Author: Robyn

Bill Heard Chevrolet – which is where we got my previous vehicle, the much-loathed and not-at-all-missed truck – is running a radio ad these days that truly peeves me. They’re talking about their special program to extend credit to people who have a hard time finding it elsewhere, and they start listing all the people to whom they’re willing to extend credit: "Bankruptcy! Divorced ladies! Single working ladies!" Now, isn’t that just mighty freakin’ GENEROUS of them, to be willing to finance crappy used cars for divorced or single working ladies? Ah, the heart warms. The kitten (really, how many entries did y’all think I could go without mentioning her?) has the cutest damn meow. It sounds like "Em-WEE, em-WEE", and she always looks so earnest when she meows like that, as if she’s trying to say "The kitchen’s on fire! Get out of here, beeotch!" Speaking of the kitten, she went into the extra room downstairs while I was hanging up a shirt to dry, and I didn’t notice her sneaking in, so I shut the door behind me on my way out (if we don’t keep the door shut, Fancypants – that bastard – poops in the corner of the room. I don’t know why he does it, but it sure does piss me off). About an hour later, I heard the door banging and frantic meowing sounds. I opened the door, and she rubbed against my legs and told me of her tale of woe, which sounded pretty much like "Em-WEE! Em-WEE!" According to weather.com, it’s supposed to be sunny and 78 today, but it’s more like 65 and cloudy. I’d just really like to have two or three hot, sunny days in a row – is that so much to ask? The pool actually got up to 92 Friday, and Fred, the spud and I went swimming after dark. It was like stepping into a bathtub. Which is a good thing in my opinion; another 5 degrees, and it would have been the same temp as the hottub in G’burg the first time we got into it. Speaking of G’burg, Fred was talking about going back to G’burg, just he and I, while the spud is in Maine. I’m not sure whether it’ll happen or not, but it would be nice if it did. God knows I don’t get enough time to just lay around and take it easy.
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Ah, laundry day. If I were at all skilled, I’d create a little cartoonish laundry basket to put at the top of the page on laundry day, and y’all could look and say "Oh christ, she’s babbling about the fucking laundry again. I’m outta here!" Aside from laundry, I’ve been spending the morning backing up my entire system to cd in case of a crash, getting packages ready to go to the post office (there are 3), and searching Napster for a Del Fuegos song. I didn’t know the name of the song or when it was recorded, or even how it went. All I could remember was that there was a Del Fuegos song I heard in the ’80s (mid to late) and it had a line mentioning something rusting in the rain. Well, smack my ass and call me grandma – I managed to find the freakin’ thing! "I Still Want You." I hope I can find the album on Amazon. Napster is the shit. I’ve also – slowly – begun cleaning up my desk. You know, the desk I promised Himself I’d clean this weekend. It’s a major undertaking, tossing out all the crap I thought I needed but didn’t, and god knows how long it’s going to take – more than one day, surely. Have I mentioned that I’m not a big fan of cleaning and organizing? Okay, it’s hours later, and I’ve managed to get all of the spud’s laundry done, went to the post office to mail those aforementioned packages (Deb, you should get a box of books and clothes by the end of the week), and swung by Publix to pick up a few things Fred forgot to get when he got groceries on Saturday. An hour later, I’m back doing laundry and cleaning off my desk. Can you feel the excitement? So Fred got an interesting and somewhat odd letter in the mail Saturday. The return address is "Member Service Center", and it basically says "According to our files, your Credit Card On Account American Express card needs to be updated to facilitate future purposes. Your credit card’s expiration date is 06/00". Actually, that’s exactly what it said – I’m quoting directly from the letter. This is odd because first of all, they never say what company they’re with. I recognize the address as being the address for Book Of the Month Club, and the Literary Guild and those, so it’s probably from his Audio Book Tape Club, but it doesn’t say that anywhere on the letter. Secondly, his American Express card doesn’t expire for anytime soon. He immediately decided that it was a trick, and someone was trying to get his credit card number. I’m not so sure of that, but whoever sent the letter is going to get a "nice try, I don’t think so" letter from him. Oh my god, this is so fucking funny. Y’all have to read it; it made me laugh my ass off. And I got around to writing that letter I mentioned earlier: Dear "Member Service Center", I am in receipt of your letter, dated May 19, 2000, in which you claim that the expiration date on my American Express card is June of 2000. Oh, okay, let me get my new credit card out of my wallet and write it down on your convenient form and send it back to you so that when I get my next American Express bill, I can be surprised by incredibly huge charges for alcohol and women of ill repute. First of all, my American Express card doesn’t expire for two more years, and when it does expire, it isn’t in June. Secondly, have I done something to make you think I may be on mind-altering drugs? I receive a letter from a "Member Service Center", no company name, and I’m supposed to blithely pull out my credit card and send the number off in the pre-paid envelope? Nice touch, the envelope, by the way. And nice try. Sincerely,

