…the who cares girl…

You see, this is what I mean by glamour. I am dripping glamour.

Speaking of dripping (poor Maggie).

Still life with syrup.

Bought that dress on eBay. It’s Anthropologie, which normally I can’t afford. I didn’t realize it had a bubble skirt, but I don’t mind it too much.

I don’t know what he did, but this photo has a cool, tunnel-like effect.

Okay, so maybe we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here, picture-wise. “But Eddie, is it Art?”

He let me put red lipgloss on his big huge luscious lips.

Neither one of us worked on our paintings, but it was nice having them there. Certainly beat the “cabin art”–you know, paddles on the wall, stencils of seashells in the bedroom (shudder).

This was during her confinement to the porch. Look how she’s laying on the ultra-pathetic look. Dogs are really good at that.

We stopped at a little diner on our way back home. I ordered a half order of strawberry crepes, which came with a single link sausage. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had sausage. I immediately wished I had ordered a full order of crepes, they’re like air (delicious air).

At the diner I purchased an enormous gumball for 50 cents. Back at home the Boy had to hack it open with a butcher knife. I managed to chew a section that tasted like cardboard. Dammit. I didn’t want green anyway, I wanted the one shaped like a strawberry. I’m sure it still would have been stale, though. Heigh ho.

Today’s goal is to paint. I haven’t touched a puzzle since before our vacation. SCORE!

“I love you,” he said this morning.

“Yeah, right,” I grunted. “I’m going to blog about how your idea of love is dry humping me with your morning wood.”

“Oh, everybody knows that,” he said. “That’s not blog worthy.”

It is now!*

This is the one and only photo of me in a bikini from last week deemed worthy to post. Cause…the old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to beeeee….

I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the right side of this photo–maybe it was a schmear from my tanning oil on the lens or something like that.

Bear Cub getting wet.

I love it! It was hilarious to see how tiny she is under all that fur.

I tell you that spot on the lens that shows up as a blurry gray dot drives me nuts. I usually photoshop it out, but sometimes I forget, like in this picture. Can you see it?

Maggie dog loves that water.

It’s fair to say I was obsessed with photographing those clouds that day. Probably because they were directly in front of me.

I am painting a picture of…myself. This photo, to be precise. I intend on dropping a shitload of glitter on the canvas where the eye glitter is. We watched a documentary on Matisse and Picasso, and it said that Picasso would often spend all day painting, then turpentine it off the canvas at the end of the day, then repeat this process up to 30 times. I was impressed, but the cable guy merely shrugged and said “Canvas is expensive.”

Not anymore, really, unless you have designs on wall-sized canvas, and I don’t.

“I wish I knew how to make my paintings look like they’re worth millions of dollars,” said the Boy the other day, frowning at his latest work.

“I think it has something to do with layers of paint.” I replied. Y-y-yeah. Think Van Gogh. Think: CRAZY!!!

* Today’s use of italics is an homage to James Patterson, whose book “The 8th Confession” contains such a disgusting overuse of italicized words it prompted me to consider a jamespattersonsucks.com webpage. I mean really.

Yes, the mini caftan ROCKED at the cabin (all the way down the stairs until I took it off at the beach).

Little paw-paws were aching by the end of the week. The beach is rocky.

Instructions for going boating with a dog: get halfway into boat, pulling dog by collar, pick dog up, place dog inside boat, and paddle away from shore before dog can escape. Blam! Adorable photos await!

Later when Maggie had her turn, Bear Cub actually started swimming after her. I was in the cabin during this moment, horribly. Her first swim!

The Boy brought his camera along but wasn’t really feeling it.

According to Picasa I took 263 photos total during both trips, more than I expected. It didn’t seem like I took that many.

Midweek Bear Cub decided her new favorite hobby was to run next door and bark at the neighbors, so she spent the last day or two mostly confined to the back porch.

Well, with so many NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere, who knows if those people shoot dogs? Do you think I want to find Bear Cub’s mangled, tiny body? No thanks!

A rich computer nerd whose opinion we trust told us that attaching the laptop to the t.v. all the time will burn it out. As we’ve already had one laptop do this very thing, we asked him what we should do instead to save Laptop #2. He told us to hook up a Wii or Playstation 3, and since we don’t have either one of those things he loaned us a Playstation 3. Now today I have to wait for some dude to come over and hook up a modem in the living room. Hurray! No more worries about dead laptops. For now.

