Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, yada yada yada

Yeah, I'm gonna do one of those "favorite things" posts. I will admit to blatantly stealing this idea from several bloggers, but the first I read was Sarah's post at Rhinestones and Telephones. Honestly, I am completely tapped out of writing ideas. But, I'm also trying to blog more regularly, so here's my little list of some of the things I'm really loving lately.

Naturalizer riding boots

Anyone who knows me is well aware that I love all shoes, but I really love these boots. They're soft and comfy; they look great with skirts, pants, jeans, and leggings; and I get a ton of compliments when I wear them. There aren't many things I like about cold weather, but wearing these boots alllmost makes it worth freezing my hinder off.


Crunchcakes
Mr. Nerd and I made a trip to the Louisville Zoo last weekend. On our way out of L-ville, we stopped by Lynn's Paradise Cafe, which is this incredibly cool, funky little local joint with kitschy decor and the most amazing food. It's almost impossible to decide what to order, but I chose the Crunchcakes, and I was not disappointed. Two plate-sized multigrain pancakes, stuffed with homemade granola and fresh blueberries. I had never dreamed of pancakes and granola together; but, it's been four days, and I'm still thinking about how scrumptious it was. Nom nom nom.


Louis van Amstel
I can't deny it--I am an enormous Dancing with the Stars junkie. I live and die by each week's episode, and eat up my text message allotment voting for my favorite stars. This season, though, I have developed a new obsession...and his name is Louis van Amstel. He's so adorable, I can't decide if I want to dance with him, marry him, or just squeeze him. Squee! Look how cute!

Do you have any new obsessions? What do you love right now? Do you also fantasize about dancing the tango with Louis? Books, music, food, TV,  anything...tell me about it in the comments!

This is your eviction notice...

To all of the millipedes who have taken up residence in my kitchen, I have just one thing to say: GET OUT. There are five creatures who are authorized to live in this house, and you do not count among that number.

I know that it's getting cold at night now, it has rained so much lately that we need a freakin' ark, and it's much nicer in here than it is outside...but I don't care. That probably sounds hardhearted; but, you freak me out, and I'm not likely to get over that anytime soon. I'm tired of turning on the kitchen light each morning and finding five or six of you creeping around on your many horrible little legs. It's equally foul to have to scoop up and dispose of your shriveled remains (with a paper towel, of course), when you are inconsiderate enough to expire on my linoleum. The worst, though, was when I entered the kitchen the other morning without my glasses. I saw what I thought was a brown leaf on the floor, and brushed it to the side with my foot--only to have blood squirt out of it! I nearly fainted dead away. That was the last straw.

So, millipedes, I'm going to have to ask you to remove yourselves from my domicile immediately. I will permit you to remain on the patio, provided you make no attempt to cross the threshold. If you force me to make a second request, it will be accompanied by insecticide spray.

(image courtest of ohiolandlord.com)

The flu didn't get me, but I thought daytime TV might

I spent a few days on the sofa last week, recovering from what may or may not have been the H1N1 virus. It seemed like way too much effort to drag myself out to the doctor, so I just dosed up with a liver-busting amount of ibuprofen for the fever, and called in sick to spare my coworkers, just in case I did have Hamthrax. It took four days to chase the fever away, and I have to admit it--I felt like I might die a couple of times. Oh, not from the (maybe) flu, although that certainly wasn't pleasant. The real danger was the possibility of dying from boredom, given the suckitude of daytime TV.

 Mr. Nerd and I made an uncharacteristically frugal decision last year, and cancelled the "extended" cable TV package. Our plan was to rely heavily on PBS and the Discovery Channel, which were included in the "basic" package. Most of the time, I don't miss the channels that we lost too much. But, spending three solid days on the sofa, too unwell to commit to watching a movie, nearly made me weep for the Food Network or TLC.

Even in my fever-addled state, I knew that the network stations would be a wash during the day--it's all soap operas; various hard-edged judges delivering justice to a series of lunkheads;  and Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Dr. Oz (it would take a lot more than a fever to make me watch Oprah or anything Oprah-related). So, I turned to my old standby, Discovery, expecting to be able to sink back into my semi-coma and enjoy some reruns of Dirty Jobs, Mythbusters, and Time Warp. And, you may ask, what did I find there? Fishing, in many forms. A couple of shows about pimping out cars, some ghost-hunter-type nonsense, and a whole lot of other junk that I didn't care one iota about. By the second afternoon, I had given up. I didn't feel like surfing (which should give you some idea of just how rotten I felt), but I decided to check Netflix, to see what was available via their "watch instantly" feature. Hallelujah! There, I found many seasons' worth of all of my favorite BBC comedies...more than enough to get me through the next couple of days with my sanity intact. (What sanity I had to begin with, that is.) That alone was worth my $14.99 a month. All hail Netflix! And ibuprofen, and Luden's throat drops! Whatever I had, I couldn't have gotten through it without you guys.

