Saturday, February 28, 2009

HAPPY   SATURDAY   !!!!

Friday, February 27, 2009

Friday Cat Blogging

Yay Friday!

My new goal is to live every week like I'm going out of town for the weekend. I get so much more done. This week for example I am staying in town and I have gotten approximately nothing done. I have accomplished nada. I haven't done laundry or washed the dog or got any of my shite together while last week when I was going out of town, I had an entire weekends worth of chores done by Wednesday.

So I started thinking, I should always do this!, I could get all the stuff that eats my weekends up done over the work week! Maybe it would take like five nights to get everything done but it would open my weekend to stuff I actually want to do! Think about it, a whole weekend to just do stuff you want to do! No laundry, no yard chores, no dog washing no work!

When I go away for the weekend over the summer I do even more,  I mow and edge and throw away and do all the stuff I sweat over the weekend and then when I come back, I have nothing to do, I spend Sunday afternoon recovering and watching TV. It's great.

Sadly, when I'm not going away I do nothing over the work week and then have to spend my weekends working like a puppy and this my friends, sucks! I don't want to work over the weekend, I want to watch TV and go shopping and sleep! I can't properly sleep and watch TV all weekend if I am chained to my lawn mower or tied to my washing machine!

 But, let say I change my whole schedules and I decide to work covering these chores during the week, I fail to take into account that I'm all ready working like a puppy during the work week. True, freeing up my weekend would be groovy in theory but maybe I like it better if can I go home and like, pretty much do nothing but feed the animals, make dinner and run the odd errand and get ready for work in the morning, you know, take it easy. I'm going to have to think about  the initiative in more detail.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Hissssss

I’m trying to do something I haven’t done in a while. I am downloading music, legally, thankyouverymuch. I’m just not all that musical and I’m not interested in the scene. When I listen to the radio there is a pretty good chance I’m listening to Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. The only place I hear new music is on Apple ads .

Right now I am trying to download a song from Mama Mia . Yes, I am old, how did you guess? “Trying” is the operative word. I’ve been trying for the better part of the evening to download one song! And I can hear you blaming my dial up. Stop it. It’s not the dial up, I’ve downloaded many things from Itunes with my little dial up and it hasn’t taken this long. I think it may be my shuffle. I think , I know that the battery is weak and that might be what’s standing in my way. It turns out that if you don’t use the little beasty for a while the battery runs down even if I keep my plugged in on its little house thing at the ready.

Its not ready. It’s been steadily downloading and all of a sudden it stops and I have to restart it, which would be fine but its happened over and over again and again. Well, after a little investigation, it times out apparently. I should have checked my speed before I got a wild hair and decided I wanted to own the song. It’s timing out because my pick up was too slow. Whatever.

Bugger it. Deep Breaths

Have I mentioned how absolutely adorable Tiny is? He is very, very adorable, he gets more adorable everyday. I just want to eat him up. And I think he’s even smarter than Tex.

Sacrilege you say? Tex as the worlds smartest cat; A true evil super genius of the cat world - True, Tex was very smart but Tex never learned to sleep on the vents. Tiny has all ready learned that the vents are where the precious, precious hot air comes from. Tiny figured this out but fast this and has learned where all the floor vents are, he’s also learned how to position himself to best exploit the vents up higher on the walls too. Tex never even thought about the vents and Tiny is all over them.

Tiny also has learned that not only is Dogger fun to play with and possess many fun toys such as her ears, tail and whiskers, Dogger is a great conductor of heat and she and her bed are very warm and soft. Tex loved a good soft bed but he never fully embraced Doggers bed with Dogger in it. Sadly, he did not live long enough to exploit the futon downstairs. He liked the futon and he used it all the time when it lived upstairs when it served as his bed but he never got to use it after it moved downstairs and morphed into a dog bed. My poor baby kitty! Sob! I stole his bed and gave it to the hated dog and then my kitty died! Sob!

Deep Breaths

Speaking of baby kitties. The Wake County shelter hasn’t sent me my letter with information about getting Tiny fixed. They told me two weeks ago when I dutifully called and asked to have him put on the list that they would send me a letter in a week with the schedule and information on getting him snipped. I think they don’t want to give me my $100 back! That was part of the deal, I pay them twice the going rate for a cat and act as a foster parent for the then really tiny Tiny and then, when he got bigger, I would bring him back for his surgery and they would give me back  half of what I paid them. Tiny is ready for his surgery and I am ready to get my money returned.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Wednesday

Hello! Well, where did the time go? Oh I know, It got wasted showing up to a mass precinct meeting and learning that my precinct chair had decided that our precinct was going to have its own meeting on a different date.  I would have loved a call about that, I assumed he had called, as there was voice mail on my phone I hadn't checked. I checked. He didn't call.  Love. Him.

Our precinct is very shy,  if there is a mass meeting of all the surrounding precincts and they all show up or at least, they somewhat show up, my little precinct gets stage fright and hides under the bed. It makes sense to schedule a meeting of our own, our precinct can't make quorum  at the mass meeting things- But, if we have a little meeting of our own, at our own rec center, with just us, we have ten or so show up and we can get quorum and have elections and  get business accomplished. Still,  I WOULD HAVE LIKED A PHONE CALL DANNY.

Anyway.

In honor of Fat Tuesday, on my way back from the meeting, I stopped at the store and picked up some frozen pie slices so I could get my Mardi Gras on because as you are reading this, it's Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent and a day of fast and abstinance and there is officially no more frozen pie slices or meat on Fridays and there will be no  more breakfasting on Little Debbie's and  more lunchtime bike rides even if it is "too cold" and the start of the evening bike ride routine. It is a time  of sucking it up.

