Snack time for NASCAR

According to the bag, Cheddar Pretzel Combos are "The cheese filled snack of NASCAR". I'm a little confused - I would've expected them to be the official cheese filled snack. Is it not official? Why don't they make it official? Or maybe it is, but there wasn't room for the word "official" and they figured anyone who took the time to read that note would just assume it was official.

Not to knock Combos or anything, but what exactly is the competition for the title of "cheese filled snack of NASCAR" anyway? I can't immediately think of another snack food that is cheese-filled, so is the title sort of a de facto thing? That's like declaring fish sticks to be your "official stick-shaped fried fish product" - there's really not much else that fits that description.

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Ceiling Critter is watching me

I have a Ceiling Critter. I can hear it scratch and scurry around overhead. A lot of times, the scratching catches me off guard and makes me think there’s someone in the house. Then I realize it’s just Ceiling Critter. I don’t know what specific kind of critter it is, since I cannot differentiate the scratching of a mouse from a rat or squirrel or marmoset, and I’m sure as hell not checking in the ceiling to see.

I had a ceiling critter once before, and I called the exterminator to come deal with it, which turned out to be a huge mistake, so I’m not going that route again. Basically, he set a poison trap in the ceiling. A few days later (mid-sweltering-summer), I came home to the unmistakable “something died” smell. Ugh. I called the exterminators to tell them the critter was dead and they could come get it now, and they said “Well, we don’t come get it once it’s dead.” Huh? Turns out, the poison is supposed to make the critter thirsty, and when it leaves the house to look for water, it dies outside the house and becomes the problem of whoever’s yard it dies in. There is no backup plan for critters that fail to leave the house looking for water.

I had decided to live in peace with the current Ceiling Critter, since he stayed in the ceiling and I stayed out of it, but last night I came to a horrifying realization: there is a hole in the ceiling of the closet in my bedroom! There has been nothing stopping Ceiling Critter from coming down into my room while I sleep! Who knows if he already has! Ick! I have that closet locked up for now, which means I can’t get to half my shoes or my laundry hamper, but I have got to get that hole boarded up. Ceiling Critter must not be allowed to become "Omigod, There's A Critter In My Room!" Critter.

Of course, if anyone has Ceiling Critter removal suggestions, I’m open.

Ceiling Critter and Ceiling Cat are probably not one and the same.

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By the seats of their pantsuits

Since all the serious political topics have either been talked to death or are too boring to talk to death, let's look at the great party divide as it applies to fashion, shall we?
At dinner last night, my mom, while agreeing that $150,000 (in 2 months!) for Sarah Palin's wardrobe was a bit much, also said that Michelle Obama could stand to step it up a bit on the fashion. Basically, she says, Michelle needs a stylist. Apparently my mom does not think J.Crew is suitable first-lady attire. What do you think? Here are some examples, both hits and misses in my view, of the possible first lady-elect:

This one kind of started the conversation -- this is the infamous J. Crew getup (which J. Crew is now advertising heavily as what M.O. wore on Leno). It's not necessarily something I would wear, but I don't think it's bad by any stretch. Of course, someone at the show might have helped her put together that ensemble; let's see how she does when left to her own devices:

It's worth noting that last black and white dress also sparked the maker (White House Black Market) to market it as the "Michelle Obama" dress. So girl does alright for herself, fashion-wise. It's no $150,000 Bloomingdales wardrobe perhaps, but since the Obamas are (ironically) the ones being accused of being elitist and out of touch with Main Street, maybe that's a really, really good thing.

Any thoughts / critiques / suggestions for M.O.?

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It's. Just. The. Glasses.

Whoa

Thanks to Brian for the link - should I do this?

It's tempting, since I've been getting "You look like Sarah Palin" for weeks now (except for one lone soul who told me I look like Tina Fey; same thing I think), but I really don't want to go as her for Halloween. I've got a weird, reverse Clark Kent thing going on -- as long as I don't wear my glasses, no one notices me. The second I put on those glasses, everyone thinks I'm a dead ringer for the possible VeeP-to-be. So should I try to capitalize on that and enter this contest? Any ideas for what a "Sexy Sarah" photo would look like?

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It's the pirate shirt all over again!

I just saw an ad for this sweater:

It's called the "Boyfriend Cardigan". If my boyfriend was wearing a purple cardigan with flouncy, ruffled sleeves, I'd question the solidity of our relationship.

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Who do you love?

Or what do you love, really. I got this from Rachel (Ladypug) - 10 things you love that start with an assigned letter. My letter: H.

