30 (I'm going with a countdown thing here)

The crawlspace that's under part of the basement. I always imagine zombies springing up on outta that dirt and clambering over the little wooden pegboard we have up to keep the cats out of it. There's a nifty little cistern pump thing that pipe leads into also that gets filled with skanky water when the monsoons come. I'm not a fan of basements in general. When I was little I was convinced that vampires lived in our furnace. Looking back, they would have had to have been pretty dang short to fit in there, and I probably could have taken them.

31 Days o' Creepy

I have decided I don't update this thing enough, so in an effort to kick myself in the ass, I'm going to try and post a different creepy thing each day in October. First up, Al making like the Insane Clown Posse. It's Spirit Week, so they have to dress up every day, and evidently today was like, I don't know Cat in the Hat day? How this relates to school spirit, I have no clue nor do I want one. And no, she didn't take the knife to school. That's my Cutco knife, it doesn't leave the house. There were a couple of other pics but she didn't look creepy, more like the Cat in the Hat had just stopped by to make you a nice sammich and cut the crusts off just like you like it.

Cornholio

Behold, the great Cornhole boards that Terry crafted with his own two hands. I know the name of the game sounds totally nasty, but it's actually kinda fun. You put these things 27 feet (I asked for the official distance) apart, and take turns throwing bean bags at the holes, or really they are supposed to be full of corn, hence the name. We cheated and got ours at the store, they have little gravely things in them, which puff out dust and kill the grass, as an added bonus. Anyways, you get different points according to whether your bag goes in the hole, or lands on the board, and there's a whole buncha boring rules that I don't really care about and I make Terry keep score, I just wanted to show y'all this:


I mean, there's missing the board, and then there's like, missing the YARD. Annie tossed this baby into the tree! I mean the boards are straight across from each other, there's not too many tricky trajectories involved. You do not get points for hitting the landscaping.

This is her pouting because we are all laughing hysterically and telling her she has to get it out of the tree, unless she can coax her stupid cat up there to retrieve it or something. Luckily, she had this handy stick.

Poke, poke, poke.

Victory. She may not be able to throw a corn bag, but at least she can balance one on the end of a stick. No points for that though.

Hops, ready for harvesting.

Annie and I making like migrant Hops harvesters and picking all those annoying little things off. I was taking the opportunity to tell Annie how they harvest tea, or at least what I've seen in commercials on tv. Being as it wasn't even that hot the day we were doing this, we decided that being a tea leaf harvester is a job that would suck.

I think we might have actually had more than this in the end. It was quite the bumper crop compared to last year. So Terry dried them, bagged them, and put them in the freezer, and then threw away the ones from last year that were in the freezer that he still hadn't used. He doesn't want to admit it, but he's really just growing hops for fun. I like that they do the climby thing up the house, so it's okay with me.

First day of school pic, they look so enthused, no? Annie is riding the bus for the first time this year, but at least she has her badass sister with her to keep everyone behaving proper.

This is the CatLoaf, or Snarf, or SnarfLoaf, and she hets you all. She has a perpetual cold and loves to choke on her own phlegm and barf at the top of the stairs. Any takers?

End of summer extravaganza, aka these pictures took forever to upload and I'm sorry if you have dial-up

They left the head on the pig this year, that was a bit disconcerting when the opened the big roaster thingy and it was all upside down staring. Evidently it's easier to spit that way, plus maybe it makes the guys feel more manly or something. This was right before they finished unwrapping the poor thing and began hacking at it with their big knives. Barbaric, but tasty. And also, this is the hot Jeremy pic of this year. Sorry Jeremy, you looked kinda goofy in the other one I took, it was not an accurate representation of the hot factor. (But never as hot as my dear husband, no never ever)



Me and Al probably waiting around for the pig to be done, or maybe watching them hack at the beast with their steely knives. Notice the colder weather garb, this was Aug. 22 and I was freezing, not unlike Annie's field day. You can't even see my pig roast shirt -it has a pig drawn on it with X's for eyes and it has a USDA tattoo. You can see the oh so lovely shade of bright pink it is though.

