Category: Life

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant – and picked up Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates. Now, Joyce Carol Oates, you may recall, wrote the book I loathe above all others, That Damn Mulvaney Book. I don’t know how it is that I happened to buy a book by the author who wrote the book I hate so much, but I suspect it had something to do with the fact that there was a miniseries based on it, and I didn’t realize that it was the same author. Or possibly I bought Blonde before I read Die Mulvaneys, Die. OR I may have thought to myself, well, every author is entitled to a horrid piece of excrement or two. Some might say that Stephen King built a career on horrid pieces of crap. They would be wrong and should be stoned for such blasphemy, but they can certainly think it quietly to themselves and not to me. I think I’ll give this other one a try. Just because I didn’t like the one doesn’t mean I will loathe the other! I probably thought to myself. Believe it or not, I’m an optimist. In any case, a couple of months ago when I was standing in front of the bookcase trying to decide what I wanted to read next, and dithering between something I’d had for a while or something new, I said sternly to myself, you always get all dithery and indecisive when it’s time to pick a new book! So here’s what we’re going to do from here on out. See that third shelf from the top? We’re going to start with the book on the left-hand side, and read each book in turn until every book on that shelf has been read! And so, with a few side-trips (I was NOT going to wait to read the new Evanovich, for example), I have been doing so for the last several weeks. I’m more than halfway through that shelf, but it’s not empty, no no no. With the vacation money left over from our Florida trip, we made a dent in our respective wish lists. (Of course, mine still has about 45,000 items on it, and Fred’s has something like 3) So last night, it was time to start Blonde. I wasn’t really looking forward to it – it’s not only written by that Mulvaney lover, but also 700 pages long – but I tried to get myself excited about it. Marilyn Monroe! I like Marilyn Monroe! Joyce Carol Oates? Never heard of her! She was certainly never a Mulvaney, nope nope nope! I decided I would read at least three chapters of the book to give it a fair shot, and if it hadn’t drawn me in by then, off to the giveaway pile it went, because life’s just too damn short. Halfway through the first chapter, I was whinily making deals with myself – let’s just stop now and pretend that we read all three chapters! – but still I soldiered on. Crap, crap, utter crap. I know that there are going to be those who disagree with me, it was a bestseller, after all, and that’s fine. Y’all can just happily go about your lives reading books by Joyce Carol Oates, but I’m not gonna. She’s obviously just not my cup o’ tea. Whoever wins it in the giveaway certainly has my condolences. 1. Where were you born? Bangor, Maine (home of Stephen King!). There used to be an air force base there (I’m fairly certain they closed it down), where my father was stationed. 2. If you still live there, where would you rather move to? If you don’t live there, do you want to move back? Why or why not? I don’t live there, and I wouldn’t particularly want to move back to Bangor – I only lived there a short time as a baby before my father was transferred, so it doesn’t really mean anything to me. I would love, love, love to move back to Maine, or at least own a summer cottage on the ocean. Maybe some day. 3. Where in the world do you feel the safest? In Fred’s arms. Y’all quit making those gagging motions! 4. Do you feel you are well-traveled? Not really. There are so many places in this country alone that I’d love to visit, plus I’ve never spent any time in Canada, let alone Europe, that if I were independently wealthy I’d love to spend all my time travelling. 5. Where is the most interesting place you’ve been? I think Gatlinburg is mighty interesting – it’s a very touristy town, and I could probably spend all my time sitting on a bench and watching the people walk by. Plus, it’s so beautiful that I never get tired of taking pictures of the scenery. Fancypants, Miz Poo, and Spanky all hope that you have a great weekend! Well, Miz Poo and Spanky do – Fancypants doesn’t care one way or the other.]]>

