My Soldier Boyfriend

I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about Bruce, which is a shame because he’s my imaginary boyfriend.

That is to say, he’s a real person who exists, but he’s only my boyfriend in my mind. (And yes, I’ve been called ‘stalker’ before. It doesn’t offend me in the least.)

The first time I saw Bruce (April 13th, 2011) I made a Facebook status about him which somehow offended a few of my guy friends, making me both irate and greatly amused. Now that I’m dedicating a whole blog post to him, I’ll probably doubly offend them since I not only swooning over Soldier Man again, but also admitted to being thoroughly amused by their displeasure.

Oh well. I don’t need friends. I have Bruce. *psychotic grin*

So the story goes…

I was working the late shift and the cafe was pretty much empty. In the midst of my loneliness and boredom walked Mr. Dreamboat in full military uniform with the boots, cap… y’know, all the normal things that make women giddy. At this stage in my work I was not entirely comfortable with the register or filling more-than-standard orders, so whenever anyone at all walked up to the register, I’d get a little nervous. The man’s stance and expression were only making me more flustered. His hands were clasped behind his back, he was standing to attention, his eyes scanned the bakery like he was honing in on a target, and all in all, he was, as my brother’s like to say, “so legit.”

He asked for a whole loaf of Asiago cheese bread toasted and that’s when the trouble really began.

Me: You want the entire loaf… toasted?
My Brain: How do I do that? How do I do that? I burn bagels! How do I toast the entire loaf without setting it on fire? I’m going to burn the place down! Wait… he looks trained for that kind of thing. He can carry my unconscious body out of harm’s way…
Him: Yes. The whole thing. Toasted.
Me: I could try… slicing it… I guess…
My Brain: Act like you know what you’re talking about. He’s just a guy who wants toast. Don’t look stupid. Too late. You’re stuttering. Burning Panera down might be worth it…
Me: If I toast it in half, like… *making completely unhelpful gestures with my hands* this… then, maybe the loaf won’t catch on fire.
Him: I’ll trust the expert fire marshal on this one.
My Brain: Omg. I love you.
Me: Heh… okay, lemme just…*staring at the bread without a clue*

Through the entire conversation he was looking at me with an eyebrow raised as if making a valiant effort not to laugh at my foolish attempts to slice bread. By then, my manager had run out (she has a ‘hot boy radar’ as she calls it) to ask what the problem was.

My Brain: No, Kristin! Go back to washing dishes!
Me: Uh… he’s wants the… that bread… um…
Him: I would like the loaf of asiago cheese bread toasted, but there was some conflict as to how it should be sliced, *looking straight at me* was there not, Bethany?
My Brain: Marry me.

Kristin finally got the man situated with his toasted loaf, (though not before cutting herself on the knife and thus bleeding for him) but flustered as I was I accidentally rang him up for three loaves instead of the one, to which he said I was setting his credit card on fire. The card in question had Bruce printed as the first name, and my stalker-senses told me to remember it.

He left after purchasing one loaf and a bottled water and as soon as he had, Kristin and I turned to each other and basically squealed like idiots. We were also floating three inches off the ground for the rest of the evening.

Flash forward.

Monday afternoon, (August 29th. 2011) during a lunch rush, a man approached my register. He was in a gray t-shirt and he was looking at me like I should recognize him. Not only that, but he was doing this smirky face that I could only describe in my mind as “the smoulder.”

Like that, only way more subtle. And he didn't look like Flynn. And I did not react like Rapunzel.

The words, “Okay, here comes the smoulder” were actually going through my mind as he was looking at me. And as my favorite writer of Indian captivity stories likes to write, “It was such a look that I had to look away.“

Actually, I was very confused and though not as flustered as the first time, still flustered, but mostly trying not to start beaming for no reason. Fit, handsome men do not ordinarily walk up to my register and look at me like that.

He ordered one pecan roll. I was a little disappointed because the pecan rolls are my least favorite of all the pastries we have. It’s a bit dry for my tastes. But I was in such a mental flurry trying to figure out why on earth a man was looking at me like I was attractive that I didn’t say anything. I reached for his credit card. He let me grab it and then pulled it back. He did that twice.

