Only Nola

80’s Girl Strikes Again

Yep, I'm the queen of cheese. Score of 120.5, baby! And unfortunately it doesn't give half points for the places where I got one of the two words right in a line... ah, well. It did call me a 'God', thank you very much, for knowing 'warm smell of colitas rising up through the air'. Sure, it was a little before the 80's, but it was ON THE TEST, so there. I made the score, mostly, by knowing the really obscure shit that was worth the most points, lol. *hums 'Don't you want me, baby?' *

If we could somehow pull off a giant fashion do-over, the 80's would be the coolest decade...

Time and Place for Everything

One of these days I'm going to go to the mall, equipped with about a gallon of pepper spray, and just let loose on every single person from one of those little kiosk things that jumps me. They just about send me around the bend. You can't get by without getting nailed by one of them, right up in your face and trying to sell you SOMETHING... and usually something you neither want nor need. A trip to the mall for some leisurely browsing has now turned into an exercise in running the gauntlet. There should be a little bin by the mall door that hands out protective gear. Maybe offer bonus points for each encounter with a kiosk employee, whom I affectionately call 'Satan's Bitches', that doesn't culminate in a sale or an aneurysm.

I'm not sure which ones are the worst. The top three, undoubtedly, have to be 1) the cell phone salesmen, 2) the French twats pushing the hand cream treatment crap, and 3) the men who speak about one word in five of English that are selling those butt nasty little neck pillow things that give off a foul stench when you warm them. 'Comforting', they say... 'Liable to make me pop a couple of their teeth out if they get it too close to me', I say. Those French women have to be my least favorite. They're snotty, looking down their noses at me in that way that only the French have perfected. They smile, but it's ruined by the fact you can tell it causes them great pain. They latch onto the unsuspecting Mall patron and slather their hands in foul crap before you can whip out your trusty Tazer. They tsk-tsk over the sorry state of your hands, stressing how much you NEED their product to repair what is, apparently, the most appalling skin condition heretofore witnessed this side of a Gulag. Someone really needs to help them work on their technique. They also have this habit of leaning in when talking... let me just tell you how much I do NOT like people in my personal bubble. BACK OFF, FRENCHIE, OR THE POODLE GETS IT!

The cell phone salesmen are in your face, too, but they're actually pretty easy to shake. It just takes one line... 'I've already got service and I just renewed my contract... Sorry'. And POOF, just like that... they're goooooooooooooone. The cell phone contract... Kryptonite to the workers of the cell phone kiosk. Probably keeps me from having to test just how many places a flip phone can, indeed, comfortably fit.

Phone From Hell

I've decided my phone is on a mission. No matter what it takes, it wants to see me dead, or at the very least totally pissed off and on a rampage. My phone will sit, quietly minding it's own business, for hours. Then I lay down to take a nap. Fine. All is peaceful, cats are all keeping me company... or rather, keeping me firmly in place under their incredible GIRTH... I'm just starting to hit deep sleep when, you guessed it...

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING.

Well, actually, since it's my cell phone and it plays either The Pink Panther Theme, Push It, I'm Blue, or I Want Your Sex *depending on who's calling*, it doesn't actually RING, but you get the point. So, the cats all jump three feet in the air, ripping out bits of flesh, which I liked where it WAS, with their back claws. I, groggy and irritated, answer the phone. It can be anyone from my husband to the cable company. Doesn't matter. The point is it's rarely important and I don't retain the information that they give me ANYWAY, since my brain is still in nap mode, so they could have just saved themselves the trouble of calling. So, I hang up. Cats give me dirty looks and settle back down in their assigned spots *yes, they each have a specific spot they claim as their own... don't ask*. I get comfortable again. Takes awhile, but I finally drift back off. Gee, I wonder...

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. Cats are now sporting the bushy tails, plotting my death. My head is pounding and I can't make my eyes uncross. At this point it's usually a telemarketer. I'm pretty sure I make them rethink the wisdom of their chosen profession by the time I get off the phone.

