While Geoffrey is elsewhere, rocking out to Motley Crue, I’m home enjoying another band entirely. Beanpole brought over his DVD collection, and so I’m enjoying and all that could have been aka Halo Seventeen from NIN. (My Number One Internet Fanboy has obviously influenced me, as I thought, “Oh, how neat that they recommend Firefox to access the site.” Since that’s the browser I use.) I’m really pissed that I can’t find my Halo Twelve, since I really wanted to watch it again, and show it to Beanpole. Especially as he’s been so nice as to let me borrow his NIN CD collection to import onto my iPod mini, since my NIN collection disappeared under suspicious circumstances years back (which thoroughly pissed me off).

I’ve just been doing laundry, cleaning, and crocheting all day. Time to change over the laundry again, and enjoy some more Trent while I fold clothes. Nine Inches is a good thing…Nine Inch Nails, that is. *grin*

I’ve got a hot date next Friday – part of a rather full weekend, actually. I’m taking the day off from work so I can be fresh as a daisy (what makes daisies particularly fresh, anyway? and where do these sayings come from?!) for the Blogathon Saturday. Friday is also payday, which means I’ll be doing some shopping for Blogathon-sustaining goodies. Like some really tasty creamers for the gallons of coffee I’m sure to be consuming, for one thing.

And at noon I have an appointment to see Jane, my aesthetician. I always feel prettier after a good waxing!

Then it’s out for a romantic lunch, followed by spending a couple of hours in a nice air-conditioned movie theater, seeing Stealth. Military scifi may not be a consistent genre, but occasionally you get some good flicks out of it (Aliens, anyone?).

So with whom is my hot date, one might be wondering. Just this luscious guy I know, with gorgeous dark hair, exquisitely soft skin, lovely green eyes, and sensuously-quirky lips. You know, that guy I’ve been madly in love with for 6 years now. I’m keeping him.

I hope Geoffrey has fun on his hot date tomorrow night, with the cute little brunette chick who’s taking him to the Motley Crue concert tomorrow night, but she’ll have to be okay with a timeshare deal. She can only have him weekdays before 5, unless I take the day off work. *snicker*

The other day I finally got a photo of the big, official, orange sign that amused me to no end, posted near a highway exit, that says, “DANGER – KEEP OUT”. Unfortunately, the picture was super-blurry because I took it from my car and the stupid auto-focus decided to focus on the inside of my windshield. It probably didn’t help that I was …well, driving. Uh, my bad. (Warning: Don’t try this at home. Or in your car, either.)

And I couldn’t get a picture of the neat thing I heard on TheBuzz, since it was (duh) radio. A caller named Jordan was on the air, and the DJ’s all started talking about what a “totally hot name Jordan is for a girl!” That was pretty nifty, and I’m sure my Jordan will appreciate it in a few more years. (That’s not the only radio station I listen to, or even my favorite. My favorite is whichever one of the six stations I listen to does not currently have talking, commercials, or crappy music. Sometimes all of them do, however, and I tend to dislike the DJ’s on TheBuzz the least. And KNRK’s new website sucks, but KUFO has the suckiest “personalities.”)

So here are some things I did get pictures of, and made a new photo gallery for critters! I got a decent pic of the squirrel feeder that I nailed into my wild plum tree in the front yard, complete with a “customer.” The lid is hinged so squirrels can lift it up to get at the goodies. Yes, there’s actually commercially-sold squirrel food, which is a mixture of cracked corn and a variety of nuts & seeds. Squirrels reportedly like pumpkin seeds best, and I can’t blame them.

I didn’t have the presence of mind to grab my camera and get snapshots of the 3 quail that were in my front yard on Wednesday night. Nor the last couple times we had raccoons wandering through. And the possum waddled away too fast to even get the camera, much less snap a picture. Oh well, maybe another time. But I’m starting to think I should try to get my yard listed as an official wildlife refuge. *grin*

I did get pics of a critter that wasn’t in my yard, though. As I was headed up the stairs in my parking garage today (part of the exercise plan, I take the stairs instead of an elevator if it’s not more than 2 floors), I spotted a bug on one of the steps. A big bug. Since my co-worker Martin has a degree in entomology and is always collecting specimens (one of his pals even got him a hand-held bug vacuum that really works!), I decided I’d try to catch it …just as long as it didn’t jump at me or fly in my direction! So I went to my car, got a handy-dandy wide-mouthed water bottle, and went back to the step. It took some gentle encouragement from my handy-dandy keychain to convince it to get inside the container, and it tried to fly out of it all the way home. I don’t think it liked the car’s vibrations (that’s okay, I didn’t like it’s creepy wings-thwapping sound). Once home, I transferred it to a wide-mouth Mason jar with a damp paper napkin in the bottom, and covered it with tin foil (airholes punctured with a fork) secured by a rubber band.

