Friday, October 31, 2008

Is the Slime Indeed Bottomless?













Fake Virginia vs. Real Virginia
Anti-America vs. Pro-America
Godless Money vs. ??? WHAT???

I would have posted a link to the video if I could figure out how.  It's on YouTube.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The Final Weeks of High School

Admittedly I spent my final days of high school skipping classes and hanging out with my friends at a beach so remote the Vice-Principal would have had to be in a boat on the water to find us.

The final days of this election cycle is populated with perhaps the archetypes of high school seniors in the final days of school.

Bush: 
Bad case of senioritis.  No friends to hang out at the beach with.  Most likely to attempt some huge destructive prank before graduation.

Palin:  
The kid who pulls the fire alarm and calls in the bomb scares just to be disruptive. (Note: when I was in high school bomb scares were: a. more frequent than fire drills, b. taken less seriously than fire drills, and c. unlikely to be covered by our local paper much less become a media event.

McCain:  
Palin's creepy anti-social boyfriend who she is openly cheating on.  He is the angry, dispirited kid who just wants everything to be over.  This kid was never a good student, not an athlete, never found a social niche, and lives with the scars of some long-ago childhood abuse. He shows up at school most days but may as well be invisible.

Obama:  
He reminds me of a specific person rather than a 'type'.  Our yearbook editor was a girl named Sandy.  Sandy was a tad under 5 feet tall and renowned for the number of books she could carry home to study.  And not 'study' as in 'do the assigned homework' but 'study' in the sense of do more work than required and learn more about the topic than possibly the teacher.  Even with the yearbook safely at the printer, the college deposit sent in, and her position as class valedictorian assured, Sandy was still writing papers, still studying for tests and still showing up for class (or so I heard from the beach) prepared and ready to discuss the topic of the day.

Obama must remain like Sandy.  No letting up until the diploma is safely in hand, belongings are moved into the college dorm room and class registration is complete.  Then maybe a coffee break of an hour or two, but surely no partying away the first semester. The same level of commitment shown in high school must be evident on Day One of college.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Designer Hockey Mom Duds

Not sure I know  of any other grade-schoolers who carry Louis Vuitton. But maybe she's just carrying it for her mom.  Wait, I didn't know hockey moms wore Valentino (and I swear I would have blanked out the face if I could have and still made the point).  Maybe this only happens in the 'real', 'pro-America' America.  Surely not in the 'fake' America where I live (outside of Fairfield County, that is)!

$150,000 for clothes, hair and make-up?  Did Joe Biden get a multi-thousand dollar makeover? Just sayin', you betcha, also.



Coolest Dogs Ever!!! (After Rupert the Noisy, of course)


I was not aware of this breed but a co-worker has two of them so I looked them up on Google images.  This is a Bergamasco and it bears a striking resemblance to a dust mop - in a good way.

I had to include a picture of Rupert lest he be offended.  This is the 'why are you waking me up to take my picture' look.  About two seconds later he was barking like a lunatic at the mail carrier.




Saturday, October 18, 2008

Reasons to Love Fall







Twisted Logic


Much has been made over Barack Obama's middle name.  The yahoos at the McCain/Palin rallies just love to refer to him as Barack Hussein Obama.  Clearly this is an attempt not only to portray him as 'other' but also to link him to that other Hussein (psst, you know which one). Saddam Hussein was an enemy of America.  Obama's middle name is Hussein.  Therefore Obama is an enemy of America.

Using that twisted logic, since my middle name is Edith, I must be a 'dingbat'.  Non-religious Hubby (middle name Peter) must have some hugely Catholic leanings or at some point caught a wolf by the tail.  And, Becki, have you been hanging around in Oz again with Rupert look-alike Toto, a scarecrow, a lion, and a tin man???

So the only conclusion we can come to, using this McCain campaign logic is that John McCain is gay.  His middle name is Sidney.  From 1981-1983 there was a TV show called Love, Sidney in which the title character, an artist played by Tony Randall, was gay.   There you have it. The character Sidney was gay.  McCain's middle name is Sidney.  Therefore McCain is gay.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Road Work



I know the city/state or whoever owns the road is trying to save money on overtime, but it just doesn't seem like a good idea to repave the major access road to the highway on a weekday at rush hour.  Saw and heard lots of road rage on my way to physical therapy this morning.  Took the back roads home.

