You Can Combine Anything You Want

Me with the mullet wearing super hero.

This weekend was soooo much better than the last couple. I picked up the guy after work on Friday. We had chili and cornbread and then watched a movie called Pandorum. It was pretty violent, but not all that predictable. After I dropped the guy off at his place. Stinky and I had a fire in the backyard. It was a nice way to end the week.

On Saturday, I was a little migrainey. I ran and got a few things done. Then picked up the guy after the football game and we had the spicy peanut noodles and soup I made for dinner. It was really good. We spent the rest of the night talking. Lovely. After I dropped the guy off at his house, I stopped downtown for one beer and to check out some of the costumes. I lasted a whole hour, but I had a lot of fun during that time.

Stinky worked most of the day today. I was still migrainey so I didn't get a lot done. I did some cleaning but not much battening of hatches. I spent some time with Stinky after she got off work and then went out for sushi with the guy and our friend Pat. It was a nice way to end the weekend.

Freaks Come in All Shapes, Sizes and Colors

Me being a flapper, D. being a cougar and G. being some kind of super hero.

Well, kids. I'm finally at that point. You know, the one where you are so overwhelmed that you have to start cutting things out...And unfortunately, those things are the fun ones. Damn! I still haven't found a subletter for my apartment and that is starting to really stress me out. I hopefully have someone else looking at it tomorrow after work.

The girlcrush hidden in her husband's feathers.

So, Friday night Stinky went on a hay rack ride and Coadster and I stayed home with a taco pizza, and strawberry cheesecake and watched scary movies. It was exactly what I needed.

Our new friend from the conference a couple of weeks ago showed up dressed as PeeWee Herman. He asked me if I wanted to go see a movie and promised to keep his hands to himself. (hahahaha)

I went back to sleep for a little bit on Saturday morning after dropping my girls where they needed to be and was awakened by another phonecall:

Me: Hello?

Caller: You bitch! Why didn't you tell me you bought the house?

Me: Hello?

Caller: Oh, I guess I should let you know this is Libby. I was just stalking your house and when I drove by it had a sold sign on it. I thought you were going to email me?

Me: I'm sorry. I put it on Facebook. I just didn't get around to emailing and calling everyone yet.

Caller: Even though you're a bitch, we'll still help you move. Let me know when you need us to show up with a truck.

Have I ever told you how much I love my friends? Well, after that, how could I not?

A friend of mine had the best Ka-Pow! sign. It was perfect for when all the Batman villians showed up. It's always best to be prepared for that occurrence.

I ran a ton of errands on Saturday. I stopped by my friend G.'s house to pick up a blonde bob wig for my flapper costume, but it didn't really work. It said one size fits all, but they meant for normal people. They need to have another, bigger, one size fits all for Irish people. It was just a little too small. Plus, it made me look like Andy Warhol in drag. I then went to my neighbors J. and S.'s house to see if they still had a black bob wig leftover from last Halloween. Luckily, they did. They also said they'd help me sand and refinish my hardwood floors. Score!

This table had the coolest costumes ever.

I finally got the girls where they needed to be and went to my friends' house. I was driving, so I stopped to give them all a lift. Sometimes the getting ready is almost as much fun as the going out. This Halloween was a lot more mellow for me than last year. Mostly, I had so much to get home and do, that I had a hard time keeping my mind on the fun. I did have fun though and I love, love, love to see people in costumes.

I still had much cleaning and getting ready for the next day when two people were supposed to come by and look at my place. I went home a little after midnight and cleaned until 3 am...Even with the extra hour.

My favorite costume...The polygamists. How great is that?

Today I finally had to eat my reality sandwich. Turns out, I can't do everything and do it halfway well and still stay sane (shut-up). Who knew? The girl who came by with her boyfriend to look at the place said she wanted to think about it. I think it was a little too pricey for her with the utilities. My apartment is crazy cheap for a two bedroom in this town, but I think she was used to living in an efficiency.

Then Coadster informed me that she had a showchoir thing she had to be at and needed to eat before that and I had someone else coming by to look at the place at 5. I realized there was no way in hell I was going to be able to ride bikes with my friends for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, so I canceled. I didn't think it would be that big of a deal since there were so many people going, but my friend G. told me I was the only reason she got up when she did. I felt like shit. So, I've vowed not to make any concrete social plans until I can sublet my apartment and get moved and stuff.

God, I hope I can get my place rented and fast. Today I waited for someone who was a half hour late and then for another person who didn't show up at all. Nice. I hope something comes through this week. Wish me luck.

Sixteen Candles Make a Lovely Light

Here is Stinky as a baby. I wouldn't be surprised if she was trying to push the swing to make it go faster and higher.