It’s over an inch long – I tried to get a picture that would properly demonstrate that, but the perspective is a bit off. Still, it’s a neat bug. It has long feathery antennae and it’s a really big brown beetle-type-thing with white stripes lengthwise down its entire back. I’ve never seen anything like it, which is why I want Martin to tell me what it is. I figure, if anyone knows, he will. For crying out loud, he studies ancient bug parts that he found in core samples from 10,000-year-old peat! (He showed me pics he took with an electron microscope. Creepy.)

So here are the bug pics: the slightly-better focus, and the slightly-better angle. I hope Martin likes it. After all, I scared the crap out of myself capturing it. I utterly detest bugs, and I have screaming phobias of large flying bugs! But sometimes my curiosity is stronger than my phobias.

It was well over 90 degrees today, and tomorrow is supposed to be just as bad. The 10-day forecast is for 80+ degrees every day. All I can do is try not to melt, and be grateful I work in air-conditioned comfort.

My Onion horoscope said: “You’ve always feared change in your life, so relax: You’re going to be in a nice, stable coma for the foreseeable future.” Y’know, a coma doesn’t sound too bad right about now.

Except that I don’t want to miss out on the Blogathon (see that neat button above my calendar, that a very cool guy put up for me!). In preparation for it, I will be scanning some piccies that were taken back before computers became a household accessory, and taking the day before the Blogathon off work so I can sleep in (since I’ll be up by 6 am on the day of the Blogathon, which is a Saturday). Oooooh, some nice lady pledged a big chunk o’ change to the Cat Adoption Team no-kill shelter! If you want to join in with all the cool kids, click here!

Maybe I’ll even have my Darigan Paint Brush by then! I’m getting ever-so-close….

Gee, my life is so exciting. *rolls eyes*

In other news, I now have a crapload of stuff on my desktop (me, the minimalist who utterly hates a cluttered look, and hides pretty much all icons) because Karel is evil, and he linked to the Konfabulator. (Now I have to figure out how to get rid of the stuff I don’t want that automatically comes with it.)

Aside from a lovely dinner out and a nice visit with my Number One Internet Fanboy, and a really warm chat with an old pal who sometimes calls me Helen, today sucked a lot. It was Monday, after all.

The eldest demonspawn went to an unofficial SCA event with her boy, and one of my old SCA pals brought them home. I should say “one of my young SCA pals,” actually, since the lady in question was one of the few people I broke the Decade Rule for. For the uninformed, the Decade Rule is a rule I created after the end of my second marriage (to a guy 15 years older than me) in light of the fact that both that and my first marriage (to a guy 21 years older than me) were not what one might call successes. (Actually, one might call them “utterly heinous debacles” just as easily, if not as tactfully. And I am not exactly Ms. Tactful.) But really, when a person is full of Buttershots and a stunningly lovely buxom young blond girl is amenable to helping you debauch a stunningly lovely young blond man, and the debauching sort of runs amok…well, I certainly got my come-uppance the next day when I awkwardly tried to explain that I hadn’t planned on That Sort Of Thing, and it was “sort of an accident” — to which she replied snarkily, “Sure, you tripped and accidentally fell between my legs.” (And in that moment, I suddenly felt a better understanding of — and something of a kinship with — tactless guys in general.)

Thank heavens she was past her 18th birthday. (We won’t go into how far past.)

Anyhow, one of the funny moments I apparently missed at the event was my SCA daughter Etain talking with this lady, hearing a story or two and finally putting things together in her head, and exclaiming, “Oh my god, you’ve slept with both my SCA daddy and my SCA mommy!” (Damn, it was fun being one of the Naughty Young Maids of An Tir!)

Another funny (or so I was told) moment I missed was when Angst went swimming topless and was told by more than one person, “Hey, your mom wants her body back!” Hmm, now that I think about it, I was probably one of the Naughtier Young Maids of An Tir. But anyway, rather mixed feelings on that comment…it’s lovely that I’m remembered fondly, but not so lovely that there’s currently a lot more of me than most would remember.

