Category: Life

Sadly, I didn’t meet my goal of getting all the laundry done Friday night and even as I speak there’s one last load of towels gurgling in the washer. Woe is me.

The weekend didn’t fly by as quickly as it has been, which in my opinion is good. I got lots of reading and lolling about lazily accomplished today, which means two thumbs up for today! For me, anyway. Fred isn’t feeling too well; I think he caught the cold that the spud had last week, and his colds tend to turn into bronchitis. He’s not sleeping well at all, and he’s been coughing on and off. He managed to get a nap in earlier today, which made him feel a little better. He’s already planning to take tomorrow off.

My parents will be here Thursday morning at 10ish to begin their long, long visit. On the upside, they’re going to Nashville next weekend and taking the spud with them. They’re leaving Friday afternoon and coming back Sunday afternoon. I’d be more excited, but the fact is that not much will be different around here with the spud gone. We’ll still be in bed by 10 Friday night, watch movies and putter around the house Saturday, and have a big breakfast Sunday morning. We do not lead exciting, club-hopping, beer-guzzling existences, but we like it that way. Stop mock-yawning, reader, you know you’re jealous of our idyllic lives.

While I sit here at my computer, Fred is sitting at his across the room. He asked me to turn around and check out a picture on his screen, and I did so. As I turned back to my computer, my heart did a little pitter-patter of joy when he said "Aren’t you looking all cute…" I smiled to myself and perhaps even blushed a little. "Spot," he finished. Hmph. Is it fair that the cats get way more lovetalk and compliments in a day than I get all month? I think not.

We watched "Go" last night. I liked it; it was rather Tarentinoesque. Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf as gay actors were great, and at one point when they shrieked, Fred and I laughed our butts off. Fred pointed out that no matter what Jay Mohr is doing or saying, he always looks insincere, and I’m not sure if that’s just because he has a fakey smile or because of the characters he’s played. Insincere or not, he’s beginning to be an actor I enjoy a lot. William Fichtner is in the movie too, as a cop. He was the blind guy in "Contact" and one of the astronauts in "Armageddon", and he’s been in tons of other movies, but I spotted him long ago on "As the World Turns" back in the late ’80s and early ’90s as a rapist turned good guy, and I’ve loved him ever since.

Did everyone watch "Annie" tonight? I got all teary-eyed when Andrea McArdle was singing and dancing, I’m not sure why. Kathy Bates kicked ass, of course, and so did Alan Cumming. I really like the new Annie a lot, though she doesn’t seem like she’s 11 years old. That, or the spud has skewed my view of 11 year-olds as looking and sounding older than that. And about Victor Garber, I have only one thing to say: Hubba-hubba!

And with that, I bid you goodnight, sweet readers.

