The Big DumpTruck

Junior and I discovered Charlotte's babies had hatched on the side of the house. Sorry this looks a little dark, it looked fine on the laptop. I shouldn't try to edit photos on the laptop, should I? No, I shouldn't.

Okay, so I'm assuming these are deadly spiders because that's the kind of optimist I am. I took pictures with the super macro setting and then moved far far away from them.

Interestingly, I didn't hallucinate about spiders last night.

As everyone should on Memorial Day weekend, we spent most of yesterday driving to the Vermont Country Store in Rockingham VT. Cause if you have cheese money and a need to buy soap that you can't buy anywhere else, this should be your destination. If you haven't been there, it's hard to explain, but to me, it's just one of the best stores ever. Penny candy, barrels of pickles, samples cheese, crackers, jams, sauces, etc. etc. are in every aisle. (Yesterday I had samples of 4 kinds of cheese, cashew butter, dill dip, green tomato pickelilly (I have no idea how you spell that), artichoke hummus, some kind of sweet dip (there was no card) and venison summer sausage. I mean, it's heaven for folks who like single bites of food on little hard crackers.

We got a cup for making slushies at home, candy, pickles, cheese, two boxes of oyster crackers. Junior got a mood ring. We wanted to get a tabletop hockey game but my dad and Mr. Dump wouldn't let either me or my mom buy it. Boo to them. I wanted to buy one for a family Christmas present last year and couldn't find one. I'm going to get one of these things if it's the last thing I do!

All these items should be available at http://www.vermontcountrystore.com. But really, you need to go up there yourself, and then keep driving another couple of miles to Chester VT where you should have lunch at Raspberries and Thyme. You will not regret it!

When I was a young lass (not that long ago, thank you) I was a Girl Scout. I really liked being a Scout, and one of the things we did was march in the Leominster Memorial Day Parade. One year we sang patriotic songs at the Elks (for the Elks). The parade was cool, though, because you felt soooo important. I got to be the flag bearer one year - I think because I was the tallest girl in my troop.

But the songs we sang were the old standby classics - This Land is Your Land, America, etc. etc. This morning I went to a Memorial Day Extravaganza at Junior's school. 218 (!) second graders sang for about 40 minutes. It was, and I'm not just saying this, a really fantastic show. I didn't really know most of the songs, and that helped. The fact that my kid was in it also helped, but I think I would have enjoyed it anyway. And my God, when 218 little voices first start singing, if you don't get a lump in your throat you are an evil soulless person. It was just very touching.

I'm glad that we had some soldiers there as special guests - I like that the kids actually understand what it's all about. So even though it's early, I just want to say thank you to all our Veterans, our enlisted men and women, and those who have gone on before us. Happy Memorial Day.

Update: I was seated fairly far, and didn't have the big camera because I was going straight to work after. I got pictures and all the kids' eyes appear to be glowing white. Freaked me right the hell out.

I think one of the medicines I take has the side effect of "hallucinations". Not in the Movie of the Week sense, but in the "I wake up freaking out because I thought I just saw a skunk crawling around on my bedside table."

Yes, that's right.

Poor Mr. Dump. He just puts up with my waking him up to take care of things that aren't actually happening in real life. Usually these "dreams" take the form of me thinking there is something in the bedroom that shouldn't be there. People. Bugs. Small animals. 80% of the time, I jump up and start flailing my arms because a spider or some other bug is just about to land on my face. About 20-30 seconds after the freakout, I realize what it was (nothing!) and calm myself back down. And apologize to my husband for shoving him to wake him up so we can sneak out of the room before the skunk on the nightstand notices us.

Oy.

My dining room table is a mosquito-free zone. I know that because I can smell Junior's citronella bracelet. I think it's over on the other side of the table but I'm too lazy to hunt it down. But I can smell it, so that means no mosquitos will bother us while we're eating dinner inside the house. Cool, huh?

I am not selling anything, don't worry. Unless you want to buy something. You tell me what I have that you want to buy, and how much you want to pay for it, and I'll sell it to you. Say for instance, you want to buy my Emeril page. That's cool, I'd consider letting it go if the price was right. So you write a number down on a piece of paper and slide it across the table. I'll let you know what I think. I may write down a different number and slide the paper back across to you.

