Remember the Ladies

This is a great video and entertaining, too. It's a shout out to all my favorite SAH Moms out there.

Ain't No Sunshine When He's Gone

Tomorrow is the last day of field station and Matt will be coming home. Hallelujah!

For those that didn't know, my husband has been away the last six weeks at intense forestry boot camp. When I do get to see him on weekends, which is typically for fewer than 48 hours at a time, he is a shell of the husby I am used to, sleeping about half the time, while spending the rest removing caked mud from all his clothes. Not that I am complaining about our weekends together. I have been so happy to see him, he could have been unconscious most of the time and I would have just been glad he was here.

But enough is enough. Last weekend I saw a glimmer of old huzz, when he decided, somewhat spontaneously to fell a tree in our backyard. "It was rotten and we needed more sun back there," he said. I ached when his truck pulled out of the drive, even knowing full well I'd see him in less than a week (and that night, as it turned out, in Etoile* where I had to meet him to bring him his forgotten boots and Tuesday night when he spontaneously drove home to see me because he missed me!).

I know I haven't blogged tons since I started a new job, but part of the reason I haven't blogged tons in the last six weeks is because I, too, have been a shell of myself. It's like the life I usually live in technicolor has been in black and white for six weeks. I don't see my friends as much or work on hobbies as much or laugh as much. I don't enjoy some of my favorite domestic goddess habits like cooking or even cleaning--my favorite. Maybe it's because without the huzz here, the house stays clean all the time. But instead of feeling clean all the time, thereby bringing me joy, it just feels stagnant and dull.

It's amazing how a man who has perfected the art of the grimy credit card (no kidding) and the lint and paper debris sculpture can, by his presence, turn our house into a home and my heart into 100,000 fireflies.

MRT insists that when he comes home, it'll be beer drinkin' time in a big way, but husby, as the song goes--I could drink a case of you. Can't wait to see you tomorrow, huzz! Come home soon, else I'm liable to quote every cheesy love song I have in heavy rotation on iTunes...

*Sometime when I am not waxing sentimental about number one best huzz, remind me to talk about the hilarity that is Etoile, TX.

P.S. Should it bother me (or Matt) that I wrote a post with pretty much this exact title one time when Molly was boarded at the kennel?

There's No "U" in READING

What do people have against reading? It's easy and fun and helps you to not only discover the magical world of Harry Potter but also to get out of my piece and stop asking every question five million times that I ALREADY ANSWERED 105 TIMES IN RESPONSES TO ALL OF YOUR EMAILS THAT YOU ARE TOO LAZY TO READ, BUT KEEP REPLYING TO ANYWAY.

I feel a lot better.

Did anybody read this far? Just checking.

P.S. I think it might be time to return to Job Rants--not because of the job, but because of the world.

Free Advice

If your last name (or your first name, especially!) is one letter away from or rhymes with words like moron and bitch, you should probably work extra hard to be nice to people. Otherwise, you KNOW what nickname they're giving you, and it's going to be necessarily cruel and unforgiving.

Microsoft's Dark Mark or Hallow (in narrow sense)

Because I was encouraged, nay assigned to do so for my class, I recently subscribed to the RSS feed for the blog Musematic. And I am so glad I did! It's an extremely thoughtful blog for (let me stick out my chest while I say this) cultural heritage information professionals like me--sometimes sad, sometimes HILARIOUS.

So I started reading this entry about how PowerPoint is the Death Eater of the software world that can suck the life out of even the most uplifting, powerful speaker. The entry then offered as evidence a PowerPoint of the Gettysburg Address, which made me laugh and laugh and laugh. I hope you will, too, even if the "outlook -87 years ago" shows no new nations. Haaaa!

UnGodly

Why is this woman sad?



Is it:
A) Because the state of Texas seized her children
B) The food beyond the cult makes her gassy
C) She is wearing a prairie dress.
D) She is wearing a freaking prairie dress.
E) She is wearing a freaking, turquoise, 1880s-era prairie dress.

Guess which one I think it is?

My rage towards the prairie dress compells me to write this post and ask why? why?! Turquoise Any prairie dresses may be the root of all the problems of both this cult and maybe the world.

How irrationally would you act if you had to dress in this hot Texas weather like...like...like a polygamist! Oh.

Yes, I see how that rather begs the question.

But still, I know they want to set themselves apart and such, but really they do that enough with their weird "familial" relationships. They're like the poorest man's Amish. I don't even know what to say to sound articulate about these things because I hate prairie dresses. I just hate them. If it were 100 years ago even, I might need to see a therapist about this problem, but even then, peops were on the eve of shortening their skirts and bobbing their hair(s).

Oh and don't even get me started on people who need to get haircuts, growing it all out to their butts like Lady Godiva, as if that is an attractive or sanitary style. Whatever, I won't go off on this now. I already sound like a lunatic, but I simply had to voice my distress over the vile P.D.! BLARGH!