Annie and Terry taking a paddle boat ride. Or is it pedal boat? I mean, the boat has pedals like a bicycle, but the thing on the back that propels it is a big paddley whatsit. So maybe it's a pedal paddle boat, which makes me think of that Fox in Socks book. Sorry it's kinda blurry, but the blazing speed they were churning through the water at made it hard to get a good pic.

I think Terry was starting to run out of steam by the time he went with Al, he made her do most of the work. He looks kinda scared that she's driving, or maybe that look of discomfort is from the fact that he's freezing to death in shorts, and his ass is kinda wet after two boat rides.

My dream house on the other side of the channel. There are a lot of gorgeous houses out there, but this one is my fave.

You know it's getting to the end of summer when these big ole noisy bugs come out of hiding. Al had never seen one up close, I think this one might have jumped her while she was mowing or something. Notice the artfully chipped black nail polish. (On Al, I don't think the bug is wearing any)

The great white hunter chased a squirrel up a tree, and then followed it onto the shed roof as it tried to make its escape. And then he got stuck up on the shed roof, because he's a dweeb like that. He paced back and forth, surveyed his neighborhood kingdom for a bit, made that sound that appoximates a meow...

But scorned any proferred help, I think he is actually waving me away with his paw. He stayed up there about 40 minutes or so and then finally figured out he could ever so carefully ease down the slant of the roof and then jump for it.

Is it wrong that we want to get another little black cat so we can make a furry Oreo?

Creepy statue thingy at the Renaissance Festival Terry and I went to this past weekend. We were mean and ditched the kids and went by ourselves. My favorite part was avoiding using the Kingdom's Privies. You would think with having a big ass permanent installation like they do at this place, they could put in some real facilities, it's not like Port-a-John's aren't anachronistic, for reals. Oh, back to statue--it was really a person, and it would move eeeverrr so slowly, being creepy as all get out.

The Flying Zucchini Brothers, we love these guys. They juggle and joke and generally entertain. We usually go see Ded Bob too, but we didn't this time. I was afraid I would laugh and then you know, have to use the privies. And there were waaaay too many people eating those big turkey legs wandering around for me to want to do that.

I think she likes the smell of his butt, she spends a lot of time like this. And as for the following, that is if there is a video there after you scroll down, at least according to the wacky format I see every time I try to preview, I heartily apologize. This song has been stuck in my head for ummm, going on a week now, and it's all Al's fault. I first heard the ukulele version by Julia Nunes, but then I had to look at the real song and this techno crap got stuck in my head. So being the generous person I am, I thought I would share.

Introducing....

The newest drain on finances. I think I need to stop letting the girls spend time at Aunt Patti's because they keep coming home with kittens. I don't want this stuff to escalate and next thing you know, it's a calf, or a goose, or whatever the heck else she has roaming around the back 40 looking cute and making moon eyes. This itty one doesn't really have an agreed upon name. First it was thought to be of the male persuasion, so "his" name was Jasper, which I think is a girly name anyways and still could have worked when it was suspected that gender identification was full of wrong. So Al started calling her Alice, after some other character in Twilight, which I find enormously ironic considering how much time she has spent expounding on the overall lameness of that franchise. Plus, I just think Alice for a cat kinda sounds stupid, so I suggested Shadow, or Spectre (complete with pretentious spelling) since we already have a Ghost, but nooooo, nobody liked that either. And then I suggested Cinder, since hello, itty blackness, or I was trying to come up with something that had to do with my Dad since he was always fond of black cats and such. So right now, we have been calling her (well, when I call her something besides," hey you, get your snout out of my water glass") C.A.S.T., which stands for Cinderella Alice Shadow Templar. She's snuggly and sweet, but her farts are the foulest stench known to mankind. Last week there was an itty cat barf next to the litter box, I bet it was her heaving at her own stench.

Oh, it looks like Ebony and Ivory living in perfect harmony, but this was just the lull in smackdown action. Ghost does look kind of butthurt when the kitten plays with his old toys, but overall I think he's happy to have someone who will actually play with him, rather than our other two crotchety old cats who don't want none of that consarned friskiness going on around them.

