For you, June, are a slob

November 16, 2018November 16, 2018 June36 Comments

I have many topics, the fresh topics of our day, to discuss with you, and all of them are dull. Read on!

Just so I won’t forget them, because you know how I am, they are:

Work
My eyesight
My winter jackets
Turning into my grandmother, Vol. XIV

Did I not TELL you they were all dull? Let’s begin.

Work.
I read a book once, by Stephen King. Or is it Steven King? That guy who scares you. Anyway, he wrote a good book on writing, and he said one thing people love to read about is other people’s work. To which I said, hunh.

Is that true? Did you see that was one of my topics and thrill to the idea, or were you all, I’ll take Winter Jackets for $200, Alex, and by “Alex” I mean all the Alexes at June’s work?

So. Work. I’ve been at my current job for seven years, six months and 15 days. So, I guess you could surmise I must like it, and I often do. But some days? Ridic.

For the first five years, I worked on one account. Then they switched me over, and it’s like that account never existed. Once I was off of it, I was off of it. A clean break. Like the one I had with Ned.

So you can imagine my surprise at 4:59 last night when–bloop!–my computer did what it used to do two and a half years ago, which is pop up with a little assignment from this account.

“You have a task due from [fancy client you’ve heard of]!”

I do?

So I opened it. Yep. There it was, looking just as fine as it did in Two Aught 15. I realize that’s not really how you say 2015. Calm down.

Without having any idea why I was getting this, I just started, you know, copy editing it. It was like riding a bike, except I can’t ride a bike.

Then–bloop!! An email.

“Hey, Juan, here’s the task. Let me know if you have any questions.”

…..

Let me know if I have any questions? Okay. How about, is it 2015? Did I just return from some kind of “I’m in the future” amnesia, where I thought I lived for almost three years working on other stuff? If so, did I really move? Who are my pets? I’ve no idea who Ima go home to.

When is this due?

Am I copy editing it, or are we in that six-month period where I edited instead?

Do I have any questions.

Then–BLOOP!–I get another email from another person. “Thanks for working on this!”

Who ARE you? Do you work on this account? Do we know each other? Do you even work in my company?

Then GRIFF shows up. Griff never left that account. “I hear you’re working on our stuff all day tomorrow.”

I am?

“Yeah. I won’t be here, though. Just use your common sense.”

My common–oh dear god we’re all doomed.

Finally, FINALLY, I get an email from a ninety-seventh person who asks, “Dear June, Would you have time to work on [insert account you’ve so heard of]? The regular copy editor isn’t available. It’s all due tomorrow.”

Sigh. So I guess I’m having a Flashback Friday today, working on my old account, and if Ima do this, can I go all the way and sit at my old desk, on my old floor, kibbitz with my old ridiculous boss who’d get me on tangents about Ode to Billy Jo? Cause that would be magnificent.

If you could flash back to, say, November 2015, what would you be doing?

Eyesight
I’m glad I did that list, above, because I’d already forgotten what else I was gonna talk about.

Yesterday was my annual eye exam, and man, was I excited to go. First of all, I can tell my eyes are most def worse, and so is my vocab. Plus also, the last time I bought glasses was in 2015, and 2015 is a big year with me today. But in that time, my prescription has DEFINITELY changed, and don’t you hate people who write “defiantly” instead of definitely? Plus also too, in those three years, since the apparently magical year of two aught 15, those glasses have been skidded across the floor by cats, ridden at the bottom of my disgusting purse, been stepped on, etc.

I take terrible care of my things.

So they’re uncomfy and twisted and scratched, and I was so excited to order new ones. I never wear my old glasses, even though they’re black cateyes with diamonds and technically I love the IDEA of them, but it feels like I have a bobcat on my face when I wear them.

You know how THAT feels.

My eye doctor is a jovial sort, and very large. I mean he’s tall and has an enormous frame. He’s just a lot of man. But I like it there because they have equipment that makes it so they don’t have to dilate my eyes, which is crueler than April, the cruelest month. April totally texts about you after you’ve gone.

“Well. You are one nearsighted young lady,” said my eye doctor, and it’s now at the point where when people say, “young lady,” they’re being ironic, like Willard Scott and his 105 years young thing.

“But your eyes are great. They’re strong, they’re clear, you’re doing great. No change.”

No…NO CHANGE? But I was CERTAIN they’ve changed. Not even close up? I can’t read the shampoo bottle close up anymore.

Nope. Same.

Goddammit.

But you know what I did? I used my insurance money to get new glasses anyway. I tried on approximately four billion pair, till the glasses guy started tying a noose, and I decided on these sort of rosy tortoiseshells that I will show you when they get in.

I can’t wait to take terrible care of my glasses.

Coats, Soothes and Relieves
Which brings me to my winter coats. [Everyone scoots chair up, as we’re finally getting to the good part.]

Cold weather is upon us here in North Carolina, and for the first time this season, I reached for a winter jacket recently.

Almost every winter frock I own has something fucking wrong with it. Why don’t I take care of my things? So now I have a plan to fix all of the things I can fix. For example…

My leopard coat, which I believe one of you sent me, has a missing snap. Oh, snap. I am horrific today. Why?

Also, every time I got a coat out to photograph for you, ridiculous Milhous came over and posed with it. Yes, his eye IS red. He got in a fight. With a cat. He deserved it.

The fabulous orangey-red coat I got at Kit’s store is missing a little sew-y piece of thread of the cuff of one arm, so instead of turning up saucily, it droops and flops over.

Blue raincoat: Steely Dan chew mark. Also, fur.

Pink raincoat? Coffee AND lipstick stain. I don’t even know if the pink raincoat can be saved.

I should just wear black garbage bags in winter. It’d be cheaper.

Grammy
Now I’m late of course but my last topic is this. You know how I’ve turned into my grandmother? When she was living alone, she had a fabulous book holder, so she could sit at her kitchen table and read and eat all at the same time, but not have to hold up her book. Yesterday at lunch I was tryina eat something healthy [Burrito Supreme] and read my book and you know what I craved? A book holder. I know the right answer should have been kale, but there it is.

But I’m having the kind of schedule lately where I’m running from one thing to another and haven’t had time to look, although of course I had time to photograph my coats. Anyway, if you find such an item, please alert me in comments so I can go get one.

Oh my god, I have to be at work in literally two minutes.

Efficiently,
June

I hate everything

The good, the bad…

November 15, 2018 June44 Comments

As you know, from your now-oversized Book of June Events, my washer has been broken and I just went on a trip.

So selecting clothing for the workplace has been my own challenge. I have an inspirational poster about challenges above my increasingly empty closet.

But yesterday, as I listlessly perused my offerings, I found OH! How EXCITING!

My poncho.

We were pretending to be mannequins. Or maybe a JCPenney catalog. I forget. The point is, our hilarity never stops and for that you are welcome.

I purchased said poncho last year with my Aunt Kathy, at Thanksgiving, when I was visiting home and we popped into a Basic Girl Shoppe.

“Oooo, I forgot I had this,” I said to myself/Edsel/it’s sad. Also, let’s review the part where I forgot I had it when I (a) purchased it less than a year ago, (2) packed it into a box in August, (r) unpacked it a month ago.

Excited, I slipped on said poncho, added jeans so once again I could avoid looking like Porky Pig

s-l225 — Porky Pig is big with me lately.

and added my brown boots. I was a legend.

Photo on 11-14-18 at 1.07 PM — Maybe I’m amazed at the way I love me all the time.

So, in my cute surprise ensemble, I headed to work, where I immediately ran into a coworker I’ll call NotPatrick.

I really like NotPatrick. I’ve worked with him at other locales, and his wife has worked with me for years here at this job, then NotPatrick joined up awhile back. He and I voluntarily worked on an ad idea together that got chosen from a bunch of other people coming up with ads.

If you work with me, I certainly have made it a mystery who I mean, here.

Last year I tried to arrange a happy hour with the people at work who were older. I was trying to have a place we could gather and discuss Ruben Kincaid without having to explain who that was.

No one came. EXCEPT NotPatrick and his wife.

So, there he was yesterday, seeming likable, and he said, “I like your poncho.”

“Thanks,” I said, swirling like Stevie Nicks.

“You look like…well…” he trailed off.

I whipped back around. I know when a man fears me. Men fear me often. He was going to say something and then he feared me.

“What,” I said in my Linda Blair voice, a voice that would also have to be explained to people under 40.

“No, nothing, it’s…” he tried to walk away. HE ATTEMPTED ESCAPE. Suddenly, NotPatrick was a bug and I was Iris.

“YOU HAVE TO TELL ME,” I said.

“You sort of look like, I don’t want to say it. You sort of look like Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” he said.

259975

Goddammit.

Awhile later, I saw my other coworker, Frapdorf, who adopted one of my kittens this summer, that really cute orange one, if you follow my endless parade of kittens on Instagram. One of the ones I had to bottle feed. He also took the orange one’s brother, the black and white one.

Anyone who (a) hates cats and (2) isn’t on Instagram is 100% over me at this juncture.

“Nice poncho,” said Frapdorf.

“Yeah, thanks. NotPatrick says I look like Cli–”

“CLINT EASTWOOD!!” he finished. What’s with men and that movie?

For the rest of the day, Frapdorf would sing…

any time I strolled past.

“You have not gone ahead and made my day,” I told him, and by the way, he HATES the blog name Frapdorf and I had at one point told him I’d change it but NOT TODAY, WHISTLER.

I’ve never actually seen The Good, The Bad, and The Aging is a Natural Process. What’s it about, and why is Clint Eastwood wearing that fruity poncho? Is he on his way to Burning Man after?

Anyway, that wraps up yesterday. Get it?

Pashmina,
Joop

...friend/Ned · Film · I am berserk · I am high-maintenance · Not Grace Kelly

From underneath Laila Ali

November 14, 2018 June38 Comments

Current situation: My tight-fitting Laila Ali dryer bonnet is atop my head. I’ve got fresh coffee in my favorite mug (for local folk: It’s one of those really thick ones from The Green Bean) and I DID have a dog snout in my lap till just now, when I snapped at my computer.

Does your computer…BOUNCE things at you at the bottom of the screen? First of all, why does everything need updating ALL THE TIME on one’s computer? Surely these aren’t all necessary.

The other day, I finally acquiesced to the CONSTANT bouncing request to update something or other, and after having to shut everything down and wait, then click a bunch of shit to get back on again, once all that was done and I could commence using my computer again, do you know what it did?

It asked if I wanted it to check for updates. Something at the bottom of my screen BOUNCED at me to ask. So you know what I did? I said okay. After being unable to use my computer for 40 minutes so everything could update, I wanted the satisfaction of that damn bouncing thing saying, Sorry. I bounced for no reason. Sorry I’m Tigger.

But you know what happened instead? IT TOLD ME I NEEDED UPDATES.

I HAD JUST UPDATED IT JUST THEN THAT MOMENT.

Goddammit.

So that’s why Edsel took his snout away just now. I just got all set up here at my desk when

BOUNCE

went two, not one but two, things at the bottom of my screen.

“WHAT,” I snapped, and Edsel has left the lap of luxury. He fears my moods.

I guess in general, I hate being interrupted. I assume this has to do with my attention deficit problem, in that I have a deficit of attention. So once you pull me away from something, I get highly irritated because I know it’s going to be difficult for me to get back where I was. It’s, like, all I can do to stay focused in the first place and now you’re pulling me away to say, “How was your weekend?”

The open floor plan at work vexes me. Can you tell?

Anyway, so I’m back in the swing of everything, if you want to call this swinging. I got to work and had exactly what I like, actually. A ton of stuff due in a just-a-bit-scary-but-doable amount of time, no one rushing in to tell me to set that aside to tackle ANOTHER scary thing, and also there was free dessert from some meeting. So.

Then at night, I went to my old movie theater and saw Rear Window.

Isn’t this like the 20th time you’ve seen Rear Window at that theater, June?

Actually, no. The last time I had planned to go, with Ned, and at the last minute I had a crisis du jour and told him I had to cancel. An hour later, my crisis was averted, and I phoned Ned and he wasn’t there.

This was back in like year one or two, when I still liked Ned and I did not know the way of his people, such as he is a

PIT

BULL

about plans. He makes a plan, he sticks with said plan. So what did he do? He went to Rear Window without me.

