Ten Years On

Hey!  Guess what today is!  It's the ten year anniversary of this blog!

Ten Years.  Whew.

Let's see.  In the past ten years, I've:

Bought a house
Started fostering - this current litter puts me at over one hundred fosters!  Yikes!
Experienced the loss of three of my perma-cats (Rocky, The Runt and Little Girl)
Bought a couple of different cars
 Lost my Mom to Alzheimer's
 Learned how to kayak
 Stopped speaking to about 95% of my family
 Visited Texas
 Made some new friends and cast some old ones by the wayside
 Read a ton of books
 Learned how to paint
 Had a lot of fun

What will the next ten years bring?  Who knows?  Bring it on!

I always assumed all that stuff on the walls was fake

Here's an interesting article about restaurant decor:

The Death of Flair

Which I found on this amazing website:

Messy Nessy Chic

Good reads!

Is this what's done, now?

So there's this blog that I check in on once in a blue moon.  I don't check in more often because it's very much a "mommy" blog, one of those where seemingly every action of every member of the family is documented obsessively with photoshopped pics, so meh.  But  I checked in recently for the first time in a few months to find that the woman's husband had passed away from an aggressive form of cancer, leaving her to raise their five young children.

So terribly sad.

And the woman had had a couple of friends of hers take photos of the funeral.

Lots of photos.

All skillfully taken, artfully lit, and filtered.  Including photos of the children grieving, and the woman sorrowfully bending over her husband's casket.

And the woman put the photos up on her blog.

And I just ... is this a thing, now?  Taking photos at funerals?  and then photoshopping the photos to get the best shot?  I mean, I know they photographed caskets, etc. in the early 1900s, when "post-mortem" photography was a creepy thing (confession time) (they sometimes posed the corpses to make them look alive, oh YUCK)  but now?  Today?  And then posting them to the internet, where any schmo, myself included, can look at them?  why?

Please tell me this is not a thing, now.  Please.  Because looking at the grief-filled pics of a stranger's funeral seems an awful lot like rubbernecking at a traffic accident, i.e., not something to be encouraged.  And now I feel petty just for commenting about it.  Ick.

Thank you James P. (Ginny)!

Thank you for the crossword puzzles!  And these ones haven't been filled in yet!  Ha.

I've got a little something on the way to you in return!

KIDDING I am KIDDING.

(But it can be arranged, if you'd like.)   :)

Southern Culture on the Skids

Last weekend, I met up for lunch with a friend of mine, who was kind enough to pick up the tab because of my might-soon-be-uncertain employment status, so thank you, Laurie!  I owe you one.  ANYway, we had been talking on the phone earlier in the week, and she was telling me about some weird dessert concoction that is a holiday tradition in her family, and she brought some along for me to try.

It was Southern Pineapple Casserole.

It tasted ... odd, but not as odd as one might think a dish made with pineapple and cheese and Ritz crackers and butter (erk) would taste.

But it got me thinking ... it tasted really, really similar to another dessert I had tried before ... one with, like, pineapple and cake mix and butter ... what was it, what was it ...

And then I remembered:  Dump Cake!  I had once made a Dump Cake that tasted really similar to the casserole.  Time to google, where I found an old favorite website, but only if your stomach's not feeling queasy ...

The Southern Culture on the Skids recipe site!

Let me warn you again ... do not click on that if your stomach is under par or if you are a delicate flower, because some of those recipes are a little dubious.  And feature roadkill.  But if you could use a laugh, click away!  And I gotta say, the Dump Cake recipe is not half bad.

Exciting! Blogger! News!

You guys!  The reader who comments here as Domestic Kate, and has a blog named Simply Kate,  had her baby!  And he's adorable!  Go see the pics!

Congratulations, Kate!

Stuff I've felt like putting on Facebook lately

Yeah, I don't think I'm temperamentally cut out for social media.  So don't even ask me what I'm doing on Blogger.  Ha.

Cards here! Getcher Christmas cards here!

The only thing more enticing to a cat than a spread-open newspaper is, evidently,  spread-open Christmas crap.