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Goddamn little bitches, was my first thought. I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to kick and slap and punch them. I wanted them to cry like she was crying. I wanted them dead, the little bitches. Hurt the feelings of my child? I’ll show you! But we live in a civilized world where Moms don’t kill the brats who hurt the feelings of their child. At least, that’s the world I hope we live in. Fred called the coach of her team, and ended up talking to the coach’s wife because he’s out of town right now. She was appropriately horrified, but also bewildered. “When could they have been picking on her? The coaches are always around,” she said. I think she was imagining a scenario wherein the spud’s teammates pursued her, calling her names and pushing her around. That’s ridiculous, of course, because the coachesare always around, and there are always a few extra parents hanging around during practice, so if there were any sort of physical torture, it would have been nipped in the bud. What I suspect happened is that one or more of them made snide comments to the spud when the coaches were on the other side of the field. A smirk here, a rude comment there, and what’s supposed to be fun becomes not very. It makes me sad, because is this when it starts? Is this where the gradual ripping apart of her self-esteem begins? She’s an average student, she’s not very physically skilled (she gets that from her mother), and most of her clothes come from Wal-Mart. And when you’re not good at something, unless you’re hugely delusional, you pretty much know that you’re not good at it. Even if you don’t know, there’s always someone more than willing to point it out to you. Repeatedly. If you’re lucky, that person is not one of your parents. I happen to think that the spud is the cutest kid to come down the pike, but guess what? That doesn’t help her out there in the real world when her bitchy little teammate informs her that she can’t kick the soccer ball worth a shit. Why are people so intent on ripping others to shreds? Why do we feel the need to look at people and point out every imperfection, real or imagined? And it’s not only women, not by a long shot. Fred worked with a man who was completely average-looking, and whenever Fred would say that he considered this woman, or that woman attractive, the other guy would point out every single thing he perceived to be wrong with her, from her hair color to the size of her feet. Why? Because he knew he couldn’t get her? How does putting someone else down make you better than them? And before it sounds like I’m preaching from a self-righteous pulpit, I know I do it too. The Arquette conversation from last night is one very clear example. However, Alexis, Patricia, and Rosanna Arquette aren’t likely to be hanging out in our living room anytime soon, and chances are 99.999% that none of them will ever set sight on this site. I’d never tell anyone to their face that they were ugly or that they sucked at doing this or that. Fred and I both grew up overweight. Do you think, for one single, solitary moment that we didn’t know we were overweight? And yet, I was regularly informed throughout my childhood and high school years that I was fat. What does that prove? Only that the person telling me is a clueless idiot or a total asshole, I suppose. As an overweight adult, do you think I don’t see the people nudging each other and laughing at the fat chick? I’m sure they’re saying “If I ever get that fat, shoot me.” When I was 25, I made the mistake of purchasing half a dozen donuts to take to work with me. The cashier at the grocery store announced loudly that “my goodness, those donuts could feed me and them!” (gesturing toward the three people standing in line behind me). What was her point, that I eat too much? Gosh, thanks for the newsflash. Did I say “Thanks for the newsflash, you hideous old bitch”? Of course not. I took my donuts and scurried away, head down. Just the actual fact of being fat made me the lesser person, you see. And what’s saddest of all is that I feel compelled to tell you, reader, that the donuts were not for me; they were for the whole office. ]]>

I’m so glad the week is over. It was one of those weeks that just lasted forever, even with a day off in the middle of it. I thought about going to the movies after leaving work, but I was so bloated and gassy from the shrimp lo mein I had for lunch that the thought of sitting in a movie theater for a longish period of time just made me nauseous. Instead, I swung by the grocery store and then came home, put the groceries away, straightened out the pantry, tossed a lot of stuff, and waited for Fred to get home from work. Oh, and I started the laundry train rolling along. It’s my dream to finish the laundry on Friday night, just once. Most often I get one or two loads done Friday night and have to do the bulk of it Saturday morning with a few straggling sweaters or shirts that can’t be washed with everything else getting finished up Sunday. I hate it when laundry spills over into Sunday, though. I try my damnedest to keep Sunday a laundry-free day, but it rarely happens that way.

Hey, this is some exciting stuff, isn’t it? What will I talk about next, dryer lint? Woohoo, somebody stop me!

Spanky is in a somewhat clingy mood these days. Everywhere I am, he wants to be. It’s like having a 2 year-old. I like my privacy in the bathroom, but if I should — God forbid — go in and shut the door, he’s out in the hallway screaming for me. "Momma! Momma!" he howls. "Momma, whyfor have thou forsaken me? Oh my God, I’ll never see my Momma again!" and then he stands on his hind legs and digs at the door near the doorknob. The other cats often gather to observe. When I’m annoyed enough, I reach over and open the door so he can join me. The other cats either scatter or gather around the doorway to sniff appreciatively. Spanky winds back and forth between my feet, purring loudly. When he’s happiest (which is a lot), he has a very loud purr with kind of a catch in it. He sounds as if he’s singing, like a cricket, rather than purring, so we call it (can you guess?!) his "cricket purr." He’s been purring his cricket purr a lot lately, especially in my ear. He seems to be especially attached to me when it’s close to my period. Fred suggests it’s the estrogen in the air, which it very well might be; the other cats tend to get a little nuts at the same time Spanky gets friendly, so perhaps it’s hormonal. My hormones, that is, not theirs. They were all fixed long before they got a chance to develop any hormones of their own.

So aside from doing laundry this evening, I’ve been paying bills and making a CD for myself. Our new computers came with nifty CD Reader-Writers, and I went through some of my CDs and made a mix. There’s all kinds of stuff on there, from Elton John to Edwin McCain, to Live, to Tim McGraw. Right now "Wrong Again" by Martina McBride is playing. I love that song. I really like slow, depressing songs. I used to have Pearl Jam’s "Black" dubbed on the front and back of a tape and would listen to it over and over. It’s one of the few songs of which I never tired. (yes, that sentence did previously read "few songs which I’ve never gotten tired of." I try to be grammatically correct sometimes. Wanna make something of it?)

