Spinning

I kept up my pursuit of the  chaise by dipping a toe into Craigslist. Overstock. Com did not have the selection that I had hoped. I decided that CL was an option when I looked at the prices and saw that if I only had to fork over $100 for the piece that I could afford to have it recovered to make it suit. I mean I could still end up paying  big dollars for it but at least it would be exactly what I want and isn't that why we pay the big bucks for custom anyway? Besides buying used is much better for the world at large than buying yet another new thing.

I still cling to a fantasy if finding the perfect chaise and having it be part of some sort of dream living room set that is in the right color the right style and the right size  and getting rid of everything in my living room and starting fresh-  all for $400. New.

Speaking of size and style. When did "contemporary and modern" start to mean "As seen on Miami Vice? I walked through to several different showrooms (completely unmolested by salesmen) and they were all  full of enormous pieces of furniture shaped like gigantic upholstered pancreas's! (pancrei?) So Miami Vice, I mean it may be because its a bastardization of the  same style they were ripping off twenty years ago on the show but everything was just sooo round. Good thing I didn't like anything because no one would have wanted the sale anyway. I was practically invisible everywhere I went. I think its because the furniture was all too big for me.

The same thing happened to me at both Lowes and Home Depot when I was buying appliances. I was there with my checkbook in hand and I had to beg a clerk to sell me something. I should have brought a penis to the showrooms, it might have gotten attention. There is a handy dandy Adam and Eve right down the street. I could bring in at least a pseudo penis and see how long it took for someone to wait on me. I'll just wag my penis around and wait for someone to ask if they could help me find what I'm looking for. No asshole. I think I just want to walk around your 10,000 square foot showroom with my penis.Without your help. I did it the other day with just my vagina and you ignored me just fine.

Everything I saw was designed for our 6500 square foot mini mansions and our equally huge asses. I saw a story online about how furniture designers are designing chairs larger to better suite our increasing size of our asses - Well, they are! And from what I can tell, the average buyer of new furniture is a huge, gigantic fat person living in a huge gigantic fat house. I mean really! I saw chairs that you could back an aircraft carrier up to. Tacky, tacky, tacky. If you're that big you don't need a chair you need a stall.

And woe to you trying to furnish something more modest - I saw some smaller pieces at the cheap joe's place I went to earlier but if you actually had money to spend and taste you would have to learn to embrace minimalism because the places I went to did not think small, even the kids furniture had roid rage.

Garden 2010 Update 4

Furniture shopping is  soul sucking and not even remotely fun. You would think shopping for a big ticket item would be by definition at the very least fun but it is not and I can't get waited on! WTF!. So soul sucking not even remotely fun and bad for my self esteem. I have however decided that I want a chaise lounge.  So, soul sucking and esteem destroying and not fun but not a complete waste of time.

Onto what is fun.

Yay for the baby garden. Progress had been made!

Clearly, I need to move some of these guys to bigger pots, that's my project for the week. Chaise shopping and bean re-planting.

I'm excited about these because I was starting to worry if they were going to sprout at all. I don't know what they are but they seem a lot more hardy that the other flowers, which have shown no change in condition. They are still there but they aren't developing further, it may be time for some large scale thinning.

My other sprouty flowers are doing very well and hopefully I'll have a couple of lovely flower pots at the very least.

This coming weekend I move my attention from the baby garden to the Big Garden. I'm going to get nice dirt from the city, spread more Wally World manure, turn the garden again, get my hoses out and lay down franken hose.  It's going to be a busy weekend. Hopefully.

Lists

I gave my self a very ambitious to-do list for the weekend.

- The kitchen is filthy
- The"club chair"   will not buy itself
-The upstairs bathroom is a shameful mess.
-The dog needs more cookies
- The laundry needs to be done
- The yard is hideous
-The beans could be replanted into bigger quarters
- The Hangover needs to be watched and returned
- The garden needs to be turned again
-The garden needs to be enriched
-The garden needs a plan
-The psudoplanters need to have drainage holes drilled

And I really tried. But Friday night I tried to go chair shopping only to discover that you can't go chair shopping in the evening! You can't. I was bummed. I had to watch The Hangover instead that was funny was not as pants pissingly hi-larious as I had been promised. I did however, get it off my list. Yay.

Saturday I went chair shopping. I haven't gone furniture shopping since 1997. My problem then was having more taste than money. I have the same problem in 2010 except that the furniture is now even more expensive than it was in 1997 and my taste has not change and now I have even less money. I still want what I can't have. I have corinthian leather tastes on a genuine man made leather budget.

If I like it, I can't afford it. If I think its crap its right in my price range. Do you have any idea how depressing it is to go into a discount, wholesale, clearance house,  factory blow-out, total liquidation  outlet and still not be able to afford anything? I saw a chair I liked strictly on its looks and discovered it was like sitting on a concrete bench, too bad it would have looked great with my couch.

