Linky Dinky of the Day

If you haven't already heard of Go Fug Yourself, you must do your funny bone a favor and read it. It's a blog dedicated to skewering the ridiculous fashions of the Hollyweird gang, and it is FUNNY. When you read it, not only will you get some good jollies from laughing at the ridiculousness that is the celebrity mind, or stylist, or whatever, but you will also see a different side of George Clooney, learn that there is, somewhere in New York City, a creature named Phoebe Price who is apparently famous for. . .something, and gain a whole new respect for Joan Collins. And some other stuff, but when you start reading it every dang day like I do, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Check out this particular picture of Amy Winehouse--when I saw it, all I could think was "They tried to make me go to teeth-hab, but I said noooooo, nooooooooo, noooooooo. . ." Hee hee how can you not love Amy Winehouse? She's like a hot lunatic with a scary Africanized killer beehive and filthy ballet slippers. And a rockin' singing voice, but with some weird lyrics. Like, what exactly does "lickle" mean? Is it a real word, or like an English slang thing with indeterminate meaning (Ex: the word "chav." Chav? Huh? All I know is that that is what they are calling Posh Spice and that Jordan chick but I don't know exactly what it means. I kind of think it's similar to calling someone a redneck but I'm not entirely sure.)? And what, exactly, does she mean by "rulers one thing but come Brixton, nobody stands in between me and my man?" What?!?!? I think maybe she drinks.

I went to the gym today

Since I've been taking this walking/fitness class, I've been trying real hard to eat right, and today I started WORKING OUT IN THE GYM. That's right, Couch Potato Extraordinaire went to the gym and lifted weights and pulled levers on the machines and stuff. I'm writing about it because I need accountability. It's very easy to be gung-ho for a couple days or weeks, but I always seem to fizz out after, well, not usually very long. I suppose I lack discipline or something like that. Okay I totally don't suppose, I DEFINITELY lack discipline and EVERYTHING like that, at least when it comes to working out. So here I have posted a picture of my heroine, Xena--cuz you know darn well she didn't whine and complain when she didn't feel like getting off her patushka to train with that chakram (on a side note, I never noticed before how much the designs on the chakram look like bunnies. Bunnies. On a weapon that could get way worse than medieval on your heiny. Nice going, people-who-forged-the-prop.). Nosiree bob, you simply can't throw around a magic frisbee (or large, fur-and-leather clad bad guys, or insane serial killers named after one of Jupiter's moons, or seriously hot but obnoxiously egotistical gods of war, or Julius Caesars, DANG that woman got around) like she did without a heck of a lot of practice. And you know homeskillet was BIG. I mean, I don't know what she could bench press but I imagine compact cars weren't out of the realm of possibility. Anyway, since I don't have a big poster of Xena to put up on a wall somewhere with a cartoon balloon coming out of her mouth saying "I'll kick your @#$ if you don't exercise today, pantywaist!!!" (and even if I did, that would be kind of weird) I figured I'd just upload it to the blog where I know I can turn anytime for some inspiration. I used to love watching Herc and Xena back in the 90's. Also Earth, Final Conflict--but I digress, and I'm too tired to fully explore this digression. It's freakin' midnight and I have been up since 6:00am and I have to get up again at 6:00am and lie around in bed staring at my alarm clock saying to myself "just 5 more minutes" until it gets to be 7:00am and I finally roll out of bed, step into my fuzzy purple slippers, stumble into the living room and lie down on the couch until 7:15am. Then I usually get up for realz. I just freakin' digressed again and tomorrow I'm going to read this and go "now that post was stupid" but I won't bother deleting it because if nothing else, it has this truly excellent pic:

Because that, my friends, is just priceless.

Linky Dinky of the Day

So, last week the members of my gym class were guests in the Tai Chi class that goes on at the same time as our walking class, and we did this one move that exercised our arms and legs and all I could think of was badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM. I'm telling you it was the exact same dance (?) that the badgers were doing. Watch the vid and you'll see.

Here's the original.
This is a different version.
Just in case you can't get enough dancing badgers.
No badgers, but this is what introduced me to the hotness that is J. Picking.
I forgot about this. They're everywhere.

