'Involucrata' sounds like a bodily function.

I have been feeling very lonely these past few days. I really wish I had friend.

After food shopping today we stopped by Home Depot to pick up some fuses. I found a very beautiful little plant and took it home, but it had lost it's identifying tag.



After several hours of searching, I found out that it's Pilea Involucrata, commonly known as the Friendship Plant.

How's that for underwhelming wish fulfillment?

Fan Mail

I'm really glad you like the paint color...It was EXTREMELY PAINFUL to make a decision out of the 8 trillion different shades of purple. But I think it looks good too. I have no memory of the earthworm incident and require photographic proof so that I can giggle to myself about it later.

The most pressing project is getting the trim up around the ceiling, windows, door and floor. We got some molding and we just need to paint it. We had planned on 'Tinkerbell Green' but now I'm thinking some form of an off white would look really pretty, too...Dunno. I'll post pictures and maybe you can make the decision for me. My brain hurts.

Resume = blegh.

Everyone's doing well...Swiper's recovering from his semi-abandonment. He continues to snub his food and eat half-consumed bowls of Cheerios, the crusts of PB&J sandwiches, Ramen noodle, etc.
The Dr. Who season closer is tomorrow...He began regeneration at the end of the last episode, but I know for a fact that they signed Tennant on for 2009, so it will be interesting to see how they explain this away.

Pete'll be gone this weekend, so I'll probably try to pry up the tack strips so we can put the trim on next weekend. We gave to crowbar back to his parents though, so I'll have to find something else to use. I think the paint scraper and a hammer worked pretty well. Mil took us shopping for curtain fabric yesterday. She was looking for fabric with Tinkerbell on it, but I'm thinking maybe a solid color with Tinkerbell ribbons to tie it back. Dark green, maybe? Pete found some neat gauzy, sparkly, rainbow-y purple stuff that would work for really cool sheers. I'm thinking maybe white (off-white?) curtains would go with it. We have to line them and have them extend at least six inches below the window edge to keep out the cold this winter, and I don't know if white anything is a good idea in a kid's room. We also talked about putting up the big curtains across the front and back wall of the house. I think it might be a good idea, at least then we wouldn't have to staple garbage bags over everything. Don't know what type of fabric to use for those either, though.

My shirt remains in pieces until I can find a few minutes to puzzle out the directions again.

Grass-ias!

After a few days of straight-up rain, we have green stuff growing in the backyard!



I'm hoping that my mint seeds are finally coming up. Haven't seen any so far, though. The kids are much happier with the grass than the mud.



And we finally got some paint on the walls in the girls room! I love it.



As you can see, the floor's pretty decent too. There are some stripped spots, but we'll probably just put down some wax for now; hopefully we can refinish it sometime next year.

And just because it's fun:

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	High
Schizoid:	High
Schizotypal:	Moderate
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Moderate
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Very High
Dependent:	High
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Low
-- Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Information --

Go find out what the heck is wrong with you!

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Yeah, I admit it, I loved the first one.
Hellboy is the character I loved without knowing he existed, the one I created over and over, with varying levels of sophistication, as a retarded teenager.
Unfortunately, some hack named Mike Mignola beat me to perfecting the concept, around 1993. Damn him. I would have gotten it eventually.

Anyway, basking in it's awesomeness & reading badly scanned pages online is all fine and good, but I really loved the movie.



Maybe it's the muttonchop whiskers. They never should have gone out of style.
Anyway, you can tell that this next movie is going to be really good, there are Glocks in it!



Although they got the guy from Pan's Labyrinth to direct again, it looks like they ripped off a bunch of stuff from WOW. Seriously, check some of the pictures. But I have high hopes. Again. (eyelid twitch)

AND ANOTHER THING...
I have been spoiled by Patrick Tull. It has been my distinct, aural pleasure to listen to him narate the Aubrey/Maturin series, from Master and Commander to The Surgeon's Mate, he has given me hours of gravelly, accented entertainment.
However, to my great distress, I have found that my copy of The Ionian Mission is narrated by an upstart whelp named Simon Vance.
He troubles himself to give a decent Scottish accent to a minor moral philosopher, but performs Stephen's voice with an insistent, high-pitched, snottily english accent. Jack's voice is distinguished from the rest by lowering into a faggy, unimaginative, idiot drawl that sounds about as realistically 'British' as I do. Jack lisps, Stephen simpers, and don't get me started on his high pitched, breathy 'woman' voice. He makes Diana sound like an affected grandmother. Mowett sounds like a bad stereotype of a high-class twit trying to speak ebonics, and Killick sounds like a big wad of phlegm.
The only voice he does well is Pullings, who has about two lines in the whole book. Bleagh.

Update phase 2

So here is a picture of one wall all mudded:

And here's a comparison of the mudded wall vs the not mudded wall:
We'll probably recoat them one more time, then prime & paint.

Here's my catnip, Thai basil, fevervew and ruffly purple basil...

My pepper plant, my froot-loop flavored lemon grass, and a very tall cilantro plant.

yaaaaaaawn.