Fred bought these bags that come with bait and attract the damn things, and then they drop into the bags and roast to death (far too kind a death for them, in my opinion). Fred put up pictures toward the end of his entry here about how full the damn bags were when we got back from Florida – and the bags had only been out for 5 days, I believe. Just looking at those pictures make me want to gag. A few weeks ago, I went out to get the mail, and about fifteen minutes after I came back inside my scalp started itching. When I went to scratch it, I was horrified to find that there was a Japanese Beetle hanging out in my hair. I screamed, threw it to the floor, and stomped on it. Grrr. I hate Japanese Beetles. HATE THEM, I say! Since I was out taking pictures, I got a few garden pics: This rose is my favorite, because not only is it gorgeous, but it smells awesome (don’t ask me what kind o’ rose it is – I have no clue). I really like this one, too. The picture’s a little blurry, but I just love the color of this rose. Remember a few weeks ago when I asked for advice on trimming back petunias, and many of you emailed me to tell me that I could, indeed, trim them back? Well, the very next day I went out with the garden shears and began trimming. At first, I was careful to do as instructed – cut above the “y”, be sure to leave some leaves – but patience (at least when gardening) is so very much not my strong suit, so I started just kind of hacking away at random and when I was done, I had a pile of petunias beside the pot, and the plants inside the pot didn’t even reach the top. “I think I went too far,” I told Fred. “I just got bored and carried away and chopped the hell out of them. I guess it’s a good thing they weren’t expensive, huh?” Three weeks later, this is what they look like: Apparently Petunias aren’t all that delicate. Yay for Petunias! And inside the house, my begonia is doing a lot better than I expected. From what I’ve read, begonias are picky, delicate little plants, but this one is thriving and blooming like hell. I love the color, but after I bought this one, I saw some yellow ones and wish I’d bought one of those. I could actually have two begonias in the house, I suppose, but I try to keep the plants kind of up and away from the cats so they won’t chew on the leaves, and we’re rapidly running out of places to put plants. Miz Poo shows her portly side (and if you look closely, you’ll see she’s sticking her tongue out at y’all).]]>

“I’m an excellent back scratcher…” It is, by the way, a fallacy that you have to have long nails to give a good scratch of the back. When I was 18, someone at a party asked me to scratch his back (what kind of girl did he think I was!), and when I was done, he sighed happily (I always have the effect on men, har de har) and said “You must have really long nails!”, and was amazed to see that they were as short as they are now. It’s all in the technique, y’see. * * * Fred sent me this link, and when I was done reading it, I had a mental image of a very large nekkid fat man laying on the road in the rain, covered by a very small rain coat. It reminded me of the interview I read several years ago with Chris Farley and David Spade, where David Spade said that Chris Farley – who was standing behind David – would start giggling and tell David to look because Chris was going to show him the funniest thing ever. David Spade would say “It better not be fat man in little jacket!”, and Chris would say “No seriously, turn around! You’ll laugh your ass off!”, and when David finally turned around, there would be Chris Farley standing there, having crammed himself into David’s jacket. That’s an approximation of the interview, anyway. ]]>

memorial for Nicole and Bill’s Cleo. * * * Y’know, there’s just not a whole lot going on around here today, so what I’m going to do is toss up a bunch of cat pictures I’ve taken lately, and call it an entry. There aren’t any pictures of Spanky or Fancypants, for some reason, but there are plenty of that fashion model we like to refer to as Tubelle. It’s a Poo! Inna box! A Poo inna box! What more could you possibly hope for? Spot’s putting his foot (er, paw) down and taking over the pillow on my desk. Actually, Miz Poo has rather abandoned it – lately, whenever she’s on the desk, she prefers to be laying directly between the keyboard and me, so that I can’t type and can only pet her, pet her, pet her, the whole livelong day. If this ain’t a guilty lookin’ Tubelle, I don’t know what is. Actually, I think I caught him in mid “march”, because he will sit and knead for hours and hours before settling down to sleep. Exhausted from all that damn kneading. A Poo! Inna bag! A Poo inna bag! How handy. How do YOU carry YOUR Poo around, after all? Spot and Tubelle were having themselves a bit of a lovefest before they heard me coming upstairs. Tubby’s getting ready to flee the premises. There’s nothing a fashion model like Tubelle likes to do more than sprawl out on his back and stare off into space. Notice the incredibly dirty back feet. Tubelle cannot reach his feet, poor boy. Oh, goodness. Time for a stretch. After wearing himself out sprawling and stretching, Tubelle will surely need a nap!]]>

