Freaky Friday - Neighborhood Edition

Directly behind the parking lot for what was supposed to be the new ice cream store* in my neighborhood lies the hermit house. From what I've been told, a hoarder lived there for many years. After he died/went into a nursing home/nobody's-sure-what-happened-but-he-doesn't-live-there-anymore, somebody bought the house and cleaned all the accumulated stuff out. They replaced some of the windows, and started work on the plumbing, and then, for whatever reason, abandoned it.

I've been told that approximately nine billion feral cats live there, but I didn't see any on the day I trespassed stopped by to take some pics.

Obligatory spooky basement:

Weird outbuilding with grass growing on the roof:

hahaha Rob, see that? IT'S STILL SNOWING HERE.**

I've been calling it the "hermit house", because that's what sprung to mind, but really, I think this looks like a good old-fashioned haunted house. I think I'll start telling the neighborhood kids ghost stories about the hermit ghost who lives in the house, just to scare the shit out of them and infuriate their parents when the kids insist on sleeping with them for the next ten years or so, because THE HERMIT GHOST MIGHT GET THEM IF THEY SLEEP IN THEIR OWN BED. Hey, not my problem! And besides, every neighborhood needs a haunted house, no?

Let's see: He has a hook for an arm and only comes out when the moon is shining .......




*Still just a vacant store. I'm not happy.

**Not really.

Movie Review: Orphan

Hahahahahahaha ...... I wish I could say this one was so bad it's good, but .... no. It's just bad.



"Orphan" is about a couple who adopt a little Russian girl with ....... ooooooohhh ......... a deep secret, and the whole thing is just so bad it's reedonkulus. This piece of crap actually got some good reviews on IMDB, which is pretty much mystifying.



So! You can skip "Orphan". If you want to watch a "bad kid" movie, try "The Bad Seed" from the fifties - that one's actually pretty good.

F*ck tha gutters

I tried caulking the gutters. I tried taping the gutters. I tried taping over the caulk, and STILL the gutter seams all leak.

Arrrrrgggghhhhhhh.

Screw it. Let 'em drip. A couple of giant tree limbs came down on top of the shed last night, so I've got bigger fish to fry, anyway.

Am I the only one who loves this commercial?:





I watched it about 15 times before I even realized what the commercial was for. I wish I was the person who came up with this - it's genius.

Updated to add: On the way to work this morning, that Lady Gaga song Bad Romance was on the radio, and now it's ricocheting around my brain and driving me crazy. I can't stand Lady Gaga. And then I learned all about the Budd Dwyer suicide on Mental Floss and went to youtube to watch the video, which makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with me.

Patron Saints

So! After all the excitement over Saint Jude, I did a little googling to see how many patron saints there are.


Holy cow, you crazy Catholics, there's, like, a ton of them!


As ~~Silk pointed out in the earlier post, Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, which is actually kind of perfect for me. But I did find some others who would also fit:

Patron saint of Doubters: Saint Joseph. Gardeners: St. Fiacre, St. Sebastian. Notaries: St. Luke, St. Mark. Secretaries: St. Genesius. Stenographers: St. Cassian Tangiers.


There's some I can only aspire to, like St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, and St. Sophia, the patron saint of wisdom. I could find no patron saint of beer drinkers, which is probably just as well.



Now, I'm not sure how authentic some of the ones I found are. I mean, there's a patron saint for illegal drug dealers? Really? And kidnap victims? I mean, are there really that many kidnap victims that they need their own saint? Oh, and how about "Tongue Trouble"? Allegedly, there's a patron saint for that, too, which sounds kind of sketchy to me.



Oh, and evidently there's a patron saint for "Enemies of Religion", which is kind of surprising, seeing as how Catholics are not really that tolerant of non-believers. Why would they give us non-believers our very own patron saint? And I mean, it's not like we non-believers are going to believe in our patron saint, or anything.



luckymojo.com/patronsaints lists a whole boatload of patron saints. Did you know that the patron saint of basket-makers is Saint Hilarion? Sounds like a pretty funny guy. *groan* (Sorry, I just couldn't pass that up.)

I think I'll make up my own patron saint. Saint I'm-Trying-My-Best-Here, maybe. And who's the patron saint of home repair? I could use him right about now.

DAMMIT, LG!

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Frogs. Now she's bringing in frogs.





Looks like you guys were right.

Freaky Friday!

Some of you long-time readers may remember Dead Ted Head, my roadside rescue.

This is Ted, almost two years ago, air-drying after cleaning:

Dead Ted Head is currently residing in a comfortable pile on one of my bedroom dressers. He has a view of the park. He is still awaiting his calling in my House of Odd; one day soon, it will come.

Not my experience

The latest blogger to happen big appears to be Hyperbole and a Half, and she deserves it, because she's hilarious.

She's gone from total anonymity to, like, a kabillion page hits a month in less than a year.

That's not my blogging experience.

Mainly because I will never be one-hundredth of the blogger that she is, and that's fine with me. I am very happy with the little niche I've carved out for myself here.

And then there was that convenience store worker down South who played the lottery a few weeks back and won a kabillion dollars.

I've been known to buy a lottery ticket every once in a blue moon, but actually winning money? Not my lottery experience.

I guess I got thinking about this whole "experience" thing when I found out my ex was living in a trailer park. If I had stayed with him, who knows? That might have been my experience. But I left him, and it wasn't.


Not sure what I'm trying to get at here, except that maybe life is equal parts effort and serendipity, and as long as you're happy with where you end up, all is well. I think that most people, when in a good situation, will try to stay there, and most people, when in a bad situation, will work to get out of it. But sometimes, I think inertia sets in, and it's easier to just stay where you are than to try to move on. Personally, whenever I'm in a bad place, panic sets in, like, "holy shit, what if I'm stuck here forever?", and then I get my stuff in gear and work to get to a better place. Sometimes it takes a while, to be honest, but I do get up and go. But I've seen an awful lot of people stay in really bad places, just because they don't want to put in the effort to get out, or don't think they're worthy, somehow, of getting to a better place.


Right now I'm in a good place. I'll try to stay here.

Playing favorites

In the next couple of weeks, I'll be buying some plants to fill in bare spots in my garden and around the perimeter of the house. I brought some of my favorites from the old place with me: Tiger lilies, asiatic, oriental and turks-cap lilies, bleeding hearts, lilies-of-the-valley, phlox, hydrangeas and rose-of-sharons all came along and are doing well as transplants. Well, the rose-of-sharons are kind of iffy, but I think they're gonna pull through.



Some things I had to leave behind because they were simply too big or too root-bound to move: Lilacs, ferns, azaleas and rhododendrons all stayed behind. I didn't bring the poppies or the columbine, either, because they had died back for the summer at the time of the move and I was afraid they wouldn't transplant well.

When the trees and bushes at the edge of the new place started to leaf out this spring, I was surprised to find that I had lilacs! The white kind, though, not the purple which I prefer, so I did a lilac exchange with one of the guys at work: White lilacs bushes for purple ones, which he had at his place. It'll take a few years for the new plants to get established, but I've got time.

Oh! And I relocated some bluebells and ferns from the creek to the new place, and ordered some hibiscuses and a butterfly bush and a weeping cherry from mail-order, all of which have arrived and been planted. I'm still waiting on the magnolia - get on that, Michigan Bulb, would ya?

