Dead Girls Don’t Dance

You thought (or hoped) I abandoned my site? No, I didn’t, and I’m not going away. The computer died, my phone died, my internet connection died, and I fixed it all. Ha! I stab your hopes and dreams of being rid of me, and stand triumphantly laughing as they bleed to death on a dusty floor.

It’s been well over two weeks since my last post, primarily due to the previously mentioned technical difficulties. Very little that bears mentioning has happened in that time. Not much weirdness, very few drunken crazy hijinks, and nothing that ticked me off enough to make my writing finger really itchy. (Yeah. I write with ONE FINGER. The orderlies don’t let me have crayons anymore since the “unfortunate accident” that severely injured one of the other inmates.)

However, I can still make mountains out of molehills on a peevish whim, and will have quite a bit to say in the near future, even if I completely IGNORE the Democratic primaries until they’re over and done with, which I am really trying to do. I don’t know enough about OH!bama, and I know more than I want to know about Billary. As far as the general election goes, John McCain can call himself a maverick until he’s blue in his withered old face, but he’s still a constipated elderly racist warhawk. (You’d think he would know better, after what he went through in Vietnam, but standing by your principles just doesn’t pay in DC.) I’m probably going to be writing in Jello Biafra again when I vote this year. He won’t get elected, but I’ll be making a point, assuming my vote gets counted, which is unlikely, in my racially mixed, lower-middle-class voting district in Florida. At any rate, Jello is smarter than all of the rest of them put together.

It’s pretty f***ed up that an aging punk rock guy has more common sense than the main contenders running for leadership of the United (in Name Only) States of America.
I would like to expand upon this topic, but after re-reading that previous sentence, there’s really nothing to say. However, I think it is worth mentioning that the spell checker thought “Biafra” was a misspelling, and suggested “unafraid” and “riffraff” as possible corrections.

My spider sense is telling me that I have inadvertently come up with an idea for another post, so I’ll stop right here, leaving you breathless with anticip

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Isn’t this raccoon just the cutest thing? He was strolling around on my patio in broad daylight early this afternoon. I wanted to love him and squeeze him and name him George, but if I had tried, he would have ripped my face off and given me fleas. So, I ran to get my camera instead. The trashcan bandit was still there, snacking on leftover cat food when I returned, and obligingly stood still and looked directly at me just long enough for me to snap this slightly blurry but adorable photo before scurrying away (conveniently providing a desperately needed charming lead-in for the story I promised in my last post).

Sometimes I think people don’t believe me when I tell them that I frequently have wild animals in my yard, because it happens to be small and very near the geographical middle of a fairly large city; however, this photo is proof. (I admit I cropped the picture to exclude a chair with a muddy towel draped over the back, and the patio table, which is covered with beer bottles, but it’s still proof, dammit!)

In addition to raccoons, I have also had possums, bobcats, turtles, lizards, rabbits, feral chickens, giant bullfrogs, owls, hawks, and turkey vultures back there, and on one memorable occasion, a beautiful egret, but at least none of those can get into the plumbing and come up at me out of the toilet. And yes, I am, in fact, slightly anxious about that possibility.

As if war, recession, global warming, the health care crisis, and the exploding cost of living weren’t enough, now I have to worry about the possibility of ravenous, 20-foot, 250-pound Burmese pythons coming out of my toilet and swallowing me whole. That sounds crazier than usual, so let me explain: According to this article in USA Today,

As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast…

Wonderful. I live in Florida, which contains the Everglades, a favorite dumping ground for no-longer-wanted exotic pets. God only knows what I’m going to run into from one day to the next. Boa constrictors. Ostriches. Ocelots. Walking catfish. Tourists. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell them apart.

But it gets worse. There’s this article, about a woman in New York City, of all places, finding a python in her toilet. Sound like an urban legend? I think not. Here’s another one, only this time in Australia.

