London Olympics Opening Ceremony

I haven't watched an Olympics Opening Ceremony since Barcelona in 1992.  I just don't get that excited about the Olympics, sorry.  But upon hearing earlier in the week that Mary Poppins was going to fight Lord Voldemort, I decided I had to see this.

I tried to watch it live, or as live as NBC was going to make it, which I think was a 6 hour delay or something.  Not even five minutes in I set the DVR to record it and changed the channel.  Turn of #1: the narrators at the beginning of the program with in and out British accents, trying to pump up the Olympics.  It was awful and I decided I would just wait it out and watch when I could fast forward past the boring parts.

Cue Saturday evening.  I plop my self down on the couch, remote in hand, finger poised over the fast forward button, and I have have to fast forward through the first fifteen minutes or so.  The queen making James Bond wait before climbing into a helicopter and then parachuting from the helicopter into the stadium was kind of cool.  She didn't look too happy to be there otherwise.  Of course she's getting old, it was probably kind of chilly, as the commenters kept reminding us, and it was late.  Plus all she ever does when she goes out in public is smile and wave, so if I was her, I'd look grouchy too.

Fast forward through commercials.

People walking around with sheep and cows. 

Commercials.

Now there are smoke stacks coming out of the ground while a thousand miserable looking people tear up the grass and pull levers and look miserable.  Meanwhile 5 guys in top hats walk around waving their hands in the air.  I think they're dancing.

Commercials.

Kids in beds while doctors and nurses (real sick kids, and real doctors and nurses as the commentors made sure to tell us five times) dance around while lights on the beds spell NHS.  As an American with certain political leanings, I'm jealous.

Commercials.

The kids fall asleep, there's what I think are nightmares.  A REALLY creepy Queen of Hearts rises out of a bed.  It's far creepier than the giant Voldemort.  Then twenty Mary Poppins' fly in and kind of wave their umbrellas at Voldemort and vanquish him.  I say:

I mean, if you're going to take the time to have Mary Poppins fight Voldemort, you could at least have lasers shoot out of her umbrella.

Commercials.

Mr.  Bean.  Chariots of Fire.  That is all.

Commercials.

Something about a girl losing her phone and a guy finds it.  Lots of dancing.  My question is the guy finds her by calling her on a cell phone.  Who's phone is she on?  Did he just call one of her contacts who just happened to be with her at the giant 50 year British music dance-off? 

Commercials.

Interviews with gymnasts.  Fast forward.

Commercials.

Parade of Nations!  We make it halfway through the Bs before more commercials.

As the Parade goes on, more and more commercials get squeezed in.  Two countries go by, commercials.  Three more countries, commercials.  My finger and the fast forward button get acquainted real quick.

Finally we get to the United States and the cameras linger on the athletes and Uzbekistan, and other U countries get ignored.

Commercials.

Finally the host country, Great Britain, which caused me to wonder "Do Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland not have their own Olympic teams?"  I don't know enough about how the whole Great Britain, United Kingdom, Commonwealth thing works, (in fact all I know of modern Britain comes from Doctor Who), but if Torchwood: Miracle Day taught me anything, you will still get punched in the face if you call a Welsh woman English.

Announcement that Sir Paul McCartney will be singing.  I hit stop on the remote and when the tv asks if I want to delete the program, I hit yes.

And that is what I got out of the London Olympics Opening Ceremony.

BTW:  WTF is these things supposed to be?



Breaking Bad Ramble

Here I go again, breaking my promise to blog on Saturdays.  As always, I forgot to do it.

Breaking Bad is back.  If you don't watch this show, you should.  I didn't watch it for the first 3 seasons because I couldn't quite grasp the idea of Brian Cranston in a dramatic role.  The only thing I knew him from was Malcolm In The Middle where he played Hal, the barely there dad and husband.  Finally I broke down and watched the first episode because Netflix kept throwing it into my suggestions.

I was hooked.  I mainlined the first 3 seasons that were available on Netlflix and then tracked down the fourth season and watched it.  The fifth season started last Sunday and I've got the DVR set for tonight.