Actually, I only wrote that down because Mr. Dump just sent me an email letting me know that Staples is having a big sale today, and I was driving around Sunday evening looking to buy some HP 4x6 photo paper. Target was out, and Staples and Office Max were closed. I was forced to go into Barnes and Noble and spend all my cheese money on books. But I still need the photo paper.

Okay, so this is funny. I was all set to deal with the thunderstorms when they passed through, but by early afternoon there had only been a few sprinkles. I picked up a couple of plants with mom, dad and junior and we did get rained on at one place. We decided to go see Over the Hedge, for the 4:45 show, and left the house at about 4:20. Thought the movie was really cute, the popcorn was only okay, but they have Coke Icees there, so all was not lost. When the movie ended it was POURING rain. That meant Junior's 6:30 baseball practice was cancelled, so we ran to Target to pick up a couple of things.

I picked up what I needed and when I got to the register, it was sunny, with blue skies. I expressed my amazement to the cashier, who proceeded to explain to me about the weather we had apparently missed while in the movie theater: black skies, lightening, 60mph wind gusts, hail, lost power, etc. Are you kidding me? That all happened and we didn't have a CLUE.

So next time a big storm is predicted, I'm definitely going to the movies.

I hear we're gonna get hit with some fun thunderstorms this afternoon, so I'd better finish all my "outside" chores right now. That means I should stop typing. Because I need to go do chores. Because it's going to rain and thunder and stuff later. So I should stop doing this and go do that. Okay? You understand, right? Okay. Thanks.

• Grubs - Mostly dead, it appears
• Ants - Made a run for the house when the lawn got over-saturated
• Lawn - Most of the topsoil and seed washed downhill. What's left isn't looking good. That may have been $60 "down the drain" as it were.
• Car - I need to remove several months worth of flotsam from under the seats
• House - Will this be the weekend we clean out the spare bedroom?
• bigbadwords.com - Mr. Dump swears the design will be done by this weekend, but by the way, he's not really the best CSS programmer so good luck with that. Wait, that means I've got to start working on the content?
• iTunes - Is there any way to back up your purchases to CD without having to burn it as a CD? I want to fit more than 12 songs on the CD at a time, but as far as backing up goes, if my computer died would I be able to just restore iTunes if all I did was copy the entire iTunes folder to a blank CD or DVD. I'm getting nervous that I've bought a lot of songs from iTunes and if my system croaks I'd have to a) reload ALL my CDs including the backup CDs that I've burned, 12 songs at a time.
• Dinner - Went to the Monument Grill last night. Good Lord, I love that restaurant. We really do need to go there more often. Last night we went for our belated Anniversary dinner (our 13th anniversary was Monday). Good stuff, especially my favorite sweet potato ravioli appetizer.

Just read a great piece over on Riba Rambles . And by great piece I mean something that made my face red and forced my eyes to go bloodshot and pop out of my head. Because this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if we're not living in some scary Orwellian universe. Which, of course, you already know we are if you read the news. "The US Government" has become one of the scariest entities on the planet, people. Keep your eyes open before they crush you under their fists and steal your lunch money.

Okay, so Riba alerts us all to a new initiative to label all pre-menopausal woman as "pre-pregnant," meaning that at any moment they could become pregnant and thus they will exert some sort of control over our bodies to keep the old female reproductive organs ready for planting.

She tells how her doctor won't put her on any medication that may have bad effects on a fetus, even though she has no plans to get pregnant. Here's the scary summary: "My neurologist does not trust me to not get pregnant. My neurologist puts a potential fetus's potential health over my health."

Ladies, you know if men got pregnant this wouldn't even be a consideration. Do you really want the government to step in and tell you you can't get certain medical treatments because you are pre-pregnant? HELL NO!

She's got more excellent points on how stupid this all is, that they are focusing on the WRONG things, all in an attempt to get themselves out of the cellar on that list of countries with poor newborn survival rates. Maybe if they worked to get everyone some level of health care it would solve the problem. I'll just let you go read it and get angry on your own.

