Magic Hands Workshop

Broken Hearts and Farewells

2011-12-13T18:04:00.003-06:00

I haven't posted in a long long while. I was too busy living to write about it. I've had lots of ideas, but no urge to type. I find now that I must.

Over the time I blogged, something that started as a business and craft site very quickly became Guess What The Dog Did. Bander has always had a way of doing that, making everything revolve around him.

I've posted endlessly about his fears, his quirks, his anxieties and his need for prozac. I've shared his surgeries and his truly mind-boggling level of financial support. There are also things I didn't say much about, and I hope they were understood - his dignity, his endless patience, his courage, and his unbelievably sweet disposition. Along with his high level of dependence on us, came a level of trust in everything we asked of him. He was a perfect gentleman in restaurants, at the vet, or in noisy crowds.

Yeah, that's past tense you're reading. Because he is crossing the bridge tomorrow, and we are already reeling with pain and loss.

With Bander's death, the blog ends.

Early Endings

2010-12-08T22:23:00.003-06:00

I am damn near done. I have a little bit of stock left - like, about enough to fill a shoebox. And - you'll think I lost my mind when I tell you this - we're moving this coming weekend.

We're just going across town, to a place that is better for us and WAY better for the dog, and if you've read this blog for more than one entry you know he gets three votes and Jesse and I get one each. But the fact remains that we're moving, and I should have my head examined.

What this all boils down to is that I am NOT going to make it until December 31st. I think I might make it until December 15th.

So, two weeks early, at most. I can just barely manage it.

Black Friday Stuff

2010-11-26T07:14:00.002-06:00

Well, I decided to drop the four bar pack down to $16.50, just to make it a better deal. I you already bought one, you'll be getting a refund.

While I'm at it, how about a free lip balm with every purchase over $20 - and free shipping for everything over $50. Sound good?

Thanksgiving Weekend Specials

2010-11-24T07:20:00.003-06:00

You'll probably be amazed to hear that I did manage to throw together a sale package for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. From now until Sunday night, I'm listing a four bar sale pack, for $18 plus $4.95 flat rate shipping (that's the US shipping cost - orders to other countries are higher).

I'm low on quite a few scents, so everything is on a first come, first served basis - grab 'em while you can.

May your pies be plentiful - and thanks!

Dazed and Confused

2010-11-07T10:18:00.004-06:00

First of all, thank god for the time change, because I flat-out NEEDED that extra hour.

Secondly, I probably need another hour, maybe even a whole day. See, here's the thing: My whole goal in life is to take all the curing soap and finished products and get everything stamped and wrapped and labeled and whatever else they need, because some of the orders I'm getting these days are rather large, and life is a LOT better if I can just cruise down the rack of stuff that's ready to ship and sling it all into the box. Plus, I can't keep track of stock if it's in fifteen different stages (and therefore in different spots in the workroom).

So I am trying to catch up. One of the things I'm behind on is lip balms. I have a large order to go to a wholesale client. The lip balms are all made - I poured them and shoved each batch into a ziploc with the name written on the outside. What I have NOT done is apply each finicky label and wrap them in the little shrink wrap tubes.

Here's the thing: the labels have to be carefully applied because they barely fit, and it's easy to overlap the edge of the lid and glue the damn things shut if you don't watch it. Secondly, the tubes are small slippery ovals, and the heat gun blows a wide path, so it's pretty much like trying to shrink wrap an effing minnow while frying the fingerprints right off your hands.

So I put it off. And now I have a big pile of ziploc bags full of cranky little lip balms lying in wait.

I decided to be brave. I jumped in and started working on bag #1, carefully gluing the label down - Honey flavored - and then gave myself third degree burns while shrink wrapping. I was all pleased and proud that I had at least one flavor done, until I noticed that the outside of the ziploc bag I was putting them back into said "Vanilla Mint" instead of "Honey".

But there's a bag over there that ALSO says "Vanilla Mint". And bag #3 that says "Honey". WTF is this bag in front of me? I sealed them all, so I can't pop one open and smell it. And why did I make an extra batch of one of the flavors? And which extra batch did I make? What if it isn't Honey OR Vanilla Mint, but one of the other flavors I was supposed to make? WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING?

So, that's my Sunday morning. I am sitting here glaring at a little pile of Heisenberg Uncertainty Balms, and wondering when the skin on my fingers will grow back so I can un-label each one of the little bastards and start over.

How's YOUR day?

On The Curing Rack

2010-10-24T12:50:00.009-05:00

Man, I am pedaling as fast as I can here, and kinda sorta keeping up. Blowing through raw materials at an alarming rate, too. I honestly can't imagine what it's going to be like NOT to have hundreds of pounds of various vegetable oils in the workroom, but the time is coming up soon.

Anyway, here are a few things that will be back on Etsy shortly:

Bitter End

Cedar & Saffron

Pipeline Porter

And one Endangered Species:

Firelight Salt Bar - only two of this one left.

More later - back to the salt mines for me!

Old Dog, New Tricks

2010-10-13T22:38:00.004-05:00

When we got the Bander-Boo, he was terrified of cars. Since he's also afraid of rain, thunder, airplanes, being left alone, firecrackers, and Wes Craven films, this isn't a big surprise.

Well, we got the chance to take a drive just for funsies the other day. And you know, there's hope for Bander the Neurotic Wonder Dog yet. Because look at this:

Is this the face of somebody who's afraid of cars? No, in fact, this is the face of somebody who has figured out that we're in the drive-through waiting for cheeseburgers.

He didn't get one, don't be silly.

He gets McNuggets.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

2010-10-09T09:03:00.006-05:00

Well, I announced this in my newsletter, so I guess it's time to put something on the blog. Just to make it official in multiple places.

I'm closing up shop at the end of the year.

I realize that this has gone through the grapevine and might not be news, but I also keep getting messages from people who want to know WHY, so I suppose I can explain a bit.

I had originally planned to make soap full time. And for the first half of the year, that's exactly how life went. Then came the oil spill, and the economic blow to the community. Long story short, I got a full time day job.

So Jesse and I are both working full time, and I was back to running the soap business at night. Which is exactly what I did for the nine years before this.

And perhaps you see the problem before I saw it. I pretty much chucked everything and changed my whole life, moved from one coast to the other, all so I could have a life instead of the endless round of work/sleep/work that California had become.

I needed some time to live, to enjoy my wonderful hubby. To pet the dog until I wore the fur right off him. Maybe take a walk, or have a day off. What was the point of this big move if I was going to be locked in either the office or the soap room every single day?

Don't get me wrong, I'll miss the business. But I'm missing my life. And I can always start another business, while this one life is all I'm going to get. So one job, with a little massage on the side (something else I miss doing, and have no time for right now) - that's a schedule that allows me some time to breathe.

And sit.

And possibly read a book.

Or work on a painting.

Or do a little sewing.

I'll spend the next couple of months using up the materials I have on hand, and selling off the ready stock, and then I'm going to sit in the park and watch Bander chase squirrels.

It sounds completely peaceful.

Endangered Species

2010-09-29T20:11:00.004-05:00

Two kinds of soap that are just about gone - Lemony Snickets and Tonic Salt Bars.

And two that are coming in soon - restocks of Pink Grapefruit Salt Bars and Alabaster Salt Bars. Be sure and let me know if you have special requests!

No More Big Bombs

2010-09-25T17:59:00.001-05:00

Well, so much for giving anybody notice. But I just broke my effing bath bomb press that makes the great big bombs, so that's the end of that. There are a few fragrances with one each, and that's the end of the giant bombs.

If you want the regular bombs, I still have those, and I can do custom scents in the smaller size.

*sigh* Stupid bomb press.

It Ain't Over Till It's Over

2010-09-22T19:27:00.009-05:00

I may have panicked a couple of people with an email I sent a few days ago. Just to clarify things a bit:

I am not out of anything just yet. In fact, I have stuff on the curing rack. I will be making everything I can manage for the next few weeks, then I am going to ship out everything except the dog and my clean socks. I will eventually start to run completely out of stuff, so I'll be posting two things here, fairly regularly:

1. On The Rack -upcoming stock, for sale shortly.

2. Endangered Species - things that are going quick and will not be back.

I hope that will help a bit - and let's start with what's coming out in the next couple of weeks!

Waterfall, Turkish Mocha, and Red Currant Salt Bars. More to come!

Walmart Is A Comedy Goldmine

2010-09-19T15:18:00.007-05:00

People have been asking me if I was ever going to blog again.

Okay, fine, I'm back.

I spent most of the summer in a pretty bleak state of mind, and nothing kills my creativity faster than depression. But I finally found something that was so effing ridiculous that I couldn't stay in a funk.

I was walking down the aisle at Walmart - yes, I know, they're reprehensible corporate bastards, but there are some things you can't buy elsewhere, not here in South Alabama.

Anyway, I was in Satan's Discount Den, looking for socks or bug spray or some damn thing, and I overheard the following snippet:

God strike me dead for laughing at some poor bastard who's about to be unemployed, but that's funny right there.

So I'm back.

I have more to say about work and mythology and soap and Walmart, but I don't wanna blow it all in one day. Stay tuned.

Oil Spill Update

2010-06-02T21:05:00.003-05:00

The spill is about five miles directly offshore, being blown north toward us right now. It's completely heartbreaking.

And try not to think about what happens if a hurricane or heavy storm comes ashore - black oil rain across the eastern US.

I'm too depressed to post any more.

Time and Tide

2010-05-25T21:15:00.011-05:00

Another much-needed day off today.

I've been spending endless hours trying to make bath bombs lately, in humidity of 85% or above. If you're a fellow bomber, you're laughing your ass off right now because from a technical angle making bombs in this weather is like trying to thread a needle while you jump up and down on a trampoline after drinking a couple of six packs and taking a handful of Ambien. I have lots of failed ugly warty bombs on hand right now and my frustration level is through the roof.

So, in a rare but delightful day off together, Jesse and I decided to head for the beach.

Bander wasn't invited, sadly - which is fine, because we've found some lovely folks to do his day care, and he hates water. So we dropped him off early, and headed out for a quick round of shopping.We had to do the shopping because we both needed new thongs and I needed a new bathing suit (NOT a thong). In fact, the bathing suit was a daunting task; I have a couple of problem areas.

I was hoping for something with a bit more coverage than my past suits - a vintage style would have been my most flattering option, like this little Victorian number.

We settled for an extremely basic black number from the clearance rack, and headed out for the Gulf of Mexico. We've been living here for six months now, half a year, and this is our first chance to get in the water. We chose Navarre as our baptismal point, although nearly any beach would have done. The water temp is 82 degrees, not quite bathwater yet - it'll get warmer as the year goes on - and there was a little choppy surf, but nothing like what we're used to.

It was certainly time to wash away some debris and pieces of the past, and time to soak up the local waters. We played and splashed in the water, stopped for a terrific seafood lunch, took a stroll, and picked up the dog. It was a lovely day.

Only one drawback, brought to you by my pale Irish skin:

SUNBURN. Dear god, I look like a cranky boiled lobster. Now shut up and don't touch me.

Eeeewww, Part Teeeeewwwww

2010-05-23T09:53:00.003-05:00

Since I don't want you to end up looking at bugs, here's something awful that you can look at instead. Give yourself bonus points if you own any of the items shown.

Denim Disasters - The Ugliest Jeans Ever

EEEEEWWWW

2010-05-23T09:30:00.002-05:00

Okay, it's going to be another post without pictures. That's because I'm kind and considerate and don't want to squick you out.

Because here's the thing: summer in Florida includes mandatory visits of Palmetto Bugs. If you've never seen one of these beasts, the first thing you should do is spend 20 minutes or so thinking about how lucky you are and then congratulate yourself for living somewhere reasonable.

Palmetto Bugs are Florida cockroaches. They're 2-3 inches long, not afraid of light, and they FLY. The effing monsters FLY. They also run toward you if you startle them. And they bite.

Bander is horribly confused by them. At first, he thought they were mice (yes, they're that big). One got in the house last night and he started chasing it until he actually got close, and then he got all big eyed and ran away. When a bug is big enough to scare away a hundred pound dog, it's pretty big.

I used my patented Palmetto Bug killing technique, which is to flap my hands like a wounded chicken and do my Special Roach Dance while I scream for Jesse to come kill it. When he isn't home, I either stun them with a broom and sweep them away - since I don't have to get any closer than the length of the broom handle - or, if I miss with the first whack and make the giant bug angry, I run away. Since they fly and I can't, this involves a lot of panicking and slamming doors. Of course Jesse is reading this while I type and keeps reminding me that they can crawl under the doors and now I'm afraid to ever sleep again unless I can find some sort of combo jammies/beekeeper getup.

Bugs are gross.

Love Shack

2010-05-06T18:59:00.010-05:00

I both love and hate our current house.

(No, this is not our actual decrepit shack. It's close, though.)

I love the trees, of course. And I love the fact that we have workroom and workshop space. I love that it's an older house, and has some character and charm that you just don't find in new cookie-cutter houses. It reminds me of my grandmother's farm house from early childhood. When I look out at the yard I keep thinking I should plant tomatoes or keep chickens. (Neither of which I have time for, mind you.)

I hate the neighbors, or at least their hellspawn kids. I hate the fact that since our house is old, the rooms are very very small. Our queen-sized bed is damn near wall-to-wall, and that's in the biggest bedroom. And right now I hate the landlord.
Here are the things that have broken, since we moved in:

1. The heater, twice, during January. It was forty degrees in the house one night.
2. The plumbing. Apparently the pipes for the washer and dryer were installed by chimps, because if you do more than a very small load of laundry, the sink in the garage overflows.
3. The fence. We had to do our own repairs, just for Bander's safety.
4. The plumbing some more. There's a leak in the backyard somewhere. Which I suppose means that I don't have to water, which is fine.
5, And now.... the air conditioning has decided to be fussy.
This is indeed the South. I can't describe our natural surroundings without using words like "lush", "green", "humid", and possibly "dank". "Moss-covered" and "languid" are high on the list, too. It isn't truly hot yet, not full summertime hot, but it's warm. And if the house is empty during the day, when we get home it's in the high 80's inside, and dammit, we need a little AC to bring it down to a balmy and tolerable 79.

What we've learned about the landlord is that they will wait until I raise seven different kinds of hell before they actually fix anything. The plumbing issues are something we've been discussing since mid-March, and we've seen a plumber exactly once. He scratched his head, opined that they needed to replumb half the house, and drove off. That was the end of that.

