Oh, Ew! Or, Crap I Found Under My Sofa

Fucking ew! Laceball!

Remember that time I thought LE had eaten all the meatballs I gave him for dinner?

Of course you don't. That's because I save this kind of mundane shit for Facebook, though I don't actually post it there either. In fact, I generally keep the boring details of my thrilling life to myself, in order to make my life appear more thrilling to the people I imagine are watching me on the Internet. It's all about being conscious of one's audience. Whether or not said audience exists is irrelevant to the construct.

Anyway, you know what this crap I found under my sofa is?

That's right. It's the shell of a meatball that's been eaten to lace by ants. By the time I found it, it was dried out to the point of being something other than meat, with a few lackluster and disappointed-looking ants creeping around on it, plus some hair and some dust. Given how much I've been cooking lately, which is not much at all, I judged the laceball to be about 2 weeks old.

And you know what I did with it after I took the picture? That's right, I knocked it back under the sofa with whatever implement I'd used to get it out of there in the first place. You think I'd touch that shit? And hold it in my hand all the way to the garbage? Hah! I pay people to do that kind of thing for me, because I'm so fucking fabulous. And also lazy. And also creeped out by laceballs under my sofa. They deserve basically the same strategy as cockroaches, which is to be moved to somewhere I can't see them. Then it's kind of like they aren't even there at all.

Lurking.

Terror Scaffolding! An Adventure In Safety

You see that little door underneath the scaffolding? That's the door to my office. Up on the scaffolding they have stuff like mallets and drills and claw hammers, plus some rather well-worn and rickety-looking uneven planks for the guys to walk around on, precariously balanced across the scaffolding bars. The guy on the ground usually gets a hard hat. The guy up top gets a safety belt that isn't attached to anything.


As if working in the summer weren't bad enough, with all these unwilling and fed-up kids, we now have to walk under the terror scaffolding several times a day. When you're coming in to the office, the guy on the ground sometimes yells at the guy up top to stop doing whatever debris-dropping activity he might be working on. Going out though, there's nothing to do but be quick!

For our safety, there's some old plywood with rusty nails sticking out

.

Today they've started drilling the wall. Bits of cement, large and small, drop to the ground and explode. Fortunately, they installed some safety panelling over the door.

There's also that extra scaffolding bar across the door for hitting your head on, in case the falling cement misses you. The other door has some "do not cross" tape across it, so I don't know if the tape or the bar implies more danger. Tell you what, though. I'm having lunch at my desk today. Breadsticks and hazelnuts.

At least the workers are a bit of eye-candy. Otherwise, I don't know what I'd do.

Carry on as usual, I suppose.

A Trip To The Pazar: Short Film By LE

I've already gotten a notice from YouTube that MÜYAP owns the music, so this little achievement of mine may be short-lived.

Dear MÜYAP,

Please don't sue me.

Love,
Stranger

WTF Is It? Thoughts On Bugs

There has been an influx of wildlife in my house recently. For example, the other day I spotted a little lizard, which ran under the bed. I was all, "Note to self: Capture lizard and show it to LE before it dies." And then I forgot to undertake the capturing project, so I do hope the little fellow made it out all right, preferably closing the way it came in, whatever that was.

I'm okay with you, little fella.

Reptiles, I'm cool with. I rather like them. I wish we had chameleons or geckos or something. Geckos are nice. You can hear their little sucky feet tapping around at night. Chameleons are super-cool with the stretchy fast tongues and mood-ring camouflage skin and all.

So far, we haven't had any birds in this house. Birds, I hate. There's something terribly wrong with reptilian features on a feathered creature. The feathers say, "Touch me, stroke me, I'm cute and soft," but then the eyes and skin say, "I'm a fucking reptile with staring, cold terror eyes and deeply unsettling pink skin and I'd as soon peck your eyes out than let you touch my lovely soft feathers."

Get the fuck away from me, bird!

At least reptiles are truthful. They say, "I'm cold-blooded. Do what you want with that, and let me be."

I have mixed feelings about bugs. On one hand, I do hate to be all girly and "Eek!" about bugs, but you know what? A lot of bugs are fucking scary, with creepy fucking legs and scuttling behaviors. So I've narrowed down my bug issues to those that I Can and Can't deal with:

Bugs I Can Deal With:

Completely un-scary and cute.

1) Bugs that I know for sure don't bite or sting. I love bees in theory but I don't want them on me.
2) Baby bugs that are very small. Very, very small.
3) Exceptions: Daddy-long legs and mosquito-eaters. I don't mind them a bit, except when you try to release them back into the wild, they can break. It upsets me terribly when I let one go and find a piece of leg in my hand after.

Bugs I Can't Deal With:
1) Bugs that are larger than a green lentil. That's about my limit. Sowbugs are cute and all, but there's a dead one on the floor now I'm not dealing with because it's the size of a jellybean. Also, see # 2, below.
2) Dead bugs. I fucking hate them because sometimes they come back to life.
3) Black bugs, unless they are extremely small.
4) Bugs with creepy legs. The creepiness of the legs seems related to size, but it's worth mentioning.
5) Shiny bugs, with the exception of very small, shiny, non-black beetles that I think are pretty.
6) Bugs with hair.
7) Bugs that might make any audible sound, crunching or otherwise, if you kill them.
8) Bugs that appear in groups larger than 3. Newborn spiders taking flight a la Charlotte's Web are fine, though, as long as they are outside and aren't on me.
9) Bugs that are on me by surprise. One of the worst bug encounters I ever had was a huge dead black beetle a little bigger than a piece of okra, that stuck to my shoulder while swimming in the sea in Mallorca. I looked at my shoulder and bah! It was right fucking there in my face!
10) Bugs that scuttle.

