CAPTCHA Madness: OH MY FREAKING GOD!

WHO WRITES THESE????

Geneviève Bujold?

Dispatch from Wellesley...Learn how to flipping park.

Dear reader,

What happens when you take people who have too much money, have too many SUV's per capita and have a sense of entitlement?

An entire community that can't park.

Now I love driving in Boston because I love the bumper car driving, but this parking thing here is maddening.

People here love parking sideways, at angles and they don't give two rats asses if they take out two, three or four spaces.

And it's men and women who do this. They are completely unaware of anyone around them. And their cars look it! BMW's missing headlights. A Lexus with a broken tail light. Everywhere.

Tonight on Charles River Road a Maybach made a Left hand turn into traffic, and then the driver flipped off the people who came to a screeching stop.

Where do these people come from?

According to my sister in law, they come from Weston.

Tomorrow we take my mother in law to the bank. We fly how many miles and we're spending our time at Bank of America. Woo hoo!

Well guess where I woke up today!

Generic Picture of the Town Hall

...Wellesley.  Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Worse yet, we flew stand-by to save a few kopecks. I loathe flying stand by.  But I have Xanax, so I shouldn't care.

Why Wellesley? It's time for a safari to the in-laws, and we never know what fun we will find, or angst we'll discover.   And it's going to be a long - a very long visit.  Thankfully, I adore my in-laws.

Still, one never knows what we'll find since two large (100 foot tall) White Pines fell on their house last month and tried to cleave it in two.

The house is all repaired, but the views will most certainly be different.

My husband has promised me good meals.  And I might need to escape to Newton, Natick or even Needham if things get really bad.  And we may have to take a side trip or two to shrines of the family and other ancient locations.

Ugh.

On the plus side, we will get an audience with King Jed and Queen Nettie.  King Jed and I went to college together 30 (has it really been that long ago?) years ago.   I would have married King Jed if he were gay.  Lucky Queen Nettie.

Our house sitter will be watching movies and eating us out of house and home she's half boll weavel.

All I can say is thank God for Yodels and our iPad.  Makes the whole thing bearable.

More to come as things develop.

I'm so stressed right now, I really don't care!

Things are happening people behind the scenes. There is BIG change for the Cookie household in the future.

I'm hoping I can tell you soon. Unless Kabuki Zero dreams about it and spills the beans!

CallistaWatch: I'm ashamed to say I didn't see it first

Oh, Bitch. Please.

Oy!  Such tsoris!

OK.  So let me get this straight.  Tim "Make It Work" Gunn admitted on TV that he hasn't had sexual relations with anyone in 29 years because of one bad experience in which his performance was ridiculed by his partner.  Really?

Really.

So let me get another thing clear, OK?  Were talking about project Runway Tim Gunn, the man who coldly pushes people and constantly judges them, demanding that they be better and Better and BETTER and still NOT BE GOOD ENOUGH THAT THEY PAY FOR THEIR WAYS BY BEING KICKED OFF THE SHOW WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A HUG?

And he made this confession on an ABC daytime talk show - with no Barbara Walters prompting or probing (stop thinking that I am using this in the transitive sense) questions, and in front of Ty Pennington?

Oh bitch. Please.

According to Gunn, a man that he was very in love with criticized his sexual performance and later said that he wasn't that great in bed.   So what does Gunn do? He curls up and becomes a celibate?  Oh, bitch, please.  Someone needs to get a life or get a therapist.

Tim, darling (if you are out there, and I know you aren't) take it from me - someone who was raped as a child and learned not to internalize it or make me feel like less than a human - you need to build a bridge and get over it. If I can do it,  You need to get out and take you own fucking advice and make that ass pussy of yours  work, Princess.

Personally, I think the bitch needs some sex with a big black man to realign his chi.

I'm stealing this from Jason...

Something disco, somewhat harsh. Taken, given a simple piano hook, and made beautiful in a different way. It's all in the interpretation.  And I love it.

Thanks Jason!

The world I was born into...

Callista Gingrich: Take Me to Your Leader

I am fascinated with Callista Gingrich.  The more I find out about her, the weirder she becomes.

1) She's a homewrecker.

2) She not only slept with her boss who was a leader of the family values movement that ran roughshod over Washington in the 1990s, but she married him.

3) She's only 45!  You heard me - FORTY-FIVE bitches, but she looks like she's going on SIXTY.  And she did it on PURPOSE!

4) She looks like a Vampiress, aka, Queen of the Damned.