They did fix the heater, since it was broken when we moved in and it was actually possible to get frostbite in the living room. They promised to send tree trimmers and fence repairmen, but that never happened because there wasn't any health risk. I bet I have to bitch a LOT before they worry about whether I'm a mite warm this evening.

I'm sure I could use the plumbing issues to break the lease. But I just got all the boxes unpacked, not that long ago.

What should I do?

She's a Killer Queen

2010-04-30T15:55:00.005-05:00

I am a murderer.

So, one of the things we have here in the new house is a cute little garden window in the kitchen - the sort where you grow herbs in pots and use them for cooking.

I've been making a lot of my own salad dressings lately, and fresh herbs are expensive, so I ran out and got some cute pots and hardy looking little plants, and spent part of last weekend planting and arranging my new friends.

As of today, I can no longer pretend that there is ANY way the cilantro is still alive or could ever stage a comeback. I have things in the outside compost heap that have more life left in them than this poor thing does.

Cilantro is generally pretty hardy, and tough to kill, but I did it in record time. The poor thing looks like I filled the pot with dirt, watered it carefully, and then set it on fire. From across the room with a blowtorch.

I guess I won't be making salsa any time soon.

I was going to take a picture so you could all be sad with me, but the battery in the camera is dead. I am reeling from the irony.

At Last!

2010-04-29T21:03:00.004-05:00

Guess what's finally ready?

Perfume!

The first three scents available are Maui Sunrise, Ambre de Nepal, and Wildwood Rose. I'm off to list them on Etsy right now!

Uninvited Guest

2010-04-26T09:29:00.010-05:00

A few days ago I wandered out into the back yard where Bander was relaxing, to find an unexpected visitor. It was a Miniature Pinscher that lives a couple of blocks away.
If you're not familiar with the MinPin, they look like tiny little Dobermans:

They're little dogs, about the size of Chihuahuas. Now, we have a large yard, and the fence is not in the best condition. We've repaired any holes that Bander might get through, but since Bander is about the same size as Tom Hanks this just meant a few planks. If we want to patch all the holes that Little Dog can get through, we'd pretty much have to replace the entire fence. Since we have a really big yard that's a big expense, and we're renters, so forget that idea.

I know where Little Dog lives. I've taken her home a couple of times, but she gets out of her own yard just as easily as she gets into mine. Her owners haven't been home when I went by, but you can see evidence of many, many attempts to patch each and every hole. Clearly they're failing, since all the other neighbors have told us that Little Dog runs all over the neighborhood all the time.

Lately, though, she comes straight to my house. I'm pretty sure that Little Dog is in heat and she seems to have chosen Bander as her life partner. This is a poor choice since I estimate that Bander outweighs her by 85 pounds, and he lacks some of the essential equipment for the job. He was neutered before the rescue group even put him up for adoption, so Little Dog has missed the window of opportunity by oh, four and a half years or so.

This does not keep her from trying. She dances around Bander and wags wildly. He's not so happy to have other dogs in his space. but seems to tolerate small ones better than big ones. He hasn't tried to eat her yet but I bet he's considering it.

She's showing signs that she'd like to live here, although she's clearly well fed and cared for, and we are NOT in the market to own a highly active but not terribly bright Little Dog, particularly one that is an escape artist.

Right now Bander and I are hiding inside with the doors closed pretending that we're not home, while Little Dog prances around impatiently on our back porch. I hope she finds a different boyfriend soon, because I'd like to go outside at some point this summer.

Into each life....

2010-04-23T07:06:00.004-05:00

Today I'm going to be loading tote boxes with product and piling them into the car, along with tents and tables. I'm getting ready to go do a weekend craft fair in Milton, Florida. Setup is tonight, and the show is Saturday and Sunday.

I've found a sitter for Bander, who will take care of him until I'm done, since Saturday is a long day - twelve hours. I take him with me to a lot of fairs and markets, but that's a long time for him to just sit there, wondering what the hell Mama is waiting for.

And guess what the weather prediction says?

That's right, ladies and gents, I'm going to go stand outside in the rain for twelve hours straight and see whether my tent attracts lightning.

But you gotta go try. Dammit.

Homework, Lesson Four: Sweating the Small Stuff

2010-04-19T13:01:00.008-05:00

If you've been dealing with life-changing stress for the past year, and your focus is on whether someone else has a driver's license, you are focusing on the wrong fucking thing. It's quite astonishing to me how petty and self-flagellating some people can be, to the extent that they hobble themselves in every single endeavor.

I watched somebody do this recently in their personal life - obsess over a minor detail, and miss a one-time-only opportunity. Of course, it's true in business as well.

I know we've all heard it said before - focus on the big picture. Choose your battles wisely.

There will be day-to-day setbacks. There will be slow afternoons. There will be soap batches that came out.... well, stinky. There will be moments of horrible self doubt, wondering where the rent payment will be coming from.

You will make yourself crazy if you keep your focus on the here and now. Watch the horizon, the long-term trends, the overall course. If you're a freeway driver, and you're any good at it, you know that you watch several car lengths ahead. If you just obsess over the bumper immediately ahead of you, and mutter angrily to yourself over the number of Qs they got in their license plate - unfairly, to be sure - you are NEVER going to move past this plate. You've just earned yourself a permanent spot behind that car.

So. Look up. Look out. Raise your viewpoint, expand your horizons. That way you can see how the road ahead moves and flows, you can enjoy the trip and allow yourself to plan your path.
Or keep your focus on the unfair plate right ahead of you and stay small and petty.

Your choice. Just remember who made the decision on how you'd be guided.

PS - yeah, that IS a picture of Tom Petty. Some concepts are surprisingly hard to illustrate.

Busy Bee

2010-04-07T13:27:00.006-05:00

Sorry I'm late, but I picked up an office temp job for a few days, and since the dog hasn't learned to make soap yet, the goldbricker, I was filing during the day and soaping at night and thus had no time left for blogging.

So, a couple of quick updates - one, we found a lovely little open field only a couple of blocks from our house that we walk the dog to, early in the morning. This is a good view of the bayou across the street from us (mostly it's blocked by houses).

The only odd thing was the moment when we figured out that it wasn't always an empty lot - it quite clearly used to have a house there, and I'll bet you five bucks that it was flattened by Hurricane Ivan. There's a lot immediately next to our house that has nothing left but a foundation and a sidewalk, and I'm sure that it was an Ivan casualty, too. We didn't realize how hard our neighborhood got hit. I can't tell if that makes me feel terrified, or comfortable because seriously, what are the odds that we'd get another direct hit like that?

Besides, I had to run from fires, and we missed the recent earthquake, so I'm prepared to flee storms if I have to. We got a piece of very useful advice from a native: "If it's over a Cat 3, take your kids and your wallet and run." Okey dokey!

And to end on a positive note, I know I showed you the tree in my front yard a few months ago. Here's the back yard tree, even bigger and a little more beautiful.

Just don't talk to me about rakes right now.

Chatterbox

2010-03-29T21:26:00.004-05:00

Well, the weekend was EXHAUSTING. Friday and Saturday I did the first live craft show I've done in years. And wow, are they tiring!

I did get to break out my new banner with the newly updated logo - here's a quick shot of the booth. I quite like it. Modern and funky, not as serious as the old one. I think it suits me more this way.

Now, I don't know what anybody else's sales technique is, but mine is talking. Talk talk talk talk talk. I talk to customers, other vendors, spectators, passersby, everybody. I don't even talk about soap, necessarily - this weekend I talked about finances, weather, bagpipes, Hawaiian music, dogs, belly dancing.... it was endless. I babble a whole lot. It's sort of stand up comedy crossed with street busking and a side of soap selling.

Bander went with me, since he's been having lots of anxiety and overreactions to noise - Jesse was busy and I couldn't leave the Bander-Boo by himself, so he hung out in the tent all weekend. As per usual, he was the most popular person at the festival. And he spent a good while barking at the bagpipe players, but by the end of it all he was taking everything in stride.

And we did pretty well sales wise, too - so overall a great success for both me and the dog. It's just that I'm out of small talk for the moment. I'll be back when I think of something important to say.

Homework, Lesson Three: Schedules Are Not Just For Trains

2010-03-21T21:09:00.013-05:00

I think a lot of us who are working for ourselves, from home, are drawn to it partly because we all imagine that we'll be free as birds, able to do what we want to, when we want to do it.

Pardon me while I kill myself laughing.

Because here's what really happens; work is often erratic, especially in a growing business and a difficult economy. When the opportunities to work crop up, you'll grab them. For an online retail business, what this means is some days with no orders, where you bite your nails and wonder if you're doing everything wrong, and some days with so many orders that you work up a sweat trying to get the boxes packed.

If you're lucky, the cash flow averages out at a point where you can make the rent payment. It's likely to be some months a bit over and some a bit short, just to make life really really exciting.

Your workday will be at the mercy of the weather, the number and duration of walks the dog thinks he needs, the amount of laundry that's gotten backlogged, the incoming orders, the upcoming shows, and the availability of supplies. You will have moments of overwhelming success followed by crushing bouts of self-doubt and visions of living on the street.

There is only one way to maintain sanity in the middle of all this.

Make a schedule. I know, you quit so you didn't have to adhere to a schedule, but guess what? You now have the toughest boss on the planet, and it's YOU. You'll work harder for yourself than you ever have for another person. Want to cope with this terrible boss?

I know. It's awful. Make a schedule.

You need to have times that you work, and times that you don't. Your family and friends need to know what your working hours are, so they don't assume that "working from home" means "available for annoying errands and social engagements". You need to pay attention, too, so that you don't decide that your morning would be best spent eating leftover pizza and watching "Revenge of the Nerds".

And your time off needs to be time spent NOT working. Just sneaking in a few minutes of printing labels turns into hours of work if you're not careful. And off time is an important thing - it keeps the creative juices flowing, prevents burnout, and makes you a lot more fun to be around.

Time off does not mean eating leftover pizza and watching "Revenge of the Nerds", by the way. It means getting your ass OUT OF THE HOUSE. Go somewhere, do something! If you work at home, getting a change of scenery is absolutely vital. Even a walk around the block is a start.

Now, why are you sitting here reading this? You should either be working or playing. Go!

Build Your Own Log Splitter

2010-03-20T22:23:00.018-05:00

Brace yourselves - I'm going to actually talk about soapmaking for a change. I happened to mention on a forum I belong to that I'd built my own log splitter, and several people asked me for pictures and a description. If you're not a soapmaker, this should bore the poo out of you. If you ARE a soapmaker, this is a great piece of equipment, and it was super dooper cheap.

Let me start by saying that I have very little in the way of power tools - if you have a full wood shop you can probably make a prettier version.

This thing is called a log splitter - it takes a slab of soap and turns it into logs that then get sliced into bars. Let me just apologize up front for the pics - the lighting in my workroom is not great for photos. Anyway, here's the beast:

This is built from a sheet of melamine, coated on both sides. I used it for a few reasons - it's easy to clean with a wet cloth, it's smooth and it slides on itself, and it was on sale because it's a partial sheet. Cost nearly nothing. The edges of the sheet are a little chipped, but I don't care. The top slider is roughly 30 inches long, to handle my standard soap slabs, which are 24 inches. The slit in the sliding sheet is roughly 26 inches - and going through the slit, from the overhead metal bar to the support underneath, is a guitar string (unwound E). The string is held at the top with a tuning key - I bought both the string and the key at Guitar Center, about $13 including a replacement set.

To make sure that the top slider stays absolutely straight when it slides back and forth, I made a channel in the support and attached a thin square molding strip.

This is the slab of soap I'm going to split into logs. It's a twenty pound slab of Raspberry Fizz, and it smells wonderful. It's going to be split into three logs, each 24 inches long and 3.5 inches wide.

I've brushed the top of the slab with some silver mica before cutting. Now the slab is in position on the top slider, just touching the guitar string.

The first log has been split from the slab and removed. I've repositioned the slab on the edge of the slider, again touching the guitar string. I'll just push the slider along, with slow even pressure, and let the wire make the cut for me.

Ignore the sound. I didn't realize our camera would record video, so I wasn't talking. Duh.

This is the log after splitting, turned onto it's side.

After a few hours for the logs to dry, I'm now cutting them into bars. This batch was made with coconut milk, which tends to add a blue tone to fresh soap - these will cure to be a violet shade with white swirls. It's on the curing rack, letting the dehumidifier do it's thing.

I estimate that this cost me about $23 to build, using nothing more complicated than a circular saw and a drill.

Questions? Feel free to ask!

Fruit is Dangerous

2010-03-17T07:16:00.004-05:00

From a new blog I tripped over, My Food Looks Funny. From people who have a lot more free time than I do.

The Sky is Falling

2010-03-11T09:55:00.009-06:00

Have I mentioned that the dog is afraid of thunder?

Well, welcome to springtime in the South.

Tuesday night we had some intense rain and thunder in small cells, which scared the bejeebers out of Bander-Boo. He generally reacts by huffing and pacing and panting and trying to get our attention. Jessie can sleep through the antics, but I'm a light sleeper and I can't. On the basis that at least one of the three family members should get a decent night's sleep, I always get up, take the dog into the living room, and close the bedroom door. The dog then proceeds to get on my very last nerve while keeping me awake until the weather clears.

Tuesday, that was bad, but not awful - I ended up going to bed at 10:30, getting up at 2:00, going back to bed at 4:30 and getting up again for the day at 6:00. Five hours, rocky but manageable.

Except that it rained and thundered again last night. Started at around 10 pm and didn't stop until 4 in the morning. So I fell asleep at 4 am and got up for the day at 6:30, a very short 2 1/2 hours later.

Guess what's predicted for tonight?

I can't be mad at the dog for being afraid. He's not doing it on purpose. And the most effective way, we've learned, to handle his fear is to ignore it. Not to comfort him or yell or do anything at all.

And I can't be mad at the dog today, either, because dogs don't go "ooo, I bet she's just cranky over last night, or that time I said mean things about her sister." Dogs are the ultimate Zen masters - they live in the NOW. This is why punishment in general doesn't work well as a training tool, because dogs just don't connect past actions to current reactions.

All Bander knows today, right this minute, is that he's tired, too. He didn't sleep any more than Mama did. He tried to find a quiet place in the yard but didn't get much farther than the back steps.

I am doing my very best to be patient. But god help people who cross my path. I will therefore stay home today, and prep for the coming storm. By napping, if I'm lucky.

Homework, Lesson Two: Oprah Is Not Research

2010-03-10T07:30:00.005-06:00

I mentioned in my last post that I personally fall into the "work constantly" category. That's both a blessing and a curse. A lot of people find themselves in the "I'll get to it pretty soon" group.

