Thursday, November 29, 2007

MS Word Underlines My Name In Red.

It should surprise no one who used to get e-mail from me that I am capable of churning out 50,000 words. But all on one subject other than myself, for an entire month? This has never happened before. Until late last night.

Official NaNoWriMo 2007 Winner


I'm not done with my story, it may take another 30,000 to get it to the point where it doesn't read like CSI: Dick And Jane, but--and I like big buts, I cannot lie--I probably won't finish it until January, as I've got other things going on that really need me.

More things in life whould declare you a winner after you've put in enough time on them. Blogs should like, declare you a winner after you post. That'd kick ass. Cars should declare you a winner after you drive them ten miles. There's a toothbrush that smiles when you've used it long enough, but that doesn't count, I want to win at something like raking. There's gotta be 50,000 leaves outside.
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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I Watch Shrek For The Wrong Reasons.

I like Puss, the little Antonio Banderas cat, and I'm guessing a lot of people do, because ABC used Puss to bribe me into watching Shrek The Halls, some odd holiday fart joke that was on TV tonight.

I realize they only had about 19 minutes to work with, and so they focused on the one winter holiday that has a costume, so everybody could dress up and Puss could become mesmerized my the jingly pom-pom on the end of his hat and.... My feelings for Puss In Boots are special ones. I have to clean up the drool now.

I just...I just thought there'd be one character in all of Shrek's friends who celebrated something else. You know, so Disney could market a plush Donkey with a dreidel, Fiona with a sun gong, or Puss with Kwanzaa books. But no, we get another meaning of Christmas story that's like, don't kick your friends out in the snow, because apparently they have no place else to go.

If only Puss was in the Chrismahanukwanzakah ad, then I could just watch that and be happy.

(For as long as it stays up, YouTube has the best part of Shrek The Halls, Puss telling his tale of Christmas. Enjoy. I know I did. I've...made a mess again.)
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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I love the Swiss.

A magazine psychic once told me I'd end up living in Switzerland--the same guy that told me I left my king in India and had a wonky pancreas--and I can understand that, because I *heart* snow and all, but what I love even more than Swiss Miss hot chocolate and puddings are their knives. Not the ones with the corkscrew, just the classic little knives like the one I hid in 2-XL in case I had to battle ninjas.

My Swiss Army Knife bob haircut was sorta legendary in my family, you know. Yes, I gave myself a straight, even, total Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction hairstyle (of course I have a picture of it). It was a long time ago, I don't have that kind of patience anymore. It should come as no surprise that the scissors--or rather the spring that makes the scissors work properly--broke. It was a very sad night, during the Powerpuff Girl doll project of 1999, just...poof, right in the middle of Bubbles' shoe.

The scissor to my second knife, the red one, finally went on Friday. It was just one of those days in general...I was on Sudafed, I had PMS, I was 7,000 words behind on my NaNoWriMo project, my hands were cracking and bleeding on family members and flatware, and I still had yet to smash my head into a doorknob. No, not deliberately, but it happened. I'm not proud. Or at least, I wasn't proud when I woke up. I was proud of the cats for staying by me to make sure I wasn't dead. Unless...nah, they weren't that hungry.

The hands will be okay in March, the bump on my head went down, the hormones and psuedoephedrine left my system, and I not only caught up on my story I'm only 2,000 words off the goal, but my scissors, they are all still broked. I was sad.

But no, the brilliant, genius Swiss...they make replacement springs.

I would like it to be known that of all the things I was given on Christmas Eve 1993, that black Swiss Army Knife is the thing I have used consistently, and not even to slice the tips of my fingers off or hack holes in my walls, really. The socks? Don't get to wear those colors often. The...Eh. I think that was all I got that year. Socks and my black Swiss. This year I get my black Swiss back! And my Red one! I thought after Helio won Dancing With The Stars my day could not possibly get any better...but I am going to get both of my scissors back. That'll be handy, eh? EH? Suzie Swiss Scissorhands.

edit: I will have extra springs for the "small" classic knives, so, y'know, I can hook you up.
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

72 Days

It's 72 days until my mum is eligble for Medicare, and today we both--at separate times--saw the delightful new anti-smoking ad with the guy in a park...with one leg. He goes on about how many colors his leg turned, and how he ignored the smell, and apparently cigarettes migrated into his leg and clotted there and now he has no leg, but he started smoking in the park 40 years ago. Don't smoke, kids.

