Trick or Treat?

If you watch TV for longer than three minutes, you might be familiar with the ads for the new 3 Musketeers Mint candy...thing. The ads show a woman eating a long candy bar that makes it snow or something because mint means snow! Very much like Peppermint Patties bring on hallucinations of ski lifts.

For a few weeks, we looked in our stores for these seemingly wondrous things, because if there's anything we need, it's candy. And possibly a blizzard. I finally found a bag of bite-size 3 Musketeers Mint candy things at the Rite-Aid Halloween sugar-fest. Me, buying candy? Something is wrong with the planets.

3 Musketeers Mint taste exactly like Peppermint Patties.

However, even the small Peppermint Patties are bigger than these 3 Musketeer Mint things. The name is bigger than the candy. The candy is a one-inch square. That's unfair, if you ask me. I just get into eating candy and it's gone.

I have eaten five 3 Musketeer Mint things in the past hour. It's not snowing yet, unless you take my perpetual seborrhea into account, and I wish you wouldn't, because it freaks me out. Now all I can think of is how many Peppermint Patties I used to eat as a kid, and I wonder what happened to the wrappers. I was going to use them as tiny book covers, man! Anyone who has seen B. Original must realize how ahead of my time I was to consider making books out of candy wrappers. Retro '70s candy wrappers at that, it would've been fabulous.

Happy Halloween, I hope your sugar buzz makes you as high as me!

Trick or Treat?

Dear flashy television show,

You know who you are, you crazy show. Stop it. Just stop it with the bright white flash at every cut. Your sponsors need to stop that too, because I don't want to watch your show anymore. The flashing patterns are telling me to kill, they're telling me to maim.

I'm coming for you, horrible television flashiness. If I can get off the floor.

Dear flashy television show,

Is it cannibalism if it tastes so good?

And a hundred more! (After all, hazmat crews aren't happy unless they have loads of smoke to dance around in. So I've heard.)

Is it cannibalism if it tastes so good?

The Great Tragedy.

The one I looked forward to seeing first thing in the morning, that always guaranteed to wake me up and warm my soul has lost its handle.



Twenty-three years is a pretty good record for a coffee mug.

Sure, with all the problems in the world, an out-of-season reindeer and bunny mug that was probably coated in lead paint seems small and unimportant, but that was my mug, and that mug fueled most of what I've done since 1984. I remember the Christmas it was given to me, I'd made a load of Pillsbury sugar cookies and for some reason I had the song Free Nelson Mandela running through my head all day. At that point I wanted to be some sort of 5th grade crime-fighting Martha Stewart karaoke champion, and the fact that this mug came with its own coaster that doubled as a lid turned me on.

You know I glued it back together. But I have no faith in the Krazy Glue, and not wanting to get completely intimate with a cup of boiling hot coffee, my reindeer mug now sits on top of my computer, but now the something hot and black it contains is a little plush cat.

I shall never love another mug the way I loved this one. No really, it's...not healthy.

The cake pictured was what my mother came up with for my birthday this year. It was a slice of white cake, lemon pie filling, strawberries, Cool Whip, sprinkles, and pure pain for anyone with their own teeth. I had said I liked all of those things, and I have to admit they did not taste entirely bad together.

The Great Tragedy.

Pining for the little birds.

Halfway through my puppy's walkies, I heard the squawking of many crows. I haven't heard that in a while, lack of trees and loads of West Nile Virus have made my neighborhood vulture-less for quite some time. I happened to look up to see if they were heading right for me, and they weren't...they were busy having a fight with a red-tailed hawk.

I think I have noted every time I've seen a hawk on the Internet, so it never gets old. The fact that this hawk was involved in a noisy smackdown in my pine tree just made it that much more interesting to me.

I did not get a good picture of the hawk, as it flew away while this one of its butt was saving. Behind those pinecones, I assure you there is a bird that was so big, I could see it a block away.

I...can't say I'm sorry it left, but it was nice to see.

Pining for the little birds.

I Like My Environment.

I became obsessed with not mucking up the planet at a very young age. No one told me to, but I heard some catchy songs about acid rain and people starving in the desert, and my favorite movies were Blade Runner and Planet Of The Apes, plus I had a weird interest in fallen civilizations, so little by little I turned into the flaming hippie I am.