Amanda‘s (who is updating again, and about damn time!) brought back a memory about the second time Fred and I met in person. For the record, the first time we met in person was over Memorial Day weekend in Pennsylvania. The second time was a couple of weekends later in Virginia. (The third was in Rhode Island (he flew up for the 4th of July weekend), and the fourth was sometime in July when I flew to Alabama. The fifth was when the spud and I moved here. Amazing it’s worked out so well, isn’t it?) Anyway, at this hotel – like at many hotels, I’ve noticed – the headboard, rather than being attached to the bedframe, was actually hanging from the wall. One might assume that it was bolted to the wall, in fact. Later, during…. a discussion, let’s say, I got rather, er, excited about making a certain point. So I reached up and grabbed the bottom of the headboard, which was hanging over my head. Suddenly, the freakin’ thing pulled OFF of the wall and hit Fred in the head. You can imagine I was pretty freaked out thinking that I had a) killed Fred, and b) ripped a headboard off the wall with my superhuman strength, probably leaving behind large, gaping holes in the wall. To my relief, the headboard wasn’t that heavy and left no indentations in Fred’s head, and it turned out that it (the headboard, not Fred’s head) had grooves in the back that rested on bolts, so it was easy to put back together, lucky for me. * * * Fred and I were sitting in front of our computers one day last week – Thursday, maybe? – and suddenly the wind outside picked up. I glanced up out the front window to see that it was a little overcast. Out the back window, though, it looked like a twister could drop out of the sky at any moment: Note Miz Poo’s little head looking out the cat door. Luckily, there was no twister that evening, but it did rain pretty hard. Speaking of the cat door, it’s working out pretty well for us. Spot, who was the most nervous about going out through the door at first seems to now be the one who uses it the most. I don’t know if Fancypants spends all night out there or not, but he hasn’t poo’d on the floor even once since we installed the cat door (and we actually left it open while we were in Florida), so I’m happy about that. The cats are so funny-looking when they go through the cat door, because they have to sniff around the edges for half an hour first, and then carefully push the door open and slowly walk through. They seem to come in faster than they go out, for some reason. * * * So, I was reading People over the weekend, and read a blurb saying that Alanis Morrissette is suing the guy who owns alanis.net because the guy had the audacity to register alanis.net, and according to the letter he received from her lawyers, his actions constitute, among other offenses, a wrongful use and misappropriation of our client’s name in violation of her federal and state common law and statutory rights, including, without limitation, rights of publicity, rights under the Lanham Act and certain rights under the Trademark Cyberpiracy Prevention Act. Of course, the guy’s site only presents his side of the story, but if half of what he says is true, Alanis might think of getting over herself. The guy has owned alanis.net for three years and never used her likeness, name, or even referred to her, from what I can tell. I guess I’d better be watching my ass if the notorious girl who shares my name gets a bug up her butt. I’m still kicking myself for not having bought robyn.com back when it was still available, though if I had, I’d be inundated with visits from fans of that singer chick. I see that r0byn.com (that’s a zero, not a letter o) is still available. But it kind of defeats the purpose if you have to say “That’s a zero, not an o” when you give someone your url, I think. King Tubby, snoozing on the pillows. Putting those pillows on the floor is about the smartest thing I’ve done lately. I only pulled them out of the wardrobe to look for stuff for the last giveaway and left them there, and in the week since, there’s always a cat on the pile of pillows, and usually another one waiting for their turn. Our kitties, spoiled? Nah.]]>

Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” he added hastily.) Perv. So, last night we watched the new news show on Fox, The Pulse, which is good, because it’s got all the cool kids from Fox News on it. Well, the cool kids and Geraldo Rivera, anyway. It just astounds me that that man still has a career – he’s got to have some serious dirt on one of the muckety-mucks somewhere, is all I can guess. Anyway, Geraldo was doing a bit where he walks across a dirt driveway or yard – I wasn’t paying attention, because I don’t care for him – and Fred said “Geraldo is walking like he thinks he’s some kind of stud.” I looked up from my book and saw Geraldo walking all bow-legged, with his ass stuck out, and said “He walks like Tex.” Longtime readers will remember Tex. For the rest of you, let’s just suffice it to say that he’s someone we know and dislike. After a moment, Fred said “He looks like him, too. They’ve got the same kind of ugly.” Whereupon I almost choked to death on my Diet Coke. Because, yes. Tex and Geraldo certainly DO have the same kind of ugly going on. Hee! I’d do a side-by-side picture comparison of Tex and Geraldo, but it wouldn’t be prudent. Is it just me, or do the previews for the new Harrison Ford movie – K19: The Widowmaker – make it look like the most boring piece of shit ever filmed, or what? I mean, fuckin’ yawnsville on that one. I’ll be avoiding it like the plague, believe you me. And I like Harrison Ford. On the other hand, I’ll be hauling my ass to see The Good Girl in the theater, because it looks REALLY good, and I like everyone who’s in it. I watched a movie after Fred went to bed last night. A Walk to Remember, I watched, god knows why. Want to know what it’s about? Sweet girl with strong christian faith turns bad boy around, makes him fall in love with her, but – gasp! – she’s dying of leukemia! Which was so very obvious by those barely-there circles under her eyes! So they get married and she dies, and although we don’t see the scene where she dies, I am certain that if we had, it would have been very similar to the scene on The Bold and the Beautiful years ago where one moment Taylor was happy and healthy and dancing with her husband, and LITERALLY the very next moment she had collapsed and died in his arms. Because god KNOWS there’s no suffering when one dies of leukemia. One looks gorgeous right up to the very end, except for some occasional weakness – evidenced when the sick person swoons prettily – and the occasional slightly dark circles under the eyes. My god, talk about your dreck. What’s sad is that I watched the EXACT SAME crap not two years ago, in the form of Here On Earth, wherein Leelee Sobieski played the Mandy Moore role and Chris Klein played the Shane West role (and if Shane West was actually born with that name, I’ll eat my hat – and a check of the Internet Movie Database proves me correct. He was born with the name Shannon Bruce. I can see why he’d change it). Hell, I think we all know why I rented the movie. I rented it because I like that cute little Shane West, despite the fact that he has no clue when choosing his movie roles, apparently (I offer the painful Whatever It Takes, which should have worked – cute actors, cute (if overdone) premise, gets the girl in the end – but very much did not). Anyway. Avoid A Walk to Remember unless you’re having trouble sleeping. And all that said? You KNOW I teared up when they got married, because I’m the sappiest sap on the whole damn earth. 1. Where are you right now? In the shower. Hee! No, I’m in front of the computer, which is on my (messy, nasty, needs-to-be-cleaned) desk in the computer room. To my left are two sleeping kitties, and to my right is a Fancypants, who is swishing around and trying to decide whether he wants to go outside. 2. What have you lost recently? Well, I didn’t lose it, I’m pretty sure it was STOLEN, but the smiley-face ball that was on the antenna on my Jeep is gone. That pisses me off, because I had to actually order the damn thing from Wal-Mart online, since our local Wal-Mart didn’t have one, and I had to pay more for shipping than the damn thing cost. And now it’s gone, damnit, gone! 3. What was the first CD you ever purchased? Does that embarrass you now? I’m fairly certain it was probably Wilson Phillips’ self-titled album. And no, I’m not embarrassed. If my love for Olivia Newton-John won’t embarrass me, nothin’ will! 4. What is your favorite kind of writing pen? Skilcraft pens are absolutely the best pens ever. Other than that, I have a pile of doctor’s office pens (pens that drug reps and such drop off at doctor’s offices) that Mary Ellen’s cool momma sent me, because she rocks. Sometimes, when I need a pen, it’s quite the dilemma for me when I try to decide which pen I want to use! 5. What is your favorite ice cream flavor? I prefer french vanilla, actually. I’m also enjoying McDonald’s frozen yogurt these days, too – it’s surprisingly good, and I just had an ice cream cone from there last night.]]>