 My new mantra is Suck it Up so I will not have to Suck it In.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Perchance to dream

You know you stayed up too late the night before when you've started to plan your afternoon nap while you are still making your bed in the morning.

I won't put the bike back in the car like I was going to, I didn't put air in the tires anyway so instead of trying to do that before work, I'll do that later.  If I don't ride the bike I can take a nap at lunch. What I should really do is tape No Reservations and go to bed at ten instead of staying up.  That's a great idea. I like that idea.

I did not nap at lunch, I started a book about the flu epidemic of 1918. It's a real page turner, but I all ready know how it ends SPOILER : Everyone dies. So, I didn't get a nap, mostly because of my book  is so engaging but also because it was really cold and I don't find shivering to be restful although I have heard that freezing to death does make you a little heavy lidded. It wasn't that cold but I forgot to figure out the alarm feature on my phone so I had to learn about mortality rates among troops in the fall of 1918. Answer?  They were really, really shitty, and thousands died.  They had a better chance of surviving in the trenches than they did  at their forts stateside.

If a similar virus came through today and killed  the same ratio of people with the same efficiency it would take more people then die of AIDS, cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's combined. Tomorrow I'm going to learn about what the preserved bodies of flu victims buried in the permafrost around the arctic circle taught researchers! I find it really interesting. I'm also learning about earlier epidemics, but no solutions. Every few years plagues roll into the population, kill about a third of the population and roll out. No one knows why they start or why they finish other than they have killed everyone not naturally resistant and they run out of tinder. And then everyone is fine and disease resistant until the next time and the next virus.

The 1918 flu was called the Spanish flu because that was were patient zero was when he died. He never left Spain but the virus went on a world tour. It even went to little the environs of Marquette, MI . I read the Marquette paper every day and they have a feature of news stories from 30, 60, 90 years ago and  the 90 years ago entries since the fall have been heavy on notices about canceled events and closed schools and business and warnings about avoiding crowds or  groups. That must have really sucked for them. There is so little to do up there and to have gatherings and meetings suddenly verboten, it must have gotten very lonely, I could go to the picture show or I could not die... the fact that the other stories were about soldiers coming home from the war had to also be worrying - True, they came home but what did they bring with them? Oh Thank God! Welcome Home! Now, go away!

And then it was over and everyone just forgot it ever happened and they never wanted to talk about it again. It was the ultimate Don't Ask Don't Tell. Tens of thousands of orphans, decimated towns, mass graves ... and it all just disappeared into the mists of time.  I'm hoping my book tells me why.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Oscar Results 2009

Best Supporting Actress - Penlope Cruz,  Vicky Christina Barcelona
Animated Feature - Wall -E
Original Screenplay - Milk
Adapted Screenplay  - Slumdog Millionaire
Cinematography - Slumdog Millionaire
Art Direction - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Animated Short - La Maison en Petits Cube
Costume Design - The Duchess
Make Up - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Supporting Actor - Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Documentory Feature - Man on Wire
Documentory Short - Smile Pinki
Visual Effects -  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Film Editing - Slumdog Millionaire
Sound Mixing - Slumdog Millionaire
Sound Editing - The Dark Knight
Live Action Short Film - Spielzegland (Toyland)
Original Score -  Slumdog Millionaire
Original Song -  Slumdog Millionaire,  "Jai Ho"
Foreign Language Film - Japan, Departures
Best Director -  Danny Boyle,  Slumdog Millionaire
Best Actress - Kate Winslet,  The Reader
Best Actor -  Sean Penn,  Milk
Best Picture -  Slumdog Millionaire
HAPPY    SUNDAY    !!!!!

Saturday, February 21, 2009

HAPPY   SATURDAY  !!!!!

Friday, February 20, 2009

Friday Kitten Blogging

You didn't ask for it but you're going to get it. The inescapable, federally required, Blogger.Com mandated Oscar prediction entry.

Oscar Nominations 2009

Best Picture

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" - I liked it better when it was called Forest Gump and I didn't like Forest Gump

"Frost/Nixon" (Universal) - Cliff Notes of history. The average movie goer doesn't know who David Frost is and knows only that Nixon was a president from the old fashioned days. It was a play, it's still a play.

"Milk" (Focus Features) - I worked with Mosconi's son,

"The Reader" (The Weinstein Company) - Nazis, but girl Nazis. No Spielberg no statue.

"Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight) - Bingo!

"Slumdog Millionare".  I'm expecting it.

Performance by an actor in a leading role

Richard Jenkins in "The Visitor" (Overture Films) - Who? If this was best supporting actress and he was a chick he would have it made. It's not and he isn't. Sorry dude.

Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon" (Universal) - Old fashioned president guy.

Sean Penn in "Milk" (Focus Features) - Again, I worked with Mosconis' son.

Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.) - Nah. It wasn't acting it was CGI and make-up. And Tom Hanks all ready won for this part.

Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler" (Fox Searchlight) - He gets points for his little dog dieing.

Winner - Sean Penn

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Josh Brolin in "Milk" (Focus Features) - Has he done enough? He could play the ingenue card and get it for doing a good job so soon, but ... Prop 8 may make homophobes not real popular among the voters.

Robert Downey Jr. in "Tropic Thunder" (DreamWorks, Distributed by DreamWorks/Paramount) - Hey! I saw this one! I liked him he was good.

Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Doubt" (Miramax) - He's always good but he did just win... he may have to keep his seat.

Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight" (Warner Bros.) - He was good when he was alive. I would hate to see them waste an statue on a guy whose career isn't going to be helped by the win. The voters are old enough they may not have caught the love.

Michael Shannon in "Revolutionary Road" (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage) - Who?

Robert Downey,  because comedy is really damn hard.

