Archive for the ‘Random Thoughts’ Category

I’ve been playing on foursquare a lot lately. It’s so pointless, yet so fun. Everywhere I go, I check in. I’ve checked in at about four or five local bridges, and am thinking of going up to the peninsula this weekend just so I can check in on the Monitor-Merrimac bridge-tunnel. I want to go to a cupcakery in Hilltop to see if it will give me the Cupcake badge, or if I need to visit a few more cupcake places (there are only two around here, sadly, and I’ve already been to the other one). I’m mayor of my house and my kids’ speech clinic. I have several badges and on the way to several more.

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.

This was just a short ‘un, down to the OBX for the day. Swimming in the sound, sifting for fossil shark teeth at the Elizabeth II, ice cream in Manteo, and Wright Brothers Memorial. The usual round, basically.

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.

I have now been without Internet for over 24 hours. If I didn’t have a Droid phone, I might actually be losing my shit right now.

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.

So my friend Melia, while mocking blog prompts (and rightly so) came up with a few of her own. I’d like to answer this one:

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

I think it’s pretty clear.

It has begun.

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.