I found chocolate. My coffee maker is dead. I wanted to punch a guy in his junk. That's the least interesting parts of the weekend.

I am exhausted.  Worn out.  Tired as heck.  I can barely walk.  My feet hurt.  My hips hurt.  My butt hurts.  My right hamstring hurts.

But I had a really great weekend full of fun friends and my older brother.

And there was a super annoying dude too. 

I'll blog about Saturday today.  And I'll save Sunday for tomorrow which was the more interesting day full of men dressed up like women (yes, I have pictures) and that's the day I went to a psychic. 

But first, I have to tell you what happened at Disco Kroger on Friday night.  Other than the part where I saw one of the attorneys from my office.  And really, I just left work 5 minutes earlier and I have to see attorneys still?

I eat fairly healthy, but there are a few things that I consume on a regular basis that are more the diet of an 8-year-old boy.  One of those things is that I have to have a glass of chocolate milk every morning and it can only be made with Nestle Quik.  This is because in high school we had someone from Consumer Reports magazine speak to us and the only two things I remember he said are that if a door has a gap under it that you can stand a dime up in, a giant rat can squeeze under it.  And the other thing is that Nestle Quik had the most stringent rules about how many insect parts are allowed to be in it and that a good bit of our food supply is allowed to have a certain percentage of bugs.  I know! Do you know packages of shredded cheese have wood chips in them to keep the cheese from sticking together?  I learned that from my brief Pampered Chef career.

So Friday night, I could not find the Nestle Quik in the Disco Kroger and there was going to be much disappointment in my life on Saturday morning if I didn't find it because I was out at home.  I saw an employee who was re-shelving stuff people had I assume taken to the check out and then changed their mind on.  I asked her if she would help me find the Nestle Quik.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Chocolate milk mix," I replied.

"Oh.  Okay.  I know where that is."

I followed her about 4 aisles over and she took me to the baking aisle and said, "It's right there," as she pointed at Hershey's cocoa powder.

"Um, not exactly what I was looking for.  I'm looking for the powder you make chocolate milk with.  Sort of like Carnation," I said. 

"Oh!  I know where that is."

She took me 3 aisles over and we walked along and I don't remember what was on that aisle, but it wasn't Nestle Quik.

"Well, I've only been here for 5 months and I'm still learning where stuff is," she said.  "I don't know where the chocolate milk stuff is though," she finally admitted.

I walked over one aisle and found it finally.  And why don't grocery store chains keep stuff in the same place in all of their stores?  It makes me crazy.  Anyway, as I was grabbing my sweet nectar of the gods, Nestle Quik, the lady happened to come down that aisle. 

"I found it!" I told her.

"Let me see.  Oh!  Chocolate milk mix.  That's what you were looking for?"

"Yes.  Chocolate milk mix as I had told you," I said.

Then she started tapping on her name badge and said, "Can you do me a favor?  Go to Kroger.com and recommend me by name and tell them I was very helpful to you.  I might win a giant television!  And you can get some coupons."

Yes.  Let me get right on that and tell them how helpful you were in dragging me all over the store and not knowing where stuff is. 

But Saturday I watched football.  Yes, I know.  I've told y'all I don't like sports and hate watching sports and yet I've spent 3 days in the past 3 weekends watching football.

The thing is, my neighbors are super fun to hang out with, but unfortunately for me, they are football watching fools.  They spend all day on Saturday watching college football and normally they spend all day Sunday watching pro football, but their team is playing in the Monday night game this week so we didn't watch football yesterday and instead I went to a psychic while they stood and waited.

The neighbors are HUGE fans of LSU.  My other neighbor, my brother, another guy and I are Georgia fans.  I am a graduate of UGA so I do pull for them even though I don't want to actually watch them.  And this weekend was the GA/LSU game so even though I don't keep up with football, I showed up dressed from head to toe in red and black and I brought a cake that said "Go Dawgs!" on it to irritate my neighbors.  Anyway, my neighbors pull their big screen TV out on the deck, the kids swim in the pool and the rest of us sit and eat and watch the game(s) and there is a lot of screaming and yelling and whatnot that goes on and even though I don't like watching sports, I always have fun.

The only downer this week was this annoying dude who was there.  My neighbors have a good friend and the annoying dude is a friend of his and has apparently attached himself to my neighbors.  Their friend was not even there, but his annoying friend showed up.  (Are y'all keeping up?)

The annoying dude thinks he's going to be a big time entrepreneur but in the meantime, he has no job and he has no money and no place to live.  So he moves from couch to couch and I threatened my neighbors if they ever tell him which house I live in.  He asks people to loan him money, he eats piles of whatever food you put down, and, oh yeah, he's a womanizer and a gigantic pig.  He sat next to my brother and my brother eventually came over and stood behind me and whispered in my ear that he was ready to punch him.

He showed up again (uninvited) on Sunday night when my brother and I went to my neighbors' house to eat dinner and the wife said as she put the food out and annoying dude was the first one to grab a plate and get in line, "Please remember there are 5 of us who need food so don't eat it all."  And when he went outside for a minute she snatched up all of the leftovers and put them in her fridge and told her husband that annoying dude was not allowed to take the leftovers to wherever he was staying that night because she was sick to death of him.

After the GA/LSU game was over, they watched some other games and I eventually walked home during that game because annoying dude was really getting on my nerves and I can only take so much football in one day.

And that's when I killed my coffee pot.

I walked in the kitchen and saw a huge bug on my counter, and it ran behind my coffee maker.  I grabbed a paper towel to snatch it up in, and went to move the coffee maker.  When I did, the bug came screaming across the counter towards me and I dropped the carafe onto my granite counters where it shattered into a million pieces.

The damn bug got away.

My ex-husband and I got married in 1998.  And I know I got this coffee maker 4 or 5 years before that, so maybe 1994-ish.  I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be too upset that I have to buy a new coffee maker finally.  Coffee ran down the side of that pot and all over the counter every single time you poured coffee out of it if you didn't remember to pour over the sink, so I'm actually not going to miss it too much.

Do y'all have recommendations for a new coffee maker?  I know we discussed this on June's blog at some point, but I was happy with my 20-year-old coffee maker so I didn't pay attention.

The only technology I used to need was a pocket calculator.

I'm sitting here at work and both of my bosses are gone for the rest of the day so I'm completely and totally goofing off for the next 3 hours.

And what that means is that I am currently sitting at my desk looking at the following:

1. My tablet is plugged into my computer being charged.
2. I have my larger capacity mp3 player sitting next to my computer because I just downloaded some new music on it (Alabama Shakes! $5.99 on Amazon.com!).
3. My smaller capacity mp3 player is plugged into my computer because I also just downloaded my new Alabama Shakes album on it too and it's charging.
4. My phone needs charged some but I'm out of places to plug it in my computer and I don't want to crawl up under my desk to plug it into the wall so I'll wait and charge it in my car on the way home.
5. I have my headphones plugged in and hanging on my head so I can listen to music on Spotify.
6. I have Pinterest pulled up on my screen (well, I did until I started blogging) to find something to make for my lunches and dinners next week and I'm searching for something fun to take as a side dish for football watching tomorrow.

What has happened to me??  I used to look up stuff in cook books.  I used to hold my boom box next to my stereo speakers to record stuff. I used to use a pencil to wind up my cassette tapes when they started getting loosey goosey.   And that worked for me just fine.  When did I get so spoiled?  Now I think I need a smaller memory mp3 player to use strictly for yard work because it has a clip on it and I can clip it onto my shirt and another mp3 player with a larger memory so that I have enough songs at my beck and call that I could drive back and forth to work for 2.5 months, one hour each way, without having to listen to the same song twice.  (That reminds me.  I need to download a couple of Beck songs.)  I know people who used to have a Mr. Microphone for goodness sakes and we thought it was SO high tech.  And I probably thought the black dude dancing down the street in the ad was cool back then too.

"Hey good looking!  We'll be back to pick you up later!"

Since when do I need all of this stuff?  My purse weighs about 10 pounds more than it used to back in the day because I'm toting around technology that's supposed to be making my life way better, more productive and easier.  Yet my back hurts from carrying it, I'm always looking for a place to plug something in, and I complain when something isn't loading quickly enough on a website.  You know, as I'm looking up super important stuff such as what those white fuzzy bugs are when my friends and I saw some flying around a couple of weeks ago in the backyard.  Or when I was looking up videos of Maru, the funny Japanese cat who runs and dives into boxes and slides across floors and walks around with paper bags on his head to show my neighbor while she was at my house painting last weekend.  I mean, that could not wait for a second so it's a good thing I had several forms of technology right at my fingertips so we could survive the day.