So! Back to the point. I'm going to be buying some more plants. Columbine, I think, to replace the one I had to leave behind. Maybe a trumpet vine, although I never had any luck getting them to bloom at the old place. Maybe wisteria, which I've never tried before. I was at Agway today and they had dutchman's pipe vines, which I remember my mom telling me was one of her favorite plants as a kid. I bought a heliotrope the other day, because the name sounded familiar to me, and then I learned that they're also called cherry pie plant because the blooms smell like cherry pie! So I gave mine a great big whiff, and yep, cherry pie it is. It's only an annual, though, so I'll have to dig it up and bring it inside this fall if I want to keep it around.

The point, the point, here it is: What's your favorite perennial plant? Preferably one with fragrant blossoms, that can make it through a Zone 5 winter (hardy to -20 degrees). Do you have a flower or plant or bush you remember fondly from your childhood?


What should I plant in my garden?

One born every minute

They're selling potted Mayapples at the local Agway. Mayapples look like this:






And this time of year, local woods look like this:






It's like an ocean of Mayapples.

I should go back to the Agway and ask them if they're actually selling any of the Mayapples. If so, I think I'll dig up the dandelions from my lawn and start a little garden stand. Is genius!

We interrupt the regularly scheduled Freaky Friday to bring you ....

............ FIRE!


This was the scene in the park last night:









The view out my front (screen) door:






A brush fire started down by the creek - I suspect the local kids who sneak down there to smoke may have played a part, but it's hard tellin'.



The fire company was there for a good two hours. They finally took in a backhoe to do ...... something. Not sure. I was a little nervous when they left, because the fine local volunteer firemen have a history of ..... well ...... not completely extinguishing fires; often, local fires tend to start back up a few hours after the firemen leave, but all was well this morning.



Let's see. So far at the new place I've had a flood and now a fire. What's next? DON'T ASK.

Home Improvement

Peeps? I've got a confession to make.


I ..... I ..... I can't stop working on my house.


Every night, I go home from work, and I change out of my "work clothes" and into some jeans, and I swear that I'm gonna pop a beer and just chill for a few, and then ....


...... and then ......


....... and then I look out the window and see that the grass needs trimming around the mailbox or that the willow has shed yet more giant branches onto the back yard, and so I go outside to tend to that, real quick-like, and while I'm out there I notice those lilac saplings that I was going to relocate and the windowsill with the peeling paint that needs to be scraped and painted and the drainage ditch that really needs to be dug out and that hollow spot in the lawn that needs to be filled in and .....


...... the next thing I know, the little-leaguers playing ball in the park next door are packing up their gear and I look down at my watch and holy shit! It's eight o'clock - where did the time go?


I need help.


I fall into bed at night, exhausted, with aching muscles, and swear that the next day will be different. That I'll get home from work, pop that beer, and just relax and enjoy the house.


And of course, the next day I get home from work, pull in the driveway, and oh crap those gutters need to be caulked and the grass around the shed needs to be trimmed and .....

I mean, some of this stuff I enjoy. Anything to do with the garden is pure fun, and even some of the grunt work is satisfying in a get-it-done kind of way, although dear God it was raining this morning and those gutter seams that it took me two hours to caulk last weekend are leaking AGAIN and it looks like I'm gonna have to get up there with some kind of thermonuclear device to stop that f*cking dripping and ......


I am actually hoping for rainy days right now. To keep me inside. Except then I'd just look around inside the house and see that the bathroom ceiling needs to be painted and the insulation in the garage still needs to be covered up and .......


...... oh man.


You guys were holding out on me. Nobody told me that once you buy a house, you start a to-do list, an ever-changing to-do list, that will NEVER BE FINISHED until you sell the house. Or drop dead. Whichever comes first, I guess.


What else did you not tell me? Fess up.

Little bug

When I took this pic of the bluebells I "repurposed" from the woods:

I never even noticed the little dude hanging out on the blossoms:

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If I'd have known he was there, I would've macroed in on him and gotten some really cool pics.

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Oh well. He probably wouldn't have been too jazzed about having his picture splashed all over the internet, anyway.

Breaking News!

Rumor has it that the former carpet-and-tile store three blocks from my house is being converted into an ice-cream store.


Yippee!!


Paging Jillian Michaels ........

Oh, have I got a story to tell you ....

Call me petty, but I experienced a little frisson of happiness this morning when I discovered that my ex-husband is now living in a trailer park.

Now I, myself, lived in a trailer park back in the day. A pretty run-down trailer park. Actually, I lived in a run-down trailer park with my then-husband back in the day. Because we were young and poor.

We were actually living in that run-down trailer park when I packed up and left him. Because, you see, I found out through trailer-park sources that he was sleeping with another woman. A married woman. A married woman with children.

(Note: You cannot get away with ANYTHING in a trailer park. They are like the worst little small-town Peyton Places EVER. Should you ever find yourself in a trailer park, BEHAVE, because if you don't, everybody in the place will know your bizness in about half a day. The trailer park grapevine is a mighty thing to behold.)

So! I left him, the woman left her husband, they moved in together, and here's where the story gets REALLY GOOD.

When I left him, ex-husband and I agreed to split the cost of the divorce 50-50. I should have made him pay for the whole damn thing, but I knew the odds of that happening were zero, so I decided to settle for half. I had my half of the money and went on with my new single life in my new apartment (over a bar) (movin' on up!), waiting for him to cough up his half of the dough so we could make the break official.

Fast-forward to several months later, when I'm in the parking lot of a local grocery store. An EXTREMELY PREGNANT woman walks up to me, says, "Um .... excuse me? Are you *Insert first name here*? *Insert first name here* *Insert last name here*?"

"Yes," I said. "Do I know you?"

Yeah, you got it.

It was the ex-husband's new girlfriend, whom he had managed to knock up in world-record time, and she was just about to pop.

"Why won't you give him a divorce?" she asked. "We want to get married so we can give the baby his last name."

How honorable, I thought. I then explained that we had agreed to split the cost 50-50, and that as soon as he coughed up his share, we would divorce. ASAP would be fine with me. Yesterday, if possible, as far as I was concerned.

"Oh!" she said. "He told me that you were refusing to divorce him, and that's why we can't get married!"

"Honey", I said gently. "Is that the first lie he's told you?"

"No", she said quietly, a sad look coming over her face. "I'm sorry to bother you."

And she walked away.

I don't know what happened to her or the kidlet, but my ex is now living, by himself, in a trailer park.

And because I am mean and petty, this little factoid makes me happy.

The End.

"Ominous trend", indeed

On Saturday, Little Girl got her first snake.

On Sunday, she got her second snake.

Last night, she got a rabbit*.

Shit.





*I managed to rescue the rabbit, but still.

You better think .......

...... is what I told the lawn mower on Saturday afternoon when it conked out. I left it alone to peruse its options, and when I went back an hour later it started back up. Wise choice.

Other random weekend stuff:

When you've got a bad shoulder, it's probably not the best idea in the world to spend two hours up on a ladder with your arms over your head caulking the gutters.

On the other hand, if it will stop the damn gutters from leaking, it's worth it.