Yep, it's that time of year again.  Time for Christmas cards!  You know the routine - If you got a card last year, you're on the list for this year.  If you've never gotten a card before, email me (rockycat24 AT yahoo DOT com), and you'll be on the list.  If  you've gotten cards in the past and were less than thrilled (hey, I make these things myself - they can't ALL be gems), feel free to email me to be taken off the list.

Tis the season!

Favorite Hate Reads

Dooce, obviously, although I haven't actually read her in a long time.  Not sure if anybody else reads her anymore, either.  She jumped the shark with the Poverty Porn trips.

Pioneer Woman.  Remember when they were going to make a movie about her, and Laura Jean Poon ... errr, Reese Witherspoon was going to star in it?  Yeah, I'd totally forgotten about that until they mentioned it on GOMI the other day.  Oh, and if you want a laugh, head over to this post:

Reese Witherspoon Knows Shakespeare

Make sure to check out the comments, where hilarity ensues.

There's some other blogs I hate read, but they're really too small to publicly snark on here, so if you wanna know, just shoot me an email.  The woman whose blog rhymes with Sigh Sigh Die is a current hate-fav.

How about you?  Got any hate reads?

I really should just stay out of current affairs

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of headlines and thinking they look suspiciously like Stephen King book plots.  Ebola, anyone?  And the two health care workers getting evac'd to Atlanta?  "The Stand".  Missing Malaysian jetliner?  "The Langoliers".

Yet another blogger (one of the, "I'm so much more SENSITIVE than the rest of you poor bastids" ones) (see also - Subcategory:  I'm mentally ill and milking it for all it's worth*) has chimed in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Siding with Palestine, for what it's worth.  I was kind of surprised that a commenter dared to question her, because she's got some pretty rabid fans, and so when I saw that the first comment was a dissent, I said to myself, "Cue the attack in three ... two ... one ..." and sure enough, the blogger's fan base started piling on.

I will freely admit that I have no idea who is good and who is bad in this particular conflict.  I'm kind of on the, "they're all a bunch of religious fanatic a**holes" side.  But I am getting kind of tired of the attitude in bloglandia where dissent is not tolerated.  As in, you either agree with what I say, or shut the f*ck up.  And UNTIL you shut the f*ck up, my fans and I will make you regret speaking up in the first place.

Eh.  Hive-mind makes for pretty boring blogging. 

About the only thing I do know is that if I lived in Palestine OR Israel, I'd be living someplace else right now.  Hell, I'd flipping crawl out of the country if I had to.  Screw that bomb shelter crap.  I'm OUTTA there.  I wouldn't care if I was leaving a job, a house, relatives.  I wouldn't care if the only thing waiting for me was uncertainty.  F*ck, I wouldn't care if the only thing waiting for me someplace else was a steaming refugee camp or jail or a detention center.  As long as the bombs weren't landing there, I'd be cool with it.  Just get me away from the got-dam bombs, and it's all good. 

So, yeah, I really should just stay out of current affairs.  I'm obviously woefully underinformed and overly opinionated.  So, the stereotypical blogger, pretty much.





* Yeah, I know that's gonna catch me a bunch of sh*t.  I don't care.  I have nothing but respect for people who struggle with mental illness.  Because it IS real, and it IS an illness.  A rat b*stard of an illness.  Where I do have problems, is with bloggers who pull out the Mental Card whenever pageviews drop.  Or when they've got a book to sell.  Cry me a river, Crazy.  We've all got our crosses to bear.  And the incessant "I'm so BRAVE and MIGHTY" crap, especially when it's only pulled out when it can benefit the blogger, gets mighty tiring mighty fast.  Stop milking your pain like it's a f*cking cash cow already.  Oh wait; it IS.  So, yeah, if you can make money offa it, I guess go right ahead.  I dunno. 

How to kill an entire afternoon

I just managed to get our rescue into another local store for adoption events, and now I feel like a total bad*ss.  Kind of makes up for that whole "yelling at a little kid" thing.  Sorta.

