Shipping Charges Have Become Outrageous

I took some old school bloggy buddies off my blogroll thingie and it made me sad. Sad that they'd stopped blogging and sad that I hadn't. When I started the blog...well let's just say, we had a different Secretary of State. And there's been two since. Only one of the three had hair worthy of naming a blog after.

But this post isn't meant to be a jaunt down memory lane, oh no. It's meant to be about PICKLES.

A couple of months ago, I threw out a devil-may-care challenge concerning a limerick and some pickles and here it is...so much time later...only one person took me up on it. Stinkypaw wrote me a pickle limerick...and so today I sent her a jar of the good shit in return for this poetic gem:

To write a limerick I thought would be easy,
But now I see it's not that peasey
The things I'll do to taste your pickles
I'll ask, I'll beg but won't suffer thru tickles
Because I woudn't want to be queasy.

By the way, did you know you have to fill out a customs form for CANADA? Ridiculous.


When the postal employee asked if the package contained anything breakable, liquid or perishable...I throughoughly enjoyed saying yes to all three. So Stinkpaw...a glass jar of pickled cucs bobbing along in brine is on its way to you. They stamped 'FRAGILE" on it, so I know that means it won't break.

Viva la awesome blog buddies.

Discomfort is a State of Mind

After non-purposefully swallowing a little ball of allspice, it's now stuck in my throat. It won't melt and I can't cough it back up, so I guess it will just have to sit there forever. Maybe it'll multiply and I'll be able to spice cider just by gargling it. Genius.

Halloween fever has hit hard, people, and those who have me on the face of book will have seen just how hard. In the meantime, I feel the smug need to share with you my success in turning Brendan into Ira Glass (as previously promised).


Behold.


It took me a month to gather all the crap from various thrift stores, but we attended our first Halloween party of the season on Saturday looking like a very respectable NPR radio show host...





...and smartly dressed Alice with a penchant for chopping the heads of white rabbits and turning them into flask-holding purses. You better believe it.


In a week I'll be over it. Moved on to an obsession with stuffing and cranberry sauce...and learning how to make a pie. Holidays are wonderful things for those who suffer from the short attention span. Like 30 minute episodes of life...only, you know, in days.

Speaking of 30 minute episodes...I'm waiting for the next "ripped from the headlines" segment of Law & Order about a boy floating away in a homemade balloon contraption. The world has waited long enough! And by "the world", I mean me! I can't take the suspense. My guess is that there'll be a twist in the last 5 minutes when the father takes the stand and rips off his toupee to reveal that his full head of hair was just a hoax...a publicity stunt and that it all...the whole brouhaha...was to come down to this. I'd watch it.

Seriously though - what I want to know is WHY IS THIS MAN STILL IN THE NEWS? What will it take to get the cameras off of this family? What sparkly thing can we dangle? Shoot...maybe I'll go out and cause a newsworthy ruckus. Just give me a small arsenal of super soakers, a nun, a mid-sized gerbil, a passport and a jar of petroleum jelly. It's ON.

Happy almost Halloween. This one's for the freaks.

Waste-of-money Product Reviews: The BumpIt

It's a well known fact to people who know it - I love infomericals. I will watch one in its entirety before I even know it's over. And then do everything in my power to control the impulse to 'call now' regardless of what the extra bonus offer is.

So when the stupid inventions on TV show up in Target and I'm with amy g. ... and it's called a 'Bumpit' ... and it's under $10 ... and there's an hour until 30 Rock starts ... I think you see where this is going:

The Bumpit. Pronounced "Bump It" and not "Bum Pit" - unless you are us, and then that's totally how you pronounce it.

It comes with directions.
Let's give Kara a beehive!
It works for your hair OR your ass!
The finished product is a bit...like a growth. A growth that's very slowly falling off my head.

Front view.
Perhaps a little moisture will help the staying power. (No, she didn't really lick it.)
(Or did she.)
Now it's amy's turn. There was a little more success with her non-toddler hair.
Enough to inspire a dance with the joy of it.

And then...the double BumpIt. Which only succeeded in giving her an alien head.
As a product - it completely failed to do anything but make us laugh. Needless to say...the As Seen On TV invention is going back. So now you have two reasons not to buy one. 1. It doesn't work. 2. You might accidentally buy the one that we returned. And after watching amy g.'s review summation below, you'll understand why you should live in fear of such an occurance.

(Note: At one point amy refers to the 'jojo boys'. Jojos are fried wedge potatoes sold in the corner store across the street. They are glorious. And there are often boys hanging out in front of this shop with apparently nothing else to do. That is where the name comes from. The fact that they happen to sport 'ethnic hair' is purely coincidental. But yes, she's totally also racist.)

No, YOU'RE Out of Order!

After spending the afternoon at Small Claims Court...I don't know why I was even nervous.

Wait, jumping ahead...let me back up:

Our old landlord did some shady sheez with our deposit. When I wrote and told him to make good, he ignored. I wrote again. He ignored. The next letter he received was from a Sherriff. SERVED!

That was many months ago. You may not believe this, but the courts are kind of backed up. You'll figure out why later.