I understand this, I really do. One of the big benefits of working from home is that you get to make your own schedule, and be your own boss. If you're not a morning person, and I most certainly am not one, you don't have to get started at 7 am. Heck, you don't have to start until 9 am. It's when you drift off to noonish that the trouble starts.

If you don't have a clear view of what the day entails and what the plan is, it's pretty easy to just check the television (or internet) before you start working. Since each television now has about a zillion channels, chances are high that you'll find something you'd rather be doing than recording your expense receipts for the fiscal quarter.

That leads to a day of watching old movies and eating bon bons with your feet up. We all need those days, once in a while. Pretty easy to take a second day, 'cause you're tired and you worked hard last week. Soon it's Thursday. Then the twentieth and you suddenly realize that you need to mail the rent check and you haven't done a damn thing all month. You can justify it all you want, but if you have to borrow cash to pay the landlord anything you say will sound like an excuse.

What you have to do, to be a success at this working from home gig, is to harness the power of inertia. It's pretty simple: bodies in motion tend to remain in motion. Bodies at rest tend to lay on the couch and eat Cheetos.

Try to plan ahead, to give yourself something to accomplish each working day. A scheduled task. You can watch TV after you finish, but you might find that once you've accomplished one thing, you're ready for a second thing. Just keep moving, and you're golden.

Homework, Lesson One; Jammies Are Not Sportswear

2010-03-07T21:42:00.009-06:00

Well, not so much homework as working from home.

A lot more people are finding ways to work from home these days. I've done it more than once, in different jobs, so I thought I'd share some of the things I've learned.

There are a few different categories that your bad habits can fall into. The first one, my own personal trait, is the "working too much" slot. That's when you find yourself saying "oh, just one more package" and everyone else has gone to bed already because it's midnight.

First of all, I don't care how cute your jammies are. You'll need to take them off some time, and put on real clothes.

Sure, the mailbox is pretty close, but the neighbors will notice you running down the driveway in your onesie. And it does NOT look like a jogging suit, no matter what you've told yourself in the house. Yeah, it sucks up twenty valuable minutes. Get your butt into the shower and then put on some damn clothes. And comb your hair.

And like everything else I know, I learned this the hard way. It was years ago, and the details are way too mortifying, but when you meet the handsomest man EVER you don't want to be thinking "Did I shower this week? I don't think so. " and hoping to god that the wind doesn't shift.

I have soaping clothes now, and since I work with lots of oils and colorants they look like hell, but they're real daytime clothes. I look like hell, but they're not jammies.

We'll talk about schedules in another post. First, get dressed and have some coffee. And maybe some toast.

Have two cups. You're gonna be busy.

Fighting Boredom With Bacon

2010-03-02T18:36:00.011-06:00

I spent most of the morning doing admin stuff for the business, while Jessie went on a job interview. Once we finished our respective tasks, I dragged him to the store with me so I could do a little shopping for photo props. That meant a trip to World Market.

I know you'll all be surprised to hear that I got distracted in the chocolate aisle. Not just distracted, but well and truly boggled. Mostly by this:Yep, you're reading the ingredients right.

There's no possible way I could pass up such a thing, of course. So I furtively shoved one into the basket and nonchalantly strolled up to the checkout line before Jessie could stop me.

It looked pretty normal when we peeled back the foil, so we each tried a small bite, and gave it an honest try.

Jessie carefully contemplated the flavor.

I'm not sure he enjoyed it all that much.

Anyway, here's our final analysis.

A tip if you try this candy: Keep something to cleanse your palate handy. Sandpaper works pretty well, especially with a nice Draino chaser. Bleck.

Please Stand By

2010-03-01T11:52:00.004-06:00

So, we had some ongoing technical difficulties with our website. Until we get things fixed, we've changed everything over to the Etsy store for now. Which was a big pain in the butt because I have all the technical know-how of the average turnip.

This also gave me the chance to update the newsletter format - and it went out this morning. I think I managed to transfer all the subscribers over, but if I missed you, please let me know.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go break some stuff here at the house, too.

Signs of Spring

2010-02-23T18:32:00.007-06:00

Guess what? I'm not cranky!

Well, not right this second. I was earlier today, and I'll probably get there again before bedtime, but right now I'm fine and dandy. And that's because, frozen though we've been, I'm seeing signs of actual springtime.

(Side note: yes, fellow Floridians, I have heard that this is the coldest winter in many many years and many of you are just as surprised as I am, but this is my blog so the only complaints that matter are mine. Plus we had to go buy long pants, so I'm all indignant about that.)

Anyway, in addition to my lovely live oak tree in the front yard, we have this fabulous thing:

It started blooming about two or three weeks ago, which bodes well for some nice warm weather to come along soon. I think it might be a crepe myrtle - if anyone wants to chime in and confirm it, or give me other suggestions, I'd be grateful.

And it's covered in gorgeous blossoms, though sadly no fragrance.

Whatever it is, it's gorgeous, and it's right outside my front door.

Today's Tip

2010-02-20T09:15:00.004-06:00

If you are working with glue and glitter, the ceiling fan should remain in the OFF position.

Goddamn it.

My God, A Day Off

2010-02-17T19:41:00.011-06:00

I've been locked in the soap room for a solid six weeks now. Except for the days I'm locked in the wrapping room. So I was really thrilled to take an actual entire day off.

Jesse and I are still exploring the area, so we decided on a drive. Bad dog-parents that we are, we took Bander to doggie day care for a bath and some baby sitting. Then we took off to take a look at one of the resort areas, Perdido Key.

Perdido Key looks mighty fine from the air, and not so shabby from the ground. It was a little surprising that the beaches were dead empty - even on a Wednesday in February, in California you'd never get an empty beach.

We were driving east (toward the top of the pic) along the water, noticing how we seemed to have the place all to ourselves. We'd gone out with some notion of getting lunch or something, but a lot of the restaurants were still closed, so we kept heading east until we crossed over into Alabama. (This includes driving through, I am not making this up, Floribama.) We finally paused in Orange Beach, Alabama, for coffee and beginets.

Beginets are one of my favorite things about living in this area so far. It's like a donut lived a saintly life and then came back as something better. And then that something better got deep fried and sprinkled with several pounds of powdered sugar. Jesse had never eaten a beginet, and kept arguing that we could get mayonnaise at home. I swear he goes deaf sometimes just to spite me.

So, I knew that beginets were delicious. What I didn't know is that it's not advisable to eat them in a moving car, and certainly not while wearing dark clothes. Because the minute that you hit a bump, this hot fresh delicious confection turns into Satan's Fritter of Doom and bounces out of your hand and leaves powdered sugar donut prints down the front incline of your clothes, so that if you go out in public for the rest of the day everyone will be able to look at your shirt and secretly condemn you for being a sloppy eater while simultaneously being jealous of the beginet that you obviously had earlier. Plus you attract ants.

We tried to get past the problem by eating faster. Bigger bites, simultaneously. Jesse found that his sugary bite glued itself to the roof of his mouth, rendering him unable to speak and warn me not to take a big bite. Which is too bad, because I took a giant bite and then inhaled or something and accidentally sent about six pounds of sugar rocketing up into my sinuses from the inside. If I had only had a blowhole I would have looked like Old Faithful.

We pulled the car over and got out, hoping to stop wheezing and finish our breakfast but the wind whipped the box top out of Jesse's hands and then plastered me with a drift of sugar from head to foot. We threw the damn things away.

We were stopped at a perfectly lovely state park but I was pretty bitchy about being lightly glazed so we didn't stay for too long. Approximately a nanosecond. But Jesse did take a photo to prove that we were there.

Anyway, we drove home, had a late lunch at a decent (but not wonderful) Mexican restaurant, and picked up the dog. He had been bathed and perfumed and smells like a big green apple with horrible breath. Plus we smelled like donuts but didn't bring him any so there's a sort of cloud of resentment and Jolly Rancher dog farts in the house now.

I think it's time to go back to work.

Another Thing That Irks Me

2010-02-16T19:33:00.007-06:00

I suppose y'all thought that having no day job would cut down a bit on the things that got on my last nerve. Well, that puts you somewhere between "naive" and "entirely unfamiliar with my cranky existence".

OF COURSE things are annoying the crap out of me. Here's the one for today: people who list ingredients for products and include things like "love" and "good fortune" and "prayers" and other happy bullshit. Implying that their stuff is made with loving care and that everyone else's is made with .... lesser ingredients, certainly with inferior grades of karma.

Really? Because my products contain spite and malice. Actually, the body polish is full of loathing because it makes it much scrubbier. And my soap is made with ennui and angst, in alternating layers.

Tune in tomorrow, when I make bath bombs filled with formless dread and night sweats.

Hans Christian Andersen is a bastard

2010-02-15T21:32:00.009-06:00

This post has been brewing for a while.

Before we left California, I was wandering through the mall and I stumbled past a kid's store that was playing some Disney music - earworms, every single tune - and included in the craptacular soundblast was some blathering from The Little Mermaid.

Man, did they change THAT ending.

This really shouldn't go in my mythology category, because by and large I'm interested in the old root tales, and The Little Mermaid was written fairly recently (published 1837.) But it's such a terrible story, and got altered so much, that I couldn't leave it alone.

The Disney line of bullshit is the usual one. Plucky heroine defies her parents in order to gain the love and attention of a prince. Things do not go her way until she learns a lesson and grows up a little, and then the prince comes to her rescue. They live happily ever after. Much singing and rejoicing.

We will gloss over my thoughts about the prince coming to the rescue, simply noting that it's a big lie and repeating it in every single story doesn't make it any more true.

And it's completely different from the actual story. In the written work, the mermaid falls in love with the prince and defies her parents. Things do not go her way, until the prince marries someone else and she dies. That's right, she turns into sea foam, and then into air, where she learns that if she is good and noble in the afterlife, she might possibly go to heaven. Screw her entire life, that's wasted, but hey, she might be able to have a soul. Someday.

Andersen also wrote The Little Match Girl, about a sweet and deserving urchin who starves to death in the snow while hallucinating that she might get a big warm dinner once she gets to - you guessed it - heaven.

A lot of his writing is about completely innocent creatures sunk in misery who will have a better life once they're dead. And there's a uniquely Victorian piety about the whole thing, like he's standing around moaning "won't somebody think of the children" when instead of writing and moralizing and babbling about them going to a better world he could have maybe given one of them a fucking sandwich except he was so busy praying that they STARVED TO DEATH IN THE SNOW.

Anybody who would offer a starving child a prayer instead of a bowl of soup is an asshole. Writing children's stories and pretending that dead children are better off is a whole new level of sanctimonious bastardry.

So. Hans Christian Andersen sucks. And yeah, I know he also wrote The Emperor's New Clothes and The Ugly Duckling and those are fine, but on behalf of The Little Match Girl, I hereby declare him a bastard.

On The Curing Rack

2010-02-10T18:57:00.013-06:00

Well, I finally got the store open - last week - and of course now I'm behind on the blog. Damn, there really is no rest for the weary, is there?

I've been churning out lots of soap, though, and here's a preview of some things coming up soon - Arrogant Bastard, Gardener's Soap, Valencia, Carrot Citrus Ginger and Cucumber Mint.

More to follow soon, too!

Detours and Delays

2010-01-15T09:11:00.002-06:00

I know, I said the store would be open again by now, or within a day or two. So of course this post is a list of excuses and reasons that I was wrong.

First, when you move long distance, it only makes sense to move the minimum amount of stuff possible. So the cupboards are bare around here. I ran through all the raw materials before we left, then sold off all the stock, so I'm starting over.

Most of the suppliers I use were closed until the first week in January - so I couldn't even order anything until then. Things are arriving now - we've had a parade of trucks dropping pallets in the driveway, which is of great interest to all the neighbors and has given me plenty of time to practice with the hand truck.

And then there's the ergonomics of setting up the workspace. Deciding what goes where takes a few attempts and plenty of shuffling, either moving big heavy boxes and pails or lots of little tinkly glass bottles full of expensive essential oils.

And the dehumidifier should be arriving in a few days. It wasn't in stock, of course, but it's a necessity here in Florida. Oh, and the office has to be organized. And all the business paperwork has to be terminated in California and re-filed in Florida.

It's like starting over from scratch, really. And I'm old and slow. But I'm pushing, hard, and I'll be back as soon as I can. Really really.

Neighbors, and Why I Usually Hate Them

2010-01-11T16:53:00.000-06:00

We've been pretty quiet for a few days, I know.

We're finishing up with the unpacking chores, plus unpacking and inventorying for the business, and getting a new workroom set up, all while Jesse is job hunting. Then there are the supply orders, which are a) enormous, at least by my piddly standards and b) urgent, because we were out of everything and I am due to reopen. It's a LOT to take care of.

While this is going on, we learned something. Fireworks are legal in Florida. This is something I never considered, because when we lived in California, anyone with a firecracker would be shot on sight. One spark during dry weather and half the state would burn down. So it never even occurred to us that you could buy fireworks everywhere. There's an aisle for them in the supermarket, for pete's sake.

This is only a problem because it turns out that we live directly across the street from three hell-born urchins. If you saw Talladega Nights, and you remember the two unwashed brats that were in that movie, you can picture these kids. I've never seen their parents. What I do see is a six year old - maybe seven - out in the front yard every evening after school, with a shopping bag full of firecrackers and a lighter.

And of course, it turns out that the dog is afraid of firecrackers. I have no particular desire to be the lady who runs around the neighborhood telling all the kids to knock it off, but seriously, you let your second grader spend all his free time trying to earn the name Nine Fingered Willy?

I do know that their house is on the market, so I can only hope that they move on to torture somebody else. Or it's going to be a long, cranky summer.

Happy New Year, too!

2010-01-01T11:49:00.000-06:00

Well, happy-ish.

I am sad to report that things did not work out with Sandy. The two dogs started out tolerating each other, then moved on to being grumpy with each other, then open dislike. Within a couple of days we were experiencing physical violence, and had to break up a couple of nasty dogfights. Sandy actually bit Bander, which stunned me - they're both so very sweet with people, but hoo boy, not each other.

I talked to a couple of experts and got confirmation of my fears - that the best course of action was to return her to her owners, and give up on the adoption attempt.

I hated doing it. She was a great dog, and as far as the people part of the equation, we were an excellent match for her. But the stress was just too much for Bander, and the poor guy has been through too much to have his home turn into a place where he gets attacked.

So she's back with her former owners. They'll be looking for a home where she can be the only dog. If you want a great girl that loves kids, and don't have a dog right now, drop me a line and I'll hook you up. In the meantime, she gets all my mojo for a good home.

