Coracabana

The one where Froot Loops and feelings fly!

2012-01-30T06:00:00.001-06:00

Hiya, Blogaritaville!

I have a few more pictures to share with you from my second attempt at Project 365. First though, I must admit I am enjoying the project a whole lot more this time around. Maybe it’s because I have a better camera now. Or maybe it’s all the fancy lenses my new camera has. Or maybe I’m just feeling a little more adventurous with my picture taking. I dunno. Whatever the reason, I’m finding that this time Project 365 is much more fun. So, wheeeeeeee!

Day 24 (2012-01-24) ~ Hey, looky! A levitating Froot Loop! Sa-weet!

Day 25 (2012-01-25) ~ Bits and pieces. I got the inspiration for this picture during a phone call with my lawyer. Yes, we are STILL caught in the ugly court war between my wonderful, beautiful daughter, Wednesday, and her needlessly cruel, abusive father who often seems to exist solely to break the poor, undeserving girl into a million bits and pieces, as if destroying her is nothing but a game. Bits and pieces. This is what that sadistic man reduces my sunny child to. And I rebuild her over and over again, just looking forward to the day that he can no longer break her.

Day 26 (2012-01-26) ~ Strawberry Shortcake was my favorite toy when I was a kid. I had dozens of Strawberry Shortcake Dolls and my room smelled just like a bakery. Mmmmmmm! When I was 17, I sold them all in a garage sale and regretted it ever since. (Perhaps that's why the Jessie being given away to the Goodwill scene in Toy Story 2 KILLS me every time I see it. *sniffle*) The past few years I have slowly been rebuilding my old collection on eBay. The collection is almost complete again!

Day 27 (2012-01-27) ~ The court case against my emotionally/verbally abusive ex was on my mind an awful lot last week, as I’m sure you can tell. With this picture I wanted to show how powerful the sound of words can be. Especially cruel words coming from a parent and dropping like stones onto a child. Words can hurt. Words can destroy. This isn't the sort of picture I typically take. I found it utterly emotionally exhausting creating this picture, but I'm reasonably pleased with how it turned out. The words and phrases I put on the picture are actual things my ex has said repeatedly to my poor daughter. He has claimed he does it to “improve her”, but all he succeeds in doing is crushing her to a fine paste and making her feel like she is worth utterly nothing. When I look at this photo, I am reminded what Scope, Wednesday, and I are fighting against and how, no matter the cost, it is worth every cent!

If they will allow me to show that picture in court, I will. I think it tells Wednesday’s side of the situation much more effectively than anything we could possibly say. Absolutely.

Update on Project 365: Day 20 through Day 23

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000-06:00

Day 20 (2012-01-20) ~ Space: The final frontier! I wanted to try my hand again at yesterday's experiment with water, oil and food coloring. I love how this one turned out, all dark and Sci-Fi-looking!

Day 21 (2012-01-21) ~ How icicles form in the windy city.

Day 22 (2012-01-22) ~ I was out walking around the alleyways taking more pictures of icicles today when I noticed this tangle of barbed wire silhouetted against the cloudy white sky. What would you think this barbed wire mess is protecting, hmm?.... A bank?.... A gun shop?.... A jail?.... Nope. It's protecting a BAKERY, of all places! Ha!

Day 23 (2012-01-23) ~ This was a tricky attempt at the bokeh effect which didn't turn out quite as I was hoping for. I couldn't get the lighting on the cup quite the way I wanted it and I don't think I had the cup as far away from the string of lights in the background as I should have. I tried to adjust the poor lighting in Photo Shop, but still wasn't liking any of the results.... until I inverted the image. Wow! I actually gasped when I saw it like this! I still want to re-shoot the original setup in another location where I can better control the lighting, but until then this will do juuuuuuust fine. :-)

More will be served up sooooooooooon!

Project 365: And so it begins…. (Again.)

2012-01-20T06:00:00.001-06:00

I attempted Project 365 once a couple years ago, but I heartlessly abandoned it when life got too chaotic to care about taking a picture every day. This year I am trying it again—only differently.

I am adjusting the rules a little bit, making it more user-friendly. This time, if I eff it up and forget to take a picture for a day or two will the whole project be dead to me and ditched like a dirty diaper because it’s hopelessly ruined? Hell no! This time if life gets in the way and I forget to do a photo—*light bulb moment*—I’ll just take two the next day.

(I don’t know why I didn’t think of that last time—duh.)

(And, please, I’ve already had to bend the rules twice in the last 19 days, so I think I can say with confidence that making it user-friendly is a nifty plan.)

(Clearly.)

(Ahem.)

And, hey, it’s not like the Project 365 Fairies are going to go postal if I contort the rules a wee little bit, right? I mean, really, I’m pretty sure they have bigger things to worry about…. like the fact that there are 366 days this year, not 365. (D’oh!)

Anyway, here is what I have accomplished in this year’s Project 365 so far.

DAY 1 (2012-01-01) ~ Visiting Seattle for the holidays. I had forgotten how thick the moss is out there. The trees all looked like Oscar the Grouch!

DAY 2 (2012-01-02) ~ My friend Callista's uber-cute dog.

DAY 3 (2012-01-03) ~ I found this on a wall near the Pike Place Market in Seattle. Bizarre. I have no words.

DAY 4 (2012-01-04) ~ Okay. Fine. I cheated, okay? I forgot to take a picture on January 4 because I was busy with family stuff (Bad Cora! Bad!) So, I'm posting a second picture from January 3 to make up for it. It's the Gum Wall in Seattle.

DAY 5 (2012-01-05) ~ Taking a walk around Gene Coulon Park in Renton, WA.

DAY 6 (2012-01-06) ~ Again, call me a cheater. I was too busy to do a picture on Januray 6 (read: family stuff) so I'm posting a second picture from the 5th in its place. This was taken on my walk around Gene Coulon Park in Renton, WA.

DAY 7 (2012-01-07) ~ Flying home to Chicago. This was the view of Washington from above. Soooooooooo beautiful!

DAY 8 (2012-01-08) ~ A strange, wavy building in Chicago.

DAY 9 (2012-01-09) ~ The sunrise at Welles Park in Chicago.

DAY 10 (2012-01-10) ~ Mmmmmmmmm.

DAY 11 (2012-01-11) ~ My first bokeh attempt using Christmas tree lights. I'm not sure if it qualifies as good bokeh or not, but I kind of like it.

DAY 12 (2012-01-12) ~ Winter has FINALLY arrived in Chicago!

DAY 13 (2012-01-13) ~ A snowy day in the garden.

DAY 14 (2012-01-14) ~ Snow, snow, snow.

DAY 15 (2012-01-15) ~ Another bokeh attempt with Christmas tree lights.

DAY 16 (2012-01-16) ~ An adorable little birdhouse in the snow.

DAY 17 (2012-01-17) ~ My precious.

DAY 18 (2012-01-18) ~ Painting with an LED flashlight.

DAY 19 (2012-01-19) ~ What it looks like when you combine oil, water and food coloring all in one bowl. CooOOooOOool!

And that is what I have so far. Now that we are all caught up, I (hopefully!) will be posting my Project 365 pictures on a more regular basis in smaller posts. I will be using different cameras and trying different things. Some will be good, some won’t, but I hope you enjoy the journey with me.

Like a bewildered, cranky groundhog being yanked from its den, I am emerging from The Holidaze. Hi, how ya doin’?

2012-01-19T17:02:00.000-06:00

Alrighty, let’s just jump right in here. Our Christmases were fantastic, yet mind-bogglingly busy and time-sucking. Frankly, I’m still disoriented and wandering ditzily around in a blind, stupid stupor from it all. I’m going to assume you are too.

And, yes, I said Christmases.

Christmas #1 was spent with Scope’s parents in Kewanee, IL, where we channeled our inner Guy Fieri and played Minute To Win It (Scope’s sister’s idea) and, among other impossible hijinks, attempted to migrate Oreo’s from our foreheads into our mouths using only our facial muscles.

(Not easy, people. Not. Easy.)

(That’s Scope’s sister and nephew pictured above, by the way. *snicker*)

Christmas #2 was just the three of us in our home in Chicago, where my hubby gave me a fragment of Voldemort’s soul (aka a horcrux locket) that I had been eyeing for many a moon (wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!!) and Santa visited and noshed himself into an uncomfortable food coma on all the candy-ified cookies we baked for him.

And Christmas #3 was with my family back in Seattle, where we visited the Pike Place Market, left our grody mark on the Gum Wall, hung out with Callista, and celebrated New Year’s Eve AND Christmas all in one night. *whew!*

(Oh! And we succeeded in accidentally royally pissing off my dad. But that’s a story for another day.)

Of course, Fernando Von Bakonstein was with us the entire time and he enjoyed himself, having lunch with Wednesday and my nephew….

….and having a kick ass throw down with Simon from The Chipmunks….

….and hobnobbing with other porcine folk he met in the Pike Place Market….

….and slurping hot chocolate at Seattle’s Best Coffee….

….and, most especially, making faces with Wednesday at poor Scope as he slept on the flight back home.

(Tee hee hee.)

So far 2012 has been little more than a blur, honestly. (It’s the 19th already?! Really?!) I went whole hog and made several resolutions, instead of just one, which I intend to keep this year. My resolutions?:

1. To Eat Healthier Foods. So far so good on that effort! In fact, in the past 19 days I have not only tolerated oatmeal every morning (which I have utterly loathed my entire existence) but I have actually grown to love the stuff. I know! What the hell, right?! Me liking mushy slop?! No way! But—taa-daa!—it’s happened.

2. To Build Muscle Mass. I have been trying and failing to lose weight since moving to Chicago a year and a half ago. After beating myself up over it all this time, I finally realized what the problem probably is: loss of muscle mass. Back in Seattle I was a nanny, hoisting hefty kids around every day. Sure, it was murder on my back, but it was great for my ass! So, this year, I vow to get strong again. In fact, I filled a suitcase full of hardback books which I have been working out with and toting around almost daily. *whew!* A stronger Cora is in the making! (And hopefully a stronger Cora will fit back into all of Nanny Cora’s cute, teeny former clothes. *fingers crossed*)

3. To Speak The Truth And Not Sugar Coat Things In A Misguided Effort To Try To Keep The Assholes, Scumbags, and Jerks Of The World Calm. This doormat is done playing nicely now. *pounding my fist into my hand*

4. To Take A Picture Each And Every Day In My Second Attempt At Project 365. You may recall I attempted Project 365 back in 2009/2010, but I abandoned it because life got too crazy what with my tonsillectomy, the wedding, and the cross-country move. With everything that was going on, taking a daily picture just fell right off of my list of priorities. I kind of regret that though. I wish I had kept the project up because I would love to have photos documenting my old Seattle house going from bustling home to bare rooms filled with packing boxes, but the sad fact is that I didn’t do it. I felt like I didn’t have time to take a picture every day. (But, really, how much time would it have taken?) Of course, there will be days I screw up and forget to do a picture, inevitably, but when that happens this time I won’t just drop the whole project and walk away, I’ll just take two pictures the next day to even it all out. (See? Thinking!) So far it’s been going splendiferously! I will be posting the project’s pictures here starting with my next post. I hope you guys enjoy seeing them as much as I’m loving taking them.

5. To Get My Bloggy Groove Back And Blog More Often. I figure Project 365 will help with that, right? :-)

So, anyway, Happy New Year!

Up next: Project 365. Stay tuned!

Do I smell cake?!

2011-12-22T06:17:00.000-06:00

Happy Birthday to the World’s BEST husband and father, Scope! Wednesday and I love you so very, very much, hubba hubba hubby!

Two words: YOU ROCK!!!!

It’s beginning to look a lot like…. well, you know.

2011-12-21T10:17:00.000-06:00

So, my calendar keeps telling me that Christmas is this weekend. Yeah. THIS. WEEKEND. What the hell?! Stupid lying piece of crap, there’s NO WAY that can be right! Right?

R-r-right?

*dazed and crazy-eyed stare*

I simply don’t see how Christmas can be here already. I swear it was just Halloween. Hell, I still have the callous on my finger from sewing our costumes in October, so it can’t be December already. It CAN’T. It just doesn’t add up. I refuse to believe it.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

And yet….

There are trees with twinkly lights in our dining room (yes, TREES—plural—just roll with it), a bulging pile of presents on our floor, stockings hung by our fireplace, and Christmas cards lurking in our mailbox every time I dare to peek inside. Christmas cards like this one….

Isn’t that AWESOME???? It was sent to us from the spectacular Vegetable Assassin and we all busted out in giggles when we saw it. Wednesday is already plotting evil plans to steal it for her sprawling Tim Burton collection, of course.

BUT NOT IF I STEAL IT FIRST!!!!

(Thank you, Veggie!)

Wednesday, Scope and I have been enjoying Christmas in Chicago, even though it is just a thousand shades of wrong that Christmas is here already. A couple of weekends ago, we went downtown to lap up all the in-your-face holiday-osity lurking there. We went to Macy’s….

….where we bought what we thought was chocolate fudge….

….and we were blissful. Until we opened it and realized it was mint.

Dammit.

Mint is Wednesday’s culinary nemesis. It even outranks the unbridled terror which is tomatoes on her list of Foods So Nasty They Prove God Does Not Exist, but only because mint can be a tricky little shape-shifting bastard. Sometimes you don’t even know mint is there until it’s too late! Diabolical is what it is. Wednesday loathes mint in all its many forms and disguises, of course—but especially deceptively delicious-looking chocolate-fudgy ones, which are just SOOOOOO unfair and wrong. So, curse you, Macy’s, for your inadequate fudge labels!

Mint: 1 Wednesday: 0

After Macy’s, we went to the Disney Store where we watched their unintentionally hilarious opening ceremony (I’ll let my hubba hubba hubby tell you that tale of stupidity HERE) and where I felt tall (for once!) inside the princess castle.

Yes, quite tall indeed.