Gosh, thanks, Ad Council, I want my mum to see a one-legged version of Aqualung while her leg is all weird. Thanks.

Oh, um, that reminds me, happy Thanksgiving everybody! No, really, I mean that, I probably won't get the chance to wish you a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow because I'll be unconscious. Pie.
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Sunday, November 18, 2007

A Good Reason To Keep The Floor Clean

You never know when you might have a party. Here's the top of my head showing the top of my neice's head where we keep the glasses. She's an excellent drummer.


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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Injuries, when set to music, are fun.

It's been a while since I gave you some music videos to watch...right? These are like, the best videos ever. I saw them all around the age of ten and they changed my life. Not really changed, I guess, because having watched Laurel & Hardy and Benny Hill from the time I was three, I sort of always dug people getting hit by stuff. Much like my love for intoxicated characters in movies and TV shows, things are just better if stuff is going crazy. For other people.

Love's Been A Little Bit Hard On Me by Juice Newton shows why you should never trust anyone to close your car door.




Cold Shot by Stevie Ray Vaughn shows why it's okay to love your guitar.





She's Right On Time by Billy Joel has to be seen on YouTube, but it is so worth the trip over there...emphasis on trip. If you like madcap slapstick with explosions and good music, this is for you. Yes.

I used to laugh so hard at these videos. This should give you some insight to why I think it's funny when stuff falls on me.
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Friday, November 16, 2007

The Cleaning Ninja: Episode 1,986

I cleaned the kettle.

Holy hell I can't believe we drink from that thing.

I bet the coffee will taste horrible now.

*sigh*

Did not wear the nice gloves to clean the kettle; now I have steel wool splinters in three of my fingers.
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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Penance.

I should start by pointing out that yes, I do have a certain degree of OCD, but I am my own walking cognitive behavior therapist and can control it, within reason and with the use of the kick ass colorist gloves I found under the sink. I don't say this often because I have been told I either cannot possibly control it all by myself, or that I just don't have it. I no longer get into quibbles about that, I don't care. It's like when the neighbors see me standing up and think I'm just not cutting limbs off my trees because they haven't pointed out those limbs to me enough. Same thing. I know me better than anyone else, and I don’t expect anyone else to get every little thing about me (like how much I love those gloves I found under the sink)—I wouldn’t want them to, just like I also don’t want people to take the fact that I don’t have an ice pick sticking out of my head as evidence that I’m perfectly fine when I say I have a migraine.

That said, I cleaned the bathroom today.

The bathroom wasn't horrible or anything, no, but the rug had died years ago and was decomposing all over the place. We have a ceramic tile floor in the bathroom, but potential frostbite and the drawback of having an echo chamber led us to put down the nice plush gray bathroom rug, which at the time of its death had a sort of reddish polka dot pattern and had lost its non-skid backing. The backing wasn't actually lost as much as stuck to the tile. So I scraped the floor after I'd folded up the rug and stuffed it all into a bag just like the last victim. Having scraped and swept the floor, I then got it into my head to wash the floor. Only, I don't use a mop. I use a sponge and bucket of water and whatever chemicals I can find (hence the greatness of the gloves). Electrasol dishwasher gel is fabulous for the kitchen floor, btw. It gets that crunk off dishes, and it gets that crunk off the floor under the fridge.

I always liked cleaning. Hell, I used to have to be physically removed from the stove on holidays because I loved cleaning so much. I have the chemical asthma and dermatitis to show for it. The side effects of my misspent youth can be a drawback, especially when my hands crack and start bleeding all over the nice clean curtains.

Those who have been inside my house may think I'm spouting lies because maybe it doesn't look that great. I'm all heaving acid and breaking out and keeling over and for what? There's still a wisp of a cobweb in the left corner of the hallway that I either missed or left because I believe spiders have squatter’s rights. I will tell you why that is. Part of the reason I even brought up the OCD in the beginning is because as a child, I was really obsessive about cleaning, but the dirt, it would come back. Again and again. I would vacuum the hallway, and some yutz would track pine needles into the house and not even notice or care what he’d done. It was pointless, and eventually I gave up because no one cared. From then on, I vowed I would clean, but not at the expense of my skin and lungs. It was superficial and half-assed and as I like to call it, “The illusion of clean.” There was no point scrubbing the bathroom when every morning after the first person to use it was done there was toothpaste vapor all over the mirror, and drips, and stains, and hair that I could not identify as coming off of any part of me.

