The PTD list

PTD of course equals 'poop to do' and is a staple of life around these parts. Why, just tonight my PTD list includes

• fold laundry
• wash dishes
• make something for dinner
• finish that one stupid work project that keeps hanging on like one of those mystery dingleberries that seems to be coated in TP kryptonite. If I might be so bold.

The PTD list does NOT, however, include playing Bejeweled Blitz for 45 minutes trying to best the two people ahead of me on my 'team,' if a loose amalgamation of people who are my FB friends that play the game can be called such. Why, several of us have never met some of us, so where's the 'all for one and one for one' in THAT, I ask you?

I have a feeling that if offered a thousand dollars or the chance to be permanently seated at the top of the leaderboard, I'd take the latter, and that is NOT a proud thing to say.

Hey - I'm working on it. It takes precious TIME to write a post, you know. Time that could be spent furiously playing!!

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You can tell from the PTD list that I am, in fact, a rockstar. So glad you noticed.

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Also, and you might not have been able to tell from the way the stars align in the heavens just SO when I post, but it's been frigging busy where I live and I'm running short of topics except how the cats hate us and the dog is half bald and it's getting hot in here and those dishes won't wash themselves, Missy. It's kind of like this gigantic repeating loop of nonsense punctuatated by little glimpses of what life could be like if the World Went My Way.

Of course, it might well be that the world is indeed running my way, which would explain the ever-growing sense of impending DOOM, because a whole WORLD running one's way does make a racket and carry with it the question of 'do we have enough dishes'?

Or is that, once again, just me?

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I got a lovely compliment today. The Man to Whom I am Married told me that he thinks I'm adorable and fascinating.

NEWSTIP: Folks, if you want a guarantee of getting a lil sump'n sump'n from your love, just use that line. It melted me like buttah, all ovah. Seriously, a compliment that works for on the outside (adorable) AND the inside (fascinating)?? It's magical. And so I share it with you, my friends, in the hope that you can work it into conversation with the one YOU love, to see if in fact its powers are as nuclear as I think they are.

And good luck with that. I expect a full report in the morning.

Tiff out.

Punk'd

On the playlist tonight:

• Daft Punk
• TR3
• Wild Cherry
• And maybe some Sound Tribe Sector 9.

See what happens when you start playing CDs in the car and Just.Can't.Stop once you get home?

Good thing there's an absolutely STUFFED music folder on the home computer. From 65 Days of Static to Yes, we have multiple genres, generations, styles, and moods from which to choose. Yay for the small things!

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Oops - now there's some Pink Floyd. Heaven only knows what will come up next. iPod roulette is rather fun.

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So, we had a wonderful weekend away, the Things and I. The Biffster would have been there, but he had to play rock star this weekend (again! woohoo burgeoning popularity!). The bois and I headed up to Smith Mountain Lake for a weekend of birthday celebrations, German food, and an unexpected boat rental. With my bro turning 50 (and who doesn't have the grace to look it, dang him), Thing 2 turning 13, and me turning *(#(*%&)# in a week or so, it was a good excuse to get together. We had knockwurst and bratwurst and red cabbage and kartoffelklose and applesauce and BEER, and life was good even through the rainy afternoon.

When the festivities were over, the skies cleared, beckoning us to the water, but we'd not planned for a boat and so were stranded, unhappily.

Ah-HA! Not for long though, because 1) I am impulsive and blurted out "lets go see if we can get a boat" and 2) my younger brother is a willing and able co-conspirator, which found all 13 of us climbing into a pontoon boat at about 6 p.m. Saturday evening for a wonderful 2.5-hour putter around the lake. When the sun is setting, the lake is calm due to a relative dearth of traffic upon it, and you're well fed, there's almost nothing better than to go messing about in boats. It's damned picturesque, is what it is, and because we're good-looking family the whole lake was suffused with our heavenly glow of perfect satisfaction!

Go be jealous someplace else. I'm basking here.

Anyhow...because we rented the dang thing for 24 hours, baby bro and I and the 4 kids decided to take another tour on Sunday after the other family had left. Why not? We paid for it, might as well use it! So, trundling along at massive speed (10 MPH! oh my!) we kadoodled down to Smith Mountain Dock for lunch, then to the Dam to scare the pants off the nervous, then to take a dip in the cold cold lake, then to outrun a thunderstorm on the way back to the Marina.