Fred and the spud are watching another "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie. I went upstairs to put some laundry away and saw Patricia Arquette and said "Hey, it’s Pamie!" If you haven’t seen pictures of Pamie, she’s a dead ringer for Patricia Arquette, only better looking (which I guess wouldn’t make her a total dead ringer, but you know what I mean). A short conversation with Fred ensued whereupon we discussed the Arquette family:

Fred: Damn, she got the looks in the family, didn’t she?

Robyn: Yeah, totally. Except, there’s one last brother who’s entering showbiz, and he’s pretty cute.

Fred: He’s gotta be better-looking than Alexis.

We have truly scintillating conversations, don’t we? I know you’re jealous.

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Dear Grammy and Papa, Today I went to the Dentest because one of my baby teeth was cracked in half so they gave me two shots and pulled my tooth out then mama was paying and i felt dizzy then I felt like I was going to barf so i went in to the bathroom and barfed. How are you doing? Pretty damn cute, huh? Even cuter, this morning she came to the doorway of my bedroom and said “Momma?” I turned and said “What, spud?” She held out the envelope that the dentist had put several pieces of gauze in for us to take home with us, and said “I only have one gau left.” Get it? She thought “gauze” was plural, so obviously the singular would be “gau”! Despite the fact that I had yesterday off, today managed to crawwwwwl by the way Thursday always does. We managed to get our invoice and other reports turned in a day early, which thrilled me to no end (sarcasm). I thought I was going to have to throw a temper tantrum right there in the office because everyone except Tex had emailed me their monthly report. Once I get everyone’s monthly report, I have to format it a certain way and print it out to go to the customer with our invoice. It’s a pain in the ass and I hate doing it, but it doesn’t take very long. I mostly dislike it because they email their technical computer-geek monthly accomplishments to me in sentences and I have to cut and copy them in task & description form, and I pretty much have no idea what any of it means. I might as well be sitting there typing “Task: Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blahblah.” I haven’t received any complaints back from our customer and I’ve been doing it for close to three years, so I guess I can’t be screwing it up too badly. The hugest pain in the ass, though, is getting everyone to get their reports to me without having to harangue them every five minutes. I gave them two days notice this time, and you’d think that would be enough. But not for Tex, oh no. God forbid he take time out of his busy computer card game-playing schedule to do something so mundane. The cleaning lady cancelled again today, so we’re not going to bother seeing her. If it’s this difficult to get her to come over for an estimate, how hard will it be to get her to actually clean for us? Besides, she doesn’t have her own car — the Yard Guy, her son, apparently drives her wherever she needs to go. We called around to several different places, and got over-the-phonequotes of $75 – $80 a week. We’re just not willing to pay that much for weekly housecleaning, so I guess we’ll continue with cleaning ourselves on Saturday mornings.]]>

The spud had her cracked tooth pulled today. Luckily it was a baby tooth and only attached at the gums, so they shot her up with Novocaine and yanked it out. There was a lot of blood, but it didn’t bleed for long. The only downside was as we were standing in line at the check-out desk, the spud turned an interesting shade of green and told me that her stomach hurt. "Okay," I said blithely. "I’ll get you a soda on the way to school." She tugged on my sleeve frantically and informed me that she was about to throw up. I directed her to the bathroom. She went in and treated the whole office to a very loud gagging sound (she gets that from her mother), and came out a few minutes later a little less green. At that point, I decided she wouldn’t be going back to school today, and we came home where she got into bed, sipped gingerale, and watched TV.

I cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed the entire upstairs, and did some light reading. I don’t much care for days when I’m home because the spud isn’t feeling well. Unlike days when I pretend to be sick, the time off is wholly unexpected, and if I don’t do some sort of housework, I feel guilty. Of course, once the housework was done, all bets were off. I read some, surfed some, and got caught up on the last week and a half of "The Bold and the Beautiful." About which, I have this to say: Cut the apron strings, Eric, you self-righteous, sanctimonious asshole. And get a personality, Macy. Brooke will have Thorne, and you can all go to Hell.

