An acidic and hostile place: since 1999
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“Come give me a kiss, beautiful.”
Booger and the ladybug. Doesn’t he have gorgeous eyes?
You don’t impress him much.
“One day Daddy will let me get the toy…”
Talk about your long-suffering look!
Clearly, all that yawning wore him out.
I saw this in the grocery store parking lot this morning and it made me laugh.
Miz Poo lurves the sun.
mandarin muffins for breakfast yesterday and then again for lunch, and a better Christmas day breakfast does not exist. The oyster dressing was made by Fred’s stepfather, who is from Louisiana, and the man knows what he’s doing when he’s in the kitchen. Everything he makes (with the exception of stuff made from deer meat, because I have that mental “Bambi!” block going on) is sheer heaven. Really bad for you, too, but if you can’t eat stuff that’s bad for you at Christmas, when can you? So we got home from Fred’s father’s house around 9 Friday night. We carried our presents inside and put stuff away, and then the spud went upstairs and I started carrying the presents in to put under the tree, and Fred came to see what I was doing, and I said “Why do they have to give her SO MANY FUCKING PRESENTS??” Of course, I think everyone should give her tons and tons of presents, but I was tired and had to carry the presents into the living room from the dining room and I just wanted to go upstairs and get into my nightgown and exchange presents with Fred. Fred, on the other hand, was looking toward Christmas morning and thinking about how long it was going to take the spud to open her presents – about two hours, on average, because I make her keep track of who gave her what, so she knows what to say in her thank you notes – and he said “Why don’t we let her open some of her presents tonight?” And I was aghast “Let her open presents tonight? Without watching??” Fred said “She can take them up to her room, open them, and then show us what she got.” The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a really good idea, and so I agreed. I went into our room to change into my nightgown, and I heard him knock on her bedroom door. “Go get ten – no, fifteen! – presents that you want to open from under the tree, and you can open them tonight and then show us what you got.” “But none from us!” I yelled. “Yeah, make sure none of the presents you bring up to open are from us,” he said. So she did, and while she was opening her presents we exchanged presents – I got several books from my wish list and the Live Aid DVDs, which I had seen advertised on TV when we were watching TV. I said “Oh, I want those!” and them promptly forgot about them. Fred, however, didn’t forget. I guess he DOES listen! I gave Fred a t-shirt that says “If I got smart with you, how would you know?”, which was a big hit, a remote-control flying saucer that turned out to be a piece of crap, a couple of books, and the Star Wars trilogy. By the time we were done exchanging presents, the spud was about a third of the way through the fifteen she’d brought upstairs, so we went to check out what she got. She got some pretty cool stuff, but I would say that the hit of the night was the bathroom set my sister and mother sent her.
The Basilique du Sacr� Coeur.
“Is it over yet?”
This is the chocolate-raspberry cake Fred made for dessert tonight. I’ll put the recipe up soon.
This is the cross-stitch picture I made for the spud, which I FINALLY finished. I just have to get it framed and it’ll be ready for hanging on her wall.
“Mother. A small dish of milk, if you please?”
* * * IT IS FUCKING COLD OUT THERE. And y’all shut up with your “I’m in Alaska, and it’s thirty below here!” It was ten below with the windchill this morning, and my husband went running in it. His testicles crawled so far up into his body we’ll be lucky if we see them again by June. Right now it’s, like, ten degrees out and I had to go to the bank, but because it rained like hell last night and then dropped way below freezing, my doors were frozen shut. I had to take a hammer to the handle to get into the fucking car, and then I had to warm it up for ten minutes to even be able to sit in it, and THEN I had to clean the fucking puddle of antifreeze/ coolant off the driveway so that no neighborhood strays would come along and slurp it up, and die a painful death. I live in Alabama. IT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS FUCKING COLD. Days like today make me seriously want to move to Florida. Fred won’t go for that, though – there are no freakin’ mountains in Florida. Thank god for space heaters and gas fireplaces on days like this.
“Dat’s right, Momma, I’m laying in your seat, and you can’t do NOTHIN’ about it! Ha! Ha!”
“He thinks I don’t know he’s holding that fucking toy over my head, trying to annoy me. In about ten seconds I’m going to chomp his hand right off his arm.”
