Coming home!

Aaaaaaaand now for ANOTHER update on this year’s Project 365….



Day 214 (2012-08-01) ~  I've said it before and I'll say it again: the trees in Seattle remind me of Oscar the Grouch!  All that lush, green moss looks a lot like fur sometimes.




Day 215 (2012-08-02) ~  Meet one of my neighbors during my stay in Seattle.  These slimy dudes were EVERYWHERE.  Ewwwww.





Day 216 (2012-08-03) ~  A toad sculpture in my mom's garden.  Pffft!  I can never tell if he looks happy or menacing.





Day 217 (2012-08-04) ~  I got a few pictures of this guy wind sailing a massive tree.  He was maybe 50 feet up that tree, leaping around the branches and wielding a chainsaw like it was nothing.  My sister got a shot better than this one though—after I'd put my camera away, the guy lit a cigarette up there and clung to the tree while smoking!  Yeesh.





Day 218 (2012-08-05) ~  Feeling blue.  Again.  Scope had gone back home to Chicago a couple of days before I shot this picture, and my baby had gone on the second part of her stay with certain estranged relatives, a three hour drive away, and I was still loitering on my mom’s couch.  It was kind of depressing, actually.  :-(





Day 219 (2012-08-06) ~   What a cutsie flower!  It took every ounce of my self control not to draw a smiley face on it.





Day 220 (2012-08-07) ~   Ugh.  Spiders.  I hate them.  HATE!!!!  While staying in Seattle, I found at least one spider in the house every single day.  Sometimes I found three before breakfast.  *shudder*  I see no reason why nature shouldn’t just stay outside where effing it belongs, like this one that I found in someone’s garden.





Day 221 (2012-08-08) ~  While out on a walk, I found this fence in dire need of a new paint job.... but, yet, I still think it looks somehow quite pretty in its own way, don't you?





Day 222 (2012-08-09) ~  While in Seattle I found out that my old favorite radio station from my high school days still plays all the old music I loved back then every Thursday morning.  They call it "Save The Wave".  They were playing Depeche Mode, Erasure, Book of Love, and all that good stuff from way back when.  So, I thought the radio dial deserved to be a picture of the day.





Day 223 (2012-08-10) ~  The blackberries in Seattle started ripening while I was still in town.  Yay!  I filled several big tubs full of them and kept them in my mom’s fridge.  Mm-mm-mmmm.  When we lived in Seattle, Wednesday and I would fill our freezer full of tubs of blackberries we picked for free in the neighborhood.





Day 224 (2012-08-11) ~  He’s sexy and he knows it.  In the grocery store with my nephew, we found a figure of the brown M&M lady standing in the candy aisle.  Of course, my LMFAO-lovin' nephew went running right over to it to do the "wiggle dance" like he was the red M&M in the commercial.  (Hee hee hee.)









Day 225 (2012-08-12) ~  Really?  Fall in Seattle?  In early August?!  Wow.





Day 226 (2012-08-13) ~  Eh.  Just a quickie for the day because I was ultra busy.  It's my mom's watering can.  Whatever.  They can’t all be good, right?





Day 227 (2012-08-14) ~  Ohhhhhhhh, the joy!  Wednesday came back from her stay with her other relatives, and my nephew and nieces were SOOOOOOOOOO excited!  A water fight AND a silly string war promptly broke out in the driveway and this is what my delighted nephew looked like as he ran, screaming, as Wednesday chased him down with her silly string can.  :-)





Day 228 (2012-08-15) ~  This was our last night in Seattle.  In some respects, the five weeks went by much faster than I had expected, but in other respects, it took FOREVER.  Wednesday and I hung out with her cousins our last night in town.  There were mixed emotions, of course, as we were simultaneously excited and relieved to be going back to our normal lives with our beloved Scope in Chicago, but we also knew we would be missing those three munchkins in the picture there.





Day 229 (2012-08-16) ~  On our flight home from Seattle, the kiddo and I passed by Mt Rainier.





More pics will be posted soon!  Hopefully, we will be all caught up by next week.  (Yay!)






© Coracabana

Revenge of the nerds

Aaaaaaaand now for another update on this year’s Project 365….


Day 128 (2012-05-07) ~ Just an experiment with food coloring in water. I figured it had been awhile since I did one of these. (That's one of the glasses from my wedding. Awwww.)





Day 129 (2012-05-08) ~ Anybody remember those red loudspeakers with the word "BONG" scrawled across them which Depeche Mode used to have all over their record covers in the 80's? (What a great advertising ploy. I loved those!) This picture kind of reminds me of them in a way. It's a shot of one of our kitchen lights.





