Cat Lady

Hello Friends,

So I pretty much abandoned this blog a couple months ago because life got in the way, however I'm using it tonight to tell you a story that's sad, but hopeful.

Around two weeks ago I started noticing a gray cat frequenting my alley at night. He or she was really sweet and I started feeding it because I have a soft spot for cats - you're shocked, I know.

I named him/her Alley because I'm just that creative at night. Here's a picture of the little dude or dudette.

I fed him or her for a couple nights and then one night it brought around brothers and sisters - two of them. It was then I realized I had a situation on my hands.

Turns out, the man who lived across the street from us was feeding and allowing a number of cats (6) to come into his home. He decided to move out and left all the cats behind, but they are still able to enter the house through a crack in the foundation. His house is now scheduled to be demolished in January. Once this happens these guys won't have any shelter and will most likely freeze to death.

When I found this out I started an effort to trap and house the cats. My neighbors have been amazing with their help and support, but unfortunately no shelter will take in cats who have lived on the street for as short a period of time as 6 months - which is how old (I believe) the younger ones are based one their size compared to the size my own cats were at the time.

My neighbor and I trapped two of the cats last Sunday and they were fixed, vaccinated for rabies/distemper, given flea medication and tested negative for feline leukemia. They are now living in the bathroom of a neighbor who is very sweet, but is at capacity for the number of cats she can take in. Here's a picture of those two:

There are still cats who live in that house, need to be caught and at the very least fixed so this doesn't continue to be a problem.

This is something I can do, but it's going to take money as there are no clinics that will fix and give medical attention to the cats for free. Ideally I'd like to get them in homes temporarily or accepted into an existing cat colony permanently, but this will also require money for food/supplies for whomever agrees to help.

If you are willing to donate even $5, I would be forever grateful. Here is my donation site - http://www.giveforward.com/helpforstraycats

I'm looking to raise as much money as I can to make sure these cats don't get killed or injured during demolition. I have a number of ideas to help them moving forward, but right now I just need help with getting them fixed and housed in the meantime.

Thank you so much for anything you can donate. If you have questions or would like more information feel free to email me - LindsMOlsen@gmail.com

--Lindsey

J Lo made it look so easy

Sup Internet?

So wedding planning is in full swing and I'm not really sure how it happened so fast. I was more than prepared to sit on my engaged ass for a couple years and mindlessly pin a bunch of crap on pinterest, but apparently I was the only one who had this idea and the very first thing I learned about having a wedding is this:

The wedding isn't really yours.

Now I'd love to say I am one of those responsible people who has been saving money for a wedding my entire life and I did, in fact, start saving a few times as a kid, however Malibu Barbie is a greedy bitch and her constant demands for the latest in fashion ensured that I would never get very far in the savings department. I may have accidentally bought a Prada purse somewhere along the way as well, but that's neither here nor there.

That being the case, I have to rely on the help of family to fund this palooza, which means they get a say. How much of a say has yet to be determined, but I will tell you that I became a member of a local Catholic church yesterday and if the Catholic church and I were in a relationship on Facebook it would read, "it's complicated." Nuff said about that.

Another thing I've learned while beginning to plan a wedding in Chicago is that Chicago is the 2nd most expensive place in the country to have a wedding (suck it New York!) which basically blows. It's also one of the most desirable places to have a wedding. All the venues, vendors, bakers, etc in Chicago know this, which means you have to beg, borrow and steal to get them to even take a phone call. It leaves you feeling like the fat pimply kid just trying to get a date to the prom... by paying someone.

Apparently the most important thing to start with is finding a venue. I was all prepared to jump head first into cake tasting, but I was advised that no, I would instead need to look at a bunch of buildings where, much to my dismay, there would be no cake.

After emailing every venue in the city that didn't look like a VFW dining hall we booked some tours and were on our way. Me, Dave and my big dopey $30 ULTIMATE WEDDING PLANNING BINDER from Barnes & Noble. There's pretty much no way to walk around with that thing and not look like a giant fucking tool.

I believe it was at this point I looked in the mirror, binder in hand, and said, "What have I become?"

I'll tell you who I became. I became someone who asks site coordinators about liability insurance. A month ago I didn't know that even existed, but after consulting THE BINDER, I learned a whole mess of things that now run my world and I have yet to eat a single bite of delicious cake.

Shortly after getting engaged, at a point when I had only just dipped a toe in the wedding planning pool, Dave and I were off to a (long before planned) trip to Vegas.

I'm not going to lie. I thought about it.

