Month: June 2005 (Page 1 of 4)

OK, so all I do now when I’m outside is sweat. It’s awesome! It’s like, TOTALLY cleansing! My pores are the size of nickels, and I prefer to think of it as a moist dewy glow, not a slick salty sheen.
Yeah, what-fuckin-ever. Welcome to Missouri, where sometimes we call it “Mizzery” because that’s what 100-degree weather IS. Hell’s waiting room.

But this is actually a happy post. It’s a good thing. Martha would rip that poncho right off over her head if she was out here in this heat, but I’m sure she’d whip up some homemade ice cream and sew us all some cool icee bandanas to tie around our necks.

Tuesday night, JWo was on a canning spree. He’d bought some cauliflower & carrot slices at the grocery store & all the rest was from the garden – banana peppers, jalapenos, onions, zucchini, & cukes. The first round of canning had begun, and we were making Hot Mix. The air was heavy with fumes from the apple cider brew, as it bubbled with turmeric and mustard seed. It burned our eyes and replaced oxygen in our lungs, but the payoff came later, after I’d packed the jars full of vegetables, and he’d hot-water processed them.

Every few minutes, a metallic “pop” sang out from the dining room table, telling us that another jar had vacuum-sealed shut. We didn’t say anything, just looked at each other each time we heard it, and smiled. An official start of the summer harvest.

There was a furniture store in St.Louis that featured the children of the founder (and when I say children, I don’t mean cute tykes, I mean 30-year old spoiled rotten cheeseballs), and at the end of every spot, the guy would point at the camera & in a drawl, state: “Because you lahk NAHCE THANGS!”

That line, of course, became part of the everyday vernacular. Feel like going out & buying some clothes? Why not! Because you lahk nahce thangs. Spent a little extra on lunch? Of course you did. Because you lahk nahce thangs! I still hear it, in my head, even when I am just internet-window-shopping, and I click through on, say, a Bed Bath & Beyond email touting some new bed linens, and I discover the color scheme I was attracted to includes a dust ruffle that could be mine for the unbelievably great price of $229. For a fuckin’ DUST RUFFLE. Brain Kerfuffle! That dust ruffle would be covered with black dog hair in one day. But hey, I could use one of my eight thousand 20% off coupons! That would bring it down to just $183.20. FOR A DUST RUFFLE. Do you know how much yarn that kind of bling would buy? How many pairs of Doc Martens from Sierra Trading Post? Hell, it’s almost two iPod Shuffles! A new set of tahrs fo’ the Civic! Four nice dinners out with the free spirit who is the JWo!

All I could do was laugh when I saw the prices. It never fails for me to pick the spendy-spendy things, NOT THAT I ACTUALLY BUY THEM (all the time). Blame my parents for the emphasis on good taste & having the finest. Why wouldn’t I be drawn to a $229 dust ruffle? I mean, geez – it’s 100% silk. Of course it costs that much!

Because I lahk nahce thangs.

OK, my dog Polly is one enthusiastic dog. Black Lab, loves EVERYthing. Vegetables, running at high speeds, licking, hugging, toys, sneaking an entire pound of cooked bacon off the kitchen counter, you know, the whole 9 yards. One thing she especially loves is to get the Paper in the mornings. Any time of day, just the mention of “paper” makes her ears go into full-on bat-wing alert. Sometimes a head cock to boot.

(Do you need me to get the paper again? It’s no problem! I love to get the paper!)

This morning, while JWo was out picking peppers (he’s gonna pickle ’em!) she snuck off – and came back with – yep, a paper! Aaaaaaand she’d already fetched ours this morning. So she’d run down the street, looking for another subscriber, because obviously we needed all the papers collected, and she was ON IT.

So my apologies to one of our neighbors – I know the Star will bring you another one – but our doggie just can’t help herself! She loves to get the paper. PAPER!
JWo, get the PEPPERS! I guess that leaves me to get the Patrón!

Thanks, Scorpy.
I love me some quizzes…

…. putting mentholated lip balm on the dog. Just a smidge.

Hey, she wanted to know what I was doing. So I shared!

Just to let you know, my tagline for the summer will be: “I’m Melting! I’m Melting!”

Two more months and then hope is in sight.
Sweltering, sweaty Jen until then. Purty!