Fred Why, oh why, does writing snotty letters amuse me so? Am I just weird? (Don’t answer that!) I once bought a 12-pack of Coke, and when I got home, there were only 11 cans in the carton, so I wrote them a letter. In the letter, I claimed to be a single mother on a very small income, my one "splurge" being a 12-pack of Coke once a week. I wove a tale of heartbreak and horror, and I wish I’d kept a copy so I could remember what I said. Anyway, a few weeks later the main company sent me a letter of apology – blaming it on our local Coke plant – along with two coupons for a free 12-pack each, and three coupons for free 6-packs. I thought that was pretty damn cool. There’s a letter I did save somewhere, about a trip Deb and I took to the grocery store and our run-in with a bitchy customer service clerk. I’ll look and see if I can’t find it here in the next few days. —–]]>

Spanky if he doesn’t stop that infernal fucking howling. He’s lucky he’s still alive after I found yesterday that he’s been peeing over the side of the litter box, against the wall (thank god we’ve got the wall covered with plexiglass). And of course I’d skipped cleaning the litter box on Thursday, so there was a river of cat pee collected under the litter box, coating the floor and the bottom of the litter box, which I didn’t realize until I was holding the litter box and it was dripping cat pee all over my foot. The red veil descended, as Fred would say. I was already in a bad mood because of my FUCKING email (more on that in a sec), and then to have cat pee dripping all over my foot was the final indignity. (I seriously considered running upstairs, grabbing the little bastard, dragging him downstairs, pushing his nose in the pee, and spanking him, but knew for sure if I started spanking him, I would probably beat him to death, and I am many things but a cat-killer I am not.) I threw the offending litter box into the garage after cleaning the litter and tossing it in another litter box (I guess I wasn’t that out of control), then tossed a layer of clean litter on the floor, and heaved the litter box back where it belonged, then stomped into the bathroom to take my shower. Where I discovered that I had no towels, because I’d put both sets in the washer the day before and neglected to put them in the dryer, save for a small hand towel. I knew that if I ran upstairs or called up to Fred to drop me down a towel, I’d start ranting and lose my mind. Since Fred stayed home from work yesterday because his ears were bothering him, I didn’t think he’d care to hear my bitching, so I used the damn small hand towel to dry myself. Small towel, big ass. Let’s just say I wasn’t completely dry when I walked out of the bathroom. Then I stomped upstairs, complained to Fred about my email (I’ll get to it in a minute; be patient), and he yawned at me and didn’t say anything, proving his disdain for my troubles, so I flounced into the bedroom, slammed the door (okay, quietly shut the door), and threw myself on the bed whilst swearing to myself that I was going to stay in bed all day because if I didn’t, I would surely kill someone. After half an hour or so of perusing an old Entertainment Weekly, I’d calmed down enough to not bite Fred’s head off when he knocked on the bedroom door. Pardon me while I pause and tell y’all that the kitten just came downstairs with her toy feather duster in her mouth, chirping proudly the whole while. Did I get a picture, you ask? Well, of course.
So, the day turned out to be okay, despite it’s shitty beginning, which reminds me that I forgot to bitch about my email. My host, whom I shall not link because I hate them and they can kiss my ass, was in the process of updating their mail servers all day Thursday and all day Friday, and meanwhile I could not get one single, solitary piece of email. Can I tell you how FUCKING FRUSTRATING that is? Oh, and the best part is that instead of all my mail sitting somewhere until such a time that they finished upgrading the servers, instead of something REASONABLE like that, INSTEAD, all my motherfucking mail was BOUNCING. Ugh. So if any of y’all emailed me and I didn’t respond, it probably didn’t make it’s way to me BECAUSE MY HOST BITES THE BIG ONE. I’d’ve moved long before now, but where else can I find unlimited storage space for $60 every 3 months? *sob* I spent forever and a day shredding stuff last night, because Fred took a look around the computer room and said "Beeeeeeeeeessie? What would it take for you to clean up your side of the computer room?" I snarled "I’ll get it clean this weekend!" Why is my side of the computer room such a mess, you may ask. Well, mostly because I pay the bills, so all the bills are piled on my desk, and if he doesn’t know where to put a piece of paper, he piles it where? On my desk. Where does the kitten like to sleep? On my desk. Where do packages which need to be mailed out go? On my desk (granted, this is my fault, because I only get my shit together and get packages ready to go every once in a blue moon). Who has a too-small desk, so that the scanner and printer and CPU can’t comfortable fit on the top? Moi. Anyway, I filed the huge stack of papers sitting messily on the TV, which needed to be filed, and then I went through the files and pulled out things like my pay stubs from 3 years ago, and a lease from our old apartment, and other things I decided we didn’t need to hang on to. By the time I was done, I had a stack 6 inches high, and since you can’t just throw that stuff in the trash whole because there are people lurking out there who are ready to steal your identity given the slightest chance, I began shredding. And shredded and shredded and shredded, until halfway through the stack, the shredder broke. I broke the shredder, damnit, can you believe that? I ripped everything else by hand, and this morning my hands were sore. Well, since this entry is one big bitch-fest, I’ll close it out by mentioning a good thing that happened: Fred agreed to take over the weekly grocery shopping. This is good because he sticks to the grocery list, unlike a certain someone, who throws all sorts of bad-for-us stuff in the grocery cart, and therefore he spends a lot less on groceries than I do. —–]]>