If you're living under a rock and don't know the basic premise of the show, here it is.  Walter White (Cranston) is a high school chemistry teacher with a pregnant wife and a teen aged son with cerebral palsy.  He's in debt up to his eyeballs and frustrated by life.  One day he goes to the doctor for a persistent cough and finds out that he has lung cancer.  He's told that it is inoperable and even with treatment he'll be dead within a year.  Walter wants to be able to leave his family debt free with money to pay for college educations for the kids, so he hatches a plan.  After hearing his brother in law, a DEA agent, describing the insane amounts of money meth dealers can make, Walter decides he's going into the business of cooking and selling methamphetamine.  He finds a former student, Jesse Pinkman, who is a small time meth producer and dealer, and blackmails him into teaming up to sell the drug.  Hilarity ensues.

I'm not joking about the humor in the series, especially in the first season.  Walter knows his chemistry and produces superior meth that soon catches the attention of the local drug lords and authorities, but he has no clue how a criminal enterprise works.  Jesse on the other hand, while not exactly stupid, obviously slept through most of Walter's chemistry classes, and is prone to taking short cuts (as evidenced by his decision to ignore Walter's instructions about buying a plastic container to dispose of a body, leading to me laughing at the same time as being horrified when a half dissolved body plunges through the ceiling.  Watch it.  I'm not describing anymore.)

As time goes on things get more serious as Walter and Jesse go deeper into the criminal underworld.  They both grow and change; Walter becomes more and more ruthless; Jesse loses some of his naivete, but not enough to keep from being manipulated by more powerful people around him (including Walter, who despite claiming to care for Jesse has no problem with using him as a pawn and a shield).

The acting on this show is just amazing.  As I said before, I only knew Brian Cranston as Hal, and he was hilarious on that show.  Sometimes, especially during the first season I get a Hal sort of vibe from Walter, but that soon goes away.  When Walter stares down a rival meth cook in the parking lot of a hardware store, you're actually scared for the rival.  Jesse started as a one note joke, (ha ha, look at this high school drop out in his baggy pants.  He doesn't even know that metal conducts electricty) -and according the creater of the show, he was supposed to die at the end of the season- but Aaron Paul really brings a lot to the character.  You believe how conflicted Jesse is in all the things he is made to do by Walt and others.

Here, just watch these videos, because I don't think I can adequately describe how great this show is. FYI: Lots and lots of spoilers in these vids.

Finally to lighten things up a little (does not feature any previously mentioned characters, but it's great anyway):

Videos and Recommitment To Blogging

I don't know why, but I find this commercial highly amusing.  I guess I'm the kind of person the advertisers are going after.  The kind of person who thinks shouting "Whoo!  Dachsund!" is hilarious.
I also think the Geico commercial with the piggy going "wee wee weee" all the way home is funny (the first one where he's in the car with the pinwheels).  I laughed out loud the first time I saw it.

This week I heard this song and it brought back memories of the 90's.   Ahh the 90's.  They were so awesome.

Anyway, I've been gone for awhile.  I just haven't had the energy to blog.  I'll get an idea and think, "I oughta take note of that," and then I get distracted and completely forget about it.  I suppose I should make a schedule.  I think I started with a schedule back in May, but that went out the window pretty quick.

I'm going to take this moment to recommit to blogging here at Completely Unoriginal Thoughts on a regular basis.  Every Saturday.  I need to move on from posting videos from YouTube and actually write something.  Starting next Saturday.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

(Remember the old SNL skit with John Lovitz?  The one where he's always lying and saying "Yeah, that's the ticket"?  I don't know, just random memory).

Oh, one more video and I'll stop.  I promise.  I love me some old school muppets, no Elmo for me.  I hate the song being parodied, but I love cookies.

Crap.  Now I have the original stuck in my head.

My God. It's full of stars!

This week I found this:

I got nothin' else.

Looky What I Got

Thank You to CLR at The Slow Dripped Life for awarding me the Kreativ Blogger Award.

As these things go there are a few things the recipient has to do:

1. Thank and link back to the awarding blog.
2. Answer the 7 questions.
3. Provide 10 random factoids about yourself.
4. Award the 7 more deserving blogs.

Let's start with the questions.

What's you're favorite song?
I don't have any favorites.  15 years ago it was Bohemian Rhapsody.  This week I'm kind of stuck on Lippy Kids, by Elbow, Sealgopur by Sigur Ros, and Somebody I Used To Know, by Gotye (which I like to pronounce Got-Yee). 