Performance by an actress in a leading role

Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married" (Sony Pictures Classics) - Yeah. Nope. I would be shocked and she wouldn't be deserving. She has years to do a lot at this level of achievement before she's really in the running.

Angelina Jolie in "Changeling" (Universal)  I'm still mad she got it for Girl Interrupted

Melissa Leo in "Frozen River" (Sony Pictures Classics) - Wouldn't it be cool? It would be, but it's not going to happen. Meryle Streep is also in the field.

Meryl Streep in "Doubt" (Miramax) - A great performance for a normal actress but this is Meryl Streep.

Kate Winslet in "The Reader" (The Weinstein Company) - Probably, but she plays a Nazi we're supposed to be sypathetic to and we hate that.

Kate Winslet because she's won all the other contests thus far. But still,  the no Speilberg problem is an issue with a Nazi movie.


Performance by an actress in a supporting role

Amy Adams in "Doubt" (Miramax) - She's young, she's pretty, she dressed as a Nun.

Penélope Cruz in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" (The Weinstein Company) - This is an ingenue award and she isn't.

Viola Davis in "Doubt" (Miramax) - She's very good, hasn't done anything else and is youngish. Almost a shoo in.

Taraji P. Henson in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount and Warner Bros.) - BB wasn't important enough of a film, Pitt isn't going to win and neither is she.

Marisa Tomei in "The Wrestler" (Fox Searchlight) - Too old for the ingenue win. Rourke might pull it out just because of the shock that he isn't dead somewhere but Tomai all ready has an Oscar.

Viola Davis, small part, not on screen long but made an impression. The ingredients that make up a Best Supporting Actress winner.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Puppy Love

Dogger is being a brat. She is eating me out of house home, literally by eating my house and home! There is a lyric that says You are never fully dressed without a smile, the version that I sing around the house is You are never fully dressed until you soak you shoes in bitter apple . It just doesn’t flow nearly as well.

I do this because Dogger chews on my shoes, she doesn’t bother just waiting for me to take them off to spring, she’s very happy to attack them while they are still on my feet! And I say No. Bad Girl! Stop It! StopitStopitStopit! and pull my feet back and she thinks this is just too much fun! I’m yanking my feet back and she’s thinking that we’re in the middle of the most fun game of tug ever!

So. Enter Bitter Apple. I can (briefly) get her off my feet but this does not keep her from shredding magazines and book jackets that she happens to find around - Well, book jacket actually, its from a book that’s binding broke and the cover became detached and Dogger just thinks it’s the bestest toy ever. The fact that I keep taking it away from her makes it all the more attractive.

And then there is the cookie issue. Dogger is eating something I do not want her to eat, like a section of the newspaper I saved. I tell her to PUT IT DOWN and to LEAVE IT while I chase her around the dinning room table. The only way to keep her from completely destroying whatever it is to offer her a cookie.

I give her a cookie and she gives me back my thing. No cookie, no thing and it doesn’t work the other way around, she won’t give me the thing until I give her the cookie. Period.  I know she has something she shouldn’t because I can hear her chewing. If she has an approved of toy, she very quietly gnaws on it, but give her a TV remote or a copy of Vanity Fair and you can hear her chewing outside. She has it all worked out. She holds something hostage, throwing out a finger every once in a while to remind me she means business,  until I give her a cookie and she frees her hostage.. Lather, rinse, repeat.

She’s doing this because she’s bored. She doesn’t get the exercise she once did and now that she’s healing  her energy level is increasing and she wants to have the run of the house and not be cooped up in “her” room all day. I understand this and I would love to have her out wandering the house all day because I think it’s a good deterrent to have a huge dog face looking out the windows. I locked her up (again) after a period of house wandering freedom after she hurt herself last summer and she’s slowly over time graduated from being in her crate 24-7 to being crated only during the day, to no crate, to her dog bed and finally to the futon. All of these things being in the office, her room. She’s got cabin fever, I get it but that’s no reason for her to turn into a canine Cuisinart  the minute she gets her liberty.

All I want is for my seven year old dog to stop acting like a teething puppy. I would like my dinning room to not look like a ticker tape parade just passed though. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad, thrilled even, that she's healed enough and strong enough and that she’s even up to tearing around, chewing stuff up at all, but geez, can’t she be happy with tearing around chewing up her own stuff?

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Strangers

Monday I had two run in’s with people of questionable mental hygiene and neither of them were on Dix Campus . That’s what happens when you cut mental health funding, you go from contained mentally ill people to free range crazies - It’s clearly the best solution for everyone.

Blergh. The first time was in the Sam’s parking lot. I was in my car innocently digging around in my purse looking for my Sam’s card, which was not there because it was at home, upstairs in a shirt pocket, but I didn’t know that yet so I was digging around in the purse and I hear this scritch, scritch, scritch noise outside the car and so I look out the window and there is the little, hunched over old man trying to force his basket between our cars.

There was enough space for a person to walk comfortably between the vehicles, you could open your door most of the way but you could not fit a grocery cart and this guy was trying to fit a grocery cart! That scritching noise was my paint .screaming as it fell to the ground. And he was just shuffling along, scratching my paint as he went and he didn’t stop until I banged on my window and alerted him that the car was not empty and I did notice what he was doing. I would have gotten out of the car but he was a thousand years old and looked like Humpty Dumpty. Life was hard enough for him all ready.

I drove off thinking uncharitable thoughts about him and went to this Subway to get a sandwich - Where I stood in line for about forever because this Russian guy treated every sandwich like a freaking art project and I was like Ivan! Comrade! Buddy! Here we do not like standing in line! This is not a form of entertainment! Capitalist Running Dogs need to run! Finally, I got my lunch and I sat down to read my book. Fine. Lunch at last.

