Big Girl Underoos

This is a picture from the Keene Pumpkin Festival a few years ago. It's amazing. you have to see it to believe it. There are tens of thousands of pumpkins on every surface and they build three story towers to hold them all. There are a few pics at the link above. I like the one above in the middle (above) that used baby carrots for "hair." Mine is below in the middle at the bottom. I used the stem as a nose. My Dad's is the one to the left of mine with "RX" carved in it. He's a pharmacist.

I moved this weekend. More specifically, I was moved this weekend. By 10 of the best people in the world. Thank you, thank you, thank you - FG, Mom, P, N & A, N, N, W, M & S!!! This was not your average move. It could have been. Oh yes, it could have been except that a monsoon descended onto the area causing high winds and freezing rain. If we hadn't been going up and down stairs carrying boxes of my crap and my obnoxiously heavy furniture we would have all died of hypothermia and exposure. It was nasty out folks. Nasty, nasty, nasty. But we, and all my possessions, survived. Except for a filing cabinet my Mom, brother, Friendster Guy and I transported in a pretty much empty Uhaul at the end of the day when everyone else had left. (I needed to go through it and trash stuff anyway. It's a blessing in disguise.) Everything else made it through with flying colors. I spent yesterday unpacking. I made serious progress. I'm down to the boxes labeled "Nik Naks," ...

Inspired by Shell over at Words, Words, Words , (who posted a very cute pic of her and her niece), and by a new set of prints my sister sent me, may I present my niece - E-lo or E Diddy or something. She's got attitude to spare.

I was chatting with my X today (we were swapping car keys so I could borrow his truck to do some moving) and it turns out that his girlfriend - have I even mentioned that he has a girlfriend? It's so new I don't think I have. Anyway, he and his girlfriend are planning on moving in together. I'm pretty sure they met in August, maybe July. Maybe. And when she moves to Burlington, VT in May he intends to follow her - despite being in the process of looking for a tenure track faculty position and there currently being none in his field in that fair city . All that being said, I would like to use this information to illustrate how much I have grown as a person and how much things have changed of late. As he was telling me all this I felt not one twinge of jealousy, annoyance, animosity or anything. In fact, all I felt was happy for him. I imagine that if I were not in a fabulous relationship myself I'd probably feel somewhat differently. But I AM in a fabulous relationship s...

Oh. My. God. When is a urinal even more disgusting than urinals usually are? When it looks like this. *shudder* *cringe*

Crap. You know how in the last post I said my car loan had been lowered? I was wrong. (Apparently Sassy Pants likes to make assumptions. But on a positive note, they are always glass half full type assumptions. I never assume the worse. Maybe I should start.) For several years I had been paying from a pre-printed booklet so every payment was the same whether I paid more the month before or not. However, for whatever reason the loan company recently switched from the booklet to a monthly bill. What I thought was a lowering of the payment was really a reflection of the extra I'd paid the month before. So now I have to recheck my finances and make sure I can pay the rent, car, utilities, life AND student loan bills, while also attempting to save some money. ha ha ha ha, lol, rotfl, hysterical giggles, etc...

Sallie Mae* has found me. Apparently, my assumption that I didn't have to pay off my student loans until I was done my thesis was wrong. And you know what that means. Yup, I'm an ass. An ass who now has a new $250 bill every month. Yeeha! Luckily, my car loan company decided that they didn't like that I was paying extra on my loan every month so they decided to extend my loan and lower my payments (without telling me first). Normally this would annoy me but since the difference will now partially cover my student loan payment and therefore allow me to continue living as I have been, instead of destitute and on the streets, I'm more forgiving. Especially with winter coming and all. * student loan collector extraordinaire. Otherwise known as "that bitch" by my sister because her first student loan payment was due on Christmas.

I saw snow this weekend. Accumulated, on the ground, on the trees, in little piles by the road, snow. Blech. Thank goodness I'm moving to an apartment with a garage. It'll be the first winter I've ever had where I won't have to scrape my car in the morning. I've lived in New England all my life (with brief stints in PA and TX) and I've never had shelter for my vehicle. I'll still have to scrape in the afternoon when I leave work but a couple of extra minute of warmth in the AM will be nice.

Let me know if you can actually view this (I can't - I'm in Flashplayer hell). See previous post for info on the context of this video. 2007 Chevrolet Silverado: Anthem

A case of misguided patriotism or an advertising agency run amok? A friend forwarded this article to me from Slate. It about Chevy's ad that uses footage of historical and recent events, John Mellencamp, and a patriotic themed song to sell trucks. That all sounds ok on paper (and admittedly I haven't seen the ad because I can't update my Flashplayer on my work computer) but from this article it seems highly misguided. I mean, footage of Dale Earnhardt, Nixon, 9/11 and Katrina to sell a truck? Why not a klan rally, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Tsunami, and Afghanistan to sell ice cream? C'mon Ben & Jerry's. I'm seeing a whole new ad campaign here. Here's what I think Chevy is trying to say: We're tough idealists but sometimes we F'up and if you buy a truck everything will be better. If you don't think a Chevy can overcome death, destruction, hopelessness, fear, and shame, well then, maybe you should buy a Toyota. Hell, we bombed the shit out of them i...