Besides, I know it can happen, because I have already had to personally remove several unpleasant reptiles from my own toilet. The toilet in the house where I live right now, thus the anxiety. In the words of Dave Barry (who once wrote a column about a woman in Florida who had a squirrel come out of her toilet), I am NOT making this up.

Years ago, I came over to visit my elderly mother, and had only made it halfway to the door when she burst out of the house, wild-eyed, wild-haired and in a panic.

Mother: “HELP! There’s an alligator in the toilet!”
Me: (I couldn’t have heard that right.)“What?!?”
Mother: “You heard me right, I said there’s an alligator in the toilet!”
Me: (naturally, I started laughing) “A gator? In the toilet? What the HELL have you been eating?”
Mother: “Oh, so you think you’re funny! And don’t you dare curse at me!” (slapped at me and missed) “This is not a joke, Miss Smartass, now go get it OUT!”

Knowing she wouldn’t miss if she swung at me a second time, I sighed and trudged to the bathroom, silently wondering if my poor mother had lost her mind. Then from behind the closed bathroom door there came an ominous splashing noise. Oh, no. I opened the door, to find water all over the floor, and the toilet lid weighted down with a potted plant. The splashing became frantic, as did my mother.

Mother: “See? SEE? I TOLD YOU there was an alligator in the toilet! That is NOT senile dementia sloshing around in there, you ungrateful little shit!”
Me: (uh-oh, maybe I didn’t wonder about her sanity as silently as I thought…)“Did I actually SAY anything about senile dementia?”
Mother: “No, but..”
Me: (smugly interrupting) “Well, then…”
Mother: (smugly interrupting) “…BUT we both know you were thinking it!”

I didn’t have any answer to that, and we both just stood there for a moment, contemplating the tempest in the pee-pot. Strategy was needed.

Me: “So how big is it?”
Mother: “Big enough to try to bite me on my ass when I sat down.”
Me: “Don’t you LOOK before you sit?”
Mother: “Why the hell would I check the fucking toilet for goddamn alligators before I take a piss?”

She had just cussed more in the last five minutes than she usually did in a whole month, and I wasn’t going to let that much profanity go by without a snotty comment. Also, she had a good point, so I wanted to change the subject.

Me: “Don’t YOU swear, if you expect ME not to.”
Mother: “Don’t you DARE chastise me when I have an alligator in my toilet.”
Me: “Can I chastise you when there’s NOT an alligator in your toilet?”
Mother: (gave me The Look Of Imminent Painful Death By Her Hand)
Me: “Never mind. Really, HOW BIG? Is it big enough to take a finger off?”
Mother: (leaving the room) “Let me see if I can find you those leather work gloves.”

Well, THAT answered my question. This was one of those terrible moments when I almost wished she WAS senile, so I could put her in a home and pay somebody else to wrestle her alligators. The scrabbling and splashing in the toilet continued, punctuated with plaintive squeaks. Poor little thing, I thought. I foolishly decided to take a look. I removed the plant that was weighing down the toilet lid, and immediately regretted it. The little gator knocked the lid up, hissing furiously, and tried to scramble out of the toilet. I managed to whack the critter back into the toilet with a towel, then slammed the lid down and sat on it, with my heart racing because I had narrowly escaped spending God knows how long chasing a wet, dirty little wild animal through the house. That would be like babysitting, except with no pay and only slightly less chance of being bitten.

In case anyone wonders: No, it never once (at the time) occurred to me or my mother to try simply flushing the gator back down. That would be unkind to an innocent creature, and probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway.

My mother finally returned with the leather gloves. I put them on, and told her to shut the door behind her when she left. The instant I stood up the alligator shot out of the toilet like there was some tiny lunatic in there, armed with a reptile bazooka.

After much shrieking and scrambling around (on both sides of the bathroom door; my mother was was having hysterics from the combination of suspense and a full bladder) I managed to catch the alligator without injuring either one of us. It was a little over a foot long, yellow striped, and highly indignant about having been unlawfully detained in a toilet bowl for over an hour.