Oooooo, I was mad. I guess I’d wanted him to stay home worried sick about my crisis. Or dash over and help. But instead he just went to the movie. Like in Family Circus, where the gramma does stuff but with the outline of deceased grandpa.

download

That was the day I Jack Ruby’d Ned.

I TORE down to the movie theater, and I WAITED outside till it was over, and oooooo, I was burning mad. I should have known then how Ned would be the whole relationship. June? I can take her or leave her. June is French dressing.

Anyway, once people started milling out of the theater, Ned said I BURST into the crowd like Jack Ruby, out of nowhere and full of rage.

I didn’t shoot him, though. I just scowled and complained.

I remember Ned calmed me down by saying, “Every time Grace Kelly was on the screen, I thought about you.” That line totally worked on me, and I am with you on the “Bitch, please” you’re uttering right now. What can I tell you? I was smitten.

Anyway, I saw it last night, the movie I mean, not Jack Ruby, and why is Grace Kelly so perfect? Why am I not her? Grace Kelly would never sit in the front seat of her car and eat Long John Silvers.

I have to go to work, and this new 8 a.m. start time is like to kill me. But before I do, I wanted to share with you this.

You’re welcome.

From out of the crowd,
Joon

ADD is--oooo, shiny! · Family

Pee-y’s Big Adventure

November 13, 2018November 13, 2018 June64 Comments

I honestly don’t even know where to start describing my trip to Michigan, so I’ll just comb through my photos and tell you everything that way. Does anyone have a comb in her back pocket I could use, a comb that you got at CVS (in 1979) that has your name on it?

…Thanks, Jill. Or Laurie. Or Tammy. No one from this generation is named Tammy. Or Karen. Our now-defunct names are the Mildreds of our generation.

I was at Hallmark on my trip. It was my mother’s birthday while I was there, and I know an organized person would have purchased a card beforehand, maybe even gotten a gift and wrapped it all up nicely or had it in a gift bag as you real women seem so wont to have on hand. What’s with y’all and the gift bags? Do you buy them in bulk, LaurieJillTammyKaren?

Other people got me a card. I’m real disappointed in your org skills, honey.

Anyway, I was lucky I remembered pants and did not have to Porky Pig it to the Hallmark, there, to get my mother a card ON her actual birthday. I had to leave her in her high chair with her cake all over her to get a card. I had to leave her at Chucky Cheese. I had to blindfold her during pin the tail on the donkey and rush out while she couldn’t see me.

The point is, they had…something for sale there on display. The fact that I can no longer recall what is a good sign I didn’t even need to consider buying it. Anyway, whatever it was was personalized. Maybe…necklaces? Let’s say they were necklaces. Or mugs. Maybe giant thick marital aids with your name on them. I forget.

The point is, and I know I already said “the point is” and at this juncture, you’re telling me you really have to go,

but the point is I swirled that display around to the Ks, and instead of my name, they had names like “Kaylen” and “Kafir” and “Krackajawa” but no…well, no NotJune.

Is there anyone out there who still thinks my name is June in real life? Let me get you some tea, Jill.

Oh my god, anyway. My trip.

I like that Olay Microsculpting Cream but it also makes me Microshiny. We sent messages to Mars from my forehead later.

Even the lines to get to the bar are drunk.

Where am I, near Mexico or Michigan? Dammit.

So as you know, from your Big Book of June Events, I traveled with the dog to Michigan this week, a now-12-hour drive that I broke up into two nights each way.

I’ve never understood people, mostly men, who want to know “which way did you take?” Why? Why do they wish to know this info? Also, I really never know. I’m just lucky I got here. In pants.

But I been living in North Carolina 11 years now, and I been driving home all that time. It always took 13 hours. This time it was less than 12. Or it would have been, had I not hit a terrifying rainstorm in the damn mountains. The Blue Ridge Mountains can suck it.

In the past, what happened was, you leave North Carolina, which doesn’t take long — like an hour. And then you’re in Virginia and sure to get a ticket and FUCK YOU, VIRGINIA. YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A FUCK YOU CLAUS.

Anyway, at some point up there past North Carolina, you got you a road called 77, and your phone would say to you, “Take this road for 6,020 miles” and you were golden. I mean, you just drove straight ahead for a day.

But THIS time, my phone kept telling me to take this one road for 19 miles then this one other road for 30 then this road for…and imagine how insane my grandmothers would find me, my grandmothers Evelyn and Nita, who are the KarenJillTammys of their time. Imagine how insane I’d sound saying over and over again that my phone told me what to do. And also that I can’t remember pants.

So there must be a new route to Michigan or something, but to tell you the truth, I’d rather just take one road the whole way and be an hour later. It’s too stressful to be all, Wait. Do I need to be paying attention? Did MY PHONE not TELL me I need to take an exit soon? And is it on the damn right or the damn left?

Anyway, I got there, in record time with 200 different freeways behind me. And then the moment I got there, it started to snow.

It was pretty, actually. And Edsel liked it. He was a perfect dog the whole trip. I don’t even know what he was up to. He didn’t woof ever, and didn’t act the fool, and I worried he wouldn’t poop the whole trip because he’s shy about dropping the Brown Lab off at the pool. But he pooped like a good poop boy!

I realize there isn’t a breed called “Brown Lab.” Now I’m like those people who say Golden Lab. If you ever want to get on my nerves, say “Golden Lab,” or also just exist.

Aunt Kathy wonders why I’m such a bitch. Aunt Kathy speaks for our nation.

Anyway, I feel like I didn’t really cover much in the way of details, but as you know details are my strong suit, and what’s my job again? Speaking of which, I ought to get off this machine and into a shower, so I can attend said job and find the devil in the deets.

Talk to you tomorrow, when possibly I might make more sense, but let’s not bank on that.

Truthfully,
Joon

June's stupid life

I’m taking a drive with my best friend (name that band)

November 9, 2018 June42 Comments

I’m in Michigan, blogging from my phone. With Edsel. I mean, he’s not blogging. Now I picture him tapping his dog phone with his dog claws. edz blawg from iBone.

We’re having the season’s first real snow today, as it always does on or right near my mother’s birthday, which is today. She is 100 years young. I’m Willard Scott. Enjoy Smuckers.

E6F3FE92-D372-48D0-BF1A-90A7D3A455CF — Edsel has discovered the squirrels outside. This is not good. My mother has some sort of feeder situation going on out there, and he wants his own feeder situation. If you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

Anyway. We drove here Wednesday and Thursday, the dog and me, and stayed at a dog-friendly hotel. It was dog-curious.

We drove six hours Wednesday night; as soon as I got out of work we got on the road. It was pitch black the whole drive, and boring AF.

I hadn’t eaten dinner, and when we got to the hotel, they told me the kitchen had just closed. Son of a bitch. I got up to the room, and they had a cute little welcome kit for Edsel.

Oh, sure, they had food for the dog.

Anyway, I called downstairs for a glass of wine to be sent up. “We just had last call, ma’am.”

Son of a bitch.

Eds was very good at the hotel. I worried he might bark at people walking past our room, but he never did even once. He was also good in the car. He was mostly a letter C, I have no idea why.

I’m here for my mother’s birthday and also because there’s the film festival in town. Last night, we went to see The Wife, not that I’m married, and it was at this old movie theater I went to 100 million times when I was a kid and haven’t been to since I saw Wayne’s World in the early 90s.

DE84A3B1-0594-4818-B4F1-974B4B80EC8C 424A33F9-DD4C-46D6-892D-1F69F2F456F4

B5F9A33A-FED0-4F8E-A3F6-2237C0D73DBB — It’s like I’m at Sundance. Saginaw dance.

When I was a teenager, we lived right near that movie theater. In the summer, they would show dollar movies. I must’ve walked down there three or four times a week, because it was cheap, it was entertainment, and most of all it was air-conditioned. This is probably why I still go to movies all the time today. Anyway, it was cool as shit to be back in there.

I have to go get a card for my mother. Look, I was planning a lot to get here. I asked her if she had any spare cards and YOU KNOW SHE DOES cause she’s a mother, but she refuses to give me a spare card. So now I gotta traipse out in this BLIZZARD. God.

Talk to you later. My mother won’t stop talking to me even though I said I was honing my marvelous craft here on my phone.

Friends · June's stupid life

Wingdog

November 7, 2018 June37 Comments

Edsel is my wingman. We’re going on a road trip together tonight. I have never actually understood what “wingman” means. He’s going to eat my leftover wings? Because Edsel will surely do that.

Anyway, tonight after work, once it’s dark and dangerous, The Eds and I are getting in the car and heading to Michigan. We have a reservation, under his name, at a very nice hotel in West Virginia for the halfway point. I stay there every time I head back, and I know I have many photos of me posing under the bad art in the bar there, but I do not have time to Google that for you right now, as I have to get old Mutt and Jeff to the daycare, where he will be getting bathed, and that is fortunate for all involved, except maybe Edsel.

Also, that was a beautiful and concise sentence, up there.

A housesitter is coming to make sure Iris and Lily do not bludgeon the kitten.

In the meantime, careful readers will note that I have the kind of mail slot that comes in through the door (squeee! Have always wanted. See? Wishes really do come true.) and also that yesterday I told you I had to get my washer fixed.

My reliable and not-ridiculous new handyman, who we will call Not Alf, called me midday. “I’m sorry to call you during work,” he said, because he’s reliable and not ridiculous. “But I’ve been watching YouTube videos all morning to try to figure out what we need to do with your washer. Did you really wear a wedding dress to work today?”

See. I don’t even remember telling him I was going to do that. But you and I both know it’s one of my signature lines. Maybe I could’ve whipped out the Matt-Rick-teal-homecoming-dress new material I developed for y’all yesterday.

Also, stop calling homecoming “HoCo.” Just stop, before I bludgeon you like I’m one of my cats.

Anyway, what he decided was, the washer might be shot, but he’s gonna order this one part and we’re gonna see if we can get one more year out of that thing, and meanwhile he said I can USE my washer, it just won’t, you know, churn the clothes like it ought to.

Well.

I HAD to wash clothes because I was so out of clean items that I wore my wedding dress to work.

I’ll give you a second to stitch up your split sides.

But really, I leave for this trip, nothing is clean, it was worrisome. So last night when I got home, I was laundry speed queen. I was meeting The Other Copy Editor, fmr., at 7:00, and I managed one and a half loads before I got up with her.

We had a beer and watched election returns like they were sports, except neither of us would be caught dead watching sports. TOCE, fmr., is the one who owns that nice old bed and breakfast on the same street where I spent my year abroad. She and her husband used to wander down and sit on my front porch there.

I texted her before we met up. “I know you live on the same street as he, but just so you know, this is a No-Ned November, possibly segueing into a No-Ned ’19, so there will be no Ned talk tonight.”

“Oh, I got plenty of my own stuff to talk about,” she said, and she did.

…I don’t know that you can tell, as I was unable to really capture this on …not film. I was unable to capture it on phone. But I just looked up, and the sun is shining on the rain, fmr., on my den window, and it looks like someone pressed a zillion diamonds on my screen, which, that person should maybe look into other hobbies.

I wonder if this diamond-presser is related to Jack Frost? Jack Frost always freaked me the fuck out. Stay away from my window.

Stay away from my back door, too.

Disconnect the telephone lines.

Relax, baby, enjoy that wine.

Me and my important ’70s lyrics must leave you now, but I’ll try to write you from the road. With m’wingdog.

Wanderlustily,
Joop

Hair · Money

June-o Vannelli

November 6, 2018November 6, 2018 June70 Comments

A. I’m dyeing my roots.
B. My mouse battery is very low. This means (I’m not gonna say the struggle is real. If you hear me saying the struggle is real, I want you to impale me with 10 mouses) THE STRUGGLE WAS REAL even getting on here, and it took ages, and NOW I gotta stop and rinse my dye.

I just gotta stop. And tell you what I feel about you, babe. I just gotta stop. The world ain’t right without ya babe. I just gotta stop.

And rinse my roots.

Did EVERYONE have a perm in the early ’80s? Was it the LAW? (June acts like she wasn’t sportin’ the perm. Say it loud, I poodle and I’m proud.)

…Okay. Roots, rinsed. Self, cleansed. Laila Ali hairdryer, on. Looking, fetch.

