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The house of J is expecting a new little bundle of jokes joy on 100810. I’m rooting for 101010 since that was what I was hoping for my own mythical child that will never be.

I’m sure my brother, Jason can suggest something along the lines of arturo fuente cigars for the blessed day, since his facebook status updates have been all cigars all the time recently. And can someone tell me why people celebrate the birth of a baby with healthy lungs by polluting their own?

Anyway, congratulations Frank and Sarah. I’m very happy for you. I hope your pregnancy is easy without health complications, and that the baby looks more like Sarah than Frank!

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I posted a commercial earlier today that features my former employers. After seeing them on my tv a few weeks ago, I sent them a note and received an amusing letter in return. I hope I’m not out of line in posting excerpts.

Our Toyota Service Advisor asked us one day if we would like to “try out” for a Toyota commercial. He said they were having a “casting call” in Orlando on a Tuesday. We said “Sure!” We’re retired. What else exciting did we have to do? We went to the casting call, and the next day they called to say that we had been chosen for the commercial, and could we come to Tampa on Friday to film it. So off we went on Friday.

When we got there, we found ourselves at a Tampa TV station. They had wardrobe and makeup people, just like on TV. They also had a big catered lunch for everyone who was working on the commercial, and we filmed after lunch.

::snip::

Since then, the commercial has been shown on American Idol, The Olympics, football games and several other shows, including a movie on TBS. I’ve gotten emails and calls from friends in [other states]. The commercials are being shown in all southeastern states.

Yesterday, [we] both got invitations to join the Screen Actors Guild. It said that because of our employment as a principal performer in the Toyota commercial, we now qualify. We laughed till be cried.

It may not amuse you, but I found the whole story to be amusing and enlightening!

I’m not taking any sort of stand in support of or against Toyota, I’m just posting a story because it involves people I once knew very well

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We hit a new grocery store, Sedanos, this evening. We would have eventually gone anyway to check out a new store, but we specifically went because of the brochure they sent us advertising pork shoulders (lechon) for 49 cents a pound with a $10 purchase. In all our years of purchasing lechon, we have never found it for less than 69 cents a pound. So, we headed out to the new store got 18.48 pounds of pork, two lechons, for just over $9. Fantastic! They also had manzana on sale for 99 cents / 2 liter. We prefer manzana in cans, but it’s always so expensive. We found everything else in the store to be ridiculously expensive. And, truth be told, if we’re going to shop at a Spanish grocery store, we’ll go to Bravo or Publix Sabor before we go back to Sedanos. But we will keep an eye on their sales, because that was a fabulous price for lechon. And their chicharon was also reasonable. They had goat on sale, but only had one package left. We’ve not yet tried goat and have been meaning to, but that package did not come home with us.

On the way home, we stopped at Lowes and wandered around lawn and garden. Sheesh, one nice weekend, and their plants were picked clean! I got distracted by pond lights. We’d love to put a water feature into our yard, but some might say that enormous pond in our back yard qualifies as a pre-existing water feature!

For the first time in a long time, we left Lowes without spending any money. Weird.

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When I was 20, I was hired by him to be the receptionist at her law firm. I spent about three months answering phones and transcribing dictation (is why I can type so ridiculously fast now) before they promoted me, called me a paralegal, and moved me to the back to write estate planning documents. They were very accomodating with my full time school schedule. I worked M-Th, ten hours per day, and greatly enjoyed having every Friday off. Or, if I had class obligations, I could work whenever, as long as I met my 40 hours per week.

This was where I worked when I botched my suicide attempt. These were the people I called in dead to (charming message I left on the company voice mail). He was heading to my apartment to break down my door to check on me when my cousin called him to say she was taking me to the ER. These are the people who called my dad to tell him the news.

This is the company I left to go work where my now-husband works. And, three months after leaving, they offered me a butt load of money to come back to them. Which I did. Money talks.

This is also the most stressful job I’ve ever had. Even moreso than Ball and Hammock last year. We’re talking spider nightmares on a regular basis, screaming in the middle of the night. I left them after I graduated college for a much less stressful, short-lived job.

I’ve not made that much money since. I’ve not had that much work-related stress since.

These are also people who regularly attended Thursday night karaoke with the rest of our staff. They would get onto the dance floor and dance their hearts out! And, occasionally, drive their drunk employees home, and never hold that over our heads in the morning (we were all 21 year old girls).

I sent them a note via snail mail letting them know how much I enjoy seeing them on my television. I’ll have to post exerpts of her letter back to me telling the story of their commercial. It’s very amusing… to me.

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Don’t believe the little runner girl in my sidebar. She’s way off on how far I ran this morning, because I still haven’t calibrated my iPod sensor. So when I was crossing the 3 mile mark, my iPod thought I was at 3.8. It was a 10K race, which is 6.2 miles.

This was in central park in Winter Park, at the start/finish line. After the race, those booths have things like bananas, strawberries, smoothies, milk, water, sports drink, and other stuff.

This was the start line.

It was a pretty run through the mansion-lined streets of Winter Park. I think this is Lake Osceola.

