TOOTHPICKS BRING ME DOWN

Hi, so I have a short attention span today. So I am starting this blog with a LOLcats-generated picture I did a few weeks ago. That site is too much fun.

I have work I need to be doing, yet I can't stay on a task long enough to get much of anything finished. I haven't even been playing on the internet much, either...which is normally my big distraction. Nope, it's just that today I am flitting about like a chubby hummingbird. Without the humming.

I love eating fresh strawberries, but I hate the seeds. I have this jacked-up molar that has the tooth equivalent of a pock-mark (not a cavity) in its worth-down enamel (from years of teeth-grinding), and 100% of the time when I eat strawberries, a seed will get wedged in that spot. And then I feel it every time I close my mouth and the top teeth hit it. I'll be obsessed with trying to push it out with my tongue, even while people are talking to me. I think I move my mouth around a lot when people are talking to me, which probably looks really strange. I keep my mouth shut, at least. So all they would see would be the muscles working around under my cheeks. When I think no one is looking, I hook a finger in there and try to pop the seed out with my fingernail. Yuck. Then I'm stuck with a spitty finger. And lately, the seed doesn't pop out quickly, like it used to. I guess the spot is getting deeper the longer it's there. It now requires a mirror and usually an implement of some sort-- if I'm home I'll just brush my teeth. In public, I use a toothpick. I've been stashing toothpicks in my desk for a couple of months now, taking them from restaurants on my lunch hour. It's helped a lot, and cut back on "spitty fingers." It occurs to me that maybe I should have been using the toothpicks all along. Well, whatever.

I still feel weird using a toothpick, though. When I stick one in my mouth, I immediately picture how I look and that to everyone else, I look like a simpleton, some kind of country hick with no class. You never see high-class ladies picking their teeth with a toothpick. There's really no delicate way to do it. I've tried to be lady-like in my picking, lightly grasping the end of the toothpick and keeping my wrist up as I discreetly work things around in there. Instead of looking classy, I think I just look even more like a spazz and probably draw more attention to the act of toothpicking than I would have had I just shoved the thing in, picked what needed to be picked, and tossed the pick away, bam bam bam, done.

But I feel like with the toothpick in my mouth, I should be wearing overalls and leaning over the open hood of some old Chevy pickup, a beer in one hand as I squint at the engine. "Yep, looks like the carb-er-rater's shot," I'd say around the toothpick dangling on my lower lip. Then I'd lean back and belch. I'd probably have an old hound dog that would lie on the porch next to the old couch we'd use as a sittin' spot, and upon hearing my unladylike belch, the dog's ears would twitch for a second and then he'd go back to sleep. That lazy ol' hound.

It might seem like I am imagining myself as a gentleman in the above scenario, but I am not. Because I have seen "ladies" like that, plenty of times. Out here in Arizona they're always leathery, too. Dried out and greasy. Way too much time out in the sun, and not enough time spent on hygiene. Sad, really.

Because I don't want to wind up like one of those dried-up broads, I think I need to cut back on my toothpick usage. What if it's just a slippery slope? First it's the toothpick, then it's the crappy old clothes, next I'll forget how to speak properly, and at that point I might as well just give up on life and go with it.

I'm wondering if Dried-Up Toothpick Broad would be a decent Halloween costume idea. A similar idea would be Dried Applehead Witch. Remember those? You take a peeled apple, carve a crude face into it, and let it dry out so you can make a doll out of it? No? Anyone?

We had a kitchen witch when I was little. A good-luck charm, apparently with German roots. She was a little witch on a broom with a shriveled-up face. I can't find a picture of what ours was like, but it was kind of like this:

So maybe this would be a fun costume to try to put together. But where in the world do I get an apple as big as my head? Maybe at one of them fancy bioengineered farms they got now. I seen a watermelon that was as big as a calf. No foolin.

Where's my toothpick? (SPIT)

POPCORN, JOCKEYS AND GANGRENE

I am reposting this, yes. Bear with me. RRRAAWWWRR!