Well, kids. it's time for another mushy, gushy birthday post. This time it might even be extra special cheesy for a few reasons. The first is that my baby is turning 16 this year, and once she starts driving, there's no telling whether any of us will be around for her 17th, and if we are, I might be writing that post from my new digs with the nicely padded walls.

Here is Stinky a few months before she got sick.

The second reason is because February of this year marked the 10th anniversary of Stinky having meningitis. In March she got sick with very similar symptoms, and since we were told her chances of getting meningitis are higher because of her first incident, all of those feelings came back to haunt me. Luckily, it was a false alarm, but I was surprised how much Stinky remembered from that time. She still knows that hospital better than most of the people who work there, I bet.

Here is Stinky at my family reunion in Breckenridge. She might be just a little off.

I feel very lucky for every day I've had with her...Although, with her tendency for boundary pushing, I have to really remind myself sometimes. No. She's a great kid. She's goofy and silly and quirky and all of those things I can relate to. And if nothing else, I think her illness has taught her to grab life with both hands and not just appreciate every day of it, but make it her bitch.

Stinky at her dad's house on Halloween. It's her favorite holiday and this was her favorite costume. She got to combine being creepy with wearing a "pretty" dress. She went as a dead bride that year, and all day at work, I was afraid her school was going to call me and make me change her into something a little less offensive.

This year, like the year she was born, Stinky's birthday falls on the first day of Fall. It also just happens to be her favorite season. She loves the changing of the leaves and football season and especially Halloween. When my girls were little, my brother who is also a fiend for Halloween, used to send us a huge box of Halloween related crap every year. We had spider webs, spiders and bats hanging from every room and Stinky would plan her costume out for the next year, the day after.

Stinky driving her sister insane, which is a job she takes very seriously.

This will be a tough year for Stinky in some ways. She's been trying to prepare herself for a while for her sister graduating and moving out of the house. At least she'll finally get her own room, but I have a feeling if it were up to her, she'd still rather share it with Coadster.


So, Stinkyjandra Luz Maria. Happy sweet 16th and happy Equinox and and happy September 22nd and happy first day of Fall! I'm so thankful I get to spend it with you.

Somebody Gotta Save My Soul

I ran my seven mile route that goes past the Halloween barn on North Scott Road. I hadn't photographed it in a couple of years, and I saw some new stuff, so I went back with my camera.

So, I took most of the weekend off from the blogosphere. I needed a break and I had a great weekend. I think most of that was due to the fact that I didn't have a migraine. So nice.

When I got off work on Friday, it was raining. Both of the girls took off to their different social engagements and I had most of the night to myself to hibernate and watch movies. I saw The Big Bad Swim, which had an ensemble cast. It was a little slow getting going, but I liked it by the end. If you're into fast action and shit blowing up, this probably isn't for you. The other movie I watched was Fracture with Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. It was pretty interesting, and it had Ryan Gosling in it. There was a courtroom scene and some things seemed a little unbelievable, but it had Ryan Gosling in it. I think the most memorable thing about it was Ryan Gosling. Did I mention Ryan Gosling had a pretty big role in the film?

I liked this skeleton in parts on the fence.

The girls worked most of Saturday. I try to do at least one crappy practical thing during the day on Saturday. This week, I took in my recycling and did some house cleaning. I couldn't run my eight mile route, because there was a home game and the West side of town was crawling/stumbling with drunken Hawkeyes.

Apparently, you get dead from jumping on the bed.

Around six o'clock, my friend Sara came over and we ate nachos and drank beer and I let Sara burn some CD's of my incredibly cheesy music and caught up on the last year. It was perfect.

At one point, some of Coadster's friends came over to pick her up for a party. Sara hadn't been around teenage girls for a while and when they left, I asked her if her head hurt. She said, "A little." I told her the key was not to show fear around them. I just talk a ton of shit, and they always tell Coadster how cool they think I am, even though I'm probably the biggest dork they'll ever meet.

The skeleton on the lawn chair was the first thing that caught my eye when I ran past the barn.

Originally, I thought I was going to the Picador, but I guess that's next weekend. I figured I'd probably just stay home after Sara left. Around 9:30, I got a call from my friend D. asking me if I wanted to meet her at the Dublin. Sure, I did. She said she had just been on the phone with a woman she met when she was studying in Germany. The woman told her about how she had been in Europe for three weeks. The first week, she was at a wedding in England and the other two weeks, she walked across Spain. She then described her wonderful life in San Francisco, where she does swing dance competitions. After D. hung up the phone, she decided that after all her friend does, she should at least leave her house.

This demon head was pretty creepy too.

After some picking up of Stinky girls, I finally made it to the Dublin. It was packed full of twenty'ish year old boys. My friend Dexter, looked around at all the guys and told me it wasn't the best singles bar for him. I said, it wasn't for me either because they were all too young.

I love it that they used a rusty farm implement to make this creepy monster.