In any case, the day flew by, and before I knew it, Fred was home from work. We lay on the bed and talked for a little while (no, that’s not a euphemism for sex), and waited for the sprinkler guy and the cleaning lady we’re getting an estimate from to show up. The cleaning lady was supposed to be here after 3, and she never showed up. The sprinkler guy showed up around 4:45 and fixed the leaky line. While we were hanging around waiting, Fred called Schwan’s and asked them to cancel our service. Does the rest of the country have Schwan’s? It’s a yellow truck that stops by every two weeks, and fills your order for frozen foods like chicken nuggets, pizzas, ice cream and the like. Their stuff is okay, but since you have to buy in bulk, not only do we end up with stuff that sits in the freezer taking up valuable space, but we always spend way more money than we’d like. The guy at headquarters tried his damnedest to talk Fred into staying with Schwan’s, but Fred was firm and didn’t budge. Which is more than I would have been able to do. The first time the guy said "But the food from Schwan’s is so yummy!" I would have folded like a… something that folds easily. A cheap suit? A house of cards? I don’t know, but you get the idea. I would have been signing up for every special that came down the pike, and then some. This in spite of the fact that the Schwan’s food is nothing to write home about. I’m a lily-livered, spineless fool when someone gets me on the phone.

I still hang up on telemarketers, though, so don’t get any bright ideas. I’m weak, not stupid. At least, that’s what I like to think.

As I was sitting in front of my computer this afternoon, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, in the direction of the window to the right of my computer. I turned my head to look, but saw nothing. A few minutes later, another motion in that direction. This time when I looked, there was a big, scary redneck-looking Grizzly Adams type stomping through my front yard. Gave me quite a fright, I’ll tell you, until I realized that it was probably the pool guy come to take a sample of our pool water. I waited for him to ring the doorbell to ask me to let him into the backyard, but he never did. He apparently assumed no one was home, and simply left. By the way, here’s a picture of our pool from today. It’s much more impressive with the solar cover off:

Looks like sewage, doesn’t it?

The cleaning lady, as I mentioned before, never did show up. We waited until 5, and then Fred beeped the guy who — along with his gaggle of children — mows our lawn. Robyn, you’re saying, Why would the lawn guy give a flying fuck that the cleaning lady never showed up? Well, reader, it’s like this. She’s his mother, and she cleans houses in her spare time. Since we are the original Lazy Ass Family, we would like someone to come once a week and clean. Fred makes some pretty damn good money, and what better way to throw some of that money away than by hiring someone to clean for us? God knows I can think of better things to do than clean the toilet.

Like sit on my lazy ass.

And with that, I bid you good evening.

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Ah, me, what to write about?

It rained like hell last night, and we woke up this morning to find our pool full of mud. We have a small sloping hill behind our pool, and behind the fence there’s more sloping hill and lots of mud. Here’s what the pool looked like:

 

The picture doesn’t really do it justice. See all the water under that solar cover? It’s murky brown like the Nile River. There are more pictures, and perhaps tomorrow I’ll put them all on a separate page.

Fred freaked out when he saw the state of the pool this morning. He was afraid we’d have to empty the pool and spray it out and scrub it and then refill it. The guy who owns the company that put in the pool came out and looked at it, and said he didn’t think it was a big problem. He told Fred to shock the pool and over the course of the next few days, the mud should circulate out. Fred calmed down a little, and called around to get estimates for a brick wall to hold back any future mud floods. Pretty expensive, we found out.

Isn’t our back yard tiny? To the left, off-picture, there’s a patio, and next to that there’s some more lawn, but all in all it’s pretty damn small. It suits our purposes, though, and we like it, which is the important thing.

The spud cracked a tooth today as she was chowing down on a package of skittles from Halloween. It’s a tooth she says had been loose for a while (she still hasn’t lost all of her baby teeth), and she said the cracked tooth didn’t hurt, but it’s bleeding a lot. So I guess it’s off to the dentist for the spud and I in the morning. Damn that Halloween candy!