What’s with me and all the predictable jokes today? Fetch. ’80s perms. Any ref to the ’80s at all.

Would you like to know what bugs the shit out of me? When people make everything about the ’80s. Blue eyeshadow. NOT AN ’80s INVENTION. I remember traipsing to the drug store in the snow to get me some baby-blue eyeshadow in the late ’70s. What might be more accurate is electric-blue eyeliner. Now, that was some ’80s shit.

Anyway, I’m tryina think of what’s new. Oooo! I know one thing.

This weekend, I knew I had to pay bills. Although I’ve read online that least one of you was “so sick” of hearing about how I didn’t have money, and what a strain that must have been for you, to hear about how my husband left me when I was jobless, and how my mother offered to buy my house from me but I wanted to remain independent, so somehow I MANAGED TO NEVER MISS A HOUSE PAYMENT even though I was unemployed. I’m so sorry that annoyed you. Let me guess, husband has always had a good job and you live in a cookie-cutter modern house? Talk-to-the-manager horseshoe hairdo?

June is feisty today.

Anyway, I hadda pay my bills, including the mortgage, for the first time since moving in here.

When I first sold my house and moved in here, I sat in a Subway parking lot during one lunch hour and paid off bill after bill. $500 I owed the lawn guy, boom. Doctor bill I was trying to make payments on, boom. Stupid Ultherapy that didn’t work, boom.

Bill after bill after bill. They were mostly $500 here or $250 there, but they were all over the place. Then I waited for my credit score to go up (why does a BAD thing affect your credit almost immediately, but a GOOD thing takes 60 days to make your score go up?).

But I kind of forgot I did all that as I sat down with my pile of bills. Truthfully, every bill time, I had to set aside several hours, first to gird myself for how anxiety-inducing it was, then to be in a bad panicked mood after. I did that this past Sunday. I had several hours no one expected to hear from me.

So. Mortgage first. …Oh, okay, that’s right. It’s lower than it used to be. Maybe I’ll round it up to the next hundred. Put that on the principal. Principle? Which is it for a mortgage? I’ll round it up to the Mr. Dixon. Because Room 222 references are fetch.

Then I paid the water bill. The electric. My phone. My internet.

Well! But…

I looked around me. I went back to my bill box. There was one thing left in there, under my alarm instructions. A check for $250, something about overpaid mortgage from the last house.

I paid all my bills, have emergency savings, a credit score inching up toward 800, 15% a pay period going to my four-oh-wonk,

AND I HAVE MONEY LEFT OVER after paying the bills.

Oh my god! Who even am I?

Afterward, I celebrated by painting the dresser pink, and that was a mistake. I’d show you photos, but my mouse is hooked up to the same little cable thing that my phone hooks up to the computer with, and there was a marvelously constructed sentence.

The point is, I’m scared to UNplug my mouse to plug in the phone and upload the photos for you.

Anyway, I hate it. Ima try to repaint it Kid Glove, the white-ish color, and I act like something can be white or sort of white. I guess it’s more of an ivory, merchant.

I must go, as it is 7:42 and I have to be at my desk at 8:00, via my new hours. I have no makeup on, and in the ’90s–not the ’80s–when I ventured out sans makeup and just a little sandalwood oil, I was all fresh! and natural! Now I look like I was pulled from the river. On Sunday afternoon I stopped at a coffee shop sans makeup, and a handsome age-appropriate man was walking in as I was walking out. I smiled at him and he looked down, like he’d turn to stone if he looked at anyone that hideous.

No, mom. He was not intimidated by my beauty. Also, he was not gay. Mom pulls out all the stops before she admits someone just wasn’t that into me.

Also, I like how I leave the impression I was there for coffee and not a chocolate croissant. Why so not fetch?

I’ll talk to you tomorrow when I hope I can report I have a fixed washer. The owners, fmr., of this house, left the washer and dryer at my request, but I do believe they’re from the ’70s, not the ’80s, and I washed my comforter in there and broke the damn thing. So my sensible reliable handyman is coming today, because nothing is clean and I have to wear the calf-length teal dress I wore to 10th-grade homecoming to work today, along with the nude low-heel shoes that went with said dress.

That was in the ’80s.

I see pictures of people’s kids at homecoming now, and they’re all hootchie-gootchie girls, and I dressed like one of the Golden Girls at 17. Dear Matt Rick, my homecoming date in 1982: I am sorry I dressed like Rose Nylund and not a go-go dancer at homecoming. At least my Princess Diana hairdo was fetch.

Okay, really going now.

Juan

Neighbors of June

Peg o’ My Heart

November 4, 2018November 4, 2018 June75 Comments

Before I could go to Peg’s funeral on Saturday, I had to take the kitten to the vet.

Not only did Milhous need booster shots, but I also needed to ask what to do about the fact that he hates food.

My vet is pretty good at solving stuff. “Hang on, let me get something,” she said, and returned with a can of sardines, as you do. I thought the only people who had cans of sardines were Finnish folk or your grandpa.

The vet opened that disgusting can, plucked out one of those oversized goldfish, put it in front of Milhous, and?

That cat ate like he hadn’t eaten in a week, which he practically hadn’t.

“I’ll give you the rest of the can,” the vet said, plinking those gross still-having-eyeballs sardines into a plastic baggie.

So now what do I gotta do? Do I gotta buy sardines alla time? Where the hell do you buy sardines? The Old Man Halls Mentholyptus and Sardines Emporium?

SarDine and Deluca?

Once we were done, I screamed home and dropped off the Old Man and the Seafood, there, and got back in the car to vote. It was 12:30, Peg’s funeral was at 2:00, and I figured it’s the midterms. I’ll just pop in and pop out.

Hello, angered nation. Holy cats. There was literally no parking at the rec center. I had to go to the Dollar Store and walk back there, and then I waited in line for an hour. I finally voted. I’d say half of you might be pleased with how I voted.

At this point, I had less than half an hour till Peg’s funeral. I thought of the joke of being late for your own funeral while I screamed home, put on ANY FUCKING THING that was remotely dark and sorry-you’re-dead-looking, and screamed to the church.

I was still five minutes late; the whole thing had already begun. I was very Benjamin in The Graduate, and you can image how delighted everyone was when I dashed into the funeral yelling,

“ELAINE!!!”

“ELAINE!!!”

The good news is, no one noticed me slipping in late except the guy who made you sign the guest book. I listened to the very nice Presbyterian minister whilst I plucked the myriad animal fur off my black mourning tights. Mostly I was just going through the motions, till they played a “reflective piece,” according to the program.

Peg had been a member of this church; she was in the choir. I knew pretty much all the members of said choir, as they had regularly attended the many parties Peg had during the 10 years she was my neighbor. There was the woman who stays pretty no matter what age she is. There’s the friend Peg and I went for Mexican food with. They were all there.

When the pianist got up, I expected some somber hymn. But it wasn’t.

It was 100% Peg.

It was upbeat, it was whimsical, it was so absolutely her. I saw all the choir members smile and tap their feet, rockin’ out with their Presbyterian out.

And all of a sudden, the reflective song really became a reflective song. I thought of the day I met Peg, how she told me about all the good shopping in the area. I got right in the car and checked it out, that minute.

I remembered her driving me one night, in the rain, to a housewares store she knew about that sold really great stuff for cheap.

Peg was an absolutely horrifying driver.

I remembered the one, two, three times she helped me decorate my house. Peg was an artist and an interior designer, and she was good. She helped me when I first learned what she did for a living. She drew me diagrams of where things should go in each room.

She helped me again when Marvin moved out. As soon as she heard he was leaving, she took my side, even though she had no idea why he was going. I remember her helping me paint the dining room and never saying ONE WORD to on-his-way-out Marvin.

And finally, when I came back after my year abroad, she saw me get out of my car and her reaction was priceless. “Yay!!! …Ohhhh.” She was happy till she realized why I was moving back. And she helped me unpack by sitting in a chair, with wine, and telling me what to put where.

I did everything she said.

I thought of the parties she had, and all the celebrating we did together: New Year’s Day meditations downtown, Halloween when she dressed as Bob Ross, Christmas when she made the best bacon ever, the royal wedding at 5 a.m.

While that piano player was playing his so-totally-Peg tune, I thought of all that. And from the smiles all around the room, I could tell everyone else was thinking their own happy Peg thoughts.

And I know that in this life, some of us want to have fame, or wealth, or great beauty, and fortunately, I have all those things in spades.

But when you come down to it, you really can’t ask for more than to leave a group of people smiling on a sunny fall afternoon because they’re thinking about who you were while you were here.

As the funeral came to an end, I grabbed my stuff to go to the reception, and it was right then that I remembered what I had in my purse.

Peg, I’m sorry that I came to your funeral with a whole mess of sardine eyeballs staring disdainfully through a baggie.

But I think somehow you’d have loved that.

ADD is--oooo, shiny! · Busy busy busy busy. Thank heavens for Angie's List.

Morning coat at 8 p.m.

November 2, 2018 June35 Comments

Oh my gawd, this day is a WASH.

Is a wash a bad thing? or is it just an even-ing out? What I mean is this day can suck it.

First of all, note I’m here 12 hours late. When we last spoke, swearing we’d stay together forever and exchanging class rings (isn’t mine nice?), I was on the horns of a dilemma re what my new hours at work would be.

I decided on 8 to 5. I get a lot of “Can you do this today?!” requests at, like, 4:00, which is relaxing, so planning on an earlier departure would be for naught.

So, the new schedule started November 1, and in case you aren’t being kept abreast of the dates because you’re in a tower somewhere, like let’s say you’re Rapunzel, or a prisoner of war, or a sex slave or something, this is November 2, so I had to start my new hours forthwith. (Also, you may have bigger fish to fry beyond, “What day is this” and “Which hours did June select for work?”)

The point is, that alarm went off this morning at what felt like 2 a.m. and I wanted to die. Oh, I felt out of it. I was foggy, I was without personality, I had no will to live.

It was 30 minutes earlier than my usual wakeup. Thank god for daylight savings this weekend.

Anyway, I did not blog. Because personality, where is it. Searching for Bloggy Fisher.

I worked from home today, as I was expecting a delivery and also my handyman who is not Alf came over.

Once, a few weeks ago, Alf couldn’t help me out, so I cheated on him, and I found a distinctly NOT ridiculous handyman who is straightforward and dependable, and I am sorry he is not as fun to hear about as Alf, but he put up two light fixtures for me today, to replace a brown-and-brass ceiling fan

and also a fluorescent light, because nothing says Home Sweet Home like an office light.

We didn’t know what we’d find when we removed the old lights, but now he has to come back and

fill

holes

and paint over the discolored rectangle up on m’ceiling. He comes back Monday. See, that would have taken 49 nonsensical texts with Alf to arrange.

Anyway, while all that was going on today I had WORK OUT MY ASS, and I was work work working as hard as I could, I was ROCK-HARD working, I was RAM-STRAIGHT HARD working, and then I hope you’re sitting down but I got a “Can you do this today?!?” email at 4:00 and I ended up working 8:00 TO 5:30, and Lu totally resent.

Mostly I resent because for MONTHS, YEARS, even, ALL MY LIFE, pretty much, I’ve been so, so, so looking forward to today, which is November 2, Rapunzel the Sex Slave, because as you know it’s the day the Freddie Mercury movie premieres and ALL I WANTED was to type in all caps a lot but then also GO TO THAT MOVIE and it started at 5:50 and please see above re working till 5:30, and I still had to slop all the hogs and I looked like shit so I thought, oh, I’ll just go to the 7:00 showing and guess who fell asleep and missed it by five minutes.

This day is a wash.

Tomorrow I take Milhous to the vet, although he is now eating, but he still needs shot boosters. He’ll deign to eat some adult cat food in a can. That’s it. Not that he personally sits in a can, but speaking of which, he FELL into the toilet today and I am so glad I was home. I was all, What sounds barf and it was a kitten plunking into the toilet, and if you ever need a barf sound effect, turns out that’ll do, pig.

Also, speaking of barfing, tomorrow I head off to Peg’s funeral. Cel-e-brate good times, come on!

Did I tell you Peg, my neighbor, fmr., died? Peg was the best. She really was. It’s sad. Everything is sad, honey.

My grandmother said that to me once, when I was in high school. Why so atypically depressed, June?

