Sweating my fur balls off...

My central AC decided to quit working today. I know, you don't wanna hear me bitch about how hot it is in my house right now... even though it is... hot... fucking hot. So I'll spare you that gripe session and instead I'm going to bitch about my HVAC unit and my crawl space and the reason why I, though I hate going in there, have to enter that hell hole every couple of weeks. The good news is, I've got pictures!


The entrance to the portal of hell: it's about 20 inches wide by 30 inches high, and it's on the floor of my garage.



Once climbing down into the tomb, you'll notice several things: a pile of ancient relics on the left, haphazardly thrown there by my ex about 10 years ago (I don't dare move it for fear of what I might disturb), cobwebs everywhere, rat droppings on top of the furnace and everywhere else, and no light in sight.



This is a shot looking back at the opening to the tomb, once you've traversed the tricky walkway, while completely hunched over (it's about 3.5 to 4 feet high in there at any given point... sometimes less). I was going to take a picture of myself hunched over, but at the last minute I thought, "What if I hold the camera out, snap the photo, then turn it around to see what it looks like only to see some C.H.U.D. or goblin in the shadows behind me!" That would freak me out and I'd never be able to go in there again, so I didn't take a picture of me. Plus I was sweating balls.



Once around the other side of the furnace, THEN you will find the light with the pull chain, after you've crawled under the big metal air pipe that's 2 feet off the ground...



That's also where you find the opening to the furnace's air filter... so I stand there, leaning over that big pipe with a few inches between my hair and the spiders inhabiting the spaces between the floor joists above my head, trying to maneuver the filter in place, duct tape it back up (or the rodent denizens will pull it out and use it for bedding), all while screaming, "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! I HATE SPIDERS! I HATE THIS FUCKING FURNACE! I HATE THIS FUCKING CRAWLSPACE! FUCK!"


So I did all that to no avail today, because the cool air never came back on... I guess I may have finally burned out the nearly 30 year old compressor... choked the system with love, that is... which brings me to my next set of pictures and the main reason for my having to go down into Al Capone's vault every couple of weeks: my family of furballs. I've taken some artistic licence here, but I wanted to introduce all of them anyhow.


This is Ufa, whom you've all met previously when she tangled with bees a little while back. You've probably also noticed her and I sharing a kiss in my photo gallery. She's part English Setter and part Labrador Retriever. She's definitely the beauty queen of the bunch.


This is Gracee, whom the vet told me when it was discovered she had patellar luxations as a puppy that she wouldn't live past 10 years due to severe arthritis... she's turning 14 now and though she may not be able to get up the stairs anymore, she's defying the odds. She's part Pit Bull and part Golden Retriever... not a good combo... looks rather like a hyena. But she's the lead dog of the pack, after me, that is.



This is Chaucer, doing what he does best... peeing. He's a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and the only pet I've gotten from a breeder (the rest are adopted from shelters) and some of you may recognize him better from this shot...


Baby Chaucer, 8 yrs ago



That's Queequeg with Gomez... not a good picture, but that's because Queequeg is camera shy and afraid of her own shadow. Queequeg is a Black Lab mixed with god knows what, and Gomez is a Prazsky Krysarik... I found both of them at animal control in the same exact cage, but 2 years apart. To get a sense of scale, try this equation: G = 1/12 Q, and Q = 48 pounds. (For the non-mathmatically inclined, G = 4 pounds).


Gomez is a little camera floozy, as you can see by his following bit of mugging:

"Keeeeess me."



"Love me."



"Pet me."



"Feed me."



"You cannot reseeeest me."
This is actually one of his favorite positions... to lean up next to you and look backwards and up at you... a lot like those flying fox bats. I love feeding him grapes, because he looks just like them when he tries chewing one up.



Catching some rays.



Smiling.



Centerfold.


Now onto the cats:

Morticia (yes, I adopted her from animal control at the same time I got Gomez)



Meringue (she's actually snow white, not electric blue and green)



This is Logan, who loves to lay on his back everywhere, but is better known for his Gene Simmons impersonation...


and like Gene and other men, he loves a good butt scratch



and finally, this is Houdini, who is better known for his Peter Criss impersonation, apparently...



That's it... the 9 reasons why my damn furnace filter clogs with hair every couple of weeks, sending me into the place where my nightmares dwell. Next life... it's gonna be all Sphynx kitties and Mexican hairless (or more Prazsky's) pooches for me... and a house where the air filter is in an acceble closet or something. Sheesh! I still have no idea if the compressor is going to revive or not... it's been several hours and it's still not working.

