Ahoy Ye Scurvy Dogs!!

It's HERE!!! Today is hands down, without a doubt, unquestionably my favorite made up holiday. It be Talk Like a Pirate Day!!! Whooooooooooo Hooooooooooooo! Erm, I mean ARGGGH!

So, feel free to call me a landlubber or sing a few bars of "A Pirate's Life For Me" just make sure you look like this:



when you do it.

Things you should check out Volume 3

Every so often a show comes along that reaffirms that there are intelligent people who write for television. Pushing Daisies is one of those shows. Please please please check this one out. It is delightful, quirky, wierd, beautiful, dark, life affirming, romantic, frustrating, and just all around FANTASTIC. Annnnnnd, as an added bonus, the tragically shortened first season is now out on dvd.

Pushing Daisies is the story of Ned the piemaker who has a terrible and wonderful gift: he can bring the dead back to life, but if he touches them again they die forever. As with any gift there are problems. If Ned brings someone or something back to life for longer than a minute, someone or something else in the vicinity must die.

I know it sounds grim, but it's really not. It's a bright red and yellow feast for the eyes actually.



Plus there's the amazing cast:

Kristin Chenowith as Olive: the gorgeous and heartsick girl unlucky enough to be in love with Ned:



(British!!) Anna Friel as Charlotte "Chuck" the only girl that Ned has ever loved and brought back from the dead is equal parts toddler and ingenue as she attempts to live every second of this new life she's been given.



Swoozie Kurtz as Chuck's grieving, agoraphobic, former synchronized swimmer aunt who sports an amazing eyepatch:



Chi McBride as Emerson Cod: a private investigator heartless enough to use Ned's gift as a means to collect reward money, yet sensitive enough to knit cosies to hold it.



and Lee Pace as the adorably conflicted and strange piemaker Ned who has to pet his dog with a wooden hand and kiss his girlfriend through a sheet of plastic:





Yes, it's wierd. Yes it's about a guy who can't kiss the girl he loves. Yes the characters break into song. Yes. Yes. YES! Watch it!

Plus: It was made by the genius who created this show:



(And if you haven't seen that one, then you'd best check it out too!)

You can't keep a bad boy down

Today Austen continued his senseless campaign of destruction. I'd hoped that after killing an innocent pillow bed he'd be satisfied, but unfortunately, today he took it to another level.




Today, he destroyed his crate.



Where does all of this sleep related hostility come from? Is it sympathy for his insomniac mother? Is this his way of telling me how he feels about his being neutered last Friday (if so, he should be blaming my dad. He's the one who stole his bits.)?


Or is this just one more "Screw you woman! I'll do what I want!"





Methinks it's the last one.

Do they call it a fireside because you're sitting right outside the gates of hell?

Just wonderin'.

Yesterday at church I was sitting, minding my own business when my friend Jen came up and asked me to go to a Single Adult fireside with her that evening.

Dilemma: I love Jen and I would like to get to know her better, but I HATE firesides. Scratch that. I generally like them once I get there, but it's the getting dressed in my Sunday duds again and driving across town to attend yet another meeting part I can't get behind.

I. Hate. Meetings. A feeling that's only gotten stronger in my two years as a master's student at UNLV.

I thought about getting out of it, making up some stupid excuse and staying home with my dog who loves me and who I don't have to impress, BUT..... I decided to climb out of my hobbit hole and go.

I told my sister right before I left for the fireside that I didn't know if Jen and I could ever be REALLY good friends 'cause she's just so darn positive about everything. Let me tell you something. I was wrong. Jen is hilarious and just a lil' bit dark about the whole "Single LDS woman past the age of 30" thing. I can get behind that. I feel that.

The topic for the fireside was on financial planning. It sounded like a kind of dry topic, but I thought, "Hey, I might learn something important." Instead of teaching us how to make wise investments, the speaker spent twenty minutes telling us not to be suckers and fall for bad investments. It was pretty depressing, but I thought that the next twenty minutes would be about how to make good ones.

The speaker went another direction with it, though. After the twenty minutes of doom and gloom he said, "Well, I'm going to stop there. Let's go eat some cookies and commiserate." Seriously. That is pretty much word for word.

I know what you (or at least my brother Matthew who likes to give me grief about my lack of a social life) are thinking, "It was a single adult fireside, were there any romantic possibilities there?"

Well, most of the guys (4 of the 5) that were there looked kinda like this:



or, even more frightening, like this:



The fifth guy was pretty good looking and because Jen and I were sitting by him I can also report that he was funny and a little sarcastic. Now, here's where I show what being single over the age of 30 for 4 years has done to me.

Did I look at this handsome, clean cut, guy who came to a single adult fireside by himself in order to learn something and think, "There's a handsome, clean cut, spiritual guy that I might possibly want to date."? Nope.

I thought, "Hmmmm. I wonder what's wrong with him." I know I know. Some of you right this second want to post comments about the fact that I need to be less negative, that I need to give this whole single adult activity thing a fighting chance. In theory, I agree with you.

In practice, however, I've found that if a guy looks too good to be true, you need to do your research. This involves the homegirl background check: call every single LDS woman you know and find out which of their friends have dated him in the past in order to find out if he's a commitment phobe, mama's boy, or garden variety freak show.

In practice, my last boyfriend is now the vice president of an organization for lesbian and gay professionals (I'm NOT lying about this).

In practice, I currently have a bad attitude.

I'm working on it.

Luckily I have a thing for Bad Boys....

Yeah. Austen's not reeeeeaaalll big on getting put in the kitchen when I leave for work. Every morning is a battle of wills with me telling Austen to go into the kitchen and him standing on the other side of the room and attempting to stare me down. I swear to you, I've never seen as defiant an expression on a dog's face in all my life. If he had the means to do it, he'd flip me the bird.

