Have you ever lived with someone a long time, known them even longer and assume that they know anything of interest about you and have heard all of your stories probably more than once? But then one day you discover that there is still a tidbit from your past that has somehow gone undetected. How exciting.

The other night I was tap dancing in the kitchen and decided to try and teach the associate the old “shuffle, ball change” maneuver, a nice simple beginner’s step I thought she could handle. Let’s just say, tap is not her gift. Anyway, halfway through the lesson she stopped me and said “did you take tap lessons or something?” “WHAT!?” I said in amazement, “yes I did, and you don’t know that? Wow!”

No, she in fact did not know this about me.  Sure, it’s just stupid tap dancing lessons but for some reason it made me so happy to have something new to reveal.

Here I am before my big dance recital, probably around nine years old.

Don’t you just love that stage of growth where the kid’s head is too big for their body and their teeth are too big for their head.

I wasn’t really into working today and it was so nice outside that I threw caution to the wind and asked the associate if she would want to come home early so we could all go for a hike in the woods. Much to my surprise, she said yes. “Yeah!” said the puppies as they danced around the living room.

We are very lucky because although we live on the outskirts of the city we are also about two feet away from Fairmount Park, one of the largest city parks in the country (according to them). So we all piled in the car and drove to one of our favorite sections of the woods, smearing our noses on the car windows in eager anticipation. 

The critters wasted no time jumping into the stream, well Piglet was a little more cautious here in “the rapids.”

It was close to sunset and the woods were very quiet. I found it very odd that on such a perfect day, there were virtually no other people out hiking.

Piglet and Josie sniffed, pooped and peed on everything. They ran and jumped and frolicked like they were just set free from prison. Occasionally they’d stop for a treat.

I was busy most of the time taking photos so I often got left far behind. This doesn’t usually sit well with the pack. If I’m not too far behind, Josie usually will stop and wait for me, keeping an eye on me the whole time until I catch up. If I’ve gone out of eyesight, Piglet leads the pack in a mad dash through the woods to try and locate my position. There’s nothing better than seeing him come running over a hill followed by the rest of the gang coming to claim their lost sheep. It really makes a person feel loved.

They really wore themselves out and a great time was had by all.

Yes it was two months late, but I have finally given bluberd her birthday present.

It has a wonderful new home, but I miss it terribly.

I doubt the color is accurate in this scan. I just got my monitor back from being repaired (for the third time in a year and a half) and I need to calibrate it. Plus, I forgot to color correct this image before the painting left.  After spending five months with it you’d think I’d have it memorized but I was still sort of guessing at the adjustments (too much red and yellow tone maybe). Amazing how different an image looks from monitor to monitor. And this monitor has three brightness levels which also make it look totally different. Well, even if the colors are off, you can get an idea of what it looks like.

Now I just have to come up with an idea for a new one. Hopefully I won’t take a three year hiatus again.

Here’s my last self-portrait using online tools. I used the Scribbler this time. That thing is so slow I couldn’t believe it and I don’t think it ever actually finishes. It also sucked up about 95% of my CPU. Maybe it’s just my computer, but all I know is that as soon as I closed the Scribbler window my computer sighed and flashed up a thank you message.

It is interesting to watch it build the drawing and you can potentially create some very interesting scribbles if you have the patience of a saint and a lot of time to kill.

Check out everyone else’s doodles and image manipulations for the week at the self-portrait challenge.

So where have I been for days my handful of readers may wonder. Well, Thursday I was in NYC with friends to see Mew, one of bluberd’s favorite bands.

As usual, I gradually started melting away more brain cells than I should have when we met up with my sister for dinner. We had some sushi and some laughs but evidently overstayed our welcome because the manager essentially offered to buy us all drinks if we’d get our butts out of their booth. My sister was the first to jump at the free drinks and seemed ready to bitch-slap any one of us who was inclined to reject the offer (bluberd). So we did our shots and proceeded to the venue.

As luck would have it, Ms. bluberd has struck up a friendship with Nick, the keyboard player from the band, so we had a pre-show beer with him which was fun.

Next up was the show. This was basically music, beer, music, beer for me since bluberd was out and about with her “photo pass” taking sweaty close-ups of the band and whatnot.  

(photo courtesy of bluberd)

Again, due to our well connected groupie, we got to go to the after party as Thursday night spilled into Friday and I continued to eliminate whatever tenacious brain cells refused to play dead earlier in the evening. Here I also saw Michael Stipe, hung out with a couple people I shouldn’t have, ogled a giant covered in tattoos, got ditched, reclaimed and finally went to the hotel some time after 3:00.