I have few new pics, but my Fan has urged me to post more, so here's an update.
After tearing the drywall out of the girl's room, Mr. Legs rewired it:



And then my lovely family helped us put up the insulation that apparently no one else saw the need for in 30+ years of occupation:



And then nailed up the drywall for us. A nice clean slate that I neglected to take any pictures of. It looked pretty rough at first, but the taping is all done and we're now putting up the skim coat of mud, and it's looking beautiful. I'll try to get some pictures of that up tomorrow. I can hardly wait to paint. If everything dries satisfactorily by Friday, we may get to paint this weekend!
I'm halfway through The Fortune of War on audiobook, which makes the mindless scrape-scrape-scraping go very quickly.

I turned out a really attractive(I thought) collar for the pit bull group's big get together, but the person in charge never got back to me about it so I moped around and decided not to go. That'll teach my face!

Mr. legs & I watched Be Kind Rewind, which was pretty funny in spots and was a little less insipid and Jack Blackish then I feared it would be. Still watching Dr. Who, maybe just because I want to hear the English accents. DD #1 is learning consonant digraphs, DS #1 I still on the letter P, DD #2 is learning her letters and their sounds and DD #3 is perfecting the art of Irritating Mommy Like a Gangrenous Tooth.

Our garden's growing well (pics tomorrow), and I've aquired a very attractive, ruffly kind of purple Basil. it reminds me of a dream I had awhile ago, the most memorable part of which involved using purple basil for currency. I also have a lucky bamboo stalk in a vase of water, and took it upon myself to replace our goldfish. I took the tank out of the kid's room and found a really pretty white, fan-tailed goldfish. After explaining to the kids why it was bad for them to be constantly reaching in and grabbing the fish, we decided to name her Rapunzel, and got her a little pink fishy castle.

DD #2 asked what "der flappy tings around her necks are", and we had a pretty informative discussion about gills, mucus membranes, lungs, oxygen and the molecular composition of water, of all things. Most of it was ripped right off a government website about fisheries (Minnesota or somewhere, I think) and I didn't think she'd retain any of it, but she surprised me by talking with me about the things we'd learned a couple of days later. Maybe she'll grow up to be a...gillologist. That's got a lot of syllables so it must be pretty high-paying.

Swiper's doing as well as he can...Mr. Legs has taken a sudden irrational turn against him, so he tries to be as underneath me as he can be. Maybe not totally irrational, since he nipped DD #1 a few days ago. We've been working on it though, and I'm keeping a sharp eye on him. I've started kenneling him during meals & school time, because he seems to think he should be involved in both and trying to push his big feet off of a school book is nearly impossible.

He almost got his feet on DS #1's Purple Pointilism Pansy, which would have been disastrous for the picture and for the floor. DS was very proud of the word 'pointilism' and I have high hopes he'll use it without any prompting in front of the grandparents; I'm sure that would please & impress them.

Looking back at this I see I had more to post than I originally thought. Yay me!

YOU ENEMA-SIPPING SWINE

The Sweeney Todd let-down was not enough, eh Hollywood? You had to rape The Mist too?

Fred Darbont, you suck. Stephen King, you suck too. You have always sucked, only now that you're mutilating the ONE STORY of yours that I kind of liked, you've gone beyond it. I can only hope that you and your cow-tonguing sap of a director will collapse under the magnitude of your collective disgrace. The ending was GOD-AWFUL. Your attempts at emotional manipulation were juvenile and crass. I know you were trying to be all tragic and oscar-worthy, but it just came off as cold and punitive. That's what you get for your stupid hope! Shoot your kid to spare him from the monsters and then find out it was totally pointless because everything's fine! You could have just pasted that "Look at me, I'm an attention whore!" graphic over the last ten minutes of the movie and it would have been fine.

Your transparently superior attitude, your over the top church lady villain, your blatant sneering at the 'small town hicks', it was just too over-blown, too obvious. Your imagery was subtle. I especially like that part where she was praying to the toilet, and then your heroine comes in and is so sweet and supportive, and then the evil church lady starts being all mean for no reason. That was classic. Who's being preachy again? You spent more time spewing out Bible verses in this moving than most people do in church! And of course, we have to throw abortion, and stem cell research, and child sacrifice into the mix! After all, people who are against the first two are totally fine with the third one! Those wacky Christians!

You simpering catamites should hop into the sack with whoever wrote yesterday's Dr. Who episode. "Meh, I'm a whiny little girly-man who doesn't like being around people with guns cause they're the bad guys, meh!" Dear sweet mother of Bill Clinton, you're a time & space bending, face changing TIMELORD who goes around thwarting evil and fighting hideous aliens with laser swords but TINY LUMPS OF COPPER CARRIED BY ENGLAND'S MILITARY MEN MAKE YOU SOIL YOUR KOTEX?

Every time I find a TV show or movie I think I will love, you have to ruin it by tossing in a bunch of unrelated diarrheal mouth dribblings trying to educate me. They are like hideous pulsing carbuncles, distracting me from the movie beneath and sweeping away all feelings except that of rage at your arrogance.
Thank you, movie & TV industry, for attempting to enlighten us. Thank you for spending millions of dollars trying to lift us from our pig infested hovels and lead us, mewling like filth encrusted babes, into the light.

CHOKE ON YOUR SWIVING COSMOPOLITANS AND DIE.