My weather stripping took a nosedive off the door last week, and Terry keeps trying to put it up with ancient double faced tape, which, yeah, doesn't work, so whoever forgets and opens the door gets smacked in the face. Although now it just hangs there all deflated because the magnetic thingy inside just slid right out (makes a nifty fridge magnet, I might add). See, this development is bad, because without getting smacked in the face, it could be months before this thing gets fixed. So really, I am just putting this pic up so I will have documentation of when the strip first fell off, so when I yell to Terry as he replaces weather stripping in a full on blizzard, "If you had just done this six months ago, we wouldn't have to deal with this snow drift in the entryway!"

In Case Y'all Haven't Noticed....

I haven't been around so much lately in the blogosphere. I've mostly been working my fingers to the bone and falling down repeatedly and burning myself every now and then just for good measure. There have been a few bright spots here and there, but mostly this has been the summer of suckiness. I'm hoping that the fall (not literally, although lately I seem prone to it) of frivolity, or fabulousness, or financial security follows this season.

Volunteer sunflower that is growing out of the side of the compost pile behind our shed. The little booger cheers me up with its tenacious growing all out of a heap of dumped stuff. Guess I should look for some New Age touchy feely symbolic meaning to all that, but I'll just go with, hey, that's cool.

Our lily patch this year, a little past its prime but it's still purty. I had strewn some wildflower seed back there too hoping to get the whole English garden (what I call it when I'm too lazy to weed) going, but I don't think that patch gets as much sun as I thought.

Annie wanted me to put this up in the hopes that someone would know what it is. We went grave visiting the other day (Annie has discovered a love of cemeteries, she says she likes the peace and quiet) and found this thing blowing about. I'm sure I could google, but she was all put it up on the blog and ask, so here it is.

Tomorrow would have been my Dad's 65th birthday, so that probably contributes to my somewhat morose mood. Happy Birthday, stupid dying on me Daddy.

UPDATE: Sunflower toppled over and died, Annie found it. Stupid sunflower.

ePIC Entry

This little green dude stopped by the other night, he was all minding his business stuck to the glass, when we saw him and screeched with delight and immediately ran outside to molest him. He hopped in my hair at one point, but no pic of that. I think he was less than pleased with our outpouring of affection, go figure.


Annie was drawing on the deck the other night, some abstract something or the other, and then she kept adding and Terry told her she overdid it and sometimes less is more, and this is the next drawing she did. He didn't criticize this one as much.

The kids had just tortured the cat by making him go down the slide, and then Al crawled up it to shove herself onto the deck thing at the top, so we took a picture of her ass and announced we were going to put it on the blog.

She then suggested that we read between the lines.

But Annie got her back for us, she was writing on Al when Al thought she was making a drawing (how she couldn't tell the difference, I don't know, and why she would let Annie draw on her in the first place, also a mystery). I think this would make a nifty tattoo. We later found out Al had started it by leaving a message on Annie's open notepad on the computer, and there's been a whole poo flamewar going on we had no clue about.

I have no idea what all this green stuff is, we have planted many things in that area over the years and nothing has ever came up, but now, wham, nifty groundcover.

The hops are doing very well this year. The one in the middle is a new addition, that's why it's so teeny.

Yum, strawberry shortcake for dinner, one of the perks of summer. I mean, you could have it in the dead of winter, but it wouldn't be the same. Not that we really have summer here. We had like, two days of it last week, and now it's been cold and off and on rainy. Booo.

The Great White Hunter chased a squirrel and then ended up stuck in the tree for a good 40 minutes before he figured out how to get down. We did try to help him, but he wasn't so much up for that. I thought this was a good pic because you can see his creepy little eyes. And he's STILL pooing on the floor, despite threats, cajoling, and me spreading tacks behind the couch where he's been going (he jumped over the dang things and pooed in a new spot). This cat, he is mentally deficient, and my couch is starting to smell like the zoo. I am not happy.

I unexpectedly found this on the fridge last week, underneath some stuff on the side, and it made me giggle and then boo hoo. We have always called it the "Pop-eyed Poppy" picture. I sure wish this crap would get easier, you know?