6/9/06

Glory Road the other night, and the next morning I woke up with Marty Robbins bouncing around in my brain singing El Paso. Pretty easy to trace where that came from; most of the time when songs are bouncing around in my head, I can’t figure out why. Glory Road, by the way, was a pretty good movie in the way all those underdog feel-good sports movies are. Emily Deschanel was completely and utterly wasted in the role of the Loving Supportive Wife Who Holds Down the Fort At Home While Dad Shows the Big Boys What’s What. I don’t know why they even bothered to give her character a name; Interchangeable Supportive Wife would have explained all you needed to know. But that Josh Lucas; hubba hubba! We refer to him as “The Poor Man’s Matthew McConaughey”, but the older he gets, the less he resembles MM and the more he grows into his own looks. We watched Firewall Tuesday night, and it wasn’t bad – typical Harrison Ford fare – but has Harrison Ford gotten old all of a sudden, or what? I swear, he kept stumbling around like an old man and didn’t seem all that steady on his feet. Maybe Calista Flockhart’s keeping him off-balance with the hot, hot sex.

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Yesterday ended up being a busy, busy day for me. I got up at 6:30 (I’ve been getting up at 6:30 most mornings, god help me, because the earlier I go out and walk, the less hot it tends to be. That’ll hold true for another couple of weeks, and then it’ll probably be so unbearably hot outside at 6:30 that I’ll have to start either getting up at 3 am or exercising inside), went for my walk, came home, cleaned the bathroom (and it’s only been a WEEK since I cleaned the bathroom! Holy crap!), vacuumed the entire upstairs, talked to my mother for twenty minutes or so, and then headed out to do errands (after I got dressed, of course. My purple nightgown is cute, but not really the thing for errand running). The first place I needed to stop was Target, so I did, and I bought two 35-pound boxes of Arm & Hammer litter (our litter of choice, because it clumps fast and hard and does the best job of reducing the litter box stank) and some bird seed. My main reason for stopping at Target was to get a big box to set the litter box inside of. See, we used to use a sweater box for a litter box, and then we’d put the litter box inside a bigger box, because Spanky – cute as he is – is a little bastard who adores peeing over the side of the litter box, and no matter what we’ve done we can’t get him to STOP FUCKING DOING THAT, and at some point if you can’t change a behavior and you don’t want to get rid of the cat, you’ve got to figure out how to deal with the behavior. So we dealt with it by putting the litter box inside a bigger box, then every time I’d clean out the litter box, I’d spray down the inside of the bigger box and wipe it down. Good lord, I must really love my cats. Who else would put up with this sort of bullshit? Anyway, one day I was in the pet store, and I stumbled across the covered litter boxes, and they have nice BIG covered litter boxes, and I thought “Self, what if I got a big covered litter box? That way, Spanky could still pee up the side to his heart’s content, and it would be less of a pain in the butt. Well. It turned out to be MORE of a pain in the butt, ’cause I’ve been having to take the cover off the litter box, spray down the inside of the cover, dump the litter into the other litter box (through the strainer), wipe down the inside of the cover, and put it all together. Plus, on the days when Spanky is particularly hydrated, he manages to pee up the side of the inside of the cover enough, that pee leaks out and makes a small puddle on the floor. So we’re going back to the litter box inside of a bigger box, and I’m going to get rid of the covers to the litter boxes, which is why I was at Target looking for a big storage box that the litter box would fit inside. Luckily, I measured the litter box before I left the house, so I’d know what size would work, and so there I was in Target, looking at EVERY storage box, only to find that none of them were big enough. I convinced Fred to make a trip to Lowe’s tomorrow morning after he gets groceries, so hopefully he’ll find something that’ll be just right. I left Target with my litter and bird seed and headed up University Drive to the Goodwill store, to see if I could find some jeans that I might fit into. The pants I’m wearing currently are too big for me, and I can’t find pants that I really like in a smaller size, so I thought I might go in the direction of jeans. And my brother told me that my sister-in-law bought jeans at thrift shops when she was losing weight, so I tried the thrift shops around here and found nothing, so I decided to check out the Goodwill store to see if I could find something. And I did not find a damn thing. I dug and dug and dug through the racks and racks of clothes, but didn’t find a thing in my size. Here’s an example of how I cannot, for the life of me, look at a piece of clothing and know whether it’s my size or not: I walked through the door of the Goodwill, and I saw a pair of jeans hanging on the end of a rack, and I thought “Oh, those look like they might fit me…” and when I checked, they were a size FOUR. Um, yeah – not so much! So I left Goodwill and went to Sam’s, where I stocked up on all the stuff we’ve been running out of lately – Tide, paper towels, shrimp, more bird seed (the stuff I bought at Target was Finch food), and bottled water – and once I loaded everything in my car, I called LoneStar to place an order for a Steakhouse salad (salad with bleu cheese crumbles, lettuce, tomato, red onions, and – surprisingly enough – steak). Then I headed over to TJ Maxx to look around for a few minutes, with the idea that I might find a comforter for the spud’s bed, but I decided pretty quickly that if I was going to get a comforter, I needed to have her with me to tell me what she did and didn’t like. From TJ Maxx, I went over to LoneStar to pick up my lunch, and headed home. I got home around 2:00 – three hours after I’d left the house. The car was PACKED, and it took me a good ten minutes to unload it, but I’d say we’re all set on paper towels, shrimp, and gum (the only kind of gum I chew – and I chew a lot of gum – is Trident White Wintergreen, and for the longest time Sam’s had stopped carrying it. Yesterday, they had it again, so I stocked up in a big way, just in case they stop carrying it again) for a long, long time. I put everything away, and then I sat down and ate my salad, and it was faaaaaaaaaaabulous. Well, at least while I was eating it, it was. A little later I turned into (sorry to be gross, but a reader over at OFB suggested this term, and it makes me giggle every time I think of it) a salad shooter. To continue the grossness, it AMAZES me that you can eat something and then see it again (IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, AND I THINK YOU DO) pretty much undigested 30 minutes later. Aren’t your intestines, like, long enough to reach to the moon and back? Are the raw veggies going through my intestines on the bullet train, or what? Okay, I’m done with the grossness. And that was my day!
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Currently reading: Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, by John Stossel. I generally like John Stossel, and I’m very much enjoying the book. Finished late, late, late the other night: Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen. I just love Carl Hiaasen to death. I wish he’d stop putting out the damn kids’ books and write another one for adults, though! (Rumor has it he’ll have an adult book out early next year.)
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Random pictures: This is what I made for Nance for her birthday. I loved making it – I love all the Dolly Mamas pictures – and it was fun making the picture and sending it off to her. The t-shirt I got in Maine ’cause I loved it so much, then couldn’t wear because it was too small for me. Now it fits! Whoo! Trying to get a decent picture of myself, because the picture I’m using over at MySpace is at least four years old, if not older. * * * And, cat pictures: Suddenly, Sugarbutt adores the Sug Cave and spends almost every evening here. SUCH a Tommy look he’s got on his face. Preparing to jump. All of today’s uploaded pictures are hither.
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Previously 2005: Teen labor: I highly recommend it. 2004: The quarry. 2003: You can’t tell I’m PMS-ing with a vengeance, can you, with all this talk of food? 2002: No entry. 2001: No entry. 2000: So, have I mentioned that I’m an idiot?]]>