The Sparkling Wave Pine-Sol I used on the floor reminded me of his cheap aftershave.

Why was there a tiny bottle of fruity Pine-Sol under the sink anyway? We didn't buy it. Was it planted there, knowing I would be the only fool to try using it to remove the stains from the tile behind the toilet? That has to be it.

I have reclaimed the bathroom once more. I even threw the shower curtain into the washing machine. I can come on here and brag about it for roughly three more minutes, and then I expect the tiles to start gathering dust again. I'm not the only one who cleans the bathroom, mind you, but this time around, I'm the one who did, so you get to relive it with me in a random crazy kind of way. Nan has thrown her knee out of whack and my mother...well, read back a few posts. To quote Warren Zevon, it ain’t that pretty at all.

November 15 is the day all the women bloggers who are childfree come out and say, well, whatever they want, but I'm using this post to give you a very good idea why I am, as they say, childfree. I have my cats, of course, and they're very clean and they don't track crap into the house or draw on the walls or exhale while they're flossing their teeth, plus they like my taste in music and movies and games, and I can dress them for under $5. If I need to show why I prefer cats to humans any further, my Fluffy One came in when the floor was dried and I was finishing with the curtain. He looked around, sniffed the air, stood up to the toilet and the sink, inspected every corner, and then looked at me and said, "Brrm?" There isn't a human I know who ever said anything so nice to me.
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Monday, November 12, 2007

I'm not sure Darth Maul should be the innermost Sith nesting doll.

I like Star Wars. You know this well, I'm sure. Right? Right. Yes, I loves me the space opera, and had my ISP not dropped alt.fan.porkins, the newsgroup I created to honor the greatest character to come out of those movies, my love would be very apparent indeed.

These days I limit my collection to looking at RebelScum.com and saving the pictures. Aye, hard times = no new little plastic friends for me. But it's okay, because my display was starting to take on the look of a Japanese subway car.

Now, Nan and her thing for Russian nesting dolls rubbed off on me. We've only gotone nesting doll between us, a bunch of black cats holding pumpkins that we found in Woolworth before they closed. (This post is full of injustice, first Woolworth, then afp, oh, it's unfair!)

Looking at it now, I realize it was only a matter of time before someone came up with Star Wars nesting dolls, but I never, ever, ever could have expected them to call them Chubbies.



Will someone really go bragging, "I've got Wookiee Chubbies!" and not get arrested? Time will tell.

I for one would very much like a nesting doll of X-Wing pilots, featuring the chubbiest of all, my man Porkins.
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Saturday, November 10, 2007

It only makes sense if you know why.

Things like this happen for a reason. I'm sure of it.


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Friday, November 09, 2007

Fixating on the stupid.

Secure Horizons, the HMO affiliated with AARP in this area, had promised my mother they'd rush an information kit to her...three weeks ago. This week, she got a big envelope from them, which contained a postcard she could fill out for her super-duper information package which will be rushed to her...as soon as they get the postcard with all of her address and everything all over a postcard for anyone to read.

I understand the concept of *headdesk*, I really do.

My mother has to enroll in a Medicare supplement by December. When she was on the phone with Secure Horizons (three weeks ago), they told her their least expensive plan required her going down to Chinatown. In my head, I heard a line from GTA III, and because I'm tired right now, and because you may know the line I'm tallking about....

"Somebody call a medic!"

Do I give a crap about AARP at this moment? No, I do not. Poking around on the website (because I am not waiting for the next information kit), it doesn't even look like she'd be able to go to the local hospital, only the hospital with Towel Lady, the woman who transferred from the late lamented Pelham Bay General and told me it wouldn't be such a big deal if I lost my breast when I was 14. (I mean, I get that, I got that then, but it's an insanely stupid thing to say to a child you don't know. It's an insanely callous and stupid thing to say to anyone.)

Oh, modern healthcare in America, you give me so much material.
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Tuesday, November 06, 2007

I cannot blame the planets.