Day 130 (2012-05-09) ~ Revenge of the Nerds! Looks like someone had a food fight on the stairs. What a sad, SAD waste of perfectly good candy.





Day 131 (2012-05-10) ~ Just a quick shot of some irises I found outside a local elementary school playground. Holy moly, what a precarious place for flowers to dwell. I honestly can't believe they haven't been stomped to death by hundreds of tiny feet!





Day 132 (2012-05-11) ~ Out for a walk with my kiddo, we stumbled upon this beautiful flowering Clematis, climbing its way up a tree trunk. I thought a little focal color would be a fun twist on this image.





Day 133 (2012-05-12) ~ On the train home from work, Scope saw some graffiti he thought would make a great Picture Of The Day. However, when we went back to look for it, we couldn't find it. All was not lost though because, while we were hunting around under the "L" train track, we found this garage we would never have seen otherwise. Someone has painted a spectacular picture of a sleeping girl across the doors. Sooooooo cool!





Day 134 (2012-05-13) ~ For Mother's Day, Scope and Wednesday got me a brand new point and shoot camera because my old one is literally falling apart and hauling my huge DSLR around in my purse can be a bit ridiculous. My new Cyber Shot has all sorts of fun features to play around with, so we and I went out for a long walk so I could try the different settings out. My favorite (so far!) was the Partial Color setting. Wowza!





Day 135 (2012-05-14) ~ A shortcake in the making (part 4). Taa-daa! Our first strawberry of the summer! Of course, we couldn't make a shortcake out of it because it is an early bloomer and all the other berries are still little and green. But still, we shared it at dinner and it was sweet and delicious! Mmmmmmmmm.





Day 136 (2012-05-15) ~ Ha! So, Wednesday found a typo on our box of Triscuits and I thought that would make a mighty fine picture of the day. Mimimum! *snicker*





Day 137 (2012-05-16) ~ Whoopsie! There was a car crash on the street right below our balcony. Luckily, everyone was alright.... although, the drivers needed to wait almost two hours for the police to arrive because NATO was in town and the cops are busy with that.





Day 138 (2012-05-17) ~ While waiting outside of a local high school, a girl and a couple of her friends suddenly unrolled a banner on the pathway so she could ask a boy to prom. It was sooooooooooo cute! Awww. It's not the best picture of the moment because I was trying to be sneaky about it and didn't want to spoil the moment at all by making them nervous that some strange lady was taking their picture! As for the boy, he said yes. :-)





Day 139 (2012-05-18) ~ Just playing around again with the partial color feature on my new camera. This time I set it to blue, obviously.





Day 140 (2012-05-19) ~ A macro shot of my water cup and it’s straw.





Mm-kay. That puts us at about 36% of the way through the project so far!





© Coracabana

Why Windex smells like VICTORY.

In loving memory of my favorite photo editing playground, Picnik, where I draw all my cartoons, I’m serving up one last Picnik-ified story here, just for YOU. You see, Picnik was hijacked by Google awhile ago and, most sadly and inexplicably, the Google overlords decided to pull the plug on Picnik yesterday. *sniff* So, while I figure out where oh where I will do my cartoons from now on, please enjoy the following tale of Windex, a drunk, and one satanic zebra.



Back in the early 1990’s I worked one summer in a snack hut with several other girls, selling hot dogs, chili, and Slushies to camera-toting, clad-in-plaid tourists.


Oh! And we made ice cream cones……





….for bears.





(Yes, bears.)


(Really.)


(I swear.)


This snack hut sat amid the rock-strewn parking lot of a famous sort of drive-through zoo in Washington State. Since I don’t want to get sued right now (one legal rodeo is more than enough, thankyouverymuch!) let’s not mention the real name of the place and, instead, just call it The Drive Thru Zoo, ‘kay?


People could drive their cars through The Drive Thru Zoo and get all up close with bison, llamas, deer, rabbits, peacocks, and one perpetually pissed off zebra.





(Watch out! He bites!)





There were also bears who lived in pens in The Drive Thru Zoo. These bears would do tricks for their trainers during show times in return for ice cream cones.


(Bears prefer Sherbet.)


(Just saying.)


Anyway, I would show up to The Drive Thru Zoo’s snack hut five days a week in my Depeche Mode t-shirts and Doc Marten boots, munching on Mentos, quoting Seinfeld, and singing Nirvana songs.





(It was the 1990’s. Shut up.)


The job didn’t pay very well ($6.00 an hour, I think it was), but I got all the free food I wanted during my shift which kind of made up for it.


(And which also meant I made sure I ate three meals a day there.)





(Ahem).


Besides the lack of money, I really liked my job. My co-workers were hilarious. The food was delicious. The hours were great. And the animals were fluffy and sooooooooooo cute!





