Thank you for purging your tracking records. Not.

I'm really enjoying the fact that the package tracker is telling me that the item I ordered that was shipped yesterday arrived in Des Moines, Iowa, in November 2006.

I'll try and pick up a Tardis with my next Amazon order, so I can go back and collect the other item that was shipped...



Kthx.

So I was going through my inbox deleting old and trash email, and came across this one, that's been sitting in my inbox since 2002. It seems I got this joke off a newsgroup at the time. It still cracks me up.

---

Two nuns, Sister Marilyn and Sister Helen, are travelling through Europe in their car. They get to Transylvania and are stopped at a traffic light. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a diminutive Dracula jumps onto the hood of the car and hisses at them, through the windshield.

"Quick, quick!" shouts Sister Marilyn. "What shall we do?" "Turn the windshield wipers on. That will get rid of the abomination," says Sister Helen. Sister Marilyn switches them on, knocking Dracula about, but he clings on and continues hissing at the nuns. "What shall I do now?" she shouts.

"Switch on the windshield washer. I filled it up with Holy Water in the Vatican," says Sister Helen. Sister Marilyn turns on the windshield washer. Dracula screams as the water burns his skin, but he clings on and continues hissing at the nuns.

"Now what?" shouts Sister Marilyn. As Dracula hangs on. "Show him your cross," says Sister Helen. "Now you're talking," says Sister Marilyn as she opens the window and shouts, ... "Get the Fuck off our car!!"

When Prez informed a former colleague of the birth of Matilda on IM the other day, he joked to said colleague that he could type her name as ~ (tilde) being that Tilda is one nickname for Matilda. Said colleague then pointed out that we already have a - (Dash) and that we are the ( ) (parens aka parentheses).

Doh.

Funny, but completely accidental.

So our family is (-~) ?

HAHAHAHA.

For those of you who haven't seen yet, prez posted 2 pictures in his LJ of Matilda yesterday.

Please welcome Matilda Anais (supposed to have 2 dots on the i, but PreZ's laptop won't let me do it the way I know how).

Born March 25th at home in the pool at 3.54pm as a surprise breech birth! She decided that coming head first was too mundane, and so she came butt first instead, to everybody's surprise.

8lbs 1/2oz and 19.5 inches tall.

Other than her surprise presentation (being that she's been head down for weeks, even for an internal exam), labour was pretty fast once I got past yesterday's pro-dromal and early labour. Pushing itself was a 10-15 minute affair which occurred much sooner than I had anticipated.

Anyway, needless to say we are thrilled, and also tired and sore.

Thanks to all who wished me well in the earlier stages! :)

You know, I swear that if Purgatory exists, there is laundry there.

Washing machines, dryers, washing baskets, and endless piles of clothing that need washing, drying, (ironing if you're a total masochist) folding and putting away. And by the time you get through most of it, there's already another mountainous pile of dirty laundry waiting to go through the same cycle.

The day before I left the UK to come home, I realised while packing that I had misplaced my cell phone, sometime between New Year's Eve and the 13th. Either it fell out of my pocket somewhere when we were out, or Dashiell lost it for me when I gave it to him to play with, though that was usually indoors or in the car, but no phone to be found anywhere when it was searched for.

Prez and I were labouring under the impression that our cell plan wasn't up until March, and that I'd have to wait until then to get a new phone with the renewal of our plan. Of course today he found out that our plan was up back in November, and I could immediately get a new phone with the renewal of our plan along with the renewal discounts that you get on the cost of the various phones.

I will soon be getting a nice purple phone, woot! It's on order (because apparently the purple Samsung Gleam is only available on the Verizon website, not in the actual Verizon stores), but I can wait the extra few days for it to be shipped. Prez just called me from his new phone which he picked up on the way home, and he made the guy at the Verizon store put my number on his phone, so for the intermediate period, I will be able to use his old phone. Well, I will when he gets them to unblock my number again, because he had that done when we reported it lost. Knowing my luck that'll occur around the time the new phone arrives...

In other completely unrelated news, I have to thank vgnwtch for finding this icon, letting her hubby show it to me, and that I had to steal. It is much with the awesome!

I'm back again from my 2.5 week stay in the UK.

While there I wasn't online much, besides to check email every so often. I certainly won't be able to catch up to everything posted on my friends list in the past 2.5+ weeks, so if there's anything you posted that you feel I really need to read, please comment and leave me a link to it.

Right now I'm still getting over the last vestiges of a tenacious cold, and so I may not be on LJ much for the next day or two as it is.

Dear Pharmaceutical Companies,


Please stop putting food dye in children's medications.

Besides the fact that many kids respond to food dyes in unpleasant ways (hyperactivity etc.), do you have any idea how fucking annoying it is to have to try and wash out pink stains from clothes worn by a toddler reluctant to drink the unnaturally red-pinkish cough syrup*? If not, by all means come over to my house sometime soon.

Tylenol, you are partially excused for actually having a dye-free version of your infant Tylenol.

Regards,


Me


* And this was syringe-fed, not spoon-fed too.

Yesterday afternoon I went digging around some of the clothing that was still languishing in a box in our bedroom closet, because I wanted to find my scarf. I found my scarf, and my hat, gloves, Prez's smart (i.e. smooth leather, can wear to work) Ugg boots and Dashiell's funky Hanna Andersson hat.