The locksmith showed up! Hallelujah! Now all the locks are keyed the same, which is like a miracle, until of course I lose the key, at which time it will suck. (Yes, I did have him give me a couple extra copies. Thanks for asking.)

Painting window frames takes about five times as long as you think it will. As far as that goes, ANY type of home repair takes about five times as long as you think it will. At least.

Wasps do not like to have their nests moved. Bite it, wasps. You're not nesting on my window frames. Be thankful I didn't bust out the Raid.

Little Girl got her first (that I know of) snake on Saturday. On Sunday, she got her second. I'm sensing an ominous trend here.

The same Little Girl who hunts down snakes is scared of the ceiling fans. And The Runt is terrified of the ceiling fans. It's gonna be a hot summer if I can't get them past this.

I saw a barn owl yesterday, which was very cool.

The trilliums are blooming:





Oh yeah, which way are ceiling fans supposed to turn in the summer? Clockwise or counter-clockwise? I know you're supposed to run them one way when it's hot, and the other way when it's cold, but I don't know which is which.

Of course, it won't matter much, if the cats keep hitting the floor like they're being strafed by the Luftwaffe every time I turn the damn things on.

Freaky Friday!

The subject of today's Freaky Friday has been on my blog before; forgive me if you're seeing a repeat.

I'm pretty sure this was some grade-schooler's art project.

I like to imagine what a massive papier-mache mess must have been created to come up with this thing. The bow tie's a nice touch.

He likes to look out the garage windows. Keeping an eye on things.

(Oh, and doncha love the supa-dupa paint job on that window frame? I DID NOT DO THAT. Thanks, previous owner! Thanks also for painting the garage windows shut. Jeezus.)

More hare-brained schemes than Lucy Ricardo

So! Some of my mail-order plants arrived yesterday. You know how it goes: They show giant, full-grown bushes in the catalog, and what shows up on your doorstep is a couple of sticks with a few leaves on the top.

I was going to put the weeping cherry out in the far corner of the backyard. But right now it's only about six inches high; if the lawn mower doesn't get it, the deer/rabbits/whatever-else-is -roaming-around-back-there surely will.

I think I have a plan. I think I will plant that weeping cherry in a pot-with-drain-holes, and then plant the pot itself in the garden close to the house where the lawn mower and the deer can't get at it . In a couple of years, when the plant is hopefully bigger and more able to cope with the wild wild west of the far backyard, I'll dig up the plant, remove the pot, and re-plant the plant itself where it's supposed to go.

That's it - my Cruise-azy idea. Is genius! Or not? What do you think?

Speaking of death .....

While rooting around in one of my cupboards the other day, looking for the jar of mayo I was sure had to be in there, I discovered a bag of goldfish crackers with a "Sell By" date of April 5, 2008.


Yeah.


You know what that means? It means that I bought that bag of goldfish crackers sometime (presumably) before April 5, 2008 and stuck it in my cupboard. At the old place. And it sat there for over a year, until August of 2009, when I packed up and moved. And at some point in the packing process, I picked up that bag of goldfish that had expired OVER A YEAR AGO, took a look at it, evidently shrugged, and packed it up to move to the new place*.


Where it sat, for almost another year, until I rediscovered it the other night. I took a look at the expiration date, sighed, and took the bag to work to snack on. (I mean, I'm going to snack on the crackers inside, NOT on the bag itself, although at this point in time, there may not be a whole heck of a lot of a difference.)


I'll let you know how they taste.


Or, you know, not, depending on the outcome.




*And I can even tell what my thought process most likely was at the time: "Meh. It's only been expired for a year. It's still good - might as well pack it." I swear to God sometimes I think I'm a guy.

So bad it's good. Almost.

On Saturday afternoon I stopped at a cemetery to visit my Grandma and Grandpa's graves. I hadn't been there since my Grandma died over twenty years ago (the cemetery is a ways out of town), and I decided to take a walk around while I was there. The last time I was in a cemetery, I found some, well, unusual headstones, and on Saturday I found another doozy:

You can click on the photo to embiggen. Sorry about the poinsettia in the way. (Dear relatives: It's April. You can remove the poinsettias.) Basically, it's a bucolic nature scene, with a man, a woman, and a cat (!) on the left; the man is reaching across a stream to a buck on the other side. Why is he reaching out to the deer? I don't know! Maybe he had a pet deer as a kid?

One thing's for sure: They had a cat named Morris.

I have all kinds of questions about this headstone, namely: Why is the lady so flat? Granted, I myself am not chestfully endowed, but if I was going to be represented on a headstone, you'd better bet I'd give myself a nice rack. Why not? I'd be dead; who's gonna call me on it?

'

Also, who's the artist? Oh, wait, was it Morris? And he signed his name? Nah, I'm pretty sure Morris was the cat. I am guessing that the artist was one of the deceased (before they died, obv), or possibly a family member. Frankly, the artwork leaves a little to be desired*, but then again, maybe the headstone maker was at fault. Maybe he was presented with a fantastically detailed piece of art, and this was the best he could do.

'

And I got to thinking, having a bad headstone is kind of like having a bad tattoo; you don't have to look at it, but everybody else does. Forever, in the case of the headstone.

And then I wondered if the cat was buried with them. I mean, he is in the picture, after all. But then ....... what about the deer?

It keeps coming back to deer, doesn't it? I found YET ANOTHER set of deer remains on Sunday; I'm not even kidding you. One of these nights I'm gonna hear a tap, tap, tapping on my front door, and it's gonna be a deer, wanting in. Wanting his dead relative's bones, probably.

*Could I do better? NO I COULD NOT.

The reason why I haven't mowed the back yard yet

Freaky Friday!

Meet Gatorduck:



Gatorduck was a white ceramic goose in a previous life.


Here's Gatorduck being sprung upon by his archnemesis, MoonCat:




Their battles are epic.

Step AWAY from the tree

The Runt got himself up a tree the other night. WAY up. With bluejays circling his head, just like in a cartoon.

When he was a kitten, he had a nasty habit of getting stuck in trees. And needing neighborly intervention to get back down.

So when I saw him in the tree the other night, I was relieved that at least it was a many-branched tree, one that he would have a good shot of getting out of all by himself. Unlike the no-branches-for-the-first-forty-feet pine trees he was so fond of at the old place.

And thankfully, within a half-hour he had made his way out of the tree. No neighbors with extension ladders and tuna-smeared-poles were involved.

Stay out of the trees, Runt. Trust me on this one.

Holy SHIT he actually came through

If you've been reading here for a while, you may know that my boss has a habit of ignoring things like Administrative Professionals' Day (it was yesterday, btw) and work anniversaries.

I am not above using subterfuge and guilt to collect my due on special occasions.

This year, I was truly not expecting anything, especially as my boss has his foot in a cast and is, well, not doing so hot with the whole crutches concept. Actually, I almost took the day off, but decided at the last minute to come in.

Little did I know when he grabbed one of the guys from the office yesterday morning "to go to a job site" that he was actually going to the local garden center to get a flowering almond for my yard. He even got a card! And put money in it! Without me guilting him into it!

Duuuuuude. Thanks!




Oh! And the icing on the cake? The guy he took with him to schlep around the garden center and cart the plant around (because the boss is on crutches) was this guy. How do ya like me now, brudda?