Finally, last night he said, “It’s not being away from home I don’t like. It’s being away from you.” from the entry on the 9th brought that on), and so I’ve been racking my brain for smack talk about Himself. The only things I’ve been able to come up with are: 1. He can’t close a drawer all the way to save his life. I spend half my life walking around the house completely shutting drawers and sometimes doors. And when he gets out of his Jeep and I’m staying in the Jeep waiting for him, he doesn’t close the door all the way, but just kind of half-heartedly pushes it so that it stays open, letting in the heat and flies. 2. He leaves his clothes all over the place. Okay, that’s not true. He leaves clothes that he thinks he might wear again in a pile on the table in the master bedroom and on the shelf in the closet, so that when it’s time to do laundry, I have to go around and pick up the piles to wash. Inevitably, he says “Have you seen my red pants with Hershey’s Kisses all over them? I was going to wear them.”, and I have to tell him that they’re being washed. 3. He loves Tubby. No, he LUHRVS Tubby. He also loves Fancypants, and I suspect that if Fancypants were a human, he and Fred would spend all their time singing show tunes to each other, if you know what I’m saying. 4. He is inordinately interested in our lawn. He cuts the grass before it needs it, and neatly bags the grass clippings. He also edges and sometimes sweeps the walk to the front door, clips the roses, and checks the Japanese Beetle traps daily. But that’s a good thing, because if it were left up to me, our yard would probably look like the crappy, never-mowed, overgrown yard of our neighbors up the street, the ones who are trying to sell their house (and good luck to them, with a yard like that!). What a lame list. I’d love to provide some juicy gossip for y’all (he netsexes Nance every day at noon!), but there’s just nothing. I’m frightened to think of what he could come up for smack talk about me, though! When we were at the Gulfarium in Florida, we saw this bird, and I said “Is that a stork?”, and Fred said “Yeah, I think so…” I said, “Oh, I’ve GOT to get a picture of it, so I can make a joke about how I talked to the stork, who told me that he’d be visiting Athena on July 9th!” Unfortunately, it’s not a stork. It’s a pelican. But it would have been funny, no? Y’all think good birthing thoughts for Athena. She’s ready to get this show on the road! Something on the floor? Climb up on it and wash yourself, of course! We’re going to Fred’s mom and stepfather’s house this afternoon. They just adopted a 6 week old kitten, and I’m dying to get my hands on it. I don’t think I’ve played with a kitten since Miz Poo was one, so I’m looking forward to it. I like cats, have I mentioned?]]>

With a pile of pillows on the floor, where else would a portly princess settle her ass? While we were on vacation in Florida, I finished reading Me Talk Pretty One Day, which I highly recommend. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, since I wasn’t crazy about Naked, but I was so amused by Pretty that when I was ordering stuff off of Amazon last weekend, I went ahead and ordered Holidays on Ice. That’s right, I cleared a bunch of stuff off my Amazon wish list over the weekend. We didn’t spend all our vacation money in Florida, so we split what was left over and went to work on our wish lists. Fred’s is down to something ridiculous like three items, and mine has been reduced from two pages to one. That won’t last long, I’m sure. Speaking of books, I highly HIGHLY recommend Kiss My Tiara. I happened to catch a recommendation for the book from one of those crazy kids over at Fractious Times, and put it on my wish list. And then, when I had some extra money laying around (not literally – we don’t let our extra money just lay around. We bury it in big pickle jars in the back yard) I bought it, it sat on the bookcase for god knows how long, and finally I read it. And loved it so much I’m keeping it, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned previously is unusual. So go forth and buy it for yourself. Because I said so.]]>

