BOO!!!

I love Halloween, but I'm glad it's over. My husband bought the candy. Two grocery bags full. I couldn't believe it when I saw how much he bought. At least he bought good candy, Kit-Kats and Snickers and Milkyways, not just a bunch of sweet-tarts and tootsie-rolls. We broke our trick-or-treater count. We moved into a new subdivision 7 or 8 years ago. The first Halloween we didn't have any visitors, the next year we had about a dozen. This year we had 93, but we still have a ton of candy left over. There goes my diet for the next month. My husband said we are going to put a sign in the yard saying Halloween 2.0 and give the rest of the candy out tomorrow.

I guess Halloween is a good time to come out of the broom closet and admit I'm a witch. I couldn't decide if I wanted to let the whole world know, or just keep it to myself. Finally I decided I might as well go for it. I'm a witch. I don't sacrifice babies or fly through the air on a broom. I don't hate Christians, and babble about 'The Burning Times' when people bring up their religion. All I ask is the same treatment from other people. Not all witches are Satanist, most of them don't even believe in Satan. They might believe in the Horned God or the Green Man, but not some freak in a red suit with a pitchfork. I'm not really sure what I believe in, but I know I don't believe Christianity is the only path to eternal salvation, the Bible wasn't written by the Big Man himself, the idea of 'Original Sin' is the biggest bunch of bullshit I have ever heard, and Jesus would probably have a stroke if he had to sit through most Sunday services. This is a pretty good introduction to modern Paganism. Maybe not exactly my views, but close.

Laptops Rule!

It is so nice to have my laptop hooked back up to the web. I missed being able to write in here while I'm sitting on the couch, in front of the fireplace, watching TV. Sitting in the office is like being in detention or something. Of course, right now my husband is watching wrestling, or raslin. I like wrestling just because it's so funny and comic-book-ish. If anybody did the same moves these guys do people would end up dead or crippled, but you know all these guys get together after 'work' and have a beer together. My husband used to work in a restaurant near the hotel wrestlers stayed at when they came to St. Louis, and a lot of them came in all together after their matches like they were all best friends, even though they were supposed to be mortal enemies. They have big pay-per-view matches about every month, and they bill each one as 'the best match ever'. It's all just a joke, but as long as you realize that it isn't any more ridiculous than watching Days of Our Lives or Friends

Anyway, I'm loving my laptop. Friday I'm going to be the designated trick-or-treater meeter greeter, but those little brats are going to have to wait for me to get around to putting my laptop down before I answer the door. I have my priorities.

The Holy Church of Moo

Here's a cool cud-based web site. I'm thinking of converting.

I am so happy. I finally have my laptop hooked back up to the internet. I am trying to write this on my laptop and see if it is working.

Well, I had to kick and scream and pull my hair, but I finally figured out how to put comments in here. Now everybody can let me know what they think. I had to publish this about 20 times because I would try one comment system then publish to see if it worked. Of course it wouldn't work, so I had to go back and erase the code I added to the template and try adding code from a different comment system, publish again and see if it worked. Once I did something horribly stupid and when I tried to see if it worked the whole blog was gone, invisible. Luckily, Blogger gives you a selection of different templates to chose from, and every time you change templates all your tweaking vanishes, so I was able to bring this back up. I would be really bummed out if everything I had written got wiped out. Now I just have to put the links to other blogs back, and maybe add some other things to the sidebar and I'll call it a day.

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I love the ocean. I love the way the ocean looks at night, with the moon shining down. I love the way the ocean smells, how it sounds. I love licking the salty water out of my fur and then stretching out on a warm rock in the sunshine. At low tide I love digging for clams in the sandy mud flats, and then washing off in the tidal pools, searching for crabs and fish. At high tide there is a spot where the water crashes down on the rocky coast, sending up giant waves of misty spray. I love to stand there, on the edge of a rock, and feel the tiny droplets of water rush past me. When I close my eyes it feels like I'm flying, soaring through the air like a seagull. Then I leap out as far as I can and dive back into the ocean.