I’m just about to ask him what his deal is and if he wants the pecan roll or my entire hand/arm when he finally gives me the card and I swipe it before he changes his mind.

The name on there was Bruce. (I would just like to point out that I never remember names or orders. It took me three full months of a lady coming in every single day before I remembered her name and that she likes one iced tea.)

So first this guy blows my hair back by talking like he escaped from a literary novel, and then he gives me the sort of look that got Christine to walk through a mirror.

My Brain: Everyone is busy, I have you all to myself, and dibs because the other girls have boyfriends!  BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Yeah, so by now we’re both smirking. I sigh and shake my head a little and say, “No asiago bread today?”

“No. Just the roll.”

“Do you want me to slice and toast that weirdly, too?”

And he threw his crumpled up receipt at me while maintaining the most wonderfully sarcastic expression I have yet seen. There were so many things I could have said at that point. (Like was he going to flog me for my insubordination.) But I chose not to. I was afraid it would come out in a weird stutter and no longer be intelligible.

He said yes to the toasting, but I ignored that. I figured if he was serious about toasting a pecan roll he could come back to complain and I’d willfully stick it in the toaster while glaring at him, knowing full well it would burst into flames.

Heehee.

So I brought him his roll and a couple napkins and utensils, and I let him reach for the box and then pulled it back. But I only did it once. But the look on his face was priceless. If it could be verbally translated, I think it would say, “Well played.”

Then he left me for the second time and I hope I see him again before too long. He gives me a high. I don’t even remember what the next ten orders were like. I was busy keeping my head down and biting my lip so my cheeky grin didn’t explode off my face.

When I gushed to my mother about it she asked, “What if he just bought that uniform online and wears it to impress girls?”

I answered with another set of questions. “What if a guy walked into work wearing Victorian clothes and talked like Mr. Darcy? Would I care that he wasn’t really from the 19th century?”

(Answer: Only a little.)

Excuse me while I sing this for the next 48 hours.

Project Hair Grow – Month 11

Come September I’ll have reached the year mark for when I started these hair posts. Okay, so technically I started posting in October, but the picture was from September, so that’s where I’m counting from.

Can you believe it’s almost been a year!? I can’t! I can’t even believe I’ve been blogging here for that long!

I know, I have lazy eyes. It’s not the only lazy thing about me. (Look how late this post is.)

This is just to show how uncomfortably hot it was.

My bangs grow so fast. They went from the above shortness to being so long I could curl them back to be indistinguishable from the rest of my layers–in a month.

See what I mean? You can’t even tell I had bangs! But no worries. I have them again now. I know my hair looks fairly tolerable in those pictures, but they’d got to the point where they sproinged wrongfully at the sides of my head and wouldn’t be tamed by a flat iron or hairspray. It was time. They’re much more manageable now.

Hopefully next month I won’t be so late. Hopefully you can see my hair as it currently is. And since it will be the one year mark, I’ll have some refresher pictures and “this is what I want my hair to be” photos. Yay!

Victorians and Zombies and Mermaids! Oh my!

This has been an interesting week for dreams.* I had two that I remember in the same night–one right after the other–that in no way connected, but nonetheless shall be shared together.

First, it was playing like a period film. I was following the lives of this large family in the late Victorian period. There was the main couple; a widow who had remarried a man played by Mr. Preston of Wives and Daughters. (Or more epically, Ser Jorah Mormont–Guy who helps Savage Queen–of Game of Thrones.) There were daughters and sons by her first marriage, a daughter from her new marriage, cousins, uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers… all connected to this family. And they were all meeting on this estate for a family picnic. Several children in wide collars and pinafores were trying to get a kite to fly, and all the unmarried ladies were discussing their prospects while the married couples looked on approvingly with their tea in hand. It was quite lovely and could easily have been the end scene of a period film.

