HP vs. me - I win

Projector is fixed. Terrorist attack averted. Even after half a bottle of wine I'm a pretty good engineer.

Will have to look into that "mercury" thing tomorrow. The old bulb exploded. Apparently I might have been exposed to mercury. I used gloves. I think I'll be okay.

If not, I'll give the mad hatter a run for his money.

HP launches a terrorist attack against me

Fuck you movie projector. You are the largest asshole on the planet.

I was watching Wings Of Desire and couldn't take it anymore (1 hour into it - movie sucks - and I like weird french films) so I put another movie in. Then I heard an explosion. I lost the picture. And my house started to smell like melted plastic and smoke.

WTF? I looked at my projector. Uh oh. Red lights are bad.

So, of course I decided to take my projector apart (after consulting the internet first). With my trusty tools.

This little tool kit, which you can't buy, can fix pretty much anything.

Except, apparently, my projector. Thanks for the useful graphic. Er, or not useful.

I hate my projector. It's supposed to be my friend. How am I supposed to block out the real world with exploding bulbs and stinking burnt plastic? I can't even begin to figure out what tool to use to remove the bottom screw.

Done and done. I'm going to bed. Will deal with this tomorrow. What else is going to go wrong this month?

BTW, projector, I can run you over with my car. Just so you know. Did I mention I hate you?

smiley face counter top

A few weeks ago I picked out a counter top for my kitchen remodel. I started calling it the smiley face counter because it has a bunch of faces in it:

When Christine went to order it she found out it's no longer being made (it's recycled quartz). Tres depressing. She called all over the place and then I did a search. The only place that still has the counter top is Vancouver, BC. I contemplated a drive there but don't have any vacation at work yet.

So then Christine found this for me. It's called Spring Blossom. No faces, but it's colorful:

And how about that fake clam!

She told me to go to Stone Collection to get a sample that I could take home. Stone Collection is the largest granite/stone warehouse in Denver. I went there and met a very cute guy who immediately informed met that Spring Blossom is also discontinued.

FUCK!

Sensing my angst, or perhaps because he saw me trip over a granite sample and cut my foot so badly it started bleeding, he offered to walk me through the granite warehouse. They have loads and loads of granite. It was overwhelming. Every time I saw something I liked he marked it on a little checklist.

When we got done he asked my price point. Then he complimented me on my good taste. Granite is rated from 1 (cheap) to 7 (costs more than God). I had picked out 2 7s and 2 slabs that weren't even priced (the rating said "exotic"). I had wasted an hour and a half for NOTHING.

Then I saw some Vettrazo counter tops. There's one made out of recycled skyscraper bits, one made from traffic lights, and this one, Alehouse Amber, made from recycled beer bottles:

I was like "I love that!" and the guy was like "um, that's going to cost four times your budget per square foot".

Wah.

Christine had also given me some miniature samples of quartz. I wasn't crazy about them until I got home and realized that my kitchen is being demolished in two weeks and I have no fucking counter top and I've been to the largest stone dealer in Colorado and hated everything but the stuff I can't afford and couldn't afford unless I was a multi-multi millionaire.

I looked at one of the samples...and noticed:

Smiley face counter top the sequel!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And men with sunglasses!!!!!!!

Yeah, it's a shitty picture. Do I look like someone competent enough to operate a camera? Trust me, the sample is SMALL.

Anyway, I think I'm going to order smiley face the sequel on Monday. If it's out of stock I will scream. And then cry.

