How to Kill An Hour or Twelve

Please witness my newest obsession. My friend at work Jogger hipped me to this website that basically lets you upload photos of yourself or loved ones and then magically superimpose the face on old yearbook pictures


I have been laughing like a donkey all night. Thanks Jogger!!


Here is the picture I started out with - it's one that I posted here on my blog several months ago:


and here are some of my favorite results as Lady thru the ages...


As a girl:

1952 1964 1966 1982 1988



As a dude:

1950 1952 1968 1986



Enjoy!

Love, Lady

Stick Around for Joy

Don't get too excited. The picture above is my pipe dream - hopefully soon a reality. The before picture is the current state of our living room floor - filthy and stripped bare. The after picture is of our master bedroom floor, which was already refinished when we moved in a few years ago, but the model of what we hope the rest of the floors will look like when the job is finally completed.

Meanwhile my life is in chaos because my house is in a total fuckin' shambles. I want to move somewhere far, far away. To a place where all the rooms make sense. Where the kitchen is the kitchen and the living room doesn't echo and give me splinters.

What feels like an eternity has passed since my darling decided to rip out the nasty carpets in our house. It was a spur of the moment decision even though we have always planned to refinish the floors in our house. We just hadn't planned to start ripping up carpet that very second.

He is not typically a man of action. In fact most of the time he mainly stays very still, so I don't know what came over him. At the time (Labor Day weekend) because he was supposed to be simply shampooing the carpets, I was thoroughly prepared for a carpet cleaning project. We moved all of the furniture and breakable items out of the way and created a situation that I thought would be temporary, like for one day.

I left him alone with the shampoo-er machine for less than 5 minutes and returned to find him wild-eyed and grinning, on his hands and knees, looking up at me and barking proudly "Look at this! - These floors are perfect, why didn't we do this before??"

Because you need a plan crazyman.

To be honest, at first I was kind of excited to finally get the wheels in motion, but that was a few weeks ago and at this point I am tired of living like an animal. Meanwhile, the estimates have all come in, a deposit has been paid and the job has been scheduled - in another 4 weeks.

So I am writing to you now from a cramped space that I have carved out for myself in the office by moving several large piles of crap. I'm going to post some pictures tonight and reassure you that I haven't dropped off the face of the planet. It's just difficult to get in the post writing zone when I'm drowning underneath all of the crap piles.

Here is what used to be my kitchen, filled with all of the crap from what used to be the dining room and some of the crap that used to be the living room... and some other crap that I have just started piling on top of it because I have no fucking idea where to put it anymore...

Here is what used to be the entry way filled with more of some of the crap that used to be in the living room. We have to tilt the pizza boxes to get them through the door. What? You think I'm going to try to cook something in this shithole?

Here is some of the crap I had to move to get into the office, including the ever present shop vac... like those American Express ads, it's everywhere I want to be...

Here is one of the few rooms in the house I can stand to be in... our lovely empty dining room...

If You Need Immediate Assistance You Can Go Piss Up a Rope

I've been working at a job I truly enjoy, with a great bunch of lovely people that I truly like, since the middle of February. I'm a temp and, unbelievably fabulous and amazing though I am, have been given no promise of permanent employment. Not even a smidge. Oh sure, they all tell me how great I am and have thanked me with kind words and a few small bonuses here and there, but my ID badge is dated Jan 15, 2009. My expiration date.

It's sad really, but on the other hand, being a temp gives me great freedom to say fuck it, when certain situations arise.

Be that as it may, I have done the best work possible for these people. I never say no when someone gives me an assignment or complain no matter how crappy that assignment may be. I smile, and say "Sure!", although I might ask how soon it's needed so that I can better prioritize all the other 10 kazillion things they have me doing. I have to prioritize because I have to somehow fit it all into an 8 hour day. I'm an hourly employee and not approved for any overtime.

I make it happen because I am good and I am trustworthy. I am Supertemp. You can rely on me.

Lately, because summer is drawing to it's close and the people I work with are gainfully employed and have all worked there longer than dirt (this month Hey Mr. DJ celebrates his 38th year with the company with no sign of eminent retirement) and subsequently have more vacation time, sick time, and personal days racked up than I ever dreamed would be possible in a lifetime, let alone in one year, they are often out of the office - and have all apparently decided that I am a terrific out of office back up.

I'm a temp. I don't get vacation days. I am always there. Every ding dong day. Reliable, that's me.

It's fine when it's one person. But when it is 3 or 4 people and on one occasion recently FIVE people - it's just simply not OK.

I should mention that I barely have time to perform my own job and fulfill my own responsibilities and tasks within a what always seems to be a very short 8 hour day.

Frankly, it's getting old.

So here is a message to all of the people who have slammed me, and will probably continue to slam me during my coworkers absences, with arm flapping emails marked "Urgent!", with all caps in the subject line and little flaming envelope icons:

I'm only vaguely aware of some of the projects that my lovely teammates are currently working on.

Don't get me wrong, I am happy to help you when time permits and when my associates have given me the tools and background information that I need to help you. But they didn't. They only fill me in on the truly important stuff and since I have no fucking idea what the bloody hell you are talking about, I can only assume that you are:

a.) a giant liar head
b.) mistaken
c.) in a deep bucket of shit because you waited until the last minute to do this "Urgent!" thing and forgot that my co-worker was going to be out of the office
d.) all of the above

Don't get me wrong, I am indeed a whiz, and I really (sort-of) would like to help you out, but you are misguided if you think that I am so intimately up my collective coworkers asses as to be able to read their minds from afar. And no, I'm not going to try to reach them at home.

As I mentioned before I don't even know what the fuck you are drivelling about, so don't ask me to make snap decisions on their behalves, try to gain access to their files, or have all the relevant numbers for your project memorized.