Next, we crossed the street to the Christkindlmarket, which is like a little old fashioned Christmasy German village in the shadows of the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, where they were advertising free photos with Santa.

FREE?!

My inner penny-pinching cheapskate did cartwheels! So, we got in line to see Santa.

The line looks long in that picture, but it moved quickly and it was about a third as long as the line to see Santa inside Macy’s. We played 20 Questions while we waited. And we laughed at the butt-ugly tree the city put up on display.

(Really, Chicago? Really? That’s the best tree you could find?! Pitiful.)

The Santa setup was really cute and the picture turned out great….

….but, unfortunately, the resolution is really low. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to print a decent 4x6 of it whenever I get around to updating my old school non-digital photo albums.

*sniffle*

So, maybe sometimes a free price tag isn’t the best deal after all. Bummer. Then again….

After Santa we went to the Lincoln Park Zoo (which was also free!) and took care of phase one of a school biology project Wednesday had been assigned.

She had to find five animals which live outside in the zoo during the winter. We found sea lions….

….and a Siberian Tiger….

….and European White Storks….

….and an African Wild Dog….

….and an Amur Leopard….

….and a few others. Then the sun went down and and all the animals went to bed. Shhhhhhh….

And while the zoo inhabitants snoozed, we got to run amok and enjoy the Zoo Lights in the dark, which was a pretty impressive display….

But, best of all, at Zoo Lights Wednesday got a brownie which was NOT mint flavored and then—POOF!—all was right with the world again….

Mint: 1 Wednesday: 64 billion

Why I have had ABBA perpetually stuck in my head for three months.

2011-12-08T11:42:00.001-06:00

*sigh*

I know. I deserve a Crappy Blogger Award. Or a slap on the hand. Or, at the very least, a stern glare and a murmured ‘you suck’.

I feel the shame.

I haven’t really been participating much in Blogaritaville lately. There’s no single big, bad, burly reason to ~~blame it all on~~ explain it. More like a steady stream of distractions—SQUIRREL!—which have kept me preoccupied: I’ve been feverishly job hunting, selling things on eBay, Christmas/birthday shopping, and attempting to write this year’s Christmas Letter completely in rhyme like ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.

It’s a bit surprising how time-consuming those activities can be. I mean, you try rhyming ‘man, court is expensive’ and ‘don’t you EVER hurt my kid again, you jerkface rat bastard’ and make it sound jolly and shit. It takes some thinking, people.

However, the guilt and shame of ignoring you all has finally gotten to me, so, dammit, let’s blog!

Yesterday was a BIG day here in Chicago. Even if I hadn’t been paying attention to the news, I still would have known Rod Blagojevich was wearing the dunce cap again.

I can always tell.

How? Well, I live in Blaggy’s neighborhood and whenever the Governor Gone Bad is having a bad day, helicopters swarm over my house. Yesterday morning there were at least four helicopters hovering overhead waiting for Blaggy to leave his home and head to court for sentencing. This was the view from my deck.

The noise was utterly obnoxious. It sounded like the sky was full of pissed off bees. I decided to take a stroll down the street to see how big the media circus was outside of Blaggy’s house, because how often do you get to see news crews camped out on your neighbor’s front lawn, right?

(Hopefully, not too often.)

There were reporters everywhere. The street was clogged with parked cars and vans. I stood across the street from the mob just kind of taking it all in. I started snapping pictures of the crowd as they waited for Blaggy to appear, when suddenly there he was!

Blaggy and his wife emerged from their house to go to court and I realized—WOAH!—that I was taking pictures of them.

(And, yes, his hair is even MORE ridiculous in person.)

Once Blaggy got into his car, the crowd swarmed around it trying to get pictures of him through the windows.

Then off the ex-governor went to court where he found out he has been sentenced to fourteen years behind bars for being an asshat. Ouch.

And that, my friends, is how I became an accidental paparazzo. I had no idea I would be seeing and snapping pictures of Rod Blagojevich on his way to court! I had only planned on scoping out the media frenzy, not actually participating in it. Whoopsie.

Other news from around here lately? Well….

Our Halloween costumes turned out pretty badass. Wednesday was Catwoman, I was Poison Ivy, and Scope was a Rastafarian.

(And, yes, Wednesday and I sewed every silver stitch on her costume by hand—and I still have the callous to prove it.)

We spent our Thanksgiving visiting Scope’s family where Wednesday and Scope pulled the wishbone and Wednesday won.

But Wednesday’s most favorite Thanksgiving Day moment was seeing the brand new Tim Burton balloon in the Macy’s Parade!

(She still squeals when she thinks about it!)

Most sadly, one of our little pet frogs, Kermit, died unexpectedly. We don’t know what went wrong. He was swimming happily in his tank one minute, then flat on his back then next. Wednesday and I are completely heartbroken and we miss him very much. I’m just glad we managed to move the little frogs from Seattle to Chicago over the summer, so Kermit could spend his last couple of months with us. I know that means a lot to Wednesday that she got to have that time with him here.

We had a funeral for him. Wednesday picked out a planter that looks like water and a plant that looks like lily pads, then we buried Kermit beside the plant and she wrote his name on a heart-shaped rock.

*sniffle*

And, last but not least, we have been playing bloggy hosts to Blogaritaville’s travelling porcine pal, Fernando Von Bakonstein!

Fernando used to hang out at The International House of Blogcakes (RIP) and has spent the last couple of years travelling around Blogaritaville, visiting his blog buddies. He came to us from our good friend Skyler’s Dad and we have been taking Fernando everywhere around Chicago and showing him a good time.

Hell, we even took Fernando to “The Hog Capital of the World”!!!!

We have been GREAT hosts…. but crappy bloggers. We just haven’t gotten around to writing about our adventures with Fernando Von Bakonstein. Yet. However, REAL Fernando posts are in the works and I will be serving them up for you soon, swearsies!

Until then, please sit back and ~~suffer through~~ enjoy the song that has been chronically and mercilessly stuck in my head ever since Fernando arrived on our doorstep: ABBA - “Fernando”.

(SOMEONE HELP ME!!!! I BEG YOU!!!!)

The seven year bitch.

2011-11-18T09:03:00.000-06:00

“How’s it hanging, Death?”

Seven years ago today I beat death.

It went down kinda like this.

:-)

Oh, yeah? Well, I’m a BLOGGER, lady. Maybe you should have thought of THAT before you decided to be an assface.

2011-11-07T12:06:00.001-06:00

For a long, long time I worked in the customer service sector of society, schlepping clothes, toys, ice cream cones and family portraits to the masses. Yeah, customer service jobs are usually tiresome and the pay is horrible, we all know that. But there are far worse things one can do to pay the rent.

Like styling Justin Bieber’s hair.

*shudder*

Working in customer service is how I paid my way through college. I’m high energy, I like people, and I smile a lot, so I was really, REALLY good at my job. Perhaps that is why I get so PSYCHOBITCH ENRAGED when I am the victim of bad customer service.

As a customer, I don’t ask for much. I’m never picky. And unless the cashier coughs on my change before handing it to me (yes, that really happened!) or juggles my maxi-pads before putting them in the bag (yes, that also really happened!) (????) then I’m usually understanding and compassionate. I know what it’s like to be short-staffed, exhausted, and to have a hundred people wanting things from you all at once. I don’t mind waiting my turn. I’m patient. I get it. Completely.

However, when I have a run-in with a customer service representative who just simply does not give an effing fuck, it gets right under my skin.

And festers there.

Forever.

But, sadly, besides complaining to the offender’s boss like a whiny little girl and/or boycotting the offending business like a grumpy old man and/or bitching about the whole thing to your confused relatives in your annual Christmas letter like wacko nutjob, there isn’t really much else you can do when you receive bad customer service.

:-(

Unless you’re a blogger.

:-)

If you’re a blogger, well, then you can blog about it. You can vent and tell your story to dozens (!!) or hundreds (!!!) OR EVEN THOUSANDS (!!!!) OF PEOPLE!!!!

(In this case, it will be dozens.)

(Shut up.)

Will it change the world? No. But if telling my tale stops the same thing from happening to someone else, then I’ll be satisfied. Thus, I’m starting a new series here on Coracabana called Bad Service Bulletin Board to shine the light of shame on customer service reps who need to get their heads out of their asses.

Our first entry on The Bad Service Bulletin Board is Farmers Insurance.

I have had Farmers Auto Insurance on my various cars for…. ohhhhhh…. roughly 21 years. (That’s over half my life, people!) My mom used to work for my original agent at Farmers for many, many years. Let’s call him Tim, because he always kind of reminded me of Tim Allen.

Tim was what Farmers considered a “little agent”. He had a small group of people he insured and that was what worked well for him. He made enough money to get by and he knew each and every one of his policy owners like we were his close personal friends.

He was happy and so were we.

Well, apparently, the Farmers Insurance bigwigs were NOT happy. They called Tim in for a meeting several years ago and told him they were going to get rid of all the “little agents” and threatened him that he would be fired if he didn’t double his business in six months.

*cough—money grubbing bastards—cough*

Tim tried, but Farmers was not impressed with his efforts, so both he and my mom were fired. At that point, my policy was transferred to one of Farmer’s Insurance’s “big agents”, whose assistant immediately sent me a welcome letter which obnoxiously badmouthed poor Tim and told me I would be taken care of much better now that I was in the hands of a “bigger and better” agent.

That was five years ago. I have never heard from or seen my new agent or anyone in his office since. In fact, I don’t even know where the hell their office is! Every month, they mail me a bill. And every month, I mail my payment back. And that’s the full extent of our relationship.

When my mom was fired, she chose to switch her auto insurance to a different company. She told me that she had a hard time cancelling her policy with our new Farmers agent because he never answered his phone and never returned her messages and when she wrote a letter to him about it, his assistant got really rude and claimed they never got any of her messages and refused to refund her money that she was rightfully owed. Mom was furious!

I told her to contact the agent’s district manager (who she knew well because she had worked there for so many years) but she wouldn’t do it because she felt like she wouldn’t be taken seriously because she had worked for Tim. So, she walked away without her money, letting Farmers screw her out of both her job and her cash.

I thought about switching to another insurance company at that point too, but never got around to actually doing it.

(Hey, it’s been a busy five years, okay?!)

Fast forward those five busy years and here I am living 2000 miles away with a new name and a whole new life. I sold my car last month (because I just don’t need it here in the city) and immediately called my “bigger and better” Farmers Insurance agent to cancel my policy and get the $100 back that I paid for coverage I won’t be using.

No-one answered the phone.

So, I left a message explaining the situation and making sure to leave my new phone number, my new address, and my new name VERY SLOWLY AND CLEARLY so there would be no confusion.

They never called me back.

Okay. Fine. So, I called them again. And, again, they didn’t answer the phone and never returned my voicemail message.

*snarl*

I called them several more times, but never once did anyone pick up the phone—just like what happened with my mom five years ago. So, I decided to try a new method of attack. I wrote a letter of cancellation and a complaint about their neglecting to return my calls to both my “bigger and better” agent AND to his district manager. I figured THAT would get a response.

And it did.

Within a week, the “bigger and better” agent’s assistant called me and left a blisteringly bitchy voicemail message saying that the only reason they never called me back was because I never left them my phone number, which is an utter lie. I know I did.

At least twice!

Then she sneered they had just cut me a check for my $100, but that they sent it to my old Washington address, not my Illinois address…. for no reason other than to be shitty. Nice. Very nice. But the part that REALLY got me mad was the last line of her message when she said about the misaddressed check in a voice that was positively slimy with sarcasm and snarkiness, “oops. Well, I guess I hope you forwarded your mail then!” and then she hung up.

Wow.

Unbelievable.

After 21 years of my religiously paying my bills on time and never, NEVER causing any sort of grief for them whatsoever, THAT is how Farmers wants to say goodbye? Fine. Then THIS is how I am choosing to say goodbye, by telling all of Blogdom what a nasty company I think Farmers Insurance is.

Furthermore, to Farmers Insurance: I’m truly sorry about your bigwigs’ tragic genitalia complex, but you should know that bigger is NOT always better. Clearly.

And, lastly, to Juno's Dad in the “we are Farmers ba-da-da-da-da-da-dum” commercials: You’re better than that, dude! You’re JUNO’S DAD! I love you and I hate to see you whoring yourself for a company that just doesn’t care about its customers like this. It suffocates my soul. I’m serious. Please, please promise me you’ll go ask Allstate if you can do their ads instead. Mayhem could use sidekick, you know it’s true—and you would be AWESOME at it! Think about it? Thanks.

Okay, boys and ghouls, gotta make this one a quickie!

2011-10-31T08:51:00.000-05:00

It’s Halloween! My favorite holiday. I’m in a full-on obnoxious panic this morning though because I’m not yet done making both Wednesday’s and my costumes for tonight.

(Eeek!)

However, I can’t let the day wither away without watching Thriller!

Ahhh…. now I feel better.

*le spooky sigh*

Okay, gotta run. I need to make a pair of boots, make a whip (don’t ask), sew stitches on a black dress, and buy green eye shadow, elastic, garment tape, and ivy vines. Ugh.

(Any guesses what we’re going to be? Hmm….?)

Happy Halloween, Bloggers and Bloggettes!

On second thought, I’m pretty sure Jesus has WAY too much class for that

2011-10-06T11:08:00.000-05:00

Monday morning I went for a walk along a big, busy city street. It was just me; four lanes of pissed off, backed up, honking traffic; and—ohhh—roughly 2 million Hispanic used car dealerships. No big whoop, I typically walk along this particular street daily. By now I know the road well and feel perfectly comfortable on it, and—excluding the day a man came running up to me, crying his face off, and asked me for money because he got in a fight with his “girlfriend’s boyfriend” (????)—it rarely flings surprises in my path.

But Monday? Yeeeaaahhhh, not so much.

It started out normally. I had my iPod on and I was zipping down the street, lost in my daydreams as usual.

