Does this look comfortable to you?
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Best wishes to reader Aly, who will be walking in the Atlanta 3-Day this weekend. Here’s hoping that the rain just blows on by!
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Have I mentioned that my parents, my sister, and my nephew are talking about coming to Alabama for Christmas? It’ll depend on whether my mother can get the time off.
My mother is just dying to get the hell out of Dodge over Christmas – for years she’s been saying she was just going to go away for the holidays and everyone else – my grandmother and uncle – could just take care of themselves. She’s tired of cooking all kinds of food to only have my grandmother be uninterested in eating.
Anyway, I should know more this weekend, if not before. It would be kinda cool if they could do it – and the spud and Brian wouldn’t have to go an entire 10 months before seeing each other again.
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During the eternal days of rain we suffered through last week, I happened to glance out the window at our bird feeders. Apparently the rain and humidity had caused some growth:
Yesterday, when I went to empty out the feeders to clean them and refill them with clean seed, I found that both feeders were ROOT-BOUND, and I was unable to empty them. Because the feeders are a few years old, I figured they’d done their tour of duty and tossed them in the trash.
Later, since I needed a few other things, I ran to Target, with the intention of buying a couple of bird feeders on my way out. After going all OVER the store and being unable to find them, I had to stop and actually think about it.
“Where,” I asked myself, “Are the bird feeders at Wal-Mart?” I thought a good long time, smoke coming out of my ears. “Oh yeah… by the dog and cat food. Does it not, then, stand to reason that the bird feeders in Target might be near the pet supplies?”
And they were. So I stood in the aisle, looking for feeders just like our old ones, and when I thought I had found them, I was aghast.
“TWENTY-FIVE dollars for a bird feeder?” I said to myself. “I think NOT!” And as I looked closer, I noticed that the feeder was just like our old ones, but didn’t have the little seed-catching/ platform thing on the bottom. And we have big, fat doves who love to come eat from our feeders, and without the platform thing, there would be no way for them to partake of the yummy seed, because they’re very big and heavy, and couldn’t possibly balance on the tiny little stick-things that the smaller birds can easily sit on.
I stood in the aisle for perhaps five minutes, looking at each and every kind of bird feeder, trying to decide what to do. I wasn’t willing to spend much more than ten dollars per bird feeder, and some of the prices were just ridiculous. I thought and fumed and considered, and then I decided I would just haul my ass to Wal-Mart, because I knew for sure that they had the right kind of feeders.
And as I turned, I saw it. Directly in front of me, was the exact kind of feeder I wanted, on sale for just under $11. It had been there the entire time, but I just hadn’t seen it, despite the fact that I’d made a point of carefully looking at each and every feeder at least twice.
I hate it when that happens.
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Spanky is the Lance Bass of our family. Lights? On. Yet no one is home.
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I’m kind of excited about tomorrow. See, there’s a no-kill shelter in Madison – they have mainly cats – and they’re in partnership with one of the pet stores in the area, wherein the pet stores keep several cats in cages so that people can come in and fall in love with them and want to adopt them. There are volunteers who go to the pet store each morning and evening to feed the cats and scoop out their litter boxes. Fred went and did it on Monday, and said that I should volunteer to do it as well. So I emailed the lady who runs the shelter and asked if they needed any volunteers to help out, and she said that starting next week one of their regular volunteers would no longer be doing [censored so that stalkers won’t know when to find me] mornings, and if I wanted, I could take over. Oh, and their usual Friday morning person was going to be out of town this week, so could I cover that as well?
So I’m going to, and of course the best part of this whole experience will be neither the feeding nor the scooping, but rather the petting and hugging.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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Fred took this incredibly good picture of Tubby, and I stole it. So there!]]>
2002-10-03
to happily answer my query, no ten zillion pieces of spam waiting for me each and every morning, no journals and forums to read, no Snood to play…
No nothin’.
How, if I needed to know the name of that song on Felicity, would I ever have figured it out in 1995? I know I would have, could have, because when I needed to know something I was very resourceful, and I can’t remember a single question that, in the long run, ever went unanswered, but I’m at a loss to know how I would have done it.
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Another song that breaks my heart every time I hear it is This Woman’s Work, sung by Kate Bush. I can’t hear it without thinking of 
Poor Kato! I was disappointed, to tell the truth, that David (Bud Bundy) Faustino was the only one to step up and have his head shaved – I would have liked to see Coolio with no hair, though they did shave his face. But we’re talkin’ CELEBRITIES, here, and I’m SURE it was written into the contract that they couldn’t make them shave their heads.
Nikki Schieler Ziering wasn’t the brightest bulb in the lamp, but I found myself liking her, anyway. The surprise, really, was Coolio and Lorenzo Lamas. I ended up not caring for Coolio at ALL, due to his attitude (kick his ass, Rosenbaum!). (And it was obvious Coolio didn’t watch the first Boot Camp and see the shit-fit McSweeney had over the mint, or he wouldn’t have tried to smuggle that muffin from the chow hall.)
Lorenzo Lamas, on the other hand, had some real leadership potential, which I never would have expected.
I think my favorite moment of all was when everyone got a one-minute call home, and Kato MISDIALED the number and got a stranger’s answering machine. Instead of hanging up and re-dialing, he LEFT A ONE-MINUTE MESSAGE ON THE ANSWERING MACHINE. Damn was that funny. Kato’s not terribly bright, but he is infinitely likeable.
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Only a week and a half, and I’ll be in Gatlinburg, y’all! I’m way too excited about that…
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Sooooo Fancy!