In other news, I did a bunch of shopping (actually bought real fruit, as well as canned diet chow), and figured out a theme for my Blogathon adventure. “What,” I asked myself, “do I know enough about that I could possibly write 48 blog entries about?!” Several topics leapt to mind, most of which I dismissed on the grounds that this is A Fund Raising Project For Charity, Damnit, And Let’s Not Be Too Lascivious. Besides, it gets annoying trying to write about people without naming names and embarrassing them when their moms Google them. *snicker*

So my Blogathon theme will be cats. After all, I’m blogging for the Cat Adoption Team (C.A.T.) shelter, I’ve known & loved many a cat in my lifetime, I have two of the furry little maniacs currently, and I’ve said for years that I was raised by housecats. (Besides, I have a ton of cat humor at my main website that I can mine for blog entries. And a digital camera to inundate my entries with piccies of my darling felines.) Meow and goodnight.

With a few discs from Netflix, and a few borrowed DVDs from Beanpole, we’re having a movie weekend. The kids are gone, the Lyse beast is over, and the popcorn is hot. Here are the movies we’ve seen, and Sunday we may watch The Game, although I’m kinda expecting it to suck. (I’ll update this entry if we see it.)

The Jackal – Bruce Willis is a bad guy. Bruce Willis kisses another guy (as part of scamming the guy, who is gay). Bruce Willis wears a variety of disguises and never quite manages to look inconspicuous or even nonchalant in them. *sigh* I’m used to Bruce being so much better. Richard Gere did an excellent job as an occasionally-clever, stupid-but-likeable criminal (who’s really a good guy). Sidney Poitier must have needed a paycheck, is all I can guess at, and can’t quite pull off being an FBI agent. I guess this was supposed to be a caper flick, of sorts, but it just misses the mark. More explosions would have made it more interesting, but still wouldn’t have saved it. Nonetheless, at the movie’s end, I didn’t quite feel like I’d wasted 2 hours of my life.

The Bounty – Pretty good flick. Lovely scenery, gorgeous tall ships, many beautiful half-naked Polynesians doing stupendously-gorgeous tribal dances. A pretty straight-forward and not overly-entertaining retelling of the famous mutiny. Mel Gibson & Liam Neeson look incredibly young, Anthony Hopkins looks suitably gruff. Absolutely nobody’s acting skills stand out, except perhaps the guy who plays the Tahitian king. The only glaring flaw in this movie, though, is that the youngest officer on the ship seems to be “spotlighted” early in the movie, so that you’re waiting for this young actor (probably all of 15 at the time) to have a major scene or somehow be an integral part of a sub-plot…but it never happens, and you’re left feeling vaguely confused by it. Great to crochet by, or otherwise idly watch while devoting part of your attention elsewhere.

White Noise – If you like scary movies, this one’s a keeper. Micheal Keaton is good, although he doesn’t seem to be aging all that well (I really loved him in My Life, where he plays a dying man who makes videotaped messages for his unborn child to watch as the child grows up). I was pretty impressed by Deborah Kara Unger, who I don’t think I’ve seen in a movie before. She’s very striking, and has a compelling charisma even when she’s not doing anything in a scene.

I won’t be watching it again, though, because like all good scary flicks, it has just enough realism to creep you out. I giggle at zombie & vampire movies, because (despite my Buffy fangirl-ness) there aren’t really zombies & vampires out there. I enjoy creepy sci-fi flicks, because they’re set in the future, with lots of high-tech stuff we don’t actually have, and generally in a galaxy far, far away. But horror movies set in the here & now, or the historically-accurate past, with phenomenon that are actually possible in the real world (even if highly unlikely, still possible)…yeah, I don’t need to dwell overly much on that. I dismiss odd occurrences in my house with chuckling references to our “black hole,” which (if it indeed exists) is the most mellow poltergeist in history. (Or possibly the ghost of an absent-minded librarian, since it often moves keys, books, remote controls, and other small items from where you left them.)

Of course, having a beloved with a sick sense of humor helps lighten the mood a bit. Although there are several serious “jump moments” in White Noise (those bits where you’re startled into jumping, even if the scene isn’t actually that scary) – including one that made Lyse jump, shriek, and quickly scoot backward a couple feet – it’s hard to really get immersed into the horror of a flick after a scene where Micheal Keaton is looking terribly concerned & thoughtful, and Geoffrey voices gruffly, “I’m Batman.”