I was really getting into it.

I started walking faster.

And faster.

And faster.

And faster.

And then suddenly….

Something HUGE and inexplicably papery (?) fell out of the sky and landed with a SMACK right in my path, just a mere yard or two in front of me.

It looked like a spit wad; THE WORLD’S BIGGEST FREAKING SPIT WAD!

A mammoth ball of wadded up, shiny paper the size of small car and had come falling from the sky and nearly hit me. I swear I’m not making this up. Had I been shaking my groove thing just a second or two faster…. well…. I shudder to think what would have happened.

Naturally, there was only one conclusion to be made: Jesus must be REALLY peeved with me.

I looked up into the sky expecting to see Jesus riding on a cloud and taking another aim at me with his big-ass straw, but instead I saw this….

There were two idiots up on a big billboard, getting ready to put up a new ad. They had removed the old ad, wadded it up into a ball the size of a buffalo and then just—wheee!—tossed it down to the sidewalk below.

Without.

Even.

Bothering.

To.

Check.

If.

The.

Sidewalk.

Was.

Clear.

First.

!!!!

(Like I said, IDIOTS.)

What kind of wanna-be-sued halfwits just ball up a big ol’ billboard advertisement and throw it down to the sidewalk below without looking for pedestrians first?! Huh? Someone could have been seriously hurt! I mean, what if that had hit somebody—like a pregnant woman?!

Or a 90 year old man?!

Or a preschooler?

Or, heaven forbid, a puppy?!?!

I just can’t comprehend something so negligent. I live on a third floor condo and I TRIPLE CHECK that the sidewalk is clear below before even daring to shake off my feather duster over our balcony. So, how someone can throw a damn BILLBOARD to the ground without so much as a “heads up!” first just makes no sense to me.

I don’t know how long I stood there staring up at Idiot 1 and Idiot 2, wanting to yell something scaldingly scolding to them about their blatant carelessness and craptitude.

It was awhile.

But in the end, I walked away without saying anything at all. Not even a measly, “hey, watch it.” I dunno, I guess I just figured it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Anyone stupid enough to throw something the size of a baby elephant down onto a sidewalk without looking below first isn’t going to have any sort of epiphany brought on by anything I had to say, I’m quite sure.

And as I turned and walked away, “Bohemian Rhapsody” ended and my iPod shuffled its songs and decided to play this next….

Touche, iPod. Touche indeed.

The one where I steal stuff from Joshua

2011-09-26T11:20:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I was just over on Vive le Nerd and Joshua was talking about Write or Die, this stream of consciousness writing tool where you set a word count, a time limit, and a consequence if you—*gasp!*—don’t reach your selected word count in your set time limit…. and then you ~~stare at the blank page and think things to yourself like ‘this is stupid’ and ‘Self, you’re not the boss of me’ and ‘I’d rather be scrubbing the freaking toilet… or maybe not’~~ write about whatever comes into your mind.

I thought I’d take a whack at it. My goal was 300 words in 15 minutes. My consequence was walking an extra mile on my treadmill if I failed. And this is what I got:

Well, great. Great. Now I can’t think of anything. Blank mind. Nope. Nothing. Nothing in here. NUTHING. Just brain-cobwebs and thought-tumbleweeds. Nothing more.

This is ridiculous. What to say? What to say?

Umm…. I like chocolate cake and Oreos and mixed nuts (the party food AND the Christmas movie! BEST! CHRISTMAS! MOVIE! EVER!) and taking pictures and thrift stores and eBay. Which reminds me….

Thanks to eBay, I’m probably about halfway done with my Christmas shopping already. Sad, I know. It’s only September, but still, I can’t help myself. I just can’t Christmas shop at the last minute. CAN’T. I think that would qualify as my worst nightmare, shopping for 20 people on Christmas Eve.

*curling into a ball on the floor*

I had a dream the other night that I was watching a brand new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. They had recast Elizabeth Swan. Yep. Keira Knightley was out. OUT! In her place?

Martin Starr.

In drag.

I swear I’m not making this up. I forget what else happened in the dream. There was something about running in a ditch behind Martin Starr/Elizabeth Swan and I’m pretty sure Scope was there, running behind me, but I don’t know why we were running.

Then again, why WEREN’T we running?

Jesus, I am ALWAYS running in my dreams. Running and doing astoundingly impossible gymnastic feats to escape who/whatever is chasing me. Like the time I scaled a pile of snow as tall as a two story house faster than a squirrel—or Edward Cullen—in a tree.

Or the time I kicked the asses of a hundred feral little boys in their underpants with my umbrella.

Or the time I was hanging by a chain upside down over a field of sharp knives and I swung and back flipped through an open window of a castle and ran through the hallways until I came to a screeching halt in front of a mirror and stared at myself…. because I was kind of surprised to see I was Jack Sparrow.

Hmm.

I guess I dream about Pirates of the Caribbean a lot too. Whatever.

Aaaaaaaand, done! 354 words in 15 minutes. Yeah, baby! But, because I’m all pro-getting-back-in-shape-and-getting-my-ass-back-into-my-smaller-pants lately, I’m STILL going to walk an extra mile on my treadmill anyway even though I met my goal. See, maybe this way I’ll meet TWO goals today, huh?

*fingers crossed*

So, wanna play along? If so, either post your stream of consciousness on your blog or in the comments section here. Have fun! :-)

Make no mistake, I am MOST DEFINITELY feeling secure NOW

2011-09-15T16:44:00.000-05:00

So, this afternoon a security guard attempted to escort me from Wednesday's school while I was waiting to pick her up. He called me "Miss" and told me to take my backpack and leave the grounds.

What the—?!

I was just about to go all Enraged Crazy Redhead on him when we suddenly both realized his mistake: he thought I was a loitering kid from a rival school!

*sputter*

It's funny how one can go from murderously pissed off to obscenely flattered in 0.3 seconds when mistaken for a 17 year old, huh?

BEST security guard EVER!

Tales from the Road Trip: The day I was a mutant freak and—taa-daa!—the day we made it back home

2011-09-13T06:37:00.001-05:00

Our fourth day of the Road Trip, Scope, Wednesday, and I awoke in Oacoma, South Dakota. Remember Oacoma? No? Where the shitload of mayflies swarmed all over us and watched us all Peeping-Tom-like through our motel window? Yeah, that’s the one. You got it. In fact, I wrote a little song about Oacoma. Mm-hmm. Wanna hear it? Yeah? Okay. (Don’t worry, you’ll get the tune.)

Ohhhhhhhhhh-acoma where the bugs come swarming in your face
And as they pass
It sure sucks ass
’Cuz those little pervs go for second base

Well, that’s all I’ve got so far. It’s a work in progress. But anyway, back to the story….

Those millions of mayflies that had violated us like perverts in the parking lot the night before, well, they were all dead now. They were all sprawled out on the ground around the motel doorways like giant, grotesque welcome mats.

Nasty.

(Sorry, had to borrow that picture from Google. I was too busy standing there like a dummy, torn between my utter revulsion at the sight of that many dead bugs and my euphoria that, hey, the little effers couldn’t crawl all over me anymore—score!—to bother taking a picture, but it looked just like that shot there, I swear.)

There was a maid on corpse duty outside the motel, sweeping up all the mayflies into massive piles as we hauled our bags out to our car. Every step we took made a sickening swishy kind of muffled crunching sound. So freaky.

And speaking of freaky….

Have I ever mentioned I’m a mutant? No? Well, I am. There, I said it. I don’t know why, but my skin is extremely sensitive (read: overdramatic to the point of ridiculous, Jim Carrey-ish proportions) to lengthy sun exposure. Even with sunblock. Pfffft!—my skin goes all honey badger on sunblock; it really doesn’t give a shit. If I’m in the sun for long periods of time, sunblock or not, my skin swells up painfully. And after sitting in the sunny car and loitering around 95 degree sightseeing spots for three days straight, my skin had had enough of me and my audacity.

Thus, when I woke up Thursday morning, I discovered my hands and arms had started to resemble inflated rubber gloves overnight.

Not good. At all. I knew from past experience that it could easily get waaaayyyyyyy worse if I didn’t take it seriously, and that if I didn’t stay out of the stupid sun until the swelling went down, I would find myself in the ER, which was SO not on our sightseeing list!

So, how does one stay out of the sun on a sunny Summer Road Trip, hmm? By wearing winter gloves and a hoodie all day, that’s how!

And by hiding in the shade in between cars when one is feeling too much like a freak to wear one’s winter gloves and hoodie out in public on one of the hottest days of the year.

(As if hiding in between cars is somehow less freaky than wearing gloves!)

(*rolling my eyes*)

(Yes. I’m special.)

(Moving on….)

We only had one big sightseeing adventure on our list for the day: The Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. It only took us about an hour to get to Mitchell.

When we arrived, they were setting up some sort of street carnival right outside The Corn Palace, which was kind of annoying because it made getting pictures of the thing kind of difficult. But I did my best (whilst hovering in the shade between the carnival booths).

We didn’t bother going into The Corn Palace. It was just the outside we wanted to see. And I have to admit, I don’t really get it. Mmm…. nope. Not at all. The purpose of The Corn Palace is…. what exactly? I’m just not sure. Okay, it’s kind of cute and silly and there’s nothing wrong with that, but…. no, I still don’t get it. Sorry.

We walked by a few little stores (on the shady side of the street), including one that had a real Snoopy Snow Cone Machine in the window! WHEEEEEEEE!!!!

I wanted one of those SOOOOOOOOO BAD when I was in third grade…. until my friend, Nikki, got one and I realized what complete and utter slave labor it was to grind up ice cubes with that little plastic handle for 20 minutes—and that’s only if you're doing it with psycho killer rage! If you’ve got a gentler touch, my friend, forget it! The ice will have melted, evaporated and rained down over Switzerland by the time you’re done!

20 minutes of grueling work just to get the world’s dinkiest little snow cone, when I could go over to the damn freezer and make a big, fat ice cream sundae with a mere spoon in 20 seconds flat instead? Umm…. no thanks. (C’mon, Snoopy! What’s the deal?!) But still, slave labor bitching aside, I got a kick out of seeing the snow cone maker in the shop window.

*nostalgic sigh*

Anyway….

We hit the road and along the way we passed a sign for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home.

Once again, my inner third grade self quivered with glee! Slap my ass and call me “Nellie”, I was in Little House on the Prairie-ville! Yeah, baby!

We saw a funky cow pasture with huge random sculptures in it.

And then soon we were saying goodbye to South Dakota and hello to Minnesota.

I had never been to Minnesota. I’d heard the stereotypes (that they talk like Bob from That 70’s Show and that they are all super duper uber nice) but how come no-one told me they welcome Cylons there?! What the hell?!

(That’s a little TOO nice, if you ask me!)

And how come no-one told me the sky in Minnesota looks just like the wallpaper in Andy’s room in Toy Story?!….

….And that there are stick-bug-ish, alien-looking windmills slowly spinning in nearly every direction you look?!

(Personally, I suspect they’re Cylons, Eeep!)

We stopped at a little rest stop, so we could say we actually touched the ~~Cylon~~ Minnesotan ground.

Then we drove on…. while Wednesday took pictures of her spiffy socks in the backseat.

*snicker*

We crossed the Mississippi River….

….and then—hey, looky!—we crossed the border into Wisconsin, just one itty bitty State away from home!

Now, we COULD have made it home to Chicago that evening, of course, but we would have been pulling into the garage at about midnight or later, and we were already tired from driving on next to no sleep for the last four days, so we decided we would only go as far as Tomah, Wisconsin and get ourselves a well deserved decent night’s sleep and then make it home the next day refreshed instead of thrashed. Yeah, we were almost to the finish line, but, dammit, we really needed the break! So, off we headed for Tomah. Along the way we saw some dude hovering in the sky with a parasail powered by a MASSIVE fan….

….and we saw this guy who was all ready with his snowplow for the first snowfall of the season. IN. AUGUST….

(I know it’s Wisconsin, but seriously, dude?! It’s over 90 degrees out!)

We made it to a motel in Tomah—there were no perverted mayflies there! YAY!!!!—and the lady at the desk gave us a coupon for dinner at The Ground Round just across the street….

….so that’s where we had dinner (which was delicious!) and then we hit the sack.

The next morning, Day 5 of our Road Trip, we had breakfast at the motel. Wednesday and I split a waffle just like we did at all the other motels during our trip. (Minus the icky dead hooker motel in Montana—eww!)

Then we headed for home on the same road we started our trip on back in Seattle, I-90 (which happened to be Siamese Triplets with I-39 and I-94 at that point; weird.)

We passed a lot of signs for cheese, ‘cuz—hey—it’s Wisconsin and all.

(Pffft! “Fireworks and cheese”—that kills me every time! *snort*)

And then we started seeing signs for Chicago!

In next to no time, we left Wisconsin behind and crossed the border into Illinois….

….aaaaaaaaaaand, right on cue, Illinois immediately held out it’s hand and said, “pay up, punks!” by hitting us with a toll booth.

Nice.

I-90 is free to drive on the whole 2000 miles from Seattle to Wisconsin; won’t cost you a penny. However, the second you hit Illinois—BOOM!—I-90 morphs into a toll road, and you have to pull over and cough up cash every few miles or so, or invest in an I-PASS transponder, as Scope did.

As our I-PASS wasn’t mounted in the car, I had to hold it up every time we drove under a toll scanner.

(Yep, still wearing my gloves.)

(And, yep, that’s my iPod hanging from the sun visor, playing The Chipmunks or something awesome like that through the radio as we drove. Poor, poor Scope.)

We hit a bunch of road work….

….and then another toll booth.

We passed by O’Hare Airport….

….and then another toll booth.

And then when traffic got claustrophobic and ugly and made us wanna start punching unicorns and running over grandmas in crosswalks, we knew we were home! *le sigh*

We exited I-90 and wove our way through the side streets.

(Hey! Watch it there, Grandma!)

