Puppy Pads - The Perfect Wedding Gift

Hello Blogsilvania! Happy New Year to all!

Here we are getting ready to put our house on the market (It's all yours if you want it!) and that includes getting rid of a lot of stuff.

It's interesting selling things on Facebook. I'm finding out a lot of surprising things like, "People are flakes!" I don't know how many people have told me they're coming only for them to not show up, or show up an hour later than they said they would.

But the most surprising thing is what does and doesn't sell.

Bikes sell.

People do NOT want bone china. Apparently.

And they don't want silver plated anything either.

My dad says this is because everyone gets silver plated stuff for their wedding and they don't know what to do with it. I can tell you what NOT to do with it, and that's sell it on Facebook.

But I'll tell you something I know people need for certain. Giant Lego head sorters. And puppy pads. People are all over puppy pads.

So my advice is, next time you need a wedding gift, puppy pads are definitely the way to go. You're welcome.

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On the Stuff I Didn't Do This Weekend

First and foremost what I didn't do on Saturday was eat.  It was Yom Kippur and so that means fasting.  I'm a lousy, lousy faster.  Pretty much all I can think about the whole day is whether or not I'm going to pass out out.

It may or may not be evident that I did a little redecorating around Blogsilvania.  Needless to say, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking up delightful and inviting writing and photographs to offer all four of my faithful readers (Hi Cid!  Hi Mom!  Hi Dad!  Hi Mark!).

I did figure out more or less how to use Adsense, but they put an ad on my blog for Philippine p 0 r n.  So then I had to un-figure it out sort of quickly.

I'm working on trying to get like a nice Zullilly or Gymboree or something.

Meanwhile, we made eggplant bites (perfect for people who hate eggplant with a passion, but whose husband grows tons of it in the garden).

But, I didn't have time to write it up into a recipe yet.

Other posts I did not complete this weekend included another play dough recipe, a bubble recipe, and a free download.

So that means, if you're here from Blogsville, feel free to vote in the comments whether my first free download should be a texture or a recipe card.  Cause I'm nice, right?

Meanwhile, if you're here to see Philippine p 0 r n, you're totally out of luck.  But if you came to see a cute baby, I at least managed to snap this:

AND REMEMBER to enter the $500 giveaway!  It's still going on RIGHT HERE!!!!!

Bail Bonds Go with Everything

Once upon a time when my brother was maybe 5 and I was around 7, my mom & dad left us with friends for the weekend. This family ground their own wheat to make the flour to make whole wheat bread, and they showed us how to milk...I'm pretty sure it was a goat and not a cow...for the milk for breakfast. My point is, refined white sugar and surely Little Debbie type snack cakes were not a staple in this family's diet.

So anyway, the parents come in to ask us if we like oatmeal for breakfast.

Oatmeal? What's oatmeal? My brother and I turned to each other.

We didn't know oatmeal.

But we DID know oatmeal cookies. More specifically we knew the Little Debbie type of oatmeal cookie with the yummy white cream in the middle.

I stopped at three different stores today and never found these kind of oatmeal cookies, so I had to borrow a picture here:

My brother and I decided that obviously if the brown things on the outside were the "cookie", the white creamy icing on the inside must be the "oatmeal". Oatmeal. Cookie. Made sense to us. And what kid doesn't like pure sugar for breakfast? Yes! Some of that white creamy icing sounds like the breakfast of champions! We had obviously hit the jackpot.

We assured the unsuspecting parents we definitely liked oatmeal, only to refuse to eat the hot unsweetened bowl of mush which was served to us, the same gluey stuff had turned our own mother against oatmeal for life.

I tell you this because if your own child or a child you have known has clamored for a food that was later refused, there may have been a similar misunderstanding.

The only other information I really have to share this week is that bail bonds go with everything. Apparently.

Bail bonds and tacos, for example:


(I apologize for the lousy picture, but it's hard to take at night from a moving vehicle. I assure you that the last word is the bail "bonds" though.)

Next up, bail bonds and a hair cut. Bail bonds and a hair cut kind of confused me at first, but I guess you want to look your best in court:


And that's about it, except for this sort of scary picture of my bipolar kitty:

He's not that scary in real life. Except for sometimes. Hope everyone is having a good week!