And after the vet and the funeral, Ima paint. See? I’m finally getting to the paint portion of our blog.

Careful readers will note that most of this house is painted kind of a coffee with cream color. My problem is, this house is way too tasteful. Fortunately for me, I still have a can of Sleepy Blue like I had in my old bedroom, which will go in my …new bedroom. And I have a can of Quietude, which goes in the den. Ned once said I speak of Quietude the way other people speak of the home run they hit in 1979.

But this weekend, I’m painting the living room a color called Alabaster, and I am doing so because a woman whose house I admire said to paint it that color and I’m all, okay. I will do whatever you say. Because your house. I admire.

Also, I am painting my dresser a pinky rose.

Shut up. I don’t care.

I’ve wanted to paint the dresser for awhile. Last weekend, I was at the never-busy Lowe’s paint department, waiting while every woman on god’s earth ordered a light green, a Quietude, if you will, for her walls. They sell furniture paint there that you get a can of and have them make it into a color from their brochure. That’s how my nightstand became seafoam. Don’t it make my nightstand, don’t it make my nightstand, don’t it make my brown nightstand bluuuuee (-green.)

I was planning to have them mix up for me the white-ish color of furniture paint, Kid Glove, but I’ve been walking around with a fabric sample from my new chair in my purse, like that’s just what you do, and since I was there

for

fucking

ever,

I matched the fabric of my chair to the paint colors available in their furniture paint,

and by the time it was finally my fucking turn at bat, I said, “Mix me up soma that Morning Coat, and be lively with ya, m’lad.”

Then the guy at Lowe’s cockpunched me.

Don’t you like me better at the end of the day, after a nap and maybe a snort of the hootch? I know I do.

And look here, Miss Beige-y Basic Bitch of the Beige. I don’t CARE that a pink dresser isn’t your taste, and you want me to be tasteful, and do a taste-y freeze on my choices. I just don’t care. This is the joy of being single. You get to paint your dresser Morning Coat, whatever that is.

Edz: wat wrong wif beyge? Milhous: wat dat spot on flor?

So that sums me up, I think, and I’ll report back to you post vet/funeral/tape/patch/paint/ooo, pink!

Going into the weekend like:
June

June's stupid life

Sweet November

November 1, 2018November 1, 2018 June60 Comments

Did you ever see that movie? Sweet November, I mean? It stars a very namby-pamby dying Sandy Dennis, which I guess is redundant. I think they remade it later and I never saw the remake, because remakes annoy me, with the exception of A Star is born, which I have seen twice and will see 700 more times.

Yesterday was Halloween, and I went as a disappointed middle-aged woman. As I was leaving work the night before Halloween, people asked me what my costume was going to be, and I said I didn’t have one.

“WHYYYY?” they were wondering.

“Because I’m an adult,” I said, and for a moment that burned until they remembered who they were talking to. Adult. heeeeee!

Yeah.

Actually, the woman in the next row at work is pregnant, and it was only one day before Halloween that it dawned on me we could have gone as Mia Farrow and Ruth Gordon.

6b089e7970f917b050bd8c01ba19f6a5

In case anyone’s keeping track, that marks the 54th year I’ve gotten a great idea too late. But next year? Ryan at work, and me. Harold and Maude.

Clearly I just want to be Ruth Gordon. “Love fades.” She says that in Annie Hall, do you remember that? Maybe you would have needed to see Annie Hall 79 times as I have.

Soon I’ll be quoting A Star is Born all the time! Won’t that be refreshing?

Anyway, so other, life-embracing people dressed up at work yesterday, and we had a contest and so on, and then later in the day people brought their kids. I took pictures of people’s kids in 2013, and now whenever these same families come to my desk for candy, I whip out the Google Photos and force them to look at themselves from years back.

The Poet and her pals as the four seasons. The Poet is summer. You’re welcome. And yes, I DO adore the winter guy. He’s the bomb.

My boss, fmr., crnt., fmr. and now crnt. With her offspring, crnt.

Do you enjoy my clever editing skillz, with taking the name plates and making them useless? I’m like a photo editor guru. Every time I say that word, I say it, “guRU,” because there’s a Hallmark commercial where this woman visits her old professor, and he says, “What did you become, an internet guRU?” and she says, “No, a teacher,” and pretty much every Hallmark commercial sends me into fits of the weeps.

Anyway, the copy editor guRU who sits behind me had come to work at FIVE TO 6:00 yesterday morning to get a big thing done, so she left before the kids got there at 4:00, but put this candy right behind me and Dear Children: I am sorry the other copy editor did not leave you any candy. She’s so rooood. Luff Juun.

Anyway, after that I sat on my porch and waited for trick-or-treaters, millhouse edition. My neighbors tell me the people who owned my house used to have a big bonfire and serve hot chocolate, and clearly I am not a life-embracey person as they are.

You know what I like? I adore Day of the Dead. Apparently I’m a death-embracey person.

My point is, I had a few T-or-Ters, but not a lot.

That about sums up yesterday, not that you asked, except as I was getting ready for bed, I wondered what was up with Milhous, who finally ate, like, 10 bites of adult canned cat food and that was better than he WAS doing, so.

Anyway, I was all, why’s he obsessed with my nightstand, which careful readers will note I painted kind of a seafoam.

Anyway, once he got his buff ass pushed off the newly green nightstand, I realized Iris was glowering inside the bowels of it. She’s really not that mad. I mean, she’s not growling or anything. But she wanted her sanctuary, man, and Milhous can’t let her be.

It was kind of a “shove Milhous off things” kinda night.

But in the end, he prevailed.

I will leave now, but I know I have to tell you about paint, and I really know how to lure the reader back for more. Also, they’re having us send in an official thing® at work about what our hours are gonna be, and you can get in any time between 7:00 and 9:30, and you can take half an hour or an hour for lunch, and leave once it’s been 8 hours that you’ve worked.

So which should I go for? Like, 8:00 to 5:00 with an hour for lunch? Or 9:30 to 6:00 with half an hour for lunch? Somewhere in between? I can’t decide.

Meanwhile, Lily has decided the kitten litterbox is again preferable. Sigh.

Milling around,
June

June's stupid life

Let’s scare each other

October 31, 2018 June95 Comments

I’m running late because I’ve spent all morning presenting Milhous with 75 kinds of food he won’t eat.

At the shelter, they gave me a bag of Science Diet kitten food, claiming that’s what he’d been eating.

Won’t eat it. Covers it up with his paws.

So I gave him a can of kitten Fancy Feast.

Won’t eat it. Covers it up with his assy paws.

Okay, then. Would you eat another dry kitten food? Let me head to the store again and get you another brand, she says a trifle shrilly.

COVERS IT.

What about adult canned food, she asks desperately.

Paw. Dick-ass paw, covering it.

WHAT ABOUT DRY ADULT FOOD? FOR ADULTS ONLY CHICKA BOW-WOW?

COVERS IT.

He has the energy of a thousand suns, and he drinks water, but I’ve only seen him indifferently nibble a few bites of adult canned food. Everything else can go to hell.

Meanwhile, Lily and Iris are Templeton at the fair, as they are getting his dregs.

images

So, anyway, I was gonna tell you all about seeing Nosferatu at my old movie theater last night, where they had a live organist as opposed to a dead one playing, which would have been more in keeping with Halloween, but I guess really I just wrapped that all up even though I said I was “gonna” tell you.

B000PUQTWS_nosferatu_UXEG1._RI_SX940_ — Nosferatu coming back from a mani

But since I have to get in the shower now and worry about my kitten, and also make sure I have enough razors to stick in all the Halloween candy, I thought I’d turn it over to you today.

Let’s scare each other.

Yesterday I mentioned to The Poet that I was going to see Nosferatu, and she said the photos from that movie scare her to this day, and Dear Poet: Sorry I just scared you with that photo above.

I cannot, I mean cannot, look at anything having to do with The Exorcist or I get chilled to my very bone parts. That movie scares the crap out of me.

(Also, Milhous craps, so he MUST be eating something, right? He’s over in the chair and I can hear him purring. He seems fine other than NOT EATING.)

Anyway, back to our topic. The Poet and I then discussed other movies that have always scared us, and I told her about one that was on TV late at night, at some point in the early ’70s, and these people, I think, killed someone? And wrapped the victim in a sheet? And placed him on the elevator in their apartment to get rid of the body?

But then the ghost of that sheet would ride past their place, whistling and so on and trust me it was terrifying. The elevator would come up, right in their living room, and there’d be that sheet, just whistling.

“But what I wanna know is, how desperate for an apartment must you be to elect a place that has an elevator going right through it?” I asked.

“Might it have been a dumbwaiter?” The Poet asked.

And right then I knew.

ALL MY LIFE I’ve gone around thinking that movie had an apartment with an elevator going right through the living room–and hey, good design–when I’ll bet you anything it was a dumbwaiter and I was too young to know what one was back then.

So, my point is, what movies still scare you to this day?

Or even better, what ghosty things happened to you that you can’t explain, that still kind of scare you to this day?

When I was a kid, we turned part of the basement into a TV room. I’m certain we thought we were the height of sophistication with the particle-board walls we put up, decorated with a WC Fields poster.

That room had one bare hanging bulb you had to pull a chain to turn on or off, a dark-blue velvet chair and an old couch, plus one TV tray, as I recall. I watched all my Saturday morning cartoons down there, till the sun would creep in the windows and I’d feel guilty and bring my bowl up and go outside out of some sort of childhood duty.

Anyway, it was always slightly creepy to pull the chain on the bulb and leave the dark TV room and have the rest of the dark basement among you. I’d always

RUSH

up the basement steps, in a way that would kill my knees now. Each step was covered in a sort of brown ribbed plastic that kept you from slipping, and in my MIND, there was always a scary creature, let’s say Nosferatu, just behind me, and if I made it up the brown steps I’d be fine.

So one time I’d successfully escaped the clutches of Nosferatu, Saginaw basement version, and at the top of the steps, I stared down to the basement in victory.

And the light in the TV room?

Turned on.

Then off.

Then on.

Then

MOTHER OF GOD I GOT THE HELL OFF THAT LANDING AND INTO THE KITCHEN

and I never told anyone that story till now.

So now you go.

...friend/Ned

Catch up on…June’s love life

October 30, 2018 June52 Comments

First of all, I’m not back together with Ned, and I’m not sleeping with Ned.

Okay, once.

As you know, from your Big Book of–oh, hell, like two days ago, I told you that since I changed my mind at the last minute about which house I wanted to buy, I ended up being homeless for about 10 days.

I closed on my house the day a hurricane was coming. The news was obsessed. Flo is on its way! No hurricane in the history of time will be as bad as Florence! You thought Florence from The Jeffersons was bad, wait till you see THIS, sucka!

Didn’t she always call Mr. Jefferson “sucka”? Why wasn’t she terminated?

They ended up moving the time of my closing to earlier in the day so that we could all get our business done before we washed out to sea. I was just excited that if a tree fell on my old house, I’d not be responsible.

Twasn’t an unfounded fear, as a HUGE tree fell in my old neighbor’s yard. It’s still there, last time I creepy crawled my old house. (The new owner’s put up a privacy fence and a screen door in the front and fixed the deck, and when I spoke to her once, she told me she’d painted the whole inside neutral.)

So on the first day of Hurricane Florence, I went to the shabby old downtown office of a shabby old attorney who was clearly suffering from some sort of personality disorder, and we signed the 20204023 papers that he had to reprint because he’d misspelled my name on all of them.

My real name. It’s f-e-l-d. It doesn’t have an “i” in it.

THERE IS NO FIELD IN JUNE GARDENS.

Anyway, after we finished with Mr. Personality, up there, in the law offices of Smile, Chat and Eye Contact, LLC, the rain was starting to fall, and the sky had an otherworldly feel.

I like how this is supposed to be a rundown of my love life and is instead a blow-by-blow account of my closing date.

The point is, they were predicting this giant hurricane and the 40 pets and I had just moved in with Ned temporarily. There were all sorts of dire warnings about not going anywhere, so Ned stocked up on eggs, oranges, beans, rice and beer, while I stocked up on Beefaroni.

And then we were stuck together in a hurricane house for days on end. I mean, we weren’t allowed to go anywhere, which by the way ended up being sort of a hurricane who cried wolf and not that strong here, and then like two weeks later another hurricane

came through and was scary as shit.