Oh, and to get a little too much sun (me) because someone is an idiot and didn't apply the oh-so-important sunscreen. Hi, I'm nearly 50 and still think I'm invincible. Gooooo, stupid!

(however, I do have a lovely healthy glow about me today which I rather like, and a dermatologist appointment tomorrow to go over all the bits of me that are rebelling because of all the sun exposure I had years ago, soooooooooo......ahem).

All in all, it was great. Could have been better with the addition of what my brother calls "the perpetual 13-year-old" (that'd be Biff), but hey, we have the rest of our lives to hang out doing fun stuff and sometimes, maybe, it's OK to do your own thing as as to have stories to talk about later.

I'm not convinced yet, but that's the story I'm going with.

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Off to cook some burgers and get ready to do some workly work tonight. I'mma little behind on some stuff and I' hoping to have the energy to git 'er done tonight so tomorrow is as bright and sunshiny as a new brass kettle.

Y'all be good now.

Boing boing

Thing 2 is having a birthday tomorrow.

He will be 13.

10 years ago we threw him a bash at the local McDonald's, at which he got to sit in the 'big chair' and drink soda.

10 years from now he will undoubtedly be celebrating with friends, sitting on some strange grungy sofa, and drinking things I care to not think about.

It's a weird time for him, I think. He's at the tipping point between childhood and adulthood, could probably kick major ass in a fight if need be, is 3 inches taller than me, and can palm a basketball, but he's still my baby. My sweet child, who was calm and observant from the moment he was born, who cut teeth at 4 months because he was too impatient for baby food, who crawled until he was sure he was steady enough to stand, who loved fire trucks and dinosaurs and his big brother, who would at 5 years old bound up the basement steps yelling "mom-ee-hee-hee!" when I got home from work, who has amassed a vocabulary that would make William Safire proud, who is now a trombonist, a scholar, a wit, a martial arts dude, and now an enthusiastic trampolinist.....my baby.

My towering, deep-voiced, slightly hairy, clear-eyed, intuitive, smartass child. Try as you might, there's none better.

Unless you have one of your own, and then you know what I'm talking about.

Happy birthday, Thing 2. May your teen years be deeply rewarding and may you grow in knowledge, patience, and joy each and every year from now until forever.

Love,
Mom

Yes, I am a purist.

At least where my favorite 1-minute interwebby game is concerned. Thus far I've amassed something over 2 million boost points and just can't bring myself to use them. Wonder what they'd go for on eBay?

*snoert*

A couple of my most fierce competitors on the 60-second Game of Incredibly Addicting Powers are a high-school classmate, an expert on hillibillies, and a dialysis tech/rock star.

Technology - capable of bringing out the bloodthirsty in even the most apparently mild-mannered of us. What can't it do???

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SoooOOOOoo, what's going on with y'all? I'm not very interesting these days, as my life consists pretty much of the standard round of daily chores, which now includes the bonus of daily vacuuming ti pick up the GIANT CLUMPS OF DOG HAIR that little the LR carpet on a nearly hourly basis. Our dog is so miserable right now; the yearly allergies have flared up and she has, once again, chewed her ass nearly bare while dropping mats and fuzz and pounds worth of her gross spitty hair all over the place.

Is it so wrong of me to have the occasional hope that she might, um, disappear and never ever come back? Yes, ti's selfish, but if she just disappeared then I could hope she went with some nice person who lovelove LOVES dogs and can work magic on an old fat itchy beast such as she. I've had many years of it, and it gets.....old. FAST.

Baths dont work, even with the special itchy dog shampoo. Extra fat in her diet doesn't work, though she appreciates it like mad. Gentle combing out of hte mats and tangles doesn't work at ALL, and if I was a bettin' person I'd say the combing makes it worse. She's just scratchy and sad and uncomfortable and I'll be danged if anything really works besides the Benadryl I jam down her gullet just to get her to calm the heck down already.

So, your suggestions are welcome. Just for the record, I've not yet tried beer on her. Or IN her. That might be next on the ol' agenda.

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Sigh.

