If I ran the flower shop

Because I'm a jerk.

In other news, did anybody catch "Carmen" on PBS last night? I'm not really a big fan of opera, although I do listen to it on the weekends when it comes on NPR and I'm too lazy to change the station, but I've always loved "Carmen", probably because I saw "Carmen Jones" (the 1954 version) as a kid and it amazed me. I didn't learn until much later that they totally redid all the lyrics.

So! I was going to watch a little bit of Carmen and then switch to something else, but I turned it on, and holy SHIT that Elina Garanca is HOT.

Did you guys see her? I mean, I'm as straight as they come, but there was no denying that she is one hot woman. You just can't take your eyes off her. What a performer! and HOT. I ended up watching almost the whole damn thing.

Okay, that's my little girl crush for the day. I'm not the only one, am I? Who else has girl crushes? Fess up.

Chapter Twelve, in which I alienate my remaining readers

Warning: Discussion of gross medical symptoms, coming up!

I mean it!

You've been warned!

Okay, so Monday at work, the inside of my forearm started itching. I looked down, and there was a raised red area about a half inch long by an inch-and-a-half wide. By yesterday, little teeny-tiny blisters were forming. By today, the area was starting to get, well, {upcoming grossness YOU'VE BEEN WARNED} crusty, and when I accidentally-totally-on-purpose scratched some of the crust off, yellow-ish liquid came out.

WTF?

Am I dying? Have aliens laid eggs in my skin? Am I contagious?! Come'ere, lemme give ya a hug.

I had to go to my doctor today for something totally unrelated*, and she took a look at it and thought it looked like an allergic reaction. I think it looks like a really pissed-off spider crawled up my sleeve and fanged me up.

Any ideas?



*annual lady-parts check-up. GOD.

You be the judge

I did a favor for a friend of a friend last week, and she sent me flowers as a thank-you. Nice, right? Except ......... well ...........

And here's the thing - she picked that bouquet out.

Is it just me? Because I think it's damn creepy. Not as bad as a black-silk clown painting, but in the same general league. I do not want my flowers looking back at me.

Here's a pretty flower, just to even things out:

Hollyhock, taken this morning.

So! Do you think the flower-face thing is cute? Or creepy? 'Cause I think it's just plain wrong.

This is what happens when you let the gas boys on your land

Right now there is a huge controversy here in upstate over gas companies using hydraulic fracturing, also known as "fracking", to force natural gas from an underground foundation known as the Marcellus Shale.


While some individuals, towns, and counties are selling the gas rights to their properties as fast as they can, others are taking a more cautious approach, saying the DEC (Dept. of Environmental Conservation) needs to do more research into the drilling before allowing the gas companies to start work. In other parts of the country where this type of drilling has been utilized, there have been all sorts of problems with contaminated water, increased illness rates, and other nasty stuff.


There is an undeveloped park a couple of miles down the road from me, and the town has sold the gas rights for the park to a gas company. The DEC hasn't even given approval to start drilling yet, but the company who bought the rights has evidently already started work there, judging by some pics I took the other day.


This used to be a pretty little footpath winding through the woods:







Yeah. Think twice, people, is all I'm sayin'.

I am not worthy

I was at the library the other day, and I decided to get out some magazines along with the books. Looking through the magazine stacks, I picked out a gardening magazine, and "Taste of Home", because they might as well have named that one "Cooking for Dummies with Five Ingredients or Less", and, let's see, I grabbed an "Outside" magazine, and, finally, a "Harper's".


Have you all ever read "Harper's"? Because I hadn't. And the reason, as it turns out, that I have never read "Harper's" is because I am, evidently, too stupid to understand the articles.


Seriously, that magazine is hard-core intelligent.


I mean, I like to think that my reading-comprehension level is fairly high. I also like to think that I'm a reasonably intelligent person. But I swear, I started trying to claw my way through the articles in that magazine and my brain was all, like, "owwwwww. Stop itttttttt. It hurtzzzzz."


In a way I'm glad that there's a magazine for people who are, evidently, a billion times more intelligent than I. (Or is that "Than me"? Oh noooooooooo.) And it's given me a new thing to put on my goal list: Make it through an issue of Harper's and understand all the articles.


Hey, a person can dream, right?

In other news, I made an ill-advised attempt at conquering a gigantic banana split on Saturday. *urp* Seriously, I thought I'd lost my taste for soft-serve completely after trying to scarf down that monster. Until Sunday, when I ate more ice cream. There's something wrong with me.

Freaky Friday!

I have this thing for trophies - I think they're cool. I never participated in organized sports or anything like that as a kid, so I never had any of my own. Until I bought my house, when I gave myself a trophy:

That's the ...... I don't know ....... best home-buyer trophy, or something.

So when I was running errands the other day and saw two full boxes of trophies by the side of the road, with a big ol' "free" sign on them, well .....

..... you know I snapped those thing up.

Lots of them are bowling trophies won by a woman named Dixie, which is all kinds of awesome. There's some music trophies in there, and a bunch of talent show trophies. I'm pretty sure I can guess the talent, judging by the four batons that were included in one of the boxes.

Oh! And speaking of talent, what is up with that Toddlers and Tiaras show? Do those parents NOT UNDERSTAND that the whole thing is just a money-making racket for the people running the shows? And the money they spend on the costumes and shit, well .... what about poor little precious's college tuition? I think the mommas are just trying to live through their kids, which is creepy. And the way they make up the little girls - they speed right past the dewy, fresh-faced "early twenties" look and head right for cougar country. It's gross. And why are these parents teaching these little girls that dressing like a slut and acting like a tease will make you a "winner"? *rant over*

And! On a lighter note! Today is the one year anniversary of the day I closed on the house. Happy anniversary to me! and the house! I should give myself a trophy or something. Oh wait ....

I blew it in the clutch

Last Friday was a pretty bad day. Work was screwed up, and I got caught in an absolutely blinding thunderstorm on the way home, and all I wanted to do was get home, pill The Runt, and then sit down and relax.

I walked in the door and the phone rang.

"Rockycat? It's T! Do you like pizza?"

T is the neighbor across the street, an absolutely sweet old lady who lives all alone. I usually really enjoy chatting with her about her garden, and her kids, and all manner of things. But when she asked if I liked pizza, I thought I knew what was coming. I thought she was going to invite me over for dinner, and I was just so damn tired, and The Runt hadn't had his pill yet, and all I wanted to do was just throw some shorts and a t-shirt on and sit down and relax, and now I'd have to go sit with T and oh dear God and

"Actually", I said, "I'm allergic. To pizza."

Whaaaaaaaa? Back the f*ck up. Did I just say that? Where the hell did THAT come from?! Realizing how STUPID it sounded (is it even possible to be allergic to pizza?), I dug myself in a little deeper.

"Well, not pizza, actually. It's oregano I'm allergic to".

What IS this, an episode of The Brady Bunch? The one where Jan lied to a nice little old lady and then couldn't go to the school dance because they were serving pizza there?

T was very sweet about the whole thing, if a little perplexed. She explained that her daughter had brought her a half-sheet for dinner and she had a bunch left over and wanted to know if I'd like some, and now I felt like the biggest jerk in the history of the world.

Why did I lie? Even if she DID invite me over, all I had to do was explain that I was tired and would have to take a raincheck. I just SO did not want to hurt her feelings, and I blurted out the first excuse I could think of, and this is why I'd be going to hell if I believed in that sort of thing.

I lied to a little old lady. I told her I was allergic to pizza*. I feel horrible.

Every time I start to think I'm a halfway decent human being, I go and pull something like this. Damn.




*which is INSANE. Jeezus Christ I can't even LIE right. NOBODY'S allergic to pizza. F*ck.

Cat food cage match!

(Back story: The Runt has been having allergy problems. The vet thinks it's an inhaled allergy, i.e, pollen or something similar, and has him on steroids, which are controlling his symptoms. Doing a little research, I kept hearing about food allergies in cats.)