Update: To clarify any misunderstandings, we did NOT learn of the oatmeal cookies from our parents! I'm afraid we had previously learned of the snack cakes from other kids' lunches. I'm not sure of why we didn't learn of unsweetened, unflavored oatmeal from other kids' lunches...

Besides for two trips to the ER, sliding my mom's car into a ditch, and a bruised (cracked?) rib, it was a really, really fantastic vacation!

What with the multiple ER trips (for That Sweet Pea O' Mine, for asthma), a rib injury (for The-Guy, although it was not skiing that did him in, but in a snowball fight a day or two later) vacation wasn't as carefree as I had imagined. But it was still a very, very nice trip.

We skied. We read the paper. We had a New Year's party. Or we helped Mom and Dad have a New Year's party. Although, I wasn't actually all that much help. Sometimes I make a New Year's resolution though.

One year my resolution was to start liking whiskey. It took me more than one year to accomplish, but I'm glad I did it because it saves a lot of calories. Another year I resolved to start saying more swear words, but that didn't really take.

This year I'm resolving to stop gasping. Y'know, like when you suddenly remember that some big project or assignment is due in an hour? My brother says it causes excess adrenaline, and I barely know what to do with the adrenaline I've already got, so I'm trying to go cold turkey on the gasping. That Sweet Pea O' Mine says she's going to help me by flicking me every time I gasp.

I used to put a lot of emotional energy into whether or not our New Year's party traditions were maintained, but I'm mostly over that now. If my brother pours a champagne tower wearing a silly hat, I'm about as happy as can be. Unless there's music and singing and dancing. Then I'm even happier than can be.
One year we even canceled the New Years party altogether, and merely had people over for food and drinks and music and decorations and dancing. And that is totally different from having a party. Because it is. I don't know why.

Here are some pictures from New Year's past:

New Year's Eve, 1979, Little Rock, Arkansas
New Year's Eve, 1980-something, Sharon, Vermont:New Year's Eve, 1993, Sharon, Vermont:I'd wish everyone a happy New Year, but I think I've already done that on my last two posts. So I'll just wish anyone who saw midnight or beyond a speedy recovery on the sleep front!

This Blog is a Bargain. Apparently.

While innocently doing my schoolwork this weekend, I ran across an article on making a living by blogging. "Don't expect to make more than $50,000," it warned. But, it said, you mostly have to write about certain things to make a living. Let's see...they were sex, famous people, and something else I can't remember.

So yeah. My family sat three rows behind Lyle Lovett and his mom in the (totally awesome) Anderson Fair movie last weekend!!!!

And I have a whole category on dating and another on vibrating boobs. Does that make this blog worth $50,000?

No? Drat! I wish I could remember what that third thing was...

Anyhow, DJ Kirkby came over here looking for pictures of homemade tortillas awhile back. This is what I do for those kids o' mine: I make them a few dozen tortillas most every Sunday to pack in their lunches. (Recipe here!)Also, I took a bunch of pictures of mailboxes. I guess I was just impressed that they were all more or less on the same block of the same street.

I took this one's picture out of pity. It looked a little sad.

This is the one that originally caught my interest.

It's quite a variety for one street, isn't it?

I saw the Anderson Fair movie, The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken miraculously installed a shower door without even cursing a bunch or running back to the hardware store for something he didn't know he needed, and I wrote more essays for school than you can shake a stick at. That's been our week so far - hope you're having a good one!

Those Hidden Camera Things Take All the Fun Out of Getting a Traffic Ticket

Me to my sweet pea yesterday:

"I'm getting sick and tired of all these traffic tickets! I'm going to have to try something new. Like obeying the law."

My most recent transgression was sent to me through the mail, which seems particularly cruel. Not only is it impossible to remember why I might or might not have committed a particular violation THREE WEEKS AGO, but all drama is removed.

I'm just innocently going through the mail when suddenly I'm attacked by a photo of my license plate.

Gone is the wondering, "Is that ME getting pulled over?!"
Gone is the panic, "What was I doing wrong? Can I find my insurance card? Is my registration up to date? What about my inspection?"

Gone is the chance to talk your way out of a ticket. I hardly ever manage, but I usually at least make the effort. I got out of one when I was 19 or 20 via this conversation:

Officer: Do you know why I pulled you over?
Me: Was I going too fast?
Him: You were speeding.
Me: But I saw a deer! It came right in front of my car! It was so close!
Him: Let me get this straight. There was a deer in the road so you drove faster?!?
Me: I wanted to get home to tell my goddaughter. She's going to be so excited! I just really wanted to tell her.
Him: Well just remember this is a neighborhood. And be more careful next time.

