Saturday, March 31, 2007

Don't let the picture fool you....




...these two are never this still of their own free will. They are temporarily trying to sit and be good in the frantic, panting hope that they will receive the Milk Bones I am dangling above my head. The Milk Bones, in fact, are what they both are staring at so intently.
Lokie, the black dog (a lab), belongs to Christina, our house guest. You'd think this would be a wonderful opportunity for FurGirl to bond with and play with one of her own kind. But no. FurGirl, in fact, doesn't know she is a dog. When Lokie tries to play and/or roughhouse with her, she looks at him like WTF? Sometimes she runs over to me as if to say, "Mommie! There's this black furry thing with four legs? It sniffs me? What is it and why is it bothering me? Help! Also, do you happen to have bacon?"
Last night, during a particularly aggressive attempt at playing by Lokie, FurGirl startled us all by raring up and giving a loud, vicious big-girl bark. This is a sound I've only ever heard her make a couple of times before in her whole life, in times of extreme agitation, usually when she feels threatened or thinks I am threatened.
You can see FurGirl is freshly shorn and sporting her warm weather hair-do. You can see her actual pink skin through the fur on her chest. She LOVES to be shorn and is, I think, spoiled on it, to the point that she goes around panting pathetically at the first sign of warm weather if she has a thick coat of fur.
Satan is off again out of town again--woohoo! Christina and I, in a fit of christian charity, spent the morning tidying up Satan's balconey and then moving his plants outside for him. He HAS been awfully busy lately.
I continue to suffer through a series of sinus headaches no doubt brought on by the incredibly high mold count coupled with the thick pollen floating through the air.
Ouch.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Special Delivery...




It's heeeeere!


Yep, that is all or most of the loot I ordered from e.l.f. (eyes/lips/face) cosmestics as discussed in my post of March 24th. I speculated that, at a dollar each, the cosmetics would most likely be sample sized. And I don't know if you can tell from the picture but, while they aren't large sized, they aren't sample-sized either. The glosses I would call standard sized.
So far, I've only tried out the lip gloss, but I'm pretty happy with that and I'm anxious to road test the rest.
Only problem is...I can't stop asking myself if, at those prices, did I order enough?


Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Grey Matters

It's been a while since I've updated in regard to mine and Satan's Netflix queue. And, while we've recently watched some seriously notable movies, among them "The Departed" and "Blood Diamond", my first thought is to share are all about Grey's Anatomy.

Satan and I are SO HOOKED on this show. We're SO HOOKED that, while I linked to the website in my last paragraph? I made certain that I didn't really take in the contents on the index page because, as usual, Satan and I are watching the episodes in DVD time which means we are still a full season behind the rest of the world. I live in fear that I will accidentally learn future plot points.

These are really strong words, but the show is approaching "Thirtysomething" status for me. It isn't there yet, but yes, I'm liking it awfully well. It is so much more than your run of the mill hospital ensemble show, the characters believable (mostly), likeable, relateable. The situations are engrossing and the acting top notch, especially in the come-and-go characters of the patients; the show manages to really excell in those situations, while the regular characters are multi-dimensional and interesting. The on again/off again relationship between the titular character, Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and Derrick Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) is incredibly compelling. The show leaves me in a sniveling heap on a regular basis. If you're not into it yet, the back episodes are worth a rental. Trust me.

As for "The Departed". Dare I say...the ending let me down. Still a great movie though, and I do recommend it. "Blood Diamond" is a riveting and brutal movie but SO WORTH SEEING to watch Leonardo DiCaprio, holy toledo, could this guy get any hotter? I don't think so.

Was going to...write more...but getting sleepy now.....

Who knew?

Today's conversation on the cell phone with Satan:

SATAN
Hello?

ME
Hello?

SATAN
Hello?

ME
I have some bad news.

SATAN
Oh yah? What is it?

ME
(*sigh*)

SATAN
Well, what is it?


ME
(deep breath)
Okay. I'm a crafter.

SATAN
You say you're a cracker?

ME
Well of COURSE I'm a CRACKER!

SATAN
Yah, so what else is new?

ME
But also....I'm a crafter!

SATAN
A CRAFTER?


ME
I'm a cracker crafter! I made a wreath today.


SATAN
You say you made a what?

ME
A WREATH. Like you hang on your door?

SATAN
Dear God.

ME
It was, like, the most fun EVER.

SATAN
Well, I guess that's it then.

ME
Yah, guess so. Who'd have thunk it?

SATAN
Not me.

ME
I don't know what came over me.

SATAN
So...I guess we call the lawyers now?

ME
No. I think you can get an annullment under these circumstances.

SATAN
Hmmm. Probably so.

(click)
(click)
***

Anyway, look ya'll, look at my wreath!

My first one EVER!:






Truly, I am a cracker crafter.

(Hold me?)



Spring Fever


Ohmygosh. I think I may have the worst case of spring fever in recorded human history. Whether it's because spring has come so soon this year, or because I've already moved all the plants back to my balconey and begun planting and transplanting new ones, I don't know.