But!  While I was on my lunch break I was perusing the internet, as one does, and I checked out GOMI, one of my favorite sites (see again: am horrible person), and came across this gem of a trainwreck:

Forum Hall of Fame:  Beverly and the Haunting of GOMI Manor

Dudes, it's priceless.  Make sure you check out the actual forum itself as well.  I'm only, like, sixty pages in, and it just keeps getting better and better. 

Oh!  And while I was scanning through the forum posts, I came across a link to this, which creeped me right the f*ck out:

My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on facebook

Warning:  You may never sleep again after checking out that link.  I'm not even kidding.

Happy  reading, and you're welcome.

How much do I love this? Way more than I should.

From What Would Tyler Durdon Do:

"I hate when people protest McDonald’s as if Indiana Jones just emerged from its bowels with secret findings about how disgusting the food is or how everybody who works there is making minimum wage plus two cents an hour for greasy complexion compensation. Yeah, you got them, Indy. Or protesting bitches at their headquarters in Illinois demanding Mickey D’s pay their workers more, as if those who work at McDonald’s are somehow born into indentured servitude like the pyramid builders. McDonald’s hasn’t changed in fifty years. They’ve still got unskilled burger flippers and fry cooks doling out meals at inexplicably low prices to pre-diabetics passing through their high speed turnstiles. What’s changed is everything else around them. Like heads of households thinking they can provide for a family with a job meant for high school kids with too much acne to work as grocery store baggers. I’m sorry you have a brood to feed and the six-figure french fryer jobs at the McDonald’s competitors were all taken. You’re supposed to be broke-ass when you’re a teen or make lots of babies or drop out of high school or predominantly speak one of those weird languages that always sounds like you’re fighting. That way you get to learn for yourself that being broke sucks and you ought to do something about that. Like, learn a trade skill, or I guess make signs and yell really loudly until somebody pays you to go away. The last time people protested McDonald’s, we ended up with cryo chamber apple slices and a talking big-toothed Minions character ripoff pushing milk to go with your quarter-pounder. We don’t need that shit. Leave McDonald’s alone. It’s absolutely perfect at being what it is. It’s you who needs to change."


My opinion:  Should managers at McDonald's be making more than minimum wage?  Absolutely.  That's the whole damn point - you go in there entry level on the fryers, and work your way up.  But to insist that a sixteen-year-old working six hours a week for video game money  be paid twelve bucks an hour?  Or fifteen?  Or twenty?  Bullsh*t.    Look at it this way:  How much do you pay your kids' teenage babysitter?   Yeah, that's what I thought.

Look.  I've been there.  I worked fast food, for more years than I'd care to admit.  Was I paid a "living wage"?  Haaaaaahahahaha don't make me laugh.  And I shouldn't have been.  It was a part-time, unskilled job which I educated and worked my way out of.

Entry-level jobs are exactly that.  ENTRY-LEVEL.  And they should be compensated for as such.

Okay, okay.  Rant over.   Just don't f*cking insult me by insisting that some teenage fry cook should be making as much as a paralegal or a librarian.  That's bullsh*t.  And if you're thirty years old with three kids and two divorces and you're still a fry cook?   Shoulda stayed away from the drugs, my friend.

Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (smbc-comics.com)

Too funny not to share. 

These people are flat out of their minds

I read a lot of blogs.  Fashion blogs, political blogs, lifestyle blogs, blogs that mock other blogs - I read a lot of them. 

And it always knocks me out when a blog can putt-putt along, day after day, then suddenly take a sharp right turn into crazy land.

Witness this recent post on Life in a Shoe:

Giants in the land

I ... I can't. I just cannot deal with this level of crazy.  These kinds of posts at first make me laugh out loud, and then, as I read the comments and find more and more people who agree with the insanity ... it worries me.  It's like finding out there's a whole subgroup of people out there who actually believe in the Easter Bunny.

Now, I live not far from the scene of the Cardiff Giant hoax, so this stuff is not new to me.  But ... but ... people actually believe this shit?  Holy cow.  That's all I can say.  Holy.  Freaking.  Cow.

And the best part?  (Or the worst, depending on your point of view?) - The woman who wrote this is a homeschooler.  Oh yeah.  *sob*

"We don't NEED his help! Maybe he KNOWS that!"

