I’m still in Maui, which means I **shouldn’t** be on the computer. But, we all know me, we all know that getting my pictures up here (just a few of the 312 I’ve taken thus far as a start) is important, so please, no lectures. I’m relaxing…I’m relaxing…I’m repeating this as my mantra. It’s sort of working.

I’ve bachelorette-partied. I’ve rehearsal dinnered. I’ve weddinged with the best wedding date I’ve ever, ever had. I’ve enjoyed a balcony. I’ve stayed up REALLY late. I’ve swam in the ocean before 8am. I’ve hiked on lava rock. I’ve snorkeled. I’ve sunned. Seriously, I’ve been busy in the past 5 days; the fact that I have another week to go continues to shock me.

So you’ll excuse me while I go and eat some guacamole, take a late-afternoon nap, and do – well – nothing. While I’m gone, click on the fabulous wedding with the fabulous sunset picture above to see a brief sampling of what I’ve been doing as of late.

Am in Phoenix with only one thing to say:

Dry heat, my ass.

If I were one of those people who could contain their excitement, I would definitely do so here. But really, we all know I’m not, nor ever will be, one of those folks. Instead, you’re stuck with the gal who does all she can NOT to write in all caps when she gets excited, tries to contain her gushing and raving and ebullience to a minimum when really, she’s just elated. Basically, I’m trying to contain myself, and I just can’t. So I apologize in advance for the following.

I’M GOING TO HAWAII!!! TODAY!! (Ok, I’m en route to Hawaii starting today, with a stop in Cleveland and Phoenix, but the travel officially begins today.) BUT YAY! HAWAII! WAHOO!

(See? Not really containing myself here…)

What really sent me over the edge to pure elation is the fact that my date for the wedding (thus the reason for the trip) is getting his cute Australian ass on a plane and MEETING ME IN MAUI! (I mean, really – how movie-script-esque!) So not only will I be in paradise, I’ll be in paradise with the best thing that Australia has created in, well, ever, and yes, I’m even putting him in comparison to the wine.

So I apologize if I don’t get to post very much, but know I’ll be living it up, getting fuel for the proverbial fire, and will write up a storm when I come back. Just don’t blame me if my eyes remain a bit starry…

An Open Letter to a Person who I No Longer Date,

Please, stop it. You were never that nice when we dated, so please stop being such a charmer when you turn up in my dreams. Never once in reality did you bring me flowers, so while the thought is nice, IT ISN’T REAL. Your dream-persona is making me forget that your real-persona is a complete and total jackass. So, going forward, if you **MUST** show up in some of my random dreams, please represent yourself accurately; i.e., the ass that you are.

Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter.
-Aubrey

An Open Letter to ANOTHER Person who I No Longer Date,

Please, don’t stop. You never kissed that well in reality, so even if my knees are getting weak only in my dreams, it’s well worth it. Keep up the good work, baby.

More please,
Aubrey

I love my new chair.

You see, I’ve had this chair for over a month, what with it’s over sized gloriousness and pseudo-suede stain-repellent fabric, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I was able to enjoy it. Actually, it wasn’t until yesterday until I was able to even sit on it. Yes, as trite as it sounds, I’ve been *THAT* busy. But sit on it I did, yesterday afternoon, with Lila Belle acting uncharacteristically good, sitting on my lap and only biting me ten times a minute vs. her usual fourteen. The house was clean, even after the party o’ fabulousness, the errands had all been run, I had slept in until 10:30 (a magical feat in itself) and I had even showered. It was a Sunday, I had nothing to do, and life was content in my big red chair.

And then there’s today.

Mondays are never fun – something always goes awry, whether it’s realizing that I overdrafted my checking account by splurging on that round of shots over the weekend or just having the typical “why am I at work and not sleeping” slump that can happen. But today – well, it started off innocently enough, yet by 8am, Murphy had come for a visit.

I woke up at the semi-typical 6:30 to Lila Belle announcing that her bladder was calling; I let her out, pretended to go back to sleep but finally sucked it up and took her for a walk. Since Lila is a dog not aversive to the fun that red Georgia mud can bring, I decided that she was in need of a bath before I partook of the shower. And that’s where it began.

Lila isn’t a fan of the bath; ok, Lila HATES it. I have to literally lock her in the bathroom and hose her down while she tries to bite, scratch and claw me. She’s very creative in her methods of torture. After 10 minutes of torrential puppy-shaking wetness (with a little all-natural herbal puppy shampoo to boot) Lila was clean…and then she managed to run around the house, slipping and sliding and running into doors with her wet little curly self. Lila was a dog possessed. Lila was ALSO a dog who needed to spend some QT with herself in her puppy crate while I tended to my own getting-readyness.

So I showered. No detail necessary there.

Post-shower, I realized I needed to brush one of the cats, but – as is the case nearly every day – the cat brush was missing. (I assume it’s in the black hole o’ Aubrey things that still have yet to be discovered, cavorting with my nail polish, eyelash curler, tweezers and iPod mini somewhere in the house.) So, instead, I used this comb I had back when Sebastian was a kitten; it’s actually a flea comb but works well to get out Samantha’s long-cat-hair matts. So I’m combing, and combing, and – huh. What was that? That little black thing? It kinda looks like….

OH NO IT ISN’T.

(But it is.)

A flea.

Well, in the land of the Sabala menagerie, a flea is an indicator of something more, something much, much worse. After all, there’s never an isolated flea, and with three (yes, I admit it, I’m a virtual spinster) cats and a dog, a flea ushers in Crisis Management: INFESTATION procedures. Yes, one flea means many fleas on many animals who sit ALL OVER THE HOUSE. Including my bed. Shoot me now.

