Month: November 2000

The Perfect Storm last night, and quite frankly, I was disappointed. First of, what was up with that Diane Lane character? I couldn’t stand her from the get-go (as she ran to Mark Wahlberg’s character and jumped on him squealing, I turned to Fred and said "I can’t imagine ever being a woman like that."), and she just got more annoying as the movie went on. I didn’t know Cap’n Billy Tyne, and he certainly may have been a deep thinker and all, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that he never said anything close to like the Hollywoodized speeches George Clooney kept pulling out of his ass. As I told Fred, what bothers me most is that I know the movie was based on a true story, and therefore every idiotic-sounding line that came out of George Clooney’s mouth was something Billy Tyne very likely not only never said but never thought of saying, and it just really bugged me. Let’s move on, shall we? I heard on the radio this morning as I was cleaning up after Fred’s popcorn orgy from last night an ad for Lasik eye surgery. In this ad, the announcer announced that if you called RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND to get information about the surgery, they would enter you in a drawing so that you might win this surgery for free! Now, to give y’all some background, I am very very spazzy about my eyes. If I were to, oh, break an arm or something, I very likely might say "Oh, I’ll just wait a day and see if it gets better on it’s own…" But if there’s the slightest indication that something ungood is happening with either or both of my eyes, I’m at the doc-in-a-box in thirty seconds flat. I am very careful to take my contacts out every night and clean them, and some weekends I go without my contacts just to give my eyes a rest. If you make a movement like you’re going for my eyes, I will scream, cover my face and fall to the ground before you can pull that piece of fuzz from my face. In other words, Robyn is a total spaz about her eyes, comprende? If you understand that, then perhaps you will understand my horror at the thought of Dr. Craig Whatshisface performing Lasik eye surgery for free. I could just imagine Dr. W standing over the "nonpaying" patient, jovially chatting with his assistants, and thinking to himself, "Oh, I don’t need to be careful or anything – it’s not like this chick is PAYING for the surgery!" No thanks, Dr. Whatshisface, you keep yourself and your laser on the other side of Huntsville, if you don’t mind, and I’ll just go rinse off my contacts with a little saline…
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everyone – showed up for JournalCon 2, but my main memory of the dream is that I ate Patrick’s frosted cherry Poptarts, and man was he ever pissed at me. And I don’t even like cherry Poptarts! So we got on the road as soon as the spud got home from school Thursday, and were at the hotel around 9 (eastern time, ’cause we go from central to eastern somewhere around Chattanooga. Or is it Knoxville? One or the other, anyway). We ended up in a particularly nice hotel suite, where I managed to not take a single picture at all, but you can see it here. The balcony off the bedroom overlooked a lovely mountain stream, and there were no other balconies in sight. Neither Fred nor I slept well Thursday night – we hadn’t expected to, since it was the first night in an unfamiliar bed – and we were up and out of the hotel by 9 Friday morning. We spent the next five or six hours walking around the town of Gatlinburg, going into shop after shop, spending money on this and this, and going into places like the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! museum (which was kinda cool, but mostly lame) and others of it’s ilk. We went through a haunted house which was quite an experience. You walk through the haunted house, and you have to go through in single file, with one of your hands on the shoulder of the person in front of you. Large portions of the walk were pitch black, and the guy at the head of the line had to feel his way along, leading us. He and his girlfriend were at the head of the line, then Fred, the spud, myself, and three girls behind us. The girl behind me had both her hands on my shoulders and her chin on my shoulder as well. I was practically carrying the girl piggyback, I’m telling you. If I’d’ve been a guy, I’m sure I’d have loved it. The girl in the very back was in serious hysterics the whole time, because apparently someone was walking behind her and whispering "You’ll never get out! You’ll never get out!" in her ear. I mean, the girl was sobbing loudly to the point that people working at the haunted house were breaking character to ask if she was okay. The best part was at the end, though, when a guy came running at us with a chainsaw. The girl in front of Fred screamed and ran off, and the three girls in back of me all but lifted me off my feet, they were pushing so hard. We also went up in Gatlinburg’s answer to the Space Needle, where Fred stood by the edge and tried not to look nervous while I snapped his picture. Despite our plans to go back to the hotel room and make sandwiches for lunch, we ended up having lunch at a fairly nice restaurant, which ended up being the only nice restaurant we visited whilst in town. After lunch we did some more poking through gift shops and then I went back to the car to wait for Fred and the spud, who came along twenty minutes or so later. We went back to the hotel room and I laid on the bed and complained about how much my feet hurt. Fred proved how much he was listening by trying to talk me into going to Dollywood and spending another five or six hours walking around. Finally, he took the spud down the street to a mini amusement park sorta thing, and they rode rides and played games for a few hours while I relaxed, read, and ate candy (since that’s really what vacation is all about, isn’t it?). Our search for dinner in Pigeon Forge was absolutely abysmal, because traffice was bumper-to-bumper, and every restaurant we came across was packed with lines spilling out the doors. We finally found a small Mexican place and stopped there, discovering that Pigeon Forge is a dry county, and I couldn’t order a margarita or beer or anything to make me forget the pain in my feet, but the chicken quesadilla was pretty damn good. At least there was