Lordy, it’s only 8:30, and I could use a nap already. I had to get up before 6 to make Fred’s lunch and breakfast (because I’m a good wifey)(not that I would be a BAD wifey if I didn’t, you understand), and then tore around like a chicken with it’s head cut off to get the house ready for the cleaning lady. Then I woke the spud up, took a shower, and left (avec spud) to meet Fred at the car place so he could drop his jeep off to be worked on, and took him back to the office.

After we dropped Fred off at the office, we went to Wal-Mart so that the spud could finally FINALLY buy the hoop earrings she’s been obsessing about for weeks. This morning, she was all worried "Will $14 be enough for a pair of earrings?" she fretted. I refrained from pointing out to her that if she was spending more than that on a pair of hoop earrings, she was spending too much, and simply nodded. Not only did she get a pair of hoop earrings, but she got THREE pair of hoop earrings (1 pair silver, 2 pair gold) AND a keychain.

I vegged in front of the computer for a few hours waiting for the pest control people to come – which they finally did – and then the spud and I went to the bank and post office, so I could get a money order to pay the ticket I got last week. $125, down the drain. *sob*

On the way home, I realized we’d never picked up the spud’s final report card, so we went and did that, and then stopped by the school she’ll be attending next year (Middle School! How’d that happen??) and found out that we’d missed an Open House sometime at the beginning of May, where all the (soon to be) 6th graders met the 6th-grade teachers and saw what the school was like. Anyway, we got the spud’s schedule for next year, and one of the ladies who works in the office took us down around the 6th grade wing, which was very nice of her.

I noticed that several homes and businesses we passed on the way home were running their sprinklers, which just makes me want to grind my teeth, and I have to fight back the compulsion to stop and say "Hey, don’t you know you’re not supposed to water your lawn in the middle of the day?! It’s not good for your grass!" I never do stop, though, ’cause I don’t want to sound like a nosy know-it-all.

