No Celery Please

Now, I am fully aware of my tendency to be a whiny whiner.

I think one of the things I appreciate about blogland, but do not mention, is that reading about other people’s lives really puts my petty struggles with having a slightly boring job and an penchant to want to change my environment every ten minutes in serious perspective.

Today, a good blogger has passed away. I didn’t know that Dr. Syn was Blitz Kreig – Guess I wasn’t paying attention, but that just added an extra hit to the news.

He walked into a door a few weeks ago. Walked into a door. He posted about it… joked about it. A pirate with an eye patch. Now, a couple of weeks goes by and he has died of a subsequent infection. Life is fragile. It should not be taken for granted. A door.

So, for the record, since I know I will go back to being a whiny whiner pretty soon – it’s in my nature – I would like to say:

• I am lucky to have my life.
• I have a place to live.
• I have enough to eat.
• I have a husband that I love and who loves me.
• I have a loving family.
• I am in good health.
• I have an abundance of “stuff” that would probably make my depression-era grandmother blush if she could see it.
• I have a good job that pays my bills.
• This is a good life.

Dr. Syn – you will be missed.

I do not know if I mentioned back in the Spring that the house next door to us got foreclosed and went up on the market.

It it a 2-story – ought to have gone up for about $140K, but instead, due to the bank just wanting their money, it got listed at $99. (Thank you, oh foreclosing bank, for dragging down the property values of the whole neighborhood in your haste to unload this place.)

So, needless to say, at that price, it was under contract fairly quickly, and now it is sold and the new people are moving in.

They look, from the outside, like Perfectly Normal People.

I am operating under the assumptioin right now that they are, and will remain PNP.

However, as we all know, sometimes under a PNP facade, can lurk a whack-job crazy-ass freak bunch of crackheads.

So I am crossing my fingers and hoping that the PNP Man, Woman, Child, household that was moving in this weekend is what it will stay.

Haven’t met them yet. We do not get overly friendly with the neighbors… talk in passing, that sort of thing. I find that if you are going to be stuck living next to someone (which we are, see afrementioned dragging down of all property values), you don’t want to risk a soured relationship… best to keep things just business in my opinion.

But, there may be some things that will need to change.

With the previous neighbors, all three of us in our cul-de-sac had small dogs. All dogs were free to wander all three yards. No one complained about anyone else’s dog being in their yard.

So… what if they don’t like dogs? Got to retrain that Boo to stay home. OR – Even Worse!!! What if they have some kind of giant, slavering Pitt Bull or something? If they turn up with a big dog, I am gonna have to build a fence around the yard to protect the Gabber-hund.

Sigh – why’d those previous neighbors have to do something stupid like quit a perfectly good job to become a financial advisor with no experience and end up losing their house because they didn’t have sense enough to know you don’t take stupid risks like that without ensuring you can at least pay the mortgage? They weren’t the most wonderful neighbors ever on the face of the planet, but they were a known quantity, a quiet known quantity.

Change is good, right?

So last year, about this time, I sold a story to a new Sci-Fi magazine.

They paid me money for it and everything!

Woo Hoo!

Last week, I got my “authors copy” of the issue that I am in .

Then, this week, I got my regular subscription copy… along with a note that they are going out of business and a refund for the rest of my subscription

SO… I sold a story… and they went out of business.

Ah well, at least mine got out there!

I would provide a shameless link to the magazine and exhort everyone to go buy a copy, but, heck… they are going out of business anyway… plus, in my ongoing attempt to remain anonymous on this version of my blog, I don’t want to link to a place that has my name on it

OK, so my current plan is…

I will get a pumpkin this weekend…

Carve it with my company logos…

Bring the pumpkin in on Halloween and put it in the break room!

Fun and no ToT!

I had a horrible dream last night.

Horrible

Beyond Horrible.

No, I am not telling you what it was about. It was that bad.

So bad, that even though I do not think that people can really be held responsible for things they dream about, I almost want to apologize to the people that were in the dream for dreaming such a thing.

Problem: Horrifying dream now stuck in my head.

How do you shake a nightmare?

I’m not a huge fan of Halloween.

As a kid, we lived in England on and off for about 7 years total… There’s no Halloween there, so it’s not something I ever got into.

Past that, we kind of lived in the boonies when we were in the US, so Halloween might encompass going to one street where there were houses and loading up on crappy candy like Mary Janes and those stripy humbug things (why do people give this crap away? – Does it just build up over the year and they foist it on unsuspecting children? Does anyone LIKE those things?)

So – Halloween has never been a big thing to me.

I understand now that it’s become something of an adult holiday / party excuse.

But… um… yeah, I am just not built for the costumes that seem to be required wear for females at Halloween. The world does not EVER need to see me as a slutty nurse, slutty pirate, slutty vampire, slutty witch, slutty princess, slutty baseball player, slutty bottle of ketchup or any other wacky slutty outfit the halloween industry can come up with that allows women who would not be caught dead on an ordinary night with a skirt that comes up to their ass to show off all the hard work they’ve been putting in at the gym on the squat machine (I can only hope they have, anyway, otherwise they might want to reconsider the whole costume thing).

Add to all this… my neighborhood has a high percentage of retired folks. And the houses that do have kids, well, those kids are mostly sullen teeenagers, and they kind of scare me, and I don’t really want them coming to my house. Some kids do come in from other neighborhoods, but the crowds are not huge.

Also, the dog goes apeshit with packs of wild children coming to attack her house every 15 minutes.

So mostly I do not like the giving of candy either. Last year I called a halt to it and we left the porch light off.

So why does this present a conundrum? Why should I not just hide away and wait for the spooky day to pass me by?

It’s like this… last year, I went to a pumpkin carving event, and I carved me a cool MINI pumpkin.

After Halloween, when everything was on sale, I bought a pumpkin carving kit.

This new method of the carving – it’s so fun! When I was a kid, we had, what? A giant kitchen knife – useful only for hacking out triangle eyes and a toothy grin.

But now… razor blades, scoops, spoons, tiny sharp knives. Layers of carving, different levels of light coming through. It’s like art!

So I want to carve a pumpkin… but then, you know, I don’t just want to throw it away. So that brings up a need to put the pumpkin out somewhere, and that will bring by children wanting candy. (Which ain’t cheap, because I don’t go for giving away the bad candy).

And, If history is any guide, if I start with a pumpkin, I will probably go all overboard and deck out the whole house in spookitude. I am known for the overboard-going.

Maybe I can carve a pumpkin and give it to someone else. Anyone up for pumpkin-mail?

Yeah, I stole this from Renn. So? It says I am smart, nothing about not being a thief.

Am-I-Dumb.com – Intelligence Test

Fun test, though.

I admit it.

I play the trivia almost every day over at Wordnerd’s place.

Why does it feel so good to get the answers right on such absolutely useless questions?

I do not know.

But it does. Oh… it dooooooooes.

This weekend at a book store the SB and I saw these books called something like “Useless information you’ll never need to know” or some such.

It was touted as a popular “Secret Santa” gift – so I guess that tells you all you need to know about the book right there.

I thought… “Well, at least this might help me increase my huge supply of useless knowledge!”

So I opened it. Looked in several places in the book.

My God! I already knew all the stuff in the useless knowledge book!

But ask me to remember my dad’s birthday? Or “Do you remember when we…?” Nope. My brain is so full of useless information that I have no room left for anything vital.

The boss is in town today.
I must wear a skirt.
Oh how I hate business clothes!