And then within minutes we were parked in our garage.

(No, those aren’t our bikes. We share the garage.)

(And, yes, I blocked out my license plate. That way, hopefully, none of the Wyomingites I offended in my two previous posts will be able to successfully hunt me down and drop an Acme anvil on me.)

(*fingers crossed*)

And soon I was opening our front door with my big, giant, swollen, mutant balloon hands (ewwwwwwwwwwwww)….

….and then we were introducing our pet frogs to their new home in Chicago!

For those who are curious, the frogs are happy here in their new home and are doing well. Wednesday is THRILLED to have her pet frogs back after living without them for a whole year. Yes, my swollen hands are totally back to normal now. No, we never got in any fights or got sick of each other during our five days in the car together; Scope and Wednesday were WONDERFUL! And, yes, we are still looking for a buyer for my car, but hopefully that will be resolved pretty soon.

All in all, it was an AMAZING trip! It truly was! I am so glad the five of us (don’t forget the frogs!) were able to share the experience together. We saw some spectacular things and we took roughly 2000 photos during those five days on the road…. which is the reason why it has taken so damn long to blog it all; soooooooooo many photos to sort through and edit! But I’m really glad we were as snap-happy as we were because now it will be UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE for us to forget the adventures we had on our trip across America.

:-)

DAYS 4 AND 5 STATISTICS (FOR THE NERDY)

MILES DRIVEN ON DAY 4: 475
MILES DRIVEN ON DAY 5: 168
MILES DRIVEN TOTAL: 2233
MONEY SPENT ON GAS ON DAY 4: $64.72
MONEY SPENT ON GAS ON DAY 5: $15.04
MONEY SPENT ON GAS TOTAL: $212.57 or $239.60, depending on whether or not you believe the first fill up counts.
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN WA: 15 (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Alberta)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN ID: 3 (Nevada, West Virginia, and Quebec)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN MT: 9 (Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and British Columbia.)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN WY: 6 (Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, and Ontario.)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN SD: 6 (Georgia, Missouri, New Jersey, Tennessee, Manitoba and Saskatchewan)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN MN: 1 (Pennsylvania)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN WI: 4 (Indiana, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Virginia)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN IL: 2 (Mississippi and North Carolina)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD TOTAL: 46 (40 USA/6 Canada)
US LICENSE PLATES WE MISSED: 11 (Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Carolina, Vermont, and Washington DC…. although, we did see a couple of those in parking lots, but Scope said they didn’t count because they weren’t “on the road”. New Hampshire, I’m looking at you and shaking my fist menacingly!)

Tales from the Road Trip: The day I saw the Devil’s Chiclet

2011-09-07T06:30:00.001-05:00

The morning of our third day on the road, Scope, Wednesday, our pet frogs, and I awoke in a motel in Gillette, Wyoming. The hurtful insults and sadistic abuse Wyoming had inflicted upon us the night before were still stinging and fresh in our minds and, frankly, the only thing I wanted in the whole wide world was to get the eff out of Wyoming—like NOW!—before Wyoming could think up some other brand new, shitty hell to dump upon us.

(Wyoming, I still hate you.)

(And I always will.)

(Forever.)

(And ever.)

(Just FYI.)

(Jerkface.)

Our little aquatic frogs, Kermit and Trevor, who weren’t exactly digging life on the road (a bit too bumpy and sloshy for their liking), definitely liked motel life. It’s funny, with bodies the size of Corn Flakes and brains the size of flax seeds, you’d think they would be kinda stupid and personality-less, but actually the exact opposite is true. Those little fellas are bursting with personality and, without a doubt, interact with people and with their environment, so they were loving all the new, fancy-ass things they got to see in the motel rooms. Like the spiffy red digital clock! Ooh! They thought that was mighty splendiferous….

….and now I know exactly what to get them for Christmas. However, the froggy love affair with the glowing red alarm clock had to come to an end (*sniff*) as we loaded our stuff back in the car and stowed the frogs away in their secret, hush-hush lunch cooler so we could stealthily take them places with us without anyone knowing what amphibianistic shenanigans we were up to. And then we took our concealed froggies to breakfast with us…. after some horseplay on the hotel luggage cart, of course!

At breakfast we sat across from this inexplicable bitchin’ granny with hot pink hair.

(Touché, Wyoming. Touché.)

Then we were back on the road, heading for Mount Rushmore. On the way, we sped by Devil’s Tower of Close Encounters of the Third Kind fame.

And when I say we sped by it, I mean we sped by it at about 70 mph from about 30 miles away, so it looked like a teeny little grey Chiclet on the horizon, but even still it was recognizable, which was pretty damn cool.

See it there in the middle of the picture? Not so much? Even if you squint? No? Oh. Well, sorry about that. It’s the best I’ve got. We didn’t have time to make the detour out of our way to get a closer shot of it because we needed to get to Rushmore early for the best light and also so we wouldn’t be even more behind schedule than we already were. Use your imagination and pretend the picture I just showed you looked really impressive and Steven Spielberg-y like this one, ‘kay?

Maybe our view of Devil’s Tower wasn’t as big and burly as that one there, but, dammit, it still kinda felt like it at the time, okay? We were all pointing and squealing in the car looking over at Devil’s ~~Chiclet~~ Tower across the fields.

‘Cuz we’re cool like that.

Besides Devil’s ~~Chiclet~~ Tower, there wasn’t much else to see the rest of our time in Wyoming. So, we kept racing across I-90 and soon we crossed the border into South Dakota.

*the sound of angels singing, “laaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”*

(‘Bye-bye, Wyoming! Smell ya later!)

I was stunned at how quickly the landscape turned from puke-yellow to holy-shit-things-are-actually-alive-here! green when we crossed the border. It was as if South Dakota had heard how crappy Wyoming had treated us and was welcoming us in with open arms. And chocolate cake. With ice cream. And sprinkles.

(Oh, South Dakota, you thoughtful, sexy lover, you.)

We drove by Sturgis….

….which had just wrapped up its annual Motorcycle Rally, so there were still hundreds of bikers from all over the country vacationing in the area, and they were pretty damn cool. Hell, some of them even helped us out the day before in Yellowstone by taking our group picture for us at Old Faithful. Awww.

We drove by Black Hills National Cemetery….

….and then soon we were in Rapid City, a stone’s throw away from Mount Rushmore and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Sweet!

Rapid City was a cute little town where there are life-sized bronze statues of the Presidents standing on the street corners.

Travelling precariously behind a truck of ewww-inducing, wobbling, ill-restrained Porta Potties (please don’t let there be a car crash…. please don’t let there be a car crash)….

….we soon saw Mount Rushmore from the road. WOW!!!! Even from the street where all the penny-pinchers were pulled over trying to snap pictures of the monument without forking over the $11 entrance fee—*cough cheapskates cough*—Rushmore was breathtaking…. although it did look a wee bit like Lincoln was smooching Roosevelt. I dunno, you decide.

However, we were totally up for paying the fee to get up close and personal with Rushmore. And we did.

And—look!—with my telephoto lens, we can practically see right up their noses!

And we even had a woman, who shall forever be known as “Boob Lady”, take our group picture for us.

Thank you, Boob Lady, that was really sweet of you and I’m 100% completely certain without a doubt that your thoughtfulness is the SOLE reason my husband hasn’t stop talking about you EVERY SINGLE DAY SINCE, and has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the fact that you had knockers like this.

(P.S. – There’s no way those things were real. Just sayin.’)

After picking out some postcards in the gift shop, we said goodbye to Mount Rushmore—check it out, you get a split second peek at Washington from behind Rushmore as you leave….

….and we headed over to South Dakota’s OTHER mountain sculpture (‘cuz one just isn’t enough!), Crazy Horse.

(Sorry, had to swipe the picture of that sign from Google because mine didn’t do it justice.)

When you first arrive at Crazy Horse after seeing Mount Rushmore, you can’t help but think ‘that’s it?’….

….but then they pull you aside and show you a movie about how they have been carving the mountain, little by little, for the last 63 years to honor Native American heroes, such as Crazy Horse, and you start to realize the massive scope of the task they are trying to complete on their own without any Federal funding.

After 63 years of blasting away at the mountain, they have only completed Crazy Horse’s face. *stunned expression* They still have his body and his horse and all the rest of it to tackle! It’s mind-boggling, really.

On the viewing deck, you can see a mini version of what they hope to make the mountain monument look like.

I hate to say it, but I have my doubts that mountain will ever end up looking like that sculpture on the viewing deck. Maybe I’m just a jerk, I don’t know, but it just doesn’t seem possible nor likely that the rock will be stable enough after all that dynamite blasting to withstand so much drastic change, especially those little pointy stick-out bits, like Crazy Horse’s finger and his steed’s leg. How…. how is it possible to make a mountain look like THAT? Won’t that finger and all the other poking-out parts just fall right off like the mountain has leprosy, killing hundreds of tourists below?!

Seriously, look at that sculpture and then look at that mountain behind it. I just can’t envision that even being possible, can you? But I sincerely hope I’m wrong. If they really can successfully morph the mountain into the image of that sculpture, it will be absolutely phenomenal when they are done! If they really accomplish it, I soooooooo want to go back and see the completed Crazy Horse.

Then again, as it’s taken them 63 years just to carve the face, I am pretty sure Crazy Horse won’t be completed in my lifetime. Nor Wednesday’s lifetime. Not even in Wednesday’s children’s lifetimes. :-(

We spent some good quality time at Crazy Horse. We saw pictures of the progression they have made to date. (You might have to click this one to make it bigger to get the full effect of what you’re looking at.)

We saw the mountain monument.

And—look!—with the telephoto lens, you can even see a halo of scaffolding around Crazy Horse’s head and teeny, tiny workers up on his arm!

And Wednesday, Scope, and the frogs (in the cooler!) picked out and bought a rock which had been blasted off of Crazy Horse.

We headed back to Rapid City for lunch at Perkin’s, a Denny’s-ish restaurant my Dad talks about all the time. I don’t remember what I ate for lunch there, but I do remember the dessert!

And I remember the huge, freaky-ass, neon-green bug we saw in the parking lot.

Holy hell! What is that thing? It was like three and a half inches long! Weird. This was the first of several bizarre bug encounters we had while in South Dakota. Yep. There are more to come. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to put down whatever you’re eating right about now. You’ve been warned.

(No, really. Stop eating now. I’m not kidding)

We got back on the road again and all of a sudden things got really creepy, really fast. It was like something out of a strange horror movie. The freeway was suddenly speckled yellow. What the hell?! It was covered with thousands of these big, fat grasshoppers who were jumping all over the place in front of our moving car, zooming past the car windows, and (in the case of the stupid/suicidal ones) hitting our windshield with incredibly loud SMACKS and splattering everywhere.

Ugh!

But, hands down, the worst of them was this kamikaze one who decided to jump right into our windshield wiper, die immediately, and then stare, sinisterly, right into my face with his blank, buggy eyes for miles and miles as we sped down the road. Nasty!

(Hey, no bitching! You were warned!)

With the evil kamikaze zombie grasshopper glaring into our car the whole time, we headed to Wall, passing—ohhhhhh—approximately 24,698,001 billboards for Wall Drug along the way.

Wall Drug really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, wants you to visit.

Really.

In fact, $50 says there are cops hidden behind all those billboards, ready to arrest your ass if you dare try passing through Wall without stopping at Wall Drug. So, we stopped at Wall Drug.

As I’m sure you’ve either imagined it or seen for yourself, Wall Drug is full of quirky cowboy crap. We stayed long enough to go to the bathroom and take our pictures with some of the funny figures and then we moved on.

Our next stop? The Badlands!

The Badlands were truly amazing. At first all you see is flat, grassy prairie. But then you turn a corner, and—BAM!—you’re looking out over the top of the most beautiful, colorful, strange, and slightly scary expanse of land you’ve ever seen. It’s otherworldly, I swear. There’s no other word for it. You just can’t believe you’re still on Earth, it looks so eerily gorgeous and alien.

The Badlands seemed to stretch on and on forever, unendingly. I mean—check it out!—you can actually see the curvature of the Earth! I swear, the only other time I’ve ever seen the curvature of the Earth was when I looked out across the ocean when I was in Hawaii!

We spent a great amount of time at Pinnacles Overlook, gazing out at all the spikes, stripes and ripples that make up the Badlands.

One of my favorite shots is this one of Wednesday looking out into the abyss in a shirt that says “incomplete and all alone” (sooooooo funny!), so I jazzed it up to make it all dramatic and moody.

*snicker*

Despite a slight fear of heights that suddenly enveloped me there on top of the Badlands due to Wednesday’s desire to be a punk and freak me out by getting waaaaayyyyyyyy too close to the edge on purpose—*cough brat cough*—I could have stayed there on Pinnacles Outlook forever and never tire of the view. However, the sun was starting to sink in the sky and the last thing we wanted was to be at the top of the Badlands in the dark. Not because of the winding, deathly-looking road we would then have to maneuver in suffocating blackness (pffffft!—whatever; we crossed that bridge yesterday!) but because, if it got dark, we wouldn’t get to see the rest of the Badlands, so we leapt back in the car and headed off down the twisting road through the stone towers, past ominous signs warning of falling rocks.

We spiraled down the road amid the cliffs and spikes, no longer viewing them from above as we had before.

We stopped at another viewing spot.

This was the ground beneath our feet. It’s crazy to stop and think about it, but that massive, awe-striking, otherworldly landscape all around us was really merely just crumbling rock.

Back in the car, we passed a little prairie dog village and lingered to watch the little cuties popping in and out of their holes for awhile—soooooooo freaking adorable!

Then we wound our way through the Badlands some more, and the view just seemed to get more and more astounding.

And, just as the sun was really starting to set, we wondered if we should have made an effort to get to the Badlands earlier in the day so we would have had more time to enjoy the views. But then we looked to our right and gasped as we saw this….