And then I go out to my car and there is another crazy person too close to my car. This time I go woman-a -o-mano. I approach the car, keys at the ready - I could open my car door or turn him into a human strainer, its up to him. He starts his patter Ma’m do you...,. He could have just sized up the situation, noticed the smoke coming out of my ears, and choose to leave quietly. I cut him off, sadly, he had taken the “Stab Me” option. I cut him off, Iain'tgotnomoney. and I motioned him to get away from my car. He says, really kind of snippy, "Oh. Am I in your way?" and I’m like Dude. No you didn’t! Don’t make me cut a bitch! This is the murder Subway! A woman was murdered here not that long ago. I’ve had a bad hour and I didn’t kill the other guys but you on the other hand, got lippy with me... and he wised up and went to go visit with the dumpster...

You know its not a good day when if left to my own devises I would have killed three people just over my lunch hour.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

It's not news, its clinical depression...

Top Five Places To Go Before Global Warming Messes Them Up
How Green is my dirt patch

In my desire to make January into April, I have started to think about the design of Garden 2009. Last year, Garden 2008 was a strip of ground ten feet long by 2 ½ feet wide. The plants and I needed more space, which I thought I had achieve by adding a few feet at the far end, but it was not successful. I learned that the garden doesn’t want to be longer it wants to be wider.

Its not really about ground space, its more about breathing space. Last year everything was crowded together and it had a negative impact on output. There wasn’t enough air circulating, too many plants in too small a space meant too much shade so there wasn’t enough light to go around and they had to fight for the avail be nutrients in the soil.. Which reminds me, the soil was really good at growing leaves, not so good at growing fruits. This year I’m going to get in touch with my county extension service and see what I need to do to make the soil I get from the city more fruit friendly.

My thoughts on getting more space for my plants are to reclaim a 7x7 square of yard directly in front of the existing garden space without unseating my semi-attractive patch of semi- blooming iris. It would take up most of the remaining sunny area of the yard without depriving Dogger of her  favorite pooping patch. The down side being that the new square would be right in the middle of the seasonal creek that develops in the spring during the rains - but the existing garden space already is part of the flood plain and it did all right, in fact I think the smaller tomatoes produced better than the larger tomatoes that were planted further down the strip away from the better part of the flow and the cukes that were directly in the stream did better than both of them. The peppers didn’t seem to be negatively effected by the extra water either.

Garden 2009 is made up of better, higher quality, neater peppers and tomatoes and I do not want them to get stressed and since there is only one of each variety, I don’t have a lot of back up and I need to give my plants as much of a chance as I can. I am hoping that you get what you pay for. I paid, I want to get.

It’s the journey not the destination... Size doesn’t matter... Its not about winning...

The addition would be a lot more garden to garden, which would mean more work for me. The garden in its current incarnation is very easy to garden. It’s small, narrow and easily accessible. I can see all of it and things and it was hard for nasty beasties to hide from me, All said, as convenient as it is, the space is too small and it isn’t big enough for what I want to do or to allow plants to do what they need to do. We both need more space.

This year I also have much higher expectations for my plants. Last years plants were el cheapos made up from what I could get from Wally World and what I got from the farmers market. I was pretty impressed that they formed fruits at all. This year, just doing their jobs won’t be enough. I want them to produce! I’m wanting more than six or seven large tomatoes over the season. I know that’s not good enough and they did not do as well as they could have. I am of course blaming them for my poor harvest, it couldn’t possibly me having a black thumb. I watered them, fought their enemies, I gave them nice fertilizer and designer dirt and I expected more. This year my goals are more fruits through more light, more air and less nitrogen.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Someone decided this was a good idea because...

Sing for your dinner unemployed person, Sing! , Oh, whats a little humiliation!
Valentines Weekend

The only good thing about good about the Valentines Day candy and gifts and related heart shaped crap is the day-after-Valentines-75% off- candy, gifts and heart shaped crap. I would feel really bad about getting any of that stuff knowing that in a few hours its going to be 75% off. Why would you want a partner who would waste money like that? Smart couples should agree to celebrate Valentines on February 15th. For my part I celebrated the holiday by baking seven dozen pink, heart shaped cookies for Dogger.

Post treat-o-rama, I went to Target. I went there Sunday on a mission to buy doggie toothpaste and left out of there with considerably more than my doggie toothpaste. It is only through an act of Gawd that I did not also leave there with two gorgeous, deeply marked down lamp shades that any one of my home improvement shows would turn into clever swag lamps. I totally wish I needed a couple of cleaver, DIY swag lamps. Target is also evil because in addition to offering deeply discounted home decor items, they do not carry toothpaste for cats. Petsmart carries toothpaste that is formulated for both cats and dogs but they charge twice what Target does for its single formatted toothpaste. Target may sell kitty toothpaste and it’s probably with the kitty flea and tick meds they also did not seem to carry. Cat Bigots! They are just lucky that Tiny’s real teeth haven’t come in yet.

I wouldn’t have this problem if Wally World stilled carried Hartz toothpaste, it was formulated for both cats and dogs and had a pleasant beefy taste. It didn’t make empty promises about post brush fresh breath either. What animal cares about fresh breath? I don’t think I’ve ever caught Dogger or any other dog I’ve ever known checking their breath. And even if the animal is some freak that does care about their breath, and even if you spend a lot of time doing mouth-mouth with your dog, no post brush fresh breath is going to last for long. Dogs have dog breath if you need to spend a lot of time with your nose in Fidos’ mouth, learn to breath through your mouth.

