Friggin Fraggin Friday

Friggin Fraggin Friday says it all. What a weird day. I may or may not have forgotten today was the last day to move out of my apartment and back in to the house (results of a situation best left to another post) So my day did not go as planned to say the least but as you can see by the notes I did accomplish most of what I set out to do....sort of......


It's Friday. Friday is my weekly day of domestication. I always make a list of everything I need to accomplish to prevent the house from going into Thunder Dome status and still enjoy my weekend. Since I am now committed to blogging daily I will be posting Friday's Blogs in two parts. First I will be listing all of the things I would like to accomplish and then re-posting the blog with notes as to what I actually accomplished (and my excuses). I am off to a late start today which turns out to be awesome because I can both add coffee to my list and scratch it off. AND coffee makes me delusionally ambitious so my list will be a thing of grandeur indeed. Hey screw you spell check. Delusionally is a word. Isn't it? Moving on.

1. Gym - Cardio and Yoga - about a thousand trips up three flights of stairs to get the rest of my stuff should satisfy the cardio portion of today's program. I will sleep in the corpse position also known as the foo-kin ti'ed salutation.
2. Wake and Bathe Children - Technically I did both of these things.
3. Breakfast - Donuts at Maverick
4. Herd them on to the Bus - 1 out of 3 ain't bad
5. Take squirt butt to the babysitters - This one is completely true
6. Bank - Nope and at this point in the day a few random things happened. Well it was more like 3 specific things. Internet, Beer and IMAGINATION TIME. In my defense the beer was the coldest thing in the fridge and the internet was the coldest thing in the fridge and my imagination is always the coldest thing in the fridge. 
7. Scrub Down the Kitchen - Mostly true. Scrub is a funny word that lends itself to so many different interpretations it's really kind of ridiculous let's not get bogged down in semantics. 
8. Sort through the bizarre amount of papers through out the house that constitute in class and take home homework. Try to figure out if anything needs to be saved or if I can recycle everything. - I might have demanded Hannah do this.
9. Wash, Fold and Put away a Cabillion loads of laundry - Not quite a cabillion but close. Four.
10. Grocery Store - Nope
11. Scrub bathrooms - Oh! I did do this! And can I mention how much I love the Clorox Toilet Wand. I know I really should rave about fashion and movies and music and blahhhhh BUT this thing is bad ass. 
12. Organize Bedroom - Organize shmorganize. I did put all my shoes away in order of color and heel heigth.
13. Plan meals for the week - This may have been when I was drinking and thought it would be fun to use facebook to interact with all my friends whose name starts with the letter A. If your name starts with A and we are facebook friends you know this is true. 
14. Grocery Shopping - I really should admit this is a typo but I firmly believe that when you make an obvious mistake you can't roll over. This is the time you insist it was an intentional and strategic maneuver. I put this on my to-do list twice because I'm psychic and technically I get credit for one of these. I did shop today at the Grocery Store but that's because my grocery store has a toy department and at the last minute my daughter reminded me she had a birthday party to go to. So ....
15. Take hand me down clothes and coats to be donated - I bagged them all (most of them) and I set them in the living room by the door ready to be loaded to take in the morning. (I might have played North Pole for an hour and a half but you'll never know for sure)
16. Eat something while trying for the billionth time to understand how twitter works and why so many hookers are following me. - I actually spent 5 hours doing this as explained on item 6. But I learned a lot of stuff! Some porn sites are free. There's two hours I'll never get back.
17. Recite the cremation of Sam McGee while cleaning the Living Room (because there is a big mirror there and I like to really get in to it.) - I did this but in two parts. I eventually cleaned the living room but first .... I found out that my voice is SO much scarier if I lay upside down on the couch.
18. Kids have returned by now put them to work cleaning their bedrooms. - This is true. It was also the point in the day that I realized that I had wasted the whole day and I had to sober up, go pack and do everything on this list.
19. Sit down and answer all the emails from the day - This I did do. All 2 of them. 
20. Sit down with the kids and decide how we will make our yard the most Halloweenish Halloween yard in the history of the universe. - This did not happen, however I did take the kids to get Ice Cream, Take Aud to a birthday party, eat at Arby's, Take squash to his cousins, record the funniest voicemail greeting EVER, pull out one of Hannah's teeth, have a tickle/dead leg fight and make Aud noodles because the birthday food was "not her style of eating"
21. Bike Ride - Damn It
22. Dinner - Yes!
23. Movie Time - Damn It
24. Kids to Bed - Yes!
25. Add a few notes to the ole' Blog - Workin' on it
26. glass of wine in celebration of my days accomplishments - ........................ probably shouldn't have made this my first order of business but hindsight is 20/20.
27. Sweet sweet slumber - This is still the plan