And two weeks ago I was sitting in a bar in Little 5 Points and looking up the name of the hotel where Bobby Kennedy was shot while we were in the middle of watching a football game because somehow we got on that topic and out of six grown ass people none of us could remember.  In their defense, two of the friends I was with are from Amsterdam so maybe they shouldn't be expected to know.  Really?  This is stuff I urgently need to know?  How about going to the library and looking it up in an encyclopedia?  It was good enough for us back in the 80s!  Okay, no.  I don't want to do that again.

I remember when I would ask my dad where some country was and he didn't say, "Look it up on your iPhone there, missy."  Instead he would say, "I could tell you because I know.  But go in the next room and find it on the globe.  It's near _______ and _______ but you need to find it for yourself because then you'll probably remember where it is."  And he was right.  Of course half of the countries have changed since then with wars and stuff and now I look them up on my iPhone. 

The last time I used my phone for an actual phone call was two days ago.  Apparently I've been too busy using it to look up hillbillies dancing with racoons to an Aretha Franklin song.

Sadly, as I'm sitting here I've forgotten the name of the hotel where Bobby Kennedy was killed already.  But thankfully I have a tablet, a desktop computer, and my iPhone all within arms reach so I can find out.

But I remember those fuzzy bugs are called woolly aphids.  Hey!  I did learn something from my iPhone.

*The Ambassador Hotel.  I looked it up.  (On my desktop in case you care.)

I've seen the light!

I'm sorry to tell y'all that it's kind of a slow day for blog material in my life. 

Last night I went to run several errands including going to Party City to try and figure out what I might want to dress up as for Halloween to go to the Little 5 Points Halloween Parade.  I didn't come up with any great ideas when I was in there, but then this morning I thought of something.  But I'm not going to tell y'all what it is yet because I might change my mind. 

So that got me thinking.  For those of you who are coming to the party on October 26th, do y'all want to dress up and make it a semi-Halloween party too?  Costumes would be optional because I know not everyone wants to go to the trouble of coming up with something, but we could make the food Halloween-ish.  I'm not bobbing for apples though because I'm a germ-a-phobe and don't particularly care for sticking my mouth all over apples other people have been touching with their noses.  I mean, I did buy Poizon wine the other night and it might be kind of weird to serve that to someone on their birthday, but not as weird for a Halloween-ish party.  If y'all think this is the stupidest idea ever, then say so.

I also stopped in the pet store because I can't get my cat to stop demanding that I feed her every single day.  She's really pushy about it too.  I could have just had a kid if I knew animals could be so demanding about a regular diet.

Then I decided to run into Trader Joe's to pick up one thing but ended up buying over $40 worth of things.  One of the items was this:

I don't even need whipping cream, but I've never seen any that is shelf stable before and I thought it would be nice to have on hand and try sometime so I bought it.  Apparently, it's pretty good according to a blogger who tried it.  But the problem was, it kept ringing up as pale ale at the checkout.  So a manager had to come over and people in line behind me got all huffy, and look lady in your bright red jacket, it's not my fault the computer thinks my whipping cream is beer so you just calm down and stop sighing loudly at me.

I also bought something else that I absolutely needed.  Yes, need.  Do not judge until you've tried it because then you will understand how it becomes a necessity in your life:

I've never had the crunchy version before so I'm looking forward to trying it.  Probably tonight.  I can't lie.  I have PMS and I WANT SWEETS!

I got home and had to deal with some ridiculousness with fake daughter (but it's not worth blogging about) and then I read until almost 1:00 a.m. because, as usual, I could not sleep.

I have motion detector lights all around my house and detached garage because, if I haven't already mentioned 945804580489 bazillion times, I live in the 'hood.  I also have an alarm system, security bars under all my doors, and a killer cat.  One of the lights, on the corner of my garage, goes on and off very quickly if something sets it off and last night I had my eyes closed trying to force myself to go to sleep but I kept seeing a flash of light.  So I would quickly open my eyes, pull back the curtains and look outside and the light would be out and I would see nothing.  This went on for a while.  Probably 45 minutes or so which helped my insomnia a lot.  And then do you know what?  I realized it wasn't the motion detector light at all that I was seeing flashes of when my eyes were closed.  It was push notifications popping up on my cell phone which was right next to my bed.  Doh!

It reminded me of a story from a few years ago, and if you are one of the few people here who used to read my old blog, you probably heard this one already.

I was at my family reunion one year and we have it in a state park in the blazing hot month of June near Puckett, Mississippi.  It's central for people y'all.

We stay in cabins that I'm pretty sure were built in the George Washington era and haven't been redecorated since then and have the original mattresses and sheets and bedspreads.  There is a small cluster of 6 cabins and we all cram in them because my mom is one of 8 kids and they all have kids and grandchildren so it's a lot of people.  A few people use their camper down by the lake and some people stay in the lodge which is kind of like a hotel, but most of us cram in the cabins.

I always end up in one of two cabins and they each consist of one bedroom with two beds, one bathroom and a tiny kitchen.

The one I was in this particular year has the doorway to the bathroom and the doorway to the kitchen right next to each other at a corner.  So from the bedroom you turn right and down two steps into the kitchen or go straight to get in the bathroom.  Just next to the door leading to the kitchen was a dresser and mirror.  The cabins are in the middle of the woods and they are pitch black, can't-see-your hand-in-front-of-your-face dark at night.

My mom and one aunt and I were in our cabin because a bunch of people couldn't make it that year so we weren't sleeping on air mattresses, etc. like we do sometimes. The first morning we were there, my aunt said as we were waking up, "I don't want to scare y'all, but there was something in our cabin last night."

And my mom and I peppered her with questions.  Obviously.

"Was it an animal?"

"It better not have been a snake.  If it was a snake, I'm moving to the lodge tonight."

"It wasn't one of the uncles trying to scare us, was it?"

"Was a stranger in here?  How did they get in?  We locked the door, didn't we?"

Every single question we threw out she responded with, "No," and she had an odd look on her face.

Finally I asked tentatively, "Was it a ghost?  These cabins are really old.  There's no telling what kind of stuff has happened out here."

And she looked at me funnily and said, "well, not a ghost exactly.  At least I don't think so.  But a spirit of some sort was in here and I am pretty sure God sent it to me."

And my mom and I looked at each other with a look like, "Oh goodness.  She's done lost her mind.  Bless her heart."

So I asked her what in Sam Hill she was talking about because honestly.  What in Sam Hill was she talking about?  God sent her a spirit?  Pfft.

She said she had gotten up to pee in the night.  "Yes, I know.  I heard you," I said.

And she said she was trying to find the bathroom door and was hoping she wouldn't accidentally fall down the stairs into the kitchen since the doors were right next to each other with only a corner in between them.  "Yes?  And?" my mom and I kept asking.

"As I was about halfway across the room, I thought to myself, 'a light sure would be good right now' and y'all?  God sent me a light.  It was a small green spirit looking thing and it was surrounded by smaller green lights in a circle around it.  About the time I made it to the bathroom door, the lights disappeared."

"NO WAY!" my mom exclaimed.  "Where was this light?"

"Right over by the door," my aunt answered her.

I sat there with my mouth shut, biting my tongue and was trying not to crack the heck up.

"So I made it to the toilet, and as I sat there peeing I said a little prayer.  I said, 'God, thank you for sending me the light on the way to the bathroom.  Please, God, send me a light again when I'm done.  Send me a light to get back to bed without falling down the stairs."

At this point, I was about to pee myself because I was suppressing my laughter and I thought I was going to burst.

"And y'all aren't going to believe this...." she started.

"But God sent you another green spirit surrounded by a circle of small green lights AGAIN?" my mom asked.

"YES!  I couldn't believe it.  Y'all, God sent that light. I know he did."

At this point, I could not hold it in and I started cackling and I could not stop.

Then my mom started laughing and she didn't even know what was so funny.  She was just laughing at me.

Y'all, I could not breathe I was laughing so hard.

My aunt said, "It's not funny.  It's completely true.  Why are you laughing at my story?  God sent me a light so I wouldn't get hurt.  I promise I'm not making this up."

I stopped laughing enough to gasp, "Oh, I know you're not making it up.  Because I know exactly what you saw."

"What?! You saw them too?  So you believe me, right?!"

I got up off my bed and walked over to the dresser which was right next to the kitchen door.  I picked up my cell phone and walked back over to my aunt and mom.

"God didn't send you a spirit light in the middle of the night for you to pee safely.  Verizon did."  And right as I said it, a green light that would blink every minute or two on my phone to let you know it was turned on, lit up.

