Darren B.’s Neighborhood

Winners pee rainbows

who ever designed these shorts should...um...not be allowed to do that anymore.

WANT!

The Fourth of July was always one of my favorite holidays in the US. Not that I'm terribly patriotic or anything, just...there are fireworks and BBQs and its an excuse to drink = HELLO PERFECT HOLIDAY.

Now, it of course means something else to me. It makes me miss home.

While I'll be having fun tonight celebrating Iain's birthday (it's tomorrow!) down by the Thames...there's a part of my heart that will be back home in my parents back yard, drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade and with a over excitable chihuahua at my feet. (Praying for crumbs.)

If I could fly back home today, even just for a couple hours and to see my parents and my sister, I would in a heart beat.

On the Fourth we'd always go to the same spot to watch fire works. My mom and my sister and I would lay on our backs and wait expectantly for the Sperm Fire Works.

If you don't know which ones I'm talking about, the you don't know what you're missing out.

They're the bright, white ones that look like tad-poles when they're first launched, but then go off in crazy directions...as if searching for a big, unfertilized egg in the sky.

It dawned on me a couple of years ago that they totally looked like gigantic sperm. I started laughing hysterically - only to notice that my sister was cackling to herself as well. Then my mom started laughing,

"OH MY GOD THEY LOOK LIKE SPERM!!!!"

Hopefully the Fourth of July Sperm Fireworks won't be nearly as fun without me this year...(If I can't have a fully complete Fourth of July THEN NOBODY SHOULD.)

Happy Independence Day, my fellow Americans.

May this recession end soon, may the gas prices go down, and may all of your BBQ's be fully cooked so you don't end up with the shits all weekend.

This song reminds me of home...

The washer, which has given me 12 very good years, is about on its last leg.  It has a tendency (sometimes, not always) of leaving lint on the clean clothes, so they don't actually look so clean.  I figured there had to be some sort of filter that I could clean if I could get to it, so I popped the top off to check it out.  Couldn't find it.  And realized after the fact that the top was not pop-off-able.  So it's loose.

hmmmmm ...

The machine still works, and after some serious silicone-in-a-tube action, the top is reasonably stable.  But it looks like hell, and I still have traces of lint.

The tv, which we've also had forever (well, 11 years is practically forever when you're talking electronics, right?), just didn't turn on one day.  With summer vacation barely a week old.  Yeah, it wasn't pretty.

hmmmmmm ...

what to do

what to do

Yeah, you guessed it.  Since the washer is actually still working, and the tv wasn't we are now the proud owner of an HD digital flat screen tv.  It's amazing, and believe it or not, Stuff-mart had the best price of any store, including BJs.

I may be washing my clothes in the tub by next week, but we've got Spongebob and the Red Sox again.

And yes, my priorities are completely in order, thank you very much.

WOW! It's been a while since I last posted. This is mostly due to the fact that I've been doing nothing but updating my Twitter and wanking all day because isn't that what people who work from home, like, do and stuff?

LOLZ. Just kidding. How could I possibly be on Twitter all day when this happens every five minutes?

Your MOM's down for maintenance!

No, but really I have been busy. And not just wanking all the time. (That only takes up at 5-10 minutes at a time, anyway.)

Let's see. What have I been up to?

I suppose the event that sticks out in my mind the most is that last weekend I was worried for a full 24 hours that I was knocked up. I was a few hours away from buying one of those tests when - glory be to god - it happened. It was a weird week, to tell the truth. I had like, 7 pregnancy dreams that involved either twins, a miscarriage, an ultra sound, a pregnancy test, or me just waddling around being pregnant.

All of these dreams were horrible, can I just say that. Horrible. They fucked with my brain, especially when I thought I actually was pregnant. I thought somehow, someway, my uterus was whispering sweet nothings to my subconscious - but alas, the dreams were probably because I:

a) Watched Juno twice. (Once normal, once with the commentary on. Hello NERD.)
b) Watched a special on teenage mothers and young grandmas
c) Went to a screening of Baby Mama...ironically on the same day that I totally thought I was knocked-up. I was not pleased.

I didn't really to write about The Scare, as it wasn't even quite a scare. Flow was like a day late. A day. It was just the combination of dreams and lateness and the realization that if an *accident* were to occur, I know what I would choose to do.

But I was afraid that choice would make me seem selfish.

I'm married. I'm not 16. My life is pretty stable...right?

But in my heart, I know that would take our life into a different place. A place I'm not ready for. A place I don't think I'm mentally capable of navigating very well. That version of my life...I'm not ready to take it on. I'm not...we're not there.

So, that's that.

Thankfully, this choice only had to happen in my brain. I still think from time to time, about the decision we would make. I know it's for the best, but it really made me look at the whole issue in a new way. A woman's right to choose...