We’re back…..from outer space! In the time that I was gone Flickr has changed and I don’t like it ONE BIT.

The first portion of our trip was One Sky, a yearly camping trip that takes place up in the mountains on an old hippie commune with the people we went to Burning Man with.

It was a little different this year, more low-key. No stage, no turntables, no band set-up.

Drug snarfing, sure. The Boy smoked pot and ingested some kind of psilocybin nugget and had a good time…until Kim appeared.

Kim was some kind of scary leftover from the 60′s, with an emaciated frame, long scraggly hair, and a penchant for constantly asking people for booze or hits, and losing her cigarettes (which were always in her jacket pocket).

We went back to our camp at one point to hang around our campfire with Dizzy, our hilarious campmate, and there was Kim, hovering around just out of eyesight from the fire, so all you could see was the ghostly glimmer of her white sweatshirt. She mumbled to herself about the devil and staying up for three months and the mire, it was all about the miiiiiiire.

Eventually, thank God for hippies, Dizzy and his girlfriend Dolly gently led Kim back to the main camp. The Boy perseverated on Kim’s creepiness for at least an hour. Kim was awful enough sober, but nobody should have to handle Kim on their first mushroom trip.

That was the worst of it. It didn’t rain, delicious food was made, everyone had a good time.

Ugh, my weird fake tan. So the tanning salon that I go to changed their Mystic Tans to some other machine, “Vespa”, or something like that, and they’re awful. I’ve had two now, they’re patchy and spotty and fade horribly. Word to the wise: beware.

I brought our hoops and my box of hoop tape to donate to the hoop-making that went on that weekend. I am, predictably, “over” hooping. I’ll still do it from time to time in the backyard, sure, but the days of obsession and practice and videotaping my efforts are ovah.

The gang started up a game of kickball.

I did not participate, insisting that I was “the photographer”. Let’s face it–I don’t do sports. ANY sports.

The blue hippie house that is in the center of the property.

Mer-lerp-plurp-preeturp. The Boy is watching “Ghost World”. Never mind that I’ve seen it 10 billion times–suddenly now I wanna watch it too. I love that movie.

I went to Toys ‘R’ Us, which I never do, to buy myself a floatie for our upcoming vacation and maaaaybe a puzzle or two. Their puzzle selection for adults sucked, but I did find a discounted floatie for 7 bucks.

My sister-in-law remarked that Toys ‘R’ Us is “sad”, and when I was there, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem, but “sad” pretty much sums it up. The fake food aisle (I love fake food) was particularly depressing because several items were McDonalds. What the fuck, America?

I bought some chewy toys for sweet little Ronia.

And a bubble rocket thing for Elliot.

Brenna’s lash extensions. Don’t they look amazing?

If I had an extra 100 bucks I would spend it on highlights, but if I had an extra extra 100 bucks I would consider lash extensions. Of course the problem is I would become addicted (like Brenna has) and then want them ALL THE TIME.

You can tell I’ve said something to them because Maggie has her head tilted in that “Huh?” kind of way and Bear Cub is looking towards the camera.

I like to squirt whipped cream on either end of a rawhide and then watch them slurp it up. I have problems.

Maggie’s life is kind of pathetic, I realized this morning as she was draped across my pillow with her doghead on my forehead. Her life consists of waiting for us to feed her or walk her or take her to the dog park. She has no independence, like Bear Cub, who happily hangs out in the backyard all day and ignores me. Are all labs this co-dependent, I wonder, or is it just a Maggie thing? I may never know.

“So I realized today,” I told the Boy last night, “I can hear the neighbors talking in their backyard from inside the house. That means that they can hear me every time I scream “SHUT THE FUCK UP, BEAR CUB!” at the top of my lungs.”

Later on he said, “Remember when you said you were going to stop screaming “SHUT THE FUCK UP, BEAR CUB!” because the neighbors can hear…”

“No no no,” I replied. “I said they could hear me. I didn’t say I was going to stop.”