"It was sitting on the dresser right in front of the mirror so when it lit up, it reflected off the mirror and made it look like a big light surrounded by a circle of smaller lights," I barely got out as I started howling with laughter again.

Then my mom started laughing.  Then my aunt joined in. 

And that was a pretty great way to start the day.

How about a bottle of 'Poizon'? I'd prefer a bottle of POISON!

I had no weird dreams last night.  Thank goodness, you're thinking to yourself.  I don't have to read about her stupid insane dreams again today.

No, today you get to read about the insane woman who stalked me while I was shopping last night.  If you're on Facebook with me you may have already seen a little about this.

I have a history of attracting crazy people when I'm out minding my own business.  There was the girl at the nail salon who had just been given a real tiger cub as a gift and she was raising it in her apartment down by Ikea who found out her brother had just been arrested for shooting someone and she screamed a big announcement about it.  And this was after she pulled a tupperware container of hot wings out of her purse and ate them while having her nails done and complained about the salon not having bottled water for her because her hot wings were burning her mouth.

Then there was a whole group of people walking around with raw hot dogs hanging out of their mouths trying to talk to me.  And I absolutely HATE hot dogs.

Various people have sung to me on elevators, a lady refused to sell me more than one postage stamp because she said I need to learn to share with others, I had a massage therapist massage the inside of my ears, I had the smurf/surfer salesperson when I bought my dining room table who tried to also sell me weight loss products and insinuated I didn't look like I have good credit and when he found out I do, he tried to sell me a houseful of stuff (after he'd told me I'm fat), I had a random guy run up to me in the grocery store who jumped in front of me, looked me right in the eye and said, "I think you're probably a lot like Wonder Woman" and then walk away, and I could go on and on. 

My friends always say I must make eye contact or lead these people to me in some way and I honest to goodness do not.  Finally, I had a witness to it once.  I was at an art festival just walking around with a couple of friends of mine and one of the exhibiting artists ran up from behind us out of his booth (and no, we had not spoken with him at all) and sought me out of the crowd.  In fact, when my friend heard him running and shouting, "EXCUSE ME!" to people behind us she looked at him and asked if he was talking to her and he pointed at me and said, "No, I need to talk to her."  He then jumped in front of me, pointed at his name badge, and waved his hand under it saying, "You will notice that my name is _______" and then just stood there rapidly nodding his head at me and never said another word about anything.  And my friend said, "Oh.  Wow.  You're right!  You really don't do anything to attract the crazy, do you?  They seek you."

Last night I stopped in Cost Plus World Market after work.  I had only been in the store about 9 seconds when crazy sought me out. I was right in the center of the store where the Halloween and fall decorations/foods were and a woman walked up from behind me (so no, I wasn't making eye contact or trying to engage her in any manner) and she said, "they have absolutely the best Halloween stuff of anywhere! I love this store!"

At that point I just thought she was an extra friendly type of lady so I responded and said, "Yes, they do have a lot of cute stuff in here," and I thought that would be the end of it.  Oh no.  It was only the beginning.

She proceeded to tell me she was only looking and wasn't going to buy anything at all last night, but she just wanted to see what they have this year.  "It's not even October!" she exclaimed.  "I won't buy any of my Halloween stuff until then."

"Okay," I replied.

Then she picked up a bag of chocolates that were wrapped up to look like skulls.  "Aren't these cute?"

"Yes, they are cute."

"Here, why don't I just put these in your basket so you can buy them?" she asked.

"Um, no thank you [crazy person - buy it yourself].  I'm not shopping for Halloween.  I just want to look at their fall decor," I stupidly said.

"Oh!  Here!  Look!  They have pumpkin soup.  Do you want me to put some of it in your basket?"

"No, thank you. [How about I open the jar and pour it over your head?]"

"How about some corn chowder then?  Wouldn't that be good?  Do you want me to put some in your basket to buy?"

"NO!  I am going to just look around for now and see what all they have.  I'm not deciding on anything right now [except that I have decided you are completely insane].  But thanks anyway."

"LOOK AT THIS!  They have pumpkin chai tea!  Do you want some?"

"NO THANK YOU.  I don't like pumpkin flavored foods," I responded [hoping it would make her stop suggesting every pumpkin flavored food in the store].  (I do like pumpkin pie for the record.  But  I abhor pumpkin flavored coffee.  Don't hate.)

I finally managed to meander over to the next aisle and thought I had escaped.

I had not.

She ran over to the aisle I was on carrying two bags of pasta.  "Just look!  Maybe you should get this pasta.  It's in fall shapes like leaves and stuff.  Isn't it cute?  And these are for Halloween and they are shaped like bats and spiders.  Oh, how cute!!"

"Um, no thanks.  Like I said, I'm just looking around right now [so please LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE]."

I finally made it two aisles away when she came up with two bottles of wine.

"Look at this!  It's a wine called Poizon!  I bought some of this last  year for some baskets I put together.  You see, I'm a dog walker.  And I could do Christmas baskets for the families I work for, but that gets too expensive.  So instead I do Halloween baskets.  Isn't that fun?!?!  Halloween is just my favorite holiday!  It's so much fun.  The kids have fun.  The adults have fun.  It's just fun!  There are some families I walk dogs for that I only do baskets for the kids.  But some of them are great customers I've had for a long time so I do baskets for the mom and dad sometimes too.  And last year I did baskets with wine and food.  Now that does get a little expensive.  But it's just so fun!  Do you want me to put this bottle of 'Poizon' in your basket for you?"

"Um, NO!!  I DO NOT!  [But a bottle of real poison might come in handy right now.]  Like I said, I'm only looking for the moment," I replied a little loudly for me.

Before I knew it, here she came again.  This time she came bearing a silver, squirrel-shaped nutcracker.  "Isn't this the cutest?!  Look!  It's a nutcracker and it's shaped like a squirrel!!  This is so clever!  Don't you want this nutcracker?"

"No.  You know, my grandmother had something like that back in the 60s," I responded.

At other various points she tried to interest me in a corn husk turkey, a giant jar of apple juice, a pillow and some coffee mugs.

Finally a salesperson came up to ask her if she needed help finding anything.  I wanted to respond, "No, she's found me 1,000 things she wants me to buy even though I don't know her!"  I also wanted to scream, "RUN!  SHE'LL DRIVE YOU CRAZY!" but I somehow refrained.

Instead, I took that opportunity to hightail it to the other side of the store and hide behind shelves of dishes and glassware until I peeked around after about 10 minutes and she was gone.

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I went back to that section and I bought me some fall shaped pasta and a bottle of Poizon wine.....they are kind of like a souvenir of my weird shopping experience.

It might be a moose, but at least I know something loves me.

I'm alive, PJ!

I didn't even get sick from that mayonnaise.  I did, however, have the craziest dream in the history of time and Karen suggested the rancid mayonnaise caused it.  That sounds like as good of an explanation as any because I dreamed I went duck hunting after a funeral with 3 of my uncles, my older brother, and my fake kids and then got chased by a moose who was in love with me.

Is there anything worse than reading about someone's dream?  Then skip this entire post.

We had just come back from a family funeral and I was in a weird humongous cabin with about 50 other family members and the cabin had secret staircases and entrances.  My uncles decided to go duck hunting and the cabin was kind of creeping me out so I tagged along even though I didn't want to hunt.  I just wanted to watch.  On the way to go duck hunting, we came upon a flooded intersection.  My fake kids saw some animal struggling in the flooded intersection (and I can't remember what it was but it was something like a zebra or elephant and not a normal dog or cat) and they jumped out of our vehicle, ran into the flood and wanted to save the animal.  Then the water started receding but they wouldn't get out of the intersection and so the police started coming after them because they were backing up traffic.  All of this was happening in the middle of L.A., by the way.

We finally got to a lake in the middle of L.A. and my fake daughter accidentally shot her gun and it shot something that wasn't a duck, it scared my uncle when her gun went off because she shot it towards downtown where people were, and my uncle fired off his gun and killed a duck.  He didn't mean to kill the duck even though he was duck hunting and he got distraught.  (I don't understand my uncle either.)  The police started chasing my fake daughter again.  That was right when a couple of moose came up out of the lake and approached me.  One of them decided it loved me and wanted to lick me to death so I ran and the moose was chasing me through downtown L.A.   Thankfully, that is when my alarm went off and I was saved from drowning in moose saliva.

I don't sleep a lot, but when I do I have a history of incredibly weird dreams and animals are a huge part of my dreams.  Usually it's about birds.  I cannot say I've ever dreamed about a moose before.

