Cleolinda everywhere

I won't get too deeply into this for the sake of my neighbor and her privacy, but yesterday afternoon, we had three police cars, two fire trucks, and an ambulance at the house across the street. I saw a couple of cops come out toting two different tackle-style boxes; the ambulance casually left without turning on the siren. Two cops stood on the front porch talking for a while, and one of them was on a phone or radio at a certain point. When all three cops left and got into one of their cars, I swear I heard one of them chuckle, so it couldn't have been anything too dire. I know I sound like your stereotypically awful nosy neighbor, but the neighbor's daughter was a couple of years younger than me, we had university classes together, and apparently the neighbor has an abusive ex. I still have no idea what yesterday in particular was about, but the ex hassled my parents about trash collection, of all things, and then went back and told her, "They'll hate you now." So he's tried to use harassment as a way to bully her... but she told my parents what was going on, so it didn't actually work. My point is, I wouldn't be surprised if the ex had called in some kind of false tip and sent all the emergency services of Homewood over there.

Today, it was our turn. ( Read more... )

Just wanted to poke my head out and assure y'all that I am, in fact, alive. For some reason, I have just been really drained and listless the last several weeks, and so... something. I don't know. I'm tired. For no good reason. Not necessarily sad; pretty good mood today. EXCEPT FOR the constant banging and hammering that was coming from somewhere behind our house, but I couldn't see anything through the trees, and it wasn't actually hammering for the first hour, it sounded more like God popping really, really big bubble wrap, and then five hours of hammering kicked in, and right about the time the phrase "Blair Witch Construction Project" got thrown around, I finally spied roofers through the foliage. Oh. Roof repairs. On the house behind us. Great. I'm sure that won't take most of the week or anything.

None of this explains the frequent cries of "Whoo!" and "Wheeeee!," though. At least someone was having some fun.


ETA: OH OH OH also you should see this.

Good news: getting a lot of writing done. Bad news: the last slat fell out of my bed late last night and I had to sleep, for inferior values of "sleep," on the couch. Explanation of bad news: I have an old hand-me-down queen-sized bed (it has appeared in Secret Life pictures a couple of times) that I ended up with after my mother and stepfather got married and merged their furniture. It's great and all, but it has only three, loosely-fitting wooden slats beneath the box spring; they tend to shift diagonally over time until one falls out and onto the floor. Well, me being a lazy cuss, I was like, "What? There's some boxes under the bed, it'll hold." Because wrestling with the various slabs of mattress on that bed is a two-person job, and wahhhhh I don't wanna. Well, here we are seven months later: I'm sleeping on two fallen slats, a packing box, four piles of old magazines and a precariously sunken mattress. Because I rock it classy like that. And then the other shoe--or slat, rather--dropped. Which wouldn't even have stopped me except that the bed was severely tilted towards the headboard and shuddered weirdly when I sat on it. So the couch it was.

I did not sleep very well, is what I'm saying.




Which is pretty much what the couch looked like by the time the dogs had finished piling onto me.

Meanwhile, longtime reader spectralbovine writes,

I'm raising money for 826 Valencia, which provides writing workshops for students from elementary school through high school as well as resources for teachers. They offer one-on-one tutoring for everything from fiction to college application essays. They even publish their work in books, which does wonders for their self-esteem and confidence. They also run the pirate store in the Mission, and I try to support them when I can because I believe in their mission to promote the literary arrrrrrts.

On February 17, 826 Valencia is hosting a Spelling Bee for Cheaters. I am on a fundraising team of LIBRARIANS (Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe), and the more money we raise as a team, the more we can cheat in order to beat such luminaries as Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon and the inimitable Lemony Snicket, not to mention Adam Savage from Mythbusters, John Vanderslice, and Tracy Chapman. Of course, the real reason we're raising money is to benefit the children. Every little bit, from $1 to $100, helps keep these programs free for students. It's a great organization and a fun fundraiser that I think would be relevant to your readership! I'm trying to raise $5,000, and I think I can pull it off with everyone's help. Here's my donation page. Thanks!

While you consider this, I have to go assist my mother. She's now under the bed with a hammer. "Your job," she says, "is to call for help."


ETA WTF:

@cleolinda: I just found a bottle of 1995 cabernet sauvignon under my bed. I HAVE NO IDEA.

( There's wine under my bed and you're invited! )

So all the snow was supposed to come yesterday, and it was nice and swirly but the temperature was above freezing so it didn't stick, and it was kind of lame and nothing really happened.

Then I looked up from my computer this morning sometime after 8 am, and we've got a minor blizzard going.

Snowfari 2010, featuring Scout and Shelby:

( Read more... )

So last night we finally decorated the tree that we got last weekend--the first thing you have to understand is that Christmas is a BIG THING in my family. Not in a religious sense--in a We Are Going to Decorate the SHIT Out of This House sense, and I love it. Of course, I loved it double-plus verygood when my mother opened a bottle of wine ("@cleolinda: Bottle of wine WOOOOOOOO"). I sucked down two glasses before she'd even made a dent in one ("@cleolinda: Second glass of wine WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"). Y'all, I need to drink every night. For real.

