Starting off a New Year

Whitenoise keeps pestering for nekkid snaps. Does this one of my New Year's toes in FloridaDad's TajMahTub count?


Found a ridiculous calendar that tickles me silly: "Veggies Gone Wild! Produce Behaving Badly". Here's January:

Shiver Me Timbers

Ahoy me hearties! Raise high yer noggin o' rum on this, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Well gotten booty, ho!

Did you know that the most successful pirate EVER was a woman? A Chinese pirate married a prostitute in 1801, and she took over his bidness when he died in 1807, growing the operation to 1500 ships and 80,000 sailors. I'd say that makes Cheng I Sao the first female CEO. Granted amnesty by the government in 1810, she lived to be 69 and a great-grandmother. Read all about Cheng I Sao's bad self here.

As a little kid, I'd bop around the living floor when the Olympics came on, pretending to be a gymnast. Can't WAIT to bring back the let's pretend spirit tonight and strut about as a pirate wench, instead:

From a Telegraph article billed on Fark:

How to be a pirate girl

Wear a lot of bandanas. Especially ones with skull and crossbones designs and red and black ones. When not wearing a bandana, make your hair a bit messy. You can also use an eye patch. White, ivory, beige, cream and tan peasant shirts are great for the look. Skull t-shirts are also great. Plain black, white or beige shirts with cut-off sleeves are a great addition to your wardrobe. Brightly coloured long sleeve button ups are piratey. Just make sure they are loose, not stiff like a shirt a corporate executive might wear to the office. And make sure you leave all of it untucked but the very front, creating a sagging look (regardless of how it's finished) and unbutton the top few buttons.

How to talk like a pirate

Growl - and scowl often. Pirates don't use a cultured, elegant, smooth vocalization - they mutter and growl.

Gesture with your hands frequently. Don't forget that pirates do most of their talking on the deck of a ship - out on the ocean, where wind, waves, and bird calls make it tough to hear. Gesturing often gives you a sense of "being there."

Run words together. Saying, "The boys and I were out for a lovely day on the water today" sounds like something you'd overhear at a yacht club. Instead, try, "Me'n'these here scurvy scallywags drug our sorry keesters out t'th'ship'n'had us a grand great adventuaaarrr! We almost had t'keelhaul Mad Connie f'r gettin inter th' grog behind our backs!" Note that you should always endeavour to call the addressee by some insulting name, usually involving an animal. "Yer a scurvy bilge rat, ya pompous gasbag" or "Here's yer dinner, ya mangy cockroach." (source: wikiHow)

From Robert Balder's PartiallyClips.com

Do your part!

Stopped by Whole Foods last night to re-stock my sparkling water stash. Spied their calendar on the way out of the sto' and learned that today is National Waffle Day.

Be sure to do your part in supporting this signifcant day! I'll be having bacon with a side of waffles, myself.

What's Important in Life

My guilty syndication re-run pleasure? That would be The Gilmore Girls on the Family Channel. So sad when the series ended this past Spring. I loved the rapid-fire dialog, the Mystery Science Theater 3000-like references to movies, literature, and music. And the actors.

Saw an episode the other day when Miss Patty (Liz Torres) was boo hooing after a townsperson had passed away at a ripe old age. Her line?

"You know, it's times like these that you realize what is truly important in your life. I'm so glad I had all that sex! (sob)"

Favorite Places. And sucking.

Visited CarolinaMom last week. She's called Yanceyville home for some 16 years. Each time I'm there, I wonder why it's been so long between visits.

The air is cleaner. The sky is bluer. The night sky yields more stars.

If you're ever driving through Yanceyville on 158, be sure to stop and have a bite at the Redneck Riviera (a.k.a., the diner counter at the Texaco). Their bacon sandwich is the bee's knees. Joined CarolinaMom for breakfast Friday morning with two of her exercise buddies. Mo blew me away - spry as all get out, clear eyed and level headed. You'd never know she was 81, had open heart surgery two years ago, or that after her husband died she decided to fulfill a lifelong dream and restore an old house. Girl's got game *and* gumption. Goin' ON!

We then moseyed on over to Chapel Hill to visit one of our shared guilty pleasures and druther place that does not completely suck: A Southern Season. Lunch in the café is required so as minimize the take home of well gotten booty. Incredible tea and wine selections. My favorite scores this trip were Illume candles, a deep dish pie plate, and Vosges chocolate bars (DancingSpice turned me on to Vosges years back). Bacon in chocolate is a challenge I whole heartedly accept - will report when consumed. Mo's son makes the sauce in the picture.