I took it outside (it was squirming, squeaking, and biting all the way; thank goodness for those gloves) and turned it loose in the creek next to the house. As it eventually turned out, there was a crack in the septic tank, which was leaking into the creek. Over the next few weeks that it took to get somebody to repair the septic tank, I ended up getting several frantic phone calls from my mother, and fishing four more angry reptiles out of that toilet. Two skinks, another baby alligator, and a small water moccasin.

Don’t get me wrong; I actually LIKE snakes. Snakes are cool. The vast majority of snakes are not only harmless but beneficial to people. Nevertheless, I don’t want them in my toilet.

Which brings us back to the Giant Burmese Pythons In The Toilet Crisis. This is alarming. Right now, I have a non-leaky septic tank; now that it’s been repaired, it’s a closed system, which means no critters in the plumbing. However, the city is putting in sewer lines in my neighborhood, and expects everybody to jump on the sewer bandwagon. (Isn’t THAT a lovely mental image?) This will effectively mean that my toilet will be connected to every other toilet in a large city… so if somebody else flushes a snake, it could eventually wind up in MY toilet. Plus, a lot of cities have sewer systems that connect to other cities’ sewer systems, making a nationwide plague of Giant Toilet Pythons a distinct possibility.

How will we protect ourselves? How do you keep a giant snake from getting out of the toilet and eating you in the middle of the night? A reinforced steel toilet lid that latches down would be no help, because men would leave it up, putting the entire household at risk, because it takes too much time and effort to even put the SEAT down, much less the LID, TOO.

Maybe we should just have toilet bowl cleaner tabs with snake sedative in it, and make the snakes lethargic before they get out of the john.If you have a python in your toilet, who do you call? A plumber? Animal control? The Department of Game and Wildlife? All of the above?

Perhaps we should have Giant Burmese Python Police, tirelessly patrolling the sewers of America with snake-catching equipment, who only emerge, pasty-faced and odorous, to save the day when a life-threatening serpent erupts from a taxpayer’s toilet, spreading mayhem and sewer slime.

All I know is right now, I have NO intention of hooking up to the city sewer system. I refuse to expose my precious rear end to the predatory impulses of enormous snakes unless I am somehow legally forced to do so. Perhaps not even then, because I don’t think I should pay TWICE for water (once coming in, for water I actually use, and a second time, for waste water that won’t eventually get filtered back into the Florida aquifer.) And in the meanwhile, I might to try to tame George the Raccoon.

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Today is CSS Naked Day, and my blog is naked, in honor of the web designers who work so hard to make the web beautiful, and the people who tirelessly work to create, promote, and implement web standards, to make the Internet safer, more functional and accessible to everyone.

Besides, I’m always looking for an excuse to get naked. Now I just need a CSS Drunk Day.

P.S. My next post will be about the day I saved my mother from an alligator. Stay tuned.

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First off, bow, dammit.

I am your Queen. You will honor and obey me, or die.

(any resemblance to your marriage vows is purely coincidental)

Here are the new laws for the whole world, effective immediately.

POLITICS:

If you declare war, or vote to declare war, you will be the first out on the front line. If you are too old and decrepit to be out there, you will be wheeled out into a mine field, by your favorite grandchildren. Don’t worry, Gramps, they’ll get the same kind of body armor and medical care that the regular troops in your country get.

The problem with democracy is that only crazy f***heads want to be president. In view of recent difficulties, apparently only STUPID crazy f***heads can be elected in the U.S.A, because their daddy’s friends own the companies who make the voting machines. Therefore, all Amurrican citizens will be IQ tested, and the president of the United States will be randomly selected by me, Queen Of The World, from a big box of shiny ping-pong balls with all the smart people’s names written on them. I will wear a sparkly dress, like Vanna White, and smile a lot during this grave procedure.

