Surviving Halloween

Happy Dios De Los Muertos!  As I type this, I'm sitting in my kitchen having just scarfed down two breakfast tacos from Taco Joint and am making my way through my second cup of coffee.  I was a zombie yesterday.  And I'm a zombie this morning (which I guess is appropriate for DDLM).  But with no less makeup on my face/neck/arms/legs.  I'm still rocking dark circles under my eyes.  Oh Halloween, you're a harsh mistress. 

If you're strapped for cash and don't want to spend $40 on a Halloween costume, the zombie look is for you.  Just run over some old clothes with your car and slap some cheap white/black/gray makeup on your face and you're ready to go!

Yesterday started innocently enough: at work.  Buuuut there just happened to be a Bloody Mary and mimosa bar in an empty cubicle.  And Jell-O shots.  Lots of Jell-O shots.  I was proud of myself: I only had a Solo cup of champagne (filled up about a quarter of the way) and one Jell-O shot.  I should explain... The company I work for is big on celebrations and Halloween is the biggest.  Which is pretty awesome, albeit exhausting. 

That time I was a total sucker

Since we moved into our new house, we've been getting a ton of junk mail.  Like pounds of it.  Junk mail is one of my pet peeves.  A weird one, I know.  I can't believe companies spend money on direct mail pieces (my employer included)!  I spent a few minutes every morning this week calling companies and asking to be removed from their mailing list.  One of the pieces of junk mail I received (addressed to "Resident") was a shiny, colorful piece of card stock from a local car dealership telling me that I may have won a new car, $15,000 in cash, an iPad, or a Wal-Mart gift card.  Enticing, I know, especially the last prize.

I called their main line and simply asked to be removed from the mailing list.  Standard procedure.  Now, I have to give major props to the girl on the other line.  She asked which mailing piece I received, and I described it to her.  She then said, "Don't you want to claim your prize?"  Um, what?  She then proceeded to explain that if the number in the scratch off box matched the number printed on the paper, I was eligible for a prize, and to claim it I needed to make an appointment and come in.  I told her, Sorry, I'm not in the market for a car.  She said it's no problem, but I should come in and retrieve the prize that's rightfully mine.  I'm embarrassed to say that I made an appointment for 12:30pm that day.

I told my bf about this via text.  Surprisingly, he did not discourage me from going.  I would almost say, he encouraged me to go.  Probably so he could hear about how I awkwardly showed up at a car dealership demanding to be given the grand prize.  Well played, sir.

During my lunch break I drove to the car dealership on the other side of town through rush hour traffic, nervous that I'd look like a schmuck or a freeloader, or a wicked combination of both.  I arrived at the dealership and was welcomed by a super nice sales guy, whom I told, "I called to ask to be removed from your mailing list and the girl on the phone talked me into coming into claim my prize", as I proudly flashed the mailer to everyone in the show room.  "My appointment is at 12:30," I told him, thinking he'd bring me to a room behind a velvet rope where the prizes are kept alongside chilled bottles of champagne.  Instead, I sat down at his desk and he filled out a form with the info from my driver's license.  So now I'm probably on their permanent mailing list. Awesome.

"Now we'll walk over to The Board to see which prize you won!" he tells me, and parades me over to "The Board", which is in the back of the showroom, so everyone can laugh at the girl who came in to claim her prize.  I hate to admit that during this time I was thinking about all the house projects I could complete when I win the $15,000 grand prize.  I'm such a loser sometimes!

To win the good prize, the special number on your mailer has to match the number next to the picture of the pile of cash.  Mine didn't match that, or the new car, or the iPad... But EVERYONE is a winner at this dealership, so I won a Wal-Mart gift card in the amount of $5 to $25!  YEEE-HAW!

At the end of the day, I spent an hour of my time to drive to some obscure car dealership.  I came away with a Wal-Mart gift card and a purse full of business cards from the sales guy to pass out to friends.  The moral of the story: Direct mail really works!

Now I'm off to Wal-Mart to spend my gift card.  We're low on Funyuns.

A little rant and Oh Mexico

It's finally Friday and I'm glad this week is over.  It's had highs (a great dinner with friends last night) and lows (taking my brother to the emergency room for a bulging disc in his back), so maybe those events cancel each other out and it was really more of a neutral week.  (Trying to be positive here...)