Over at Becky’s blog, she wrote about going to an adult store to shop for an upcoming bachelorette party. It reminded me of some of my (always hilarious) ventures into those stores, the funniest being a time many many moons ago in Chicago. We were in some store in the Boystown area, and were strolling around, giggling at some things, marveling at others, furrowing our brows at some…… and then at the counter I espied a little note taped to the cash register, written in all capital letters: NO RETURNS ON BUTT PLUGS.

Well, never shying away from an opportunity for a laugh, I asked the guy, “So, do you get a lot of people trying to return butt plugs?” And he (VERY seriously and oh so VERY gay) responded, “OH, yes. People are ALWAYS buying them way too big. They think the small ones look too small, so they don’t buy them, and then they come back the next day, wanting to exchange them. And we just won’t do that.”

Okey dokey. Good to know! And I can’t really blame them!

Until one of us dies, JWo and I will always always always disagree on the matter of time. His alarm clock is set 17 minutes faster than “real world” time. My clock is jacked up and off by a few minutes, because I still haven’t fixed it since I randomly set it after the power went off a couple weeks ago. It’s a mind fuck, in my opinion, to live by a clock that is not reflecting the current real time. It’s playing a game with yourself, so that wherever you end up, you’re there early. And me? I’m always late. I get distracted easily and I long ago gave up excessive worrying about timeliness, because it wasn’t something I got raised with – my father being the chronic late arriver, every time.

Take today’s fish fry – his grandparents? Arrived an hour early. I no longer am surprised by these events, but instead have the opinion that in arriving early, they will then get what they get – which is me sweating profusely in a nightshirt, vacuuming. Hey, if the party ain’t startin’ ’til 4, no tellin’ what you’ll discover at 3. Pretty don’t get out of the box ’til 3:45, and you can marvel at the transformation.

And take the term “Fashionably Late”. Fashion. Style. As in, vogue, trend. Dare I say, cool. You never hear about “Nattily Early” or even “Ravishingly On-Time.” I’m just sayin’ – the terminology doesn’t judge or say late is bad. I can find the differences between us & laugh at ’em, because neither of us is changing dramatically tomorrow, and despite the differences, there’s nobody I’d rather wake up next to – even if my clock says 7:02, his says 7:19, and Naval clock in Maryland says 6:59.

The reason I’m lovin’ the photo of the old people behind me is that I actually captured their reflection (and possibly their souls) in my rearview mirror, exactly as I saw them from the driver’s seat. (I figured if I tried to wrench-around & shoot it through the back window, they’d have seen me!) Plus, if I’d turned around for their picture, it would have allowed you to see all the crap in my backseat. I use my car as a very large, very not-paid-off purse.

I love the idea of a series of photos like that, what you can capture in a small mirror – but if you’re using your rearview mirror, just remember you have to hold the camera up further than your eye, because you don’t have much error room & cropping when you’re that close! (thus the ten pictures & two stoplights…)

Is it a blogging photo challenge? Just don’t do it WHILE DRIVING peeps, that is too dangerous! Safety First!

~Your Iowan Good-Driver Blog Hostess

My birthday is fast approaching, and I already started to flip out about turning forty. (In three more years, but I figure if I start prepping now, it won’t be a big deal by then!) So aging & life & whatnots are top-of-mind right now.

On my way to meet the KnitChicks for a field trip to Lawrence, to the Yarn Barn & dinner at Free State Brewery, I take a different route than planned, staying off the highway and on the bigger streets. Not too bad, it worked out ok. Being a GOOD DRIVER, I am always checking my mirrors, noting who and what’s around me, etc. At one of the stoplights, I look in my rearview mirror, and see JWo and Me, in forty years. The woman is wearing those enormous plastic sunglasses you wear over your regular glasses (which I already know I’ll end up wearing, when I can’t find my Jackie O dinner plate sunglasses). The guy looks like he’s been married to her a long time. I could see them talking to each other, and I could imagine them griping about the traffic and who had the brilliant idea to go down Quivera during RUSH HOUR, and the other one saying YOU’RE the one who had to go to Red Lobster tonight, and then they laughed.

It just struck me as FUN-NY. It took me two stoplights and about ten pictures, but I finally got the shot, from my perspective:

Looking backwards at the future….