5) She choose to sleep with Newt Gingrich and let him put his teeny dick in her secret woman place.  Doesn't that just make your skin crawl.

6) She could be our next First Lady, unless we wake up and use our votes to make sure her husband never becomes President.

And my favorite fact (or not) about her:

She has top secret laser beams implanted in her eyes!*

*It could happen

Shindig

An interesting clip. I love it because it's the best clip out there for Nino and April singing Swing Me. But I also love The Blossoms. But there is entirly too much Donna Loren.

Santorum = Assclown

I can't stand Rick Santorum.

Curtains, plaster and floors, oh my.

So the husband and I are putting in some work here at Cookie Manor because winter is when you get your best rates with contractors.

We even brought a real estate agent into walk through the house and tell us what she spied that needed done.  Why?  Because yours truly bought Cookie Manor in 1993 and frankly, after you have lived in a place for so long you become blind to its faults, especially when the house is 96 years old.  So fresh eyes are a good thing.  And fresh eyes will also ensure that we fix the things we need to fix, and not waste our money doing something stupid.

So the plasterer is coming in to redo the bathroom ceiling and the second floor hallways ceiling and fix other little things.

THEN the carpenter is coming in to replace the sub-floor floor in the bathroom, and then I lay a new floor down that I bought at Carmello's Flooring and Carpets.

Then I have to get new curtains for the dining room.  The agent did suggest that, that's my thing.   The agent said if she were to list our house that she would have us remove all the window coverings a la HGTV.  Yeah, right.  Like I want to live my life in front of my neighbors, many of which are already living their lives in front of bare windows at this moment.

Don't believe me?

Well, "Cash Position Gary" (who is always predicating his spending habits on cars and European appliances by saying "I'm in a cash position to ...") is, at this moment banging his boyfriend in their bed which sits in front of a double window over looking the street.  And he's really pounding it to him.  I can't see it. How do I know this?  Because Hairy Sandy is banging on the door of his house screaming at the top her lungs.  That I can see, and she only does it when Gary is banging his boyfriend, which Sandy can see from her house.  And as a "womyn" who eschews contact with men, it takes something mighty big to get her womynself to cross the street and have anything to do with a man.

Oh, wait, Gary's opening his door. I wonder if she knew he was coming?

Now Sandy is doing her version of the Chicken dance by flapping her arms while she's screaming at him.

He must have closed the door because she's stomping across the street and going home.  Now she's throwing a snowball at the house, now she's going home.

Well, then.  Unless she goes for her gun, I'm going curtain shopping. 

Have a great day darlings!

Thombeau has a NEW blog!

The ever handsome, entertaining and creative Thombeau has tapped in the collective television zeitgeist and launched a new blog, The Redundent Variety Hour, an homage to those hour long talent showcases that have gone extinct in this age of more channels and less variety.

I note that he features Columbus, Ohio's own Nancy Wilson covering  Etta Jones classic Don't Go to Strangers:






And for your consideration, Her's Etta's version, which is one of my all time favorite songs:

The right eye has met the enemy and it is the left eye.

Never trust shifty eyes.

So, now I can see out of both eyes.  This is creating a problem.

My right eye, the eye I had been relying on, is my dominant eye.  I've used it almost exclusively for the past five or so years while the cataract in the left eye rendered it useless.  The surgery last week took care of the left eye. 

So my left eye is pretty much healed and it has discovered that it very much enjoys seeing the world, and I enjoy seeing out of it because it is CLEAR.

The right eye - old reliable - has a cataract as well as it's vision (near sighted and astigmatism) issues.  It resents the interloper.

The left eye, now wants to do everything, but the right eye is in cahoots with my brain and my brain liked the old set up because it is familiar.

The icing on this cake is that my glasses are only good for driving.

Then there is the issue of color.

When I look at something white through left eye, it's white.  When I look at something white through the right eye, its, well, beige, which is a sign of a cataract.   When I look through both, they fight for dominance.

Now, take this picture of a man that I found on my porch roof outside my home office this afternoon:

The man is my husband, and trust me when I say this - I love looking at him no matter what.  Still, the image on the left is what I see in my left eye, the image on the right is very close to what I see through the right eye. 

The eye's also fight when it comes to how far away I hold things when I read.   My right eye wants the paper (or screen) right in front - like three inches from the tip of my nose, a la Mr. Magoo.  My left eye would like things a leisurely foot or so up to about two feet away, thank you very much.   The brain, which is behaving like a child in a divorce custody battle is trying to make both sides happy.  And me, I'm getting a headache.