A good thing too, it snowed overnight, and we have a good inch of accumulation right now. The snow stopped falling about 45 minutes ago, which is a pity, they were such pretty fat fluffy flakes.

I hope the early snowfall, being that it's not officially even winter yet (though at least it is December), doesn't mean that we're in for a long cold hard winter this year.

And, because the whirl of the silly season has started, it's time to look at the Scared Of Santa gallery again :D

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/entertainment/sfl-scaredofsanta-ugc,0,2343680.ugcphotogallery

Today is Prez and my 6th wedding anniversary.

Happy Anniversary prez! :D

Tuesday night I finished part 3 of my St. Petersburg chart.

Time consuming with all the backstitching on the wrought iron gates, but it's taking shape nicely.

Once again the pictures don't necessarily show everything quite true to colour, being that they were taken with the camera flash and indoor halogen lighting, rather than natural light. It's washing out the colours somewhat, unfortunately.

( Pictures )

Ever since the weather started getting colder, I started thinking about making those little birdseed balls for birds in the winter. The one with birdseed and fat that solidifies, that you can hang up with a string or something.

And then I remembered that we have already had a mouse problem here a few months ago, albeit inside and in the basement whereas the birdseed balls would be outdoors, but then I don't really want to attract any more rodents to the area than necessary. The dumpster out the back already attracts squirrels and even raccoons wander around here as well, and I certainly don't need to give mice even more excuse to hang around near the house.

So that idea will have to be shelved.

Maybe I'll have to just make other wintery things instead... like clove studded oranges or something.

I happened on this link today, as I wandered from various Etsy pages to personal artist blogs. And sometimes you find interesting things on such quests. I found this helpful link:

http://www.catalogchoice.org/

In the past few months that we've lived here, the amount of unsolicited catalogues we've started receiving has grown to a ridiculous number, at times it's at least one a day. A lot of it seems to be kids toys and clothing catalogues, and it makes me wonder where they've been getting my details from.

Anyway, the above mentioned link is a place to unsubscribe from catalogues. They pass on requests to the merchants to stop catalogues being delivered. It takes about 10 weeks to be removed though, which is a tad unfortunate, though considering how hard it is to even be removed from email mailing lists sometimes it's not that strange.

It'll be nice to get less stuff in the mailbox that goes straight into the (recycling) bin.

Now if only I could find a way to make being on the state and national Do Not Call lists work better... the telemarketers seem to be increasing again, irregardless of being on said lists. Extremely vexing indeed!

Sunday night I finished part 2 of my St. Petersburg White Nights cross-stitch piece. Hopefully this weekend I'll manage to get part 3 completed. I'm hoping to catch up with the online class a bit over the next month or two (which is currently at part 9, with parts released monthly).

( Pic Here )

Happy T-Day to any who celebrate it.

Being that we had no family obligations this year, we went nowhere (well, besides taking Dashiell to his therapy this morning), and I'm just making a cottage pie*. Neither Prez or myself grew up here, so T day was adopted anyway, and doesn't have all that much significance for us, and cooking a turkey for 3 people, one of whom doesn't eat turkey or much at all, didn't seem worth it.

I forgot to make a pumpkin pie earlier, and being that between prep, cooking and cooling time is about 3 hours, I'm not bothering now. I might bake another batch of pumpkin cookies later though. Between prep time and eating time is 20 minutes there ;) much easier to deal with.





* I would have gotten a chicken and saved the cottage pie making until tomorrow or so, but the local Shoprite apparently decided that turkeys were the only birds they were going to stock, and I didn't want to brave traffic on Wednesday afternoon to go to Whole Foods.

Going through some older mail in my gmail account, I came across this gem:


Subject: I MUST KILL YOU
From: clifford avrus <cliff_avrus06a@hotmail.co.uk>

I am clifford avrus a murderer who lives in london but on mission to kill you,for your informations i was paid $100.000.000 to eliminate you.
I just wanna get you informed that i am coming after your life and that of your family so that you would definitely knows your death is around the corner.
And i must make sure you die,so bad that you offend a friend of your who paid me this money to kill you.
bye

clifford.
contact me on this mail:princegordons@aol.com



HAHAHAHA. Man, I'd love to know who I pissed off enough that they can afford to waste 100 million dollars on coming to kill me. You'd think I was Bush or something.

I don't claim to be up on fashion or particularly fashion forward, so can someone please tell me what the deal is with the new trend of wearing wellington boots?

Seriously? What. The. Fuck.

When I was in NYC with my brother I first noticed it, and it seems to be popping up all over the place now. Even with funky patterns, there's something distinctly ugly about wellington boots. And when they're worn when the weather is dry, it looks even more ridiculous. I've questioned the style aspect of wearing Ugg boots with everything, but they're haute fashion compared to wearing rubber wellies with a nice skirt or outfit.

I haven't worn wellies since I was a kid, and I don't intend to unless I move somewhere where it rains a lot or if we have a garden I plan to spend a lot of time mucking about it.

Once again I can just be glad that I'm not a slave to fashion trends...

Halloween pumpkins always amuse me several days after they've been carved.

As the pumpkin flesh starts softening because putrefaction starts setting in, all the sharp lines of the features start curling inwards a bit and the mouths sag shut some, and those grim looking pumpkins with toothy smiles start to look more like little gummy old men who've forgotten to put their dentures in.