the everyday adventures of sabrina

I did something for the first time ever tonight: I bought a lottery ticket. Sure, I’ve done the little scratch-off ones when people have bought them as gifts for me, and when my mom played lotto when I was a kid sometimes she’d let me pick numbers and fill in the little scantron form, but I’ve never actually played the lottery myself. In all honesty, I think of it as a gullibility tax. (The slightly more cruel variant on that is ’stupidity tax,’ but I know smart people who play the lottery too, so I go with a less catty nickname.)

Anyways, as it turns out, I’m pretty gullible myself sometimes (ask my coworkers) so I thought, what the hell, I’m going to buy a lottery ticket. I marched right up to the lottery machine in the local ex-White Hen (sorry, 7-11, it’s always going to be the White Hen to me)… well, more properly I went in the door and got in line behind the other guy who was waiting for the one guy working to check out all the people who were buying actual things so he could buy a lottery ticket, and waited for my turn, but I did that, anyways. And then I asked for two Mega Millions quick picks (because I figured their pseudo-random number generator was at least as likely as my brain to pick the 1 set of numbers out of 175,711,536 possible sets that would match), and then gave them two dollars and they gave me one slip of paper with a little bar code on it. (I feel robbed. Two “tickets,” I should have two slips of paper to show for it; to hell with the trees!) And now I shall wait until tomorrow at midnight, or more properly Saturday morning, because to be honest, I cannot be bothered to watch television at midnight to see if I won the thing there’s no way in hell I’m going to win.

But, I have to say, the novelty of buying a lottery ticket has been interesting. It’s been sort of fun thinking up how I would spend money if I didn’t have to worry about it, since I first thought of buying a lottery ticket two days ago. If the cost of a really lovely daydream is only $2, how can you argue with that? That’s value. Most of my dreams (cough, cough, ENGLAND, cough) cost much more than $2. I suppose if I played regularly, the dreams wouldn’t be nearly so lovely; it would be routine and boring and maybe I’d just skip it entirely in the drudgery of buying my habitual ticket and shoving it in a pocket while fetching a coffee on Monday mornings, like clockwork. But for a first-timer, it’s been fun to sort of lose myself in a little bit of pointless dreaming.

And of course the tradition of winning the lottery is that then you go out and spend your ridiculous amounts of money. I don’t want a big house, and I like my car just fine (okay, maybe I’d have it detailed). So those are not really in the cards for my theoretical jackpot. And there are philanthropic things I’d do for friends and family, but then I’d lose the surprise if I just went and blogged about it in advance, so where’s the fun in that? So here it is, my list of Ten Selfish Things I’d Do if I Won the Lottery (or, I should say, if I win the $140m jackpot that is the only lottery I’ve ever played or am likely to play for the foreseeable future, because seriously, it really is a gullibility tax, y’all, and I am gullible but it takes real guile to trick me repeatedly):

