…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.

Monday evening we arrived at the cabin, looking just the same as it did 2 years ago.

Amazingly, Maggie’s stuffed octopus toy that we had accidentally left behind 2 years ago was in the bedroom, like it was waiting for us.

We went for walkies on the beach at sunset.

I purposely didn’t bring any puzzles for this trip, but of course there were puzzles at the cabin. You can’t escape. One 1000 piece underwater scene was made with “extra large, special grip” pieces. The outline alone filled up the entire kitchen table. I worked on it a little the first night we were at the cabin but then not for the rest of the week.

I had brought a fresh selection of library books and was hoping they’d last all week (“On the Road”, an anthology of comics, an autobiography by Marianne Faithfull, another, early book by Kerouac that I couldn’t get into, etc.). I got desperate and went for the books in the cabin bookshelf–including “Great Expectations”, of which I only read the parts with Estella and Miss Havisham.

And sure, we had our e friends that first night. Nothing happened with me, which is beginning to become the norm, whether it’s my meds interfering or just my body’s way of saying “The Good Times are over, babe.” How I long for the days of candy-colored pills with dolphins and shamrocks! What I wouldn’t GIVE for a palmful of questionable pills that Dancesafe.org doesn’t even categorize! Oh, the joy of jaw grinding and stutter vision! Siiiiiiigh.

M-m-more to come.

I started “The Trazadone Diaries” in Word this morning so I can start typing out all this weird shit that I dream every night/morning. This way I won’t be tempted to blog about it.

“Now I won’t bug you with my dreams,” I told the Boy.

“That’s sad,” he replied.

“You mean you like it when I tell you about my dreams?” I said, thinking about the midget psychiatrist make-out dream from a couple of days ago.

“Yes!”

Well, who knew?

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.

Photo dump from our day trip on Monday:

Gee, my lip gloss looked awfully nice on the car ride there. It’s been a year and I’m STILL in love with those neon green sunglasses. I dunno, they just seem to coordinate with everything.

Maggie looks stoned. Or maybe she was just trying to avoid the camera flash into her dog eyeballs.

You’d think coming from Idaho I would know, but I still had to ask what the white things were. Hay bales.

As is the case many days in Seattle, the weather started out all cloudy and dismal in the morning and cleared up by afternoon. I like that.

I was specifically craving a chocolate milkshake and blammo! Out of nowhere, this tiny general store offering ice cream milkshakes. Heavennnn. They also had a giant rack of “Prison Blues” merchandise–weird.

I’m a little pissed at myself for using the “foliage” setting on my camera for all the trail photos–it works so well for close-ups on plants and flowers, but for wide shots almost everything came out blurry. Damn. DAMN! Also, I’m thinking about switching back to film, lately. Just for a change.

Blerp. Okay, true story–I starved myself yesterday and my weight dropped 11 pounds–swear to God. Sure, I was faint and starving this morning–but ELEVEN POUNDS!!??

“See?” said the Boy. “I told you it wasn’t fat.”

“Then what was it?”

“Water. And poop.”

So says the man who spent all morning researching sticky poop. Answer: a bidet. But who in the hell has a bidet? Nobody I know. I know that my father has wanted one for years.

Oooh, ahhh, the waterfalls were beautiful.

We were standing over a cliff while I took this photo and the Boy mentioned something about the dogs going over the cliff and I said, “They’re not that stupid, are they?”

The sentence was barely out of my mouth before a dog nearly went plummeting over the edge. Which dog? Well, retarded Maggie, of course.

That sweatshirt’s been getting a lot of lovins.

God, what a chunky monkey. Well, NO MORE. Once again, it’s time for (drum roll please): Operation Starvation: A Celebration. It usually lasts a couple of weeks and then I give in, generally to an Oreo Blizzard.

Today I’m going to kick Maggie outside and sprinkle all the carpet with this special “pet odor removal” powder I bought and then vacuum. Terribly exciting, I know, but if every time you were in your living room and you spelled dog piss (and I spend most of my time in this room), you would take drastic measures too. Not drastic enough to pay someone to clean the carpet, pssshhhh, maybe someday when Pee Pod is no longer incontinent, if that day ever comes. Sob.

A few more photos from the fab-uh-luss nursery trip…

Would you look at this watering device? A pig with gold wings! Sob sob snivel!