One thing's for sure: All I want to do is plant myself in my flower chair, put my feet up, listen to the birds chirp, and read a good book (and I have several).


Wah!

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Does it get any better?

Greetings and saluatations! I'm coming you live from My Perfect Weekend.



Witness:



Satan is out of town. Woohoo!



Yesterday, I got a much-needed haircut, then spent the day with four of my favorite people: Mom, Grandmama, Aunt Pitty-Pat, Aunt Mona. I learned all about Arty's chequered past. We ate fudge.



I awoke, all by myself this morning, at nine a.m. This means I slept ten blissfully uninterrupted hours with my sleep-number bed adjusted to my own favorite sleep-number without ridicule (Yes! Satan tries to control MY SLEEP NUMBER. Feel my pain.)



I rolled out of bed and, due to recent miserable exertions on the Bow Flex, felt Less Flabby. I applied tinted moisturizer, threw on some shorts a headband and sunglasses, and headed downstairs to take a beside-herself-with-excitement FurGirl out for her morning constitutional.



We flung open the front door. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. FurGirl sprang off the porch and began wallowing in Satan's newly-planted patches of grass seed from sheer joy.



My neighbor walked over and handed me this:







The photo was, evidently, part of a display at a recent neighborhood birthday party during which many resident's heads were super-imposed on the bodies of famous old Hollywood stars. Ironically, Satan is a W. C. Fields fan and can do a pretty fair imitation. My neighbor and I shared a snicker.

I walked a block and a half over to my friendly neighborhood coffee shop and ordered my favorite coffee concoction (which is, face it, a coffee milkshake) and a toasted bagel and cream cheese.

I strolled back home and logged onto my computer while enjoying my breakfast with FurGirl snoozing at my feet.

I immediately discovered, through an e-mail from Christa, this website. It is the site of a new cosmetics line, supposedly comparable to MAC, where everything, EVERYTHING is (brace yourselves), ONE DOLLAR. This includes brushes and tools such as eyelash curlers, foundation brushes, along with lip gloss, etc. Yes! After nearly hyperventilating from excitement, I did a little shopping. And, while I'm sure the products I'll be receiving won't be standard sized, still! One dollar!

I'm now off to begin readying my porch for the season and moving my plants outdoors.

Tra la!

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Sunday Catch-Up


I don't have any words these days, mostly just pictures. Above is Satan's latest gardening achievement: an orchid. We bought the plant in the discount bin, marked down from it's original crazy $35 to only $5. It looked dead for all the world. A few months in Satan's care, though, and it has roared back to life. I'm impressed. Although...it does look a little indecent in the middle? Sort of O'Keefe-ish is all I'm saying?
In case you couldn't tell by the photos, California took my breath away--what a beautiful place. And I only saw a very small part of it. We covered an insane amount of ground in just three short days. Getting to the amazing places we went to comsumed a huge amount of time. We left the hotel at dawn most days and didn't get back until well after dark. Also, seeing the Sequoias and Yosemite meant driving up and down mountains, where going 30 miles can take better than an hour and a fair amount of nerve.
Satan and I make quite a pair in these situations as I'm prone to car sickness (from the curvy mountain switchbacks) and Satan is afraid of heights. This means I have to drive in order to avoid barfing on the rental car while Satan is forced to just sit there, experience the precipices, and try not to let his terror get the best of him. He's mostly pretty good at it except for the parts where where we get so high up that we're looking down at the clouds.
Once, when we were in Colorado in this situation, I was driving on the rim of a particularly insanely high canyon with no guard rail when Satan looked down and saw two giant aircraft carriers flying below us. He's never quite gotten over that one.
Come to think of it, it still freaks me out a little bit too.
I can't even begin to describe the feeling of being near the sequoias. Such massive, silent living giants, they were already growing up there in the Sierra Nevadas when Jesus walked the earth. The General Sherman, largest of the trees, is taller than the Statue of Liberty, for God's sake. The snow on the ground, so deep that it completely covered the park benches, only added to the unreal, magical quality of the place.
Don't tell anybody, but we may or may not have pocketed a few pines cones and be sprouting a little Shermette of our own.
And then there was Yosemite. Yosemite!
I'd always heard about it, and I'd seen Ansel Adams' prints, but I still wasn't prepared for seeing the place with my own eyes. It's a photographer's dream with a gorgeous shot in every direction almost all the time. I snapped over three hundred shots, eventually just giving up and never turning off the camera. I finally had to force myself to stop looking through the viewfinder as I darn near walked into a few trees.
Though dead now, of course, Ansel has a photography shop named for him in Yosemite Village where they still sell photographs printed off his original large format negatives. This was especially significant to Satan as, on his last trip through Yosemite (in the early 70's), he actually MET Ansel and shook the great man's hand. Satan treated us to a print which should arrive some time next week.
As for the Pacific? Well, I have to admit, it's cooler than the Atlantic.
So, all in all, a great trip. I think I'm still recovering from all the traveling at such a hectic pace, though. I'm off to bed to dream of El Capitan...
(edited to add: No idea why this darn thing won't let me doublespace between paragraphs...argh!)

