If Given the Opportunity...

I would like to meet the man who came up with the brilliant idea that is the glass shower, and punch him in the balls.  Repeatedly.  So hard and so fast, that they travel all the way up his throat at which point he chokes to death on them.  Honestly.  What idiot thought that was a good idea?  And the reason I am assuming that the inventor was a man is because no woman would voluntarily want to add more work to her cleaning repertoire.  She just wouldn't.  This is purely the invention of a man who didn't think for one minute about the poor woman who was going to be forced to stand there for an hour with the glass door closed, breathing in the fumes, scrubbing furiously until her fingers are red, her eyes burning from the chemicals, and her patience just thin enough to consider murder an appropriate decompression therapy after the trauma obtained while scrubbing said shower.  I'm sure all he thought about was how sexy she was going to look showering off afterwards.  Well I've got news for him…no woman who spends the better part of her morning scrubbing a shower wants anything to do with anything he might have thought up while watching her shower through that pristine glass…which is, as she washes, collecting more soap scum to be scrubbed off at a later date.

I just spent the last 2 hours cleaning our bathrooms…one hour of which was spent solely in the the glass shower.  I have decided that I will never do it again.  Not that it won't ever be cleaned again, but next time I will be paying someone else to do it.  I don't care what people think about that or how much it costs…I literally cannot even look at that glass torture chamber without wanting to take a sledgehammer to each pane of its transparent evil.  And you know the worst part?  After I'm done, and the glass is sparkling, the spots that I missed become painfully obvious, mocking me, revealing to everyone that even though I was in there scrubbing non-stop for a full freaking hour, I didn't do a good enough job.  Glass Shower: 1, Stefanie: 0.  Well screw you, glass shower.  I'm going to use the other shower.  The one with the bathtub and the curtain.  The curtain that when soiled, either gets tossed in the washer or tossed in the garbage…win-win for me as I'd much rather do laundry or drop $5 at Target on a new curtain than scrub soap scum off of glass.

And one of the most infuriating things about cleaning the bathroom?  The dog hair.  Hands down, almost as frustrating as scrubbing the glass, although not quite.  The dog hair is ubiquitous in our house, apparently, and appears to be attracted to clean surfaces more so than any other surface (outside of the comforter that Grandma E and I made out of corduroy…the dog dog hair, sadly, will most likely never be fully removed from that thing).  I wanted to punch through the wall every time I swept a surface with a clean rag, only to see a spattering of dog hair left in its wake.

And then there's the toilet…ah that bloody, bastardly toilet.  I hate that thing.  After scrubbing the pee drops and the poop splatters from its gleaming porcelain surface, I'm contemplating just going to the bathroom out in the woods.  Heck, if it's good enough for those morons lighting the woods behind our house on fire (repeatedly), then it's good enough for me.  I think I can even manage to poop in the woods without lighting them on fire, which makes me better than them by leaps and bounds.

I have to wonder what Simon was thinking from his post in the kitchen, listening to me swear a blue streak as I got cleaning stuff in my eye, I repeatedly dropped the scrub brush, the cleaning bucket tipped over, the dog hair…that damn dog hair.

It's no secret that I hate cleaning…there's a reason I do it so infrequently.  Ask anyone who's lived with me.  My poor college roommates…although, to be fair, I don't think any of us outside of Naomi were actually clean people.  I would say that I'm tidy…I will pick up after myself…if only that were enough.  Simon is the first man I've lived with who actually cleans, which is more than I can say for the other idiots I'd managed to date throughout the years.  Either they expected me to be their little June Cleaver (ha…weren't they disappointed…they should have known that no self-respecting June Cleaver would have the mouth of a sailor), or they were just as content as I was to look the other way when mold started growing under the shampoo bottles.  Simon vacuums every few days, which I appreciate, as I still don't know how to use the Dyson.  I am a failure as a housewife, but I think he probably knew that going into it and decided to be okay with it.

I'm still irritated that I spent 2 hours in the bathroom and I myself am dirtier than when I began.  Gross.  I'm trying really hard not to think about the time that I temporarily lost my balance and my face fell against the side of the toilet.  And now that the shower is clean, I don't want to use it because that means I'll have to clean it again.  But I do need to get this Soft Scrub off the bottoms of my feet, my arms, out of my hair, etc before it burns my skin away.  Nothing like chemical burns as proof of a morning spent scrubbing the bathroom.      

The Post That Should Have Been...