(Image courtesy www.santacruzhealth.com)

So what is Eeyore, a werewolf?

Ah, it's that time of year again. Autumn is my favorite season. The leaves are changing color, the weather is getting cooler, the scent of fireplace smoke is in the air...and the Halloween people are decorating with reckless abandon. I don't have anything against Halloween, but I'm not really into it, either. Dressing up is a lot of trouble, and we don't usually hand out candy because it makes the dogs go nutball for a solid two hours. I have a fall-color wreath for the front door, but that's pretty much the extent of my decorating. Some of the people in my neighborhood, though, are REALLY into it.

I was passing by one of those homes yesterday when I saw it. This is far from the most macabre Halloween decoration that I've ever seen, but it was still kind of disturbing:

What this inflatable says to me is that either: a) Winnie the Pooh has a dark side that none of us knew about; or b) Pooh (like pretty much everyone else in the free world) has been sucked into the Twilight phenomenon.

Now, I can't claim to be an expert on ol' Winnie by any means, but I read the books and watched the TV shows when I was a kid. I feel pretty comfortable in my assessment of Pooh as a gentle, slightly goofy kind of guy who likes to hang out with his buds and nosh on honey. So, whether he has truly embraced the bloodsucking lifestyle, or he's just another one of those emo vampire posers, neither of those personas really fit with Pooh's traditional reputation. Pooh's pretty lazy, so I just can't see him putting forth all that effort to chase down victims and do the whole neck-biting thing. His general outlook on life is sunny, and he doesn't really have the sort of depressive, poetry-writing nature that I associate with emo kids. The more I think about it, though, Eeyore kind of fits that image. So many questions! Of course, there's a better-than-average chance than I'm putting WAY too much thought into my neighbor's lawn decoration.

So, what kind of decorations have you seen in your neighborhood? Do you decorate your lawn? Do you find vampire Pooh disturbing, or cute? (By the way, "vampire poo" was one of the auto-complete searches when I was checking Google for that photo. Part of me really wanted to look, but I resisted.)

"Real life" can be really inconvenient sometimes

I can't believe it has been almost two weeks since I posted! No real crises or tragedies or anything; I'm just SO busy right now that I barely have time to string two thoughts together, let alone compose them into a blog post. For those of you who know what a Facebook crack-monkey I am, this should prove how little free time I've had lately: I haven't spent more than three minutes at a time on Facebook in over a week. Seriously. Another writing project, a major housecleaning adventure, sick dogs, and a whole load of church activities have combined into the perfect storm of butt-smoking busy-ness, and I'm ready to get off the merry-go-round now, please. Since I am still short on time to write, here are a few random thoughts I've had lately:

• Why do I keep doing embarrassing things in the copy room at work? I can stand primly by the copier for 20 minutes, and not a soul will come in...but, let me try to copy a move from Dancing with the Stars, or burst into a rousing rendition of "Son of a Preacher Man," and suddenly, someone will be standing right behind me. Then I get to spend the rest of the afternoon doing that whole did-they-see-or-did-they-not-see thing. Why do I never learn?
  

• I am a terrible dog mom. Abby Dog had her yearly checkup and vaccinations last week, and the vet found that one of her ears is horribly infected. (I will spare you the details, but the words "ulcerated lesions" were involved.) The treatment? Antibiotics--and a rolled-up gauze square, soaked in medication and inserted into her ear canal, while I hold her ear closed, once a day for two weeks. Surprisingly enough, dogs don't really like it when you shove things into their ears. Poor Abby deserves some credit, though. After four days of doing the gauze-roll thing, she has stopped struggling when I hold her. Now she just sighs a lot and gives me dirty looks. It's a good thing dogs don't hold grudges, or she might try to smother me while I sleep.