• I’d pay off my mortgage. (This is arguable as a selfish thing, since it’s my mom’s house, but it’s my name on the paper, so I think it counts.)
• I would pay off my student loans and not take out any more, ha ha ha, sorry Department of Ed making big bank (ha) off my interest.
• Speaking of which, screw this whole sticking around and trying to qualify for a work permit thing, if I had like $50m cash on hand I wouldn’t need to work constantly — I’d totally try and get a visa immediately and move to the UK. Maybe finish my degree there. Or maybe I’d try and buy the Swinford toll bridge from its new owners before they can get really attached, and spend the rest of my life collecting 5p pieces one car at a time, and catching up on Eastenders in my little toll booth. I’m just saying, I’d have a little more leeway.
• But until I did that: FULL SEASON SOX TICKETS, BABY, and going to allllllll the day games. Box seats, too; third base line, right by my guys’ dugout. And all the churros and Beers of the World I could handle!
• I think I’d buy a new iMac. Just walk right in to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue and buy one, not worrying about MacWorld or WWDC or random Steve Jobs announcements obsoleting it immediately, and take a taxi straight home, because I would totally be rich enough to do that.
• I would renew my city sticker, ‘cos I’ve kind of been putting that off since, um, June, when they screwed up my paperwork and I have to go stand in line to tell them that my 2001.5 Volkswagen Passat four-door passenger sedan did not, in fact, overnight turn into a truck. Chicago, I love you, but sometimes you are honestly just plain chock-full of idiots.
• I can’t believe I am running out of ideas after only 6 things. Oh, all right, fine: I’d buy actual diamond replicas of some earrings I inherited from my grandmother when she passed. (We had lots in common; a shared love for shiny, sparkly things was only one of them.) They’re costume jewelry but I love them because they were Grandma’s. I actually bought CZ replicas of them a while back, because I was afraid of losing the real ones; every time I put the fake fakes on (which is most days; they’re my default earrings) I think of Grandma. And I’d buy real ones, but cruelty-free diamonds are not cheap, and I am a college student. So if I won the lottery, I’d buy real ones just like them, but in expensive fancy-pants Canadian nobody-died-for-this-rock ones that sparkled all over the room. I think she’d be behind me a thousand percent on this one. — I was kind of planning to make that my college graduation present to myself (I survived! Now I get sparklies!), but what the hell, if I win the lottery, I can cheat a little bit on the timeline.
• I would totally go to France. I’ve never been, and that is like the second thing that people ask me after they learn that I can speak French. It’s starting to feel a little stupid that I’ve never gone. Maybe I’d go to Alliance-Française de Paris and take one of their immersion courses; I’ve wanted to do one of those for ages. Nothing against my beloved Alliance-Française de Chicago, but you know, there is something to be said for learning to wear Hermès scarves with the native folk. (And, okay, maybe I’d go to Québec too, because, truth be told, the Quebecois accent is a little mystifying to me and I’m starting to think that I really will have to spend some time with it before I can figure out how the heck they get from ‘hiver’ to what sounds more like ‘hivaille’ to me.
• That reminds me. (Merci, Tricot Machine.) I will buy every record I have ever wanted to buy but couldn’t because I couldn’t afford to buy music at the time. That includes one-hit wonders like Jesus Jones, because my freshman year in high school they released “Right Here, Right Now,” and I loved that song, and every other album that I don’t already have that was on that list — which I still have, because I carried around a little notebook in high school to take random notes on, and I still have it, because I was a freak who loved high school. and also, like, massive shit-tons of classical. If I didn’t already own the Police box set it would be everything they ever did because I loved them so, so much in the 80s and never got to buy any music because I didn’t have an allowance, so no money until I got a job in 1994. I’m sure there will be mistakes along the way — I know Pablo Honey was on that list, and I think that album is pretty pointless (no offense, guys) now that I own it — but there is no doubting that I loved Pet Shop Boys hard when “West End Girls” came out and I love them even harder now, so, I’m pretty sure the music purchase will work out, net, in my favor.
• Is that ten yet? Shit. I mean, I’m sure I’d spend more money if I won the lottery, but going to the Body Shop and picking up a tube of hand cream even though I don’t strictly need it doesn’t quite count, does it? Okay. Ten: I would throw a ridiculous party at my house. You’d all have to put up with my playing deejay (I love teh musicks), it’s a teeny apartment so it’d be scrunched, and I’d invite my family so you might have to listen to my dad ramble about Nascar (for god’s sake, it’s not even a real sport), but I promise top-shelf liquor. And cupcakes. Always the cupcakes.

White Sox players I would most like to do various things GET YOUR FILTHY MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER with:

• I’d most like to feed a double bacon steakburger and shake to: #10, Alexei Ramirez
• I’d most like to go sing bad drunken karaoke with: #32, Brian Anderson and #45, Bobby Jenks
• I’d most like to go work on a Habitat for Humanity house with: #25, Jim Thome
• I’d most like to get to bring me homemade venison jerky: #56, Mark Buehrle
• I’d most like to just go get a beer (or six) and hang out with: #12, AJ Pierzynski
• I’d most like to get in a batting cage so he could help me with my swing: #20, Carlos Quentin
• I’d most like to go to a nice sit-down restaurant with: #14, Paul Konerko
• I’d most like to go to a Kanye show with: #23, Jermaine Dye (dude has had Kanye songs as his intro music two seasons running now, I think it’s a sign we’d both have fun)
• I’d most like to take Spanish lessons from: #13, Ozzie Guillén

eeeee! <3 my guys! t-minus 125 minutes! soon i will get to see this year’s jumbotron montage in person!

People ask me what I do in the winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.
—Rogers Hornsby

i am still convinced that kenny williams is going to wait until i am out of town and distracted, and then dump half the roster and, like, hire kansas city’s entire bullpen (again) now that he’s gotten rid of boone logan and needs to backfill more talent-free relievers.

DON’T DO THAT TO ME, KENNY. DON’T YOU DO THAT!

Dear White Sox Bullpen (and Ken Griffey, Jr.):

Just wanted to let you know — a multitude of regular-season sins can be forgiven through the skillfull execution of October appearances. FYI.

love,
–sabrina.

Dear White Sox:

Knock it off, you weenies. I am not amused by your continuing to lose like losing losers. Especially to the damn TWINKIES.