I finally decided to take my leave of the Dublin and as I was going, my friend D. introduced me to a guy she knew. He was pretty hilarious and very drunk. He was telling me about how all the women in the world wanted to sleep with him. He then pointed to the one table of cute young girls in the whole bar and said, "See them? Yeah, they're chubbie chasers. (he was heavy set) They're totally checking me out." I looked over at the girls, as they were all checking out some other hot young guy.

"Oh, yeah. They're all over you," I said. Then I told him I had to go.

"Is my hotness too much for you? You having a hard time controlling yourself?"

"How did you know?" I asked. "Was I that obvious? I'm going to run home and take a cold shower right now."

Here is a zombie coming out of the ground.

Sunday was pretty relaxed. I got a text from my friend K. to meet her and her boyfriend and his son at the Vine for football. Our friend James joined us a little later too. The Steelers won, my Bears won and The Cowboys lost, (if you're a Cowboys fan, I'm sorry. I like you, I just don't like your team) so it was the perfect football trifecta for me.

I've photographed this goblin before, but I still love it and now it's on the ground so I was able to get a better shot.

I also obviously ran my seven mile route and took some creepy photos. Now, all I have to do is gear up for Monday, and since it's after midnight by the time I'm actually finishing this post, what I really need to do is go to sleep.

Here is a head on a stick on a fence.

You Just Might Pick Up My Magic Sticks

Stinky tried to dye her hair blonde today. Even though she's half me and I am one pasty, pale Irish girl, her other half is Mexican and the closest she could get is reddish brown. She said she's going to try to lighten it up one more time tomorrow. We'll see what happens.

This week I've become a bit of a jinx. Believe me, I would much rather be a minx. (I'd be having a hell of a lot more fun) Apparently, though, you don't get to choose your afflictions in this life, they choose you. You think I'm being dramatic don't you. In what way have I become such a bane, do you ask? Well, let me tell you.

I've been a scourge to all computers I've come into contact with this week. I already told you about the issues I had with my home computer on Monday. Yesterday, I got a virus on my computer at work. From what the IT guy who worked on it for the last two days said, it was a doozy. Our IT guy is a total saint, by the way, and he kept trying to reassure me that it wasn't the very worst virus he's come across in his career, but it definitely gave him a run for his money. I had to sit on a file cabinet for the first three hours at work today and talk about movies and television shows with him, until he finally killed it. Thank god IT guys are geeky, so we had plenty of things in common. Dude, we could have talked about Transformers and the Transformers movie for the three hours alone. He has all his Transformer toys from when he was a kid, just waiting for his son to get old enough to play with them.

I've also been a bit of a weather jinx this week. On both Monday and Wednesday night, I went over to Mr. Dateman's house with nasty storms riding my ass there and back. Luckily, Mr. Dateman likes storms, so I was the only one breathing into a bag both nights. I didn't have to feel quite so guilty.

So, what do you think? Is this some kind of residual Friday the Thirteenth hex, or was I cursed as a baby to start wreaking havoc in my forty-second year? If I'm going to be this way for a while, I'd like to know so I could try to harness these powers to work for me instead of against me.

Don't Let it Bring You Down

I just found out a guy I know died this weekend in a plane crash. He was a great husband and father to his wife and three kids and he was also just an all around good guy. I don't think I ever even heard him talk shit about anybody. He always made me look really bad in comparison.

The weird thing, is that his death was almost one year to the day of the awesome history professor's last February. Both men were amazing and worked hard at raising great, healthy kids. Of course, those kinds of deaths always beg the question: why, when there are so many nasty people fucking up kids on a daily basis, do the good dad's die before they have a chance to finish, or in this case, barely begin their job?

I read a blog post last year, (I have no idea which one it was, or I would attribute) where they talked about being able to trade one living asshole, for a great person who was already dead. I wouldn't even have to go that far. I'd be happy to just prevent the good ones from dying young in the future. I'd also be willing to trade some other jerk to die in their stead. In fact, I think we could easily work out a two for one deal. Give me five minutes to write a list of possible jerk candidates that I'd be willing to sacrifice, and it would stretch all the way down to the end of my very long street.

Okay, I'm done being all depressing for now. Tomorrow I promise to make more dork-ass cartoon pictures of myself, or go on ad nauseum about how crunk I was because I drank my gin and juice out of a sippy cup at the mall or whatever heinous nonsense I usually write on here. However it turns out, I'm dedicated to making my next post more Churlita-lite.

Everyday I Wake Up, Hummin' a Song

This is a photo of a door by the Picador. It has nothing to do with my post, I just like all the different textures in it.

