Where Am I?

I'm trying to wrap my head around the fact that I'm only in NYC for about 36 more hours before I scramble for Chicago and Portland, and all I have managed to do in my jetlagged state is drink coffee and unzip my suitcase and stare at the clothes I need to wash between now and tomorrow night.

I should be going into the office, but part of me says, nahhhh, do that tomorrow.

I'm going to meet Roni for pizza at the place on Bedford Avenue that we love. I always love real New York pizza when I come back from a trip, and the best is in Brooklyn, my friends. We have all those Napolitanos and Sicilianos you see, and they make the best pizza. Though I'm not a fan of the Sicilian pizza -- too bready. Gimme a nice thin-crust cooked in a wood-fired oven, with mozzarella that was made this morning, and I'm the happiest girl in the world.

We're having.regular summer here, too, which means that with the blinds closed and a fan blowing, my room feels all cool and cozy. I could lay around in here all day with the little miss and be perfectly happy to read and nap for the next day. She'd probably like it, too, seeing as she's happily thrown herself down next to me and is contentedly upside-down with that half-inch of tongue sticking out and her paws kneading the air. Now that her rather doglike "You're back! You're back! Oh my GOD, I thought you were gone forever!" frenzy has passed, she's perfectly content to just be Aileen-adjacent again with just the occasional pat with a paw. "Still there? Okay, snore."

I was going to call the SNF while I'm here in town, but decided, again, nahhh. Honestly, I just don't feel like shaving my legs right now. Plus, the afterglow of the redheaded pressman hasn't worn off yet, and I think I'll wallow in that for awhile.

Confession: while the actual grown-up rumpusing is oodles of fun, and I mean rolling around, changing positions, let's try this, ow that hurt, okay that's good, whoop-em-up OODLES OF FUN, I love the making-out-like-horny-teenagers part just as much. And the Woodpecker is a great maker-outer. Head-spinning, devastating kisses, of the hand on the small of the back, pull you in close like it's a slow dance at the prom variety. Savory.

I think marriages would be better if couples just made out more, don't you? If, instead of having sex appointments ("Well, honey, it's 10 o'clock on Saturday night, should we get it on?), they just randomly started grabbing each other and making out whenever the urge hits.

Now, I may be unqualified to make this statement, having never been married nor having had children myself, but I think it would be a nice thing for kids to see their parents are still hot for each other. I'll bet lots of couples had noisy, enthusiastic sex before the kids came along, only to turn into those couples having silent, furtive sex only when the kids were asleep. Maybe that's why so many married women get all fake-orgasmic and "Ohhhh, my gawwwwd," when they eat a rich dessert in a restaurant -- they can't make those faces and noises at home anymore.

Me? I certainly enjoy a great dessert, but I'm not transferring any sex noises to the creme brulee unless the creme brulee is being licked off my thighs.

Root beer. I want a root beer with my pizza.

Home Sweet Hovel

I love my funny little apartment, I do I do I do I do I DO!

I'm back in New York, and so happy to be home. I always get that jazzy, grinny feeling as we start to descend into home-ish airspace. I had an aisle seat this leg, so I didn't get to press my face against the window and say, "Hi, Coney Island Cyclone, hi, Brooklyn, hi New York, my love," as we came in for our landing, but I thought it, oh, yes I did.

Now I have 48 hours to wash out my gutchies and get ready to do it all over again next week in Chicago and Portland, OR.

Miss Madison Kitty has adhered herself to me like gum on a shoe, and I am pouring myself a finger of Maker's to take the airplane stink out of my head and try to erase the image of the truly bizarre-looking feet of the woman sitting next to me from my brain. Her toenails were so odd that I couldn't stop staring at them. I can't even describe them, except that her toes were like mushroom buttons and her toenails were really, really narrow and tiny and quite disturbing to look at.

So another LA trip is put to bed, and I have to go into the office tomorrow to sort out other work stuff.

So happy to be home.

Oh, and the heatwave appears to have broken! Yay!

The Big Doughnut, The Redheaded Pressman, and Other Musings About L.A.

Hi everyone, it's your favorite Lost Angel, writing from the city of Lost Angels.

