Things I Have To Restrain Myself From: cubeecraft.com

As someone with limited space to begin with, you wouldn't think I'd be eager to go filling up my room with more cute little effigies of pop culture characters. But I'm a girl. And cubeecraft.com has an Indiana Jones! Darth Vader, the TARDIS, presidential candidates, even Domo-Kun, they can come out of my computer and be part of the real world, where real people can see them and I can say, "Er, Domo-Kun, he's a...dude, it's Japanese."

Okay, so maybe it's just another way to invite more questions I can't answer, but they're cute, and if you don't count the cost of ink and paper, they're free! Just think if I'd made my Star Wars Action Figures this way! They'd be 1000x less crappy!

This diversion brought to you by the sad realization that there will probably never be a papercraft horse-headed naked dancing mushroom chef.

Things I Have To Restrain Myself From: cubeecraft.com

I Must Share The Horror

I made the picture as small as possible, but you can click it and make it bigger if you like to freak the hell out that things in pictures are coming through the screen to get you like I do.

I apologize for this, I really do.

But this latest catch of Domo-Kun the sunscreen, it was the largest thing since that bird. We'd just come home from gathering food and it's customary to dump certain things on the table between the house and the basement, while we figure out where to store the teabags. I was carting the bag of cat food into the house when I heard Mum say, "Look at that thing," and Nan agreed in the similar tone of someone witnessing something existing that should not be. I wasn't at all well, having injured the arch of my foot jamming on the brake after I zoned out and nearly ran a red light. So I stepped back outside not really interested in what I was going to see.

And then I saw it.

I've seen hornets before, yellowjackets are regular occurances, and the occasional large beetle buzzing along the roof of Domo-Kun hardly makes me blink anymore. But there was this great big three-inch long vespid instrument of fear trying to figure out how to escape the same sunscreen I too happened to be trying to get the hell out of as quickly as possible.

Of course I ran for the camera. Having the camera in between me and something that has a face and is looking at me sort of makes it all better...almost. Taking the pictures, though, I realized this mutant only wanted to get back out to its life.

So I unzipped the far panel of the sunscreen and guided the hornet out with a rake. I hope it remembers and calls off the invasion because we're mostly nice blokes.

In apology to you, dear reader, Natalie Dee's Megabee is way cuter to look at and explains how something like this ended up in my sunscreen.

I Must Share The Horror

The Calling Plan of Doom Just Wants To Play

I don't write about the movies we've seen to be all, "Ha! Rented it on the first day," or anything, it's just that this is all sort of a writing prompt. There are few other times I'm experiencing the same thing as other people in the same room, so I try to remember it by writing it down. I think this week I'll totally go off on the movies, though, because these are two that have been out for a while.

I can't brag about seeing One Missed Call for instance, because I don't know what the hell it was about it lost something in translation. The movie was very short, so they could have worked some more plot in there and still made it under 1:45, but apparently the makers were content with the idea that the calling plan of doom gives out free candies. Also, peepholes are still a bad idea.

I feel bad about watching Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer without my aunt there to love every eyelash in Ioan Gruffudd's head, but she was at home with her own copy this week and we were down to that or Charlie Wilson's War (which was good, though, we saw that the next night). On Saturday we like to see the world get saved in a fun way that has little to no repercussions in the future, so we watched the Fantastic Four. If you liked the first one, you will probably like this one as well. Although I have fond memories of those cartoons, I like the movie versions better than the Hanna-Barbera version, because the cartoon people had scary eyes...I remember my childhood like it was a weird drug trip. It wasn't, either, man, aside from the occasional chewable aspirin and candy cigarette. But there's a surfer, and he's silver, and he surfs through planets but he can heal people and he hangs ten like nobody's business and Ioan Gruffudd dances and cries and I have to find out if my aunt's seen it yet because I swear I could hear her saying, "AWW!" in varying pitches as the movie went along.

Apparently my hair is really cute this week. I've heard that my hair looks nice. I'll be talking about the Asian long-horn beetle, and before I can say infestation I'm cut off with a compliment to my hair. Honestly, all I've been doing is wetting my head a lot so I don't die, but I guess that look is in this year.

Other movies we saw were an '80s movie set in the '40s, with Crystal Bernard (of Wings!) and Annabeth Gish (from X-Files!) as...women...I think they were detectives, unless only one was, I came in on it. It was okay until the dog got it. This is how I rate my movies, people.

We didn't stick with Sometimes They Come Back...For More after one character, played by Faith Ford, argues that the pissed off man heading for the door can't go out after someone because it's 60 below. "If he can survive it, so can I!" Mr. I-wear-green-camo-in-snow snarls, and proceeds to stomp out into the snow. I mean, I know I shovel in a T-shirt, but 60 below?

The rest of the week my free time went to catching up on the gardening I couldn't do in the heatwave that tripled in size overnight during the insane rainstorm we got. I would like a little rain every few days, please. Not three weeks of no rain and then 24 hours straight of water that will end up mostly inside my house.

Then I saw a baby pigeon. Baby birds are so cute in a freaky my-mother-could-peck-your-eyes-out way. It was standing on top of Domo-Kun. Luckily it flew back up to the trees and not into the sunscreen or the house. Because that would have warranted a post of its own.

