Wordless Wednesday - Don't Step on the Third Rail.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I may or may not have had too much to drink last night. Now I have that feeling, you know, the one that feels like a bunch of heavy soggy lukewarm bandages are wrapped tightly around your head. That one. Blaaaaargh.

So I'm leaving you with a photo for Wordless Wednesday while I try and go get acclimated to my brain again.

Not the best photo ever, and would likely benefit from some editing, but it's somewhat old... Most underground DC Metro stops look like this one! I was at the Smithsonian stop, waiting for my train.

My lucky day! I'd like to thank the Academy...

I won me some awards! Two on the same day, nonetheless!!


Lady Hill has awarded me the Versatile Blogger award! I'm delighted and all a-flutter. Thank you to the most awesome zombie-hunting Lady around!! :) For this award I have to list 10 things about myself, and then pass the award on to 15 bloggers. (I may just do 3, because that's how I roll.)

Giving this one to the following lovely ladies:

Gnetch @ Thank Goodness for the Good Ones
Shelly Ann @ Painting The Memories
Tazim @ Being Tazim

My second award...

From JessRaquel comes the Sugar Doll award! Another fantastic lady that deserves a big THANK YOU, because she is just that awesome. :) This award also has you list 10 things about yourself, and pass it on to 10 (Three? Heh heh.) bloggers.

And this one's gonna go to ...

Krysten @ After I Do
Lindsay @ PancakesNPajamas
Becky @ So Very Blessed...

So, here are my ten things:

1. My very first crush was on Richard Dean Anderson, aka MacGuyver. I was five. Augh. Mullet.
2. I would *much* rather spend a quiet evening in watching movies and having drinks than going out to a bar/club and staying up late. Yep. Getting old!
3. Scrabble is my favorite board game ever!!
4. One of my big pet peeves is impatient people that stand right-behind-you in a checkout line at a store. That's not making you go any faster, dingbat!
5. I dislike Lady Gaga. Her songs are somewhat catchy but she's trying way too hard as a 'person' to be a unique snowflake.
6. My bed is my no-worry zone. Regardless of whatever's been worrying me during the day or stressing me out, I leave it at the door and relax in my safe-haven bed. :)
7. I haven't been to the dentist in a year and a half. Ack!! I know. Not only am I a dentophobe, but I'm also unemployed.
8. There is a stuffed walrus on our refrigerator.
9. I own the SeaQuest season 1 boxset. Yeah, I know ... awesome!!
10. I love being outside during thunderstorms. They are amazing!


Phew. Totally done with babbling about myself! It always takes me for-ev-er to think up those little random factoids. ;)

A morning beach event, complete with alien crabs and Jesus.

First off I want to thank everyone that commented on my last Saturday Centus post - I wasn't going to reply to every comment, but any type of criticism is more than welcome and I really enjoy writing! Honestly I really prefer writing darker, more eerie/supernatural stuff and I used to write a lot back in the day so mostly it just comes naturally. It almost makes me want to write a short story but then I'd have to have a solid plot and not just 100 words. ;)

At any rate, moving on...

I was going to do a vlog today! But this morning was my beloved Netherlands facing Slovakia, so I had to cheer my Oranje boys on. (We won! Quarterfinals baby!~) After that and lunch I sat down with my new book, fully intending to read one or two chapters, but I got *so* wrapped up in it that I accidentally read four or five before I realized that the afternoon was upon us. We had The Bug Man coming today to do his bi-yearly spraying (Something this ex-Northerner has never had to deal with.) and I highly doubt he'd want to see me wailing on the vuvuzela.

So there went that idea.

And then I was going to write a post about the US Men's National Team losing to Ghana and how awesome we did. But I KNOW it would just turn into a post about me being absolutely googoo over Landon Donovan ( Hummana, hummana, hummana (those hummanas are picture links btw) - most people are so not into the fivehead he's got going on but may I just say, meeeeeow! btw email me bb. ♡ ) so I erred on the side of caution there.

So I decided to write about our Sunday morning excursion.

