor in Colorado.

I think the choice is obvious.

March 9th, 2010 | Category: eats | Leave a comment

Hi strangers and loved ones that don’t really care about my twat, sit down right there and let me tell you a story!

For awhile now, I have been having some issues when I pee. Hell, I’m not going to sugar coat it, my pee smells like a dead animal. Soaked in rubbing alcohol. And then left outside in 90-degree heat for a month.

It’s basically AWESOME.

(Luckily it’s only my pee and hasn’t affected my sex life. Let’s just state that here and now.)

Since I don’t have a doctor in Germany that I can see unless it’s an “emergency” (and since my health insurance made me pay out the butt for my last trip to the doctor when I thought I had swine flu - apparently that’s not an emergency), I’ve been trying home remedies to, um, clear things up. Namely, lots and lots of cranberry juice, gallons of water every day, even some German “bladder tea” stuff.

No dice. Results are still the same. In fact, it’s so bad that after I pee, Travis makes me spray the air freshener. FOR PEE.

Wow, totally TMI. Sorry ’bout that.

Well, last night Travis made some garlic mashed potatoes for dinner. Except instead of using a clove of garlic he used a head of garlic. (I had a nice conversation with him about the difference.) I came to work today and had two people ask me if I ate some garlic - 15 hours AFTER last night’s dinner.

Basically, all kindsa fun smells emanating from me, huh?

But when I went to the potty today, I’m proud to report that my shit don’t stink! (Where shit = piss, fyi.) So I started thinking that maybe the three pounds of garlic cleared it up. I did a google search for “garlic cures” to see what garlic is good for. One of the first results was “How to Treat a Vag Infection with Garlic.” Ok, interesting, we may be on to something here.

And then I read the article.

Let me quote for you:

If a woman can pay attention to the first tickling of the yeast infection, she can use the following treatment. Take a clove of fresh garlic and peel off the natural white paper shell that covers it, leaving the clove intact. At bedtime, put the clove into the vagina. In the morning, remove the garlic clove and throw it in the toilet. The garlic often causes the vagina to have a watery discharge.

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME, RIGHT?

No seriously, there is someone in the world that would actually do this?

First, who would get an infection and go through this thought process in the first place? “Let’s see, I need a nice vegetable to cure my crud, let’s see, cucumber? No… Carrot? Nah… I know, garlic!”

I don’t care what kinda action I have going on down there, you can be damn sure I’m not putting a clove of garlic in my who-ha.

EVER.

February 26th, 2010 | Category: The better half, finds | Comments (3)

We’re starting to get excited about leaving Germany and returning to Denver. Excitement, mixed with maybe a little dread at the upcoming work in store for us, and topped off with a squirt of sadness about leaving this great country. But mostly excited.

We’re also looking forward to being more avid travelers around the US, as we feel we’ve done so much here and still have a lot to see on the homefront. Last week, I fired up a Kayak.com Fare Watcher for Denver on my iGoogle homepage (two things I couldn’t live without).

Phoenix. San Fransisco. Los Angeles. Three great cities, don’t get me wrong.

But, I’m leaving behind options like this?

Amsterdam! Paris! Vienna! Somehow these seem much more exotic.

February 22nd, 2010 | Category: random | Leave a comment

Last week, my work computer caught a mysterious porn virus and I lost a lot of precious, valuable information. Including all of my wallpapers of various locations we’ve been that I have on my desktop which change every 15 minutes to remind me of the fact that “Hey! I’ve been there. And look how much nicer it is than this cubicle.” *daydream for 15 minutes about awesome location, then watch new picture appear and repeat*

And since I can’t stand that horrible Windows generic wallpaper, one of my first priorities was to get out there and go through all of my pictures to get some more pretty stuff up. And then it hit me.

MY LIFE IS INSANE.

In the last 370 days, I have been:

• Norway
• Luxembourg
• Belgium
• Holland (only four times)
• France (three times)
• Greece
• Malta
• Turkey
• Hungary
• Poland
• Italy
• Czech Republic
• and multiple trips to the U.S. and throughout Germany.