What's you're favorite dessert?
If it has sugar in it I will eat it.

Which do you prefer:  White or Whole Wheat?
Whole wheat bread, white for any other grain based food.  I've tried the whole wheat/multi-grain pasta, the texture-to me- is not worth any health benefit.

What do you do when you're upset?
Go to sleep.  If I'm really upset, the only thing that makes it better is to sleep.  I usually feel better and think much more clearly afterwards.  If that's not an option (like I'm at work) I'll go for a walk, but that is usally only a short term solution.

Which is your favorite pet?
If we're talking what type of animal, that will have to go to cats.  If we're talking which cat is my favorite pet, it will have to go to Jerry.

What is your biggest fear?
Awfully personal of you to ask that, so I'm going with a joke answer: people with disproportionally small hands.

What is your attitude, mostly?
First off, this question is worded weirdly, just getting that off  my chest.  Second off-spacey.  Is spacey an attitude?

Ok, now 10 random factoids:

1. My left foot is smaller than my right foot.  I ususally don't notice it unless I'm wearing shoes without laces.  Then the left shoe is looser than the right.
2. Additionally the whole left side of my body is just stupider than my right side (I'm right-handed).
3. I've lost 50 pounds in the past year.
4. I can crochet a baby blanket in a day.
5. I'm so slow at knitting that it can take me a week of very diligent work to do a scarf in garter stitch.
6. I'm looking at the Kreativ Blogger Award and wondering why "Award" is in brackets.  Is it a design choice?  Is it supposed to be sarcastic?  Also, there is no "e" at the end of Kreativ, and though I can accept that it starts with a K, the missing "e" I can't forgive.
7. I will correct other people's spelling, grammar, and sentence structure, but never see my own mistakes.
8. I am a comma abuser.  I've become so concious of this that I agonize over whether to use a comma in a work email even though 99% of the people reading the email won't ever notice it.  It's the two people who will notice that I want to impress.
9. I'm intrigued by the semi-colon; but I don't think I ever use it properly.
10. I'm bad at coming up with random facts about myself.

Now for my awardees:

Hektor Karl at After Troy-Hektor Karl
Ermie at Just Ermie
Rhi at Weird and Important

--and I don't have anyone else.  I'm going to do like Absonditus Creations of Art Of A Hidden Heart and open it up to anyone who would like to self nominate.   Just leave a comment and I'll make sure to add you the list.

Saturday Night Wrap Up

I feel bad that I haven't been posting so much since A to Z ended.  Without the pressure of a challenge forcing me to post everyday I have gotten a bit lazy.

So I'm going to do what I did last week and post some stuff that came up this week.  I think I'll try to make this a regular thing-post every Saturday at least.  And maybe once more during the week.  I don't know.  Definitely Saturdays though.

Anyhoo,  I heard this song this week.  People always have something to snarky to say about it, but how did it become so popular?  Hypocrites.  Also, I just realized, 20 years later, that he talks about getting shot at.

At work, one of my new duties is to send out a report to the floor with a list of available work.  Background: I work in a call center for a credit card processing company.  You know when you run your credit card or debit card at the store?  We are the middle man that transmits the information from the store to the bank.  My department makes outbound calls to reprogram credit card terminals to a new processing platform (not going into details, it's kind of confusing, and probably proprietary information anyway).  Well, I send out a report that says we still have 250 merchants to call who haven't been called yet that day.  People start FREAKING OUT because I didn't give the correct number.  Whatever.  The ONLY reason I send this report is because about 50% (and I am not exaggerating this number out of frustration) of the phone agents figure someone else will do the work and don't bother to look for it on their own.  One of the other Team Leads comes to me and says "So, uh, the wayward children (that's what he calls them) are a little upset because of the report."  My response: "If they did their jobs, I wouldn't have a chance to screw up my own."  I am SO tired of hearing people bitch just to bitch at this point.  And that turned out way more ranty than I planned.

On  a lighter note, I got 90 minutes of Community this week.  Sadly they have only been renewed for 13 episodes next year, and I guess the fired Dan Harmon, the show runner, so I don't know how those last few episodes will turn out.  And now 4 minutes of Troy crying:

Ten-year-olds are gross

Why tell a kid to wash his hands before making no bake cookies, when he's just going to stick his hands in his arm pits IMMEDIATELY after washing them?

