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Tchotchkes

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Location: Connecticut, United States

marybb1@gmail.com

Monday, April 30, 2007


The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The Good: Husband made fantastic Italian bread!

The Bad: Finbar jumped up on the curtain rod yet again.

The Ugly: Finbar decided to drink from the lasagna pan that was soaking on the counter. Notice how a black and white cat can turn himself into a calico!



Wednesday, April 25, 2007


I feel like Finbar looks in this picture: sleepy.

He was standing on the counter waiting to be fed, but he could barely keep his eyes open. I also would like to be fed, but am too sleepy to do much about it.

I did make deviled eggs this morning. I have only made them maybe twice in my life, but a friend told me he had this big craving for deviled eggs and of course, he transferred his craving to me.

Yawn.

I ate two but I put in too much mustard I think. Still they have stopped the craving.

You'd think a pot of coffee would have woken me up by now.

Yawn.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

I guess I'm a foodie because I woke up today thinking about food. And the food I was thinking about was all fried. I want fries and onion rings and KFC and taquitos and fried ice cream too. I usually feel this way when I've been eating relatively good food for a long period of time. Then comes the junk craving and I go for the fats and the salt. I do crave sweets but not as often as I do crappy junk food.

Naturally I'm married to a man who prefers to eat good food. Salads and grains and lean meats and lots of fruit. Fruit's okay with me if it's hanging off the side of a cocktail glass.

Sunday I indulged in three Krispy Kreme doughnuts which was wonderful. Maybe that's what started the cravings or maybe it was the bag of chips I somehow inhaled yesterday...but fat and salt is definitely on the menu for me today.

If left to my own devises, I will eat junk food and drink beer and not gain any weight -- basically because if you don't eat good food, you don't waste any of your daily caloric amount on these good foods, leaving more calories for junk food.

Husband who is the chief chef and baker in the house, has been sneaking in white "whole wheat" flour into his cookies and breads and I'm always suspect now of his desserts because he's adding nutrition into them that I don't want. I want the sugar, butter, salt and pure white flour devoid of any nutritional value. That's what I crave.

I don't crave oats, wheat, or flax seed. I think I can live my whole life without ever needing or wanting flax seed but now that's been sneaked into the house. He's flavoring breads with honey and molasses.., I want refined sugar dammitall.

Hmmmm sugar, makes me think of the ice cream I have in the freezer and the new recipe I clipped out for easy hot fudge sauce. Maybe I'll have a sundae on Tuesday for breakfast. Why not?

I live on the edge.

I have given up my obsession with Hostess cupcakes and Devil Dogs though. And I've finally eaten enough Butterfingers to find them mildly repulsive as a breakfast food.

What do you like to eat for breakfast? Do you fall on the steel cut Irish oats side of the breakfast graph that husband eats every day or the hot fudge sundae side of the graph like me?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

I hate Support the Troop magnets so I really enjoyed this.

Hilarious!!!!

Friday, April 20, 2007


Company's Gone Yes!

I Get My Room Back!!!!
(Why do they insist on calling it a spare room, it isn't spare it's my room!)


I get my favorite green chair and I get my bed.

Life is good again. xoxox Finbar

Hope everyone has a great weekend. I'm going to one of my favorite chef's house for dinner tomorrow, I can't wait.

I am getting the water-in-the-basement estimate tomorrow too.

Tonight I can pick going out or take out and I'm having a problem choosing my cuisine of choice.

Stay in sweats or get dressed to go out. Right now sweats are winning.

I will not watch the news today and I will go out in the yard for a little sun. Remember, the sun is not your friend. It causes skin cancer even in very young people. Be careful, wear a hat, wear sunscreen. The hole in the ozone layer makes even a little sun very dangerous. Since skin cancer decided to descend upon a young ( in her 20s) family member, I feel it's my job to caution everyone; it can happen to you too.

Even basal cell carcinoma, thought of as common and easy to cure, can be devastating and need extensive surgery. Most skin damage is done by 18 years old so cover up the kids!

I mean it!

Tuesday, April 17, 2007


Finbar Before;
Couch Potato






Finbar After;
Mantle Man


Monday, April 16, 2007

Wanted: Used Ark, Dinghy and Forklift

I'm definitely in the market for a used ark. I figure a new ark would probably be out of my price range, but a used one might be cheap enough for me to buy.

Also I need a dinghy. Anyone have a dinghy for sale?

The rains came down hard last night and kept coming. I could hear eerie water sounds outside and inside the house. So could Finbar.