And next week Egypt, then back to the Netherlands (at least twice, maybe three times), then Austria, then maybe Belgium again.

And that will all be happening in the next six weeks.

Oh, and also? Planning a move halfway across the world in less than three months.

So, do I REALLY need excuses why I don’t have time to blog?

*back to daydreaming at pretty pictures. Oh, look, it’s Malta!*

(Actual picture on actual desktop as I type this.)

February 5th, 2010 | Category: random | Comments (1)

My daily routine lately.
8:00 wake up. (&*SH!T!*& I meant to get up at 7:00.)
8:15 breakfast and Facebook. (Yeah, I know. It’s like my coffee in the morning, ok?)
9:00 leave for work. (If I’m lucky.)
9:15 at work. (Love that commute)
10:00 actually start work after catching up with co-workers,  seeing if the house I want in Denver is still on the market, checking CNN to see if any wars broke out while I was sleeping, and getting a cup of tea.
10:15 Thinking “I’m totally going to update BOTH blogs today.” Updating Schnitzel.
10:30 work
12:00 lunch time already? I don’t have time, I’d better work through it. But first, let me check to see if the apartment we want to rent is still available IN CASE the house we want to buy is sold when we go back.
12:15 Found 8 other houses and apartments that could be nice. Sent all to Travis.
12:30 Back to work.
1:30 Realize I need to do some random one-off thing that I forgot to do last night but if I don’t do it today it will keep me awake all night (i.e. book a hotel in Austria, look up the CDC rules for bringing a cat to the US, price one-way airline tickets home, see if I have enough frequent flyer miles to upgrade a flight).
1:45 Back to work.
3:00 Denver people start responding to e-mails. Things get crazy.
4:00 Meetings begin.
6:00 Meetings end. And I’m starving! Time to go home.
6:30 Dinner. And maybe a glass (bottle) of wine.
7:00 Facebook again. Maybe some online poker. Sometimes writing the Schnitzel post for the next day.
8:00 Shower and hair dry so I can sleep on it, and grease it up and have it under control for the next day.
9:30 Off to bed with my nook. Maybe some good night kisses. (To the nook, of course.)
11:00 Still reading.
11:30 Realize I have to go to bed so I can get up at 7:00 (or 8:00). Lights out.
12:00 Realize I never updated the friggin blog. Mentally apologizes to the SupaCoo faithful.

February 1st, 2010 | Category: Life of I | Comments (1)

The other day, the lovely and talented Candice posted a story about keeping the heezie clean, which was perfect timing for my own story from this weekend.

I don’t like secrets, neither to hold them or to have them kept from me. If there is any notion - at all - that something is being kept from me, I will bug relentlessly until I am satisfied that there will be no surprises. I may or may not hack into people’s e-mails and Facebooks to help me with my investigative work, too. (And by “people’s” I mean “Travis’s”.) (Unless Travis is reading this, and then I totally mean other people.)

Not long after we got married and moved into our house in Denver, I had a cleaning lady come by after I realized that 2300 square feet was too much work for my lazy ass. She told me she’d be happy to clean our place for $100 a pop.

I told Travis that the cleaning lady would be coming every other week at $100 a visit, and he FREAKED out. That was too much money, we’re on a budget, am I insane? And yada yada.

But the cleaning lady, on the other hand, had three children and this was her only job and she was really sweet. I couldn’t really tell her she was fired before she was even hired.

So I did what any young newlywed housewife would do - I told her to come once a month, instead. And since I managed the checkbook, a certain husband would never be the wiser. And plus? I could totally win good housewife points for keeping the abode so spotless. Win-win.

Last weekend, something bubbled up in me as we were cleaning. I asked Travis if he ever wondered why we never had to clean the house in Denver but here we had to clean it every week. Then, I spilled the beans.

After the expected response of “WHAT THE FUCK?” and “What OTHER secrets do you have?” he laughed at me. And then he asked if I ever took credit for her cleaning efforts.

The answer to that, my friends, is a secret I’m not prepared to share yet.

