Category Archives: nonsense

smurf ass

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So, the thing about brightly colored hair is, it bleeds. The darker colors especially have very large pigment molecules, lots of which don’t actually penetrate the hair shaft, but rather just sit on the cuticle (the surface of each hair) until they are eventually dislodged by washing or what have you. As a result, the first few showers I take after a dye job are pretty spectacular visually: mountains of purple suds when I shampoo, rivulets of purple water running across my skin, and swirls of purple circling the drain at my feet.

The color doesn’t just come off in the shower though. I try to wear my hair up for the first few nights after a fresh dye because otherwise I’ll end up with a disturbingly bruised-looking neck and shoulders:

dyeneck

The purple really adds depth to my neck rolls, doesn’t it?

When the dye gets onto my skin like this, it’s quite hard to get off, even with soap. Almost like it’s, you know, MADE to stain. I’ve never had it transfer to my clothing or other surfaces from my skin, though – only ever from my hair itself.

Until today, anyway…when I stained the toilet seat blue at work.

Yes, that’s right, not only do I apparently have Smurf Ass, but it appears to be catching. Or at least, transferable to other surfaces, porous and non-porous alike.

I mean, I’m PRETTY sure the toilet seat wasn’t blue-ish before I sat down on it. It’s not like I was on it all that long or like my ass was especially sweaty while I WAS on it. But, when I stood up and looked down at the toilet, there was definitely a faint blue ass-print there.

All I can figure is that the sheer amount of extra dye being rinsed out of my hair this time stained my ass. I checked out my ass in the mirror after I noticed the toilet seat, but the lighting in the bathroom is terrible and who can actually twist around enough to see their whole ass anyway, you know? It maybe looked a LITTLE blue, but not like…”Jesus, what’s wrong with your ASS?” blue.

So I don’t know. Maybe the toilet seat really did have a weird faint blue butt-print on it before I got in there. Or maybe the cleaning ladies that come in this weekend are going to be SUPER confused.

I’m honestly kind of hoping it’s the latter.

This is my truest self.

The world didn’t end so I guess I have to write more blog posts.

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Well, here we are, so I suppose the world didn’t end.  Again. The most hilarious part to me is that the wing-nuts who make these predictions don’t ever seem all that embarrassed that they continue to be wrong. It’s almost like a lottery drawing, you know?

“Aww, SO CLOSE, only one number away from the End Times! Sorry, Revered Wing-Nut Steve…better luck next time!”

 

Time for another stamp!

Anyway – it’s been a busy week here around HBCIG Headquarters. I guess. I mean, that would explain the sink overflowing with dirty dishes and the living room floor strewn with socks, right?

Actually, that’s pretty much business as usual around here:

Notice the desperation of the stuffed alligator stage left, and the "who, me?" look on the small white demon in the upper right.

You thought I was joking. Look at the dog’s face. He’s like, “This shit is GDFR, folks”.

It HAS been busy, though. Since the world didn’t end on Wednesday, my super awesome husband reserved me a space in a cooking class at our favorite local restaurant. I’ve been to four or five classes there and it’s always interesting. It’s demo-style, so it’s not like Chef is letting us have knives or anything. It’s really more “edu-tainment” than education, but I’ve definitely learned from every class I’ve gone to. Plus, there’s something to be said for spending time in a place where you feel like you belong, and for me, that’s kitchens. And, you know, I’m not ever going to bitch about anywhere that not only actually WANTS me to drink wine, but keeps bringing it to me when my glass mysteriously empties.

Thursday was full of fuckery, plain and simple. There was work fuckery that had me feeling like I embarrassed myself, which is always good fodder for a subsequent round of self-loathing. There was also small appliance fuckery in the form of the crock pot refusing to turn on for me after I had peeled, cored and sliced seven pounds of apples in preparation for making apple butter. In the crock pot. That wouldn’t turn on. After a mild panic about what my options were for dealing with a huge pile of peeled apples at 9pm, (for context: I’m usually in bed by 9, so the idea of trying to fuck around and make pie crust or even wait for the apples to cook down into sauce at 9pm was like, nearly cause for crying. Hormones may have also played a part), and some especially creative and descriptive cursing, the crock pot finally deigned to turn on for me. I loaded that sumbitch with apples, brown sugar and a boatload of spices and was rewarded in the morning with this:

Wow, so brown, much apple.