Linky Dinky of the Day

I don't care what anyone says. This man is gorgeous and I desperately want a lock of his shining, chestnut-hued hair for my very own. Also he is exquisitely talented (remember when he was Michael Knight? And Mitch Buchannon on Babewatch? I mean Breastwatch? I mean BAYWATCH?!?!? AAARGH and didn't he play a guy named Snapper on General Hospital or something in the 70's? You KNOW you watched it!!! Ahhhhh, Hasselhoff. . .what is a Brad Pitt or a George Clooney compared to thee?) as evidenced by the following video, and yeah it's old, and yeah you've probably already seen it, but I found this awesome picture of him that I wanted to put up, so I figured I should link it to that vid, but take heed: anyone who watches it, and has the utter gumption to not like it, and say so out loud within earshot of my, uh, ears, will have to answer to me. I mean it!!! David Hasselhoff has given his all for his craft, his heart and soul and quite possibly a sizable chunk of his me-time to his particular brand of thespianism, and I shall give you a very stern dressing down if you dare hassel (yeah, I said it!!!) this angel-on-earth.

See, you people think I'm being sarcastic but after you watch this you'll see why I'm such a big fan. Nobody, but nobody, could pull this off but the Hoff. Nobody!!! Well, maybe Christopher Walken, but I kind of think he might put too ironic a spin on it and suck some of the joy from it. Or maybe not. On second thought I take that back. Christopher Walken is the hotness. I think I liked him best in the Dead Zone but he even brought awesomeness to Joe Dirt, and that is no mean feat. However, David Hasselhoff David Hasselhoff David Hasselhoff!!! He's wearing a Speedo with a leather jacket!!! Can you imagine anyone else pulling that off? Nobody can do that, NOBODY!!! It would look extremely dorky on anyone else in the whole wide yurld, but David Hasselhoff--not. He is Adonis, Apollo, and Kevin Sorbo all rolled into one. I miss Kevin Sorbo. Thank goodness for syndication. At least I can still catch Andromeda.

College Algebra is not rocket science. . .

. . .or so sayeth one of the brainiac tutors who helps me in the math lab, but dern (or is it "durn?") if I can graph a page full of functions without getting a headache and feeling like running around in circles [with a radius of 1/2 cubit, whose center is at (-1, 7)] just to make myself feel normal again. AAAAAAAAAA, but I will triumph. I only have one really cerebral class this summer (I'm also taking a gym class but I don't really have to study much for that, hee. I hope like heck my gym teacher never reads this, cuz she can totally kick my patushka. Have you noticed how often I like to veer off on totally unrelated parenthetical tangents?) so I CAN DO IT. It's funny, but for some reason I seem to understand my assignments better if I'm doing them in the math lab, even if no one is helping me. Maybe it's because it's a learning environment, without all the distractions like laundry and the dog and the tv that I have at home. Or maybe it's all the brain waves from the Math People (da da DAAAAH) flying around the room and helping me understand via osmosis. I don't know. Either way, I love the people of the math lab. Do you hear me, people who can make jokes about things like asymptotes and parabolas and cube roots and the quadratic formula and get why they're funny? I LOVE YOU. You're the meaning in my life, you're the inspiration, you give meaning to my life, you're the inspiration. I never really noticed how redundant that line was until just now. Stupid Chicago!!! I bet they don't know how to find the equation of a line when given 2 points by calculating the slope and putting it into slope-intercept form!!! Let's see Peter Cetera try to find a polynomial of minimum degree that has the given zero!!! Just because they can count all the way to whatever number album they're on now, sure as the dickens doesn't mean they know how to solve systems of linear equations using the Gauss-Jordan elimination on augmented matrices!!! I have no idea what I just said!!! So take that, Messrs. "25 or 6 to 4" (what, you think you can impress us with ratios? YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHO YOU'RE DEALING WITH, MESSRS. I like using the word "messrs.")!!! This here is an exclusive club, and you, and all your lowly ilk, are not invited to the party. So there!!! *makes really mature raspberry sounds and sticks her thumbs in her ears and waggles her fingers at Chicago*

And that concludes this post-"I just spent 3 and 1/2 hours in the math lab NOT doing rocket science" insanity session. Have a lovely!!!

Oh, yeah: Just so you know, I don't have to do any problems as complicated as that monstrosity at the top of the post. It was just for dramatic effect. Most of the stuff I do is more like:

See? A picture's worth (31.6227766x)^2, where x= + or -1, words!!! AAACK!!! HELP!!!