1. Halloween - totally my favorite, ever! I love everything about it, especially the costumes! I'm going as Amy Winehouse this year, so I have props for my costume: a microphone and an empty vodka bottle.

2. Hair - fake hair, mostly. I wear wigs, extensions, etc like they're going out of style (like they were ever in style?).

3. Home - mine, specifically. I love my house - I saw it in a dream before the real estate agent showed it to me, so I think that God wanted me to buy it. There can be no other explanation for why I would buy it - it was falling in on itself at the time and it's still a wreck. But it's my wreck.

4. Health - I'm very blessed to have this. Every now and then I get a reminder of how easily it can slip away.

5. Heels - I'm known by friends and co-workers for sporting the highest, most torturous stilettos I can find. I can work them, though. I actually walk better in heels than flats. If you see me wearing flats, it is probably not a good day.

6. Honeysuckle - I love the smell. I keep meaning to plant some around my house, but I'm not sure I've ever seen honeysuckle at a garden shop - I think I've only seen it growing wild.

7. Holidays - In the British sense, that is - vacations. I think I need one right now.

8. Humor - I love to laugh, so anything funny makes the list. Comedy Central is a gift from God.

9. Habitrol - It's a brand of nicotine gum, which I am addicted to despite having never, EVER smoked a cigarette. It's a long story. A long and stupid story.

10. Highways - I'm reaching here. I don't like all highways, just the ones where I'm driving with the top down, good music blaring, gorgeous weather and no traffic to hold me up. Those are the good ones. After all, life is a highway.

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Bail!

I’m more than vaguely annoyed that taxpayers like myself (and probably yourself) have to bail out companies that made stupid decisions and gave housing loans to people you shouldn’t lend lunch money to if you ever want to see it again. I realize something probably had to be done to keep the whole country from being dragged under, but I’m still annoyed.
I'm less annoyed (but still annoyed) with the people who bought houses they could in no way afford because a little flash ad on MySpace said they could get a $500,000 mortgage for $500 a month. Not everyone can be good with money; it's just not everyone's gift in life (it's certainly not mine), but can't a person be reasonably expected to know that these loans were too good to be true? Like I said, less annoyed but still annoyed.
But I was reading some news just now, and I'm seriously annoyed, to a pissed-off level, even. Check this out:

I have helpfully highlighted in green what should be blowing your mind about now - an epic bailout was just passed, and there on the side of that very story is one of those ads that got us here in the first place! They didn't even change up the format of the ad to try and make it look like it's not the same shady people as before; it's the same nonsensical dancing people with a link to get your spanking new payment on the house you couldn't pay for the first time you bought it. I can't believe they're using the exact same format for the ad - have people genuinely not caught on to the fact that if the ad involves little dancing people, really low mortgage prices and more than one exclamation point, it's not for a reputable institution?

Granted, it's a little more realistic this time; $133,000 mortgages for $679 is a little more believable than the half million dollar, adjustable rate credit destroyers the pushers were pushing last time. But it still seems to me like it's the same companies getting away with it all again. It's as if crashing the stock market and causing thousands to lose their homes was just a move in an overall strategy to keep bleeding money out of people who don't have any. We're not bailing you out so you can keep scamming people, making bad investments and destroying the economy, jackasses!

PS - did you happen to catch the macabre reminder of how this financial "game" can end? It's down in the corner under "Most Popular": "Woman in foreclosure shoots self."

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Everything?

Somewhere, angels are singing:


It's salt. Salt that tastes like bacon. Slogan: "Everything should taste like bacon." Upon further contemplation, that's pretty gross. Still, at first glance, it totally seems like something I would buy, if not invent. It also comes in "Hickory" and "Peppered" in case you cared.

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Where I work

Rachel (or, as you may know her, Ladypug or Killer) posted a "work meme" a while back. The idea is just to show where you work I guess. So, here we go into the abyss:


It's sort of . . . gray. And dark. Actually, it's only dark in the area where I actually work. Let's look closer, shall we?


Okay, from this angle there's a little more color going on, mostly in the form of sticky notes. I likes the sticky notes. There's also some photos: me and some friends at the mud run a few years back, Clementine, me, Mary and Cori modeling fake hair and faker mustaches, and an autographed photo of AFI, without which no work could be done. This also serves to confirm that I am as messy at work as I am at home. On the other side of cube, sweet cube:


. . . my purse, in it's usual state of full-to-overflowing, a jacket (the Link world headquarters is perpetually freezing; we double as a cryogenics lab), and one of those myst balls in the very back there. See it? It sort of looks like a crystal ball. If I filled the bottom part with water and turned it on, steam would come out of it, and different colored lights would illuminate the ball. Oooooh.

