Epitravelogue

Well, I made it home. Still not dead! No thanks to the ravens. My diversionary tactics worked perfectly. I sailed through security, sans corkscrew, and even had time to suck down some hooch at the airport bar. My second glass of crappy but overpriced merlot was so loaded up that I dumped it into an empty water bottle so I could take it on board and introduce it to the mile high club.

It seemed like pure absolute zero torture at the time but now as I look back on it through the haze of retrospect, maybe it wasn't so bad. Isn't that always the way?? I learned some stuff, for one thing, and I always appreciate that. I was so sick one day that I turned on the TV. My energy gave out just as I clicked on 'Extreme Cheapskates'; have you seen this show? They had this woman on, she looked totally normal, but then she cooked a lasagna in the dishwasher WHILE IT WAS WASHING DISHES.  It might not be so weird if she was just cooking, BUT THE SOAP!!!!!! And the lasagna was for a party; a party at which the guests had to use a candle to find the bathroom because she wouldn't let them turn the lights on. I mean, my party guests always hate me, too, but it's only because I live in a swamp. I know better than to be stingy, too.  I actually don't think cooking in the dishwasher is all that strange, but maybe I come by it naturally.  My dad doesn't have a dishwasher, so he recently tried to cook some sausage, noodles and broccoli in his coffee maker. I don't think it's because he's a tightwad, though. If he was he wouldn't buy clothes for statues and food. Disappointingly, the coffee maker meal was not a success, but I think he might just need a new model. So, that's one lesson: my family is not NEARLY as strange as I thought they were.

Here's another one: you can make a candle out of used motor oil, steel wool, and an empty beer can. I would totally do it, too, if I could force myself to drink beer out of a can. That one comes courtesy of a mechanic who lives in his shop. He just sleeps in cars people bring in and bathes himself in his car wash bucket. The candles were for a blind date. Lucky for him, too; if she could see she'd know he lives in an auto shop and be out of there like a shot.

And here's a little silver lining: I was too weak to buy neither a single pair of boots nor nary a touristy trinket. Not that the local wares are all that appealing, but the locals do push a certain kind of specialized knife. It comes with a DVD, or so the sales pitch goes. I don't know about you guys, but none of my friends or family members need a sharp implement that requires an instructional video.  That adds up to tons of extra Christmas thrifting cash for me; I think my dad could use some new kitchen appliances. If I don't have to spend it all on antibiotics, I mean. And those stupid fines to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Who knew ravens were so valuable?

Cat Wigs

Oh, you guys. I swear, I NEVER know what I'm going to hear or see next around here. Last night the boys decided they needed wigs for Jake and Henry so they would look like girls. Or, 'goowuls', as Shane says. They wanted to know where one could buy such a thing, so I googled it for them, while telling them that there are probably not any cat wigs. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I realized there are totally cat wigs. Naturally, the boys wanted one right away, the pink one, and were quite dismayed when I informed them that there was no way we were going to spend sixty bucks on a wig for a cat. I mean, seriously, who would do that? Do you know how much wine I can buy with sixty smackeroos?

While they were pitching their fits, I posted the cat wigs on facebook, because what else would I do? As always, the best part of my facebook posts are the hilarious comments from my fantastic friends. Here are a few:

If any of my friends were going to discover cat wigs, I would bet it would be you.- S.

I'm totally buying one. My cat will look dashing in the Bashful Blonde.- S.

Oh and Thanks now my daughter wants a cat and a wig for it...Thank God the baby is allergic.- H.

Oh. My. Goodness. I have no words except "0h. My. Goodness. I have no words." -L.

How do you get a cat to keep a wig on??? -M.

And I'm the hard core one? -G.

After the boys recovered from the disappointment associated with my frugal approach to cat accessories, I told them they could MAKE cat wigs if they wanted, for a fraction of the price. We decided doll hair would make good wigs, but they didn't want to cut the hair on the dolls they already had, so obviously a thrift store trip was in order.

THEN, when I told my sister that I was taking the boys to Goodwill to buy dolls to cut their hair to make cat wigs with, she said, "You're going to make cat wigs out of doll hair? What a ridiculous idea. Why don't you just come over here? I have some cat wigs you can have." Every word of this is true. Can you believe I didn't even have a category for her until just now?

So, sure enough, I went over there and she gave me a bag of wigs. Two cat wigs and two little boy wigs. Let me just finish by saying there were mixed feelings about wig-wearing around here today. You may notice Jake is not in any wig pictures at all, and in fact is in hiding and hasn't been seen for several hours. Henry, however, cheerfully donned two different wigs and posed for a lengthy photo shoot. Enjoy!