Oh my god, June, get to your vagina.

Right, so, Ned and I lived together for 10 days, and we got along great. It was like the first days of our relationship, minus the bone-chilling fear that he’d leave me that I had during those first years. So we were having fun living together, and we were stuck in the house for days, and bing, bang, boom, there it was. We Did It.

Hey, mom.

But we are not back together by any stretch. We aren’t even speaking, currently, but when we are speaking, I can tell Ned is out there on the prowl. And the greatest part is, I give no shits about that. Go. Find a new person. I hope she’s a succulent. I was an orchid.

I sound bitter. Maybe I am, a bit, because I’d set my sights on him so much. But we’re too different to ever be a thing again.

You know what I want? I want a man who comes over on a Friday and stays through Sunday. Actually, now that I write that, that sounds horrendous. Get the fuck out of my house.

But I want someone who can just hang out, is I guess what I mean. With Ned, we always had to be doing something or have some kind of plan. We were always on a date. We could never just be. We were never just reading our books on the couch, with no plan in mind, not even when we lived together. Ned was always, “What do you want to do now?” and if I didn’t want to do anything, he’d leave. “Well, then I’m gonna ride my bike.”

There was a level of intimacy missing from that. At least that’s how I saw it.

So as for someone new, nope. And I’m not even trying. I’m not on any dating sites right now. I had a bad date on Good Friday, and that’s the last one I recall. Last Saturday I saw Ward, a man I went out with a few times in 2017, but I don’t know if it counts as a date. We’ve texted sporadically since then.

I think maybe at this age, there just aren’t many good men. You know who’d be the best, probably? Widowers. At least they made the relationship work till they offed their wives. I should hang around the funeral homes, or maybe grieving groups.

“What are you grieving?”

“The elasticity of my skin.”

I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t care if I never meet another man or have another relationship. Maybe that sounds sad and dreadful and Miss Havisham-ish to you, but there it is. I don’t feel sad and dreadful, I just feel sort of resigned. Contrary to what they say, there is not a lid for every pot, and I don’t even want anyone to put a lid on me.

It might be that I’m too set in my ways.

So that wraps up June’s love life and oh! For some reason, many people really want to know why Nancy, Ned’s cat, was a twat. There was much interest in the land re Nancy’s twatitude.

When Nancy lived at my house, when I was fostering her kittens, she never met the other pets. Then she moved in with Ned, and then 10 months later we all traipsed in one day and she wasn’t having it.

The other pets were fine with HER, but she was never fine with THEM. She spent 10 days growling.

For a normally cheerful cat, she was just a stripy bag of bitch that whole time. So that dashes any hopes Ned would have for getting a second cat. Not that that wouldn’t take him seven years of “deciding” anyway.

So now you know.

Catch you tomorrow, you stripy bags of bitches,

June

Proofreading/Copy editing

Catch up on June’s…hard-hitting career. The Asses of Roses edition.

October 29, 2018 June45 Comments

It’s been so long since I’ve gotten up in the morning and not blogged. These other posts I wrote at night, the posts since my triumphant return. Celebrate June’s triumphant return at the country fairgrounds and civic center.

I wish you tell you what’s new with work, but I worry about getting fired. I guess I can tell part of it because the company president told the story at our company meeting. Say “company” one more time, June.

I can’t remember which of the four states I’ve lived in that used to say the utterly hilarious line, “If you don’t like the weather in [Michigan, Washington, California, North Carolina], just wait five minutes and it’ll change.”

Whew. Let me get my needle and thread so I can stitch up m’sides. Oh, I can’t catch my breath.

Anyway, it was probably Washington, although in truth it is 63 degrees and raining in Washington 99% of the time.

Maybe it was Michigan, although in truth it’s 4 below zero there nine months out of the year there.

It wasn’t California. It’s 78 and sunny there. It just is.

Maybe it was here.

The POINT is, for the last year and a half, my job has been like that weather. Wait five minutes and something’s different. We’re going through a lot. And the thing is, I was really happy there, back when it was the way it was for the first six years.

My and my horn hair on my first day of work seven-and-a-half years ago

So the first thing that happened this year was in February, a place I freelance for, a publishing house nearby, offered me a job out of the clear blue sky. I’d have been a senior editor, and it would have been sort of fancy. But they couldn’t pay me much more than I make already, AND I’d have a 40-minute commute instead of a five-minute one, so when I added it up, it didn’t make financial sense, and you all know what a financial guru I am.

“On-time” does not need a hyphen, up there.

You know what, though? I AM being a financial guru lately, so suck it.

I believe that’s Suze Ormon’s slogan. “I’m a financial guru. Suck it.”

Oh my god, anyway. So I turned that job down.

But I know you know that the changes at work had made me sad, feeling isolated. And so this summer I searched for a job and I found one. I got offered a job in Blacksburg, Virginia, although I wouldn’t have had to move there. I know someone in Blacksburg, though, a person I dated maybe three times before the distance got to both of us. So I know it’s cute there, had I been forced to move eventually.

I was going to be the manager of their social media, and that would’ve been exciting because two days ago marked the official 22nd year of me being a copy editor. At this point, there’s not much more I can, you know, learn about copy editing.

“You’re not gaining experience, you’re gaining years,” my Uncle Bill, who is a job guru, told me.

So I accepted the position. I’d be working from home, which I was a little worried about hating, but still.

I put in my notice at work, and my last day was going to be July 3.

I gave notice at the end of one day, and the next morning when I walked into work, I was heavy with regret. What had I done? Sure, I’d had some struggles, but mostly I loved it there.

HR had sent me an exit interview form that I could fill out instead of an in-person thing if I wanted. So I’d filled it out that morning, before work. I was just getting all set up at my desk and had even announced my leaving my job on stupid Instagram–in fact, I’d JUST hit Post–when my phone rang.

It was the president of our company. You know, as you do. Calling June’s phone. Another day, another buzz from the desk of our president.

“Hello, president of our company,” I said. I really did, too. I like to think I’m charmingly quirky, but probably everyone there wishes I’d die a fiery death or maybe melt like the Wicked Witch of the Weird.

“Have you got a minute?” he asked, and I always love it when powerful people ask you that. Well, you know, I just posted to Instagram and I kind of wanted to stay near my phone and watch the emoji responses roll in.

Photo on 10-29-18 at 8.14 AM — My personal fave emoji. Be more dramatic, emoji.

Anyway. You’ll be stunned to hear I said, “Oh, sure, I have a minute,” because hello.

The president of our company is a very likable person who clearly does 230483403205302 sit-ups a day. He probably gets up seven hours before I do and works out and then presidents and also never blogs emoji faces. He’s dignified. I understand that Rip Taylor is more dignified than me, but still.

My point is, there I was in the president’s office, which in the case of my company is not oval. It’s more of a rectangle.

And what we did in there was, we talked. I was honest with him about how I felt, he was honest with me about what’s going on, and in the end, I stayed.

I mean, it’s nice to know a quirky-yet-not-lovable, ancient, cranky copy editor who recently was in a hurry and tried to fix the spelling of assess and accidentally changed it to asses is valued, you know?

So I stayed. And then three days later got set selling my house, because chaos addict.

I have to go to work now, speaking of work, but I have many things to tell you about PAINT, so I know you’re on the edge of your seat, which sounds like a recipe for chafing. Toooooon in tomorrow for JUNE TALKS PAINT. WHAT SMELLS PAINT.

Meanwhile, I just went in to get more coffee and here were the sights I enjoyed.

My favorite thing kittens do is when they just walk around like real cats, not knowing how adorable that is.

Talk to you later. We can asses the situation.

Corporate-ladderly,
JOON

P.S. This latest shooting, and how ridiculous that we have to call it “this latest shooting” makes me want to convert to Judaism. I have no idea why. But I think I’d make a fine Jewish person. I mean, I’m a fine anything. #Solid6.

Faithful Readers · My pets

Catch up on June’s…animals (ya got all weekend?)

October 27, 2018 June55 Comments

Before I begin delighting you all with pet speak, lemme tell you what just happened.

These past two days, I’ve been tryina keep up with reading blog comments, but it’s not easy. I tried looking at them here, not in email, and one thing that’s irking me is the comments are in order from oldest to newest. So every time, I saw the same comments and had to scroll endlessly.

From my phone, I tried to mess around with my comment display on WordPress, and you’ll never guess what I found.

Apparently, there is someplace on my blog (not blog) that tells you, a faithful reader, that if you click here you can send a personal message to June, and that June will know this and read it.

Except I never knew this place existed till an hour ago. If you sent me a message there and you were all, What a bitch, you were right, but not about the part where I didn’t answer you. (And in fact, even if I had read these as they came to me, there’s no Reply button.)

I sat here for a whole hour reading messages y’all have sent me since day one of me being here on WordPress. And with no Reply button, I had to sit here going, “No! I didn’t block you on Facebook” and “I’m not an admin on Facebook of June!” and so on. Oh my god, it was like a nightmare! There were sweet comments and mean ones.

My favorite was the person who said, “Are you ever coming back? Because frankly, I’m getting tired of checking here all the time.” Well, if I wasn’t tempted to return before… Apparently, it’s right up there with brick-laying, checking over here.

What most of your messages were about, though, were why I’ve blocked you or refused to let you comment or go on my Facebook page. Every single person who wrote was someone I (a) didn’t actually know and had no hard feelings toward (2) did not block in any way from any portal of my life.

One lesson I offer is to not take things so personally. Because I left Facebook months ago of my own accord, and I stopped writing here months ago of my own accord, and it was not about you, 50+ people who assumed it was.

“JUNE. Why did you block me on Facebook?!”

“JOOON. I can’t see new posts. Did you block me from your blog?”

“JOOOOOB!!! Why won’t you let me into Pie on the Face? Why did you kick me off Pie on the Face? Why can’t I find Pie on the Face?”

So, in summary:

I can’t block anyone from seeing this blog, or new posts on this blog.
I am not on Facebook at all. I did not block you personally; I blocked myself from the whole organization.
I am not on Pie on the Face, I was not an administrator of Pie on the Face for a very long time before I left, and it’s not called Pie on the Face. It’s called (Face)Book of June.

Good gravy.

Oh, and

4. Don’t contact me via that Contact Me thing, wherever that is, because I don’t know if I’ll ever find it in the bowels of WordPress again! That was nightmarish, seeing all those messages I blithely didn’t respond to!

I suppose I should figure out how to remove that, along with the Amazon link that no longer works. Oh, June. Blogging was supposed to be fun.

Okay, onto my pets.

When we left each other, handing each other our yearbooks and swearing we’d be friends forever, 2 Good 2 Be 4Gotten, I had Edsel, Lily and Iris. Steely Dan was missing.

And he still has that loose tooth.

Still have Iris. She still has approximately .025 of an eyeball.

And I still have the Delta Burke of cats, big giant rotund yet lovely Lily.

Steely Dan is still missing.

I can’t even stand it. I left a note for the woman who bought my house, saying if an all-gray cat wanders onto her roof, he’s mine. I’ve checked the shelter 900 times because of course, I’m at the shelter 900 times a week. Or I was. For I was still fostering up until the very, very last minute of my move (they were kind of dicks about that, which I’ll tell you about further down).

In June, and who isn’t. Hrrrrrr. That was supposed to be a June’s hot love life joke, but IN JUNE, the shelter had me foster three ferals, and they broke my heart the most of all my fosters.

Because they started out terrified

and ended up being the sweetest three kittens you ever saw. They were so nice!

And how it works when you foster is this: You take them home for a week or two and medicate them if they need it and also fatten them up, like veal, then you go back to the shelter and they get booster shots. If they weigh two pounds, they’re officially adoptable. And for these three little shy muffins, they made it to two pounds way too fast for me. I was just getting them to trust me and then they were back on that adoption floor. I was haunted by the idea that they’d go back to terrified, but fortunately, you can refresh the shelter’s “adoptable cats” page like an obsessed person, and as soon as they’re adopted they leave the page, and they all found homes REALLY FAST THANK GOD.

So that ended well, but it was a rolly coaster, as one of my relatives would say.

Then at work, one of my favorite coworkers died very suddenly, in her sleep. It was awful. I’d been kibitzing with her on Friday and she died Sunday.