So that's about it. Not exactly the corner office, but I get stuff done. Like posting this blog.

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Suicide by zombie

I had the weirdest dream the other night. I have weird dreams a lot, but this one stuck with me. I was living in this dystopian future where zombies were a constant threat. The still-living would occasionally be attacked by a horde of zombies, fight back, kill off most of them eventually, then go back to life more or less as usual. The thing was, they never quite got all of the zombies, so there was always the threat of another outbreak. Because of this, people had built up different systems of barricading themselves and their families for protection and everyone was very suspicious of everyone else, since any strangers could be carrying the zombie-ism disease (I guess it was kind of slow-acting) or could be followed by zombies. Everyone was in constant survival mode and ready to throw their fellow human to the brain-hungry masses to protect themselves and their families. Some people got so weary of living that way that they finally gave up and let the zombies get them, just to finally get it over with. No one actually killed themselves; just let themselves be killed.

Somewhere along the way, God came down to earth, but turned out to be sort of clueless and required a lot of hand holding to grasp the situation at hand. We were in some kind of fortress watching all that was going on in the world, and God just had no answer for what to do.

In the middle of all of this was a kid and his father who had been largely ostracized by everyone else because for some reason the zombies were after the kid in particular. They had survived together for years, but any time there was an attack, they had to find their own hiding spots, since no one wanted to be near this kid. The father wound up being one of the ones who lost the will to go on and just let the zombies get him. The kid was still alive when I woke up, but I had the sense he wouldn't be for long unless some kind soul took pity on him. Weird, eh?

Britney Spears, the sequel

It is truly impossible to go anywhere these days and not be bombarded by Hannah Montana stuff. How long until she's in rehab?

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Ideas for things to do today

1. Fake own death and move to foreign country.
Difficulty level (out of 10): 9
Advantages: Vacation, no more taxes, get to pretend I'm a spy
Disadvantages: Truly can't come home again, would probably miss family and friends
Hurdles/issues: Don't have a passport, have no idea how to fake death
Conclusion: maybe I just need a vacation.

2. Post more odd clip art.

This is your heart on drugs?

The plant that ate the Alamo

Initially, I was just so thrilled that I got a plant to actually stay alive that I didn't notice the insidious nature of it. It's called a "moonflower vine," and for the low, low price of $6.98 I wasn't expecting a whole lot. It surprised me. Now it's concerning me. I took some pictures to show you. I'd describe the moonflower vine so you could be certain you're looking at the right plant, but as you'll notice it's the ONLY potted plant that isn't dead or dying, and also it looks poised to eat my house, so I trust you'll figure it out.

It starts out innocently enough:

But it's got two main branches, one of which winds down the stair railing:

And the other, which has stretched up onto the porch, behind the gate:

and up the side of the iron gate/door thing:

Mind you I'm not doing anything to influence how it grows and what it climbs up. I pulled it off the gate a couple of times, but I gave up.

I didn't know what it was up to, but the horrible realization is beginning to sink in. This thing has set itself up so it can shut the gate, turning my porch into a cage, and lock me in (or out of) my own house! Yeah, there's a back door I can escape through, but I get the feeling if I let this thing continue its uncontrolled growth it'll wind its way around the house and block that off as well. It's got a third branch beginning to sprout, which I assume will wind directly into my bedroom and strangle me during the night. Did I mention I bought this thing as a tiny little sprout and I've only had it for two or three months? The fucker's exponential.

Oh, and since I could never be content to be paranoid about just one thing, I've got:

TWO of them!

I swear, my house is a horror movie waiting to happen
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PS - if you don't know me, I call my house the Alamo. Ah, now the subject line makes sense, you're thinking.

Confucious say "Whoa, dude."

From a fortune cookie: "Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think." Pretty deep for a fortune cookie, eh?

We can be heroes

I was someone's hero last week. I was at Bodega with a mixed group of people I knew and didn't know and one of the ones I didn't know kept requesting 80s songs from the bartender who was running the music from an iPod. Amazingly, she had most of the songs he asked for, except "Bohemian Rhapsody." He was totally bummed at the lack of Queen, so I swiftly produced my iPod, which does contain "Bohemian Rhapsody." "You're my hero!" he said as he ran over to the bartender, who played the song right then and there. Seriously, she was way nicer than she needed to be.

I started thinking that maybe we've come to throw around a lot of words too casually, "hero" among them. Then again, maybe different people have different expectations for their heroes. Some people want a savior, some want someone to look up to or rely on and some people just really want to hear "Bohemian Rhapsody." Either way it feels good to help out a friend (or near total stranger) in need.