If you follow me on Twitter (and if you don't -- why not? ;) you may have seen me post this pic early Sunday morning. Matt and I got up at 6:30 to get our junk together and head out for ... get ready for this awesomeness ... breakfast on the beach. We stopped at a local deli on the way and got the most amazing bagels ever, got to our little parking area at 7 am, and trundled out onto the empty beach to set up our chairs, eat our bagels, and enjoy the sunrise over the water. AAH! Freakin' amazing. This is fast becoming a Sunday morning ritual. I fed that nosy seagull up there a few pieces of my bagels while the waves crashed.

We stayed for two hours, and I discovered two amazing things on this trip.

1. CRABS. I don't know much about them, and I'd never seen a live one until this day. Sitting around in our chairs, for some reason I looked behind us... and saw a crab as long as my hand pop out of the sand. EEHHH?! Eyes wide, I couldn't take my eyes off it as it scurried around, hiding in the little sand gullies (from roving seagulls I imagine) before scuttling around some more. And then... I saw another... and another... at one point, at least 8 crabs behind us, scuttling and hiding, bobbing and weaving.

It was almost like being in a crab-related horror movie ... one girl's trip to the beach at sunrise ends fatefully ... she didn't know about the sand crabs ... waiting just beneath the surface to pop out in hordes, scuttling, clacking, pinching!.... THE CRABS, coming summer 2010. (Starring me and Landon. Wait, I, uhh.... ahem.)

I came home and learned that they were ghost crabs from this Wikipedia article. I always wondered why I would find fist-sized holes in the sand sometimes, going down at a 45 degree angle. Answer? Space alien crabs.


2. Apparently one of the churches on the beach holds a Sunday morning sermon at 8 am. Where? About 50 feet behind our chairs. Complete with a speaker system, acoustic guitaring, and about 40 church-goers with beach chairs dressed in their Sunday finest. We got to listen to the dulcet sounds of Amazing Grace while the entire congregation watched my wide load lumbering around in the sea like Jonah's beached whale. I think next time, we'll park one public access down the way...



Can't wait for next Sunday morning! But now, I'm going to write fan mail to a certain midfielder...

Saturday Centus #5

I'm doing Jenny's awesome Saturday Centus again! Yippee!! Briefly, she supplies a writing prompt, to which you have 100 words to weave your story with. Awesome fun. Here is my submission for this week, with the supplied prompt in blue...


* * * * *

Uncomfortable and in a hurry, I jostled through the others as I made way for the door, hearing more murmured concern.

"Did you notice Elizabeth in class this morning and how forlorn she seemed?" Perhaps I will write her a comforting note, I thought.

Likely that wouldn't help. I'd seen her glassy gaze, empty expression, half-parted lips in an eternal sigh. I'd seen the barely there matching bruises.

I knew.

In the night the swamp air was steamy, and clung to my clammy skin. I followed the wrought iron fence through the gardens to the cobblestone street, breathing heavily; nervous? I knew I wasn't alone.

I felt those predatory, unliving eyes on my back as I hurried home.

* * * * * *

Long before Tru Twilight was even a thought, there were vampire novels - Anne Rice was my absolute favorite author while I was in high school; her vampire chronicles engaged me in a way no other books ever had. And now I want to re-read them. :)

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend; mine will be filled with edge of your seat soccer games, a beach morning tomorrow, and lots of tasty food. Enjoy y'all!!

Shiny, shiny pictures!

Yup, it's back. I'm back in the saddle again. (Not unlike that awful screechy Aerosmith song.) After a two week absence I'm ready to go, and I'm beyond thrilled with my results for this week.

Oh, if you haven't the foggiest what I'm babbling about, a trip here may make things a bit easier on the ol' brain.

Anyways, I'd had a pretty solid idea in my head for photo three for quite some time ... you see, there's this soccer thing going on ... what, you didn't know? Well I'll be! But there is a soccer thing going on. It's pretty big time. And I wanted to base my photo around that.

I'm rooting for a place called the Netherlands. Where's that? Uhh... you know, Holland. Huh? You know, up above Germany? Amsterdam? Ahh, now you know, that city. Holland. But that's not why I'm rooting for them, they have some superb players on their national team and... blah blah you really don't care about that part, huh...

