February 11, 2005.

Napolean Dynamite. It’s weird, actually – I liked it okay when we were watching it, but as time goes by, I actually like it more and more. In fact, I think I’m going to netflix it and teach myself the dance sequence. What? Is that strange? GO FIND YOUR OWN TOTS. (“Go find your own tots” would an excellent title for a blog.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Pet store kitty pics from Monday are here. The ones from last Monday are here. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ We watched Wife Swap last night, and GOOD GOD was I pissed off by the end of the show. Fred started a thread about it over on his forum; go add your two cents. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ So not only did I get the “Cat in the Garden” picture from Fred for my birthday, but I used some of the money I got from his parents for my birthday to buy another picture. This one, to be exact. Y’all know how I love the daffodils! I really like this picture, too, but I’m not sure where I’d hang it, so I might have to lust after it from afar. So that picture is going to be going up in my bedroom along with the other picture. We’ve lived in this house for 3 1/2 years and until now we’ve had nothing at all hanging on our bedrooms walls. In fact, we had nothing much hanging anywhere until about the last year, when I hung the picture over the mantel, some pictures in the hallway, a Tubby picture at the bottom of the stairs, and the cross-stitch “Mad Bluebird” picture my sister cross-stitched for me last year, which is now hanging in the living room. Why, it almost looks like people live in this house, now. I figure it’ll take another two years for me to get the walls of this house looking like I want them to. Just in time for us to put the house up for sale, in other words. Speaking of selling the house, Fred called me from work earlier this week. “I don’t want to refinance the house,” he said. “Oh, why? Is it not going to lower the payment as much as you thought?” I said. “No, that’s not it. It appraised for (large number that’s way more than we paid for this house 3 1/2 years ago and made me gasp). I want to sell it!” “We’re NOT selling the house,” I said. “Awww, come ON. We could get so much money for it, and buy a less expensive house and practically pay cash for it!” “We’re NOT selling the house yet,” I said. “I bet she wouldn’t mind switching high schools,” Fred said. “HA. We are NOT selling the house yet.” I think he got the idea. It was nice to see that the house has gone up in value so much in the past 3 1/2 years, anyway. Hopefully it’ll continue to go up over the next two years and when it’s time to sell we’ll make a tidy profit. Of course, the people who owned this house before us had it for sale for almost a year before we bought it. I’m hoping the same won’t be true for us, but god knows. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ The kids who live on either side of us have no qualms at all about running through our front yard, up our driveway, through our front flower beds (are they called flower beds if there aren’t actually any flowers in them?). I don’t like it much when I’m sitting in the computer room – which looks onto our tiny front lawn – and a kid comes to rummage through the flower bed directly in front of the window to look for a ball that went astray, but I can live with it. I mean, I bitch about it to Fred, but it doesn’t piss me off so much that I’d go out there and say something to the kid or his parents. So the kid next door got a croquet set at some point in the last few weeks, and he and his friends have spent much time in the front yard play croquet. They left their croquet mallets on the front lawn for a few hours on Saturday, and Fred and I joked about going outside and walking up and down the property line and casting horrified looks at the mallet and then at the neighbor’s house. (Because the woman who lives in that house used to go outside and walk up and down the property line, stand at the street and stare up the property line, hold at-length conversations with her friends while standing in the street staring up the property line, and did this for the better part of a year before she came out while Fred was mowing one day, called him “Dude” and asked him not to mow over the property line because it looked funny and because ChemLawn wouldn’t spray that part of the yard because they assumed it was on our property. Why she felt the need to ostentatiously walk up and down the property line so many times instead of just coming over and talking to Fred, I have no idea. I guess she hoped we’d get the idea, but all she did is make me paranoid. “What the hell? Why is she doing that? What the fuck is her problem? Is our fence on their property? They SAID we could attach to their fence! WHAT IS SHE DOING? WHAT DOES SHE WANT???”) Anyway, by the time evening came the parents had made the kid move his croquet set into the garage, and then Monday morning when I was walking out to the mailbox I saw it, sitting there not three feet from our front door – a pretty blue croquet ball. I swerved out of my way a little and kicked the ball, then kicked it across the lawn and into the street. ‘Cause, you understand, it wasn’t MY ball and it didn’t belong in MY yard, and I am ten years old at heart, and very possessive of my tiny front yard. Once the ball hit the street it ceased to exist for me, and aside from hoping that it hadn’t gone down into the storm drains, I completely forgot about it. Until Tuesday morning when I was leaving to go somewhere, and I glanced out into the front yard as I backed out of the driveway, and saw it again. The same (I assume) blue ball, sitting in roughly the same part of the yard. Was this on purpose? I wondered. Had the neighbor seen me kick the ball into the street and was now taunting me by putting it back where it was? Or had the kid been out playing and knocked it into the yard again? Because I’m paranoid, I suspected the former, that the neighbor had waited until dark and crept into our front yard and placed the ball near the front door, snickering the entire time. When I got home again, I remembered that I needed to mail a movie back to Netflix, and so I got the movie and walked out the front door, skirted the ball, and walked to the mailbox. I put the movie in the mailbox, put up the flag, and glared at the blue ball. Should I pick it up and bring it inside, since it was on MY lawn? Should I kick it into the street again? What? I walked to the ball, picked it up, and threw it toward the street. It went a lot further up the street than I expected, almost two house up, before it came to a stop in the gutter. For the rest of the day, I went to the window several times to see if it was still there, and until about four o’clock it was. Then I got busy making dinner and all that, and the next time I looked out the window, it was gone. I expected to see it again on Wednesday, but it was nowhere to be seen. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Thanks, those of you who shared your flan recipes yesterday, but the spud had a recipe that her Spanish teacher gave her. She and Fred made the flan yesterday, and it looked pretty good – and the entire house smells like burnt sugar. Which is not an unpleasant smell at all. I looked at the flan after it had cooled for two hours and was dumped out of the pan and into the fire onto a plate. “It looks good,” I said. “It looks kind of spongey. I’ve never had flan.” “It’s the consistency of a custard,” Fred said. “I’ve… never had custard, so that doesn’t mean a lot to me.” “Oh. Well, it’s like the consistency of a container of ricotta,” he tried. “Umm… nope. I don’t know that I’ve ever had ricotta.” “You’ve had ricotta!” he said. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve always used cottage cheese in my lasagna.” “Oh. Well, it’s like…” he thought about it, then brightened. “Like a big block of brie.” “Uh, nope. Never had brie.” So then he gave up. Heh. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Look, look! Look what a very cool reader in Iceland cross-stitched for me, and made the front of a holiday card for me! It’s a robin! Isn’t it adorable? I think I’m going to take the cross-stitch part out of the card and make it into an ornament to hang on my tree for next year. It’s so cute, I love it! (Thanks Johanna!) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ “Nyah!” ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~]]>