So the court date finally arrives. My dad (and also a landlord in his own right) drove up to give us some pointers about representing ourselves, etc. He was also there for moral support, because sometimes a girl needs her dad.

We had to go through mediation. I was ok with this, I thought 'hey, this guy can't be totally unreasonable...maybe we can just settle this here'. No. Even after admitting the law was on my side he refused to offer an amount that was anything less than offensive because he 'didn't think we deserved it'. Of course a guy with Git 'er done embossed on his checks probably doesn't like being told what to do by a 5'2" blond chick half his age.

I told him that if he didn't want to take the negotiations seriously, it was time to go before the judge.

And so it went. We went before the judge...I pointed out the inconsistencies of his story and he tried to slander our character. It was tense. And then - in a beautiful moment for our justice system - I sat back and tried not to smile as the judge ruled that regardless of his feelings about us and his track record as a landlord...he had no evidence and the ruling would go in our favor.

We won almost $1,400 and he's now got a judgment against him that will hurt his credit. Wonder if he thinks it was worth it. Can't say I really care at this point.

But that's not what I loved about today, oh no. After mediation failed we had to return to the courtroom and wait for our case to be called. That meant they had to finish up with the "Stalking Protection Orders" These. are. glorious.

Some quotes:

Judge: Why do you believe you are in imminent danger from this person?
White-haired 'stached guy: 'Cause she told me to go to the Embassy Suites and I went and she said she was gonna beat my ass and get a Measure 11.
Judge: Had you had an intimate relationship with this person?
White-haired 'stached guy: She kep' askin' me to go to a motel. And well...I went.

Judge: Why do you believe you are in imminent danger from this person?
Carhartt-clad, Anthrax beard-sporting, self-absorbed doucheku: Because I can see the anger that comes into her eyes.
Judge: What has she done to threaten you?
CCABSSAD: Well, see, she's totally in love with me. And she comes over for no good reason, like one time she brought me soup. I mean, I didn't eat it, I threw it away because it looked too foreign...........................and I mean, she hasn't hurt me yet, but she's been in this country for 9 months and she has to learn that she can't just do whatever she wants here.

Dad and B were getting seriously annoyed at all the crazy, but I enjoyed it. Watching crazy can sometimes be relaxing. At least it was in this instance. I knew that no matter what I said...I would come off as infinitely more intelligent and credible than anyone else in the room. Except maybe B, but I didn't let him talk much.

Basically I'm here to tell you that I'm awesome. Feel free to rent my legal services. I take payment in the form of baked goods.

MTV Shows

Self-involved Blurgh

I've had a day and I'm feeling fragile. The kind of fragile that keeps me from even judging a woman I pass struggling up the bridge pulling a dog behind her bike in one of those kid trolleys. Why isn't 'trolleys' spelled 'trollies'? Stupid.

I've had a glass of wine and a potato; The Office is on TV and I'm feeling better...but damn. Days like these are, well, the reason one really should own a pair of polar fleece sweatpants. And potatoes.

Tomorrow will be better.

Right?

In the meantime - tonight's bad '90s teen scary movie: Disturbing Behavior

Seasonal Greetings to You and Your Kin

As I was surfing the channels just now, and ad for an upcoming screening of The Wedding Date popped up on ABC Family. For those who don't have crap cable, ABC Family is a channel that plays family-friendly shows and whatnot. Their new motto is that ABC Family is a new kind of family.

The Wedding Date...you lucky ducks ...is a Debra Messing RomCom about a woman who can't face going dateless to her sister's wedding so she hires a manhooker. I think she pays him something like $5 grand. I doubt it was enough. My guess is at some point toward the middle, both hilarity and true love ensues.

So ABC Family condones getting paid for sex. Definitely a new kind of family. One I can get behind. Keep that economy going however you can!

It's Halloween month and that fills me with the kind of joy only achieved with mass quantities of candy corn. My costume is already in the works and we'll start on B's next week. We have a couple sets of friends who love Halloween so much, they want to make babies with it, so the pressure's on. Last year we made a decent pass at Juno and Paulie despite my being sick as a dog filled with sickness (see left).

This year will hopefully turn out just as well but with less sickness. I'm going for a certain type of Alice in Wonderland and B is gonna be Ira Glass. These are almost cheating since both of us need to do very little to pass, as you can see by the comparative photographs included here. Astonishing, isn't it.

This time of year makes me happy. I'm having to physically stop myself from going out and getting pumpkins to carve yet, since they would rot within days. I bought fresh cider at the Farmer's Market earlier. A fire was built in the fireplace this morning. That bit took some work. I had to flip a swtich. I've already watched two out of long list of bad teen scary moves from the '90s. Did you know The Faculty and Apt Pupil were directed by Robert Rodriguez and Bryan Singer? Sometimes directors do the weirdest things.

In other Octobery news, I've purchased a pair of fleece sweatpants and I may never take them off. Yes. And before you call me boring, I'd like to point out that last weekend I rode around town in the Booty Mobile. I just didn't blog about it because what happens in the Booty Mobile stays in the Bootie Mobile. Besides, the pictures are on Facebook and they know what they did.

I've had enough computerness for the weekend. Off to read a book.