I have a website that I use to look up dream meanings and apparently the moose signifies I will have a long life.  And that's good because I'll have plenty of time to have a lot of weird dreams and I don't need to be overly concerned about eating bad mayo. Being in a cabin means I will succeed via my own means and I am humble and like simple things in life.  Such as duck hunting and being chased by a moose in L.A. I suppose.  The ducks are a connection between my physical and spiritual worlds, or, alternatively, it means I'm being set up (as in a sitting duck).  Let's hope for the former and not the latter.  Watching someone else hunt means I'm searching for a hidden aspect of myself or I'm trying to challenge a situation.  The flood means I need to release some sexual desires, but it was a gentle flood which also could indicate that my recent worries are going to drift away.  Being chased by the police means I either need to stop my reckless behavior or that I'm failing in some commitments or obligations.  To see children swimming means I need to loosen up and be more carefree, and to dream of L.A. signifies opportunities.

So overall, I think my dream means I need to get regular sleep and stop eating bad mayonnaise.  But I'm going to be eating that pasta dish I made all week for lunch.  I hope I don't have any dreams weirder than this one.  Why can't I have normal falling dreams or being naked in front of a group of people dreams?

On to Music Monday!

First place goes to Karen with Robert Palmer:

Second place goes to Scraps for Fever:

And Third place goes to me for Cake singing Sick of You:

If y'all want to share your weird dreams in the comments, please do so.  Maybe I won't feel quite as insane.

Blech!

If I don't post tomorrow it's because I am busy blowing chunks.  Calling Uncle Ralph on the big porcelain phone.  Launching my lunch.  Yodeling my groceries.  Giving a psychedelic yawn. 

I might be sick is what I'm trying to tell you. 

I've told y'all that Sunday is the only day of the week I cook because I hate cooking and refuse to do it every single blasted night.  Yesterday I was making something that I kind of made up and you would probably all find it disgusting but you don't have to eat it so don't worry about it.  It's a buffalo chicken pasta dish and the dressing is a mixture of a little mayo and a little blue cheese dressing with some hot wing sauce along with some buffalo style chicken and I normally throw in some feta cheese or blue cheese crumbles.  I saw a buffalo chicken pasta dish in the deli one time so I made up how to make it and since I'm no chef, I am not claiming mine will win any sort of prize.  Anyway, I had bought some mayonnaise a couple of weeks ago and since I didn't need it right away, I put it in my pantry.

On Saturday morning I had cleaned out my refrigerator since fake son moved to Europe last week and there was some questionable stuff in there and I had thrown out the little bit of mayo that was in the fridge because it wasn't worth saving there was so little of it left and yesterday I grabbed the new bottle out of the pantry and squeezed it in the big bowl of pasta and chicken, mixed everything else in, divided it all up in individual containers and threw everything in the fridge.

About 10 minutes later I thought to myself, "Self, you didn't have to unscrew the lid of the mayo and tear off the seal before you squeezed mayo into your food.  That mayo was already open in the pantry."  And I cursed out my fake kids because I don't know which one of them was the complete nincompoop who opened up the mayo to use some and then put it back in the pantry instead of in the refrigerator.  And I had just used almost $9.00 worth of chicken and some other stuff and it was all mixed in with it.  I was pissed.  Fake daughter wasn't home and she was having not a very fun weekend so I didn't want to call or text her and fuss at her since I didn't even know if she's the one who did it.  My guess is that it was her brother but I really don't know.

I pulled the mayo back out and looked at it and smelled it and everything seemed normal. So today I have conferred with two co-workers, one of which is a major foodie, and we Googled some stuff and I have decided I'm going to take a chance and go ahead and eat the lunch I brought with possible contaminated mayonnaise.  Because according to The Association for Dressings and Sauces it should be okay.  Did you know there is an association for that?  Me neither.  But anyway, I'm going for it and hoping I don't hurl by tonight.

But if I do hurl, I at least fixed my toilet this weekend.  That's right.  Something else broke in my house, but it was kind of a minor break so I fixed it myself with a piece of cardboard torn off the top of a beauty product box so I'm sure I did it the right way.  My toilet isn't leaking and running water out of the top of the tank anymore so I'm good with how I fixed it and don't really care what a licensed plumber would think because he would make me buy some expensive parts and pay him a lot of money and I would have to look at his butt crack.  I stopped the leak with a piece of folded up cardboard and there's nothing in the world wrong with that.  And my butt crack didn't show at all while I did it.

On Saturday night I thought I had a much bigger something broken in my house and I almost cried.

My little 7-year-old neighbor loves to paint and the weekend before when I was at her house "watching" football, she asked me when she could come to my house to paint with me again.  So we decided she should come over Saturday afternoon.  The last time she painted with me was right before Easter and she told me she wanted to paint an Easter bunny in a swimming pool with swim floaties on his arm.  And that's exactly what she painted.  We also collaborated on a painting of a tree (I painted the background and the tree and she decorated the tree.)

This time she painted a Halloween painting with witches' hats and a ghost and I had a rubber bat we glued on the canvas, and then I helped her paint two more canvases to put up for her parents for Christmas gifts.  Fake daughter also painted and since I only have two easels, that meant I didn't paint anything.  Then fake daughter went out and my little neighbor said she wanted to hang out with me longer so she stayed at my house until almost 8:30 and we sat in the kitchen and talked for a while while she ate potato chips because I always like to feed kids a balanced and nutritious dinner, and I tried to put a sparkling water machine together and deal with a carbon dioxide canister. (The stupid thing doesn't work - I have it hooked up right and it makes a lot of noise and the water bubbles, but then when you take the water bottle off the machine, there is no fizz in it.  That's what I get for buying a soda machine maker for $14.99 at Tuesday Morning.)

After she went home, I sat down to a gourmet Saturday night dinner of store brand cocoa puffs cereal (because I always like to feed myself a balanced and nutritious dinner) and flat water since I got ripped off by my new machine, and I was sitting at the bar stool at my island and happened to glance up at the kitchen ceiling and saw a dark spot.  My paint studio (which is really just an extra bedroom) is right above my kitchen and right where I saw this dark spot is where the bathroom is off the studio and we had been using the sink in there all day long to get rinse water and clean paint brushes. 

I almost cried y'all.

Which would have been a total waste of tears since I got up yesterday and looked at the spot when I came downstairs and there was no spot at all.  Apparently it was a shadow only seen at night because half of my pot lights (can lights for Tee so she won't think I'm a marijuana farmer) are still out since my fake son never replaced the bulbs for me before he moved. 

Anyway, it's almost time for me to go eat my rancid mayonnaise.  Yum.  I can hardly wait to throw up!

Let's do Music Monday again today.  The theme is......sick!  The song(s) you submit must contain a word in the title that have something to do with being sick:  sick, vomit, doctor, fever, etc.

I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes I saw the sign

This morning I was driving to work and, for those of you familiar with Atlanta, I was driving down N. Highland in the Morningside area between Virginia Highlands and Buckhead.  Suddenly this big ol' jerkface in his tan minivan came flying out from a side street and almost creamed right into the side of me had I not slammed on my brakes which made me almost get creamed from behind by someone else.  And which I've been fearing since I just got my car paid off last month.

I said some bad, bad words that would make my mother cry like a baby from disappointment and then do you know what I noticed?  He had the back of his minivan covered in magnets and bumper stickers.  There were a bunch of them for different schools and soccer teams and then there was the most prominent one of all right in the center of everything:

DON'T TEXT AND DRIVE.  IT KILLS!

Apparently blowing through stop signs and almost wiping someone out is totally safe and okay as long as you aren't texting while you do it.  So this made me think about People Who Annoy the Crap Out of Me.  And honestly the list started getting really long, but here are some highlights:

1. People who blow through stop signs.
2. People who stand at my desk and want to chat about stupid nonsense even when I tell them I am super busy with a deadline project and I will need to talk to them later.
3. People who are out jogging on really busy, high-traffic roads and they jog IN THE ROAD instead of on the sidewalk which is 2 feet from them.  Especially when they do this during rush hour.
4. Bicyclists.  Holy crap.  I could go on for hours about them.  They don't follow traffic laws.  They come out in huge packs of 50 riders and block major intersections and crowd busy roads during rush hour in downtown Atlanta.  They ride right down the middle of the road wearing dark clothes with no lights when it's dark outside.  They seriously bug.
5. People who come up to me in the break room when I'm eating lunch and can see I'm trying to read a book or a magazine and just talk and talk and talk.  
6. My boss who was a total butt to me this morning when he told me he was surprised and disappointed I didn't know how to do something in a software program that I've never used before and he's never asked me to use before.
7. People who know you but smirk and wave at you as they see you running for the elevator and let the door shut right in your face (see: butt headed boss above).  It didn't happen today, but he's done it to me before.
8. Several of my friends on Facebook who think I give a rat's behind that they think they are the smartest person on the planet about politics and everyone who disagrees with them are just ignoramuses.  These are usually the ones who claim to be the biggest Christians as well yet judge everyone who is a little bit different from them.
9. Women who pee all over the toilet seat at work and leave it. I bet they don't do that at home.

