So Close...Yet So Far Away

Here's reason #72960 why my next car will have navi:

I had to go to a store last night that I've never been to. Its fine with me because all I need to do is Mapquest the location and off I go. The directions say to take the 170 North and exit Roscoe. I leave at 6:45pm, which is still daylight out, and although there's traffic, it shouldn't be a big deal. Besides, its only 9 miles away.

There's a little bit of traffic, but its more than bearable. I'm jamming to Madonna (back when her music was enjoyable and she had better things to do than write children's books, or say, posing nude), and inching along the freeway. Pass up the exit to my gym, and think I'm getting close. Pass up 5 more exits, and still think I'm getting close. Come upon the 'Pasadena-next 6 exits' signs and realize, 'HOLY SHIT-this isn't right!!! In sheer stupidness that only I can achieve, its dawns on me that I was on the wrong freeway. From the get go. I was suppose to take the 170 N, but instead hopped on the 134 E.



So, here's a map of my scenic route. The little green arrow (the southern most of the three points) is my humble abode. The yellow dot to the northwest is my destination. The red dot all the way to the east in BFE is where I ended up before it hit me that I was on the wrong track. I can't even say that I made a wrong turn, because I kinda fucked up right after I left my hood. 134. 170. You say tomato, I say tomatoe. This is one of those times where getting 1 out of 3 just doesn't cut it.

This is probably why I can't do well on the math portion of the GMAT. I can't even play Sesame Street and realize 134 is not the same as 170.

How to Look Bad While Trying to Look Better

One of the things I hate about going to the gym after work is that everyone else on the planet is trying to do the same. At the same damn gym I frequent. I'm not a fan of waiting for a treadmill or elliptical machine to open up. I don't like hopping on an exercise machine right after someone hopped off. It's the same train of thought as waiting in line to use a public restroom. Gross.

So I decided that I would hike up to Griffith Observatory as a workout at least twice a week. Its a great ass and thigh workout, which is excellent since my badonkadonk seems to grow exponentially with each passing breath. I've gone every Saturday and Sunday for the past two weeks. Eventually I'm trying to build the strength/energy/stamina/guts/neurosis to walk up it twice. Every time I'm next to my car stretching, I think, 'Ok-Legalmisfit-today's the day you're going to hike up it twice! No giving up or wimping out!' Five minutes later, sounding like an asthmatic kid, I think, 'Yeah-who are you kidding. Let's just try to make it to the top without dying/passing out/or dying, passing out, and rolling off the trail.' Hope springs eternal, I guess...

I'm not skinny. In no stretch of the imagination am I skinny. Oh wait. If being a female and weighing 250 lbs is average, then yes, I am skinny. But I wouldn't go so far and say I'm gargantuan either. Hefty? Chunky? Fat? More likely than not. (this is depressing) So I can't understand why people more round and robust than I pass me up on the trail. Not just one person. More like 5. Is there chocolate cake at the top I'm unaware of? I don't think I'm slow. Ok-maybe I am slow, but it's a pretty damn steep incline. So how are these people who are clearly heftier than I going at a faster pace?

That's not even the worst part. OLD LADIES PASS ME UP. I'm not 15 years old and think that anyone over 21 is old. I'm 27 and consider anyone pushing 65 old. The old people passing me up? There's at least a generation gap between us.

I'm baffled.

I've Got the Magic Touch

Some people have talent. Others have crazy amounts of talent. Michael Phelps can swim faster than a swordfish (I just Googled it-swordfish is one of the fastest fish, if not the fastest). Michelle Kwan looks like a ballerina on ice. McGuyver can make a bomb out of an eraser, a feather, and belly button lint. Paris Hilton has made a career out of lacking any talent. And then there's the kid who memorized the first 400 digits of pi.

Here's my talent: I can break things. Not anything and everything (sadly, I'm not that omnipotent). But if an object requires electricity of some sort, chances are I can wave my fingers and break it faster than Lindsay Lohan can wreck another Mercedes. Lemme run through a quick list of things I've broken:

1) A Mac at the computer science lab in college
2) The Mac to the right of the first one I broke
3) The Mac to the right of the second one I broke
4) The antenna on my first car
5) The antenna on my dad's current car
6) 3 iPods

The latest victim? My laptop Marshall. I'm not sure if he even turns on anymore, so I can't even crack jokes about getting the blue screen of death. Seeing that ominious sign would be a step up. Now Marshall sits in my backpack waiting to get repaired. I have begged IT to look at him and tell me if he's a lost cause or if I can continue to hold out hope.

Just so you know...you can go ahead and blame me if we're cruising in your car and all of a sudden it goes dead.

Take That Twice Cooked Pork!!!

This is what I learned this weekend:

Oven: kitchen appliance used for baking or roasting
Dutch Oven: a heavy cooking pot, usually of cast iron or enamel-on-iron, with a heavy cover.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered they were two different things. Previously, the only definition of dutch oven I knew was from Roomie: when you fart and hold your partner's head under the cover.

