like a salt-filled pancake laid upon the body politic

Dear Friends,

If you follow the national news, you might have seen that Arizona in particular was hit with some weird-ass weather, essentially culminating in a year’s worth of precipitation in about 2 days. There was even a tornado warning in Scottsdale (a warning, can you believe it?) which is nigh impossible considering the washes, the canals, and the little mountains that are up there.

I’m all for rainy weather in this area though, considering that Arizona has been in a drought for the past 12 years or so, so it’s about time that the wet stuff deluges us all. This is, however, the only state I’ve lived in where people stop what they’re doing to marvel at the water falling from the sky.

It’s very akin to seeing the sun during the winter in the Pacific Northwest. The year I lived there, seeing the sun anytime between October and March led us all to cower in fear, shrieking, “The big glowing orb will fall from the sky and kill us all!”

Recent Conversation with the Hubster:

Valkyrie: Where did your butt go?

Hubster: What?

Valkyrie: You used to have a cute little perky butt! Where did it go? I’m gonna put a cat down your pants.

Hubster: A cat??

Valkyrie: No, better would be an envelope of kittens.

Hubster: Why did you put kittens in an envelope?

Valkyrie: I didn’t put the kittens in the envelope. That’s the way the kittens were given to me!

Hubster: Who the hell gave you an envelope full of kittens??

Valkyrie:  No one did!  This is just a hypothetical envelope of kittens!

Hubster: *pause* You’re weird.

The rain, you see. Too much rain in the desert, you get hypothetical envelopes of kittens. You get glowing orbs falling from the sky. You get Cthulu balaclavas:

 

if it was my money, it stayed in Vegas.

Dear Friends,

So the Mother has gone home after two weeks of angst on my part, 12 casinos, far too many fattening dinners, and not enough drinking on my part. Here is a sampling of my texts to the Hubster from Vegas:

• Hate Vegas
• Hate casinos
• Typing this from Caesar’s palace bathroom just had to get away from her for a couple of minutes
• Saw Beatles LOVE show very good but very French
• Still hate casinos
• Save me
• Decided to force her to walk until she’s exhausted
• Mom just won $1275 jackpot

Which Mom actually did do; she won $1275 on a nickel “John Wayne” slot machine:

The pit bosses even needed to come out and count out cash to her. Mom was, however, disappointed as she though she’d be getting one of those “large checks”. All she got was the cash and a tax form as she needs to claim any gambling winnings over $1200.

Otherwise, we saw a lot of the Bellagio fountain displays:

Which were absolutely beautiful, as were the Bellagio displays for the Chinese New Year:

We did go to the Cirque du Soleil’s production of LOVE, the Beatles music show, and yes, the best way to describe it is:

• It was very French
• There were people bouncing around everywhere
• Yellow Wellingtons are very important
• If you look like Pee Wee Herman carrying a few daffodils, you will never find love
• If you are Queen Elizabeth I, you will not have a back on your skirt
• If you are in fact Sergeant Pepper, even if you find all the instruments, no one really cares

It’s amazing what you can learn in Vegas.

 

so stand up and shake what your mama gave ya

Dear Friends,

I used to be funny. Wasn’t I funny at one time? In the past, if a hapless reader happened to click on my blog, that person would be treated to a rant on pants or some hilarious photos with snarky commentary, or even a “what if” scenario involving mud wrestling between unlikely sparring partners.

So what has happened? I hardly write anything here anymore, and when I do, it is either an apology for not writing, or is some minutiae regarding my life, which is generally galumphing along as lives generally do.

But what has happened to my Funny? Where did it go?

I’m blaming the medication. I got new meds because the Hubster thought I was being a bit too manic, which I was – bouncing off the walls and all, flitting hither and yon without a purpose. But actually, what this means is that I can blame the Hubster for effectively squashing my Funny – his being a Vulcan and all.

What a poophead. His butt smells really farty, you know.