Going "down the stairs" in Sedona

So last week I went mountain biking for the very first time…and I loved it.  I have to admit, I was very skeptical about it, as physical activities and my physical limitations do not typically jive.  Case in point, I struggle a lot with cross-country skiing.  I don't hate it, per se, but I don't much care for it.  For two winters now I have tried my hand at cross-country skiing, and I was mediocre at best.  And who wouldn't be, their first time trying out an activity that they've never done before?  For some reason I have this delusional idea that there is some sort of physical activity out there that I will somehow take to like a prodigy.  I'm still trying to find that activity…I'm thinking that it probably doesn't exist.  Hahaha! But I keep looking, and I keep having expectations.

So, given the struggles that I had with cross-country skiing, I had my doubts about my ability to mountain bike.  Turns out, they were mostly unfounded.  For someone who is afraid to ride a bike up a curb, I barreled up rocky paths with some deeply buried courage that hasn't been accessed in quite a long time.  I'm a chicken heart, you see.  Put me in any situation, and I'll give you several different ways in which you could be mangled or killed while doing it.  I don't know where this comes from, I don't know why I do it, but there it is just the same.  I'm afraid of a lot of things.  And even though there were times while mountain biking on rocky paths that I thought I was going to go tumbling over the edge, a stream of expletives exiting my mouth, I hung on, hunkered down, and just went for it.  I can see why so many people here in Flagstaff are mountain bikers…it's a pretty phenomenal rush, and this is one of the perfect places in the country to do it.

I think another reason I felt safe mountain biking is because I know how to ride a bike.  I've been riding a bike for as long as I can remember.  In fact, I remember one of my very first bikes…it was blue with a white basket and it had those hard rubber tires…you know the ones, the ones that don't have any air in them.  That was the first bike that I can remember.  My next bike was a really old-school Schwinn, I think one that had been passed down from person to person before landing on me.  It had cushy tires, dark blue paint, and I had put a bunch of those beaded things on the spokes to make it look more girly.  I loved that bike.  I thought I was really fast on that bike (I probably wasn't).  It's funny, there's a hill of sorts near where I grew up, and I remember walking down it with my bike when I was little because I thought that it was too steep.  I go back there now, and it's barely a hill.  I had myself almost convinced that they must have graded the road and straightened out the hill sometime ago, because there's no logical reason that I should have been afraid of it.  But that's how it is with childhood…things that seem big and scary just get small and inconsequential as you grow up.  After a few mountain bikes to get me through my teenage years and college, I bought my first real bike after graduating from nursing school. It was a Trek mountain bike, and it had front shocks and I bought it at a bike store because I didn't know where else people bought nice bikes.  It was my first big purchase to congratulate myself for making it through 4 years of college and actually finishing with a degree.  Funny that I bought a mountain bike and never once took it off-road in the time that I had it.  I just felt comfortable on those fatty tires, I guess.  I ended up selling my Trek while on an assignment in Colorado.  I put that money towards my fixed-gear road bike, which was the only bike I had up until last month when I bought not one, but two mountain bikes.  I know…typical Stefanie…buying in multiples once again.

Me with my new bike, on Bell Rock Pathway

I posted a picture of Mountain bike #1 in my last blog, my Cannondale 6, and it was such a pretty bike…flat black, nothing flashy, very under the radar as far as looks were concerned.  Nice and light, front shocks, disc brakes…everything I was looking for in something that I had no intention of riding on pavement.  And it performed better than I ever could have expected during my first ride in Sedona.  It hopped over rocks, scurried down paths, and climbed uphill like a beast.  It was so much fun, and I was eagerly looking forward to the next time that I got to take it out on the trails.  My butt had to recover first…you can't ride 3 hours on rough trails and not have a serious case of biker butt.

Unfortunately, the post that was meant to sing the praises of my newfound sport are to be short-lived.  My pretty little Cannondale 6 was stolen during a recent trip to Phoenix to try out some of the trails down there.  Simon and I had our bikes locked to the bike carrier on the back of the Jeep, and during the night some neanderthals with a set of bolt cutters made quick work of our bike lock and cable and off they went with our bikes.  I was devastated.  Simon was pissed.  And you know, by the end of the day, I wasn't upset about the money, heck, I almost wasn't even that upset about the bike…I hadn't had the thing long enough to get attached to it.  What was most upsetting was how losing our bikes ruined our trip.  We had planned a four-day trip to Phoenix to go mountain biking, stay in a cute hotel in a pretty centralized location to everything that we wanted to do, to meet up with a friend at the Botanical Gardens, to go see The Grand Budapest Hotel in a movie theater that serves you food and beer from your seat, and to hang out with the few family members that I have down in the Valley.  Waking up that first morning and realizing that our bikes were gone ruined everything.  It was so disheartening and frustrating that we just couldn't find the energy to be excited about anything else that we had planned.  And you know, Phoenix has very few redeeming qualities as it is…it's unbearably hot, the drivers are a-holes, the traffic is atrocious, the people are selfish and rude…Phoenix has very few things going for it.  We are continuously just on the cusp of writing that entire city off entirely.  I think this may have tipped the scales.  My family is the only thing that will pull me down there in the future.  And maybe some of the micro-breweries…maybe.  You can bet that I will be bringing no possessions whatsoever.  They can't steal what I don't have.