January 15th, 2010 | Category: The better half | Comments (1)

I know everyone has some quirks, and a few of us may be more OCD than others. For example, I have a small panic attack if my shampoo and conditioner are not at the same level in the bottle. As nutty as that sounds, if I run out of shampoo but still have some conditioner, down the drain it goes and I buy two new bottles. Considering I hate wasting things, this is a pretty bizarre habit. But I’ve become resourceful in using up one or the other just to keep them even, for example, by shaving my armpits with shampoo for a few weeks I can usually straighten the mess back out.

That’s probably the strangest of my strange habits, and there are a whole slew of additional minor things that drive my husband apeshit. But I don’t even hold a candle to a woman I work with.

When I was back in Denver for Christmas, my team at work went out for a white elephant exchange + dinner at a casual pizza joint. As my boss passed out napkins, I noticed the girl sitting across from me at first tried to refuse it, then thought better of it and took the napkin. But instead of putting it on her lap - you know, like a civilized adult - she put it on the railing above her head, next to her.

I thought this was a bit odd, so I asked her, “Don’t use napkins, huh?”

She blushed and glanced away before responding, “No, actually, I hate them.”

Of course this piqued my interest and I couldn’t help myself. “Hate napkins? WHAT?”

“Well, this is gonna sound crazy, but…” she began. And it really WAS crazy. She can’t stand the feel of paper products. For toilet paper, she carries around her own wet wipes. Napkins she opts without. Cloth towels are always given the nod over paper. She won’t dry her hands in the bathroom if there’s not an air dryer. She even told me that when she eats popsicles she stops at the stick because she can’t stand the feel of the wood.

Of course, I teased her relentlessly over this CRAZY and then, to make her feel better, told her my shampoo and conditioner story. And she had the nerve to insist that it was not her but ME who is the nutter, that I am the one who should be locked up.

Personally, I agree that I might be a little out there, but not being able to eat POPSICLES? She totally takes the cake.

January 13th, 2010 | Category: random | Comments (2)

Ok, let me preface this by saying I REALLY DO NOT SMOKE CRACK. Because otherwise this entry is going to sound like it’s straight out of bizarro-world. But really, I don’t.

Last night I had a long, elaborate dream in which I went to the Esprit outlet store and was shopping and Cate Blanchett was my personal shopper (although she was employed by the store, but she was totally MINE). And she found me all of these bargains for things for like, $1. I ♥ you, Cate!

But Cate wouldn’t let me buy a sweater, and I was a little bitter for her enforcing her tastes on me. She would only let me have dresses and jackets. A bit format for my tastes, but still. CATE BLANCHETT.

After I left Esprit (in my dream), I went out to dinner and was sharing this story with a few people. A few people who just happened to be New Kids on the Block. And I was sitting next to Jordan (barf) and across from Jon, but I was focused on my dreamy Joe, wondering how I could have ever crushed so hard on him. And also? Jon was gay.

And you would think this crazy dream ends here? No, it kept going, and involved some kind of football celebration where someone in a black and gold number 54 jersey sprained his knee celebrating a big win. Which I thought was totally funny, because he didn’t get hurt in the game but he got trampled by the crowd celebrating.

Really? Not funny at all. In fact, frightening.

But this is how my mind works. I wonder what kind of awesomely frightening dreams I would have if I *did* do drugs.

January 12th, 2010 | Category: random | Leave a comment

I had never heard of this chick until today, but apparently she was a born and bred “socialite.” Just what that is, or how one attains that job title I’m not completely certain. Apparently it requires copious amounts of rich ancestors.

In other curious news, how does one get the name “Sale,” as in the deceased’s mother’s name? Ah, the lives of the rich and famous are just too difficult for some lowly one like me to understand.

And finally, I know I live in Germany and all but I didn’t realize that was another planet, cause WTF? There is actually a person named Tila Tequila?

Now excuse me while I go to Monster.com and save my job search for “socialite.” That’s totally up my alley.

January 6th, 2010 | Category: Life of I | Comments (1)