And I WAS more careful next time. WAY more careful! And for lots and lots of next times after that. I just have trouble remembering to drive more slowly ALL the time.

And apparently I have trouble now and again remembering to stop at the yellow and red lights too. Because when I got my ticket in the mail, it showed a website where I could watch myself sailing through an intersection, not a care in the world, luckily not crushed to death by oncoming traffic, and definitely unable to talk my way out of a ticket.

In other news, it is EIGHTEEN stinking degrees here in Texas this morning. EIGHTEEN!

I'd like to know where to register my complaint.

Because we already have hurricanes and fire ants and cockroaches for crying out loud. What we do NOT have around these parts is proper insulation and air tight houses. So yes, our pipes are frozen, thank you very much.

Here are some upside down signs at that very same intersection where I got the ticket. They look like they're doing gymnastics, or at least headstands. They've been that way all week. I hope that their backs have gotten a good stretch and that they're ready to go back to work next week:



I hope everyone had a good first week in 2010!

My Stalking Story

I keep trying to type in my real stalking story and my problem is this: being stalked takes a very long time and most of it is excruciatingly boring to everyone except the recipient of the stalking.

Basically this acquaintance, a racquetball buddy of my ex husband, called me from out of the blue to say he was separated and getting a divorce. He had moved into my apartment complex.

He really, really had to talk to me.

A LOT.

And the calls started getting more and more frequent and occurred at less and less socially acceptable times of day.

You know how when preschool teachers finally get a chance to talk to someone that's not four years old, they occasionally sit around and talk about male body parts? Well, apparently men do that too.

Or at least my ex husband must have. Because the racquetball-ball-buddy-turned-stalker accidentally left a long, detailed message on my answering machine in which he THOUGHT he had hung up and was just discussing my body parts (as reported to him by my ex husband) with whoever was in the room with him. But my answering machine was recording the whole conversation.

So it turns out that according to stalker guy that my boobs make up for a multitude of other sins. I think that was the gist of the conversation. I mean, the whole thing was sort of muffled since he was leaving the message unintentionally. But that's what I got out of it.

I felt extremely exposed during all of this, because my old apartment complex had a public walkway that went right past my bedroom window. So when he called the next time at 3:00 AM, I called my brother and burst into tears.

No matter how much of a hard time my parents and I may give my brother for being impossible to reach by telephone, he has always been there each and every time I've called at three in the morning. So a word to the wise: if you're having trouble reaching your brother, try three am. But do so judiciously because otherwise your sister in law will (rightfully) hate your guts for life.


My brother listens and advises me to call the police. "But what do I tell them?" "Tell them you're a woman at home alone with her child and you're terrified because this guy won't stop calling."

"Oh!!! I'm terrified!" I replied to him incredulously.

Well certainly that explained things.


No wonder I had burst into tears.

My brother assured me that the police certainly would have had weirder calls that night and that if they didn't feel it was worthy of their time, they would tell me so.

The police come and stalker guy calls during their visit. They tell me that if I feel comfortable, I should answer and tell him to stop calling. I decide to wait until "morning" (which I considered 5:00 AM to be, although it was still dark) because talking to stalker-guy-who-lived-in-my-apartment-building-and-had-easy-access-to-my-bedroom-window seemed way too scary to do at night.

So he calls and I tell him never to call me again, ever. And my tone of voice was, as my dad would say, "the way you talk to a dog". And then my boyfriend called him and left him a message in the tone of voice that I imagine was, "the way you talk to a guy who's terrifying your girlfriend."

And I thankfully never heard from him again, except my boy was in the same homeroom as his kid last year. And the moral of my story is that you can be all kinds of careful on blogs and Facebook and all OVER the internet and STILL pick up a random stalker from real life. But at least he won't have your email address.

I hate to say that was the SHORT version, but it really was. And it's still too long for me to even post pictures of my newly green living room or funny bumper stickers I saw last week. But that's about as short as I can seem to manage, folks. It was a LOT longer in real life.



(Photos from Dollar Photo Club. Which no longer exists actually.)

That Interview Thing - Part I

I did A Free Man’s Interview thing, which means that Arizaphale of Now Where Did I Put That Flaming Sword? interviewed me, & I interviewed Father Muskrat.

