extra, extra...
a lot has changed since my last post on august second:
i'm no longer on the dreaded uss carl vinson
i have a tan
i'm taking yoga and water aerobics classes
i put in a rental application for a three bedroom home three days ago
i'm back into blogging

needless to say, i'm happy. it turns out a sailors life may not be quite the life for me. now that i'm back, i've been spending my days leisurely, laying in the sun, eating good food, thinking of my life and the direction i would like for it to take now that i have my freedom back. i'm reading a book by the infamous dr. laura schlessinger, entitled: ten stupid things women do to mess up their lives, and it's a book every woman should read. it's the closest thing to a feminist book this anti-feminist will ever read. she also authored ten stupid things men do to mess up their lives
the best thing that i've done since getting back is talking to my friend nikki meyer who lives in downtown chicago and leads this ideal, mary tyler moore type of life. she never fails to wow me and always sort of wipes the smudges off of my rose colored glasses. this girls is the furthest thing from jaded it gets and one of my very few, but very close girlfriends. i'm amazed constantly at her intelligence and her sense of adventure, for instance, she jetted off to italy this summer to spend two weeks with her ex-lover, jeff, and she and jeff subsequently jetted off to tunisia and spent lovely days basking in the african sun. i mean, that's a whole different continent!
amazing women seem to be the theme of my homecoming (could it be that i fit into that category somewhere?). i've been watching sex and the city, season three over and over again because i refuse to pay for cable and it gets boring sitting around my barracks room waiting for my rental application to come through. i never tire of the crazy misadventures of the four single new yorkers and always find something new and fabulous with every veiwing. i've come to think of my life as an episode of this show, as most women probably do, and i can't help but associate my misadventures with some of theirs. one thing that happened to me, that i can bet would never happen to them, but millions of regular women probably experience daily is this:
at four this morning i awakened to a rustling, no, a clinking of dishes. my assumtion was that it was the few dishes that i had on top of my small refrigerator rattling together as the motor shut down, but when it happened again just seconds later, i became alarmed. i turned on my bedside table light and looked in the direction of the noise and saw this little mouse. i let out a muffled scream and was surprised at how terrified i was. after all, it was a tiny mouse that was probably more afraid of me, but all i could think of was that it was going to attack me and scurry up my neck and get in my hair. then i remembered reading somewhere that women in a survey proclaimed that their biggest fear was having an living thing (bird, spider, mice, etc.) get in their hair and not being able to get it out. i knew where they were coming from. i threw my dr. laura book that was laying next to me at the mouse and it jumped- i swear on my life- two feet, and scurried behind the armoir. i ran out of the room and told the guy in charge of the barracks that there was a mouse in my room. he apathetically suggested i use a broom to swat it, which made no sense to me- what better way than to climb up the brrom handle, for the mouse to get in my hair? he eventually sent his footman to my room to set a mouse trap. the footman was decidedly more of a huntsman than the guy in charge and he cleverly set the trap with a combination of blue cheese and sour dough bread as bait. the mouse would be helpless to pass by such a smorgesboard, and the footman promised that as soon as i shut off the lights i would hear the sharp snap of the trap and my problem would be gone. i thanked him and said goodmorning. i got back in bed and shut off the light, but there was no immediate thwack and i fealt the terror return. what if the mouse, like the nimh mice in the cartoon, was too smart for the footmans' trap and became enraged at my murderous solution to his starvation and called his little mice buddies to get ready to make their nests in my hair as soon as i fell asleep? or what if he did fall victim to the smorgesboard and his little body was trapped beneath the metal, but he was still alive and he was squeeling and making those terrible mice noises? i finally had to get up and turn on loud music and make loud noises and leave. i'm dreading my return, the anticipation that his tiny body will be broken under the wire is too much, but i'll forget about it as soon as someone takes it away. the only thing left for my to worry about then is whether or not he told his little buddies.... dun dun dun!