So my response? I got a kitten and named it Leonard, which is her last name.

And you remember the part where Edsel adores kittens? And how NINETEEN KITTENS that I can think of have passed my door this year alone? And he’s lived for them all?

He hated Leonard. I mean, he wasn’t mean or anything, but the first thing he did when I brought Leonard home was hide behind the toilet. He spent the next 10 days behind the toilet. I kept “giving it a few days” and there was Edsel, Eau de Toilette, getting tanked. He was flush with fear.

He was Kohl toward that kitten.

Eventually, The Copy Editor Who Sits Behind Me came over, took one look at Leonard and took him home.

And guess what. Leonard CONSTANTLY bites her dog. Like, he’s just a terror to her dog. She’s tried everything and is hoping he gets better with age. Not biter with age.

Eds knew.

As soon as Leonard was gone, I heard a screech in the night.

SQUEEEE!

MEEEEE!

SKEEEE!!!

“Did you hear that?” I asked my neighbor, fmr., who has a very cute cat named Oscar that Iris basically tried to kill.

“Was that a kitten?” asked my neighbor, fmr.

‘Twas. And for the next 87 nights, we sat outside of bushes and kneeled under his deck and carried on trying to get this bitty kitten to come to us, as it was clearly under duress, because did I mention

MEEEEEEEEEP!

It was so sad. I eventually put an ad on NextDrama, asking if anyone had a humane trap, and met a very nice retired math teacher who did. You can imagine the lively math talks he and I had.

Night after night I’d put canned kitten food in there like an asshole, and night after night I’d watch that slip of a kitten go in, eat the food, and walk right back out because he was too light to trip the trap.

The happy ending to that story, much like my massages, is that kitten never did get trapped but got totally friendly and up close and personal, and my neighbor, fmr.’s brother took that kitten and he’s a big friendly gray cat now. I mean, he always was a gray cat. You know what I mean.

The summer ticked by and right when I was in my OH MY GOD MY HOUSE SOLD IN A MILLISECOND drama, the shelter called. They had three two-week-old kittens, and could I take them, and bottle feed them, and teach them to poop and pee, and

SAID

YES.

It was about this time that I convinced self that I am chaos junkie.

They were so boopy and teensy at first! I put them in a laundry basket and they slept next to my bed. At first I’d get up in the night and try to bottle-feed them, but then I read if you feed them a bunch during the day, you can sleep through the night and I said Oh thank god.

Their mother had been hit by a car, so I had to be their mom, and that involves stimulating their pee parts till stuff comes out, and it’s not necessarily as tidy as you’d like that process to be.

After weeks of mixing up formula and bottle-feeding them 20x a day and making them poop and keeping a warming disc constantly warm and JUST TRYING NOT TO KILL THE KITTENS, they stopped being personality-less lumps and started being fun.

Edsel’s such an asshole.

For six weeks, these three were at my house, just getting more adorable by the minute. Meanwhile, I’m tryina pack shit, and having three teensy kittens in the way was not great. I kept them in their concrete floor room when I packed, but eventually, I had to pack that room.

And that’s where the shelter sort of disappointed me.

Because often, in fact, every other time, if I took my fosters in for their booster shots and they weighed, you know, 1.8 pounds, they’d take them from me and make them adoptable. I was maybe a week from moving, I’d spent SIX WEEKS feeding and pooping and socializing and caring for these kittens DURING A MOVE, and when I

STEPPED

THE

YELLOW

ONE

I called the shelter. And when I took them in, they said, “They aren’t exactly two pounds yet. Can you take them back with you?”

I had a friend at work who was definitely taking at least one. And I really couldn’t take them back. A mover was coming to get furniture out of that kitten room the next day. The boxes were sky-high in my house. It wasn’t safe there anymore, really, and I had too much to do.

So instead of saying, Oh, thanks for the

SIX WEEKS

of paying for food and litter and bedding and formula that cost $900 a can and for not sleeping, instead of saying thank you for all that? They took the kittens and huffed away.

Honestly, I felt horrible.

I felt terrible for the kittens, and I felt like I let the shelter down, even though that was by far the toughest foster I ever did.

They were ready for adoption in like two days. And my coworker took the yellow one and the black-and-white one, and someone snatched up that tortoiseshell, thank god.

Which brings us to today.

I can’t foster here at this house, because there’s not a good room with stupid concrete floors that I can shut off, and after that last experience I’m a little…reluctant to help the shelter.

So last weekend I found myself missing kittens, and I went to the shelter just to visit. I’ve done that quite a bit, actually. Just go say hi to cats, pet them, get some strange and come home.

But on Sunday, there was one I really liked. He’s buff. Not that he works out. He’s buff COLORED. And he was so chill. He has a little white tip on his tail.

I left him at the shelter, figuring he’d get adopted that day.

When I looked at the June’s OCD shelter website on Wednesday, he was still there.

So I drove there Wednesday.

Turns out they were having a sale. Kittens are normally $75, but they were $13 that day. According to my maths, that’s 900% off.

And that is why I am the proud owner of an 11-week old kitten named Milhous. Get it? Do you? Milhous? Cause I live in a…mill house?

Edsel does not fear him, for he is a sweet puddin’ of a kitty, who is sweet.

injoy my white tip. dat nother nod to mom sex lyfe.

Iris and Lily’s souls died months ago. They’re like, nother kidden. hooo care.

So now you’re up to date on my animal sitch.

We’ll talk soon. Be sure to write in and ask why I blocked you from Pie on the Book.

Furrily,
Juan

June's stupid life

Catch up on June’s…new house.

October 26, 2018October 25, 2018 June127 Comments

Since y’all mentioned in the MORE THAN FIVE comments yesterday that you’d like to hear about m’new house, I thought I could start with that story, and on the following days we could have a delightful new catch-up series, a catsup series, that really cuts the mustard. You’ll relish it. Hot dog!

(Dear June,
Please go back to obscurity.)

A catch-up series wherein I tell you what’s new with my pets, my job, my friends, and m’love life. As in, is that a bone-in ham?

As you know, from your Big Book of June Events that apparently has been lying sandy at the bottom of your beach bag all summer, I was always brokeldy broke broke. It was driving me crazy.

I had the idea to sell my house, fmr., because while I know it wasn’t any grand mansion or anything, it was cute and in a very desirable area. Trust me. That area was hot. Like, you’d totally wanna finger that area.

First of all, it was centrally located. Second of all, it was rich-people adjacent. Like, across one busy street from my house, fmr., is the neighborhood of George Bailey, the richest man in town. I mean, it’s swank.

Plus also too, I was in the school district you wanna be in, apparently, which as you know makes a giant difference to me.

So for all these reasons, I sort of, oh, impulsively called a real estate agent offa Zillow one day in early July. I was looking on Zillow to see what my house was worth (hint: Eleven billion dollars more than I paid for it in 2008) and below that it said, “Interested in impulsively selling? Call now!”

So I did.

The real estate agent came over soon after, and said, “Everyone is looking for a house exactly like this.” Then he told me what he could get for it, and it was more than stupid Zillow said, and my eyes turned into dollar signs.

A few days after that his wife came over, because she’s good at staging a house, and she was all, “Oh my god, everyone is looking for a cute house just like this. Hide the litter boxes and the 18 foster kittens and you are golden.”

They scheduled an open house, like, immediately, and meanwhile, 23948572240 people came to look at it.

This entire time, mind you, I was all, THIS IS GREAT and WOOO! and MAKE IT RAIN and what I’m trying to say to you is I called a Realtor offa Zillow on a Tuesday and my house was sold for the full asking price on Sunday. I had multiple offers.

Marty and Kaye and me going out for ice cream during my open house. That whole week I drove around like an idiot while people creepy-crawled my house. Eds was my co-pilot. Also, I seem to have ice cream on m’face. Ya big disgrace.

So that was fun. And then I figured out why my house sold so fast.

There were no other good houses for sale on earth.

Also, that is right about the time my real estate agent became George Bailey, the most beleaguered man in town.

(If you still don’t get my It’s a Wonderful Life refs and you had all summer with nothing to do and no blog to read, I don’t think I can help you, and neither can our Lord and Savior.)

My poor Realtor. It’s rewarding to know that you can change someone’s life for the worse in just one summer. Oh, I wish you’d all been there. Because my real estate professional lost his will to live, and sort of wished I’d shuffle off this mortal coil my own damn self. No one has hated a person with more white-hot heat than Bob My Beleaguered Realtor ended up hating me.

I wanted to buy something cheaper than my house. I wanted LOWER house payments. But everything lower was on the corner of Crack and Ho. Right off Methamphetamine Ave.

And everything a tad higher was BRAND-NEW! In a street with NO TREES! And an HOA!

Ugh.

Girl, I looked at real estate apps the way a 17-year-old boy looks at titties. I looked at real estate apps the way Camilla Parker-Bowles eyes up a bag of feed. No one was more attuned to Greensboro’s real estate market harder than I was July and August of 2018.

Bob showed me places in the country that were charming but looked out at cookie-cutter subdivisions.

We gandered at adorable old cottages in Winston-Salem, because who DOESN’T want a 40-minute commute?

We even looked at a KICK-ASS condo downtown, where I would commence to drive all the old men crazy, starting with my beleaguered real estate agent.

I almost made an offer on the downtown place. Turns out my pal Kit had lived IN THAT VERY PLACE in the ’70s, when it used to have a pink bathtub. But what about Edsel? There was no yard. If he got diarrhea in the night I’d have to take him to the rapey streets of downtown. Where I’d be driving all the old men crazy.

Dear June,
Okay, no one really missed you.

Finally, I made an offer on an old-lady townhouse that I could have made ADORABLE, and they didn’t accept my offer.

Asses.

Then I made an offer on a really beautiful hou$e not far from where I lived, and they said ye$, but once I met with The Money Lender, it turn$ out my monthly payment would have been way more than the online mortgage calculator said. $o I had to say, Okay, never mind.

I mean, dudes. There was nothing out there. Oh my god. Pickins were slim, pickins.

Seriously considered this little house in the country. Drove by it maybe 900 and 14 billion times.

And sometimes I’m haunted by the fact I didn’t take this one. But the *commute*. I’d be livin’ in the country, driving all the old June crazy with that drive.

There’d been a house my pal Lilly found, over in her town, which isn’t that terribly far away. It was cute, and in a cute hood, and I looked at it, liked it, and after a week of deliberating, I made an offer.

They accepted it.

So that was it. I had my house. I was gonna move in, and yes, I’d have to learn to navigate a new town but what the heck. And I’d be near Chris and Lilly. I’d be living in their town, driving all the millennials crazy.

But for some stupid reason, I kept my Trulia app on my phone, the way you keep your Tinder going even after four dates with a promising guy. And maybe two weeks after my offer and right before my inspection, I saw this…

Dudes.

I saw it first thing one morning, soon as I woke up. And I gasped out loud. I had a G-O-L situation.

And it wasn’t just cute on the outside, the way I am. It was pretty on the inside, too. The way I’m not.

DUDES.

So I phoned Bob, my beleaguered realtor.

“Bob, I found a house I like better than the other house.”

Bob sighed.

“I mean, we can go look at it, but the inspection is scheduled, you’ve paid a due diligence fee. Your move-in date might not jibe anymore. You might be homeless a few weeks. We can do it, but it’d be a lot,” he said beleagueredly.

Beleaguered Bob hates me.

I went to see it despite these obstacles, and I almost cried. I have no neighbors behind me. There are woods, then it sharply drops off, and there’s the train track. THE TRAIN TRACK!

The house was way less expensive than my old one, making the payments really low. Stupid low. You-wouldn’t-believe-it low. It was the price I’d hoped for but never found beyond the corner of Ass and Rape.

But this neighborhood, while not pristine, was cute. And? The house was in impeccable shape.

I sat on the back steps and watched yellow finches fly in the pear tree. I heard the train rumble past. And I thought, Could I ever be lucky enough to live here? I had tears in my eyes because I never thought I’d get lucky enough to live somewhere this good.

Turns out yes. I CAN live somewhere this good.

AND? It turns out I knew the owners! I work with the woman who owned this house! Her husband had lived here since 1963. She’s a wonderful person, and they kept the place immaculate. I will ruin it immediately.