“It reminded me of when we went camping and we saw that woman yell “SHUT UP OR I’LL THROW A ROCK AT YOUR HEAD” to her kid.”

“Oh yeah,” I cackled. “And then when she saw us watching she got all embarrassed.”

Except I’m not embarrassed for yelling at Bear Cub, because her latest activity is to pace in front of the fence and peer through the knotholes until she sees a cat and then bark as loud as she can, all day long. Sometimes I just storm outside and grab her by the collar and force her to stay inside and watch me watch “Reno: 911!” and drink orange sodie. I hope this approach works for disciplining children.

Speaking of (my) children, Maggie kept coming up to me in the morning and chewing on something, but by the time I pried her dogmouth open it was gone. The Boy guessed puzzle pieces, but I said there was no way she’d eat that many. Wrong! I had clumped together about 9-10 pieces off to one side of the puzzle mat and in the morning they were all gone. ALL OF THEM. Maggie’s problem has clearly escalated. What a ho bag!

This is my homage to Lindsay Lohan’s “breathe” tattoo. The Boy didn’t think it was funny, but I think it’s hilaaaarious.

Today’s goals are to pick up more special dog food for Pee Pod that’s supposed to help with her incontinence. At 90 dollars a bag we’re all hoping it will. Also to start tracking my “emotional ups and downs” via blog entries (ha!) like my therapist told me to do.

I didn’t get into “South Park” when I was younger, but I’m making up for it now, thanks Netflix. It’s great background noise while I’m puzzling.

We took the Boy’s parents to our favorite dog park on Monday.

Maggie swam…

…while Bear Cub watched her from the shore. Bear Cub jumped in the water once, and I doubt she’ll do it again. I’m not one of those sadistic dog owners that will throw my dog in the water, either.

They were chewing on either end of the stick in the most adorable way but by the time I grabbed the camera they scattered. I tried to force them back into the pose but it didn’t work out. Dogs.

This morning I turned the alarm off, thinking, “Let’s just see what happens.” Guess what happened? I slept in until NOON! Pathetic. Well, the whole day’s wasted now, I supposed I may as well…puzzle.

This is a 32 second long video of Maggie eating a moderately rotten apple, filmed by the Boy. If you turn up the volume nice and high you can really hear the slurping and chewing sounds. At the end the Boy says something in his Dumb Doggie voice, which sounds an awful lot like my Dumb Doggie voice.

Sometimes I’ll wave whatever Dean Koontz book I’m reading at the time at Maggie, saying, “Why can’t you look happy like Trixie?” Because Trixie always looks happy, grinning, really. Of course Trixie is dead now, but Dean is so obsessed with her that Trixie has her own website and books, and Lord knows what else. And I wonder about Anna, his new Golden Retriever, who always looks a little depressed in all the photos. She probably knows she’ll never measure up, that every time Dean is stroking her fur he’s thinking Trixie…ohhhh Trixie.

Someday Maggie will die but I won’t replace her with a black lab. I want one of those giant fluffy tri-color dogs. Sometimes I think about Maggie getting old and not being able to run and jump and fetch and annoy the shit out of me and I get a little sad. So I quit thinking about it.

I don’t have any goals today. I’m goal-less. Aimless. I baked Snickerdoodles yesterday for my husband and then ingested about 13 of them. Maybe I should decoupage my make-up box. Or organize my wig collection. Or put on 15 pounds of make-up and take some self-portraits. Hmph.

Yesterday the sun came out for about an hour FINALLY FINALLY so without hesitation I threw on some shoes and we went to the park.

Well, at least one dog is waiting for Mommy to catch up.

Lots of new mushroom friends have cropped up because of all the (terrible, horrible, no-good very bad) rain lately.

I didn’t bother putting on make-up or changing out of the painting shirt I had on or even putting on a bra, that’s how eager I was to enjoy the sunshine with my doggy dogs. And I never leave the house without a bra anymore. After a certain age it’s just…tacky. Oh my God I sound like my mother.

What’s better than exploring nature with dogfriends? Not much!

Ahhhhhh….uhnphgggg more, please.

Today’s goal is to send off Kissy’s muumuu and to try not to be too full of rage about the weather and to see my crazy doctor. I don’t have a lot of crazy to report, which I suppose is a good thing.