Nebulous Mooch

Because I look up to my little sister so much, I’ve started taking lots of pictures of myself. Most of the time my sister’s camera is full of pictures of herself taken at arm’s length.

Have you ever had a favorite article of clothing that you thought you looked really good in until you saw a picture of yourself wearing it? Let’s just say that my newest hobby has taught me some interesting things about my wardrobe.  The jeans that I thought looked great on me sag oddly in the crotch region. My favorite short-sleeved sweater makes me look like I have a giant stomach. There goes my plans of starting a style blog.

When I confronted my husband for not telling me about the abomination that is my wardrobe he claimed to not have noticed. I’ll give him a break because he isn’t exactly the epitome of style. I won’t give him a break for not telling me that I had a booger hanging out of my nose before I went to my passport interview though.

Here’s a picture I took of myself the other day in the questionable sweater. I had to twist around to get rid of the appearance of a giant stomach.

Sometimes I look at these pictures and swear I have a lazy eye.

We get mail that was intended for someone else all the time here. When a letter for Sharon Pain or Mike Jones or some other such strange person comes through our mail slot, we write wrong address return to sender on it and pop it in the mailbox when we’re out for a walk. Even though I am tempted at times, I never open the envelop to find out what’s inside.

When emails come to the wrong address it’s a different story though. I kind of have to open it. I got this email not too long ago.

To Whom It May Concern,

I’m Denise Yeung representative of Vroyal Pte.Ltd. We are considering the purchase of the following product

Product Name : Garmin GPSMAP 696
Manufacturer Part Number: 010-00667-40
Quantity : 5 units

Please refer to this order as “Purchase Order #CH/06/11″. If this order cannot be processed as requested, please contact me at this email at your earliest convenience.

Please send the quotation by email with complete details of specification, terms & condition, warranty/guarantee.
May feel free to contact on E-mail.

Best regards,
Denise Yeung

I would love to be able to fill Denise’s order for the Garmin GPSMAP 696, but I’m not a warehouse and I have no idea what she is talking about. I emailed her to let her know that she contacted the wrong person and I got this email in return.

I’m Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you but I’ve been on
holiday and just returned to the office today. I would like to change
my orders with 20 units
of Garmin zumo® 660 (Part Number: 010-00727-00). Please let me know
the grand total includes freight via Fedex International priority. I
already to arrange
the payment today after you give quote for 20 gps units. I’m waiting
your reply soon.

With best regards,
Denise Yeung

Wow, the order has gone up from 5 units to 20. I wonder how much I could make from this transaction. Too bad I’m not selling GPS systems (that’s sat navs for my British friends). I do have a stepson who likes maps and is pretty good at giving directions though. I wonder if she would accept one of 17 year old boy instead of 20 GPS systems. As an added bonus he could name all of the world’s state leaders for her. Hmm…maybe I should write her back to find out how much she’s willing to pay.

I hate the self-checkout at the grocery store because that computerized cashier is way to suspicious. Every item I bag weighs too much and the live person supervising self-checkout always has to check my bags. It takes me 1,000 times longer (that’s no exaggeration) to get through self-checkout then it does to see a real cashier. Though the computerized cashier cheerily thanks me for shopping after I pay the bill, she isn’t much for small talk.

I usually go to the basket line in the store to avoid the empty accusations of the self-checkout computerized cashier. The other day while waiting in the basket line an elderly woman got in line behind me. She had a shopping cart (trolley for my British friends) and clearly shouldn’t be in the basket line, but I was minding my own business that day so I didn’t say anything. When she got to the counter she took a basket from beneath it, sat it on the belt, and started unloading the contents of her cart into it. There was a lot on stuff in her cart and she had to carefully balance the pile of groceries in the basket.

She kept her cart with her. She probably needed it to put the grocery bags in after she paid. She had taken care of the basket requirement for the line though.

That’s the good thing about being old. You can do something like that and no one will say anything to you about it–no one except the computerized cashier over at self-checkout. She would accuse you of stealing whether you’re 18 or 85.

I have a tumultuous relationship with spell check on the Mooch. It’s British and we don’t see eye to eye. It’s always wanting me to do things like add an “o” to fetus or diarrhea–two things I write about often. I’ve taken the ignore-it-and-it-will-stop-nagging-me approach to remedy the situation. The problem is that sometimes spell check just shouldn’t be ignored. Like when you’re not quite sure how to spell aluminium. That’s the British spelling of aluminium, but I don’t know the American spelling so it will just have to stay that way.

Anyway, Wikipedia has a fascinating article about the difference between British and American spellings. In this instance, the word fascinating is used loosely to mean mildly interesting. Here’s the article for you word nerds out there.

