Walk on by

I decided to try an experiment. I left my computer on and open to a blank word document, and every time I went by, I typed what I was thinking at that moment. It’s an old trick from my English major days – used to help get the creative juices flowing. So that’s what this is – my thoughts as I passed by.

There’s a big difference between lesser-known celebrities and well-known-for-being-sleazy celebs. Especially when it comes to reality television.

Dieting is simple. Not complicated. There are a couple of basic rules. 1. If you take in less calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight. 2. Eating a variety healthy foods (whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean meat, good fats) is better for you. The problem is not that losing weight is complicated – it’s that it’s hard. Not fun. Takes will power. Means you have to exercise more and eat less Ring Dings. All this talk about specialized dieting (more carbs, less carbs, all protein, more fat, no fat, no sugar, nothing you chew) is making me crazy.

Speaking of Ring Dings – I love them. They are so much better than Ding Dongs. And they come in twin packs! I really can’t have them in the house. Kinda like somebody I know can’t have Hostess cupcakes around. Right, Hallie?

Why is it that when you usually have to wait at least five minutes to pull out of your driveway because of traffic, that the one time there is no traffic anywhere in sight and can pull out immediately, that you only get half a mile down the street and remember something you left behind and have to go back?

Businesses with drive-up services are awesome when you have trouble walking. Why isn’t there a drive-through grocery store around here?

Why is it that when you go to the store for eggs and milk, that you come home with $50 worth of groceries, but no eggs?

People who work at gas stations and banks and redemption centers who have doggie biscuits in their pockets for their canine visitors are awesome.

I love the smell of clean laundry. I’m a regular-scent Snuggle gal. I like to breathe in the lovely smell when the laundry is still warm. Mmmm.

Why is it that when you decide, finally, to cut your hair, after it’s been driving you crazy for weeks, and has looked like crap every single day, and you make the appointment to get it done - that day your hair comes out perfectly and ten different people mention that your hair looks great?

I have to remember to mention - for those who asked or wondered - Yes, I WAS shoveling out my gas grill so as to USE IT. We grill year round up here. There is no other acceptable way to cook a steak, in my opinion, so we just suck it up. I've been out there in my nightgown, with boots and a parka. It's just what we do.

Wasn't there a song about little things meaning a lot? There are a bunch of little things that can make a world of difference in my life: cleaning my computer screen (who knew you were all so pretty?), a shower, ibuprofen, fresh sheets, a phone call from a friend, funny blog entries or friendly comments. Maybe it’s all I need – to focus on the little things that are so satisfying, and leave the big stuff to those who are more qualified to deal with it.

Lady sings the blues

Melancholy is my mood today. I am feeling a tad discouraged.

I’m still unemployed, and I shouldn’t be. I’m talented and smart and a college graduate. I should have an awesome job by now.

I haven’t heard from my birth mother, and I thought I would by now. It’s been weeks. She should call me. Or write me. Or at least send some medical information.


I’m laid up and can’t walk (don’t ask!) and I hate being stuck at home on the couch. I need to be out and about, distracting myself from my own misery with people and activity.

But I can’t. So, in typical ME fashion, I’ve decided to avoid thinking about the whole mess. I am watching everything on my DVR – hours and hours of shows I recorded to watch some time when I had a minute. Well, I have a minute. I have lots of minutes.

I did a jigsaw puzzle. I love puzzles, and have several of them in the closet, waiting for time to put them together. Well, I have time to put them together.

I knitted some really nice socks with soft gray Alpaca yarn and started knitting a ribbon scarf with some funky ribbon yarn I got from the dollar store. Hey, I know what you’re thinking – alpaca yarn and cheapo dollar store yarn are very different, but that’s me – a real renaissance woman. I’m sure I mentioned it before.

I read three books in the last week. One was beautiful fiction, one was an amazing true story, and one was kinda trashy. I won’t tell you which one I liked the most.

I joined Facebook. I really think I am too old to be on Facebook, but I have secured a promise from Hallie that she will teach me everything I need to know. Maybe she can teach me how to seem younger while she’s at it.

