Drives Like A Girl

On my way back from lunch I walked past a cook wearing all white. Black would seem like the obvious choice to me, because it hides most stains. (Then again, you can’t bleach it. But that saves money on bleach, eh?) At a sushi bar last weekend I flung soy sauce all over myself and boyfriend with a spectacular slip of hand, releasing my water glass right over the saucer. And I was very grateful for my black tank top and dark wash blue jeans at that moment. Maybe there’s another reason chefs wear white. Which is the sign of a better cook: more or less obvious food splatters on your kitchen scrubs?

When I got home I found that there was even soy sauce in my hair. On top of my head. There were several soy sauce freckles hiding amongst my natural ones, the difference between which my boyfriend couldn’t tell. At least I didn’t splatter the other guests at the packed bar. The teenage girl with her parents to Dave’s left thought it was quite “nicely done.” I’m here to please.

Random thought for the day: What kind of health insurance do doctors have?

The last two weeks were the open enrollment period for everything that has to do with insurance at my company. It was heavily stressed that we MUST enroll by November 16. In typical indecisive fashion, I put off doing some research on the four health plan options until the latter part of the period during which we MUST enroll. (Really? Is someone’s head going to roll if we don’t?) The last day rolls around, and I still haven’t decided. There is nothing on our literature giving an exact cutoff time on the 16th, so I asked our HR and was told I could enroll online until midnight. There was no specification of time zone, so my assumption was local time. All our literature says we can call the help center from 9-5 LOCAL time, so there was no reason for me to deduce this could be otherwise.

At 10:40 pm, while I’m in the middle of using the online tools, I find I’ve been logged out again due to inactivity on the main site. (They have an annoyingly short inactivity logout time, and to top it off, you can’t even create your own username to log in with. Every time you have to input an alphanumeric code they assigned.) I log back in, and the tools are gone. The enrollment stuff is gone. I’ve officially not enrolled in anything, will have no health insurance of any kind come January 1, 2008.

Well, there’s nothing I can do about it over the weekend, so on Monday I call the company that is our new benefits administrator and explain what happened. I’m told the web site should have shut down at 12 am Eastern time, 9 pm local time. If they let it go until 10:30, they might as well have thrown in the last hour and a half! She puts me on hold and comes back to tell me she can’t do anything. What? The customer service people can’t enroll me over the phone despite the innocent snafu?

No. I must fill out a FORMAL APPEAL explaining why I missed the enrollment window, which will then be sent to the insurance gods at Omnicom, apparently.

Ridiculous.

So my blog is major boring, eh? Well, Dave and I stripped my 240SX and had it towed off for body work and paint prep over a month ago. I can’t get a hold of the guy who is supposed to paint it. His phone has sent me to a voicemail box that’s full for a week and a half, so I can’t even leave a message. I hope my engine is still in it. Can’t wait to get the damn thing back in all one color. Well, two.

I’m currently slouched in the corner of a cheap black pleather couch in the curtained-off lounge area of Stage 1 at South Bay Studios. It’s in the oh-so-charming industrial area of Long Beach, California, off of one of the most broken and abused roads in the known area. Big rigs do pavement no favors. The road does my stiffer-sprung 240SX no favors.

We’re in day four of the G37 Coupe brochure studio shoot. The Radio Paradise internet radio station is streaming on the photographer’s laptop. Their playlists are a crapshoot; one day it will be the most infinitely pleasurable mix you’ve ever heard, and the next you can’t even suffer through 2 songs. Today seems to be a classic rock day, and besides the Hendrix song that just played, I’m not digging it. There’s no sure-thing alternative though, so I’m not going to say anything to the crew. Maybe tomorrow’s songs will be better.

Styrofoam cups are the shit. I poured my can of coke into one with a handful of ice cubes an hour ago, and it’s still as cold as if it just fell out of the fridge. Not even plastic can match that. Glass? Pfft. The chill starts leaving the drink faster than a 3rd gen RX7 can blow up on a dyno. Which leads me to an interior design dilemma: plastic looks cheap and unsophisticated, while glass does not. I like cold drinks to stay cold without watering down too much. I want to be more like a sophisticated adult. Perhaps screw it all, and go with styrofoam and the image of transience?

If I wander through the halls, maybe I’ll see someone famous. It hasn’t happened yet.

And so dawns a new era in middy.net history. The original was purchased and hosted for me by my UNIX-systems-administrating ex-boyfriend in 1998. I can’t recall how many iterations it’s been through since then (not that many), but the last redesign was executed in 2002. Sure, I added the gallery in 2004, but the main site was unchanged and in dire need of a makeover. The old 90s-style “personal home page” thing died years ago and I’m late to jump on the blog-wagon because, well, I didn’t think I had enough to say. Or an audience. Blogs have been on my mind for a while though, and my sad-sack site was becoming a source of embarrassment. With a nudge from my co-worker and new friend, Lauren, I’m now here to say that I have something to say.