I saw this at Ace of Spades, thought it was hilarious and then my seeeeeester(!) sent it to me in an email. So now I must share with all! I love Joe Cocker, as does Jan, but let's face it, he is a trifle difficult to understand at times. So, now with convenient subtitles:



I don't think I can remember what the real words are now.

So, I was in Target today after work, shocking I know, and I went down the aisle where my skin care line is located. Now, I had been racing around the store collecting items for my retail therapy, I was wearing a fleece, and I think I'm trying to come down with something. Hopefully, not swine flu. But I digress. The point is in this aisle was a little aesthetician type chickie who may have been legally able to consume alcohol in public for about 15 minutes, max. I mentioned to her that I had been using a certain product but had been thinking of switching to another product made by the same company, and what did she think. As she was formulating a plan all my rushing around, fleece wearing, and feeling punk caught up with me and I got a little warm. This cosmo-nymph looked at me and said, "Hot flash huh? My mom gets them all the time, so I recognize the signs." She must not work on commission, that's all I'm sayin'.

Medical Outlook

The girls are having a wild night whooping it up and drinking buckets of booze (basically 5 kinds of rum served in a sand pail!), but since I'm on call at 0300 I'm at home hammerin' back diet Pepsi and Sun Chips with bean dip. They will just have to do without their designated driver this time!

I think they got this episode from my hospital and I'm definitely adopting this description of humanity:

Bud Abbott and I learned math from the same place!

"Did you ever go to school, stupid?"
"Yeah and I came out the same way!"

Did he say something about "chief school?" heh.

Double heh.

Heh.

I should go to bed instead of lurking YouTube and listening to Red Eye....naaaaahhhh!

But she was dressed cute!

ripped off from Sith by Sithwest

Oops

After a day spent refreshing my Advanced Cardiac Lifesaving knowledge in the frigid basement of a converted church on a gorgeous 75 degree day, and hearing about 900 jokes about 420, I sent the kids out to walk the dog around the neighborhood. FB is 10, our neighborhood is as safe as it can be in this day and age and I threatened SoS within an inch of his hide if he didn't listen to his brother. I expected few problems. They came home within a reasonable time for walking the dog around the 'hood and SoS bursts in with "Mommy! I got you flowers!" And he had a fist full of these:

"Erm....those are beautiful, honey, thank you so much! But, sweetie, don't pick the flowers in other people's yards. Those are their pretties."

"Okay, Mommy. But can we still keep them?"

I expect a notice of damages to be paid to be staked to my door with a blood stained dagger any minute now. Homeowner Nazis.

Redneck Heaven

This weekend we indulged our redneck roots (well, my redneck roots and the kids redneck ancestry) by attending the Spring Fair. Now, what made this redneck was not corn on a stick, barbeque, or pig races. These are all found at the regular fair. Not even the kiddie ride packed with kids tipping over mid-ride made it redneck. Although that helped. "We don't need no stinkin' redundant safety systems!" What made my little redneck heart go pitter patter like a squirrel with paroxysmal atrial tachycardia (sorry, ACLS season) was SLAMFEST 2009 Demolition Derby, baby! Woot!

We went with my dear friend and her family, her brother and a son of another dear friend. So basically Rena and I were swimming in a sea of testosterone with 2 men and 6, count 'em 6 boys ranging in age from 10 to 5. Captain Chaos!

They look like they were prepared to have fun, although I'm missing a kid here...I believe he was sandwiched between a bro and Dad. You wouldn't really think there would be a big draw for this kind of thing here in ultra liberal land, amazingly the grandstand was packed.

i spent a great deal of time staring at the kid in front of us and doing my impersonation of Austin Powers "Moley, moley, moley, moley!" Come on now! We have some damn fine technology these days, remove that sucker. Or at least I could give him a quarter and he could go downtown and have a rat gnaw that thing off his face. (Anyone? Anyone at all get that quote?) I found out that not only Monster Truck races have an inordinate amount of infants and hugely pregnant women attending. There are easier ways to get yourself into labor, ladies!