Speaking of Finbar, I am changing his name to Lassie. Yes, that's right. He will be called Lassie because he tried to save us from the rain and the rising water in the cellar. He started knocking knicknacks off the fireplace mantle. How he leaped up there I don't know. I heard stuff falling and saw what he was doing: trying to wake us up.

He ran to the cellar door and pawed at it in a frenzy. Then he ran to the sofa, leaped up to the curtain rod and both Finbar and the curtain rod came falling down.

He was definitely spooked by the winds and rain and wanted us all up for company.

We peeked down the cellar stairs and saw something float by. Our cellar was filling quickly with water.

My furnace, washer and dryer and beer fridge were under siege.

One can live without a furnace and a washer and dryer, but one can't live without a beer fridge!

Pumps have been pumping and shop vacs vaccing and all this noise is punctuated with the odd curse word here and there. Damp cellar smell is everywhere.

Tomorrow we're having overnight company (we do have a lot, don't we?) And not only do I have to clean the house with special care to the guestroom, I must also pump and vac, pump and vac, pump and vac. I love cellar monitoring almost as much as I love dog poop scooping. Which one I love the most is hard to say.

Anyhow, the dinghy would come in handy as I rowed my way to the beer fridge and the ark would be great to have in the back yard, ready for the floods that seem to be taking over Fairfield County CT.

I probably should advertise for a used forklift too.

I could use the forklift to get the beer fridge into the ark and then I'd say: Screw the rain.






Friday, April 13, 2007

Ra!

The sun is a god. I say this because I woke up to sun rays streaming through the bedroom windows and I instantly felt all things were possible. Gray days make me gray. Sunny days make me sunny. I guess I'm not unusual in that way.

Laying in bed I also started thinking about the odd things people say and do.

For example, you are at a party and need to use the bathroom. The door is shut. You wonder, is it shut with no one inside or is it being used? So you knock on the door and you hear:

Someone's in here.

Someone.

Some unnamed person who won't reveal his or her true identity to the knocker.

Yet these same unknown someones can meet you in the hallway without covering their face. The identity of the bathroom user can only be known once the bathroom user has vacated the bathroom. Otherwise, it's just someone. What's that about?

I also love this one -- you see someone and say hi, and they say, Hi, how are you?

You then must say good, how are you? The person then says good. If either you or the other person mentions any illness or problems or tragedies -- you have gone over the line of good taste. How are you? does not mean really, how are you? It's just a suffix to the Hi.

I was also thinking about how insulting the word verification proccess is. The invisible WV people treat you like you are mentally deficient when all it might be is (like me) a keyboard that no longer has any hints of the letters which should be visible on each key.

Example: I place a comment at a friend's blog and in order to publish it I must type: iijlmrmriij

I try but fail on the first attempt.

WV gives me another chance smirking, I know WV is smirking: ppwqtti

I enter the letters but ooops, make another mistake and wait for my new WV.

My new WV is actvt.

Notice how each time the WV gets simpler and simpler? I wonder if it ever gets to the point where the letters are reduced to something like cat or dog. In fact I really wonder why the WV has to be a group of letters that you 'd never find in juxtoposition. Why can't the WV still do its magic trick of eliminating spam, but use real words like father or desk or apple? Why the super cyphered code? Is this really necessary?

One more of my musings. Why is it you can save something for years and years because you might need it one day, and within 24 hours of throwing it out (because you never needed it in 30 years) you you need it?

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Hey, got skin cancer? Is it on your face?

Want the Mohs technique? (surgeon removes cancer sparing skin cells {examines cells under a microscope and if cancer-free --stops, if not, takes another sample} rather than take a big scoop for good measure) BUT, do you want a plastic surgeon at another office to close the wound?

Well do your homework.

My relative had cancer surgery today. All went well. By 11 AM she was cancer free (basal cell carcinoma) yet at 8 PM she is now in the hospital, moved from the office of the plastic surgeon because he couldn't numb an area on her face where he needed to cut.

Cripes, bad enough to have the Mohs (which was done with a local but didn't hurt) but to then have to be in pain for hours because the plastic surgeon was busy and wasn't expecting to need to send her to the hospital. I feel for her.

You must coordinate the Mohs surgery with the plastic surgeon...oh, that won't work I guess as she had already done that. I don't know what the screw up was but really! This seems barbaric to me.

She's got a huge hole on her face now since 11 AM with no one able to do the reconstruction.

Maybe when the doc comes back from dinner. I hope so.

Shred any document with personal information prior to throwing it out.

Just do it!


Husband tells me this all the time, and usually I do, but sometimes I say to myself: Sure, like someone's going to sift through my garbage and find the crumpled up paper I threw in the bag along with chicken bones, vegetable peelings and pot scrapings?