How appropriate that this should happen during Administrative Professionals' Week

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Dear CAD drafter:

When you said that the secretary (i.e., me) should take over some of your job responsibilities, implying that because I make less than you, it would save the company money?

What you didn't know is that I make MORE than you do, not less.

Get ready to do a bitchload of filing, asshat.

The bluebell thief

I was down by the creek the other day and discovered a huge patch of bluebells growing wild. We're talking at least a hundred plants. So I went back to the house, grabbed a spade, and dug up a couple of them for the garden.

I am a bluebell thief.

Now, as far as I can tell, bluebells are not endangered in any way. This particular patch of bluebells possibly arrived via the recent floods, as they're in an area that got about three feet of water in January. And, the spot where they're located is very likely going to be overrun by Japanese bamboo in a few years, as it's already within about thirty feet of the bluebells.

Justification blah blah blah

I stole some bluebells.

And just the other day I noticed a bunch of ferns popping up where the new playing fields are going to be put in .......

The Osprey Cam is back! The Osprey Cam is back!

Guys! The Osprey Cam at Montezuma Wildlife Refuge is back up and running for another year!

Last year Mama Osprey hatched three - count 'em, three! - little ones, so be sure to check in and see how many baybies appear this year!



Click here. The link is also over on the left, there, under ..... wait a minute, let me find it ..... Okay, it's under "Interesting People" - click over there on Osprey Cam!



Or, you know, click here. Heh.

Freaky! Friday!

First off, many thanks to the kind Jess Riley, who sent me milkweed seeds to plant. Thanks, Jess - I can't wait to get started.

Also, the lawn-mowing-Mexican-standoff in my neighborhood has officially ended. Everybody was holding off on mowing their lawns, knowing that once they started, the lawn-mowing season would carry merrily on for the next SIX MONTHS. So everybody was waiting, waiting for a neighbor to mow first and shame them into mowing their own lawn.

I resisted the peer pressure when T. across the street had her lawn mowed, but when L. right next door to me mowed? I bowed.

Lawn-mowing season has begun. *sigh* On the plus side, that's a pretty good sign that snow-shoveling season has ended.


Okay, on with Freaky! Friday!

I picked up this book at a thrift store (where else?) - it's a Christian Science book. An inscription on one of the title pages is dated 1919, so it's at least that old.




The thing that kills me about this book is the seal on the cover:



In case you can't see it, it reads "Heal the sick - Raise the dead - Cleanse the lepers - Cast out demons."

Raise the dead? Sounds like zombie action to me. Count me out.

craigslist.weird

The former owner of my house left behind an upright freezer in the garage. He left behind a LOT of crap, actually; boxes and boxes of old shit up in the attic, and a couple of garbage cans full of old shingles and ceiling tile out IN THE BACKYARD, and cans and cans of paint, opened and God only knows how old, in various places.

Thanks, former owner! It's bad enough that I had to clean out the place I was moving FROM; it just adds insult to injury that I had to ALSO clean out the place I was moving TO.


Sheesh. I don't get paid enough for this shit.



ANYhoo, I had myself a freezer. Unfortunately, I do not have a ton of kids or a husband who hunts, so I had no need for said freezer. And it was taking up valuable real estate, i.e., a corner of the garage that I would prefer to fill with crap of my very own.



First, I tried to barter it with the various people who were doing repairs on the house. No dice. Then I tried to GIVE it away. Nope. Finally, in desperation, I put an ad on craigslist.



And let me tell you, the squirrels come out of the woodwork when you put an ad on craigslist. Dear sweet lord, there are some ODD people out there. Along with the old deaf people who try to talk to you on the phone without actually being able to, you know, HEAR what you're saying, there's the scammers and the spammers, and there was ALSO one enterprising individual who actually HIGHJACKED my lowly listing in an attempt to sell some old Nissan. DUDE: Listings are FREE. Get your own.



But! The freezer is sold. Fifty bucks, in my pocket. And hallelujah, because that thousand-dollar timing belt job that I got talked down into three hundred bucks? Has morphed into a timing belt-water pump-tensioner EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAR EXTRAVAGANZA* under the hood of my car.

Don't ever buy a Saturn. I am telling you right now, DO NOT EVER BUY A SATURN. I won't go into all the reasons right now, but a main one is that Saturn is proprietary with their parts, meaning that if something breaks on your car, you can't go to the local parts store and buy a replacement. You have to go directly through Saturn, which in this area means a warehouse an hour-and-a-half away, which means it takes AT LEAST a day to get parts.


Which means my car has now been in the garage, on a lift, for THREE DAYS, patiently waiting for various and sundry parts.


And the garage dude is all, "well, I'm having to rearrange the schedule here at the shop because your car's on one of the lifts", and I'm all, "YOUR schedule? I'M the one with no car, brudda!"


On the plus side, Little Girl was kind enough to bring me a mouse this morning. Thanks, Little Girl! Maybe I can trade it for some car repairs.



*Updated to add: Did I say eight hundred dollars? I just got off the phone with garage dude, and I MEANT to say eight-hundred-fifty-two-dollars-and-seventy-one-cents. SON OF A BITCH.

It's like the Deer World is trying to contact me

It all started with the antlers from Jimay's. Then came the Big Box O'Antlers. Then there was the deer bones by the side of the road. After that came the bones I found by the creek.

On Saturday, I was out mucking around and found yet another area where deer had been field dressed last fall.

These remains have a little more, well, decomposing to do before I'm willing to load them in the back of the wagon. I'll keep an eye on them.

And then, Sunday, I was out walking someplace else, and looked down and saw a big ol' antler just laying on the ground:

Look how big this sucker is!:

Did you know that white-tailed deer shed their antlers every year? I did not know this. In all my time wandering around in the woods, I had never found an antler. Until yesterday. I had always assumed that you could tell how old a buck was by how big its antlers were. Silly me. Although, as it turns out, in general the older a buck is, the bigger its (annual) rack will be, so I wasn't totally off base. Just some.

But with all these bones appearing to me, it's like the deer are trying to tell me something. With their bones. I just can't figure out what it is.

Maybe they'll get ahold of me via the radio station in my house.

Random cranky Monday-afternoon-office thought

People who leave time on the office microwave clock are like people who leave the seat up are like people who litter.

Inconsiderate of those who come after them.



And hey, kid, GET OFF OF MY LAWN.

Awake and dreaming

First off: TURRRTLES! The turtles are up out of the mud and sunning themselves on logs and rocks. Welcome back to the topside, guys! A hearty welcome as well to the snakes and the rabbits, also spied out and about this weekend. See also: Mayflowers, spring beauties, skunk cabbage, bluets and trout lilies. The fauna and flora are back in abundance.





Okay, here's a weird thing. On Saturday morning, around six-fifteen, I had a dream. (I'll keep this brief; I promise.) And in the dream there was a radio playing really LOUD. I woke up, and I could still hear the radio. At first I thought that one of the cats had knocked over the radio in the bathroom and it somehow turned on, but as I listened, it sounded like, you know how when you're dialing around to find a station and you somehow get in between TWO stations and you can hear bits and snippets of both?



Except it was just, like, syllables. Like, "kay-do-me-by-ee-lan-ma-dee". Really LOUD.