I’ve been going through old photos – kind of an ongoing project to rescue my pictures from those horrible albums with the sticky pages and plastic sheets that they didn’t warn us about a hundred years ago. If I had known those nifty albums would eat my pictures, I would never have put them in there in the first place! Anyway, I’ve re-discovered some terrific family photos, and the memories to go with them. You’ll probably get to see a few of them now and again.

I’ll leave you with this photo of me, back when life was simple. When there were no piles of snow to shovel off the roof. No wonder I’m smiling!

The Morning After

I did get a few pictures of the BIG SNOWFALL before I dropped my new camera in the snow. Luckily, after I dried it all out, it seems to be working fine. I thought you might enjoy seeing them.
This is one of my kitchen windows, but it's what every single window in my house looked like during the storm. I kept trying to look outside to see how bad it was, but the wind was smacking the wet, heavy snow up against our window screens and it stuck there. It was a little creepy, to be honest with you. I like to be able to see outside. I'm funny like that.

After it was (mostly) over, when we went out to try to dig out the vehicles, I saw that the snow was sticking to the whole house. This is unusual. Generally, the snow falls on the ground, the cars, the roof - not the side of the house. Weird.

I wish this picture had come out better. This is the path I just created by walking down my side steps and around my car. I was hoping you could see how deep the drifts were. I was walking - well, shuffling, really - through crotch-high snow. Wait, that's not very lady-like. Let's say it was hip-high snow.

Believe it or not, this is after about twenty minutes of car-snow removal. I don't ever remember the snow on my car being this tall.

Still, it is pretty. And fun to play in. And, as soon as the pain is over (snow removal causes pain - it's just a fact of life!) I'll be happy to talk about how lovely Maine is in winter. But first, I have to dig out my gas grill and my trash cans.

A Hard Day's Night

Sometimes, here in Maine, it's hard to think about anything but surviving. Especially for those of us who live in the more rural areas. It's as if Mother Nature says, "forget all that other crap you're dealing with and focus on this, right now."

As the weather guys on TV said, we just 'experienced a winter storm.' I would amend that slightly. We just got dumped on. BIG TIME. We're used to snow. We get snowed on a lot, and that's actually one of the things I like about Maine. But this was more - a lot more - than the usual storm. We had about 18 or 20 inches of gorgeous white precipitation, and suddenly, our priorities shifted.

Now, some people will talk about how beautiful it is, and show pictures of trees laden down with glistening snow; or how fun it is to play in, and show pictures of kids and their sleds or snow men. I'm not going to do that. I'm pretty sure there are enough bloggers out there to cover that topic, and they're all right. It IS pretty, and it IS fun to play in. But there are a lot of factors that affect how much fun it is, and I'm going to list a few of those here for you southern folks.

FUN or CRAP? ISSUES DETERMINING ENJOYMENT OF WINTER STORMS

1. How much snow? 6 inches - pretty and fun. 20 inches - too much.

2. How much snow did you already have? If you already had snowbanks too high to see over when you wanted to pull out of your driveway, more snow is not always a good thing.

3. How much space do you have to store snow? One of the biggest issues is becoming 'where do we pile the snow?' We live on a major road, and aren't allowed to push it across the street (although sometimes we do...shhhh!) so it just gets plowed up until the snowbanks are as high as the second story of my house. I am perfecting the 'listen and pray' method of determining when it's safe to pull out of the driveway.

4. Do you have a garage? Huge factor, this one. If you have a garage, your life is totally different than us garage-less folks. Cleaning off your cars after a big storm is a major undertaking, and for us it's usually a task completed in a giant rush while the plow guy waits, looking grumpy. I-HEART-GARAGES. I plan to get one someday.

5. How much snow do you have to shovel by hand? Again, this is a huge issue. If you have a small area to shovel, you may actually enjoy it. I've heard of this, although I don't really understand the feeling. We have to shovel so much you wouldn't even believe it. Front steps and pathway. Back deck. Mailbox (if it survived the big state plow). Path to dog yard. Path through dog yard. Gates (and there are a lot of them). Individual dog spaces (30-plus of them) so that they all can access their houses and food bowls. Individual dog pens, where older dogs or puppies live, so that they stay secure (after 3 feet of snow falls, a safe 6-foot fence becomes a unsafe 3 foot fence). There's more, but you get the idea.