For the last several weeks, once or twice a week, I’ve been getting calls at work where, once I answer the phone "This is Robyn", the person hangs up. Just hangs up! No, "I’m sorry, wrong number", they just hang up. When I check my caller id, it says "unknown number, unknown name," so either they’re calling from an unpublished number or, more likely, they’re dialling *67 before they call me. I was bitching about it in the IRC channel Fred and I hang out in during the day, and a few minutes later, the phone rang again. I checked the caller id, and it says again, "unknown number, unknown name." I picked up the phone and uttered my usual greeting, only this time the caller said, in some obviously fake accent, "Bye-bye!"

It had to be someone in the IRC channel. Fred, who is the king of geeks, checked the access logs to our company webpage and somehow figured out, looking to see who had visited our "contact" page, who it was. Busted! That man just amazes me more often than not.

Later on yesterday afternoon, another IRC person called and said "Want to touch the heiny!" Which is something this particular person had done before to Fred, so I wasn’t too freaked out.

We chat with some interesting people, don’t we?

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So, Fred and I watched Arlington Road last night since everything was in reruns. It was pretty damn good. Tim Robbins does creepy better than I’d expected, but if Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins had switched roles, I think the movie would have been just as good. By the time the movie was over, it was past our usual bedtime, and we lay in bed talking for another half hour or so before Fred stumbled, half-asleep, off to bed. I tossed and turned most of the night, but felt fairly perky this morning when I rolled out of bed at 5:45. And the sun didn’t shine in my eyes on my way to work! Well, the sun wasn’t really out, but I could see the outline of it behind the clouds, and it was too high to shine in my eyes if it had been. Last week at work, Fred discovered the greatest thing. You know those incredibly annoying pop-up ads on Geocities and Tripod and the banner ads on other pages? Well, you can filter them out with the "Proxomitron." I downloaded it at work, and it works really well. And it’s free! Go here to download it and try it out for yourself.

In the "bathroom wars" news: Well, I haven’t done anything I’d planned to, yet. But today, someone peed all over the rim of the toilet in the bathroom I prefer to frequent, and it wasn’t me. Can penii really be that difficult to maneuver? There’s a huge hole (the toilet), you whip it out, you aim, you pee. Where’s the problem, boys? That’s okay; I figure next time I have my period I’ll leave a big old drop of blood on the seat and watch the bastards run away screaming. On the upside, the cleaners cleaned over the weekend, and got rid of the bloody booger-type thing on the tank.

Such appetizing topics, eh?

I’m really quite excited at the moment. I got my statement in the mail, and saw that — try to remain calm, people — I earned thirteen cents on my savings account last quarter. I think a month-long trip to the Bahamas will put a little dent in that windfall, yessiree.

I was listening to country music on the radio this morning, and at one point I got up and walked to the kitchen to wash my cereal bowl. As I walked down the hall back to my office, I heard a high-pitched "Woo! Woo! Woo!" coming from my office. "What the–?" I wondered out loud. Was one of my morally bankrupt bosses boinking someone in my office? Perhaps someone was plucking their eyebrows using the mirror on the back of my door? Turns out it was Shania Twain singing her "Man, I feel like a woman" song. "Woo! Woo!" indeed.

I found a url Fred sent me from a few weeks ago. This article talks about Gulf War Syndrome, and how the antidote Gulf War veterans were given could conceivably be the cause of the widespread illnesses among veterans. The following excerpt from my IRC conversation with Fred pretty much sums up my opinion on the subject:

Robyn_ : (quoting from the article) "Officials at the Pentagon, which commissioned the study, stressed that the findings are not conclusive. "

Robyn_ : And they’ll never be conclusive.

Fredster: 🙂

Robyn_ : Because God forbid our government ever take responsibility for anything it does.

Robyn_ : In 75 years, president Chelsea Clinton will be handing out miniscule payments to descendants of Gulf War Veterans and apologizing.

I guess that would be more of a one-sided mini-rant than a conversation.

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Happy Halloween to all, and Happy Anniversary to Fred! Yes, this time last year I’d only been married for about two hours. My wedding day, such a happy memory… True to form, Fred was nervous about getting married up until the very day we got married, and I wasn’t at all until that day. All day long last October 31st, I said "We don’t have to get married. We could just wait ’til next year. Shouldn’t we get married on the anniversary of the day we met? That would be more romantic!" Lucky for me, he just smiled and kept on driving (yes, I was even trying to get out of it as we drove to the chapel). Not that I didn’t want to be his wife, but what was the big hurry? I would’ve been just as happy to put it off for another year or so. Of course, if he had wanted to put it off for another year, I’m quite certain I would have thrown a temper tantrum and run sobbing to the bathroom, snarling to myself what a bastard he was.