And I laid there, wondering, what the heck IS this radio station? And where is it coming from? And I thought, well, maybe the paperboy's got a radio. But instead of sounding like it was coming from one specific place, it sounded like it was all around me, like I was in the middle of a stadium and all the speakers were going at once. LOUD. And I was pissed off, because THIS IS WHY I MOVED.


And then, just as I was about to get out of bed and find out what was happening, the sound started to fade. Over the course of about a minute, it went away completely.


Okay, the way I see it, there's two options here:


1. I was still dreaming. Waking up and still hearing the noise was all part of the dream, and I woke up for real some time later.


2. The mothership came back for the damn winged rabbit, and was hovering over my house beaming down instructions for return to the homeland.



The rabbit's still in the kitchen, so I guess I've gotta go with option 1.


But it was still weird.

Freaky Friday - Peter Cottontail edition

Okay, so, the antiques store where I bought Saint Jude has a Table O'Crap right by the cash register, where all the dealers pile the cheap, often broken stuff they can't get rid of. Everything on the table is a dollar.

The dude behind the sales counter was bullshitting with the customer ahead of me and I had to wait to buy Saint Jude, so I turned around to purvey the Table O'Crap, when what did I see but this:







(Note: Not actual antiques-store-Table-O'Crap. This is my own personal Table O'Crap, one of several at my place.)



What in the hell IS this? It's about ten inches tall. It seems to be made out of plaster. It's got rabbit ears and and a rabbit nose, but also wings. It also has a human body, with what looks like six-pack-abs, along with a freakin' belly button, evidence that it was not crafted to look fur-covered as a rabbit would be. Rabbit head; wings; human body. WTH?



Peeps, I don't find this stuff. It finds me.

One born every minute

So, I was driving back from the bank the other day when I passed a house with a blooming magnolia tree in the front yard.

And I remembered how, this time last year, I drove past a different house with a magnolia, and I instantly wanted one, and even looked into the details of getting one, but then realized that the backyard where I was renting was already pretty shady, and did I really want another tree, and hey, I wasn't gonna live there forever anyway, RIGHT?

What a difference a year makes.

Now I am in my own house, with my great big backyard (photo taken last year; everything's still pretty brown right now):




Jeezus, I love that backyard. Even if it DOES get squishy this time of year.

And I can plant all the trees I want.

But not too many. I like sunlight, not shade.

Side note: According to my neighbor, that tree to the right of the willow is an elm. Evidently the neighborhood was once full of them, but then Dutch Elm Disease came along, and I've got one of the only ones left. Go, elm tree!

Back to the story: I went on line and bought a magnolia. I thought about buying a Catalpa, but you guys told me they were a pain in the ass, so I'm going to pass for now.

I don't know about you, but I find it impossible to go to a nursery website and buy just one thing. Plus, Michigan Bulb (I know. I KNOW.) is having a special where if you buy forty bucks worth of stuff, you get twenty bucks off the order. Who can resist?

Not me.

So now I've got a magnolia on the way, and a weeping cherry tree, and a butterfly bush, and three hardy hibiscuses. Hibisci?

Oh! Oh! And then I was in Crapmart the other night, and there was a whole shelf full of peony plants, you know how they come, just the bare roots in dirt in a bag? And one of them was struggling to start growing, inside the bag, inside the store, under those crappy Crapmart lights.

I'm not made of STONE, people. I bought that peony. If it's trying THAT HARD to grow, against all odds, I'll give it a home. I know this photo is blurry, but check out those shoots poking up:



And then I had to stop at another store, and they had a display of starter lilacs for four bucks. Four bucks! I had two lilacs, a white and a purple, at the old place, but they had grown too big to move and I had to leave them behind. So I had to buy one of the four-dollar lilacs, natch.



Time to start digging some holes. C'mon over!

Up next: Kazoo

What is going on with American Idol? Last night, that one gal was accompanied by a guy on a didgeridoo, or whatever you call those giant Australian horn thingies, and that other dude's performance featured a dramatic entrance by a ....... bagpiper.

And OH MY GOD could they have dragged that show out any longer? Gah.

Too bad none of this year's contestants can actually, you know, SING. Oh, I know, a couple of them have passable voices, but really nothing terribly stand-out-ish.

So said the girl whose cats flee the room when she sings. Heh.

Oh, boy, am I pissed (Now with updates!)

People I am currently waiting to hear from:

1. The mechanic, with an estimate for replacing my timing belt. Okay, okay, the car's timing belt. I called him yesterday, and he said he'd call me "right back" with the price. Yeah.

2. The locksmith. I've been trying to get a doorlock situation at the house remedied since, oh, last August. (Dear robbers: All of the locks work. I just don't like the type of lock. Repeat: All of the locks work. Just so you know. You robbers.) This particular locksmith got involved about a week ago, and said he'd have someone give me a call and let me know when one of his guys would be stopping by. Still waiting.

3. The furnace guy. Jesus CHRIST what is with this guy? He finally showed up a while back to put in the new blower motor, but the furnace STILL isn't running right, and he was going to just pop by when he got a break in his schedule. That was ....... weeks ago? Maybe months? F*ck.

4. The plate-glass window guy, who was out to lunch when I called an hour ago and ...... oh wait! He's on the phone. Hallelujah. Be right back.

Okay, so the plate-glass window guy said come right over, bring your windows, and I did. And he said he could replace the broken glass in my storm windows, no problem, and he'd - uh oh - "give you a call when they're ready." Shit. F*ck me.

I know I've ranted about this before, but WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET SOMEONE TO FIX SOMETHING AROUND HERE? I am paying GOOD MONEY to get this shit fixed and WHY WILL NO ONE RETURN MY CALLS and HEY KIDS GET OFF OF MY LAWN.

Sheesh.



Updated to add: The mechanic just called back. He wants a thousand dollars to replace the timing belt. A. thousand. dollars. Granted, that includes a new water pump (which the car does not need; it was replaced two years ago, thankyouverymuch) and a system flush, but still. It's a THIRTY-FIVE DOLLAR PART. Calling other garages in three ....... two ...... one......

Updated AGAIN to add: See the comments for the latest development!

Non, je ne regrette rien

'

'

Peep is Risen.

ONE

...... singular sensation.

I quit smoking one year ago today.

Can I have an Amen?

For those of you who may be new here, I smoked a pack-and-a-half a day for almost thirty years. And then I quit. Cold turkey.

One last run of the numbers:

Number of cigarettes I would have smoked between April 3, 2009 and today, had I not stopped smoking on that date: 10,950.


Amount of money saved: $1,952.75. (Just to clarify: I smoked cheap cigs I bought on line. Had I been buying name-brand smokes at the 7-11, that number would have easily been double. I used a figure of $3.56 a pack, since that's what my cigs cost at the time I quit.)


I've owned cars that cost less than that. A LOT less.


I suppose I really should get all introspective up in this space right now, but I'll try to avoid it. I've been posting Nomoblowsmo updates one a month for the last year, so I think I've pretty much said it all by now.


I hope to shit that this is not gonna come off as pretentious, but I do think that if you've got a kid, you may want to print out some of those once-a-months (posted on the third of each month) and show them to him/her. You may want to black out the swear words, but show him/her some of those posts.

