The above via the Parody Motivator Generator, thanks to a link from Chris Locke.
good for a laugh
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Author Archives: Elaine
funk! funk! funk!
Iam in a major funk. Can’t get myself motivated. So I’m going to visit my women friends in Albany this weekend. Pizza and a movie. Maybe a few beers. And brunch on Sunday. A stop at BJ’s to load up on staples.
Autumn has always been my favorite season — the air crisp, the sun still warm. But somehow, this year, it’s a Funking Fall.
A lot has to do with the fact that I can’t remember when I last laughed — belly-cramping laughed. The kind of laugh where you can’t stop. And everyone else is laughing that hard too. OK, ladies. Your assignment is to make me laugh my way out of this Funk! Funk! Funk!
For starters, here’s the best chuckle from this past Tuesday’s Harper’s Weekly:
“On the advice of his witch doctor a Serbian premature ejaculator had sex with a hedgehog and had to be hospitalized for pricks.”
lurkin’ on PhoneCon
Well. I tried. I actually managed to hook up my headset and get into the PhoneCon. These are definitely multi-tasking people — on-line chatting, blogging, talking, uploading photos. Someone calls in from his car on the way to work. There’s no way I can keep up. I don’t know what to say. And then I hear some commotion from my mother’s rooms, and I have to hang up.
I get on my laptop and into the Chat. Tamarika is there. I manage a couple of posts before I have to help my mother find her glasses.
The world is passing me by.
This blog is my tenuous link to a community that’s always moving a few paces ahead of me. I’ll never catch up.
I wonder if Jeneane managed to link up 95.
Hello? Hello? It’s PhoneCon 2.0
Well, I was never a part of that insane 2004 Con, and I’m not really well-informed about anything the least bit techie-related — if they ever actually get into any of that. But what the hell. I’m going to take Jeneane up on her offer to join the PhoneCon 2.0 gathering — not because I have anything to contribute or have any opinions about what’s going on among all of the techie ingroups, but because it’s there.
I’ve got my badge.
Now all I have to do is get out of bed at a reasonable hour. What the hell, I can put the phone on speaker and leave my weary head on the pillow. Ah, the wonders of the telephone.
help b!X walk for AIDS
He’s half way to his goal and has five days left to reach it. Go here and give him some monetary support.
Stress
I feel it across the middle of my back when I bend down to pick up her trail of used kleenex. It radiates around to my front, where it constricts around my lungs. I feel it in my knees when I bend down to tie her shoelaces. I feel it in my skull as the day stumbles along its well-worn track of miscommunication.
I sit and take deep breaths and Nexium. I raise my arms, stretch, bend over and let the weight of it all drain out my fingertips. I take Excedrin.
The leaves are starting to turn on the mountain, reminding me how quickly time is passing about me, without me. I am contained, constrained, remaindered.
new virus
It’s called the Lorena Bobbitt Virus. It turns your hard drive into a 3 1/2 inch floppy.
That’s a line from this weeks’s Eureka.
It’s Harper’s Tuesday
But, instead of Harper’s, today, I’m doing the harping. If I don’t get out of here for a couple of days, my head is going to implode, explode or do something equally damaging to this place on the mountain. So I’m going to my daughter’s tomorrow — just for one overnight, but at least it’s not being here.
So, while I’m gone, if you haven’t heard Keith Olbermann’s rant on MSNBC on 9/11, please go here. Read it if that’s all you can do, but if you can, LISTEN.!
To spur your interest, here’s how Olbermann ends his piece, using a quote from a Rod Serling “Twilight Zone” episode “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An “alien” is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.”
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.”
When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have “forgotten the lessons of 9/11″… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.”
When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have “forgotten the lessons of 9/11″… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
We need to do a lot more harping on that issue.
frog in the garage; magnets in the mail
At first I thought it was a leaf, but then I saw it hop under some assorted pieces of wood my brother has stored in the garage. He’s going to have a fit because he’s told me a million times to make sure I close and lock the side door to the garage. I was out working in the garden the other day, which I access through that door and I forgot to lock it. It blew open in the storm yesterday, and I’ll bet that’s when the frog got in. Anyone know how to get a frog out of a garage?
I’ve got an idea about how to give my mother something to do that will engage her interest. I’ve ordered two magnet boards and a bunch of magnetic pages that are supposed to work with an inkjet printer. I’m going to make a geneological magnets for her, with photos of her relatives (and their names) on magnetic paper, and she can practice putting them in the correct family order. It’s taking me forever to crop out faces from scanned in photos, but it will be worth it if having the whole set will entertain her. It will also help her remember the names of her children and grandchildren. Heh.
Storm Large
Turn on your speakers. Get ready for your toes to curl.
I dedicate this post to Michaela, Pam, Joan, Susan, and Penny.
She’s my idol.
Bigger than life.
A survivor.
My kinda woman.