(photo courtesy of bluberd)

It took me a couple days to recuperate, I just don’t seem to bounce back the way I used to. It’s probably because I’m so sleep deprived to begin with, eh, I had fun anyway.

So here’s a bit of Mew for those of you who don’t know them. This stinking song always gets stuck in my head for days after I see them:

Side note for anyone interested, Nick is also an exceptional photographer.

ALL RESCUES IN AND SURROUNDING OHIO….
BEWARE OF MAUREEN MCLAUGHLIN!

This woman pretends to be a rescue. She collects small animals from unsuspecting people looking to place their animal with a rescue and possibly from breeders. She places the animal in a small crate and submerges it in a barrel of water….she drowns the animals. She has stated to the Humane Society that she has killed approximately 650 animals this way. According to local news station, WBNS Columbus’ Channel 10, she is now on the run. She may be “working” for rescues, shelters, or even a vet office.

BEWARE!  You can see her picture, read the news story, and watch the news video at:
http://www.10tv.com/?sec=news&story=sites/10tv/content/pool/200703/1765432341.html

I finally maxed out for the moment on the image transformer, so for this week’s self-portrait challenge I decided to try something easier on the eyes. I used Typedrawing, which is a cute little tool to piddle around with and I actually spent way more time playing with it than I meant to. I was hoping to make this one a quickie and get to bed before 2:00 am tonight, but alas, somehow an hour has gone by and this is what I have to show for it:

 
click to view a larger version of this masterpiece

There’s supposedly some way to go to Typedrawing and watch this drawing play out just as I drew it. But I can’t get the link they provided to work. Frankly, it’s not that overwhelmingly interesting anyway. Here’s the link if you’re bored and want to see where I’m going wrong.
http://storyabout.net/typedrawing/index.php?requestedID=33880

Some of you may know that I am less than thrilled with the way Father Time has mercilessly beaten me about the face as if I’m a baby harp seal and he just decided he needs a new coat.

But I’m not here to complain about that today, I’ve decided to take action. I’m not sinking a small fortune into Botox or selling my VW to pay to have the fat sucked out of my jowls and put into the creases between my eyes. I’m not going to buy the burka that I keep threatening to don or even remove all the mirrors from my house as has been suggested by friends. No. I can’t do any of that because all my money is tied up in Guatemala, I need my car, I’m not a Muslim and I need the mirrors to look at my butt and check for underwear lines.

So what can I do? Research free self-help options online of course. I completely changed the shape of my legs in under two months after a little research so why not my face too? As a result, I found a website that promotes facial exercises as a way to “tone your facial firmness.”

“These lines, wrinkles, folds and bags are not really wrinkles and lines as such, but are the supportive muscles in your face going soft - losing firmness, and not supporting the skin any more. Facial exercises can help with this - creating that facelift look with a non-surgical procedure.”   

Sounds good to me. I figure it can’t hurt, nothing ventured nothing gained. Of course this website is selling a slew of products too, but I ignore that. Their list of reasons to exercise the face seem compelling enough, so I’m giving it a shot.

Here’s their list of exercises for anyone who’s interested and wants to sit around making funny faces for a few minutes a day. I’ve assembled them onto one page instead of having to click around their website for them.

I know this will do nothing for the scars and other things that bug me but what if it helps the sagging and folding?  I’d even settle for brainwashing myself into thinking it is working.

By writing this, I’m not looking for anyone to tell me I look fine, because if your going on the way I look in the photos I post, I have a secret to reveal—I’m pretty good at Photoshop and most of those photos have had scar, crease and jowl reductions when necessary. I know it’s not like I’m the elephant woman or something. There are far worse cases out there than me, but that’s their problem. And maybe they were homely their whole lives and are used to it or perhaps they’re just well adjusted people who haven’t been hypnotized by the media into worrying about their appearance, good for you, I’m jealous of you people. If I could just accept the way I look and adopt a more “que sera, sera” attitude in general, life would go much smoother for me. Maybe some day.

If all else fails I can just eventually hide behind my hair because I’m well on my way to this look:

Today I almost lost an eye while hastily trying to put the vacuum cleaner away. It has one of those retractable cords that you give a little tug on and it winds itself back up all neat and tidy. But today, it just wasn’t moving fast enough for me so I yanked it like I was trying to start a lawnmower, the cord started retracting at the speed of light and whipped itself around the floor and into the air just grazing my eyelashes. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “what an incredibly stupid way to lose an eye that would have been” (well, that’s the cleaned up version). Not that there’s a smart way to lose an eye but it would have just been to embarrassing to admit that I lost mine while trying to clean up faster.