Then, in the same night but not the same dream, I was suddenly standing in the doorway of my house. It was just growing dark and I was trying to call in the little ones. I was upset because the older boys refused to come inside and the younger kids just wanted to do with their big brothers were doing. I told them this was not a joke; the zombies were coming and they’d better come in and bolt the door. They finally came, but it was reluctantly, and with no concept of the danger we were in.

We went around the house, boarding up windows and bolting the doors. The later it got, the more danger we were in because these zombies couldn’t come out in the daylight. A few minutes in the sun killed them for good.

There were a lot of frightening noises like snarling, scratching, and wailing outside our house, and gunfire from the armed forced that were sent out to stop the zombies. I’m sorry to say that in my dream my brothers were absolutely useless during this zombie apocalypse. They were more concerned about how much nacho cheese dip we had left and how long we’d have to wait before we could go buy some more.

In the morning, I opened the front door and the landscape was a COD level.

This one, to be exact:

I can't believe how quickly I found this screen cap.

Except for one glaring difference; zombie bodies were everywhere. Their black, charred remains were heaped into piles so large that one spilled right into the next. Being that my brothers and I were none to bright in this dream (and I have no idea where the little ones were at this point; I really hope sleeping) we wandered outside to have a closer look.

I was studying the faces of all the zombie corpses, trying to see some remnant of humanity in their expressions, and this very hostile–hostile to me–lieutenant guy started yelling and getting in my face. I had no idea what he was angry for, and the more he yelled the more his eyes took on this unnatural kind of glazed look.

That’s when I knew he was infected.

He backed me up against a large pile of zombies and I tripped and fell. My hand brushed against a gun one of the zombies had been using when destroyed, and I picked it up and fired just as the angry lieutenant did. Oh yes, and it was a long barrel pistol. That’s about as technical as I get with guns.

Apparently I killed the half-zombified lieutenant, but not before he shot me in the arm. So I got up, and I stumbled a couple feet, and there was this medic. And in my mind I was like, “Oh, hellooo conveniently-placed good-looking medic! Finally, some good fortune!”

And I passed out.

While I was recovering at home under the supervision of said medic, there was some question as to whether or not I was infected. I knew the guy didn’t bite me or anything, but no one else did.

And that dream ended. Which is a troublesome thing because I really wanted the medic to know I wasn’t a zombie.

So, mermaids!

I’ve watched far too much H2O since being shown all its wonders, because I was Cleo and my best friend Rikki and we had to convince our families to go to this one resort to be near a conference center where something significant was going to take place that we wanted to stop. I think. It was not that clear.

Eventually we found ourselves surrounded by a bunch of evil non-mermaids (mostly teenage girls with knives) who were after our secrets and we couldn’t use our amazing woodah powahs on them because after twilight our powers were too weak. So we ran through these ruins to try to escape and ended up being herded to the edge of some very rocky cliffs and we knew to get out of there alive we’d have to jump.

That was the end of that dream.

More recently I dreamed I worked at a 19th century whorehouse. But not as a whore. I was like… a maid/secretary. Then this well-to-do gentleman enlisted my help to find his kidnapped infant son and I did. He took me to his estate to let me stay a while so he could find me a better line of work but his family were a bunch of self-righteous prats who did everything in their power to make my life miserable. Then his little nephew or brother or some kind of youthful male relation asked me for advice about a girl he was fond of and somehow that set the family in an uproar which was a direct cause for my sobbing hysterically which made my new gentleman friend stand up for me and eventually propose.

Oh. He was a widower. I suppose I should have made that more clear to begin with. I think the story was that his family pressured him into matrimony, the wife turned out to be a cold fish, she had one son whom she despised and then she died from lack of willpower to be useful to anyone.

It’s the damsel complex.

Although I must say, her son and her willingness to die allowed me to find my gentleman friend. So perhaps she wasn’t entirely useless.

*This was written up as a draft weeks ago. Just fyi.

A Really Stupid Post

This post is so lame I captioned a white square for lack of a more relevant picture.

I figure I might as well slack in quality as well as quantity when it comes to blogging. I don’t slack half-way!