I mean the whole city pretty much screams, "Get MARRIED!" Well, to be fair, it screams "GET A HOOKER," but I'm pretty sure the marriage thing is right behind that. My dad was all for the idea (for obvious reasons,) but I'm pretty sure it would piss off quite a few people so I gambled a bunch and drank free engagement champagne instead.

Side Tip: if you're ever in Vegas with a friend, boyfriend, whatever, call the front desk and say you just got engaged. Instant Champagne! No proof required. I don't know about you, but I plan on getting engaged A LOT in the future.

So we won a few hundos in Vegas and it was back to the real world and wedding planning. I think I'm doing a pretty ok job keeping on top of things seeing as

...but only time will tell. I do have some phone calls set up with wedding planners in the next couple days and we'll see how much involvement I enlist them to have.

When I was a kid, like 3 or 4, my Grandma took me to Dairy Queen for my very first ice cream cone. I ordered vanilla, but before I was allowed to eat it my Grandma showed me how to lick from the side, keep both sides even and (for the love of God!) don't bite it. After a good 4-5 minute tutorial she handed me the cone. I looked at the cone, paused, then looked back at her and said, "If you're so good at it. Why don't you just eat it."

I probably deserved to have that cone shoved up my ass for a comment like that, but it very clearly portrays how I feel about speaking to a wedding planner, so we'll see if I just throw in the towel (also known as all my money) and just let one of the pros handle it.


Stay tuned... (that is, if you give a shit)

Toodle-oo!






Here's my favorite thing from the internet today.

Hating hipsters before it was cool, circa 1969.

 

Run Forest, Run

Hey everybody, how's it hangin?

It's my busy season at work with hundreds of projects coming in all at one time and I just finished designing my first museum exhibit, which was cool because you get a party after. I didn't go to it, but I hear there were lovely foodstuffs and bubbly.

Even though I'm pretty busy, I've managed to find the time to get to the gym quite a bit and reclaim my status as an avid "runner." I feel like anything over 20 miles a week will put you in that category and I'm pushing 26-30. Suck it.

I haven't always been a "runner" (that's the last time I'm putting runner in quotes because it's annoying, but I have done so because I think people who refer to themselves as one are doing so to impress you. I don't want to impress you. I just don't want a fat ass.)

...I often get away from myself with these parenthesis. Anyway, I haven't always been a runner, but back in my college days I moved to London for a little while and being the underage co-ed that I was, the 18yr old legal drinking age opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me. However I realized if I was going to pub it up every night after work I needed to get my butt in a gym to save myself from having to buy an extra seat on the flight home. My luggage wasn't going to be the only thing with a weight limit.

May I introduce, waiting for bad joke reaction eel.

So I joined a proper British gym and started running daily. I found my relationship with the treadmill is obviously love/hate. I loved not becoming a circus freak, but hated the actual running process. I tried running outside once, once however all the fuckers with bikes threatened to run me over and I nearly took out an entire neighborhood's population of kids on scooters, so that experiment was a failure. Logging countless miles on the mill it was and so my Forest Gump habit began.

When I moved to Chicago for school I was dirt poor, but decided a gym membership was pretty important to keep me sane and I didn't know anyone save for the advertising weirdos in my classes (yep, you're weird. you know it.) so I joined a gym in my neighborhood called the Sweat Shop to feed mah running need and possibly meet new friends.

This would have been a brilliant plan if this Sweat Shop establishment was located in any neighborhood other than boystown. As it was, the Sweat Shop was a place where gay men exercised in their boxer briefs and looked at me as if my boobs offended them, but whatever, it was cheap and a block or so from my apartment. It was, however, a complete shit hole. I think they had like 6 treadmills and these weren't the fancy pants treadmills with TVs and 100 different settings. These were the Salvation Army reject treadmills and the sole TV was one of those giant cube jobs that was haphazardly strung up in a corner above one of the treadmills.

That machine didn't see much action.

The other ghetto-fab quality that the Sweat Shop offered was the big open windows in front that all the machines faced and since we were at street level, you were literally running in front of and next to people who were cruising the sidewalk. There was a fried chicken place across the street and every now and then you'd get some wise guy who thought it would be hilarious to buy a bucket and proceed to stand in front of you and make love to a chicken thigh while he ate it. I squirted one of these jackasses with water once, but was promptly told by a SS employee that it was frowned upon, so I remained defenseless against the slobbering chicken lovers.

