Abby gave me a J

Abby gave me a "J" for the meme she got from Terri.

I present: "10 thing I like beginning with the letter J" (but not necessarily in the order in which I like them best).

1. JABBERING - This one gets me in trouble on occasion, but I can't seem to help myself. I do sometimes realize that I'm dominating the conversation, but even then I find it difficult to shut my trap.



2. JOKING/JESTING - There's a good chance that you wouldn't know this unless you actually got to know me. After that, you should develop a tough skin.



3. JESUS - Jesus is very cool. If you want to hear more about that you can ask me.





4. JEWELS - I'm so glad that Dirty Larry used to be in the jewelry business. I got some very pretty things before he left that field. Some of those pieces have extreme sentimental value, like my gold hoops with teeth marks made by my children when they were tiny babies. I could never replace those.



5. JON BON JOVI - Honesty, I can't imagine why anybody WOULDN'T like this man. He makes cookies and brings them to school for his children and their friends for pete's sake. And then there's that whole "I'll be there for you" thing.
   
   



6. J.R.R. TOLKIEN - This was a brilliant man...AND he was friends with C. S. Lewis, which is just a reflection of his brilliance if you ask me.
   






7. JUSTICE FOR GIRLS - This store is a 10-year-old girl's dream place. I like going there and finding exactly the right thing for every girly birthday party within minutes and under $20.
   




8. JUSTICE IN GENERAL - I like to see things work out properly, although I admit I don't see that very often. Therefore, when it DOES happen, that makes it even more special.



9. JAM (NOT JELLY) - Jam spreads so much easier than jelly.



10. JACKET - I love my brown lamb skin jacket. It is so soft and it smells so good. I'm sorry for the little lamb that gave up it's life in order for me to wear it, but I just try not to think about that. It's a crying shame that I get to wear it so little. For example, today it was 78°. It's December 27th and it's 78°. That's not right.

Merry Christmas to all...

Just some weekend stuff

Litkia: Hey mama guess what?
Beej: What?
Litkia: If you don't count today or tomorrow or the next day, it's only ONE DAY 'til Christmas!!

Brilliant.

Guess what happened today? Dirty Larry handed me the final quarter (Tennessee) that Litkia and I needed to complete our set of State quarters. I came VERY close to putting it in its place without Litkia present, but thought better of it and let her do the honors. Now, I'm sure some of you (and of course by "some of you" I mean Coco) are gonna laugh at the fact that I collected all the state quarters, but this sort of activity is RIGHT up my alley. There are a finite number of spaces to be filled and how can anybody resist filling them? I'm so glad I gave up my stamp collecting (shut up) because that was an exercise in futility. Not to mention it was very expensive. There was absolutely no way to fill up the spaces with labels like 1847 - Washington. Just impossible. It still kind of gives me stomach pains when I look at the empty spaces, but I console myself by looking at the large number of pages with no stamps missing. Very satisfying is what that is.


I went to a Christmas party Saturday night at the home of some friends and I talked to many interesting new people and ate yummy food. Dirty Larry and I were the oldest people there and I'm pretty sure we were the only ones there with kids. We were the first people to leave and we got a little flack from the hostess and some of the guests about our 10:00 departure. It seems that these people don't yet understand my way of life. When it happens to them, I'm gonna point and laugh.

Happily, Dirty Larry drove by Bienville Square on the way home so I could take sparkly pics of the thingies hanging from those beautiful, huge oak trees and the fountain (now Christmas tree). It was a nice weekend. Now I face the week with my kids home from school and work still lurking at my desk. Wish me luck. I truly think I'm gonna need it.