Linky Dinky of the Day

This is a link to a game website. This website is not for the timid, nor for the faint of heart. Like the 12 Herculean tasks, this site will make you run a gauntlet of Olympian proportions, and if, intrepid gamer, you find yourself not only playing these games over and over again just to see if you can improve upon your last run, but also enjoying playing them immensely, you may truly be worthy of being called A SERIOUS NERD.

Let the Games begin!!! THIS!!! IS!!! SPARTAAAAAAAAA!!!

Got Me A New Hairscut

You'uns!!! I haven't written anything in a while because I'm lazy and also because not much has been happening out of the ordinary (except for my GYM class that I have to take this summer OMG) until today--I got a new haircut (no, that's not my picture, but we have "new haircut" solidarity, me-n-him) and it's actually not my 147th version of a straight bob. Wooee, this is kind of big. For many years I clung to the long straight hippie hair I had always ended up with before, mostly because I neglected to get regular haircuts, but today I said, "oh just have some fun with it and cut it off." I think my hairdresser (my Aunt Rosie!!! Hi Ro Ro!!! Hee!!!) thought I was Punking her, since I've been resisting her suggestions to cut off my mop and do something other than the straight bob (or for a minute in the 90's I did the Rachel; yeah, I know, but it was a good haircut) for like a decade or some such. NOPE. It was for realz. So, Scissor Sister worked her magic and now I have a funkay new haircut. I look like Joan Jett. No I don't but I wish I did. I mean I wish I looked like Joan Jett from like 1986 or whatever when she was in that movie with Michael J. Fox and she had a nerdy little kid with a bowlcut (cuz Joan Jett would totally give her son a bowlcut) and they were in this band and they worked really hard to make it and drove around touring in a beat up crappy van and she stole some guy's tools to pay for a Peavey amp and Michael J. Fox was all righteously indignant about it like he'd really rather work at that factory where they made tv trays with pictures of Prince Charles and Princess Diana (sniff!!!) on them and then they got a big gig and they knew that they were just around the corner from the Light of Day, yeah. Does that ring a bell with anyone? Or should I be more specific? Anyway, I don't look like her, but oh crap I don't remember what point I was trying to make. Something about blah blah doing something different for once in my life blah blah blah. Also, I've recently decided--AGAIN--to make a Lifestyle Change, regarding my expanding measurements, etc., so maybe the hair thing was a signal that I actually might mean it this time, since I've been on and off diets and exercise programs ever since a few years back when I started to look a lot, well, rounder than usual, ahem. :) Maybe it's a Freudian thing; you know, shedding weight, shedding hair, parallels and symbolism, unconscious desires manifesting themselves in conscious thought processes and actions, et al. Or maybe I just saw a picture in a book and said "Hey!!! Neat haircut!!! Me want!!!" but that makes me sound like a caveman (no, not the kind who eats roast duck with mango salsa, but dang that sounds good--AAACK!!! RICE CAKE INJECTION--STAT!!!) so I'll just go with the Freud thing.

This is your abrupt ending for the day: I'm tired. I mean like so tired that I'm starting to have those in-between non-dreams where you're not really awake but neither are you asleep so you're just kind of delirious and a little punchy, and I just saw the unicorn wearing a sign that says "Excuse Me," and I think the squares and the triangles might be plotting against King Trapezoid and his butterknife collection, and my dictionary is demanding to join the union so it can eat bubblegum while it reads the spiral notebook, so before things start to get weird around here, I think I'd better just say good night. Good night.

I can make it to the fence in 2.5 seconds. Can you?

Here's a picture of Lucky doing his favorite thing in the whole world--being on the alert to defend his homestead and the people he has sworn to protect. As you can see, Lucky is ever-vigilant in his avowed duty to protect the innocent and helpless. Always on his guard against ruthless predators such as cats, bugs, shadows, vacuum cleaners, and weird noises, our faithful companion uses his heightened senses of smell and hearing to detect any piece of food that hits the floor, or any opening of a refrigerator door within a 15 foot radius. Also, he knows karate, jujitsu, aikido, Tai Chi, and Tae Bo, and is skilled in several types of weaponry, including Nunchaku, Sai, Katana, those little throwing stars that could give you a really ugly cut, and the Chia Herb Garden (no, I don't know how he uses the Chia Herb Garden as a weapon--it's an ancient Chiaese secret). His paws are registered weapons (well, the front ones are). And so I say to any burglars, marauders, pillagers, Vikings, or anyone else who might have been thinking of burgling, marauding, pillaging, or Vikinging our home, I have one thing to say to you: Don't even think about it. This dog is a killing machine, and I can't be responsible for his reaction if you try to cross our threshold without at least offering him a Dingo bone or scratching under his collar.