Lyse instructed me to smack him, but I was giggling too much to do it.

I couldn’t do it last year because it didn’t happen, and the year before…well, we just won’t go into that. But this year, I’m all set and raring to go with the Blogathon! What better way to put my new digital camera to use, than oodles of pics to blog about for charity.

My chosen charity is the Cat Adoption Team, the largest no-kill cat shelter in Oregon. It’s where I got my two sweet kitties. (Okay, my cats are occasionally sweet, but more often loud, needy, and neurotic. That’s what happens when you choose cats for looks instead of brains. I call them my Keanu cats.)

I’ve been impressed by the Cat Adoption Team’s efforts for over 3 years now, and if you like animals even a little, you should make a pledge. Skip one cappucino or fast food meal this week, and you won’t even miss a $5 donation. The shelter saves the lives of 2,000 cats per year, most of whom would become abandoned feral cats, or be destroyed at county facilities, if C.A.T. wasn’t there to take them in and find good homes for them. All cats are spayed or neutered, and the people who adopt them agree to keep them as indoor cats (outdoor cats spread disease, harm wildlife, and are at risk for injury & death from cars or other animals). Most of the supplies & veterinary care are donated, and the daily work of keeping the shelter going is done by volunteers.

Now I just have to figure out how I can post something interesting every 30 minutes for 24 hours! (And hey, if the thought of contributing to my sleep-deprivation makes you chuckle, that’s a good enough reason to donate!)

It’s been a long day. Ten hours at work, then doing the exercise thing at Curves, then going to Freddy’s for prescription refills (and getting distracted by a sale on purses!), and didn’t get home until 15 hours after I left this morning.

In other news, my hair is no longer purple. I’d post pictures but I have determined that: A) I am not photogenic under the best of circumstances, and B) I cannot take a decent picture of myself. Even with setting the shot by standing in front of a mirror so I can see where my head is in the preview window on the back of the camera. Obviously there is a skill involved, which Mari & Doug have perfected, but which I lack entirely.

I’m going to move all my stuff from my purse into my new purse now, and shortly thereafter I will collapse into my bed. And I will think about how ambition and greed are not necessarily my strong suits (since those are, basically, the reasons I volunteered for the 10 hours of overtime this week).

At the Curves where I work out, there’s a big dry-erase board where they write a new quote every few days. (Obviously someone had me in mind when they started Curves…the decor is purple, it’s all women so I don’t care if I look stupid while exercising, they play music that is often spiffy, and they have quotes…aka taglines!) Sometimes they’re funny quotes, like the one from Dolly Parton, “It never bothers me when people think I’m a dumb blond, because I know I’m not dumb…and I know I’m not blond!”

Today’s quote was more profound than funny, and very very true. I thought that more people should be exposed to this thought, so here it is:

“In my day, we didn’t have self-esteem, we had self-respect — and no more of it than we had earned.”
(Jane Haddam)

Since I’ve been working some overtime, I have literally seen Geoffrey (while both of us were conscious) a whole whopping hour between Sunday night and this afternoon. Sure, we talk on the phone for 15 or 20 minutes on my lunch break every day, and chat online with one another while he’s at work each evening, but it’s not the same as actually getting to talk (and cuddle! and other happy stuff!) in person. During today’s lunchtime phone call, I remarked to him that our anniversary was next week, and how it just amazes me that we’ve been together nearly 6 years – which is 2 years longer than I’ve been with anyone else (romantically, anyway, since Lyse & I have over a decade “together”). Geoffrey made me laugh a lot when he replied, “So I guess you’d better check my butt for an expiration date or something, right?”

While Geoffrey’s butt is quite nice to check out, I’m sure there’s no expiration date on it. Apparently there is one on various parts of me, however. I went to the doctor today to find out why my wrists & forearms hurt every day. It turns out that I have a tendonitis problem, which means that I get to wear the sort of wrist braces that you often see on grocery-store checkers or people with carpal tunnel. Yeah, my wrists apparently had an expiration date of 36 years. I even have to sleep in these wrist braces, because of my tendency to curl my hands up under my chin in my sleep. I’ve been told by a few people in the past that it’s adorable, but today my doctor told me it’s also highly aggravating to my tendons. Oh joy.

Hey, between these wrist braces and my knee braces, tattoos and (currently) purple hair, all I need now is some elbow pads and a helmet, and I’m ready to buy a skateboard and become a total sk8tr grrl.

Or not.