Another thing that made me hate Target . They had a huge amount of clothes on sale and I didn’t want any of them! Hateful Target! They did have some cute mini-trenches that I could totally see myself in but they weren’t on sale. I’m fearful for that Target though, there was a lot on sale and not enough not for sale, if that makes sense. It also had a lot of empty spaces and no Muzak playing. I’m glad its not my primary Target because otherwise I would have been really alarmed.

After my disturbing visit to Target it was onto Sam’s Club to pick up lunch for next week and freebie snacks for now, right up until I walked in the doors and into a line. I decided that next weeks lunch could be picked up next week. I took the tour of snacks and headed home. I don’t know how you spent your valentines weekend but I spent it eating freebies and discounted candy and feeding my dog pink dog treats. How Romantic.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

HAPPY    SUNDAY    !!!!!!

Saturday, February 14, 2009

HAPPY  VALENTINES   DAY !!!!
 And a special Happy Valentines Day greeting to my follwers for giving me a shot of much needed validation every day.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Friday Kitten Blogging

The bad economy is good news for the environment in the UP

MARQUETTE - Development of the Kennecott Eagle Minerals Company nickel and copper mine on the Yellow Dog Plains has been "deferred until market conditions recover."


Yellow Dog plains is spared for a little longer 

Friends of Friends

You can think of today as either the dreaded Friday the 13th or as the day before Valentines Day. I think I prefer to think of it as Friday the 13th, it has better connotations.

I’m still spending too much time on Crack Book. Its fun though, every new name is a flash of memory and a shock of excitement. I called one of my friends from college and we went though various lists of friends of friends. Hey remember so and thus? No... Wait? Did he date Whoosie? Who was the guy who was always on skates? Was his name Chris? No! It was Thus and Thus! Oh, remember So and So?! . It can be kind of disheartening when I realize that I just can’t remember who a lot of these people are or I only remember them as people who dated someone I knew better. I can’t remember if we were friends then or if I even liked them. There were a lot of people I didn’t like. You think Christian Bale can throw a fit? He’s an amateur.

And the people I see are just the theater people. I must have known other people while I was there, but other than a grand total of four people I knew through the dorms as I can’t remember  full names of anyone else I was close to. I was friends with a guy named Noodle but they don’t have nicknames on Crack Book. I’m pretty sure that his real name was Michael but that doesn’t really narrow it down, every guy I knew was named Michael. I also knew a guy named Jason and a girl whose name I can’t remember but she had dark hair and she shot a goldfish bowl at the honors dorm, and there was this girl names Robin and her friend who I’m sure had a name other than Robin’s Friend. I know I had a lot of friends outside the theater department, okay maybe not a lot but I must have. I took classes outside so I must have known other people. I just didn’t know their names.

My high school people aren’t much better. I’m pretty much friending the college people as long as I don’t remember actively disliking them at the time or if I remember them as being popular and out of my league so if I friended them now would I just look even more pathetic than they probably remember me being at school.

The high school people are harder because there is so much more history there and it feels like more of a statement, but then one of the other girls has Calvin as a friend and she wasn’t even in our kindergarten class! So maybe I am entirely over thinking this whole thing. There are names I recognize and if they were people from college I would add them without really thinking but it isn’t and they didn’t and I can’t or I could I just don’t want to. Do I really need to know how Calvin Mims is doing? I mean I don’t think we’ve spoken since fourth grade. Do I want to blast back into his life? Does he remember who I am? Does he want to? Does he remember me being a total mean girl like I remember the likes of that girl Colleen who was such a grade school beyotch.

And what if he does? Is that totally going to mess with my groove if some guy I knew in elementary school doesn’t friend me? (edited to add, he did! Yay  for more validation!)

Thursday, February 12, 2009

The bad economy comes home

They took the coke machine out of our break room because too few people were using it. The pepsi machine is next.

Edited to add:

NEW YORK – The Coca-Cola Co. said Thursday its fourth-quarter profit fell 18 percent as it dealt with the global recession and volatility in the currency markets Gulp!
Summer Lovin'

I checked our weather here yesterday and was shocked to see that we were under a Fire Weather Watch. We were experiencing strong, dry winds and the humidity was very low. Its like seeing Partlly cloudy with a chance of afternoon fire storms. This must be what it is like to live in Southern California.

Razzle Dazzle Hybrid’, a unique deep raspberry slicer with exceptional texture and flavor, ‘Tangerine Mama Hybrid’, the new bright orange counterpart to ‘Golden Mama Hybrid’, the first yellow paste tomato to keep its bright hue when cooked, ‘Italian Ice Hybrid’, the sweet and extra mild cherry tomato, ‘HoneyBunch’, the honey-sweet miniature currant tomato.

Mmmmm. Pink tomatoes, orange tomatoes, yellow tomatoes white tomatoes. Big tomatoes, little tomatoes, wee baby to tomatoes, I’m not just going to have a garden I’m going to have a bouquete!
And that’s not all

Great Stuff, Bananarama, Golden Giant, Red Delicious, Gypsy, and The Godfather. Highly productive peppers for every occasion - salads, grilling, stuffing, frying. Burpee's favorite peppers in one collection.

Green and yellow and orange! Fat and skinny and big and little! And even more cool? They aren’t even going to arrive until it is time to plant in my zone! The very sexy Zone 7, which means they will arrive around the middle of April. I’m hoping for a better yield this year but I am also starting off with what I beilve are better quality plants, Wal-Mart while cheap is just not the best source for variety or quality, I should have known that. Burpee is pricier but they don’t also sell tires or DVD players. They sell White Tomatoes! I’m going from two red varieties of tomatoes to six varieties and from a single variety to five different peppers. That’s a lot. Probably more than I have room for but that is why gawd invented kiddie pools. I am also forgoing eggplants, cucumbers and squash this year. They all took up too much ground and didn’t produce as much as I had hoped. I’m thinking that the tomatoes will take over the cucumbers old stomping grounds as well as the patch that did belong to the eggplants.