Number 9 is a nice segue to this next completely random thought of mine.

Do you know how sometimes you feel like the universe is sending you signs?  It sometimes feels like the same message is being sent to you repeatedly in a very short span of time so you should probably pay attention because something is about to happen.  Do y'all know what I mean?

Maybe you get signs that you're about to meet that special someone.

Maybe you get signs that you are going to have a baby soon.

Maybe you get signs that you should buy that house you've been thinking about buying.

Maybe you get signs that you should change jobs.

Maybe you get signs that you should go to a certain vacation spot.

Late yesterday afternoon, someone sent me a link to a video and it had an ad that played at the beginning.  This is now my new favorite ad and here it is:

This morning someone sent me a link to a site and as I scrolled through it, I saw this:

And shortly thereafter, this was brought to my attention:

Clearly, the Universe is sending me a sign.  It's trying to tell me that I'm going to have diarrhea soon.

Help!

I didn't post yesterday because this is what my day consisted of:

Ring, ring, ring.

"Help Desk, this is _________ speaking."

Me:  "HHHHHHEEEEELLLLLLPPPPPPPP!!!!!"

Anytime I can have THREE people in our IT department admit defeat after I have spent approximately 2.5 hours on the phone with them logged in with me working on a document is a day when I don't feel like such an idiot.  Because I had already tried to figure this document catastrophe out by myself, but after spending a couple of hours at my desk cursing under my breath, I called in for help.  Our trainer, who I've never known to not be able to figure out how to fix something, said this document was not fixable (it was what I call a Frankenstein document - my boss had cut and pasted parts of documents from attorneys here, from the client, from documents on the internet, and had revised it repeatedly over the course of a month, the client had made revisions, etc. and then I was given the fun task of formatting the entire thing and creating a Table of Contents).  Between that and having a billing deadline with approximately 20 gazillion clients with 20 gazillion bills each, I did not have time to post.  And you can imagine I was in a good mood too.

Before I go on with my post for today (which at this point I have no clue what I'm going to write about), let's talk about the salad dressing I drank because two of you asked what kind of salad dressing I drank like that is the important thing.  The important part of the story is that it was disgusting to take a giant gulp of salad dressing when you're expecting a sweet and creamy gulp of iced coffee.  But the truth is, I don't even know what kind of salad dressing I drank. 

We have lots of breakfast and lunch meetings in our office and there are lots of leftovers around here which is why it's a good thing I don't normally go to lunch until 1:00 or 1:30 because I get free lunch a lot.  And sometimes there are TONS of leftovers so we get free lunch and then put some up for the next day too or, as was the case this time, I was in the middle of eating my lunch I brought from home when the leftovers were brought in the break room so I got some salad to save for the next day's lunch.  The salad and dressing were from Maggiano's and I had put some dressing in a cup so that I wasn't Miss Piggy of the law firm by taking the entire container.  It was kind of beige/off-white in color and creamy but it was not a typical ranch, blue cheese, etc.  It was something I've never had before and it was not good to gulp straight from a cup, however, it was quite delicious on my salad once I finally ate it the correct way.

And guess what I just ran and got.  More free salad.  It's Caesar with Caesar dressing and I've already put the dressing on my salad since I'm going to eat it in about an hour so I won't be drinking it today.  I think it's important that y'all know I'm not going to make salad dressing gulping a habit.

Also, y'all discussed my garage door remote situation.  Sara with your h, I can buy a remote that attaches to my key chain and program it to go with my existing opener? Even if I'm the most technology challenged person on planet Earth?  Where do I buy one?  And Anita, you're not dreaming.  I did get a new keypad installed to open and close my garage, but my hands were too full to hold the remote and they were also too full to slide open a cover and punch buttons on a key pad.

One more thing y'all asked about in the comments is if I have tried melatonin (I just typed melanoma at first and no, I haven't tried skin cancer to cure insomnia) or Mid-Nite for my sleeping issues.  And the answer is yes.  I've tried Mid-Nite, Calms Forte, melatonin, Ambien, Tylenol PM, Advil PM, store brand PM, two different natural products my mom uses but I can't remember the names of either of them, and my doctor has tried putting me on anti-anxiety meds and anti-depressants and neither of those phased me.  Well, the anti-depressants phased me but not in the area of my lack of sleep.  They made me lose all sense of balance to the point that I would be walking down the hall and fall down for no reason (and let's face it, I don't need any help falling down since I fell and broke my arm twice in a year without being on any meds at all) and they made me drive like a maniac and know it but I could not stop myself from going 30 - 40 miles over the speed limit and cutting and weaving in and out of traffic closely in front of people on the expressway, so that was a very short six week experiment that failed miserably and almost made me injure myself or someone else.  I've tried cutting out all caffeine.  I've tried exercising.  I've tried meditating and do y'all know what I suck at?  Meditating.  I went to a counselor to "talk about things" and "share my feelings" to see if I just had too much crap bottled up inside (which I do, but spending all that money talking about my crap each week for over a year didn't help me sleep either).  I've tried not watching TV or looking at electronics for a certain amount of time before bed.  I've bought new pillows.  I've sprayed stuff in my room with lavender and chamomile.  I've drank chamomile.  Hot showers.  Hot baths.  I've even bought a new bed.  Nothing works.

So basically, I just get by on 3 or 4 hours total of broken up bits of sleep (and that's on a good night) and I read a whole lot of books in the middle of the night.  Reading does put me to sleep fairly quickly, but I don't stay asleep for very long.  Sometimes I'll stay asleep for an hour, sometimes only 15 or 20 minutes.  But if y'all can think of anything else to try, I am game.  I never had sleeping issues in my life until I went through my divorce.  So I blame my ex-husband for this.  Along with a bunch of other stuff (see above re: bottled up crap).

Well, look at that.  I didn't know what to write about but I think this is long enough.  Long enough to make y'all think I'm insane anyway.

Today I drank some salad dressing

Happy Tuesday!

In addition to accidentally taking a giant gulp of salad dressing out of a cup sitting on my desk earlier this afternoon as one does, I have been busy printing hundreds of pages of court cases about blah blah blah for one boss and I should probably print a set for myself to take home and cure my insomnia I've had for 10 years (and seriously, something I could never do would be reading the crap attorneys have to read all day), getting a phone installed for another boss, and learning that I am the ONLY person in my entire law firm of over 200 people who does a certain task in the particular way I do it as opposed to how everyone else does it.  What I like to be is weird and different so the girl who has to work on this stuff on quite a regular basis told me she likes me and she likes weird so I should keep doing it my own way so I absolutely will.  She gets me.  We are both flying our freak flags as much as you can do that when working for a serious law firm.

Also, we have a bakery in our building (I know!) and I try to forget it's there because they have awesome stuff and I already weigh 9,000 pounds, but today they were giving away free coffee.  I think they were supposed to give us a small complimentary size cup of coffee but what they handed me was kind of like a gallon of coffee.  I drink iced coffee about 75% of the time and even more so since I'm pretty sure I'm starting to have hot flashes which suck so very much, so I started pouring my free bakery coffee in one of our firm provided solo cups over ice which is how I make my one cup of coffee I drink every day (I didn't say I'm a snooty iced coffee connoisseur).  The point is, I drank FOUR solo cups of iced coffee and still had hot coffee left over and so I've spent about 2 hours of my day running up and down the hall to the bathroom because oh my word I cannot stop peeing, and I am about to climb the walls because I cannot sit still.  This should help the whole insomnia thing.  But honestly, I stopped drinking it around 11:00 a.m., it is now 5:25 p.m. and I'm still peeing non-stop.  How do you pot-a-day coffee people get anything done?

They are giving away free coffee tomorrow morning too.  If you're going to be in Buckhead between 8 and 10 I can tell you where!

In other news, my fake son left yesterday to move to Europe so I'm down to one fake child.  Let me rephrase:  I'm down to one very sad, very lonely, very depressed, very teary-eyed fake child and honestly my heart was breaking for her last night when I got home and went in her room to check on her.  They are very close so I knew she would have a hard time when he left and she cried when I talked to her.  I felt so horrible for her.