So! The more I noodled around on teh internetz, the more it looked like feeding The Runt a limited-ingredient diet might help, if the steroids didn't relieve his symptoms. I found a brand called Natural Balance that offered "limited ingredient" cat food. I went to the pet store last week and picked up a couple of cans, thinking I'd give it a whirl.

Here is Natual Balance's idea of "limited ingredient" cat food (Venison and Green Pea formula, $1.49 per 6-oz. can):

Venison, Venison Broth, Venison Liver, Pea Flour, Venison Meal, Salmon Oil, Dicalcium Phosphate, Kelp, Flaxseed, Guar Gum, Potassium Chloride, Methionine, Taurine, Parsley, Yucca Schidigera Extract, Sodium Chloride, Dried Cranberries, Carrageenan, Zinc Sulfate, Ferrous Sulfate, Vitamin E Supplement, Copper Sulfate, Manganese Sulfate, Niacin Supplement, Sodium Selenite, Thiamine Mononitrate, Calcium Pantothenate, Calcium Iodate, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Riboflavin, Vitamin A Supplement, Folic Acid, Biotin, Vitamin D3 Supplement, Vitamin B12 Supplement.

Guaranteed Analysis:
Crude Protein 9.0% minimum
Crude Fat 5.0% minimum
Crude Fiber 1.0% maximum
Moisture 78% maximum
Taurine 0.05% minimum

Let's compare and contrast, shall we? Here is the ingredient list for Friskies Meaty Bits with Beef in Gravy cat food ($.40 per 6-oz can):

Water sufficient for processing, meat by-products, beef, wheat gluten, chicken, turkey, fish, soy flour, corn starch-modified, artificial and natural flavors, added color, potassium chloride, taurine, calcium phosphate, salt, choline chloride, zinc sulfate, thiamine mononitrate, ferrous sulfate, Vitamin E supplement, niacin, manganese sulfate, copper sulfate, calcium pantothenate, Vitamin A supplement, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of Vitamin K activity), pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin supplement, Vitamin B-12 supplement, biotin, folic acid, Vitamin D-3 supplement, potassium iodide, A-6102.

Guaranteed Analysis
Crude Protein (Min)11.0 %
Crude Fat (Min)2.5 %
Crude Fiber (Max)1.0 %
Moisture (Max)78.0 %
Ash (Max)2.5 %
Taurine (Min)0.05 %

By my count, Natural Balance "limited ingredient" cat food has 35 ingredients, compared with 33 in Friskies.

Hmmmm.

Now, I understand that the big selling point for Natural Balance is that it's grain-free, grain evidently being the main culprit for food allergies in cats. And Friskies does have "wheat gluten", but it's not even one of the top three ingredients - it's number 5. And the guaranteed analysis appears to be about the same, except that Friskies has ash in it, which - I don't even know what "ash" means when it comes to cat food. Cremains? Soylent Green? I do not know. And both brands contain 78% moisture, which means it's basically food-flavored water.

Bottom line: I cracked open a can of Natural Balance, spooned it into dishes, set it on the floor, and both cats sniffed it and walked away.

Back to the drawing board!

and then that happened ....

Okay, so I was going to do the Cat Food Smackdown today, but then I realized that I STILL haven't talked about what I did on my time off, and if I wait any longer it's going to be ancient history, so let's talk about that.

Honestly, I think possibly the best part of my time off was re-watching the MST3K episode skewering "The Painted Hills", featuring Lassie as Shep. Pile On Pete?! Whaaat......

Sorry, you kind of had to be there.

Oh yeah, and I ate the first ripe tomato off the first tomato plant I have ever grown, ever. And there is a squash-like protuberance coming from the squash plant, which I am pretty sure is a .... squash.

I did get a couple of the window frames scraped and painted, although not as many as I wanted to, thanks to the goddam motherf*cking BEES which kept dive bombing and, in one instance, STINGING me every time I climbed up the ladder.

Bees, I am the one who delayed mowing the freaking lawn so you could get more quality time with the clover. You may want to re-think your hostility.



Oh, and I found a great big clump of daylilies in the park which I helped to relocate to my garden. Note to police: These were not daylilies which had been planted by park staff. These were daylilies carried in by the flood and deposited in an area scheduled for clearing. Ahem.

There was a lot of stuff I WAS doing to get done that I just ... didn't .... quite.... get around to. In my defense, it was in the upper eighties and humid all week, and two of the five days I got called in to the office, and ....

Nah. No excuses. I mostly did a whole lot of nothing that week.

Which was kind of the point. And a little prescient, given the craziness that followed. Guys, you will not even believe this: The car broke down AGAIN last night. This time it's something with the brakes. AND when I got home, my refrigerator was busily endeavoring to freeze everything solid. Aces!

I need some more time off.

Blacktop Watch: Day And Then My Head Exploded

First off, I'm all wordy up in here today, so scroll down to see an exciting! action! picture! and updates on what's going on. Go ahead - I'll wait.


aaaaaaand here we go with Blacktop Watch.

On Saturday, my neighbor L was out in the yard, and I asked her, nicely, what was going on with her driveway.


"What do you mean?", she said.

"You're still not parking on it!", I said, laughing. "Is there a problem? Did the blacktop not set right?"

"Oh no, no, everything's fine", she said. "We're just not supposed to park on it for two weeks."

"Two weeks?!", I said. "I've never heard of that! It just takes a couple of days!"

"Nope", L said. "B (her husband) said two weeks."

Well, I thought, just a few more days.

And then, and then, B, the husband, was out in the yard.

"A month", he said. "You've gotta let it set for at least a month. I think I'll give it five weeks, just to be sure."

"A MONTH?!", I said. "Who told you that?!!!!! It only takes a couple of days!Didn't it set up right?"

"Oh, it set up just fine", he said. "But if you want the blacktop to last, the longer you stay off it, the better."

and then my head exploded.



Peeps, once blacktop has set, it has set. AND THIS SHIT HAS SET. We are living in upstate New York, not freakin' Borneo. The temps have gone down to the fifties and stayed there overnight several times since that driveway was paved. If it ain't set up by now, it ain't never gonna be, is what I'm sayin'. NEXT, these kind folks are pushing eighty. They shouldn't be buying green bananas, if you know what I mean. They do not need a driveway for the ages. And ANYWAY, the shit has SET. It is DONE.


At the very least, you'd think this would get them to start parking back in their own damn driveway:

That's my driveway. That's their brandey-new car, there on the left. And those two orange blobs on top of the car? That's my cats, climbing and leaving pawprints and scratch marks all over their brandey-new car.

I did not tell them to do that. They just figure, hey, if it's over here, it's ours to climb on!

A MONTH. Or, you know, FIVE WEEKS.

*kaboom*

there went my head.

Rainy Sunday

That's The Runt on the left, and Little Girl on the right, and yeah, that's usually about as far as I get with making the bed before I lose interest. (click on the pic to embiggen, if you need even more proof of my lack of housekeeping skills.)

After several days on steroids, The Runt is showing marked improvement. He now goes to every-other-day with the pills, and we take it from there. It is just so nice to see him laying there all peaceful and sleepy, instead of scratching/licking/digdigdigging.

As usual, I've got a ton to talk about, first of which is an update on this situation.


My friend called me last night, explaining that she'd been noodling around on line yesterday, decided to check in to my blog to see how The Runt was doing, and, KAPOW!

She said that she had no idea how much I actually made, but had just assumed that because I'd been with the same company for so long, I was making much more than I actually was. She said she would never have said what she did if she knew the actual numbers.

It meant a lot that she would call to explain once she found out how upset I was about the whole thing. Apology accepted!

Coming soon: Blacktop Watch! and, Cat Food Smackdown! oh, and ohmygod, DO NOT let me forget to tell you the pizza allergy story, in which I make an absolute ass out of myself!

Stay tuned!

Freaky Friday - what I did on my summer vacation edition

.......must.......keep.......blogging.....

There is just TOO MUCH to share with you guys today! Scroll down for a tale of the homeless, another thrilling edition of Blacktop Watch, and the story of how a good friend accused me of being overpaid! ME!

