Puppy Love

Carefree Lunch

Semi-retirement half-day Wednesday lunch at Cafe Bink.

Soooo good...

Strollers

Sunday a'fair

Bring on the punk -  Cars, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Oingo Boingo-ish bands at Scottsdale Center for the Arts 

March 3rd - noon - 4

Movie Madness - Beautiful Creatures

After weeks of missing in action, I was just so happy to finally make it to Movie Madness, I hardly cared if the movie was actually any good. Something like that bumper sticker: A bad day at the lake is better than a good day at the office. But I should have realized, sitting with two other mall rats at the food court just like back in high school, hey, even my old high school boyfriend showed up, joining the other blonde Scottsdale beauties, for a burger and fries, that we were in for a teeny bopper flick. So besides a few memorable lines and a couple of scenes from what, on paper, was an extraordinary cast, we all walked out thinking we probably should have just stayed in the food court for two hours and watched the world go by.

Lovely Saturday afternoon trip to England - giving us all hope that, in the end, there's still time to sing.
And, to keep our vocal chords in good shape, a gossipy drink after the movie, too!

Anonymous

Hey, Anonymous, I know who you are now. Minding my own business, blogging away, someone hacked in. Left a message. "Anonymous" loves my blog, begged me to go to his blog. Don't click, Lisa. Don't click. But I did and the next day, my junk mail box looked like this: P@yd@y Lender$. Lo@n$ Are U$. @cme p@yd@y (my IT gurus taught me to use symbols to increase safety). I don't know if it will work, but for the time being, if anyone would like to comment, you can't be anonymous anymore. I realize blogging and privacy don't really go hand-in-hand, but I'm not the only (oxy)moron out there - Micro$oft, F@cebook, and @pple all have been hacked recently. I'm being forced to "upgrade" my hotm@il account to outlook, whatever that is. I'd love to get all upset and switch to someone new, but I soooo hate to give up my address. Do you how many Li$@ $ulliv@n$ there are out there? Thousands. And I'm the only one with a nice, clean, no numbers or symbols address. Hotm@il's protecting me a bit, sending the creepy ones to Junk, so for now, I've just got to be more careful. Work harder to be anonymous. We all do.

T.G.I.Lit

 Lit - Theme tonight: songs to break up to - hilarious.
Such a cool Friday night thing to do.

Book Club - The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Novel lesson: Stay strong, ladies.

Shoring up the cabinets.
Lighting the fire.
Playing musical chairs.
Standing room only.
Fooling nobody with amazing food.
Finding an anchor.
Strawing the wine.
Astonishing kitchen elves.
Cheers, cheers, cheers.

Snowed

Where's the snowplow?

Look, there's my exit. 

Somewhere over the rainbow...

I Am Not A Hipster

I Am Not A Hipster

Magnum's ManDate

After playing XBox Army man for years online with a bunch of guys, Shawn got an invite to meet face-to-face. Sort of strange, like match.com for middle-aged married men. Are you supposed to bring your wife? Should you dress like your avatar? Which one are we meeting? The homophobic racist? The pothead poolboy? The Obama hater? No, said Shawn, just the nice ones, it'll be fine, but I think even he was a little nervous. I thought of the little circle of IT guys in my universe I talk to several times a week. Email like crazy. Yell at, then thank profusely, all behind nice, secure virtual and telephonic shields. But tonight, the XBox shield came down at swanky Magnums for my mandated man date. Four hours of scotch drinking, cigar smoking and chatting. I'm now even a cigar aficionado after having a cute little Cherry Bomb - puff it in, don't inhale, let it waft in your mouth. I don't recall even one mention of gaming, just lots of other common interests - medicine, books, military, saving the world, travel. Tomorrow, maybe, the man dates will be back online, but for tonight, at least, it was good to be out of the (X)Box.

Girls Rock

Fun girls' retreat in Cave Creek with some cool gals - thanks, and write on ladies :)

Goldilocks and The Three Bars

Eeww...Sun Too bright. Table Too wobbly. Service Too slow.

Nnooo...Chair Too low. Bad wedding-like, plastic-walled room Too boring.

Mmmm...Love-seated chocolate martini sipping under a sparkling chandelier.

Just Right

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!

If you've got a good one, squeeze him tight :)

Candy Hearts

Beer-shooting-out-of-your-mouth hilarious stories of food and love at Crescent Ballroom tonight!
Reminded me of a Caf' Casino's Beef Bourguignon, leftover croissants, lacy aprons, lesbian shoes and bleachy fingers story that's just itching to get out now.

