anything but ordinary

disco is alive and well...

my fiance and i have been waiting a LOOOOONG time for this day to come...the opening of a new "Crazy Horse" saloon. No, we are not country music fans. We are disco fans.

there used to be a crazy horse near us until the owner of the irvine spectrum "entertainment" center decided to remove most of the entertainment places and replace them with nothing but crowded retail stores that all look the same, quickly turning this center into nothing but an outdoor mall with high price tags and WAAAAY too many degenerate "rebellious" teenagers hanging out with their daddy's credit cards.

so, after stalking the crazy horse website, we learned last december that there would be a new restuarant opening in WEST COVINA (about a 45 minute drive from where we live) in early 2008. then, the website was updated to read "July 2008". next perusal brought us "summer 2008". then "august 2008". but finally came the day when it said "we are open!!!" and we even heard a radio commercial on a local station (KBIG 104.3) saying that there would be no cover charge on friday. that was all the nudge we needed.

being on a budget, we swigged a shot each of jaegermeister from a plastic waterbottle that we had packed to bring as a "predrink". there was no cover charge, but the drinks were sure to be expensive.

and then the fun began. the inside was bright and colorful, and reminded us of a vegas nightclub. the band, the same one from the old club, was energetic and charasmatic. and the floor was packed with people dancing. not just standing around bobbing their heads, but really dancing. it was sooo much fun.

summer nights in the living room...

so, a few posts ago, i vented about my noisy neighbors. the situation continues, but tony and i decided to take the "high road" for now. we don't feel like stressing ourselves out over it anymore (at least not at the moment)...and we have decided to make it a "summer thing" to camp out in the living room. kinda fun, actually. and, i have to say...our mattress is actually so bad that it's actually MORE comfy to sleep on it on the FLOOR than to have it on the springs in our bedroom.

so, till it cools off a bit and our neighbors start closing their windows at night (which will HOPEFULLY help solve this noise problem, since our management told us outright that it would be a LONG process to evict them for noise problems and the neighbors don't seem to care to STOP the noise...), we lean our mattress against the wall in the hallway during the day, and at night drag it the few feet to the open area of the living room floor. our alarm clocks are set up on either side of the mattress.

we can laugh about it a bit now, and know that this will definitely be one of thse stories we can tell our kids about someday...

remember this moment...

so, i had the house to myself one night last weekend. and i felt like being creative. usually i put on the tv and work in front of it, but a few days ago i was stuck by the inspiration bug, and just wanted to lose myself in the moment. all of my scrapbooking supplies are in the 2nd bedroom (known at this point as the "large closet"), so, rather than sort thru what i needed and drag it into the living room, i set up camp on the floor of that room. (i still had a mess from my last creation a week ago...see my NEXT post...so it wasn't a big deal to simply ADD to the mess...) i put on some cds that made me nostalgic, like "color me badd" (no laughing...okay, maybe a little bit) and "dave matthews band." and i grabbed a mini-bottle of wine...just cuz i could.

i was going to work on a project that i didn't get to finish from CKU, but just wasn't "feeling it"... i felt like i needed to start something from scratch. so, instead, i did a simple layout about a moment from that weekend, anyways. nothing bit, just a simple moment in time, but something that i really wanted to remember. so i got to "work" on it...here is what the journaling says:

"Sitting in Starbucks at the Anaheim Marriott, before Ali Edward's album class at CKU. Anticipation and excitement building but trying to relax. Dunking an orange-cranberry scone into my white chocolate mocha drink (with whipped cream). Tapping my toes to the classic jazz playing (Sinatra?) and reading the last Harry Potter book. THIS is contentment."

And here is my layout:

 

sleepless nights...

so, my fiance and i moved into a new apartment a little over a month ago, right? well, we haven't really gotten much sleep since then. noisy neighbors. we tried to ignore it, and finally took to sleeping with our window shut and a fan on, for "white noise".

now, it's not like there is a party going on next door or anything. nope. it's what you might call "normal" noise...people slamming doors, yelling to one another from room to room, kids with their shrill voices playing and yelling at one another...

the part that is NOT normal is that this starts up around 11:00 pm and continues well past 2 am into the next morning. and when we need to get up at 6 am for our jobs, tony and i are not happy campers.

we have called the apartment management office several times to complain. they promise that things will be handled...first a "warning", then a notice that they are in violation of their lease...but how long will this process take? obviously, whatever steps have been taken so far aren't enough to change their behavior.

not afraid of confrontation, i headed over there myself in my jammies the other night...circling their place, able to hear them from every side (they connect to us on only one wall). unfortunately, i also heard a man's loud voice from inside, and ffrom the sound of him, he might have been drinking. NOT a situation i wanted to deal with, so i just went back home.

last night was almost comical. just after 11:30, tony commented, "well, at least there are no sound of the neighbors tonight." not 5 minutes later, it started up. no joke. well, we laid there as long as we could. at about 1:30 this morning, we decided we couldn't deal with it any longer...and picked up our mattress and took it to the living room, where we spent the night on the floor. i was laughing (almost delirious from sleep-deprivation by this time), saying that i will NEVER forget that moment.

can you BELIEVE all of this? so now, i don't know what to do. sigh.

just one of those days...weeks..etc?

having one of those "days", though it's been longer than just one day now. i seem to be stuck in a cycle of sorts...the kind i used to tell myself would NEVER happen to me. i get up, i go to work, i sit in front of a computer, being bored all day. then i come home and sit on the couch, being bored all evening. no motivation to do much else. and, believe it or not, the boredom from the daytime wears me out even more for the evening. my fiance is stuck in the same trap, so even our interactions seem to be minimal at the moment. each stuck in our own little world. ocupying the same space, but seldom interacting.  it's enough to make me wanna cry.