Oh, and The Runt is doing much better. After three days on steroids, he's still licking/scratching/digdigdigging, but with much less enthusiasm and with far less frequency. I did some research into hypo-allergenic foods, and I'll have THAT smackdown here on Monday.


Here we go with Freaky Friday!
I thought I'd show you some more of the crap stuff I bought when I had a few days off last week.

I remember having some souvenir pennants as a kid, so when I saw these, I neeeeeded them:



I've never actually been to the alligator farm, but it sounds like a rockin' place, no? I wonder if it's still there.

Here's a (Hindu?) (Buddhist?) lunchbox:





I like the back better:



Because every kid needs to go to school with a lunchbox featuring an elephant riding a giant rat. Screw Hannah Montana.

So, this homeless dude walks across a road ....

First off! Scroll down for Blacktop Watch, and scroll even further down for a scintillating tale of a dear friend shivving me in the back!




I was running errands last night and had to stop at one of the longest red lights in town. (Four Corners, I'm lookin' at you!) I had all my windows rolled down because the AC in the Saturn conked out two years ago, and I was just sitting there, waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the light to change.

There was an old man standing on the corner with a box of clothes in his arms and some type of medical braces on both feet. He started to slowly shuffle across the intersection, and I got a little worried, because it was obvious he wasn't going to make it across before the light changed, but I wasn't really paying all that much attention, to be honest.

"Oh, miss! Miss?"

He was standing right next to my car.

"Ma'am, I missed my bus. Are you heading across the bridge? Could you give me a ride?"

"Hop in", I said, hoping I wasn't about to get ax-murdered. But, I mean, it was broad daylight, the dude was old, and he could barely walk, for Pete's sake.

So, I gave him his ride, let him out, and went on my way.

And I just hope to Christ that it's not me some day, thirty years from now, standing on a corner with a box of clothes in my arms and braces on my feet, asking for rides from strangers.

I don't know what is going on with the world today, but that shit's just not right.

Blacktop Watch: Day Nine

*sigh*



Oh! Be sure to scroll down and read all about how a very dear friend poopied all over my parade last night!

Dudes. Duuuuuuudes.

I have got SO MUCH to talk about today, including the homeless guy I gave a ride to yesterday and an expose of Natural Balance "Limited Ingredient" (HA!) cat food and possibly Freaky Friday, but first -

but FIRST -

Okay, back story, I got a raise yesterday. Yippee!, right? And I was talking to a dear friend on the phone last night, and we were just chatting away, and I mentioned that I! got! a! raise!, and do you know she said?

DO YOU KNOW WHAT SHE SAID?

Here's what she said upon learning that I got a raise:

"Really?", she sniffed. "You know, you're ALREADY overpaid, RockyCat."

??????????

What. the. f*ck.

Do you know what I make? DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MAKE?

I WILL TELL YOU. (CAPS LOCK ALERT! DANGER! DANGER!)

After thirty years in the workforce, twenty-three of them in a professional area, last year I took home a whopping

(ARE YOU READY? HERE IT COMES!)

twenty-five grand.

And this woman, this dear friend, who I know for a fact made AT LEAST three times that before she retired, had the f*cking NERVE to tell me I'm overpaid.

Oh, my cheese is grated. I'm not even sure I can be friends anymore. Ooooooh, I'm a steamin'. Who SAYS shit like that?!

Grrrrrr.


So! I will try to cram some more stuff up here later today, because, BOY, do I have a lot to talk about! Don't let me forget to tell you the story about the homeless guy!

Blacktop Watch: Day Eight

(If you're late to the game, I told my neighbors that they could park in my driveway while theirs was being redone. The workers finished up eight days ago.)


I'm beginning to wonder if they're waiting for the blacktop guy to come back and take down the rope and the little advertising sign that he strung across their driveway.


I feel like going over there and staging an intervention: "It's okay! You can take down the rope yourselves! He's not coming back for it!"


The other possibility is that something went horribly wrong at the batch plant that morning and my neighbors are now stuck with a driveway full of never-setting blacktop.


Time to set up those parking meters. I wonder where you buy them?

QOTD: Does your cat have allergies?

So! The Runt and I went to see a specialist last night about his continued discomfort. While he had been doing better after his initial treatment for flea allergy dermatitis, he had still been occasionally scratching and digdigdigging at himself, and last weekend he took a turn for the worse.

I got the name of a cat specialist, and last night we went to see her. She seems to think that in addition to the flea allergy thing, he also has an inhaled allergy, i.e., he's allergic to something in the air, like pollen or ragweed.

The thing that was throwing me off was that he keeps acting like something's biting him. He'll be just walking across a room and he'll flinch, like something just chomped on him, and then he'll throw himself to the floor and digdigdig at himself.

The specialist vet explained that in cats, inhaled allergies can "settle" in the skin. In humans, if we're allergic to pollen or whatever, it affects our mucous membranes, so we get all congested and wheezy and teary-eyed. But in cats, it tends to make their skin itchy. And it kind of acts like hives, so that while they're itchy in general, a certain patch of skin can suddenly act up, causing them to dig madly at one spot.

I don't know. Does this sound reasonable to you? Because we started him on the steroids last night, and this morning he's still digdigdigging.

*sigh*

Poor guy. Send kind thoughts his way, please.

Holy Shit!

..... for reals?!


I got a letter from my mortgage company the other day with my annual escrow account statement, now that I've been paying on the house for a full year. (One down, twenty-nine to go! Woot!)


And evidently I'd been paying a TAD too much in escrow, because my mortgage payment is going to be dropping by a hundred bucks a month.


And! I went to file the statement in my house file today, and reading all the way down to the bottom, the mortgage-holder is ALSO sending me a check for $2,300.00. A refund, if you will, of the extra money I'd been paying into escrow.


Okay, my question to all you long-term homeowners out there:

Is this normal?


When I filed my taxes this year, my accountant told me that my escrow payments looked awfully high, so I thought there might be an adjustment coming, but this much?


Really?


I mean, this is a really good thing, because The Runt has to go see a specialist today, and God only knows how much it'll cost, but it kind of disturbs me that they could be off by that much.


Oh! Oh! And I was just telling a co-worker about it, and he showed me the escrow statement HE had just gotten from the mortgage holder (same one as mine), and his monthly payments are dropping by three hundred bucks a month, plus he's getting fourteen hundred bucks back!

WTF? I do not understand.

And in totally unrelated news, my neighbors (love them!) had their driveway re-blacktopped last week. I told them to go ahead and park in my driveway while theirs was being redone.

The workers finished up last Wednesday, and the neighbors are still parking in my driveway.

Blacktop Watch: Day Six.

No shit, you guys, I think they've decided that their new driveway is too damn pretty to park on, and they're just gonna park at my place from now on.

Maybe I should install a couple of parking meters.

Okay, so I'm five minutes back to work ....

.... and I discover that the office is out of paper towels, kleenex, and toilet paper. Makes me wonder what this place devolved into by Friday afternoon.

Freaky Friday!

Okay, I'm not really here today, although I was in the office AGAIN yesterday putting out more fires. I'm thinking double overtime for this stuff.

On one of the days I did actually manage to have off, I poked through some local antique stores and came up with this picture:





Yeah. Looks like Mom and Dad are dead and propped up in their chairs, and poor little Junior is all, "WTF"?

There's no way I can leave that little nightmare up here all weekend, so here's a happier picture, found on the same shopping expedition:




Boy? Girl? You be the judge.

I'll see everybody Monday when I'm back from my little break.

Check it

Okay, so some poor soul at Enterprise has been assigned to posting comment replies to nasty blog entries. Elizabeth, I feel for you.

My time off has been going great, except for this morning, when I got called in to work to deal with some admin bullshit. *sigh*

I'll see you soon - hope everybody's having a good week.

Freaky Friday!

The weather's fine; we might as well continue with the garden tour.

This gargoyle and his friend the bird sit on the steps leading up to the porch:



They like to watch the little league games in the park.