FASHION:

Rule 1: There will be no spandex clothing manufactured over size ten. Fat chicks must not be allowed to wear spandex, ever, and that includes me.

Rule 2: Wearing form-fitting exercise clothing anywhere but a gymnasium or the privacy of your home will be strictly illegal, unless you look good in it. This will be determined by the fashion police, who will immediately ship you to Iraq with faulty body armor if you are caught waddling through a shopping mall with back fat hanging down over the top of your bicycle shorts.

Rule 3: Anyone suspected of having an eating disorder will be sent to Dr. Phil’s Happy Fun Time Boot Camp, to be located in a leaky shack with no plumbing, in scenic Darfur.

Rule 4: If you are apprehended by the fashion police and found to be Paris Hilton, or one of those icky twins, or a member of a boy band, you will be shot on sight, on general principle, unless you are already at the Happy Fun Time Boot Camp.

ONE LAST THING:

No more Twinkies. You heard me. NO MORE TWINKIES. The filling is made of sugar and whipped beef fat.

WHIPPED. BEEF. FAT.

Figure it out for yourself, pervert.

Tags: semi-daily // 2 Comments »

Today is the start of Sanitation and Hygiene Week. Before launching into my usual nasty, insensitive tirade, I’d like to point out that lack of sanitation is a serious issue all over the world. A shocking number of people get sick and die from lack of access to simple soap and water, in places like Sudan, Kenya, Mozambique, and post-Katrina New Orleans. (Thus concludes the formalities.)

On to the insensitive tirade.

However, if people do have access to sanitary facilities and fail to use them, I wish they would die. Possibly by having me shove them into the river from a moving vehicle. There is no excuse for boarding a crowded city bus exuding an eye-watering cloud of unwashed ASS FUNK that would embarrass a cat in heat. I mean, honestly, why get on a bus at all? Where the hell can you possibly GO smelling that bad and be welcomed?

I was sitting on the bus, thumbing through a newspaper. Then this man gets on the bus, reeking of Eau de Hot Dirty Ass Crack. Care to know where the only empty seat was? Yep, right next to me and my sensitive nose. My nose was already being assaulted by an old bum sweating out the cheap beer he had for breakfast all over the seat behind me. So right after Mr. Butt Stench lowered his ponderous ass next to me (and partially into my LAP) I feared I was going to throw up.

I don’t mean like, “Oh, that’s gross” throw up, I mean I was truly fighting to keep my lunch down. For a glistening moment, I considered just giving up and hurling chunks of partially-digested grilled chicken sandwich all over Butt Stench, in an attempt to make him smell slightly less unpleasant. However, I wasn’t the only person leaning away from him with a pained, nauseated expression, and if I had let loose, I think the whole bus would have turned into a huge traveling chain-reaction puke-a-thon.

To make matters worse, every time I inched away to keep from coming in contact with his big unwashed ass (half of which was hanging out into the aisle), he apparently thought I was trying to make room for him to get comfortable. So he scooted over closer and closer, until I had to fend him off with an elbow to prevent him from pressing his vile flesh against me. I wanted to curse him out, but I didn’t because the long, profane lecture on hygiene that I was silently composing would have required me to gag in more of the befouled air in order to actually speak aloud.

This was all completely unnecessary, dammit. The guy didn’t LOOK dirty, and he wasn’t fat enough to make washing difficult. He just didn’t bother, for reasons known only to himself. He was SMILING through the whole bus ride, too. Hell, maybe he LIKES to smell like ass. People who deliberately avoid washing their putrid, sweaty ass should be shipped off to a third-world country where soap and water is hard to come by, and then maybe they’ll appreciate it more.

Bottom (no pun intended) line: Wash yourself, or don’t leave the house. Ever. And particularly not during International Hygiene Week, you nasty ass-reeking bastards.