27 things to do. Not impossible. This will be the day that nothing will deter me. Wish me luck.

So my Friday was a little backwards is all. If I learned one thing today it is that all procrastinating means is that I get a lot of shit done later. 

What if an old old lady just really likes a shaved kitty?

Courtesy of FUNLOL

I've seen this photo floating around facebook and tracked it down to www.funlol.com where I was disappointed that the photo had been captioned there too. For many reasons, but mostly because I want to wonder, just wonder. Don't direct my mind in any direction I just want to see this and think #$%^&!! I love when I see things and think @#$%^!! You stole that glorious experience from me whoever captioned this photo. I offer this comparison:

courtesy of picocat.com

Oh my gosh!! This cat is crying. How did this come to be? We don't know for sure. We can just stare at this photo of a cat posing. Cat's will not pose for a photo unless you suck the will to live from their weird little bodies. What is this cat's name? Tell me it's Fluffy. You can name a cat with fangs and claws Snowball and it will still scratch your face. Nothing robs a cat of it's pride and feline ferocity UNTIL NOW. I'm going to print this picture and put it in my wallet to serve as a constant reminder. No matter what activity I engage in for the rest of my life it will never be weird when directly compared to this photo. 

This brings to mind my lifelong love of these critters. When I was younger my cousins had a cat named Pumpkin. Pumpkin tried to eat my feet one night. 

It was in the black of night. 

My tiny little body in an exhausted heap after a long day.

Sprinklers, trampolines, tag, and small fires in a field. 

Suddenly! 

I was ripped from slumber by the sharp sting of tiny fangs piercing my big toe. 

yadda yadda yadda

 and from then on that cat was very afraid of my feet. 

10 years after that cat and I established how we felt about each others species I took part in what has become one of my very favorite conversations ever. I give you ..... a reenactment:

ME: "Finally. What the hell were you doing? We were sitting in your driveway for 15 minutes."

COUSIN: "I was drying my hair I didn't hear you honk - what is that noise"

radio turns up

ME: "Have you eaten? I'm starving."

COUSIN: "I had cereal - did you hear that?"

radio turns up

COUSIN: (Yelling now) "What is that noise? Turn the radio down. Can't you hear that? OH MY GOD!! DO YOU HAVE MY CAT IN YOUR TRUNK?!!"