Bander's Christmas Present

2009-12-28T11:17:00.000-06:00

Meet Sandy.

Although we might change her name, because it's too close to Bander and they don't know which one we're calling. She's a half-lab, half-St. Bernard girl, about 2 years old. She's a good 30 pounds smaller than Bander-boo, which puts her at about 60 pounds.

Of course, just because we got him a girlfriend doesn't mean that Bander is entirely on board with the idea.

They're learning, and having the usual jostling for position. Well, actually, Bander is quite clearly the alpha, which doesn't surprise me a bit; but she's young, and has to learn not to be in his face all the time. It's only been 24 hours, and she's here on a one week trial, so we have time to see whether they work it out.

They do well chasing squirrels together. Bander spots them and barks, and Sandy runs over to see what all the fuss is about.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-12-25T09:04:00.000-06:00

Jackie is prepping the Thanksgiving feast as we speak.

She had a dream that she left the giblets in the plastic bag and in the bird. Whilst I'm s'pos'd to be peeling apples and potatoes I have craftily, shrewdly, deftly, furtively, and almost succinctly, managed to be thrown out of the kitchen.

So, I would love to take a pilgrimage into the past, and discuss Jackie's Calvinist and Hobbes post from last Día de la Gracias.

You see, it's a true story, and it happened like this:

A long time ago, on a continent, far, far, far away (by yesterdays standards, for in those days, they measured distances by having someone run as fast as they can and yelling, "Faaaaaar!" and when you could still barely hear him, that was considered far; which is why mother's always told their children not to run off to far) a ship set sail for the Americas. It was a long and boring journey, and not really important to the rest of the story. But they got there and set up a colony.

There was this guy named John Smith, who met an emo tween named Pocahontas (which was not her real name, by the way). You might say they hit it off right away, he liked her 'cause she was young and exotic, and she liked him for all the bling he wore.

Her family did not approve, and decided to have him whacked.

Miss P. stepped in and saved him, of course. Her father, Wahunsunacawah (which means Capulet), forbade her from ever seeing him again, and that would have been the end of that, if not for John Rolfe.

True story.

Oh yeah. We're having turkey for lupper today because we were packing on the real Thanksgiving.

Connectivity!

2009-12-24T10:08:00.000-06:00

Aaaaaand we're BACK!

A big shout out to The Geek Squad and our new router, and once again we join the computer age. Just in time for another rainstorm with dog antics, and just in time to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

I might have more to say later, but right now I have to go deal with giblets. And probably the rest of the turkey while I'm at it.

(I may live in the South now, but I refuse to deep fry the damn thing. I will, however, serve biscuits. Mmmmmmm.)

Pluses and minuses

2009-12-15T22:00:00.000-06:00

Plus: The pod arrived, three days early. Excellent!

Minus: Crap, it's raining. Gotta run through the rain with my belongings on my back like a crazed carpenter ant.

Plus: Got about half of it unpacked, and tomorrow will be the major furniture (such as it is).

Minus: Deepest puddle in the panhandle? My front driveway. Have to stand in it to close the gate after I pull the car in.

Plus: Hey! A Starbucks drive-through, with holiday latte flavors in season! Today we'll go with Eggnog. Gingerbread tomorrow.

Dog Heaven

2009-12-14T19:49:00.000-06:00

Well, we picked up the keys to the new place this morning. The rooms in the house itself are smaller than we thought, but the floorplan is great and the garage/laundry room is ideal for my soaping needs.

The best part of the whole thing, though, is the yard. The wonderful yard. The front yard has this huge amazing beautiful tree:

Best part?

Dozens of squirrels live in the trees. As far as the Bander-Boo is concerned, this is winning the canine lottery. He was the happiest he's been since we loaded up the car a week ago.

I love the climate here, even rainy and foggy like it's been. We'll see how the summer goes, of course, but so far I'm really feeling good about things. This has been a long roll of the dice, but I think we did well. Change was upon us no matter what we did, so there was nothing to do but embrace it.

We'll see how we feel once hurricane season arrives.....

Rain, Rain, Go Away

2009-12-12T17:25:00.000-06:00

Well, it's raining on everybody right now, except the people who are being snowed on, so I guess it's too much to ask for the rain to stop just for us.

We're in the home stretch of our trip now.

A couple of notes about today's drive: one, the South is all really, really pretty. I've spent my whole life in either Nevada or Southern California, so deserts are what I find normal.

If you see a bucket of water in the desert, two people are about to have a two-year lawsuit over water rights to the bucket, during which the water will evaporate and one will sue the other for emotional distress due to the lost water. Also, trees are all managed carefully with a sprinkler system, and are spaced in a very careful grid, like the fake pores on band-aids.

So my first view of a Louisiana swamp had me gawping like I just saw Bigfoot riding a unicorn. Water and trees and green stuff for miles and miles. Gorgeous to look at, even if they are most likely full of bugs and squishy stuff.

I liked the greenery of Mississippi and Alabama, too, and downtown Mobile has a stunning skyline. Plus you get to drive over a finger of the Gulf, which is freaking awesome.

The only downside is that it was grey and rainy. But it didn't rain too hard, the dog once again behaved like a champ (thank god), and we made it safe into Florida.

Tomorrow we get to drive around and look at our new home.

Wheee!

Texas In My Rearview Mirror

2009-12-11T15:19:00.000-06:00

Alarm clocks are for people who don't have dogs.

We enjoyed our day off in San Antonio. We looked at the Riverwalk, took a short sight-seeing drive, ate a ton of barbeque, and went to bed at a reasonable hour.*

At about five in the morning, Bander let us know that it was time to get up. Since there's no point in arguing, we got up, packed the cars, and took off. Part of our strategy was to miss any sort of rush hour traveling through Houston.

That turned out to be a good thing, because whoever handles road maintenance in Texas is on a wild tear-ass spending spree. More of the I-10 was chewed up and in the process of revamping in Texas than I could believe. I wanted to explain to the chowderhead in charge that instead of ripping everything out and then starting repairs, you do one freaking section at a time.

The crown jewel in the asphalt crown of freeway fuckery is the center of downtown Houston, where the I-10 - a major cross country artery that carries scads of long-haul trucks and a big chunk of travelers - is squeezed into a single ultra-narrow strip that clearly used to be the bike lane. It took quite some time to get through, and I can't imagine how long it would have taken during normal traffic hours.

We did indeed like San Antonio, but the traffic alone put Houston on the list next to El Paso of places that we don't need to visit again.

What seems endless hours later, and we've finally finished crossing Texas. We're in Lafayette, LA, and we found a restaurant that will deliver deep-fried alligator nuggets for dinner. Louisiana is pretty country, and they have fried gator.

I'm happier already.

Finally...

2009-12-10T19:26:00.000-06:00

Maybe we can sleep tonight.

The long and winding road

2009-12-10T10:11:00.000-06:00

So, you know that we hated our time in El Paso.

Two things you need to know about what happened next:

First, El Paso is barely over the edge of the Texas state line. It’s damn near New Mexico, at least as far as geography goes.

Second, Texas is big.

Vast.

Wide.

A complete pain in the ass to drive across.

However, since we had accidentally holed up in El Paso like bats in a cave, we were behind schedule.

We made good time today – 550 miles of it. From El Paso, we’re now in San Antonio, and in a MUCH nicer hotel.

The storm is over, the dog has relaxed, and all is well. Of course, we have thunderstorms waiting for us during the rest of the week, but we’ll cross that horrifying panicked dog bridge when we come to it.

In the meantime, we’re taking an extra day here to rest after the long day’s drive. We went through a part of the state called Hill Country – a much greener and prettier terrain than we’ve seen so far. If you’ve never traveled across the American Southwest, you may not realize how much desert there is – but trust me, there is an endless expanse of cactus and dust storms and sad dried up lizards. It’s nice to finally see the landscape changing.

Jessie and I are driving in separate cars, which is a pain in the ass because there are a lot of things to talk about and we’re too brain damaged to remember what we wanted to say long enough to get to the next rest stop. Among other things, we’ve seen a lot of cars with California plates, loaded up with the family belongings. Apparently we’re not the only rats leaving the ship.

I also saw a pickup truck loaded down with the back end of a pickup truck, towing a trailer made from the back end of a pickup truck which was holding a couple more back ends of pickup trucks. I guess there’s a thriving market for pickup butts out there.

And just in case anybody is wondering about yesterday’s dog panic – he’s better today. And yes, he’s on anti-anxiety meds. He’s seen a trainer (clicker method). We’ve consulted a veterinary behaviorist. I have indeed heard about Bach Remedies, DAP collars, and I’ve tried a vet recommendation of using Benadryl to sedate him.

As far as I can tell, he’s impervious to everything with the possible exception of a big rubber mallet, and I’m going to try that next.

We're Still on the Road to Morocco.

2009-12-09T18:20:00.001-06:00

Oh dear Zod.

Passover El Paso...
...Passing El Paso...
...Pass the El Paso sauce...
...El Paso de la gone.

Any of these would have been better titles than:
Eleven minutes into yesterday, the Dog, the occasional center of our tiny universe, began to pace. Not surprising, as there was a storm a-brewing outside. We were at four thousand feet above sea level, or so, the winds were fierce and the walls were thin.

Pacing begat huffing, which begat panting, that begat twitching. This in it’s turn began a chain of dog bedroom olympic events:

1. Jump onto the bed. Points for distance, height and accuracy. If you can land on someone’s privates or sore spots, gain additional points.

2. Breathe Fire. Marks for huffing directly into the face and/or drool hitting between the eyes.

3. Sitting, timed event. Cumulative, bonus points for sitting on someone’s head.

4. Freestyle dance. Artistic expression, avoid the Russian judge.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

We tried everything we could think of to get and keep the dog calm. Jackie even tried going to the truck to see if that would convince him. Some time around three, we taped our eyes open and tried to make for better ground.

Which brought us to El Paso.

We were originally planning to have lunch and continue to Fort Stockton, I think it was, but ended up in a Motel, hoping to catch a few hours and press on. Another windy room, and Jackie was way too exhausted to continue.

So we stayed for the day.

It may be a lovely town, but what I saw off the I-10 did the city no justice. Abandoned buildings, the smell of industry, incessant trains, a giant sign pronouncing that Jesus Lives. It reminded me a lot of downtown L.A. or the back side of the San Pedro docks, sans the water.

Then I turned on the t.v. to hear that dry cleaning chemicals, rocket fuel and other crap was found in the local water. Not a pretty snap shot, sadly.

With winds gusting to 100 mph, w decided to stay the night, and let everything subside. We tackled the dog in shifts, alternating walking, and resting and sleeping and whining and bemoaning our lot, for something like 24 hours, without the cool ticking clock thing from that show.

The motel had cable, and HBO, even, so we watched ‘Taken’. A fun once movie, in my opinion, although it was on two or three times. Then we watched something with Brad Pitt that was absolutely fascination and engaging.

The winds died, and all of us passed out. At 5:30 this morning, we showered and escaped El Paso.

Did you know the speed limit during the day is 80 MPH in Texas?

Yeah, not fast enough.

We're on the Road to Morocco, Fer Shur

2009-12-07T20:55:00.000-06:00

Captain's log, Stardate, somewhere in Arizona.

The dog is lost. No, he didn't jump out of the truck, he just can't find a proper piece of grass in all the rock gardens. He's apparently gonna hold it until we cross the mighty Mississip for some true personal time. That, and nothing smells right, I'm sure. I could have sworn the whole back end of California smelled like propane and propane accessories.

Thus our dog has this sad expression as we set down for the evening:

Were in the local motel; they advertised it as being in a town, but it really is a glorified truck stop with room service. I always thought that it was an elitist's exaggeration when all the tough guys, the wise guys, the paisans, et al, made fun of the local talent's marinara sauce turns out they were actually right.

Not that I'm an expert, but I ordered fettuccine alfredo and I got spaghetti noodles with (breakfast biscuit) gravy, and a few chicken fingers tossed in. Jackie says chickens don't have fingers, so Gods only know what they're really made out of, but my bet is either chicken butts or that little rubbery flappy thingy on chicken legs.

We're tired, there's some Carrie Underwood thing on the t.v. (the other choices being Telemundo recaps), the dog has claimed the bed and Jackie is soaking in the tub.

Did I ever tell you that wherever we went, we got the special extra tall toilet seats? The kind that make you think you're a little kid again? Yeah, the tradition continues.

-Jesse

We're on the Road to Morocco, D - 1

2009-12-06T08:58:00.000-06:00

24 hours and counting...

There are a few things still left to load. The washer and dryer, the couch and one dresser. If there's room after that, we'll squeeze in the microwave table and the computer desk 'n' chair. If there's still room, maybe we can load some of the spare lumber.

So, is it red sky in the morning, or is it just all the clouds?

Whilst taking the dog for his morning constitutional, I noticed that it's getting a little cloudy outside. A quick check at weather underground tells us that it's not gonna rain until tomorrow, but I better get my butt moving.

As a total side note, it's 50 degrees outside and 71% humidity, here in Oceanside. Right now in Florida, it's 45 & 70%. Just sayin'.

We're on the Road to Morocco, D - 2

2009-12-05T12:52:00.000-06:00

Less then 48 hours.

A third of the pod is loaded; all the non-furniture pre-boxed stuff that was ready when it arrived yesterday. We also got all of the workroom torn down and boxed, the half the bedroom and some of the garage.

We've been testy, argumentative, conciliatory, happy, grumpy, testy and occasionally at odds with each other. Mostly, its the bottleneck of this-or-that bric-a-brac that cries out to be done first, and foremost. You know, chicken or egg arguments in this true life scale Tetris game.

Today we tackle the big furniture, and all the cubby-hole items. I hope that one of us is still alive to pick up the dog tonight.

Yes, we sent him to daycare, because he lost his shit with all the ins and out and 'what? No walks this time?' that happened yesterday.

I mean, he has a nervous breakdown anytime we rearrange the furniture, so can only imagine the horrors that are racing through his mind as everything inside gets crammed into an even smaller house that is the pod.

---

I'd post pics, but I don't think 'Picture of Disarray' is all that interesting.

We're on the Road to Morocco, Part Zero

2009-12-04T09:54:00.000-06:00

Well, soon enough.

But first, last night, we got an Omen:

Jackie had been trying to make as much as possible before we move, and that glop above was supposed to be 'Dead Sea Mud Salt Bars'. We definitely got mud and dead, but no bars. It was time for her to close up shop.