Top Shelf from KISW was there judging the best looking (WTF? these are demo cars!) vehicles.

They announced he was signing autographs and I got myself in a twitter (no, I don't tweet!) and frantically started looking for autograph worthy items for him to sign. I turned to Rena and said, "What have I got that he can sign?" and we both automatically looked at my chest. "Um, no." Her brother shook his head and when I informed him he had missed us being together so horribly as to be like unto a day without sun, he had no recourse but to agree. Besides, we'll hurt him if he doesn't. By the time we had a Cow Chip Cookies box for Toppy to sign he had disappeared. More than likely slunk into the beer garden. We also saw this guy who was into '80s retro rat tail.

Too bad SHSo'C is gone; he would have loved it. But, back to the demolition derby...

It was fabulous! What could be better that a large rodent with a checkered flag

a rollover contest

engine fires

Hipsters and really bad Hawaiian shirts

and let's not forget, lots and lots of car crashes. For some reason, this was my favorite car:

All in all a good time was had. Even the Senior Chief smiled

I think it's because he's imagining those poopies he works with in some of those cars!

Volkswagon Beetle Turbo. Is it just me or is that a bit of an oxymoron? But that could just be my age showing. To my mind, Bugs are still orange with flower decal door panels and a very distinctive sound of a three cycle engine redlined at 45 miles an hour.

It's late at night, I've got 3 boys asleep upstairs (sleepover), a fourth boy calling me to pimp me for my ebay account (nephews!), a dog asleep on his bed and a cat sacked out so close to my thigh he's almost part of my DNA. The idiot box is showing that 1986 ode to teh ghey Navy, Top Gun. Or I've been told that's what it's an ode to and not just the best recruiting video ever. However, this insight was from members of "The Silent Service", so there may be some bias there. Although, surface ships at least have women, .....they could be frontin' I guess. And has anyone seen Val Kilmer lately? Time has not been kind, that's all I'm sayin'



Not a bad picture in a I'm-too-sexy-for-this-flight-suit kind of way.


Carbs might just kill, man.

Okay, seriously, could Top Gun have had worse dialogue? I feel like I need a shower now.

Somebody just freakin' shoot me

Coming home this afternoon Spawn of Satan says, "Mommy? Do you know where my girl sensor is?"

Me: "What?"

SoS: "My girl sensor; do you know where it is?"

Me: "What?!?"

Sos: "It's in my wrong spot. I mean my inappropriate spot."

Me: "Are you talking about your penis?!?"

SoS" "Yeah!"

SoS and I then had a conversation about how in THIS house, it is a penis and nothing else, it's not a wrong spot (something he picked up at school) but he's too young to worry about girls, so this particular line of questioning WAS inappropriate. Once again, where does a six year old come up with this???? I see an ass load of medication in my future and not for the kid. All for the mama!

Birthday Evolution

At one year of age:


Life is grand! I get to play ball, smash cake in my hair, and play with the boxes of all these toys people got me!


At 18 years of age:


Life is grand! I'm getting lots of money, I'm getting things to use in my dorm room when I go to college and the parents have no idea about the kegger later! (By the way, this was taken by a pinhole shoebox camera I made myself. Go Dad and his darkroom!)