This got me to thinking about other self-inflicted mishaps I’ve had in my life. There are far to many to list in just one post so here are a few other eye related injuries:

• When I was little my grandmother was visiting us for awhile when one day I decided to snoop through her cosmetic bag and found her razor. I proceeded to play with it and one thing led to another—I ended up one eyebrow short. When questioned about this new look, I lied and said I got too close to a candle and burnt it off. I guess my parents bought it, I didn’t get in trouble. (Why didn’t they wonder what I was doing 1/2″ from a candle? And why was that ok?)
• Probably around second grade my elementary school bought a kiln for the art class which they kept in a tiny closet like room across the hall from the class. The clay was great fun and I was obsessed with sculpting mushrooms. When the time came to fire the ceramics I was so excited I couldn’t contain myself so I asked to go to the bathroom which was way down the hall. Once free to roam the halls, I just had to see how my precious mushrooms were doing in the kiln so I snuck into the the little room and crept up to the kiln like a mouse. I remembered the warnings about keeping away but it meant little to me as I slid the cover over the peep hole and peered inside. What I saw was evidently the bowels of hell and before I could turn away I got a burst of heat in the eye that I wouldn’t soon forget. I knew I had just made a BIG mistake and was now afraid of being caught so I scurried down to the bathroom thinking the worst was over. Once there I took a look at my face to make sure my eyeball hadn’t melted and realized that I had burnt all the eyelashes right off my face, (I thought something smelled funny). I don’t recall getting in trouble for this one either, perhaps I told them I fell on my grandmother’s razor and it chopped off my eyelashes?
• My favorite eyeball story happened only a few years ago. Late as usual, I was rushing to get ready for my friend’s birthday party. I had just gotten dressed, put a bunch of lotion on my hands and began to put some makeup on. It was going just fine until I got out the eyelash curler. (Okay, this next part still makes me shudder, I can barely write this without feeling the pain.) So I proceeded to race through curling my eyelashes with my freshly lotioned hands when the curler twisted in my greasy fingers ripping every single eyelash from my eyelid in one swift move. The shrieking that came from the bathroom must have driven any dog within earshot absolutely mad. I looked at the eyelash curler and it appeared as if someone glued an entire set of fake lashes to it. The horror. I couldn’t even bring myself to look in the mirror for at least 15 minutes and when I saw my swollen, red bald eye I nearly lost my mind. It definitely took me some time to regain my composure. I don’t remember how long it took for them to grow back and I was afraid they never would. They did finally return but I had to draw a dark line on my eyelid for a very long time to give the illusion something was there.

I have so many more accident stories but they’ll have to wait their turn. I’m sure I’ll do something else soon that will trigger the memory of the time I got my arm trapped in a 10 gallon drum of glue and then I’ll tell you about that one.

Consumed with anger—I’m fighting the urge to just fill this page with every nasty word I can think of. This is a very hard task for me since I normally sound like someone with Tourettes Syndrome as it is. So while I’ll make an attempt to keep it clean, if you are a swear-o-phobe, you may want to leave now.

About two weeks ago I got a letter from the city of Philadelphia’s parking violations branch informing me that the parking ticket I contested will not be cancelled.

First off, I never received a parking ticket and as a result I never contested any parking ticket. I called and explained this to the douche-bag lady on the phone who finally said she’d send me a copy of the piece of shit stinking ticket.

When the copy arrived, I read the information and the only thing on it that pertained to me was the license plate number. The car was wrong, the color was wrong and there’s no way I was where they say I was on the date they say I was there. As a matter of fact I was home sick in bed. I was issued this ticket at 10:15 am, anyone who knows me is aware of the fact that I only get out of bed at 10:00 am so even if I wasn’t sick, I’d have been brushing my teeth at the time.

My associate called to inform them of the blunder and as I assumed, the only way to contest a parking ticket is to take a day off from work and spend it in traffic court or what ever bullshit court it is. Of course this won’t happen because the ticket was for $26 and the money I’d lose from not working while fighting the ticket is far greater—they win.

So just because some asshole bitch dick-head civil servant fucked up incorrectly wrote down the car’s information, I’m stuck paying the ticket.

The final insult came when I went to pay the ticket online and found that so much time had elapsed we now had incurred a penalty fee and almost doubled the fine.

Go to hell you thieving, inept, brain-dead, pig fuckers jerks!

Maybe this seems like an excessive reaction, but I’ve had a difficult day in many other ways and paying this ticket just sent me over the top. I think there’s a Smithwick’s with my name on it right about now.

P.S. - H, are you thanking your lucky stars that you’re out of town tonight?