Actually they suck

When this blog lived at Blogdrive, I paid $2.95 a month to remove ads. Paying a little bit also afforded me more space to upload pictures. For a few months I even paid $4.95, but I can't remember why I did that. At any rate, I was paying the $2.95 when I left to begin blogging here. I started blogging there in 2005 and if you've known me for any of that time, you know that they were a constant thorn in my side. I haven't had any response from Blogdrive yet about the old place being disabled, but I'm pretty sure the reason they did it was because I'm no longer paying that small fee and my picture storage is over the limit for the free version (seems I'm using 4886% of the allotted MB). I'm willing to delete pictures, but since the blog is disabled, I can't even see what pictures were posted where. I suppose I could pay again and take the time to do some photo deleting or possibly just grab my content and be done. I'm so frustrated. I'm trying to decide if there was anything written in all that drivel that was worth keeping. (Stories about Daddy...the whole week before he died...the memories I've written about my kids) Is it worth the (huge amount of) time and (seriously huge amount of) effort to do that? Maybe I could take the $2.95/month and give it to a jobless person and hire them to copy and paste for me. Oh wait...I forgot I'll have to pay to get it to even show up. There are over 750 entries there. Impossible. Just impossible.


I've learned a lesson though. If I want to keep any of this stuff, I need to do it as I go. We all know Beej is brilliant and she doesn't like learning lessons. It makes her look like she didn't know something. Beej would much rather the blogdrive people just be good to her and answer her email like a proper business and not like a website run by amateurs. Instead, I get this statement, written to me on the page I visited to submit a trouble ticket, before I ever even began to complain....


"Due to the large number of trouble tickets received, we may not respond to all."

Blogdrive never plays nice.

What reason can you think of that blogdrive would disable my old blogdrive blog? I go to that page and it says I should contact blogdrive support, but it doesn't offer a way to do that. I did email contact@blogdrive.com but haven't heard anything from them. *SHOCKER* I'm going to refrain from saying anything further about this situation. I choose to wait it out a little bit and see if there is a really great reason that they disabled it and decided not to notify me or give me a chance to make good on whatever is wrong before they did it. Wait...I didn't refrain. Sorry about that. NOT.

Things I did on Saturday

Made sausage bread and pepperoni bread!

Went to the Christmas parade! (please note the excessive number of moon pies and their various flavors in the parade loot)

Listened to Litikia sing at the lighting of the city's Christmas tree!

I also went to the gym, delivered Christmas presents, helped the kids put the finishing touches on some of the presents they are giving to friends, put the wreaths on the windows, typed some dictation for about 30 minutes, paid bills and took a short, but well deserved and refreshing nap. I do not, however, have pictures of these events.

I'm extremely tired now. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I was exhausted. I will now go to sleep and try to talk myself into NOT skipping church in the morning as that is what is on my mind at this moment. I'll let you know how that goes. (click on the pics for a GIANT version)

Why Colbie isn't my favorite person anymore

We went to the Colbie Caillat concert last night and I must say that I left there not loving her as much as I did when I went in. She made me extremely uncomfortable from the moment she stepped onto the stage until the moment that she took her last bow. She wore a black baby doll dress that was so short she couldn't bend over to pick up her water glass. She had to bend her knees to get low enough to pick it up without mooning the entire audience. She kept tugging on the dress at the straps like she was afraid she was gonna fall out and she was perched so precariously on her extremely high heels that I was afraid she was gonna tumble over at any given moment. And of course, the song everyone wanted to hear was the song she just refused to sing. It was maddening. When she waved her hand at the audience and announced "good night everybody", I just thought to myself, "What an attention HOG! She knows we'll all have to scream and holler to get her back out here to sing that song and she just wants to hear us do it." I chose to sit in quiet protest. She did come out for her encore and my LORD she sang something else! She did finally sing "Bubbly" but by the time she did I was so irritated I couldn't even enjoy it.




Good stuff about the concert:

*She really does have a pretty voice.
*Her drummer's t-shirt said "RUN DMC".
*She sang a very acoustic and very lovely rendition of "Killing me Softly" with her guitar player that made me kinda swoon.
*I enjoyed watching Jon McLaughlin, the opening act, beat the living devil out of that piano. I was sure it was gonna splinter into a million pieces. And he couldn't sit on the stool. I don't even know why it was there. Very entertaining. He's like a mix between Ben Folds and Eric Hutchinson.
*I think the Mobile Saenger Theatre is just the prettiest old place. I liked just sitting in there.
*The Bienville Square fountain has miraculously turned into a sparkly lighted Christmas tree for the holidays. Made me smile. Oh wait, that wasn't about the concert...but I saw it walking to the theatre so it counts.