But if it's still not working by tomorrow afternoon, you bet your ass I'm going to be bitching about it here! Consider that fair warning for the possible Tourette's tirade.

A Dream to Build a Kiss On?

I brought it up too many times already about how I don't sleep at night. I do sleep, however. It's just more like catnaps here and there... never anything more than 4 hours at a stretch though.

Since the blog entry that I posted after last weekend about wanting to believe in something and my new "I believe" mantra, I've had an interesting recurring semi-dream. It's not really a dream, per se, since I'm experiencing it while I'm drifting off and when I'm coming to again, but that's the closest that I get to remembering dreams most days.

What's been happening is that I keep hearing "I love you" over and over and over again.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

Correction: hearing is probably the wrong descriptive choice, though they sort of register in my brain like I've heard them rather than thought them myself. I guess what I'm experiencing is more of a feeling... the one you get when someone says those words to you and you feel exactly the same way too, so your whole body just begins beaming with happiness. It's a nice feeling... very nice... even nicer than the recurring wet dream that I blogged about so long ago... the one I used to get throughout all of 2004 that left me with "underpants soup" when I'd awaken.

Waking up to those words and to that feeling makes me want to stay in that groggy land of nod between dreamland and reality. Although the feeling stays with me for a bit, the reality that sets in of knowing that there isn't a someone with whom I have that mutual feeling at the moment is a little deheartening.

It also stings a bit when I know that someone has just said those words to me very recently... but, unfortunately, it didn't have that musical ring to my ear and there simply wasn't that full-body buzz from it the way there should have been... and thus, I couldn't return the feeling. Although I did try to see where it would go for a couple of weeks, it didn't take me long to realize that I needed to let him go, so he could find the right girl for him... and so that I could perhaps find the right guy for me.

But back to addressing the current "dream lover" experience, it's left me trying to analyze why I might be experiencing it. Part of me wants to say, "It's a sign of things to come!" I want to get excited that maybe the feeling that has eluded me for most of my life is just on the horizon. And another part of my thoughts wanders to intuition of another kind... that someone unseen is letting me know that I'm not alone, that I am loved, that I always have been... a psychic love letter, of sorts, perhaps. And of course my inner therapist chimes in and tells me that I'm just giving myself what I need, because we cannot find love without loving ourselves first.

Whatever the case may be, I do hope I'm ready to hear those words when they do come around again. And just as importantly, I hope that I already am feeling that way, too.

This also makes me recondsider the possibility of that guy that I used to believe was hit by a bus long ago might actually still be alive, whoever he is... the one who understands (for the most part) my wide-ranging taste in music, movies, art, and a multitude of other subjects... and who is just as interested in those things too. He's not necessarily exactly like me, because it's also fun to be with someone who can teach you new things... just hopefully overlapping a good deal for us to enjoy each other's company. And he has to have an appreciation for a twisted, quirky, South-pawed, indie, progressive, Socialist loner with a penchant for non-fiction, documentary and rescuing animals. And he's not freaked out by kids.

Okay, okay... now I really am dreaming.

Ghost Toasties

Some people's ghosts leave pennies everywhere for them to find. My ghosts are less practical and more pyromaniacal... they leave lighters... all shapes, sizes, and colors.

Yesterday I was finding them everywhere... floor of my vehicle, floor of my office, on my nightstand, under my couch, around my kitchen, in the garage, in my purse, in every drawer I looked, and even in my bed.

I decided to fuse those finds with my recent peculiar nocturnal eating habits, which are partly fueled by insomnia and partly by my now annual summer ritual of eating everything in the house until it's gone in an effort to go without buying anything at the store until the kids return... this is year 2 of this particular brand of madness. I'll blog about that later, most likely with pictures.

So in the wee hours of the morning, when the rest of you less derranged types were probably sleeping, I went all MacGuyver on my mid-night munchies and found a container of kabob skewers, a really fat candle, and a bag of mini-marshmallows pushed to the back of the pantry... probably there since the 90s.

I then snapped the skewer ends off and stuck them all over the sides of the candle... pointy side out... followed by pushing a mini-marshmallow onto the end of each skewer point.