(Well, maybe not the zebra.)





In fact, there was really only one thing I hated there: My manager. Let’s call her, ohhhhh, I dunno…. how ‘bout…. Ann. Ann Ebriated.





Ann’s in-law’s owned The Drive Thru Zoo and she actually lived on the zoo’s property in a house which was sitting smack dab in the middle of the parking lot, right within view of the snack hut. Ann was loud, picky, irritable, and had nothing to do all day but stare out her living room window at us slaving away in the snack hut, just waiting and waiting for someone to do something she didn’t like so she could march on over and yell at us.


Yelling at people was her second favorite thing in the whole wide world. Her first favorite thing? Getting drunk. And if she could find a way to combine the two—well, hello!—then her whole week was flipping made!


It became a regular sight to see Ann stumbling in a drunken rage across the parking lot towards us, shouting to herself about idiotic things. Then she’d burst through the door, yelling and throwing things at us in front of all the customers.





When Ann was drinking, no-one could do ANYTHING right. It was so humiliating. One of the girls once got yelled at for writing a smiley face on the dry erase board with all of the day’s Specials.





I once got yelled at for putting lids on the relish and onion jars on the condiment stand to try to keep the wasps from crawling around inside them.





What truly evil, inept employees we were.


One day, there were three of us working in the snack hut when we saw Ann staggering her way over to us, flailing her arms angrily and hollering to herself. Again. We didn’t know what she was mad about this time, but I noticed that the glass counter top had some coffee drips on it and, not wanting to get screamed at over it, I quickly grabbed the Windex and started frantically cleaning the counter as she bumbled her angry drunk self our way.


I was still scrubbing the counter with the Windex bottle in my hand when Ann came tripping furiously through the door in mid-tantrum.


“You little b*tches!“, she drunkenly boomed and started slurring off today’s list of irrational grievances. But she only got about three complaints into it when suddenly she gasped and stared at me in horror as if I had just sprouted a unicorn horn….





….and then farted a rainbow.





”Is that W-w-windex?”, she said in a raspy voice, pointing at the bottle in my hand. Thinking I was about to get a Mounds bar chucked at me, I nervously nodded. Ann’s bleary eyes flew wide open and then she immediately scampered back out the door and stumbled her way back home across the rocky parking lot without even finishing her tirade.





Bizarre.


The next morning, Ann was there and surprisingly sober this time. She sat us all down to have a serious discussion during which she told us she was “very allergic” to Windex and that we should never, never, ever spray the foul stuff if she was in the room.


Interesting.


Now, Ann mysteriously failed to mention what form her awful Windex allergy took. Perhaps she broke out in hives. Or had trouble breathing. Or maybe her boobs would shrivel like raisins as she involuntarily moonwalked through the bison poo piles and then she’d spontaneously combust while screaming “ayiyiyiyiyiyi” like Xena. (One can hope!) But it didn’t matter, because at that moment we were armed with almighty knowledge, and Windex became our valiant savior.





Whenever Ann came charging towards us like a drunken bull, we knew exactly what to do: hose the place down STAT! We would spray Windex all over the counter top, the door, the fridge, the sink, and even out dang the window while giggling to ourselves maniacally.





It worked like magic every time. Ann would thunder in through the door, take one whiff and then leave again without being able to properly degrade us.





And the beauty of it was that we could always claim innocence later on and say we were just keeping the snack hut sparkling clean, and—please—even someone like Ann didn’t have the gall to berate us for that. Windex was the perfect sauced a**hole repellant!


It’s been nearly 20 years since then, and I still LOVE the scent of Windex. Windex smells like power, victory, and craftiness frosted with a heaping helping of utter jubilation!





*le sigh*


I would totally wear it as a perfume. I’m not kidding…. Y’know, if I didn’t think I would end up in a padded room, listening to Zamfir, and braiding yarn baskets for doing so. Just sayin’.


Anyway….


What became of Ann, you might be wondering? Well, last I saw of her, she was on the local news. Some patrons of The Drive Thru Zoo had their skivvies in a bunch because the evil zebra was biting people, and they had the videos—and scars!—to prove it. Despite the fact that one of the first things Ann ever said to me when I was hired was, “don’t go anywhere near that damn zebra; he’ll bite your arm off,” she was rolling her eyes on my TV and telling the reporters that the satanic zebra was safe and tame and that the zebra's victims were making a big deal out of nothing.





Unbelievable. Did I mention that one of the zebra's victims was a three year old who was yanked right out of a car window and dragged along the ground and had to get stitches? Yep!





I wonder if Windex repels demonic zebras too?....






© Coracabana