The eye doctor said it would take a couple weeks for my brain to figure this out.  I'm good with that.  Still, it's an interesting process or "unlearning". 

Tomorrow is my third doctor appointment in the past week, and one of the things we are talking about is getting my right eye done in February so both eyes are in balance.

If that comes to fruition, then this battle royal will continue until about the third week of March - when both eyes are healed enough to get a good pair of progressive lenses so I don't have to do battle with outmoded glasses

And that means a trip to see Missy, my optometrist's wife.  And Missy understands that me looking for glasses is a lot like when women shop for the perfect paif of red shoes. 

So if you see a man putting on and taking off his glasses, squinting and trying to read at various levels in the next six weeks or so, that would be yours truly.  Do say "Hello".

If it is not me, well then you have a perfectly good excuse for getting out of a delicate situation.

If you think about it, they're right.

Headline writing is an art

Is that what he is calling it?  Some of us call it "shit".

Where did Romney lead Paul?   I hate to think about anything surging from Santorum.



Catholic Online finally comes to an agreement with Dan Savage on the real meaning of "Santorium".

I can see clearly now, the cataract is gone, now.

Well, had my surgery at 8AM - a climate issue in the OR slowed down everything.  My left eye is now functioning and I can see out of it for the first time in several years.

Spent more time in prep than anything.  They make you wash your face.  They ask you several times what eye they are doing the procedure on, even though that have marked your face.   They make you wear those unfashionable head OP caps.

To be honest, it felt like a couple minutes and *POOF*, done.  Husband got to watch the whole thing on a giant TV.

The worst part of the thing is the clamps that they crank you eye open with.  They pinched. 

After the procedure they inject some type of anti-biotic into your eye that is a milky white color, so I was one eyed Dick for about eight hours, but everything has worn off and I am seeing through the eye great.

Because that left eye was out of commission for so long, and it was such a slow process, I now have to get used to seeing something clearly from BOTH eyes at the same moment, so I have to mentally tell my right eye to kinda relax a bit and left the left eye do its fair share.

You never realize what you are missing in life until someone or something opens your eyes. 

Guess what's happening to me right at this moment?

If you guessed cataract surgery, you guess right.  After this procedure, I will no longer be dead eye Dick, so to speak.  The left eye was getting so bad that I was just pretty miserable all of the time and on foggy days, I couldn't leave the house because the weather made the vision in the left eye completely stinko.

Because I can't get both eyes done, I couldn't get the flexi-lenses that would correct my eyes to better than new condition.  I had to go with a fixed lens that will take my eye from -4.00 (with a bad astigmatism) to
-2.00 and no astigmatism.  We had to go this route so when I take my glasses off I can still function.  (Evidently people's sense of balance is affected one on eye is off by more than 3 diopters.

The doctor says that after the surgery I will be seeing clearly from both eyes in about two weeks.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that that until the left eye settles in, I can't order a new lens for my glasses, so I'll look a bit odd with one lens in and one lens out.

Until then, I'll be doing a lot of winking.

Seldom heard round the seashore these days...

(Special thanks to William Dimitroff for the prosaic dialog)

 

The winds of change are a blowing, or My Resolutions

Well, after yesterday's shocking news, Mother nature and the gods, and God for that matter are sending us a clear message today - the winds of change are a BLOWING!

Some of the gusts that came in with this weather front have been so harsh that Cookie Manor has shuttered from their brutality, and the fierce desire to sweep out the old and bring in the new.

We're hoping that its a metaphore for the year to come.

That said, I am sharing with you my Resolutions for 2012, because if you aren't growing, you are dying.

1) In 2012 I will become a Certified Genealogist.  Its what I love doing, and I could get paid for it, so why not?
2) Change my outlook in life. 
3) Try and suffer fools with a bit more compassion. 
4) Bite my tongue and count to ten before I go all Julia Sugarbacker on someone.
5) See things more clearly - step one of which I will undertake this week.
6) Travel more. 
7) Make plans for the future.  None of this living in the moment crap.  It gets me nothing and I have nothing to show for it.
8) By fewer lottery tickets.
9) Find someone else in the family to take over this family farm accounting that I do.
10) Get out of the credit union industry once, and for all.
11) Go to California for a certain wedding, and then have dinner with Felix and Donna.
and the most difficult one of all...
12) Try to see that my cousin Ellen's husband is good because he makes her happy, and the not as consumate asshole that he behaves like.

What resolutions do you care to share?