I'm going to be taking a few days off to figure out how to relax a little, instead of constantly running from one project to another. Stuff will still get done; I'm just going to try to learn that it doesn't all have to get done RIGHT NOW. Life in panic mode is starting to tire me out.

Enjoy the nice weather - I'll see you soon!

Swimming pool vs. swimmin' hole

The weather here's been a steamer for the past week, so I've been investigating swimmin' holes in the creek that runs by my house.

I found a great big one about a hundred yards down the creek. It's big and deep and murky and mysterious and I know damn well that if I went for a dip there I'd spend the whole time wondering when something was gonna grab my ankles and drag me under, so I took a pass on that one.

Then I found another one, even closer to my house, that's about five feet deep and nice and clear, with the creek running right through it to keep the water moving and cool. There's a spot where the creek funnels through some boulders, and you can sit on a rock and put your feet down in there and get a foot massage. Or you can stand in the water and watch the shiners nibble at your ankles. You can bet I spent some quality time there this last weekend. Swimmin' holes have swimming pools beat, any day. And you don't have to worry about the chlorine turning your hair green.

Oh! And in other news, I saw a painted turtle, and some people up on the hill blew off a shit ton of fireworks Sunday night that I could watch right from my front yard, and my neighbor L and her son had me over for a clambake Monday night. I tried everything but the crawfishes, which I just could not bring myself to eat. Too many legs. Too monster-looking.

My neighbor T has a granddaughter visiting from Oregon, and evidently they don't have fireflies out there, because this young woman was just fascinated with them. She's pretty enamored of my cats, too, but unfortunately, they're not returning the favor. I'm hoping they warm up to her, because she's homesick for her Maine Coon.

And I found a peppermint twist phlox at CrapMart the other day which I just had to buy, even though I didn't really have room for it, but I MADE room, and it looks specTACular!

So! Just wanted to throw some good news out there, to get some balance back in my little world. There's always some good news, if you look for it.

FML

So! Back a few months ago, I had to dump over eight hundred bucks into the car. (Timing belt, idler pulley, water pump.)

Then the lawn mower quit. A hundred bucks. Then the cat got sick. Three hundred bucks. Then the toilet exploded. Four hundred bucks. Oh, and over the past weekend, a light fixture stopped working and a puddle formed on the garage floor when I did the laundry.

So I wasn't exactly surprised when, at lunchtime yesterday, a coworker came into the office and asked if I knew there was a gigantic puddle of antifreeze underneath my car.

Shit. SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT I cannot AFFORD any more of this.

Oh, and my boss, from whom I usually get rides when my car's in the shop? His car's in the shop, too.

Which meant that I needed to RENT A F*CKING CAR while my car's in the garage. Oh, and Enterprise? You need to hire somebody to answer your phone. For reals. I cannot rent a car from you if you don't answer the phone. And Hertz? You need to stop advertising free pickup and delivery if you won't, actually, pick up and deliver for free. "Take a cab!", you told me. No. No thanks.


So when I finally found a car rental place that would rent me a car and come pick me up, they informed me that I would need proof of insurance. Which was in my car, which is at the garage, up on the lift.


*sigh*

So I call my insurance agent, who assures me that he will fax me over proof of insurance right away. In his case, "right away" meant "not today". Thanks, Allstate! You SUCK. So I walk BACK to the garage (thankfully, it's just a couple blocks from the office), grab the insurance cards, get driven over to the rental place, and ......

...... it's the second day at her new job for the gal behind the counter. It took me FORTY-FIVE F*CKING MINUTES to rent a f*cking Hyundai.

And WHO KNOWS how much it's going to cost to fix the radiator leak? Any guesses? On second thought, I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

Excuse me while I go crouch in the corner and cry. And then break things.

Because apparently, breaking things is my goddam SPECIALTY.







*rant over*

Curiouser and curiouser

Remember Jean Stevens? The lady who exhumed the corpses of her husband and her twin sister?

Well, today the local newspaper printed an interview with her. Here's some of what she had to say:

"I think when you put them in the ground, that's goodbye, goodbye. In this way I could touch her and look at her and talk to her."

{shudder}

The article goes on to say:

"She kept her sister, who was dressed in her "best housecoat", on an old couch in a spare room off the bedroom. Jean sprayed her with expensive perfume that was June's favorite.

"I'd go in, and I'd talk, and I'd forget," Stevens said.

"I put glasses on her. When I put the glasses on, it made all the difference in the world. I would fix her up. I'd fix her face up all the time."

She offered a similar rationale for keeping her husband on a couch in the detached garage. James, who had been laid to rest in a nearby cemetery, wore a dark suit, white shirt and blue knitted tie.

"I could see him, I could look at him. I could touch him. Now, some people have a terrible feeling, they say, "Why do you want to look at a dead person? Oh my gracious," she said.

"Well, I felt differently about death."


Dudes. Duuuuuuuudes.

Okay, first off, define "best housecoat". Aren't they all basically the same? Oh, and "expensive perfume". I'm thinking that was mostly a defensive measure on Jean's part. Because even if those bodies were embalmed, well .....

I mean, especially James! He died in 1999, for Pete's sake. Then again, by the time they found his body, eleven years later, there probably wasn't much smell left. But June just died last October ....

Oh, and she's not tellin' who helped her dig up the graves.

Here's a link to the whole thing:

Woman who stored corpses in her house just couldn't deal with death.

Not sure how long they'll keep that link up, but it's there for now. And I see there's some pretty lively conversation going on in the comment section over there.

Fireworks!

Happy Independence Day, everybody!

Freaky Friday

I decided that the swamp out back needed a little spiffing up.






Unlike Mr. Z, these guys are not visible from the road, or even from my neighbor's yard. No one can see them but me. And the frogs.

Best neighbor ever? You be the judge

So, I was out mowing last night, and my neighbor L came over to give me an update about my other neighbor, T, who had been in the hospital.

And we chatted for a little bit, and I went back to my mowing, and AN HOUR LATER, when I was FINALLY done with the lawn, I had just gone inside to clean up, and there was a knock on the side door.

"RockyCat! RockyCat!*"

It was my neighbor L, back again, bearing a plate of dinner for me! And a cold beer!

"I thought you could use it after mowing that lawn!", she said.

I love my neighbors.



Oh! Oh! And how did she react to the House of Strange, you ask? (We've chatted plenty in the yard, but last night was the first time she'd spent any time IN the house.) Well, the display of deer bones took her a little aback, but other than that, she didn't seem too discomfited by my decorating scheme, and stayed to have a beer with me.

Hmmmm. Maybe I'm not a weird as I think.


Oh! And in other news, the lilies are blooming:

(Full disclosure: That's a pic from last year, at the old place. But the lilies made the move with me, and they are thriving in the new garden.)

These lilies smell just like bubblegum. I cut a bloom off last night and floated it in a dish in the kitchen, and now my whole house smells like Bubblelicious. Yum!

*not my real name. obv.

Confetti!

had a dream

Okay, so I had this dream ....

I know. I KNOW. I'll keep this really brief, I PROMISE.

Anyway, I had a dream last night that I bought a pack of cigarettes.

(For those of you who may be new here, I quit smoking last year after smoking a pack-and-a-half a day for thirty years.)

So, I dreamt I bought a pack of cigarettes, except it was more like a nightmare. In the dream, I was all, like, nooooooo! Don't doooooo it! But I went to the store, and I bought the cigarettes, and I took the cellophane off, and I was peeling back the foil, and the whole thing was in slow motion, the way dreams are, and I was SO DEPRESSED that I was going to start smoking again. I was all, like, you've worked so hard to quit, and now you're going to just throw it all away?! DON'T DOOOOOO IT.

And looking back now, it was really kind of funny that I was going through all this turmoil in my dream over smoking a cigarette. I mean, it's not like somebody was forcing me to smoke it; it's like I was having a little existential meltdown over the idea of smoking again.

Whew. Glad it was just a dream. And I mean, come on, I'm SURE this has something to do with my niece and her whole situation. But it's weird that it's like my subconscious wants me to start up again, and the conscious me is all, noooooooooo! Hell, at least I'm refusing.

Heh.