In addition to listening to a girl cry and having my heart broken last night, it was the night to take the trash to the curb for pick-up.  Exciting, right?  My garage is detached and I have to use my remote to get in the garage each morning (as opposed to walking into the garage from a door in my house - keep up) so I can't leave it in my car when I get home at night.  So I stuck my garage remote in my pocket because I had to carry my purse, my lunch bag, a magazine, push the trash can up to the curb, check the mail, close my front gate, unlock the front door, open the door, and try to not let my cat get out of the house.  In the process of doing that, I apparently hit the button on the remote with the fat around my hips or I may have hit it with my finger when I was taking the remote out of my pocket, but somehow I opened my garage door and didn't know it.

Fake daughter has to leave for work before I get out of bed because she has to arrive at 7:00 a.m. and she texted me telling me what I had done.  So yeah.  I left my garage door open all night in the 'hood with my car unlocked, my lawn equipment up for grabs, my dad's antique camera collection available for the taking, and all of fake daughter's stuff she bought for her apartment along with a lot of her clothes and her bicycle just sitting there for anyone who wanted it.  Luckily no one seemed to know because everything seemed to be there.

And now I am hoping for a very calm night.  But I plan to go run some errands after work so there is no telling what will happen......as long as I can stop this blasted peeing.

Is this your dad?

Happy Monday!! 

Do y'all want to hear about my weekend?  I hope so because I have nothing else in mind to talk about today.  That's not necessarily true, but there are a lot of things I can't talk about even though they're on my mind.

Friday night I did exciting, party animal kinds of stuff.  I went to Disco Kroger after work to buy groceries (and I did not try to steal them this time), got home and stayed up all the way until 10:30 doing laundry.  I know!  It's like I thought I was in my early 20s again with all of that craziness and wildness going on at my house on Friday night.

Atlanta has nicknames for all of our Kroger stores and Fay is a big fan of that fact.  She has a map of them and everything which she emailed to me once.  Sometimes I tag her on Facebook as being there with me just so she won't miss which Kroger I went to.  Disco Kroger used to be, wait for it, a disco!  But now it's a grocery store.  We also have Hipster Kroger/Emo Kroger near my house and I am so wild and crazy that I go there even though I'm not a hipster.  I also live not too far from Murder Kroger and you can guess why I don't want to do much shopping at that one.  I have never been to Lunatic Kroger but I probably would fit right in.

I'm sure some of you might remember that my dad passed away last August.  He was a professional photographer for about 40 or 50 years and my brother who lives here in Atlanta and I have been dealing with his photography equipment and an antique camera collection ever since.  We're selling some stuff, keeping some stuff, having stuff serviced to sell, etc. and it has been a giant pain in the patookus if I'm being honest.  We had to take about 50 antique cameras to a guy on Saturday and do y'all know what's fun?  Loading a whole bunch of boxes of cameras in your car, unloading a bunch of boxes of cameras from your car and carrying them into a camera store, loading the cameras back up and carrying a bunch of boxes of cameras back out to your car, and unloading a bunch of boxes of cameras out of your car when you get back home, that's what.  And this is the second time I've had to take them to this guy but luckily my brother was able to help me this time AND we got a parking spot right in front of his store as opposed to the time I did it by myself last fall and I had to park at the other end of the shopping center and do it.  That time sucked way worse.  Some of the antique cameras are those huge wooden ones with the leather bellows and they take up an entire box all by themselves so when I say it was a lot of boxes I'm not making that up.  And we have an antique aerial camera that must weigh 9,000 pounds.  Guess which box I happened to pick up?

After we got enough exercise for the next year, we went to my neighbors' house to watch college football which I do not give two hoots about.  And yet they watched 3 different games and I stayed there for 8 hours.  In 8 hours/3 football games I honest to goodness saw 4 plays and that was it.  Because thankfully there was another lady there who didn't give even one hoot about football so we talked about horrible dates we've been on, they talked about childbirth (which was when I watched football for a few minutes), and then a guy they knew showed up with an interesting new girlfriend situation so we discussed that for a while (she was 25 years older than him and my neighbor was suspicious that she was a transvestite - I was on the fence about the transvestite part but let's just say she was probably over 6 feet tall and there was nothing feminine about her).  And the lady who used to live next door to me came for a bit and I adore the crap out of her so we got to catch up.  And that is how you go to a football party for 8 hours and only see 4 plays or downs or whatever they are.  There also may have been 5 glasses of wine involved on my part and that's about 5 glasses more than I've drank in quite a while but since I live 3 houses away and don't have to drive I drank up.  At their house you normally have a choice of beer, wine, tap water or juice boxes and I don't trust drinking Atlanta tap water.  I had taken 3 bottles of water and my brother drank two of them and I had already drank the third because we were parched from all of the box toting we had done earlier.

But yesterday is when the weird stuff happened.

The first weird thing is that I didn't even have a hangover when I woke up.

The second weird thing had to do with my dad.  Do y'all remember last week when I was feeling kind of blah about September 11th and mentioned that my friend's father had passed away the night before?  What I didn't tell y'all is that the friend was the one who lived in my neighborhood growing up and told me my dad was dating her Aunt Martha Stewart a few years back.  Her dad and grandfather built most of the houses in our neighborhood, etc.  Anyway, her dad had been okay one day and then an accident of sorts happened and something happened during surgery from the accident and he never woke up and died a week later (it's not my place to tell all of the details of what happened).  My dad dropped dead of a heart attack.  We both lost our fathers completely unexpectedly and I think what has happened is that it has triggered me to finally start grieving my dad's death.  Yes, I know it's been a year, but right after my dad died we had to deal with his greedy wife and a whole bunch of stuff she did to us over the course of several months, my older brother and I spent every weekend for about 4 or 5 months cleaning out his house, then I fell and broke my wrist, I went through moving at my office, then my fake kids showed up, and I don't think I ever had any downtime to grieve and suddenly since her dad died last week I can hardly go 5 minutes without thinking about my dad.

Yesterday I was in the kitchen cooking all of my lunches and dinners for this week and my phone was sitting there on the counter.  It started beeping that I had a text message and I looked over and an old back and white photo of my dad when he was pretty young popped up on the screen. 

"Is this your dad?" the message asked.

It was my dad.

I had never seen this photo in my life but without question it was my dad from the 60s or 70s.  He was sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him with two cameras hanging around his neck.  There is another guy kneeling beside him with a cigar in his mouth.

When I opened the message up, I saw that it was from my friend who just lost her dad.  I wrote her back and told her it was definitely my dad but I had never seen the photo before and asked her where on earth she had found it.  She told me the lady across the street from my dad's house had them at a yard sale and her dad bought two albums from her along with some negatives they think are from my dad and took them to his house.  I asked her how long ago her dad had bought them.  She told me it was 3 weeks ago, only 1 week before his accident. 

My friend and her mom were looking through them yesterday and they both thought it was him and her mom said she'll save them for us.

The lady across the street is a drug addict.  Her husband is either still in prison or was at one time for being a dealer.  The day my dad died, she came over as I was getting out of the car and talked to me and some other people who were standing outside.  She walked up to me and held out her arms to hug me and said how sorry she was and how much she would miss my dad being there across the street from her.  I honestly didn't want to touch her because she was wearing a filthy dirty square dancing dress, flip flops and had scabs all over her arms and legs, but I hugged her anyway.  She was really sweet and that was honestly the first time I had ever talked to her even though she had lived across the street from our family home for the entire 33 years my dad owned it.  I hadn't talked to her before because when I still lived there before I went away to college and then went on with my life, her sons were known for shooting stray cats with BB guns if they came in their yard and I didn't want to know anyone who would do something like that.

The only thing my brother and I can figure is that she broke into my dad's house before we finished cleaning stuff out and stole that stuff.  There is no way my dad would have given her photo albums with personal pictures or any of his negatives.  They were friendly to each other as neighbors, but they were not friends.  Plus my dad was an organized hoarder.  He did not get rid of stuff.  Ever.  We found plane ticket stubs from the late 70s.  His car insurance bill for a car he owned in the 60s.  His gas and electric bills from the 60s.  Now we wonder what else she might have taken of my dad's that we will never know about or see again.

And I feel so sad.

How to have a stupid afternoon/night in eleven easy steps

I had a really ridiculous and stupid afternoon and evening and I’ve broken it down into easy to follow steps if you’d like to have a stupid afternoon and evening too!