Wow, so brown, much apple.

It actually didn’t look like that at first – that was after a judicious thrashing with the stick blender. I can’t lie to you – this shit tastes amazing. It’s like the inside of apple pie but without the chunks to get in the way, basically. I had a couple spoonfuls of it mixed into some plain 2% Fage greek yogurt for lunch just now and it was like eating all the non-pastry parts of an apple danish but without all the weird feelings that may or may not bring up…

And, finally and most terrifyingly, Friday I applied for spring semester at my local community college. It’s not that I’m afraid of being rejected – it’s a community college, for fuck’s sake. I don’t think they’re actually ALLOWED to not accept anyone who wants to take classes. No, the terror is more along the lines of, “shit, why am I volunteering to write essays again?!”. I always liked school in that my friends could be found there, there was usually chocolate milk available at some point and music class was pretty awesome, but I could never quite get the hang of writing essays. Funny from someone who likes to write, I know, but notice how most of my posts just ramble on and contain a lot of cursing and made-up words and I don’t usually have a point or the ability to edit myself? Yeah. That approach doesn’t really work for school essays, and that’s…the only approach I have, basically. The upside is, I’ll be studying accounting so hopefully there won’t be too much call for essay writing. I’m also harboring the hope that, since I’ve been doing accounting and bookkeeping professionally for more than ten years now, I might actually be able to test out of a bunch of classes. That would save me a lot of time, money and sleepless nights staring at a blank computer screen.

if the world is going to end, I need to tell you some things

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Crazy people think the world is ending tomorrow.  They’ve never been right before, but I figure, why waste a perfectly good opportunity to tell secrets and air grievances, right?  RIGHT. So pour yourself an adult beverage and let’s begin. Try not to judge me too harshly, ok?

Let’s start out with some easy ones:

  • I love canned whipped cream.  The actual whipped cream part, not the nitrous oxide, I swear. A can of whipped cream lasts maaaaaybe 36 hours in my house. MAYBE. I will continually wander over to the fridge, up-end the can and spray sugary processed white joy into my mouth with utter abandon. There is no bad time for canned whipped cream. Which is exactly why I don’t buy it except on rare occasions.
  • I would eat pizza once a day, every day, and twice a day on weekends, if I could. Standards apply, of course. I’m not talking like $3.99 frozen pizzas. But decent gas-station pizza? Oh, it’s ON.
  • I talk to my dog constantly. That in and of itself isn’t so bad, but I also do the dog’s part of the conversation back to me in dog-voice. If my husband and I are both home, we take turns doing dog-voice. If the dog ever grows thumbs, we’re totally done for.

Now, some less easy ones:

  • I’m pretty sure most people that say they like me really just feel sorry for me. I don’t feel like I’m a particularly pitiable case or anything, but for some reason I just can’t ever quite believe that most of my friends would actually want to talk to me or hang out with me if given another alternative.
  • I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m almost 36, so this one is starting to become kind of a problem.
  • I am super duper afraid that I’m wasting my life.  I struggle with feeling like nothing I do is ever enough to live up to the fact that this is IT, you know? This is the only time I’m going to get. Am I using it well enough? It’s a scary question, at least for me.

And finally, here’s a video of my dog licking almond butter off a spoon as a bit of a palate cleanser for anyone who made it this far:

motivationally chilly

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My dog is doing this devastatingly adorable thing right now where, while sitting on my lap, he tucks his little nose just under the side of my arm and snoozes.  I’d like to think it’s because he adores the shit out of me, but in reality it’s probably because the poor little bastard is freezing, given I haven’t broken down and turned on the heat yet.

HPIM3269

“I wasn’t a white dog to begin with.  This is accumulated frost on my fur.”