(This is not a picture of the actual road....this is Google image)



Sunday, October 5, 2008

I Want to Knit Again


This is the Icebreaker speech I gave at Toastmasters a couple of weeks ago:

"I have not knit in over 20 years.  The last time I knit I made myself a sweater.  It was a very nice sweater but it had very long arms.  Now I have long arms so normally that would not be a problem but this sweater was made from a stretchy mohair yarn so each time I wore it and had it dry cleaned the sleeves got longer and longer and longer until finally they were a good foot longer than my actual arms.  I eventually had to get rid of the sweater and I haven’t knit anything since. 

But when my book club read The Friday Night Knitting Club and decided that in addition to discussing the book we would all begin a knitting project I got excited.  The book was quite enjoyable and I began to have visions of the scarves and wraps and shawls and bags I would knit in fabulous silk, cotton and wool yarns.  I had already decided that I was giving up on sleeves so sweaters would no longer be an option.  I was pumped.  Unfortunately, due to family commitments I was unable to attend the book club meeting but I did get a report from my friend Karen who picked both the book and the project. 

The project, a scarf, was billed as a two hour effort; all ‘knit’ stitches, nothing fancy, no purls, no yarn-overs, no slip stitches or anything complicated.  It was knit with a double strand of yarn so the idea was to pull one end from the outside of the skein and one end from the inside, hold them together and knit with the two strands.  This is harder than it sounds.  According to Karen much wine-fueled hilarity ensued as the yarn got increasingly more and more tangled.  Eventually everyone managed to get untangled, cast on the 12 stitches and even actually knit a row or two.  The evening was declared a success. 

The next day Karen dropped my yarn and knitting needles off at my house so I could catch up.  I read the directions, discovered that I had the wrong size needles, decided that I would cast on 14 stitches instead of 12 to make up for using slightly smaller needles and then I set to work.  The outside end of the yarn was easy to find.  I began to root around inside the skein to find the inside end.  Then the tangling began.  Two hour project indeed.  After two hours all I had was a mess.  I was supposed to have a scarf not a bagful of purple spaghetti.


Every night I tried to untangle the yarn with less and less success.  Eventually my daughter, who, incidentally, was effortlessly creating a mohair and cotton confection with a definite lacy pattern on scary-looking double ended needles, suggested I cut the yarn at the knot and keep trying.  I thought cutting was the easy way out so I soldiered on.  Still I had no success. 

My husband is a casual fisherman.  Fishing lines frequently get tangled and he is quite good at getting them untangled.  I thought that if I sat on the sofa with my purple pile of spaghetti and looked sad he might take pity on me and do the untangling for me.  Sadly he did not rise to the bait. 

Eventually I cut the yarn but it still didn’t help.  Time was running out.  It was two days before our next meeting and everyone supposedly was bringing their projects.  I didn’t have a project; I had a mess.  So I did what any sane person would do, and what I should have done sooner, I went to buy more yarn.  This time I got two skeins so I would only have to deal with the outside end and the proper size needles.  Then I got busy.  Luckily by the time the meeting rolled around I had about 20 rows done and it actually was beginning to look like a scarf. 

At the meeting we shared our projects, at least Karen and I did.  The others said they ‘forgot’ to bring theirs but I think that was code for ‘I was embarrassed to bring mine.’ 

Karen decided against giving her scarf to her daughter-in-law as a birthday gift.  It would likely send the wrong message as Karen had picked up a few stitches along the way and the shape of the scarf was definitely not rectangular.  But she is thinking about a baby sweater for an expected grandchild and I still have the visions of scarves and shawls, so I think I will continue. 

Our next book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  I hope this doesn’t involve cooking."

Here is my finished project:

 

I have a new project.  It is supposed to be a felted hobo-style bag.  Clearly I have not made much progress.

 


Saturday, October 4, 2008

Bud & Clamato


I found this a while back when Becki and Sho were here.  For the uninitiated Clamato is clam flavored tomato juice and Bud is, well Bud.  Maybe this is a big hit I know nothing about but is it vile? You betcha.......