Sunday, July 22, 2007

terribly early in the morning

Our Li’L Foster is Famous @ Petfinder.com

Check out his cute little face!  Or, even better, go to Petfinder to see him live and “in person”, and just browse the site, because it’s a really good site…not just because Carlo is on the homepage, but that helps a little.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

late afternoon

Hey, Baby…it’s 4:21

I took this picture for Helly & Alan, and let’s just say that it took me a minute to get the phone turned on to take the picture.  Damn, it was going to be so perfect.  Well, at least you still have my creepy looking face and the phone reflecting back at you, as a consolation prize. (Oh, and this isn’t meant to insinuate anything about Helly & Alan, just that they might appreciate knowing exactly what time the song came on, and what time I thought of them today, while sitting in the parking lot at the vet’s office, while Leigh-Ann was picking up some parrot pellets.  Then, she came back to the car and I said, “This, this is the song I was telling you about yesterday!  You know the one that Helly had on her blog.”)

 

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

the wee hours

R Family Cruise - July 2008?

I never thought I’d voluntarily want to subject myself to a cruise full of children (I like kids, but I don’t generally think of them as peaceful additions to a vacation), but I think it would be cool to see all those kids with their gay parents.  Together, not having to hide anything or fear anyone.  It’s like the first time I went to Gay Pride in West Hollywood.  The parade was okay, but except for the Santa Claus Lane Parade every year when I was a child, parades weren’t really my thing, and Pride parades with topless (and let’s be honest, sometimes scary looking) lesbians on motorcyles, men dancing on floats sponsored by bars…seeing it on tv is really enough.  However, the festival afterwards is great!  A huge area where you don’t have to be afraid to hold anyone’s hand (hell, we held hands with just friends…because we could) or kiss your partner or change your pronouns when you’re talking about them at work, is just amazing.  It’s hard to get back the feeling of the very first one, when you realize that you can be yourself in a crowd of thousands, without being in a bar.  Plus, the food and music are always great.  So, I was watching Rosie’s video of snapshots of people on the last R Family cruise, and I want to go!  I don’t like the song, so maybe put on a nice song of your choice.  Watch it, and then let’s plan a vacation together.  Straight people are welcome too, so let’s go on the New England & Canada cruise next summer, okay?  It leaves from NY, then goes to Halifax, Nova Scotia; Saint John, New Brunswick; Bar Harbor, Maine; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Newport, Rhode Island, and then back to NY.  It’s pretty much the same cruise I’ve wanted to go on already, but I think I’d like the atmosphere better.  Plus, I think they get more interesting entertainment, because they get some big names going.

So, who else wants to go?  I have both straight and gay readers with kids, and they’re people I’ve never met and would like to.  Wouldn’t it be fun to plan it for next year?  Of course, I’m poverty-stricken right now, but it’s a whole year away.  We can all save up, and I can bribe my nephews to take care of the pets.  Or, we can save up to pay a vet tech or something, so my nephews can go on the cruise too.  So, bring your kids, bring your parents, bring your spouse or partner, bring your siblings…

Monday, July 16, 2007

late afternoon

The Most Awesome Dream - Mostly Unremembered

So, we tried to sleep with the little fosters again, and it’s a bit hit & miss with them.  Sometimes they’re perfect angels, who jump up on the cat tree next to my side of the bed, and instantly fall fast asleep.  And sometimes, that cat tree is like a catapult that launches them (and their nails) into my side or right next to my head, onto my pillow.  They really are sweet little guys (and still up for adoption!), but on the nights that they don’t manage to go to sleep well, neither do we.  We crane our necks up at the tree (it’s terrific for causing neck pain, if you’re looking for the antidote to a relaxed neck), wondering if they’ve decided to sleep yet…or if they’re planning an assault on us.  Last night/this morning, they seemed to settle down really nicely, but we stayed up reading for about five minutes too long, because they seemed to be injected with copious amounts of caffeine just as we wanted to go to sleep.  They were RACING up and down the cat tree, RACING across the room chasing each other…under the bed, sometimes over the bed (which means over our bodies usually), and they were just nuts.  Then, one would settle down, and we’d sigh with relief, knowing that the other would soon follow, like usual.  But no, one would settle down, and then the other would still be crazed, and that kind of “don’t let your foster parents sleep” crime desperately needs a partner.  Oh yeah, and then a couple of times they both settled down, and TJ who seems to be a bit hormonal with Bunny, would start biting her neck.  It’s hard to be nice and settled when a furry thing is standing over you and biting your neck.  I don’t blame her for that.  Eventually, Leigh-Ann gave up and took them downstairs to sleep in their cozy bathroom with Missy Mae.  Generally, they don’t mind and Carlo still has some occasional pooping on the floor problems (he gets horrible cramps that you can actually see rippling through his teeny little body), so it’s okay when they sleep down there.  But, we’d like to have them trained as nice kitties for someone else’s home, where they won’t feel really cozy in the bathroom.  Our bathroom downstairs is decked out for the cats - litterbox, two nice beds, food & water, and lots of toys, and Missy Mae as a babysitter.  Anyway, it took us a couple of hours to finally get settled to go to sleep, which I think leads to some strange dreams.