This morning, the buzzards began circling:

But before you get too excited:

Going Down With The Ship

2009-10-26T07:40:00.000-05:00

Things with the day job are winding down, it seems. Well, to be quite frank, they've been in a long slow decline for months and months now - but the downhill slide has gotten a lot more downhill and a lot slipperier. I keep looking at our course, and I know for a fact that there's an iceberg, dead ahead.

I think I've mentioned that I work for a real estate developer - I'm the person who handles escrow and loan closings on very large-scale deals. Of which there are NONE at the moment. And nothing on the horizon, not for long time to come.

I've been in and out of real estate for quite a long time now. I actually went through this sort of thing once before, in the very early 1990's. I worked in the savings and loan industry, which led to me working for government regulators. This included a huge flood of foreclosures, so I got to manage a pretty big portfolio of properties that had been taken back. It wasn't pretty. I'll spare you the details, but I got to deal with toxic waste, mismanaged nursing homes, and crack houses. Eventually the properties were cleaned up and sold, and that was the end of my career, until the industry recovered.

That crash was limited somewhat, because it was really S&Ls and the drop in value was pretty well centered in California. This time, of course, the problem is a hell of a lot bigger. Given that the last little hiatus made my line of work pretty well non-existent for five years, and that I'm getting older... my tenure in real estate is very likely over. By the time the jobs come back, I'll be too old, and frankly too tired, to start over.

I'm okay with that, really I am. It was fine while I did it, but it's never never been anything that lit me up inside. It's time to move on and move forward.

But like any other change, it's a little sad. And more than a little nerve-wracking. It'll take a couple of months, maybe less, but here we go....

Parting Shot

2009-10-23T16:19:00.000-05:00

Just a short update, because I have a ton of stuff going on – but remember Sally, my dearly departed Mustang? We got a receipt in the mail saying that she fetched $1100 at the charity auction, money that’s helping to send needy kids to day care. That’s at least $500 more than I was expecting, so good for her.

And kudos to Father Joe’s Villages for doing so much good with something that was of no more value to me.

Thanks, Sally – you were a good girl, right to the end.

Watch Out for Warts.

2009-10-14T17:56:00.000-05:00

You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.

We’ve all heard that.

Usually after you get back from a date with a creep, one of your friends will trot this out to make you feel better. It’s supposed to evoke the story of the Frog Prince, where the princess kisses a frog to transform him to a handsome prince. Of course, like nearly all modern stories, it’s a big fat candy coated lie.

The Grimm story, Iron Henry, does indeed include a princess and a frog. The princess loses her golden ball, and the frog returns it to her. (I will gloss over all the bad jokes and Freudian implications here.) She has promised him the reward of sharing her supper and her bed in return for this service. Of course, once she has the ball in her hands she breaks all her promises and runs away because it’s just a nasty frog.

She does eventually keep her promises, because her father forces her to make good. At the end of the night, she throws the frog against the wall, hoping for a good splat and a quiet night’s sleep, but he then transforms into a prince who wants to marry her. The original story is European, mostly appearing in English and Germanic sources, but it shows up around the world with variants in Sri Lanka, Korea, and China.

I’ve always found this story a bit odd.

For one thing, the princess is beautiful but clearly a spoiled self-centered brat. And for another, she doesn’t show any kindness at all toward the frog, but rather a deliberate cruel streak. What exactly does the prince see in her again? I’m pretty sure that there are going to be some domestic violence charges somewhere down the road for this family.

The kiss got added later, when we modern humans tried to make the whole thing about love and romance. Romance itself is a concept that wasn’t around when the story first appeared, back in the thirteenth century or so. That may be why it makes no freaking sense.

Animal bridegrooms are a big, big section of mythology. Far too much to cover in one post, in fact, so I’m going to just stick to magical frogs.

You can understand, I’m sure, why the frog seemed so magical to the earliest storytellers. They do, in fact, transform. If they can change from tadpoles to hopping bullfrogs, maybe they can change even further and we just haven’t caught them at it. If you’re in Asia, frogs are good luck and probably bring wealth. If you’re in South America, they’re a vital ingredient in blowdart poison. If you’re a Pacific Northwest hippie, you’re licking toads for the hallucinogens.

See? Magic.

And if you were a toad – or a lowly peasant, or a deformed leper, man, don’t you wish you could change, too? So it’s easy to see where the idea of transformation, particularly a transformation from ugly slimy warty toad to handsome rich prince, is an attractive thing. The stories very rarely address the front end of the transaction where the prince gets cursed and becomes the frog, because that is neither hopeful nor fascinating.

Everyone who reads this story understands right away what’s in it for the princess. She acts like Paris Hilton, gets yelled at by her dad, throws a tantrum, and gets the reward of her ideal husband. Wait, WTF? She doesn’t have to be good, or kind, or virtuous in any way whatsoever. Just gets rewarded for being a princess.

The appeal of this is so widespread that getting some illustrations together for this post is requiring me to wade through page after page of tasteless commercial variations of a little plastic frog with a little plastic crown glued to it’s little plastic head.

What nobody has been able to tell me is what’s in it for the prince. What does HE get out of the deal? The nicest thing you can say about the princess is that she looks okay as long as she doesn’t talk. I guess he gets to not be a frog, and maybe flies taste bad enough that not being a frog is its own reward.

Or maybe he did something terrible that led to the curse in the first place, and his sentence isn’t lifted, just transformed. Maybe she’s the next punishment. Maybe their kids will have warts.

Or take out the pasted-on romantic crap, and perhaps he inherits the kingdom by marriage, and his reward is not the girl at all, but the money attached to her. So the frog is a money grubbing gigolo, and he and the princess deserve each other.

And they lived happily ever after.

Or, you know, not.

Spamalot

2009-10-12T19:03:00.000-05:00

Somehow, at some point in the last five years, we got on somebody’s group mailing list. This is one of those big gangs of people with a common interest who stay in touch by emailing each other constantly with all kinds of random bullshit. They’re all on the other side of the country, but somehow we’re included to every Taco Tuesday to discuss fundraising and t-shirt sales, or whatever stupid event they’re having lately.

We didn’t complain for quite a while, because there was a couple who were having quite the drama-filled long-drawn-out breakup. It was like watching Cops via e-mail. Joe would say “Just so everybody knows, Linda is not comin to the piknik becuz she thinks I’m sleepin with Susan and shes mad”. And then Linda would e-mail everybody and say “Joe is a basterd and I put his stuff out on the lawn so if anybody wants a guitar for free come get it right now”. And then the next week or so they’d announce their engagement.

Anyway, as long as this was going on it was hilarious and we were glad to be included. However, they finally broke up or one of them got a restraining order or something, and they stopped posting to the group. We still get the emails, but the joy is gone. And over the past couple of years both the e-mailers and I have gotten older and crankier. The emails got dumber and more political, a bad combo.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it any more. I sent a response to the primary offender, saying “I don’t know you. Take me off your list.”

I got the luxury of a personal response.

And since it included an agreement to take me off his mailing list, I just responded with “thanks”. But since I had more to say, and I didn’t want to start a fight, I’ll respond here.

(Click the pic for a better view)

MHWS Server Issues

2009-10-12T17:13:00.000-05:00

For the past few days, our site host has been having issues with their hardware. They just informed us that they will be moving us to a new server. As far as I can tell, this is gobble-de-gook mumbo jumbo for our site being offline for a little while today, and apparently off and on for the last week.

So if'n ya looked at our site and it is and or was down, it's only a temporary thing and should go away soon. Nothing more than the electronic sniffies.

P.S. - Jackie's working on a new post about more crazy people. It would seem that there is no end to the crazies around us. Look for it tonight or tomorrow morning!

Sound & Fury, Signifying Nothing

2009-10-08T18:04:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I amaze, even myself.

Srsly.

I have been running around like a freakin’ lunatic for a month now, waving my arms wildly and complaining about how insanely busy I am. Don’t see any products yet, but whooooo! Look at me go!

And with all this activity, this frenzied strenuous run-around, what do I have to show for it?

Nothing, that’s what.

I’m exhausted, and I know I was in high gear, but … I got nuthin’. I’m kind of hoping it’s another senior moment, like the drivers license fiasco, and that I’ll find loads and loads of nicely wrapped soap, freshly folded laundry, and tasty nutritious lunches, neatly packaged and pre-frozen.

But if that’s what I’ve got, it’s behind piles of soap that still isn’t cured and needs to be wrapped and labeled, laundry that is festering and so close to being a life form in its own right that it has a rudimentary written language, and … okay, I have some frozen lunches, but Jesse made them for me and I’m so worn out from running around that I can’t possibly remember to bring them to work with me.

Luckily, several people have had birthdays recently and I’ve been able to survive off plates of day-old cupcakes from the tops of file cabinets outside the office of the birthday girl. I’m hoping for a birthday boy soon because they usually have some cheese and crackers instead of just sugar and I’m on a week-long frosting high that isn’t helping things.

I’m hopeless.

Fairy Tale, Hairy Tale

2009-10-05T13:07:00.000-05:00

One of the things I find so very interesting about fairy tales is how far we’ve edited them from the original forms. In our modern, post-Puritanical, won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children modern world, we’ve changed stories nearly beyond recognition.

I didn’t notice this right away. I had it pointed out to me by a child.

About ten or twelve years ago, I was visiting my mother. One of my nieces was there – she was about five at the time – and we started talking about the video she was watching. It was Rapunzel, and since I am not the most child-friendly person, the best conversational opening I had was “what’s it about?”

She said, very seriously, “A girl who lives in a tower with a witch. She’s sooo beautiful that she can’t get out.” Thoughtful pause. “Nobody can escape and go do stuff until a prince comes to rescue them. “

I said, “Nobody? Does EVERYBODY need to have a prince?”

With the exaggerated patience of someone lecturing to the dimwitted, she said, “Yes! You can’t go anywhere if your prince doesn’t show up! Nobody can do anything until the prince gets there!”

Well.

What exactly was the message here? Your life doesn’t start until there’s a man in it? I didn’t like this one bit. I corrected things by teaching her a version where Rapunzel cuts her own hair, braids it into a ladder, runs away to the city, and gets a job. Rapunzel is not stuck, and isn’t waiting around for anybody. She’s got things to do and she by god gets them done.

And of course what I’m doing is editorializing, after the fact. Changing the story to make it fit our modern ideas of right and wrong. I’m altering the tale to give the message I think is appropriate, just like Disney does. The difference is that … well, I was going to try and take the moral high ground, but my high horse is in the shop.

The original story doesn’t allow Rapunzel to escape. She holds the key to her own liberty – the hair – but somehow she’s unable to use it.

The Maiden in the Tower – well, she’s a prize to be won, not an active character. If you’re familiar with the original, you know the girl starts life as a bad trade, given up by her parents in payment of the lettuce her mother craved. She’s kept in a tower, companion to the witch, until a prince finds a way to climb up the tower. They hatch a long, slow escape plan, which gets blown to smithereens when the witch notices that her darling girl is preggers and can’t fit into her clothes very well anymore. (I guess the prince is pretty darn charming, after all.)

The girl gets banished to the desert, where she gives birth to twins. The prince falls from the tower into a big pile of thorns and is blinded. Years later, he wanders into her path, she cures his blindness, and the lovers are reunited.

A lot of this story got changed pretty early on, of course. Around the mid-1800’s, the prince decided to propose marriage, and somehow the pregnancy got swept under the rug. Rapunzel fell in love with the prince, instead of being a silly easily tricked girl. I know it’s possible to blame Disney for princess marketing and branding, and oh I really do blame them, but the Victorians had some pretty uptight ideas that got implemented, too.

Even earlier versions of the Maiden in the Tower have an actual active heroine, instead of an object, a prize to be handed around and discarded once deflowered and therefore spoiled. And it’s funny how stories have echoes of other stories within them….

The Prince leaps from the Tower to escape.

Familiar?

The princess, Rapunzel, once she has (carnal) knowledge, is banished from the Garden. I can’t help wondering if her twins were named Cain and Abel.

So the threads of other stories and archetypes weave in and out of everything. Of course, now, when you do a search for blog illustrations, you have to sift through endless pages of Rapunzel Barbie. To get at the original stories, you have to sift through the bright sunny cheerful and above all plastic face that we’ve put on everything.

I can’t help but wonder why we’re so insistent that everything be so frelling cheerful all the time. If nothing else, we’re setting ourselves up for a huge disappointment, because life is not always cheerful. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. I’m just slightly more positive than that, actually, but it’s a quote from Thomas Hobbes (1651) and I’m always trying to find a way, no matter how small, to use my college education. My point is that we have changed one set of stories – the fairy tales – and since everything is connected, the change vibrates down the strings to other stories, and if we’re not careful we end up in one big irritating episode of My Little Pony.

Here’s hoping that modern marketing hasn’t distorted the tapestry too badly, and that the stories continue to weave and grow.

We Have a Winner!

2009-10-03T09:23:00.000-05:00

Thanks for the entries and for all the votes! I hope you'all'll play again next time!

We're formulating a new contest, but we have one brain between us, and it's somewhere in the house. As soon as we find it, we'll let'cha know.

Everybody Loves the Bander

2009-10-02T11:01:00.000-05:00

I think I mentioned earlier that Jesse and I went out of town for a few days. We met my mom and her husband in Carmel-by-the-Sea, one of the most gorgeous little towns I’ve ever seen.

Carmel is tiny, one mile square, and it’s known for being one of the most dog-friendly places in the world. We tested the boundaries, because Bander went on the trip with us, and we took him everywhere.

EVERYWHERE.

If you want a lot of attention, I recommend getting a big white dog with soulful eyes and putting a bright red cast on his leg. Then go for a very slow walk. Honest to god, people were pulling over and jumping out of their cars to look at him. Then they’d say something stupid, usually a variation of this: “Oh my god! Is he OKAY?” while staring at the cast.

Well, to be quite honest, no, he isn’t okay, which is why he has a cast on. But I spent money I didn’t actually have yet in order to get him terrific medical care so that he would be okay someday, and that’s why I dress like a bag lady and he has a big red cast. But Carmel is lovely and I was in a good mood so I didn’t say that.

I did briefly toy with the idea of looking at the dog in horror and screaming to Jesse “Honey! The dog has a cast on his leg! When did that happen? Who did this to him?”

I also considered saying “Oh, he’s perfectly fine, but I’m trying to train him to limp so I bandaged him up.”

Since people were eyeballing me suspiciously to make sure I wasn’t a dog-abuser, I didn’t do either of those either. I just told the story of him jumping off the roof to try and follow our cars and then watch their eyes well up. The dog and I can really work a crowd for sympathy. If I had had the foresight to have Jesse pass a collection plate, we could have made out like bandits.