You've been warned.

Sometimes it's nice to be a pack-rat

Today I was looking through a lot of my packed up junk (to get rid of some stuff--AAAGH) and I found a tub FULL and I mean FULL of old cards (when I say old I mean like cards people sent my Mom and Dad when I was still making Mom crave pickles) and newspaper clippings, old report cards from kindergarten, postcards, pictures, etc. I looked through a good bit of that stuff and you know, I had a lot of fun. There were all my 3rd place ribbons (ha ha) from track and field day in elementary school, my first squeaky clown toy (who apparently deflated when I used my brand new teeth to bite a hole in his head), letters from people I had forgotten had ever written me letters, and newspaper articles about people like Frank Mullen, the 81 year old man who used to take our class on hikes on the Stoney Lonesome Trail in Gardners and tell us about flowers and animals and the CCC camp that used to build roads and stuff back in the "olden" days. I found old pictures of my friends from elementary school through high school, and notes we had written to each other when we were supposed to be listening in class, ahem. I found a little New Testament that was given to the 9 year old version of my Dad and a prayer book that belonged to my Pap (my Dad's Dad) when he was a little kid. I saw a book called "Expecting?" that had a picture of a pregnant cartoon bear on the front, and inside was kind of a diary of what Mom was doing, thinking, and feeling while I was busy growing hands and feet and a circulatory system inside her. It made me feel good to remember that stuff. And the truth is, if I hadn't kept that stuff, I would have forgotten a lot of it. Not because I want to forget, but because I don't have a great memory, and I never really have. Having this stuff brings back memories for me that I'm so glad that I have, and although people always say "you can never go back," I think you can. Not for real, obvy, but I know that when I laughed at the references to our boring psychology teacher in a letter from one of my high school friends, and laughed at the pictures of my 19 year-old self acting goofy with my 19 year-old friends, I didn't just remember what we did back then, I remembered what it felt like. It felt really, really good and really, really free. I don't know what point I'm trying to make, exactly, except that the older I seem to get, the more grateful I am for all the stuff I've saved and kept and put away in a box, where I keep it until I feel like I need it. And looking through it all never makes me wish I could go back. It only makes me grateful to have been there. So I guess gratitude is the moral of today's story. And I'm very, very grateful for almost (had to put that in there, heh) everyone who's ever crossed my path. So if you have ever crossed my path, May God bless you, and I thank you for the good mood I was in today. It was quite nice.

Linky Dinky of the Day

Here's a waltz down memory lane:

Check out this music!!!
And this music!!!
While you're at it. . .
This one's the best!!!

I'll leave you to figure out where it comes from, hee hee.

Here's the link to the whole page of it. I'm in awe.

Linky Dinky of the Day

Sometimes, when I find a really cool, interesting, or relevant website or blog, I'll make it a "Linky Dinky of the Day" and post it to share with you. I don't think I'll do it every day or anything but I doubt anyone will care. The bestest ones will make it into my Linky Dinky list on the left side of my blog. Also, if anyone has a cool link to share, let me know and I'll make it a LDOTD, unless I hate it.

Today's LDOTD is World of Delp, where my dear friends the Delps blog about their family and post some way cute pics of their little'uns. If you ever need an "awwww" factor to cheer yourself up, go here and scroll for a while. Also, check out some of the cool links on their page--I especially recommend Urp the Wonder Horse; you'll see why if you click it (it'll make you feeeeeeel good. . .).

Enjoy it!!!

Pray for Them

Well, today I put my blog back up (under a slightly different name) and I'm sorry my first post is a sad one, but I want to send my thoughts and prayers to all who were at Virginia Tech when that terrible thing happened, and to all their friends and family. It's hard to imagine how or why anyone could do such a thing, and I can only pray that they find strength and comfort in each other and in God. We can only hope to learn something from this, and do whatever we can to try to prevent it from happening ever again.

I can't pretend to understand what it's like to grow up in such a time, where people do things like this in a school. I don't know what else to say, so I'll just say a prayer for them:

May the Lord be with the souls of the faithful departed and with their families, and with the family of the shooter, and may He bring to them comfort and peace. Amen.

Please pray for them too. :(