http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwnFE_NpMsE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnvgq8STMGM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKttq6EUqbE

My life would be complete if the Sassy Gay Friend would help Lydia Bennet next.

I had a fantastic idea for a present for my mom for Christmas, which I will not detail here because sometimes she reads my blog. Mwahahahaha. But it will be awesome, and after Christmas I will post pics of all my crafting and sewing. I have a lot to do, basically. I have big plans for my niece, too. I have some pink tie-dye fleece that is going to be a hat and mittens for her, and I’m going to make her a purse, because every stylish one-year-old needs a bag to carry her toys in (she is a Libra). I think I might also make her a tutu, haven’t decided yet. She’s going to get some books from Auntie Megan as well, because I’m told she has none, and that ain’t right. My kids have more books than toys (unless you count Legos, which are insidious and probably multiplying every night, ready to attack like the bubonic plague of toys). They read all the time. She needs to read too. And it will be fun to buy princess books. I’m planning to give my nephew books this year as well. He’s gotten into reading, so I’m going to send him the first couple of Harry Potter books.

I also need to get started on the boys’ Christmas pajamas. I bought Christmas print flannel last year and never got around to making the jammies. So now I have washed the fabric, and will cut it out and try to get it sewn tomorrow. I hope. Going to do some button-up collarless shirts style jammies (they won’t wear it with a collar, they complain any time I try to put so much as a polo shirt on them. Reminds me of my brother, who claimed every shirt with a collar was choking him to death. I can still hear his little seven year old voice acting like he was being strangled, “It’s binding! It’s choking me!”).

I think that’s it for Christmas to-do lists. Must send out cards. I’m lazy and don’t do the letter thing, I just send a photo card. No one reads those letters anyway.

But I’ve been thinking.

And all the movies I love, the ones I watch over and over to the point of memorizing entire scenes (or the entire movie, in the case of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which I could recite in its entirety during college), and even my favorite fairy tale, they all have a theme in common: The characters are willing to do whatever is necessary to get what they want, and in almost every case this means subterfuge. But always, someone is going all-out, full-tilt for what they want, no matter what it takes.

Interesting.

I told my aunt she should write a book about her theory. I actually do think she’d make a great New Age guru. She’s very big on visualizing what you want and assorted other hippy New Age sort of things. She’d be great at the guru thing.

I find this funny because my response to a large event is to want all-new garb, while his is to want new armor. I did make him a bit of new garb, but he’s still got quite a bit of decent garb, so I didn’t bother with much.

They’re heading out Saturday night (why? Men are so weird) and then as soon as he comes back, he’ll be going out on another out of town job. Hawaii. Wish we could pick up and move there already. One of these days I’m going to make that happen. And then I’m never leaving Hawaii again.

And a quick kid funny: The boys are building with Legos right now (they LOVE Legos) and Twin B is saying “This police car going to blow your feet off. That means it going to be very surprising. It going to knock your socks off forever.” And because they always need to top each other, Twin A responds, “Well these spaceships are going to blow your HEAD OFF.”

There really seems to be very little purpose to this thing, though, I have to admit. It’s sort of like a game. But now I want to go somewhere, so that I can check in to local places somewhere else. I keep thinking how fun it would have been to be foursquaring while I was in Hawaii or San Diego, or up in Maine. In two weeks, I’ll be down in Florida for Infinitus, and I’m going to be checking in left and right down there. I can’t wait. In the meantime, I’m looking for somewhere interesting I can go this weekend so I can get some new check-ins. I’m almost at the 25 check-ins badge.

While at the Wright Bros, I attempted to instill a sense of the grandeur of history in my evil twins. I explained about Wilbur and Orville Wright and the first flights, and added “It was over a hundred years ago!” Twin A immediately piped up, “Dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago!” If this were Twitter, I think the appropriate hashtag would be #justgottold

A few pics I snapped on my phone. I would share the ones I took with the spiffy camera, but sadly, my Internet is still not working. I will try to remember to add them later.

Yesterday I realized, I no longer function without internet. I had to look up a phone number. Couldn’t find the yellow pages. Had to use my phone’s browser to search for it. Wanted to check the weather to see how long the storm was meant to last; the storm had taken out the satellite tv. Had to use my phone again. Wanted to find a recipe, couldn’t get on allrecipes. Scrapped it and made something else instead of trying to use my phone (I wonder if allrecipes has a Droid app?). About a hundred times throughout the day, I wanted to look something up (I do bits of incidental research all the time) and couldn’t without my internet.

Verizon needs to hop to it and get that circuit fixed. I need my information back. My Droid is really keeping my ass out of a sling, at least I can check Twitter and Facebook and pop off a quick blog post.

What do you think really happens in the “undisclosed locations” that politicians flee to in times of crisis?

I think it’s pretty clear.

Every year, I fight what I know is a losing battle against the weeds in my haphazard little flower beds. Sadly, the weeds are almost the only things I can grow.

When we moved in, the landscaping on our circa-1940s house consisted of two camellia bushes out front and three small hedge-bushes (I have no idea what they’re called. Box hedges?) around the side of the house. The hedges have grown into monstrosities (The Husband strongly regrets not ripping them out eight years ago) and the camellias are still hanging in there and blooming, but every year I make an attempt to add to this. I put up that concrete scalloped edging to fence in an area as flower beds, more dirt, and attempted to make green shit grow.

I’ve tried many and varied plants in the front. Hostas seemed to work at first, and came back once, but then were dead. I’ve killed several spider plants, two aloes (one my sister had begun and was like 4 feet high when she gave it to me. I can kill anything, though), quite a lot of azaleas, miniature roses, a hibiscus bush that claimed to be able to thrive in this area, love-lies-bleeding, and many other plants I’ve repressed or forgotten. Most plants die around me. If it cannot thrive under benevolent neglect, it’s just not going to make it in my yard. I have managed to keep a hydrangea bush alive – this will be its third summer with me, and the green is coming back and it gets bigger every time. I have high hopes that it will survive after all. In fact, ignoring growing the hydrangea has been working out so well that I’ve decided this year’s attempt at forcing something (apart from clover) to grow in my flower beds will be a new hydrangea bush. Maybe three. I have a very large bare patch on one side where three azaleas (“hardy”, they claimed to be. I contend that they were weak) died last year, and a small bare patch on the other side where one azalea bit it. I’m thinking two hydrangeas on one side and one on the other, maybe they’ll hang in there.

The other thing that has grown despite my inattention I’ve managed to keep alive is a trio of randomly selected and placed rose bushes. I believe this is because The Husband planted them. He has the green thumb I lack. He once bought a 99 cent tiny little (maybe an inch high) tomato plant at Wal-Mart, and by the end of the summer it had gotten to roughly four feet, spherical, and produced so many friggin’ tomatoes that I could have started my own tomato sauce business. He planted my roses, and while I’d like a few more – there’s still room for another two or three – I’m afraid to try it myself. The miniature roses were dead inside a month – I planted those.

I really would like to do a vegetable garden this year. Our last attempt at that, however, involved the deaths of a blueberry bush, a raspberry bush, watermelons, carrots, tomatoes, yellow squash, a sage bush, basil, and mint. And that was WITH The Husband helping. The watermelons actually did grow a little, but we live in an area with wild rabbits, and they kept eating everything, even after we put up a small fence around it. Clearly I need a very large fence to attempt this again. Not sure I have the inclination for a vegetable garden. I can’t even keep an aloe alive for more than a year or so, and that’s pretty sad.

The next paycheck should have some extra money where I can go buy a couple of hydrangeas. And a hanging plant for me to hang on the ghetto shade and start killing.

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