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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.
Many of you are probably familiar with the Expert Village videos you can watch online to learn how to do things. They have videos on everything from how to wash windows to how to start dreadlocks. The clips are usually about a minute long and sometimes give you useful information and sometimes they just don’t.
Demand Studios owns Expert Village and I used to work for them many years ago writing articles. Demand Studios is a content mill that in my opinion is partially responsible for ruining the World Wide Web by posting tons of useless articles that clog up internet searches. I really don’t like the company at all and am so glad I don’t have to work for them any more. It’s my personal theory that they are owned by the same person that owns Monsanto, THE DEVIL.
Since I’m talking about my personal theories and THE DEVIL, I might as well let you in on another theory. I believe that THE DEVIL is actually two people on this Earth today. Those people are Dick Cheney and Kenny G. I think they are working together to ruin the world with bad music and bad badness. If Dick Cheney is your father or you’re listening to Kenny G as you read this, I would just like to say that I’m very very sorry.
When I was working for Demand Studios I looked into making videos for them, but didn’t have the appropriate equipment to make the quality videos they needed at the time. I know that they pay between $200 and $600 for videos.
Anyway, I’m sharing this information with you because my husband found these Expert Village videos today made by someone who is obviously not taking this whole making videos for Expert Village thing seriously. Either that, or he really has no idea what he’s talking about. I love how in this first video he suggests doing a human beat box while playing the piano.
When my husband got home from his gig tonight he asked me if Esperanza Spalding had Brazilian parents. Apparently, he had a bit of a disagreement with someone about her ancestry. Someone was insisting that she was Brazilian and my husband insisted that she was African-American or what I sometimes refer to as North American Black. I find that it causes less confusion when living overseas.
Anyway, I went to Wikipedia to find out about her ancestry for certain. Instead, I learned that she deserves nothing. In fact, she is non-existent. I copied the page because I knew it wouldn’t be up long. Here it is.
Biography
Early life and education
WHO IS ESPERANZA SPALDING!?!? REVOKE HER GRAMMY. SHE DESERVES NOTHING! I FEEL SORRY FOR JUSTIN BIEBER… HE SHOULD HAVE WON THE GRAMMY. ESPERANZA SPALDING, YOU ARE NONEXISTENT!
Spalding grew up in the King neighborhood of Portland, Oregon,[6] a neighborhood she describes as “ghetto” and “pretty scary”.[7] Her mother raised her and her brother as a single parent.[8]
Spalding has a diverse ethnic background.[7][9] She notes, “My mom is Welsh, Hispanic, and Native American, and my father is black.”[10][11] She also has an interest in the music of other cultures, including that of Brazil,[12] commenting, “With Portuguese songs the phrasing of the melody is intrinsically linked with the language, and it’s beautiful”.[13]
Poor Justin Bieber. Well at least he has the privilege of existing.
I used to have quite a problem with depression, but that has gone away. I’m telling you this because today when I talked to my father on the phone he asked me if I was happy. “I mean you haven’t been depressed or anything have you?” he asked.
When I told him that I hadn’t he seemed pleased. Then he said, “That’s because you’re married now and you have a good husband.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I thought it was just because of all the butter I’ve been eating. Butter makes everything better.”
Don’t believe me. Try it. You’ll find that it’s true. I believe in butter.