Weird.

Oh, and I went to visit my niece last night. She's doing better, and is expecting to be released either today or tomorrow. I'm not really sure if she has a plan for her quit, but I guess all I can realistically do is be there for her if she needs me. Who knows - maybe she'll surprise us all.

What do you say ....

.... to a niece who drank herself into the hospital this weekend?

Yeah. I got nothin'.


Oh, I mean, there's plenty that I could say, but I doubt it would do any good. I swear to God, my little community has got to have the highest rate of alcohol consumption in the entire state. This is a neighborhood of people who think it's perfectly normal to get up in the morning, start drinking, drink until they pass out, and then wake up and start drinking again. I've never seen anything like it.

And it doesn't help that the niece's live-in boyfriend is also a heavy drinker. He's been known to literally drink himself into seizures. He quit for a couple of days after that. A couple of days.

And now niece is in the hospital with pancreatitis, which the doctors have informed her will kill her within five to ten years if she doesn't stop drinking. She's only thirty-four.

You know what she asked me?

"I wonder if I can still drink O'Douls?"

Probably not, niece. Probably not.

Oh boy.

Well, now I know what I'm NOT doing this weekend ....

Okay, okay, first off, scroll down to see Freaky Friday, if you're so inclined.

Now, a headline from today's local newspaper:

'Renaissance fair with wings' to bring out fairies and elves

*cough*

The story:


"Fairies, elves and other creatures will gather this weekend in the hamlet of (local town) to celebrate nature's wonders and the magic of imagination. The second annual New York Faerie Festival starts today and will run through Sunday on private land on (insert location here). The family-oriented event offers the opportunity to (blah, blah, blah)."

"It's like a Renaissance fair with wings," said (so-and-so). Everyone at the festival will be dressed up in their best fairy costumes, organizers said."

errrrrrmm ...... "best fairy costumes"? "Faerie Festival"? Renaissance fair with wings?


Put me in a car and point me in the opposite direction, is all I'm sayin'. Sweet Jeezus.


Oh! Oh! And apropos of absolutely nothing, is anyone besides me watching "Raising Sextuplets" on the WE network? The mom seems nice enough, if somewhat vacuous, but the dad .... oh boy. What a jerk! He's just such a .... jerk. The mom does ALL THE WORK taking care of ALL SIX KIDS, PLUS she works a regular job, and if he, like, changes a SINGLE DIAPER he struts around like he deserves a f*cking medal. I just want to punch him.


But then last night, I was watching the episode where the mom and dad go out to dinner, sans kids, and she actually salted his dessert to get him to stop eating it because she wants him to lose weight.


She salted his dessert. I'm not even kidding here. WHO DOES THAT?!


So they're both total jerks. I guess I can stop watching the show now, except I'm still watching Little People, long after Matt Roloff revealed himself to be, basically, the biggest (um .... littlest?) jerk in the Pacific Northwest.


I watch too much tv.

Oh! And in other news, a local garden center is getting ready to close for the season (yes, I DO live in the Frozen North, dammit), and they are having a fifty-percent-off sale.

Oh peeps, how can I resist that? I can't.

Time to dig some more holes ....

Freaky Friday!

Okay, so I had several contenders for this week's Freaky Friday, among them:

1. Me doing dishes, as suggested by an earlier post.

2. My new three-hundred-and-eighty-four dollar toilet. *sob*

3. The beheaded baby bunny I found in the garage this morning. (1)

None of them seemed quite right, so I decided to continue with the garden theme as found in last week's Freaky Friday.

Here's some stuff you would find as you walked toward my front door:




That dude above stands guard at the foot of the path that leads to my door. If you press a button in his chest he roars and moves his head back and forth, which is pretty cool.

.... with a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, he pulls the speeding high-tension wires down ....

This guy is at the bottom of my front step:



He's wearing a white silk beribboned top and a tutu, because that's what all the fashionable sentries are wearing this year.



(1) I'm afraid those cats are earning a lifetime of bad karma. Seriously - three baby bunnies in one week? What up with all the carnage? On the other hand, my neighbors with a vegetable garden are very appreciative.

Oh, and "beribboned" IS TOO a word, blogger spell-check. Shut up.

I blame it on the earthquake

Did you know we had an earthquake here yesterday? No? Me neither, until I heard about it on the radio.

So anyway, I woke up around three o'clock this morning to the sound of rain dripping out of my leaky gutters.

trickletrickletrickle

It was kind of peaceful, actually, until I realized that it didn't really sound like it was raining out.

It sounded

It sounded like

It sounded like it was coming from inside the house!*&%!

Oh shit.

It's never a good sign when you hear running water inside your house at three in the morning and you're the only one home and you've been fast asleep.

Wondering what fresh new level of homeowner hell I was about to experience, I reluctantly crawled out of bed and went to investigate, only to discover

*splash*!

The bathroom was flooded. Floooooooooooded.


The toilet tank had SOMEHOW managed to develop a top-to-bottom crack, straight through the goddam porcelain, that was merrily dispersing water all over my bathroom floor. And of course, the water level in the tank could only get so low before the float kicked in, sending fresh water into the tank which subsequently ALSO ended up all over the bathroom floor, etc., etc.

So, I turned off the water to the tank, and commenced mopping. And, this morning, made a call to the plumber, who will come out this afternoon and cheerily charge me an arm and a leg to replace the toilet.

And no, I'm not going to try to replace it myself. I don't want to deal with it. I will cheerily (okay, grudgingly) write a check to Mr. Plumber-Man to do it for me.

I blame it on the earthquake.

It's either that or the ghost.

And while it's possible that my homeowner's insurance covers earthquake-related toilet damage, I'm pretty sure it doesn't cover ghostly manifestations.

Earthquake it is.

This is where your Grandma shops

Okay, so you guys know the Skymall catalog? The one that's always in the seatback ahead of you on the plane? The one that you grab a couple of hours into the flight, when you're insanely bored, and you're idly flipping through it, and all of a sudden you're, like, "Holy shit! I really need one of those!" and "Look at that - it's the coolest thing ever!" and pretty soon you're dog-earing pages and shoving the catalog into your purse as you get off the plane, and then you go do whatever you were on a plane for to begin with, and you forget all about the Skymall catalog, and you find it again like five weeks later when you're FINALLY unpacking your carryon after you've already been back home for a MONTH and .....

Okay. So we're talking about the Skymall catalog, which is full of cool things that you reallyreally need when you're insanely bored at thirty thousand feet.

Allow me to introduce you to the exact opposite of the Skymall catalog:

CollectionsEtc.


Dudes. Duuuuuuudes. Click on that link. Go ahead. I dare ya. Here, I'll give it to you again: CollectionsEtc.



hahahahahaha so THAT'S where Grandma buys all that shit.



What's making it even funnier is that I'm trying to paste some of the eye-searing images from that catalog onto here, and a pop-up comes up informing me that the images are COPYRIGHTED by CollectionsEtc. and unauthorized use is STRICTLY PROHIBITED and ohmyGod it's like they KNEW somebody was going to use those pics to make fun of them and so they paid some poor summer intern schmuck to program the site, photo by photo, so that nobody could take their images and say HAHA LOOK AT THIS SHIT and ...


oh. It worked.


Know what's even funnier? I was trying to reason why they would send this catalog of horrible, polyresin schlock to ME in particular and then I figured out that it was probably because of that order I placed with Oriental Trading for the pink flamingo lawn ornaments and ...



ooops. Shutting up now.

Recently read

Per usual, skip it if you wanna.



1. The first three Harry Potter books. (Chamber of Secrets, Sorceror's Stone & Prisoner of Azkaban.) Kid lit, but I really enjoyed them - fast reads, with good (if fantastical) plot lines. If, like me, you've been avoiding reading these because they're "kids' books", go ahead. They're actually quite well-written.



2. Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven - Novel about a young woman who wants to sing at the Grand Ol' Opry. Set in the thirties, this was a really interesting book. I liked it.