….and we knew then that sunset was the PERFECT time to see the Badlands. Wow. Spectacular!

We left the Badlands feeling all warm and fuzzy. Then we got on the freeway heading for Oacoma, South Dakota, for the night. On the way, near Murdo, we passed this unexpected sight.

Uh-huh. It’s a skeleton walking his pet dinosaur in a field. It was so unexpected that I couldn’t even get my camera’s lens cap off in time to get a shot as we rocketed by at 75 mph. (Seriously, who expects to see THAT alongside the freeway, huh?! A little warning would have been nice!) So, I had to borrow one from Google and alter its colors to make it look all sunset-y and magenta-colored kinda like it was when we saw it.

I found out from Google that the dinosaur dude is part of Murdo’s 1880’s Town attraction. Huh. Who knew? There was no sign near it or anything. I just figured some farmer had a really awesome sense of humor to build something like that in his/her field! I’m actually kind of bummed to find out that wasn’t true! Oh well.

On we sped to Oacoma in the dark. This time the freeway was actually illuminated, as all freeways should be in my opinion, but, unfortunately, the lights didn’t really help much and we still could barely see out the windshield. Why?

Bugs.

There were so many, many big, juicy bugs splattering on our windshield that it started to look like it was snowing. We couldn’t do anything about it because the windshield wipers only made the mess worse, so we had to just squint through the bug guts and hope for the best. By the time we made it to our motel, the windshield looked like this.

Blah. We were utterly grossed out at the sight of so many dead bugs on our car. I mean, what could be worse than that?!

How ‘bout living ones?

Thousands upon thousands of big, ugly, demonic-looking bugs were flying everywhere in the night. They were all over the buildings and the cars, and they kept landing on us. I didn’t get my own picture of it because I was too busy trying to dodge the flying beasts while refusing to talk to anyone lest one of the bugs fly into my mouth. So, I’m going to let Google show you what it looked like instead.

Repulsive, huh? I know! In the motel they assured us the bugs were harmless and wouldn’t sting or bite. They were just mayflies, no big deal, but even still, they were creepy as all hell. And they were pervs too! They were all over our motel room window, watching us while we slept!

*shudder*

However, despite the big, ugly, peeping tom and kamikaze bugs South Dakota pelted us with, I still prefer South Dakota to Wyoming. A hell of a lot. So there.

DAY 3 STATISTICS (FOR THE NERDY)

MILES DRIVEN TODAY: 437
MILES DRIVEN TOTAL: 1590
MONEY SPENT ON GAS TODAY: $50.00 (even!)
MONEY SPENT ON GAS TOTAL: $132.81 or $159.84, depending on whether or not you believe the first fill up counts.
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN WA: 15 (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Alberta)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN ID: 3 (Nevada, West Virginia, and Quebec)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN MT: 9 (Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and British Columbia.)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN WY: 6 (Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, and Ontario.)

Up next: Day 4 of our Road Trip, where I took much fewer pictures because my hands were swollen up like Kirstie Alley’s ass.

© Coracabana

Tales from the Road Trip: The day I swear I was stuck in a freaking Wile E Coyote cartoon

2011-09-02T06:30:00.001-05:00

Tuesday morning, Scope, Wednesday, our two pet frogs, and I awoke in a smelly, dirty motel room in Bozeman, Montana. (Eww.) After having the world’s quickest showers in a cringe-worthy unclean bathroom which perfectly matched the disturbingly stained boxspring on the bed—*gag!*—we bolted like bandits out of that dead hooker hangout, destined for greener pastures.

Literally.

We grabbed both breakfast and lunch from Subway (seriously, only $24 for six meals, people—TWENTY. FOUR. DOLLARS—woohoo!) and stored our lunches in a cooler for later. Then soon we found ourselves cruising through the gorgeous Gallatin National Forest on our way to Yellowstone.

We made a quick stop by the Gallatin River because it was simply so beautiful that we just couldn’t resist.

We drove through Big Sky, which was absolutely stunning too.

By noon, we arrived at Yellowstone National Park. To my squealing surprise, we didn’t even have to wait in line at the gate! *squeal!* The downside to not having to wait in line? We zipped through the entrance so stinkin’ fast that I didn’t even have my camera ready to snap a picture of the Yellowstone sign.

Frick!!!!

So—shhh—I borrowed one from my good friend, Google, instead. Isn’t it lovely?

We drove on into the park and soon we crossed the border into Wyoming…. and since I was busy taking pictures out the windshield of all the dang trees, I missed getting a picture of that sign too. (DOUBLE FRICK!!!!)

(Ohhhhhh, Goooooooooogle? Can you help me out again?….)

(Thank you, Google. You rock.)

We started to wind our way through the park when we came across another beautiful river bank and got out of the car to explore and take pictures.

We saw pretty little flowers….

….and interesting speckled stones that looked like camouflage….

….and this fierce beast….

*snicker*

Back in the car, we passed by the crowded hot springs. Again, I’m going to need Google’s help with this one ‘cuz I was busy oohing and ahhing like a dummy with my face out the car window instead. (TRIPLE FRICK!!!!)

It was truly spectacular, all colorful and steamy and otherworldly and supervolcano-y. It would have been awesome to have stopped there for a little while, but we missed it. We shot right on by and, when we realized what we were passing, it was kinda too complicated to turn around with so many people hanging around there. We figured there would probably be another similar—nay, better—one further down the path we could stop at instead, surely. But there wasn’t.

Crap.

Oh well, one to add to the list for next time, right? Exactly. However, I did manage to spend a few quality minutes with this geyser just down the road though….

The ground all around that geyser was peppered with massive piles of poo. I started to realize I was wandering through some gigantic, gruesome, ghoulish creature’s toilet and decided to get myself the hell back to the car where Scope and Wednesday were waiting before the creature (buffalo?!) (bear?!) (bigfoot?!) (Mike Tyson?!) could return and personally escort me from the facilities.

Speaking of bathrooms….

Next, we arrived at Old Faithful. Now, it should be obvious, crystal clear, and blunt as butt cheeks to anyone that the first thing one ought to do upon arriving at Old Faithful is to CHECK THE DAMN SCHEDULE TO FIND OUT WHEN OLD FAITHFUL IS GOING TO ERUPT, right? Uh-huh. Of course. Perfectly obvious. Duh.

Well, we didn’t do that. We ran for the bathrooms first.

*shaking my head at our stupidity*

We emerged from the bathrooms, marveling to each other how lucky we were that there were no lines for the toilets (that shoulda been a sign, huh?!) when we suddenly realized we had missed Old Faithful’s eruption by about five minutes. Thaaaaaat’s right, Old Faithful had erupted while we were all peeing like morons in the deserted, ghost town-like bathrooms.

D’oh!

We had to wait 90 minutes for the next eruption, which was a complete bummer because it threw our schedule way off for the whole rest of the day and left us in a very sticky spot at sunset. (But more on that predicament in a minute.)

While we waited for Old Faithful to erupt again, we ate our Subway lunch (mmmm) and walked around a little bit, looking at everything. Old Faithful was slumbering….

The sun was blinding….

And Ranger Smith was warning folk about pic-a-nic basket stealing bears….

(Or something like that.)

Soon (ish) a huge crowd started to gather and Old Faithful got all sassy and whatnot by psyching everyone out with little mini eruptions….

As Wednesday put it, “it was like the Earth farted!” (Amen, sista.) And then suddenly—THAR SHE BLOWS!!!!

The eruption of Old Faithful was incredible. When Nature wants to show off, it REALLY shows off. If you’ve never seen it, I definitely recommend going. And I recommend getting pictures of it back in the shade of the trees rather than perched on the uncomfortable benches up front where you will completely roast in the sun and be far, far too close to the geyser get any sort of decent shot of it.

The eruption went on and on, and the five of us were completely comfortable watching it in the shady trees. Yeah, five of us. You didn’t think we were leaving the frogs to boil in the hot car did you?! No way! Kermit and Trevor travelled to all the sights, restaurants, and motels right along with us the entire trip, safely insulated and hidden in a cooler so no-one would know….

(And, no, that’s not the same cooler our lunch was in, thankyouverymuch.)

After leaving Old Faithful, we stopped at the Continental Divide….

….and on a ridge above beautiful Yellowstone Lake….

….and on a bridge beside Yellowstone Lake….

We saw a deer….

….and a buffalo….

The views were astounding….

We saw haunting, ghost-like white trees left over from a previous forest fire. So sad, and yet kind of beautiful all at the same time….

Then we said goodbye to gorgeous Yellowstone and set out across Wyoming, heading for Rapid City, South Dakota, which would put us in a stellar spot the next morning to catch Mount Rushmore in the best light. I had never been in Wyoming before and I was startled at how quickly the landscape changed after leaving Yellowstone. Suddenly—BAM!—the lush, green paradise wilderness was gone and all that was around as far as the eye could see was dust, rocks and desert.

There was a cool oddity every now and then, like this bizarre house we saw along the road….

….but for the most part, Wyoming looked just like a Wile E Coyote cartoon, all desolate, desert-y and dead-looking. And, clearly, the people of Wyoming are OBSESSED with Buffalo Bill (not judging, just observing) because almost everything you pass along the unending, dismal road is dedicated to him.

I was the one behind the wheel in Wyoming, and I swear that the more I drove, the more I felt like I had been kidnapped by aliens and dropped on Mars. What a weird and ugly place! People actually live here? Voluntarily? By choice? Why?

I just don’t get it.

We quickly stopped in Cody (another Buffalo Bill-proud Wyoming relic) to fill up the car and grab a quick dinner. It was right around this time when we realized our odds of getting to Rapid City before midnight were not good. Thanks to our ill-timed potty visit causing us to miss Old Faithful and wait around for an hour and a half there, we were waaaayyyyyy behind schedule. *grumble* We decided to just go as far as Gillette, Wyoming, instead that night and get up early the next morning to—hopefully—get to Mount Rushmore by a decent time.

The GPS map didn’t look too bad. Just take Highway 14 through Bighorn National Forest and then get back on I-90 until you get to Gillette. No biggie, right? Sure. So, off we headed for Gillette. At first the road looked like this….

There wasn’t much to see, although we did zoom past the Museum of Flight that had a very cool airplane graveyard by the roadway. There was no time to stop and linger, so, sadly, my pictures of it didn’t come out very well taken through the speeding car window. QUADRUPLE FRICK!!!! So, rather than have you squint at my blurry-ass pictures, I’m going to let Google show you what it really looked like….

And we also rocketed past Devil’s Kitchen, which is a little like the Badlands….

As we sped down the road and our shadow was getting longer and longer, there was this massive wall-like mountain in front of us….

Now, maybe I’m just stupid, I dunno, but that mountain directly in our path really wasn’t worrying me. All I knew was that the sun was setting soon and I just wanted to find the freeway before we lost all our light. So, on we flew, directly towards the mountain.

And then we reached it.

Holy hell.

Highway 14 through Bighorn National Forest is a steep, skinny, precarious, ridiculous, nightmarish road which I’m certain was built by feuding hillbillies who were trying to kill each other. It zigzags sharply and dangerously, just barely clinging to the rocky ledges of the orange cliffs with nothing to keep you from plummeting to your death but a laughable, knee-high, flimsy rail. It’s like Wile E Coyote meets Ice Road Truckers. It is speckled with warning signs telling you to turn around and go back to the nearest town, like 50 miles away, if weather conditions are not ideal.

And It is the ONLY road in the area.

Oh. My. God.

Scope offered to drive it, but I chose to do it myself because I didn’t want to delay our travelling even a single minute by switching seats (which would mean Wednesday and the frogs would need to switch seats too because there was no legroom for Wednesday if she was sitting behind Scope). The sun was rapidly setting and I just wanted to get us the effing hell out of there, so on I drove on like Road Runner through Wile E Coyote’s ‘hood.

We drove on and on, twisting and turning our way up and over the malevolent mountain on Death Road as daylight got dimmer and dimmer. It felt unending. And I realized then and there that I hate Wyoming. There, I said it. Wyoming, I hate you, you mean, mean fucker.

*obscene hand gesture*

As the mountain started to turn a bit grassier along the side of Death Road, suddenly there were signs all over the place warning of “Open Range” farm animals which may or may not be roaming around the twisting roadway. (Because that’s what every death-defying road needs, random farm animals.) And they weren’t kidding either—we came face-to-face with several cows!

We also saw deer….

….and even a moose!

Once we got over the mountain we thought we were in the clear. We were morons.

Before making it to the freeway, night fell, but we weren’t concerned (read: morons) because the Death Road was behind us. We even had the ignorant gall to stop and waste more time taking a picture of and laughing at the Crazy Woman Saloon in Dayton….

(Oh, Crazy Woman Saloon, what a soon-to-be-realized prophetic sign you were.)

As we approached I-90, we felt really good about things. Okay we still had like 140 miles to go or something like that, but—hell—it was the freeway, so it would be a snap, right?

Yeeaaahhhh, not so much.

To my surprise, horror, disgust, and I’m-gonna-puke-ness, the freeway wasn’t lit, there were next to no other vehicles, and there were no towns around it, so it was pitch black. Like velvet. Or like ink. I honestly couldn’t tell you what the landscape was like around us, because I simply couldn’t see it. There was just no light at all. Were we surrounded by mountains? Farmland? An army of drag queen ninja robots? I couldn’t tell, all I could see was impregnable blackness. Even with my high beams on, I could only see a few yards in front of me and the signs along the roadway and nothing more.

And those signs along the roadway did NOT make me feel any better about things.

There was an Acme sign, which further confirmed my theory that I was trapped inside a Wile E Coyote cartoon, and which would have been funny had things not been so—uhh—unfunny.

(From this point on, all my pictures are borrowed from Google, because we sooooooo weren’t bothering to take pictures of our own anymore, we were too busy trying not to die! Google didn’t have any pictures of these signs in the dark, as we saw them, so—let’s pretend. Quick! Put on your night vision goggles and check it out!)