Because my brother is going to be fine (I strongly believe our health is the most important thing in terms of worldly worries), the WORST part of my week was getting my first paycheck of the year and seeing the pay cut I got thanks to Uncle Sam.  It really hurts!  Yes I  ball, but I ball on a budget!  I'm trying to save for retirement, save for a down payment on a house, save for a rainy day, while buying organic meat and produce so I won't get cancer someday (because the government allows all kinds of scary sh*t in our food these days), and Big Brother comes along and takes over a Benjamin a month from my net pay! That's like a car payment for a vehicle I'll never get to drive, since Social Security won't be around by the time I'm eligible to receive it.

DARTing Around

For a Southern city, Dallas has decent public transportation.  It's not nearly as expansive as the systems of Chicago, San Francisco, or New York City, but it's slowly growing (since its most recent expansion, we have seventy-two miles of light rail service) and it's better than nothing!  As a resident who would like to see more of it, I should do more to support our Dallas Area Rapid Transit, aka "The DART".

This weekend I stepped up my game and participated in my friend's second annual DART Rail Pub Crawl.  Atendees purchased a $4 day pass and could join the fun at any one of the nine stops along the way.  I posted our agenda below in case any of my DFW-are friends want to recreate this epic pub crawl while supporting our public transportation infastructure.  (I like to consider it "crawling for a cause"!)  DARTing is a nice break from driving and the hassles that come with it (I'm talking about you, parallel parking!).



My posse and I joined the group downtown at City Tavern.

Cajun Country Road Trip

My last post about New Orleans got me thinking.  Louisiana has so much to offer!  The Big Easy is probably the most popular tourist destination in the state, but there are other areas to explore that offer visitors a glimpse into a distinct regional culture.  A few summers ago, a friend and I took a weekend road trip off the beaten path through Cajun Country to check out the southern central part of the state.  It's a fun little weekend getaway and pretty easy to cover in a couple of days, especially if you live in a bordering state.

On a Friday night we left from Dallas and spent the night in Shreveport.  If you live in the Southern part of the country and are passing through, it's a fun little town to stop and place some bets, but I don't recommend it as a destination.  Go to Vegas.  Just do it.

After winning a little and loosing more, we got up early the next morning and set out for our primary attraction of the weekend: the Tabasco bottling plant on Avery Island.  In my opinion, it was a scenic four hour drive almost due south from Shreveport, so if you enjoy swamps, bayous, and cute little historic towns, you'll agree!

On our way we stopped for lunch at Pat's Fisherman's Wharf in Henderson, which has been serving Cajun cuisine since 1948.  It's still operated and owned by the Huval family and is a popular stop in the Atchafalaya Basin.  We sat on the screened-in patio on a bayou and enjoyed some cold beer and crawfish!  Yum!

Spring Forward

Even though I'm "sacrificing" an hour of sleep each night, I'm SO EXCITED we sprung forward on Sunday morning!  I get to see the light of day when I leave work and I feel motivated to get things accomplished in the evenings.  The weather is getting warmer and it's made nomadic life a lot easier, with rummaging through the trunk of my car, lugging around bags, etc- not so much fun in the cold and dark.  The trees around my office are blooming, making for a lovely commute in the mornings and evenings, and they're so beautiful I felt compelled to take some photos when I left work today.

Step Two: Organization

My first "secret-revealing" post, The Purge, told you all about how I narrowed down my possessions to just the essentials.  Now here's the fun part!  I am an organization geek- I get overly excited about nesting boxes, file folders, and containers of all shapes and sizes.  I got rid of nearly everything I owned, but still have necessities I need to easily access while storing them somewhere.  My personal challenge with my living experiment is to operate as efficiently as possible as I go from one place to the next.   My goals are:

1. Be organized and look nice (I don’t want it to be obvious I’m living out of my car!)


2. Don’t leave anything (for more than a couple of nights) in my friends’ homes


3. Leave a place better than I found it (life lesson from Girl Scout camping trips)

I have three places I store my things:

1. Trunk of my car


2. Locker at work


3. Boyfriend’s garage (original plan was to rent a storage unit but I'm taking my time to shop around for the least sketchy, most convenient location that is safe to visit by myself in the evenings... it's like searching for a needle in a haystack!)

What I access the most often (once or twice a day) is the junk in my trunk!  This is where I store my toiletries, pillow, blanket, accessories, and some clothes.