I'm sure my writer friends will weigh in with their opinions, which I will ignore, because tomorrow Kevin invited everyone over to my house for dinner and a reading. We have a new member in our group, another woman to even things out a bit.

highlights from the weekend

• I was reading a magazine while waiting for Pascal at the airport. He walked right in front of me and made a scary noise, causing me to almost have heart failure. I thought that was kind of mean considering I had brought him banana pudding and a glass of wine to enjoy on the ride home.
• Pascal said I was under watering one of my plants and then criticized the way I watered it. Apparently you are supposed to put the plants in the sink and pretend to make it rain on them, and then leave them soaking in water for a few minutes. I stand corrected on my bad watering.
• We got into an argument about the difference between a capability, a service, and a product. I won.
• I showed Pascal a very cool spreadsheet I created using pivot table to determine a project's risk. He likes talking about pivot tables.
• We went hiking at Roxborough. It was over cast when we got there but I was like "it never rains in Colorado". Then it started raining. So I said "well, at least it's not a storm." Then we heard thunder. So I said "as long as there's no lightning we're okay." It started lightning. Luckily we made it back to the car safe and the sun came out at the end of the hike so Pasc got some really good pictures. We saw a ton of deer.
• Pasc suggested we go to a grocery store. He likes those places. Then he wanted to walk down all the aisles (up until our trip I've never been down most of the aisle in my grocery store). He knows how to fart in a way that sounds like a duck, so when I was trying to decide which dishwashing soap I wanted he started making duck farts. People in the aisle were looking at us. Pasc was staring off into space as if I was the one who was farting and he was just an innocent bystander.
• He made a stew with a full bottle of wine in it and some other stuff. He put it in the oven and we went to the british pub. For some reason the taps weren't working. We subsequently went to three more bars and encountered the same problem. I drank a british beer called...something...and after I took a swig of it Pasc said "the best thing about that beer is it will make you fart". Great. We accidentally stayed out two hours longer than we had planned having beers at different bars in LoDo. That's how the stew got a little over cooked. Pasc had insisted I buy flour because he thought the stew would be too watery. By the time we got home almost all the liquid was cooked out of it so he added more water just so he could use the flour that I had been carrying around LoDo in my backpack. It was heavy. I was like "I've been carrying this damn thing around for 3 hours, you better fucking use it".
• We got into an argument about spring rolls and egg rolls. It turns out that an egg roll is a subset of a spring roll. I never knew that. I lost the argument. But kicked Pasc's ass at spinjas so it didn't matter because spinjas are way more important than egg rolls.
• I showed Pasc the godfather, the city of lost children, and rosencratz and guildenstern are dead. They are some of my favorite movies. He fell asleep during them. I also introduced him to David Chappelle. 
• Pasc ate potato chips on my leather sofa and managed to get more of them on the sofa than in his mouth. He also got potato chip crumbs, inexplicably, on his shoulders and back. When he got up off the sofa there were crumbs everywhere except where he had been sitting. I eat potato chips on my sofa all the time and never get crumbs on it.
• I took Pasc to Wahoo's. He now likes fish tacos.
• We got carded at every bar we went to. Go us. Though, most of the time they couldn't find Pasc's birthday on his jacked up driver's license. But he was served anyway because he exaggerates his accent and is very flirty. Apparently most american women find a british accent very sexy.
• We spent 3 hours at the Denver Botanic Gardens and had lunch there. Pasc ordered chicken curry samosas and then spent 30 minutes explaining to me how they weren't really samosas and that they were made wrong.
• He introduced me to Eddie Izzard. We spent Sunday night laughing our asses off listening to him.

If you ever have the chance to host a brit I highly recommend it. Though, full disclosure, they tend to fart a lot.

british invasion

I haven't been writing lately because the brit came back again on Friday night. He left last night.

We had many adventures involving searching for breweries where the tap was actually working, going to the british pub in my neighborhood only to find out Pascal couldn't drink for free there (rather than letting brits drink free the bartender said they charge twice as much because brits are so rowdy), hiking in a storm (between Pascal and I we are probably the most likely people on the planet to be struck by lightning), eating stew that we overcooked because we were drinking and lost track of time (it was still really good), shopping for flour at the slum mart down the street (turns out we didn't need it because the stew was over cooked - also, the flour almost got rained on), and running amok at the Denver Botanical Gardens.

Details to follow.

Tomorrow my friend Neil arrives. He's coming for a Vietnam Vet reunion. I'm a popular hostess these past few weeks.

And I made the banana pudding. It was good. I am awesome at cooking. Er, cooking desserts. That don't require actual cooking.

my broken mirror