I bought all the ingredients to make pot roast. Its suppose to take three hours of cook time, and probably 30 minutes of prep time. I logged in an hour's worth of prep time. So I'm happily washing the veggies and whatnot, and Roomie informs me that we don't own a dutch oven. Hummm...
Then she comes up with the genius idea of using the slow cooker. Brilliant. The only thing is that I found a recipe for pot roast using the slow cooker, and let me just say this: starting at 4pm it would have been done around midnight. But we figured that's as good an idea as any. Since we were trying to speed up the process so that it wouldn't take a mere 7 hours, I browned the meat in a pot over the stove. After 10 minutes, I dumped it in the slow cooker with carrots, celery, onions, garlic, mushrooms, rosemary, and thyme.

In the meantime I studied (supposedly) and worked on my fitness (according to Fergie Ferg). Three hours later, took the lid off slow cooker and said, 'DAMN!! It doesn't look hearty!!' Roomie asked me why I wanted something hearty when its 90 degrees outside. I had no clue, but I was really after some blizzard weather hearty meat.

The slow cooker ain't lying when it makes the claim that it cooks slow. NO JOKE. I cut open the meat and its red. Blah. About this time its 9pm, and I've been at this since 5, so needless to say I'm hungry and impatient. We decided to stick the pot roast and all its glory onto a pan, throw some foil on top, and finish cooking it in the oven for an hour. And the picture below is the result. Yummy! Seriously, it was yummy. The picture doesn't do my three times cooked pot roast any justice. The picture looks like a mini moat with floating carrots...

Tacolicious!

This was one damn good layered taco salad. Ok-it was really just decent, but the standards I judge my cooking by are significantly lowered. It just has to be to level the playing field. But anyway, from start to finish, the recipe claimed that this was a 45 minute meal. It took me nearly 2.5 hours. And that's not including the trip to the grocery store to get all the ingredients (where I proceeded to have a spazz fest in front of the butcher because I didn't know what ground chuck was or what a proper substitute for it was).

My True Calling

So if roughly a million other people come up with the same brilliant ideas as mine, does that idea lose its brilliance and gets relegated to the status of being a good idea? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it still make a noise??

I figured on Mother's Day everyone should be taking their mom out for brunch and a day at the spa or a day shopping. Thus, it would be the perfect day to hit up Disneyland. I've obviously given children way too much credit because Disneyland was PACKED. A thousand moms got hosed. But anyway, this is the picture of Nico and I on the Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride. My score puts me at Level 5- Ranger First Class!!!! I'm doing my part to save the universe from the evil empire Zurg. We'll forget for a minute the fact that the ride stopped twice which helped my score immensely...
Good to know I'm good at something. Always need a Plan B in case a career in finance isn't in the cards...

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Growing up I used to watch this show. It was touted as the fun way to learn geography. I'm sure this show, along with my elementary and high school education have taught me generally where countries are located.

Through the UCLA extension program, I'm going towards a certificate in International Trade and Commerce. It's definitely not all that and more. One of the courses I'm taking this quarter is titled, 'Doing Business in Europe.' This is taken verbatim from the course syllabus:

DOING BUSINESS IN EUROPE is a 12 week course designed to introduce various participants to approaches, opportunities, and risks of doing business in the markets of the Western and Eastern Europe, primarily Germany, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, Greece, and Turkey. The course focuses primarily on the member nations of the European Union.

I should sue the program for false advertisement. Let me re-hash what I've learned about doing business in Europe after 4 weeks (a quarter of the way through the quarter)

1) The Swedes are the most educated group of people

If you read that line and you didn't know it before you read it, you owe me $181. That's about what 4 weeks of this class has cost me.
I sit in class for 3 hours every Tuesday evening bored out of my mind. I think gouging my own eyes out with an icepick would be a more pleasant experience. Studying for the bar was more interesting. Yes, read that again-studying for the bar was more interesting!

Last night we discussed the roles of various religions and how they effect business policies. Fair enough. However, we had already discussed religion last class. So this class session, we broke into groups of 3-4, had to pick a country, and talk about how the various religions affect business decisions by companies in that particular country. It sounds like a good plan. Until you realize that the class is made up of students (students in the sense that no person has more than a year or two working experience, not student in the sense that we are students taking this course). And I already learned the first class that no one has any experience working in another country or working for a company in that company's global relations/sales department. Basically none of us bring anything to the table. Which is fine. That just means that it cannot be as interactive as the professor had hoped, and as the students, we rely on him for information on doing business in Europe.

So, with none of us having any global working experience, we can't really say how religion shapes the business practice of a company doing business in Europe. Nevertheless, we trudge on. Here's the kicker. The first group picked as their country India. The second group picked Japan. My group picked France. The last group picked Russia. Now tell me when Japan and India were officially recognized as European countries?