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Mornings. Don’t like them. I don’t know what I would do if I had actual children, I can’t even get my guy out of bed in the morning. I am fully aware that he is an alleged adult, and shouldn’t require my assistance, but sometimes it’s either I get him up or he’ll lie like a log until he’s already supposed to be at work. Well, if logs could snore and fart, anyway.

Me, I can’t really sleep in. It’s difficult to hit the snooze alarm and catch a few more z’s when you have a fat, elderly, brain-damaged cat sitting on your chest like a nightmare, meowing sadly and poking at your face with his chubby paws. So Thursday morning, I sighed and removed the drooling moron from my bosom, got out of bed, started staggering toward the bathroom, and promptly stepped on the other cat, Chloë (aka Princess Evil Bitch Monkey). An argument ensued.

Chloë: “How dare you?! Take that, inferior being!” (swats at my bare ankles)
Me: “Don’t sit in the doorway in the dark if you don’t want to get squished, dumbass.”
Chloë: “Do not speak to me in that disrespectful manner.” (swats again)
Me: “Screw you.”
The Light of My Existence: (groggily, from the bed) “Who the hell are you talking to?”
Me: “This rotten little cat.”
The Light of My Existence: “You’re a fucking weirdo.” (resumed snoring)
Chloë: “Feed me, slave. NOW.”
Renfield the drooling moron: “Me hungry too.”

I ignored both cats as they escorted me to the bathroom, where I fell into the toilet butt-first. You’d think after living with a male of some sort or another most of my life, I would automatically check the seat. I think I usually do, but sometimes I don’t, and end up awkwardly trying to lever my cold, wet ass out of the john in the morning before I put in my contact lenses. It certainly startled me wide awake in a hurry, but I can’t say I found it very refreshing. And there were kitty paws waving and grasping around comically under the bathroom door. So both chuckling and grumbling at the same time, I dried myself off, put my eyes in, and then a little parade headed for the kitchen to start the coffee. Chloë was imperiously leading me as if I didn’t know where the hell I was going, and Renfield was padding behind me, because he probably DIDN’T know where HE was going.

Chloë: “Where’s my breakfast, slave? I demand food immediately! That means NOW, dammit!”
Renfield: “Me hungry too. Me hungry. Hungry too. Food? Please?”
Me: “Shut up and get out of my kitchen, both of you!”

Renfield scurried away, but stood peeking around the doorway with a mournful expression. Chloë hissed and continued to swat at my ankles as I began making PEOPLE food, just to piss her off. Chloë apparently thinks she’s ten feet tall and bulletproof, but in reality, she’s tiny. AND her claws are clipped blunt, so her ferocious attacks inflict zero damage. But it makes me (and anybody else who happens to be around) laugh when she tries to show me who’s boss around here, which infuriates her even more. I make her wait to get fed, just for the entertainment value.

Anyway. Using coffee, toast and scrambled eggs as bait, I lured The Light up so he would have some chance of making it to work on time. Taking time to eat could very well have made him late, but at least he was in an upright position and slowly regaining consciousness. Then I fed the cats. Everybody was happy but me; by now, MY breakfast was lukewarm. And I spilled my coffee (then took a picture of it; it somehow seemed to symbolize the whole morning so far, and this blogging thing is having some odd effects on my behavior).

Cats: purr purr crunch scronch snorf purr chomp crunch munch
The Light of My Existence: slurp slurp crunch scronch snorf slurp chomp crunch munch
Me: *sigh*

I reheated and ate my breakfast while The Light dashed wildly around the house trying to get dressed. I will leave out the tedious details of the no doubt familiar (to women) scene where he stood helplessly staring into the closet asking me where his pants were (right in front of his nose). After he left, I started getting ready for work, and was fresh out of the shower and about to dress when Renfield tottered in looking more mournful than usual.

Renfield: “Ohhhhhhh.”
Me: “What’s wrong, Fuzzybutt?”
Renfield: “Not feel good. Help me. Woe!”

