Oy with the vey – Okay, let’s get (a little) caught up.

Who do I work for now?
Three valet companies:
1. Dolls – first love, blue collar sorority, originator of more fun than I’ve ever had on any payroll ever. (and I’ve been on a lot of different payrolls!)

2. Prem!Co – another private event valet co which I was ref’d over to by a fellow Doll because I needed to pick up more hours. Not nearly as fun, and mostly guys, but still – pay the bills.

3. SpiffV!Hotel – high end hotel on the beach in Santa Monica who originally were interested in me as a doorperson full time, but right now I’m just working a fixed Fri & Sat night shift, 8pm – 2am. Named on a variation of the last fixed locale I worked at in Westwood which I called Spiffy!Hotel.

Oh, an in between all this? Still taking clients, trying to maintain the work, and attempting to figure out how the hell I’m going to a) afford & b) fit in Not!Grad School in the fall.

Happy 4th of July! :falls over:
So from Friday to Monday of 4th of July weekend, my life went like this:
Valet – SpiffV!Hotel
Sleep in parking lot at LB boathouse
Row
Lunch w/ Jess
Sleep for an hour
Valet – SpiffV!Hotel
Sleep in parking lot near LA boathouse until Panda Face got off the highway & called to wake me up.
Row
Go home, assure Zoey her mommy was still alive
Drive to Malibu
Work for Dolls for about 8 hours
Sleep for about 3 horus in my bed for the first time in a few days
Row w/ the juniors
Valet – Prem!Co
Get fed awesome food because there’s few things better than a Jewish family having an engagement party/housewarming for their new mansion. (Smoked lox with dill wrapped around cream cheese… oh so good :insert Homer Simpson donut noise here:)
Go home
Sleep from 4:30pm – 7am
Tuesday
Wake up & realize that I had a crapload of stuff to do to get caught up.
Despair.
Do a load of laundry.
Despair more.
Drop off the rest of my portfolio for Not!Grad School review.
Attempt get caught up.
Fail miserably.
Sleep.

…and that pretty much brings us current. Go Team me!

1 ticket down, two to go!
I have this little…problem. It’s called Street Parking. Because as any city dweller knows, when you have street parking, you’re vulerable – your poor car is subject to the leanings of any drunk passerby, as well as the travesty of parking police driven to leave unsightly & economically damaging tickets on otherwise nifty windshields as part of their attempt to do their part to plug the state’s deficit so they don’t have to go on furlough.

Combine that with my unsighly state of unemployment for the last year or so, and hey – those tickets can add up. I dunno that I’ve ever admitted this publicly, but a strong motivator in getting my sorry arse to the boathouse on Monday & Tuesday mornings has been to remove my car from the possibility of a street cleaning ticket lest I discover that I’d messed up & parked on the wrong side of the street, which has a minimum penalty of $55. (Yes, you read that right – fifty-five dollars.)

So as part of my whole “Trying to get my life in order” (which I’m sure I’ll write out & explain later when I have time, but yes, let’s just roll with the concept that I’m trying to get my life in order) I’ve been on a campaign to get rid of these monkeys on my vehicular back, and thus have slowly siphoned a fraction of my cash tips from any job I can spare it off into a clutch purse which sat innocuously amongst the tomes* on my bookcase, sides slowly bulging out with one dollar bills.
*tomes = programming books that I still haven’t had time to do the exercises in yet. :sigh:

Thankfully, the breakneck pace of 4th of July weekend meant that I had finally hit the $154 total needed to pay off the first ticket. (oh yes. you totally read that right. One hundred and fifty-four dollars. For realsies.)

In attempting to recover from the “despair” portion of yesterday, I gathered my pluck and moseyed to the ATM to deposit said cash so that I could pay it off today once the deposit had cleared. After all, Bank of America has the nifty new cash deposit thing, it should be easy peasy, right?

Let’s not play – just the fact that I asked that question should tell you the answer.

The next time I have to do this, someone please remind me to go change the ones to larger bills, m’kay? Because having the ATM process over $100 in one dollar bills was a less than idea experience – wrinkled & folded bills got kicked back out & had to be re-entered, and after the third time of trying to deal with the fact that it only lets you deposit 40 bills at a time, I swear to gods that ATM was making aspersions on my profession based on me being a female in Los Angeles depositing a large volume of $1 bills. Shut it, Bank of America – I’m a valet, ‘mkay? No, that’s not a euphamism – I seriously AM a valet. If I were a stripper, I should hope the hell I’d be depositing way more than $154 after a weekend’s work, or I’d be a really bad stripper.

The upshot being that the money is in the bank, and once I get home tonight to a place where I can print the receipt, I’ll have paid off the biggest ticket, & then there’s just the $122 & the $97 ones to go before I am footloose & DMV free, thank the gods.

——————–
What made me smile today:

Finally – a class that would actually get Sachiel to the gym!
ZombieFit classes. How to prepare for the inevitable apocalypse. yes, you TOTALLY read that right.

What made me laugh out loud today:

I’m not a Twi-tard, but I do less-than-three me The Fug Girls. As someone who often sees the celeb crowd (and the aspiring celeb crowd) in their comings, goings, & rates them based on whether they can spare the valet a $5 when we all know what they made for their last movie, I find the Fug Girls’ sometimes scathing evaluations to be oddly in line with my own inner monologue, and I won’t lie – sometimes when in doubt about what to wear, I have been known to think, “What would the Fug girls say?” (Incidentally, their “No to leggings” is a movement I can get behind)

So it was with that in mind that I read their eval of Kristen Stewart’s newest attempt at a press junket, because yes, I totally think that girl really needs to learn to wash her hair a bit more, and considering my complete lack of patience for anything beyond shampoo & conditioner, that’s what we could call “an indicator”. And while I’m not really a Robert Pattinson fan (he glitters, people. How the fuck can I take a vampire seriously when he glitters? ) I did love thier parting shot:

But now the twosome has gone public, finally, and the stress of hiding — and coming up with new coy denials and vague non-answers — has lifted. The question is answered, and we think it’s a big part of why Kristen can relax and try to enjoy herself instead of waiting for a bullet to dodge. Also: What’s up with the denials in the first place? He’s Cedric Diggory, child. BRAG.

Music: Jakob Dylan – Nothing But the Whole Wide World