Hi, folks! So, the big news is we're just days away from our exciting NJ trip! I can't wait, especially since this is a very special trip-- and not like in a Very Special Episode of Blossom kinda way, either. It's the first time I'm bringing Greg there to finally see where I came from; it's my first trip back in almost 4 years; and I will meet a bunch of blogger chicks in person!! That's just going to be so cool. Some might scoff at the concept of "blog friends" but they're just jealous. We know we have a pretty sweet network going on here. Besides, it's just too damn hard to make good girlfriends in the first place, the older you get. If mine come from the blogs, so be it. Amen.

Want to hear about the weather? Hell, who wouldn't!

It's officially the monsoon season here. It's really...warm outside. I refuse to say the "H" word because it's just ALL a person hears around here this time of year. "OHHH, it's soooo H*#!" everyone whines as they either head outside of an air conditioned building or when they are coming in from the heat outdoors. At a certain point, you have to say, "Really? Wow, I never would have expected it to be H in Arizona in the summer! OMG!" If you insist on stating the obvious, then I shall insist on throwing mud in yer eye.

That phrase, "here's mud in your eye," makes me smile. I like the idea of someone running up to another person and flicking a spoonful of mud into their eyeballs. Because yes, in my mind, it's a spoonful. And for some reason, the person flicking the mud-spoon looks a lot like me, but in old-timey clothes (like Tom Sawyer-times), and the person with the flung mud in their eyes looks a lot like Orville Redenbacher. I have no idea why. Maybe because I never liked the looks of that guy. Sure, I liked his delicious popcorn, but I won't trust a guy with a corn fetish and suspenders. So don't try to make me.
Orville Redenfreaker sure loved to "pop" some "kernels" every chance he got.

By the way, here's what I came up with when I tried to find out the origin of "here's mud in your eye":

_It's a horseracing phrase: The winning horse would kick up mud at the also-rans. (OK, I don't mind thinking of horses kicking mud around, but I'd prefer the mud hit the jockeys in the face instead of the other poor horses. PS: I am also kind of creeped out by jockeys. They're just too small to be "right," and I hate when they stand really, really still for days and days outside of someone's house, holding a lantern...)

"At my signal, UNLEASH HELL!!!"

_It's a Biblical phrase: In the Gospel of John, Jesus cures a blind man by rubbing a bit of mud on his eyes. (Now I don't know 'bout you, but the Jesus I IMAGINE wouldn't play a mean trick like that on some poor, blind dude. And I don't care if it is in the Bible, I think the Son of God would just use good ol' fashioned GodMagic and not waste time smearing wet dirt on the faces of the unfortunates.)
"OWWW! What the hell are you doing?! I asked you to heal me, not make me even MORE blind!"

_It's a World War I phrase: Soldiers spent a lot of time hunkered down in muddy trenches. The horrors of that war were many: Machine guns, grenades, gangrene, mustard gas. If all that happened to you was a little mud in your eye, you were lucky. (Christ, I should say so. Imagine how terrible it would have been to be a WWI soldier? Worse, imagine getting gangrene? How about in your eye? And you're stuck way out in some trench in some foreign battlefield, and no one has any idea how to treat ocular gangrene, so you are stuck sitting there, holding your gun, waiting for your rotting eye to just, I don't know, fall out? Mmm, wait a second. That's not a nice thing to imagine. Besides, I don't really know anything about how gangrene works and I'm certainly not in the mood to look it up! What do I look like, a smart person or something?!)

"Dudes, living in this trench sucks. We've got to get out of here before someone gets gangrene in their eyes."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRISH!