Oh man, it's kind of cruel to laugh at crazy, but I was just now made aware of last week's episode of Kitchen Nightmares, and hahahahahaha.

I stopped watching that show a long time ago, mainly because I got tired of watching Gordon Ramsay scream at people, but dlisted clued me in about the Amy's Bakery episode that aired last Friday, and oh man, it's a doozy.

Click here for links to all of the insanity.

Basically, the lady and her husband were running a restaurant and claimed that "bloggers and Reddit and Yelp" were slamming the business unfairly.  She called in Kitchen Nightmares to salvage her reputation, and the rest is history.  And in a classic bored-at-work timesuck, the deeper you go, the crazier it gets - I knocked off about the time the commenters started talking about Afghans and money laundering.

Wanna kill a couple hours?  Click here.  You're welcome.




p.s. This should probably go without saying, but I was in no way compensated by dlisted or anyone else to put up this post.  I just wanted to share the insanity.

Time for a pop quiz!

Planet Zella has memed me with the most dastardly, time consuming challenge EVER.  Thanks, Zell!  :) 

Okay, here we go. *rolling neck* *cracking knuckles*

First off, I am to share eleven random facts about me.  Hmmmm ...

1.  I was blond as a child, but as I've gotten older, my hair has gotten browner.  Dammit.

2.  I loathe cold weather.

3.  I almost joined the Air Force straight outta high school.

4.  I have never traveled outside the country.

5.  I was married.  Once.

6.  I am a Notary Public.  It actually has much less practical application than you'd think.

7.  I am a cat person, not a dog person.  Dogs are pains in the asses.

8.  I do not eat beets.  Or liver.  Or kale. 

9.  I never went to college, unless you count vo-tech as college, which I do not.

10.  I used to be able to play piano.  And flute.  And piccolo.  And drums.  I have forgotten all of it.

11.  I watch a lot of crap TV.



Okay.  Part Two.  Dammit, Zella, this is hard! 

I have to answer the following questions:

1. If you could gather three known persons (celebrities, politicians, artists, etc.) for dinner with you, who would they be?  I am assuming they have to be currently alive.  Let's see ... Barack Obama, Bruce Springsteen, and Stephen King.  Wouldn't that be awesome?

2. You are told that you will have to go back to school and study a new profession; what will you study?  Medicine. 

3. The classic question: you will be sent to live on a deserted island for six months -- which five things will you take with you ? Not allowed: cell phone, computers, radio, other people.  A house, a fully-stocked grocery store, a library, a swimming pool (I don't care for ocean swimming), and a bicycle so I can tool around the island.  (Is that answer "cheating"?  Tough.  This sh*t is HARD, y'all.)

4. Sexiest song you know?  Father Figure by George Michael. I KNOW it's kind of skeevy, but it gets me every time.

5. What makes you cry?  Oh boy, you name it.  I cry at sad TV commercials, for Pete's sake.

6. Apple or Microsoft?  Microsoft. 

7. You have to leave your country of birth (or the country you're currently living in) -- which country would you move to and why?  Oooh, someplace warm ... but well, civilized.  I don't want to get murdered in some violent uprising or something.  British Virgin Islands, maybe?

8. Four toppings on your pizza, what are they?  Easy-peasy.  Pepperoni, sausage, onions, green peppers.

9. If you were forced to have a piercing, where would you have it?  I would LOVE to have pierced ears.  Sadly, my ears will have none of it.

10. What are you proud of ?  Working hard enough that I was able to buy a home.

11. If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be ? Physically or personality/qualities..make your pick.  Oh man, I wish I wasn't such a know-it-all. I have tried and TRIED to work on this.  Hopefully I'm getting better. 



Okay, next up.  (Zella, I thought you LIKED me!)  I have to come up with eleven questions for other bloggers.

