Life in the Land of Dreamy Dreams

It’s tough being a weiner. Your hair is really short and you’re close to the cold, cold ground all the time, so I’ve had to become one of those ‘clothes for the dog’ types.

He looks really, really unhappy about this particular wardrobe choice.

Who is busy slamming his head on his keyboard, trying to meet a fixed deadline while his boss keeps moving the damned target. :::sigh:::

So this is just one more example of how I lose time. I was working on NaNoWriMo, really, I was. I’m also fighting with a really nasty cold that just won’t let go, Alison had a sleepover, and blah blah blah.

So what do I get caught up in? I started finally editing photos from November 1st, All Saint’s Day, and end up posting to the other blog this photo of the Schoen’s Funeral Home clock/ advertisement that hangs over St. Patrick’s Cemetery.

How long does that take? 5 minutes? At most?

But then…but then. Then I start wondering, “Hey, is Schoen’s even still around? If it’s closed I should mention it.”

So I google it. Yep, it’s open! And it has its own website, how…ew! They have a ‘merchandise’ heading? What the hell does THAT mean?

Oh, no, you’re kidding! A video put out by a casket manufacturer to market to the bereaved. How very…classy.

What the hell is THAT thing in the video? Seriously? They have tacky corner cutouts where they’ll put “personalizations” in? to show what they were interested in? Like the jumping trout and screaming eagle they’ve chosen to highlight? And then you can remove them to put them in photo frames they conveniently sell?

Lord, I’ve never been so happy I’m being cremated.

But now I really want a copy of that video to put on here. Only it’s not embeddable, as far as I can tell. Time for more googling.

Nope, I can’t even ’save as’ and post it. Guess I’ll just have to put a link to the thing.

Hey, wait, what about YouTube? Oh…damn. This is even weirder.

Anyway, it’s shorter, and the kicker is right at the end. I won’t spoil it for you- it’s only 30 seconds long:

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is how I lost an hour of my afternoon.

… an appropriate Pratchett quote. Haven’t done one in a while, anyway:

“Cats are sacred,” said Dios.

“Long-legged cats with silver fur and disdainful expressions are, maybe,” said Teppic. “I’m sure sacred cats don’t leave dead ibises under the bed. And I’m certain that sacred cats that live surrounded by endless sand don’t come indoors and do it in the king’s sandals, Dios.”

As the owner of cats with unlimited access to outside, cats for whom the world is their toilet, I’d like to know why, oh WHY is the couch corner so irresistible??

Pratchett tries to show me up by writing up a storm.

I read about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in the spring and decided I’d participate when it came around in November.

Famous last words.

You’re supposed to write 50,000 words in a month- 1,667 a day if your output is consistent- and voila, you have a novel. It doesn’t have to be a good novel- it just has to be a complete one. The idea being to get out of your own way- WRITE, dammit- don’t edit. Just let the words come, even if you’re not sure they’re the right ones. And that’s one of my big problems. I’ll agonize over a paragraph, a sentence, a word…and then a bunch of time has passed and I’m nowhere. And depressed.

I’m so terribly behind right now I just can’t see how I’m going to catch up, but I’m going to take tomorrow mostly off and really plow through this weekend. If I can’t kick ass on the book, then I’ll be kicking my own ass for all time…and I can be merciless in that regard.

The funny thing is NaNoWriMo’s prep materials are all like, ‘go tell everybody what you’re doing! Tell them you’re doing this amazing, difficult thing and make them all be super duper nice to you! Make them cook and clean and rub your back every single night and tell you what a phenom you are!”

Riiiight.

That might work with lots of people, but not when you live with a real, honest to god, serious & important capital-W-Writer. Then you feel like what you’d be saying is, “Honey, I know you have actual deadlines and writerly stress and all, but I wanna go play make believe, okay?”

Plus…well, he already cooks for me, so I’m not really about to ask him to do anything else. I’m pretty spoiled already.

If you wanna kick my ass, feel free. Here’s the link to my word count- currently pitiful, but hopefully shooting rapidly upward!

I actually laughed out loud. It’s a little dated, but still true.

(click if it’s too tiny)

Been crazy. Aside from election addiction/madness/withdrawal (Yay! (mostly. Boo for Jefferson, dammit))

All sorts of stuff, but a rash of updates about to be posted. You’ll have to find the cream to clear them up on your own, tho…

Now that we’re not so…uh…immersed in the ‘adult toy’ industry, we’ve got some stock to sell off, and I wondered if eBay would be a good place to do it.

The answer is ’sort of.’ It turns out they do have a Mature Audience section, but there are a bunch of restrictions, the biggest pains being no paypal allowed, and higher fees (surprise!).

BUT….(butt?) it’s amazing how much you can get away with as long as you wink and call the item a “health aid” or somesuch. As long as it’s not lifelike and veiny, they don’t wanna know.

In the spirit of public awareness, I decided to post this product of my research, a video that was embedded right in an ebay listing for a “Body Massage Massager Vibrating Vibrator Health Care.” Right.

My favorite part is the background music, which sounds like it should be in a really upbeat Ken Burns documentary. (BTW- this is NOT graphic at all, but after it’s done, the related videos are definitely NSFW)

It’s time to fix that. As I’ve said before, my inbox got a lot more interesting when we started selling adult products- and now I get full color ads of new um….’marital aids.’

Every. Single. Day.

You wouldn’t think there would be so much out there begging to be invented, but apparently, yes. And if it’s not new, it can be repackaged, renamed and done in florescent colors. (Here’s today’s. Yes, those are bunnies and dolphins.)

I also get exciting info about adult movies, which we don’t put into baskets, so I never bother paying attention, but I’ve seen several things come across (har har) for one particular ‘film,’ (”BIGGEST ADULT MOVIE PRODUCTION IN HISTORY!!!” sort of things) and finally I broke down and clicked the link.

They even have a PG-rated version of the trailer! I mean….what? Granted, it doesn’t tell you anything, but why would you bother, given your target audience? There’s another more hardcore trailer, but even there, what they’re really working on showing off is the fact that they obviously had enough of a budget to hire a CGI dude.

If you watch the full trailer, you’ll see there’s even acting, of a sort. The women are particularly pitiful, but they definitely hired real actor-types for the bit players.

The day we’d scheduled to visit the Gulf with friends the tropical winds and surf meant red flags were flying- no swimming, and even sneaking into the water up to your knees meant being menaced by the swarming jellyfish.

Still, it was a beautiful day, warmish with a lovely breeze and that particular tropical storm ended up not really bothering anybody, so happy endings all around.

So far, so good. Nothing’s brewing in the tropics, yard cleanup has begun (again), and things move forward.

We lost power before the storm really even began, and didn’t get it back for 4 days. Luckily, they were breezy days, cool by New Orleans standards, and were spent in a strange sort of suspended animation. Lots of naps, some wandering about, and just waiting. Waiting to see what Ike would do, waiting to see when the power company would show up, waiting for the internet to come back, waiting for our mayor to get his head out of his…oh, nevermind. Let’s not get carried away, we all know that’s not gonna happen.

In the meantime, Charlie received a request to write a piece for a newspaper about why we/others decided to stay, and he hit it out of the park, so not all of us were just lazing about for several days.