6. What is your method of heating your home? This becomes important relating to #5, because if you heat by oil, you have to shovel a path to the oil-fill pipe, or they won't deliver oil. And today's delivery day.

7. What is your back-up heating method? This relates to loss of power situations, which we had to deal with this time around. Luckily, we have our power back now, but there are 70,000 people in Maine who are still without electricity as I write this. If you have a good system to heat your home while the power is out, then you're in a better spot. Us? not a great back-up system. Gotta think about that one for next year. I was surprised to find out that wood pellet-burning stoves, which everybody was buying like crazy up here when oil was so expensive, actually need electricity to run. Who knew?

8. How hard is it to remove snow from your roof? I don't even want to think about this, but it has to be done. Sigh.

There's more, but I think you get the picture. It's beautiful, all right, but sometimes it's hard to notice that part, at least until you get by the surviving part. I took some pictures yesterday, and if any of them came out, I'll post them later on. In the meantime, I have to go and catch up on reading blogs. No power is bad for my blog habit!

5 Things I Hate About...

Since we're racing again this weekend, I decided to leave a little slice of the real me here on my blog. I know most of you think I'm all sweetness and light (those of you who know me in real life, SHHHH!), but in reality I do have a dark side. There are a multitude of things that irritate me. A lot. I think I'm going to start listing some of these in the hopes that blogging about them will make me feel better.

Because there are so many of these things, I'm going to group them by category. For our first installment of THINGS THAT BUG THE CRAP OUTTA ME, we'll tackle television.

Now, you probably all know by now that I love TV. Really really love it. I grew up in a television-watching family. We did lots of other things - played board games and cards, read lots of books, played the piano and sang, even conversed with one another. We just did it while the TV was on. It doesn't seem weird to me. I was programmed from when I was small to multi-task. It's just who I am.

That being said, there are things I can't stand about the blasted box, and I'll give you the short list.

1. VOLUME CONTROL - Why can't all the channels adhere to some sort of rule about similar volume? I am often watching some channel, for instance TruTV (formerly known as Court TV) which requires me to turn the volume up a lot just to hear it. Then, I'll change the channel, and because I have a short attention span, I'll forget to turn it down first, and I'll get blasted out of my chair by the other channel SCREAMING AT ME. Arghhh. And what is it with the commercials being so much louder than whatever show you're watching? Are they hoping, if you fell asleep, that you might wake up if the Geiko lizard yells at you? Double arghhh.

2. MUSIC - Why don't any of the so-called music video channels show actual music videos anymore? I used to love to go to sleep to VH1 or CMT. It helps me keep current on what's happening in the music scene, since, left to myself, I'll listen to my Ipod oldies and never hear anything made since 1980. Unfortunately, they don't play music videos anymore. Instead, they opt for crappy reality shows, like AGING ROCK STAR PICKS THE BIGGEST SKANK, RAP ARTIST I NEVER HEARD OF FINDS THE WEIRDEST SLUT WITH BAD TEETH, DATE MY MOM/DAD/UNCLE/SECOND COUSIN/SISTER ALL AT THE SAME TIME, FORMER CHILD ACTOR DESPERATE FOR ATTENTION CHOOSES REALITY TV OVER THERAPY, and my personal favorite, GET THE 12 WORST HUMAN BEINGS ON THE PLANET AND MAKE THEM LIVE TOGETHER AND PERFORM STUPID STUNTS FOR OUR AMUSEMENT. Bring back the music videos. I miss them.

3. LOGO ABUSE - Why is it that every channel feels the need to display their logo in the bottom corner of the screen during the whole freaking show? Are they having an identity crisis? Did some high-priced marketing expert tell them that it will subliminally affect our viewing habits? Look, I KNOW what channel I'm on. I know, because I PUT THIS CHANNEL ON. I do not need a constant reminder. Lose the logo.