I am fond of the words "shit storm" when used to illustrate family gatherings

Today is the 27th day of September in the year 2011. Today I decided to break my life up into categories. Create goals specific to improving these areas and then kicking it up a notch by creating specific action plans to achieve these goals.
It started as a bucket list, but five items in I realized I was hurtling over a lot of necessary experience. For instance, I cannot wake up on a Thursday when I'm 56 and decide to set a world record on the track. I can however improve my running/jumping/climbing time slowly over months. I cannot on a Thursday night of my choosing in the year 2040 become a Zen Master. Experience inner peace by meditating more I can do. You see how mature I was today? Very proud of me we are indeed. Bucket Lists are clearly for a**holes.
In my creativity category I wanted to write more. To express myself. And that's when I remembered back in May I decided to blog your mind and then I stopped ...... and now I'm back.
Well, now that you are all on the same track as the Stacy Train let's take this journey together.
First the categories in no particular order, please let me know if I have overlooked a key component.
 physical, mental, spiritual, professional, creativity-(al?), parental or PMSPCP for short. (holy crap stick! that would be a wicked combination. So much death)
I'm going to start with Mental because I am a little tired of hearing about people running irrelevant distances using unnecessary equipment a la Facebook.  And before you get offended, who has two thumbs and posts that information all the time? that's right you do. Kidding, I'm guilty as well.
So mental improvement. Here is my goals. I would like to remember things and I would like the ability to focus. Presently I can do neither of these things. It has really become an issue. I was asked for my cell number and email recently. I blanked. I had to suggest they tell me their number and I call them and then we both save to contacts. Don't get the wrong impression I am way too slow to have avoided looking like an idiot. The conversation went something like: "What is the best number to reach you?" "I have no idea. Do you know your number? Can I call you and then we'll know my number?" Sometimes I am embarrassingly ridiculous.
The focus half is equally awful. Especially when it is critical that I listen. The more dire the circumstance the worse it is. When someone, anyone, is speaking to me I am thinking so loud and hard that I cannot hear them. No joke. Sometimes a person is looking me right in the face and I have no idea what they are saying because I am talking to me too and I am being so distracting. And then the inevitable moment happens and clearly we are both contemplating........something. They are racking their brain to come up with a solution to whatever problem or question they just posed. I am trying to figure out what we were talking about by process of elimination. We probably weren't wondering who had bigger feet Michael Angelo or Leonardo da Vinci. I wonder if da Vinci had webbed feet and when that didn't make him a better swimmer he assumed it must make him better at flying. Do all birds have webbed feet? No, I guess not but they all have weird feet.
It's this bad ALWAYS. Joking? Not even a little. I'm not just thinking one thing though. I am thinking something completely unnecessary and also yelling at myself about it "stop imaging a chicken with lips speaking Japanese and pay attention!" And then I start arguing with myself that I can hear them and wonder if a submerged hippo was as gassy as a horse (because in my head hippos and horses are pretty much the same thing). And if so has a gassy hippo ever sent a monkey jet skimming across a jungle pond? Not that far fetched. I have a jetted tub whenever little Audrey takes a bath in it. But as usual I am right about being wrong, I apparently cannot think and pay attention. Then I have to choose should I ask them to start over or just pretend I was listening. Neither plan works well. You might now be thinking about the time you were telling me about how sick your elderly grandmother was and I smiled. It's not as bad as it looked. I'm sick but not as twisted as I sometimes appear. I would have had sympathy IF I had listened to anything you had said. Let's get back on track.
I would like to remember things and I would like the ability to focus. What is my clear plan of action? Simple, I will exercise my brain parts. I've come up with categories. (It's sort of my thing now) Calculations, Solutions, Deductions, and Memorization. I will work on Calculations by completing math drills. I will work on Solutions and Deductions by doing challenging brain teasers. Which reminds me recently I was at Barnes and Nobles and they had a table of books on clearance. A few caught my eye and since I love nothing more than a book, I bought several. I got home and lo and behold I bought two of the same book. I tried to picture the episode from the point of view of the cashier. We started the operation needing my phone number so that my member discount would be applied to my purchases, eleventeen attempts later we were cooking with fire. He had to have noticed that he rang in the same book twice but I wonder if at that point he decided not to mention it because after studying my blank stare he realized there was a high probability I couldn't even read so what did it matter. What makes this story more awesome is that it was two copies of a book called Mental Challenges.  Which brings us full circle and back to my plan. To work on Solutions, I will do Mental Challenges. For Deduction (deduce is funner to say) I will do the other copy of Mental Challenges. For Memory I will make a list of things I want to memorize and I will slowly scratch them all off the list. Soon you may feel free to quiz me on all the state capitols, the periodic table of elements, or ask me to recite the Cremation of Sam McGee. I am sure I will be able to do none of those things but I'm going to give it all the old college try.