1. While you’re eating lunch in the break room with co-workers and they start asking if you saw on the news about a big mattress factory fire the day before and you say no, then start making jokes about how someone must have been smoking in bed and they look at you like you have 8 heads and a unicorn horn and say, “No, the fire was in some trailers behind the building and it was a factory, not a mattress in someone’s home.”  And you try to explain that it was just a joke about how people smoke in bed and start fires and they still look at you like you’re an idiot and keep saying, “No, it was at the mattress FACTORY” so you finally just mumble about how they have no sense of humor and sit with them in silence.
2. As you are putting a paper liner on the toilet seat in the women’s restroom, you should completely lose your balance for no explainable reason, and fling yourself very loudly into the wall and the door of the stall and alarm another person who happens to be quietly getting their pee on.
3. A few hours later, suddenly realize that you are apparently too dumb to look at a clock and discover you have been sitting at your desk working away and it is 25 minutes past quitting time and you are pretty much the only person at your end of the hall still at work.  And what you’ve been so busy working on isn’t even due for another six days and you can finish it in a matter of a few hours.
4. When you finally decide to leave the office after working late like a doofus, get on the elevator with the HOT new attorney who just started working at your firm and has his office on your floor.  As he tries to make small talk and introduce himself and says he has seen you walking around a lot but doesn’t know who you are, get so tongue tied because he is so HOT and his eyes are so piercingly beautiful that you can’t even say your name properly.  Did I mention he’s HOT?  He is also probably young enough to be your son, but who cares.  Because he's HOT. Tongue tying HOT.
5. Decide to stop at Best Buy on your way home to buy a cover for your new tablet computer thingie so that you don’t scratch it all up and ruin it.  When you walk in the front door, realize the Home Depot deactivator/scanner thing did not work and your purse is still setting off door alarms and the security guy at the door is giving you the stink eye.  Start babbling about how you went to Home Depot and they tried to scan your purse so it wouldn’t do that anymore, and how you’ve gone through your purse and can’t figure out what’s setting off alarms all across the land and ask the security guy to please not forget what you look like because you’re going to set off the alarm again when you leave.  AND KEEP BABBLING even when he says repeatedly, “Ma’am, it’s okay.  Don’t worry.” 
6. As you leave Best Buy, start babbling AGAIN to the poor security guy explaining that you are the one who set off the alarm when you came in and does he remember that because apparently you think he has no ability to remember something that happened less than 10 minutes ago, and explain you’re going to set it off when you walk out now and honest to Pete, why can’t you just shut up already?  He’s nodding okay.  Just shut up and leave.  So you leave and yes, you set off the alarms again.
7. Get a giant hankering for a Steak ‘n Shake Frisco Melt hamburger when you see a stupid billboard. 
8. Drive about 4 miles for a stupid, stupid fattening hamburger and fries which you have no business eating.  And do it in a lot of traffic so it takes you almost 45 minutes to get something that’s not even real food.
9. Get lost on your way home.  Seriously.  The Steak n’ Shake is at the corner of two major roads and you turn one way on one of them thinking you know exactly where the road comes out and another major road it’s going to connect with, but then realize you’ve apparently never been on that particular section of the major road even though you’ve lived in this city for all 45 years of your stupid life and get lost trying to drive home to eat your dumb hamburger that you don’t need.  And please don't use the GPS you have in your car because YOU WILL FREAKING FIGURE THIS OUT ON YOUR OWN.
10. Finally get on the right track and get home almost 45 minutes later and eat your dumb, cold hamburger and fries.  By then it’s time to take a shower and go to bed because you’ve had such a long and stupid night.
11. Wake up at 12:30 a.m. to pee.  Wake up at 3:00 a.m. to pee.  Get up at 4:30 a.m. to pee.  You don’t have to wake up to do it, because you have been awake reading since you woke up at 3:00 a.m. to pee but can’t sleep because you have too much on your mind which is the story of your life and realize you’ve been staying awake reading for half the night every single night for weeks which is how you have now read 15 books in only the past two and a half weeks and thank goodness for free books on Kindle.  Finally fall asleep again around 5:10 a.m.  Wake up at 5:40 a.m. to pee.  Curse self for drinking a medium Diet Coke with your dumb, cold hamburger and fries right before going to bed.  Doze back off finally around 6:15 a.m. since you don't have to get up until 7:00.  Wake up at 6:25 a.m. when your fake daughter drops something on the hardwood floors across the hall from you and it sounds like a bomb.  When you get up at 7:00 a.m., don't go in her room to check the floor to make sure it's not damaged because you don't even want to know.

I need some help from Uranus

I got me some new technology last night, y'all.  "What?!  I thought you were broke?" is what you're probably thinking.  And I am.  But I got this new technology for F-R-E-E which is the perfect price for anything.

I recently switched my internet and cable provider at home and one of their incentives to sign up with them was to give you a free gift.  My real incentive was that my previous internet wouldn't stay connected half the time and it was driving me bat shit crazy having to unhook everything and turn it all off and then back on and reconnecting several times per week and sometimes it would stay out for a couple of days even after they re-wired my house twice, plus the new provider is $60 cheaper every month.  But a free gift didn't hurt any either.

I had a choice of a Kindle Fire, a Google Nexus 7, some music thing I had never heard of, or a $125 Visa gift card.  I already have a regular Kindle, I had never heard of the music thing, and the Nexus  was worth over $200 as opposed to a $125 Visa gift card, so I went with the Nexus tablet. 

I've already downloaded a few apps that make life worth living such as Facebook, Words with Friends, etc. as well as Candy Crush (I have a theory that Candy Crush was developed by a group of mental health providers because they know how to make people addicted to something which will cause them to be institutionalized at some point).  But what I still need to search for is an astrology app.  Have I told y'all how much I love me the online astrology?  Do I believe it will predict my future and do I avoid signing contracts or buying expensive things when mercury is in retrograde?  No.  However, I just thought about something.  I should absolutely go back and see if I closed on my house while mercury was in retrograde or Neptune was up Uranus.  I read it for entertainment.

For instance, one of the astrologists I read said this about my sign (Leo!  Woot!) for this month:  "Your very best days to look for more income will be Thursday, September 5; Friday, September 6; and Saturday, September 7. Jupiter, the good fortune planet, will signal the mighty Sun and shower you with luck. Your house of income (where the Sun is moving through now) and Jupiter, in your house of confidential meetings, will work together to help you get compensated generously."  

Do y'all remember what happened on September 6th?  I was paying someone to unlock my garage door which my luggage rack had secretly locked.  Does that sound like Jupiter was showering me with luck?  I think not.  No, Jupiter was showering me with stupid crap.  Also, I do not think I have a house of income.  I have more of a shanty of income.  Or a cardboard box next to a fire in a metal barrel of income.  A living under the bridge of income.  And who knew we had a house of confidential meetings.  I need the stars to be more concerned with building me a whole house of income instead of focusing on a house of confidential meetings.  Astrology is ridiculous.  Entertaining, but completely ridiculous.

It also says I should ask for a raise this week.  Guess what I am not doing this week because astrology can suck it!

And there is this:  "Venus will be in your house of home from September 11 to October 6, so you may decide to add fresh design touches now."  For me, that would mean I should start preparing for another bathroom to leak so bad I have to have it re-tiled or a floor to fall in or something.

What I do think about astrology is that sometimes it can explain your personality a little bit. Yesterday I took this color quiz and I am here to tell you that it nailed things!  It said I'm currently obsessed about money matters.  Y'all have no idea.

So if you feel like it, take this quiz and let me know if it's accurate for you too:

Color Oracle

That site also has a place where you can put in your birth date, place of birth and time of birth and you can get other reports.  My personality report says my chart shows things will be very unfavorable for me in financial matters during my life (totally true),  that there will be major events surrounding my mother (my biological mother died when I was 5 which I would certainly categorize as a major event), and it says I will be a polished and refined person (okay, so it can't be 100% accurate).

What would you do with the last hour of your life?

I am feeling a little too down to write a post today.  One of my friends lost her father last night and I've been seeing all of the 9/11 reminders today, and I just don't have it in me.

But please take the time to click on the link below and watch this.   Wow.

The incredible inspiration one man gave us in the last hour of his life

Where are my keys?

Well.  I think what I learned from Music Monday this week is that there have been no songs recorded about jail/prison in the past 30+ years or that we are all at least 192-years-old with the stuff that was submitted. 

I'm going to stick with my declaration of AC/DC being the winner.  Because I heart them.  That Webb Pierce thing which TWO of you submitted?  Um, no.  Just no.  That brings back too many memories of having to sit with my Mam-ma watching Lawrence Welk and his bubbles on Saturday nights down in Vidalia, Georgia.  Usually followed by Hee Haw or my Poppie would take over the living room to watch an Atlanta Braves game while listening to the play-by-play of a different baseball game on the radio and reading the newspaper sports section about the games from the day before while gnawing on a cigar.  He was a multi-tasker and I adored my Poppie.  Except for his baseball/newspaper reading/cigar gnawing habit. 