I was alarmed. I love this stupid cat dearly, and he has a urinary tract condition that nearly killed him a few years ago. Flare-ups are expensive to treat. I felt his tummy to see if his bladder was distended. It wasn’t. Oh, what a relief! So what the hell was he crying about?

Renfield: “Woe! Woe! Wooooe!” (upchucked what looked like either a giant hairball or an entire squirrel on the bath mat next to my foot, along with most of his breakfast)
Me: “Ewwwww! Oh God!” *insert much profanity here*
Renfield: “Me hungry.”
Chloë arrives on the scene: “What is that enticing fragrance? Fresh vomit? How delightful!”
Me: (removing the repulsive, steaming bath mat) “Get out of my way.”
Chloë: “Where do you think you’re going, slave? I was going to eat that!”
Renfield: “Hungry.”
Chloë: (running after me) “Come back here!”
Renfield: “HUNGRY.”

Just before I headed out the back door with the befouled bath mat, I realized I was naked. I would have to put the mat down before I could put on my robe, so I dropped it into the kitchen trash. Fuck it, I was going to miss my bus if I didn’t get dressed and get out of the hellhole my home was rapidly becoming in my mind.

It had been a long time since I was THAT glad to go to work. I have no idea how people with actual human children manage to make it through mornings without getting drunk and forcing their kids to go to school wearing no pants and an upended bowl of cereal on their head for a hat.

Tags: semi-daily // 4 Comments »

I am SO sick of these adverts for prescription medications on TV, and a lot of them are for imaginary diseases, anyway. There seems to be a horrible, potentially death-dealing drug for every possible minor inconvenience, lately. For example:

Restless legs syndrome:
also known as “My body is telling me to get up and move around but I don’t want to because I’m a lazy pig” disease

Oh, boo fricking hoo. You sit at a desk at work all day, then you sit in front of the TV at home all night, and then you freak because your legs feel funny at bedtime? Hello, the symptoms listed for “Restless Legs Syndrome” all sound EXACTLY like my ass going to sleep if I don’t move around. Listen to your body, people. It’s telling you to heave your bloated carcass off the couch and go for a walk after dinner.

There’s an ad for a drug for this so-called ailment, but if you’re paying attention, the side effects sound WAY worse than the problem the medication is supposed to treat:

• Feeling faint or dizzy when you stand up (Not good.)
• Feeling drowsy or falling asleep during daily activities such as driving (Potentially fatal.)
• Hallucinations (Oh, HELL no. What if you have a hallucination WHILE DRIVING, just before falling asleep at the wheel?)
• Compulsive gambling (This medication is so expensive, you can’t afford to lose. And what happens if you hallucinate while gambling?)
• Compulsive eating (Just what you need when you’re taking a drug that makes you not want to move.)
• Increased sex drive (Okay, so that might not be all bad, but what if you fall asleep while having sex? While driving a car? And hallucinating?)
• Nausea and Headache (If I have to explain why these are bad, you needn’t worry about “restless legs syndrome”, because you already have “I’m A Blithering Dumbass Syndrome.”)

Acid Reflux
“I eat huge piles of fatty rubbish and can’t understand why I always have heartburn” disease

Please. If you constantly get heartburn, just FUCKING STOP EATING THINGS THAT GIVE YOU HEARTBURN! You will not DIE if you pass up pizza, fried chicken, or any of the other greasy nasty shit that tends to trigger indigestion. Hell, you might even lose some weight.

Side effects of most acid reflux medications include headache, diarrhea, and abdominal pain. No surprises there… but I actually looked this shit up. You know what was surprising? The main ingredient in most “acid reflux” medications is sodium bicarbonate, also known as BAKING SODA, which can be purchased (retail) for less than 80 cents per POUND. It was only mildly surprising, though. Why the hell not add a patented ingredient that does nothing but increase the risk of bad side effects to baking soda and charge 3000 times as much for something you can buy at the grocery store? I wish I had thought of that, because I’d be filthy rich. Even after all the wrongful death lawsuits.