Because when I was a kid? I bought all that smoking-is-DEATH stuff they taught us in school - hook, line and sinker. I remember making up anti-smoking POSTERS and parading through the smoke-filled family room, BEGGING my father to quit.

A few years later, I was bumming smokes from him.

When you're young, you think you're invincible. Lung cancer happens to OTHER people; YOU, on the other hand, are going to live forever. And besides, you can quit any time you want. It's easy!

Um, no. It's not. And maybe if you show your kids some of these posts, and they see the way I've struggled for A YEAR to quit, they'll get the picture. Just a little. Probably not, but maybe.

And I just want to mention, real quick-like, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allan Carr. You can get a used copy for less than ten bucks, including shipping, on Amazon. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have been able to quit smoking without it; I don't know that. One of the attractions was that you could smoke while reading the book; honestly, I probably wouldn't have bought it if not for that. I just know that I bought the book, smoked as I read it, put out a half-finished cigarette as I read the last words, and haven't smoked since. I was actually kind of afraid to read it, if you want to know the truth; it was kind of like, holy shit- what if it actually works? What if I actually quit? What will my life be like if I don't smoke? What will I DO without cigarettes?

It works, and I quit. And there was nothing to be afraid of. What do I do without cigarettes? Everything I did before, just without a cig in my hand.


I made it.

Funny? Or not-so-much?

First off, I am pleased to report that the spring peepers were peeping away last night, which is VERY cool, because at my old place, I had to go down to the creek if I wanted to hear peepers. Here, I just open a window. AND, I found coltsfoot on my property. It's blooming away, which means spring is surely here. It also means that I have a very soggy yard, but we'll skip over that part, shall we?



Okay, so I have been delegated to bring dessert to Easter family dinner. And because it's impossible to accurately predict how many people are going to attend beforehand, I thought I'd just make a sheet cake and be done with it.


Except I thought that a sheet cake was kind of boring, so I thought, well, I'll frost it in a pretty spring color. Like pink, or yellow, or green.


Hmmmm...... green......... If I frosted it green, it would look like grass, and I could go to the dollar store and get some little plastic bunnies to put on it. Festive! *cough*


So! I go to the dollar store, and what did I find but ...... bunny peeps! Cool, I thought, I can put the bunny peeps on the cake.


And my mind keeps churning, and I'm thinking, I can do a whole Easter scenario with the peeps! Like, "Christ is risen", with peeps! And I can put one peep on a straw to get him up above the cake, and I can make a little halo, and all the other bunny peeps can be looking up in amazement ....



See, here's the thing: I think that's funny. I'm pretty sure some other people who will be at Easter dinner will think that's funny. But there's some others, in particular the Catholic deacon ...... well, I'm not so sure.



What do you think? Christ in peep form, or play it straight?

..... and these were the last images found on her camera after her death.

Duuuuuuudes, check it out:





Sorry for the poor quality - I was trying to get some pics quickly, before he stabbed me to death with his bloody horn.




It's hard to tell from the pics, but that horn is definitely not after-market or what remained after something else was broken off. The red color is original, too, and not the work of some emo kid with a Sharpie. You can click those pics to embiggen.

Here's a pic of something similar I found on Flickr*:



Who is this dude?!

Right now he's on my kitchen windowsill beneath the Cabinet Wall O' Religion. (Whole other post, right there.) But I would not be surprised if I woke up some morning to find him on my nightstand, peering up at me. **






*When I went to look it up again so I could credit the photog, I could no longer find it. Spoooky.


** ha ha, not really. Because then I would die of fright.




DISCLAIMER: This totally counts as this week's Freaky Friday. Shut it, Rob.

..... and I don't even know what nah-mah-stay MEANS

Yoga kicked my butt last night.



As you may recall, I decided to try and get rid of some flabby spots (ew) a couple of months ago, and settled on the thirty-day shred. After a few days, my knees spontaneously combusted, and I had to take a break to recuperate.

I started back up with a "core" workout, which is basically thirty minutes of crunches, which at least gives my knees a break. Oh yeah, and when did sit-ups become "crunches"? Who was the genius who figured out that you didn't have to go all the way up? In any event, I'm just glad that crunches don't require somebody to hold your ankles. Remember that, in gym class? Pairing off to hold each other's ankles for sit-ups? Ah, memories. God, I hated gym class.

ANYhoo, the crunch thing was going along swimmingly, and I decided to alternate it with a "stretching" workout, because if I was any stiffer I'd be plywood. I gradually worked Ms. Michaels back into the mix, and now I alternate between shred, crunch and stretch. The Spanish Inquisition lives!

SO, I was at the dollar store the other day (don't judge), and they had yoga DVDs! For a buck! I bought one, and last night was the big yoga debut, and ....... wow, those people are bendy, aren't they? I don't think my body is ever gonna do that stuff, and this morning, my back and neck are ..... cranky. They are not happy with this particular party.

But! Yoga is fun! You get to do all kinds of funny-sounding stuff. Oh! And speaking of funny-sounding, what the heck is "nah-mah-stay"? And how do you say it? This one girl on the DVD was saying, "nah-MAH-stay", but there was a dude on there who was all, "nah-mah-STAY". Is there discord in the yoga world? Are there warring factions over the proper pronunciation? Is there going to be a schism in Yoga, with one group breaking away from the rest? The suspense is killing me.

Okay, not really, right now it's the yoga that's killing me. Stay tuned - Eventually, I predict that I'll exercise myself right into the ER. It's only a matter of time.

I have my limits

Okay, so you guys know how my house is full of all kinds of weird shit. I have got to tell you, on Sunday I saw something in an antiques store that was too weird even for me.



It was a ceramic statue of a saint, about 8" tall, dressed all in flowing robes. The saint was cradling a medallion of another saint in his arms. And he had a bloody horn on his head, right in the center, at his hairline.



WHAT. THE. F*CK.



Catholics, help me out here. I really, REALLY wanted to buy that damn thing (three bucks!), but I don't want to bring some evil bad awful thing into my house. I don't want to end up like Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror with that nasty little kachinka doll thing chasing me around.



But seriously, which saint is this guy supposed to BE?! Is there a rational reason why a saint would have a bloody horn on his head?



I don't get it.

Alone

My neighbor T. invited me over for coffee yesterday afternoon. I had chatted with her before, but this was the first formal "visit", if you will.

We went in the kitchen, and coffee was poured, and snacks were had, and we chatted. Visited. And she told me about her grown children, and her grandkids, and her friends, and trips she takes to Oregon. And she talked about her husband, who died of cancer three years ago at the age of eighty-two.

And I thought how sad it must be, to have spent your entire adult life with someone else, and then to have them die first, leaving you all alone for the first time in fifty years. I remember how lost my Mom was when my Dad passed away. She didn't even know how to balance a checkbook, for Pete's sake - Dad always did that stuff.

After our visit was over, I said my goodbyes to T. and went back to my place. And I thought, Wow, how lucky I am - at least I'll never have to deal with that. I'll never have to fight panic at the passing of someone I spent my entire life with.

Because I'm already alone.

Freaky Friday!

Okay, okay, technically it's Saturday, but ROB was having a frickin' heart attack over the lack of Freaky Friday, so here we go. Oh, and by the way, ROB, it's FREAKY Friday, NOT "Wacky" Friday. Christ.