Sunday

Holy cow, people! Look at me go! I think this is my seventh post this week. I missed a day, but I did two on Monday. This is the second to last thing I should be doing, right in front of boot shopping, because eleventy jillion people are coming over for early Thanksgiving this afternoon and the place is a mess and there's no food. It's just the family, though, and they've met me so probably aren't expecting much better. Dad is bringing the turkey, fortunately for me, and Jen is bringing dessert. So really, all I need to do is wash some forks and open wine. The aunts are coming also, though, so my excellent manners are hounding me to mash potatoes and make stuffing. Maybe even some vegetables, because I'm an overachiever that way. I'll get right on it as soon as I finish blogging and boot shopping. You might wonder where Lloyd is, and observe correctly that this operation would be proceeding much more smoothly and appropriately were he running it instead of me. As luck (bad for me, good for him) would have it, he is taking a refresher course required to maintain his instructor ratings this weekend. That's what he said, anyway, as he tore out of here this morning with an evil laugh, leaving rubber on the driveway.

So, yep, I'm going to get on that pretty soon. Those potatoes won't mash themselves! Unless I invent something. Maybe after I look at some more boots. I don't actually NEED any more boots, of course, especially after I bought some last night. I now have perfectly good black ones AND brown ones, and still I want MORE. It's a sickness. I am close to justifying it, though, with all the money I've been saving on shampoo and conditioner. I haven't used a single drop of either one for at least two weeks, so I figure if I keep it up, the boots will pay for themselves in only 94 more weeks. Of course, I do incur a cost for the baking soda and apple cider vinegar replacements, but we already buy that stuff by the bushel for volcano making and the like, so it's practically free. Plus, I am almost out of my store bought hippie deodorant and am about to switch to homemade, so that will be an extra couple of bucks a month.

All right, FINE, I'm going now. I just remembered I also have to police the house for pee balloons. Not everyone is as tolerant of such things as you guys are. Oh, it might be too late- one of the boys just said 'I smell something stinky!', and their standards are pretty low. I'll try to provide a full report later. I know you're dying to know what the boots look like.

Veteran's Day

Happy Veteran's Day! I actually think our veterans would be much better served with adequate pay, benefits and support than with a day of celebration in November. I guess it's a nice gesture. That makes lots of money for corporate America, no doubt. Sort of like Mother's Day and Father's Day. Tons of cashola for retail giants but no family friendly policies anywhere in sight. So that's business as usual. Have a nice day, veterans! Sorry about that TBI; you know how it is. We found a corporation that had to pay a few bucks in taxes, so we have to remedy that instead of fixing your head that we damaged in the first place. Among other issues, veterans are much more likely to be unemployed than non-veterans, and non-veterans aren't doing all that well, employment-wise, these days. Lots of families don't have enough food- it's a great time to donate to Northwest Harvest or a food bank near you. You can probably donate right at the cash register the next time you go grocery shopping.

Anyway, moving on, because that is super depressing, I got a new pair of boots today! The guilt-inducing ones I ordered last week came today. They are quite fabulous, and Shane turned the box into a WALL-E type contraption and wore it around the house all day with nothing else on except his teeny-tiny tighty whities- SUPER CUTE! Also, I discovered what Lloyd and the boys do all day. I strapped Shane in his seat this afternoon to hit the grocery store, and he said, "I would like to go to Starbucks for a hot chocolate and a blueberry scone, please."

Sorry I didn't post all week- I MEANT to, but there was this giant hurricane-ish storm in the Bering Sea so I had to work from 0'dark thirty to a million o' clock all week. Lloyd was gone, too, requiring painful, expensive and exhausting child care machinations. Thank God I get a celebratory day in May! I'm not sure about this standard time thing, either. It seems like it shouldn't be THAT big of a deal but I have not been sleeping properly ever since we fell back. It's such a stupid idea, anyway: it's not as if we REALLY get any more daylight. I have an idea! Let's donate Mother's Day, and bust it up into 24 one hour chunks, which we can then spread out for an actual extra hour on 24 different days! Brilliant, right?

And call me crazy, but I am getting some new-to-me cats tomorrow. I found them on Craigslist, and one of them looks exactly like Henry! We have been easing into the idea for a while, but the Fur Real cat Weston got at the Goodwill last week was the final straw for Lloyd. He said if we're going to have that creepy hideous thing around here, we might as well have real cats, as long as they're free. Lloyd has a real aversion to paying good money for used cats, especially if that money could be used for hot chocolates and blueberry scones. I'll keep you posted.

Have a good weekend!