The Calling Plan of Doom Just Wants To Play

Every Time The Sun Rises, Domo-Kun Eats Another Bee.

The ladies who really wanted that ginormous brown sunscreen just outside the back door have sat in it a total of...an hour? The Puppy gets more use out of it, laying under the table in the dim brown-tinted sunlight.

To the right, you may be rather displeased to see what I believe is an extraterrestrial harvesting scout. I've seen a few of these over the years, once when I was twelve and much more likely to react by recklessly hurtling through the air to get away from The Thing On My Leg.


The weird-ass bugs that live in our neighborhood love it, though. Sure. They flock to it and can't get out, so we come out to a huge brown screened room full of flying insects. And ants. Sometimes the ants fly, too, but I haven't got the ability to take a really good photo of a flying ant. Bad enough the yellowjacket in the second photo went on to sting my Puppy in the foot. I think. They all look alike. They're also all dying by the sunscreen-load every day. I've had seven yellowjackets go to the great lawn and leaf bag morgue this month.


I can't be afraid of these things anymore when they're so fragile that the appearance of a great brown nylon thing kills them. Maybe it gets too hot, maybe they just can't find their way out and commit bee seppuku, I don't know, but my inner rabid environmentalist worries about the future of bees when my backyard has brought more death to them in one week than overturned trucks and cell phone towers.

All these bees and flying maniacs are upside down in the pictures not because they're dead, but because they're hanging from the ceiling of Domo-Kun.


The cats love the way Japanese beetles (or jitterbugs, or "those noisy bastards that end up in the water bowl") collect inside the sunscreen. The final picture shows the record number (so far) of three armor-shelled, blindly bouncing beetles. I took that picture surrounded by Japanese beetles. Twenty years ago, I would scream and run indoors and stay there for three days if I heard one of them bouncing off the siding. Now, I rescued one that got tangled up in the tied-back panel of screening.

Of course the panels of screening are tied back. If we didn't tie them back the cats and dog couldn't get in and out. Or the birds. Birds have flown in. Luckily, they fly back out again and don't cook themselves on the sun-heated pipes.

I sat inside the sunscreen one day...it was hot.

Every Time The Sun Rises, Domo-Kun Eats Another Bee.

Do Yourself In Project #97: The Sun Screen

A while back, when I was staggering around Home Depot like an extra in Zombie Gardeners 3, Mum got an eyeful of this huge screened-in gazebo thing that was the solution to all the world's problems.

We have this great big section of concrete outside of our house, with southwestern exposure. This means that when I set foot outside my back door, I am unconscious by the time the door slams behind me. As a kid I used to sit there, with the rest of the family, to get some sun. That was around when I began choking on food, but that's another story. Not really.

It was a hot sunny day this day we saw the Home Depot gazebo. Standing inside of it, as it stood inside Home Depot, did not cool me in the slightest. Also, the weight stamped on the box--which was coincidentally my own weight--rather put me off the idea of dragging it back to the car. We asked if it could be delivered to the house, and it could...for a price. Also, the box that weighs the same as me would be deposited on the sidewalk some 50 feet from where it actually needed to be. And it wasn't going to put itself together, either.

We did not get a screened gazebo thing that day.

Now, for some reason my family has purchased about seven light, non-permanent sunshades for the yard over the years rather than actually using all these butch building skills we have. They insist each one will be different...stronger. Each one usually self destructs by October, because you aren't supposed to leave them up the whole damn year. It takes me about fifteen minutes to put these things together, so I can only assume it would take me less time to take one apart for storage. Ah, the arrogance of my youth...it's slipping.

Brylane Home sent a catalog to my house. In this catalog, was a screened version of the ol' windsock on legs. In brown. Dark brown. The kind of dark brown that conceals spiders and hell knows what else as you walk through it at night...because you have to walk through it, because it is parked right outside the door of the house and only the cats and dog have the sense to just run directly at the screened panels to get through it rather than finding one of the two zippered "doors" that are made of black screening that you can't really see until you're bouncing off of it.

Of course we got it. It was on sale!

It took me twenty minutes to put together, because the sun was out and I was sort of dead as a result. Bees rushed to the cool shelter of The Sunshade before we even had the Velcro straps adjusted. They're not dumb, those bees. They don't help, either, they just hover, jeering at the humans trying to adjust the crooked seams. A bird flew into it too, and man was he surprised by all that screening! Almost as surprised as I was to have a bird flapping around my head as its friend sat on the roof of the sunshade loudly wondering where his flying companion went. The bird figured it out and flew back around the way it had come in soon enough, and I'm relieved because I've just about had it with worrying about birds this year.

Mum and Nan love the sunshade in all its dark and not-rain-resistant-at-all glory. I have nothing against the sunshade itself as it's a lovely sunshade, but I have the kind of crazy that rejects what I've realized is basically Domo-Kun sitting in between me and my trees. I've taken to saying hello to the bees that gather along the ceiling as I lurch through, and luckily The Puppy does not want to grab the sunshade and run around the yard with it. Because you know who would have to go get it from her and put it back? Yes.

I predict this post will have a follow-up. But never mind that, here's a really nice picture Mum took of The Thing during the day, when it doesn't seem so menacing. Mum loves the sunshade so much she trusted it with her gardening bear. Aww.

Do Yourself In Project #97: The Sun Screen