A while back I picked up this concrete tiger at a flea market, because I am a sucker. He's about two-and-a-half feet long, and weighs about what you'd think a concrete tiger would weigh.

I couldn't figure out what was up with the white. Was he supposed to be an albino tiger? If so, wouldn't the stripes be black instead of orange? And why was his face all orange, when the rest of him was white? So many questions. I couldn't figure out the original intent, so I decided to make him a regular tiger. Because that's what every house needs: A regular concrete tiger.


A few coats of paint later, and I have the world's largest paperweight:







I think I'm gonna varnish him and put him in the garden. To keep Mr. Z and Mini-Z company.





I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY, ROB.



(just kidding)

People I am trying my best to ignore right now

1. Tiger Woods. Okay, he cheated on his wife. A LOT. And then evidently claimed he had some sort of "sex addiction" and went into rehab, which is just laughable. Banging anything that'll hold still for it is not an addiction; it's stupidity, considering all the sexually-transmitted diseases out there. The honchos at the PGA must've shit their pants when all this came out - there goes the ol' meal ticket. I am vaguely interested to see what the ratings do when he starts showing up for tournaments again. It'll also be interesting to see how many Little Tigers come out of this.


2. Kate Gosselin. At least with her OLD reality show, she had to spend time with her kids if she wanted to get any airtime. Now all bets are off, and I'm just left to wonder exactly how much plastic surgery she had, because she sure doesn't look like she used to. At all. Those poor kids. All I can think of is that children's book where the little animal (chicken? puppy? I can't remember) wanders around asking various items, "Are you my mommy?"



3. Sandra Bullock and her (soon-to-be-ex) hubby. WHY DO PEOPLE NEVER LEARN? Sweetie, if he cheated on someone else to be with you, he'll cheat on you to be with someone else. Learn it. Love it. Live it.



Whew. I feel better now.

She. and. her. shaaaaaadow .......

While we're talking about Little Girl, I thought I'd put up these pics I took a few weeks ago, back when the world was still all white.






The snow had finally packed down enough so that the cats could walk on top of it, instead of floundering through.




Little Girl would paw at the snow, and then examine her paw, as if to say, "when is this stuff gonna GO AWAY already?"





I love the way her shadow stretched out behind her.

Today, just a few weeks later, it's rainy, and the tiger lilies and irises (and all the mystery stuff the last owner evidently planted - crocuses and daffodils, so far) poke out of the ground a little further every day. We may still get snow; heck, we've been known to get snow here on Mother's Day, for the love of Pete, but the worst is over.



So I hope.

She's a traveller

Little Girl has been giving me fits lately - she takes off and is gone for hours.


On Saturday, she left the house around ten a.m. and didn't come back until almost 7:30 that night. Yesterday, she was out the door by seven a.m., and I didn't see her again until after dark.

Saturday was especially worrisome, because I was working in the yard for a good chunk of the day, and usually when I do that, the cats come around to supervise. Faithful Runt was glad to oblige, but not Little Girl, even when I called and called and CALLED for her. Only to go inside, truly frightened, at dusk, to discover that she had done an end-run around me via doggy door and was (FINALLY) inside eating her dinner.

Where does she go? Someplace covered, because when she came in last night, it had been raining for a while, but she was fairly dry. I would assume she was double-dipping, i.e., hanging out and eating at two houses, but she wears a collar with my phone number on it, and I would think I'd get a call if someone had an extra cat at their house.

She's been spayed, so she's not out getting frisky. She's not scratched up, so she isn't fighting with other cats.

And I have to say, poor Runt is all out of sorts when she's gone. He paces, and goes in and out, and hops up in the cat tree so he can look out the window, watching for his sister.

Where do you go, Little Girl?






Ask my feral mama, she says. I'm not tellin'.

Last night's American Idol

'
'
Dear Miley Cyrus:

PUT SOME PANTS ON!!


That is all.

Recently Read

Skip it if you wanna.



1. Promise Not To Tell by Jennifer McMahon - Murder mystery. Interesting, and an okay read.

2. Under the Dome by Stephen King - Whew, this one took me a couple of months to get through. Not that it wasn't interesting; it just takes me a while to plow through a thousand pages. It's a novel about a community sealed off from the rest of the country - who did it, and why? I LOVED the big reveal - when you find out, you'll be reminded of an old Twilight Zone episode. It's typical King - Long, with lots of interesting characters, a plot that keeps you turning the pages, and an ending that's an absolute barn-burner. Oh, and there was one passage, just a couple of sentences, actually, that made me cry. It's been a long time since a book did that. One quibble - characters kept saying "clustermug", which may indeed be what they say in that part of the country, but where I come from, it's "clusterfuck", and I kept wondering why he didn't just go ahead and use it. Good book - good read.

3. Lark and Termite by Jayne Phillips - Novel about a young woman and her disabled brother in the fifties. It got good reviews, but I felt distanced from the main character and gave up about halfway through. I might try it again sometime.

4. Making Shit out of Sticks - haha, not really. I DID get a book out of the library called "Making Furniture from Twigs" or some such, because that willow tree out back is shedding like crazy - but I took a look at the diagrams and thought "nope".

5. If The Creek Don't Rise by Rita Williams - Memoir of an African-American woman raised by her grandma out west - interesting.

6. Dogwood by Chris Fabry - I really, really liked his book "Junebug", so I thought I'd like this one, too, but sadly, I just couldn't get interested.


7. Okay, let's do a movie review! (500) Days of Summer is a cute romantic comedy. There's no explicit sex scenes, in case you're looking for something to watch when the folks are visiting. It's bright, and funny, and not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.


So that's what I've been reading and watching lately. "Under the Dome" was the best of the bunch. How about you - read, or watched, anything good lately?

Notes from the weekend

1. When calling your cat who has been missing all day (I was so worried), it's best to call her by her nickname, Gee Gee. Because wandering around the backyard calling out "Little Girl! Little Girl!" is probably going to make the neighbors nervous.



2. That patch of ice WILL make you fall. Do NOT try to cross it because you WILL fall. Whoops; too late. Ouch.



3. BONES! I have them:






These aren't the ones from the side of the road. Mom and I were walking down by the creek yesterday when to what should my wondering eyes appear but a deer skull! Woot! Further examination revealed the rest of the bones. I do feel sorry for that poor lady we ran into on the way back who greeted us with, "Hi! What a nice day for a walk ............" and then trailed off as her eyes traveled down to the big ol' bag of bones I was carrying. On a related note, I wonder if someone from the FBI will show up at my door if I google "how to clean bones". Let's try that out.

4. My neighbor T. came over and chatted for a while when I was working on the front garden. Later on, I traded some just-started sunflower plants for a piece of homemade cherry pie from my neighbor L. My neighbors rock. And I definitely got the better deal on that trade.

5. I think I'm going to wear chain mail the next time I have to put new flea collars on the cats. Jesus CHRIST those claws are sharp. It's just new collars, cats; calm down already.

6. The prayer flags are up!

So pretty!

Freaky Friday!

Back around this time last year, when I had been looking at houses for months and hadn't seen much I even wanted to bother to put an offer on, I heard an old wives' tale about how if you wanted to attract a boyfriend, you should hang a mirror over your bed.