I have had a week where I really didn't feel like blogging.  My duties at work changed so that I sit in a cubicle all by myself, staring at a computer all day; doing reports, updating spreadsheets, writing procedures.  It's not hard work, just time consuming so most nights I don't feel like being on a computer.

So, just some random things that happened this week.

Just this afternoon I was at Walgreens when I heard behind me-in one of those thick accents that make people outside Kentucky think creepy banjo music-"Ma said they was selling licker up here now!" I am purposely misspelling "liquor" to make a point here. "How much is it here! She said it was supposed to be cheaper!" The exclamation points aren't hyperbole.  This man was actually shouting like the person he was with was hearing impaired.  "How much is that bottle of Jo-se Cuer-vo?!  Sixteen dollars?!  I ain't payin' sixteen dollars for Jo-se Cuer-vo!"  I don't know, maybe you had to be there. 

They also had wine in those little cartons like chocolate milk come in, which I found...odd.

I heard this song on the radio one day on my drive to work.  It reminded me of highschool since it came out at about that time.  A walk down auditory memory lane.

It was my brother's birthday Friday.  I didn't forget it, but every birthday reminds me of the Flight of the Conchords song "Hurt Feelings" where Jermaine says "The day after my birthday is not my birthday, Mum."  I crack up everytime I hear that, probably because of the New Zealand accent.

Oh, and I saw this on the internet one day.  I don't recommend it for everybody, because even I was a little afraid that I might have come one step closer to insanity after watching it.

Reflecting on the A to Z Challenge Reflections Post

I heard about the Challenge back in December of last year, and debated whether I was going to do it.  This site had existed for about 6 months and I was having problems getting into the blogging thing.  I finally made the plunge and signed up for it.  I was at first daunted by the task of posting once a day, mostly because I can go a little overboard when I start writing and just keep going no matter how far off point I get, so the suggestion of keeping posts under 500 words definitely helped me to keep length under control.  Also I didn't feel so bad when I had nothing to say.

I did learn some things though.  I learned that ubermensch is a word. I learned that I CAN think of something to put down even if it was just a YouTube video with a description.

Easiest post? Luck, a piece of fiction that I thought up in a few minutes while laying in bed one morning.

Hardest? V-Day.  I had already gone the route of just listing words that start with U, and I didn't want to repeat myself.  So, I just rambled on for a while about words that start with V.

Best part of the Challenge?  Getting to visit some great blogs.  I didn't get through the entire blog list.  Sorry, I only have so many hours in my day.  I did find a few that I enjoyed visiting daily.  I also loved receiving visits from others to my blog and I got really excited every time I got a new comment on one of my posts.  I am, however, a bad visitor in that probably 75% of the blogs I visited I didn't leave a comment.

So, overall I would call this a complete success.  I am notorious for starting things and not finishing them so I'm really proud of myself.  I went ahead and added a page up there at the top with a list of all my A to Z posts, in case anyone wants a walk down memory lane, or in case any stragglers come by and want to see what I did last month.

Special thanks to all my followers and for everyone who left me comments.

And a final note:  During the Challenge I did 5 posts of fiction.  I remembered that I really liked writing fiction.  So, I decided to start a second blog called A Creative Exercise that will be devoted to writing.  I'm one of those insane people who plan to keep more than one blog running.  So, hop on over to my second home. I've already posted my first message to the masses.

Image courtesy of here

Zombie

For the last day of the Challenge I chose the word Zombie. 

Slightly off topic, but I wonder how many other participating bloggers are going with Zombie today?  Imma go with....25%.

Anyway, zombies are hot right now.  So hot I even fought my way through Pride and Predjudice and Zombies (never again will I be tricked into reading Jane Austin). I don't know what it is about them that people like.  Maybe because it's a way to justify fantasies of blowing peoples heads off when you're having a bad day.  How many conversations have I had detailing what I would do during the Zombie Apocalypse (coming to a shopping mall near you December 21, 2012)?  The CDC even used the idea of an outbreak of Undeaditis to illustrate emergency preparedness. 