candy back in the room. Saturday morning, Fred jumped out of bed, stretched happily, and sang a chorus of Oh what a beautiful morning! "I slept REALLY well last night!" he giggled. Whereupon I pulled out a gun and killed him, then pushed him into the lovely mountain stream our balcony overlooked for good measure. "Oh," he said with false concern. "Did you not sleep well?" I had to bite my tongue very, very hard lest a stream of obscenities be loosed loud enough for the entire town to appreciate. "No," I informed him. "I did NOT sleep well. I did NOT sleep well AT ALL." "Why not?" he asked, continuing with the false concern. "Oh, I don’t KNOW," I said, snarling despite my efforts to remain calm. "Maybe it was the fact that you breathe REALLY LOUDLY. Or the SNORING. Or the CONSTANT TWITCHING. Or the fact that you shut the door so that instead of hearing a wave of white noise, all I could hear was you BREATHING AND SNORING AND FARTING all the live-long night! BUT I’M GLAD YOU SLEPT WELL!" Luckily, he didn’t take my snarlings personally, and soon enough I had calmed down. We had our showers, breakfast, and soon enough were on our way into the National Park on a search for waterfalls. You may or may not recall, but last time we were in Gatlinburg, my waterfall pictures didn’t come out very well because the sun wasn’t shining, and it was dark and dreary. Well, apparently all the waterfalls in the first 15 miles of the National Park had dried up, because there wasn’t a one to be found, damnit. After returning to Gatlinburg, we parked and walked up the street a ways to take the tram to the top of the mountain (well, a mountain anyway). It sucked, because I couldn’t get any good pictures, and all I wanted to do was ride the tram to the top and then back down, but there was SKEE BALL, and Fred has never met a skee ball he didn’t like, so he hauled the spud off to the game room while I sat on a bench and watched the people wander by. Then we rode the tram back down the mountain, and Fred bonded with an older black guy, who was telling his wife all the things Fred was trying to get me to believe (ie, "If the tram cable breaks, as long as you jump just before it hits the ground, you’ll be okay!"), and we listened to the guy who was running the tram chat with the aforementioned older black guy. I wish I’d gotten the camera out, because the tram operator, while seeming to be a very nice guy, had about the smuggest expression I’ve ever seen on anyone’s face, ever. After the tram, we walked even further up the street, because Fred had spotted a Thomas Kinkaid (is that how you spell it? I don’t really care, I know y’all know who I mean) Gallery, and wanted to check out the pictures. There were no prices anywhere to be seen, so we assumed they were a tad too rich for our blood, and after a cursory glance around, we were on the move again. It was about lunchtime, and I’d seen an advertisement for a seafood restaurant which served oysters on the half-shell, so I insisted we go there. We ordered our sodas and Fred ordered the oysters for me, and we began perusing the menu. Fred rapidly got disgusted at the price of the offerings and decided there was nothing he wanted, and I couldn’t find anything I wanted – for crying out loud, everything they had was deep-fried, haven’t they heard of BROILING? Apparently not – and so we finished our sodas, I snarfed down the oysters, and we went back out onto the strip. The spud and I sat and watched people while Fred went into some "moving theater" something or other (I really wasn’t paying much attention), and then he and the spud went up the street to buy corn dogs to take back to the hotel for lunch, and I went back to the car to read and wait for them. We ate lunch, blah blah blah, and then were off to Dollywood. Now, when I say "Dollywood" what, aside from a buxom blonde, do you think of? You think of an amusement park, something along the lines of a smaller DisneyLand, right? (Just say "yes", you smartasses) Well, me too. Except that that’s not really what Dollywood is like. Dollywood, instead of having all those fun rides and amusement-type things, only really had two rides for adults, a bunch of shops, and some what seemed to be fairly lame shows. Fred and the spud rode the log flume ride three times, getting fairly wet in the process (and ending up cold since the sun went down while we were there, and it was something like 40 degrees out), and Fred rode the roller coaster ride a couple of times, we visited the kiddy section, where he played ten thousand rounds of skee ball, a couple of other games, and spent twenty some-odd dollars to finally win me a small stuffed Grinch. After three hours or so – maybe longer, it FELT longer – we left, stopping to buy a few candles and a "best of Dolly Parton" tape, so Fred could listen to "Love is like a butterfly". We had another abysmal search for a place to eat dinner. I suggested finally that we go back into Gatlinburg, take a left, and eat at The Alamo, for which we’d seen the advertisement and liked. When we pulled up to The Alamo, Fred complained that it looked packed. I pointed out that we could go back to the hotel room, but by the time we got back to the hotel room we’d have been seated and ready to order. Fred talked over me, suggesting that we go up the road to a pizza place instead. "Fine," I shrugged. The fine pizza establishment up the road, which had many cars full of very scary people parked around it, had no booths for eating, so we had to order the pizza and take it back to the hotel. Forty fucking minutes it took them to make the pizza. Man, was I pissed. I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t go on vacation to eat pizza. Fred and I snarled back and forth at each other a few times, ate the incredibly crappy pizza ("I thought it was pretty good!" he lied), watched TV, read, and went to sleep. Except for Fred’s twitching and brief turning on of the light sometime around 3:30, I slept fairly well. We got up around 7:30 and were packed and out of the room by 8:30. We had to stop in Georgia for about an hour because there was a bad accident on Interstate 40 (or 75, I don’t remember which), but we still made pretty good time home. Miz Poo has been all over me since we got home, sleeping on my head at night and following me around the house all day long. It’s good to be home. —–]]>