You kids have been very patient, waiting for me to release the name of the new website I'm adding to the family. Now if you click to go to the site, you will just see my placeholder page while Mr. Dump helps me work on the design. He's done with the main landing page, I think, which will just leave us to figure out how the subsections will look. I may use color to differentiate them. But as I said, we aren't there yet.

Also, for you writers out there, I will probably open up the site to submissions, but I haven't decided any of the details yet. What makes that site different than anything else I've worked on? I'm actually working on all the design details before launching the damned thing.

It also means there will be a slight redesign of this site, as I move some of the content from here to there. Primarily the Still Life with Interview and the Open Letters, I suspect.

Okay, so here you go:

http://www.bigbadwords.com

Hey, funny thing about two weeks of heavy rain...it starts to make the commute a little hard. I thought I would be safe but I did get blocked on my way to work today, right around the Hollis/Amherst line. Of course, there were no detour signs to be found, so I sort of went the way I hoped would loop me back around to 101a. Ended up way down near exit 6 in Nashua, which is about 4 exits south of where I normally come out on the back roads. Now THAT is a detour. Such is the fun of commuting from Leominster to Southern NH...

So now I'm wondering what other roads are closed. I hear people who work near me talking about closures, dead ends, etc. I am worried that route 13 in the Brookline/Mason stretch will be closed because the stream that follows the road down there should be a raging river. Luckily, the Manchester TV station, WMUR, has a website that lists all road closings by town. I don't know how up-to-date it is, but I'll be keeping an eye on it. I'll be able to get home, but I may need to allow a lot of extra time to deal with the roundabout route and all the extra cars from people like me trying to detour past closed roads. Click on the link for the viewer photos if you want to be blown away. There are roads with sinkholes the size of the ones in Superman 1 when Lois's car got filled with sand after the earthquake. That's a lot of sink and a lot of hole.

Hey Christine, we drove through Bolton flats yesterday going to and from Solomon Pond Mall...the road was still open at 4pm yesterday - how was it this morning?

"So, did you remember to water the lawn?"

Happy mothers day to you and yours! It's such a LOVELY day here in the northeast. I suspect I'll be seeing animals walking by in pairs any minute now.

Off to breakfast...bacon twice in one week! I'm a lucky lucky mom!

Admit it, you're all wondering what happened with my email.

But this isn't about that kind of bounce, it's about the dryer sheet. I was reading the back of the box for reasons that are probably best left to the imagination, and they are advertising their website "BounceEverywhere.com" and the box says, and I quote, "avoid direct contact with fabrics."

Okay, maybe I'm naive, but isn't it a fabric softener? Doesn't it touch fabric in the dryer?

We're facing Mother's Day 2006, people. Are you loaded up with bouquets, candy and jewelry? No? Well, you still have two and a half days.

I am getting something good this year. Well, I'm kind of picking it out myself, but that's important for the gift I'm getting. I'm getting a new domain to play with. Isn't that a cool gift? See, back when I was pregnant with Junior, I closed shop on the little ezine I was running. It wasn't much, but it was nice to still have a hand or a foot in literature. And ever since blogging took hold of America, my website has changed from being a "magazine" type site to just a blog.

Just a blog.

*sigh*

So I think it's too late to try to undo that mentality and try to get BDT back to what it was 10 years ago when I started it. Instead, I'll leave this as the blog, but start a new content-driven site that only updates when there's something new - photos, art, articles, poems, blood stains. You know, stuff like that.

I'd tell you the domain but because I can't register it until payday (tomorrow) I'd have to kill you all. That's gotta be at least 6 or 7 murders - and some of you live out of my local area so that would really be a drag.

Keep your eyes here for the announcement sometime next week. You know, after I actually own the domain and have at least a placeholder up.

(Oh, and after I do that, I get to register one or two other domains, because they're cheap and I'll be able to point them to my massive new home on the web. Dudes, have you looked at this deal? I think we should all get websites for Mother's Day!

Sorry for all the junk code over in the blogroll the past couple of days. Apparently the people at blogrolling.com just allow errors to be published instead of sending a note to you to tell you that your account expired so your extra blogrolls were disabled. Thanks blogrolling! That's great customer service! Way to make me want to send you another twenty bucks to renew!