It’s not that we can’t afford to run the heating.  It’s more that I’m just needlessly stubborn.  And also kind of a cheapskate asshole sometimes.  But mostly it’s that I’m a little bit of a sicko and I kind of enjoy the game of mental endurance involved.  It feels like an accomplishment to get through a slightly uncomfortably chilly day without turning up the heat.  My husband doesn’t share the same strange brand of masochism.  He would in fact prefer it if we kept the house at a tropical 78 degrees so that he could lollygag around, comfortably watching football in his undies.

I, however, find the cold motivating.

As in, I need to keep moving in order to stay warm.

Speaking of which, my toes are turning blue. I think it’s time to vacuum!

easy come, easy go

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This morning while I was cooking breakfast, Husband was harnessing up the dog for the morning constitutional and said something to him about being “just a poor puppy”. In my head that immediately turned into “I’m just a poor pup, nobody loves me”, which in turn lead to me singing Bohemian Rhapsody in dog-voice while Husband made the dog dance along.

That was quite possibly the sanest thing I did all morning.

It went downhill quickly after that, with stops at “surely I’ll have time to watch an episode of Jeopardy without being late for work”, and “this sweater with giant horizontal stripes doesn’t look THAT bad on me”, before reaching the near-inevitable nadir of me choosing to fully line my eyes with black eyeliner a la Jared Leto circa 2006:

30 Seconds to Mars, indeed. It almost works in a goth-lite type of way in this picture but trust me, it's much more ridiculous in real life.

30 Seconds to Mars, indeed. It almost works in a goth-lite type of way in this picture but trust me, it’s much more ridiculous in real life.

And I’ve still got bloody fucking Bohemian Rhapsody stuck in my head, four hours later.

“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO?!”

…and then I lost an hour’s worth of work.

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I went on vacation over the weekend.  I wrote a big long post about how great it was.  There were all kinds of pictures with funny captions and everything.  It was probably the best thing I’ll ever have written.  We’re talking Pulitzer material here, honest.  If they gave Pulitzer prizes for blog posts about vacations, anyway.

Then, The Internets decided to have a freaking seizure juuuust before I hit “post”, and all my hilarity went right down the tubes in one fell swoop.

I am not some grannie who has never used a computer before, people.  I grew up in the 90’s!  I SHOULD DAMN WELL KNOW BETTER THAN TO NOT PERIODICALLY SAVE MY WORK.  It’s like I’m back in 7th grade again, trying to convince my teacher that I DID have a book report but the computer ate it.

I can’t even with this shit.

I also can’t decide if there should be a comma in that last sentence or not.  Technically, it probably isn’t even a sentence so it doesn’t really matter.

OMG I am so annoyed.

Here, enjoy this picture of Pierre photobombing a scenic vista while I cry a little bit and curse my inability to simply hit the “save draft” button once in a god damned blue moon.

“Oh, hallo! Ah am ze Fronch anteater, Pierre. Ah weel show you zeez rocks en Maine. Zey are velly good rocks, ah promeez!”

Dear Internets: WTF is this thing?

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There’s a thing growing on the edge of my lawn and it’s kind of freaking me out:

Does it not look vaguely sinister to YOU? It does to me. I mean, most stuff does...but this REALLY does.

Sorry it’s blurry – the light was really bad and I was a (very full) glass and a half of Chardonnay in. Not a good combo, at least for taking nature pictures.

It’s not actually on the lawn proper – it’s growing just past the edge of the lawn where the underbrush and woodsy shit starts.  It has been there for a couple weeks now.  Last night was the first time I actually went and looked at it closely, so I don’t know if this is just one disturbing stage in its metamorphosis into some kind of Mothra-esque creature that wants to suck my brains out or what.

Is it some kind of bonkers mushroom?  There are weird skinny leaves coming off the stalk, so I don’t think so.  There are day-lily plants (now died off, but the bulbs are still there) that grow right next to where this thing came up – I don’t know if that matters, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.  More information is better, right?

The actual berry-looking part is maybe 2.5 – 3 inches tall, and the stalk it sits on is quite woody-looking, and another maybe 3ish inches tall.  You can kind of see the long skinny leaves coming off the stalk in the picture.  The whole thing just looks vaguely sinister to me.  I mean, most stuff does, to be fair…but this REALLY does.