Being at street level also allowed me to once witness a guy on the treadmill in front of me flip off a policeman who was giving some car a ticket. Apparently he thought the Sweat Shop windows served as some sort of legal barrier, the likes of which this policeman could not penetrate. He was wrong. Policeman walked right in and handed him a ticket for harassing an officer. That was pretty neat.

Anyway, I was a proud member of the Sweat Shop for 3 glorious years...Then came the fateful day. Myself and other members of SS were doing our hamster runs and starring out the window per usual when they arrived.

Bulldozers, dump trucks, tractors and other various construction equipment gathered across the street at the site that would soon be known as Lakeview Athletic Club - a towering 4 story powerhouse with two pools and enough equipment to train the NFL. Poor little Sweat Shop cowered in the LVAC shadow as we ran and watched it built from the ground up, day after day.

I had high hopes for the Sweat Shop, believing that its members would never jump ship and abandon the trusty vessel that had been there for them countess years. Never judging. Always waiting with open arms to offer its subpar equipment and basic cable. But no. I soon started recognizing former members walking up the giant steps of LVAC, ready and energized for a traitor's workout. It was only a matter of time. One day I walked into the Sweat Shop and was greeted with a huge sign that read, "Lakeview Athletic Club welcomes former Sweat Shop members!"

fuck you

Well, not really. They offered us the same rates we were paying at SS for the duration of a year (which was much cheaper than their normal rate) and I didn't have a lot of other options save for braving the mean running streets again, which wasn't very appealing. 

So I became a LVAC member and a bunch of the former SS employees got jobs there. I never relinquished my Sweat Shop water bottle though. It sat proudly on the high-tech treadmill as I watched HBO and tiny midgets fanned me with palm tree leaves.

Today I am a proud member of Lincoln Square Athletic Club because it's closest to Dave's condo. LSAC isn't as showy as the Lakeview one and I generally like it better there. However every gym tends to have the gym douches and this one is no exception. There are four types of gym douches who threaten to ruin my runs. Lets examine them.

1. The Grunter: He's beefy. He's sweaty. He's working hard. And he wants you to know it. I've lifted many things in my 30 years and never, not once, have I found it was easier if I emitted lyrics from the "Sounds from the commode" soundtrack. Why then? Why do they do it? My only conclusion is that Rex over there wants me to know that he could javelin throw me over the el tracks if he so pleased. Noted, buddy. Noted.

2. The Dropper: A close friend of The Grunter, this guy is determined to put a hole in the floor as he lifts 200lbs above his head and promptly releases it. I imagine he does this because after you lift 200lbs up, you don't feel like putting 200lbs down. My solution to this would be just not to lift the 200lbs in the first place, but that's just silly logic.

3. The Talker: She could be there with a friend or she could be on her cell phone. It doesn't make any difference to me. This person came to the gym to make conversation through her entire workout and she don't care who's listening. It's cool if you want to have an easy breezy walk and chat with your friends, but take it outside sister. If you want to exercise like an old fart, please go join the 70 yr-olds in the park. You'll learn some lovely new knitting tips.

4. The Look At Me Guy/Girl: I don't think this person actually ever steps foot on a machine or lifts a single weight. He/She wears the equivalent of a body condom to the gym and struts around so you can see just how big his muscles are or tight her abs look. Perhaps gyms hire them as inspiration to keep coming back and they're actually just planted there. I sincerely hope this is the case because if it's not, fuck those guys.

Alright time to sign off. I don't have time to proofread this right now, so if you find grammar/spelling errors, feel free to chastise me. And if you've learned only one thing from this post, let it be that the Sweat Shop is dearly missed by myself and others in a I had grown fond of that ugly mole before the doctor burned it off kind of way. If you happen to live on Broadway and pass the old spot often, do me a favor and toast a chicken leg to it's memory.

Rest in peace you old dirty hag.

In honor of Obama coming out in favor of gay marriage this week, here's my favorite thing on the internet today.

You tell em, Tom!

Baby flu

Hello blog readers,

Sorry about the delay between posts. I decided sometime last week that I hated the soap dispenser in our bathroom, but one doesn't simply replace a bathroom accessory. So $300, some paint, plaster and furniture later we have a redecorated bathroom. Time did not allow for writing during this, so I apologize. At some point I may decide that the coat hooks in the kitchen are sub-par and you'll have to deal with a gap in writing at that time as well. I'm sure we'll all make it through.

You'll also notice I've gone through a slight blog redesign. I'm on the fence about how I want it to look because I find a lot of blinged out sites are just distracting. So for now we're keeping it simple.

On to the blog.