After further inspection, the worst was found to be true. Sebastian, Sullivan, Samantha AND Lila Belle all have fleas. That’s FOUR ANIMALS, sitting on EVERY SURFACE of my house, with fleas.

Really, shoot me now.

I didn’t think there could be an insect that I hated more than ants; oh, but I was wrong. There’s something about the little ones, those creepy crawly little things that hide themselves in their meager size, and just make my skin crawl. And while the animals haven’t shown a symptom (there’s been no scratching or itching on ANY of them), I, on the other hand, am now suffering from first-degree psychosomatic skin itchiness. I swear, any errant hair falling on my arm sends me into a tailspin of scratching.

To add insult to injury, Lila absconded my lavender scented eye pillow, and after no less than 10 minutes (!!) of chasing her around and around the coffee table (a game I could see going on ad infinitum) I finally ripped it out of her mouth – only to have the silk fabric rip, sending lavender seeds flying like a virtual fountain ALL OVER THE LIVING ROOM.

Then the toilet overflowed.

Then I stepped in dog pee.

I looked at my watch…7:56am. Looks like Murphy’s Law has hit La Casa Sabala with a vengeance, providing retribution from a nice, relaxing Sunday spent cooking and finally watching the TiVo’d Alias and Gray’s Anatomy finales.

Seriously, it has to get better.

Doesn’t it??

• I’m wearing a crown. It strongly resembles this.
• I’m drinking a Tecate.
• I’m trying to create an “Ode to my iPod Shuffle”, my newest toy and addition to the 20 gb. and mini counterparts (of which I have both.)
• I think the grammar in that sentence is wrong, but I don’t have the energy to try and fix it (partially due to all aforementioned bullet points.)
• I’m making a badass mix for my Birthday extravaganza tomorrow.
• Weather permitting, we will all be listening to said badass mix in this.
• Said badass mix includes the Thong Song, I Touch Myself, and Party All The Time. (Yes, by Eddie Murphy.)

So yes, if you see someone in a baby pool rocking out to Part Time Lover while drinking a Tecate, chances are, it’s me. Do say hello, won’t you?

The new Britney Spears/Kevin Federline show was supposed to be called “Can You Handle My Truth?”. In possibly the only smart decision that the couple made, they decided to pass on this; however, Britney utters this phrase no less than 4 times in the first episode, causing gawkers worldwide to throw up a little bit in their mouths. There’s nothing like regurgitating your dinner due to a pop star’s obsequious self-aggrandizement.

Still, with all due disrespect to the aforementioned couple, admitting the harsh truth about yourself is hard. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, after having this website and basically putting [most of] it out there for the world to see, should they choose to, but yet it never gets easier. Especially when it’s something unattractive.

A few months back, I realized that I was insecure in my relationship, something that didn’t surface until I was drinking. Sober? All was good and fine. The relationship was as easy a one as I’ve ever had, and things were going along quite swimmingly. While drinking, however, was a completely different story. Instead of relishing in my boyfriend, my inebriated mind twisted things all around and remnants from the past came to rear their ugly heads. It wasn’t anything he was doing, mind you, but more the regression into patterns from relationships past, relationships where – for one reason or another – I always found myself suspecting that they weren’t being loyal or forthright, suspicions that later proved themselves true. There’s something to be said about women’s intuition – it hasn’t yet let me down – but sometimes I think we’re all too prone to consult it even when everything is fine.

Whether or not things were actually fine is another story; we ended up breaking up shortly afterwards, possibly partly caused by this over-analysis and continual need for reassurance that things were, in fact, ok. Which, in retrospect, apparently they weren’t. Women’s intuition or self-fulfilling prophecy, who knows.

Through this experience, I found myself taking a deep look at myself, trying to see if this was a pattern found in other relationships; I went so far to ask some of my exes if I had done this, if they had found me insecure; for the record, they hadn’t. (Then again, these are the same people whose very actions caused me to be insecure, so their authority on the matter is somewhat questionable.) Regardless, I have spent the last few weeks in an introspective tailspin, trying to take an honest assessment of who I am and how I feel about that. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s certainly been interesting.

I realized, amongst other things, that I’m somewhat passive-aggressive, and that my whole life, I’ve done everything I could to avoid conflict. I’ve never gotten in a true fight with my parents, with a friend, with a boyfriend. When couples talk about how much they argue in a relationship, I can’t relate – at all. Instead of ‘rocking the boat’ and standing up for myself, I instead internalize it…there’s a recent example where someone I cared about acted like a total ass, essentially leaving me alone at an out-of-state wedding, and instead of leaving him there (had I been sober, I would like to think that I would have the gall to do so; in reality, probably not, even though he deserved it) I found myself upset because *I* had done something. Instead of being furious, like I should have, I was so worried that my behavior would shake things up so much that we wouldn’t survive. Well, joke’s on me – the relationship didn’t survive, leaving me not only alone, but angry at him AND myself for not standing up for myself.

Things are going to change. RIGHT. NOW.

Conflict is never fun, but neither is suppressing it. Instead of bitching about it to someone else, I may as well address it with the person; what’s the worst that can happen? They could get mad? Bring it – I need a little conflict resolution these days, and at least I know I’ve not sat on the matter, mulled it over internally until it made me sick to my stomach.

My Mom says the best thing about turning 40 is that you learn not to give a shit. Mom, I hear ya loud & clear … only I’m learning this 12 years early. While I may not have seemed like a force to be reckoned with in the past, take heed – times, they are a-changin’.

Get ready.