Okay, I can't lie. I had a really good time, but she absolutely needs to try to look more stable and balanced on the stage if you ask me. Just Beej's helpful opinion.

Coco's Christmas Present

I was sitting in the doctor's office the other day and a poem came out of me. I took the poem along with some pics and made a book from it at Snapfish.com. This book was then given to Coco for Christmas. I wanted to do a slideshow but I got frustrated, so here's the book in blog form. Every verse had a pic, but dang I don't want to load all that stuff...

BEEJ AND COCO

Coco is sassy and sometimes she whines,
She seems to find problems when everything's fine.



But Beej still loves her in spite of it all,
And listens intently whenever she calls.

Back in the day, they made quite a pair,
Hanging at Starbucks and straightening their hair.


Then suddenly Coco moved far away,
Leaving Beej all alone every night and all day.

The laughing, the movies, the fun stuff....all gone,
But the bond that still lingered was sturdy and strong.


How nice to have someone that I can call friend,
Even though you're a big pain, I love you. THE END.

I'm not impressed....or even amused really

My friend Gnutcase, who never darkens the door of this blog anymore, sent me an interesting article the other day. It seems that I live in a town where it is acceptable to spend $9,000 of the city's money to create a giant Moon Pie that will drop at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve this year instead of a ball. And not only that, but they've hired a bakery in Tennessee to make the world's largest Moon Pie so the partiers will have something to snack on while they wait for the ball...um...Moon Pie to drop. Can you imagine an enormous crowd of people surrounding a giant Moon Pie and everybody trying to get a piece? That is so very nasty. And whose gonna clean that mess up afterwards? We're talking MARSHMALLOW people. Again, tres nasty.

I do understand the significance of the Moon Pie to this fair city; truly I do. But, I think this may be taking things a tad too far. I'm already embarrassed about the fact that my children scream MOON PIE at all the parades (even the Christmas parade) to get the people riding on the floats to throw them. This is the behavior of the average citizen and I've always sort of made fun of them for it. My kids are learning strange things.

I didn't grow up here and I do NOT do that. I'm not saying I wouldn't eat one if it happened to land beside me or if I caught it because it was hurdling through the air directly at my face. But scream for one? No. Besides, if you're standing in a bad place there's a good chance they won't throw anything but the banana flavored ones. Can you say "puke"?

The wrapping paper even looks like it's fading...

My children have lots of stuff. The stuff tends to take over their rooms like the falling leaves have taken over my front yard and we wind up raking the excess stuff up in a pile for burning. Okay, we don't really burn the stuff. But there was the leaf analogy going and I didn't want to mess it up. We take the stuff to a charity, ok? Anyway, they have everything they need and most of what they want. When my kids decide they want something new, and I decide against it, they sometimes do something that I despise. They beg and plead. I have to say that this truly doesn't happen very often because they know I'll turn a deaf ear. If they do stoop to begging they quickly remember that it leads nowhere...nowhere good anyway.

So, as an adult (who has everything she needs and most of what she wants and who should know better), why is that I beg and plead with the air? Do I think the air is going to help me out in some way? Do I think my incessant moaning to the atmosphere will cause my wishes to be granted? It started out as prayer, but I guess I felt like a bratty kid and that God may not look favorably on all that whining. As time has moved forward, it has turned into a kind of pleading with the breathable molecules in my immediate vicinity. Did you ever read "Frannie and Zooey"? Yeah, kinda like that.

I'm pretty sure I quit talking to God about it because I realized I was asking God for mercy that He had already supplied. Only thing is that he supplied it in a way different than what I wanted, and like a spoiled brat, I turned my nose up and sort of refused to accept it. Now, I'm just talking to the air while looking at my mercy present sitting in the corner collecting dust. Wonder what will have to happen to get me to go open it.