Anyway, Bander got to go everywhere, and be the king of Dog Mountain. Even his 'doggiesitter' du jour, thought their matching casts were cute.

He sat in various restaurants, and servers brought him plates of diced grilled chicken, generally serving him before serving us. He sat inside the Post Office, under the “Service Dogs Only!” sign while I waited in line to mail a package, and the line would have moved faster except that the employees were all petting him instead of opening another window.

He laid in the middle of a king size pillowtop bed, managing to hog the entire thing. I swear he was smiling while he did it. He got petted by strangers so much that he had bald spots where the hair wore off. The B&B where we stayed took his picture for the guest book. If I hadn’t had to sign the credit card slip, they never would have noticed I was leaving.

Then he took a fistful of Benadryl (wrapped in liverwurst by his sneaky mama) and snored in the back of the SUV all the way home.

He had a much better time than we did.

Everybody loves the dog.

The Car is Dead. Long Live the Car.

2009-09-30T13:43:00.000-05:00

Well, I’ve certainly had a lot of things to say about my driving habits. I’ve been influenced a lot by the car I’ve been driving for the past ten years. Ten HARD years, too.

Sally is… was…. a black Mustang convertible, with more power than was really necessary. She had flair, and style. She’s the kind of car that Satan’s wife drives when she’s going out with the girls. Good for cruising down the road with the top down, looking over at the ocean and laughing like hell while you shoot through traffic like they’re standing still.

I drove her for many miles. Nearly 225,000. I thought I was going to get a quarter million out of the old girl, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Last night she started overheating during the commute home. I pulled off the road and Jesse and the dog came to my rescue – we let her cool down, filled the radiator, and babied her back to the home lot. We poked around under the hood, which is total fakery on my part because I know nothing about cars, and decided that I’d go back to taking the train. I’d been pretty good about the train, but stopped after Bander injured himself; it was too hard to take care of him while dedicating the extra time to the commute. And if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time at all, you know the dog gets the top spot in my schedule. (There’s a “top dog” joke in there somewhere, but I’m too lazy to dig it out.)

So we reasoned that I could limp my car back and forth to the train station. Just five or six miles each way. That should work for a while, right? I have some other stuff in the works that isn’t quite ready yet, and I could really use a few more months out of Mustang Sally.

Well, at 7 am the following day, I found out that both Jesse and I are stupidly optimistic. I did manage to get to the train station, and as I stood there and watched my engine billowing steam, I made a mental list of the things that are wrong with her. Poor thing.

1. Tires are bald.

2. Water pump has given up.

3. Several different fluids are leaking. I have not bothered to sort out which ones.

4. The thermostat is obviously not working. (hiss, billow, steam.)

5. The rear differential slips. A lot.

6. The transmission has developed a nervous tic.

7. The cruise control is dead. It hasn’t worked for the last hundred thousand miles.

8. You can’t roll down the driver’s side window. This makes fast food runs a horrifying ordeal.

9. The engine stutters if your speed is between 40 and 70. I solved this one by driving eighty all the time.

10. Something is odd about the suspension. I can’t put my finger on it, but it sort of feels like the right front tire might fall off one of these days pretty soon.

11. Jeez, even the wiper blades are rotted and useless.

I’ve loved Sally, I really have. But it’s been a hard life for her, and I have certainly gotten my money’s worth. As I walked away from the steaming hulk to board the train, I realized it was time.

I spent most of the morning combing through Craigslist, and shortly after lunch I became the proud owner of a Ford Explorer. Used, of course, since a car loan is NOT part of my plans. Ten years old, in fact – but it’s been a kinder ten years with whoever owned him last. He wears it well.

He’s a much bigger and more muscular guy than I’m used to, and I immediately noticed that he doesn’t corner the same way Sally did. There’s less hugging the curve and more “keep this up and I’ll tip the hell over”. The back is nice and roomy, which the dog will like. The seats are comfy. All in all, a good purchase.

I haven’t yet decided on a name. Sally was fun and flirty. This guy is more staid and conservative. So I need to find something both stuffy and referencing exploration. I’m thinking maybe Stanley, after the Welsh gentleman who trekked through scads of African jungle before uttering the famous, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Most explorers are named things like Amerigo or Ferdinand or Erik the Red and my new ride is not nearly that exotic. And a lot of explorer-type names are ill-omened. I’ve been researching this for all of ten minutes, and I’m already surprised by how often I’ve heard the phrase “sadly, he never lived to tell the tale”. Quite a number or explorers have met untimely ends by… well, by exploring, and discovering waterfalls by blundering over the edge. Or by mutinies, from crew members who were promised things like fame and fortune and are now being dragged across trackless wilderness while the leader says things like “I wonder what’s over that hill, the one in the distance?”

As usual, I digress. I’m going with either Stanley or possibly Livingstone unless one of you suggests a better name.

Oh, and a local charity group is coming to the train station tomorrow with a tow truck. I’ll be there to sign paperwork and watch her go.

Go gently, Sally. You were a good girl.

Myth Perceptions

2009-09-28T17:58:00.000-05:00

I was having a conversation with a dear friend of mine, when somehow or other we got onto the subject of fairy tales. She loves Disney, and likes the sweet fantasy of happy endings.

I’m sure you’re all terribly surprised to hear that I favor a darker approach.

Before anybody starts forming any mental pictures, I’m not a goth.

Mostly because I’m too old, and while young men and women look lovely in goth clothes (and even lovelier in steampunk garb) older ladies just look creepy.

I AM creepy, and even sinister, but I don’t see any point in dressing to advertise it.

I keep the dark side hidden. But I believe that all things have a balance, and that to have the sweet glittery fluffy cupcake, there’s also the dark and terrifying clang of the oven door. Hope it’s not too hot in there!

Anyway, I’m a lifelong fan of fairy tales and mythology of the world.

It started at an early age. Talking to my mom a few years back, she expressed regret over something she bought – a set of children’s books, from a door to door salesman. My parents were young and struggling, and had very little money, but my mom saw deep longing on my face and spent more than she should have. In remembering the incident, she said she didn’t know if the books were worth it.

What she didn’t realize, until that conversation, is how dearly I loved those books. I remember them vividly. There were fairy tales of all sorts – The Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, Aesop’s Fables, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault. To my further delight, they included 1001 Nights (the tales told by Scheherazade), extensive Greco-roman mythology, the Rudyard Kipling Jungle Books and all of the Just So Stories, all of the Alice in Wonderland books, Treasure Island, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson….
THAT’S how you get a child with an active imagination. To this day, it’s pretty hard to mention a fairy tale or a myth and not hear my opinions and comments on the origin and meanings. I’ve added to the book collection, somewhat – it now includes The Golden Bough, Bullfinch’s Mythology, and Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I love the early, truly grim versions of the classic fairy tales. They weren’t written for children – society in those days did not think of childhood the way we do, as a safe, warm, fluffy place. They were stories for the whole tribe to nod over and discuss, and they contain some damn good advice:

If you talk about fairy tales, I’m likely to have an opinion. I have so much of an opinion, as a matter of fact, that I’m going to break this down into a series because nobody, not even my nearest and dearest (I’m talking about the dog) has the patience to listen to the whole damn thing at once.
So… if you like going into the woods, if you feel sorry for the wicked witch, if you think that the Prince is late all the time and quite frankly not all that charming, come sit by the fire with me. I have a story to tell.

Say Anything Sale.

2009-09-26T10:18:00.000-05:00

Jackie said that we should post a sale, just for our blogging buddies. (Really, did I just say blogging buddies?) So here's the deal:

Today, if you say anything silly, crazy, admit to an inner truth, reveal a veiled mysticism, deny the existence of spoons, or just say that Jessie sent you, we'll give you 10 percent off your order. That's in addition to our Etsy sale, later today. So leave a message in your order notes and we'll simply refund you the difference.

Driven to Distraction

2009-09-24T19:12:00.000-05:00

I hate these moments.

See, most of my posts are me bitching about other people. But sometimes, dangit, I’m the problem.

A couple of weeks ago, Jesse and I had some errands that required us to rent a car – neither one of ours were suitable, or up to the task. To be quite frank, I drive an overpowered Mustang convertible with 225,000 miles on it, with bald tires and a slipping rear differential, so it’s isn’t suitable for very much but I can STILL suck your doors off while passing you in the slow lane.

Anyway.

We went trotting down the road to [Star Fleet's Finest] rent-a-runabout, where I had reserved a more reliable (and slower and more boring) small SUV. Everything was fine until I got to the counter and had to show my driver’s license. Which, as it turns out, is expired. It expired on my birthday, nearly four months ago.

I had never noticed.

I never get tickets because I’m sneaky and who the hell writes checks any more? It’s all about knowing to slow down before the blind hiding spots where the motorcycle cops lurk, and using the debit card.

I kept a straight face, and said, “Huh, must have left it at home. Go ahead and put it in his name, it’s just as easy.” Inside my head, I was doing more wild screaming “aaaaagh! I’m a felon! I’ve been driving around illegally for months! Wait, he’s looking. Be cool.”

So technically speaking, Jesse rented the car, and off we went.

My next thing was to figure out why I hadn’t gotten an automatic renewal. I always get an automatic renewal. So I called the DMV. Since I have to do this during office hours, there’s always a chance that I’ll get interrupted for work questions or rush projects, and the hold times are looooooong.

For several days, I did the following:
1. Phone the DMV.
2. Go through the endless menu of buttons to be pushed.
3. Get connected to the hold system.
4. Listen to the Muzak version of “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” and don’t I wish I was kidding about the song selection but I’m not.
5. Wait 45 minutes.
6. Get an incoming call.
7. Put the DMV on hold, answer the other call, and see the hold light go off because that very second was when the DMV picked up the farking phone.
8. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finally I got to talk to someone.

He agreed that I should indeed be eligible for automatic renewal. He mentioned that sometimes things get lost in the mail. He explained that I would have to go to the DMV office and handle it in person. He agreed that it did, in fact, suck to be me. Then he said thank you and hung up.

Next step: Find a nearby DMV office.

This is not hard because there’s a big cloud of misery over each such office. You can see it for miles. Then I start checking hours. The DMV system here in California has an appointment feature, which is great except that you can only use it for setting times at least one month away. They list wait times at the various offices: with appointment, 3 minute wait. With no appointment, 1 hour 40 minutes.

Crap.

I spent several days trying to guess a pattern, like if I scheduled my lunch at 2:15 and drove to Fullerton, could I save twenty minutes? After much watching of wait clocks, I realized that the only thing to do was to show up first thing in the morning, before the line got long.

So today, I left early for work and went to the DMV office nearest my house. Then I went inside (wait time: 1 hour. DAMMIT). While standing around feeling my life ebb away, I realized that I probably had to have my proof of insurance card. I know I’d emptied all the extra crap out of my bag lately, into my trunk, so it must be in there. I go outside and start rooting through all the bits of paper.

Guess what I found.

Go on, guess.

My updated extended driver’s license. Good until 2014.

This means I have no memory of the following things:

Getting the renewal form.
Completing said form.
Writing a check and mailing said form, or going online and making the payment.
Receiving the license.

How the hell have I forgotten FOUR steps?

Having a middle-aged brain bites.

An Early Lead...

2009-09-22T19:27:00.000-05:00

We're just about half way into the voting, and the Cherish'ers of the crazy cat calling contraption cartel are in the lead. Have we forgotten Ben and his pleas to be remembered, or is it that Jen's ex-boyfriend truly too weird to vote for?

poll by twiigs.com

Vote, and vote often!
Shave your beards and vote again!
Or put a fake one on, and vote again!

Congratulations!

2009-09-17T16:57:00.000-05:00

You all have spoken, and the Leader of the Pack has won round three.

And Now for the biggie:

Crazy Cat Calling Contraption Lady
vs.
Last Will & Testament
vs.
Leader of the Pack

poll by twiigs.com

Crazies Among Us, Volume III

2009-09-03T16:25:00.000-05:00

Voting will be open until the 15th. Vote early, vote often.

poll by twiigs.com

In case you want 'em:
Crazy Cat Lady
Hot Dog
Leader of the Pack

On the 16th the winners from all three contests will meet in:

Common Scents

2009-09-01T17:29:00.000-05:00

Well, it’s that time of year.

Everyone else is thinking of the dog days of summer, and the last lazy time around the swimming pool before Labor Day and me…. I’m locked in a hot hellish kitchen getting ready for the Christmas rush.

Generally, when I’m making soap, I do scent “groupings” – like if I just soaped jasmine, I’ll do gardenia and vanilla and sandalwood. They go together, see? And the four different kinds of soap sit on the curing rack together, getting along nicely. In a similar grouping, if I just did pineapple, chances are good that orange and mango are on the list.

Right now, though, you know what I’m making?

EVERYTHING.

I (and by me, I mean Jesse) even added more curing racks in every nook and cranny throughout the house. And while he frantically builds shelves, I am setting up wholesale customers, taking new accounts, making custom orders, and stocking up on our own stuff. I have soap curing on just about every flat surface.

The only problem shelf is the custom order one. This contains soap batches for several different clients. It has rosemary/mint, tea tree/eucalyptus, peppermint/menthol/eucalyptus – so far, so good, although if you breathe deeply in there you don’t have to brush your teeth that morning, and your sinuses are nice and clear. But it ALSO has black raspberry, vanilla musk, pineapple/grapefruit, and ginger/lime. The two elements together are … not nice.

It smells a lot like a koala horked into a bag of Skittles.

If you wander into what used to be a walk-in pantry and is now a curing room, you will hit a wall of peppermint, pumpkin spice, cider, and sandalwood, topped off with a big batch of beer soap which is still in the early stages – stale beer funk crossed with cat pee. It takes beer soap a little while to settle down and stop smelling like a frat boy on Sunday morning, and we’re not quite there yet.

Tonight I will be making two different batches, I can’t even remember what, but I bet they smell godawful together. Probably Cranberry and North Woods – I won’t know until I get home and read the little scrawled notes I left myself.

This is the torture I put myself through for you guys.

I hope you appreciate it.

Let There Be Light

2009-08-28T16:07:00.000-05:00

I wanted to write more about other crazy people at my day job, but it turns out that the woman who cries about the alignment of staples is just way ahead of the pack, and cannot stop providing me with blog fodder.

Here’s the current problem.

Recently, we started an effort to go more “green” This is corporate-speak for “let’s make stupid empty gestures while changing nothing”. For individual people, being green might have actual meaning, but filtered through layers of committees and focus groups and middle management, it just ends up being stupid.