And of course, new year new dirt.

The peppers are going to be a the satilight garden on the front porch where I hope the light will be more conductive to pepper happiness then the brighter, hotter light the back yard garden gets for longer. The front gets really nice sun in the early part of the day and a defuse light for the rest of the day. The tomatoes liked the back yard but the sun burned my peppers. I’m also hoping to have more space for them in the baby pool which should tell you how small and narrow the backyard garden is.

This year I am also going to start off with baby plants in cages instead of trying to inflict them on grown plants too late. This year I want to Just Say No to cutting off my plants heads. Doing it the other way was just a bad, bad thing. And stupid. Very, very, stupid.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Grow

I think my baby broccs are dead. It turns out I just to do not  have enough  true gardening passion to be a winter gardener, it is with great shame that I admit to myself that I am a fair weather gardener! I just can not work up the desire to spend the time a garden needs to have spent on it if I to spend it being cold. Do you know that garden gloves are not the same as regular gloves? Really, they do not keep your hands warm at all, they are made, I learned after reading the literature,  to keep your hands warm they are made to keep your hands clean. You can be clean or you can be warm you can not be clean and warm. Well, you can, but not if you shop at Poverty Barn. If having warm hands is a priority for you; you should not be a winter gardener. Selfish cow.

... Not that I ever did  any obviously. Which pisses me off because I worked hard for these plants while it was warmer and then later I went out in the not warm to cover them and uncover them. I babied them along after all my other plants had stopped producing or had been pulled out. I bought broccoli on purpose so I would spend the winter in the garden! I enjoyed gardening over the summer and  really thought that I would keep on enjoying it over the winter, but I didn't. Fair Weather Gardener!! For better or worse, I am all ready pouring over seed catalogs and lusting after exotic tomatoes and peppers. No eggplants this year, I am not harboring any eggplant lust.

I still feel bad. I got really excited about some budding baby broccs and now I’m not going to get to see them grow up. They had to work really hard to get as far as they did and now they aren’t going to get any further. I’m not going to pull them out quite yet, I’m hoping maybe they’ll seed themselves or something and I can grow them when its more convenient FAIR WEATHER GARDENER . We eat broccoli over the summer, where does it come from? Is all that summer broccoli old broccoli? Or to get summer broccoli maybe you have to live in Maine.

Sigh

Speaking of gardening. I planted the broccs in the experimental  section of the garden strip and after studying the broccs , I’m not sure that area gets enough sunlight, which would suck for tomatoes but might possibly work for the peppers which got burned by the sun where they were last season... I’m mulling over not planting squash because they didn’t pan out last year and I don’t eat squash and I don’t know how much squash people who do eat squash actually eat... Less room for squash means more room for more tomatoes! Yay!!! I’m also thinking of putting my cukes in the baby pool and utilizing braces for them to grow on... I’m also toying with taking a tomato plant and maybe green beans, if I can find some, over to Alphagal and Broskeys’ and maybe playing farmer with Tiny E this summer. Jealous sigh... They have the most fabulous fence for vining

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

...and light, sweet crude for March delivery tumbled $2.01 to settle at $37.55 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was the second day crude settled below $40, a price last seen three weeks ago.

If a jump in per-barrel is expressed immediately at the pump I want to see this reflected on my way home. Hmmph. I'm not going to see it, but its a nice thought.

Quiz








Yay for Dogger!

I wasn’t completely useless over the weekend, I got a second wind Sunday evening and bathed Dogger and vacuumed and laundered everything that touches her, up to and including pillow covers that I’m pretty sure I have never washed. I didn’t want them to feel left out.

Speaking of Dogger, this weekend was her One year Addisons Disease anniversary! I knew it was coming up but I wasn’t sure when specifically as there are some things I prefer not to dwell on and I don’t think about it as much anymore. A story in the Sunday paper about the Krispy Kreme run reminded me that last year I had a dying Dogger in the back seat and was forced to contend with the non-fun non-run Krispy crowds blocking access to my vet and then the same damnable crowds complicating the trip to the emergency vets where they told me why Dogger couldn’t walk and why she was shedding the way she had been and why she was dying and exactly how much it was going to run me for Dogger to get her groove back. They of course gave me only two options and neither was acceptable. It killed me that I was being forced to decided between her quantity of life verses my quality of life. It will only run a couple hundred dollars a month indefinitely! It didn’t seem fair and either way I was going to be the bad guy.

Thankfully, through the internet and a Canine Addison's’  Yahoo group I found a third option, Tiffany Natural Pharmacy , the worlds best compounding pharmacy and a year later my Dogger is just like all the other dogs, well, almost, she’s just like all the other dogs who have bad knees. Post -AD we did have to stop going to the dog park and that was a major change in lifestyle for the both of us but it was getting too crowded and Dogger didn’t need the added stress. She also didn’t need to get into as many fights as she was getting into and the more I stressed about that the more stress she felt and she isn’t supposed to be stressed. I tried to step down our every-day-for-two-years dog park habit by using the small dog park ( too small, too many small dogs) and going at times I knew the park was not as used, but at the end, it just wasn’t worth it. We did go one final time on March 21, in the rain and on the leash but it was just so pathetic that I made the decision to go cold turkey.

So we started back on our walks and going to the baseball diamond, where on July 13th she tore a ligament in her knee and we stopped going anywhere at all. For the second time in a year the doctor gave me an ultimatum - Absurdly expensive treatment or euthanasia and for the second time I said Neither and searched online for a third choice. Mercifully, I got lucky again and with a lot of work, Dogger is still with us. She is doing much, much. much better and is well on the road to recovery - No more off leash time for her or long walks, but I think she’s okay with it and while it makes me a little sad to remember her running and cavorting those scenes always end with her running towards me in slow-mo and then yelping and falling. Today instead of imagining her running towards me at full gallop, I think of us strolling, together.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Four Days ago I was wearing a parka, today I wore a tee-shirt.