As soon as she and I figured out I was looking at HER house, our respective real estate professionals told us DO NOT SPEAK. And we didn’t. Even though we were dying to.

And yes, it was a pain in my ass to switch from the house I said I’d buy to this one.

So I made an offer on this house, and had to live with Ned for 10 days, while the poor woman I work with moved out tout suite and Bob the Beleaguered Realtor took up sniffing glue.

And look. This neighborhood ain’t fancy. It’s a mill neighborhood. It’s on the historic register. We’re near two mills, and these houses were BUILT by those mills. The houses on my street are identical, just boop! boop! boop! all the same design, and we all have an alley behind us because in 1932, everyone had an outhouse. The really cool news is, the alley for some reason stops at my house, so I have, like, a personal alley.

You know what song I hate? The Alley Cat song.

Anyway.

So while these houses are charming AF, not all are as…kept up as mine. Most people who live here have lived here for generations. Their parents were mill workers, and in some cases so were they.

The nearby mills are shut down now, but one has been revamped with fancy apartments (Ned looked at one back when he was looking for places) and restaurants and so on, and they just broke ground on another even closer, less than a mile, to do the same.

So I think this neighborhood may become more desirable as time goes on, and in the meantime it’s quiet, other than my neighbor’s rooster WHOM I LOVE, and everyone here looks out for each other. And I have the prettiest little pink millhouse in town.

So that is the story of how I became an urban pioneer. And of how Edsel managed to ingratiate himself into nearly every photo.

P.S. I have been getting together with other UPs in the neighborhood on Friday nights. We go to the local Mexican restaurant and talk about just everything, including how charming this neighborhood is. It’s just three blocks, mostly with dead ends, and the train tracks behind us. We’re very sort of isolated here.

And oddly, I am now just on the OTHER side of the rich-people neighborhood.

I keep skipping over moving right in there.

So that’s the catch-up info re my house, and I hope it answers everything re this, seeing as I’ve droned on for 1900 words and you are doing this:

2lm2iz9

Driving all the old women crazy,

June

Aging ungracefully · Ask June · Faithful Readers

It’s Britney, bitch

October 25, 2018 June318 Comments

I’ve sat here for two days making little changes to this now-defunct site. “Should I start this up again?” I ask myself. Then I think about all the ways people could be unkind and I walk into the next room, all sweaty.

To be fair, I’m menopausin’, so I walk into every room all sweaty these days. Mother of GOD.

While I menopause and reflect, I also think about nice people. The nice people outweighed the not-nice ones up in here. Not literally. I mean, I don’t know how much you weigh. Maybe that would be a nice place to start. Let’s all get reacquainted by writing in and saying what we weigh!

Yeah.

So if I do come back, what do you want to know? Because I could sit here and recap the whole dang four and a half months and bore you to tears if you wanted. Also, the good news is, maybe five people will even see this site is up so there won’t be that many questions, and maybe I can write one nice, concise, here’s-what’s-you-wanted-to-know post and we can move forward from there.

Meanwhile, what’s new with you, five people? Tell all. Including your weight.

Love,
Jooob.

I seriously didn’t mean to write “Jooob,” with a b, but it was nice to get that typo back, just like old times.

yuu way HOW mutch? eyeriss can’t see it. think yuu look grate.

ADD is--oooo, shiny!

Funeral glitter

June 6, 2018 June82 Comments

Summer’s here, but I don’t think the time is ever right for dancin’ in the streets. Seems obnoxious. And possibly risky.

Dancing in the streets. Fekking hippies. Get out of the road. Get a job. Unless one gets a job in a parade, and then one’s job would literally be dancin’ in the streets.

…I realize that summer is not technically here yet, which was always something Ned had to point out.

Me: [sample kvetch] It’s spring. Why is it so cold?

Ned: [sample mansplain] ACTUALLY, spring is in 12 days.

Ned: It’s not autumn until the 21st.

Ned: No, it isn’t. It’s still technically not the vernal equinox.

And that is why Ned is in a shallow grave.

Also, he always had to correct me saying, “rug” when I apparently meant “carpet,” or maybe it’s vice versa. Whatever. Apparently one covers the whole floor and the other is for an area. You’d think as a copy editor I’d care about this, but the depth of my caring about this is as deep as Ned’s shallow grave.

But ALSO, Ned insists on calling the living room “the den.” I think this came from having grown up richer than me, and having one of those fancy living rooms no one ever goes in–and what is the point of those?–and then the room everyone gathers in to watch TV–which probably no one does anymore but that was the plaid-walled idea in 1967–is called “the den.”

You’d think as a copy editor I’d care about the structure of that alarming sentence, but the depth of my caring is about this is as deep as Ned’s shallow grave.

Anyway, it always bugged me when he lived in an apartment and referred to his living room as “the den,” particularly because he had a two-bedroom apt., and there was the bedroom he slept in, and then another bedroom that just had a couch and a desk and his computer, and THAT, to me, would be a den.

But he never called that room a den.

I harangued him about this for a long time, till one day I was around his brother, who referred to his mother’s living room as the den.

And right then I knew.

It was a family thing.

Marvin used to always leave the foil top on things. You know how when you open peanut butter or new aspirin or what have you, and it has the annoying foil lid on top of it for no reason other than the Tylenol scare of 1812? Marvin would peel it back, but not remove it entirely. Then for the rest of time, you had to wrestle that foil lid, like a teensy obstacle course. I think he thought it kept the aspirin fresher or something.

Once I was at his mother’s, and got something out of the cupboard, and sure enough.

The half-on foil lid.

It was a family thing.

Years after he left, I got some spice out of the cupboard, and you can imagine how much spices get used in this House of Lean Cuisine. But I got down Chaucer’s Choice Ye Olde Spice Blennde, purchased with bones because money hadn’t been invented yet, and there?

Was a half-on foil lid, left over from Marvin days.

I ripped it off. It was so satisfying.

But I was talking about summer being here.

June, I’ve been meaning to ask, are you still taking Ritalin?

No. It gave me migraines. What doesn’t? Hey, is that something glittery?

That reminds me. I have a stone I got from someone’s funeral. The person collected stones and rocks, and at his funeral they had a basket of them, and you could take one as a memento of this person. I have it at my desk at work–it’s sort of pink with gray lacing through it.

At my funeral, I want everyone to get a little bag of glitter, and you can all toss glitter at my casket as I pass by. Or keep it forever.

“What’s that?”

“Funeral glitter.”

Anyway, summer. Edsel and I heard our first cicada the other night, and what’s really cool is I think we heard its first-ever song or buzz or whatever it is, as it gave this sort of introductory throat-clearing and did this weird instruments-tuning-up hum, then

ZZZZ!!ZZZ!!ZZZZ!!zzzzzzzzzzz…. of the cicada.

We also have been seeing lightning bugs this week, and the magnolias are bloomed, plus also the mimosa trees, a tree I would dearly like in my own yard. I have never understood the joyless people who don’t like a flowering tree because it leaves a “mess.” Good gravy. Rip off the foil lid and enjoy yourself. Flowers are never a mess.

flat,800x800,070,f.u1.jpg In case you don’t get mimosa trees in your region, here is what they look like. And apparently it is very important to James Brotherton, sisterton, that we know he took this shot, as he has BRANDED it into the corner.

Anyway, they also smell really good, mimosas do, and if I had scratch and my chair would get recovered, then I’d have Alf plant a mimosa in place of the poor tree that’s on its last limbs out in the front of my yard. I’d make him plant one that big.

Don’t you wish you could do that? Plant giant trees? And also get your hair cut long?

Waiting for things to happen is the worst.

Just ask my Chaucer spice.

Summer. Felt.
June

June's stupid life

The one where June’s chair, screen and hair look awful

June 5, 2018 June47 Comments

Why does every cat here have to be gray? I see one running across the yard and my heart leaps, and then it’s just Lily or Iris.

Is everyone waiting for me to recover that chair/footstool already? I know. I’ve got the fabric, but it’ll be about $750 to actually have it recovered and I don’t have that kinda scratch.

But when I DO get that kind of scratch, I plan to lug this chair into the living room, and move the big scratched comfortable leather one into here. This does me no good till the scratch.

This all reminded me to put up an Amazon link, above. Go to the image. Click. Get to Amazon. Shop. I get scratch.

June, stop saying that.

My luggage came! Only 6 nights without it! Probably any progress I made on my skin with my Retin-A has gone back to the beginning. Now I’m even OLDER than when I started using it.

Speaking of which, it’s pretty much been three months since I spent…scratch on Ultherapy and guess what. I look the same.

I’d been scraping the damn concrete floor, so I was shinier than I was in March. Also, what the hell with that screen. How many times have I replaced that screen since you’ve known me? Why do I have a dog? Look how it’s all brown where he puts his horrific paws up to let himself in.

I give up.

You know what I did? I didn’t give up. I just got annoyed and went outside and scrubbed that door, but it’s forever stained by dog paws. The screen looks nice, though. I guess I’ll have Alf replace the screen in there AGAIN.

It’s sort of meta that you can look in my door and see this blog post, isn’t it?

I guess the only other thing that’s new is we had some restructuring at work, and now my boss, fmr., is my boss, current. We need to think of a new name for her. Boss, fmr./crrnt. is too taxing to write. It’s like how I got sick of writing “…friend” so I thought of “Ned.”

Speaking of Ned, I’m dragging him to see Mean Girls tonight at the old theater. I’ve never seen it, and you’ll be stunned to hear neither has he, but I’ve always kind of wanted to see it.

I remember when this was a real movie at the theater, there was a billboard for it on my way to my LA therapist’s office. In Los Angeles, you had to have a therapist or you couldn’t get your driver’s license.

Why does the Department of Motor Vehicles keep insisting it’s “driver license”? No one says that but them. And yet they keep trying it. “Any second now, ‘driver’ license will be sweeping the nation.”

Speaking of sweeping the nation, I feel I must officially announce

I’VE

SEEN

THE

KIDS

DOING

THE

BEE

GEES

IMPRESSION.

yfsf-kids-2-2018-2018-050518 — There’s a video of some music competition where kids sang Too Much Heaven. It’s cute. Or it was, the first 18 times it got sent to me. Then suddenly I wanted to commit Bee Geescide.

Thank you. There is no further need to put it on my wall, or text it to me, or email it. I’ve seen it.

It’s this year’s cat/dog diary.

Hey, I do the same thing. I see a dachshund thing, and I think of sending it to Miss Doxie, and then I think, probably 86 people are having this same thought right now.

Why does “dachshund” have to be the hardest word in the world to spell? What word can’t you spell? I never do well with words where you leave the “e” off, like “truly.” I mean, I know that one, but words of that ilk.

I leave you with the following evidence that I finally in this life found a four-leaf clover. I’ve always wanted to.

That I found it while my cat is missing and so were all my haircare products cause they were with my luggage and I looked like dung is beside the point. Maybe things are looking up!

God, my hair really does look bad. Which looks worse: my hair or my screen door?

I’d better get to work. The other part of our restructuring is that I helped some people out who needed work done, and now between you and me I’ve got too much work. But if I just forgo peeing, I can get it done today. Is it forego or forgo? See what I mean?

Lov,
Jun

I like cats

Cat out of the bag

June 4, 2018 June105 Comments

I knew this would happen.

When Steely Dan was a tiny kitten who should’ve still been with his mother, he wobbled up to two college boys who could not leave a tiny kitten on a sidewalk in the rain. So they brought him home, marveled at how brave and playful he was, and realized that with school and job–and I’m going to go out on a limb and say beer–they really didn’t have time or funds to give to a kitten.

So they gave him to me. They gave me his a-boy-bought-this blue bowl and too-big litter box and yellow polka-dot scratching pad that he actually used constantly.

As soon as I held him, I said, “Oh, this is a good one.”

For I don’t know if you know this about me, but I have cats. I’ve always had cats. I know from cats. And I could tell, in my bones, that he was my type.

I like a no-nonsense cat, I guess to offset my own nonsense. I like a solid, stoic, unflappable, brave cat. I guess to offset my flappyness.

Mr. Horkheimer was that way, and so was Winston. So was Roger. Solid cats.

