Anachronism

I am equally attracted to and repelled by this.
I believe in that whole gender role thing, a lot of the time; I would love to stay home and cook and clean and do all of those "wifely duty" things, but I can't imagine that I would ever want to go back to using antique appliances and decorating in aqua tile. Not to mention the fact that all these women have really bad hairstyles. I know that there was better hair than that in the 30s, 40s and 50s. The clothes are nice though, and I do admire their dedication.

Terroni's Right!

It is my blog, and I don't have to be fair. So, I present to you my lovely new water-lily header. I'm sure if it had been on the ballot, you all would have voted for it. Keep your eye's peeled for Shannon's header too. I can't find where I saved it...



PS: Visit Justin's Blog to hear all about the financial aid nightmare that he went through at school yesterday.

On a completely unrelated note, look at my super cute niece and nephews! These kids are seriously more attractive than any children have a right to be.

The Winner Is....

Yellow. But I'm not happy about it. It's my least favorite one. However, here to save the day is my friend Shannon,who has created a better one than the yellow one. Anyway, since yellow won fair and square, I'm leaving it up there for awhile, but don't be surprised when it gets replaced with the one that she made for me...and don't be surprised at some point later when that changes again, because I have a pretty short attention span with this blog thing, and I like to play with it.

Six Word Memoirs

Love the song, like the video, want the book!!

Vote

No, not for president or anything important like that. I need you to let me know which header you like better for my blog. I'm going to leave it blank up there for the next couple of days. There is a survey box to the right. If no one votes, I might have to make an actual decision on my own, and I haven't been very good at that recently.

Here we go, do you like :

Pink:
Green:Blue:
Yellow:

Bad Casting

I like the Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer. I know that movies are never as good as the books that they're supposed to be based on, but not only does this trailer totally not do the book justice (we'll have to see about the movie), it's not very good casting. Edward should be much, much hotter than that.





PS: Does anyone actually know how one becomes a casting agent?

Ruby Slippers

When I'm very upset, the first words that always come out of my mouth are "I want to go home." This makes perfect sense if I'm upset somewhere like the mall (which happens more often than you might think), or in traffic or on vacation in some hostile city, but most often it happens when I'm at my house.

Nowhere that I've ever lived for any extended period of time has felt like home to me. The closest I've come was my little apartment in Canyon, but even there, when I was feeling sad, it was always "I want to go home." It took me a long time to figure out where that home might be, and now that (I think) I know, I'm even more frustrated because I have no idea how to get there. I don't know how to pick up a whole life and move. I know that people do it every day, but it completely baffles me, and so I wait. I wait for someone to tell me what to do. I wait for a job and apartment to fall out of the sky. I wait until opportunity has passed, and then it's gone and I'm still looking for home.

I don't want to do that anymore. I want to take control of my life and be in the places that I want to be. I want to find a job that I love, or at least one that I don't hate. I want to stop being afraid. I'm going to try very hard to figure out how to do those things, and then, maybe, I'll be able to find my way home.

Back.

I'm back, and after only a week, which surprises me. I was pretty sure that I wouldn't be posting here for quite awhile, but I missed it. The truth is, I've been really sad, like, throw myself in front of a bus sad. I guess it's a good thing Levelland doesn't have any public transportation. Anyway, I'm feeling better. Today is the first day in 2 weeks that I've made it through a full 24 hours without crying (assuming that I can make it another hour until midnight). Anyway, I have to get ready for work, but I wanted to say hi, and let my (6) readers know that I haven't forgotten about this blog completely. I'll post again soon.

Disappearing.

I'm working on something, so I'll be disappearing for awhile. When I'm finished, I'll post here again.

Miss me.

Home.

I'm home from Seattle, (it's actually been nearly a week) but I'm having a bit of a hard time adjusting to being back here...I'm just going to post a few pics and call it good for now. These are the view from the hotel room, which was absolutely fabulous.

Here's the very first Starbuck's.

And here's me, really happy, in some random ice cream shop across from the public market.

As If I Needed Another Reason to Cry.

Dented

This is not my secret, but it totally could be. When I was little, I always went for the broken toy. Even now I guess...Marlowe is missing about half of his tail.


Although, I wouldn't ever buy baked beans in tomato sauce. Gross....do they even really make that?

Doctors, Again.

My dad's hanging out in the emergency room at the Heart Hospital today. They really should set up some sort of frequent flier type program, I'm pretty sure my family would find it quite beneficial. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, my step-mother called me a few hours ago and told me that some routine tests had come back this afternoon showing his cardiac enzymes were a bit elevated, and the doctor suggested that they head over to the shiny new heart hospital to have that checked out. It clearly wasn't that big of an emergency because they waited about 3 hours before being called in. I'll update when I know more, but that's what's going on right now.