That’s just the kind of gal I am.

Anyway, things certainly turned out for the best. We did not, as I’m sure you’re wondering, get married in costume. We talked about dressing up as Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, but in the end he wore a nice shirt and shorts, and I wore a nice sweater and slacks. The spud was more dressed up than either of us. We got married in the "Madison Wedding Chapel", which is a tiny building about five miles from where we live. The minister was a sweet woman, and her assistant had taken care of ordering our wedding cake. The cake was incredibly good. After the ceremony, we came home, ate a small piece of cake, and then Fred took the spud trick-or-treating.

Simple. That’s the way we like things.

That’s how we spent our anniversary: simply. We woke up around 6:30, lazed around and talked, had breakfast, watched the "RE/MAX Tour of Homes" show, and then pretty much puttered around the house for the rest of the day. Fred watched a movie with the spud and tried to take a nap. I cleaned up the kitchen, read some magazines, took a nap. We ordered dinner from Allen’s, a fairly new restaurant in the area (not the greatest food). It was nice. I liked it.

And without getting too sappy, I must say that marrying Fred was probably one of the smartest moves I’ve made. We actually — can you believe it?– talk to each other. We argue sometimes, and we’ve had a fight or two. But the most amazing thing is that we communicate with each other. If there’s a problem, we talk it out. He makes me laugh, and I make him laugh, sometimes even on purpose. Best of all, he puts up with me. PMS, headache, just general hostility at the world, and he puts up with all of it from me.

Could I be any luckier?

Alright, enough of the hearts and flowers. I see you rolling your eyes out there.

The spud got a pretty good haul last night. She and Fred were gone for about an hour, and covered a good part of the neighborhood. She came back with her plastic pumpkin stuffed full of candy and other stuff. One person even gave her a full-size container of playdough. We had plenty of kids come to the house, too. I actually got rid of about 2/3 of the candy I bought yesterday morning at Wal-Mart — did I mention I went nuts buying candy, because we weren’t sure how much we’d need? Better to have too much than not enough, is my philosophy.

That’s probably obvious.

There’s not a lot more to report. Fred and I are going to go watch Arlington Road here in a little while, since everything on TV is in rerun in preparation for November sweeps. Here’s a pic I took of Spanky this afternoon. Is it obvious that he’s secretly (or probably not so secretly) my favorite? That’s ’cause he’s the only one we’ve had since he was a tiny little baby.

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So even though it’s not Halloween, the area kiddies are doing the trick-or-treat thang tonight. We live in a fairly large subdivision with a bunch of kids, and until this year, they had a deal where all the kids gather at the subdivision office and then go trick-or-treating in a big group, with the parents. It’s safer that way, I guess, and you don’t have to keep jumping up to answer the doorbell and hand out candy; they come and go in one group. This year, due to lack of interest, they didn’t do it. So Fred took the spud out around the neigborhood, and I sat on the tailgate of my truck in the garage doorway and handed out candy.

I was lucky when I was growing up; we lived on base, and everyone in base housing has kids, so everyone hands out candy. I recall being 8 or 9 and going out with my sister and a few friends, and getting tons of candy. Then we went home, dropped off our bags, and went back out. Between the four kids in my family, we probably could have provided a third-world country with a year’s worth of candy.

I know my Mom snuck into our rooms while we were at school and stole the good Halloween candy. I’m sure I’ll do the same with the spud. It’s only right to keep up the tradition, you know.

We watched "Never Been Kissed" this afternoon. Cute movie, but it was really hard to watch the scenes where everyone picked on Josie (the Drew Barrymore character). Not that I can relate to that; I wasn’t a geek in high school. I wasn’t popular either. I was just one of those kids who no one really bothers, and I am so glad in retrospect for that. We didn’t have popular girls like the ones in the movie. I mean, we had popular girls, they just weren’t those dimwitted, all-surface, super-c*nt types from the movie. One of the most popular girls who springs to mind, Joan Foster, was not only pretty, she was nice and extremely smart. The other two who spring to mind were nice enough to the behemoth, socially unskilled me, but we weren’t friends or anything. It probably helped that I didn’t give much of a shit about what other people thought of me. If they wanted to pick on me, they didn’t get much of a reaction other than a snarl and a shrug. I also never had a yen to be popular, so that probably also helped my high school experience to be the joy it was.