Well. I didn't necessarily want a boyfriend, but I did want a house. I got a mirror at the thrift store, and I put some illustrations of houses on it, so the ju-ju gods wouldn't get confused and send me a boyfriend instead. Then I started adding on stuff I picked up on walks, acorns and feathers and stuff, so that my new place would have a nice big yard. I added on stick figures of The Runt and Little Girl and myself, and put Rocky on top to supervise. And as time kept passing, and I kept looking at houses I didn't like, I kept adding to the mirror.






Please ignore the gal with the bedhead.



I don't know if the ju-ju mirror helped or not, but it IS hanging in the kitchen of my new house.

Just call me Jessica

Remember that TV show, the one with Jessica Simpson, and her hubby Nick Lachey (or however you spell his last name), and in that one episode, she's got a can of tuna, only she's all confused, because it's Chicken of the Sea brand, and she's all, "Well, is it tuna? Or is it chicken?"

Yeah.

I am currently pondering the status of Animal Crackers.

Are they crackers? Or are they cookies?

I mean, the bag says they're crackers. Animal Crackers. But they taste like cookies. Kind of shortbread-ish. But then again, there's that Shirley Temple song, "Animal crackers in my soup", which would seem to indicate cracker status, because you're not gonna put cookies in your soup. But then again, I've never heard of ANYBODY putting animal crackers in their soup, outside of that one song, so that would lean toward the cookie side of the debate.

And let's not forget, you can also purchase frosted animal crackers, and who the hell would frost an actual cracker, so maybe cookie it is.

Cookie? Or cracker?

I'm so confused.

Breaking News!

The Bleeding Hearts are up!

They start out as little spears of red fringe poking out of the ground. Two months from now, they'll look like this:



I'm so excited! These are some of the plants I moved from the old place, and because I moved stuff in August, possibly the WORST time of the year to try to move perennials, I had no idea if anything was going to make it. But the Bleeding Hearts are up! Oh, the tiger lilies are coming up, too!

Spring is coming.

People of Walmart

I had to go to Walmart last night. I try to avoid it whenever possible, and I absolutely WILL NOT go to Walmart on the weekend, because the people there fill me with rage, and there are exponentially more of them there on the weekend. Seriously, I can walk into Walmart on a Saturday feeling just fine, and by the time I leave, I'm ready to go do a drive-by shooting.


So! Weeknights at Walmart are decidedly less insane-making, preferably Monday or Tuesday. And last night, as I was shopping in the (relatively) quiet store, I noticed something that's struck me before: The most crowded aisle in the store is always, always the chips-and-snacks aisle. We're talking, you can't even get DOWN that aisle, it's so crowded.


Least crowded aisle? Fresh produce. It's like a ghost town.


And I was all ready to get all judge-y and shit, but you know what? Fresh produce is expensive. Junk food is cheap. So I get that if you have limited dollars to spend, you're going to spend it on the stuff that will fill you up. I mean, I can totally see why Ramen noodles are so popular with the struggling-college-student crowd. Four for a buck?! Yeah way!


No judging here. Today, at least.

Spongebob Squarecat

Hey, she like right angles - nothin' wrong with that.

Freaky Friday!

I bought a box of deer antlers at a flea market a while back. The best ones I hung in a doorway; I still had a bunch left that I wasn't sure what to do with, until I decided to arrange them in a display. Kind of like flowers. Or not.

Every day I drive past a spot where somebody field-dressed a deer not far from the side of the road, and the entire ribcage is right there. (Holla! I live in the sticks now.) You have no idea how tempted I am to grab those bones; one of these days it just might happen, if coyotes don't beat me to it.

First World Problems

Hahaha - Sorry about that - "First World Problems" - do you dislike that phrase as much as I do? The first time I heard it, it just grated somehow - it just sounds so, I don't know, condescending or something. And now, of course, it's all over bloggyland, so I guess I'll just have to tough it out for awhile.

Oh! And another phrase that drove me crazy from the get-go is "old soul". I do not like "old soul". If you want to call someone wise, go ahead, but unless we're talking about Vishnu or something, you might want to steer away from "old soul". It's been done. and done and done and done. I'm waiting right now for someone to call Corey Haim an "old soul".

Ooooookay, now that I've wandered about as far off track as I can, let's get to the point. I used "First World Problems" {shudder} as the title today because I'm about to talk about money and the lack thereof. And Ex, I am telling you RIGHT NOW, if you're gearing up to chime in about how if we all just got advanced degrees and cushy jobs like you, there'd be no problems, well ...... aw, go for it. It's always nice to hear another view. Here's my story .....


On Monday, my co-workers and I got some bad news of the financial kind.

Nothing earth-shattering, nothing to land me in the poor house, but it's always disheartening to discover that not only are you not getting a raise, you are actually going to be taking home less money.

And again, while this was no way going to ruin my world, it was a blow. And I was worried. Worried about how I was going to make my budget stretch that much farther, and worried that at almost fifty, I wasn't making more money and was actually starting to slide backward - never a direction you want to go.

Oh, and the reason for all this financial woe? MVP, our f*cking health insurance company, who decided to jack premiums 17% this year. Because they can. Meaning it will now cost my employer six grand a year per employee for health insurance. No dental, no vision, big-co-pay health insurance.

If there are any right-wing, tea-party, no-nationalized-health-care wingnuts reading this right now? KISS MY ASS.

Ahem.

So anyway, I spent a couple of uneasy nights re-working the old budget and trying to figure out a way around the problem, and I came up with a solution. I would still be making less money, but it would be coming out of my vacation hours, instead directly out of my weekly income*, and I thought it would work for both my company and I, but I wasn't sure if I should present it to the boss or not. And I kept worrying. And fretting.

So! Yesterday afternoon, the boss could evidently tell something was wrong, and he called me into his office and asked me to spill.

I started to explain, about how this financial loss would be hard for me to fill, and ..... oh f*ck me sideways ...... I started to cry.

I HATE it when I cry at work. The guys don't cry at work, for Pete's sake - why do I have to cry?

In retrospect, I guess some of what caused yesterday's tears is that I spent a long time at the financial edge. Then I finally started making more money, working hard, getting secure, and to start going backward was just ....... no. HELL NO. Waaaaaa.

And when you are the sole breadwinner in your household, when there is no spouse or significant other to help absorb the blow, well, it's up to you to hold off the damn wolf at the door. And that's scary.**

But! Happy ending! As soon as I started to spill, the boss said, "Oh yeah, I meant to call you aside after that meeting ...... it doesn't apply to you."

'{wiping tears away} '{feeling really f*cking stupid}

Yay! No ramen noodles for me.

But here's thing: In this shit-tastic economy, where the banks and the fat cats get bailed out and the rest of us get told to go piss up a rope, this kind of thing is happening to a lot of people who are NOT getting told that it doesn't apply to them. I just happened to be incredibly lucky.


And I am grateful. And worried about what happens next year, when MVP inevitably decides to jack their rates yet again.

And I am glad that I dodged the bullet this time.



*I know that makes no sense, but there is no way in hell I am going to go into any more detail about financial stuff here. Sorry.


**See also: That's being an adult. Suck it up. Jaysus. I annoy myself.