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Tiff out.

Right brain, left brain

The ice cream truck that runs through our neck of the 'burg plays the creepiest frigging music EVER.

I'm a little afraid of ice cream trucks anyhow, because they seem so.....weird now that mostly everyone has a little thing called a 'freezer' in their house. Who needs expensive whipped AIR from a truck? Also, I'm certain that in every ice cream truck there's a child-sized locked cabinet just waiting to be filled by the DRIVER, who of course is very likely a basement-dwelling Trog who only comes out at dusk to troll for young tender children so he (always, ALWAYS a 'he') can snatch one up, chuck it in the locker, drive it to the house he lives in with his deaf Mom, and make it fetch his Cheetos and Fanta so he doesn't have to take any breaks at all from playing online RPGs involving avatars that are so much more cool than he will ever be.

The music doesn't help this dark vision any. Piped at ear-splitting volumes through a speaker that is incapable of NOT distorting whatever is on-air, the music Dopplers around the neighborhood tunelessly beckoning the unaware and unsuspicious children from their front yards to come, COME! Like an electronic Pied Piper it plays its sultry tunes, the siren call of summer blaring a raucous accompaniment to the twisted aims of its driver.

So, no. No to the ice cream truck. Not then, not now, not ever. Please, just make it go away.

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Oh! Hey! Something less sinister!

The butterfly bush in the front garden is about to take over. Last year when we bought it it was 18" tall and came in a cute little pot. This year it's 5 feet tall, at least that wide, and seems to grow visibly on a daily basis.

Thank goodness they can be pruned at any time of year, and come back well from a very severe pruning, because otherwise it might be time for a touch of herbicide to reign that sucker in. Continued growth like this would see the Tiny House swallowed up in a sea of sweet-smelling blooms this time next year if mitigation wasn't possible. This, friends, is the year to get that vigorous pup under control.

AFTER it's done blooming, naturally. I have visions of scads of butterflies flitting about it in a most picturesque manner. Also, in these visions, I'm wearing a large straw hat, am fashionably attired in some thing floaty and wondrous, and show no signs of perspiration even though it's North Carolina in the summer.

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Clearly, if I'm not obsessing over Highly Dangerous Ice Cream Doods I'm busy populating my pretend life with goals so lofty as to be utterly unachievable.

Aim high, I guess is the lesson here.

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Two years ago I wrote this. Still holds true. There. That's me being all archive-y and stuff.

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That'll do for now. Tonight, if it gets below BLAST FURNACE TEMPS outside (it's 89 degrees at 6 pm y'all. That is hot), will find us raking out the front yard, putting in lawn edging, and possibly re-seeding the yard with what seems to be poppy seeds. I don't know, it sounds like an awful lot of work, doesn't it? And will almost certainly involve....sweating. Ew.

Y'all have a good one.

Slightly iniquitous

I've heard the term bandied about lately on gossip blogs and around the ethersphere. This thing has sounded slightly gross, slightly fantasy, slightly OMG if this thing is real then for SURE these are the end days because wow. Really? Crystals? Down THERE? But thanks to Jennifer Love Hewitt, whose name has been associated with this current trend on more than one occasion (gosh her mom must be happy), we are firmly stuck (pun!) in the middle of the vajazzling trend times.

ORLY? Wha?

Vajazzling? (friends, do your own GIS - I'm not woman enough to link the finds here)

Yes, darlings, it's for real, has been around for years, and those who practition it call it a 'treatment,' in much the same way, I'm sure, that having someone paint your nails for 25 bucks is a treatment.

OK - I'm letting my inner cranky old lady sing this out loud and proud - My eye and ass vajazzling is a treatment for anything but terminal boredom! Pasting crystals onto your precious Mons Venus is not a treatment, ladies, it's torture, because dang that crap can catch on all manner of underthings, ripping one or more of the epoxy-ed gems off your girly bits to fall unceremoniously into 1) your undies or 2) onto the floor (depending on your state of commandoness at the time). And also, it's clear that your netherbits must have defected to Brazil to get the 'treatment' which I'm pretty sure not everybody is willing to do, because some of us like to keep the delicate flowers under close supervision and not let them go wondering off to other southern hemispheres where they have things like Carnivale and nude beaches. A pudenda could get corrupted that way.