Passing Thoughts: No. 4 in an Occasional Series

What's up with deli meats? Yesterday, while looking into the deli case, I noticed that the packages of meat look pretty much like the body shape of the animal they are from, as if someone had just cut the limbs and head off and made a neat solid-meat package without blood or bones. Then I started freaking out about the process by which this occurs and wondering if bones are either sucked out or pulvarized and what's really in those round little packages of meat. I don't mean to ruin your lunch, but how do they do this? And also, why do the meats always have a weird little grid-like texture on the outside?

Someone, explain me the mysteries of the deli counter. Oh, and if you could throw in an explanation about why exactly Nacogdoches Kroger stores cannot get someone polite, efficient, or at least competent at either of their deli counters, that'd be great. (Any of the three would be fine!) Because rude, unsanitary, lazy, grumbling, inaccurate deli staff the last many months have not been impressing me.

I am Matilda.

I'm really not sure how it is that I keep comparing my life to that of Matilda Wormwood. I certainly enjoyed that book many, many times over in my youth (and now, admittedly), but it seems a little odd that she and I lead parallel lives, even in my delusions.

First, there was the Trunch. And there's nothing more to say about the Trunch than that I worked for her.




As this is a family site (ish), I will only post the link to this completely hilarious sculpture I found online of: Miss Trunchbull takes a bath. You won't regret clicking on that, I PROMISE. (High hilarity ahoy!)

This morning in the shower, I started thinking of how else my life is like Matilda's, aside from being a precocious reader. (I did not read the entire public library by age 5 though.) I was trying to explain why I have been such a pitiful blogger of late and I began concocting an elaborate analogy with the story, wherein I, like Matilda, had been a creative genius who was stifled and therefore blogged with all my pent-up energy out of self-preservation, instead of moving chalk with my eyes and pretending to be my kindergarten teacher's dead father. But now that I am thriving in my new job, Trunch-free and have started school, I have nothing left to decry various chokeys of the world.

But then I thought, pretty much only Jo and my sister will find this hilarious--and maybe just Jo. I better write about Ted Kennedy. And here we are friends. Here we are. You really should read Matilda if you haven't though because it's only a matter of time until I liken myself to her again or at least need to discuss riding breeches with you.

MaryT's Rules for Sniffing Out Hipsters #2

Courtesy of Chrissy, MLS.

Equipment needed:
- an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper
-a discerning eye

Hipster love the asymmetrical haircut. Notice how similar asymmetrical looks to assy... Basically, for this bit of detective work, you should approach the suspected hipster at a distance, but head on. Place a piece of paper's edge to your nose (caution! paper cuts!). Close one eye and examine half of the hipster. Now open that eye and close the other one.

Are the hair lengths different in a way that doesn't just say "inexperienced stylist"? There's little doubt a hipster is near.

Dead giveaway: said person is crying in the dark.

The Challenger

At what point did life's most major bummers start getting defined as if they were part of a strategic planning session for the board of directors of IBM?

You know what I'm talking about: challenges. Not weaknesses. Not crises. Not scarring personal tragedies. Only silver linings and challenges straight ahead, please.

No, young person, your house didn't burn down, you are merely presented with a little "challenge." I heard on the radio this morning that Ted Kennedy was having brain surgery on his large malignant tumor for six hours. It was referred to by his press peops as "the senator's health challenge."

Challenge? Challenge?! Challenge is what you do when you're pretty sure your opponent is bullshitting you in Scrabble. Challenge is what goes down in the dining hall when your roommate asks you if she should drink a shot glass of jalapeno salsa mixed with horseradish.(The answer is always yes, of course.) Challenge is the name given to a very small, but messy task on a nostalgic game show called Double Dare.

Look, I don't mean to give power to cancer or burning houses here, but let's call a spade a spade, shall we? These are not challenges. These are bitches and then some. Sure, you can get through them, but these are legitimate instances when freaking out only confirms your humanity, and failing to do so confirms your robotic heart.

I don't know if this is a fairly recent spin term or if my awareness of it just grows ever stronger the longer I am in, or at least in the direct line of, the spin business. But it's annoying as all hell. More annoying than hearing "climate change" instead of "aaaaaaahhhh! it's global warming manbearpig!" all the time. I hate to be an alarmist (well, "hate"), but I think we're becoming an emotionless society and that kind of reduces the flavor of life.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if Ted Kennedy came back from all this surgery and was all "that sucked balls!" Instead, he'll probably be born again (well, maybe as zealous as a converted Catholic instead of a born one) and create some kind of healing institute for polar bears who are not, as we'd like to think, drinking frosty Coca-colas and waiting for Santa under the aurora borealis, but instead dying at an alarming rate as the ice caps melt and the fish go away. Fortunately, they don't need to go on the endangered species list says this administration. "It's just a little challenge."


P.S. Additionally, I invite you to consider the space shuttle Challenger in the context of this post and writhe with irony.