I am thankful it's a decision I have the right to make. That I have the option to choose.

But what a fucked up choice it is to have to make.

Well. That was heavy.

Here, have some cute dogs with their hair blowing in the wind...

tonight, while I was walking, a bunny came hopping full speed ahead and almost hit me in the face. I saw it coming at me out of the corner of my eye and held my hand up thinking it was a rabid flying squirrel. It hit my hand and fell on to the road, rolled around until it was on its feet, and took off again. I screamed an embarrassing sound. Then a little miss-pickles-sized dog that was chasing it jumped into the the road barking and came up to me and sniffed my hand. That bunny was really soft.

The Oldest is 19, and flunked out of her first college and is trying to get into her second.  This summer, she's landed 3 jobs ... at a grocery store (she's been there over a year) on the weekends, for the town rec dept. (this will be her 4th year), and at UPS hucking boxes in the evenings.  The rec job hasn't started yet, but it's right down the street, and she walks there, but for the other two, she needs wheels.  She's been using mine, which leaves me without a car every night from 5 on, and either carless on the weekends for several hours a day, or in the position of dropping her off and picking her up (17 miles round trip).

We have some cash put aside that belongs to her, but she doesn't know that.  We were going to put that towards a car, and have her pay us back like it was a loan, but all the while she'd be paying herself.  We were hoping the potential guilt of welching on her parents for a couple grand would keep her honest.  This kid is just plain bad with money.

So, found an older beater that actually is in decent shape right in town, in our price range, and even though it's older (1994), it's been well-maintained and would get her a few years if she treated it right.  Seemed perfect, until today when she said she doesn't have  her paycheck from last week because she "lent" $200 to her friend.

How ... dumb ... is ... THAT?!?!

WTF?!?!?

So, even though she'd be borrowing from herself for this car, Steve is just plain disgusted that she acted SO irresponsibly (again ... this is a recurring theme in her life), he's nixed the whole thing.  Which means she loses any freedom she would have by having her own wheels, but I also continue to lose my car every night while she racks up the miles, plus part of most weekends.  I agree with him in theory ... I mean, she couldn't even hold on to her first real paycheck from UPS without letting the moron in her brain take over.  She'll never see that $200 back in a million years.  Can anyone say "doofus?"  I knew you could.  But, theory aside, I miss being able to go anywhere in MY car.  It seems like the one suffering for her mistakes is me (selfish, right?).

So ... your feet in my shoes ... your kid, your car, your decision ... get the car?  Or suck it up?

 when Richard tells Liz:

Groceries, you gotta let it go...

just sit and watch the world pass for a while...

chasing life so hard will lead you to death... and time when pursued like a bandit,, will make it behave like one...

this is something to share from the book im reading now.. :)

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Bold: I have read.
2) Italics: Those I intend to read. 
3) Underline: Books I love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated. 
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (maybe not every word, but close enough)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (only because I got through most of it in college, and see no need to go back)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (but isn't this included in #33?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery (parts of it, in French)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Muskateers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So, 25 out of 99 so far (there's no 58, why is that?)  Not too bad, considering I read a lot that's not on this list.  A couple books I'd add to it:

The Once and Future King

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Call of the Wild or White Fang

The Little House books

And get rid of at least half of the Jane Austen books on the original list ...

Do you think that when the marketing firm for Geico were having their power hour meeting about commercials and first came up with the "So easy a caveman could do it" slogan..and then after that came up with actually putting cavemen in the commercials that they thought it was so funny they sat there laughing their asses off?? I imagine a bunch of smartly dressed people sitting around a big table,  brainstorming. And came up with this:

After which, of course, they were laughing all the way to the bank.

For the record:

As a consumer - the Geico caveman commericals have lost their humor. They are no longer funny. Go sit around that table and come up with something else, please. And I have never been inspired by the commercials to switch to Geico car insurance. That shit is expensive.

However, the cartoon girl who kicks ass on the E-commericals - now THAT shit is cool..

yess, i'm alive.. :)

and thank GOD.. everything is going okay with me.. and Thailand is the place i wanna go to this summer due to budget issues and tickets prices to europe.. they are so EXPENSIVE.. still, excited about it.. !!

i got myself a DHL account for online shopping... still have to get myself a Visa or what banks call, internet shopping card.. ! hehe.. stupid i know.. gotta do this and order the LENS and the ZUNE PLAYER... YEAAAAHHHHHHH !!!!!

what else? school? well, it's also strangely Okay.. :D
and im kinda keeping up with the work, thanks to friends who keep helping me.. good stuff.. !!

emmm,, and there you go.. one gift to tell you guys that im sorry for my lack of updates and rants !!

Lighthouse in a dark night...

since i got nothing to do.. i should read... im almost half way through my book,, and it's a nice read.. not a light read of course.. heheh.. !