Plus which? Having the Marital Duties while one of your ticklish bits is covered in CRYSTALS? Ouchie ouchie, and thanks for taking a BUNCH of positional options off the table, stupid crotchcrafts!

And now I shudder whilst pausing to think about just how many girls at Thing 1's school are jazzled on the vag, and how boys will very likely EXPECT this to be the norm from now on instead of being nicely surprised to be face to face with a regular ol' Triangle of Mystery. What's next? PUPPET SHOWS coming out of that thang?

Holee crap.

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I need a drink. Tiff out.

Hold me close to your Cockaigne e’re I faint dead away

Oh, my pretties. Heads out of the gutter, it's not what you think.

I’m merely using vocabulary words in the post title to express a place I’d really like to be instead of the place I am right now, and you would too if you knew what that word meant. Trust me on this, and go look it up unless you’re some kind of super smarty pants who already has this word emblazoned on their heart in vivid shades of burnt umber, carnelian, and longing.

Yeah, Cockaigne sounds kind of nice, eh? Sure does to me, especially since lately I’ve really been struggling with regular life. Sometimes I’m simply not strong enough to deal with a blizzard (cataclysm? hurricane?) of stressors, especially when several of them have to do with the pets we’ve chosen to have live with us and who are making life an utter mess at the moment, well I think you can see where one’s thoughts would turn to pet-icide pretty rapidly.

It was, in fact, almost time to use the noose we keep handy in the bedroom to dispatch one of the cats yesterday. This is the same cat that is in heat and who we suspect of peeing all over the carpet in the Things’ room, causing it to smell like a stack of moldy newspapers, or that stank-water that happens when you leave flowers in a vase too long.

I makes me angry as a nest of hornets that some dang fool cat felt it was fine to piss all over the nice carpet I had put in 3 years ago to replace the OLD stank carpet that was there when I moved in. I mean, really. There is a perfectly good litter box in the house – USE IT! Not only did I spend half of Saturday using the Little Green Cleaner on the whole carpet to NO EFFECT, the Rug Doc I got at 5 Saturday afternoon didn’t spray water (at which point I started getting out the ice and Mama Juice), and the one I did use on the rug Mother’s Day (Mother's Day!) had almost no effect on the reek, and neither did the 11 dollar bottle of Nature’s Miracle I purchased late Sunday afternoon to dump all over the offending spot which I finally found after crawling around on hands and knees, SNIFFING THE CARPET.

Yes. I spent time on Mother's Day sniffing the carpet in my kids' room to roust out a vile odor. Shows you I know how to have a good time, right?

Stupid dang cats, anyhow.

All y’all dog people? Hush. We have one of THEM too, and she’s shedding a pound of hair a day, chewing herself raw (again!), and whining constantly at the cat in heat while the cat in heat trills that frigging ANNOYING sound while shimmying her bony butt in the air and OMG where’s my checkbook so I can throw a bunch of money at the vet to make it stop already?

Oh right. I ran out of checks. Grrrr. (Shut up YOU for mocking my reliance on the checkbook. I'm not 'there' enough yet to fly on debit cards, for lo they do not come with handy carbon copies through which to track your spending. I did, however, sign up for one yesterday, because yowza, come on into the 20th century, Tiff.)

And then, because sometimes the gravitational fields of this planet like to put me square in their sights as their dancing puppet of utter frustration, yesterday was spent dropping crap. Over and over. Fork? Ding! Sugar? Ding! Mail? Ding! Over and over. It was like being pregnant all over again, a time when the dreaded ‘dropsies’ were a constant companion. This time around, I can only blame the Forces at the Center of the Earth for my bumbling, because that figurative filly is out the barn and over the hill and only the swayback mare is left behind, silently munching on oats and the dusty gray memories of former glory.

Sigh

Oh, and lastly there was the air-hammering kitchen faucet and the 90 freaking degree heat and Biff being out of town for a week, and lo! did the world start to go a touch twitchy on me over the last few days.

So you can see why I’d love to sidle up to a nice big Cockaigne right about now. All you have to do is open up your mouth and your hearts desire falls right into it. And that? Is pretty dang sweet.