As a teenager, I sat around in a darkened room, not because I was moody (even though I was), or because I dug watching the bouncy lights on my stereo (even though I did), but because my house ran on two fuses and if I wanted my stereo and my computer, I couldn't have light. To add light would overload the circuit. My house taught me to be a conservationist. It also taught me to develop a little obsessive feeling that the house would burn down, but I see that as a good thing, because how else would I have seen all those episodes of Monty Python over and over if I wasn't up until dawn all alone every night?

My house isn't perfect, there was the oil spill of '04, when the oil tank under the patio disconnected itself from reality, and that followed the frozen pipe of doom that wasted a ridiculous amount of ice cold water, but overall this house has taught me what I need and what I don't need.

I don't throw out fallen leaves, I mulch them. My plants need the mulch, might as well use my own leaves. I can't afford loads of chemicals to treat anything, so I ward off the aphids with light oil and kill the weeds with boiling water.

I don't drive much. That's one way I've managed to not pollute. In this way, my migraines helped me save the Earth. Many people in my family haven't seen me in years, but hey, I prevented emissions!

I unplug everything I'm not using, not only to save money, but to keep my house from shortening the lives of the electronics. Even though the house was changed from two fuses to proper circuit breakers nearly twenty years ago, the wiring still demands a sacrifice once in a while.

I can stretch a three-inch scrap of paper to contain the notes for an entire month. It's not that I don't have paper to write separate things on, it's that I don't feel the need to write all big so everyone can see I need to remember to remind myself that I have to tape a movie and get the lotto numbers.

I'm still on the same four sets of rechargeable batteries for my radio, going on five years. Considering my radio uses two AAA's worth of power every three days, that's a lot of saved batteries. Yes, I have to recharge them off my house electricity, I'm not perfect. I haven't sent seven hundred-and-fifty alkaline batteries to the dump, though, that's something.

The low-wattage light bulbs we're all switching to with trace amounts of mercury in them are something, too, I just haven't figured out what, yet. They may make all my photos without a flash look green and creepy, but they've saved us a chunk of change we've used for...well, I guess not enough for healthcare, but we can eat!

Happy Blog Action Day, everyone. This post made me feel petulant and I'm sorry if it came through, but the whole purpose of Blog Action Day was to raise awareness for the environment--which some people think is perfectly fine and that thinking crosses over into places in my head where I am not funny and friendly and I don't want to go there because I do think the environment's going downhill as fast as my own house, but like with my house, I can only do what I can do and hope it helps. Another point of the day was to donate the day's earnings to charity, and well, from here? There are none. But I reused some packing today, and I still haven't gotten my faucet repaired, so I didn't waste any water today because no water comes out unless I use the sprayer. It's also cooling off so that's less power used to keep me from melting. Yay for natural air conditioning.

I Like My Environment.

Putting the new in news since....I forget.

I haven't really had anything very interesting to tell you. I mean, last week I aggravated my hernia, and that's not confetti-worthy. I tried to make it funny one night, but if I so much as thought about giggling, my dinner was all up in my ears, and spaghetti sauce does not feel good in the ears. I can't even say it's an aquired feeling.

While I wasn't writing I did add three things to the overflowing sidebar, first off is a link to subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments! Why? Um...well, I know I subscribed to remind me how much replying I've got to do (and I will, if I do it when I'm 90, I will).

There's also a link to the one article I've written on Helium. My writing is worth exactly one penny as of this moment, and that would make me very warm and fuzzy indeed if my hernia was not giving off more heat that my chest knows what to do with.

Hot chests right into nerds. What will happen next? The Formidable Nerd knows what will happen next, yes. RASSM's pea-farmer has become a reporter of nerdly news, and his site loads really fast, you could say...at lightspeed.

That brings me to the tangent about the sky looking way better when it's freezing out. Not that it's exactly freezing, but one weekend I'm wearing shorts and the next weekend I'm wondering why I'm wearing shorts because my knees have caught cold.

This is Venus and Saturn in Leo, and it was over my house this morning. I'm pretty sure it was over everyone's home, so if you didn't see it, this is what was up there (with the exception of my phone line, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have that where you are):



(This post is what happens when I don't plan what I'm going to write ahead of time.)

Putting the new in news since....I forget.

An important lesson for us all.

Do you know what to do when you start feeling funny? This gem from Japan will make sure you never forget what it means when your bottom feels funny.



I am a pants man, you know. I...take pride in that. It's not much, I know, but some days it's all I have.

An important lesson for us all.