I took a step back and thought about other options. Consignment! I've seen things I've really wanted at such stores and always said that the minute I actually needed anything that I would come right back and buy something. When I was not in the market they had the perfect chair! I remember it. Now when I am in the market? Almost nothing and the one possible was in worse shape than the chair I want to replace.

Bygones.

So Saturday I drove a lot and didn't really get anything off my list. I paid the guy to mow my lawn. Saturday night I made dog cookies with the cutest cookie cutters evah

Cute no? Well, in reality they proved to much cuter than their cookies. The bunny is passable but the ducky. ..

The ducky looks like a penguin, which would be fine, except that penguins are not seasonally appropriate! Its very confusing to the dog.

HAPPY    SUNDAY    !!!!!!

HAPPY     SATURDAY     !!!!!

Friday Cat Blogging

Best Laid Plains

I am very proud of me. I survived the first day of The Plan.

And I puff, puff am in puff such bad shape. I mean really, gasp, choke. I was in better shape but then it got cold and I wore layers. Today I did my first full day of The Plan. I walked Dogger in the AM, ate a protean bar for lunch, walked Dogger after work and ate a relatively not entirely
unhealthy dinner, but I will do better - and then rode my bike around the neighborhood and then walked Dogger again in the PM.

The walking I was find with. The bike rides nearly killed me.

Enter the puffing and the gasping. I even had to cross train! I haven't crossed trained on a bike ride since this time last year. So I shouldn't be entirely surprised but still, the gasping and puffing and hacking were really embarrassing. I'm riding, I'm riding , I'm riding and I was feeling great and then out of nowhere is this  heavily camouflaged hill  appeared and I had to cross train my way up it or along it as it was. I was very disappointed in me.

I did ride my bike the rest of the way home, so there is hope for me.

Speaking of other things that are disappointing me. This week I collected about a quarter of my usual haul of recyclables, I'm a little embarrassed to put it out the curb. The guys are going to think I got my life together or something, in my mind they make up stories about us to explain our weekly output and they  they made up an interesting story to explain my suddenly over flowing cans and bottles bin .

I mean, its interesting to just decide to pick of cans and bottles but its more interesting to sup-posit that I suddenly started binging because of some hugely interesting personal drama. My sudden lack of output might be because I was unable to gather Friday through Sunday but that should have translated into really big hauls early in the week but it didn't. I also noticed that someone mowed my best picking grounds. The nerve. It does look much more tidy now. Maybe I also collected all the available recyclables too. It could happen, some of what I harvested had been there for quite some time, I mean, I found some genuine antiques and maybe I just hit the recycling wall.

The good news is that we are looking down a three day weekend and a religious, family centered holiday. The winos will be miserable and I will have a full bin.

I am a bad garden Mommy.

Have you ever heard of broccaflowers? I have achieved broccoli flowers. Once you flower, you are officially done. I pulled off the other brocs thgat had formed and vowed to next time to do better.

However, from a strictly I Like Flowers because They are Pretty standpoint, my broc is now a very pretty little plant, one that I welcome.

Pretty, No? I have to say I was very disappointed in  myself  for letting it get to this point , but the plant will grow a new head at some point and frankly, I'm not as close to this plant as I was. To be honest, I really didn't bond with these plants the way I bonded with the plants last spring and summer. I think in a few weeks I'm going to pull these out anyway to properly get the garden dredged up for the 2010 planting.

Shock and amazement, my little garden has changed even in the last few days. My green beans are going at it like gangbusters and every day I have a new sprout working its way up to join its much taller brothers. I planted them at the same time and yet there are days of difference in the timing of their initial earth breaking. I had not thought about this.  I think this weekend I am going to repot quite a few of the green beans into larger homes. The luffas have not yet put in an appearance yet. Hmm.

My flowers are getting taller and slightly stronger every day as well. They haven't gotten to the point that they need to be re-potted yet but they will need to be thinned before too long and there is starting to be difference in the varieties of the plants. It's kind of neat. It would be even neater if I had identified them when I planted them or if the seed packages had better pictures of the plants' leaf structure.

Leave only foot prints

Does anyone know where I can get juvenile but yet some what mature honeysuckle plants? And before you make the knee jerk suggestion that I just go dig it up because I have tried the digging-it-up method and it  was not easy and then the little bit I did get up did not survive . I  failed there, its  bloody weed and from what my meager online research, I should not have been able to kill it.

And no, they don't sell it at the Wally World or at  actual reputable  nurseries. The garden glitterati does not see honeysuckle as a plant you intentionally grow, it is seen as a plant they can tell you how you get rid of so you can replace it with a "real" plant, one they will happily sell you.