Of course, because I didn't know the expiration was coming up, I didn't bother to move the sites in the roll over to my "free" one. I tried to recreate it by hand, for the record. Maybe I'll just do that and not pay any extra. Of course, please note that the links will NOT display notice when they were recently updated. You'll just have to check on your own. Boogerheads. (Not you, the blogrolling people.)

I'm still in a good mood after last night's boinking of the Bankees. According to the NY Post Georgie referred to A-Rod as "the third baseman" instead of using his name. Heh heh heh. Poor Slappy, getting dissed like that. Maybe he can get his paycheck to cuddle him.

Is there anything better than a Sox blowout of the Evil Empire? No there is not. Well, maybe a blowout with A-Rod making a couple of errors.

Mr. Dump claims the only words better than "error by third baseman Alex Rodrigez" would be "Posada is hit by a pitch."

(He doesn't like Posada. He'd probably throw at his head on purpose if he was a pitcher.)

That's not a nice note to go out on, so instead, let's all compliment Mike Lowell for becoming a freaky deaky double hitter extraordinaire. Duuuuude!

Labels: Mike Lowell

Saturday was fix-the-lawn day at the Dump Garage. We actually were only fixing a part of the lawn because we realized that our ability to successfully nurture grass seed to life would be limited by our ability to remember to water the lawn, and having to water different sections of lawn might be beyond our grasp. Right now we've got a decent-sized patch planted (I'm guessing 15' x 10' and the sprinkler is firmly in place. When Mr. Dump is done showering (and dressing, duh) and he lets the dog out, he turns it on. So now it will get watered every day. Once we see that area sprouting, we'll patch up the next (smaller) area next to the driveway.

As we suspected from past experience (and friend-of-the-dump Kiddicus Maximus, ex-landscaper, confirmed) we have a hellish grub infestation. I dug up a couple of dandelions from the area we cleared and in there were 3-4 grubs just in that one tiny hole. (And yet, the dandelions were still alive. Go figure.)

I also cleared out my little flower garden, which was really a weed garden, so that only the strawberry plants were left. Four of them look pretty healthy, and have a bunch of flowers. I am going to have to dig them up and transplant them, because I apparently planted something last year that spreads faster than the dandelions, and that spot is useless for growing much of anything other than weeds. I'll spend a short while making sure I pulled out everything that was there (I suspect new plants will appear in a few days. I'm telling you, whatever it was, it was spreading into the lawn, and I don't remember what I planted) I'll turn all that soil, throw some topsoil on it and figure out what, if anything, to plant there. Maybe a big cactus so it will be okay if I forget to water it.

Now Christine did way more more yard work than I did, so I won't complain about the muscles in the back of my legs from all the weeding I did. I know when I've been bested...

Apparently the PHP server at my hosting company exploded. Or imploded. Or is taking a nap. Anyhoo, my site is still out there, but it can't show PHP files so I'm trying to move things over to .htm files in the meantime. I suppose I could change permanently, but I'd have to figure out what parts of my page have PHP.

So if you're reading this, cool. If not, I hope you'll remember that I do exist!

Ahhh, it's apparently cuttin limbs off trees day here in the neighborhood. Of course we won't be using a chainsaw to do our chores unless someone gets wildly out of control mowing the lawn.

So I'm feeling little to no motivation to do yard work, but the soil and seeds are bought, so I can't just leave them outt there, can I?

No. I can't. Hey, maybe I'll do before and after photos so you can shriek in horror and say to your children "THIS is what happens when you watch too much tv."

Ahhhhh! The horror! See, I'm hourly, and no pay for no play. Well, no work. And I didn't work last week so the nerve of them!

I hate being short a 40 hour check. It's like a monkey on my back, man, I'm jonesin' for some dough.

Maybe if I hadn't bought all those containers of sunscreen, I could treat myself to a Pepsi Icee at Target. I filled the car today - 50 blinkin' dollars! And you don't even get those nice young men in the suits and bowties checking your oil or tire pressure. Damn TV Land for giving me a false vision of the petroleum retail sales industry! Goober doesn't fill my tank for 2 bucks, I do all the work for half a C-note! And what about the days when you could collect a set of glasses by getting fillups? When did that stop being cool? I could use some glasses...