Overactive Bladder
“I pee a lot and I’m afraid somebody might notice and make fun of me” disease.

Oh. My. God. There’s a TV ad out there that actually tries to make women feel ashamed of going pee. What THE FUCK? We constantly hear that you’re supposed to drink 8 glasses of water a day. That’s two quarts, ladies. If you drink all that water like a good little girl, you’re gonna pee a lot, unless there’s something VERY wrong with you. Like, maybe you’re actually a man with an enlarged prostate. All that liquid has to go SOMEWHERE, and there’s basically three options: piss it out, sweat it out, or retain it and bloat up until you look like the Michelin Man. I’d rather pee.

The most common side effects of this stupid pill include dry mouth, headache, abdominal pain, and constipation. Uh, once again, I think I’d rather just pee a lot.

And right this minute, I’d like to pee sour beer all over the people who come up with these horrible commercials.

Tags: semi-daily // 2 Comments »

Now I’ve done it. I’ve gone and taken up making jewelry, as if we NEED any more craft, hobby, and art supplies taking up space in this tiny little bungalow. Here’s my first attempt at my newest non-kid friendly hobby:

I decided to keep it simple, for the first piece. It has a certain understated elegance, I believe. You can’t really tell in the picture, but the beads are aren’t black, they’re dark metallic grey, aside from the little silver spacers. And yes, that’s my very own big fat neck.
(edit) Not a clavicle in sight. I always HATED having those bones poking out when I was a scrawny teenager with no boobs, and now it’s stylish? Fuckers. But I digress.

“What’s so non-kid friendly about stringing beads?” you might ask. “Don’t kids do that in crafts in kindergarten?” I’ll tell you. It’s dangerous because I’m doing it. It’s enjoyable, but far too easy. Playing with shiny pretty things until you like the arrangement, and then putting them on a string is fun, but I need more of a challenge. One little necklace, and I’m already contemplating making my own beads, and that will almost certainly involve toxic chemicals, hot things, and sharp things. Had I only thought of it at the time, I would have added hobbies as a reason to not have kids.

This house is full of potentially dangerous stuff; crazy people, paint, glue, solvents, varnish, heat guns, hot glue guns, staple guns, nail guns, and a crucible for melting soft metal. There are shiny colorful things small enough for a rugrat to swallow, and sewing pins, knitting needles, and other sharp implements of every description. Did I mention crazy people?

It’s all I can do to keep my kitties away from hazardous items, but fortunately they generally have enough sense to leave the shit alone.

Well, not always Renfield, the Amazing Retard-O-Matic. He occasionally eats a scrap of yarn, for some incomprehensible retarded cat reason, and later horrifies me by waddling around with a bit of poop-covered string dangling from his asshole. I have more than once been forced to put on a rubber glove and pull a foreign object out of his butt, and trust me, it’s not pleasant for either of us. Just be grateful I don’t have a photo.

Anyway, I have yet another new hobby besides pulling poopy yarn out of my stupid cat’s ass, and I can make a wider variety of nice but inexpensive (and non-poop-coated) gifts for my friends and loved ones… if I can keep any friends after I accidentally poison their kids while they’re visiting.

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Goddamn flu. Why the HELL am I spending so much money on vitamins, anyway?? Stupid vitamins. What I need is a HEPA mask, and a gallon jug of hand sanitizer strapped to my chest.

I wash my hands a lot. I take vitamins. I eat vegetables. I don’t kiss random strangers with runny noses. So why am I sick? Not fair, dammit!

Thursday, one of the night guys called work (sounding like he was hacking up a lung) to say he couldn’t come in. One of the day shift guys was pale, baggy-eyed, and obviously unwell. He left early, and didn’t show up at all Friday. I felt fine.

Fast forward to yesterday morning… breakfast and a quickie. I was sweaty and shaking, which is normal… but then I ran away and threw up, which rather insulted The Light of My Existence.