You are shit out of luck.

They are not here.

It will have to wait until they come back.

Re-fucking-lax.

Oh, and while I'm at it - It is not OK to cram an entire message into the subject line of your email. It's an email, not a text message. Even if you somehow manage to squeeze "pls" and "thx" in there, it's rude. Stop it.

Pants Noise

Today I wore a pair of shoes that are a winning combination of cute and comfortable. I hardly ever wear them and when I took them down from the top shelf of my closet and pulled them out of the box, I was thinking to myself - Oh, I love these shoes, why don't I ever wear them?

Because they make an irritating rubbery squishing noise with every step - that's why.

They make a noise like wet socks inside a pair of rubber boots, but of course I didn't remember this until I was well on my way and it was too late to turn back and get another pair.

In addition to this I wore one of my newer pairs of wide-leg khaki trousers. They make a soft, swishing sound that is also pretty annoying after awhile.

So between the shoes and the pants I sounded like a one man band.

I was self conscious about it all day to the point that I made a contest with myself to see how long I could go without getting up to do anything. Pretty long actually. I made it until around 12:30. When I finally couldn't take it any more and got up to go to the break room to heat up my lunch (there was no way I was going to eat cold soup from a can) enough time had gone by for my feet to stir up a little moisture and a new delightful farting noise was now added to the mix for accompaniment.

Great.

Round about this time (12:50, to be exact) a reminder popped up on my calendar for a meeting I needed to attend - on the other side of the fucking compound. Seriously it's a very big place - the meeting was half a mile away. No joke.

It took me 11 laboriously noisy hours to walk there. Farting, swishing and squishing all the way. Of course I got there late and had to walk all the way to the back of the room to find a seat.

Marvelous.

Anyhoo... the first thing I did when I arrived home this evening was rip these shoes from my feet and ceremoniously slam them into the trash. I said, "Take that you noisy motherfuckers".

Then I unceremoniously pulled them out of the trash, put them back into their box, placed a post it note on top of the box that says simply, "Farts", and placed the box back on the top closet shelf. At least next time I'll know why I never wear them.

The title of the post is a little inside joke because when I was in middle school I had a friend named Dana whose mother was into some weird rattle-snake frenching religion and thought that everything having to do with the human body was dirty and any mention of a body part or body function was a dirty word. She was kinda like Carrie's mom.

Dana's mother once washed her mouth out with soap for saying the word "pimple". Her mother created an alternate language for such things:

Zit/Pimple = Place on your face

Fart = Pants noise

Vagina = Special place

Butt/Ass = Seat

Crazy Bitch = Mother

That's all I can remember, but "Pants Noise" always gave me a giggle and when Amy's daughter LBL was a baby, that was one of my favorite nicknames for her.

A Helpful Hint from Amy - The Cool Paper Towel

School started last week and although I'm not a teacher, most of my friends are teachers. Did I ever mention that my best friend Amy teaches the 2nd grade? Yes she does. Did I ever mention that my best friend Amy is brilliant? Yes she is.

One of my favorite works of her genius is this:

She keeps a little mini fridge in her class room filled with diet cokes and a life time supply of water-soaked paper towels tidily folded up and individually sealed in snack-size zip lock baggies.

Do you know how many snot dripping, red faced, sniffling, crying jags occur in the daily lives of 2nd graders? Well, I'll tell you, it's a lot. Bumps, bruises, scrapes, headaches, loose teeth, name calling, hair pulling, pants peeing, booger eating - no matter what your problem may be it can all be taken care of by the soothing relief of a cool, wet paper towel.

Amy always says it really fast too - Go get a coolpapertowel and sit down. The smeary red-faced child person goes to the mini-fridge and gets his or her own cool paper towel. Sometimes they even tell her when they might need one.

Mrs. Amy I'm very upset. I think I need a coolpapertowel.

I would like to state for the record that the cool paper towel works on children older than the 2nd grade also. Like 41 year old ladies who have had a bad day at work only to come home and find the kitchen sink full of dirty dishes so that she has to work all goddamn day and then clean up the damn kitchen before she can fix dinner, and clean up the kitchen yet again before bed. I think I need a cool paper towel.

Yesterday there were lots of cool paper towels getting tossed around at my house after my husband, who had started off the day sticking to the original plan of renting one of those Rug Doctors from the grocery store, ended up ripping out all of the carpet in our living room, dining room and hallways.

This is something that I have wanted to do from the minute we first walked in the door of this house, but MDH has always held back because hardwood floor restoration is in our home ownership fear zone, along with pretty much any home improvement project that goes beyond spackling or painting.

Needless to say there was some drama, but as you can see, it's a bit too late to turn back.

I'm not sure we have the skills to refinish this floor properly because it has some pretty bad stains in the wood, and I'm fairly certain that we do not have the money to pay someone else to do it.

Even scarier, MDH, in a similar fit of reckless impulse to the one that caused him to go from cleaning the carpet to tearing at it like a wild animal, decided to call in his brother Miami to see if he could come up and do the floor for us.

Bad. Idea.

Yes. Miami is by trade a concrete foreman and tends to work on high rise buildings, but started off as a carpenter and general contractor, so he knows how to refinish a floor.

He is also a roaring drunk.

Several years ago he nearly ruined the office of our old house when MDH asked him to make us some built in book shelves. Miami was all disciplined and lovely the first 2 days, but after that I'm not sure what happened, but I do know that he discovered the bar down the street kept Valpolicella in stock, and after that the job was rather untidily abandoned. He claimed it was complete, but I ended up hiring someone to come in to fix nearly everything he had done.

The thought of him coming here and attempting to take on our floors makes me need a coolpapertowl. Maybe five.

Even Turtle needs a cool paper towel after this...