Spending the better part of an hour around 3am, I watched Swingers on TBS while roasting mini-marshmallows on my skewer-candle creation by utilizing several of the lighters that I'd found laying about earlier in the day. The most challenging and time-consuming part proved to be unsticking the two fistfuls of ancient mini-marshmallows from each other inside the bag... they'd congealed over time and then petrified to form one jumbo not-so-marshy-mallow abstract sculpture. Luckily as I suspected, the flames managed to soften the insides into the usual gooey goodness you'd expect.

If I ever harness my middle of the night ingenuity one day, I might possibly be a force to be reckoned with... maybe.

Next snack adventure: peanut butter and jelly (thanks for the idea, s.a.) on 5-month-old bread... or 3-month-old bagels. That's not so old though... the peanut butter is at least 3 years old and the jelly is probably a year past its prime. That may sound unappealing to you... but if you only knew what I do... that it's got to be better than the "un" hummus I made the other night, when I substituted a shortage of garbanzos and a lack of sesame butter for a can of butter beans in their stead. Hey, I thought I was killing two birds with one stone.

It was ...... ummm ...... interesting?

Whether it's the weather I'm under...

It definitely doesn't help.

This overcast, rainy weekend has left me lost in thoughts that are tinged with one part nostalgia and two parts melancholia.

And the visions I've been watching do not make the situation better... a weekend with Nora Ephron and her ilk, casting spells on sleeping beauties who cut their teeth on fairy tale romances. Why do I not turn away from those shadowy images that I avoid when they haunt theatres?

The combination leaves me with a head full of squishy fated unions that never happen in reality. And so my thoughts turn to marriage. Not necessarily my own in the past tense ...though those thoughts do come up occasionally... but more of my own in the future tense, and how the church of "for better or for worse" has never grabbed hold of me. Have I always been too agnostic? A heretic, perhaps?

I've been thinking of other unions... those that aren't my own. Those that happen so quickly and so smoothly, and those that build over time to the inevitable. And more importantly... how enviable both types are.

I remember a time when I was riding in a beau's car... myself at the age of nearly 16 and him just 19, but somehow speaking of his future and of marriage with the unwavering bravery of a young Achilles. He had me in his crosshairs, but I was blind. I responded to his vision of the future by gazing off into the distance and stating honestly, "When I look into the crystal ball, I see myself living alone and eventually dying alone." He pulled the car over and had tears in his eyes. I couldn't comprehend his sadness and was quite sober in my resolve.

I've been called Vulcan... it's never a compliment.

Yet at other times since I have longed for that which I couldn't see then... picturing it, but more like a past-life experience rather than something on the horizon. There have even been moments when I allowed myself to be taken on that journey with someone... to envision a life together... but they were always moments of extreme practicality, never of longing desire.

I cleaned house just recently, as I do from time to time. I removed a few more ties to erstwhile maybes... thinking to myself that it's not such a good idea to remember your evaporated dreams... especially when they leave you behind, choking on their dust.

Whether it's the weather I'm under, or whether it's you... the ambiguous you and the personal you... I need to forget. Try not to take it too personally... it's not you that I wish to forget, but rather those imperfect visions in pluperfect tense. Delete. Delete. Delete.

I need to believe in something for once. Could simply repeating the mantra bring the belief?

I'll try that for now.

I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.
I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe.

~ Infinity ~

Why Am I Still Awake?

WHY?

am I STILL?

AWAKE???

It's no secret that my sleep has been all kinds of fucked up for years now, but lately my brain has been keeping me awake literally until dawn arrives. Then, when the rest of the world is starting their day, I'm crawling under the covers and missing out on... well... a whole lot of crappy heatwave stuff apparently... only to wake up when the day is finally starting to cool off again.

On second thought, insomnia has its perks.

But on third thought, I'm already weird enough without adding a vampire-like palor to the mix... like I have right now:

Don't be frightened. Not an actual vampire.

So this morning, or yesterday morning, or whatever day it was because I've lost track now, I was getting into bed again and I thought, "No, fuck it. I'm up. The world is up. I'm fixing this damn sleeping disorder now and staying up all day. Yeah. And by the time 10 or 11 PM rolls around, I'll be out like a light and presto! Normal sleep schedule."

Okay, so the day dragged by and I accomplished NOTHING other than reloading my iPod, because I was so zonked from the sleep dep that I couldn't see straight or concentrate on anything while feeling a little woozy and dizzy... though the dizzy part was kinda cool, especially the trails... and finally10 PM rolled around and I thought, "Oh, hey. I never checked the mail today. Better do that so nothing important sits out there to be vandalized by nogoodniks overnight."