Oh, my word, the sun finally made an appearance here.

We found a big doughnut yesterday afternoon after gorging ourselves on sashimi at our favorite hole-in-the-wall place in Gardena.  I don't know if it was the big doughnut, but it was a big doughnut.

Judy made me drink a giant sake at lunch because I was stressing mightily about a couple of my jobs back in NYC. I didn't feel they were being covered properly in my absence.

This I expressed, quite eloquently, I thought, in the car going to lunch. Well, eloquent might be an overstatement.  Scorsese-worthy, Tarantino-esque, expletive-laden tirade is more like it. But I do have to admit, I was impressive in my creative and multi-layered uses of the word "fuck." 

After a couple of sake belts, I realized I wasn't stressing about the actual work, but about the fact that I wasn't there to rub my greasy fingers all over it.  Totally out of my head, I know.  I am here, the jobs are there, and someone else is covering for me.  There is only so much I can do, right? 

This thought, as well as the dry sake, calmed me a bit, and I settled in to enjoy my ebi and uni.  God, do I love uni sushi.  My sister had a Japanese-American friend who described it as "baby poop on rice," but I can't get enough of it.  Eating uni isn't really eating animal flesh so much as it's ingesting the essence of the sea. When you let it roll over your tongue, and the aroma fills the back of your head and you feel its tendrils creeping up into your nasal passages, you almost feel like a sea creature yourself.  Mermaidy, if I may say so.  If someone sat me down with a plate of a dozen uni sushi, I would happily schlurp them down and hold out my plate for more.

We came back and I had a couple of ridiculously easy approvals (which we totally earned after fighting with the color on one shoe -- ONE SHOE! -- and one fur purse -- ONE HANDBAG! -- all morning. Please refrain from making dirty jokes about fur purses. I thought of all of them.)  It took us, literally, hours to get the color matched to the proofs.  Such a fight, but we were all too stubborn to break down and say, "Lift it, and make new plates." Okay, after about a dozen pulls, I was ready to lift it and make new plates.  But Chuck and Frank, the pressmen, were convinced they could get there.  And after many, many hours and finally, a couple of counterintuitive genius color moves, we got there.  In my business, that's a victory.)

And a final note, on the redheaded pressman, my hot little Viking with the body like a statue, all I have to say after not seeing him for a year is, "Oh my lord. Oh my sweet baby Jesus lord. Praise God! Puh-raise God! Thank ya, jesus, thank ya."

The Shade

It's cool and rainy where I am, and frankly, I like it.  Even though I didn't even bring a jacket (who would think you'd need a jacket in July in this place?), I'm sitting here with the sliding door to the balcony wide open. After the stifling heat of New York City in the past month, this sixty-something degree weather feels awesome. Now, if it were sunny and 65, I'd be happy as a pup who just discovered the chocolatey treats in the litterbox. (Sorry, that's gross, but why DO dogs eat poops out of the litterbox?)

Usually I stay at a hotel in Hermosa Beach, called the Beach House. I adore the Beach House, because it's quietly luxurious and a little funky.  They have all the nice amenities -- the fluffy robes, the big down comforters and pillows, beds so big you could plant an acre of corn on them, Aveda products in the bathrooms. And every room has a balcony that looks out onto the beach and the Pacific.  It's heaven, and I sleep the sleep of the just and true when I'm there.

So this trip, the travel agent flaked, and I ended up at this place called The Shade, further north on the Strand, up in Manhattan Beach.  It's nice, but a little too too, if you know what I mean.

The lobby is this ultra-modern room dominated by the bar with low, leathery divans all around (the better to drink your $14 cosmoramostini or some other such nightmare drink that because it's served in a wedge-shaped glass, they append "-tini" to the name. I'm a purist about these things. Ya can't call a drink a "something-tini" if it doesn't consist of gin/vodka-vermouth-and a twist-of-lemon rind-olive-onion. It's just not right.)  Anyhow, they have dance music playing all the time, and jarringly, sports on the televisions behind the bar.

I got onto the elevator, which is painted gray, and the lights in the elevator are BLUE. No one looks good in blue light. So I rode to the 2nd floor bathed in this light that makes me look like a consumptive.