3. The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips. Novel about 1930s Alabama. This was the best book I've read in quite a while - I even bought it after reading the library's copy, because I know I'm going to want to read it again. It was reminiscent (to me, anyway) of To Kill a Mockingbird. I don't understand why this one didn't get a lot of press, because it's really, really good. Read it!



4. American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell - Short stories about marginalized people. These stores were good reads. Not like most of the other fiction out there, subject-wise, and I enjoyed that. Recommended.



5. Rush Home Road by Lori Lansens - Novel about an old woman living in a trailer park who takes in an abandoned girl - pretty good.



6. Sporty Creek by James Still - Fictionalized account of a boyhood in Depression -era Kentucky - Technically a kid's book, but still interesting for the period details.



7. Just Checking by Emily Colas - Vignettes from the life of an OCD sufferer. I thought I had a bad case of OCD, but this woman is flat-out batshit crazy. Her accounts of incidents in her life so unnerved me that I couldn't finish it.



8. Brooklyn by Colm Toibin - Novel about an Irish woman who immigrates to Brooklyn in the 1950s - Entertaining and a quick read - I just never felt really close to or involved with the main character - she seemed a little stand-offish and cold to me.





So! That's it for now! Anything out there I should be reading?

.... survey SAYS

Here's the vet's explanation (see the post below if you have no idea what I'm talking about):

1. There is a $12.00 "dosage fee" on all medications. Oh, please.

2. The extra cost for the Frontline is to pay for the vet's support if there's a problem. (Come ON.) Also, they buy their Frontline directly from the company, so you know you're not getting diluted product from China or something.

3. Animals metabolize medications much differently than people; thus, cats need a dose of benadryl equivalent to what you'd give a kid.

4. She hemmed and hawed over this one, but bottom line seems to be that the office gets paid to pimp for Frontline.

Sometimes I think I should find a new vet, but these guys were so good with Rocky I hate to give up on them.

The Runt continues to hold his own, with no new welts and much less digging, so we're going to wait and see if improvement continues. And now I'm getting the shit bit out of ME, so I think whatever was bothering him has transferred hosts. Excuse me while I go scratch ....

Oh, and Katie, the dishcloths are GORGEOUS! Thank you so much!

This would probably go in the "What is WRONG with you?" category

First off, ROB, there is TOO a Freaky Friday post; scroll down, yo.

In other news, I just finished that bag of goldfish.

It took me two months, but I worked my way through a bag of goldfish that expired two YEARS ago.

I don't know why; I just did it. They needed to be eaten, and I was there.

Oh, and if you were in my neck of the woods the other night and saw someone on the side of a busy road, diligently digging milkweed out of the ditch, yeah, that was me. And yes, Jess Riley DID send me some milkweed seeds, but sadly, only two of them germinated, so I was ditch-diggin'.

I'm getting ready to leave the office early - The Runt has to go back for a follow-up visit to the vet. Some things I plan on discussing with said vet:

1. Why she charged me $13.10 for ONE OUNCE of iodine the last time we were there. That's a thousand percent markup over the drugstore price.

2. See also: Why she charged me a hundred bucks for six shots of Frontline Plus, when Doctors Foster & Smith are selling the same thing on line for seventy bucks. With free shipping.

3. Why she told me the proper dose of children's benadryl for The Runt would be a 3.5 ml syringe dosage, which, when squirted out into a measuring spoon to make sure you're doing it right, is the SAME DOSE you would give a six- to twelve-year-old child. I don't know how much an average twelve-year-old kid weighs, but I'm pretty sure it's not TEN POUNDS, which is what The Runt weighs. I could've KILLED that poor cat if I hadn't made sure to double-check (and adjust for human-to-pet ratio) the dosage first.

4. Why she never discussed the studies that point to Advantage being a better flea med than Frontline for cats with flea allergy dematitis.

Should be an interesting visit. Have a good weekend, everybody!

Freaky Friday!

I know I've posted about Mr. Z before, but never for a Freaky Friday, so this totally counts.

Meet Mr. Z:





Mr. Z is a kid's-rocking-horse-on-springs thingie that I painted into a zebra. At the old place, I had him in the shade garden out back, but here at the new place, he's right out by the front door, so that all the passing neighbors can conjecture about the crazy lady with the weird shit in her garden.



Mr. Z is one cool dude.

You can't make this shit up

Headline from today's local newpaper:

Woman kept dead husband, sister in home

Ah, the local newspaper, providing blog material since ...... forever.

Here we go:

"The mummified remains of people found in a 91-year-old Wyalusing woman’s home are believed to be her late husband and sister.

According to court documents filed in Pennsylvania, two workers from the Area Agency on Aging contacted state police to report that Jean Stevens’ home contained the body of her husband, Jimmy, and sister, June.

Jean Stevens showed the workers the body of her sister and told them her husband’s body was rolled up in a rug on the premises, according to the document.

The agency workers told state police that “Mrs. Stevens is in control of her mental faculties (other than her acts of keeping the bodies in her home).”

Jean Stevens told the workers that she received help to disinter her husband’s body from an unnamed cemetery years ago. She said she retrieved her sister’s body from its grave shortly after burial in October 2009.

A press conference is slated for 1 p.m. today at the Bradford County Children’s Home in Towanda.

State police in Towanda said the remains of two people were found at a house on Old Stagecoach Road at about 3 p.m. Tuesday following the execution of a search warrant.
District Attorney Dan Barrett said Wednesday his office is not involved in a criminal homicide investigation. He declined to answer other questions."

Best (or worst, depending on your opinion) line? : "She said she retrieved her sister's body from its grave shortly after burial in October 2009."

Holy shit, you guys, I wanna meet this lady.

Or, you know, not.

It's over, it's over, it's ohhhhhhver ......

IT'S OHHHHHHHHH-VER!

The local Little League season, that is.

Now, I knew when I bought my house late last summer that there was a park with a little league playing field right next door. I mean, duh, it's kind of hard to miss.

What I did not know was that the Little League games would start up in April and not end until, oh, ....... LAST SATURDAY.

Jeezus f*cking CHRIST I got sick of coming home from work every night and hearing over-testosteroned dad-coaches SCREAM at the little kids on the teams. I mean, yelling so loudly (GO BACK TO FIRST!! GO BACK TO FIRRRRRRSSSTTTTTT!!!!) that I would flinch, out in my back-backyard. I can only imagine how loud it was on the field itself.

I hope those dudes are prepared to pay the psychiatrist bills in twenty years or so, is all I'm saying. Why a grown man would think it's okay to scream at a little kid is .... well, it's beyond me.

And this would be every weeknight, from five-fifteen until seven-thirty or so, and often all day on Saturdays. It got a little ..... tiring.

Admirably, there was very little cussing, although there was one memorable night when a dad-coach lost his shit, and the F-bomb flew fast and furious for several minutes as the stands went silent and younger siblings of the players started to cry.

Ah, youth sports.

The best part of the season, for me, happened last Saturday, during the marathon, ten-hour season-ending extravaganza of games. One of the coaches was out in the practice field (adjacent to my backyard) losing his shit and screaming at one of the kids, when evidently a large bug of some sort flew into his wide-open mouth, because what I heard was something like this:

TODDDDDDDD! CATCH THE BALL!!! CATCH THE BA-*hack hack hack HAAAAAACKKKKK HAAACCCCCCCCKKKKK* *cough* *choke* HAAAAAAACCCCCKKKKKKK *gasp*

Yeah, that was pretty sweet.

Next up: Soccer. Oh, and this morning the dozers were back in the undeveloped part of the park they started to level out for new fields last year, so I'm thinking it was a good thing I dug up all those plants. The Good Samaritan, that's me.

RockyCat and the Ghostly O-Ring

So, Sunday morning I got out of bed, went to the bathroom, fed the cats, brushed my teeth, glanced at the paper, and then hopped in the shower.


And on one of the shelves in the tub-surround, next to a bottle of shampoo, was an o-ring. A black rubber o-ring, about half-an-inch in diameter.


Where did it come from? Ya got me.


