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.)