This is the fourth time I've had something significant stolen from me, and it's been a different situation every time.  And each time it happens, I lose a little more faith in humanity over it.  It chaps my hide that there are people out there who are resourceful, confident, and ballsy enough to go out there and get what they want, but unfortunately they don't use those attributes for anything positive.  They steal; they feel entitled to take what isn't theirs just because they can.  They do it with no thought whatsoever as to how it's going to affect the person they're stealing from.  It's a complete lack of empathy and a total disregard for their fellow human beings.  And that's what bothers me the most.  I can buy a new bike.  No problem.  Bikes are a dime a dozen…in fact, I've already contacted a few people on Craigslist this morning who are selling pretty decent bikes.  I could have a bike by the end of today if I really wanted one.  But what I won't have by the end of today is a feeling of trust and respect for those around me.  After the bikes were stolen and reported missing, Simon and I took a walk around the park near our hotel, and every single biker that went by me got the once-over.  Were they on my bike?  Had they seen my bike?  Were they riding a stolen bike?  And I hate that.  I hate feeling suspicious of people.  It's an uneasy, stressful feeling, and I wish that I could just trust people not to do shitty things.  But I can't.  And I'm sure this won't be the last time that I get stolen from, because unfortunately, this entire world is crawling with human vermin awaiting their next opportunity to take what isn't theirs.  I did find it ironic, however, that after 8 years of criss-crossing the country for travel jobs, this is the first time we've ever had anything stolen from us.  That's a pretty good record, I guess.      

And you know, I know that there are more good people in the world in than bad…there have to be or society would just collapse.  I take comfort in the fact that last night I slept in a comfortable bed with Simon and my pugs, in a nice house that we can easily afford, in a town that we love.  We woke up this morning and had a great breakfast, good conversation, and have the leisure time to work on our projects.  For the most part, we have a very good, very happy life.  How happy is the life of the person who stole our bikes?  I'm guessing not very.  Doing bad things to people does not make a good case for happiness…it might provide a sense of accomplishment, but it's not happiness.  So at the end of the day, he might have my bike, but I have my happiness, and that's bigger than a bike ever could be.

So I hope he enjoys what little delight he gets out of my bike, whatever he happens to do with it.  Personally, I hope he crashes while riding it and snaps his f*cking neck (and dies, of course, because I don't want my taxes going towards the treatment and rehabilitation of someone who possesses such disregard for other people…I would have to assume that someone who steals bikes also does not have insurance), but that's just the vindictive side of me hoping for some sort of retribution for the ruination of what was supposed a fun few days spent doing things I like with people I care about.  I also had visions of spending 2 minutes alone in a room with him…with my pink "Girls Rule" T-ball bat (purchased in Phoenix 8 years ago, ironically, because there were some men at the time who just couldn't seem to stay out of women's apartments…admittedly, a gun would have been a better choice, but I didn't have to use the bat, so I wouldn't have had to use the gun either).  I think 2 minutes would be an adequate amount of time for me to drive home what I really think about him and who he is and how he makes people feel when he steals from them.  Our justice system is so flawed that the criminals are the ones who are protected, and the rest of us suffer for it.  It's complete and utter BS.  

It's kinda funny…being atheist and all, I told Simon that I can't even take comfort in the end-of-days judgement that might cast the bike-stealer into that alleged lake of fire for all of eternity, because I don't believe in that.  And even if I did, a case can be made that all of god's children end up in heaven one way or another…and that's not a satisfactory ending for me either.  I do believe in a very rational form of karma, and believe that if you are a person who does bad things to people, eventually you're going to do a bad thing to the wrong person, and things are not going to end well.  Of course, I'll never hear or know about this, but I know that that's usually how it goes.  He'll get his, one way or another, he will.  And whether or not he's thinking about all the bikes he's stolen and all the people he's hurt along the way, well, that's his problem.  I've already moved on from it.

So yeah, a post that was supposed to be gushing with excitement and delight was tainted by one person's poor choice and lack of respect for people and property.  Sucky.  Fortunately for us, last night we had the pleasure of hanging out with my brother Chris and my nephew Jett, and we got to enjoy a fantastically prepared meal by my cousin Jenny and her boyfriend Scott.  Those two always feed us so well.  Oh, and I got to pet a baby horse that was only a week old…he was so incredibly soft and cute.  Nothing brightens one's mood like a baby animal, if only for a little while.