I dragged my ass down to my mailbox in the dark, when no neighbors are around, and when everyone else is brushing their teeth, because that's just how I roll... when lo and behold... there's Disc One of Season Two of Carnivale. Fuck yeah! I've been waiting to see what happened for over a year-and-a-half, while HBO took it's sweet time making the discs... really jonesing here... truly. I don't have cable because I don't believe in paying for tv in my home and haven't had it since 1992, so that leaves me at the mercy of video releases, and so I had to threaten to kill everyone near me when Season Two was airing last year if they uttered a word about the turn of events. Then the series went and got canceled and now two seasons is all she wrote. Literally.

I know. I'm rambling. Deal with it.

So it's 10:15 when I get back inside, because I stood at the end of my driveway for 15 minutes lost in rambling thought, much like I just put you through just now. Of course I had to fire up the player and pop that puppy in.

Dangling preposition, I know, shutup.

How would I have reserves for the watching a dvd? Grad school, that's how. Five years of undergrad followed by another five of graduate education and all-nighters... though overwith a year ago... have left me with the restitudinal fortitude. (No, not even I know what I mean at this point.) In much the same disappointing way that I found out after 8 dry years of no alcoholic consumption whatsoever, that once I did drink again, my youth training (and my Irish and German genes) was so thorough that it still took me 4 or 5 servings before I even felt a buzz. And that's really annoying as an adult, when drinks are far more expensive than they were when we used to steal them from our parents wetbar bottles and store our booty in a bottle behind one of our hi-fi speakers in our room.

Or maybe that was just me.

So anyway... two episodes later and it was midnight... and my brain was all fired up to do... um... nothing... because I have the attention span of a Setter... (...wait for it...)... an Irish Setter. So instead I made some dinner rolls. At 1 AM. You know, the kind you roll up and put in the oven for about 10 minutes. Rolling them took awhile, because I forgot what I was doing halfway through.

I swear I sound like I'd eaten a whole batch of pot brownies by myself, rather than just being an insomniac.

But you know what I hate most about this sitch? It's the fact that it screws with my whole "fitness agenda" ... I mean, aside from the batch of dinner rolls in the middle of the night. It keeps me from going to the gym, because by the time I'm fired up to go, it's like 8 or 9 PM and living like a vampire pretty much keeps me from going to the gym at that time... there's just too many damn mirrors in a gym for a vampire. Think about it. You never find vampires at the gym, do ya? And as supporting evidence of the mirror theory, think about all the Weeble-shaped goth chicks you know. Mmhmm. I rest my case.

Okay, that's a lame excuse. I could still go. But I feel silly and I think, "If I go this late, I'll never get to sleep before dawn." Then I sit around stalking everyone's profiles on Myspace until I hear birds chirping outside anyway. Or else I flip through the few channels that my attic antenna can pick up and complain about how bad tv is. To no one, of course.

Tonight, however, I saw a pleasant surprise. Despite my previous jab at round goth girls, I don't have any problems with other people's weight. Hell, I need to lose several hundred McNuggets myself... hence the gym membership... but I don't want to be a waif. I just want to be healthy and not taste metal and see a tunnel filled with dead relatives whenever I bend down to lace up my Fluevogs.

Hang on... Fluevogs? Vampires? McNuggets? Perhaps I need to make sure I'm not a Weeble-shaped Goth chick.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see Matthew Sweet tonight on Conan... not that I'm a big fan or anything... hell, I don't even know if I'm spelling his name right and I'm too woozy to check... but just that I finally saw him rather than just heard him. He's a big guy. In the music business. Good for him!

Of course, my level of impressedness (is that a word?) was short-lived when I saw that he was performing with Egyptian-walkin stick-figure, Susanna Hoffs (again, I don't give a rat's ass if I'm spelling that right). They looked like just about every sitcom couple that exists out there in tvland right now... dating back to the Cramdens and the Flintstones.

Suddenly I'm pissed off and over tired and eating dinner rolls in the middle of my living room at 1:30 in the morning, shouting vitriolic feminist spew at the set while flakey crescent roll chunks are flying this way and that, while chupacabras and centaurs pranced around gathering up the edible droppings and reminding me about the teachings of Jacques Lacan and only making me angrier that they'd be purporting such backward Freudian gobbledy goo.