Less talky, more Oranje!





I really really really enjoy this photo more than words can tell. (You know you want to see it bigger, don't you? I think you do. As always, BTW, you can click the photo to go to its Flickr page, read more comments by me, and comment on it there if you have a Flickr.) This actually wasn't what I had in mind at all for my finished product, and I took it more as a 'goof off' photo than anything serious at all. But when I uploaded them I saw this one and was like .... yeaaaah... that's totally the one.

I learned a lot about photo editing with this one; I did most of it myself with the exception of one Photoshop action, and I'm extremely pleased with the end result. I kind of look like I may eat your face off but I won't, promise.

... Oh! I'm wearing my Netherlands orange kit jersey! KNVB stands for ... *deep breath* ... Koninklijke Nederlandse Voetbalbond, which if not in Dutch would mean the Netherlands Royal Football Club, or something of that ilk. The lion that's sticking his tongue out and not smoking a corncob pipe is their mascot. Holland is obv Netherlands. I'm wearing eyeblacks of the Dutch flag; they feel a lot like those Biore pore strips. And the soccer ball I have is a miniature replica of the Jabulani, which is the ball the World Cup uses in all of their matches.

I'm sure that's more than you wanted to know about the Dutch national team. But hey, trivia...

My hair also had a metric crapton of product in it to get the pigtails right because the heat index here is still hanging around the 500's, which generally means the frizz of doom. Now my hair is crunchy, but it was all for the greater good!

Also, did you know I have a real live orange vuvuzela? That didn't make it into this photo? But may make an appearance in my vlog next week that I've decided to do? Did I just spoil my surprise??... :)

And one outtake from this week also:



I learned a lot about skin editing here. A -lot-. I also learned that my camera is not kind and picks up every pore, freckle, and bit of sunburn I've got. (I also learned a lot about cloning out all the stray eyebrows I had, because yeah, the camera saw those too. Eek.) I even left a few freckles so I wouldn't look like a department store mannequin! Huzzah!



I also want to say that my awesome and super-creative blogfriend Tazim is starting a new photo meme as well...

I am unreasonably excited about this because I love things, and if you love things and taking photos of them I really encourage you to join because it will be full of love and things and amazing happiness! Okay, the end. But really, I am looking forward to this project a lot. :)

Happy weekend y'all! Stay cool and out of the way of the Dutch, because we're going all. The. Way!

My movie experience.

Happy Thursday! I awoke this morning to not one, but two moving trucks bumbling up and down our cul-de-sac. It's totally moving in day, and two of our new neighbors are making it so. The construction is mostly done around us, and I do want to tell you allll about our new (and not so new) neighbors around us, but I think I need to watch them discreetly out of my picture window first to get a better feel of them.

Today, I'm going to talk about the movies. Matt and I rarely go to the movies because right now it's about as expensive as going on a mini shopping spree (okay, maybe at Old Navy or TJ Maxx, but you get the drift), and then you have the other movie-goers that don't seem to mind spending 10 bones on a non-matinee ticket to be a dink during the show.

ANYWAYS, the USA had an amazing soccer win yesterday, so we decided to get a little dinner and go see this:

Knight and Day opened yesterday, and the commercials totally drew us in. Cameron Diaz can do no wrong and is absolutely adorable, and while Tom Cruise may be nuttier than a sack of cashews, he's still a phenomenal actor and yes, I will always find him seriously attractive. It's an action/comedy movie and was a LOT of fun.

What wasn't so fun was the trio of lobotomy patients that sat two seats to my left. Okay, maybe that was too harsh. Trio of forest dwellers raised by local buzzards. ... Okay, anyway. Seemed like a dad and his two teenage children. One of them (the younger boy) escaped my during-the-film stinkeye. The other two, however...