Goopy Toe, and I have a confession to make. As I read the entry, I thought all petulantly to myself, “Why can’t I have a Goopy Toe?!” Because, my friends, I am a squeezer. There’s nothing on god’s green earth that gives me more of a sense of accomplishment than squeezing something angry and red looking and having a big pile of goop shoot out. (Insert mandatory penis joke here) I am a total zit-popper. If there’s a zit anywhere within reach on my body, I’m messing with it and squeezing it until it pops. I’m RELENTLESS in the search for zits upon my bod. If I see a little bump that doesn’t quite look like a zit? I squeeze the hell out of it. Sometimes I get a lovely surprise and it pops. Sometimes it just hurts. It’s always worth a try, in my opinion. When I was training for the 3Day last year? I loved it when I got one of those big, bubbly blisters, because I would pop the hell out of it when the walk was over. My favorite zits are the ones that POP, not the ones that just kind of ooze out. If it pops halfway across the room, I’m a happy gal. If it oozes, I’m still happy, just not so much as when I get a geyser. I suspect my love of popping zits probably comes from the fact that I didn’t have much of an acne problem when I was a teenager, so I didn’t get my fill of popping back then. I’m a freak – I fully admit it. So Fred’s been a little unhappy recently, because he was told he needed to go on a 2-day business trip to Washington, DC. He doesn’t like being away from home, and I was going to suggest that I go with him, but it seemed like a lot of money, what with tickets costing $500 apiece (I checked). Finally, last night he said, “It’s not being away from home I don’t like. It’s being away from you.” That’s right, awwwww. He’s mine, ladies, and don’t you forget it. Don’t be making moves on my man, or I’ll kick you in the throat. Unless you’re freakishly tall, in which case I’ll kick you in the shin. And it will HURT. I said “Well, it would be kind of neat if I could go with you”, whereupon he jumped up off the bed and said “Let’s check ticket prices!” After a lot of looking around and dithering with different airports, we found round-trip tickets for less than $200 each. And since his ticket and the hotel room will be paid for by the company he’s making the trip for for which he’s making the trip, all we’ll have to pay for is my ticket and meals. He got really excited knowing that I would be going with him, and went from down in the dumps to perky and happy. This morning, he found out that the meetings aren’t in DC – they’re in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He was worried I wouldn’t want to go, but hell – I am ALWAYS up for a trip, even if it’s to Gaithersburg. We’ll be there a couple of days, and will hopefully hit some of the sights in DC. I could venture into DC on my own while Fred’s in his meetings, but I’m too chickenshit to do so. We’ll be there July 23rd – 25th, and then I leave for Maine on the 30th. I’m a happenin’, travellin’ chick, is what I am. The spud is safely back from California – I talked to her last night, and then talked to my mother. During the course of the conversation, my mother casually said “They’re engaged.” We had just been talking about the spud and California and how many new clothes the spud had, so I drew a blank. For several long seconds, I sat there, my mind a blank. Finally, I realized she was talking about the ex and his girlfriend. I was wondering when he’d get around to proposing to her. They haven’t set a date yet, so I’m wondering if they’re going to have a wedding the spud can attend, or if they’re going to go the elopement route. See something on the floor? Sit on it. Actually, lay on it and cover as much of it as possible. On our way home from Florida, I did about half the driving – which is unusual and showed me that Fred was really tired of driving, because I could probably count the number of times he’s ridden in the passenger seat on one hand. I was reminded anew how much I suck as a driver – at least when I’m driving a Jeep. I have absolutely no speed consistency. One minute I’m going 75 miles per hour, two minutes later I’m going 90, without realizing I was speeding up. Thank god for cruise control. I also get really annoyed by those people who are driving the same speed as you are, if you speed up, they speed up, you slow down and they do the same, all for the apparent purpose of staying juuuuust outside your blind spot. I usually get annoyed after about five minutes of that, and stomp on the gas, blow them away, and then resume my very careful 5-miles-over-the-speed-limit speed. Fred is SUCH a backseat driver, by the way. I usually ending up bellowing “SHUT THE FUCK UP, I’M DRIVING!” at least a couple of times, because he bitches about how slow I’m going, or I’m taking too long to pass someone, or blah-de-blah. Hey, at least I stay out of the left lane if I’m not passing someone. It’s a start, right?]]>