Even though I am.

Fred’s ears have been bothering him on and off over the last few days, and this morning they were really hurting, so he tried calling his doctor, but she’s apparently on vacation this week. He stuck around work for a fairly important 10:30 meeting, and then had someone drop him off at home – his car’s still being worked on – and now he’s sitting at the walk-in clinic waiting to be seen.

Okay, Fred has not one ear infection, not two, but four – two in each ear. I didn’t even know that was possible. To his dismay, he has to stay out of the pool for 5 days. He’s blaming his ear infection on the hottub, because if anything our pool is over-chlorinated, which would kill any germs (according to Fred). And he’s the only one who went underwater in the hottub, so he’s probably right.

Poor Fred.

Using Napster, I downloaded the MP3 for Denis Leary’s "Life’s Gonna Suck." That song just cracks me up; it always has, ever since I saw him on MTV Unplugged years and years ago. Pissed-off male comics are my favorite, Denis Leary and Dennis Miller chief amongst my favorites.

Fred pointed out that I was listening to a song that proclaimed there was no Santa Claus in front of the spud, but she seemed none the worse for wear, though to all appearances she still believes in the big man. Is that normal? Well, what’m I saying – I believed, or half-believed anyway, in Santa Claus until I was 12 and my younger cousin told me that her mother had told her there was no Santa. I’m just waiting for the spud to ask me point-blank, which she hasn’t yet. If she’s like me, she figures as long as I think she believes, she’ll continue to get way too many presents under the Christmas tree.

If only she knew it’s not my doing. It’s her grandparents who go crazy every year, not me.
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black widow came rushing out. He called me out to look at it, and it was huge. Those things are so damn evil-looking. He finally sprayed it with some wasp spray, and it ran back into it’s hole and died (we assume). Yesterday, he called the pest control people and informed them that he’d found a black widow in the yard – which shouldn’t have happened if they’d sprayed back there like they were supposed to. I guess they’ll be back today or tomorrow to spray the back yard and garage. This is the third or fourth black widow we’ve found since we moved into the house two years ago. Which isn’t so bad until you realize that black widows lay something like 300 eggs at a time, and one of the black widows we found was in the garage, way too close to our door. Brrrrr. Just thinking about it makes me feel like they’re crawling all over me. Have I ever mentioned that Carol Channing just scares the fuck out of me? (holy crap, go check this out) Something about that rictus grin just gives me nightmares.]]>

I dropped the spud off at her friend’s house earlier, and then sat in front of the computer for hours and hours working on splitting my vacation pictures up into separate categories, then thumbnailing them, so anyone who wants to look at them isn’t forced to sit and wait for huge pictures to download. How good am I to my beloved readers? That’s how much I love you! So check out the pages listed below, if you’re interested. (Edited to add: Sorry, they’ve been removed.)

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Teddy Bear Factory, where the spud made a Teddy Bear for herself, and Fred made one for me (which he named Bessie Bear (his nickname for me is Bessie, I think I’ve mentioned)), we were on our way. We got home sometime after 2:00 our time (there’s an hour time difference between us and G’burg, which may have screwed us up more than we realized) and dragged all our stuff inside, gave the cats some love, unpacked, and went swimming. I’m so so SO glad to be home. The house we stayed in had a weird musty, unused smell, which permeated our clothes and all our stuff. By comparison, home smells like, well, home. I’ll be hard at work tomorrow doing laundry, so I’ll have time to start getting some sort of page of my vacation pictures put up – and there are a LOT of pictures. I’m one picture-taking fool, let me tell you. My stomach muscles got a workout while we were on vacation, because Fred did all the driving on those narrow, scary, treacherous roads, and more often that not there would be, on my side of the road, a FUCKING scary drop of, oh, twenty million feet, and it always seemed – at least to me – that we were on the verge of plummeting over the side to our sure deaths. Therefore, every time I looked out my window, I’d gasp involuntarily, tense my stomach muscles – because that really helps stop a car from falling off the side of a mountain, dontcha know – and grab the dashboard. I just thank god I wasn’t driving. ]]>