Update on the paper

Remember when I wrote last week that my office is running out of paper and has no money to buy more? It’s getting worse- today at the weekly meeting, there was serious distress over occasional six dollar fees for transactions on one of the computer systems; we simply cannot afford these anymore. The paper is dwindling and the supply fund is not, shall we say, robust. There is enough in there to buy a few boxes of printer paper, so I’m not sure why they are waiting. Perhaps there is something more important than the paper? I can’t imagine what it would be, because we have plenty of TP and coffee. I checked when I was doing the inventory for my swapping scheme. Don’t worry, though- I have another idea for how to get some, since the trading post idea doesn’t seem to be taking off.

Last week, I was noticing my hands were getting all carpal-tunnelly, and I knew why. My office chair was too low and I couldn’t get it go up. One of my cubors (these are like neighbors, only in cubes) heard me swearing and came over. He flipped my chair over and had it fixed in a jiffy, which gave me another fantastic idea for paper procurement. I figure we can put him out on the sidewalk with a sign that says ‘Will fix office furniture for paper’, and then I thought, WHY STOP THERE? Many people have skills that could be utilized to conquer this crisis. Another of my cubors, for example, dances in his free time. He could get out there in front of the office and dance with an empty paper box, so people can come by and toss paper in there. When it’s filled up, he can come in. I think this is a surefire winner, so I’m going to get a sign-up sheet and go around figuring out what extracurricular skills everyone else has. I will probably have to sit this one out myself: my only talent is coming up with brilliant ideas, and my friend Helen has already cornered the market on that. Although, ‘Will provide brilliant ideas for copy paper’ would look good on a sign, wouldn’t it?

Did you get the memo on the paper?

I work in a government office, and you might have heard something about budget problems in our public agencies lately. My office just got some seriously bad news: we are down to our last box of 8.5 x 11 printer paper. Dude! Printer paper is like the fuel that powers the machine where I work. The place will grind to a screeching halt in a hurry if the supply is cut off, and at least six, no.... seven people will immediately shrivel up and die. We've already had to go to double-sided printing. You would think people would embrace that; it cuts the paper usage in half, so that's like two trees a day, but surprisingly, this has not been a super popular move.

But if we get cut down to zero on the paper front, what are we going to push around? All day long, piles, folders, clipboards, and binders, all cram-jammed with dead trees, get schlepped from cube to cube, from one end of the office to the other. Over and over and over, like a perpetual motion machine. I've been brainstorming ideas for a good substitute, and the best thing I can come up with is old computer monitors on old office chairs. The pushing would be easy, because of the wheels, and it would be efficient because we'd be pushing two things at one time. The scary thing is, I can totally picture this in my mind, and it wouldn't be all that different. Pretty viable, don't you think?

If that doesn't work out, I have another idea to acquire the paper we need: a swap operation with other public agencies. As it happens, we have an ample supply of legal paper, which we don't use very often, and I did an inventory of the supply room. We have:

A polaroid camera, still in the box

4 unopened boxes of 3.5" floppy disks

23 dirty mouse pads

119 pounds of tabbed sheets

47 2" white binders

4 boxes of toilet seat covers

3 cubic yards of desktop organizers in various configurations

14 pencil sharpeners

Large box of fortune cookies

6 reams carbon paper

I'm thinking we can appoint a Swapmaster, which should definitely be a good promotion for someone. Not me, though- I'm not a good bargainer, plus I'm not really ambitious. The new Swapmaster could set up in the supply room on the big table with all the goods and start wheeling and dealing to get the printer paper, and we also desperately need some kleenex right away. I mentioned it at the staff meeting today and they just laughed at me, so I guess that means they all want to try the office chairs and computer monitors first. I'll let you know how it turns out! I might consider putting up pictures but I don't want to get canned. Maybe I can make everyone disguise their identities while they careen around the hallways- we can probably get a gross of masks from the health department in exchange for the fortune cookies. And, just in case that doesn't work out, keep your eyes open for surplus you might want to trade; I'll put in a good word for you with the Swapmaster.