They went into every single office and installed motion detecting light switches. They did this because there are one or two people who always left the office lights on when they left at night. This is not such a problem, because one, the cleaning crew comes around after everyone leaves, and they turn ALL the lights off, and two, most of the guilty light-wasters have been laid off and nobody really cares whether they’re sitting at home in the dark or not.

It probably would have been cheaper to go tell the remaining idjits to turn off the lights, but that would have been (gasp!) CONFRONTATIONAL. So the passive-aggressive pantywaists just gave all of us motion sensors.

I don’t WANT a motion sensor. It destroys what little dignity I have been pretending to have, because it turns your lights off if you stop too long to think, and you have to do a lot of arm flapping to turn it back on, so several times I’ve been caught sitting in my chair doing a spirited impression of a wounded whooping crane. Also, I always turned my lights off when I left, and my sensor is way too sensitive, so it turns on my lights when people walk by my office door. Therefore, I am using MORE light than I was before they gave me this great “green” device.

And of course there’s more. There’s always more, isn’t there?

The Staple Weeper is worried about flashing light, because she heard once that it might cause fits in epileptics. She does not have epilepsy THAT SHE KNOWS OF but thinks it is better to be safe than sorry. She is VERY concerned that my office light turns on when she goes past my office to the ladies room, because she might have a seizure. And she goes to the ladies room a lot, because she is an obsessive flosser. (What a shock, huh?)

Now, a normal person might solve this problem by walking down the center of the hallway, not so close to my office door, therefore not triggering the light. But that would be a NORMAL person. What SHE does instead, is to wait for me to leave, and then run over and immediately shut my door.

When the cleaning crew comes, they’ve been given instructions to leave closed door offices alone. So the cleaning crew does not come into my office, and they do not throw away my trash. I am sitting here with four days worth of sandwich wrappers and old Yoplait cups, which are beginning to reek a bit, because the Weeper is obsessed with closing the door so she can be sure she’s not going to have a spontaneous attack of epilepsy. Asking her to, and I’m quoting here...

...just results in her sobbing, and then doing the exact same thing that very night.

This is why I was in human resources this morning pointing out that our office should have a mental health professional on call 24/7. Monk is cool when he’s on his TV show and all, but hella annoying to work with.

I have two things I’m going to do to solve this.

One, I’m going to cover the sensor with a little piece of tape when I leave at night. Two, I’m going to wait until the Weeper isn’t looking and put my aging sandwich wrappers into her office trashcan.

I should be angry but I’m too busy giggling.

This should be good.

Bite Me.

2009-08-27T13:35:00.000-05:00

Well, crap.

I’ve managed to get behind on ranting again.

I had been putting off some long-needed dental surgery, because I was reserving money to make someone an offer. That fell through, so off to the periodontist I went, and had the surgery done.

I regret it, of course.

Let me start out by saying that I had somewhere between 25 and 30 shots before they even got started. I got twelve – TWELVE – shots in the roof of my mouth. I was a wreck before they even started the procedure.

With a wind-up that bad, you know the actual work was horrific. To keep from disgusting everyone, I will just say that it’s been two weeks and the sutures are really really bothering me, plus I am concerned because my supply of Vicodin is getting a bit low.

Furthermore, dammit, I am getting mighty tired of mashed potatoes and squishy overcooked pasta. I want some actual food, something I can – you should pardon the expression – sink my teeth into.

I want a crunchy salad.

I want a nice crusty loaf of French bread.

I want an apple, and my sympathies are completely with Barbossa when I watch Pirates of the Caribbean.

So I’m drugged and cranky. Jesse and the dog are both somewhat pleased about this, because the drugs slow me down and make me confused. So I haven’t found their new hiding place just yet.

I hate the damn dentist.

Bander, the Bionic Dog

2009-08-19T10:32:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed we haven't mentioned anything about Bander getting the cast off yet. After a week with no improvement, we shelled out money for some MRI soft tissue scans, and learned that the damage to his wrist was a lot worse than anyone thought - as in, he snapped every single connecting ligament.

That gave us three options, per the vet - one, very expensive surgery. Two, amputation of the leg. Three, put him down. Since both two and three were impossible, unthinkable, and just generally not happening, we went for the expensive surgery. This involved fusing the affected joint and inserting a steel plate to stabilize the whole thing.

It's been eight weeks now, and here are the first x-rays of the nearly-healed repair job:

Impressive, no?

The downside is that we still aren't allowed to walk him much, and he needs another four weeks in the cast. He always had a lot of energy to burn, and has a bad case of cabin fever, so any little behavioral problems are magnified a million times. The separation anxiety that caused him to jump off the roof in the first place? Yikes. Bring on the puppy Prozac! (so not kidding, here.) And some training. And he needs company while we're at work.

So. He now has a vet, an orthopedic surgeon, a behaviorist, and a pet sitter. The freakin' dog has a staff of FOUR. I, of course, just have Jesse, but since he only has me we just order each other around a lot and nothing gets actually done, because we're too busy catering to the dog.

It's a good thing he's cute.

Hot Dog!

2009-08-16T10:34:00.000-05:00

Crazy Contest Entry Three:

About twenty years ago, a good friend of mine, Larry, had a black lab that loved chasing and retrieving stick, balls, squirrels etc. But as a playful dog also loved being chased.

Anyways, we were in the barnyard burning some brush and branches that we had cleared previously. We set the fire far enough from the barn so as not to cause any catastrophes. But as the brush pile went down the sticks got farther from the fire, thus we started to toss branches and twigs farther to reach the fire.

Little did we know that "Randy" the lab was watching excitedly. Stick after stick went flying past him. Longing to do what labs do best, instinct took over and he charged after a stick that Larry threw.

Unfortunately, in his excitement, he grabbed a short branch from the fire and ran with it. I saw it first and chased after the dog cursing. Larry also freaked out and joined the chase. This just thrilled the dog.

Now he was running everywhere with this flaming branch.

We had the dog cornered and the thankfully the flames died down to coals on the stick end. Carefully we approached the dog talking low and cursing it sweetly.

Larry reached out slowly for the stick. But the dog knew better and off he went...STRAIGHT INTO THE BARN!!! Screaming, we gave chase as the dog ran straight to the fresh bails of hay and lay down.

Instantly the loose hay on the floor caught fire.

But as we caught up with him and stamped out the fire he ran and started more fires. With no water, and a super dry barn our fight was lost.

The fire spread fast and furiously. And while we were fighting valiantly, the stupid dog was smart enough to leave and ran to the barnyard, still with the now smouldering stick. We escaped and could only watch from a distance as the barn burned to the ground.

Larry built a new barn and started anew.

The dog still goes after sticks and squirrels.

But during brush fires, he was chained up.

Just to be safe.

Driving MeCrazy

2009-08-14T10:13:00.000-05:00

You may remember this, well, it's changed somewhat.

I’ve been driving to the office lately, because the dog is leading a very complicated life. He’s still in the cast, and likely to stay in it for another month, which is driving him absolutely bonkers. On top of that, his separation anxiety is pretty much through the roof right now – we’re working with a behaviorist/trainer, but one of the keys to success is getting enough exercise and of course he isn’t allowed to have ANY exercise, so he’s losing his mind and taking mama right down the drain with him.

So, I need to be ready to rush home at a moment’s notice. And that means that I cannot take the train, which has a set schedule. There are trains that leave Irvine at fifteen minutes past inconvenient, followed by a later train at waytoolate thirty. Sometimes those trains are late, and when a train is late, they mean it – I had a couple of nights where I sat on the tracks for three hours, wondering if I would have time for a shower before work started again.

What I’m doing instead is driving, through heavy traffic, every damn day.

The worst portion of my commute, by far, is the bit close to my office, deep in the heart of Orange County, California. And I have a couple of words about Orange County:

Heidi and Spencer Pratt live here.
And fit in without being noticeably worse than everyone else. Since Heidi and Spencer are two of the most horrible, odious people who have ever lived, this should tell you just how awful the OC is.

It’s filled with people who behave like complete self-important tools at all times. The job losses during the recession hit Orange County hard, and a lot of these folks are living on the brink of financial doom, but by god they worked hard at being so superficial and pretentious and they’ll still be yakking into cell phones via cutesy Borg-style headsets when they’re bedding down in the shelters.

If they have to sleep in cardboard boxes, they’ll check the brand of the product that used to be packed inside before crawling in.

I’m generalizing, of course. But it’s my blog, so I’m allowed.

Anyway, this population segment manages to be wildly obnoxious while standing in line, so just imagine how they act when they all run get in their Beemers and get on the freeway. I swear, I spend two hours every day on the Sphincter Expressway. That gives me a certain amount of expertise, and therefore I think I can offer some advice.

...and stops talking on our cell phones and sits up very straight while holding the wheel at ten and two, we probably saw that highway patrol car hiding in the bushes. Clearly you didn’t, and you made a point of flipping me off as you cut around me going ninety.

I’m sure you understand why I was pointing and laughing a mile later while you were getting your ticket. Next time, you should assume that the rest of the group knows something that you don’t, and fall into step.

Especially if you can see that it is at least four car lengths of space, and your lane is stopped. You might be tempted to suddenly change lanes and floor it, but be aware that you might slam into the back of a stopped car just five car lengths ahead of you. I saw some random jackass do this exact thing last week, so take the time to look ahead more than 100 feet before you test your car’s zero-to-sixty performance.

It does no good to tailgate me, then swerve wildly into the next lane and back into this one, if you have not noticed that there is a reason I am going slow. I am trapped behind a cement mixer, and so are you, and being pissed off at me is not going to make me go any faster.

What it WILL do, because I am getting pretty tired of your antics, is make me very careful to make sure that any openings for getting around said truck are just big enough for me. You’re still stuck back there?

Awwww. That’s too bad.

Somebody is changing the tire. It’s over on the side of the road. It isn’t anybody famous. Nothing to see here.

Can we all just quit staring and GO?

There’s nothing to do down here. You are supposed to be up in Orange County clogging up traffic and hogging the good restaurant tables and acting like assholes. What could you possibly want in San Diego? It can’t be good.

So that’s my summer.

Asphalt and insanity.

I can’t wait for fall.

Leader of the Pack

2009-08-11T09:54:00.000-05:00

August Crazy Contest Entry Two:

Jen invited me to join her for a dinner party one summer's even many moons ago. She prompted me that her and her boyfriend were experiencing problems in their relationship, and to expect some peculiar behavior from him. I figured they'd had a typical argument, and assured her they'd be fine. To my bewilderment, "Pete" was exceptionally strange that evening in his mannerisms and conversation. It was at dinner that I figured out what was wrong.

He announced proudly at the table that he'd decided to live a lifestyle of a different sort, that he was by nature the Alpha male of a dog pack. My girlfriend cringed in embarrassment.

I didn't know if he was joking until their dog sauntered in the room and Pete proceeded to "dominate" the poor creature. I stared gape-jawed as the poor beast rolled onto it's back in submission and Pete got down on all fours and bit it's scruff. I shot a look of sympathy to Jen, and the room went silent.

The awkwardness subsided when Pete and the dog went outside. Until Jen's Dad bellowed "BAH, YOUR BOYFRIEND IS AN IDIOT!!". We craned to see out the window he was standing in front of. The dog ran past full tilt heading down the street, followed moments later by Pete in pursuit, and completely in the nude.

We decided to make a quick and polite exit.

My husband whispered in my ear as we left that it was a 'good time to go before Pete tried humping anyone's leg'. I snorted louder than I meant to.

As for Jen, she broke up with Pete soon after, and has since married a nice human :)

Crazy Cat Lady

2009-08-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

August Crazy Contest Entry One:

Quite a few years ago I lived in a house on the outskirts of town. My Mom lived in a small cottage on the property next door.

One afternoon while we were having coffee, she told me that rather than go to the hairdresser like she usually does, she decided that she would wash and roll her hair and lay out in the sun while it dried. A little while later I saw her heading to the back yard with her blanket to enjoy an afternoon of sunbathing.

It couldn’t have been about 15 minutes after she got settled in, I looked out the window and saw her storming around the side of the house and heading for my front door. I rushed to the door to see what was wrong and when I opened the door she yelled:Although it wasn’t readily apparent to me at that moment, I knew it must be something terrible because after all, that’s why parents give us middle names. To let us know we’re really in trouble! The kind of trouble where our first name alone just won’t do.

After looking her over for a minute I could see what looked like little wet droplets of something on her lavender bathing suit top.

Then it hit me. I couldn’t hold back.

I broke out into uncontrollable laughter.

I thought I would just die as she angrily described the event….”So there I was, just enjoying the sun when all of a sudden it feels like it’s starting to rain. I opened my eyes and all I could see was this long black cat tail waving above my face.”

You see, I had this little black male cat named Zephyr. Anyone who is familiar with cats knows that in a cat’s eyes, all things belong to cats.

Being one of eight cats, Zephyr was determined to mark anything he felt belonged to him by spraying it. Cat spray is a horrible mix of urine and a pungent oily musk that they use to mark their territory. He would spray anything from a five gallon bucket that my husband brought home to a new lawn chair.

We even had to warn our guests that would come over for a visit to make sure to roll their car windows up or else Zephyr would spray the ins

ide of their car.

On this particular day though, it was my mother’s freshly washed and rolled hair. I don’t know if it was the rollers themselves, or the Dippity-Doo she used to roll her hair with that incited the heinous act, but the fact remained that she was as

mad as a hornet! She spent all that time washing and rolling her hair only to have to take the rollers out, wash her hair and roll it back up again.

Later that day, after she had calmed down, I just had to ask her the question that was burning inside of me....

The Poll's Up!

2009-08-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

Hooray! Vote Early, vote often!

poll by twiigs.com

It's About Fricken Time.

2009-08-08T10:39:00.000-05:00

Well, I got the computer fixed.

First he slowed down. Then he hung up. Then, in his infinite wisdom, Calculon the Third (C3) decided it would be fun to turn off the sound. And as a last bit of defiance, he told our printer, Gutenberg, to stop the presses.

Now I know that some of you would say that I neglected the poor thing, and that really he was sick, and needed to be taken care of. I know that some of you will recognize these symptoms as some attention seeking cry for help. But the truth is, our machines are on a Machiavellian machination of machina über alles. They hate us.

They're trying to kill us.

Really.

We've had more coffee machines than Angelina has had kids, hers or others. Jackie has been electrocuted by the crock pot. I've had various fingers almost severed by hovercraft, fans, and other sharp pointy electrical things. We may be the first people, ever, to hurt themselves with a clock radio not in a bathtub.