“You DAMN kids and your DAMN cameras! All the time flashing the fucking flash in my face! Why, in my day we din’t HAVE cameras! If we wanted to show pictures, we had to DRAW them from MEMORY, using coal from the FIRE and a piece of BARK!”
Fat Actress. We don’t have Showtime, but I had thought that I might get it so I could watch the show. That was before I saw Kirstie Alley on some news show last week, interviewed by Matt Lauer, and was reminded anew at just how incredibly fucking annoying she is. I think she’s going for “funny and sassy”, but her act wears thin (har!) after about two and a half minutes. She was annoying on Cheers, she was annoying in all those Pier 1 commercials, and now that she’s all over the place flogging her new show, she’s annoying times ten. “Oh, look at me! I am funny and sassy and zany!”, and all the while her crazy eyes are twirling in every direction. And you know what? FUCK YOU, Matt Lauer. Okay? Fuck you for this exchange right here: Lauer: So you threw yourself back into being a mother, and the version I read from time to time is that included spending times in the kitchen. And you like to cook and you like to bake. And I guess you like to eat. Wow, that’s incisive, intelligent, brilliant, DEEP reporting right there, isn’t it? “I guess you like to eat.” No shit, Matt. Ya think? Ya think she might like to eat? Because even though she’s been howling from the top of every fucking building “I’m fat because I eat too much”, I thought for sure she’d try to lay it off on her thyroid or genetics. But not with Bloodhound Lauer on the case. No one fools YOU, Matt. I don’t know – have you been talking to my friend Sean in Lakewood, NJ? Y’all seem to share the same kind of intelligence. Also, Matt Lauer, FUCK YOU especially for this one: Alley: The thing about gaining weight is it doesn’t happen, you know you don’t gain 70 pounds in two weeks. Lauer: But how do you get to 200 pounds from 130-something and not know you’re getting too much heavier? Alley: I don’t think you pay much attention to yourself. Lauer: How about when you get dressed in the morning? What about when you step out of the shower? Alley: First of all, when I step out of the shower, there’s no mirrors so it doesn’t make any difference. But what you don’t know about me is I usually wear pajamas, skinny or fat. Lauer: How about when you’re bending down to pick something up and it’s hard? Alley: Well, I haven’t hit that yet. I’m not saying I’m not stupid about it. I think people can actually be sort of dumb and I think I’m serious. I’d sit in an airplane. I’d go, look at it. They’re really screwing us in first class. This seat is smaller than a coach seat. And I’m sort of Duh.” do you know? Don’t you think you could have just shortened this exchange by simply saying “How were you fooling yourself about turning into a FAT FUCKING COW, Kirstie Alley? Don’t you think there was some denial going on there?”, Matt? Much simpler, and then you could have devoted much more time to the tabloids or just EXACTLY how fat she is or just HOW LONG it’s been since she’s had sex because she loathes her body so much that she can’t stand the thought of being with a man until she’s lost weight. Because the idea that fat is bad and horrifying and disgusting and how DID you let yourself get SO fucking fat? hasn’t been crammed down my throat often enough over the past 36 years; please try to clarify the horror of Kirstie Alley’s “extra” 70 pounds, Matt Lauer, if you don’t mind. Oh, and while you’re at it, would you please bite me? Thanks.
“Maybelle! I said, ‘Where the hell is my beer?'”