Last week I caught myself asking if I could borrow someone’s Excedrin. It struck me that no one can really borrow Excedrin. I mean, I can borrow the bottle and take a few pills, but once those pills are took, I highly doubt anyone’s going to want them back. So it made me think of all the things people usually ask to borrow that they should not.

One of those things is napkins.

Don’t ask to borrow napkins. If you’re wiping your face with it, I don’t want it back, thank you. You may ask to have some napkins. That would be fine. But they go in the trash when you’re done. Not back to me.

Feminine pads are another item you don’t borrow. Do I even need to explain why? And yes, I’ve been asked by a couple people if they could “borrow” a pad from me. Keep it. It’s all yours. No, really.

And sunscreen. In actuality, you are borrowing the container of sunscreen. There’s no way after applying sunscreen that you can scrape it off and put it back in the bottle for reuse. And if there was a way, it would not be worth doing. Same goes for lotion, hand sanitizer, and all makeup products. Although I will accept, “May I borrow your tube of lip gloss?”

Newsflash: I’ve been writing fan fiction. H2O fan fiction. Yeah. I’m that lazy. I can’t even write 19th century spin-offs anymore. It’s all about Australian mermaids. Oh! But I am learning some fantastic Aussie slang in the meantime!

For example, did you know that “grundies” are slang for underwear? I’ve read some sites that define it as “boring, uncomfortable underwear” but I’m not sure how accurate that is since there’s now an entire site called Grundies dedicated to very distinctly Australian underpants. Ah, the things I learn whilst writing.

Okay, I’ve been having a blast at work. When I get enough coffee in my system before clocking on I have the energy to be and find everything hilarious. Today I was starting some fresh pots of coffee while Matt, one of our managers, made croutons on the shelf next to me. We had a little radio playing and another manager was fiddling with it to find a good station and then Matt mentioned Pandora. I mused silently for a while and then said, “Wouldn’t it be great if some girl was named Pandora?”

And Matt said, “Whyyy?”

“Can’t you imagine how great the jokes would be at her birthday parties? People would be sitting around and someone would shake one of the presents and it would be like, ‘Don’t open that, it’s Pandora’s box!’”

It was such a bad joke that he gave me his “what is wrong with you?” look plus a chuckle when he could think of nothing else to do but laugh. Yeah. I have that affect on people. Effect? Wait, don’t tell me!  Affect is to have an influence on, or cause a change in, and effect is a result brought about by a cause, sooo… I’m going with effect. Okay? We good? Good.

Friday Night YouTube

I’m even slipping behind on the easy posts that take little effort except to copy and paste the link of stuff I’m watching!

I’m an insufferably lazy woman and I apologize.

I’m really excited to share this video with you! It’s performances like this–quirky, colorful, and madly talented–that made me start Friday Night YouTube. Or was it the cat video? I can’t remember.

Spontaneous Me – Lindsey Stirling

I want to be her. *sigh* Why don’t I have a talent like that?

Piano Guys

These are utterly amazing. Watching all these musically gifted people always makes me sad. Because I have zero musical talent.

I could watch these on loop, just to stare at the guy’s hands flying across the keys like that. Oh whoops. Forgot to close my mouth. Now I need a drink!

This one I’m challenging Best Friend to learn. He has to do it with the robes and everything.

And in keeping up with that theme, I absolutely had to share this…

The Cutest Scene Almost Ever

The Interview

Okay, so it’s a bit… crude. And creepy. But this video helped me calm my nerves for each of my job interviews. I just imagined the questions would be like this and the real questions ended up being super easy after that.

Jane Eyre – Timothy Dalton

Diaaaalo000guuuueeee!!!! Well-delivered, character developing, period-dramaesque diiiiaaaal0ogueeeee*drooooooooooooooooooooooolls* <3 Sorry, Mara. This is my Mr. Rochester. But at least we don’t have to fight!

Doo Wah Diddy

This song is in my head, so you all have to listen to it and get it in your heads as well.

And yeah, I’m watching THAT version of Jane Eyre and yet THIS song is in my head. That’s how I roll.