Today is my sister's birthday, so I wanted to publically wish her a happy birthday. Or should I say, Schoenes Geburtstag in our secret sister-language (OK, it's just German). One year she gave me a book of matches that said "Happy Birthday, You Bitch!" in big bold letters on the cover. I still have it, still love it, and still think it's fun to say that every year on her birthday. So, Happy Birthday, You Bitch! (Giggle giggle)

I'll always love my little Schwester (more of that pesky German). We've been friends since she was born, I think. I know I pushed the friendship thing pretty hard back then...I was a sad, lonely child... but maybe inside her little infant-head she was thinking, "Oh, Christ, why is that weird girl with the bowl-cut bothering me again? What a loser!" but she didn't lack the language skills to tell me. Well, if that was true, I guess my persistence paid off because we became friends by the time she was about a year old. Good for me, otherwise I'd be totally sociopathic by now, because I really had NO FRIENDS as a child until I started kindergarten. Not a lot of kids in the neighborhood, no other kids in my family--NONE. My baby book always cracks me up, because my Mom wrote things in it for several of my first years, marking down milestones, etc., and one of the things in there is a space to write in "Best Friends" and instead of the names of some other sticky-faced toddlers I played with, she wrote in "Buffy". That was the dog.

I am digressing in a big way. Must be because it's Friday and work circumstances have mushed my brain into lumpy pudding. But yes, Trish is a great sister and I am really glad that we still get excited for our weekly get-togethers where we eat some dinner, watch something like Flight of the Conchords, Mr. Wrong, Annie or Arrested Development and free-associate and laugh for hours about pretty much nothing. It's kind of cool and I feel lucky to have that. So thanks, Trish, for being fun, giving me craft advice and ideas, being "right there" with the perfect movie or TV quote at any given moment, and mostly for the friendship. I came for the friendship and I'm stayin' for the cupcakes! There WILL be cupcakes, right? Because I mean, I love cupcakes.

Enjoy your day! We all raise a glass to you!

(OK, so this is a photo of a past drink-raising, but it illustrates my point so here it is. Actually, I stole this photo from your Flickr page. So, I guess, thanks for that.)

NOT QUITE DONE
Hey, so check out this unicorn deer! It's some lucky deer in Italy whose genes went batshit crazy and made a horn grow out of the top of its deery head. I love it! Here's the official AP caption:

This undated photo provided by the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, Italy, Wednesday, June 11, 2008, shows a deer with a single horn in the center of its head. The one-year-old Roe Deer - nicknamed 'Unicorn'' - was born in captivity in the research center's park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences, said. He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.

I haven't been very communicative these days, and I'm hoping that's going to pass with the writing of this blog. That's putting a lot of pressure on this blog, I know. So I better make it count. I have a Report coming up soon and everything.

So the other day I wanted to make some brownies. I had a walnut brownie mix in the cabinet, and thought I'd just go ahead and bake some brownies before G came home from work. In my mind, we would enjoy delicious brownies after dinner and all would be well. But of course, things didn't go as planned.

I think I made two mistakes, the primary mistake being I baked them in a long Pyrex dish. The second mistake may have been putting a pan of water in the bottom of the oven, a trick G taught me to keep baked goods from drying out. It would have been fine if I'd done the baking in a dark metal pan or something, but I think the combination of clear glass dish and the water just didn't work out so well.

Because the box said "bake 21-24 minutes." But at 21-24 minutes, the toothpick was coming out covered in batter. At 30 minutes, same thing. Finally, at 42 minutes, the toothpick was still coming out with batter on it, but by that time I'd read a sentence on the box that worried me: "Do not overbake." Surely, at 42 minutes, my brownies were overbaking! Since I don't normally bake brownies, I rationalized for some insane reason that it was actually OK for some batter to be on the toothpick when you make them-- they are thicker and you want them to be moist, right? So Genius Me took them out of the oven and cooled them off. Covered it with plastic wrap, put them in the fridge for later. Figured it was gonna be OK.

Of course not. The whole middle of the brownies were raw.

That didn't stop us from salvaging what we could of the mess, since the sides were baked. Right now there is a horseshoe-shaped brownie in our refrigerator, the middle cut out and thrown far away. I did wonder (out loud) if we could maybe take that ball of mostly-raw batter and throw it back in the oven to make a nice little Brownie Ball or something...but G wisely nixed that idea.

I love brownies, cookies, cakes, all of that. Yet why am I cursed when it comes time to create some it on my own? Not fair!!