Thursday, the day Mercury went direct, returning us the cosmic normality level of a probability factor of one to one, my car died. This was a normal occurrence up until a few years ago, when I realized that the car alarm designed to keep the car from being driven was so eager to do its job, it didn't know when to stop. After we got a new battery, I never had a dead car again. Which makes this latest drain all the more tragic. There's a button, on the doorframe, which lets the car know the door is closed. It never occurred to me--and maybe you've never thought about this either--that the button could break, and when it did, the car would sit in the driveway doing the automotive equivalent of yelling, "Hey! Hey! Hey!"

The car, however, is soundproof, and I failed to wait the full ten seconds after I slammed my door to see if the interior lights had gone off. This day the button broke, I guess they didn't, because the lights came on when I recharged the car (OMG, my uncle rocks, he gave me a charger 12 years ago and it has never gone to waste) and continued to stay on. The car also kept telling me the door was open. Loud dinging to me is like I suppose being hit over the head with a wet screaming baby who is holding bells and a cuckoo clock that scratches its beak down a chalkboard every second to a person with a severe migraine. That is, I almost shot my car on the way to the service station. This is similar to the reason I don't do well with a metronome, but that's another story.

While the button was repaired--I love my service station so much for all they've done over the years I would hug them but that would be weird and I'd get smudges on my back--my mother and I had to walk to the store I was planning to drive to, because to put it bluntly, we were out of toilet paper. Those who know us very, very well know what an odd, out-of-character thing this is, and now I fully understand why my mother stashes those two rolls that always fall down and wedge in the dispenser. I also learned not to lose my temper with the toilet paper dispenser any more, but that too is another story.

Now, my mother has what I refer to as a bad leg. What it actually is, is a series of hernias that has cut off the circulation so bad that she breaks out in leg ulcers, and this year, she's got two fighting for the title of more annoying section of the ankle. She's eligible for Medicare in three months, and she's hellbent on not doing anything radical like having a doctor check it out and possibly make it all worse until she has coverage. AARP still has yet to send her either package of information on Medicare supplements they swore they'd rush right out to her a month ago. I will not forget this, AARP.

My mother should not be walking, and I actually should not be lifting. I not like to whine, but you all know of my hiatal hernia, and generally how that goes away is if you don't lift anything. Like, say, a 24-pack of toilet paper. So last weekend my mother and I sort of spent dead. My car, upon being picked up by the two of us, laughed. I swear, I heard it. Luckily, the service station did not ask me if I was fit to drive, because had I said more than, "Thank you," they would have detected the slurring. My eye has also been closing lately, and I can joke and say it's my Forest Whitaker impression, but if I was on the road with me, I'd change lanes and get as far away from me as possible as soon as possible.

Monday I drove into a pole. It wasn't a surprise, I mean, I saw the pole, and my eyes were both open at the time, however I didn't see that the pole--holding up the great big light over my car--had a base that extended out far enough that my lovely Empire State license plate got bent. The plastic frame also got cracked, and that is why I choose plain, unremarkable frames for my license plates, because while I remember all the good times we had together, it's not like I'm going to, you know...glue it back together and put it over my computer.

Really.

Being descended from Nan, I know we're not so dainty that little things like hernias and ulcers and dizziness and total inability to carry on a conversation are going to take us out that easy. Nan pretty much does double the amount of stuff Mum and I do, and she still has time to write and make out with the cats even when her legs fall off, which the dog enjoys because she's a maniacal foot-licker. I've convinced myself that everything will be fine. Even if I had trouble swallowing a French fry tonight because my esophagus has that pesky stomach wedged in it.

I also signed up for this year's NaNoWriMo, because I had a book to write anyway, and this gives me a pretty good excuse reason. I have 9,596 words written and not one person has been stabbed in the eye with a beer pretzel, been possessed by a transvestite vampire, traveled to another dimension, or engaged in random sexy hook-ups. Yet. I think it even all makes sense, which is wild.
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Friday, November 02, 2007

Yo, Holmes!

Oh, I'll never get tired of that joke. There's a new comet that just appeared seemingly out of nowhere. I read about it the night it rained, and figured the cloudy weather would continue until this new comet was long gone. But no, I've seen it! I've photographed it! I'm about to subject you to one of the photos I took!

Comet Holmes

What? This is what it looks like. Until I get an attachment for my camera to hook to my telescope, this is my official photo of Comet Holmes. And a UFO.

No, no, it's not a UFO, that's a splatter of my brain, caused by too many lights polluting my view.
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