My approach to cockroaches (yes, they don't bite, but they're big and black and shiny with creepy legs so I hate them) is to stomp near them so they run away to somewhere I can't see them. That's my approach with most bugs actually. Just go where I can't see you and I'll leave you alone. I do, however, tend to remove large spiders, at arm's length with a cup and paper or something, with lots of girly "ew!" noises. I like spiders, even the ones I can't deal with, but I don't want them having 10 billion fucking babies in my house. Also, they eat biting bugs so I feel bad even if I wreck one of their webs.

This morning, there was this bug in my house:

And actually, I tried to move it outside but it scuttled under some drawers, and anyway, LE was pissed off at me because I used his book to try to scoop it up. So it started off as an okay-ish bug that I could halfway deal with at arm's length-- too big to touch, biting status unknown, but its legs were feathery rather than creepy. Only then it scuttled so it was definitely Not Okay.

WTF is this bug? And is it lurking under the drawers right now, looking at me? Or having babies?

Shit.

Kid X-Ray

LE has had 3 x-rays in his life. The first, taken after he stood up in a chair backwards and fell over headwise into the cupboard with an unpleasantly cracky thumping sound, was my favorite because you could see his not-yet-grown-in teeth lurking under his gums.

Also baby skulls are bulbous and funny.

The second was after a mishap involving a gazebo and a nose-high marble shelf that was exactly foreshortened to invisibility from LE's height at the time. I don't know where that x-ray is, but I feel like we should have kept it. It was the most expensive x-ray ever, taken at the ill-advised, shiny hotel-like Medicana hospital because I didn't yet know about the great deals over at Medi-Life.

I couldn't figure out how to get a good photo of LE's first head x-ray. Fortunately, his dentist has some super-cool dentist software that allows him to take digital, email-able jpg x-rays. I know all about the software because I got the dentist to talk about it once, instead of forcing him to make open-mouth conversation about Turkey with me.

My tiny, MS Paint ode to Allie Brosh, who hasn't posted in ages. Come back, Allie! I've been reading old posts just to make my face hurt and my eyes water painfully with laugh tears! I promise to buy your book if you'll just come back! I'll buy more than one! I'll come to Bend so you can sign all of them! I won't make fun of your dog! Maybe a little!

Naturally, I was thrilled with the x-rays. After the dentist had pointed out the cavities and I had cringed with shame for about a second, I wanted to know all about the other teeth, to which the dentist was cheerfully obliging because he's the kind of dentist who genuinely loves his work and can't hide his pleasure when others express an interest. That's the other reason I know so much about the software, whose development process I can't help wondering about. There's an entire industry that's a mystery to me-- medical tools and technology. I'll bet there are conferences and brochures involved, too.

Anyway, those are indeed his Big Boy Teeth forming under there. And I had NO FREAKING IDEA there was such a thing as 6-year molars or 12-year molars, but check them out, there they are!

Most of the time it seems like I manage to learn something every day. But some things I learn are astoundingly way fucking cooler than other things, even if I come by them in a really bad way.

White Dread

In case you ever wondered what happens to a husky-ish dog who is never brushed, it looks a little like White Dog:

Remind me never,ever to have a long-haired dog around the house. Cleaning up all that hair, bit by bit as summer wears on, must be a Sisyphean task. White dog looks like he's lost about 10 pounds, all of it fluffy, floaty white hair.

This picture doesn't show the dreads as well, but I like it better because White Dog totally posed and smiled for the camera.

In the background, one of the neighbors was shouting, "Don't be scared! Don't be scared! They're okay dogs." LE kept his distance from the dogs because to him, they're massive and he doesn't like being licked in the face. Nor would I, I suppose, if I had a similar face-dog tongue ratio. I said, "I know they're nice. I'm just taking a picture," to which he replied, "*blink blink*" and walked away, because some things, no matter how normal they seem to me, just don't register with a lot of people.

Black dog, by the way, was there too. She (formally he, because I'm a little slow) now approaches cautiously and sniffs a proffered hand almost in shame. She's that kind of scared that makes me nervous, no matter how nice a dog is. Her wounds appear to have healed, even the one on her eye, but gone are the happy wiggles and exuberant head cuddles.

So it's either a happy or unhappy ending, depending on how you look at it and what mood you happen to be in at the time.

*EDIT* 21 July: Someone gave White Dog a haircut! He's svelte and dread-free!

I'm Covered In Either Ghosts Or Aliens

Here's a really weird picture LE took of me last week. I think he did it with one of the Instamatic effects, though I'm not sure which one.

Apparently it's the effect that makes the ghosts show.

Isn't that creepy? I have no idea what that light around my hands is, and that definitely looks like a malevolent face on my chest. It's also weird how my arm looks like it has blurry tattoos on it.

Eek! The worst part is that whatever it is, it's on me! Crap!