To Hector,
Thanks for your kind offer, but I already have a diploma. I earned it the hard way - but putting up with other teenagers for the worst 4 years of my life. And those were back in the rough-and-tumble days when they actually had a little section of the courtyard set aside for a smoking area. It boggles the mind these days, doesn't it? Oh, and there were only two pay phones available to all 1200 or so students attending at that time (I think I had 400 kids in my graduating class, so I'm ball-parking. I learned how to do that in high school). And we didn't even have a soda machine so they didn't need to pass a rule that it would only contain diet soda. Of course, back then that would have meant Tab, Diet 7-Up and Weight Watcher's Diet Chocolate Soda, I suppose.

Dear Listerine F. Wheresoever,
Good God, did your parents hate you? I can't believe you didn't change your name legally once you were of age. Seriously, I'm finding it hard to take your offer seriously. Well, that and the fact that I can't read what appears to be Russian. Although it looks really cool - I didn't know my email could handle those characters.

Dear Jeffrey Messer,
I don't know if you noticed, but the email address says the note came from Dalton Castillo but you claim your name is Jeffrey Messer. Are you using a friend's computer? So anyway, I'm not exactly sure what it is you're trying to tell me. First you say "in bladderwort it's aspect on pearl" but later you say "try schoolhouse it armco the befallen." A little clarification would be good.

Dear Emilia,
Holy cow, you sent your email from a bigdumptruck.com address, but I don't even know you! That's amazing! But to get to your note, I will say I am a little concerned. I quote "I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here [link] are bad." Oh my goodness, someone get the smelling salts, I feel a faint coming on! Please, kill yourself if you must, but don't eat your dog! I am sure that the prices at that link are, in fact, good. I just don't really need any today. I'll keep you and your dog in my prayers.

Have a nice day,

Jody

My lawn isn't just your typical spring mess. Huge portions of it are dead or dying. Something nasty happened over the winter, and we have to figure out our next step. We are not yard-working people. We don't do well standing in the hot sun with rakes and shovels. We are not skilled when it comes to landscaping. I fear that there is no hope that we can get something green happening out there. So when should we throw in the towel and just replace the lawn with something else? Cement or brick come to mind.

Post-vacation, it's going to take us a few weeks to get back on even footing financially. I keep forgetting that I'm not going to get a paycheck Friday (because I didn't work last week). I hate when that happens. So it's not like I can just dial up a landscaper to do it all for us. But I think that's what we're going to have to do. My across the street neighbor's nephew has done landscaping for her, so I'm going to ask her what he'll do and maybe get a price. I don't know...is there a landscaper out there who will do all the work and let us just pay a little up front at the rest when they're done?

See, I'm not starting with Part 1. That's just to throw you all off. I'm clever, see?

I have about 2 seconds to write this before doing more catch-up work, so I'll give you random goodies to make you wonder what the hell was going on in Florida.

1. Ate like a king. I will give a breakdown of the restaurants I recommend in a future post (I'll probably put up a Disney page with a few pix when I get around to writing it) but I'll just say that the males in the group really appreciated the fact that our lunch in Morocco included a belly dancer. And when she invited the kids up to dance with her, she included my brother-in-law.

2a. Even though I fell off and had to have an xray of my hand (nothing broken) taking the Segway class was really really really cool.

2b. Going to a clinic to get a hand xray is not a cool way to spend an afternoon, especially when the waiting room is full of people who you don't want to sit near. And they are showing a gawd-awful movie on endless loop. Anyone else hear of "A Kid in Aladdin's Palace"? No? I didn't think so.

3. Went of Expedition Everest twice. Went on Rock 'n' Roller Coaster once. Thought the latter was the coolest thing I have ever been on, ever. Zero to 60 in 2 seconds? Holy crap. The former is also cool, but it's not something I *have to* do again.

4. Finally went to one of the water parks. Brother-in-law and step-son did the water slide where you drop feet first at approx. 60 miles per hour. Didn't get a clear answer on how much of their bathing suits they had to remove from their asses. I stuck with the tamer stuff.

5. Ready for next vacation already.