Seriously, I've been wracking my brain, trying to think of where on earth that o-ring came from, and ....... I got nothin'. I thought maybe it somehow broke off the showerhead, but it's still intact. I can't think of any possible other place that o-ring came from; I mean, my house isn't exactly overrun with o-rings to begin with, and how one would end up on a shelf in the shower ....


Right now, my best guess is that I have a ghost. A ghost who got tired of listening to me bitch about the slow-running shower drain and got sick of watching me dump Drano down the drain and plungeplungeplunge and bitch when it backed up AGAIN less than a week later and .... well, the ghost went down the drain and located the errant o-ring that had been gumming up the works and then set it on the shelf to let me know what he had done because - you know what? - the shower's been draining FINE since the o-ring appeared.


Yeah, that's all I got.


Any guesses?

Music like you've never heard

Okay, so I was watching "Glee" the other night, and they did "To Sir, With Love". As soon as those first notes started up, I knew what song it was, and I remembered the jolt I got the very first time I heard the song on the radio - I must have been five or six at the time. That song was like nothing else on the radio, like nothing I'd ever even heard before, and I remember that every time it played, I'd sit, transfixed, until the final notes. Some time after that, the movie that the song is from played on one of the local TV stations, and I remember seeing it in the listings, and FREAKING OUT, because, well ...... THAT SONG!!, and I remember begging my mom to let me stay up to watch it, because obviously it must be the best movie EVER if it had THAT SONG in it.



It's happened for me with other music, too. I have a sister who is eight years older than me, and I got exposed to a lot of cool stuff as a kid. When "Fragile" by Yes came out, my sister was eighteen and I was ten, and that song "Roundabout"? BLEW MY MIND. I can still remember the thrill I got listening to ..... that song. That song!



That song.



"The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Genesis (I know. I KNOW.) came out when I was twelve, and I remember being up at the lake, eared pressed to the radio, listening to that music ..... there was something so different about it ...



See also, "Carpet of the Sun" from the "Ashes are Burning" album by Renaissance - I was eleven when that came out, and I would listen to that song over, and over, and over, wishing that it would never end, because it was so ...... something.



It still happens now and again, although not with the same gut-wrenching impact of the first time you hear a song that you think might change everything. The first time I heard the "Avenue Q" soundtrack, it blew me away, just because it was a Broadway album that was actually ...... gasp ...... funny! The first time I heard Susan Werner's song "Time Between Trains" on the radio, I called up the station, desperate to find out who that singer was, because she was doing stuff that didn't sound like anything else I was hearing right then.



It hasn't happened in several years now for me, hearing a song that's like nothing else. I hope it happens again.

The Runt says ....

..... I am fine. Thanks for asking. Thanks for not making me talk LOLspeak.






Please excuse me ..... I'm busy .......





Seriously, The Runt is doing much better. He's still grooming, but not the excessive digdigdig grooming he was doing. I don't know if it's the flea meds, the steroids, the miticide, or the (attempted) change in diet, but his welts seem to be healing and the bare spots look like they are getting better as well.

Keeping fingers crossed ....

Freaky Friday - Lookin' out my front door edition

I looked out my living room window this morning and saw this:

Why did the deer cross the road?

To get to the tasty shrubbery in my neighbor's yard, of course!:

Riddle me this: Why, when DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET from this property is acres and acres and acres of undeveloped, tree-, shrub-, bush- and flower-laden land, do the deer insist on coming into the neighborhood to eat the shrubs? Do they taste THAT MUCH BETTER than the stuff growing wild all over the place?

Is a mystery.

Oh, and the deer COMPLETELY BYPASSED all my plantings on her way to the neighbor's house. Heh.

If this doesn't scream "old", I don't know what does

I am now the proud owner of a Craftmatic Adjustable Bed.

Duuuuuuuuudes.

I can explain!

I'd been looking for a bed for the spare bedroom since I moved in last summer. At first, I was going to put a full-sized bed in there, and I even bought a full-size bed frame, see?:



Is pretty, no? Twenty bucks at the thrift store. Win!

But the more I got to thinking about it, the less sense it make to put a full-size bed in there, the main reason being that I have overnight guests approximately once every kabillion years. The room isn't that huge to begin with, so I decided to go with a twin-size bed. If I get more than one person sleeping over, somebody's going to Sofa City, is all.

Enter a guy at work, who was cleaning out a deceased relative's house, and wanted to unload a twin-size Craftmatic Adjustable Bed that had only been used a few times.

Score!

Just call me Gramma.

Oh! And did you know that Craftmatic Adjustable Beds are fun? The head-part goes up! The foot-part goes up! You can do both at once and be all pretzel-y!

GodDAM, I'm old.

You can't make this shit up

Okay, so I'm reading the local paper yesterday morning, and there's this blurb with the heading, "Miracle on Hudson passenger to speak". And the blurb goes, "Dave Sanderson, a passenger on the "Miracle on the Hudson" US Airways flight that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in January 2009, will be at the Barnes and Noble in (insert local town here) from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday."

And I'm reading along ......

"He'll sign copies of "Brace for Impact", a book to which he contributed his story about the crash and how his life has changed since the crash."

Still reading, and here's the killer ....

"His appearance is being sponsored by the (local town name) Airport."

What. The. F*ck.

This dude survives a terrifying PLANE CRASH into an ice-filled river, and the LOCAL AIRPORT is sponsoring a stop on his book tour?

Maybe it's just me, but maaaaaaan, I just don't get that.


Don't even get me started on how the local Alzheimer's Association holds a fund-raising "memory walk" every year. Errrrrrm, "memory walk"? For Alzheimer's? That's just f*cking cruel.



What are these people thinking?

A buck a can

So! Friday night The Runt and I went back to the vet. I'll tell ya, finding that cat and getting him into a carrier to go the the vet's on time, twice in three days, is a miracle akin to the loaves and fishes, but we pulled it off.



The scraping {shudder} wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and he tested negative for mites. The vet is treating for mites anyway, just in case they were all burrowed in when she took the sample. She suggested getting him started on hypo-allergenic cat food (Nutro), mixing it in with his regular stuff to start with, just in case food allergies are the problem.



Oh! And you can give cats benadryl! Who knew?



Saturday morning I was off to the pet store for some hypo-allergenic cat food, and peeps? A BUCK A CAN. Sweet jeezus. I took thirty bucks' worth of canned food, dry food and anti-itch spray home.

The anti-itch spray was a big fail. I sprayed it on, he licked it off. *sigh*. At least his tongue's not itchy. The benadryl worked okay, basically making him sleepy, but I don't know how many times I'll be able to get that stuff in his mouth without him throwing an armed revolt.

It was time to try the food.


I mixed the hypo-allergenic stuff with their regular stuff, fifty-fifty, set it down, and ........ nope. Both cats turned up their noses. Next mealtime, I tried a ninety-ten mix, nine parts old stuff to one part new stuff, and ....... nope. At this point, if there is one molecule of that new food in their bowl, they won't eat it.



What the hell do I do now?





Oh, and The Runt did land a mouse on Sunday, and spent much of the weekend stalking his sister and pouncing on her, so it's not ALL misery around here. Just so you know.

Freaky Friday!

This started out as a black chandelier, and by the time I got done messing with it, it looked more like a birdcage, so I added a bird.

It hangs in my kitchen, facing so the bird can look out the kitchen window.

In other Freaky Friday news, work edition, there is a guy out in the company parking lot right now, pressure-washing a bunch of refrigerators.

Don't ask me. I don't know what the hell he's doing out there, either.

Yes, I WAS in a bit of a bad mood yesterday .....

..... could you tell?



The Runt was sick. He's always been a, well, rather conscientious groomer, but over the weekend it got to the point where he was literally licking his fur off and developing bald spots. And then he'd digdigdig at himself until he raised welts. He felt awful, and I felt awful for him, so obviously a trip the vet was in order.



And the lawn mower, which had been acting pissy all season, finally crapped the bed on Tuesday night and was at the shop for repairs.



It was just one of those days when all you can do is sigh and pull out the checkbook.



