Spook Attack
One of our favourite things to do with the kitty is let her bat around and attack our feet. She got in a mood while I was playing with the new cam 🙂
Author: Melia
It’s here!
I haz a new camera! Now I can stop agonizing over the lack of package tracking updates – it came a day early. So. Much. Woot!
It’s smaller than I thought, but it fits nicely in my hand, and so far it takes bloody great pictures 🙂 I’m pretty much just clicking anything with it right now, checking it out, you know. I’m going to install a gallery though because I plan to get fancy 🙂
I tried snapping Spooky but she kept wandering out of the shot and appearing completely disinterested.
Anyway… yay! I’m so excited!
Tornado-palooza
It was quite a bumpy evening around here. The tornado watch started in the afternoon and by the time I got off work, things were rumbly and roiling out towards Kearney. I picked up the kidlet from work and we went home to keep an eye on the alerts. If it got bad we were going to make a mad dash for the Gs. While we debated, we gathered up the stuff we couldn’t bear to lose “just in case” – you know, the laptops, the Wii, our ipods, the external hard drive, the last book in the Dresden series that I haven’t read yet, some pictures and the cat. Oh and my bottle of Simply Divine Cherry Pie lotion. I think by this time I was just grabbing, and I distinctly remember justifying it in my mind because Bath & Body discontinued it and it’s hard to find 🙂
Mmmm cherries.
Anyway, the Big Radar Map showed that the bulk of this huge cell was heading straight for us. So we loaded up and headed for the grandparent’s basement. On the way up, Shannon video’d what she could of the sky but frankly, other than some great lightning and rain, I’ve seen scarier skies.
So we hung out with the Gs for a while. I twittered occasional updates from my cell phone because I know when I’m surrounded by tornadoes with sirens blaring and radio DJs wigging, I want to be sure all my followers know it 🙂
The cat explored her new surroundings and was very well-behaved considering she hates everyone in the entire world except for the kid and me. And then the sirens stopped and it was time to go. Maybe she liked the basement. Maybe she preferred lying on the cold cement floor instead of cowering in the backseat of the car tryign to figure out wtf is going on. But when she and I reached the top of the stairs, she freaked out. A literal hissy fit complete with fangs. So I’m trying to hold on to Angry Kitty, the laptop bag, my purse and Shannon’s purse when she decides I might be tasty. Gran is looking at us horrified, Grampa is trying to take the bags from me and Shannon’s trying to get close enough to find a way to grab the cat without exposing her own flesh.
She sank her fnags into my hand one more time, I shrieked, then Shannon finally found a grip and took the snarling, spitting cat and chucked her into the backseat of the car where the little minx flopped and stared at us through the window with a, “What?” look on her sweet little face.
Ah well. Now we’re home, the place is still standing, Spooky is banished from my room until I make my point to her that she was naughty, and I’m chilling to an old Men at Work song on XM44 🙂 My hand’s got a few punctures in it but I can still type! Woohoo!
Next tornado though, she’s on her own.
Waxing nostalgic
I’m listening to “Take Good Care of My Baby” on Matt’s show on XM5. I have strong memories about this song but it’s some kind of sense memory. I loved the song when I was younger, but I don’t think it was this Bobby Vee version. Or maybe it was. Just did some Googling. The Beatles covered it (who also factored bigtime in my youth as my mother was a big big fan) but I can’t see any other covers by anyone I really know. Weird.
I’m guessing it was a song my dad played a lot. He had a big collection of 45s and a beat-up old Seeburg jukebox he was always tinkering with. He loved all that 50s music and it was always around growing up that it was inevitable that my sister and I would love it too. And kind of fate that she would fall in love with a fantastic 50s DJ 🙂 Dad used to host a little 50s show on a tiny radio station in Santa Cruz. I loved going up there with him and hanging out (there was ping pong in the storage room) while he did his show. And he never failed to, at least once, do his wonderful Wolfman Jack impression. He rocked it 🙂
See, listening to Matt the Cat’s show always does this to me – makes me remember dad and what a cool guy he was. Thanks Matt!
I miss that old jukebox too. Once – just once – for a wrap party I had after my drama class’s last play of the year, he let me put my own 45s in the juke (mostly consisting of 80s bands.) and we set it up in our family room with the patio just outside as the dance floor. We also had a normal stereo set up in the other living room with tunes out there, but the jukebox was where everyone congregated that night. They loved it. Was a fun party (well, except for being forced to watch the star of the play, whom I had an enormous crush on, make out with his little twit of a girlfriend on my couch, but I’m focusing on the tunes 🙂 )
So I didn’t have a real purpose for this post. I just felt an overwhelming need to blog something – anything. And this little trip down memory lane was it. It was a nice trip. I’m glad I can be at a point when I can look back at stuff like dad doing the Wolfman and enjoy it instead of feeling bad. Gosh, it’s been 16 years since he died. Wow. Shannon wasn’t quite 1 yet. Kelly was 12. That’s just freaky. I hadn’t thought about how long it’s been. Sometimes it seems so recent. It’s weird.
Er, I didn’t mean to get sniffly. Still boggling at the time. It’s getting late though, should hit the sack. I want to see if the dream about the magic chalk continues 🙂
Dreamy
Just wanted to write this dream down while I still have remnants of it in my head. It was pretty cool and may have been influenced by the nightly reading of the Dresden books before bed. I just have bits and pieces since I’ve been up for a while and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t write anything down right away. Ah well.