Felicity and The Practice, if you must know. Fred thinks I have the hots for DA Richard Bay. If he only knew…) and now it’s 4:00 and I have to go start dinner (country chicken gumbo) and by the time dinner is made and eaten and I’m done laying around discussing Fred’s day with him, it will be time for Boston Public and Ally McBeal, and then there will be canoodling with the man, and perhaps some sex (though perhaps not), and then it will be bedtime. So you see, I haven’t got time for the entry tonight. That’s right, send me disappointed, nasty emails, I welcome them and adore every heated word your pissed-off selves send me, but know this: There will be an entry tomorrow, bright and early, oh yes. Trust me on this, dear readers, I will tell you all about how Fred’s proximity to running water gets his hormones a-hoppin’ (oh, I guess I just told you about that, didn’t I?), and how I never want to share a bed with him ever again in my entire life, and all sorts of good things. There will be pictures (though not a lot), and above all else, there will be bitching. Bitching and whining and moaning. In fact, my new motto is going to be "Bitch, whine, moan. Lather, rinse, repeat." See you then!
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(Sorry the picture’s so blurry, but this was the best of the bunch) I know nothing, nada, zero, zilch about the PowerPuff Girls, but from the somewhat bitchy smirk on this one’s face (her name is Buttercup, I learned), she’s my kinda gal. While I was at it, I snagged this keychain, too. I’m a sucker for happy faces, and this isn’t even the only one on my keychain. Little things make me happy. We had a fairly strong thunderstorm late yesterday afternoon, and at the very instant a loud crash of thunder sounded, our alarm went off. Apparently the thunder did something to the alarm so that every so often it would start beeping, and we didn’t set it last night, but we didn’t feel comfortable leaving it off while we were on vacation, so Fred called Securitylink this morning, and the fuckers claimed no one could make it out until sometime tomorrow. Well, fuck THAT, Fred thought, and then called around until he found a guy from another alarm company who was not only willing to come out to the house, but willing to come out immediately, as in "I’ll be there in fifteen minutes!" And he was, and he certainly knew what he was doing, and the problem was taken care of in about half an hour. If I have anything to say about it – and I think I do – the instant our four-year contract is up with Securitylink, we’ll be switching to G&G, which is the company Mike (the guy who came out) works for. He was rather easy on the eyes, if I may say so. The spud got her school pictures back and brought them home and I stupidly bought the whole package. I say "stupidly" because the pictures didn’t come out terribly well – the spud is a cute kid, but she doesn’t always translate well in pictures, and you know with those school pictures they take all of ten seconds to set up and then snap the picture. Okay, I’ll be blunt here. The spud has a big ol’ "I just smelled a fart" look on her face and it’s really pretty funny, but I don’t want to be sending those pictures out at Christmastime as I usually do. My solution, I decided, is that I’ll take a ton of pictures of her while we’re in Gatlinburg this weekend, and surely one or two will come out well, and then I can have them printed out in varying sizes and send those out instead. I think it’s a pretty good plan. Okay, I have to go make a trek through the house and decide whether I’ve forgotten anything, and then I have to run to WalMart to pick up some winter gloves (it’ll be cold in G’burg in the mornings, according to weather.com) and yarn for the spud, and then I have to pace through the house, picking up and straightening because Fred’s father will be feeding the cats and hamsters, and I don’t want him to know what slobs we really are, so I’m going to say goodbye for now, and I’ll see you on the flip side!