He finally found a way to let me know how he really feels about the whole "locked in the kitchen while Mom goes to work" scenario:







Yeah. He ripped the zipper off both the cover and inside liner of his bed and then disemboweled the poor thing.



The part that ticked me off the most about the whole situation was the expression on Austen's face when I first saw the carnage. He looked me square in the eyes, his head at a haughty angle with an expression that said, "Yeah, I destroyed m' bed. . .wot are YOU gonna do about it, huh? Nuffink, that's wot! I'd do it again!" (Oh, in my head, Austen has a tough British accent. I named him Austen, but he's no Mr. Darcy.)

Well, joke's on you little man. From now on you'll be in the kitchen all day with NO BED. That'll show you...maybe....

The Shame Spiral...

I need to get something off my chest...

I watched 3/4 of the new Beverly Hills 90210 pilot last night.



It was NOT good.

I'll probably watch it again, just to see who's Kelly's Babydaddy.

I'm ashamed of myself.

(Oh Kelly Taylor, you're better than this! Brenda....notsomuch)

Who loves ya baby?

I'm a mama's girl, and I'm not ashamed. It helps when you have a mom like I do, because she makes it so easy to be one. As we grew up my 5 siblings and I fought over who she loved best, citing pretty convincing proof. The problem was, each of us had a compelling case. It wasn't until we were all adults that I think we all (with the exception of Matthew who still believes he's the ONE. We let him think this, it's just easier. If you know my brother, you know what I mean.) realized that Mom's love for each of us couldn't be ranked on a scale like that; she loves each of us differently.

I won't attempt to explain her relationship with any of my siblings, but I want to talk a little about her relationship with me. I'm my mom's baby girl. I think that there's something special about a mom's last girl, not to say that my mom's other girls aren't special to her, I just think that as I grew up she knew I was her last chance at girliness. Added to this is the fact that all three of my sisters left at once after my 9th grade year and Mom and I were out numbered and had to band together. Anyway, on to the reason for this post today.

My mom, dad, and Aunt LuAnn just went to Wyoming to spend some time with my grandma who at 98 years old has finally reached the point where she can no longer live on her own. To call my grandmother stubborn would be a vast understatement, and we all envisioned having to drag her bodily from her house as she spread-eagled the front door with her fingernails dug into the door frame. It didn't quite work out that way, as she ended up in the hospital with a terrible case of pneumonia and then my father tricked her into the long term care facility by telling her she was simply changing rooms. I know it sounds cruel, but if you knew my grandma, you'd understand the need for such devious trickery. Bless my father's evil genius.

This trip was to see Grandma and to dig through the vast amounts of "treasure" my grandmother has been compiling for the past 45 years: quite an undertaking. A few years ago my mom and I went to visit and saw what we could become if we didn't change. We were scared straight and each went right home and cleaned out a couple of closets. Anyway, my mom called each of us asking if any of us wanted the super special collection of limited edition Native American plates made by the Franklin Mint. Shockingly, she got no takers. She asked me, "Is there anything you want from Grandma's house?"

Whenever I think about my grandma's house, the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of my childhood come rushing back. My favorite room in the house was the front bedroom. It was the room I most often slept in when we visited as it's location just down the hall from my grandfather and his epic snoring made it less desirable than the rooms in the converted garage.

It was my mother's old room, and I loved to imagine her lying on the bed gossiping with her girlfriends, primping at the tiny, built in vanity my grandfather lovingly made for her, or picking out an outfit from the closet. Apparently when my grandfather built the house my 15 year old mother dreamt up a lavender and white color scheme, even making a bedspread in those very colors in her home ec class at school. My grandpa loved his Cargy Vee, but he couldn't resist a bargain. As a result, the entire house was painted with the garish colors of the bargain paint bin resulting in among other things, a flamingo pink living room. As horrible as that was, my mother had something even more devastating awaiting her. All she wanted were white walls, but as she ran into her room she was greeted with screaming neon yellow. She sobbed in agony, knowing that they would stay that color (my grandparents didn't have the money for new paint) forever.

They didn't. Some time between my mother's high school years and my birth my grandmother wallpapered the entire room in flocked floral wallpaper. As a child I loved to sit on the floor and pet the walls, amazed by the texture of the paper. The wallpaper at our house certainly didn't feel like this! When I shared this insight with my mother she responded with something like, "I should hope not!" It took me a long time to understand what she meant.





That wallpaper became a source of laughter and ridicule among my family members over the years, one more charmingly strange thing about my grandmother's house. Even when I knew I should hate that wallpaper, I just couldn't. I made fun along with the rest of my family, but each time I visited the house I'd sneak into the room and surreptitiously stroke the walls.


So, when my mother asked the question, "What do you want from Grandma's house?" I laughed and said, "I know I can't have it, but what I'd really like is a piece of that flocked wallpaper from your old bedroom." Silence on the other end stretched for a moment, followed by "Really?" We laughed about it and then I admitted my life-long love for the horrible wallpaper. I knew it would go no where. My mother isn't the type to go into her mother's house and willfully destroy anything. She's a rule follower and worrier (good thing I didn't inherit that! Ha!) and I didn't think any more about it.

When my mother called me and said, "I cut you a piece of that wallpaper," you could have bought me for a nickel(I earlier posted a combination of two sayings. My sister corrected me and I'm now ashamed of myself. Ashamed forever.).She even sounded a little defiant when I questioned her about it, saying "You wanted a piece of that wallpaper, so I snuck into the room and cut you a piece from right near the window." I pictured her sneaking into that room armed with a pair of scissors and a mother's love, defacing her mother's home in order to get me a piece of wallpaper that she personally found hideous.



That's love baby. Love.

Who's the favorite NOW Matthew?