I guess the room is "nice," whatever "nice" means in modern hoteliery (is that a made-up word? Probably.)  Maybe if "twenty-first century porno set" is considered nice.  Once I figured out the console of buttons inside the door, mainly through random stabbing at the buttons to see what I could make them do (god knows I couldn't READ the buttons, because they're all about 1/4" to a side and printed with tasteful, tiny Helvetica type saying things like "Chroma Therapy" and "Fire Cycling") I threw my suitcase on its little rack.

I decided to take a bath to unwind. The bathtub is actually one of those jacuzzi tubs, and to add to the ambience of the red strip lights around the bathroom ceiling, the tub has a built-in light that changes colors while you whirlpool. So I flipped around in this giant tub like a baby dolphin while watching myself change from blue...to green...to gold....to pink underwater.  Trippy. And oh so very, very Ron Burgundy.  I suddenly wanted to hear some jazz flute and drink white zinfandel.  Stay classy, San Diego!

But at least I was now relaxed enough to go to sleep.  I padded happily over to the nice big bed and flipped back the comforter, dropped the towel I had wrapped around my body, and threw myself down with real glee.

Oh, shit.  They have Tempur-pedic mattresses here.  Gaaaahhhhhh!  And Tempur-pedic pillows!  Double-gaaaaahhhh!

There ensued a night of tossing and turning and sweating -- those Tempur-pedic sponge mattresses are fucking convection ovens -- punctuated by terrible totalitarian dreams of jackbooted, no-faced regiments of brownshirts. I swear it was that fucking foam mattress and those fucking foam pillows, and the awful oh-so-moderne decor in its hideous shades of puce and slate.

I awoke at 6, completely unrested and cranky, to find that the overhead light fixtures in the bathroom had what could only be 25-watt bulbs in them, so I am sure I'm walking around so garishly painted that I look like I stepped out of a remake of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane."

After the car service driver nearly killed me on the 405 by chatting merrily away on his cell phone while changing lanes without checking his rearview mirror, I arrived at the plant in a state.

Judy asked, "How was the Shade?"

"That," I said, "was the worst night's sleep I've ever had in my life."

Needless to say, she was on the phone immediately with the travel agent, begging her to find me a room at the Beach House. Unhappy, unrested Aileen means unhappy press okays and lots and lots of remade plates, which is the printing equivalent of standing on Crenshaw Boulevard and setting handsful of $100 bills on fire.

Somehow, despite some volleyball tourney, a room was found for me in Hermosa, at the Beach House.  And not just any room.  An ocean front room.

When I checked in, all I could say to the girl at the desk was, "Oh, thank god you guys had a room for me. I've never been so happy to be here in my life."

And when I opened the door of room 314, and saw the sweet little suite, with its giant fluffy white king-sized bed with its giant fluffy white goose down pillows, and its slatted doors to the balcony overlooking the ocean, I actually said, out loud, "Hello, Beach House! I'm home!"

While all this was going on, the redheaded pressman was texting me to see if I had arrived, was I jet-lagged, where was I staying, and was I going to, well, see him later? I will admit to feeling the teensiest bit excited that I am going to see him.

After I checked in at the BH and Judy and I ate burgers at Hennessey's on the pier, we got back to the plant just after shift change, and there, on the first press as I walked in, was the Woodpecker.  I said hi, he said hi, both of us all professional and shit, and as I walked past, he gave me just the tiniest wink and half-smile. 

Naughty, naughty boy.

And five minutes after I walked past him and came upstairs to the client lounge, my phone kadunked with a text sent from the pressroom floor: "Damn! You look great."

And for that, I have to say, "Thank you, MWBMH(tm).  Makes it all totally worth it. "

I am so getting laid tonight.

Placeholder Post

Just an excuse to post a photo of the little boy Sidney Crosby and announce, "74 days to first puck drop of the 2010-2011 season! Woo hoo!"

Sidney, you got a purdy mouth.  Now come on over here and let's break Rule 23.

Sorry for being a dirty old lady. He's just so cute.

I may fit right into the cougar scene at The Shade, after all.