Fall is officially here. Some people look for the first frosty morning, or leaves changing colors. I watch for ladybugs. Every fall hundreds of them, looking for places to overwinter, meet on the side of my house. They crawl all over the siding, windows, doors, steps, everywhere. Some of them manage to sneak into the house, usually in the kitchen or basement. I try to catch them and take them back outside. I can't save all of them and end up with a pile of dead ladybugs under the windows in the basement. If I don't catch them, my dogs think they are flying dog treats. I don't know what they taste like, but Buddy and Little Dog seem to find them mighty tasty.

Now that I've made this a public blog, I suddenly can't think of anything to write about. I haven't been writing about anything earth-shaking before, but now I feel the need to be clever and witty. Solve world hunger or expose a major scandal. I want to have proof space aliens are secretly mind controlling our government, or that cat food is more nutricious than Big Macs. I want people to wake up in the morning and rush to their computers, eager to read the latest pearl of wisdom here. The first words out of people's mouths when they get to the office should be 'Did you read the Daily Cud this morning?' That's never going to happen if I can't think of better writting subjects than how cute my dogs are or which sucks worse: going to work or cleaning house. Maybe if I had a more glamorous job, or lived somewhere exotic this would be easier. The most interesting thing I did yesterday was stop after work and get my hair cut. Not exactly attention grabbing.

Strike Rant

There is a big grocery store strike in St. Louis. Everybody is all in a tizzy over it. I wish they would have just ratified the new contract instead of striking. Bunch of pampered babies. Grocery store employees already make more money than I do. At least the union ones do. The new contract would have given most of them 75 cents an hour more, plus a 20 cent bonus just for agreeing to the 75 cent raise, but they would have to pay more for their health insurance. Hello, my job doesn't provide any insurance at all. Luckily my husband gets insurance from his job. You make more money than me, get insurance and other benefits like sick days and holidays, and then want me to feel sorry for you? I don't think so. People will drive 20 minutes to save 15 cents a pound on hamburger, but think the grocery strike is justified. How are they going to feel when they have to pay more for their groceries because the stores have to cave in to the union demands? I haven't had to go shopping since the strike started, but if I was out shopping I wouldn't feel bad about crossing the picket lines. Let those people go work in my factory for a couple of weeks and then see how fast they vote to ratify their contract. I'm not worried about the strike one way or another anyway because there is a Mom and Pop grocery store in my home town that I'd rather shop in anyway. It just bugs me that people think the store owners don't deserve any kind of sympathy, it's all 'oh, those poor cashiers' I hear day after day.

I finally grew a set of balls yesterday. No surgery or hormone treatments were involved. I finally decided to switch this blog from private to public. Now the whole world can experience life in the fast lane. Living on the edge. Going where no blog has gone before. I don't know why I was so worried about making this a public blog. If somebody reads this and thinks I'm a big looser they don't have to keep reading, and somebody might actually think I am worth an occasional mouse click. Somebody besides my mom and sister, the only two people that I sent this address to so far. I showed this blog to my husband, and he was spectacularly unimpressed. I know in his mind he was thinking 'Well, at least she's not on crack.' As a hobby, this is pretty harmless. At least if you don't pay attention to the amount of time I have been spending reading other people's blogs to get ideas for mine.

Jeeze Louise, I forgot all about the couch. There has to be some way to get my lazy ass off the couch. I'm thinking of some sort of timer, like an hourglass. The pressure of my butt on the cushion will open a hole in a bucket full of the cheapest generic dog food I can find. The longer I sit on the couch, the more dog food will be released. My dogs will happily eat as much as they can. The cheap dog food will transform into toxic gaseous emisions, guaranteeing a speedy exit from the livingroom, possibly the entire house. No TV program in the world can compete with the mustard gas my dogs can produce.

I have decided I need to hook my office chair up to the electric socket in the wall under my desk. I sit for hours, lusting after items on Ebay that I know I won't ever win, and reading mail from mail lists full of people who have such interesting lives that total strangers (me) will sit reading about what they've done instead of doing something interesting themselves. The only way to stop this madness is to hook a wire up to the electric outlet, run it through a timer set for maybe 20 minutes, then hook it up to the seat of the chair. It should work. Now I just have to find a timer on Ebay, and join an electrician's mail list to get a schematic diagram of the wiring plan. Wish me luck.