Anyway, at this moment my mother is puttering around my house while I’m at work, and she’s already started with the “but I’m here, so why do you have to work” deal when I’ve told her about a gazillion times that I have hardly any vacation time and I want to actually go on Holiday with the Hubster this year (even with his farty butt) but that would be logical, and any long-time reader of this blog will know that logic and my mother are two mutually exclusive terms, as well as:

• Hamburger steaks
• Military intelligence
• Jumbo shrimp

Feel free to add your own. Anyhoo, I don’t have a lot of free time here at work, not like the last job at all – which was more like happy sexy dancing fun knitting movie-watching time than actual work – which is probably also why my job eventually got offshored to India, ne? Hmpf.

The fact that I’ve even been able to type this – in little spurts and starts – shows that it’s slow today, which is fine by me! I wish though, that I wasn’t seated so close to the office snoop, because then I’d feel more at ease about my clandestine blogging – gads, she’s such a Gollum, and a snoopy, brown-nosing Gollum at that! Ech.

But I will be spending the next two weeks entertaining my mother every single second of every single day, which should be good blogging fodder, or at least some good vitriol. Keep watching this space.

 

wdls wed: have a super-caffienated christmas, yo

 

it’s lucky for me that we’re friends

Dear Friends,

Oh dear, how long has it been? Now I’m standing here, ready to read your magazines and smoke all your cigarettes.

No, that’s not true, I’m channeling a Pulp song. I really like that song.

At any rate, I have been uberbusy with the new job – at which I was officially made full-time (yay!) so in the new year, I will be able to participate in a 401(k) and medical benefits, which is so wonderful. I’m still getting used to the whole “working” while at work thing – as opposed to knitting and watching movies for 8 hours a day while waiting for the phone to ring. One of my former co-workers (of I Miss My Sanity, just click over to the right there) told me that she couldn’t believe that we used to complain about the job, which got me to thinking:

• no matter what, you have to work with jerks 
• no matter what, your bosses are morons
• no matter what, you tend to get bored out of your skull

And yes, the old job had the jerks, we questioned the bosses’ mental capacity daily, and the job was excessively boring. I mean, sure, it’s great to get paid double time while taking 3 phone calls in an eight-hour shift, and I got a real crapload of knitting accomplished, but my brain turned to mush, and it wasn’t (completely) because of the caliber of movies I was watching.

Now, I am almost constantly busy, almost to the point where I’m wondering, “am I the only one doing any work around here??” And yes, a couple of the people are jerks, I do wonder about one of the bosses, and I do get to a point where if I have to talk to another jerk on the phone I will smack someone into next week, but I smile and chat them up nicely and then call them a nasty name under my breath after I hang up the phone.

I have no time to watch movies at work now, so I watch them at home, and the caliber is no different. I’ve actually been watching documentaries on the history of porn and porn stars, which has been disappointing to the Hubster because well, dang it, it’s a documentary and not actual porn.

Poor guy.

Seriously, remember Jack Wrangler? I just watched a great docu about him. He was the gay porn star in the 70’s, then he went to straight porn in the 80’s, and now he’s married to a chanteuse 20 years his senior and he’s directing Dinner Theatre, among other things. Talk about constantly reinventing yourself! Now I want to see all his movies. I also want to see all of John Holmes’ movies too, but I think I’ll have to watch those with the sound off. I’ve seen a short John Holmes movie and I can’t stand to hear him talk. Rather arrogant, in fact.

Arrogance does nothing to cover up lack of intelligence.

Wait . . . am I talking about bosses or porn stars?

 

it’s not gonna keep me from eating roast pork, though!

Hello, Dear Friends.