Second Place goes to Sadie!  I also heart blues music and Muddy Waters is one of my favorites.

And if you'd like to see her submission you're going to have to copy and paste what I give you in a minute into your browser.  Blogger has a You Tube search thing built into it when you want to embed a video.  Sadie's submission is not coming up when I search and I have not been able to figure out how to copy and paste a link to embed because technology hates me.

Here is Sadie's submission:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98btg7T4tWI

Third Place goes to Bobbi because how can you talk about prison songs and not think of this one?  And because Johnny is shooting us a bird and making an EFF YOU! face (I hope that's what shows up when this post is published or y'all are going to wonder what on earth I'm talking about.)

In unrelated news, I have two bosses now that one of my bosses left our firm and let's just say that one of them is a gigantic challenge to work for on a good day.

He came to my desk this morning and said, "You are not going to believe what I did yesterday."

And yesterday was not fun because our entire system for internet, phones, and emails crashed for about half of the day and it's the third time it's happened in a week.  Our IT department is happy with our provider as you can imagine.  Especially since we are considered a leading technology law firm and our technology keeps crashing. 

Anyway, my boss came up to me this morning and told me that he came in the office yesterday morning and left his car running all day long in the parking deck.  I asked him if it ran out of gas and he said it was on empty when he got in it last night and he prayed he would make it to the gas station.  He made it to the gas station but discovered he had a flat tire.  So he had himself a great day of not being able to communicate with any of his clients and a great night of car problems.

It reminded me of something I did back in high school.  My dad was a firm believer in supporting mom and pop operations when you could.  His theory was that they couldn't afford advertising like big companies so they had to do a good job and provide good service in order to stay in business because they relied on word of mouth advertising.  I have to say his theory makes a lot of sense.

We always took our cars for service by a family run place and it was a couple of miles down the road from us and they had built a garage behind their house and that's where they fixed our cars. 

My younger brother and I shared a car for a period of time and this car had many weird mechanical issues so it was in the shop a whole bunch.  One day a friend of mine dropped me off to pick up the car from the family mechanic and I realized I had no more checks on me to pay them.  Because they knew us so well he told me to go ahead and take the car and I could drop a check off the next day. 

The next day I went back to pay them and it was pouring down rain.  I parked in their driveway and ran as fast as I could inside to drop off the check.  I ran back outside to my car and discovered I had locked the door.  With my car still running.  The lights were still on.  The defrost was blasting.  And the windshield wipers were flapping.

So I ran back inside and as embarrassed as I could be, I told the owner what I had done.  He asked if I had another key at home and I said I did.  He asked me if I could get in my house and I said I could.  The owner had to drive me to my house to get a car key and my entire family never let me live it down.

I wish I could tell you that taught me a lesson and I never locked my keys in my car again.

But I can't tell you that.

Because about a year later I stopped at a friend's house in my neighborhood to drop something off and I did it again.  With the car running and almost on empty.  And it ran out of gas in her driveway.

I totally just checked my purse to make sure my keys are in there. 

They are.

This also reminds me of a story I need to tell you about this boss with a flat tire and his interview here.  It is crazy.

But please tell me all of you have locked your keys in your car with it running at least once.

If I got solitary confinement I might at least have some peace and quiet

I'm very happy to report in this Monday to tell y'all that nothing broke this weekend. Well, nothing expensive on my house broke.  I did break a few things though.

I broke my fingernail on my shoot-a-bird finger on my left hand all the way down into the quick and I don't even remember how I did it.  And then yesterday I looked down and my thumb nail was completely broken off on my left hand.  Apparently I broke it while simply sitting at a table talking to my neighbors and my older brother while I was watching pro football at a bar in Little Five Points.  I know......I don't even like football.  Yet I have agreed to go watch college football next weekend with them too.  (Texas A&M and Alabama.  Why?  I have no idea.  I could give a rat's butt about football or either one of those teams.  And I don't even drink.  So I don't like football or drinking - I'm as perplexed as y'all are why I'm going to spend two weekends in a row watching football.)

On Saturday I very nearly broke my back, my quads, and my ass.  I did yard work for almost 4 hours so I can barely walk today.  I am possibly the most out of shape person in all of America.  Remember last weekend when I was uber lazy and didn't do my yard work?  This weekend I mowed, picked up sticks and twigs in my yard because I have a stupid reel mower so a twig the size of a pencil eraser will completely jam it up, cleaned my front porch, blew leaves that are already falling, and then I started emptying out dead flowers and potting soil from containers and cutting back some of the dead stuff in my flower bed.  That's when I failed to notice the GIGANTIC spider web and GIGANTIC writing spider that had spun a web between the dead stalk of a gladiola which was honest to goodness almost 6 feet tall and a birdhouse hanging on the column on my front porch.  I started cutting the gladiola stalk and was suddenly coated in spider web and saw the spider which was as big as my head and in my giant tizzy I threw, I fell backwards and almost broke my ass right in my front yard.

Later that evening after I had taken an awesome shower and cleaned all of the dirt out of my ears, off my face, spider web out of my hair, etc., I was sitting on the porch drinking a big glass of sweet tea enjoying looking at how much better my porch and yard looked and I happened to glance over and saw that GIGANTIC writing spider hanging off of a thing on my front porch and he was eating a fat slimy bug.  Gross.  By Sunday morning when I sat on the porch drinking a cup of coffee, that thing had a whole new GIGANTIC web spun and attached to my porch again.  I guess he's my new neighbor.  He had written MMMMMMMMMMM or WWWWWWWWWWWWWW or ZZZZZZZZZZZZ in his web depending on which way you looked at it.

So yes, I broke two nails and broke my ass.  But Friday night was the high point of breaking stuff.  Friday is when I almost broke the law.

After I dealt with my garage door that had been broken by the top of my car, I didn't get to work until about 1:15.  Because I had worked through lunch one day and had worked a little bit late one night and had come in a little bit early another day, I only had to work 6 hours on Friday to get my hours in for the week.  I left the office at 7:15 and planned to stop at the grocery store on my way home.  I hate going to the grocery store on Saturday or Sunday so I usually go on the way home Friday night for my weekly stuff and then I cook some huge batch of something on Sunday, divide it up into individual portions, and then I just grab a container as I walk out the door each morning so I have my lunch and don't spend $897941341645 each week eating out.  And then by Friday, I can't stand to look at one more bite of whatever it was I made that week because I've eaten it for 5 days straight.  Then I go on Pinterest and find something to make for the next week.  I'm talking super easy stuff y'all.  I am not what one would call a gourmet cook.  I don't touch raw meat and recently had to Google how to hard boil eggs.

When I was leaving work, I ran into a friend/co-worker of mine in the parking deck and since our firm takes up 6 floors and she and I work on different floors, I don't see her too often so we stood there for about 30 minutes talking and catching up.  By the time I got to the store it was almost 8:00.  I was tired, the week had stressed me out between house repairs/finances, one of my bosses who I adore worked his last day at the firm on Friday, my fake kids have been stressing me out, a friend of mine I've known for over 30 years is watching her father pass away (he fell and broke his hip last weekend and then suffered a major stroke during the hip surgery and has never completely woken up and just got moved to hospice a few days ago), etc. and my mind was honestly on about a gazillion different things but was focused very little on grocery shopping.

I stumbled around the grocery store in a daze grabbing the stuff I needed and went to the check-out.  The cashier rang up my groceries, the bag boy bagged everything up, and then I said, "Thanks!  Y'all have a great weekend!" and off I walked.  I was almost to the door when I heard the cashier screaming across the store at me, "MA'AM!  CAN YOU PLEASE COME BACK HERE AND PAY FOR YOUR GROCERIES?"

Y'all!  I totally forgot to pay.  I almost shoplifted a week's worth of groceries!

I walked back with my head hanging in total shame.  The bag boy was about to pee himself he was laughing so hard, the lady in line behind me made a half laugh/half pfftt sound, and the cashier was simply glaring at me.  I apologized profusely but Ms. Cashier was not amused.

Therefore, I've set a lofty goal for myself.  My goal this week is to stay out of jail. 

And I leave you with this:

This reminds me, let's bring back Music Monday since I seem to be posting a little more regularly.  If y'all want to play along, this week's theme is jail!  The song(s) you submit must contain one of the following words in the song title:  jail, prison, cell, lockup, penitentiary, joint, slammer, or clink.  But Jailbreak by AC/DC is probably the winner already and I've already submitted it (although there is another jail song by a man in black that I know without a doubt someone will submit and that might tie me).

I will be here at my desk jamming out to more AC/DC songs today and trying to stay on the straight and narrow.