I’m looking for a diet blog/jounal you had listed in your previous links list. I can’t remember her name or name of the journal. however, I know she lived near ocean city maryland, her daughter was diagnosed with crohns disease, and she has a new baby. The last entry i read she wrote her husband was leaving her…I can’t stop thinking about her and want to know if they got back togther. I hope all is well. I hope you can help me out. I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of Amy. Unfortunately, Amy hasn’t updated since August. Anyone know how she’s doing? Concerned readers want to know… Also from my comments: Show us your christmas tree? Or are you not doing one this year. I can’t remember I posted a picture of the tree (using the nightvision function on my camera) in this entry, toward the bottom. Sounds like you are getting back into your exercise and healthy eating. You mentioned issues that you did not deal with when you first lost weight. What are they? (Feel free to mock me in your diary for being horribly nosy.) Awwww, it’s NO FUN mocking someone when you have their permission. Hmph. No, seriously, it’s a good question and I’ll probably address it in the future (probably after the holidays are over) over in my weight loss journal. Never posted a comment before but just want to start with the fact that I love everything about you and you family. Question – is there something wrong with Meester Boogers’ eye? One of my cats paws his eye to the point that it tends to get swollen shut. The vet said he has OCD – um, yeah, I don’t think so but it could be true. So I guess, my comment is two fold – first I hope all is well with you and your family and cats (as in, I hope nothing is wrong with Booger’s eye) and second, have you ever had one of your vet’s diagnose any of your cats with a personality disorder? Nah, there’s nothing wrong with his eyes. If his eyes look funny in some pictures, that’s probably because the flash gave him redeye or completely erased his pupil, and Fred photoshopped it to look a little more normal. The vet thinks Spot might have OCD, which is why he grooms constantly and all the fur on his back legs and stomach is mostly gone (poor funny-looking cat). We had him on medication for a while but it turned him into a zombie, so we took him off it. We’ve recently started again with a lower dose, so maybe that’ll work. We’ll see! Did you get your Tivo set up? I’m looking into it, but I’m not sure I can do the connections. I have a VCR, DVD player, and cable box hooked up to an older TV now, and I’m not sure if there’s enough room and connections for yet another component. It says a broadband and a ‘one time’ phone connection. Was this difficult? Any pointers you can give? Sorry if this was already posted and I missed it. Y’all are forbidden to give me a hard time about this, understand? We got the TiVo and were setting it up, when we discovered (because we’re stupid and didn’t realize this when we ordered the freakin’ thing) that you can only tape one show at a time with TiVo. What the hell is the point of that? During sweeps months, we’re generally taping two shows at a time and watching something else we’ve taped previously. Taping one show at a time is just no help to us, you know? And yes, I know that we could have bought two TiVos and hooked each one up to a different TV (god KNOWS we have plenty of TVs in this house!), but each TiVo costs $299 for lifetime service or $12.95 a month, and that’s more money than we want to pay, you know? We sent the TiVo back, called the cable company, and they brought out a new DVR box a few days later. So far we’ve had no problems, but when we are having problems and I’m bitching about it, y’all have my full permission to say “You wouldn’t be having these problems if you had a TiVo, dumbass!” So obviously I have no suggestions for you as far as hooking up the TiVo, but I understand that they have a pretty good online support page, you might give it a try. Good luck! I LOVED the stories of how and why you got your kitties. Kitties are the best. Next time, can you also include why/how you choose Mr. Fancypants and Tubby even though they are gone now? And what happened to Spud’s cat PFE? Oh, you’re going to make me really think, huh? Let’s see… Tubby: In the summer of 1997, the spud was in Maine. Her cat PFE had died and she didn’t know, and we thought that having a new cat might distract her from her grief when she got home. Fred wanted a Bengal kitten and there was a guy in Huntsville who bred them. We went to his house and checked out the kittens he had available, but none of the kittens was particularly friendly, and would have cost something like $600, and I just couldn’t see paying that much for a cat when so many good cats needed a home. We went to South Huntsville, where at that time, the no-kill shelter I volunteer for now had a store where they adopted out cats and sold cat toys, food, and litter. We went into the cat room and played with several different cats, then Fred spotted a little black and white kitten sitting off to the side by himself. He petted the kitten and scratched him at the base of his tail, and the kitten purred loudly and raised his ass up in the air. Fred decided he really liked the kitten and I was so tired of looking at cats at that point that I just wanted to get the cat and get out of there. The lady running the store told us that Jack (the kitten’s name) had been part of a feral colony and they didn’t think he was going to be adoptable, that he’d always be feral, but he’d actually turned out pretty