Except, I think Father Muskrat decided to concentrate his efforts of late on evenly distributing his bodily functions into inappropriate receptacles instead of being interviewed, but...y'know...either way...

I've been getting kind of totally slammed by what I like to call "life spackle" lately, so I've broken up the interview into two parts to make posting (and reading, I imagine) more manageable:

1. You've got to admit, your blog has an unusual name. What does it mean (if anything) and what was your motivation in choosing it?

I overheard the name for my blog during Thanksgiving dinner maybe three years ago, uttered by my nephew. “But I was twipply skwood, because I did it at Mama’s house!”

I knew immediately that I had to adopt this new phrase…whatever it meant. As it turned out, my nephew had discovered the joys of superstitions and was entertaining his side of the table with the wishful thinking of a just turned six year old.

I don’t know if superstitions are the same the world over, but here in the United States, in addition to being somewhat reckless, walking under a ladder is also bad luck.

“I was skwood (screwed)” he explained, “because I walked undew a laddew (under a ladder)!”

He continued, “But then I was doubly skwood, because I did it at midnight.”

Finally he concluded that he was “twipply skwood” because he walked under a ladder at midnight at mama’s house.

So: skwood = screwed, twipply skwood = triply screwed

2. Why the signs? What's the attraction?

My dad has two theories about signs. One is "the brother in law theory." Someone has a brother in law in the sign making business and so a lot of stupid signs get made just to give the brother in law some business.

Dad’s other theory is that any sign means there’s a problem that, for whatever reason, no one feels like solving. I’m not sure if those two theories are mutually exclusive, or work together somehow. But either way, there are just so many entertaining signs out there.

Of course, it’s not always a sign. Sometimes it’s a fish with a tattoo:Sometimes there’s a sale at Target on movies featuring men with angry expressions on their faces:

And sometimes I see a truck that says “Fish” and I wonder, “Is that a noun or an imperative verb?”
And then I take a picture. Because why not? I mean, surely there are other people who wonder how hard it was to get the fish an appointment at the tattoo parlor and whether or not the sign on the truck is really ordering all who read it to go fishing.

Anyhow, that's two out of six. The other four are shorter and I'll post them as soon as life gives me a break here and/or some excess computer time.

My Gal Says it's Called "Word Vomit"

You know when someone asks you a question and part of your brain is listening but then part of your brain is totally going about its previous business and another part of your brain is thinking about what chores still need to be done before bed and another part is wondering what will happen to the lesson plans you left sitting on the keyboard at someone else's computer at work and part of your brain is composing a grocery list?

And so then your mouth chooses some words to use to answer the question, but the words don't have anything to do with the words that are in your brain to answer the question because, HELLO! your brain is sort of busy right now.

It's like this:
My gal - "What happened?"
Me - "The electricity went off."
Gal - (sitting beside a fully operational lamp), "It did?"
Me - "What?"
Gal - "When did the electricity go off?"
Me - "I meant that I need a computer cord."

Well, my gal says that's called Word Vomit. And she says not to give her any credit, because it came from a movie. But I don't sit still long enough to see many movies, so in my mind she still gets credit.

In totally related news (related because it filled up my brain too much to worry about what came out of my mouth) we got back from our annual labor day camping trip yesterday.

Some years we've had insect infestations. One year my friend's son got his cornea scratched. Another year her other son fell out of a tree.

One year the bathroom was haunted. Seriously. The ghost flushed the toilet and everything.

Here's my boy and my friends' boy camping last year:And me, camping and reading a biography of Townes Van Zandt at the exact same time. Aren't I talented?This year we had:
raccoons stealing chicken from a cooler
fevers (my boy, then my gal)
an ear infection (my friend's nephew)
a torn ligament (by one of the adults)
streaking (including but not limited to a friend's 11 year old - "It was fun!")
consumption of mustard by teenagers until they vomited (as payment for a bet)
heavy downpours (did I mention our tent leaks?)
tent flooding (my friends' tent leaks worse)
screw your neighbor (The card game! Not an orgy!)

Let me just say that it turns out to take very little mustard to make a teenager puke. Razor says that's why they used mustard gas in World War...ummmm...One. Or two. Well, one of those two at any rate.

In all honesty, camping is way more fun without the rain and fevers. But I've gotta admit, there's something to be said for watching teenage boys barf mustard.