Two and a half years ago I attended the wedding of a friend in Boston. Being the prompt and thoughtful gift giver I am, last week I threw a bunch of money at Crate and Barrel and sent her a wedding gift in the form of an e-gift card because nothing says personal touch like an email telling you your friend is giving you money for a fancy colander.

After not hearing from her for a day, I figured she was reciprocating by waiting another two and a half years to thank me, which seemed fair. However she soon called and that's when the bomb was dropped - she's pregnant.

This brings the grand total of people in my life who have or will have a baby within a 12 month period this year to FIVE.

FIVE.

My current facebook newsfeed.

Now I was cool when everyone my age was getting married because cake. But when did we start creating life? I still can't get our cats to stop eating my hair and my friends are making whole people. And not only are they birthing and raising kids, but they're actually good at it.

In 6th grade home economics class there was a week when we all had to carry around sacks of flour and pretend they were our babies. Being a child who took way too long to stop playing with dolls, I was pretty psyched about this. I went home and went to town making my flour baby look awesome. She had yellow yarn done up in pigtails for hair. Glued on buttons for eyes and I even managed to fit her in some old babydoll PJs. She was perfect.

That is right up until I knocked her off a table and sent her sailing to the ground where she burst into a cloud of baby dust on the classroom floor.

I didn't bother to make a new one for fear that I would waste another 5 lbs of potential pastries, so I resigned myself to the fact that perhaps babies were not in my future.

Obviously this was a silly declaration to make at 12 years old and flour babies aren't really a great way to evaluate your parenting skills or your desire to be one. Based on my experience, the true litmus test for one's desire to have children should be spending a Saturday afternoon at Costco.

It's my belief that some parents don't feed their kids all week and wait till Saturday sample day at Costco for them to get their fill because the gusto with which some of those children hurl themselves at square inch pieces of frozen pizza could only be rivaled with Kirstie Alley's desire to say "Suck it Jenny!" and send her body flying through a window of the Hostess Factory Headquarters. (It's really only a matter of time before she reaches blimp status again and I'm waiting with breath that is baited for the magazine cover featuring her that reads, "Cheers!" as she's toasting Ronald McDonald with a Big Mac.) But I digress...

Combine Costco rugrats diving for fresh-from-the-oven frozen crudites with bus-sized carts filled with 3 or 4 of them grabbing at anything they can get their grubby hands on and the screaming. Oh the screaming.

I know I know. What the hell do you expect when Costco places a picture of ice cream the size of Jessica Simpson's pregnant ass on the wall directly at the front of the store? Of course kids are going to wail until you shut their faces with frozen sugar. I don't blame them. However I do think Costco would do well to hand you ear plugs promptly after checking your membership card upon entrance.

I should probably clarify at this time that I don't dislike children. They're adorable. Really, I mean it.

Well some of them are little shits. But for the most part, they're adorable and if you're one of my friends reading this who has just had a baby or is about to have a baby, yes I think your kid is great. However forcing me to visit Babies R Us nine million times in the past year has just been cruel. Thanks for that. I hope you're having the time of your life with your bobby pillows. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to wrap one of those damn things?

Oh but I've done it and I've attended the showers where you play baby gift bingo and whatnot. Note to future mothers: alcohol at your baby shower is pretty much mandatory. This is not a suggestion. It's the only way unmarried, non-mothers are going to get through it. In my experience my answers to the endless "When are you going to get married and have kids?" questions become much more creative with each glass of wine.

An angel came to me in a dream and gave me the exact opposite news Mary got.

The bees are going to get us all anyway.
 
I've seen Alien one too many times. 

My kids could turn out dumb or Republican. Then what?

Our cats would probably kill anything I brought home. 

Because Lindsay Lohan. 

The true answer to those questions is I have absolutely no idea and don't think about it all that much, but this answer seems to make people uncomfortable. I understand that Disney movies have conditioned us to go about life a certain way - find your prince, get married, pump out human livestock. However unlike Ariel I'm not cool with having no voice so some dolt can fall in love with my eyes. And seriously, Sleeping Beauty? She got lip raped by a stranger while she slept and decides that it's true love. Bitch be desperate.

My life is far from normal and looks nothing like a Disney movie. Hell, it probably never will. I'm 30 years old living in sin with my boyfriend and two cats, but every day is more fun than a bowl of boobs.

I promise to keep liking your facebook baby pictures though as long as I can keep posting mundane pictures of my cats. It's only fair.



Keeping with the kid theme, here's my favorite thing from the internet today.

"This is the last straw!"

Dirty 30

Happy Thursday, Surfers of the Interwebs!