Saturday, March 10, 2007

The Pacific (Mostly at Morro Bay)

















We are tired, tired, tired. I have been too tired every day to write, but we have seen some sights. I must take the time to tell you that the seal swam right up to where I was standing on a dock outside a restaurant. I was so excited to have the photo opportunity that I could barely stay calm enough not to drop the camera into the ocean. In all, I have about fifteen shots of him, but I've posted the best two (which aren't the greatest). I talked to him while I was snapping, and I think he understood.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Touchdown, CA

Good morning friends! I'm coming to you live from beautiful California where it is very early in the morning. I am in the hotel lobby in my p.j.'s (NOBODY knows me! Nobody!) with an ice cold diet coke, my cell phone, and internet access. Satan is off doing Satany things. Life is extremely good.

The whole time zone thing has thrown me for a loop and it occurs to me I may be suffering from jet lag. We arrived at some point yesterday when it was mid-afternoon here and some other time entirely for me personally. Because our flight from Nashville was extremely early, we arose at the ungodly hour of 2:15 AM. This had the effect of causing us to keep having breakfast over and over and then eventually become completely exhausted with no internal clue has to what time or even what day it was.

Other than repeated breakfasts (which, let's face it, isn't always bad) the trip and both flights were uneventful. We did encounter two separate women with strange hairdos. One had actual hair antlers and the other an up-do so elaborate that I first mistook it for a stuffed animal perched on her head. Sadly, I was unable to get to my camera to document either 'do. I saw a woman at DFW, over Botoxed and obviously well-to-do, carrying a square purse made entirely of clear plastic. I'm now wondering if clear purses are the Next Big Thing and where I can get one.

I am embarassed to report I haven't snapped a single photo yet, mostly due to my jet-lag confusion issues.

That's all going to turn around today, though, as my zone is now working FOR me. Six a.m. felt like mid-morning when I sprang out of bed feeling completely refreshed.

Satan says he is going to take me to Big Sur today! BIG SUR!

More later.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Forty-Five and Out



Happy retirement to the new sheriff (above center) in town!





The posse (above).

The deputy (above center) and the usual suspects.

Sidenote: I know my photos are kinda dark. But I hate the flash and the unnatural way it makes everyone look ghastly pale. Okay, so we MOSTLY ARE ghastly pale. That's not the point.

Anyway, I'm working on it.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Say Hello to my Li'l Friend




That's right it's heeeeeere! The elliptical trainer.

Or, as I like to call it, the Franken-trainer.

See how it dominates my family room? See how it is large and undead?

Most importantly, see those two giant platform thingy's at the bottom? Those are where your feet go. And, in case the Jolly Green Giant stops by and feels like a little low impact aerobic workout? Our platforms are big enough to accommodate him, too. (Whew! I worry about these things.)

All I can say is it's darn lucky we paid extra for the model that folds away for easy storage! In fact, in the picture? It's folded up to it's smallest possible size! For easy storage! I can hardly see it! Can you see it?

Really, it's hardly noticeable.

Franken-trainer was delivered yesterday in a box the size of a briefcase that weight 200 pounds. It took poor Satan five hours and every tool in the house to assemble.

Finally, at around 9:15 last night, Satan (very unobtrusively, I barely noticed), rolled Franken-trainer into the family room where I was enjoying my ump-teenth viewing of "The Accidental Tourist".

SATAN
Well! Here it is!

ME
(sniff) shhhh...this is the part where he's going to see Geena Davis on a Paris street corner!

SATAN
Yep! This is going to be great for cardio!

ME
(turning to look)
Holy sh**! It's gigantic!

SATAN
(beginning to scale the side of Franken-trainer)
It's quiet too!

ME
(observing Satan now assuming the position in the foot platforms)
Do you even know how high off the ground you are?

SATAN
(beginning to Franken-train)
Yep! I can watch TV while I do this!

ME
Your head is, like, eight feet off the ground right about now.

SATAN
Whew! This is quite a work out!

ME
And if you fall off? You could seriously break a hip.

SATAN
(Franken-training)

ME
And you know what that means. If you, you know, break a hip.

SATAN
(Franken-training)

ME
I hope you don't think you're leaving that monstrosity there.

SATAN


(a little winded now)


It folds up.


ME


Does it fold down? Because did I mention? It's REALLY tall.


SATAN


(Climbing off Franken-trainer.)


(This takes a moment.)


ME


I thought heights bothered you.


SATAN


(Now crouched behind Franken-trainer.)


Okay...there.


ME


Yah?


SATAN
I folded it up.


ME


It's folded up? At this time?


SATAN


Yes AT THIS TIME! YES!


ME


Well. That changes everything.