At probably 14 weeks old, Tiny Kitty is slowing turning into a cat, with a clearly delineated front-middle-end like a grown cat instead of the fluffy, undefined ball like creature he has been - emphasis on slowly, “real” cats don’t spend the day on fast forward , bouncing around like a super ball. He doesn’t simply move from one place to another, he bounds from place to place. The Kitty only worked his way up to a bound if he thought he was headed toward something I didn’t want him to eat, like bread or away from something I did want him to eat, like his pills - The Kitty could move really fast if there was a doughy pay off in play. Other cats hunt mice, my cat hunted dinner rolls.

Speaking of animals, I’m listening to Dogger snore on the futon. Tiny is curled up under the sadly disused exercise bike. He’s had a busy day, I made him go outside for the first time! I pulled out The Kitty’s old mesh tube and introduced Tiny to it. He liked it better than The Kitty did but he seemed confused about this whole “outdoors” thing and why he was out in it in this contraption. He did a lot better than The Kitty who would yowl the whole time he was in there and he was a cat that liked the outdoors. Tiny didn’t even know it was an option and he seemed pretty okay with the whole thing.

Back inside, Dogger and Tiny will stretch out on the futon for these power naps but I think that Dogger sleeps better when the tiny, potentially tasty prey animal isn’t right there and for Tiny’s part he sleeps better when the huge potentially hungry predator isn’t right there. I understand. A couple of seconds ago they roused themselves independently and stretched and yawned in concert. So cute.

I have gotten so much nothing accomplished this weekend. Sometimes I set out to do nothing and am damn successful, other times I decided that I am going to get everything done and then actually get everything done and while I am very proud of myself, I also am relived to back at work on Monday because I need the rest. Not this weekend though, I set the bar very low and I worked to expectations : I did the laundry . I didn’t put away the laundry or even bring the laundry back upstairs but I did get that laundry done. I have clean clothes. The fact that I have clean clothes in a basket in the basement is irrelevant.

This time of year I can get away with doing nothing and not feel bad about it. In a few months I’m going to have a garden to serve and a yard to mow and my days of sitting guilt free on the futon with the animals will be over. I can rationalize laying around like a lump when its cold out but it just feels wrong when its nice out. Speaking of out, While we were out earlier Dogger grazed on the dead grass and chewed up some twigs, hours later Dogger decided that she had to let the outdoors back out right now. Yuck. The ideal puppy training class would cover training the dog to yack only in approved of , easy to clean areas, like the tiled bathroom floor or on the kitchen linoleum . I hope she feels better because now I’m nauseosus.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

HAPPY   SUNDAY   !!!!!

Saturday, February 7, 2009

HAPPY   SATURDAY   !!!!!

Friday, February 6, 2009

Friday Kitten Blogging

New Toy

I don’t drink, I don’t smoke I don’t use illegal drugs, I see my dentist twice a year, I would give blood if the Red Cross weren’t such tight asses about iron levels and I don’t watch Reality TV. I .was a good person and then I went to the darkside. I turned my back on Myspace and I dove into Facebook and now, two days later I am a Facebook whore. I have friended and been friended, I’ve joined groups, I’ve uploaded pictures. I check my email frequently enough to border on OCD and I visit my page regularly to see if to see if any of my friends have posted anything. I check out peoples friends lists to see if there is anyone there I like better. Two Days.

I blame this on the baby. If I weren’t anxiously awaiting news about his arrival I would never have been nervously casting about for something to keep myself busy while I waited for Broskeys’ next texted update. If it wasn’t for the blessed respite of getting myself enrolled on Facebook I would have been compulsively scrubbing my bathtub or mopping my kitchen floor.

The good news is that I’ve gotten back into contact with people from college who I forgot about seconds after they put the diploma in my hands. Now, 16 years later I’m all excited about them! I’m like Oh my Gawd! Debbie Anderson! What a bitch! I hated her! I wonder if she wants to be friends?

True, it is more like “friends” but even still. I got really excited because I got friended by a guy who was a senior when I was a freshman. I didn’t think he even knew my name much less would remember me years later and yet he did, more likely he probably friends all the Texas State Theater people. The way the screen members the only people I see are other former Theater people from the years I was there - which is cool because I had zero involvement with anyone outside the department and the only other people I knew while I was there were my roommates and I did my level best to not know them then either. Once upon a time I tried to remember their names and the order they came in but after awhile I decided that memory space would be better utilized for The Might Be Giants lyrics. I also listed my high school but there are very few of my classmates on the site and since I did just see a lot of them at the reunion, I don’t really get any kind of jolt seeing them on the site. But the college people I haven't seen in sixteen years, even the people I didn't care about then are suddenly very interesting.

I had to go check my email. I got another “friend”! And it wasn’t one of the people I friended because there were there and I said Why Not?, I actually knew the person. Kind of. From a far I think we may have spoken once or twice and we were in a directing scene together not that we ever spoke to each other out of character...I had checked before and there was nothing and I found that really upsetting! It’s been two days! What is Facebook? Some kind of digitized crack?

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

The Nephew Has Landed!  We have a baby boy! 7 pounds 1 oz!


Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Everyone old is young again

The lady I sat next to at Mass on Sunday turned to me moments after I sat down and asked me if I was a student. I assured her I was not. She said something about all the State students around and I nodded sagely in agreement.  I am not entirely sure I have ever looked at any of the younger people around me and said to myself Yup. State student. I've never been very good at guessing ages, even when I was a student I wasn't good at picking my kind out. I blame this on the fact that  everyone I knew looked like twelve year olds, the handful of people I did know who did not look twelve were twelve. At 21 I looked about 14 while the guys I was "doing the favor" for could have passed for twice that.

Her question made me giggle because my big plan for the rest of Sunday was to wash that gray right out of my hair. I couldn't believe that she was sitting nine inches away from me couldn't see them glowing. I felt like Cruella De ville. Back in college I also had white hair - Two. I had two white hairs. I feel bad for college kids today if a forty year old woman can be mistaken for one of them. We passed for twelve, they pass for forty.

If the lady thought I was a college kid pre-dye job she would ask me what grade I'm in now.

Tiny is having a great time. He's feeling much better and he's gotten bigger and stronger now and he's just everywhere. He's running around and jumping up and around and he's getting into stuff. Fortunately, his brain has not grown with him and he's still sill enough to think that if he makes himself small that it means he is also invisible. Tex was much smarter, even as a tiny kitty he had a huge brain and that made him challenging. So far, Tiny has a Dogger sized brain : small and manageable and not capable of advanced thought or planning.

Tiny has developed some short term memory and he's starting to be less surprised by his anti-biotics, he hasn't learned to avoid me first thing in the morning like Tex did, but he's starting to wise up a little and he's a little less cuddly-wuddly, lovey-dovey when I brandish the syringe in his face. This morning, day nine of his ten day  course of antibiotics he almost gave me a dirty look but it came out a dirty-wirty little baby kitty look, he can't win.  I'm going to keep dosing him until I run out of med though, even if we go past the ten days and I think we will, I think that would be the best idea and what I've always done with my own antibiotics. it's also easier to work with pills, liquids are harder to manage precisely, even with a syringe.

I think as long as he gets all the med it doesn't really matter if he gets it in ten days or twelve days anyway. I hope.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Weekend non-Warrior.

I want ya'll to be proud of me. In my effort to be less judgemental,  I had two chances  to kill people  to read the riot act  on Saturday and I didn't take advantage of either opportunity. I think I deserve a cookie. The first instance was at Wallworld. Yes, I know Wallyworld is evol, I am aware. The very first time I can afford to shop elsewhere, I will surely do it. I went late in the afternoon on Saturday, along with everyone else in the greater Southeast Raleigh-Knightdale metropolitan area

The Steelers have just won the Super Bowl. I hate the Steelers. I always want the Cowboys to kick their asses. Stupid Cowboys for punking out.

Back to Wallyworld. I found my stuff and went shopping for the really important item - A short line. Sadly, like doggy toothpaste, Wallyworld was out of short lines. I would have had a better chance to finding a truffle under my desk, so I found a line that  had magazines I wanted to read. And then I read all the magazines. Did you know that every woman in Hollywood is either pregnant, planning on being pregnant or lying about being pregnant.

About 35 minutes after I got in the line I realized I didn't have everything on my list. I thought about laying down on the floor and kicking and screaming but I was afraid I would not being to get off the floor once down there. You are too old to throw a tantrum when you start to worry about the condition of the floor and whether or not you will be adhered to it when you finish your tantrum. I stayed upright and in the line.

An hour after I got in that line, I was finally waited on. If Dogger wasn't in the car waiting for me I would have gone upstairs and if I found a manager I would have throttled him. I had a whole spiele planned while I waited in line.

Are you sitting down? WHY? I waited in line for an HOUR and you are sitting down? I work for Customer Service  Partners and there is going to be a meeting tomorrow morning and you are going to have a really good explanation for this. You should have been on the floor getting some of those lines down. No one should wait for an hour! I want to see your staffing schedule and an explanation for why you have so many stations that are not working because this is outrageous. This is why you have such a problem with shrinkage, and why your profit margin isn't where is should be. I understand you just fired some staff due to theft, why haven't these staff been replaced? You need to get someone to go through you applications and you need to hire the first fifteen that want to be  cashiers. I am not kidding.  I really have to go now before I say something I shouldn't, but I have never had a auditing visit in a store where I have been left questioning the quality of the management to this extent. You'll read a copy of my report at the meeting tomorrow and so will your general manager. Right now? Your job is in danger.  My suggestion is you take the chairs out of this office and never be caught sitting down again.

But I didn't. I went out to my car and apologized to Dogger and went home. And then I got home and saw a strange dog in the house-next-door's yard. I had Dogger and the strange dog made me nervous. Dogger has an undiagnosed case of Periodic Explosive Disorder and she was really curious about this dog.  It's really better for everyone involved when she ignores other dogs.

I can hear the dog's people shouting to it from their porch. Yeah, that'll do it. I put Dogger in the house and went after the other dog. And went after the dog and went after the dog. It wouldn't let me near it and it's people were still hollering at it from their porch. I hate them. I'm wandering around in the cold and dark after their unsocialized dog and they are hanging out on their porch.  Finally, they moter down the street where I have the dog somewhat corralled away from the busy street. I walk away and hoped they get their dog in the car.

My speech to them, had I been able to  get a leash on the dog and hauled back to the folks on the porch would have been.

Are you under house arrest! Get off your damn porch and go after your dog! I saw two cars almost hit this animal while you were conversing with it. Are you idiots? Do not let this animal get away again because I know this is the second time I've seen it out and not seen you running after it and the next time I see this dog out, I'm calling animal control and turn you in for keeping it chained 24-7 in your yard and let them deal with you!

I kept my yap shut and Sunday afternoon I ran into one of them and she called me "Friend" and thanked me for looking after her dog last night.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

HAPPY    SUNDAY   !!!!!