The girl sitting two seats to my left was likely no older than 18 and needed the jaws of life to disconnect herself from her cell phone. To her favor it was on silence, but there was a 45 minute span in which she received (and sent) text messages every two minutes. How do I know this? Because her phone lit up EVERY. TWO. MINUTES. As soon as it had shut off and I became engrossed in the movie again, I would see it light up like a lighthouse in a storm out of the corner of my eye, and here we go again.

If you can't stop texting Johnny Sexyface or Sally EveryGossip for two hours to enjoy an overpriced yet worthwhile film, then God help you. And hopefully he will, when I launch myself across the rows of seats to beat you repeatedly over the head with your phone so it will never, ever light up again.

The second offender was the father figure. Who found it necessary to have his car keys in his hand during the second half of the movie for some reason. And to jingle them softly at random intervals throughout the movie. Just soft enough to annoy the frak out of me. WHY do you have your keys in your hand during a movie? Are you trying to call Ol' Fido over? Are you planning a quick escape out the emergency exit?? No. NO. You do not do that. It's okay if you have a latent twitch for whatever reason, but do not hold noisy things in the movie theater. It will make people like me launch across the seats and ... yeah, you get it.

But honestly, compared to some movie experiences with bratty teenagers and kids under the age of double digits who don't seem to know how to keep their mouths closed for over 5 minutes at a time, it really wasn't that bad. We have more movie outings planned for this summer (because uhm, hello, Inception looks AMAZING!) so we can only hope that we're seated with other folks who are respectful enough to want to enjoy the movie.



That's all for today; back to watching my neighbors try to shove a sofa into their house through the garage door in heat indexed 105 degree heat. It's been a hot one all week here, y'all. My plans for relaxing and wandering through our botanical gardens to photograph trees and flowers and the butterfly house have been dashed this week, but you know? There's always soccer.

I have a lot of ideas.

Lately my brain has been bursting with ideas. THINGS! Things to do that sound exciting! But really? Are they really exciting?

I want to do a vlog for Monday Mingle. I have a love/hate relationship with vlogs because while once in a while they are cool, all the time I start to wonder whether I'm reading a blog or watching TV. No wait, I'm not, the World Cup is on that TV. (More on that later.) Should I do a vlog?? I have the capability, I think. But they're so weird. I'm torn, truly.

I want to redo my blog design. ON MY OWN. This may be the nuttiest thing in the world. I know diddly crap about CSS, but I know enough about blog design and basic HTML that I will likely be able to muddle myself through. I used to make awesome websites back in the day, and I'll be darned if I'm about to shell out 30 buckeroos for something I can gnaw on myself and eventually (possibly) do the right way. My own design is starting to overstay its welcome; those tiles are reminding me more and more of a chlorine city swimming pool eeeeevery day.

I want to go to a Buddhist retreat because I'm reading a book about one right now, and it sounds the bomb! But the closest one to this non-Buddhist beach town is about 8 hours away in the mountains, and it is a largely silent retreat. No talky. No makey friendy. No cellphoney also. Also expensivey. I think the no talky part is a great idea; just leave me be to my whirling dervish of non-thought and let me mosey through the gardens ....................................

Okay, non-thought over.

The World Cup is on RIGHT NOW and it's USA v. Algeria. For you non footie folk I'll just say the US -has- to win this game to advance further, and they've been presented with quite a number of opportunities to make a goal, but failed each time.

Matt is HEAVILY invested into this game. This situation can end in one of two ways.

1. Win

The skies erupt with sunshine and candy falls to the Earth! Giant macaroni and cheese platters for lunch, new wardrobes and shopping trips for everyone, and a basket of corgi puppies *somehow* finds its way to my doorstep, because the planets align and All Is Good.

2. Lose


The End. The ocean rises and consumes our house (and car for good measure). The cats contract Continuous Meowing Disease and never shut up, blowing out our eardrums. All we have to eat for the rest of our lives are those horrid Uncrustables, drinking Bud Light out of the miserable Vortex bottle; always enough beer to taste crappy, but NEVER enough to get you drunk, in this sad Sisyphean life.



Seriously, folks, it's life or death over here. And it is VERY tense. If I raise the white flag please send Pop Tarts or small cans of fruit to keep me going.