Cherokee, NC yesterday afternoon, and visit Pigeon Forge today. After sitting around the house for a while, watching TV and just relaxing, we took off for Cherokee. To get to Cherokee, we had to drive through the Great Smokey Mountain National Park, which was just incredible. (I’ve decided I’m going to put my vacation pictures on another page, or create a slideshow, because I know not all of y’all are that interested in ten zillion pictures of mountains and streams.) The drive was 33 miles, but the roads over the mountains were twisty and turny, to say the least. At one point, we drove in a complete circle within about half a mile. Everywhere we looked, there were streams and little waterfalls. Gorgeous, I tell you. Cherokee itself was less than thrilling – we walked around and did some shopping, and picked up a t-shirt for the spud and bought more stuff I didn’t really need (which could be my motto: Robyn: Buying Stuff She Really Doesn’t Need). We spent half an hour or so there, before heading back. Oh, now that I think about it, something fairly embarrassing happened. We were in the first store we visited, looking around, and there were a large number of windchimes hanging from the ceiling. I was standing there looking up at them when they started chiming vigorously, from – I assumed – a gust of wind coming through the propped-open door. After about two minutes of chiming, I good-naturedly said "Okay, we get the point," as if talking to the wind, and smiled at Fred. He got a pissed look on his face and poked me in the side and said "Stop it!" Bewildered, I said "What??" He dragged me to another part of the store and hissed "She’s retarded!" I stared at him and said "Who?" He nodded at a girl standing over by where we’d just been, and I looked at him and looked at her, and said "So?" It turns out that she’d been moving the windchimes so they’d chime. Like I was supposed to know that, fer chrissake. Yes, I was embarrassed as hell, and yes Fred thinks it’s the funniest thing ever. Grrrr. It was almost 5:00 by the time we got back to Gatlinburg, so we went directly to Maxwell’s to eat. Fred found their website before we left, and it sounded like they had a pretty good menu, so we decided to eat there. It’s a steakhouse, first and foremost, so Fred ordered the prime rib. I, on the other hand, went against a strongly held belief ("Seafood is best when eaten in a town on the ocean – inland seafood isn’t as good") and ordered the seafood scampi. The spud ordered her usual chicken fingers. The salad was just the best salad I’ve ever had (except for the salad at East Side Marios), aided by the excellent homemade blue cheese dressing. They brought out small loaves of wheat bread, which was also pretty good. When the entrees arrived, however, I realized that "seafood scampi" was code for "seafood sauteed in butter, with an entire head of garlic". It was the blandest thing I’ve ever had, and I ended up grateful that I’d eaten my entire salad and some of the bread. On the way back to the house, we stopped and rented some incredibly crappy movies (FX2 and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) from a little store on the way. For the rest of the evening, we watched movies; around 9, Fred and I went out to the hottub. The temperature was a painful 105, which wasn’t in the slightest bit comfortable to me. After floating around for about twenty minutes, we gave up and went inside and started our second movie. That Jennifer Love Hewitt, some actress, huh? Shortly before 11, I voted we go to bed, which was seconded by Fred. After drugging ourselves with Tylenol PM, we headed upstairs. Watching a scary movie before bed wasn’t a good idea, because Fred started getting paranoid that someone would break into the house, and his paranoia sparked some paranoia on my part. That didn’t last long, though, because the Tylenol PM knocked us both out pretty quickly. We all slept well last night, and I slept until after 7, when Fred – who had been up for a while – woke me up. The spud slept until after 8. We left for Pigeon Forge after 10, and visited some little shops. My favorite, far and away, was The Cat House, which had all sorts of cat paraphernalia. I could easily have spent two hundred bucks in there, but luckily (for Fred) I restrained myself. Fred was aching to visit some arcades, so we drove around looking for one. Since I have zero, zilch, nada interest in arcade-type stuff, he and the spud went in and I waited in the car with my book, the air conditioning on high. We stopped and ate seafood for lunch (no, I’ll never learn)(at least this time it was pretty good), made one more stop because Fred was thinking about buying a 7UP shirt (it’s the shirt the guy in the commercial wears, which says "Make 7" on the front, and "UP Yours" on the back), and I waited in the car again while he and the spud went down to a couple of shops (no, I know I’m no fun, but I don’t mind waiting in the car, so hush up). Now we’re back in the house for the evening. We’re going to order pizza and subs for dinner, and watch another two crappy movies (Child’s Play 2 and FX), and Fred and I will take our final dip in the hottub. I’m starting to like the house we’re staying in. I like that the entire bottom floor is taken up with the pool table, ping pong table, and bathroom, that the living room and kitchen are on another floor – along with a couple of bedrooms – and that the master bedrooms are upstairs. It’s a charming little house, despite the fake wood paneling and shag carpet. The hottub is outside, but instead of just walking outside to get to it, you have to go outside and around the house, taking a treacherous, slippery path to get there. The bathrooms are a tad creepy, because there are mirrors wherever you look, and god KNOWS I don’t care to look at myself in mirrors any more than I have to. There’s a cool hall of mirrors effect, though, because there are mirrors on two walls, and they reflect back and forth. I’ll have to remember to take a picture of that. Speaking of mirrors, I noticed yesterday that my hair just kind of fell apart after a while in the humidity. So I carefully blew it completely dry this morning, happy for once with the way it looked when I was finished. I sprayed a light layer of hairspray and skipped downstairs to present myself to Fred. He looked up from his bowl of cereal and said "Well, don’t you have the flyaway hair this morning!" The man is full of compliments, ain’t he? ]]>