Argh. Minnesota! ARGH!!!

no love,
–sabrina

dear white sox:

WHAT THE FUCK.

i am not happy.

no love,
–sabrina.

*itch*
*itch*
*itch*
WHEN DO PITCHERS AND CATCHERS REPORT?????? GAH.
*itch*
*itch*
*itch*

stupid january. you are the longest month.

Dear Cubs Fans:

This is seriously fucked up.

No love,
–sabrina.

aiee! very, very bizzy lately.

it’s good to be in french class again. i keep having weird mini-epiphanies as some bit of vocabulary that i’d forgotten pops back into my head. on the down side, i’ve lost command of what the tenses of verbs (beyond présent and passé composé) are called and what they’re used for. i can still use them if i don’t think about it, but hell if i can tell you what the imparfait is for or how to form it. okay, okay, i know what conditionnel is for, but only because the name makes it pretty obvious. still, it’s a little bit strange sometimes, dredging through my head like this.

“csi: miami” premiere last night: sincerely very meh. i think we should get more BOOM! in a season premiere, you know? i feel a little let down.

been working a fair amount. breaking the rules because i have to work from home to take care of stuff. oh well. some days are more irritating than others. someday, someday i can stop screwing around with piddly shit (like this pile of scripts i’ve been messing with, lately) and do something useful again. i have hopes, anyways. oh, and also new minion wasy starts next week: muahahahahahahahahahahahaha! minion! fetch me my coffee!!

have reverted to using the blue line to commute. last week i gave it a trial run, as i’d heard they’d completed the slow zone restoration between division and grand. they did! lovely new cement ties holding the tracks in (they look very funny, like they’re coated in whiteout, in the dingy nastiness of the filthy division stop), and not only have i not had to wait long for a train to arrive, i have been able to board easily, and gotten downtown in good time — about 25 minutes door to door. no doubt i am tempting fate by making this post, but still, after all the endless kvetching, i figure the cta deserves a little love when they quit screwing up quite so much. (i feel a little bad now about telling my new downstairs neighbor, who moved in about three weeks ago, that the blue line was unusable. hopefully he decided i was merely cynical due to accumulated years of disgust, and not actually an idiot.)

got some work done on my clapotis this weekend. i had a couple free hours (shock!) and decided that, dammit, it’s been languishing on the needles for far too long and i’m sort of sick of looking at it sitting there in the basket, and besides, i want to wear it, for pete’s sake. so it’s about, i think, halfway done now. maybe a little more. mohair-heavy yarn on addi turbos == mistake. it’s extremely slippery and sort of annoying to knit with, because the loops won’t stay still. but i finally picked up some speed with the pattern, and after zipping along for a couple of hours i got at least a quarter of it done on sunday, and another couple of rows last night as i was sacked out in front of Horatio and Friends’ Mystery Hour, and while i won’t give any guarantees of a date of completion, i think it’s actually possible that i might finish it at some point in recorded history. so that’s nice.

the baudelaires are still sitting in the Naughty Project Punishment Corner, as i have yet to recover from the realisation that i’m going to have to rip out and reknit the whole first sock because i knit it all wonky. i keep thinking that i should just finish them, but then i get sort of bitter about the impending frogging, and all the work i’ve put into them to have netted basically 1/2 a sock now. and of course i can’t start any new socks until i finish them, because i’m a one-pair-at-a-time girl, so … that probably explains the clapotis progress. maybe i’ll finish the clapotis and then go back and finally finish my MS3, and by that time (which will easily be the year 2045) i can finish the baudelaires. :)

hm, what else? oh! i got a fantastic pressie from my SP11 the other day. by “the other day” i actually mean a week and a half ago, but, you know… bizzy. the pictures are up on flickr but i haven’t had time to write a coherent post. i actually started using them on my clapotis, replacing some of my boring stitch markers, and i’m feeling pretty good about myself because i’ve only knitted them into the fabric about three times so far (which is pretty good for me using fancy stitch markers). also: cheese! how can you go wrong? so that’s pretty awesome. perhaps it is actually the stitch markers which are to blame for my clapotis progress this weekend? hmm…

they extended the road construction on my block another few weeks. they have been ripping Le Moyne St. to pieces since june — by which i mean the entire north side of the street was ripped up, dug out, and a water main replaced, and every day they dig it up and then fill it up again with gravel at the end of the day, so it’s been gravel since july. the practical implication of this is of course that there is no parking there during the day, so that’s annoying. i keep violating my personal sartorial restriction against sweatpants in public as i have to go get out of bed and move the car at 6:30AM — on the bright side, at least no one else is awake to see me. they claim that they will be done soon, and in fact today they have huge cement trucks out there doing their little cement truck thing, so that’s sort of interesting, except for the fact that if they fill the holes up with cement, they’ll be huge potholes by may, and if they don’t, they’re going to have to resurface the asphalt, and really, you know, given all that has transpired since then i really feel more than ever that they could honestly have given us more than one day’s notice they were going to be doing this all summer (and autumn) long. stupid water department.