There is a movie I like called the Breakfast Club, about a group of high school students stuck in the school library for Saturday detention. There is a scene where the principal asks if anybody has any questions. The student that's a big troublemaker asks him 'Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?' Every morning at work we have a little meeting to find out what everybody is going to do for the day. At the end of the meeting our manager asks if anybody has any questions. I always want to ask her if Barry Manilow knows she raids his wardrobe. So far, I've been able to resist the temptation. I am also tempted by the innercom system we have. All day I hear people getting paged. Joe needs to call Bill, Mary is needed on line 7. I would love to get on the phone and make my own pages. Mell Gibson is needed in the women's restroom. Doctor Frankenstien, your brain is ready, please report to the lab.

Look out New Hampshire, the Libertarians are coming! They have a plan to take over the state, called the Free State Project . It sounds good in theory, but after I got to the part about getting rid of gun control laws I decided not to start packing just yet. Yes, I know, the constitution guarantees the right to own guns, the government shouldn't take anybody's guns away, blah blah blah. It's just the idea of any psycho fresh out of prison being able to go to the local store and pick up an Uzi kind of bothers me. And once they get rid of things like taxes, they are going to have problems with little extras like snow plowing, teachers, and ambulances.

Plague Trivia

I was watching a documentary about a French town that had a plague epidemic back in the Middle Ages. From studying a painting they decided it was bubonic plague. The only helpful information I picked up from that show was that while dogs died right along with the people who lived there, horses didn't. The fleas that spread the plague didn't like horses, from what I remember. So if there is ever a bubonic outbreak, I'm buying a pony. I would buy a full-sized horse, but I think a pony would be easier to keep inside. A horse would keep hitting its head with the ceiling fan, and might have trouble drinking out of the toilet.

Music Trivia

Johnny Cash sang a song about a boy named Sue. What name was on Johnny Cash's birth certificate? Answer: JR Cash. Johnny Cash didn't have a first name until he joined the Air Force. The military decided initials weren't good enough for one of their soldiers, and told him he had to pick a real name. Thank goodness he didn't pick Sue.

Here's something fun to do when you're bored. Ask someone 'Do you know what I was just thinking?" as if you just came up with the cure for cancer. When they answer with 'No, I don't,' say 'Thank God' and walk away. It only works the first time you ask someone. After that they seem a little more on guard. Almost as if they are keeping a log of your quirks for the shrink they put on retainer, just in case you need a little vacation.

Writing in here is like alcoholism in reverse. You're fine as long as you keep writing. The more often you write the more you want to write. The problem is when you stop writing. If you miss a day, it's a little harder to pick the keyboard back up and write the next time. If you decide it isn't that big a deal to miss a day, and then miss another day, it's even harder to start. Every day it seems like it gets harder and harder, like giving up drinking after a week long frat party.

One of my main obstacles to writing in here isn't lack of things to write about. I think of lots of things to write about, but I think of them while I'm at work. Work is, well, boring, so I occupy my mind with what I'll blog when I get home. Then when I get home I am tired of thinking about the fascinating information tidbits I had planned on blogging about. It feels to my mind like I've already expressed things well enough, why should I go to all the trouble of actually typing all this?

Another reason I don't write in here as often as I would like to is I feel obligated to put links in my posts. If I want to write about a TV show I want to put in a link to the show, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes searching the web for the perfect site to link to, so I just don't write about whatever I was thinking about. I read some other blogs, and found one that I really like that isn't a link-fest. It's written by an Irish woman spening the summer at a cabin in Canada. She has some links, but mostly it's just writing. Wonderful, personal glimpses into her life. Her summer vacation made me wish I could join her, even with the mice running wild through the cabin and the 19k modem she was using. She wrote that she considers her blog a love-letter to her friends across the world who read it. I would like to think my blog is the same. I don't want to change the world, I just want to show people what is going on in my tiny section of reality.