I believe in letting cats out, a thing that would have caused nary a raised eyebrow in, say, 1975, and that now causes people to gasp in horror. Since 9/11, we’ve become an incredibly overprotective society, if you ask me. Kids don’t play. They get shuttled to school in cars rather than walking. And animals are put in sweaters and kept indoors. Everything we love has become a dollhouse creature that we keep shuttered away for safety.

My way of thinking doesn’t jibe with this. Nevertheless, my goal was to leave SD in till he was year old, till he knew where he lived and so on. After that, I wanted him to feel the grass under his paws, to lift his head and sniff at birds, and to get his fur warm in the sun.

Oh, how I didn’t know him yet. Because within months, that cat started escaping the house. I’d look outside and there he’d be. And then I’d look again and he’d be IN the house.

Were there two gray cattens in the neighborhood? Was I seeing things? Was I finally just hallucinating cats?

Turns out, he can not only open doors, that cat found an open something-or-other in the roof that led to the attic, then (I saw him do this. Stood in the hall horrified) he’d …bounce on the closed attic steps till they gave way enough that he could squeeze out of the ceiling and leap into my hallway. Boom. Home.

He figured this all out when he was maybe five months old.

And right then I knew: Steely Dan was no ordinary cat.

He didn’t feel the grass under his paws; he soared above it. He didn’t lift his nose to the birds; he joined them.

Steely Dan was the kind of cat who rarely came home. When it’s warm, some mornings he’ll stare at me through the back window, come in and gobble breakfast, then jump through the hole in the screen and go back out all day.

He’s like kids back in the ’70s. He was free.

I’ve had this cat for two years, and since then he’s gotten famous in the neighborhood. He’s very friendly, and sometimes tries to come right in. On NextDoor, there were at first a lot of hysterical, WHO IS THIS HOMELESS (MUSCLED, SHINY) KITTY? notices, but people started saying, “Oh, that’s just Steely Dan.”

But I knew that with this spirit of adventure, there might be trouble.

I knew that with a cat who lived hard, there could come a morning I’d look for his face at the back window, and if it wasn’t there, expect him to leap from the roof once I opened the door, and he wouldn’t be up there.

Friday was that day.

After my harrowing travel experience Thursday, I came home and opened the back door to let all the cats out. Lily and Iris are content with my yard. They just want to cross their paws in the shade somewhere, maybe murder a bee or something.

Not Steely Dan. And while I had been gone Wednesday and Thursday, Ned had come over to feed the cats, and said he literally caught Steely Dan in midair as he tried to leap out the door. To say SD was nonplussed about being indoors in an understatement.

So I knew when I got home Thursday afternoon that he’d be champing at the bit to leave.

Because I know letting him roam is dangerous, usually when he leaves, I say something to him. I tell him what a magnificent kitty he is, or that I can’t wait till he comes back. Just something so that if he didn’t return, I wouldn’t feel as bad.

On Thursday, I said nothing. I don’t even really remember letting him out. I was so tired, and angry about my missing luggage, which is still not here, by the way. But if I have a choice between my favorite clothes and my $150 Retin-A that’s in that bag, and seeing my cat again, my Retin-A can suck it.

And yes, I’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do when your cat is missing. I notified NextDoor, I’ve driven to the shelter (where I saw two of my orange fosters languishing there, a thing that haunts me), I’ve called the emergency vet, and I’ve gone to ask my neighbors if I can call into their sheds and crawl spaces. “Oh, that cat? I see that cat all the time,” they all tell me. “Walked right into my house once.”

I know there’s a chance he’ll still come back, just like my wayward bag. I know someone will leave an asshole comment about this, too. Something smug and shrill and probably containing the term “furbabies.”

But what I mostly know is I adore that cat. And I wanted him to have a happy life, even if it wasn’t the safest, most coddled life.

So if I never get a chance to tell him, I’ll tell you. Steely Dan is a magnificent cat, and I can’t wait to see him again. I’ll keep his polka-dot scratching pad waiting, just in case.

I hate everything · June's stupid life

June flies to Chicago, gets manicure, flies home.

May 31, 2018June 3, 2018 June44 Comments

I don’t like to travel.

I realize everyone else does, and that my not liking to travel is part of the list of things I hate that everyone else treasures: Christmas, brunch, live music, romantic evenings, granite countertops.

If you want me to have sex with you–and I realize I’m 52 and no one wants to have sex with me. But if we traveled–which I hate–through time–which I also hate–and you wanted to have sex with young, actually appealing me, you’d be a lot more likely to find me randy at some inopportune time, like lunch hour or after a funeral. But give me flowers and a dinner out and I will have all the sex drive of a slab of baloney.

Anyway.

I had a harrowing travel experience. I’d tell you about it verbally, via my podcast, but I also hate those.

SD before I left, somehow sensing he was going to be sufferin’ indoor cat for 5 days.

11 a.m.
Yesterday morning I packed a bag, grabbed my purse, and headed to my local airport. “I’m so lucky that travel here is so easy,” I remember thinking, back yesterday when my soul still had light in it.

It’s true, though. It’s a 10-minute drive to the Greensboro airport, and parking is pretty decent. It buries flying in and out of LAX, which sucked worse than Christmas brunch.

1:20 p.m.
My plane took off to Chicago. An easy hour-and-a-half flight. I had a three-hour layover, then I’d get on a plane for my hometown, in Michigan, and land at 8:00. “My nails look awful,” I thought, as I flew. The night before the trip, I did some last-minute grueling work that took me till 10 p.m., and I hadn’t had time to groom properly. “I wonder if I can get my nails done in Chicago.”

4 p.m.
Turns out, you can! You CAN have your nails done in Chicago, and if you get the basic manicure, it’s cheap. Hell, I’ll be basic. Paint my basic nails and take my basic money.

Truth be told, money was an object, because I get paid the last day of the month and this was the 30th. My money was not in some vault in stacks, like I was Duck McScrotum or whoever that rich duck was.

How did he make his money, one wonders.

But all I hadda do was fly into Saginaw ( I was going for my cousin’s graduation), and by the next morning, I’d have cash. Yay, paydays! Yay, Payday Candy Bars! Did I also have time to get one of those?

Turns out, I did. Because when I finished my manicure, and popped into the MAC store as well, I looked at the board, and?

Flight was canceled.

5:30 p.m.
Canceled? Why? I went to the ride-at-Disneyland-long line at United Customer Service. Apparently, thunderstorms were dotting the area. Bad thunderstorms. There were no flights going to Saginaw till the next day. Maybe. “These small planes are always the first to get canceled,” the beleaguered guy at the counter told me.

BOOM! said the sky.

6:30 p.m.
“Just stay overnight in the airport,” my mother said, when I called her. I looked around. Everyone was stranded due to the weather. There was nowhere to sit, much less lie down. And what if I did find a place to sleep? How would I know my purse would be there when I woke up?

I looked in my bank account. Forty dollars. Stupid manicure. All I’d eaten that day was a bowl of soup before I left. I’d purposely not gone grocery shopping because I knew I’d be gone, and that was the last can of anything in my cupboard.

The plane had offered pretzels. My feelings on pretzels rank up there with live music and cilantro.

8 p.m.
“We’ve got you scheduled to fly into Raleigh tonight, leaving at 9 p.m.,” said another beleaguered United worker. With no hope of getting to Michigan or even to Greensboro, the Raleigh flight was a big enough plane that the guy said he was “sure” it would take off.

I just wanted to leave that airport. I’d walked all of whatever they call it, section? Area? Hall? Vein? Whatever. I’d walked all of B and all of C and all of F, just for something to do. And also hoping for a place to sit.

Also waiting for his flight. Was not extinct when he GOT to airport.

At this point I was so hungry that I knew a migraine was imminent.

“You’re certain,” I said, to the man who said I could at least go near home. I’d have no car and no money in Raleigh, but at least I wouldn’t be in a goddamn airport with 9493582 other stranded passengers all night.

“Yes ma’am,” he told me.

I got the least-expensive thing at McDonald’s (Disclaimer: At an airport, that’s a Happy Meal that costs $207) and stood next to a nice Southern man on the phone with, you guessed it, United.

“I have to be at work tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock no matter what time you people get me home tonight,” he was saying. He sounded authoritative. “And I need my tools. You did this to me a couple months ago, you never did get my tools to me for a week, and you ended up costing me $2,000 in lost work.”

“This poor man,” I thought, munching a fry.

“You’re certain,” he said, sounding like me. “Okay.” He hung up the phone.

“Airline people are the lying-est motherfuckers,” he told me. “Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

Sure enough, my 9 p.m. flight? Didn’t happen.

I’d arranged with Ned to get me in Raleigh, and I called to tell him that flight wasn’t occurring either.

“Airline people are the lying-est motherfuckers,” he said.

10 p.m.
My Uncle Bill flies all the damn time. I’m certain I’ve told you before how he’ll fly to China, get home for a night and leave in the morning for Germany. I don’t know what the hell he does. Maybe he makes Minute Rice, and has to make sure the timing is precise.

What do you want from me right now. Am exhausted.

Anyway, he scored me a room near the airport, with his miles or points or pointy miles or miles of points or Miles Davis and the Pointer Sisters or what have you. The point is, I finally relented and went to it.

11 p.m.
Turns out, the hotel had a bar! Everyone in there was also stranded. I was the only loser who had zero carry-on, but not the only loser who was gonna sleep in her contacts. (Those are reading glasses, before you get all UP MY ASS.)

I called beleaguered United again, was on hold for

FORTY MINUTES

and two vodka cranberries,

and one flight they thought I’d be able to get on was a Greensboro flight the next morning.

“GIVE IT TO ME,” I said. I just wanted to go home. Then I fell into a dead sleep at midnight.

3:30 a.m.
[BOOM] Why was someone closing a door in my house? I live alone.

I opened my eyes, saw I was in a hotel room, and right then I knew: I was in a hotel room.

I knew who was closing the door at 3:30. One of the nice women at the bar was tryina get to Atlantic City to be with her friend, and her only choice was to stay up, leave at 3:30, and then her friend was 100% gonna expect her to be “on” all day in Atlantic City.

See. That’s why I hate to travel. I hate to be on. The whole thing just makes me nervous and cranky and migrainous.

Also? I never fell asleep again. I should have just gone to Atlantic City, as well.

5 a.m.

I finally got out of bed, only to discover my only coffee choice was decaf. Yes, I did call down to the front desk, thanks for asking. No, thanks, really.

Silver lining: Picking out my clothes for the day was a breeze.

I didn’t shower, because I had no hair products and no razor. I brushed my teeth with the toothbrush they give you for free, which was not unlike a prison-issue toothbrush.

Washed face with grapefruit soap, even though I’m allergic.

6:45 a.m.
Got on the crammed shuttle to the airport. No one on shuttle was cheerful.

8 a.m.
Got through security and to my gate. No one working at the airport was cheerful. In fact, they were downright brusque. There were Disneyland lines at every Starbucks, and when did fucking Starbucks become the only coffee in town? We can’t have a nice Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf? What the hell? It’s not StarBUCKS, it’s StarMONOPOLY MONEY.

What do you want from me? Am exhausted.

Anyway, I decided to have coffee on the plane.

9 a.m.
Get on plane. The stewardess informs us the coffee machine isn’t working.

You know how sometimes they show people having fits on planes? It no longer seems so outlandish.

12:30 p.m.
It’s official: At this point I could have driven all the way to Saginaw, and back to Greensboro again. I’m not sure why, but whole body hurts. Perhaps the walking for 8 hours at the airport, the standing in lines, the weird bed, the tension. The teensy lack-of-legroom flights. Or maybe I’m dying. At this point it’d be a relief. Take me, Lord, I’m ready. Oh, look, he’s delayed.

1:30 p.m.
Airline has lost my luggage. I am supposed to get it back tomorrow, but see above re lying-est motherfuckers. The luggage claim lady was nice. “Oh, honey, I am so sorry about all this. You call them and get your money back.”

Allegedly, I already have. It’s my mother’s money, but supposedly she will get a “partial” refund for the three canceled flights.

Meanwhile, I have no hair products at all, no razor, no deodorant, no toothbrush and see above re no one wants to have sex with me. Why, though.

I DO have my migraine meds, which is good because you’ll be stunned to hear I got one.

6 p.m.
Now I am home and writing you, and I really can’t wait till my next adventure. I love the open road.

Let’s meet for live music at brunch and talk about it soon.

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