At 42 years of age:


Life is grand! Get up, get dressed, make lunches, get the kids to the schoolbus, get gas at Costco, book the 10 miles into T-town for vacuum cleaner bags at the only Kirby store around, jet over to Jo-Ann fabric for materials for the Roman shades that are FINALLY going to get made, go to Petco for dog food and cat food, contemplate getting a bigger Furminator for the dog because he's dropping hairballs the size of chinchillas all over the carpet, decide the one you have is big enough since this sucker is $60, fly home, take note of the time (0948), fill the mower with gas, mow the front yard, divest the backyard of it's doggie land mines, mow the backyard while mourning the state of the twins and the ravages 42 years and two kids have inflicted on them, put the mower away, check that the dog hasn't eaten everything possibly edible in the house, wash the planet killer, break both a spray nozzle and the extension brush (needed due to severe vertical challenge) while washing said planet killer, rush inside, note only 45 minutes before friends here for lunch date, drop wet/grassy/dirty clothes in laundry, race upstairs completely starkers in a house with no window dressings and an Australian Shepherd herding you along, shower at the speed of sound, wrap towel around still wet nudeness to let the perpetually early friend in the house, set land speed record for dressing/applying makeup/doing hair, marvel that perpetually late friend is on time (1230), think about climbing gear to get into kingcab diesel truck where floorboards hit you mid thigh, drive to Panera, have delightful lunch full of giggles and snorts followed by chocolate dipped cone with massive Cherry Garcia scoop at the Ben and Jerry's Scoop Shop (laugh about losing your scoop shop cherry while eating cherries "oh, here it is!), realize it is 1530 and the kids are getting of the bus soon, race home, hug dear friends for a delightful time, wrassle spastic dog into his collar and leash, get kids at bus stop, give snack and force kids outside for 30 minutes, get ready for Tae Kwon Do, go see parents and receive birthday wishes, go to Tae Kwon Do, come home, have children shower while dinner is made, clean kitchen while kids watch TV/work on computer, put kids to bed, sit down for what feels like the first time, read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies while Snakes on a Plane plays for background. I'm sensing a slight change in how my birthdays are spent from in the past. (FB took this picture; I like it because it makes me look GIANT!)

This song scarily parallels my life! Ignore the country music (you philistines!) and listen to the words...holy crap!


Mark Wills - 19 Somethin'
Music Videos at www.yallwire.com

"I was a kid when Elvis died, and my mama cried..." I remember it like it was yesterday...she bawled for a week!

That's just dirty!

Mrs. Hardy sent me this fine picture:



HA! Peeps need love too.

FB had a belt test last night and broke two boards with a swing kick. Which is pretty impressive since this kick consists of reaching up towards your head with the kick and my kid is about as flexible as your average steel girder encased in hardened cement.

This belt test lasted an eternity and it was quite late at night by the time I got the kiddos chivvied into bed. I had pulled out a loaf of homemade bread to make their lunches for today, when I realized if I wanted them in bed before midnight, I was going to have to go up and supervise some showers. (These two are soakers...yeah, our carbon footprint is the size of the Jolly Green Giant's) I was coming down the darkened stairwell and noticed a sort of "blob" on the landing. Knucklehead McSpazatron must have, once again, gotten something he shouldn't and chewed it into an unrecognizable mass. What was it? A Nerf ball? No, doesn't look like it. Oh, heavens, did he vomit again? No, it looks too solid. There was nothing to do but pick it up. Cautiously, I bent down to prod this mass, and got a whiff of......bread? Good grief! Did this damn dog jump up, grab a whole loaf of bread off the counter and eat all but a tennis sized ball of it!?! It appears he did. What pray tell, would that do to the gastrointestinal system of an Australian Shepherd? Good thing he doesn't have IBS to begin with. I was pleasantly surprised to find no evidence of his feast upon rising. I guess he could be so bound up that he won't poop for a week....time will tell

*snicker* It's here!

"The Classic Regency Romance Now With Ultra-Violent Zombie Action!"

What could be better? The perfect novel combined with zombies...NIRVANA!!! Lest anyone jerk my English Degree bona fides I adore Jane Austen and have read all of her novels numerous times and have dissected and discussed her imagery ad nauseum. Some of my best writing revolved around my girl Jane. The only thing I adore more, however, is satire and, let's face it, liberal arts students (and graduates) have a tendency to take themselves a trifle too seriously. What better antidote to those clove smoking, espresso swilling elitists than taking a literary masterpiece and injecting it with brain eating zombies? "...Mrs. Long struggled to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut...." I never did like Mrs. Long and this seems a fitting end. I'm hoping for some more of the same for Wickham, Lady DeBourgh and that little brat Lydia if you must know the truth. I'll let you know how it ends. Read on!