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Tubbyman and Miz Poo from a Huntsville area no-kill shelter – we’re on their quarterly mailing list. When I received the most recent newsletter, I tore out the page where you can "sponsor" an orphan cat or dog – basically you send in $40, which pays for vet care and shots for an animal waiting for adoption. (I try to make a charitable donation each payday, and it all depends on who gets to me first asking for money and how much money we have left over after the bills and allowances are paid. I prefer to run my charitable donations the same half-assed way I run my life.) Anyway, I sent $40 to sponsor an orphan, and a few weeks later, they sent us a thank-you card and a picture of the cutie we’re sponsoring. Is that about the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen? Her name is Patty, she’s 6 weeks old, and she was found in a trailer park when she was 1 week old. Fred took one look at the picture and said "Awwwww, let’s adopt her!" Not seriously, of course, but I suggested we get rid of the Tubbyman, ’cause if I haven’t mentioned it before, I hate that cat. I’m not proud of the fact that I hate the Tubbyman, but I’ll never get over seeing him sitting in my outdoor planter with his ass hung over the edge doing his nasty business, the little bastard. The planter where I was going to reuse the dirt to plant gladioli next spring. Now it’s all nasty and Tubby-poo-filled. Fred tries to defend the Tubbyman, saying "It looks like a litter box, what do you expect him to do?" I expect him to keep his Tubby ass away from it, because I’ve chased him away from it often enough for it to have sunk into his little pea brain that he’s not supposed to be climbing around in there, let alone defiling the dirt I was going to use again. I HATE THAT CAT.
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Mission Impossible 2. I only rented the one movie, because we won’t be around this weekend to watch a bunch of movies, but since MI2 is an action movie, you just know that Fred is dying to see it. I myself won’t mind watching it at all since Tommy boy’s all buff in this movie, but I hear the action sequence at the end is about twenty minutes, which is seventeen minutes too long. That’s the gospel according to Beverly, anyway. Speaking of movies, The Patriot (the one with Mel Gibson, not the Cheesiest Bloated Ponytailed Action "Star" Man Alive, Steven Seagal) was pretty damn good. We watched it whenever it came out – the week before last, I think it was. I understand that there was a brouhaha when that movie came out, that many Brits were all kinds of peeved that the bad guy was British. Now… how do I say this without alienating any British readers I might have? Oh, let me think… How about, THE BAD GUY WAS BRITISH BECAUSE ALL BRITS WERE THE BAD GUYS DURING THE REVOLUTION. When a certain country endeavours to come between people and the freedom they long for, those who wish to prevent such freedom automatically become the bad guys, whether they consider themselves as such or not. As always, I wait breathlessly for any dissenting opinions. Don’t forget to go vote, y’all. Even though, according to Beverly, our votes count for nada.
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No, he’s not dead, even though he looks like it. He’s looking rather ragged these days, though, and I guess it’s about time to get out the cat brush…

Grooming, grooming, grooming. Miz Poo is just the groomingest cat I’ve ever seen.

This picture just doesn’t do justice to how cute Spot was, sleeping soundly with his front paw wrapped around his back paw.

The Tubbyman will lay and gaze lovingly at Fred for hours upon hours. He would probably gaze lovingly at me, but I can’t stand him, ever since I caught him using my outside planters as a litter box. Damn him!

More looks of love.

Really, we think he’s looking at Fred with love in his eyes, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that he’s thinking about how he could pop Fred’s eyes out of his skull and eat them for a snack.

Aren’t these roses purty? Fred bought them for me, just because. Have I mentioned that I love that man?

 

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