So.

They're trying to kill us.

Really.

Technology Hates Me

2009-08-06T20:32:00.000-05:00

We have been having technical difficulties, so we're about a week behind in EVERYTHING. We'll have a new poll for the July winner, plus some other backlogged stuff, up in the next day or two.

In the meantime, if you could hum some hold music to yourself, that would be totally wicked.

...To Protect the Guilty...

2009-07-29T11:25:00.000-05:00

I’m having a lot of trouble finding something to post about.

It isn’t that I don’t have anything to say. God knows, I have LOTS of things to say. But there are two hindrances:

Some of the stuff I want to say is stuff I can’t talk about. Not yet, anyway. I have quite a few things in the works, and I can’t discuss them without ruining it all. So *mmfff mmmmfffff mfmf mffm* (takes hand off mouth) until Spring or so.

I’m distressingly public. I really don’t make any attempt to hide my real life identity – so, if you tracked me down, stop patting yourself on the back. It’s pretty easy to get my name and address. Most of the people I know are well aware of the blog. They figured it out when I ran up to them and said “Hey, you have to go read my blog! It’s a big collection of random crap! With pictures!”

And THAT, of course, means that they can all read all the nasty stuff I say about them. I didn’t realize how much of a problem that would be until I got a phone call refuting one of the crazy stories, from someone who had a starring role. This person made it quite clear that they were not, in fact, as crazy as they had been made out to be.

Well.

Let me start by saying:

Denials are meaningless.

Secondly, damn it all, now I have to either resort to writing about random strangers or just put up with endless phone calls.

I did consider trotting down to Cinnabon in the mall food court, with a notepad and a pair of field glasses, to people watch and take notes on said random strangers while I had a nice sticky bun with pecans, but most of my posts about strangers have to do with What They Did to Piss Me Off This Time and I don’t see why I should subject myself to that. Also, each Cinnabon weighs about six pounds and contains enough calories to power a small nuclear reactor for a week or two, so I should probably rethink that plan.

I could put up with the phone calls, I suppose, and let it go to voicemail, but I happen to be one of those people who is completely incapable of letting the phone go to voicemail. I have been known to look at caller ID and shriek “Crap! I don’t want to talk to this person” in the split second before I pick up the phone, say hello, and act all surprised about who it is. I will even answer the phone to tell people that I am way too busy to answer the phone.

I guess I should have kept the blog a secret, but what would be the point of that? There’s no reason to bitch if nobody is listening. It’s like a tree falling in the forest.

I am convinced that blogs are insane. Write out your innermost diary thoughts, publish them on line, and tell everybody where to find them.

What the hell was I thinking?

What’s On The Curing Rack?

2009-07-24T13:19:00.000-05:00

California Avocado: This bar is made with real pureed avocado, organically grown from my very own tree. It's lightly scented with a combination of tomato leaf and white tea. Mild and sudsy and perfect for sensitive skins!

Carrot Citrus Ginger: can hear you thinking "carrots in soap?" Yep, trust me, carrot soap has a lovely creamy lather - it's one of my favorites! This bar is made with local, organically grown carrots, and scented with essential oils of grapefruit, lemon, orange, and fresh ginger. No added colorants - the perky orange hue is due entirely to the carrots. Give it a try!

Lavender Honey: Lavender is a long-standing classic soap scent, and the addition of honey just makes it sweeter and more soothing. This is an absolutely lovely blend!

Lemony Snickets: This all essential oil blend begins with lemony litsea, lightly touched with lavender and spearmint. Over it all, sweet and insistent, is star anise essential oil. The dark, dramatic color comes from activated charcoal.

Mardi Gras: Fresh tangy berries, sweet spice, and earthy mysterious notes - silky smooth and sinful, just like it should be. An ivory colored bar with ribbons of green, gold and purple in honor of a legendary celebration.
This bar is loaded with added silk fibers for a rich, luxurious lather.

Pomegranate & Black Currant: Tart, delicious pomegranate and juicy black currants are at the heart of this fruity blend. Pucker up, baby!

Plus, I’m starting to work on Christmas soaps. It just isn’t a summer heat wave unless I’m screaming at a misbehaving batch of Pumpkin Spice soap and complaining that my hair smells like a Christmas tree. I’m going to be bringing back last year’s favorites – Cranberry Crush, North Woods, Mulled Cider, and Pumpkin Spice. But I’ve gotta know – is there something you’re dying to see for the holidays? If there is, tell me now, and I might be able to include it. I’m rapidly losing the feeble hold I had on sanity, so no promises, but I can try.

Oh, and a word on sample packs:

MY GOD.

It’s like locusts were here again. I am out of everything in sample slices. So those will be back…

...um, in a couple of weeks or so.

I need to find a leprechaun or a gremlin or something and teach them to shrink wrap things while I sleep, or I’m never gonna catch up.

Which means that I am about to ask my annual question – how, in the name of St. Hubbins*, is it possible that it is July and I am already behind for October? What kind of insane business have I gotten myself into? And why I am in this handbasket, and why is it getting warmer?

Great. The dog is trying to hide behind the couch to avoid my ranting and he can’t because Jesse is already back there. Cowards.

* Saint Hubbins is a little known saint of quality footwear. He was a bishop and is believed to have lived in the 3rd to 4th centuries. Direct historical data is missing and several historians are of the opinion that this concerns a mixture of facts about two different bishops living and working in the different towns of Soreto and Angers. The cult of veneration has been documented as early as the 7th century. He is considered as the patron of clog makers.

Truth in Adverti-zing

2009-07-17T01:18:00.000-05:00

My darling husband is a bonafide crazy.

He's risked his job more than once for the sake of pulling a sophmoric prank.

One of his proudest moments was in the early years of his career in industrial mechanics, at a factory which produced a particular national brand of pudding cups.

This day, butterscotch was the flavor in process. Mr. Husband had to do some routine testing on the printers in the packaging department, and while he was there, decided to do some creative editing. Thank Goodness nobody took notice, because for the rest of the day, the flavor printed on the pudding cups read: "BUTTERCROTCH".

We still have a roof over our heads!

Crazy Cat Calling Contraption

2009-07-16T16:48:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine worked at a vocational rehab center and they were looking for a speech therapist. They ended up hiring a lady from Georgia. She moved out here and started work.

She was carrying a pet carrier around with her all the time, so one of the bosses asked her why.

She said that her cat didn't like to travel in the car so she left him at her old house in Georgia. She had the pet carrier because they had a mind link and when the cat was ready he was going to teleport himself to her and she needed the pet carrier for when he arrived.

Shortly after that exchange they were once again looking for a speech therapist.

Will Wierd Willy Win?

2009-07-16T01:58:00.000-05:00

In a rural town, an hour east of my home, is a cemetery with one particularly infamous resident.

Weird Willy was a terrible murderous criminal in his lifetime, and his heinous deeds resulted in an isolated grave, for no one wished to buy plots in his proximity. When he was buried in the 1920s, local townsfolk marked his grave with a stone that had engraved upon it a curse.

It attracted dare devils every Halloween, those who were brave enough, followed the directions - run three times around the grave clockwise, and three times counter clockwise. More often that not, bad luck befell those who dared- often in a big way.

The curse came to an ugly head when almost ten years ago, Weird Willy came a callin' to a known crazy in town. This fellow was well known for his love of drink, penchant for freely dabbling in chemical substances and wild incoherent ramblings. One night, "Jason" threw a party, as friends gathered to celebrate , "Jason" was compelled to get up to other business.

He abruptly abandoned his own party and went, armed with supplies in his truck, to the resting place of Weird Willy. Upon arrival at the desolate graveyard, he proceeded to exhume the remains in the dark. He took with him every last bone, and placed the sightless grinning skull on his dashboard like some macabre trophy.

It was near his home that he was caught by police for speeding, but "Jason' didn't stop until he reached his driveway. Party goers streamed out of the house to see what the commotion was with the police. But as the officer approached "Jason's" car he was mortified by the discovery of the skeletal remains, "Jason" held the skull in hand and calmly introduced the officer to his new 'friend'.

Needless to say, Jason was immediately arrested. Weird Willy was returned to his grave and laid to rest again. "Jason" faced many charges and an extensive psychiatric evaluation. Surprisingly that night, his blood tests returned clean.

The curse may have been Weird Willy's way to escape the clutches of death. For "Jason" was the second victim of an addled mind to dig up the cursed bones.

Still the question remains... ...who will be next?

June's Winner: Last Will & Testament.

2009-07-10T11:13:00.000-05:00

Poor Ben, hooray for Miss Too!
Jackie'll get a'hold of ya fer yer prize, if'n she has'nt yet.

July is here, and we'll post the first entry for July's contest later today, as soon as I find some relevant pics, walk the dog, watch Oprah and eat some Bon-Bons.

What Are You Doing?

2009-07-04T11:16:00.000-05:00

Why are you reading this?

Go out and play!

Crazies Among Us: June's Entries

2009-07-01T11:40:00.000-05:00

So, will it be Blue Man, TP Guy, Phone Girl, or House Girl?

Don’t forget, there are prizes at stake – and more entries coming for July and August!

The Polls are open!

poll by twiigs.com

What's On the Rack?

2009-06-28T18:44:00.001-05:00

I've gotten a few questions lately, from people looking for some old favorites. Rest assured, nothing has been discontinued, here's what's ready to come back soon:

Ambre de Nepal: Warm, rich and sexy, this scent is beloved by men and women alike. Each beautiful bar is dusted with gold mica and stamped in gold, for an enhanced feeling of luxury.

Cedar & Saffron: A wonderful warm, rich and sexy men's scent - unique notes of saffron overlay cedarwood.

Honey & Propolis: Sweet, gorgeous honey, with just a hint of floral notes. I absolutely love this one!

Rare Earth: I was inspired to make this after watching a neighbor build a gorgeous rock wall around his garden. This was incredibly time consuming to make, but the end result is exactly what I had in mind.

Valencia: Fresh oranges with a hint of spice, and wonderful lather due to added red moroccan clay and orange peel powder. No artificial fragrances or colorants in this one.

Wildwood Rose: A drop dead sexy blend, made up of sandalwood, patchouli, cedar, rose, and black pepper. If the Wicked Queen from Snow White wanted to take a decadent shower, this is the soap she'd use.

Since it's the end of June and the beginning of July, it's just about time for me to start making the fall and holiday scents. For the 4th of July, I plan on being a pumpkin pie smelling making fool. No doubt DH will be sad that it's not an actual pie day.

For Bander's Blog Buddies

2009-06-28T09:23:00.000-05:00

Just a quick pic, for those who miss our dog.

Crazy house Girl

2009-06-26T09:35:00.000-05:00

Crazies Among us, Entry Fore

I write to tell you the tragic story of the Crazy House Girl. No, this is not me. I am crazy, but not in this way. The Crazy House Girl,or CHG, was...well...

She went to a normal school, like the rest of us. She looked like a normal girl. She talked like a normal girl. It wasn't until I entered her room--through a window--that I began to suspect she was a fewfries short of a value meal.

The window was necessary because the door was utterly blocked by clothes and...things. Things that I refused to investigate.

You perhaps think I mean there were a few books,some socks, things that could be easily swept to the side.

No.

There was achest-high mound of clothes n' things. Right in front of the door.

The room got worse from there.

There were food containers scattered about. A shattered television set with candy boxes in it. A heap of clothes, paper, and old broken toys from which, periodically, came the unmistakable sounds of a squeaky mouse wheel, and squeaky mice. Shoes. That weren't hers. Clothes-- shirts-- covered in what I valiantly tried to believe was chocolate syrup.

Only the bed stood relatively free of the drifitnig dunes o' filth. And I stayed on the bed, huddled against the open window, until-- for some mysterious reason-- I began to have an allergy attack. I asked where the bathroom was, so I could grab some tissue, and was told "Oh, we don't go there.”

The living room?

"Oh, no.”

The kitchen? Paper towels?

"We never leave this room. That's not safe."

By now I was about to choke, or start flooding the room with snot, so I dared to ask if there was anything tissue- like in the nightmare room we currently sat in.

"Oh, just use the curtains!”

I looked at the curtains. Which had fleas. Before I could comment, she said "Oh, I'm gonna grab a snack-- you want some cheese?" and headed for her closet.

And while her back was turned, I dove out the window and fled into the night.

Crazy Contest Continued

2009-06-25T17:39:00.001-05:00

Are there really only 3 crazy people in the world? There are only five days left for June's entries. I know some of you wanna play, but are a little shy. It's o.k. - you'll be anon-knee-mouse, even if you win, we can change your name to protect your innocence.

Write a quick story! No need to be convoluted or complicated, we can add pictures and check your spelling for ya. Send your stories to me via e-mail, to magichands@cox.net - we promise not to giggle at your email name.

Honest.

Or is it that the prize isn't good enough? Is that what it is?

Rules reminder, if'n ya need it.

Why haven't you submitted a story?

poll by twiigs.com

Crazy is the New Sexy

2009-06-23T14:05:00.000-05:00

I’m not generally obsessed with celebrities. However, Johnny Depp…. Lord, I would drink that man’s bathwater. He’s got the exact look that makes my blood temperature rise; who chooses roles by how much he wants to do them, instead of what he thinks the box office take will be.

Yummy.

Another thing I quite like is Alice in Wonderland – heck, the dogchild, Bander, was named after the Bandersnatch from the Jabberwocky poem.

So in theory, the intersection of those two things should be delightful. Except that strangely, it looks like this:

This is my beloved J. Depp, in makeup as the Mad Hatter, for the new Alice movie by Mr. Crazy Pants Tim Burton. And I want to know what you think!

Yummy, once again.
Oh yeah, and he’s a great actor.

Johnny D. - Sexy or Crazy?

poll by twiigs.com

Mundane Mondays

2009-06-22T23:01:00.000-05:00

We tried Mystical Mondays, Money Mondays, Maverick Mondays and any other Monday you can think of, and the best we could come up with was mundane.

Because Mondays just sit there like a rock in a shoe. Nothing ever good happens on a Monday. The only exciting thing about Mondays are all the stories you tell that happened over the weekend.

Sundays get brunches and lazy afternoons, Saturday are forbeaches and parks and barbecues. Even Fridays get dinner and a movie.

But Mondays?

The Archduke, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on a Monday, launching World War One. Mondays are for mayhem. There's a reason there's a Good Friday, a Fat Tuesday and a Black Monday. And for the record, kids, don't use me as a reference for your term paper, I looked it up, and it was a Sunday. But you can bet your butt, they were talking about it on Monday.