Melicious Details

When my husband was a ninja vampire.

At the dermatologist's urging, Clyde had a treatment using blue light to remove some pre-cancerous spots on his face. While the end result would be a less spotty face, immediately after the treatment he couldn't be in the daylight or be near a window where sunlight was coming in, or sit too close to fluorescent or incandescent lights for 48 hours.

The morning after the blue light special, I was awoken at dawn to this:

Me: What are you doing?
Clyde: I'm going to water the tomato plants before the sun comes up.
Me: Seriously??  I need to take a picture of you.
Clyde: Are you going to put it on Melicious Details?
Me: Absolutely.
Clyde: You don't need to take my picture.
Me: This would be hard to describe without a photo.
Silence
Me: So then are you going to spend the rest of the day laying under the house?
Clyde: First I have to go to the bank.

All Ears

If you are a person talking on your cellphone in public and I can hear you, I will be eavesdropping.  Because I'm just nosy that way. 

I catch people lying all the time. Like the woman at JFK in the bookstore with me.  We'd checked in for the same flight, and now had lots of time to kill.  Which explains why we were both standing around reading magazines we had no intention of buying.  She answered her phone and started talking about nothing very interesting.  But then she says, "OK, I gotta go, my flight is boarding now."  And I look at her like seriously?  It's not boarding for 45 more minutes.  If we're lucky. 

Or the guy sitting by me outside of Peet's.  He was slumped in a chair, his head back, staring at the sky while he talked on his cell.

Guy:  I already told you.
pause
Guy:  NOTHING HAPPENED WITH HER.
pause
Guy:  Well, she's lying.
pause
Guy:  (sighs loudly) I don't know.
pause
Guy:  I have to go.  My battery is running out.
pause
Guy:  My battery is RUNNING OUT. I'll call you later. Bye.

He then dials another number and talks to his buddy about sports for the next 15 minutes.

Speaking of eavesdropping, my best one ever was a few years ago at a swanky restaurant.  A man and a woman were sitting at a table close by. They started out having a romantic dinner but it began to death spiral during the entree.  I was straining to hear because oh my god, it was obviously so juicy but they were whispering through clenched teeth, which is especially hard to decipher.  Finally, the woman pushed back her chair and said, with exceptional clarity, "John, you're the one who came home with the disease!" and walked out of the restaurant. 

It's easier to pronounce than it looks.

When I was about 12, I realized that I would be able to - if I wanted to! - change my last name when I got married.  I never liked the last name I was born with because it didn't seem special or memorable, two things I desperately wanted to be.  For sure having a new name was going to make that happen.

I hated that my maiden name was always stuck smack in the boring middle of any alphabetical listing.  And it never, ever begged the question "how do you pronounce that?"  I wanted an interesting combination of letters, and something that was fun to write when I was practicing my autograph.

So did I hit the jackpot or what when I married Mr. Dyrdahl? 

Really I did not have a terrible last name before I got married. Nichols might be plain and common, but it wasn't embarrassing.  It wasn't bad at all, compared to a guy I worked with whose last name rhymed with dildo. Or some of the other unfortunate surnames I've come across like Peeps, Snakeshaft, or Clutterbuck.  Good God, living with any of those would be brutal. 

I've now been Melissa Dyrdahl for over half my life.  I've spelled my last name out loud a million times and have had the pronunciation butchered in countries all over the world, although Americans are the worst. Brain paralysis sets in when they're faced with an unusual combination of letters like D-Y-R. 

And funny stuff like this happens all the time. I bought tickets over the phone and the person I spoke to told me I could pick up them up at Will Call, but I would have to have an ID and the credit card I was buying the tickets with, or under no circumstances would I be given the tickets.  So, when I get to Will Call, I have this conversation.

Me:  I'm here to pick up my tickets.
Woman At Will Call:  What's your name?
Me:  Melissa Dyrdahl
WAWC:  What?
Me:  Melissa.  Dyrdahl.  D-Y-R-D-A-H-L.
WAWC:  I don't see anything under that name.
Me:  Try looking under D-R-Y.
WAWC:  Oh. Here they are. How do you pronounce that?
Me:  Deer-doll.
WAWC:  Hmm.  (She hands me the tickets).
Me:  Don't you need to see my ID and credit card?
WAWC:  No...
Me:  You don't ?
WAWC:  Honey, there is no way you could make that up.