That’s Kiwi snuggling with my husband. She’s in luhrv. We spent plenty of time on the beach and in the water – until we got bored watching the people and fighting the bits of seaweed, that is. We managed to come away from the vacation without burning ourselves to a crisp (to crisps?), which is amazing, considering how god-awful hot that sun was, and how much I was sweating. I got a tiny burn around my hairline, and on my shoulder, but it was nothing to cry about. The water was awesome and warm, but there were bits of seaweed everywhere, and each time we got back to the hotel room and undress to shower, I found about three pounds of shredded seaweed in my bra and underwear. What? You thought I was going to wear a bathing suit on the beach. Um, not in THIS life. I wore shorts and a t-shirt, with underwear and a sports bra, and it was fine, except when the water was rough and would push my shorts up my butt and fling my t-shirt over my head. Luckily, with all the shredded seaweed around, no one could really see anything. Every time Fred saw a fish jump out of the water, he was positive it was jumping to get away from a shark, who was surely headed directly toward us. Despite my plans to eat every raw oyster Florida had to offer, the first dozen that I had – for lunch Thursday at Gilligan’s – were not very good, and I wasn’t interested in eating any more for the rest of the trip. Hell, I didn’t even finish that dozen, and that’s unusual for me. I didn’t have a single strawberry daiquiri – but I did have a couple of strawberry smoothies, and they rocked. Did you know that if you go over the recommended daily dose of aspirin, you might develop temporary tinnitus? Yes indeedy. The day we went to the Gulfarium – Friday – so that Fred could cavort with his One True Love (see picture above), I sweated so much that I soaked through my underwear and bra in the five-minute walk between our hotel and the Gulfarium. While we walked around the Gulfarium, I continued to sweat so much that even Fred noticed, and I had to go into the bathroom several times to mop the sweat from my face, neck, and chest. By the time the Dolphin Encounter was over, I was starting to soak through my shirt, and ready to sit my ass down in a cool place, eat lunch, and then perhaps go back to the hotel for a nap. Fred had other ideas. Fred can be similar to a drill instructor sometimes, and he wanted to walk down the road to see if there was anywhere decent to eat lunch, and though we walked by a bar and grill, he was intent on reaching this particular restaurant that he had his eye on, and when we got there, we found that it wasn’t open. “Well,” he said, “Let’s walk a FEW MORE MILES down this hot, humid, sandy, heavily-trafficked road, where many vehicles will be driven by rednecks who will yell nasty things about your fat ass, and maybe we’ll see a restaurant! And after, say, FIVE MILES, if we haven’t found anything we like, we can turn around and walk back the other way, and maybe there will be a restaurant a few miles that way! Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?!” He had a sadistic gleam in his eye. “What about that little place we passed on the other side of this building?” I suggested. The headache I’d had when I woke up that morning was back, and I didn’t have any aspirin on me. Obviously, being FRED, which according to my book of baby names translates to “oblivious male”, he hadn’t seen the bar and grill I’d stared longingly at as we walked by, and so he assumed I was wrong, wrong, WRONG, and had no clue what I was talking about, and thus he did this shuck-and-jive about how that building was closed, there was nothing there, nothing to see, move along, let’s GO. “There IS a little bar and grill there!” I insisted, my head pounding. “Okay, fine,” he said. “There is NO bar and grill, but if you HAVE to be a BIG PAIN IN THE ASS, let’s go look, shall we? For I cannot WAIT to do the dance of I am right and you are wrong!” Of course, he’s never actually perfected that dance, seeing as how he’s so rarely right. We walked back from whence we’d come, and SURE AS FUCKING SHIT, there it was. The Angler’s Beachside Grill. Which we’d walked directly by. And it wasn’t a small building, either, seeing as how it can seat 200 people. It was a large building, it had a boardwalk behind it, jutting half a mile out into the ocean, and it all but had neon lights with big arrows pointing to it. “BY GOD, YOU’RE RIGHT!” I bellowed. “THERE’S NOTHING THERE!” “Do you want to eat there?” Fred asked, ignoring my obnoxious