Anyway, I wanted to make a point here about zombies that I'm not going to articulate very well.  In many modern zombie stories, the surviving humans turn out to be 100% worse for the protaganist than any walking dead.  Like Shane in The Walking Dead, or the soldiers in 28 Days Later (side note: 28 Weeks Later sucked so bad because the attention was turned away from how horrible people can be when facing the end of humanity to a Rage infected Robert Carlyle stalking his kids through London.[side side note: I understand many people don't count Infected as zombies, but you know what? I don't care what you think.]).

Winter

Winter is my favorite season.  At least I think it is.  It has been 12 years since I have been through a snot-freezing cold winter (that's when it's so cold that when you breath through your nose the inside of your nostrils stick together.  That only happened to me?  Moving on...).

Before the age of nine I only remember living in warm Mediteranean type climates (due to a military upbringing).  To me snow was exotic and magical.  I used to sit in front of a fan powered on high, wrapped in a blanket, pretending to be an Eskimo.  To us, 50 degrees meant it was time to pull out our heavy coats.

Then we moved to Michigan.  I remember being so excited about moving to Michigan.  Michigan was in the US!  It was in the North! It was January!  I imagined pure white blankets of snow piled here and there in drifts, coating tree branches and the roofs of houses straight out of some crappy Thomas Kinkade painting (no, it's not too soon).  Children would be making snow men and snow forts, and there would be sledding and ice skating.  This was me thinking of Michigan in winter:

We get off the plane and what do I see?  Jack-squat.  That's what.  There wasn't a lick of snow on the ground.  I WAS HEATED.

It did eventually snow, and my poor brother found out what happens if you lick cold metal.  We did go sledding (on flattened cardboard boxes), and built snowmen and had snowball fights.  We "skated" on frozed puddles in parking lots.  Oh, and after a couple of years the first day of 50 degree weather was "let's pull out the shorts" weather.  Ahh memories....

V-Day (no, not that one)

So, I'm running out of ideas here and all I can think is "Five more days.  Five more days."  I guess that could be "Roman Numeral V more days" (hardy-har-har).

At first I was going to write about vision, but was it going to be the physical act of seeing?  The kind that inspires people to do great things?  Or the kind you get after eating certain types of mushrooms?

There's a line about vestigial virgins in the novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett that had me giggling for 20 minutes.

Then I thought "Vegetables.  That's easy!"  Except just like eating the recommended daily servings of veggies, a post about them never happened.

So I went online and Googled "Words that start with V" hoping for inspiration, but all I got was a list of worlds that start with V.  Thanks a lot Google.

Words like vegan (sorry, the animals are what make food taste good), and veterinarian (I wanted to be a vet when I was younger, but thinking back on it there is no way in hell I would have made it into vet school), valkyrie (are those the woemen in operas with the horned helmets and breastplates?  No?  OK), velocity (no comment here), and lots of words that start with vena, all having to do with circulatory system.

I'm done.  (Four more days.  Four more days.  IV more days.)

ps.  While searching for pictures of the letter V, I came up with the TV show V which I had totally forgotten about.  I never watched the new series, and the only thing I remember from the original 80's series is the lizard baby.

Questions

Hey! 


Now some random questions.


Q. Do you ever doubt the existence of people other than yourself?
A. Weird as that question may be, the answer is yes.  Yes I do.  How do I know that people exist when I'm not around, hmm?  Just because you say you do, I'm supposed to take your word for it?


Q.  If you try to fail, but succeed, what did you do?
A. Failceed.


Q. If a baby's leg pops out at 11:59PM but his head doesn't come out until 12:01, which day was he born on?
A.  Ummm... I think you have more important things to worry about if *a* leg comes out before the head.


Q. What's the difference between normal ketchup and fancy ketchup?
A. You squeeze fancy ketchup with your pinky sticking up.  Also it's fancy "catsup".


Q. Why do we sing "Rock a bye baby" to lull a baby to sleep when the song is about putting your baby in a tree and letting the wind crash the cradle on the ground?
A. Because they need to learn a lesson about what happens if they DON'T shut up and go to sleep.


Q. Does a 'Marks-A-Lot' marker, mark any more than a regular marker?
A. I don't know, but you can get a lot higher on the fumes from a Marks-A-Lot.

Pets

I have 3 cats. Tom and Jerry, who are brothers I have had since they were kittens, and Sunny, who showed up on my porch one day last August half starved but extremely friendly.