So, you either have honeysuckle naturally occurring where you are or you do not and I do not.  Which means, I am going to  have  to miraculously come across  a nice big patch of it and dig it up. And then not kill it.  This time I'm going to stay prepared and carry a shovel and supplies to deal with a great big clump of it and transport it.

 The polite, take-a-cutting method of  weenie, delicate, takes-more-skill- than-it-looks method of propagating did not work for me. Its tough plant and you have to show it you aren't afraid of digging its ass up. It respects shows of strength. I just need to find a source where I can just dig it up without worrying about getting busted for trespassing - which I have avoided in the past by either A) Waving my camera or in tougher situations, say those with  posted signs or B) claiming ignorant touristophila while waving my camera.

It is however, difficult to wave your camera around while digging up a fibrous, root-y plant on some ones back forty.  You walk around with a camera on not-your-property and you have an excuse to be there and you can say It is so beautiful,  I take only pictures! you walk around with a shovel and it send a potentially more felonious message.

Tuesday, the gateway to Wednesday

Dogger has run out of cookies and I saw this coming and I said to myself "I need to make Dog Cookies Monday night".  So I had it in my mind all day that I would eat dinner and then get started on the cookies but then I was still hungry after dinner and I thought about all the apples I ate over the weekend and I thought to myself that what would  be good would be another apple and since apples don't grow on trees around here, I had to go to the store to get some. I went to the store and bought pre-packaged dog treats! I feel so dirty.

I also bought raisins and cereal and for .50. two pieces of only slightly dried out chocolate cake. I ate one of the cakes and two of the little packages of raisins. I could bought two slices of coconut cake, but that's much higher in calories than cake without coconut. I wind up feeling virtuous in the end because I bought the chocolate cake instead.

I felt so bad about the cake, I bought Dogger the bacon treats. I was looking through my coupon envelope that I so wisely carry with me now and I discovered another dog treat coupon that featured the word FREE. I like free and I think Dogger will too. Gawd knows its the only way she would ever have access to munchies that cost $3.89 for two treats. I think they are some sort of chewy treat/toy thing that she will probably enjoy.

Dogger just realized that House is a rerun and I since I am not otherwise occupied, I should be out walking her. Life sucks for her. I all ready took her on  a car trip this evening so what does she want? And, it got cold again after a gorgeous weekend and now I feel like pouting and I don't want to go for another walk.

I thought after my little break that I would come back to a huge mess but there was some good news on the  cans and bottles front - after three days away, there were very, very few cans and bottles out there for me to gather! I went out twice today thinking it was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel but there turned out to be almost nothing out there, which I guess is good but at the same time, where is all the crap? Did someone do something to the great winos of Southeast Raleigh? Did they all get saved over the weekend and swear of demon rum? Did they switch to IV drugs?  If not, are they doing their drinking elsewhere? Inquiring minds want to know.

Garden 2010 Update 3

yes boys and girls its time for another exciting update! And this week? The paint has dried! I repeat, the paint has dried We have an exciting new development : Watching Grass Grow!

Moving them into more direct light seems to have been a good idea. I  also spent the weekend away from them, which was provision of the TRO that the judge granted the plants. Apparently they don't like me peering at them with a flashlight for hours on end! Who knew? I thought they would appreciate the attention as well as the benefits of all the added CO2 my visits provided.   They claimed that I creeped them out. Whatever.

You know, I don't care really, I mean one day very soon they are going to wish they had me standing over them all the time protecting them from danger. I'll get my revenge though, I know who called the law on me and when it comes time to cull the herd I know who's going first. Count on it.

Despite our difference of oppion, the flowers are doing exceptionally well for things less than an inch tall. I'm really pleased with how well they are coming up and that they are coming up at all is a lovely surprise in itself.  The poppies are doing really, really well.

Week 2

Orange poppies, red flower vine, tall white flower

Various flowers

Pink and orange poppies

Look at those sexy, sexy little sprouts! Aren't they gorgeous? They are all gorgeous but they will clearly have to be thinned at some point along the way. I thought about just saying "let nature take its course" but I'm afraid that might mean "they all suffocate and starve" instead of two or three thrive and four or five  go on to their planty reward. I think you're supposed to wait until there is real leaf growth and I don't think those things count as leafs. Leaflets maybe but I'm not going to get rid of any yet, I'm going to see who which ones are the strongest first before I start pulling things out.

I also planted a few veggies as well.  I'm hoping for a good show here but so far they aren't doing as nearly as well as the flowers. I had thought I would have more sprout than I have, and that I would have acres of green beans but its not looking like that. I may have to plant more, but it is early yet and I want to give them a chance to rebound. The beans are doing  better than the luffas.

Greenbeans and unsprouted luffas

-- House passes health care reform, the most sweeping social legislation in more than four decades.

from CNN.com

HAPPY    SUNDAY    !!!!!

HAPPY    SATURDAY     !!!!!