An update, as promised.

So after 4 hours in the emergency room the attending physician told my dad that everything looked absolutely fine (as he's told him about 7 thousand times). The doctor said there was a "glitch" in the original tests that sent them to the hospital to begin with and that he would give my dad a stress test next week if it would put his mind at ease. Since my dad has been totally paranoid about heart attacks (his dad had 5) his entire life he went ahead and scheduled the stress test. So, everything is fine and there's nothing to worry about and my dad will just have to find something else to fret about. I'm sure it won't take long...

Fancy!

So, I spent a while this morning reworking the template for my blog. I haven't decided if I like it as much as I like the one with the pink flower, but it's a start...Let me know what you think!

In other news, I cut the bottom of my right foot rather badly today. It bled all over my bedroom floor and Justin convinced me that we needed to go to the emergency room, which we totally didn't. They just put some goop on it and bandaged it and I absolutely could have done that myself. It looked like an awful lot of blood though, when I was hyperventilating on the floor so I was pretty easily convinced. Anyway, the wound isn't actually that terrible, but it looks quite nasty and I'm finding it a little painful to walk. This is particularly bad since I'm leaving for Seattle in 6 days (!!!) and that's going to involve a whole bunch of walking. Ugh. I have the worst timing.

Since I managed to get hair color all over myself yesterday, and can't seem to get it off my skin, I look like a total disaster right now. (I do, however, have exceptional hair, if I do say so myself.) If anyone has a miracle cure to take the chestnut colored spots off my face, arms and chest I'll owe you big time. I've tried alcohol, sugar scrub, lemon juice, nail polish remover, my regular soap and my foot scrubber (which didn't remove the dye, but gave me a lovely scrape on my wrist).

Anyway, I'm a mess, at least my blog looks snazzy!

Wordle!!

Bathing Beauty?

I just bought the first swimsuit EVER that I feel really cute in. This is an event worthy of celebration!! (Haven't figured out exactly what kind of celebration yet...) And I totally want to hug the good people at Target!

A Prize!!

So, I've been "working" as a guide for ChaCha which is really fun and has increased my sense of well-being (and Justin's) by about a thousand points because it gives us each our own money to play with. Anyway, today I won a prize! :

Dear Susan: Congratulations! You made our Top Guide list for the week of June 22nd - June 28th! Thank you for your outstanding support of our Text Messaging Service! This means that you achieved a quality rating of over 95% accuracy in your responses to InfoSeeker Questions! Wow! Given the varied nature of our queries and the varied times the queries arrive, your accomplishment is no small task! You should be very proud! ChaCha strives to be a valuable service for its customers. Thanks to your magical and accurate answers they are more likely to come back for more! Again, Thank You for your support and keep on ChaCha-ing! Sincerely, Esther Friend Director of Support

P.S. If you decide to become a guide (which you totally should if you spend time online or watching TV. It's pretty much cash for stuff you'd be doing anyway.) you should submit me as your referral and give them my email address. Because then, not only will *you* be getting some play-money, I'll get 10% of whatever you make. (Which doesn't come out of your pay.)

American Girl

Ok, I love Tom Petty. No other music inspires me to writhe and dance around in the kitchen in quite the same way. The music makes me feel happy and amazing. So, I was stunned to find out tonight that according to rumors, American Girl is about a girl throwing herself off her dorm room balcony. Ok, besides the fact that he says that's not what it's about at all, (says Petty himself) who has a balcony outside their dorm room? When you listen to it don't you feel happy and hopeful and like everything isn't quite as crap as you thought it was 10 minutes ago? The song is about moving on, people. Stop being so damn depressing. For those of you unfamiliar with the genius of Tom Petty, I posted a neat scrolly lyric thing (yes, that's a technical term) up there.

Happy Father's Day

I intended to post this yesterday, but the battery in my camera was dead. My dad is amazing. We've always been very close and I feel so lucky to be living close (sometimes too close...) to him again. When my parents divorced and my mom tried to take us far, far away from him he put everything he had into getting us back. At at time when it was almost unheard of for a father to get custody, my dad got it. Don't get me wrong, I love my mom and she has done a lot of really wonderful things for me and I don't know what I would do without either of my parents, but I've always been a daddy's girl.

1983

1987

2006

Unicorn

When I was a little girl, every night I wished as hard as I could that my bicycle would turn into a unicorn. Apparently some little Italian girl has been wishing the same thing, and she's better at it.:

'Unicorn' deer is found in Italian preserve

By Marta Falconi

ROME - A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

"This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. "The unicorn has always been a mythological animal."

The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed "Unicorn" — was born in captivity in the research center's park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said.