But before we get to the picspam, I will relay unto you a story Sister Girl told while she and her friend J. and I were in the kitchen afterwards: "YOU HAVE TO BLOG ABOUT THIS." (J.: "You haven't told her this yet? Oh, you gotta tell her this.") This past Monday, Sister Girl was minding her own business, working at Panera, you see, walking behind the registers carrying whatever it was wherever she was going-- ( The best book title Robert Ludlum never came up with )

Moving on! A Tannenbaum picspam expanded from LIVE ON THE SCENE Twitter posts last night:




( Read more... )


(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

So my stepfather's family is having a 75th family reunion or something, I don't even know--they are very big on the reunions--and we're now hosting a dinner (more of a grill-out, really) the first week of August as part of the festivities. Originally about ten or twelve people were going to come, but now we're looking at thirty-one, and my mother is PANICKED. My parents are having to do a lot of stuff to the house, partly because our house is just a money pit like that,* but mostly because the dogs wrought hell on it the year they were puppies. So we're having to replace the den carpet (the dogs chewed it up), the kitchen wallpaper (the dogs chewed it up), the slatted door into the foyer (third verse, same as the first), and the ferns the squirrels ate (variety!). Also, we've already resodded the little backyard (again: dogs) and replaced the gardenia and camellia bushes they wrecked (the dogs used to run run run run runnnn around them in tight little circles, and then, when they were done, pass out and nap against them) with azaleas (MY PRETTY SCENTED FLOWERS NOOOOOOOOOOO). And, of course, the Angry Jasmine, which has been buzzcut twice and only come back wrathier, and the yellowjacket nest within that had to be zapped. Oh, and the countertop in the kitchen has a huge crack in it for some reason, and one of the burners on the stove died, so we're replacing both of those (hence the helpful delivery guy with the dishwasher advice). My stepfather's out back sanding out the claw scratches on that slatted door and repainting it, and my mother and I just got back from buying incidentals at Wal-mart--extra pans for the banana pudding, foil pans to keep fifty hamburgers warm in the oven, a few wooden folding table-trays, new towels for the hall bathroom...

* Did I ever tell you that we recently found wadded up newspaper instead of insulation in the house walls? Yeah. I remember when this street was being developed and the houses were being built--my best friend at the time moved here--and apparently our neighbor's ex-husband cut all damn kinds of corners. There's a reason he's her ex now, let's put it that way. God bless this house, I love it to death, but we've had to redo it by brick and stick over the last eight years.

And then... we went to Hobby Lobby. Mom needed to replace some of the raggedy silk flowers by the front door. My God. That is one of the most dangerous, terrifying places I have ever been. We wanted to buy everything. I wanted to start doing crafts I had previously not even known existed. All I needed was craft-safe sealant/varnish and some cheap paintbrushes to improve the sparkle* of a certain vampirus scintilla minimus; I was very good and only splurged additionally on some Glue Dots, but I had to be forcibly removed from the doll furniture aisle if we were ever going to get home. In theory, my mother only needed silk flowers and artificial moss for the artificial tree** (guess who tore up the old moss). That... is not what she left with. All I know is, I hope my stepfather likes $10 Murano glass giraffes, because we've got some now.

* As a point of ever-so-little interest, here's what the previous Secret Life installment looked like before our sparkle got rained out (I never actually tried to take the pictures described). Honestly, I think the version posted turned out better, but there's a nice mental image that got left behind.

** Every single time I pass the fake tree, I make sure to greet it à la Wahlberg. "Hey, tree... you're looking good. You been working out? Say hi to your mother for me."

Meanwhile, I tried the new full 200 mg Lamictal dose on Wednesday. Mid-afternoon, I suddenly felt like crying. Not a good sign. Sounds like it's time to start cutting the pills to get some approximation of a 175 mg compromise--which I hate, because you lose some of the dose what with the crumbling and all. Maybe I'll just cut a bit of the end off (it's a diamond-shaped pill) and call it a day. Right now, though, I've gone back to my normal 150, because I've got something that has to be finished ASAP and I don't have time for this crying shit. On the other hand, I've been feeling a bit manic, which can't be good either. Maybe it's just the panicked OMG REFURBISH energy in the house right now, I don't know.

You know what happens when you cut my jasmine back too far?





THE JASMINE GETS ANGRY.

Hey guys, let's play a game! It's called "What the SHIT Is This THING I Found Growing In Our Camellias?" It's over three feet tall, "make a circle with your thumb and index finger" thick at the bottom of the stem, and it came out of NOWHERE. Seriously, I went outside and it was just THERE, it might have sprung up overnight, I don't even know. What the hell is it?





ETA: Hm. I'm liking pokeweed as an ID. Apparently it's a bitch to kill (like most random plants that spring up out of nowhere)--we've never had it before, though, which means that we are now INFECTED with it. Alas.

As threatened promised. And yeah, it did make me feel a little better.





( Dogs included )

The rest of the pictures are under the "march2009" tag; I won't burden you with them here. There's a few pictures of my cat and random things around the house, nothing terribly exciting. Although our faux-French clock is nice.

Fact: February is the beginning of spring in Alabama.

Evidence: Pictures I took in my backyard earlier this week. ( Spring has sprung )

Bonus: Sunday morning at the Jones house. Apparently my dogs went on a bender last night or something. And now you know why Shelby's nickname is Right-Angle Dog.