Today the girls and I were hanging around the house doing whatever the hell it is we do to piddle the hours away on the weekend, when I smelled something burning. It didn't smell like something was left on the stove, it was more like burnt wood. Our upstairs neighbors weren't home, so I was worried it might be coming from their place. I put on a few layers of clothes and went outside to investigate. I could barely see, the smoke was so thick. There was a fire truck in the street next door hooking up to the hydrant. At first, I thought it was the twin duplex beside us, but then I walked closer to it, and saw that all the smoke was coming from Evans Street about a block away.

The fire engine's radio was squawking very loudly at no one in particular. It said that they thought someone was still trapped inside the building, and that thought made me sick. I feel so bad for the victims. I have this weird suffocation complex, and the idea of being trapped in a smoke filled building scares the shit out of me. I used to be a wildland fire fighter when I lived in Northern California, but I don't think I could ever fight structure fires. I still don't know for sure what happened to the occupants of the building, but Stinky and some friends got about a block away and said they heard an ambulance was on its way. I asked Stinky not to get any closer, because the parade of cars that drove past our house for days, pointing and taking pictures of our despair after the tornado, has tended to make me very respectful toward others that way.

Our neighbors on Rochester Street, whose dad died two months after the tornado, just lost their grandfather last week. I thought this year might be a little better, but 2007 seems to have it in for us too. As Coadster said this afternoon, "Jeez! Our neighborhood just can't catch a break."

As usual, I'm stupidly optimistic. If good luck almost assuredly runs out, shouldn't bad luck too?

You Say You're Gonna Take Him. Oh, But I Don't Think You Can

One of their friend's took this photo of the girls on New Year's Eve. I love how over-exposed Coadster is in this. It's almost like someone was actually trying to be artsy.

I should probably warn you that I started this post with no idea what I'd write, so you can expect it to be even less cohesive than normal. Maybe if you did some drugs or didn't sleep for a couple of days before you read this, it would actually make sense.

Tonight is the first waking time I've had to myself since Thursday. Needless to say, this has been an extremely social weekend. Which doesn't mean it was a bad weekend, it's just that I'm a girl who needs hours and hours to process my experiences and when I don't get that, my synapses can't always be trusted to perform properly.

I went out on Friday and Saturday this weekend. I can't really remember the last time I went out both nights of a weekend. I met Ondine and company out at The Foxhead on Friday night. That was where I heard Saddam Hussein was hanged. It was strange to watch the coverage on the bar television set, it was almost like we were watching replays of sports highlights.

The nice thing about going out in Iowa City over the holidays, is seeing all the the expatriates who are back in town. Since I had to drive to Dubuque the next morning to pick up the girls, I was going to go home after all my friends left see a show at the Picador, but right around the same time, a bunch of other people I hadn't seen for a while showed up and I stayed for another hour. The not so nice thing about Iowa City is that whenever I go out, I'm reminded just how tiny this town is, by running into unwanted ghosts. If I weren't quite so socially retarded, these encounters (or hauntings, as I like to call them) wouldn't have to be so awkward. But, I guess getting spooked is a good way to know when it's time to go home.

I went to the early show at the Picador on Saturday night. It was a benefit, so there were tons of bands from all different genres playing. It was packed, especially since it was winter break and most of the students were out of town. In between bands, they had a guy dressed in a loin cloth diaper thing and a turban who ate light bulbs and lifted bar stools with hooks hanging from his earlobes. Lord knows, I'm a girl who appreciates good spectacle, but I get squeamish about watching that kind of thing and had to go downstairs for most of his performance. I can't even watch Cirque du Soleil because the contortionists can raise the bile from within me.

The odd thing about going out this weekend was the lack of alcohol I consumed. I had a migraine on Friday that I kept at bay by taking my meds, and I didn't want to induce it's ire again by imbibing any spirits. Usually, I don't think there's any reason to be sober at the Picador, (or what was once Gabes) but for some reason, I had a great time on Saturday and I even stayed until one a.m.

Last night, I stayed home with the girls and a few of their friends. All of Stinky's friends cancelled out at the last minute, so I drove her to some other girl's house to watch movies until 11:15. (so she could watch the ball drop on the East Coast)

Coadster had two friends spend the night and one who went home at 1 a.m. I found out later, that the girl who left early, had some champagne with her sister before she showed up. It's weird, because I haven't had to worry about the girls' friends drinking before this. Even if she had been sober, Champagne Girl would have annoyed me. She kept whining about some "bitch" who stole her man. I told her that if her man was worth having, no one could steal him from her. She didn't really know how to respond to that, so she just said, "You don't understand. She was my best friend before that..." Coadster stood behind her and gave me the sign to let it go and after she left, Coadster told me that Champagne Girl cheated on the boy first, and the "bitch" supposedly stole Champagne Girl's boyfriend after they were broken-up. I wisely went into Coadster's room and watched a movie after that. I've resolved not to discuss empowerment issues in relationships with half-drunk fourteen year old girls ever again in 2007.