this weekend shall also be very bizzy: saturday is the company’s 25th anniversary party, and i’m very excited: it’s going to be held on the trading floor, in the pits! i’ve never been down to the trading floor. i’ve never even seen it from the viewing gallery, because that’s closed except to tour groups now, so even though i work there i can’t just go strolling in and look. of course it won’t be the same seeing it with, you know, a party going on instead of floor trading, but at least i can see what it looks like. then sunday i’m heading up to the illinois railway museum with a friend to visit it before they stop running trains for the season, and then i have the white sox season closer. then it’s five whole months until baseball again. :( the world series doesn’t count… i mean, go cleveland! and all, but, … meh. i still blame kenny williams, and also the ban on mark buehrle’s tarp sliding in the rain. all the bad luck stems from that ban! rescind the slip ‘n slide ban! save the 2008 season!

oh yes:

okay, that’s it for now. gotta run go get ready for work now. also, i think somewhere in this hubbub i forgot to pay my gas bill. i wonder where i put it…

the white sox are in the basement. we are being beaten in the standings by THE KANSAS CITY ROYALS.

i think i’m too embarrassed to leave the house.

it’s a good thing that i really like the baudelaire pattern because it’s starting to look like i’m never going to be done knitting it.

so, first: i cast on my first sock. and i knit partway up the instep, discovered a problem, and had to frog back about half. then i got going again, but knit it way too long before starting the heel, so i had to frog back a couple of inches. then i got the heel turned and up the leg and did the ribbing and cast off, but the sock seemed loose, so i didn’t weave in the ends — keeping my options open as to whether or not i wanted to rip it and reknit it.

my second sock, which i’m now up to the gusset on, is turning out much better. however, it is serving to highlight the deficiencies of the first:

no points for guessing which toe was the first. … so i think i’m going to finish up this second sock, and then rip back out the first and knit it again. sigh. at this rate, by the time i get the pair done, i’ll actually have knitted about four socks. oh well, better to knit endlessly than to call it “good enough” and have a pair of socks i never wear because one of them is baggy and won’t stay up.

dragged sock #2 with me to Wrigley Field yesterday, to watch the Cubs play the Cards — it has already been to Sox Park twice, and the first sock four times. of course, we had bleacher seats, and — this was new on me — bleacher seats are all GA. and that means first come first served — and since it was versus the Cards, lots of people came early. we couldn’t find seats, and wound up just standing around on the concourse for a couple of hours before the start time and during the rain delay. and then the game started, and we found spots on the stairs along a railing… and the security guys shooed us away because someone might want to use the railing, so we couldn’t stand there. once we were back on the concourse, we couldn’t see anything at all, so we wound up leaving the park and going to a neighboring bar to watch the game on tv. somewhat disappointing. i was looking forward to a ballgame. oh well, at least the tickets were free.

i spent some time earlier today spinning some yarn up on my drop spindle, my homework from the spinning class i’m taking at Loopy Yarns. (i’d actually signed up for the class in March or so, but it got pushed back and so here we are…) i kinda hurt my hand a little bit doing that, since it’s harder on my wrist than using the wheel, but before i called it quits i got some silk spun up and some grey shetland wool. i was thinking i might try plying them together and see how it looks. although i spun just such a small amount of either that no matter how it turns out, it’ll still be the world’s tiniest ball of yarn once i’m done. oh well! we’ll have the second part of our class on thursday, so we’ll see how that goes. i do like spinning, i just wish i had more time to devote to it. as it is, it takes me forever to get anything at all completed, so … eh.

nothing else of note going on. which, i’ll note, hasn’t stopped me from blogging about it. so, um, there’s the news, from sabrinaville. come back soon!

..oh shit, i’m supposed to be at a baseball game that starts in 10 minutes!!

Scott Merkin:

Friday’s trade of Tadahito Iguchi to Philadelphia will be viewed by many as difficult to understand, with a valuable starting second baseman being moved out in exchange for a Minor League hurler whose current biggest claim to fame is being the son of the Phillies’ pitching coach.

…you think?

Hey, Boone Logan, here’s some advice for you: suck less!

Fans are “just a bunch of idiots,” indeed. Charming. Seriously, if you want to be a dick to your fans, you have to pitch at least as good as Jose Contreras. Instead of like my mother.