To offset Brian's Song:



"I'm MC Simon Milligan master of funk and....evil!"

Yet another holiday season and I have to grit my teeth to make pleasant memories for my offspring. Once again I can't have them reminiscing as saying "Mom was a raging psycho bitch during (insert holiday here, excluding Halloween of course.)" Now Easter is a fine holiday and, while I try my best to instill the real reason for Easter in the kids, we all know they only care about the candy. And eggs. I hate eggs unless they are made of chocolate and filled with caramel. I dream of the day when dying eggs is something the kids think about and go, "meh." I hard boiled 24 eggs (gagging nearly the whole time) and set the little artists to work. Unlike AWTM I can't make the effort to do cool eggs with old silk ties like she did...and cool they are. I take the lazy way out and buy kits with stickers and shrinky dink wrappers, but the kidlets seemed to enjoy themselves nonetheless.






Luckily, it's my weekend to work so the kids will be taking their delightful stinky masterpieces to my parents house.

Knucklehead McSpazatron has still not gotten over the chewing everything that isn't nailed down stage, so I bought him a giant joint/knuckle/big-ass bone to keep him busy. Which, as you see, he thoroughly enjoyed.


And proceeded to yak up all over my carpet two hours later. Woohoo.

I was wide awake from 0100 to 0330, which I'm sure had nothing to do with the ten Peeps and two chocolate dipped sugar cookies last night. I might think it had if it weren't for the fact I'm always up and don't always eat Peeps. Damn this holiday anyway! It's a plot to make my ass the size of Australia! Is is passe to say it's a communist plot? What other kind of plot can I say it is without being slammed by some kind of label with "ist" at the end? It's a confectioner's plot, that's what it is! The point is, I can withstand a lot of temptaion, but Peeps aint on the list. Disgusting little buggers, that they are. Tangent aside, I got a phone call at 0515 and was saying yes into the receiver before they could even ask if I wanted to be on-call. Despite the reprieve from work, I still couldn't sleep. I did get all grades of fertilizer/moss killer spread on my lawn at an ungodly hour of the am. I've tried to go organic on the lawn, but that is an arse load of work, so I've gone back to the ol' Scotts "kill 'em and feed 'em and don't let it get in your water supply". Goes along with driving the planet killer and threatening to squash Priuses as I go. I've turned over a new leaf and it includes increasing my carbon footprint at every turn! Haha!

I still get crunchy lawn care magazines and one has a product called "Bird Grub." Which is bird food that is actually larvae. See? Cute little play on words there...they're so funny! And look, right next to it is the ad for the Bird Grub feeder.



Just what I want to see every morning outside my window while hammering back some high fiber breakfast: a clear plastic container full of larvae. Yum.

Watching "Brian's Song" (the original and the only one that counts) and it's about to get sad. I've seen it enough times since the 70s to know it's cryin' time. I've cried enough in the last while to be dry heaving from my tear ducts, but "Brian's Song" still gets me going.



"When you dedicate a game to someone, you are then supposed to actually win it, idiot. I mean, Pat O'Brian never said 'let's blow one for the Gipper'."

"I love Brian Piccolo and I'd like all of you to love him too. And tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him."

After I ran today I pulled the keys out of my pocket and flung my license to the ground. Except it wasn't my license, it was my debit card. Apparently, that is far more familiar to my muscle memory than getting the ol' DL out. So, if I had gotten mugged this morning they wouldn't have been able to ID the body, but they could have gone shopping!