4. POP-UP ADS - Along the same lines as #3, I hate hate HATE the animated pop-up ads for upcoming shows that jump up and scare me during the show I'm watching. They are distracting and irritating. AND, worst of all, they sometimes block something I need to see ON THE SHOW I'M WATCHING NOW. They are bad for my blood pressure, and they must be stopped.

5. TIMING ISSUES - WHY, oh why, can't shows all be an even number of minutes? Remember the good old days when shows were 30 minutes, or 60, or 120? I loved the old system. Now a lot of shows are one or two minutes over, which totally screws up your ability to record one show at 9 and another - on another channel - at 10. I rarely watch TV when it's actually on. I love so many shows that it is more efficient to record them, and then zip through them later (early mornings before anybody else is up, usually), skipping the commercials. I have two recording devices: a DVR/cable box combo in the living room, and my kitchen computer, which is also a TV. Even with both of these, sometimes I still get screwed up with stupid shows that last one hour and one minute. This drives me crazy. Gray's Anatomy is guilty of this one a lot. ARGHH. And don't get me started on sports delays messing up my recording of The Amazing Race. Triple Arghh.

There you have it. Some of my pet peeves. What bugs YOU about TV? Next time, I'll tackle bad drivers!

Thanks, I needed that

Last night I managed to get out to dinner with 'the girls' and it was wonderful, as it always is. These are friends I've known for thirty years (which seems impossible), I love them unconditionally and I think they feel the same about me. We talked and laughed, and I had some kick-ass Shrimp Portofino. I really needed to get out of the house. It was good for my soul, and the leftovers will be an awesome lunch today.

Yesterday I gave a little shout out to a couple of my commenters, and then I was thinking about the whole blog comment thing. I love to read my comments. They are often more witty, more funny and more insightful that my actual blog. I probably shouldn't point that out, or you'll stop reading my blog! But, if it weren't for this blog, those particular comments wouldn't be there for you to read...well, you get the picture.

The advice I get is usually spot-on, and many times I've had things pointed out to me that I hadn't thought about quite that way before. I especially love it when a little 'discussion' breaks out between two or more of the commenters. Gosh, that truly amuses me. As a giant extravert, being home alone, as I am so much right now, really bites. Daily contact with you through your own blogs and your comments here is a real delight. Thanks for being the smart, funny, caring people that you are.

Mother Nature makes her own plans

Well, it turns out I'm not going to the state capital to check out the Maine archives today. Mother Nature had other ideas, and is dumping heavy, wet snow on us at this very moment. We have about 6 inches, and it's still snowing now (at 6:30 AM). I think it's pretty, but it's going to be heavy shoveling, and not good for traveling. Since it started last night, it also caused the postponement of my bi-monthly 'Meet the Girls for Dinner' outing. Every other month (as best as we can manage with busy schedules) I meet my two best friends from college for dinner in Portland, which is centrally located for all of us. We get together and talk really fast and laugh our asses off. There's nothing like it in the attitude adjustment arena. If you could hear us, I think, (as long as you couldn't see us with our little wrinkles and expanded waistline) you'd think we were still those girls from college, draped over those silly couches in the dorm lounge, listening to Meatloaf and giggling over boys.

Anyway, we're re-scheduled for tonight, so let's hope the storm gets its bags packed and outta here soon so the crack road crew can do its magic before 5:00!

I'll have to put off my trip to the archives until next week, because the kids are racing again this weekend, and I have to get them packed and ready tomorrow.

Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and men...

Which reminds me of that book "Of Mice and Men" which has to be one of the most depressing of the Steinbeck books (which is saying a lot.)

Ok, I'm going to stop writing before this turns into stream-of-consciousness drivel that isn't even interesting to me! Have a great day everyone, and thanks for all the funny, witty and supportive comments. They totally make my day! Special shout-out to Kim-D, who commented twice yesterday - You make me happy! and to Andrew, who is one of the most quick-witted people who has ever lived.