Hey. It’s One and Done Sunday. One picture, and five links that are worth your time.
It’s been very quiet around here this weekend. The men were away on a Scouts campout and #1 was gone as well. I let everybody else sleep in , including the dogs. The TV wasn’t on. I didn’t have to break up any fights.
Nobody complains while they’re asleep.
CC and #5 returned from their trip just a while ago. Apparently CC indoctrinated #5 into the family mantra this weekend (Life grades on a curve, in case you were wondering).
#5: Hey, you know what Dad told me about bears?
Me: What?
#5: He said you don’t have to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than the other campers.
Words to live by.
Here’s your picture. We have two utility cars: a mini van and one of those sedans that is so nondescript I can only find it in a parking lot by our license plate. Then there’s Miss Lucy, my ’66 Mustang convertible. I drive her whenever I can. There are only two situations in which I prefer not to drive her. One is rain.
The other is when I have to do the Costco run.
Now for your links.
So this dude skydived (skydove?) from space last Sunday. For reasons I can’t quite fathom, there are people arguing about it. One side accuses it of being irrelevant while we live in a world with all these basic human rights violations; another side claims superiority for science while blaming all human rights violations on religion. I would like to present all of these people with a Douchebag award for making a political issue out of skydiving. From space.
Look, some people are really good at stopping crimes against humanity. Other people are really good at jumping from outer-freaking-space with a parachute. Both are heroes. Both demand balls of steel.
Yeah, Red Bull. They financed the whole thing. Talk about taking marketing to new heights. . .
Speaking of marketing, you may have seen Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. You may have wondered how real it is. Here’s a real person I know writing a real story on her very real blog as part of it. It’s on her teenage girls and self-esteem: Inspiring Beauty at Life Well Blended.
Funny. The debate, in stills, with irrelevant but oh-so-fitting captions from The Good Greatsby: The Presidential Debate on Mute.
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.
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 