This is usually the point where I have to give it up and forget sleep. The cats take my warm spot and I go looking for the Aleve.

All I wanted was a nap, dammit.

Belated Thanks

I got caught up in my big problem with the blog and forgot to also thank Tim, over at Tim Web , for his help in making the plug in work the way I wanted to. The error that had been popping up wasn't an error with his coding, it was a problem with my server, which is now fixed *thank god*. Tim took the time to help me tweak the plug in so it did what I wanted. Thanks, Tim!

It Figures

So, the new blog and I are going a few rounds. It's really no more than I expected. Less, actually. I knew it had been going too well. I was trying to get one teeeeeeeeeeeny little thing added to the site, for the archives list, and now I can't type the word 'cat' in any article. Not by itself, that is. I can type 'cat' followed by a comma, an apostrophe, whatever, but 'cat' followed by a space makes the program reject the entire article. No, I'm not kidding. I have NEVER heard of this happening to anyone, so it only stands to reason that it would happen to me. We're talking about the chick with her own personal black cloud, remember? I'm the one that always finds the lone carpet tack that's just waiting to puncture a foot... the one that finds the SINGLE piece of pizza with the hair on it... the one that parks with eight empty spaces on each side and STILL leaves with a ding on my car door. So, of course, I get this weird shit going on with my blog. Seeing it coming does not lessen the amount that I cursed myself blue, though. That's a constant.

Lucky for me, I've got a friend and her husband who are trying to fix the problem. I'm sure they'll both be wanting to set me on fire by the time it's all over, but until then I'm depending on their patience. Throwing myself at their mercy. Offering to retroactively name my firstborn after one or both of them. You know, the usual.

Hopefully, this, too, shall pass, and come tomorrow or the next day shit will be back to normal. I still need to write about the latest developments with the Child Support Enforcement Agency. Gah.

Go Chrispian!

Just taking a moment here to say that Chrispian rocks. Yes, ROCKS! He has officially kept me from throwing myself in traffic today by saving my site from imploding. He and his wife, Aeryn, are sweet beyond words to help me with this.

*cabbagepatches around the room*

How Do I Love Thee?

I'm sitting here at the computer stuffing my face with Nature's Perfect Food. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it can only be...

The Doughnut.

Anything this good should, by rights, grow on trees. Screw the orange, I'll take the fritter. Mmmmmmmmmmm, fritters. First off, they're fried. That's bonus points right there. No food is so good it can't be improved by a good immersion in sizzling fat. Then there's the sugar. People who say there's too much sugar in a doughnut are obviously delusional and in serious need of professional help.

Now, there are doughnuts and then there are doughnut wannabe's. Take Krispy Kreme... I think I spelled that right. Well, I spelled it wrong, but that's how THEY spell it... you knew what I meant. Anyway. Krispy Kreme's are good and all, don't get me wrong, but they are NOT doughnuts. They're pretenders to the throne. Calling a Krispy Kreme a doughnut is like calling a Yugo a car. Yeah, it's a stretch. Or how about those little powdered bastards in the box at the grocery store? Uh huh, like THOSE are fooling anybody. Those aren't doughnuts, those are slightly tenderized golf balls with sugar on top. The sugar is the only plus in that situation.

Everyone swears that one day my eating habits are going to catch up with me and I'll resemble a Volkswagon. Maybe, but until then you can find me in front of the bakery counter at Basha's, pounding on the bell and putting a sleeper hold on the 73 year old woman who was trying to sneak out with the last fritter...

My fritter, damn it.