It later turned out I had a temperature of 102. I still do, and I feel cold, even though the house is nice and warm. I hurt all over, my eyes feel like boiled eggs, and it feels like an invisible sadist sandblasted my sinuses while I was sleeping.

I ended up calling in sick to work today, myself. Coughing and sneezing all over a restaurant just didn’t seem like a good idea. It’s just as well I stayed home, because I got the Hershey squirts right around the what would be the middle of the lunch rush. Yecchhh. I slept most of the day, today (highly unusual) and I hope I’m not still contagious if I feel better tomorrow. I’m going back to bed, now. AGAIN. Well, not bed, really. I’m sleeping on the couch… I can’t breathe lying down. Great, I’m turning into the Elephant Man.

Tags: semi-daily // 2 Comments »

Valentine’s Day is pretty much a wash around here. That’s partly because my beloved and I just aren’t sweet, mushy people, but mostly because Valentine’s Day is a steaming heap of over-commercialized crap. (Just like Christmas, only with most of the pressure on men.)

It’s just plain WRONG to make people feel that they don’t deserve to be loved unless they spend boatloads of money on useless rubbish, particularly when you consider the multitude of perfectly valid OTHER reasons for not loving them. If you are unloved because you’re a stupid jerk, you’re doing yourself a disservice by thinking it must be because you didn’t buy somebody that diamond tennis bracelet.

Despite all of this, and the sheer annoyance of being visually assaulted by cutesy pink fuzzy-wuzzy things every time I walked into the grocery store, drug store, or damn near any other store for the last two weeks, I didn’t see any reason not to try to squeeze a little fun out of this bullshit Hallmark holiday.

A few days ago, I spotted big bags of steamed lobster claws in the seafood department at the neighborhood grocery. They NEVER have lobster at this stupid store except around Valentine’s Day, because this part of town is not exactly a high-end market where people just simply decide to have lobster for dinner for no special reason.

So I said to my dear darling, “Hey, how about we get some of those and have a romantic dinner on Valentine’s Day?”

“Valentine’s Day is stupid. But lobster DOES sound good. Let’s get the other stuff and come back if we’ve got enough money.”

“You’re about as romantic as a plantar wart, you know that?”

We didn’t get the lobster then, but I decided yesterday to grab some if they still had any. And they did. So I bought it, and also blew two bucks on a card with a mildly dirty joke in it, and another dollar for a pair of novelty dice.

Bonehead didn’t come home, though. I signed the card and left it on the computer keyboard to make sure he’d find it, and started tucking into the lobster claws without him. In front of the TV.

When he finally showed up, I was curled up, almost purring, on the couch. He tossed a heart-shaped box of chocolates into my lap and headed for the computer without kissing me, because I had butter all over my face.

“Whumpph oo bmmphh?” I called out, spraying the box with garlic bread crumbs. (We are not only unromantic, we’re also getting disgracefully rude.)

“WHAT?!?” he shouted from another room.

“I said, where’ve you been?”

“Over at Stevie’s,” he called back. Stevie is one of his friends.

“How did Pam feel about that? It IS Valentine’s Day, you know.” Pam is Stevie’s live-in girlfriend.

“She didn’t care. I think they already did something.” Pam and Stevie are about as mushy and sentimental as we are.

“Want some lobster claws?” Please say no…

“I’m not hungry, maybe later.” SCORE! I continued to stuff my face, and then a few moments later I heard him laugh.

“Find your card?”

“Yeah. Cute.” Here’s what the card said: (Outside) “I don’t need a special holiday to tell you how much I love you.” (Inside) “But, if it leads to having SEX… Happy Valentine’s Day! Merry Christmas! Happy Halloween! Happy Thanksgiving! Happy St. Patty’s Day! Happy July 4th! Happy Memorial Day!”

That pretty much sums the whole thing up, don’t you think?

Tags: semi-daily // 2 Comments »