Jerry does what he's going to do and the others just go along for the ride. Jerry is the most stubborn of the three, but he's still my favorite. He's the type of cat who would be in the ruling class if only cats had thumbs. To keep him in his place, I like to rub his tummy and sing "I got that Jerry tummy" to the tune of "Moves Like Jagger." He doesn't get as much joy from that as I do.

Tom is the kind of cat who figures if he can't see you, you can't see him. If you pick him up he just goes limp, so you can flop him around, if you were so inclined.

Sunny is the kind of cat that people who are allergic to cats hate. If you walk into my house, he will be there to greet you like a good host, and the second you sit down he will be in your lap.

A few nights ago, I heard the cats ripping into something.  I was in bed and debated whether to check it out.  I thought they had gotten into the utility closet (where both the litter box and food are kept, which is why the door is always open) and were tearing into the bag of cat food.  Finally, to save myself the effort of cleaning up cat food the next morning, I dragged myself out of bed to slap some sense into them. (No animals were physically harmed during the writing of this post, though I probably hurt their feelings when I cussed them out.)
I get into the kitchen and what do I find?  Jerry had jumped onto THE TOP of the refrigerator and pulled down the bag of cat nip kept there.  He had chewed a good sized hole in the bag and scattered nip all over the floor as the other two cats rolled around in ecstacy, little green flakes coating their fur.
I took the cat nip and put it in the laundry closet and went back to bed.  Two minutes later I hear the sound of a small package hitting the floor and realized that there were still two bags of cat treats on top of the fridge.   I get back to the kitchen and Jerry is standing there with a bag of Whiskas Temptations in his mouth while Tom and Sunny loitered around waiting for him to give them their treats.

I blame my mother.  She had visited the week before and was always giving the cats treats.  I'm a mean cat mommy and only give them treats once a week.  I figure they got used to daily snacks and decided that if I wasn't going to give them anything, they would get it themselves.

NaNoWriMo

So, I was looking into this NaNoWriMo thing.  Basically for those of you who don't feel like following the link, it stands for National Novel Writing Month.  During the month of November participants work to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  The moderators of the event apparently don't actually verify the work, they just count the number of words. 
I wonder how many submissions they recieve that are just swear words repeated 50,000 times?

Mapinguari

Cryptozoology is a fascinating field of study.  You get things like Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, and the Mapingquari.

What's a Mapinguari?  Well, according to Wikipedia, it has "one eye, long claws, caiman skin, backward feet and a second mouth on its belly".  I also read somewhere-but I can't find the source at this time-that one of it's special powers was to turn day into night by it's very presence.  So according to the internet it looks something like this:

Except maybe not so plush.

I understand that many cryptids have some sort of basis in reality, or at least resemble animals that could possibly exist.  But what on earth were the people smoking when they came up the the Mapinguari? 

Current theories include prehistoric ground sloths or some sort of giant primate like Sasquatch, but then that just means a cryptid was derived from cryptid which is just kind of...wha...?

Keeping Up

Two weeks into the Challenge, and I'm actually keeping up.  I'm so proud of myself.  I can actually see myself finishing something I started for the first time in I don't know how long.

I'm trying to do this right by visiting other sites from the linky list.  I'm also trying to keep up with the sites I follow.  I work full time with a 1 1/2 hr round trip commute.  When I get home I have lot to do before I can sit down and focus on this thing.  Plus I need 8 hours of sleep a night or things get ugly.  After the first 2 days, I decided to set a schedule.  And after 2 days of that the schedule went out the window.

(part of my problem is that the blogs I follow only show on by reading list every other day, and they only show under my profile every 2 days.  Anybody else have this problem?  I have tried contacting Blogger about it, but I'm just going in circles there.)

I try to comment on all the sites I visit, but sometimes I skip that part, because I don't have anything interesting to say.  So, if you don't see anything from me every few days, just remember: it's not you, it's me.
That said, I'd like to point out some of my favorite bloggers so far. If you're not on the list remember:

I kid! I kid!

Adjective, Not a Noun by K.S. Lewis.  Her theme is excerpts from her work in progress.  I don't understand what the plot of the book is, but the bits and pieces she lets us see are very interesting.

