One picture, and five links that are worth your time.
My last remaining active addiction is sweets. Considering how many bakeries and ice cream shops and donut ice cream shops and crap there are within a three-block radius of my work, I do pretty well. I hold out most of the time. A significant improvement from ten years ago, when I used to have dessert with every meal including breakfast.
But every so often I break.
I snuck out to Donna Bell’s Bake Shop yesterday. This was after my husband and I had dinner between shows, after he had dropped me back off at my stage door and I was saying how I was going to go write or nap or some other bullshit. I knew exactly where I was going.
Donna Bell’s is cool because it’s unpredictable. It’s tiny, they have different selections every day, and sometimes they open late and close early. Sometimes you go and the cases are full and there are no customers. But it’s partly owned by some famous and unusual looking actress with whom I am unfamiliar, so sometimes you go and there are three tour busses full of folks buying them out of cupcakes.
I was hot for a peanut butter cookie-wich. I figured if I went and there was a giant line, or else if they didn’t have the cookie-wiches, then it would be a sign to me and I would leave, empty-handed.
There was no line.
I scanned the case and determined there were, in fact, no cookie-wiches. My eyes laid upon the Pumpkin Pie Bar (with cheesecake strudel). Intriguing, but not what I was after.
I turned to go.
But then The Oak Ridge Boys’ Elvira came on the music system. It’s a song that has been inexplicably stuck in my head this week and I knew it could only mean one thing: God wanted me to have that Pumpkin Pie Bar. He was speaking to me through the Oak Ridge Boys.
In the 1860’s, Timothy O’Sullivan took some amazing frickin’ pictures of the American West, documenting as American government workers explored the western state. Holy crap these are cool! Check out this article in theDaily Mail.
And because it made me happy, another Daily Mail article: Cat Pirates.
This is an excellently written controversial article that came out in The Atlantic in June titled Why Women Still Can’t Have it All. It’s long. Read it. There will be a follow up post on it later.
I used to date this guy back in the last year of high school and the first year of college.
I’ll refrain from commenting on the quality of the relationship.
{insert mature restraint of tongue & pen keyboard here}
{insert immature smug self-righteousness here}
His mom lived in an apartment complex that offered external storage spaces for rent to its tenants. His mom had one. We went into the storage space one day and. . . stored some stuff.
No really, that’s what we did. What were you thinking?
We stored stuff and then we left. We shut the door on the way out and went on about our business– whatever kind of business it is that one has at that age. Terribly important things, I’m sure, like buying Noble Roman’s breadsticks, playing the new Guns & Roses album and finding someone to cop beer.
A couple months later we went back into the storage unit. Whether to store or unstore, I can’t quite recall. What I do recall is that there, on the concrete floor, near the back and behind an old armchair was a cat.
Or, more correctly, what was left of a cat.
Which was a perfect, black and empty fur shell.
It appeared that the cat had gotten in without us noticing when we were storing stuff previously; unable to get out, it starved to death (then decomposed, as is the nature of things).
At this point I’m sure you’re thinking this is a hell of a way to start your morning, reading about dead cat shells. I would like to point out that I did give you fair warning with the title.
At the time, the dead cat shell was the creepiest and weirdest thing I had ever seen and while I did feel a twinge of guilt myself, I secretly blamed my boyfriend.
Even today, more than twenty years later, I have a sense of trepidation every time I open a storage door. Any door to a dusty, seldom-trafficked space where people store things that are– or at least once were– meaningful enough to them that they pay extra money to keep them safe. I open those doors and I wonder what I’m going to find. I wonder what got in and died while I was away.
Which is exactly how I felt last night logging in to my blog for the first time in about two months .
If you can gingerly log in, peek at your notifications through your fingers, glance at the new comments only briefly so as to not have a horrifying image (like a dead cat fur shell) burned into your retinas, well. . . I did that. It’s gonna take me a little while to get through the debris. I have a lot on my mind that would be positively destroyed by the discovery of ex-household pets. I must proceed slowly.
As for where I’ve been?
I haven’t been in my garden. Nor my yard.
Nor at the mall, thank God.
I haven’t been on Facebook in part because I’m weary of people at opposite ends of the political spectrum exhibiting how exactly alike they are in their closed-mindedness.
I’ve been at work and at home. Grocery stores and Costco. The airport, too many times. My kitchen, eternally. And the laundry room.
I’ve been in biographies of Nureyev, Hedy Lamarr, Valerie Bertinelli, and Judas; I’ve been in the music of Johnny Cash, Sixx A.M., a bunch of stuff Brian Paulson produced and that Live album that I always go back to, every time.
I’ve been in a meditative mood. I’ve been in a state of high agitation. I’ve been to hell & back, and also Owensboro, KY (which was a whole separate trip, and much more pleasant).
But whatever. I’ve missed this place and you folks and I’m here now.
Lovely to see you again, my friends. Make sure nothing snuck in behind you before you shut the door.
