Oh. My. Gods.

WARNING: This is NSFW! (Although now that the weekend is upon us, most don't have to worry about that. Still...) Also? Don't be drinking anything while you read it.

That I hate windows.

What are they good for anyway?

You want some fresh air? Want to know what the weather is like? What’s going on in the world at large? Walk out the front door and go outside.

Need some light? That’s what that switch on the wall attached to the electrical fixture is for.

See? Who needs windows, with their wood work and their big spaces that need to be painted around. Not me, buddy. Unnecessary holes in the wall, that’s what those are.

Stupid windows.

Painting white over off-white is an exercise in WTF.

Who the eff decided this was a good plan?
What the eff am I doing?!?
When the eff is this damn project going to be done?
Where the eff did I just leave off painting? I can’t tell!
Why the eff did I pick this damn color?

I’d like you to take eleven minutes out of your day to watch this video. And I will warn you now that it is put together by somebody who obviously backs the Republican candidates. But they are someone that also did their research, and everything in this vid is absolutely accurate factually.

Look. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I don’t really need to know who you’re going to vote for, and I’m not trying to tell you who to choose. I just want people to make an informed choice. This is only one of the issues that is on the table right now, but in our household, in a lot of households, it’s a biggie. So take the time to watch, do the research, know who you’re voting for. And why.

Thank you.




x-posted

I live in the woods. I know this.

Bears live in the woods. I know this as well.

I even accept the fact that we are, on occasion, going to see one another and most of the time, both of us will simply walk away with little more than being startled. I go my way, and the bear goes his. I am not thrilled about this, given my personal feelings on bears, but I am resigned to it. After all, I live in the woods. It comes with the territory.

However, my house is ( not a plaything! )

Left Atlanta at about 8 AM on Tuesday morning.

It is now 1:30 AM on Wednesday morning, but I am home.

I decided to do it all in one day, I missed my hubby, I missed my kitties, and apparently, I misplaced my brain because that's way too damn long on the road, even if it was broken up a bit.

I am SO sleeping in tomorrow. Replies and reports and all that crap will happen when it happens.

But I'm home, I'm safe, and I've survived my first Dragon*Con.

Gummy Bears With Machine Guns not withstanding.







x-posted to IJ

I don't wanna be a grown-up no more. It's too hard. It sucks. I don't like it, and I don't wanna do it. I don't wanna deal with mortgages or finances. I don't wanna deal with being unable to help the people I care about. I don't wanna deal with my little brother making the biggest mistake of his life. I don't want to comfort my mother when she's sobbing. I don't want to hear the tears in my father's voice. I don't want to be scared as much as I am. I want fucking cookies and naps and cuddles and happiness dammit. And until I get it, I'm boycotting adulthood.

So there.

That keyboardist is hot. And I think I'm in love with the tambourine player.

Pulling up to a stoplight, windows rolled down ‘cause it’s a nice day, Poison’s “Talk Dirty To Me” blaring on the radio, belting it out at the top of my lungs not caring who hears… and looking over to realize that the teenagers in the car next to me are singing along too.

It was just a nice moment of connection over something fun and bouncy and happy. And a reminder that deep down, we’re all a little silly.

You know I never, I’ve never seen you look so good, you never act the way you should, but I like it…

I had dreams about sharks hiding in bed with me, under the covers, trying to avoid the hordes of octopi swarming across the ceiling. As nightmares go, that one was…

Weird.

I hope you’re happy.

Or: Why Kate is so freakin’ paranoid about the cats getting out.

Because they’d get eaten, that’s why. A reminder of that was given to me just a few minutes ago.

I am sitting downstairs in the family room, looking up some very disgusting things about some ancient pagan practices on the computer, when I hear SPLORT! This is not a new sound in my house. It’s one I’ve grown accustomed to since moving here. It is the sound of a cat smacking, rather hard, into a sliding glass door. This is not done by accident, but by their own free will, usually when they are attacking a moth or bug on the other side of the glass. Usually at night, because the porch light back there attracts the moths.

But it’s not night. It’s dusk. So I was rather confused and went to investigate.

Only to find Lola staring down a fox through the sliding glass door. A fox. On my back deck. He had to walk up eight steps to get up onto my back deck. And there he is, staring at Lola. Who’s facing him down like she could actually take him. Even though he’s easily five times her size.

As soon as he saw me, he bolted. Lola seemed disappointed.

I wonder if you can rig one of those invisible fence things to the door. Maybe that’d make sure the cats never, ever, ever got out. Because they would definitely get eaten.

After some tests, we are 99% certain that the tumor is benign. My father needs to go in for one more test in August to be absolutely sure, but things are looking much better. He’s feeling better too, without the added worry. And I am far less stressed myself. Thank you to all of you who expressed concern and gave support. It helped, more than I can say.

You know the worst part of stressing out over a situation over which you have no control?

It’s a situation over which you have no control.