So it looks like this blog isn't really going to have a consistent schedule. I'd love to tell you that I'm posting on such and such day every week, but I'm very busy and important (Read: keeping up with reality TV and making sure I don't get kicked out of my non-existent book club are full time jobs) so posts will come when they do and I'll throw notices up on Facebook and Twitter whenever I've been productive. If you wanna follow me on Twitter, I'm Lalalinzy24 - dumbass name I know, but I have over 100 followers and only like 60 of those are wannabe internet porn stars, so I can't start over now.

On to the blog.

I recently turned 30 and I became acutely aware of the fact that I'm officially an adult by age standards. Yes, I know they say you're an adult at 18, my standards are better than theirs.

When I was in 3rd grade, I thought 6th graders were about as mature as you could get. They sat all smug in the very back of the bus and swung their backpacks over only ONE shoulder. If that wasn't the epitome of maturity I didn't know what was. However, as I got older I came to the conclusion that the day you graduated college was definitely it - the moment you became an adult.

(I just actually laughed out loud, but if you ever catch me writing "LOL" on here, feel free to bitch slap me with a slinky.)

When I got out of college I immediately started freelancing, but that's not exactly steady income for the most part, so I also cocktailed at Second City Chicago. If you've ever served before, you know that waiters and waitresses are some of the biggest, most irresponsible partiers on the planet. So no, I did not immediately become a responsible adult at this time. I did, however, get to meet a number of famous actors and actresses including Dennis Quaid, who when greeted with the standard "Hello Sir, how are you this evening?" promptly responded with "WATER." It was that night I learned water was classified as a state of being. Thanks, Denny.

Freelancing didn't last forever and I eventually landed myself a job in the big bad world of Advertising. Adult job, adult life, right?

Wrong.

If I thought servers were partiers, I hadn't seen anything yet. Advertising execs and creatives work hard and play like 14yr olds who just discovered the key to their parents' liquor cabinet and stash of Playboy magazines. Three martini lunches, 2pm beer carts, playing flip cup with an executive worth well over $500K...this was not the time to become the adult I had envisioned.

These setbacks certainly weren't due to a lack of guidance as I was growing up. My parents taught me all the important lessons to get me where I needed to be - Don't do drugs. Pick a college major that will make it easy to find a job. Don't rack up credit card debt. I went on to personally test the credibility of all these hypothesis and can safely say that, yes, they check out.

That last one was easy for them to say since they grew up during a time when they actually had to get up and go somewhere if they wanted to buy stuff. I, however, have woken up at 3am with the TV still on and been faced with the ultimate question of "Why haven't my jeans felt like PJs this entire time?" and decided it's absolutely absurd that I've been forced to endure this awful material for so long and it would be a travesty to continue on a path of such leg torture.

So yeah, I turned 30 last October and it wasn't the number at first that told me I was an adult. There are subtle things like not being able to instantly drop 10lbs by cutting down my gum intake by one stick anymore. Enrolling in a retirement fund hit me pretty hard too. The HR dude predicted that I would retire in the year 2045. That's like some crazy space year. I imagine my savings will be just enough to get me into a cushy retirement home that floats somewhere in the atmosphere while all the residents talk about the good ole' days when kids spoke to each other on AOL instant messenger and not through this new-fangled telepathy crap.

Anyway, what's done is done. I've survived and made it to 30. I'm an adult. I actually pay when tax time comes around instead of receiving a fat government check and heading to Best Buy for Saved By the Bell DVDs (I'm So Soo SCARED!)

...how long do you think it took them to get approval on that very special episode? You think Elizabeth Berkley was worried a caffeine pill addiction would tarnish her image? I imagine she looked in the mirror after that aired and said to herself, "Fuck it. No going back now. Where'd I put that Striptease script?"

Alright time to wrap this up. I'm definitely not where I thought I'd be at 30. As a wee bit, I declared that when I grew up I wanted to be a "Home Dancer." This logic was solid - I wanted to dance, but didn't want to leave home, so I invented the career. Had that actually panned out and I didn't realize that I had the coordination of a dyslexic octopus, I'd probably be tap dancing in my parents' living room right now. I think we can all agree this worked out for the best.

No, I'm definitely not where I thought I'd be, but I don't think that's a bad thing and I take steps everyday to better myself. Just yesterday I let a dude cut me off in traffic and didn't honk or flip him off. Watch out Mother T!

I really don't know how to end this post.

Bye!


Here's my favorite thing from the internet today. Just MJ drinking vodka like a boss with two Little People.

Ballin'