There’s also a covered hot tub, which I’ll take a picture of at some point. After we got here, we unloaded the car, then laid about, gasping for air. At some point, Fred and the spud went out to the hot tub, and I laid on the couch watching TV and snoozing. We finally made dinner – steak on the grill, mmmmmm – and then sat around watching TV, talking, and looking at the view out the sliding glass doors. Fred and the spud went to the bottom floor and played pool and ping pong for an hour or so while I watched TV and read. Just like being at home. We sent the spud to bed around 11 last night, and headed upstairs ourselves at the same time. We laid in my bed and talked for a while, then Fred left for his own bed, and I rolled over prepared for a good night’s sleep. Which so didn’t happen. I tossed and turned all night, not sleeping worth a shit. I don’t know why – the bed was comfortable, I brought pillows from home, it was cool enough, I had my earplugs. Fred didn’t sleep well either, and neither did the spud. Fred finally got up and came into my room sometime after 6, and we talked about how tired we still were. Fred went to take his shower, and I tried to get more sleep, which didn’t happen. Finally, I gave up and got up to take my shower and get ready for the day. By the time I came downstairs, Fred and the spud had had their bowls of cereal and were watching TV. It was only shortly after 7, and since nothing in town opens until 9 or later, we sat around shooting the shit. It’s now 9:30, and Fred and the spud have gone into Gatlinburg for the morning. They’ve been gone 45 minutes, and Fred’s called 3 times already, necessitating my putting down the laptop and running for the phone each time. Grrrr. They’re going to visit the arcades and all the other places I have no interest in seeing, and I’m going to hang around the house, watching TV and reading Watermelon. I brought four books with me, just in case. I’d hate to run out of books! If I’m lucky, I might snooze. This afternoon, we’re going back into Gatlinburg to visit the museums and other places we all want to see. There’s a local channel which runs nothing but local commercials, and there’s a store called HHI in Pigeon Forge (just on the other side of Gatlinburg) which appears to sell each and every piece of crap ever invented. Naturally, Fred and I are dying to go there. If nothing else, there’s plenty of shopping in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. We plan to go to Cherokee, North Carolina tomorrow. Fred is all kinds of excited that there’s gambling there. He’s talking about dropping the spud and I off to go shopping, so he can go gamble for a few hours. I’m not sure if he’s serious; I suspect not. As I tell him, though, "It’s your money, babe. Lose it if you want." —–]]>