There isn’t a damn thing I can do. Not one. I can’t call and yell at anybody. I can’t find a solution. I can’t make a change to influence the outcome. I can’t do shit. I can sit and I can wait, and it is painful.

So I’m basically giving myself stomach pains and headaches and crying at random odd moments throughout the day, and none of that makes a fuck bit of difference to anything because we don’t even know anything yet, and even when we do know something, there might be nothing that can be done. I’ve never been somebody that lived on “what if’s” but I can’t stop my brain from turning that phrase over and over again in my head. I hate the not knowing, yet at the same time I welcome it. I don’t want to plan for the worst, because I don’t want to face that possibility. Yet I can’t force myself to think it will all be alright, because I fear the disappointment if it isn’t.

I know there’s nothing I can truly do, but sitting back and doing nothing, waiting is just so hard. I want to run away from it, but I can’t do that either. I can’t… do anything. And I hate it. I hate it.

So if I’m a bit short with you in the coming days, if I seem irritable or distracted, it’s probably not you that I’m frustrated with. It’s myself and where I’m at. I’m sorry.

Or: How A Bear Tried To Take Away My Interwebs


I was awoken early this morning by an unexpected visit from one of our builders who had come to do some final finish work on the pocket doors for the library. So I got up, stumbled into the kitchen to attempt breakfast and had just sat down when I hear the hubby say, “Bear.”

So I went to look, and sure enough, there was the bear. Now, my husband claims that it must be a different bear, because the first bear I saw was rather large and bulky, definitely an adult male bear. This one was slender, smaller, possibly a juvenile or a female, says the hubby who did not see the first bear at all. I maintain that it is the same bear, it has just lost some weight. Because I refuse to think that Ted has friends, or I may have panic attacks. (Those who know me, know why.)

In any case, Ted is stretched up on his hind legs, front paws clinging to my telephone pole (and apparently leaving some rather large gouges.) We have a very long driveway, so an additional pole had to be placed on our property to accommodate both the electrical lines and the telephone wires. This is important to the story because here I do not have a cable modem. I have DSL. My phone lines are important to me, because they deliver information from all of my internet friends to this magic box I whimsically call “my lifeline.” My phone lines are lower on the pole than the electrical lines, and Ted is looking at them very intently. He even danced to the side a little, as though he was studying it from another angle. I was not pleased at this prospect, let alone the fact that there is a bear 150 feet down my driveway.

Now, on the “living with bears” care sheets (yes, they have those, lots and lots of them) there are a number of “tips” for dealing with the bears that live in our area. Most of those are about preventing the attraction of bears to where you are located. However, should you find yourself in the proximity of a black bear, if you are in a safe location and the bear has a clear escape route, it recommends that you make a fair amount of noise. The suggested methods include banging on a metal pot with a wooden spoon and yelling at the bear as though it were a dog you wished to have leave your yard.

So in one of the most surreal experiences of my life, from my front living room, through an open window, I yelled, “NO! BAD BEAR!”

Ted looked towards the house and I swear shrugged as though to say, “Eh.” Then he jumped up the embankment and trotted off. Which I suppose is better than having him stroll, so perhaps the yelling did some good. But it was still really, really weird.

When we moved from the old house to the new house a number of things were left behind. Among them were things we wished to move ourselves rather than allow the movers to touch, and things that were going to be thrown out. In the throwing-it-out category were items like a 20 year old couch (which was only supposed to have been temporary anyway), put-it-together-yourself furniture (because that never moves well), and various pieces of furniture that for one reason or another (mostly because we really don’t have a place for them to be in this house) were not coming with us. And a bunch of junk.

Since moving, I’ve gone down to the old house every day but those days when we’ve had people coming to work on the new house (locksmith, yay! I has deadbolts!) to throw stuff out and pack up the car with things that we wanted to move ourselves. Last weekend, tomegatheron went with me to help with some of the larger pieces of furniture. I did not realize when we began this process that it was going to turn into an all out war.

The Battle of the Couch this past weekend nearly did in both my husband and myself. It’s a 20 year old piece of crap, there were two of us, and we had a reciprocating saw, and the damn thing just about killed us anyway. That’s sort of been par for the course with this entire project. I am beat up. I’m sore and so exhausted at the end of the day, I’ve been sleeping so hard I haven’t been dreaming. I have bruises, and I don’t mean little yellow and brown bruises, I mean big old honking black and purple and green bruises (I have one that looks like somebody colored on me with a marker) all over my arms and legs. Yesterday, while carrying something to the car, I stepped in a hole in the yard and rolled my ankle, twisted my knee and ended up falling pretty much on my face. Fortunately it was grass, so the face was okay, even if the leg wasn’t. Today, I was not as lucky, and something fell off a shelf as I was cleaning, and smacked me in the face. Something heavy.

I have a cut inside my mouth where my teeth bit through and I have a swollen lip. The damn house gave me a fat lip. Like I got punched in the mouth.

So that’s it. I give up. I quit. I’m not fighting anymore, throw in the towel.

The house won.