If I’d been able to remember my whole dream, it would’ve made a great book about time travel.  It had some incredible details about how I was actually doing the time travelling.  It also had the requisite amount of gore to be a sci-fi book.  I was on some sort of boat, with a bunch of people that I knew, and it was starting to sink (the water wasn’t deep, so that part wasn’t overly icky), and we were all wearing nametags.  I think that came from the pictures I saw the other day on the Huffington Post of the media mogul gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho, and all the rich & famous were wearing nametags.  It was cute.  Anyway, I told people on the boat that I had to go somewhere, and then I kind of disappeared off into the mist, and showed up again at an airport or a mall (I’m not sure which) with my brother and an ex-friend.  It kept happening over and over, I’d be talking to people and for some reason, I’d drift off into another time period in my dream life.  Most of the things that happened in the dream never happened in my real life.

I had another dream after that that I remember more clearly.  I woke up in between dreams and told Leigh-Ann about the first dream, so that’s probably why I remember them both.  The second one had me ditching some odd get together with distant relatives.  Instead of going where they were, I went to a mall, and in the mall there was an odd side entrance to a lesbian bar that I’d never been to.  What a surprise, since I haven’t been to a gay bar in close to twenty years, except for the time I went out with a male friend one night to a quiet bar in the Castro.  It didn’t really count, because we could’ve been anywhere.  We just went there to talk and hang out together.  Anyway, I took a peek inside the bar, but it didn’t seem at all interesting, even though it was packed full of people.  Instead, I went to this supposedly secret hidden restaurant around the back, where you had to wait in a long line…and show identification just to get food.  But the food was fabulous, and I was sad that I didn’t have it when I woke up.  It was Cajun food, and they had some sort of specialty that was like fried lobster strings.  I guess you could make it by dropping lobster meat into a deep fryer.  In real life, I’d prefer crab, but if someone’s just giving it to me, the lobster will do.  That’s all I can think about now, that appetizer that I don’t think even exists.  I did a little search and this is maybe the closest thing I can find, “Lazy Lobster Dinner -The meat from a 1 lb. lobster taken out of the shell, sauted in butter or batter-dipped and deep fried with our coleslaw and choice of potato.”  Hey Kristine, could you go to BG’s Boat House restaurant in Portsmouth and tell me if this is any good?

Friday, July 13, 2007

evening

Could This Deliciousness Be Making Us Sick?

Wouldn’t that be horrible if all of these powders that we love so, are making us feel worse?  We know that they didn’t cause Leigh-Ann’s FMS because she had it before the drinks existed.  However, I got sick just as we switched from Gatorade (after my surgery) to powdered singles in our water bottles.  Hmmmm.  But, they’re sooo good.  The Celestial Seasonings Zingers (not pictured) don’t have any aspartame in them, and they’re pretty good too, although more expensive.  We’ve also discovered that the Stevia Company makes four flavors of powders with all-natural Stevia in them, instead of chemical junk.  We’ll have to check to see if Whole Foods carries them.

 

Hmmm, I said I was going to write about something fun, huh?  Later today, I promise.  No wait, later today I’ll write about the free discount pharmacy cards you can get online that’ll save you money, if you don’t have insurance, or if you’re like me and wiped out your pharmacy benefits for the year in March.  You can save lots and lots of money with these cards.  I only wish we’d known about them sooner.

update - Tomorrow, we’re going artificial sweetener free for a week or two, to see if we feel any differently.  We put away probably $50+ of drink singles, and if we feel better without them, we’ll donate them to people who are craving the danger of artificial sweeteners.  I wish we both liked drinking plain water, but we just don’t.  We like flavor in our lives, so we’ll figure out a way to get it without damaging ourselves in the process.