Words of brilliant wisdom from 1938

**again with the editing! A few points of clarification: FINE, I was not so much sorting stuff at my parent's house as grumping around while my sister and my aunt worked. WHATEVER. Also, of course, as revolutions go, I'm a fan of the non-violent type, which are entirely possible, no matter what Lloyd says. That is all.**

So! What super fun things are all you guys up to today? I am at my parents' house sorting through my dead mother's stuff- and boy, is it a BLAST. She was a big genealogist, and so there are piles of things from her ancestors. One of her grandfathers, Josef, was a real character, and he was not shy about speaking out against injustice, which often made him unpopular among the townspeople. Which he did not give a rat's ass about, apparently. I came across some of his writing today, and had to post a little excerpt, because it is so remarkably similar to what I wrote yesterday:

April 1938: Oh yes, there is general demand that the telegraph and telephone rates be lowered, and it can be done by not giving a set of hogs an enormous profit. The fact is, big business is grabbing all the money; it will make very little difference, how much money the government spends to relieve unemployment, in a short time it will be in possession the rich, and we are on the same old place, where we were before; that is the curse of our competitive or capitalist or profit system, and when our national credit will be gone, we will either face a dictator or a revolution, for it is hardly possible that 99% of the people will submit to the financial and economic tyranny of less than 1%.

SING IT, GRAMPS, AND BRING ON THE REVOLUTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Blame Game

I used to live in Pensacola, and there is no more beautiful place than the Gulf Coast. Weston was born there, and this picture was taken in our house there on his first Christmas. We really liked it there- the beaches were gorgeous- white sands, turquoise waters and pale green sea grasses. The oil spill makes me sick, but what makes me sicker is the disingenuous placement of blame solely on BP.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending them; they are a bunch of greedy bastards for sure. This morning, though, I heard someone say that the executives should be lined up and shot, as if they exist in a vacuum created by their own selfishness, and sadly that's just not true. If it was true, we COULD prevent future spills by shooting them. But the truth is, we ALL did this. BP is just the middleman. A dirty, slimy one, obviously, but still just a middleman. BP is only drilling risky wells because there is an insatiable market for cheap oil. They're just going after the money. Gotta keep the shareholders happy, right? What's good for business is good for America, after all. And what's good for business is fast profits. And BP's not the only one: the other companies aren't any better, they just haven't been caught yet.

Yep, we all did this. Every time you take a plastic bag home from the grocery store, you might as well toss a few tar balls on the sand. When you order takeout and end up with a bag of styrofoam leftovers big enough to choke a T-Rex, it's just the same as dipping a pelican in a barrel of crude. Driving alone to work instead of carpooling or taking the bus equals hucking a few water balloons full of diesel at a sea turtle nest.

Now, if we were willing to acknowledge the obvious truth that drilling for oil is environmentally risky, and unsafe (don't forget that eleven workers died on the Deepwater Horizon), and were willing to pay the true cost of our lifestyle up front, say around $10 a gallon for gas, maybe we would have a leg to stand on when an oil conglomerate bungles and/or underfunds a cleanup, because we would have a legitimate right to expect that safety and cleanup costs had been accounted for in the pricing of the product. But to keep sucking up oil at the going rate and demanding Government subsidies to keep the prices down, then heaping blame on oil companies after the inevitable catastrophe is hypocritical in the extreme.

This kind of mess is just going to happen again and again, if we don't change our ways. And we probably won't, but that's okay too. Eventually the oil reserves will be depleted, the oceans will be wastelands and most of the people will be dead, because much of our food supply and almost all of our oxygen depends on healthy oceans. Then the survivors will have to devise alternate energy sources. Maybe they can capture the methane from all those decomposing corpses.

Book

Look how fancy I am! LOOK, LOOK, LOOK!!!!!! It's my very own BOOK! Well, it's not a REAL book, of course, like Monica and Alexa have. But it's cool enough to make me think that maybe, perhaps, possibly, I could have a real book one day too. After all, I did enough writing to fill a 438 page book, see? SEE?

I got it from Blurb and they automatically slurped up every single Story from Korea and put them all into a slick and glossy book. They really liked it and said I was a fine author and they would be pleased to publish my fantastic book. Oh, and also I gave them approximately one hundred dollars worth of Lloyd's hard-earned money.

It was super easy and took less than an hour, and I definitely recommend it to all my bloggy friends. If I had a little more patience I could have really cleaned it up nice. But then, if I had a little more patience, maybe I would be writing an actual book for which I might get paid and which might be read by other people, now mightn't I? I mean, if I had a little more patience and also constructed proper sentences with the appropriate number of dependent clauses. But guess what? My new pals at Blurb don't give a rat's ass about my badly structured sentences, and neither do I. Because.... SEE MY ENORMOUS BOOK??!?!?!!??!?! None of that boring patience and hard work foolishness for me, so take that, all you fancy real book writing blog people. Oh, but if you don't mind, put in a good word for me with your... what do you call them? Editors? Yeah, yeah, that's it. Editors! I'm not really sure what they do or nothing but it seems like you gotta get some of that editing stuff. Not that I care, you know, but Lloyd says we can't afford any more of my books.