Friday Freakiness

Okay, I forget if I've mentioned that the neighborhood, having gotten uppity about stray cats, has seen a lot more field mice lately. This is dodgy speak for we had a few mice in the house. They came for the catnip, and stayed for the dog kibble. I swear, they threw catnip all over the place one morning. Which, I guess, is why my slinky guy was so kind to the one mouse he carried out of the house and let go a few weeks back. I never knew a cat that believes in catch and release, whatta guy.

We've got these "humane" traps that tip and lock closed when a breeze blows past them, and for a while we've had no takers on the bits of muffin or cookie or cheeto or kibble we put in there, but today...today there were so many ants in the trap that it tipped closed.

Why I didn't take a picture, I don't know. You would have screamed along with me. I don't know why I scream at the sight of loads of ants in places I don't expect them, but it's one of those nasty side-effects of being a girl, I guess. It all started when I picked up a paper cup that had juice in it...no, it's too disturbing to go back to.

I can't believe that many ants can hang out and get along, really. Ants rock. Outside of my house. Far, far outside.

Friday Freakiness

Three Thursday Thingys

Generally I try not to get attached to services on the Internet because they are upgraded to crap or taken away entirely two seconds later. Like the TV listings on Yahoo, which used to tell me what was actually going to be on and it would do it so fast, I'd have time to catch the movie we wanted.

I digress. Here are three things I've been using, and I'm not claiming I love them utterly because, you know.

Christian Montoya made a neat little timer, and if I type in say, "30" and hit go, it will let me know when I've taken too long looking for the letter that comes after N in my name.

Vixy is a service than converts FLV videos, like those you find on YouTube, into DVD-ready AVI and MOV files, or just grabs the audio as an MP3. It's free, and before the RIAA and MPAA takes interest in me, I've only used this to save copies of my neice eating her chair and taking out a water bowl.

Speaking of certain snoopy corporations getting stuffed, Anonymouse is a rather helpful website that lets you visit websites without those websites seeing your IP, and you know, possibly blocking you. I'm just sayin'.

You can easily picture me with a self-imposed time limit, watching Tay Zonday on YouTube, can't you?

Three Thursday Thingys

Wayback Wednesday

If you're like me, your entire life revolved around a show called Soild Gold. Well, okay, maybe not my entire life, that distinction went to the videos on U68. I may not be able to readily tell you why 3 × (d + 4) - 11 = 321 - 23, but by God I can tell you which video had Robert Palmer making the really cool house of cards.

Even if you're not like me, the SNL parody of Soild Gold needs to be seen.

Wayback Wednesday

Things I Learned Tuesday.

The first thing I learned today is that I no longer speak Spanish. I am ashamed. I had a conversation with one of our neighbors, and as he was leaving he said, "Hasta La Vista."

I will demonstrate, in handy emoticons, what my reaction to this was:

:D "Okay, you too!" :D

There is a point when brain auto-pilot just doesn't hack it, and I now feel like more of a mindless hick than I did that time the eye doctor asked me my address. Because, you know, eye doctors don't usually ask where you live unless they want to come to your house and remove your corneas.

The next thing I learned is that grass will grow better in areas where it is not needed or wanted. My driveway, for example, had grass high enough to hide a Snapple bottle full of urine (I know what urine looks like, trust me) and when grass gets that high, it's time for fire.

I learned that I don't own a flamethrower. I don't even know a fire eater who I could aske to come blow on the junk growing in the cracks.

I learned that boiling water or vinegar and salt works great to kill leaves, but not always roots.

I learned that everybody misses Alexander's.

I also learned that my puppy loves our neighbor up on the corner more than me. The little furry hussy.

But the best thing I didn't really learn today was that my neighbors are frikkin' lovely people. No one had to tell me my crappy stubs of dead grass looked better than the bamboo field we had there, but they did. I mean, yes, slighly improved crap does look better than utter crap, and it's nice that they see that.

I earned my pizza.

:D Okay, you too, everyone! :D

Things I Learned Tuesday.

Notes from Monday.

I get my comic strip done while whatever the primetime show o'the day is on, today that's Dancing With The Stars.

The only reason for that set-up is that you'll understand why I burst out, "Mais Que Nada is a samba, how can they dance a mambo to Mais Que Nada?! The words are 'Get out of my way, I want to dance the samba,' what kind of treachery is this?!"

I never did have the temperament for watching competitions. Depending on what entertains you, I'm either no fun when watching figure skating, or I'm full of comedy gold. The year the Miss America contestants sang the Prince song Play In The Sunshine I think was the most disastrous. I was asked to never be present when another Miss America pageant was on TV. I can't say that saddened me.

Notes from Monday.