I’m sure I’m supressing some horrid events, but for the life of me, aside from one of Tory Ricker’s friends grabbing my ass as I was walking down the hallway when I was a sophomore, nothing springs to mind. (Side note: I did nothing, and that just pisses me off. I wish I could go back and smack the shit out of that jerk. I hope his life is hellish).

Anyway, while we were watching the movie, one of the airhead popular bitches says to Drew Barrymore, "Who do you like better, Betty or Veronica?" Fred said (to me, not Drew–he knows she can’t hear him, or at least she pretends she can’t) "I always liked Veronica." Immediately, I snarled "That’s because she’s a whore!" Whoa. Even I didn’t expect that. I had no idea I felt such hostility toward the cartoon, but as I think about it she sure did play games with poor Archie, didn’t she? The spoiled rotten rich bitch.

Here’s the spud, from tonight:

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Oh, glorious Friday! Why can’t every other day be Friday? No work for two more days, and I couldn’t be happier.

I will be so glad when we turn our clocks back this Sunday (not that we’re going to get up at 2 am and do it, you understand). Every morning as I drive into work the sun is at the perfect level to shine right into my eyes, trying it’s damnedest to burn holes in my retinas. Sunglasses don’t help, and the visor doesn’t hang low enough to block the sun. The only solution I’ve come up with is to stare down at the bumper of the person in front of me rather than directly into the sun.

The worst part is when I’m sitting at the red light to turn left to go down the street our office building is on. The sun is to the left of the light. I have to take quick little peeks every few seconds to check the light color, and by the time the light turns green, I have tiny dark spots in the middle of my vision, which makes me panic that I’m about to go blind.

And going blind would just suck.

From the "Holy Cow" files: Al from Nova Notes linked to me! I was checking out my brand new shiny nedstat page, and saw the referral. I was so excited, I ran up to Fred’s office and danced around as I told him about it. Pretty exciting stuff, that.

The spud is going to be a vampire for Halloween (hey, she’s only 11, she’s got a few years before she’s too old!). Luckily, she chose an easy costume. Black turtleneck, black leggings, cape, slicked-back hair, black lips, fake blood, fake teeth, and she’s all set. I guess Fred is going to accompany her door to door, and I’ll sit at home and run up and down the stairs to dole out the candy. Which I haven’t bought yet, so tomorrow it will be an early-morning trip to (can you guess?) Wal-Mart for the spud and I.

Speaking of the spud — and Wal-Mart, actually — she informed us late yesterday afternoon that in lieu of a Halloween party at school today, they would have a "hoe-down" party, and everyone should dress farmer-like. Oh, she knew about this for days beforehand, but didn’t bother telling me about it until the very last moment. Sadly, we didn’t really have anything farmer-like around the old homestead, and so Fred took her to Wal-Mart. It’s my policy that if she waits until the night before to let me know she needs something that requires a special trip, she’s pretty much shit out of luck. I don’t "do" the last-minute dash to Wal-Mart at 9pm. Yes, I am a horrible bitch of a mother, but she knows the rules. Fred, however, is a big softy. They went out and bought a flannel shirt, a couple of red bandanas, and a way-too-big pair of jeans (Fred didn’t know the spud’s size, and consequently purchased a size 14 when a 10 probably would have done).

This is what she ended up looking like:

She looks mighty pink in this picture, but I swear, aside from the freckles she put on with a brown marker, she’s not wearing makeup. If you look over her right shoulder, you’ll see the Titanic picture Fred won on Ebay. An online friend had a friend who took Leo out of the pictures and put his (Fred’s friend) picture in it’s place. I think Fred ended up bidding around $12 for it. It’s pretty funny, and I’ll think about taking a closeup picture of it sometime soon. It’s hanging over Fred’s computer, which is located directly across the room from mine. We’re a three-computer family, and that’s the way we like it.

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