I’m obsessed with these glass mushrooms! I want all of them! (I bought none of them–but that reminds me, the Boy and I tried to sign up for a glassblowing class this summer and it was already FULL, dammit, I took a glassblowing class in college and I wanted to re-learn the joy all over again…)

Yes, yes it is.

Lisa, every time I see turtles I still think of youuuu.

Dogwoods are pretty, but look at that price! Oof!

Love these decorative plates. I still haven’t gotten over my general enthusiasm for anything with butterflies or mushrooms.

There’s that striking neon yellow-green color again, the kind that the Boy associates with “dead plants” and that I associate with “joy”. Look at how they’ve put it right next to the purple display! These nursery employees really understand cuhluh.

The Boy was attracted to this “Hori Hori” blade.

And now, what we purchased…

Our house came with two of these massive, hideous concrete planters, just begging to be spruced up. I planted…

Salvia! Woo hoo! When I saw the salvia plants I told the Boy we needed to get a couple. Mostly because it reminds me of “The Good Old Days” smoking salvia at Trancealot. Ahhhh…salvia. Ahahaahaahhaaa! Still funny!

The Boy picked out these to blend in with the salvia.

I am uber excited about the fuchsia I planted–”Grumpy”–navy blue and deep pink! Doesn’t that sound perfect? Yes it does!

We couldn’t resist buying one of the large, fabulous bright blue hydrangea bushes as well. The Boy re-planted it into a larger pot with some tiny pink flowers for a little extra zip.

Planting out in the sun together was very therapeutic. We were happy for the rest of the day!

I bought my first pair of gardening gloves. Yes, I am turning into the elderly woman of my dreams!

There’s that aqua nailpolish again.

I finally went to the library yesterday. I’ve gone through this weird phase the past month where I haven’t had a book/three going like I normally do, and it’s a little disconcerting.

“Oh that’s normal,” said my mother over the phone. “Your father didn’t read a book for three months, once.”

I decided I’d had enough so after watching a documentary about Philip K. Dick and getting revved up to read more of his stuff I got a pile of PKD books, a book about going off meds (hooray), and a book called “Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine”, for “fun”. It’s nice to be reading again.

On Monday we visited a nursery that I am 100% in love with.

I had been to this nursery last month with my mother, but going back with my camera and the knowledge that I would walk away with a new plant made the experience a lot more exciting.

I love this nursery so much that by the time we reached the register at the end of our journey, I enthusiastically told the saleswoman that I wanted to live at the nursery (while I gulped down their complimentary pink lemonade). “We like to hear that!” she smiled at me.

I’ve always loved poppies. Well really, who doesn’t?

This flower is so cool looking! Sort of prehistoric. The Boy doesn’t “get” a lot of my plant/flower obsessions. That’s okay, he doesn’t have to.

Oh man, this wall of suns is perfect. It inspires me to go back to a tattoo artist some (year) to retouch the sad little sun on my ankle.

I found myself very attracted to plants that are that yellow-green color. The Boy says he associates the yellow-green color with “dead plants”. I associate brown with dead plants.

I also love all the quaint little patio sets they have. I want one I want one!

I told Corinne that I was very close to buying a crappy old table/chairs set at a thrift shop/garage sale for our back patio, so we can eat outside this summer. She told me we could have our old kitchen table and chairs back. Since she threw away the futon frame we loaned her (without even warning us!), I told her we’d take the table and chairs back. What the hell.

I also berated her (twice) for throwing out the futon frame. “We don’t throw things away in this family!” I said. “Reduce, reuse, recycle!” I also added that the futon frame could have gone into our Creativity Room as a guest bed, to make her feel guilty. “You just fucked yourself out of a guest room!” I cried. Yes, this is how I treat my best friends. I’m so sweeeeet.

Last night I purchased some sunless tanning “foam” for my face (we’ll see) and some prunes. Elderly Liz requires regular bowel movements, but the still semi-youthful side of me wants a little cuhluh…even if it’s er, rainy and stormy and windy and crappy outside. It’s almost summertime! Time to break out the sunless tanning lotion. Yeeeeehawwwwwwr.

Welcome to Lizzie’s Nature Blog, cause it seems that all I want to do lately is wander around outside with the camera looking at pretty flowers.

The girls and I have gone to the park nearly every day this week.

I take pictures and they run around like maniacs until they are panting and tired. Then we go home.

Mushrooms everywhere.