There were at least two more ‘Crazy Woman’ themed signs we passed, which only seemed to exist to be cruel and taunting, because at that point I was white knuckled, sweating, refusing to talk to either Scope or Wednesday, trying not to cry, completely unable to blink lest I miss a turn, run off the roadway and kill us all, and, hands down, I. WAS. CRAZY!!!!

(Dear Wyoming, Perhaps women in your God-awful State wouldn’t be crazy if you didn’t have death roads and unlit freeways. Just a thought. No offense. Now, fuck off.)

But the WORST signs I saw along that blacker-than-black freeway? The 23 trillion Animal Crossing signs.

?

Seriously?! You have an unlit freeway in a freaking black hole and now you allow random animals to wander around on it?! Really?! You can’t bother to light it and/or fence it off from wild/farm/zoo/circus animals?!?! Honestly?!

I…. I have no words.

I drove and drove and drove through suffocating darkness, shaking uncontrollably, with my neck muscles rigidly seized up from stress and fear so that I could no longer turn my head. I was sure the entire time that a moose or cow or buffalo was going to leap out in front of our car and murder us all at any moment.

(And don’t go thinking Scope is a jerk for making me drive that Freeway of Death or anything! No, no, no. He offered to take over the drive several times but I said no because I, honestly, wouldn’t have felt any better about it if he was driving. We were still in a scary situation, no matter who was at the wheel and he had already driven most of the day, so I just felt it was my turn.)

At 11:45 pm we finally pulled into a motel in Gillette, WY…. and then I immediately burst into tears right then and there, bawling like a toddler in the parking lot. We made it unscathed! I didn’t kill us all!

WOO-HOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DAY 2 STATISTICS (FOR THE NERDY)

MILES DRIVEN TODAY: 482
MILES DRIVEN TOTAL: 1153
MONEY SPENT ON GAS TODAY: $40.51
MONEY SPENT ON GAS TOTAL: $82.81 or $109.84, depending on whether or not you believe the first fill up counts.
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN WA: 15 (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Alberta)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN ID: 3 (Nevada, West Virginia, and Quebec)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN MT: 9 (Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and British Columbia.)

Up next: Day 3 of our Road Trip, where we finally got to leave Wyoming! YEAH BABY!!!!!!

Tales from the Road Trip: The day we peed in a town called Ritzville

2011-08-31T06:30:00.004-05:00

Bright and ~~way too effing~~ early Monday morning we ~~staggered resentfully~~ jumped energetically out of bed, packed my car with all it could hold (including two pet water frogs who were seatbelted in the backseat) (in their tank, wiseass) and set out on Day 1 of our Road Trip from Seattle to Chicago.

We started in Renton, a suburb just south of Seattle, at about 8 am. We pretty much had the road to ourselves, which is very strange and whatthefuckish for Renton at that time of the day. Eerie, in fact. Spooky. Disturbing even. *shuddering* But whatever. We certainly weren’t complaining.

We got on I-90 and off we went, winding our way through misty Western Washington.

We made a pit stop on Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascade Mountains because we hadn’t started the trip on a full tank of gas (whoopsie!) and I always (ALWAYS) fill up at half a tank so I never (NEVER) have to risk running out of fuel on the freeway—or worse!—in the middle of nowhere.

(Eeep!)

I’m not usually anal, thankyouverymuch. Just ask the weirded-out people who were setting things up at my wedding last year when I was all in anti-Bridezilla mode, saying, “eh, whatever, it’s all good,” anytime they asked my opinion on anything. They’ll tell you. However, when it comes to filling up my car at half a tank, the. Car. Will. Be. Filled. Up. At. Half. A. Tank.

Got it?

Good.

So, we stopped at Snoqualmie.

$27.03 later we were back on the road. Soon the lush green mountainous landscape of Western Washington was behind us and we were cruising through Eastern Washington, which looks a wee bit different.

We stopped off for a few minutes or so at the Wild Horses Monument which overlooks I-90 and the Columbia River.

The view was incredible….

….but, holy hellcakes, it was WINDY!

I was fascinated with all the little albino grasshoppers that were leaping around all over the place up there.

Scope updated his Facebook status.

And Wednesday was doing a super duper job of freaking her poor mother the eff out!

(Girlie, if you fall, you’re buying your own Bandaids, ‘kay?!)

(Gah!)

Back in the car, we passed by George.

Uh-huh. That’s right. We have a city called George, Washington.

(But I’m not sure if there’s really a Hannah, Montana.)

(Ba-da-dum-tish.)

(Or a Raising, Arizona.)

(Or a Baked, Alaska.)

(Okay, I’ll stop now.)

(You’re welcome.)

Along the way we passed this oddity….

Yep. It’s a carnival funhouse!

And then it was lunchtime, we all needed to pee, and we saw a sign for Ritzville and pulled over.

Hmm.

I’m not sure what I expected Ritzville to look like. Maybe…. oh, I dunno…. kinda ritzy or fancy or snazzy or something like that. Or—ooh, I know!—home to the world’s biggest effing box of Ritz Crackers!!!! YEAH!!!!

Wouldn’t that have kicked ass? But no. Nope. Ritzville looked like this….

Total fucking false advertising. Wow. But, still, we found a McDonalds for lunch in Ritzville and Wednesday took the opportunity to check on the perplexed frogs strapped in the backseat….

The frogs were just fine. Freaked out beyond all reason, but just fine. No little froggie heart attacks, so yay! We filled up the car again and were quickly back on the road.

Washington State bid us farewell by buzzing us with an Horizon plane.

And then we crossed over the border into Idaho.

Idaho pretty much looked like this the whole way....

And, as the Idaho panhandle we were travelling through is only about 70 miles wide, we didn’t even need to make a stop in Idaho before we found ourselves crossing into Montana.

(Eww. Please excuse the ghost of the dead bug on the windshield in that picture. Unfortunately, it won’t be the last.)

Montana was hilly. (Understatement.) And wooded. (Anti-hyperbole.) And COVERED with signs for Clark Fork. (Complete and utter truth.)

Seriously. Every half-mile or so we passed a sign for Clark Fork. We were practically tripping over them. After being on the road for ten hours or so, it started to get increasingly hilarious every time we saw another Clark Fork sign.

(Sad, I know.)

We filled up the car again in Missoula and got back on I-90 where we soon passed the West Riverside Forest Fire by the freeway.

There was a helicopter making water drops with a woefully inadequate-looking bucket, trying to douse the flames. It was like watching someone trying to put out a campfire with a thimble.

(As far as I know, the fire is still ongoing and is only 35% contained. If you are interested, you can read the news updates on the fire HERE.)

We drove on….

….and on….

….and on some more. Soon the sun was setting beautifully beside us.

From that point on we kinda stopped taking pictures of our drive because they were all coming out like this….

Freaky.

We stopped in Butte for dinner (insert rump roast joke here) and then drove to Bozeman for the night. There was a college shindig going on in Bozeman and it was not easy finding a motel with an available room. But we eventually stumbled upon the Bozeman Inn.

The fact that the Bozeman Inn seemed to be the only motel with available rooms should have been a sign that it—uhh—might not be the best place in town to stay.

(Oh, hindsight, you bitchy little minx, you!)

But we were so exhausted by that point that we didn’t really care that the Bozeman Inn was obviously a little sketchy. In fact, I was so sleepy that I honestly didn’t care that our room smelled like old rancid mushroom soup, and—worse!—I didn’t even notice the disturbing stain (vomit?!?!) (diarrhea?!?!) (BLOOD?!?!) that was on the bed Scope and I slept on until Scope pointed it out to me the next morning.

Ugh. Oh dear God. Nasty. I feel the urge to go have a two hour long shower every time I think about it! Gah! Makes Ritzville look perfectly ritzy indeed! My advice? If the only room available is at the Bozeman Inn, do yourself a favor and go all Mary and Joseph and find yourself a barn instead.

Yeesh.

DAY 1 STATISTICS (FOR THE NERDY)

MILES DRIVEN: 671
MONEY SPENT ON GAS: $42.30 or $69.33, depending on whether or not you believe the first fill up counts.
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN WA: 15 (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Alberta)
LICENSE PLATES SEEN ON THE ROAD IN ID: 3 (Nevada, West Virginia, and Quebec)

Up next: Day 2 of our Road Trip, where I swear I was kidnapped by Looney Tunes and held captive in a twisted, unending Wile E Coyote cartoon. Fuck all, there was even a real honest to God ACME sign along the roadway, okay?!?! I wish I were kidding.

Stay tuned....

Tales from the Road Trip: The part where I pull a bait n’ switch on you by not actually getting to the road trip part yet. (Sorry.)

2011-08-29T06:30:00.003-05:00

WARNING: This post may contain peanuts. And a picture or two.

A few weeks ago, Wednesday and I boarded a plane and flew 2000 miles from Chicago….

….to Seattle….

….to get some scheduled court tasks done and to hang out with my family for a little bit before packing up my car with our pet frogs (whom my mom has been babysitting for the past year) and driving them back home to Chicago.

The joke was on us though. The family went camping instead.

*blink*

(Okay.)

(Wow.)

(Do we offend?)

Seriously. Wednesday and I were left home alone in my mom’s place for a week, which actually ended up being a lot of fun, unexpectedly…. despite the fact that we missed “our dude” Scope like a couple of big, pathetic crybabies.

*sniffle*

We had Wednesday’s friends come over; we went shopping (Oh, Hallmark’s ridiculously cute, yet offensively expensive Keepsake Ornaments, how I love thee!); we went on hour long walks up hills; we plotted mammoth plans involving thousands of photographs and Windows Live Movie Maker; we marveled that Autumn is already alive, kicking, and changing the leaves of the trees in Seattle (Fall? Already? Really? C’mon!)….

….we took a zillion pointless pictures of ourselves and our new ‘dos….

….and we met up with Wednesday’s Guardian ad Litem, who will be speaking for her in court.

*gulp*

We weren’t really sure what the GAL would be like. I mean, I assumed she would be somewhat teenager-friendly since that’s her job and all, but then again she was hired to investigate, probe, and sniff out what is really going on in this court case of ours and tell the Judge what is in Wednesday’s best interest…. even if it isn’t exactly what Wednesday wants. And, dammit, that’s SCARY!

*tremble*

I had imagined a no-nonsense woman in a suit, sitting across a sterile desk, x-raying us with terrifying, demonic, unblinking eyes. Instead we found ourselves face-to-face with an utterly sweet, adorable lady with a preschool teacher kind of vibe in a preschool-looking office. She was the kind of girl you just wanna run up to and hug the living daylights out of, y’know? And, good! That made it sooooooooooo much easier for poor, shy, nervous Wednesday to vent and have her say. But, even so, how do you adequately divulge fifteen years worth of chronic crap to the one woman who beholds the power to make or break your court case in one teeny, tiny 90 minute interview?

You can’t.

The best you can do is sum it up, cross your fingers, hope it’s enough, and second-guess yourself every minute of every day thereafter. Which is what Wednesday and I have been wrestling with ever since. Did we say enough? Did we make our issues clear? It’s impossible to know at this point. We just have to wait and wonder. And that sucks. But still…. when the GAL looks you straight in the eyes with nothing but confusion on her face, and asks you, perplexedly, “Why is this even in court? I don’t understand. What on Earth is he fighting for? Why won’t he compromise or listen to what Wednesday wants?”, you can’t help but feel things just might maybe possibly be swinging your way.

*fingers crossed*

On the 17th, my family decided to crawl back out of the woods to spend a few days with us before we had to leave. And on the 19th, Scope flew into town.

Or he was supposed to.

Thanks to Mother Nature throwing a temper tantrum on the east coast and grounding his flight, his plane ended up three and a half hours behind schedule. He FINALLY landed in Seattle at 1:00 am on the 20th.

*shaking my fist menacingly at Mother Nature*

It had dawned on Wednesday and me that in all his visits to Seattle, we have never shown Scope Seattle’s beaches. Our favorite beach in Seattle is Seahurst Park. I have been going there since I was a wee, runty, obnoxious kid, as has Wednesday. So, Saturday the three of us loaded up into my car and went to the beach….

Sunday we met up with my mom, my sister and her brood at I-Hop for breakfast….

….where my littlest niece showed off her new walking skillz (which Scope got an uber-cute video of which you can see HERE)….

….and then Wednesday, Scope and I met up with Callista and her hubby at Mourning Market, a spooky, gothic-themed craft fair, which was fantastic!

There were hearses parked outside….

(Yeah, that’s right. It’s the Barbie Dream Hearse. Fabulous!)

And there were all kinds of creepy crafts and ghoulish goodies to purchase inside….

My favorite were the Siamese twin ragdolls….

But for $30 a doll? Ouch! The cheapskate in me said, “Bitch, I don’t think so.” However, the cheapskate in me applauded enthusiastically and even did a backflip or two for the free bat-shaped chocolates they were handing out….

(FREE chocolates?!?! Yes, please!!!!)

Sunday night, Scope, Wednesday and I went to my dad’s house to visit him. Three days before, he had started cringe-worthy cancer treatment (I’ll spare you the details of what was done to the poor fella) and was still in some pain, but he really, really wanted to see us before we hit the road the next morning. And we really, really wanted to see him too!

He showed Scope the massive model train track layout he is building in his backyard….

….and then when Dad said he felt well enough to go out for Mexican food, we all piled in his van and went out to dinner….

After dinner we went back to my mom’s place to start packing up all our scattered belongings for the Road Trip (*insert vacation-y fanfare here*) back home to Chicago the next morning.

Up next: Day 1 of our Road Trip, where we peed in a town called Ritzville! Stay tuned.

Not to be confused with his brother, Psycho

2011-08-19T06:30:00.002-05:00

Okay, so you remember when some idiot painted “Papa Smurf” on my mom’s car a couple weeks ago, right? (Don’t remember? Click HERE for a refresher.)