So I attended the BlogHer ’12 conference in New York City last week. I decided to go at the last minute and could attend only Saturday. The hotel was about four blocks from where I work, so it didn’t really change my commute. Just had me getting up godawful early on a day that I normally don’t have to.
Somewhere around 4:30am I awoke to the unmistakable sound of a dog throwing up very near me. I cracked an eyelid, saw Jack hurling away on top of the covers, stumbled out for paper towels, cleaned it up and went back to sleep for forty-five minutes. Then I hit snooze for- I don’t know, a while, until I was coherent enough to remember I had to get up. And then stepped out of bed right into a bonus pile of dog vomit Jack had thoughtfully left for me as a surprise.
I went for the shower.
I got to the train station in time to catch the train that I had checked on three times before I left, but- as hard as this may be to believe- New Jersey Transit provided erroneous information and that train didn’t exist. Killing forty-five minutes at Seacaucus Junction isn’t nearly as sexy as it sounds. And believe me, I know exactly how unsexy it sounds.
There was a brief shining moment during a text exchange with Jules from GoJulesGo where we thought that we might end up on the same train as it came through, but alas, it was not to be.
Our afternoon. The Perrier is mine. None of these people drank as much as I expected them to.
Go click on that link. Do it, or you’re an asshole. I met Jen, the author of that post, twice for about thirty seconds and loved her right away. I wish they handed this post out at the airport with the pamphlet about the taxi fares. I wish I wrote it.
I spent slightly more time with Johi, enough to know that I covet her boots and I want to be her when I grow up. Although that implies that Johi is grown up, which she totally isn’t. I mean, she’s an adult and all, but she’s not, like, boring. She probably pays her bills and stuff and doesn’t let wolves babysit her children. Or Ted Nugent. Ted babysitting her children, not wolves babysitting Ted.
Though she might play her kids a little Wango Tango every now and then, I mean I do. Doesn’t everybody?
Anyway. Johi freakin’ met The Pioneer Woman! She almost died getting into the city. Johi, that is, not The Pioneer Woman, whom I cannot speak for and didn’t meet. Twice, if you count the cab ride out of the airport, which I totally do. Twice Johi almost dying, not twice me not meeting The Pioneer Woman. *sigh* I’m not doing well kicking coffee this time around. Go read Johi’s blog because she’s freaking cooler than The Pioneer Woman. Do You Remember That Time I Almost Died?
OH MAN!!! I ALMOST FORGOT ABOUT THE CAKE!!
What would be better than a cool policeman cake for a six-year-old’s birthday party? An Axe Cop cake, that’s what. Yeah, with severed bad guy heads and comic panels. Leigh Henderson’s edible art blog: Axe Cop Cake. If you don’t click on the link, I’m quite sure you’re breaking a law somewhere and you’ll have to deal with Axe Cop on your own, in a dark alley, when you least expect it.
I met Thoughtsy from Thoughts Appear. She hauled ass on a train from a long way away to get there for just Saturday. She had candy-infused vodka and if I could have done it without being creepy, I would have cut her arms off and sewed them on to my body because they’re so buff. Thoughtsy, don’t fret; I totally would give you my arms in exchange. I wouldn’t leave you armless. She recently moved in to a house full of boys and is learning a thing or two, like about The Pee Splash Zone.
Misty from Misty’s Laws was a joy. Completely anonymous on her blog, she’s witty and snarky without being a jerk. How the hell does she do that? I loved her. I loved her necklace.
I loved that she showed us where all the good swag was at the Expo, like the free vibrators. Misty’s nickname is Ninja Snap. She does a Weekly Whacked series on her blog with pictures of the badly dressed of Baltimore (or wherever she happens to be that week). She almost never, ever gets caught snapping. I’m linking to this post because it includes the Squirrel Car, and a unicycle.
What?
Why, yes, I did mention vibrators. Even if you live under a rock like me, you’re probably aware that Trojan (the condom folks) have come out with a line of vibrators. I think you can buy these in the drug store? Thanks to the best twelve bucks my husband ever spent, I don’t spend any time in the condom aisle anymore. Anyway, Trojan had a booth in the secret room of the Expo where they were displaying their line, so to speak. Those of us that got there on Saturday were lucky to get the last ones.
The representative (male) was heard to remark “Yeah, we brought like, four hundred of these, I can’t believe they went so fast!”
Really. At a conference of close to 5,000 largely female bloggers. I’m shocked, too.
So I did what anyone else would do and took my vibrator to work that night.
I wasn’t expecting it to be a community effort, but it was remarkably difficult to get into the packaging, and then figure out where the (included! Thank you, Trojan) battery went. Luckily help, and an instruction manual, were available.
Follow this guy on Twitter. @Dominic1110
What you can’t see in the picture are the six other people in the office shouting instructions to us. We ladies were a little suspicious of the 1-AA battery design, but after loading it up and testing it on our temples to relieve headaches we figured it probably would do the job after all.
JM Randolph, accidentalstepmom 