1.  What is one thing you failed at?

2.  What is your favorite season?

3.  Do you ever wish you were someone else?  If so, who?

4.  Is one of your children your favorite?

5.  How often do you change your sheets?  (Hey, I'm just curious ...)

6.  If you won a hundred million dollars, what's the first thing you'd do?  (Besides call a lawyer, obv.)

7.  What is one thing you're afraid of?

8.  Do you have a family member you argue with?  Other than the spouse/kids?

9.  Have you ever intentionally physically hurt someone?

10.  Ever broken someone's heart?

11.  What do you regard as the happiest moment of your life?



Almoooooost dooooooone.  Oh, Zella, you are pure evil, you are. :)  Now, I am supposed to tag three bloggers to take on this challenge.  I tag ... EVERYBODY.  If you don't want to participate, you don't have to.  If you wanna, go ahead and take this on.    You need to:

1.  Link to this blog.  (Or not.  I'm easy. Just let me know if you're going to do it, so I can read your answers.)
2.  Share eleven random facts about yourself.
3.  Answer the eleven questions above.  (NOT the ones I answered; the ones below that.)
aaaaaaaaand
4.  Make up eleven questions for other bloggers to answer, and tag three people.

Ready?  Set?  Go!  (If you wanna.)  And Zella, don't think I'm gonna forget about this any time soon. :)

I do not understand Bloglandia

Amalah put up a post about her little boys' socks and got 72 comments.  So far.

Crappy Pictures put up a post about teeth brushing and got 148 comments.

And don't even get me started with Pioneer Woman.  A poem about her CAT?  238 comments.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not jealous.  I'm more ... incredulous.

I read some of the popular bloggers.  I enjoy some of them.  But the idea that seventy-two commenters felt a need to chime into a conversation about kids' socks?

I don't understand Bloglandia.  I guess I never will.

What Blogland has taught me

1. People will sell out for an amazingly small amount of money and/or fame.

2. There are a lot of drama queens out there. A LOT.

3. See also: Hypochondriacs.  Holy macaroni.

4. People are often not what they seem.

5. There are an awful lot of bloggers who think they can write a book. Well, sure, they can write it, but will it be any good? Results vary, here.

6.  There are entire sites dedicated to ripping apart other sites.  (Yes, I KNOW I did a post about Dooce's divorce.  It was ONE POST, people, not an entire website.)  So be aware that whatever you put out there, someone may mock it or laugh at it or tear into it.  Publicly.  It's all fair game in blogland.  (See:  My Dooce post, which is STILL getting vicious comments. *sigh*)

7.  There are some amazingly talented bloggers out there.  People whose blogs put my little blog to shame.  Does that mean I'm gonna stop writing?  HELL NO.

How about you?  Anything you've learned in the mighty Land of Blog?  Oh!  And I could use a little help, here.  I'm always looking for new stuff to read, so if you know of a really great blog, including your own, feel free to pimp it in the comments.  A favorite recent find of mine is Simian Idiot.  How about you - Are you reading (or writing) any good stuff?  Enquiring minds want to know.

It was six years ago today

Six years ago today, I started this blog. Nineteen hundred posts ago.


Six years ago:

I was still on the low end of my forties, as opposed to the high end.

Rocky was still alive.

I lived in an apartment building.

I was driving a Saturn. Aye-yi-yi.

I smoked. A LOT.

I hadn't met any of you guys.



I wonder what my life will look like, six years from now? Hard tellin'. Stick around and let's find out.

In which I channel the Vintage Vixen

It's pretty rare that I find actual *vintage* in the local thrift stores, as opposed to the usual White Stag Walmart crap from five years ago, so when I found this seventies-era maxi dress, even though I know I'll probably never wear it, I gladly paid three bucks for it.

Because does this scream "Vintage Vixen", or does it not? And even though her personal style is not my personal style, she's reminded me that it's okay to HAVE a personal style, so this little number will make me smile every time I see it hanging in my closet.

Look at the fabulous detailing! (and not at the boobs. *cough* DO NOT STARE AT MY BOOBS IT'S CREEPY.)



And who knows? Maybe on one of my "oh-screw-the-world" days, I'll actually wear it.

Although I'll have to be careful to stay away from open flames, because that thing is pure synthetic (so ... slippery!), and I don't want to sacrifice my life for fashion. I'm not THAT dedicated.

Screw wearing purple when I get old. I'm wearing hippie.