Absconditus Creations.  I mentioned this site in my Versatile Blogger Award post.  I still like to visit on a nearly daily basis.  The theme for the A to Z Challenge are drawings with little poems describing them. 

Just Ermie.You should check out Ermie's plans for world domination.

mirabile dictu.  On this blog Cherstin Holtzman is detailing the process of handwriting her first novel.  I just found her a few days ago, but I love the way she writes in her blog posts.

Junk

Have you ever seen that show Hoarders?  I have, and I know that these people have a real mental illness, but I use it as a reminder of what could happen if I don't toss stuff.

I'm not a hoarder.  I don't think I'm really a pack rat either.  My problem is that I keep stuff because "I might need/want it some day", but then 2 years later I look at it and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

I used to do this with old notes from highschool and college.  I might "need" my notes from 10th grade history, in case I had a 10th grade history test I needed to take 3 years later.  I also used to do this with my son's school work thinking wouldn't it be nice to have this little memory of when he was in kindergarten and wrote his 'e's backwards.  Do you know how much crap kids bring home from school?  I tossed a lot of things, but it still piles up before I start grabbing handfuls of papers and throwing them in the trash.  I have enough drawings of sharks, thank you very much.

Most recently it was moving house.  I moved into a 3 bedroom house nearly 2 years ago.  I only needed 2 of those bedrooms so I used the 3rd room for storage.  Well, my mother was coming to visit so I had to clear out the room.  So I'm going through these boxes that have been locked in a room for 2 years and I came to the realization that if I haven't seen it this long, I obviously don't need it.  Some of this stuff has been in boxes and storage bins for 4 or more years. 

So what did I do with all my junk?  I consolidated and hid it all in various closets around the house.  Sure I got rid of some old childeren's dvds and a few board games, but the majority of it I kept.  What I'm going to do with scraps of paper, nick nacks I don't even like anymore, half finished crochet projects, two (that's 2) Christmas trees and books that I have no desire to read again (but I might want to read them again-but I know I won't), I don't know, but I might need/want them sometime in the future.

An Odd Number of Teeth

I have 23 teeth.  Yes that's an odd number, but I have a good explanation.  I always like to point out that the 24th tooth is not missing due to decay.  God forbid that anyone think I suffer from the gum disease GINGIVITIS.  The reason for this is I represent the next step in human evolution, or so I tell myself.  Better that than being some sort of mutant freak.

The point I'm getting at here is that I lack wisdom teeth and my 12 year molars.  Plus number 24 was a baby tooth that didn't have an adult tooth to replace it.  These teeth never existed in my head.

They* say wisdom teeth evolved as replacements for teeth that may have been lost during a person's lifetime, or back when we needed more teeth to chew tougher food.  Whatever the reason, God or Evolution, or perhaps Godvolution decided we don't need them anymore; our jaws shrank and there's no room for all those extra teeth in many people's mouths.  Which is why Godvolution invented wisdom tooth extractions.

Back to my point of being the future of humanity: I was musing on this recently and thought, "Hey, I'm just like the X-men! "  Wait, don't leave.  I'm getting ready to explain myself.

So the X-men are the next step, right?  They have special powers as part of human evolution.  Humans place fewer demands on their teeth in this age of cooked food, tools and Jello, so we don't need as many.  Evolution grants us fewer teeth.  Ergo-my 23 teeth put me in the same league as Wolverine.

I dare you to poke holes in my logic.**

*Some scientists I have a vague memory of reading about.
**Don't you dare try to poke holes in my logic.

The one where I went way off topic

Today is my birthday.  I am 35 years old.  I am old.


Now you may say, "35?  You're still so young!" Especially if you happen to be my mother.


But hear me out here.


I was flipping through the channels the other day and came across MTV.  It was playing those whatcha-ma-call-its.  Those things that MTV used to play all the time but stopped playing sometime in the late ninties in favor of Teen Moms celebrating their Super Sweet 16s while dealing with the Real World/Road Rules on the Jersey Shore.  You know, the things.  The videos, set to music.  Gah! What were those things called?!


Oh yeah Music Videos.


Anyhoo, I stopped to see what was going on and after about 15 minutes realized I didn't know who any of these people on my tv were.   And I didn't want to know who they were.


And...scene.