So when that jerk on the bicycle shit his pants over having to use his brakes (I didn't come anywhere NEAR to hitting him, I swear; he was all pissed off because he had to slow down for me), it was pretty much the last straw. Kind of like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, where he goes all medieval on people's asses.



Hey! Maybe they'll make a movie about me!



And maybe Julia Roberts will play me, just like in the Pioneer Woman movie! (Can you even believe that shit? Jeezus Christ.)



ANYhow, the vet seems to think The Runt has a case of flea allergy dermatitis (which I tend to disagree with, for various reasons, but hey, she's the vet) and she started him on Frontline and steroids. If that doesn't work, I'm to try hypo-allergenic cat food (oh dear Lord), and we go from there.



Poor cat. Although he DID manage to take down a mouse last night after we got home from the vet's, so he must not be feeling TOO poorly.

Dear dude on the bicycle

I. did. not. see. you.

Yes, I did pull out into traffic in front of you, causing you to have to *gasp* step on your brakes. And yes, guys-who-have-so-many-DWIs-that-they-lost-their-license-and-can-no-longer-drive DO have the right of way over cars.

But I did not see you.

And the reason I did not see you is because you were peddling madly down the wrong side of the street, up on the sidewalk where you are not supposed to be.

I'm sorry I pulled out in front of you, but you know what? When you jumped off your bike and started swearing and screaming and giving me the finger?

You are goddamn lucky I didn't pull a fucking u-ey in traffic and come back and run you over, you fucking fucktard.

Keep that in mind the next time you're pulling a fit, you asshole.

Movie Review: The Keys of the Kingdom

The Keys of the Kingdom is a 1940s-era movie about a missionary priest in China in the early 1900s, with Cary Grant in the leading role. Boy, he was a tall drink of water, wasn't he?


It was interesting, if dated. The Chinese were portrayed pretty stereotypically, but I guess that's to be expected, given the era. I liked the book better, mainly because they cut so much out in the movie, including the part where the priest and two of his companions get waterboarded in the river - that was the most vivid and compelling part of the book for me.


Oh, and I was surprised to see Vincent Price show up in the role of a bishop - How many movies was that guy in, anyway?


So! An okay movie. I probably wouldn't pay to rent it again, but if it turned up on TCM on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I'd watch it.

TV alert

Tonight, some PBS stations are showing "Alone in the Wilderness", about this guy who went way into Alaska, built himself a cabin, and lived there, alone, for many years.

The first time I saw this show, it boggled my mind how self-sufficient this guy was. And how lonely he must have gotten - he didn't even have a radio to listen to! And ohmyGod it got cold there in the wintertime - I can't even imagine how he made it.

So anyway, it's a really good show, and if the thought of watching America's Got Talent makes you want to stab yourself, you might want to catch it.

Notes from the weekend

On Friday night, I got home from a trip to CrapMart to discover that I had been charged twice for a package of razor blades. Being that razor blades are not cheap*, on Saturday I went back to CrapMart with the razor blades and the receipt, and they actually refunded me the money. They didn't have to; I mean, I had no proof or anything that I hadn't actually bought two packages, but they did. Thanks, CrapMart!

More daisies and ferns in the playing fields next door volunteered for my relocation program and are now residing around the mailbox. See also: Broken wooden bird feeder down by the creek, which is now a planter.

Speaking of the mailbox, I concreted the post in the ground over the weekend so that it'll stop falling over when my niece's boyfriend backs into it. Which ....... oh, crap, that means that the next time he backs into it, it'll probably break in two. Shit. I shoulda thought that through a little more. Too late.

Okay, so I finally watched the finale of Lost. Did I cry at the end? Yes I did. I cried until tears were running down my neck; I sobbed until I choked. You know what did me in? The dog.

Did you know that everybody smokes at the flea market? They do. It's really quite amazing; I wouldn't have been surprised to see a baby or a dog with a cigarette.

There was some kind of drama at my sister TIB's house yesterday involving a missing bowl of macaroni salad. Don't ask me; I wasn't invited to that particular cookout. Not sure why everyone felt I needed status updates.**

Did you know that pileated woodpeckers sound like demented, laughing chickens? They do. Oh, and there was one out back yesterday doing his very finest impression of a choking crow.

The fireflies are back! I never used to see them until July at the old place, but they were flashing like crazy on Saturday night. Welcome back, dudes.

Somehow, with three days off, I still didn't manage to get the lawn mowed. Oops.

So! How was your weekend?





*Razor blade manufacturers price their product using the "polaroid" method. Charge almost nothing for the original product (camera), then charge a frickin' fortune for replacement parts (film). Crude, but effective.

** (ring ring ring) "Hello?" " We found it; it was in the breadbox!" "Um ..... okay?"

Freaky Friday - Memorial Edition

This is a micrometer, also known as a "mike". Behind that is a level.


I used a mike when I worked at my Dad's tool and tie shop. I have no idea if they're still used today; I assume everything's digital now. Mikes are (were) used to measure the exact widths of things. The mike and level shown above were my Dad's; my mom gave them to me after he died.

Dad died eleven years ago today. You can read a little about him here.

I love you, Dad.

The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!

.... I'm somebody now!

Yeah, I'm pretty good at getting excited about nothing.

In other breaking news:



The peonies are blooming!


I know! Can you STAND the excitement?!

This is a plant that I transplanted from the old place last summer, so I wasn't sure if it was going to make it at all, let alone bloom, but it's come through like a champ.

Oh! And in what-a-difference-a-year-makes news, I was just toodling through the archives here and discovered that at this time last year, I was struggling to recover from the world's worst case of tonsillitis and was about to be homeless.

Holy shit, I can't believe I made it through all that and came out the other side.


What's new with you?

Little Girl vs. the woodpecker

Last night, Little Girl decided she was going up a tree after a woodpecker.

When she was about forty feet up, the woodpecker hopped over to a nearby tree, and Little Girl had to figure out how to get back down.



These cats have a long and storied history of getting stuck in trees, which I'm too lazy to link to right now, but trust me, I knew last night's voyage down the tree wasn't gonna be pretty.



She started out coming down head-first, which works about as well as if you or I tried to come down a tree head-first.



She actually made it about ten feet down before she fell, and then she free-fell about another ten feet before - ooof! - catching a branch with her tummy, at which point she grabbed onto the branch with her front claws and - I shit you not - actually did a loop-the-loop around the branch, just like a circus aerialist, before falling again and - ooof! ooof! ooof! - catching branches all the way to the ground.



And then she sauntered away nonchalantly, all, "I meant to do that", while I laughed myself silly. What can I say - I'm a sucker for slapstick.



A little while later, The Runt decided to show her how it's done, and went up THE SAME DAMN TREE, about fifty feet, before realizing - dang! - he had to get back down again.



But The Runt, being the veteran stuck-in-tree-er that he is, hesitated only a moment before swinging around and heading down butt-first, the only sure way for safe egress from a tree.


Good job, Runt!





Little Girl with a recent conquest:





Check out the size of that frog! Don't worry, I scooped him up and carried him to the swamp out back, where he swam away good as new.

Oh, like THIS isn't the cutest thing ever

Check this out:

http://cam.dellwo.com/

It's a live baby hummingbird webcam!

I was sitting outside last night when a hummingbird buzzed me on the way to the feeder I set up outside the kitchen window. Hummingbirds are really bold little things, and if you get two males at the feeder at the same time, you're in for an airshow, as they'll attack each other in mid-air to establish dominance.

Check out that link above to catch some live hummingbirds!

Hoodlums: The Next Generation

Friday night, I had a front-row seat to some neighborhood kids plotting and executing a ring-and-run on my neighbor Terry.

I thought about chasing the kids away (HEY! KIDS! GET OFF OF MY LAWN!), but heck, they didn't even have the ol' flaming bag of poop. No harm, no foul, right?

But I got to wondering, do kids who pull silly pranks on their neighbors turn out okay? Or do they turn into bad teenagers?

I don't remember ever pulling pranks on adults when I was a kid, mainly because of the fear factor - fear that I'd get caught.

How about you - did you pull any pranks?