Well, my mom’s car wasn’t the only car that got vandalized that night. Most of her neighbors’ cars were painted too. We’re talking dozens of cars and THOUSANDS of dollars in damage caused by a few idiots with paint cans and no common sense.

When I first heard about it, I was half horrified and half amused that someone would be so moronic as to paint the name of a Smurf on someone else’s car. What the hell, right? Then I started wondering what they had painted on all the other cars….?

I called Mom up and asked her. She told me the word “mad” had been painted on every single car, along with other random words, but that she couldn’t remember what had been painted on any of the other cars except for her nearest neighbor’s. She said her neighbor’s car, just like hers, had the name of a Smurf painted across one side.

“Which Smurf?” I asked.

“I don’t know how you pronounce it,” she said, “but I’m sure it’s a Smurf name because I’ve seen it before. It starts with ‘S-C-H’”

A Smurf name that begins with S-C-H? What the—?

School Boy Smurf?…. Nah. Schindler’s List Smurf?…. Nah. Schwing Smurf?…. Surely not.

I was stumped.

When I flew into town a week ago, Mom picked me up at the airport and on the way to her house we started talking about the mysterious Smurf name on her neighbor’s car again. She told me her neighbor still hadn’t bothered to have the car repaired, so the S-C-H Smurf name was still scrawled across it and I would be able to see it for myself.

When we arrived at Mom’s house, I took a look at the “Smurf name” on her neighbor’s car and this is what I saw….

Yeah. That’s right. “Schizo.”

SCHIZO.

Are you kidding me?!

I’ll have you know that I died that day. Died right there in the carport. I freaking died laughing. My mother—my very own mother—thinks there is actually a Schizo Smurf.

Oh God, I love that woman!

Pardon my French

2011-08-18T11:07:00.000-05:00

And now for an Actual Conversation with my mom.

Mom: “Well, as the French say, gracias!”

Me and Wednesday simultaneously: “That’s Spanish.”

Mom: “Is it? Oh.”

Me: “Wait—Didn’t you STUDY FRENCH?!”

Mom: “I think so.”

Me: “………..I see.”

The End

[And to all the people out there eager to back Mom up on this one, yes, I know gracias means forgiveness in French, but that is SOOOOOOO not what she meant, dammit!]

No, no, it’s not what it looks like! It’s a proper blog post, not just a bunch of crap hastily thrown together! Really, I swear!

2011-08-15T06:00:00.002-05:00

So.

Here are some random things—good, bad, and fugly—that have been going on around here lately.

THE SHIT NO-ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT COURT:

We’ve all seen Judge Joe Brown, right? People show up to court in their swankiest (or skankiest) outfits, tell their stories, say “oh no, you di’int” at each other, and then Judge Joe Brown (why is he never called just ‘Judge Brown’?) immediately sniffs out who is the asshole in the room and orders said asshole to pay up. Case closed. And it only takes about ten minutes for justice to be served. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t it peachy?

Real court is nothing like that.

Nothing.

In a real court case you will spend not hours, but days of your life writing long, lonnnnnggggggg declarations to the judge, trying to explain everything that has ever happened which led you to court as well as trying to produce proof of everything you say. You will write declaration after declaration after declaration, as will the person you are suing/being sued by. I don’t know why one declaration isn’t enough, but it apparently isn’t, so back and forth and back and forth it goes until you feel like your whole entire existence on this planet is to repetitively write the same damn stories, endlessly.

But wait—there’s more!

Each time you write a declaration, you will have to pay your lawyer roughly $2000 to read it, add the proper legalese, and submit it to the judge. $20,000+ later, you’ll still be writing declarations and still not knowing when this damn thing will finally end.

(????)

My point? Court is a complete time suck and money pit. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s worth it if you are suing someone for the right reason, however I think justice would be much more humanely served if court was really like Judge Joe Brown, inexpensive, simple, and quicker than a trip through a Starbucks drive-thru.

QUICK! GET THE DEPENDS! I AM SO PROUD, I THINK I MAY BURST:

My daughter, Wednesday, graduated 8th grade this year. She has always loved school and had straight A’s, but, y’know, I assumed that our moving 2000 miles across the country last summer would probably cause her grades to dip a little bit this school year while she adjusted and got accustomed to her new non-Seattle-y life in Chicago. But I was wrong. Amazingly, she kept her grades up and even graduated Salutatorian of her class and gave a speech at graduation which made her teachers cry.

Scope and I sat there beaming with pride during the ceremony…. and now we are trying to get a grip on the whole idea that in just a couple of weeks we will have a high schooler in our midst.

(Whuuuuuuuuuuuuu—?)

(No, really. How did this happen so freakin’ quick?)

(Wasn’t she in preschool just yesterday?!)

(*sniff*)

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! EVEN BRIGHTER THAN THE MOON, MOON, MOON:

On the 4th of July, Scope, Wednesday and I went up onto our rooftop to watch the fireworks which were going off all around us from every direction. The view was incredible! It looked like this:

MY SINCERE APOLOGIES TO THE BRIDE:

I saw a praying mantis for the very first time. It was just an itty, bitty baby one which was running up the door of a building where we were attending a wedding, but it was sooooooooooo cool! I was squealing, jumping around and taking a million pictures of it.

‘Cuz I have class, bitches.

ANOTHER YEAR OLDER, ANOTHER YEAR WISEASSIER:

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago. I’m thirty—*sigh*—nine.

Half of my entire family completely forgot all about it. However, I’m honestly not upset or feeling all Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles or anything, because they have a really good reason, which is….

HANDS DOWN, THE WORST NAMED SIGN OF THE ZODIAC:

My dad was just diagnosed with cancer. That doodle up there is my spiffy artistic rendering of what I imagine cancer looks like. Evil, slimy little fucker, no? And here is what I would like to do to cancer….

Dad’s diagnosis was completely unexpected. Except for one cousin who beat uterine cancer several years ago, no-one in my family has ever had cancer. I think we all kinda thought we were immune until now. It’s typically heart disease or strokes that get us, not cancer. So hearing Dad say he has cancer was a bit like hearing him say he was taking up stripper pole dancing. Very surreal and whatthehellish.

Everybody is, understandably and expectedly, very emotional right now. Everybody except one person.

Me.

I don’t why, but I’m just not freaking out. I feel utterly calm and positive about the whole thing. I mean, I’m not happy about it, of course! I just feel that it’s too early in the whole process to start mourning because, at this point, anything is still possible, you know? He could be treated, walk away from this completely unscathed, and live another forty years for all we know. I have seen medical miracles happen. Hell, I have been one! [LINK] And until I know for sure which way this is going to go, north or south, I just am somehow simply unable to feel devastated by it because it just feels too premature for that, I guess.

And that makes me feel like a jerk.

When everyone around me is crying with worry, and I can’t seem to manage to produce even a single teeny tiny tear, I just feel like a cold hearted asshat.

Sometimes thinking positive sucks, obviously.

WHO HAS THE GALL?:

In other unexpected family medical news, my mom just found out both she and her youngest brother were born without gallbladders. Weird, huh? Her doctor has said all the rest of the family ought to be tested now, which means that in the near future both Wednesday and I will be having ultrasounds to find out if we are malformed mutants too.

I will keep you posted.

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES:

Notice anything different? Hmm? Do ya? What do you think?

ROAD TRIP, ANYONE?:

Wednesday and I are in Seattle this week taking care of some court stuff. She is FINALLY getting to have her say in court via a Guardian ad Litem. Halleluiah!!!! Hopefully, after she has had her say, this whole court mess will become a little more cut and dry.

*fingers crossed*

In a few days, Scope will be flying in to join us, and then next week the three of us will be cramming ourselves into my car (which I left behind with my dad when we moved to Chicago) with Wednesday’s two pet water frogs (which she left behind with my mom when we moved to Chicago because there was no way to bring them on the plane) (*sniffle*) and we are going to drive back home.

See that map up there? That’s the route we are planning to take, seeing Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore and other attractions along the way. As much as I loathe driving, I am uber-excited about our road trip. I’ve never been on a road trip before, except driving from Seattle to Portland, Oregon (Pfffft! Pitiful, I know!) and I have never seen Yellowstone or Mount Rushmore or any of the rest of it. So, squeeeeeeeeeeeee!

We expect the trip to take approximately four days. Once we are back home we will be selling my car because, please, we hardly need one vehicle in the city and definitely don’t need two! So, if you know anyone in the Chicago area in need of good, reliable Toyota Corolla, let me know.

Scope and I plan to blog the whole trip (although, probably not in real-time.... but you never know), so stay tuned....

Can’t. Stop. Laughing.

2011-08-14T14:11:00.000-05:00

I promised I wouldn't mention names, so lemme just say that this 14 year old girl I know who I once gave birth to was talking all out loud about Viagra in the middle of Target.

What the—?!

I thought that was extremely strange 'cuz she's usually so quiet about such things. I inquired about her new found boldness.

Turns out she thought Viagra was an allergy medication.

File this one under WHATTHEHELL....

2011-08-08T09:35:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I heard about this family in a car on a road trip. The parents were sitting up front with four kids in the back. The five year old needed to go to the bathroom. The dad didn't want to pull over, so he made her climb out of her car seat and use her little brother's portable toddler toilet right there in the car in front of her whole family AS HE DROVE 65 MILES AN HOUR DOWN THE HIGHWAY. Then he dumped the toilet out of his window when she was done.

Your thoughts? Please discuss.

(And, yes, I actually know these people.)

(Not that we hang out or anything!!!!)

Listen, I know we're all excited to see The Smurfs... but this is ridiculous!!

2011-08-04T08:01:00.001-05:00

Seriously, people? Really?! Look what someone spray painted on my mom's car yesterday.

Yeah, that's right: "Papa Smurf".

*blinking*

Um…. okaaaaaayyyyyyy….

I know it's not funny, but I can't help but laugh. I mean, what kind of smurfhead goes around painting Smurf names on cars? (Gargamel and Azreal, I'm looking at YOU.)

But wait—it gets better! What was Mom wearing when she discovered her car had been smurfed up?.... A blue shirt and white pants, of course.

*snicker*

Valuable things my daughter has learned this week….

2011-07-26T15:40:00.000-05:00

1. That it is probably a good idea to stop the treadmill before trying to step off of it.

2. That she can, in fact, do the splits if required.

3. That—*snicker*—even a full 24 hours later—*chuckle*—the mere thought of it—*giggle*—will still cause—*chortle*—her mother—*cackle*—to cry—*guffaw*—with uncontrollable laughter; hee hee heeeeeeee!

So, Let’s Just Go Ahead And Call It Harry Potter Week, ‘Kay?

2011-07-13T06:30:00.001-05:00

The final, last ever Harry Potter movie is coming out this Friday. That’s it. Done. Over. Finite Incantatem. There will be n-n-no m-m-more Harry Potter movies t-t-to look f-f-forward to.

*sniffle*

None. Zero. Zilch. Well…. unless JK Rowling writes book eight, of course!

*hoping…. hoping…. HOPING!!!!*

(Yes, yes. I’m a dork. Just roll with it, okay?)

Anyway…. maybe because it’s Harry Potter Week (or, I dunno, maybe it’s just a coincidence or something) (whatever), but a few days ago Harry and the Potters came to town and put on a free concert just a couple of blocks away from our house.

Score!

As a rabid, drooling Harry Potter fan, I had definitely heard of Harry and the Potters, but I had not actually ever seen them in concert before nor heard any of their Harry Potter-y songs, like, ever. But so what? It’s Harry Potter Week, I’m uberoverexcited, and the price was right, so I dragged my hubba hubba hubby, Scope, and my daughter, Wednesday, off to Lincoln Square for the free concert.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting. Maybe a couple of nerdy wizard-y songs. Perhaps a few squealing Harry Potter fans in Gryffindor scarves and round glasses. I wasn’t really sure what we were in for, but I know I really, REALLY wanted to find out, and I’m exceptionally glad I did.

Harry and the Potters were sooOOooOOooOOoo much fun! The songs were definitely Harry Potter-y, but they were also catchy, brainy and funny. The crowd was a lot bigger than I was expecting (I read in an article the next day that there were roughly 700 people at the concert) and most of them knew a lot of the songs by heart and were singing along with the band. I had a splendiferous time, and I’m pretty sure Scope and Wednesday did too.

Of course, because I’m Cora, I had my camera in hand and snapped a ridonkulous shitload of pictures. It all looked a little something like this….

Waiting for the show to start…

Harry Potter fans on the loose….

The band hit the stage….

I bought their CDs. Shut up….

Scope got into the “Hagrid Is Full Of Love” song….

Scope and I attempted to make a heart with our hands, but since my hands are the size of drink coasters and his are the size of dinner plates, it came out looking more like a deformed apple. Oh well….

Wednesday and I got Harry and the Potters t-shirts….

And, hey-hey-hey, looky what I just found: someone else at the concert near us filmed the whole dang thing and put it on Youtube. Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!:

Part 1

Part 2

Part3

Part4

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand the three of us have been singing those Harry and the Potters songs ever since. We can't get them out of our heads! And I am already wondering when the band will be back in town…. Next summer, perhaps?

I effing hope so!!!!

One.

2011-07-03T16:13:00.000-05:00

When my daughter was five, she was OBSESSED with the Disney Princesses. Especially Ariel. She used to run around in her Little Mermaid costume, wearing tiaras, fancy gloves, and big fake diamond rings, believing with all her heart and soul that she truly was a princess…. and that I was one too.

It was cute as all hell, of course, but it had a dark side to it: There was no prince in our world because I was a single mom and, for some reason, that used to really bother her. Sometimes she would put her little hands on her little hips and sternly ask me why I hadn’t found my prince yet, like I was just a slacker. Other times she would cry her little eyes out over my princelessness like it was the end of the world, bawling, “But you’re a princess, Mommy, and you don’t have your prince! It’s so sad! Where is he?! When are you going to find him?!” And she was utterly inconsolable.