Then today I watched a guy in a truck stop by everyone's garbage (piled on the curb waiting for the real garbage men) examine and then select the finest bags of garbage which he then put into his truck and drove off.

If it wasn't raining and if I wasn't scantilly clad, I might have gone up to him and asked him just what in hell he was doing. But I didn't and I watched him cart off one of MY garbage bags and abscond with it. (By mistake, husband once came home with see-through garbage bags that have to be the dumbest idea in product design that I've ever heard of...who wants to look at it? But my bag was white and although slightly transparent, I doubt he could tell what I'd thrown out.)

Then I tried to reconstruct the previous 24 hours to come up with the possible contents of that bag. I don't know what he might have carted away.

I couldn't think of much I put in the garbage yesterday. Coffee grounds for sure, one cream container, one empty box of Milkbones dog biscuits, 1/2 dozen Fancy Feast cans, one egg shell, six pieces of junk mail, two catalogs, used tissues and paper towels, one grapefruit rind, 4 ounces of dog hair, envelopes from some bills (no inside stuff), contents of two dumped ashtrays, one old stinky sponge, one microfiber dusting cloth (used) and the unknown foods from two bowls I found way back in the refrigerator that were so old I have no idea what they originally were, but looked like road kill sauteed with onions.

So what do you think he's going to do with this stuff?

Make cat food?
Study packaging of popular pet food?
Test the unknown foods for Ecoli?
Spin the dog hair into a pashima like shawl?
Use the filters to mix with alcohol to make a substance that resembles male ejaculate? (Ever do that trick?)
Or was it the catalogs he wanted, god knows how hard it is to acquire a catalog.

If Larry Birkhead hadn't been proved to be Danielynn's father, I'd be suspecting him for collecting our DNA to see if husband or I am the real father, but I doubt that now.

So what in hell was it that made him take my garbage????

Wednesday, April 11, 2007


For comparison purposes...awwww









What do you think has he grown?

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Prepare to be Shocked!!!

I know this is going to surprise and mystify you, that the coincidence I'm going to relate is so amazing you will see god's face in the clouds, but...as reported by CTV.ca:

"The chief financial officer of Menu Foods Income Fund says it was a "horrible coincidence" that he sold nearly half his units in the pet food company less than three weeks before a massive product recall.

Insider trading reports confirm that Mark Wiens sold 14,000 units, or 45 per cent of his stock, for $102,900 on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27, reports The Globe and Mail. The shares would be worth $62,440 at current prices.

Wiens still owned 17,193 units and options to purchase 101,812 units after the sale."

Mr. Wiens has made a good living by feeding animals crap, but now he's trying to shove crap down our throats and I don't buy it. (his words or his pet food)

If this "coincidence" doesn't smack of insider trading I don't know what does.

----------------

The dreaded Easter holiday is over. No one knows what to do on this day. We don't go to church in my family, so by 7 AM all baskets have been found, pounds of chocolate have been eaten and no one knows what to do with themselves: Treat it like a regular Sunday and curl up on the sofa with the newspaper in jammies? Or have an event based on a mystical rabbit hiding the eggs you colored the night before?

Because there are bunny-believing wee ones in our family, we feel it's necessary to get together with family and friends, but this year I could have hosted about 26 people who didn't know what to do with themselves.

Lucky me it stayed a managable 12 guests.

I still don't like Easter. It's too cold in CT for outdoor hunts or events so we all stand around looking at each other, checking our watches to see if it's okay now to end the festivities and go back to normal life.

--------------

Today is Anna-Nicole Baby-Daddy day, and I've heard it might become a national holiday.

If the Prince is the Papa, I'm anxious to see Zsa Zsa in her role as new step-mommy, hell she's only 90 years old, and has lots of good child-rearing years ahead.

Signing off...





Monday, April 02, 2007

I See Blue People

I'm cheating on the NY Times crossword puzzle -- I'm on the net looking up Blue Hindu gods, I have Vishnu in the answer but nothing would work with those letters. Could there be more than one blue god? Yes, but of course, there's Krishna. So when I go downstairs, I'll erase Vishnu and put in Krishna and maybe I can finish the puzzle.

In my quest for blue gods, I managed to find an article about blue people. The Fugates of Kentucky who intermarried and kept the "blue" gene in the family. The bluish cast of their skin comes from this syndrome according to Wiki.

Here's more info if you want a non-medical human interest article on these blue people.

See, you never know what you are going to learn when you start roaming around the internet unfettered and unhurried looking for blue gods.