But how deep is it really?

During my month of traveling all over the place, we visited Agra, India, home of the Taj Mahal.  Since you no doubt already know exactly what the Taj Mahal looks like, I am posting two photos of other things you will see in Agra.

I loved the colors and fabrics of the beautiful saris worn by the Indian women, despite the fact that they highlighted my lack of taste and elegance while wearing traveling clothes purchased at REI. I won't be posting any photos of those.

But this sign!  Our Indian guide blamed it on the British.

I know. I know. I KNOW.

Many (OK, like maybe 4) of my readers have been asking when? am I ever? ever? going to blog again?? 

First I have some good excuses about why I haven't:  I was traveling all over the place.  Then it was the holidays.  Then it was after the holidays. 

When I started doing this blogging thing, I had do idea the kind of commitment I was getting myself into. It did not occur to me that people would be actually reading it, and then wanting me to write more of it. Frequently.  So my New Year's resolution (which I have until the end of this month to declare, right?) is to be more regular.  And write more regularly. 

Speaking of my readers, two of them are named Desiree.  Seriously, I bet none of you can say you have TWO Desirees in your life.  The first and older Desiree, soon to be a Park Ranger, and also known as the Deadly Dwarf, has been my friend and co-conspirator in several Silicon Valley companies since...well, if the HP150 means anything to you, you know how long it's been.  The other Desiree is my niece, my first little girl niece, who use to sit on my lap and ask me to put "yipstick" on her.  She's now grown up and - is this cool, or what? - has her own blog where she too writes about her dog! And her life. And clearly we both just need to get focused and write more often.

He was big and ugly...

and he walked right next to my chair on the patio this afternoon, on his way to migrate straight through the back door and out the front.  I took the photo with my iphone, which I just happened to have in my hand, and waited till he got by the dog's water dish for scale.  I had to stand back though, because any second he was going to leap up, wrap several hairy legs around my ankle and sink his fangs in to me.

Making My Ears Hurt

It's that time of year when people talk about punkins.  I heard someone say it on the radio the other day and realized not only has punkin season begun, but it will soon be followed by Febawary.  Then I heard a woman say she thought Obama might be an A-rab (which made me want to ask her if she ate Eye-talian food).  This got me to thinking about all the college-educated native English speakers who scratch my chalkboard when they say something ridiculous like "Is that siren a fire engine or an amba-lance?" 

Irregardless, alls I want is a whole nother punkin.

Most Bizarre Conversation Ever.

I was in my yoga class yesterday and a woman I don't really know came up to me and said "Did I just see you walking down the street with a turtle?"

I stared at her, thinking, did she just say turtle?  Does she mean Turtle, the guy on Entourage?  Or those chocolate covered nut and caramel candies called turtles?  Or maybe she meant those little green turtles that my mom use to buy me when I was a kid until my Dad decided they would give me salmonella?  

Needing to clarify, I said,  "A turtle?"

The woman said yes.  She held her hands up in the shape of a dinner plate.  "A turtle.  A large one."

I tried to form a mental image of a woman walking a large turtle. "Was it on a leash?" 

"No", she said. (The fact that neither of us has started cracking up at the ridiculousness of this entire conversation is astounding.)  "It was just walking next to her.  So it wasn't you?"

"Um. No. It wasn't me." 

And then I had to go sit on my mat and meditate all of that out of my brain.

Breaking my own rule.

This blog is either about everything or nothing, depending on how you look at it.  But I did decide there were a few topics I wouldn't write about. Like politics.  Or religion.  Scientology is not a religion, so no problem there.  I also try to carefully balance myself on the fine line that separates honesty and oversharing.

So on to the off limits topic of politics:  I really like this point of view regarding the marketing blunders of the McCain campaign. 

A picture of what my day can be like.

Since escaping from the corporate world, I now have the fluid, flexible, full of random unstructuredness kind of daily schedule that I'd always dreamed of.  And Oh My God.  I love it so much.  But all of this freedom has also unleashed my Inner Procrastinator, who uses my laptop as her Primary Tool of  Procrastination Domination like you would not believe. I've observed this development with horror and fascination, and have tried a couple times to write down (being a word person, not a picture person) how it happens. I could never really capture it though. But then Drew sent me a flowchart, and yeah, this is exactly it.