ways. “Yes,” I said. As we headed for the door, he smiled and said “You sure do get grouchy when you’re hungry.” Which is when I killed him and fed him to the dolphins. If Tubby were sealife, he would look like this: Speaking of Tubby, he was so happy to have us home that he showed his joy by laying on his back in the middle of the floor all day yesterday and doing his bitchy “Meh. Meh. MEH!” until I yelled “Shut UP, Tubby!”, to which he responded “Meh.” and then shut up. Do any of you Floridians know what this is? I’m just curious, because Fred passed a bush like that when he was out jogging and said it smelled really good. (Note: I’ve since learned that it’s an Oleander and comes in many different colors) So, our last night in Florida, after spending a couple of hours on the beach – Fred made sure to point out every man who walked by with an abdominal six-pack, and I made sure to point out every girl who walked by wearing a yellow bathing suit – we showered and got ready to go out to dinner. We thought we would eat at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Walton, not far from the hotel, but as we pulled out of the hotel parking lot, we saw that the traffic going left – which is where we’d have had to go – was at a standstill as far as the eye could see. “Let’s just go into Destin,” Fred said. Destin is maybe a 10-minute drive, and has plenty of restaurants and stores (including a Super Wal-Mart – obviously a town after my own heart). We turned right and drove toward Destin, and were dismayed to find that the traffic going from Destin to Fort Walton was backed up for miles and miles – and soon enough, the traffic going into Destin came to a standstill as well. “Maybe it’s just rush hour,” I suggested. “And it’ll clear out by the time we’ve finished eating.” It took us perhaps 40 minutes to make it into Destin instead of the 10 minutes we’d expected, and we stopped for dinner at The Lucky Snapper. I highly recommend the cheese bread at The Lucky Snapper, though the shrimp po’boy was a little dry. An hour later we finished eating and stood up to leave. A few tables away, a guy who slightly resembled Mark McGwire stared at me. He continued to stare at me until we were past him, and I suppressed the urge to say “Take a picture, dude!” The traffic coming from Fort Walton into Destin was, if anything, worse than it had been. Fred dug out the map and looked for another way to get back to Fort Walton. We had come from Fort Walton into Destin via route 98, and after studying the map, Fred decided that we could drive through the rest of Destin, take a left on that green road – I don’t recall the name of the road – hit highway 20, then meet up with highway 85, all the way back into Fort Walton. It took us an HOUR to get through Destin. An hour. And the entire way, I could feel Fred’s blood pressure rising. I sat happily and stared at the people in the cars around us, the condos, the beach, and hoped that the top of Fred’s head wouldn’t pop completely off before we got back to the hotel. An hour and fourty-five minutes later, we were arriving back at Fort Walton. We’d left the hotel shortly before 5, and it was 8 when we got back. As we drove across the bridge into Fort Walton, I said to Fred “Take a right onto Santa Rosa Boulevard. I want to see the houses down there.” Fred had jogged down that road and told me there were some crappy houses down that way, as well as a little family of cats in one of the yards. Since I’m a sucker for cats (I know that shocks you), I wanted to check them out. We didn’t see any cats, but we saw some crappy houses as well as some nice ones, and several hotels, including the cruddy one we stayed in when we were in Florida 5 years ago. We came to the end of the road and turned around. Ahead of us was a car that was driven by someone who apparently didn’t know where exactly they were going. I wasn’t really paying attention, as I was checking out the hotels we were driving by, so when Fred stomped on his brakes, I reacted as I usually do when taken by surprise – I flailed my hands around like a spaz. “Nice JOB, buttfuck!” he snarled at the idiot ahead of us, who had stood up on his brakes to make a turn into a hotel parking lot. As we continued driving, Fred started laughing really, really hard. “What?” I asked, sure that he was laughing at my previous spazzy flailing. “I couldn’t think of anything horrible to call him,” Fred gasped, wiping tears from his eyes. “So I called him a….hee hee hee… I called him…heh… I called him a fuckfuck.” Naturally, we’ve spent the last three days calling each other “You fuckfuck” and giggling our asses off.]]>