My sister - of whom you've heard me rant and rave - is married to a police officer. He was on the scene when a fellow officer in Manchester, NH was shot and killed. "On the scene" as in feet away and if he had been the first person to get to the suspect's car it could/would have been him. I received the following from my sister via email: Most of you know that a police officer P was working with was shot and killed early Monday morning. It has effected us and the whole city very deeply and we are looking for ways to help the family of Officer Briggs . There has been a fund set up to help the family through this time. It would be appreciated by not only the Briggs family but also P and I personally, if you could send a donation. Even a small amount makes a big difference. So often these instances seem so distant and irrelevant to our lives, this however is not. Although we are grieving the loss of a fellow police officer and friend, we could very well have been griev...

My Mom sent me the following: A nice, calm and respectable lady went into the pharmacy, right up to the pharmacist, looked straight into his eyes, and said, "I would like to buy some cyanide." The pharmacist asked, "Why in the world do you need cyanide?" The lady replied, "I need it to poison my husband." The pharmacists eyes got big and he exclaimed, "Lord have mercy! I can't give you cyanide to kill your husband! That's against the law! I'll lose my license! They'll throw both of us in jail! All kinds of bad things will happen. Absolutely not! You CANNOT have any cyanide!" The lady reached into her purse and pulled out a picture of her husband in bed with the pharmacist's wife. The pharmacist looked at the picture and replied, "Well now. That's different. You didn't tell me you had a prescription. The sad thing is, when the pharmacist is ranting about not being able to prescribe cyanide I was waiting for the pun...

Guess what? I almost managed to remember it was the one year anniversary of this blog in time to have an exactly one year later post. Almost. I only missed it by a couple days. And then I procrastinated on posting a couple more days. So be it. Anyway, last year on October 12th I began this journey of self-discovery. I took a quick look at a couple of posts from that time and this one struck me: I want someone to touch me like they mean it. I'm not saying sexually (although I'm not ruling that out), I mean those little touches people in love (or at least supposedly in love) give each other. A guiding touch on the back, holding hands, leaning against each other, intimate touches that say "I'm with you and I like that." I've missed that. And for years. I didn't really have that in my marriage. My soon-to-be-ex-spouse wasn't a touchy feely kind of guy but add to that what I calculate as about 2 years of low grade underlying disinterest and you've got n...

I'll have something deeper to say later but until then, enjoy (and drive your coworkers crazy)! Virtual bubble wrap

I'm not so sure anymore. Pretty much the first thing I did this morning was stir up a hornets nest of office/interdepartmental politics. All on my very own. I'm such a go-getter. Can I go back to bed now?

...or wherever bad ex-spouses/in-laws go. Seriously though, I don't think I'm stretching it when I say that my ex-grandmother-in-law looks an awful lot like Sir Paul McCartney. You're not getting the full effect because of the sun glasses but trust me. It's kind of creepy. I'm also not exagerating when I say that Blogger's picture utilization features pretty much bite it. Hence the wonky nature of the pics and spaces. Grrr.

Have you ever been driving behind a biodiesel car and all of a sudden had an intense craving for french fries? Friendster Guy and I were driving home from a wedding in Brooklyn and we had that experience. Or I should say he did because I had a cold and my nose was too stuffed up to notice the smell. (Which is why I haven't blogged in a few days - Brooklyn/cold - and why I am writing this fairly asinine and useless post now to tide you over.) Anyway...FG and I determined that biodiesel creates a vicious cycle as follows: Someone puts biodiesel in their car. Everyone driving around them gets a craving for their favorite fried food of choice. Those people pull over and purchase said food which creates more biodiesel from the deep frying. Then, since everyone is eating deep fried foods we all get fatter and less mobile increasing our use of our cars (not to mention the increased weight of the people in them thereby using more fuel) so we all switch to biodiesel and put more and more fr...

I just found and plucked the first white hair out of my head. I'm not quite sure whether I should embrace this milestone or start crying. I definitely cringed when I finally tracked down the bugger (it started out looking like just a really shiny hair). I removed it so I could examine it under better light and lo and behold my fear was realized. Crap. I'm not entirely devastated. After all, Friendster Guy has a head full of prematurely salt and pepper hair and I think it's distinguished and unique, not to mention kind of sexy. It suits him. But he's a guy and there are different connotations that go along with white hair for men than for women. I'm not yet prepared for what those connotations are. Sigh...I was hoping to be one of those women who had a full head of dark hair for an unnaturally long time. But no. I'm collecting the paraphenalia of age more rapidly now. First it was spider veins, now white hair. Bring on the cellulite, jowls (disappearing necks run...

Note: My X and I carpooled to our alma mater this weekend so had some quality time together. "Quality time" meaning "forced togetherness because gas prices are too high to warrant taking two cars." During our conversation I found out that my sister is questioning my sexuality. As in, she's wondering if I'm a lesbian. First, if I were, I would be proud to announce it. I have plenty of very close friends who are, and they have lovely relationship and/or just as many dating problems as I do. In addition, my family has no problems with such things so I would have no fear in coming out of the closet. The problem is that I am not a lesbian, have never been a lesbian (nor even had a lesbian experience), and unless my brain gets rewired in an as of yet unknown to science kind of way, I never plan to be a lesbian. And there is no reason for anyone, ESPECIALLY my sister, to think this. When I found that out, I was so pissed I could spit. You should have heard some ...