Is it some kind of delicious delicacy that I am fortunate to have found?  Will it give me a rash if I touch it?  Does it mark some ancient Native American burial ground?  A ghost might explain the missing scone, anyway…

Help me, Internets.  I need to know what this thing is if I’m ever going to sleep well again.

the curious case of the missing scone

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I bring treats into work on Tuesday mornings for staff meeting so Monday nights, I bake.

Sometimes I make banana bread, sometimes muffins…it really kind of depends on what I have around, what food blogs I’ve been perusing before making the shopping list, and what I feel like doing.  This week I was back in scone mode after a run of blueberry coffee cake made with the lovely local blueberries I picked and froze earlier in the summer.  The scones I had in mind to make this week were studded with dried figs and toasted walnuts, and warmed with some ground ginger, nutmeg and allspice.

I hadn’t made scones in quite a while so I had to keep referring back to the recipe a lot (baking is the only time I really ever pay attention to recipes, because way too much can go wrong if I don’t…which I have learned the hard way!  How bad can it go, indeed…), and maybe also neglected to remember that my preferred recipe only makes 12 scones.  I like to try and bring at least 14 or 15 servings to work with me, so after I had scooped out 12 nice neat piles of scone dough, I went through and trimmed a bit off each one to make them smaller and hopefully yield a few more scones in the process.  When I finished, I had 14 scones – six on one baking sheet, eight on the other.

I could almost swear to this.

Almost.

It should be noted that I wasn’t drinking at the time, either.  I just…want to throw that out there.

Anyway – so, I’m PRETTY SURE that 14 scones went to the oven, and I’m also PRETTY SURE that 14 scones came out.  I set the pans on top of the stove to cool, like I always do.  At that point Junior was spoiling for his evening constitutional, so Husband harnessed him up we took him for a quick five minute jaunt around the driveway together.  As we came inside I needed to pee so I kicked my shoes off and ran upstairs to use the loo.  I came back downstairs, went into the kitchen to package the cooling scones up, and noticed something odd…

There were only 13 scones – six on one sheet, seven on the other.

Husband happened to be coming back through the kitchen just about then, and I glared at him accusingly.

“Wha?” he said.

I pointed at the space where the scone was missing.  He blinked and shrugged.

“SCONE STEALER”, I said, pointing at him.

“I didn’t!”, he replied, without a hint of a smile.

Now, it’s not like he hasn’t nicked warm baked goods off my pans before of a Monday evening, but to be fair to him, he almost always makes it enough of a production that I’m aware he’s absconding with the goodies and have a chance to stop him if it really matters.  And even if he doesn’t, he certainly never lies about it when I call him on nicking something.  So, when I stared long and hard at him and he vehemently denied having stolen the scone multiple times without even a trace of smugness, I found I had to believe him.

And yet…I could almost swear there were 14 scones when we went outside.

Could our crazy neighbor or one of his kids have sneaked across the breezeway into our apartment, grabbed a scone and slipped back into their apartment without us noticing from 30 feet away in the driveway?  Possibly…but not likely.

Could it have been some kind of R.O.U.S. infiltration?  Again…possible, but I’ve not noticed any sign of even normal sized rodents in the apartment (thank fuck), let alone ones big enough to make off with an entire scone without leaving so much as a trail of crumbs.

Ninja pterodactyls?  Stealth scone-stealing pixies?  Aliens?

I mean…it’s POSSIBLE that I miscounted and only actually baked 13 scones…but I don’t think I did.

It’s pretty much always aliens.

Also, for the record, the next morning Husband DID admit to stealing a scone, but he was adamant that it was after I went to bed and was definitely NOT the original scone that I accused him of stealing.

Hmmm.

new morning habits

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This is my dog, Junior:

IMG_20150909_084551813

Don’t let that sweet innocent face and exposed belly fool you. This dog is a MONSTER.

Since I’ve started trying to get into this “do yoga in the mornings” habit, Junior has developed an accompanying new habit.  It’s actually a series of habits strung together into one ridiculous performance of dog fuckery the likes of which I feel few people could truly appreciate without video documentation, but I’m going to do my best to describe it to you.