Baby Sold Out

I turned on the television the other day while my computer was resting in peace, since I had to do SOMETHING, and I got to witness firsthand the depths to which the mighty can fall. I'm talking to my husband who is in the kitchen, not really paying attention to the television, when I hear a tune I recognize. I glance at the t.v. just in time to catch 'I like backPACKS and I cannot lie'... no, I'm not kidding. Baby no longer has BACK, baby got backpacks. Oh, the humanityyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

Okay, I'm not going to claim that Sir Mix-a-lot is in any way related to someone like, oh... *scratches head*... Eric Clapton, for lack of a better example of a true musical artist, but STILL... using one of THE favorite reigning cheesy booty songs to promote back to school supplies? Ignoring the obvious lack-of-taste factor, doesn't this in some way damage the artistic credibility factor? Then again, maybe a man who dedicates songs to the preferred size of a woman's ass isn't exactly striving for artistic recogniton. Even so, you have to wonder if he sees that commercial and has to be stopped from throwing himself under a bus. Watching bargain conscious nine year olds jamming to a tune extolling the virtues of a prepubescent storage device... isn't that one of Dante's nine levels of hell or something? You know, right below the level where you live with your mother FOREVER.

I'm trying to imagine just HOW broke Sir Mix-a-lot had to be to agree to this. Maybe he's been getting his money advice from MC Hammer. Now there's a financial Einstein if ever there was one. I think that if the music world were an episode of Survivor, this would officially get Sir Mix-a-lot voted off the island.

I have to wonder where this is going. What's next? Snoop Dogg's 'Ain't Nothin' but a GE thang'?

God help us all.

Offline

Yep, I've been out of the loop for a bit... the old computer kicked the bucket. Damned thing. So tonight my new one got here, and I'm working on getting it all settled in. I'll try and post something actually worth reading by tomorrow night... *looks at the clock*... scratch that, make it 'tonight'. God, I'm tired.

Deli Disaster

I've decided that I'm drawing my line in the sand. Added to my existing list of things I won't do *along with such gems as cleaning dingleberries out of my cat's fur... that's what he has a tongue for, right?* is shop at the Deli in my local grocery store. Now, to the uninitiated, this might seem like a strange thing. I mean, it's just the DELI, for God's sake, not like a KKK rally or something. But I have my reasons. Observe yet another lesson in human behavior...

Hard to decide which story to highlight... the one from last week, or the one from today. I'll just skim parts of both, since they're equally representative of the merits of my 'Legalize Slapping' proposal. Check the category 'The Human Condition'... it's in there somewhere. I'd look up the link for you but I obviously have this post to finish, and then I have streusel muffin thingies downstairs calling my name. What's a girl to do? But I digress...

People appear, to the objective eye, to regress into some primitive state when they approach the Deli counter. Not all people, but enough to make me reluctant to shop for my lunchmeat without carrying a stun gun. Seems like every time I'm there some jackass gets their panties *or boxers, as the case may be* in a twist because they want to be waited on ahead of everyone else. This would be fine if they had, in fact, GOTTEN there first, but they didn't. It's always some schmuck that is trying to weasel in way ahead of their actual position in the customer line-up. Irritating, to say the least. Last week it was this Asian guy in his late thirties/early forties. He got all kinds of loud, demanding service INSTANTLY... even though he was butting in front of me and two other people, not to mention giving the poor girl behind the counter a panic attack. Then today it was some suburban soccer mom with extremely bad fashion sense *anyone remember the movie 'Married to the Mob'? 'Nuff said.*, maybe in her mid forties. This twat comes stomping up, about ten minutes after I had been standing and waiting my turn, and starts yelling at the Deli lady. Why, you may ask? Because SHE was NEXT, GODDAMMIT! At least that's what Queen of the QVC Jewelry Hour was trying to pretend. We all knew she was NOT next, but she was trying to get by on that whole 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease' theory. In this case it would be the screaming, insane, rabid, paranoid-delusional wheel gets the bologna, but you get the point.

People get in a situation that requires them to wait their turn and they lose their collective minds. I posit that there's something about the smell of meat at the Deli counter that just exacerbates the situation... maybe brings out their inner neanderthal or something. Such being the case, I should be entitled to beat each of them over the head with a club and go on about my business.

If no one else has ever witnessed this behavior at a Deli counter, that brings up the possibility that it's not the need for fine sliced turkey that's getting everyone so riled up... it's being in my general vicinity. Personal black cloud, remember?

It's the Deli, dammit.