Anyway, in the dream, I had to guard some chalk. A big chunk of chalk that was walled up in a kid’s bedroom. I don’t know anything about the chalk other than it was magical and a bad guy wanted it. I was in the room, bantering with the baddie trying to keep him from guessing where the chalk was. I remember doing my best to resist glancing at the wall and giving it away, and I remember being quite proud of my bantering skills. I had almost logic’d him out of finding the chalk when the alarm went off.
That’s it. And I know it doesn’t really seem like much worthy of writing down, but the impressions left after the dream are still with me right now. You know how sometimes you dream and yeah you might remember a little of it, but then it goes away and you’ll never remember anything about it – but then sometimes you have dreams that seem so real and so vivid that the feelings and emotions and all that stuff follow you around for a while. This one was like that.
As for the chalk, Harry Dresden uses chalk a lot with his wizardry and I’m just about through the entire Dresden series *sniffle* I love these books so much.
anti-zombies.org
I did something a little fun and a lot geeky the other day. See, I wrote another sequel ficlet in the whole CherryPop saga and in the course of it came a little idea.
Ok first, a little backstory here. I’m pretty much writing these on the fly. I have an idea in my head of where the story is going, but I’m fleshing it out one Ficlet at a time. So when I sit down to write a sequel, I never know exactly how it’s going to turn out. Makes it kind of exciting for me to do it that way.
So as I’m writing this particular sequel, in which CherryPop and Liam have to kill some time until sunset when they can go investigate the headquarters of the Anti-Zombie Coalition, who they think might be responsible for a brutal Stupid Zombie attack. As they kill time, I have Liam poke around online looking for info about the AZC.
Poking around. Online. All he finds is a plain website with a mission statement and contact number. A website… Online… Noo.. that would be silly. But funny! Yes! I’ll do it! And I did. I waited to publish the ficlet until after I purchased the domain www.anti-zombies.org. Then I made up a little mission statement, named my character who will be the head of it, and made up a phone number for him. And I put it online. And I published the ficlet with the URL as the title. Hello expanded universe!
It’s a Ficlet with a kick! 🙂 God I love that site.
Sure it’s a little OTT and silly, but it reminds me of the viral Lost sites that kept popping up when the show was on the air that enhanced the show’s mysteries. Fun!
Indiana Jones and the Whatever the Hell
So I went to see Indy today. Looked forward to it all week etc. Spent almost the entire movie being pissed off at the theatre for not fixing the focus. This cinematographic film with beautiful scenery, sweeping views, fun in-jokes, cool fight sequences and all that makes up something put together by Spielberg and Lucas, and the fucking thing looked like the way the world looks to me without my contacts. Ruined the whole experience for me.
For any locals, this would be the Dickinson Mall Stadium theatre, auditorium 7 so don’t go see it there. You’re probably better off driving to Hastings or something.
I noticed the blurriness during all the previews but I figured surely the projectionist will notice and sort it out before the film starts. But no, they didn’t. I asked Shannon to go tell the guy we know that works there about it and she did. And they came and fiddled with it about 15 minutes into the movie. Then it was ok for a while. Then it went so blurry that I’m shocked no one else went to complain. It stayed that way til near the end, then they fixed it right after the big climax.
By that time I was so mad, I was near tears, which sounds stupid and silly. It’s just a movie and I know this in my head, but I think I was angry at all that anticipation and excitement to see this movie gone to waste and my enjoyment wrecked because I couldn’t see most of it. And maybe I overreacted too. I dunno. But the guy we know who works there was very kind and refunded our money which appeased me a little. But now when I look back on the time I went to see this iconic movie, all I’ll remember is being pissed off during the whole thing. Which sucks.
Having said that, what I did see in the movie was great, perfectly cheesy, over the top Indiana action. The whole franchise requires some major suspending of your disbelief but I’m good at that 🙂 A lot of it was predictable (going to keep from going into detail) and unsubtle, but it was a good ride and I think I liked it. I would like to see it again, but I’m wary, so I’ll probably just rent it when it comes out.
Rest of the day was cool. Made ranch burgers with peas and honest-to-goodness corn-on-the-cob that I actually had to shuck (I’m of the ‘buy it frozen and pre-shucked’ camp usually.) Turned out all right. But the best part of the evening was hitting the pool for the first time this summer. Man that felt awesome. I just love swimming. It feels wonderful, it’s great exercise that I can deal with (no sweating!) and some of the lifeguards… Yu-mmy.
Except, am I just getting old or are children just more foul-mouthed than they used to be? The kid and I are doing our thing, just paddling around in the wave pool, chatting away, and this trio of chubby boys, no more than 9 or 10 years old, were having a shouting match. But all they were shouting was, ‘FUCK YOU’ at each other and then giggling like mad. It was actually kind of funny.
I remember when I was very young my friends and I would be walking home from school and one of us had either made up or heard of some new swear word or phrase that we had to test. But we couldn’t just blurt it out in the street. No way. No, we ducked down an alley, looked around furtively, then we’d whisper some dramatic cuss that made us feel like grownups. The one I remember the most that must have been a favourite or something was this, and forgive me if I offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities here but even now it makes me giggle: Motherfuckingtittysuckingtwoballbitch. To this day I have no idea what a ‘two ball bitch’ is but the whole phrase just flows off the tongue perfectly 🙂 Especially if you say it out loud in a sing-songy voice.
Anyway, there’s a whole lotta cursing going on at the pool tonight.