Friday night found us at the Yancey House for a Texas Hold 'Em event. Not just a local yocals affair, mind you, but an official satellite tourney feeding the world series of poker in Vegas.

As an urchin, my parents thought I had great luck at cards and often joked of staking me for Vegas. Guess it was beginner's luck, cuz dood. I suck. I didn't suck quite well enough to be the first out, missing the $25 loser's gift certificate. I was second out. But it afforded me the chance to take some great snaps of the old tobacco barn on the property, before and after the sun set.



Saturday afternoon found us on the other side of Caswell County for one of CarolinaMom's choir gigs - a 75th surprise birthday bash. All was well and good until we decided to leave before cake cutting. Car key nowhere to be found. AAA's response was 2 hours, so the choir ladies circled their wagons and got Mom back home to get another key. Good news: we stayed for cake. Bad news: the car key is *still* effing missing. High we searched. Low we searched. They asked twice if the birthday boy should sort through the garbage. Now we know the answer to the question, "How many people with ADD does it take to lose car keys?" Dood. I suck again. And not in a good way.

Last bit of suckage came with the realization that my cell phone does, in fact, work in Yanceyville. My Canada Day peeps had pointed out changing my roaming mode from *provider who shall be nameless* to *automagic*, and dayum if coverage wasn't granted. Same thang in Yanceyville. No EVDO, but phone worked. How lame I am not to have figgered it out before. I can show my ma how to become a DVR addict. I can do a wee bit o' tech support on her 'puter to fix a Windows application association snafu. But I can't figger out my own phone.

I don't have to know everything. I just have to know others who know what I don't. Good thing I've got those Canada Day peeps in my bag!

If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad

Will soon get pediblinged for the holiday. What holiday, say you? Yankee Doodle Damn Dandy day, natch! Won't be with FloridaDad as I was last year. Bummer.

But my last toe bling will be sad to give up. Noonday bluish toes with pretty flowers. Not very sophisticated, but I'm not the sophisticated type. I'm more of the southern broad, literati chick type. On a good day.

But my blue toes make me happy. I think they'll be back soon.

Gooder Vibrations

With apologies to WhiteNoise, I must confess that I very much enjoyed the season finale of Lost. Sure, it was a tease. But it was a good tease. Anticipation can be a good thing. (Spoiler alert! Stop reading now if you haven't seen it!) The secret to the code to turn off the jamming signal being the notes for The Beach Boy's "Good Vibrations" ... very cheeky, given the double entendre for show history.

It got me thinking. What. is. up. with all the things that vibrate today? Sure, there are *those* kinds. Not that there's anything wrong with them! (and apologies to Erin for *almost* stealing a title from one of her posts)

Cheek recently joined the ranks of mechanized toothbrush abusers. Um, users. Shopping for a new toothbrush delivered thwartation by how large all the brush heads were. Kidding aside about how big my mouth is, structurally it's actually quite small. The big ass-brushes make me wanna heave. The smallest I could find was from Oral B with funky bristles and bonus vibration built in, no batt'r'y required. Day-um! But this baby could give *those* kinds a run for their money!

Thanks to a blog that shall remain nameless, I'm now a happy schmoozer of the Gillette M3 Power Razor, which also vibrates. I sh*t you not, there has been much less blood shed as evidenced previously (that scar is *still* effing prominent). And it delivers a much closer shave for pits, legs and sundries.

It does, however, use a batt'r'y, which one really must remember to remove before checking the razor with other toiletries. That humming noise trumpets as an unintended heralder that your luggage has arrived on the baggage carousel, turning heads, eliciting illicit snickers, and making you rip into your bag to turn the l'il sucker off. Boldly make eye contact with a snickerer and say, "How YOU doin'?".

One of the gifts under the tree last year came from CarolinaKat in the form of a vibrating footrest / head massager.

Recent scapular concerns found me face down on the table in my crack dealer / podiatrist's office for twenty minutes of e-Stim before he cracked me.

NPR reported today on the new "Shuttle Experience" at Kennedy Space Center, built to stimulate - er, simulate - what it's like to be in the shuttle during a launch. 17,500 MPH of vibration simulation, babeeeee! (Wired article here.)

The song was #6 in Rolling Stone Magazine's Greatest Songs of All Time list. It was the only tune of the aforementioned 500 Songs for Kids benefit that was not performed by a musician - lacking anyone to play it, they had Butch Walker paint a canvas while the song played. YouTube yields Brian Wilson's inspiration for the tune:


Vibrations, vibrations everywhere. Good, good, good, good vibrations. Lying in bed just like Brian Wilson did?