(Aaaaaaand at that point she’d get put on Princess Restriction and only be allowed to watch the Powerpuff Girls or Pokemon until the Sea of Drama Queen-ness had ebbed!)

(Ahem.)

Fast forward seven years or so and—*royal fanfare*—I finally found my prince right here on this very blog. Scope rode in on a noble steed of wiseassiness, brandishing a sword of pun-iosity, left me a slew of knee-slapping comments and swept me off my feet.

*le swoon*

A lot of you were right there with us sharing our journey from the Land of Flirting to the Isle of Meeting to Dating Town to Marriage City and then off to Chicago. Can you believe it’s been a whole year since I married Prince Scope? I know! One year ago today. Crazy, huh?!

It’s been a spectacular year. A wonderful year. A magical year. It’s looked a little something like this….

Because, traditionally, it’s our "paper anniversary" and we are trying to be careful with money due to the uber-expensive court case we are involved in, this is the gift I gave my Prince Scope today: A glass full of Kisses each holding a personalized paper ribbon on which I listed lots and lots of things I love about him….

And he gave me a ticket to a living room viewing of our wedding video as well as a beautiful love letter (*sniffle*) which you can read HERE. (But, WARNING, it WILL make you cry!)

Awwwwwww.

So, to my dear, sweet, spectacular Scope, Happy Anniversary, hubba hubba hubby! I love you more and more each day. You’re my best friend, a wonderful father and a spectacular husband! Wednesday and I have never been happier than we have been this past year with you. I love you with all my heart and I’m so very, very glad I met you.

*smooch*

Love,
Cora

Boo Who?

2011-06-27T13:32:00.002-05:00

Okay, so the other day Facebook served up a few new friend suggestions for me, all of which were complete strangers, as usual. Except one. Thaaaaaaaaaaat’s right: an ex-boyfriend I haven’t seen since high school.

(Way to go, Facebook.)

*rolling my eyes*

*twice*

Let’s call this particular ex-boyfriend George. George Michael Wannabe.

My relationship with Mr. Wannabe was—umm—complicated…. mainly because I only dated him to get revenge on my annoying little sister and my ex-best friend, Trayla Trash (don’t remember Trayla? Click HERE), who both had drooling, oozing, festering crushes on George, while George, clearly oblivious to the therapy-causing, life-ruining pain it caused the other two girls, only had eyes for me.

Long story short, I quickly got sick of George, his telling EVERYBODY ALL THE TIME that he was going to be a bigger singer than George Michael one day, and his constant off-key singing of “Father Figure” in a sad attempt to prove it. But the final straw for me was the day he serenaded me with a stooOOooOOpid love song he was making up on the fly in front of my mother and grandmother, who were both crying their faces off with silent laughter. I broke up with George the next day.

(Ahhh, schoolgirl revenge via the dating of dumbass boys, it ain’t pretty.)

(Anyway….)

I haven’t seen, talked to, nor thought about George in over 20 years. The last time I saw him, he was telling me I would regret breaking up with him because he was going to be famous. No—famouser than famous! Wait!—make that THE MOST FAMOUSEST FAMOUS DUDE WHO EVER FAMED!!!!

*cough—delusional twat—cough*

Naturally, upon seeing George there on Facebook, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to take a quick peek at his info page to see what he’s doing these days since I’m pretty sure that the more-famous-than-George-Michael thing didn’t quite work out the way he was hoping for. And….

Wow.

No, really.

I…. I hardly know what to say.

George is a….

….a….

….a….

….a Ghostbuster. Oy.

He travels around with a bunch of funky-assed gadgets looking for ghosts and posts pictures of himself wearing velvet suits and top hats on the internet. Yep. Seriously. I swear I'm not making this up.

And I honestly can’t figure out if I think that is really moronic or kinda cool….?

Because Sometimes Facebook Is Just Easier

2011-06-21T06:30:00.002-05:00

Hmm.

So.

I was over on my hubba hubba hubby Scope’s blog the other day when—HOLY HELL!—I saw it. Something shocking. Something disgusting. Something big, burly, zitty, unshaven, and freaking downright craptastic!

*gulp*

I shielded my eyes. I pulled my hoodie over my head. And I curled my flexible self into a cramped, uncomfortable ball in my chair, bellowing, “GAWD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!” out into the merciful universe.

*sniffle*

On Scope’s sidebar was this:

Five weeks, people. I haven’t posted on my blog (nor religiously haunted YOUR blogs) (*guilty squirm*) in five weeks….? Really? Wow. I’m—I’m sorry. I guess life got the better of me lately.

I’m still in the middle of the court case, which, much to my surprise, involves me having to write my effing soul out into long, lonnnnnnggggggggg declarations to the Court over and over and over again, which leave me utterly exhausted. And as soon as I finish one—BAM!—I am assigned another.

*whimper*

Writing used to be fun, y’know? It used to be my release. (Oh writing, how I loved thee.) But now that I am the Court’s bitch, writing has become just a vexing chore and I have not had it in me to whip up a blog post, nor anything longer than a Facebook status update. Because sometimes Facebook is just easier. And. That. Is. That.

However….

Five weeks is long enough. Too long, actually. And since I still don’t have my bloggidy groove back yet thanks to the court crap I’m still writing, Blogaritaville, I’m going to give you my Facebook status updates instead. Here’s what’s been going on in the Land o’ Cora the last five weeks:

May 11:

A new neighbor moved into the 'hood. I don't like him. At all. He kept giving me the stink eye as I walked by.

May 13:

Marizpan cake makes everything better. EVERYTHING. Swearsies.

May 17:

Clearly, my hubby still thinks it is April Fools Day. He has been leaving fake spiders EVERYWHERE for me and Wednesday to stumble upon. Wednesday found one in her sock yesterday, and this is what I found when I opened the fridge this morning. MUST. GET. REVENGE.

May 18:

Holy shi tsu! I think I just had a heart attack. I opened our door to let air in and then suddenly *BAM!!* there was a big car crash right outside our house. Luckily everyone is okay, but I think I left a dent in the ceiling, I jumped so badly. Yeesh.

May 20:

‎*hic* I have had the hiccups all morning long. *hic* I had to run errands in three different stores while sounding like a harbor seal the whole dang time. *hic* Totally embarrassing. *hic* Holding my breath didn't work. *hic* Weird, 'cuz it usually does. *hic* So, I'm about to go drink water from a cup upside down. *hic* Wish me luck. *hic* *hic* *hic*

May 20:

I spent all morning cleaning the house because my mom and nephew are flying in to visit today. My lovely daughter just got home from school, promptly announced, "Wow, Mom, it looks beautiful in here!" and then immediately dropped a scoop of ice cream. INTO. THE. SILVERWARE. DRAWER. Really, girlie? Really?
:-P

May 21:

Just got back from the aquarium!

May 24:

Hubba Hubba Hubby wasn't looking so peppy tonight. I summoned all my ninja-like nanny skillz and promptly attacked him with a thermometer and, just as I suspected, he has a fever. :-( Now I've drugged him up and tucked him in bed. Seriously, fevers of the world, what are you thinking?! I can spot a fever a mile away, you know, so don't mess with me and my loved ones, got it?!?! Jeez.

May 30:

I don't know why these strawberries I'm growing are taking so long to ripen. There are just green berries as far as the eye can see. Hurry up, dangit! I wanna make a shortcake out of you!

May 31:

"I don't know what I'm training for but I hope it never happens" - LOL!!

June 2:

I haven't eaten chocolate in over a month. I know! Who am I and what have I done with the real Cora?! New vice: marzipan cake. Mm-mm-mmmm.

June 2:

Right this very second Scope is giving Wednesday lessons on how to shoot a rubber band at me more effectively. But I'm not worried because she keeps getting the rubber band stuck on her own thumb. Yep. These are the people I live with. ;-)

June 10:

Okaaaaayyyyyyyy. Wow. I have no words.

June 12:

We have a harvest of strawberries! Mmmmmm.

June 15, 2011:

Dear 14 Year Old Daughter; The term is "BUCKET seats", okay? Bucket with a "B," not an "F". And, no, that was not an "inappropriate" song I was listening to. But thank you for the laugh! *snicker* :-)

June 16:

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! I don't even know what it is yet, but I am SOOOOOOO EXCITED!!!! http://www.youtube.com/JKRowlingAnnounces

June 18:

Just saw a firefly for the very first time. Wowza! Soooooooo cool! I was squealing like a pig on the sidewalk watching it light up and fly around. Too bad dogs and cats can't light up their butts like that. Think how handy that would be in a power outage....

Wordless Wednesday: Last Night’s Sunset Was Really Somethin’ Else!

2011-05-11T10:14:00.000-05:00

Wow. Just wow.

Because I Already Have My Two Front Teeth

2011-05-04T11:37:00.003-05:00

Dear Youth Counselor;

I do apologize. Profusely. I know it was—umm—odd for you to walk in and find me saying, "Dear Thanta, I want a horth for Chrithmath," to Wednesday as she cried with laughter outside your office yesterday. Thometimeth when I'm nervouth I mock Thindy Brady. I don't know why, I jutht do.

I'm thorry. I know it wath a theriouth thituation. I AM taking theriouthly.

No, really! I thwear!

I hope we can put thith behind uth. Thankth.

Thintherely,
Wednethday'th Mom

Aaaaaaand The Countdown Has Begun….

2011-05-03T08:11:00.001-05:00

Can’t wait!

Can’t wait!!!!

CAN’T WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mad Hatter? Damn Straight.

2011-04-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

Wow.

So, the Royal Family sure likes some bizarre-assed hats, don’t they?

I mean, forget the wedding and all that—what was that THING on Beatrice's head?!?!

I’m speechless.

Waiting…. and Waiting…. and Winning?

2011-04-08T14:11:00.003-05:00

There is going to be a ruling made today waaaayyyyyy faaaaarrrrrrr awaaaayyyyyy in a courtroom in Seattle. This ruling has a lot of very important, emotionally charged, financially staggering things piggybacking on it.

And I’m stuck here.

2000 miles away in Chicago.

Glued to my laptop, just waiting…. and waiting…. and waiting on the verdict.

I can’t spew all the details, but I’ll tell you that I’m suing my ex-husband, Baggie, over various horrible things he has done over the past seven months which have shaken my poor daughter, Wednesday, to the core. Wednesday, who has had all she can stand from Baggie, can no longer bear the idea of spending spring break with him back in Washington, nor can I bear the idea of forcing her to go. So, I’m suing to try to stop it. But first I had to sue to try to change jurisdiction, which is what is being decided today.

(Long story. Just roll with it.)

We’re supposed to fly out in exactly seven days from now for Wednesday’s spring break visit with Baggie, and today’s is merely the first of at least two rulings that MUST be made within this one itty bitty week-long time span for us to succeed in stopping it.

We have no time to spare. We are down to the wire.

Baggie, of course, knows we are quickly running out of time and decided that rather than respecting his daughter’s feelings (and severe emotional breakdown!) over things he has done to her and manning up by letting her skip her spring break with him for her happiness and mental health, he’d prefer to purposely slow everything down by asking the court for a nine day continuance so no ruling can be made in time, so Wednesday will not have a voice in any of this, and then simply due to a lack of time he’ll “win” and get the spring break he feels he is owed with a poor, emotionally-destroyed 14 year old girl who would rather cut off her own ears with a cheese grater than spend a week with him.

But is that winning? No. It’s not. Wednesday knows what’s what. She knows who is fighting for her to have her say in court and who is fighting to hush her up. If Baggie “wins” jurisdiction in court today, mark my words, he will lose a hell of a lot more than he wins. He’ll lose the last pitiful, feeble, runty little shred of respect Wednesday has for him. *POOF!* Gone. Just like that.

I made a great case, I know I did. I did the best I could possibly do to fight for my daughter. And now we wait.

I’ve been waiting all day. I’m nervous and jittery. I feel sick to my stomach. I am physically shaking.

This sucks.

Please cross your fingers for us today. We need all the positive energy we can get!!!!

Yeah, 'Cuz THIS Is What You Want To Come Face-To-Face With When You're Driving Home On The Freeway, Right?! Yikes!

2011-04-04T06:30:00.003-05:00

Relax. It was being towed. But still, it was pretty creepy looking!

There’s No “I” In Team. But There Is An Ex In Excrement.*

2011-03-28T06:30:00.002-05:00

I know. I keep promising you more cartoons and then I keep leaving you high and dry and utterly cartoonless. I suck. Clearly. But I’ve been insanely busy the last couple of weeks on a huge, uber-secret hush-hush project of the utmost importance which I can’t really tell you about here yet, lest my nemesis happens to stumble upon this little ol’ blog o’ mine and snoop through my bag of tricks and secret weapons.

(Makes me sound all mysterious, important and superhero-y, doesn’t it?)

What I can tell you is that, yes, I am taking my ex-husband back to court over recent jaw-dropping-ly nasty acts on his part. And helping me in my latest court battle is, not one, but TWO lawyers in TWO different states, which means I have a TEAM OF LAWYERS on my side, and I must admit that fact makes me feel quite hoity toity and ritzy glitzy indeed!

With all the recent lawyer-y tasks I’ve been given, I simply haven’t had the time to finish any of the stories I’ve been wanting to tell you. Hell, I haven’t had the time for much of anything else either, which explains why my legs are unshaven and look like pasty cactus plants, and why the dirty laundry pile is no longer nicely restrained in the laundry basket and has revolted, escaped, and taken over the entire effing floor of the walk-in closet.

*exhausted and overwhelmed sigh*

Hopefully, these time-consuming legal things will be wrapped up soon and then I’ll shave my legs, do my laundry, tell you all about my adventures in court, and draw you oodles and oodles of dorky doodles for your entertainment. Swearsies!

Until then, please wish me luck. Wednesday, Scope and I need it. Thanks, you guys!

* There’s also an Ex in expletive, excruciating, exhausted, extinguish, and inexcusable. Just sayin.’