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What could YOU use right about now, eh?

Paging Mr. Belvedere

One problem with having Networked blogs feed posts to Facebook is that only the first few lines of the post show up on the feed, which means that 1) they should be 'grabby' (if, in fact you want people to read them), 2) one must shelve the profanity until later in the post, if one feels like using such language (ahem), 3) whatever is posted contains NO REFERENCE to people who might read that post.

I can see you've never really thought about this before, so I am here to help by providing examples of bad choice in first paragraph writing as follows (language alert, for the sensitive among you):

A) Day 5 of the grass-growing extravaganza is going pretty well. Overnight some blades shot up 6 mm! There was 0.8 inches of precipitation in the past 24 hours, most of it happening between midnight and 4 a.m. The earth smells like cuttlefish. Air temps are rising from a low of 53 F at 5 a.m. through the 60's and are projected by 3 p.m. to be up to 72 F. Must sharpen mower blades as there are some ragged edges on the fescue.

B) that bitch Karli is soooo gonna get it after school tomorrow. 'ho was caught by S with a pic of J on her cellie, and he's MY CRUSH! imma whak her up so bad shes gonna want to call her mama LAST WEEK to rescue her fat ass. fo rlz.

C) This one time, at band camp....

D) My boss, that dickmuch Albert Corngoggles, is pissing me off so bad I think I might have to kill him good and dead before Monday rolls around. As if working at Bloviation Systems isn't bad enough, he's got to go and tell me to not wear my cutoffs too work on Fridays anymore. Holy shit man! WTF? It's FRIDAY, 'casual Friday,' you prim f-cker! The one day of the week where I, the junior G-d damned staff associate can be MYSELF and some retard in Dockers and boat shoes is going to tell ME how to dress? Piss off, you button-down pole-rammer! God, how I'd like to see him shoved headfirst into an industrial meat-grinder.

E) Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me...

F) i was talking with gina the other day about these really kewt shoes and she said that i should maybe go try them on at the kohl's before ordering them but i said no way because I know my feet are size 6always have been but do you know she had the nerve to tell me that maybe their not bcs feet sometimes grow and mine might have bcs she saw them in the lokker room monday and they looked all bloaty and hot but ha on her that was because i was on my period and stuff always bloats up then right? anyways....

G) We, as congregants of the Westboro Baptist Church....

And on and on.

Disclaimer: This admonition to carefully craft the first few lines of any new blog post only holds if, in fact, you have reason to believe that those people who see the feed might be offput by what you post. If you are NOT in that overly PC bunch, then of course feel free to go all Kaply on your blog and use words like 'fuck' at regular intervals. Why not go whole hog and just use fuck in the post title too, because that gets uploaded in BOLD font, which, really, is kind of awesome!

In all seriousness, I wish I was more like Kaply and felt entirely free to use use the words that are in my head, but my Mom sometimes read this blog, and my family too. And people from church. And former colleagues. And maybe some folks out there I've never met and who don't comment here so I have no idea who they are (including YOU, new follower! You're pretty! Or...handsome. Pick your take). Not to mention I'm FB friends with my kids and nephews, who might think I'm more genteel than I really am and who I don't want to ruin entirely just yet.

It is for those folks I've started watching my virtual mouth. At least for the first few lines. The rest of you just need to keep on reading until the good stuff starts to happen. If it ever really does. Dooce has nothing to worry about from this blog, is what I'm sayin'.

Amen.

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Please feel free to throw me a pity party in the comments as I won't be able to sleep in EITHER DAY this weekend because The Most Unfortunate Boy (Thing 2) has a snow-day make-up day tomorrow (!) starting at 8, and Sunday I'm Info-boothing my little heart out at church for the early service.

Oh bed, how I will miss you.

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Well, it's time to git.

Have a wonderful weekend, folks. , and get an extra few minutes' sleep for me, mmkay?

As if I really need to know how to thicken soup

Just for the record, I am firmly against people who drive like they're the only ones on the road, even when it's clear to the other eleventy-million drivers around them else that they are not. Those drivers who leave their common courtesy at home and replace it with selfishness, a willful disregard for the safety of other drivers and their passengers, and who inspire the more polite of us to mini-rages at their insensitivity are complete and utter wastes of skin, IMHO.