Stage One (which honestly is the same basic Stage One that we had on non-yoga mornings):

Junior starts whining at about 6am.  Husband and I take turns alternately pulling blankets / pillow over our head for ten minutes at a time while the other one pets Junior and tries to soothe him back into another half hour of dozing.  It never works.

Sometimes there’s also a Stage One, Part B where-in I try to sing the song of Junior’s people back to him in an attempt to offend him so deeply that he fucks off and lets us sleep a while longer.  Again, never works.  It does have the residual bonus of being a minor husband trolling maneuver, though.  I mean, he’s never SAID he doesn’t like it…but I can infer.

Stage Two:

Resigned to my fate of eternal sleep deprivation, I claw my way out of the tangle of sheets and feel around the bedside for my glasses like a developmentally challenged raccoon feeling for a dropped morsel of food.  Once glasses have been located and placed on my face, I pick up my phone and stumble from the bedroom to the bathroom.  I can usually get about five minutes of peace at this point before the whining starts up again, assuming I’ve had the presence of mind to actually shut the bathroom door.  If I haven’t, then there’s immediate whining and, far more disconcertingly, disappointed staring.  We’re still talking about the dog at this point, by the way.  Husband knows better than to follow me into the can first thing in the morning…or ever, really.

Stage Three:

After the whining has once again reached Emergency Alert System proportions, I abandon the bathroom and stomp downstairs.  It should be noted that Junior isn’t actually whining this way because of any deep and desperate need to go outside, by the way – he’s literally just being an attention-whoring tit.  Also, this may be your first sign that my choosing not to procreate was probably the right decision.  Anyway – Stage Three culminates in me rolling out the yoga mat on the living room floor and firing up my favorite yoga video on the laptop.

Stage Four, AKA: The Pre-Trolling Warm-Up:

The pre-trolling warm-up begins with me laying down on the yoga mat to begin the practice.  While I’m on the floor trying to like, harness my chi or find my center or whatever, Junior is busy looking out the living room windows, scanning for neighbors, neighbor cats, chipmunks, birds, swirling leaves…really anything that moves in any way.  Once he inevitably spots a target, he unleashes a tirade of the shrillest yaps imaginable.  To his credit, the yaps are usually interspersed with some pretty amazing tiny-angry-Wookie noises which I do find amusing, but generally this stage ends with me picking up the nearest dog toy and chucking it at him to try and shut him up.  There are usually grumbles coming from the husband upstairs at this point as well.

Stage Five, AKA: Full On Trolling, AKA: Shit Gets Real:

Shortly after I run out of dog toy bark deterrents to chuck at Junior, Stage Five goes into full swing.  Because, you see, my dog does nothing by half measures.  Just barking and whining while I’m trying to better myself via the ancient art of yoga is simply not enough for him.  He will at this point bound off to another part of the living room where he stockpiles all of the stinky dirty socks that my husband peels off and gives to him at the end of every work day (hey, at least it’s not underpants?), and gleefully return with one of said stinky socks in his mouth.

Now, to be fair to Junior, we DO treat socks as dog toys in this house and always have, so he comes by the sock-fetching naturally enough and I have no problem with that.  However, when he takes the sock by one end, carefully orients the other end of the sock right next to my head and then proceeds to shake the ever-loving shit out of it in a manner such that it rapidly and repeatedly fwaps me DIRECTLY IN THE FACE…I tend to take that personally.

After the sock-face-fwapping, we proceed quickly to Stage Five, Part B, which is where Junior moves from above my head to somewhere near my hip and actually launches his entire 12 pound self directly into my solar plexus, quickly and effectively undoing any deep oxygenation, chi harnessing and/or muscle relaxation I have thus far accomplished.

Conveniently, this is just about when the yoga video wants me to stand up and start doing more painful movey-aroundy stuff anyway, and it’s also pretty much when my husband has finally started to wonder what the hell is going on down in the living room. He comes downstairs at this point, leashes Junior up and takes him out while I finish my yoga routine in relative peace.

"Namaste? That roughly translates to 'abuse mom with sock', right? I mean, my accent may be a little off, but I'm pretty sure that's what it means."

“Namaste? That roughly translates to ‘abuse mom with sock’, right? I mean, my accent may be a little off, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it means.”