(Rest of the Story)

Cats & Dogs

Any apprehension that I felt at taking in the kittens has totally disappeared. They haven't caused any real trouble and there are few things as pleasant as falling asleep with a soft, rumbly kitten smashed against your neck. They also clearly understand that their jobs include catching bugs and keeping the dogs constantly entertained. I'm watching Marlowe and Gatsby play at the other end of the sofa. The game goes something like this:

1. G sticks his paw in M's mouth.
2. M looks confused and then s l o w l y closes his mouth around the intruding paw.
3. G yelps like he's been set on fire.
4. M jerks away and looks around to see if he's been caught doing something wrong.
5. G sticks his paw in M's mouth.

They've been doing this for about half an hour. Occasionally Maybe (who thinks the kittens are her babies) tries to intervene and save Gatsby, but each time she's run to the rescue, her reward has been a pretty nasty bite to the ear. Gatsby obviously isn't interested in being rescued.

Gratuitous Kitten Pics

Possible Side Effects

So, I've been having a some pain in my neck and shoulder, (probably from the uncomfortable way I'm forced to sleep at work when I'm supposed to be awake and fully engaged in the life of a deaf drug dealer, but I digress....) and so yesterday I finally gave into Justin's demands that I "take something already and stop whining." We happen to have a wide assortment of medications lying around because one of us is always sick or hurt or interested in the possible side effects of a drug we saw on TV so there was no need to run out to the drugstore. Justin brought me a Tramadol, which they market as a pain reliever, but it's really an opioid. In other words, my shoulder would still hurt, but I wouldn't much care.

Apparently the makers of Tramadol believe that the best possible way to make someone forget about their pain is to make them itch all over and provide frequent and entertaining auditory hallucinations. I slept for about 5 hours (possible side effect: drowsiness) but the entire time I heard the noise that school buses make (you know, that air-brake noise) outside my window. There was also one brief and startling moment when, I swear to god, Johnny Depp leaned over me and whispered something (which I naturally can't recall) in my ear. (I'm pretty sure the constant, high-pitched kitten mewing was real.) Anyway, I'm sore again tonight, this time from thrashing around (I prefer to call it interpretive dance) while Justin played Guitar Hero last night. This time I'm going to try Relafen, which is an anti-inflammatory. It promises to avoid the sound effects and just make me nauseated. Cheers!

Thank You Wall Street Journal

Once upon a time, I started a job at which the dress code required women in the office to wear pantyhose, even with pants, even in 100 degree weather and in spite of the fact that the men in the office didn't have to wear ties. (Which apparently is the standard male equivalent. For the record, the guys also didn't have to wear pantyhose.) I didn't know about the pantyhose rule (because really, who wears pantyhose with pants?), so the first day I wore a skirt and got in trouble for my lack of hosiery. Because it was my first day, they let me slide, but they didn't tell me that not only was hosiery required with skirts and dresses, but also pants, so the next day, I wore pants (with closed toe shoes), and again I was reprimanded for my stocking-less feet. On the third day, I wore tight jeans and a t-shirt and quit that job. I felt that the dress code was discriminatory, outdated and just plain stupid. Just because a local politician has a thing for women in stockings, he doesn't have the right to require his employees to dress for his fetish.

Finally, someone else has encountered this problem and the Wall Street Journal, bible of the business world, has weighed in and said that stockings should be optional. I'm so tempted to call my ex-employer and say neener-neener-neener!! Or better yet, waltz into that office, bare-legged and stick my tongue out at him.

I've heard the argument that naked legs are too racy for a professional setting, and that may have been true in the 40s (remember how badly I did on the 1940s wife quiz...), but I tend to believe that the opposite is true now. Stockings have become a highly sexualized article of clothing. If you do a Google search for pantyhose, the first 5 pictures demonstrate this quite nicely, in fact, I couldn't find an appropriate picture to post with this blog. (I finally just posted a picture of my own legs.) I must admit that if I wore stockings to the office I'd feel pretty naughty, considering the types of activities that I'd normally don them for.I haven't been in contact with that old boss in years, but I'd be interested to know if an uprising in a small Kansas town big enough to make it to the Wall Street Journal has had any effect on that super oppressive office.

I Have Clearly Lost My Mind

I was recently talked into bringing home two kittens that a little girl left at my parents' house. This makes us two people with four animals, and we are officially outnumbered. I'm pretty uncomfortable with this, but cats are easy and they are already trying to catch the mouse that's been terrorizing us for weeks. I'm not sure why they choose to sleep in the trash can, but whatever. I present to you:

Iris
and Gatsby

Yeah, I know the pictures aren't great, but kittens aren't really known for being still.