Different lake, with a saxophone player playing for the runners. We ran around this lake…

…and this is the other side of the lake. I was so relieved to see there were plenty of runners on the other side of the lake. Yay! I’m not last!

I passed this quartet twice, as the course looped back past this intersection a second time.

After almost an hour and a half, I finished. This was a difficult run for me; my fault for never running regularly.

Official results are posted:

1,779 people finished this race
I placed 1,696
I was 915 of the 979 women who finished the race
Clock time: 1:29:25
Chip time: 1:28:06
Pace: 14:10.7/mile

Mile 1 took me 13:10.
Mile 2 was about the same pace.

I started strong and fizzled fast.

It’s another race number hanging proudly on my wall!

Around about mile 4.5, I was dying. And my mind went morbid, and I started wondering if my husband would enjoy the life insurance payout if I died on the course! I’ll be the first to admit that life insurance rates confuse me, as do the whens and whys of payouts, but surely running a race would be one of the ways to die that would pay out without question, right? Moot point, I lived. And will race again. My next planned race is on tax day. An evening race.

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On Wednesday, I stopped at Track Shack to pick up my race packet. There’s a 10K race tomorrow that I’ll be attempting to complete. I’m worried because I have not run since my February race, back on February 5th, I think it was, and that’s a long time to be stationary. Even though I know I can do six miles with relative ease in about an hour and fifteen minutes on a bad day, I’ve managed to psych myself out about this race tomorrow. The distance seems insurmountable.

Yes, I know, I’ve run much, much, much farther.

My race packet listed my age as 33. GAH! I’m 33! I literally gasped when I saw that on my race packet in the store.

I stopped today to take advantage of the 20% off sale Track Shack was having. I finally bought my fabulous new running shoes. My MIL gave me a gift card for my birthday, and with the sale, I ended up only spending $35 out of my own pocket. I’m elated to spend so little of my own money on my $100 shoes.

They’re Asics GEL-Cumulus 11 in White/Paradise Pink/Black. I choose not to link to them, but if you’re so inclined, that search term will bring up the pretty orange shoes that were too narrow for my fat feet. So, pink. Good thing I have recently come to embrace pink as my power color!

Several people have urged me not to break in my new shoes on a 10K, so I’ll be wearing my way worn out old running shoes in the morning, and then begin breaking in my pink shoes later. I may need to apply for disability insurance, since my shoes are so worn out. Then again, if I end up breaking in my new shoes, I could end up with massive blisters and unable to walk. So, I’ll take the guaranteed leg pain from the worn out shoes over the blisters of new shoes. At least I already know what to expect from the leg pain, whereas blisters on feet are annoying. Ask Boudicca!

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I never posted a picture of the ribbons I wore on race day back in January. I wore four ribbons; in memory of Jackie, and in honor of Bobbert, Frank, and Nick. Of course, I wore a black trash bag the entire race, so no one saw my ribbons anyway, but I did run for people who are/were fighting blood cancers. When my cousin saw me outside the Magic Kingdom, they kindly took this picture for me:

since I didn’t think to take a picture with the ribbons before the race. Or after.

I have since mailed the ribbons to the people I ran for, and am keeping the ribbon with Jackie’s name on it as my own keepsake.

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I have a friend who is a real estate appraiser. I actually have quite a bit of contact with him, and know rather a lot about what is going on in our local housing market. I spend some time using his access to handy dandy things like the multiple listing site. This is how I know my aunt’s house is under contract; fingers crossed that this time everything works out for her, that her buyer’s Home Loans application is approved, and the sale closes on time. My aunt really needs to be free of the burden of that mortgage payment so she can get on with her life there in Nashville. I know she dislikes me, but I harbor no ill will toward her and truly hope this sale happens so she can have one less stress in her life.

It has been heart rending to see how the housing market has crashed the last few years. Knowing what we paid for our house in 2005, and knowing how little it’s worth today, a mere five years later. I try not to think about it too much, because the housing market will recover, and my house will again be worth at least what I paid for it, and not $80K less than what we paid for it, as it is today.

At the same time, I’m lamenting not having just a little bit of money to buy an investment property. You can pick up a condo in Orlando for as little as $9K right now. Granted, that condo isn’t in the best neighborhood, but it is in the next neighborhood over from where my MIL currently resides, so it’s also not the worst neighborhood. Oh how I’d love to pick up a condo for her for $10K and have her live there so she’s not throwing her money away on her crappy apartment in her crappy neighborhood. (Truly, I’m afraid of her neighborhood in the dark, and shame on her other son for encouraging her to move there, since we were excluded from the decision-making process.)

It would also be nice to just pick up a condo and rent it out.

Oh, and for just $20K, you can snatch up a condo in a nice neighborhood. I wish we had the extra cash right now. It would be so nice to have expendible income for real estate. Maybe someday.

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I will give you no details, but please think happy thoughts / pray for my friend AM who had surgery on Wednesday and was just crying with me over details and what ifs and pain.

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A picture from last night’s dinner with extended family.

I so wish I felt comfortable blogging about it. There was so much blog fodder.

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