STATIC

There isn't much to write about lately for some reason. I haven't even been working on my book this week, other than starting the eighth chapter about 4 days ago. I've had a ton of work to do and it's cut into fun times. Oh well. Plus, I am having memory problems, apparently, because I know things occurred this week (like my birthday, yeah) but I'm coming up blank when it comes to what I could write about. Hopefully this big huge BLAHHHH feeling will go away and I can get back to having at least one creative thought a week again, soon.

Maybe next week I'll be back to blogging. Have a good weekend though, in the meantime!

IT'S GETTING HOT ALL UP IN THIS BITCH

Well, it's true: the heat is ON. On the streets. You know this whole city's got Glenn Frey stank all over it.

Today, I went on what may be my last hike for awhile. The 100+ degree temperatures just don't add to the desert hiking experience. Not at all. You'd think that a person could last for days out in that crap, but no. My face stayed beet red long after I got home and took a cool shower and everything. And it wasn't sunburn this time. It was HOTNESS. It was bad.

I'm sad about this forced hiatus from hiking. I've grown to love it, and crave it, over the past few months or so. Now I'll have to go to the gym. Yuck. It's not the same. I'll do it, but it's stuffy and ugly in there. I hate that all the equipment faces a bank of TVs and it's hard to not look up and see some stupid show like The Farmer Wants a Wife or The Hills. One thing I appreciate about hiking in our city's mountain parks is the lack of these shows in my peripheral vision. Also it doesn't smell like old sweat and feet. And I don't have to spray down the rocks after I touch them with disinfectant spray. At least it has air conditioning, though, and I won't end up with an exploded heart from pushing myself in the retarded summer heat.

At least we have a pool, even though I'm not real anxious to go in it this year. I've got my reasons. Maybe I think there's a water-devil in there, or maybe I just don't feel like swimming. I'm not saying. Either way, though, others are welcome to go in and splash around if they so choose. Just no hobos or transients, because they'd leave a film on the surface and we can't have that. We pay a lot to maintain our pool; we don't need hobos mucking the whole thing up. Anyway, I digress. I tend to do that when it comes to the grim spectre of hobos lurking in our pool. Here's a cute shot of chubby baby legs to illustrate my point about who IS allowed in our pool. (This is Dean, the baby who came to our house on Memorial Day. He came with his parents, by the way. He didn't just drive up in a baby Camaro and barge right in or something.)

My sister got a kitten this past week. In case you haven't been to her blog yet and read all about it, you should. This kitten is kind of awesome. It's funny because the last time any of us saw a kitten this awesome 'round these parts, it was when Fizz was a baby. Now Trish has two very sweet cats. Things are as they should be. The universe breathed a big sigh of relief when Bella came home to her soul-brother Fizzgig.

We also got a new washing machine. It's a fancy high-efficiency front-loading deal. I am going to run the first load as soon as I publish this post. I'm really excited to sit in the laundry room and watch our laundry tumble around through the little porthole. I think I'll bring our radio in there and play my old cassette of The Smiths songs as I watch the wash. Why that tape? I have no idea. It's not like The Smiths have a song about laundry. Or do they? I don't know. All I know is what my great friend Karen gave me on that tape back in 1991. Speaking of Karen, this past week she became a full-fledged Registered Nurse! Here she is:

It's hard to believe that a girl I used to get in trouble with in the back of English because we were sticking scotch tape to our faces and making fun of the stupid short stories we had to read (Truman Capote? Come on) is now allowed to poke people with sharp objects whenever she wants. I'm really proud of her because that is a dream we all have and yet so few of us ever legally accomplish it. Yay, Karen! I'll play "Frankly Mr. Shankly" tonight in YOUR honor, my good woman!

I wish I could calm down but I can't. Greg just brought me a surprise chocolate milkshake from Sonic and wow, it was delicious AND satisfying. I can hear "Futurama" playing in the next room, which also makes me happy, and I'm about to embark on LAUNDRYAGANZA 2008 in a few minutes! Life is, as the Germans say, Gut.

My final thought: I hope I don't wind up with diarrhea anytime soon.

Same goes for you, too! NO DIARRHEA FOR US!

Good night, now.