Why can't folks just chill the eff OUT and get there when they get there? What's the big friggin' RUSH, for Pete's sake? How is roaring up in a 'right turn only' lane then popping into the regular lane past 20+ cars that have been doing the correct thing making anyone except the douchecanoe in the BIG RED TRUCK that did the dirty deed anything but pissed off? If anyone knows the person who executed this maneuver on the way to the middle school this morning, or is actually the person driving the BIG RED TRUCK who succeeded in making me a say a naughty thing in front of my sweet and innocent almost-13-year-old Thing 2, then I'd like to know about it so I can track down the driver of THE BIG RED TRUCK and give them the bitterest piece of my rapidly-shrinking mind.

Buttmunch. Chaps-chafer. Self-involved asshat. Ignorant cuss. Small-packaged overcompensator. Jerk.

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So, hi! Now that I have that off my chest, what else is there to talk about? Read any good books lately? Seen any memorable films? Had any wordless exchanges with invisible objects that were particularly humor-inducing?

Eh, me neither. Most of my conversations with the ethereal beings are right out loud, because they're a little hard of hearing and like for us to speak up.

Honest!

Here's a little tip: It's easiest when dealing with this kind of talking-to-ghosts situation to pretend you're talking into a Bluetooth, because we all know that you can say all kinds of wacky crap while on a Bluetooth and people have to pretend like they can't hear you. Why, you could carry on about all manner of oddities and if you have that little Borg thing sticking out yo head, then nobody is going to call the cops or the local looney bin on you because you're talking with someone, right?

Just like the lady at the Kohls last weekend, who was yammering on and on about "bein' at the Kohl's" and 'oh don't they just have the cutest things here' and "I like this new frame I just got here at the Kohl's" and suchlike. Not hard to understand how her fellow shoppers would mistake her blatherings for a conversation starter, thus more than one of us responded to her with salient rejoinders, except that she wasn't talking to us! Nope - she was on the phone. Talking about important things. On her Bluetooth. To her son-in-law. Because it's clear that having a conversation with your SIL while on line at the Kohl's is the most important thing you could be doing right at that moment, except if maybe you could add in "confusing the hell out of the people on line with you" to the mix, and then of course she'd have hit the mark square on.

So there's that.

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One last thing: I love coriander. Tasty tasty!

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Bye.

Pretty much the opposite of a career ladder climber

(at the risk of seeming too self-congratulatory with two posts in a row about What Other People Think About Me, here goes nothin')

Somehow a conversation about dreadlocks came up at work today, in which I allowed as to how I think it would be cool to have them.

Me. A 47-year old pudgy white chick.

The people I was talking with? Said it would totally suit my personality.

!!

In another conversation, a coworker of a certain age and I were talking about the lovely lovely things hormonal changes at this life stage do to your body, and she said "but I bet you're taking it fine, because you're just such a free spirit."

!!

Obviously, people see me as some kind of big ol' hippie chick.

My work here is done.

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Here' that part where I wrote out a story about almost not making it home unsullied after taking a nice brisk 2-mile walk tonight and then at a most unfortunate time being shanghied into conversation with a neighbor, but then I thought better of it and erased that block of text.

Because really. Crowing about my sphincter control would perhaps be a new low for this blog, and because I'm trying to be a better person, a new shiny wholesome person (at least on the internet), the tale was retracted.

Much like....

Oh nevermind.

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Biff is back up in the great white north again this week, re-taking stock of 'what to do' after his Dad's untimely death in January. Mopping up after a disaster, it takes time. He's a good man to do this, to help his beleaguered sisters with the clean up, to lend a literal hand in the effort to turn family tragedy into something that at least has some order to it.

Nice of him to go up there on his birthday weekend, don't you think? Par-TAY! So, if you've a mind to, go bother Biff in the places you normally find him on the innerwebs, and tell him that he should totally go wild on his birthday and maybe have TWO pieces of cake.

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With that I'll close. Must go write my Mommy a Happy Mother's Day card, and write a thank you note, and do some workly work for work because dang if they're not throwing ALL the puppies and kittens over the fence lately! Whoo-EE! Job security is what I hope that means.

Y'all have a good one. Later!