I took the Sears man's advice and shot a hurricane down the vent tube with my leaf blower. Nothing appeared outside and that's when I realized the vent I thought was for the dryer was actually for my stove. Thus began a hunt for another vent outlet. Guess what? There isn't one. Idiot contractor strikes again. So, I have no idea where my dryer vents, but I have visions of the crawlspace under my house looking like a lint graveyard. I also invision that my efforts today looked not unlike Carl Spackler cleaning his "space."

Mowin'

Apparently subtlety in advertising has gone the way of the dodo. This is like being hit with a wet tuna across your gob.



via Guidons, Guidons, Guidons! via Theo Spark

The heating element went out in my dryer and, since I paid the gross national product of a small Latin American country for a maintenance agreement, I called the handy dandy Sears man to come out and fix it. My decorating style could loosely be called casual, but the damp clothes hanging on every available surface was going too far. The next available repair date was only three days after I called, and it was my day off. Woohoo! Sears is like the cable company and you have to be available from 8-noon. Piss up a rope! I resigned myself to not being able to leave the house for many hours; it's amazing what I'll do for the convenience of electric clothes dryer goodness. Mister Sears repairman called at about 0900 and told me he would be there in "about a half hour." Oh, goody! I can work out before he gets here. Five minutes later, there is a knock at the door. What? Did he travel through a worm hole? This man has no concept of time. No matter, he will have to deal with the bed head and mismatched workout attire. I showed my savior to the dryer and continued on with my workout. I hear some banging around as he dismantles the front of my dryer and then the sound of a vacuum. Hmmm. The vacuuming continues for several minutes until I hear, "Ma'am? Could you come here?" I go to the laundry room where a disbelieving repair man informs me that the entire bottom of the dryer was full of lint, "which tells me you have an airflow problem." No kidding. He then puts me through a full interrogation of the last time I had the bottom of the dryer cleaned out. "Well, let me think....I've been in the house seven years, I bought these when I moved in, so.....never." What? I clean the lint trap nearly every time I use it. After an impromptu pep rally about March madness should equal dryer madness especially since I have the maintenance agreement and it's free (yeah, yeah, yeah) he then showed me the lint he pulled off the motor. Hey! That's molded to the shape of the motor. Erm, most of that is brown, crusty and smells like burning lint... "Ma'am, do you know that the dryer is still the leading cause of house fires? You're lucky you still have a house." Well, apparently! He then asked me where the dryer was vented. As I pointed behind me and toward the kitchen window he about had a plotz. "It raises this high and then goes another 50 feet!?!?" Yeah, dude, my contractor was an idiot, this doesn't come as the surprise to me that it is to you. The Sears god then went on to say that the vent tube was probably full of lint as well and needed to be cleaned and I had several options for that. 1)Go in the crawlspace (I don't think so) 2) hire duct cleaners which might run 300 bucks (yeah, just paid the homeowners association Nazis; not looking to cough up 300 extra bucks for something like this) 3) take the cover off the vent, detach the hose, get the leaf blower and shoot 200 mile an hour winds through the vent "but you didn't hear that from me." So totally my option! I would pay big money to do that! And I have two little indentured servants...uh, children, to clean all the crap up out of the yard! Woo doggies! Best part of this, I have a dryer that actually gets hot and dries clothes the first time through.

I have been laughing about this whole thing since it occurred, because I have a tendency to laugh at avoided tragedy. I told a friend who laughed along with me and then ratted me out to her husband. He doesn't find these things amusing as I do. So, now I've got an irritated Master Chief/volunteer firefighter coming to my house to whip things into shape. Monday might be a bad day!

It snowed AGAIN from 0600 until 1400 today. It didn't stick, which is the only reason I wasn't looking for an entire bottle of Ativan to put me out of my misery. But, in order to maintain my tenuous grip on my sanity, I'm going to purge everything out of my cerebral cortex except the image of where I will be in 56 short days:




The pool with a view of the BEACH!




Whooo doggies!