• It seems that the FDA has agreed with my opinion that Latisse, that eyelash-lengthening treatment, is pretty scary. One of the comments on my post mentioned that Latisse can cause hair to grow anywhere that it is dropped on your body, which was even more alarming to me than the side effects I wrote about. Of course, when Mr. Nerd and I saw that story on the news, he immediately asked if he could buy some to apply to his bald spot.

Okay, real life--I give! I know I'm out of writing time for tonight. I will try not to wait so long between posts next time!

A Culture of Lies

Wow, that sounds all hard-hitting and newsy, doesn't it? While I think it would be really cool to do research and conduct interviews and write revealing exposés and stuff, I'm just way too lazy for all of that. Instead, I'm going to rant about yogurt. (Culture, get it? Ha! I've got
a million of 'em.) Speaking of being lazy, it seems like the media is all about reporting on Americans' horrible eating habits these days. In response, advertisers are rolling out tons of ads for healthy food products like soy milk, fiber bars, natural cereals, etc. And, of course, yogurt. Unfortunately, most of the yogurt commercials I have seen are either really annoying, or just downright untruthful.

I'm going to pick on Yoplait commercials in particular, because those are the ones that irritate me the most. First, there was a series of ads that featured two incredibly smug women. They had little conversations about the yogurt: "this is shoe-shopping good," "this is day-at-the-spa good," and so on. Ladies, do you really need to be so smug? It's just freakin' yogurt! And,  to imply that a cup of yogurt could be better than a new pair of shoes is just some kind of lunacy, in my book. New shoes are blissful treats that can brighten a bad day, and make you feel pretty and sexy; yogurt is a barely-tolerable dairy product that you eat just because it's good for you. (But we'll discuss that a bit more in depth in just a moment.) Over the next couple of years, Yoplait continued to produce more ads featuring a number of self-satisfied women, all purporting to have lost a great amount of weight by ingesting large quantities of their rancid dairy product.

Now, Yoplait has gone too far. They are introducing a new line of products, called Yoplait Delights, which they claim taste just like a parfait. That is just a lie, plain and simple. Yogurt does not taste like pudding, or cake, or pie. And it most certainly does not taste like ice cream. This treachery upon the good name of desserts should be stopped, immediately. Somewhere out there is a woman who needs to lose some weight. She keeps seeing commercials about yogurt…the health benefits, the weight loss, and she thinks, "How bad can it be? The commercial said it tastes like pudding/cake/pie/ice cream." When she tries it, though, she discovers what yogurt really is: a slightly sour, mildly clumpy cup of thick dairy substance that may or may not contain fruit. While it's not really horrible, it surely wouldn't qualify as dessert.

In case anyone thinks I'm being too harsh on yogurt, or I don't know what I'm talking about, consider this: I ate it every single day for six years. After I did Weight Watchers in 2002, I needed to find a low-fat way to get some calcium in my body before I managed to snap my femur like a twig or something. (I can't stand to drink milk.) Approximately 2,000 cups of yogurt later, I could no longer face it, so I switched to chocolate soymilk. It doesn't taste like real milk with Hershey's syrup, but at least there are no commercials trying to make me believe it does.

It wasn't a "vacay"

It was just a week off work...and I hate the word "vacay," anyway. The husband and I were off last week, and I was officially the least productive person on the planet. I spent nearly the whole week just breathing, napping, eating, and wasting time on the Internet. As my vacation time approached, I was planning to blog more, rather than less, since I was going to have so much free time. Apparently, though, I just couldn't work up the energy.

When Monday came around, I found that I really didn't mind going back to work all that much, since my job is usually okay. I did, however, have a bit of difficulty adjusting to being around actual people again. Mr. Nerd and I have been married for quite a while, so we don't sit around under each other's feet; when we're at home, he does his thing and I do mine. So, I would go for long stretches without conversing with anyone other than three lively, but uncommunicative, Cocker Spaniels. And most of those conversations were of the "don't: sit on the other dogs / lick up things you found on the floor / barf in the corner where I can't clean it up / do unnatural things to your brother's head / bark like fiends at the poor bored neighbor dog / hit the 'delete' key on the laptop" variety. My co-workers might have thought that I was unusually quiet on Monday (unusual, since I'm hardly ever quiet), but I was really just trying to remember exactly what it is that human beings talk about all day.

At any rate, I'm back, and I have some great ideas for new posts. I'll have one later in the week; here's a little teaser:

Be sure to check in later this week!