Top Gun - take 3(D)

One night in the eighties, way before Tom Cruise got so weird, I was surrounded by a bunch of sailor boys, including my own, in a packed theater a couple of miles from the largest Naval base in the world. Back then, watching fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and guys in tight bell-bottomed dungarees saluting each other was just something I did every day, but to be a part of that when Top Gun came out was on a whole different level. There was such a sense of pride in the theater that night. All those guys who worked so hard, getting to spend two hours in a spiffed-up, Hollywooded-out, complete with beach volleyball, version of their lives, and for a few minutes they were Maverick and Goose, Iceman, even, and they got to take a little credit. The testosterone was on overtime and the crowd went wild. Fast-forward a few decades to the 3-D version tonight, sitting in a pretty crowded theater in a mall somewhere in suburbia, far away from any ocean, but still close to my sailor boy, as the view was improved, the adrenaline was still overflowing and the sense of pride from way back when was still there. 

Go Navy!

Call 911

Even Dr. Everythingwillbealright needs a little help sometimes. Still short-staffed with yours truly acting as Medical Assistant, Shawn was on his own when a patient walked in barley breathing. He took his pulse, his blood pressure, his oxygen level and things weren't looking good. Said something about a heart rate of 30. I have no idea what that means, but when he asked me to take the patient to the back room for an EKG and it took they guy five attempts just to stand up, I knew he was in trouble. With no training and no experience, Shawn figured out how to work the EKG machine and hooked up Mr. No Heart Rate. The next few minutes were a blur, but they included calling 911, hearing sirens several seconds later, holding the office door open as at least eight smiling, calm, competent manly men came down my corridor and shuffled into our procedure room, taking over with such precision and teamwork all I could do was stare in awe. Good government in action. Taxpayer dollars well spent. Made me feel safe, somehow. Stabilized, my new BFFs rolled Mr. We Just Saved Your Life, Buster, out to the lit up ambulance and tucked him in across the street at the hospital. Dr. Everythinwillbealright monitored the next few days' activities which included bypasses and stents and a pacemaker. Seems like we're all breathing a bit easier now. 

Weak Week Mash-Up

Walking by a bunch of Negative Pressure Rooms for the past several days, I figured it's probably not a good sign if they put you in one in a hospital, but for those of us that get to leave, it seems finding one would be a dream come true. Negative Pressure. No beeping, no ringing, no rushing. Just breathe. No health problems. No quitting employees. No more bellyaching, just learning to go along to get along (even with nurse Evelyn), focusing on the positives like finding real love at Grassroots, getting in a half of a book club, coming home one night to a hot bubble bath waiting for me, scoring a pair of new (to me) bad ass Vera Wang black boots at My Sister's Closet for a steal and thankful that the too-many-mojitos-at-The-Phoenix-Open daughter happened to be snuggled under my roof while some South Scottsdale flasher perv crawled through a window somewhere in her apartment complex at 2:30am. Moving on to a pressure search for a new office partner since everything and everywhere isn't in my job description, reading resumes, more than a hundred (complete with typos) and mostly two-pagers - people, most of you are haven't accomplished much yet, so if you make me scroll down just to find you worked at Wal-Mart last year and can operate a fork-lift, I'll be clicking delete. After a dozen interviews (one in flip flops, one had the flu, a wadded up Kleenex in her hand and a husband with urological problems, one was at least seven months pregnant and one didn't know anything about computers and had a forty-seven year old son that lives in Michigan with some kind of really bad disease. I passed on the the smart, bubbly one around Shana's age with kid(s) when she mentioned she needed Fridays off to work on her nursing degree. I need long-term and you can't get a nurse for fourteen bucks an hour. So I hired hope-she's-perfect Krystal with a K, to go along with front office Kris with a K, feeling a bit Kardashian-y. With no Negative Pressure room in sight, I'm learning the back-office ropes, crash course style - need an EKG, labs, the definition of Diabetes or clean instruments for a surgery? Look no further. I'm your gal. Ready to train anyone.

Bunhead shot in the pressurized office Bat Cave.

But things are turning around. No more hospitals as of today, Mr. Wet Birds Don't Fly At Night is back on his own turf, thankfully, passing out wisdom about instruction manuals that will save us all in the long run. And in week five of a cool Tai Chi class and an awesome teacher, I stood up straight, took a big breath, looked around, whoa, here I am, in a Negative Pressure Room.