It’s summer and with summer comes lovely warm, sunny days. I love summer weather, summer clothes and summer walks in the warm sun. Too bad I don’t get to go on many sunny summer walks. I swear the weather is conspiring against me. Every time I step outside to take a stroll dark clouds gather overhead and by the time I get to the corner the rain has started to fall.

I never let a little rain ruin a walk. I have an umbrella and the last time I checked skin is waterproof.

You shouldn’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry. I think I remember Richard Simmons or Oprah or some such person saying that once or twice. I consider myself a responsible shopper and try my best to always follow this rule, but whether I’m hungry or not sometimes I can’t resist certain foods.

My latest impulse buy was a package of venison sausages. It’s not a bag of chips (crisps to my British homies) or a box of doughnuts, but this package of sausages does cause a bit of an eating dilemma in our home. My husband doesn’t eat gluten. He says that avoiding it makes him stronger. While I admit that he is stronger than he looks, I’m not sure that his strength has increased any since going on a gluten-free diet. Wheat flour is the last item on the sausages’ short list of ingredients, but it is still there.

Now I have a pack of six venison sausages and–here’s were things get a bit tricky–no freezer. Looks like I’m going to be eating sausage for most of my meals this week.

The following event occurred in December of 2010, but I kept forgetting to post it.

On a shopping trip to one of my mother’s favorite stores, The Homing Shopping Network Outlet Store, my sister found these crazy shoes.

They are obviously the results of a love affair between a sandal and a boot. I’m going to refer to them as bandals. I can’t figure out when you might wear a shoe of this nature. It seems to me that if you wore your bandals when it was warm outside your ankles would sweat. On the other hand if you wore your bandals when it was cold your toes would freeze. So I guess bandals are designed with moderate temperatures in mind, but I’m reluctant to expose my toes even in moderate temperatures. Bandals must not be for people who tend to have cold feet.

My sister has a knack for finding the funniest clothes in the store. On this shopping trip she also found a strange cardigan configuration that resembled bat’s wings. It looked something like this.

Okay, maybe my drawing doesn’t quite do it justice. The cardigan looked more like this.

She also took me to the mall at one point to show me a particularly unfortunate outfit a mannequin at Forever 21 was sporting. It looked something this.

Actually, it looked worse than that, but with artistic talents as advanced as mine it’s hard to draw something that looks as terrible as that outfit.

I had to buy a new pair of jeans recently and I found that it is much easier to find clothes to laugh at then it is to find clothes that I would actually wear.

My father-in-law left his sunglasses at our house. I think they look good on me.

Too bad I can’t see anything when I’m wearing them. That’s the problem with wearing glasses. Maybe I should just try wearing the sunglasses over my normal glasses. That wouldn’t look to strange, would it?

I’m a little bit clumsy. I knocked down a display in the grocery store today. I don’t have the best peripheral vision and sometimes I run into things. A couple of weeks ago I smashed into a large blue construction fence. “You didn’t see that?” my husband asked in disbelief. It’s not that I didn’t see it. I just thought it was farther away than it actually was.

That’s what happened with the sunscreen display in the grocery store. It rammed the corner of the shelf hard with my shoulder and all of the sunscreen went clattering to the floor. I couldn’t just leave it. So I tried to put the bottles back on the shelf but the more I tried the more seemed to slide off onto the floor. I kept thinking that if I just stay calm no one will notice, but I’m sure lots of people noticed.

After a few minutes of struggling I got all the bottles off the floor and stacked haphazardly on the shelf. Then I walked away as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

The other night I was looking out my living room window when I saw a most disturbing sight. Okay, it wasn’t as disturbing as the giant rat that strolled up the sidewalk in the middle of the day and disappeared into my neighbor’s drain pipe, but it was still pretty disturbing. Anyway, back to the story…

A fox ran up the footpath by my flat and scampered across the road! That may sound completely uneventful to you, but for me it was like finding out that radioactive zombies live behind my house. Foxes are like huge mutant squirrels. Like squirrels, they always seem to be trying to cross the road. No wild animal of that that size should live in an urban setting.

In Florida the largest most ferocious wild animals I had to deal with were raccoons and palmetto bugs.

This is a Palmetto bug.

My husband just told me that raccoons are larger than foxes. He also seems to believe that if a fox and a raccoon got into a fight the raccoon would win. I don’t believe him. When I asked him what he had against raccoons he said, “There’s something sinister about a raccoon. They have rabies and they’re always wearing a mask.”

For the record I would just like to say that not all raccoons have rabies and they can’t control the whole mask thing.