If you read my tweets or facebookings or whatever the heck they’re called, then you know that I’ve been down for the past few days with the flu, more than likely of the swine variety.  The only reason I say that is because I got inoculated for the regular kind and the fact that around 4 am Sunday morning, I thought I was going to freeze to death.  So I huddled under many blankets and turned the heated mattress pad on high (yes, a heated  mattress pad, we get kind of thin-blooded here in Arizona after a while) and then woke up the Hubster who disagreed with me on the fact that I was freezing to death; I was actually burning up with fever.  Then he went back to sleep.  Hubster’s not a man to disturb when he’s sleeping.  However, if you ever ask the Hubster how he sleeps, he will tell you that he’s a very light sleeper and he hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since he met me seven and a half years ago.  On the other hand, if you ask me, he’s got the loudest snore of a “light sleeper” that I’ve ever known.

Anyway, I spent all day Sunday (which was our sixth wedding anniversary, drat the luck!) either fitfully dozing in bed or fitfully dozing in the recliner or falling down when I got up to go the bathroom.  When that occurred, Hubster reflected that he’s had pneumonia and swine flu, yet he never got faint upon standing, yet, when I fall ill, I tend to get very light-headed.  That’s probably because his brain is so chock-full of stupid facts, like the half-life of the bottom half of the periodic table, whereas my brain is filled with bad movie trivia, knitting stitches, and Gilbert& Sullivan lyrics. 

See?  You have a head full of light opera, you get light-headed when you’re feverish.  Makes sense to me, Hubster, what’s your problem??

So I’ve been home from work this week, and I’m staying home again tomorrow, because the very very tiny presence of logic in me says that I should stay home if I have the freaking swine flu, but then, the Very Recently Unemployed part of me (which is still kind of foremost in my very paranoid psyche) worries that I might not have a job to go back to.

Gah.  I am being illogical, no? 

Anyway, I’m off to take a couple more meds . . . ta!

 

WDLS WED: Kn I has new kybard?

 

WDLS WED: probably still need a map, though

 

mmmmmm . . . brains

I’m currently hiding in the back of the house because the Hubster is making horrible noises with his router.  He ’s been building a new aquarium stand and he’s doing some pretty intricate work — as he should be since he spent several hundred dollars on new tools to build this thing.  It will be lovely when it’s done, I know, but the tool noises and the smell of dull blades chewing their way through wood is giving me bad flashbacks to the old old job.   The other night was the absolute worst, though . . . he was painting the shelf area where the aquarium will actually sit with black latex paint, and black latex has a peculiar odor to it.  It’s probably the lampblack pigment itself; at any rate, the smell transports me back to seven years ago when that was the odor I was immersed in for zillions of hours a week.

The new new job continues, and after six weeks, I finally have my head wrapped around the methodology of training:

1. Get thrown to the wolves.
2. Fuck up reprehensibly.
3. Get thrown to the wolves again.
4. Get told in exasperated tones at a very fast rate of speed how to fix the problem.
5. At the same time, fix other people’s reprehensible fuck-ups.
6. Hear, “You’re doing a great job.”
7. Repeat.

I’m not sure why it took me six weeks to figure this out, because the Hubster divined the method nearly instantaneously.   But then he’s a total geek and a dweeb and an engineer for heaven’s sake; he’s hard-wired for following a flowchart, whereas I’m all organic and hippie-dippy and watching the music and hearing the flowers and all. 

Oh well, each day gets a little easier, but I think that might be also because I’ve started the habit of taking an extra anti-anxiety pill midway through the day.   Yahoo for modern pharmacueticals!  (which also help with the watching the music and hearing the flowers)

Hubster is still surviving being 40, and today we went to see Zombieland, which I thought was very cleverly written and a hoot and a half, despite the fact that Woody Harrelson has been playing the same role for about 10 years now.  It’s a wee bit old, but then Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt are also doing the same.  Marty Scorcese has a new one coming out with Leonardo DiCaprio called Shutter Island that also looks quite good, but I can guarantee that the Hubster won’t be watching that one with me.  He doesn’t go into psychological thrillers so much.  He likes things blowing up, naked hooters, and zombies.  We got two out of three with Zombieland, so it was a good day.

What would make the day even better?  How about some knitted zombies?

Do you suppose knitted zombies eat yarn barf instead of brains?

 

WDLS WED: I. Will. Kill. You.