friendly. We brought him home and (of course) Spot and Spanky freaked out and the kitten chased them around, trying to cuddle. We went through a bunch of “s” names and finally settled on Snoopy, because he kind of looked like a Snoopy. We found out pretty quickly that he wasn’t much for being held and cuddled, though he’d rub up against Fred and purr loudly. That night after we’d turned the lights off, Fred and I were laying bed talking, and Snoopy jumped up on the bed, got under the covers, and snuggled up against Fred’s back. “Oh, he’s cuddling with me!” Fred said. “He – OUCH!” It seems that the kitten had gotten so overwhelmed with love that he’d felt the need to bite Fred. On his back. Hee! He turned out to be quite a character, with his bitchy talking-back to us and his demanding food (the idea apparently being that if we were eating, he should be, too. When we’d had him about a year it became pretty clear that he wasn’t going to be a skinny cat, and over time we gradually started calling him Tubby. I think Tubby was pretty much the most popular cat amongst you readers; I once took a poll, and if I recall correctly, he was far and away the favorite. He had a lot of character, and I think it showed in the pictures and stories we shared with you. He was the baddest of the bad-asses. Fancypants was all talk, but the time a stray cat came through the cat door and into the house, it was Tubby who kicked the other cat’s ass across the room, back out the cat door, and across the yard. Y’all really know the rest of the story. About a year ago he started peeing outside the litter box – on the floor in our bedroom, in the closet, on the bed. We found out that he had diabetes, and were treating it. Things got better for a while, but he was really never the same after that. In January of this year he started just not really looking right around the eyes. I can’t explain what I mean, exactly, just that I’d look at him, and he just seemed like he was unhappy and in pain. The vet couldn’t find anything wrong with him and his blood sugar levels seemed to be okay, but there was an air of not-right about him. It was a shock when he died, but not really a surprise. Tubby and I weren’t the best of friends and there were times when I wanted to smack him, but sometimes I just miss him so much it surprises me. There’s no one like Tubby.
We both got the same phone. It’s a Motorola V180, which we got because I’ve been wanting a flip phone forEVAH, because I’m a big dork. The guy at the T-Mobile store assured us that it was a way better phone than the ones we had, but like I told Fred, technology is moving at such a fast pace that our phones will likely be obsolete by tomorrow.
We ended up spending about 45 minutes in the store waiting for the guy to get our phones set up and move the phonebooks from the old to new phones, and all that good stuff. While we were there, a guy came in to return a charger he’d bought last week. He only had the credit card receipt and not the printed-out receipt they give you with every purchase, so the salesman (not the one who was waiting on us, but a younger guy who bore a striking resemblance to Alex from Survivor: Amazon) told the customer he couldn’t take the charger back.
The customer got really pissed off, and everyone else in the store kind of whistled and looked around and acted like we didn’t hear the customer giving Billy (the salesman) hell. He threatened to cancel his account, he threatened to sue (okay, maybe not. But he might have, I don’t remember for sure), he asked if Billy was calling him a liar, he used Billy’s name 63 times in a row, he asked for Billy’s card and said he’d be calling corporate headquarters, and the entire time Billy stuck to his guns and said he was so sorry, he just couldn’t do it.
Finally the guy left, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I mean, I get why the guy was so pissed – I would be, too – but Billy Da Salesman doesn’t make the rules, y’know?
Another ten minutes or so, and we were finally out of there. Fred and I both spent a good long time messing around with our phones. His now plays Green Day’s Basket Case (the actual song, not the tune) when someone calls, and mine plays The Brady Bunch theme, but I might change that to Good Riddance (Time of your Life). I love that song – it always reminds me of ER and Jeanie Boulet singing it a capella during Scott Anspaugh’s funeral.
I’m suddenly struck with the overwhelming need to see that episode again. When I die, I want Jeanie Boulet to sing that song a capella over my coffin.
I suppose I need to get the book out and actually look through it, because I have a feeling there are things my phone can do, about which I have no idea.
I’ll get around to it one of these days, I’m sure.
Miz Poo examines the lady bug.
* * *
“I hate my mother and that infernal fucking flashy thing she’s always flashing at me…”
“How YOU doin’?”
“If I don’t look at her, she’ll go away… if I don’t look at her she’ll go away… Awww, crap. This isn’t WORKING.”
baby mongoose for Meester Boogers to play with (make sure you check out the photo slideshow! They’re so freakin’ cute!).
I said it was going to happen someday, and now it did. He yawned his ears right off his head.
“Hey! Maybelle! Bring me another beer, toot sweet*!”
*Yes, I know the correct spelling is tout de suite. HE doesn’t know that, though.
“Urrrrp! Oh, ‘scuse me. Maybe I don’t need another beer. Hee.”
“Dad, this is the third time I’ve sniffed it. It smells FINE. What stink are you talking about?”
“You. Come here. Rub mah belly.”
“I sure do lead an exhausting life.”