Well um. We don’t really follow that leash rule, although certainly I pick up their poop. I always have poop sacks in my purse!

They stick relatively close together, and they never stray too far away from Mommy. It’s niiiice.

Hey, little bug friend.

Quite happy to be outside, thank you very much.

The Boy’s dirty knees after gardening.

“Those lips…those pillowy lips!” (from “Strangers with Candy”, the episode where Jellineck loses his face)(one of my favorites!)

We held hands while watching “Herb and Dorothy“, a fascinating documentary about a married, working class couple who spent their lives obsessively collecting art. I highly recommend this film.

Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being“, a film that made tears flow out of my eyeballs at regular intervals.

We were both sick last month and in my defense, it is hard to kiss someone when your nose is stuffed up! The Boy’s handwriting and my handwriting look very similar. Similarly messy.

Quote from another documentary I’d recommend: “The Cruise” (“Speed” Levitch was also featured in “Waking Life”, and if you haven’t seen “Waking Life” then you had better).

The Boy went on a mountain biking date last night and came home full of nachos and reeking of beer with his new friendy-friend, who regaled me with a highly entertaining story about a crazy neighbor who left threatening messages in purple Magic Marker and had a penchant for pounding on his neighbor’s doors at night, singing “I knoooow you’re hooooome!”

I’m happy that the Boy has a guy friend. While he was gone I spent three hours catching up on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2!), hooping in my new psychedelic paisley (mini) caftan, and taking pictures of myself! My version of an exciting Friday night!

Today I have an appointment with the new therapist who has promised to fix me during our twelve sessions together before the insurance runs out. I, in turn, am ready to be fixed. FIX ME FIX ME FIX ME!

Photo dump from my date with Corinne and Cassy:

When I showed up they were both standing in their front yard, drinking coffee. I squealed with excitement when I saw Corinne’s tie-dyed shirt, but she explained that she was only wearing it while her clothes were in the wash and later changed. Too bad, it was perfect for head shop shopping.

I fell in love with their backyard, which has a large deck (I love decks) and is filled with flowers and trees.

These pink flowers were in the front yard. Gorgeous!

We spent a sunny, cheerful afternoon in the U district, visiting head shops and people watching and stopping for ice cream cones.

We paused to gawk at this sleeping window kitty. A sign on the bookstore door said that any bags large enough to accommodate window kitty would not be allowed inside.

We walked past a beautiful community garden…

…that even had bleeding hearts! I’m obsessed with bleeding hearts. I went to a nursery last month with Mumsie and I’m still regretting not purchasing a bleeding hearts plant for 8 bucks. Oh well.

Mostly I was have too much fun to take photos, but I took a few inside the head shops. I asked permission first, of course. I’m a polite photographer!

I yelled, “OH MY GOD!” when I saw these neon pipes (I’m still having a tiny residual neon obsession left over from last year, I can’t help it). Corinne told me that she loves my enthusiasm. Good.

We’re talking art here.

Hands down, the best head shop we went to was Piece of Mind, where the staff was delightful and extremely helpful and gave Corinne a fantastic deal and just overall, rocked. Corinne is planning on writing a positive review online, she loved them so much.

I photographed the goods she purchased once we returned to their home, in the sun (sparkle!):

Of course any glass with glitter in it wins.

She bought this green glass bong at a different head shop. It was only 20 bucks, a great deal, because when it breaks (inevitable, let’s face it) she’ll have only spent 20 bucks.

This little nug jug has glittery liquid in it that swirls when you shake it.

But really, the piece de resistance was:

The owl bong! Corinne and I both screamed when we saw it at Piece of Mind. It’s a one of a kind piece, and it was expensive, but really, I mean, it’s art. ART!

The glass is sandblasted to have a matte look.

“Looks like a penis,” said the Boy. “Everything is phallic with you,” I sighed.

The artist’s tag.

We passed a shoe store and I saw these rainbow flip flops in the window and gasped, as they are dead ringers for the beloved rainbow flip flops I had for years. Corinne, being the benevolent best friend that she is, bought them for me. Maw.

Hooray!

Yesterday I watched “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” for the first time and sobbed. I discovered that I can’t eat trail mix and sob at the same time. I started sewing a short tunic with psychedelic aqua/green/yellow paisley knit fabric, since I didn’t have quite enough to make a caftan/muumuu for Muumuu Summer. Muumuu fabric shopping will have to wait until payday!