I'm not sure if any of the above was true. Not even the Matthew Sweet part.

Please, please, please... Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream!

Don't mind the typos. I'm too groggy to whatev.

The saddest puppy dog in the world

Ufa just came in from a romp outside, and she was hanging her head low like she was ashamed of something. I thought maybe she'd been digging holes again, except she wasn't all orangey-colored from the Georgia clay. It wasn't until she laid down next to a window that I saw what she was hiding...




"I wish I could quit you, bees."

Her whole left side of her face is swollen. Again.

Ouch.


UPDATE 8:30 PM: Just 5 hours later, you'd think the painful lesson would still be fresh in her mind, but nooooo...


"You shoulda seen the other guy."

She had to go hunt down that nest ONE MORE TIME. And no, that's not her blinking or sleeping, mind you... that's as far as she can open both of her eyes now that she tangled with the stingers a second time. My guess is that she must've found yellow jackets or wasps, because I can't find any stingers stuck in her. I still have no idea where in my big backyard the nest is, but she's doing a great job resembling a prize fighter. I'm glad we don't have any porcupines here, or I'm sure she'd meet this same fate:

Treasure

A couple of weeks ago, I had to get a rental car to drive my kiddies down to South Georgia, where I drop them off with my dad and they get to spend one week every summer getting brainwashed by his crazy-assed Benny Hinn Ministries church down in Orlando. That part is neither here nor there, just back story.

What is more relevant to this story, however, is what happened when I returned the car the next day. I reached into the glovebox to retrieve the rental contract paperwork that I was storing in there, when I accidentally grabbed a handmade envelope that had been left there by a previous renter (that's just a guess... it could have been a supernatural occurrence, if you'd prefer the story to be more fantastical).

Anyhow, inside this stapled together piece of scrap printer paper was a 5x7 photo, which turned out to be the funniest thing that I had seen in a long time. I've been sitting on this, not wishing to destroy the aura of its humor to me, for long enough. Now I wish to share it with you all here.



Now, aside from the jazz hands, the salesman meets televangelist look, and the fake bald eagle in the background to prove his patriotism, I think the best part is in the bottom right corner...



Yes, this man actually went to Glamour Shots to maximize the cheese-factor. God, I love magical gifts like this. I will cherish this photo forever and truly wish I could write this dude to thank him for all the laughs he's given me.

A travesty...

It's no secret to anyone in my known universe who the love of my life is, as I mention him on an almost daily basis and my children probably hear his voice and see his face more than they hear or see their natural father.

That's right. I'm talking about Tom Waits. Again.

But this time I speak of him with much remorse and regret. You see, tickets went on sale yesterday morning for his first show in Atlanta in over 10 years... but I didn't hear about any of it until yesterday evening, after they'd been on sale for almost 10 hours. Bret... bless his soul... called me the moment he heard about the tickets and I in turn jumped on the computer to grab those puppies, no matter the cost... but alas, I was too late.

They were sold out already. Poop. Double poop. I've never gone from exhalted elation to disappointed deflation in so fast a time as those 15 minutes.

The last time Tom toured anywhere, about 5 or 6 years ago, he came nowhere near the South. But I put out word to my friends back then who were in the lucky cities and I am going to repeat the offer again:

Should anyone have an extra ticket that they'd like to let me know about, I'd be eternally grateful. Or if, say, you have a mildly depressive friend who was lucky enough to have purchased tickets for the show... I'm not saying you should do this... not really... but... maybe you could... you know... let them know they've not been looking so great lately... gained weight... have no real goals in life... or you could talk endlessly about how this country has gone down the shitter and there's no sign of returning. But, before you embark on that endeavor, maybe you could secure their tickets somehow in a safe place, or have them will them in their suicide note to me. Either or.

Another offer that I'd like to extend, just to up the ante a little more, is that if any of you should happen to actually meet Tom... if you'd like to hatch a plan to kidnap him and keep him in your cellar/attic/bunker/garden shed... I will not only grace you with my presence, I will be so grateful that... well, I won't sleep with you, no. But I would sleep with Mr. Waits and let you watch. How about that?

I'm looking for creativity, people. Somebody out there has got to know someone... or knows someone who knows someone. With all the clicks I get on my blog on a daily basis, something is bound to bear fruit.

Surprise me.